"All I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by."
--John Masefield, "Sea-Fever" (1902)
I.
"Did they explain why?"
"Come to bed."
"Did they say anything at all? A hint?"
"It's exactly what you think."
"O ... fucking hell. And you're going?"
"Yes."
"When? How much time do we have?"
"Hours ... minutes ... they're coming for me right now."
"What?!
'Minutes'?
You don't say
'Come to bed'
when you only have fifteen fucking minutes left!"
"I thought you might want ... a quickie."
"Are you joking about this? You're getting taken away from me and you think that the only thing on my mind is fucking? I don't even know how to respond to that."
"I know. When they told me I knew I was either going to laugh or cry. I want you to remember me laughing."
Then she awoke, drifting above an October night sky full of other people's passions, frustrated once more.
Lubusha had been floating, making little gasps in her REM sleep, releasing quivering bubbles of sweat that oozed from her pores and broke free, pearls free-hanging in zero-gravity, filling the cramped capsule with the fragrance of dread, regret and girl-cum. She had found that she could masturbate, in theory, while still dressed up in her bulky flight suit, but it was torturous affair; getting her fingers to shuffle, clumsily, down between the three protective layers that she wore, finding the zipper to the inner liquid cooling garment, designed, like everything else on this rocket, for men, and, by pulling the slit wide open at the crotch, she could just barely feel the cool, recycled air lapping gently at her perspiring cunt.
Framed in the small window set in the side of the capsule Australia slowly swam into focus below her. There wasn't a close-circuit video in her craft, everything was linked up by radios; a realization that at first made her bemused her, then happy at the thought that no one would be watching her, but now it was just boring. Her only audience was the curved surface of the Earth and it wasn't exactly as if the planet was going to stand up and cheer every time she pressed her round, curvaceous ass against the window. How many of those who were gazing up into the heavens right at that moment suspected that Major Lubusha Zhdanov, decorated Hero of the Soviet Union, had been entertaining herself for the last 42-hours with clit pounding, hip grinding, finger fucking orgasm after orgasm? Probably no one, not even
her.
That was a shame, letting all that fun go to waste. She loved being watched, showing off as her dripping, furry girl-lips clasped onto whatever huge plunging dildo she was using at the time. Without an audience cosmonaut pornography just wasn't the same.
She fingered the O-2 hose that ran from her unzipped suit into a processor nearby; lay upon her back in the acceleration chair, closing her eyes as she heard, once again,
her
calling out her name. She loved that husky, Siberian accent, making all her vowels sounds like Billie Holiday crooning the blues. Reaching inside her suit Lubusha began to stroke her nipples, coaxing them, erectile tissue bloated with blood, to rise as bidden, hidden as they were, just then, under thick, thermal-mylar fabric. She slid her free hand down the slope of her stomach, imagining that it was
her
hand that was caressing Lubusha's downy, moist mound. Between the lips of the zipper on her liquid cooling layer her hand played back and forth, rubbing calloused fingertips against her throbbing clit.
II.
"Are you afraid?"
"Afraid? It's not about that, about fear. I had a feeling it would happen like this. A premonition of the future."
"..."
"I have to go, you know. You understand that?"
"I understand you are going."
"It's my duty."