I carried her out to the bedroom and laid her down soaking wet on the bed instead. I knelt by her head, turned it gently and guided her mouth to my prick. She sucked, lightly at first then with gathering force. I lay backward alongside her slim muscled body, turned my own head and opened her thighs with my hands. Then I slid an arm around her hips, drew her cunt to my face and went to work with my tongue. And the hunger came out all over again, like rage. The pit of my belly felt as if it was filled with sparking wires. Down the bed, she made muffled noises, rolled her weight over and crouched above me on elbows and spread knees. Her hips and thighs crushed down on me, her mouth worked the head of my prick and her hand pumped at the shaft.

It took a long, slow, delirious time. Chemically unaided, we didn’t know each other well enough for a truly synchronised orgasm, but the Envoy conditioning or maybe something else covered for the lack. When finally I came into the back of her throat, the force of it bent me up off the bed against her crouched body and in pure reflex I wrapped both arms tight around her hips. I dragged her down onto me, tongue frantic, so that she spat me out still spasming and leaking, and screamed with her own climax, and collapsed onto me shuddering.

But not long after, she rolled off, sat up cross-legged and looked seriously at me, as if I was a problem she couldn’t solve.

“I think that’s probably enough,” she said. “We’d better get back.”

And later I stood on the beach with Sierra Tres and Jack Soul Brasil, watching the last rays of the sunset strike bright copper off the edge of a rising Marikanon, wondering if I’d made a mistake somewhere. I couldn’t think straight enough to be sure. We’d gone into the virtuality with the physical feedback baffles locked closed, and for all the sexual venting I’d indulged in with Virginia Vidaura, my real body was still swamped with undischarged hormones. At one level at least, it might as well never have happened.

I glanced surreptitiously at Brasil and wondered some more. Brasil, who’d shown no visible reaction when Vidaura and I re-entered the mapping construct within a couple of minutes of each other, albeit from different sides of the archipelago. Brasil, who’d worked with the same steady, good-natured and elegant application until we’d wrapped the raid and the fallback after. Who’d placed one hand casually in the small of Vidaura’s back and smiled faintly at me just before the two of them blinked out of the virtuality with a co-ordination that spoke volumes.

“You’ll get your money back, you know,” I told him.