The Forlorn(114)

The scurrying robots had made up the bed on top of the transmitter core with fresh, smooth sheets. There was no sign of the ropes that had bound Shael. She led him to the bed, pulled him down onto it. Compcontrol had assured them they still had twenty-five minutes before the orbital lander reached the ship. There was to be no hurrying, they were sternly instructed, as they were inexperienced operators. Psi output had to be at an absolute maximum to successfully align the atoms within the crystal lattice matrix of the transmitter.

With the intensity of desire Keilin doubted if they'd last that long. His hands, clumsy with haste and need, fumbled with her buttons . . . and then his fingers, suddenly clever, drifted, caressing her soft body. Went down . . .

The need and desire, and . . . overpowering love. Togetherness. A melding of softness and hardness, and a moment in which all the vast, glowing, shifting colors of the jewel heart of the matter transmitter turned black, and a quarter of a million miles of nanocircuitry glowed instead. The lattices within the core shifted from helium ice to the surface of the sun. Their combined psi force reached out into it, just as Keilin and Shael reached that instant at which everything was utterly, absolutely perfect.

They certainly didn't hear Compcontrol say "99.999987% lattice alignment. Initializing transmission."