Babylon's Ashes

The sound of water splashing against metal announced the shower, but Alex could tell by the music of it that her body wasn’t in the flow yet. He looked up again, found her in the doorway, her arms lifted above her to rest against the frame. She was only a little younger than him, and the years showed on her body. Silver ghosts of stretch marks just visible along her belly and breasts. The fuzzy tattoo of a waterfall down the side of her left leg. A jagged scar that puckered the flesh of her right arm. Hers was not the beauty of youth but of experience, same as his. Still, he could see the girl she’d been in the way she lifted her eyebrows, shifted her weight into her hip.

“You want to take a shower, Sunshine?” she asked with false innocence.

“Oh hell yes,” Alex said, hauling himself up from the bed. “Yes, I do.”

Ever since that first night on Ceres, he and Sandra had been spending a chunk of their off hours in each other’s company this way. When they’d been on the Roci, they’d split their time between his cabin and hers. Here on Tycho, her quarters had become their default. She’d been on the station long enough for her seniority and union rules to land her two rooms, a private bath, and a bed that was a lot more comfortable for two than trying to fit into the same crash couch.

As love affairs went, Alex had been surprised at first and a little wary. Sandra’s sexuality was joyful and unrestrained. It had taken him a little time to knock the rust off and join her in it. He’d had a few lovers before he’d gotten married, one—shamefully—while he was, and a couple dalliances afterward. A woman’s full and delighted attention wasn’t something he’d ever expected to have again. Once he convinced himself that, yes, this was really happening, he fell into it like he was sixteen.

After the shower, they toweled each other dry and he helped put lotion on her back where she couldn’t reach, and a little where she probably could too. She put on her uniform, tied back her hair, then brushed and gargled while he crawled back into the bed.

“Another day of sloth for you?” she asked.

“I’m a pilot with nowhere to go,” he said, stretching his arms out in a gesture that said, It’s not my fault. She laughed.

“This is why I’m not one,” she said. “Engineers always have something to do.”

“You need to learn to relax.”

“Well,” she said, her voice taking on a low purr that was come-on and laughing at the come-on both, “you keep setting me an example and maybe some of it’ll rub off on me.”

“Maybe when your shift’s over, we could order in.”

“It’s a plan,” she said, then checked the time on her hand terminal and grunted. “Okay. I’ve got to run.”

“I’ll lock up when I go,” Alex said.

“You’ll sleep in my bed all day like a lion.”

“Or that.”

She kissed him before she left. He let himself sink into the pillows after the door closed, rested there for a long moment, then stood up and gathered his clothes from the floor. Sandra’s quarters were soft and welcoming in a way he wasn’t used to. The comforter wadded and shaped at the foot of the bed was a pale blue with a pattern of lace at the edges. Sandra had hung draping cloth at the corners of the room to soften the light and disguise the edges. Her desk had a small glass vase with dried roses arranged in it. The peppery smell of spent perfume sank into his clothes when he was here, so that hours later he’d walk through a draft and be suddenly and viscerally reminded of her. The women he’d lived with these last years—Naomi, Bobbie, even Clarissa Mao now—weren’t the sort for frills and softness. Plush pillows and rosewater. Being around that particular kind of femininity was familiar enough to be comfortable, exotic enough to make this time, this moment, this relationship something all his own. Turned out some part of him had wanted something all his own.

Or maybe—pulling on the same sock he’d worn yesterday—it wasn’t even that. Maybe it was only that he knew how much the war might take from them all, and Sandra Ip was his chance to refill some cistern of his heart and body that there wasn’t going to be time for later. A place of gentleness and affection and pleasure like a hurricane eye. He hoped she felt the same about him. That they were stocking up good memories, him and Sandra both, against the history that was about to unfold around them.