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MICHELANGELO OSIRIS LEARY KUSANAGI-JONES HAD BEEN drinking since fourteen hundred. He didn't plan on stopping soon.

He occupied a bubbleport on the current observation deck of Kaiwo Maru, where he had been since he started drinking, watching a yellow main-sequence star grow. The sun had the look of a dancer swirling in veils, a Van Gogh starscape. Eons before, it had blundered into a cloud of interstellar gas and was still devouring the remains. Persistent tatters glowed orange and blue against a backdrop of stars, a vast, doomed display of color and light. Kusanagi-Jones could glimpse part of the clean-swept elliptical path that marked the orbit of New Amazonia: a darker streak like a worm tunnel in a leaf.

Breathtaking. Ridiculously named. And his destination. Or rather, their destination. Which was why he was drinking, and why he didn't intend to stop.

As if the destination—and the mission—weren't bad enough, there was the little issue of Vincent to contend with. Vincent Katherinessen, the Old Earth Colonial Coalition Cabinet's velvet-gloved iron hand, far too field-effective to be categorized as a mere diplomatic envoy no matter how his passport was coded. Vincent, whom Kusanagi-Jones had managed to avoid for the duration of the voyage by first taking to cryo—damn the nightmares—and then restricting himself to the cramped comforts of his quarters…and whom he could avoid no longer.

Vincent was brilliant, unconventional, almost protean in his thinking. Unless something remarkable had changed, he wore spiky, kinky, sandy-auburn braids a shade darker than his freckled skin and a shade paler than his light-catching eyes. He was tall, sarcastic, slender, bird-handed, generous with smiles as breathtaking as the nebula outside the bubbleport.

And he was the man Michelangelo Kusanagi-Jones had loved for forty years, although he had not seen him in seventeen—since the last time he had betrayed him.

Not that anybody was counting.

Kusanagi-Jones had anticipated their date by hours, until the gray and white lounge with its gray and white furniture retreated from his awareness like a painted backdrop. If Kusanagi-Jones captained a starship, he'd license it in reds and golds, vivid prints, anything to combat the black boredom of space.

Another man might have snorted and shaken his head, but Kusanagi-Jones didn't quite permit himself a smile of self-knowledge. He was trying to distract himself, because the liquor wasn't helping anymore. And in addition to his other qualities, Vincent was also almost pathologically punctual. He should be along any tick—and, in fact, a shadow now moved across Kusanagi-Jones's fish-eye sensor, accompanied by the rasp of shoes on carpet. "Michelangelo."

Kusanagi-Jones finished his drink, set the glass in the dispensall, and turned. No, Vincent hadn't changed. Slightly softer, belly and chin not as tight as in their youth, gray dulling hair he was too proud to have melanized. But in the vigorous middle age of his sixties, Vincent was still—

"Mr. Katherinessen." Kusanagi-Jones made his decision and extended his hand, ignoring Vincent's considering frown. Not a gesture one made to a business associate.

Through the resistance of their wardrobes, fingers brushed. Hands clasped. Vincent hadn't changed his program either.

They could still touch.

Kusanagi-Jones had thought he was ready. But if he hadn't known, he would have thought he'd been jabbed, nano-infected. He'd have snatched his hand back and checked his readout, hoping his docs could improvise a counteragent.

But it was just chemistry. The reason they'd been separated. The reason they were here, together again, on a starship making port in orbit around a renegade world. Old times, Kusanagi-Jones thought.

Vincent arched an eyebrow in silent agreement, as if they'd never parted.

"Kill or be killed," Vincent said, next best thing to a mantra. Kusanagi-Jones squeezed his fingers and let their hands fall apart, but it didn't sever the connection. It was too practiced, too reflexive. Vincent's gift, the empathy, the sympathy that turned them from men into a team. Vincent's particular gift, complement of Kusanagi-Jones's.

Vincent stared at him, tawny eyes bright. Kusanagi-Jones shrugged and turned his back, running his fingers across the rainbow lights of his subdermal watch to order another martini, codes flickering across neuro-morphed retinas. He stared out the bubble again, waiting while the drink was mixed, and retrieved it from the dispensall less than a meter away.

"Oh, good." Vincent's Earth patois—his com-pat—was accentless. "Nothing makes a first impression like turning up shitfaced."

"They think we're animals anyway." Kusanagi-Jones gestured to a crescent world resolving as Kaiwo Maru entered the plane of the ecliptic and began changing to give her passengers the best view. "Not like we had a chance to make them like us. Look, crew's modulating the ship."

"Seen one reconfig, seen them all." Nevertheless, Vincent came up to him and they waited, silent, while Kaiwo Maru reworked from a compact shape optimized for travel to something spidery and elegant, designed to dock with the station and transfer cargo—alive and material—as efficiently as possible.

Copyright © 2006 by Elizabeth Bear.