Portal-eARC by Eric Flint, Ryk E Spoor Page B

for them at the end of the following week, and that they were not to be working at all those days.
    “You’re looking awfully tense, Horst,” she said, raising her eyebrow and putting a hand on his arm. “Something wrong?”
    Horst gave an embarrassed grin. “Well…it’s really very silly of me. But I somehow feel like…this is as though I brought a date home to my mother’s house and we went to my room and locked the door.”
    Jackie laughed. “I guess that isn’t so silly. Or maybe like coming home and finding your parents have Just Happened to step out for that night and have left a note saying they definitely will not be back until noon the next day.”
    “Ha! Yes, that is maybe much more like it.” Horst took a deep breath and then exhaled, seeming to blow his tension out with it, and then turned and kissed her.
    It wasn’t their first kiss, of course, but it’d been a long time since they could just…take their time about it. Jackie took her time, and so did Horst.
    By the time they broke slightly apart, her hair was slightly mussed and his would have been, if he didn’t keep it military-regulation short. She smiled up at him and saw an answering sparkle in his eye. “That was pretty good.”
    “But it is important to practice your skills to make them better,” Horst answered and suited action to words.
    “Mmm,” she said appreciatively after a while. “So, besides that, what do you want to do on our vacation?”
    Horst glanced out the window, which was currently set to an active view (based on recordings, of course) of Lanikai Beach in Hawai’i. “I would say a swim, but I am told it it actually colder outside than it looks.”
    “You goof. Yes, I think surfing and swimming is out. Though,” she gave him a wink, “there is a double-size shower.”
    “Hmm. Something to consider carefully, yes,” Horst agreed; his light Germanic complexion reddened noticeably. Jackie was pleased that her Native American heritage gave her dark enough skin that blushes weren’t easily visible; it let her tease Horst, and sometimes other people, with impunity on her part.
    “Well, I actually picked out some of the newest movies that Ceres was able to forward us. You like the Kata Wandering series, right?”
    “Yes, yes! I did not know that the next one was already out. If that’s okay with—”
    “I wouldn’t have brought it up if it wasn’t,” she pointed out. “Actually, there’s lots of things to watch, if that’s what we want to do. A.J. also set up a local Quest of the Seven Races server if you like that kind of stuff—I do sometimes—and there’s some really good beach simulations if you wanted to at least pretend we’re at the beach. Or there’s old-fashioned chess or something like that.”
    “Or we could just talk, but I think we’d still end up ‘talking shop’ as you call it.”
    She shrugged, still smiling. That’s part of why I like being with him. Just any kind of talking with him makes me smile. “Well, that’s okay too—I mean, we talk shop because it interests us and we’re still doing what we want to do, way out here in the solar system.”
    She signaled the window control and one window shifted as she approached. “I haven’t got tired of that view yet,” she said softly.
    Jupiter loomed over the horizon, about half above the edge of the jagged edges of the Connemara Chaos. Shadows from the sun were thrown in sharp relief of black against the bright surface, a black then tinged with the red-brown-cream light of the largest of the planets. Against one edge of Jupiter was a black spot, a spot with a yellow-orange crescent edge—Io, where they presumed the body of Richard Fitzgerald had finally ended its journey and where General Hohenheim had pulled off an impossible escape. The stars beyond dusted the black velvet setting of the sky.
    “ Nein , I have not either,” Horst said, hugging her from behind and looking over her shoulder. “And the view will be changing