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“I would like you to kiss me,” she said, and as Sergei caught her eye and smiled, she knew that he would. She took the bottle out of his hand. Set it down. Took a step back to wait for him to follow her. And follow he did.
Margo had never been good with people, not even as a little girl. She’d been too serious, too driven, too self assured, with little patience for those without those qualities. In adulthood, the edges had softened, some, if not much, leaving her bluntness more awkward than anything, but she still found herself perplexed by most others, even within NASA. She certainly didn’t have Sergei’s quiet charm or genial disposition.
But she’d always understood him.
He was a quite ordinary looking man, she thought as he closed the distance. Handsome enough, with those piercing eyes, but…ordinary. The kind of good looking that she might not notice at all, walking down the street, or might register clinically if sitting in a meeting but easily dismiss. But those were never situations in which Sergei Nikulov had been in her life, and from the moment his eyes had sharpened at the sight of a paper coaster, and his clever fingers had started tearing it so precisely, he’d had Margo’s complete attention.
She hadn’t had time to think about it at the time, too excited by the spark of his idea, too busy tearing her own coaster to represent Apollo, too distracted by the rush of sketching out a design on a set of cocktail napkins with him over another round of drinks. She hadn’t even had time to think about it in the hours following, when they’d gone back to JSC after reaching a point where they needed more than just the supplies they could scrounge up in a bar and worked with Aleida into the early hours of the morning. But when she’d returned to her office to catch an hour or two of sleep…she’d had just enough time before she passed out for the realization.
Oh, she had thought. He’s just like me.
Even after that, she hadn’t understood, not really – there had been so much happening, too much to do to focus on such a minor little thing as a new friendship, even if it was a friendship with someone far more interesting than most people she’d met in her life. Her excitement had been for a design challenge; her energy spurred by creation and cooperation. Sergei had just…made it easy. Math, music, machines – he had something intelligent to say about each of Margo’s favourite things, and could always keep up with her, just as she could with him. That intelligence, Sergei’s immediate trust in her mind, his willingness to defer to her and lead her in turn, had made the collaboration fun.
He’d even made the administrative work easier, somehow. Knowing he was doing the same things had motivated Margo, had always reminded her of the sheer joy of their work. They were bureaucrats now, the both of them, and had been for as long as they’d been acquainted, but engineers they would always be. He wasn’t a stranger to her any longer, nor a rival, nor even a man.
Men were boring. Sergei was not boring.
She supposed it would have been obvious, if she’d thought about it – she was an engineer at heart, and her truest, lifelong love was space. Of course, she’d be intrigued by someone who had loved her greatest passion as fervently as she.
But Margo had never been in love. Never even come close. Any attraction she’d felt at all had been perfunctory, more a matter of an intellectual understanding of good looks or physical appeal than any actual interest or desire. Even at NASA, where she’d made her career, full of brilliant minds as it was, she’d never looked twice at a colleague. So it had caught her by complete surprise when she’d realized, months and months later, that the spark of excitement at the sound of his voice was still there, even when there was no immediate challenge, when she and Sergei were not getting their hands dirty themselves, when they had no concepts or problems to discuss.
Just her and him in an elevator, and she felt as alive as she’d felt at the 11:59 club, inside the module, on the phone with him while the world was on the brink of nuclear war.
Before Sergei, she’d never even considered if she were lonely.
But now he was stepping closer to her, and his hands were on her shoulders, and she was taking one of them in her own, and she couldn’t think at all.
Margo Madison, not thinking. What a world this was.
But all that mattered were his lips, pressing against her knuckles, her cheek, her throat, and finally, her mouth; those ring-free hands braced against her neck and thumbs along her cheekbones before he wrapped his arms around her completely; her own hands, touching him back and wrapping around his sides; the fervent look in his eyes after he’d lowered her to the sofa and pulled away to yank off his jacket.
She was fifty five years old, and she was breathless as a teenager under his touch.
They broke apart.
Margo had not been thinking, but apparently, he had.
He asked her for engine designs. She refused. And the KGB came hammering at the door.
“Well, I don’t care how many photographs you all took of me, or him, or anyone else,” Margo said after glancing through the pictures they’d set before her. “I will not give you our engine design.”
The damned Soviet just looked vaguely amused. “You’re obviously a very intelligent woman, Miss Madison. So I want you to understand the situation fully. You’ve been sharing classified information with us for the past nine years.”
Margo scoffed. She was many things, but she was not naive, and this had gone two ways. Their agreement had had clear boundaries, until tonight, and nothing she’d ever given him had been of immensely more value than what he’d given her. Sergei was a brilliant engineer in his own right. She had just…reduced the need for repeated work. “Anything I told him was in the interest of the furtherance of space travel and international peace. Period.”
That and the interest in the joy of problem solving, of sharing thoughts with and bouncing ideas off a person who saw it as a partnership rather than a competition, whose challenges were in the name of making them both better. She had wanted to further space travel. Just as much, she’d wanted to keep working with Sergei for its own end.
Working with engineers at NASA was enjoyable. Working with Sergei was fun.
The KGB agent just said, “I’m fairly certain that your FBI won’t make that distinction. I suspect, in fact, that if they were to learn of your actions, they would consider you a spy, a traitor. And you would likely spend the rest of your life in a prison.”
“Well, maybe I’m willing to take that chance,” she snapped. “I will not be blackmailed.”
“That’s very commendable,” the agent said. Margo scowled as he kept talking, about Sergei Korolev, about a gulag in Siberia. Then he added, “The tragedy, of course, is the price others pay for such principle. Those we love.”
She barely had time to register the words before the flunky seized Sergei from behind, wrapping a rope around his throat to choke him.
“Stop, Jesus!” she exclaimed, getting to her feet. “Please – stop! Stop! Dammit! Stop! Plea–”
The man released Sergei. Sergei collapsed to the ground, coughing.
“Take a day,” the agent in front of her said. “If you so choose, contact me at this number.”
She was always going to do it, she thought. There was no part of Margo that could let Sergei die when there was something she could do to prevent it. But it became instantly clear several hours later, after a painfully empty elevator had taken her up to her floor, in her office, once Bill Strausser told her he was leaving: “I’m taking a job at Helios. It’s nothing personal. It’s just a lot more money.”
Margo had always been in it for the science. The credit was nice, and Margo certainly couldn’t deny that in her youth, she’d been fiercely competitive about that. But it was more about discovery than it was being first, more about being better than the colleague beside her than it had ever been about ensuring NASA beat Roscosmos, that the United States beat the Soviet Union. In the grand scheme of things, competition was just a motivational tool.
It was the same reason Sergei had intrigued her – he had been just the same. An engineer’s ego, same as she – it was not possible to rise to the levels they had without one. But he’d been willing to pretend the docking system had been entirely her idea, hers and NASA’s, as if it hadn’t been he who’d first noticed. Margo had not been used to that kind of humility from anyone in her line of work, least of all men. She still wasn’t. Sergei had been special. Like her, an engineer above all else.
Dev Ayesa was brilliant, and an incredibly hard worker. Only an idiot would ever dispute that. He’d stepped away from hands on engineering work, but she and Sergei had done the same, and no amount of time spent in administrative or bureaucratic work would change the fact that Dev had been the mind behind the world’s first sustained nuclear fusion reactor. It had been that innovation behind everything that had been accomplished since.
But Dev was a changed man. He chased accolades, now, not the science.
Margo understood it. She sympathized. She’d been that person once, so determined to win the flight director’s position which should have been hers all along that she’d blackmail to get it. But that was a younger person’s game, and she was too old for it, now, with too much she still wanted to see achieved to care if it were her name or someone else’s in the papers. She had wisdom enough for lines in the sand, or so she thought.
No weapons on the moon. Exchange information happily, but no sharing anything that could have military applications. Human life above all else.
She would not be blackmailed by threats to her job, but apparently, all it took was a threat to Sergei’s life to make her fold.
No one would ever believe it of her – Margo could barely believe it herself. She was a utilitarian, through and through. The needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few. Or the one.
So many years ago, she’d been willing to let Molly Cobb die, just to avoid the risk of losing two more people. This was worse. This was so much worse. This engine had military applications. It could mean so much more than just the twothat could have been lost on Apollo 25.
But she could not let Sergei die.
They could threaten her, but not him.
He’d lied to her, and manipulated her, and she’d been angry enough to let them all leave that hotel room without agreeing, but not enough to not make the call now. She’d been furious, but when she thought of Sergei with these few hours of distance, it wasn’t deceit that came to mind, but math problems, and music records, and a red suit. Without Bill at NASA…at this point, Sergei was the oldest friend she had, the person in her life that most closely aligned with her own ideals. That she might be in love with him was…besides the point.
She turned the card over in her hand and made the call.