International Space Station, January, 2078, Wednesday…

Bruno Hauptmann slapped the cards down in triumph.

"Beat that, boys and girls!"

The cards shifted slightly in the slight breeze of the air conditioning but their magnets kept them glued to the metal surface. It was a good hand.

Laurie Adams, her bald pate shining in the dim light of the station's rec room, laid her hand down. A full house.

"Read'em and weep, Bruno."

"Shit, I don't believe it. You've got to be cheating."

She leaned over the table, giving him a full view of her bare breasts through the unbuttoned collar of her jumpsuit. She was clearly wearing nothing under it. On the collar was the UN Space Agency's emblem and the three stars that signified she was, at least temporarily, the higher ranked of the two.

"Watch it, kraut, you're out of line," growled Giovanni Prado, one of the pilots. "Besides, Laurie doesn't need to cheat. She's too damn good."

"Thanks, 'Vanni," Laurie said, raking in the pot, "but I don't need you to come to my defense. I can take old Bruno here any day." She pretended to spit on her hands, and then rubbed them together. "I mean in cards, of course." She looked at Bruno and licked her lips suggestively. "You could be a surprisingly good fuck if you got off your Prussian high horse long enough to get onto mine." There was a Nashville twang in her voice but she had been born in Kentucky.

Giovanni laughed as Bruno turned red.

"I'm already spoken for," he muttered.

He had become engaged to Margarite just before the crew jumped to the International Space Station. He and Margarite had been together for three years. Both devout Catholics, they had pledged abstinence as teenagers until they were married.

Giovanni was also Catholic, at least by birth. Privately, he didn't have much use for the Church, although he went through the public motions of going to mass with his wife and family. He was basically agnostic, hedging his bets just in case there was something to all of the mumbo-jumbo coming from the Vatican.

Laurie was the wild one. In her official life she was a type A over-achiever, a take-charge person who drove herself and others mercilessly to get a job done. In her private life, she also lived hard, wearing out men left and right in the battle of the bed sheets and beating them at poker and drinking. Her father had been a Navy pilot back in the days when there was still a US Navy. She had gone US Air Force, then on to UNSA, the new international agency that subsumed all the agencies from individual countries but still took a secondary role to the commercial interests in space.