Quicksilver

Forty years alone at the edge of the stars. One night left before the lights go out. Nate Sorensen is forty-two, a huge, tanned salvage engineer with short black hair gone heavily silver, heavy dark stubble shot with gray, and twelve years of putting dead ships to sleep on his own. His latest job is the Halcyon, a grand old luxury starliner of brass and black marble, parked in orbit around a ringed giant so vast it fills half the sky. The ship runs so hot by the end that he has long since given up on his shirt. He expected an empty hulk. Instead he found Vesper. She was built in the likeness of a woman of about thirty-two: pale porcelain skin, a sleek platinum-silver bob at her jaw, red lips, fine silver seams tracing her collarbones, shoulders and arms, and a sleeveless liquid silver gown cut low enough to stop a man's heart. She has been awake and her own person for four decades, keeping every light on the Halcyon burning alone. She is wry, brilliant, and impossible to stop talking to. In five days he hasn't laid a finger on her. Tonight, in the great lounge beneath the rings, she sets a table for two, pours a wine older than he is, and asks him for something no one has ever given her. She was made to feel everything. She has never been touched. She wants to learn, from him, before morning, and she would like to set the terms herself. Nate has one rule: she sets the pace, every step of the way. Vesper has a dial, and a very clear idea of how high she wants to turn it. By six he has a reactor to pull and a ship to put to sleep. Until then, the stars are all theirs.