Palimpsest by Charles Stross

breathing, but it was slowly getting stuffy and hot inside the wreckage of his survival suit.
    More parts detached themselves from his skin. He was beginning to itch furiously, and the lack of gravity seemed to be making him nauseous. Finally, the front of his hood cracked open and floated away. He blinked teary eyes against the glare, trying to make sense of what his eyes were telling him.
    “Kari—”
    The spherical drone floating before his face wore her face on its smartskin. A flock of gunmetal lampreys swam busily behind it, worrying at pieces of the dead and mildly radioactive suit. Some distance beyond, a wall of dull blue triangles curved around him, dish-like, holes piercing it in several places.
    “Try not to speak,” said Kari’s drone. “You’ve taken a borderline-fatal dose, and we’re going to have to get you to a sick bay right away.”
    His throat ached. “Is Yarrow there?”
    Another spherical drone floated into view from somewhere behind him. It wore Xiri’s face. “My love? I’ll visit you as soon as you’ve cleared decontamination. The enemy are always trying to sneak bugs in: they wouldn’t let me through to see you now. Be strong, my lord.” She smiled, but the worry-wrinkles at the corners of her eyes betrayed her. “I’m very proud of you.”
    He tried to reply, but his stomach had other ideas and attempted to rebel. “Feel. Sick …”
    Someone kissed the back of his neck with lips of silver, and the world faded out.
    Pierce regained consciousness with an abrupt sense of rupture, as if no time at all had passed: someone had switched his sense of awareness off and on again, just as his parents might once have power-cycled a balky appliance.
    “Love? Pierce?”
    He opened his eyes and stared at her for a few seconds, then cleared his throat. It felt oddly normal: the aches had all evaporated. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this.” The bed began to rise behind his back. “Xiri?”
    Her clothing was outrageous to Hegemonic forms (not to say anachronistic or unrevealing), but she was definitely his Xiri; as she leaned forward and hugged him fiercely he felt something bend inside him, a dam of despair crumbling before a tidal wave of relief. “How did they find you?” he asked her shoulder, secure in her embrace. “ Why did they reinstate—”
    “Hush. Pierce. You were so ill—”
    He hugged her back. “I was?”
    “They kept me from you for half a moon! And the burns, when they cut that suit away from you. What did you do ?”
    Pierce pondered the question. “I changed my mind about … something I’d agreed to do …”
    They lay together on the bed until curiosity got the better of him. “Where are we? When are we?” Where did you get that jumpsuit?
    Xiri sighed, then snuggled closer to him. “It’s a long story,” she said quietly. “I’m still not sure it’s true.”
    “It must be, now,” he pointed out reasonably, “but perhaps it wasn’t, for a while. But where are we?”
    She eased back a little. “We’re in orbit around Jupiter. But not for much longer.”
    “But I—” He stopped. “Really?”
    “They disconnected your phone, or I could show you. The colony fleets, the shipyards.”
    He blinked at her, astonished. “How?”
    “We all have phone implants, here.” Her eyes sparkled with amusement. “This isn’t the Stasis you know.”
    “I’d guessed.” He swallowed. “How long has it been for you?”
    “Since”—her breath caught, a little ragged—“two years. A little longer.”
    He gently trapped her right hand in his, ran his thumb across the smooth, plump skin on the back of her wrist. She let him. “Almost the same.” He swallowed once more. “I thought I’d never see you again. Anyone would think they’d planned this.”
    “Oh, but they did.” She gave a nervous little laugh. “He said they didn’t want us to, to desynchronize. Get too far apart.” Her fingers closed around his thumb, constricting and warm.
    “Who