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bathed in a warm crimson glow that had no source. Her naked skin gleamed as if oiled, her heavy curling black hair floated unbound.
    Dan felt her warm smooth flesh, slid his hands across her soft breasts and down the curve of her hips. She sighed softly and her arms twined around him as he stroked the silky length of her thighs.
    “I love you, Lucita,” he whispered in his dream. He had never said it waking.
    And in his dream she replied, “I love you, Daniel. I love you more than I can bear.”
    He held her slim young naked body in his strong hands. “I’ve loved you since the first moment I saw you, that afternoon in your father’s house, the afternoon of the rainstorm … .”
    Her dark, luminous eyes searched his soul. “You must not say such things, Daniel. The danger …”
    He placed a finger on her lips. “What danger? Who cares? All they can do is kill me.”
    Lucita kissed his fingertip. “But if you die,  amado,  I will die too.”
    “No. You’re young … too young to die.”
    “Daniel, I would not live without you. I adore you, my darling  Yanqui.”
    He kissed her again and felt her body arching against his. Weightlessly they floated, intertwining, gliding through the silent emptiness.
    “We can never let them know of our love,” Lucita warned.
    “Not let them know?” Dan laughed. “I want to tell the whole world! I want to write it across the sky in letters of fire!”
    “No, no,” she begged, frightened. “They will try to take me away from you.”
    “Never! We’ll run away. Where would you like to live? New Zealand? Tahiti? Shall I buy the Taj Mahal for you and make it your palace? Or build a new world all our own, far out in space where no one can ever reach us?”
    But she was very serious. “Daniel, we cannot run away. I will not be the cause of your giving up everything you have worked so hard to build.”
    “The only thing I want is your love,” he told her. “Nothing else matters.”
    “You have my love, dearest one. You have all my love.”
    Her vibrant young body was flawless, irresistible. She stretched languidly as he stroked every curve of her. Slowly their bodies revolved around each other as their passion rose, skin glistening in the heat of their desire, endlessly floating in the sensuous weightless freedom from all restraints. They were alone in their own universe, nothing else existed: no world, no stars, neither night nor day. Only each other, the electric thrill of flesh on flesh, the whispered moans of delight, the musky scent of arousal climbing to its farthest peak. His mouth on her nipples, her hands sliding along his flanks. He gripped her buttocks and she threw her head back keening as he entered her hard and demanding in one insistent thrust and they heaved and writhed together as her warmth enveloped him and he held her thrashing, sobbing, shouting her pleasure and pain and mad, wild desire.
    Dan’s eyes snapped open.
    For an instant he thought he was back on the construction gang, with the burly old Japanese foreman prodding him to get out of the bunk. But as he focused his sleep-blurred eyes, he saw that it was a stocky Russian captain in the red-trimmed uniform of the Strategic Rocket Corps prodding his middle through the sheet with the muzzle of a stubby pistol. Behind him stood two Russian soldiers holding ugly, snub-nosed machine guns. They fired fléchette darts, Dan recognized. The darts would not penetrate the fragile skin of the space station’s hull, but they had more than enough power to puncture the thin sheet covering Dan’s naked body and the living skin beneath it.
    “Daniel Hamilton Randolph,” said the captain in impeccable midwestern American, “I arrest you for piracy in the name of the Presidium of the Soviet Union and by order of Vasily Malik, chairman of the Soviet Combined Space Forces.”

Chapter THREE

    In Paris it was drizzling again. Willem Quistigaard sipped at his aperitif, savoring the golden warming glow of the Pemod