Page 4 of Her Consort
Chapter Two
It took four hours to crawl the remaining twenty-or-so feet that separated their hatch from the end of that one short corridor. It was hot. Her head was swimming, she was sweaty, and the inside of her suit now stuck to her everywhere it came in contact with her skin. She itched. Itched like a mad bastard because while the suit was impermeable to the withered and dried-out ivy vines that some past sadist had filled the subfloor confines with, her brain refused to believe those were tickles of sweat making her miserable in her suit. If she wasn’t in hives by the time she finally got to the showers, she’d be amazed.
And where was Kogan through all this? Why, walking sedately on the panels above and behind her, because ol’ Neanderthal Shoulders up there was too thick around to squeeze between the gaping jaw-like subfloor joists. Every now and then the headset speakers in her helmet crackled and there he’d be, cheerfully running through his mental database of stories about people she didn’t know and activities that only another Hoggy-whatever-ian could possibly care about. At least one of them was having a good time.
“So then I said to him,” Kogan chuckled, deep rumbles of remembered mirth while phantom itching ivy tickled at the backs of her legs and the underside of both arms, and beads of sweat rolled between her breasts and dripped from her forehead into her burning eyes. “I said, but Gurgun… that’s not a woman, it’s a billiflix!”
He laughed. If only she got the context, she might have laughed too. Instead, miserable beyond her abilities to keep locked behind tightly gritted teeth, she lost it. “Would you just shut up? For one minute, please!”
He stopped laughing.
Instead of calming her, for some reason the crackling silence made the misery worse. The itching amplified; the heat grew smothering and there were still two more mines to disarm in the six remaining feet of this first hallway and she could already see the poorly lit bump and protruding wire nests of more leading off to both the left and right of the adjacent corridor ahead. God, she would be doing this forever! Crawling around in all this itching ivy, muttering under her breath while that lazy shiftless good-for-nothing strolled so comfortably along on the panel above her…
“I am neither shiftless, nor lazy, nor good for nothing.” Kogan’s voice crackled over the speakers, somber and without a trace of his earlier humor. “It’s not my fault that I don’t fit under the floor.”
She ground her teeth. Sweat was stinging her eyes. “I didn’t mean to say that out loud.”
“I fail to see how thinking such things quietly to yourself is any better.”
“I’ll not be chided,” she snapped, “and certainly not by you.”
“Fine, but I reserve the right to debate what you do or don’t need at a later date.”
She didn’t just grit her teeth. Now, she ground them. “I swear to God,” she breathed, “if you bring up that time in Topoe when I accidentally fell in your lap, I am gonna—”
“I actually wasn’t going to, but since you brought it up—”
“Ugh!” The faceplate of her helmet smacked into a pillow of itching ivy as she dropped her head to the floor and Kogan launched into yet another of his cheerful and one-sided debates.
“—I’ve always found two problems with the way you tell that story. Would you like to know what they are?”
“No!” She stabbed the cutters into the nest of wires on the next bomb and snipped. At this point, if she cut the wrong one, blowing up would be a mercy.
“First, your definition of accident; you were drunk—”
“I was not… you’re always… for fuck’s sake, it was one bottle of beer!” she roared, grabbing the floor with both hands and kicking it, she was so aggravated.
“It was one bottle,” he agreed. “It was also two-hundred-proof beer and you didn’t fall so much as you straddled my lap—”
“Oh, here we go with the exaggerations,” she growled.
“—whipped your shirt off over your head—”
“It was hot! The temperature controls were wonky. It was one hundred and eight degrees.”
“—whooping and yelling and gyrating about.”
“We were in an asteroid belt and you were flying bumpy,” she accused. Hand over hand, she crawled her way to the next explosive.
“I could barely see over you to the controls. Which brings us to the second point—”
She paused mid-crawl, dropping her head on top of her arms again and strangling out another sigh.
“—Why, when you retell this story, do you never mention what you said?”
“Because I didn’t say anything.”
“That’s the two-hundred-proof talking. You probably forgot; let me remind you.”
