1. Miss Semipalatinsk's Extraordinary Spasm #2

“What’s happening to her ?”

“Her molecules are seeking lower energy states, but you don’t need to worry about that.”

“How?” Mangels’ voice is frail in the attenuated atmosphere.

“A little way back we passed through a defensive sphere of microshells armed with homebrew nanoculture. Shabby. Fucks one up atomically. Reformats carbon into a crystal lattice, but Mangels...”

There are glowing orange patches of decay in the polyfluid hull; broad sections can be seen to sag as stricken machinery fails to maintain thresholds.

Yet Mangels will not leave.

“Two minutes now.”

He pays no attention to the peripheral. Single-mindedly, he makes hard work of collecting the jewels, which scatter like wilful insects.

“What are you doing?”

He makes a wild leap at a fizzing emerald, misses, rebounds painfully off an exercise rig.

“They’re not worth anything, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“Help me.”

“Besides, you didn’t love her anyway.”

“Help me!”

Bolex considers the firm set of his jaw, and capitulates. With brisk efficiency, she begins to scoop up the gems with Ms Semipalatinsk’s vacant bodyglove.

The scent of freshly sharpened pencils fills the thinning air, indicating terminal deterioration in the hull material. The emergency tones grow strident.

“That’s all you can have,” says Bolex.

Circumventing Mangel’s awkward attempts to negotiate freefall, she cages him with her legs, speeds to the airlock and shoves him roughly into a zodiac. She secures him, then clambers in herself, punching the emergency release code with a slender, nervously quivering effector.

1. Miss Semipalatinsk's Extraordinary Spasm #1

Miss Semipalatinsk’s extraordinary spasm rips her body to pieces - but all Mangels sees is a flash of blurred motion.

Then a moment of clarity, a cloud of gorgeous jewels, scintillating in the rough shape of a woman. These crude contours then warp, stretch, compress to a dense sphere which explodes immediately in a spray of bright elastic. Again the iconography of the female body presents itself, before fracturing with the sound of breaking glass - and recreating itself a hundredfold.

Mangels cannot help but look at her - however mutilated, transformed. However monstrous her agony. Somehow, she is become the feminine mystery incarnate, coruscating in brilliant pieces, ricocheting hysterically from one end of his plush cabin to the other.

She is evolved and, at last, perfect.

Six months ago, Mangels plucked Ms Semipalatinsk 2037 from near-victory in a bogus international beauty quest. He has come to know her well since then. His affirmations of love have been many and mucid. She has been his constant companion through a full, hair-raising season of Solar Safari.

Yet these things are no longer important.

Suddenly and for the first time he can remember, he feels himself driven by an imperative not rooted in his glands. The germ of something sacred, a feminine quiddity, is exposing itself here, sloughing the girl’s base flesh as a lover, reckless for the touch of her partner’s skin, will desperately shed her clothes.

Mangels shows no sign of hearing the ship’s plangent distress tones. Absently, he tethers himself to a bulkhead as the atmosphere blows past towards a rent in the hull. Naked, but for a monogrammed jockstrap, he stares into what Miss Semipalatinsk is becoming…

A treasure beyond imagining.

Then loudly a generic female voice, urgent, intrusive...

“Raszewski’s out. Your turn now.” Bolex, the advenurer’s vintage Pratt & Whitney peripheral, is drifting towards him, legs trailing like the tentacles of a squid. “We’re compromised. The hull is shriveling. Counting four minutes to hard vacuum.”

But Mangels is transfixed. In her previous flesh the woman had been beautiful. Now she is transcendent...

“Mangels? You conscious?”

Bolex is beside him now, legs radiating from her shell like the spokes of a bicycle wheel, mooring her to the cabin walls.

“Kingsize chunk of frozen faecal matter. Mangels?”

There is no response.

“It totaled the airplant, Mangels. New Harmony is either weak on hygiene or very strong on make-do ballistics.”

With a beatific smile, Mangels allows himself to drift into the cloud of hot, miraculous jewels. He cannot abide the thought of leaving Ms Semipalatinsk.