"Daniel Marcus - Ex Vitro" - читать интересную книгу автора (Marcus Daniel)

Maddy had already taken her clothes off, and she stood facing him,
waiting. Jax stepped out of his shorts and put his arms around her again.
They stood there, rocking slowly, then together they sank to the carpeted
floor.

When Maddy came, a shuddering ripple passed unseen through the
pattern made by the slugs' bodies. Jax's pleasure shortly afterward sent
another wave passing through the pattern from the opposite side. The
ripples collided and scattered, each leaving an imprint of its shape on the
other.


Jax gently disentangled himself from Maddy, trying not to wake her.
She groaned softly once and rolled over, then her breathing returned to
normal. Her face was relaxed and completely expressionless, as if sleep
were a black hole from which nothing of herself escaped.

For an instant, it looked to Jax like the face of a perfect stranger, its
contours so achingly familiar that the familiarity itself was something
exotic. He reached out to touch her, and his hand hovered above the curve
of her cheek, trembling slightly.

So strange, he thought, the two of us out here, middle of nowhere, ties
to home nothing more than electromagnetic ephemera. Ghosts. What are
we to each other in the absence of context? We create our own, always
have.

They'd met when they were graduate students at the Sorbonne, Maddy
in planetary physics, Jax in system dynamics. They were both driven to
succeed, the shining stars in their respective departments' firmament of
hopeful students, and they gravitated toward one another with the same
intensity that fueled their research.

They cycled through several iterations of crash and burn, learning each
other's boundaries, before they settled into a kind of steady state. Still,
their relationship felt to Jax like a living entity, a nonlinear filter whose
response to stimuli was never quite what you thought it was going to be.

Individually, they were excellent candidates for SunGroup, a
system-wide industrial development consortiumтАФmining,
Pharmaceuticals, SP-sats, all supported by a broad base of research and
exploration. As a couple they were perfect for one of Sun's elite research
teams. When they finished out their three-year term, especially if they had
"made their bones" by discovering something of interest and potential
profit, they would have enough clout in SunGroup to command their own
programs.

The slugs were certainly of interest. They were at the apex of Titan's
spartan ecosystemтАФblack, almost featureless bullet-shaped creatures