Страница:
Chapter 10
The Udat slid over the surface of Tranquillity’s non-rotating spaceport as though it was running on an invisible wire. A honeycomb of deep docking-bays flashed past below the blue and purple hull; the spherical fuselages of Adamist starships nested inside, glinting dully under the rim floodlights. Meyer watched through the blackhawk’s sensors as a fifty-five-metre-diameter clipper-class starship manoeuvred itself onto a cradle that had risen out of a bay, orange balls of chemical flame spitting out of its vernier nozzles. He could see the ubiquitous intersecting violet and green loops of the Vasilkovsky Line bold across the forward quarter. It touched the cradle, and pistonlike latches engaged, slipping into sockets around the hull. Umbilical gantries swung round, plugging it into the spaceport’s coolant and environmental circuits. The starship’s thermo-dump panels retracted, and the cradle started to descend into the bay.
So much effort just to arrive,Udat observed.
Quiet down, you’ll hurt people’s feelings,meyer told it fondly.
I wish there were more ships like me. Your race should stop clinging to the past. These mechanical ships belong in a museum.
My race, is it? There are human chromosomes in you, don’t forget.
Are you sure?
I think I accessed it in a memory core somewhere. There are in voidhawks.
Oh. Them.
Meyer grinned at the overtone of disparagement. I thought you liked voidhawks.
Some of them are all right. But they think like their captains.
And how do voidhawk captains think?
They don’t like blackhawks. They think we’re trouble.
We have been known.
Only when money is short,Udat said, gently reproachful.
And if there were more blackhawks and fewer Adamist starships, money would be even tighter. I have wages to pay.
At least we’ve paid off the mortgage you took out to buy me.
Yes.and there’s money to save to buy another when you’re gone. But he didn’t let that thought filter out of his mind. Udat was fifty-seven now; seventy-five to eighty was the usual blackhawk lifespan. Meyer wasn’t at all convinced he would want another ship after Udat . But there was a quarter of a century of togetherness to look forward to yet, and money wasn’t such a problem these days. There was only life-support-section maintenance and the four crew members to pay for. He could afford to pick and choose his charters now. Not like the first twenty years. Now those had been wild days. Fortunately the power compressed into the big asymmetric teardrop shape of Udat ’s hull gave them a terrific speed and agility. They had needed it on occasion. Some of the more covert missions had been hazardous in the extreme. Not all their colleagues had returned.
I’d still like more of my own kind to talk to,Udat said.
Do you talk to Tranquillity?
Oh, yes, all the time. We’re good friends.
What do you talk about?
I show it places we visit. And it shows me its interior, what humans get up to.
Really?
Yes, it’s interesting. This Joshua Calvert who chartered us, Tranquillity says he’s a recidivist of the worst kind.
Tranquillity is absolutely right. That’s why I like Joshua so much. He reminds me of me at that age.
No. You were never that bad.
Udat ’s nose turned slightly, gliding delicately between two designated traffic streams congested with He3 tankers and personnel commuters. The bays in this section of the mammoth spaceport disk were larger, it was where the repairs and maintenance work was carried out. Only half of them were occupied.
The big blackhawk came to a halt directly over bay MB 0-330, then slowly rotated around its long axis so that its upper hull was pointing down over the rim. Unlike voidhawks, with their separate lower hull cargo hold and upper hull crew toroid, Udat had all its mechanical sections contained in a horseshoe which embraced its dorsal bulge. The bridge and individual crew cabins were at the front, with the two cargo holds occupying the wings, and an ion-field flyer stored in a small hangar on the port side.
Cherri Barnes walked into the bridge compartment. She was Udat ’s cargo officer, doubling as a systems generalist: forty-five years old, with light coffee skin and a wide face prone to contemplative pouts. She had been with Meyer for three years.
She datavised a series of orders into her console processors, receiving images fed from the electronic sensors mounted on the hull. The three-dimensional picture which built up in her mind showed her Udat hanging poised thirty metres over the repair bay, holding its position steady.
“Over to you,” Meyer said.
“Thanks.” She opened a channel to the bay’s datanet. “MB 0-330, this is Udat . We have your cargo paid for and waiting. Ready for your unload instructions. How do you want to handle it, Joshua? Time is money.”
“Cherri, is that you?” Joshua datavised back.
“No one else on board will lower themselves to talk to you.”
“I wasn’t expecting you for another week, you’ve made good time.”
Meyer datavised an access order into his console. “You hire the best ship, you get the best time.”
“I’ll remember that,” Joshua told him. “Next time I have some money I’ll make sure I go for a decent ship.”
“We can always take our nodes elsewhere, Mr Hotshot Starship Captain who’s never been outside the Ruin Ring.”
“My nodes, genetic throwback who’s too scared to go in the Ruin Ring and earn a living.”
“It’s not the Ruin Ring which worries me, it’s what the Lord of Ruin does to people who skip outsystem before they register their finds in Tranquillity.”
There was an unusually long pause. Meyer and Cherri shared a bemused glance.
“I’ll send Ashly out with the Lady Mac ’s MSV to pick up the nodes,” Joshua said. “And you’re all invited to the party tonight.”
“So this is the famous Lady Macbeth ?” Meyer asked a couple of hours later. He was in bay 0—330’s cramped control centre with Joshua, his left foot anchored by a stikpad, looking out through the glass bubble wall into the bay itself. The fifty-seven-metre ship resting on the cradle in the middle of the floor was naked to space. Its hull plates had been stripped off, exposing the systems and tanks and engines, fantastically complex silver and white entrails. They were all contained inside a hexagonal-lattice stress structure. Jump nodes were positioned over each junction. Red and green striped superconductor cabling wormed inwards from each node, plugged directly into the ship’s fusion generators. Meyer hadn’t thought about it before, but the lenticular nodes were almost identical to the voidhawk profile.
Engineers wearing black SII suits and manoeuvring packs were propelling themselves over the open stress structure, running tests and replacing components. Others rode platforms on the end of multi-segment arms which were fitted out with heavy tools to handle the larger systems. Yellow strobes flashed on all the bay’s mobile equipment, sending sharp-edged amber circles slicing over every surface in crazy gyrating patterns.
Hundreds of data cables were stretched between the ship and the five interface couplings around the base of the cradle. It was almost as though Lady Macbeth was being tethered down by a net of optical fibres. A two-metre-diameter airlock tube had concertinaed out from the bay wall, just below the control centre, giving the maintenance team access to the life-support capsules buried at the core of the ship. Brackets on the bay walls held various systems waiting to be installed. Meyer couldn’t see where they could possibly fit. Lady Macbeth ’s spaceplane clung to one wall like a giant supersonic moth, wings in their forward-sweep position. The additional tanks and power cells Joshua had strapped on for flights to the Ruin Ring were gone; a couple of suited figures and a cyberdrone were trying to remove the thick foam from the fuselage with a solvent spray. Crumbling grey flakes were flying off in all directions.
“What were you expecting?” Joshua asked. “A Saturn V?” He was strapped into a restraint web behind a cyberdrone operations console. The boxy drones ran along the rails which spiralled up the bay walls, giving them access to any part of the docked ship. Three of them were currently clustered round an auxiliary fusion generator, which was being eased into its mountings at the end of long white waldo arms. Engineers floated around it, supervising the cyberdrones which were performing the installation, mating cables, coolant lines, and fuel hoses. Joshua monitored their progress through the omnidirectional AV projectors arrayed around his console.
“More like a battle cruiser,” Meyer said. “I saw the power ratings on those nodes, Joshua. You could jump fifteen lightyears with those brutes fully charged.”
“Something like that,” he said absently.
Meyer grunted, and turned back to the starship. The MSV was returning from another trip to Udat , a pale green oblong box three metres long with small spherical tanks bunched together on the base, and three segmented waldo arms ending in complex manipulators sprouting from the mid-fuselage section. It was carrying a packaged node, coasting down towards one of the engineering shop airlocks.
Cherri Barnes frowned, peering forwards into the bay. “How many reaction drives has she got?” she asked. There seemed an inordinate number of unbilicals jacked into the Lady Macbeth ’s rear quarter. She could see a pair of fusion tubes resting in the wall brackets, fat ten-metre cylinders swathed with magnetic coils, ion-beam injectors, and molecular-binding initiators.
Joshua turned his head fractionally, switching AV projectors. The new pillar shot a barrage of photons along his optical nerves, giving him a different angle on the auxiliary fusion generator. He studied it for a while, then datavised an instruction into one of the cyberdrones. “Four main drives.”
“Four?” Adamist ships usually had one fusion drive, with a couple of induction engines running off the generator as an emergency back-up.
“Yeah. Three fusion tubes, and an antimatter drive.”
“You can’t be serious,” Cherri Barnes exclaimed. “That’s a capital offence!”
“Wrong!”
Joshua and Meyer both grinned at her, infuriatingly superior. There were smiles from the other five console operators in the control centre.
“It’s a capital offence to possess antimatter,” Joshua said. “But there’s nothing in the Confederation space law about possessing an engine which uses antimatter. As long as you don’t fill up the confinement chambers and use it, you’re fine.”
“Bloody hell.”
“It makes you very popular when there’s a war on. You can write your own ticket. Or so I’m told.”
“I bet you’ve got a real powerful communication maser as well. One that can punch a message clean through another starship’s hull.”
“No, actually. Lady Mac has eight. Dad was a real stickler for multiple redundancy.”
Harkey’s Bar was on the thirty-first floor of the StMartha starscraper. There was a real band on the tiny stage, churning out scarr jazz, fractured melodies with wailing trumpets. A fifteen-metre bar made from real oak that Harkey swore blind came from a twenty-second-century Paris brothel, serving thirty-eight kinds of beer, and three times that number of spirits, including Norfolk Tears for those who could afford it. It had wall booths that could be screened from casual observation, a dance floor, long party tables, lighting globes emitting photons right down at the bottom of the yellow spectrum. And Harkey prided himself on its food, prepared by a chef who claimed he had worked in the royal kitchens of Kulu’s Jerez Principality. The waitresses were young, pretty, and wore revealing black dresses.
With its ritzy atmosphere, and not too expensive drinks, it attracted a lot of the crews from ships docked at Tranquillity’s port. Most nights saw a good crowd. Joshua had always used it. First when he was a cocky teenager looking for his nightly fix of spaceflight tales, then when he was scavenging, lying about how much he made and the unbelievable find that had just slipped from his fingers, and now as one of the super-elite, a starship owner-captain, one of the youngest ever.
“I don’t know what kind of crap that foam is which you sprayed on the spaceplane, Joshua, but the bloody stuff just won’t come off,” Warlow complained bitterly.
When Warlow spoke everybody listened. You couldn’t avoid it, not within an eight-metre radius. He was a cosmonik, born on an industrial asteroid settlement. He had spent over sixty-five per cent of his seventy-two years in free fall, and he didn’t have the kind of geneering bequeathed to Joshua and the Edenists by their ancestors. After a while his organs had begun to degenerate, depleted calcium levels had reduced his bones to brittle porcelain sticks, muscles had atrophied, and fluid bloated his tissues, impairing his lungs, degrading his lymphatic system. He had used drugs and nanonic supplements to compensate at first, then supplements became replacements, with bones exchanged for carbon-fibre struts. Electrical consumption supplanted food intake. The final transition was his skin, replacing the eczema-ridden epidermis with a smooth ochre silicon membrane. Warlow didn’t need a spacesuit to work in the vacuum, he could survive for over three weeks without a power and oxygen recharge. His facial features had become purely cosmetic, a crude mannequin-like caricature of human physiognomy, although there was an inlet valve at the back of his throat for fluid intake. There was no hair, and he certainly didn’t bother with clothes. Sex was something he lost in his fifties.
Although some cosmoniks had metamorphosed into little more than free-flying maintenance craft with a brain at the centre, Warlow had kept his humanoid shape. The only noticeable adaptation was his arms; they forked at each elbow, giving him two pairs of forearms. One set retained the basic hand and finger layout, the other set ended in titanium sockets, capable of accepting a variety of rigger tools.
Joshua grinned and raised his champagne glass at the sleek-skinned two-metre-tall gargoyle dominating the table. “That’s why I put you on it. If anybody can scrape it off, you can.” He counted himself lucky to get Warlow on his crew. Some captains rejected him for his age, Joshua welcomed him for his experience.
“You should get Ashly to fly it on a bypass trajectory that grazes Mirchusko’s atmosphere. Burn it off like an ablative. One zip and it’s all gone.” Warlow’s primary left forearm came down, palm slapping the table. Glasses and bottles juddered.
“Alternatively, you could plug a pump in your belly, and use your arse as a vacuum cleaner,” Ashly Hanson said. “Suck it off.” His cheeks caved in as he made a slurping sound.
The pilot was a tall sixty-seven-year-old, whom geneering had given a compact frame, floppy brown hair, and a ten-year-old’s wonderstruck smile. The whole universe was a constant delight for him. He lived for his skill, moving tonnes of metal through any atmosphere with avian grace. His Confederation Astronautics Board licence said he was qualified for both air and space operations, but it was three hundred and twenty years out of date. Ashly Hanson was temporally displaced; born into reasonable wealth, he had signed over his trust fund to the Jovian Bank in 2229 in exchange for a secure zero-tau pod maintenance contract (even then the Edenists had been the obvious choice as custodians). He alternated fifty years in entropy-free stasis, and five years “bumming round” the Confederation.
“I’m a futurologist,” he told Joshua the first time they met. “On a one-way ride to eternity. I just get out of my time machine for a look round every now and then.”
Joshua had signed him on as much for the tales he could tell as his piloting ability.
“We’ll just remove the foam according to the manual, thanks,” he told the bickering pair.
The vocal synthesizer diaphragm protruding from Warlow’s chest, just above his air-inlet gills, let out a metallic sigh. He shoved his squeezy bulb into his mouth and squirted some champagne into the valve. Drink was one thing he wasn’t giving up, although with his blood filters he could sober up with astonishing speed if he had to.
Meyer leant across the table. “Any word on Neeves and Sipika yet?” he asked Joshua quietly.
“Yeah. I forgot, you wouldn’t know. They arrived back in port a couple of days after you left for Earth. They bloody nearly got lynched. The serjeants had to rescue them. They’re in jail, waiting judicial pronouncement.”
Meyer frowned. “Why the wait? I thought Tranquillity processed the charges right away?”
“There’s a lot of bereaved relatives of scavengers who never came back who are claiming Neeves and Sipika are responsible. Then there’s the question of compensation. The Madeeir is still worth a million and a half fuseodollars even after my axe work. I waived my claim, but I suppose the families are entitled.”
Meyer took another sip. “Nasty business.”
“There’s talk about fitting emergency beacons to all the scavenger craft, making it an official requirement.”
“They’ll never go for that, they’re too independent.”
“Yeah, well, I’m out of it now.”
“Too true,” Kelly Tirrel said. She was sitting pressed up next to Joshua, one leg hooked over his, arm draped around his shoulders.
It was a position he found extremely comfortable. Kelly was wearing an amethyst dress with a broad square-cut neckline which showed off her figure, especially from his angle. She was twenty-four, slightly shorter than medium build, with red-brown hair and a delicate face. For the last couple of years she had been a rover correspondent for Tranquillity’s office of the Collins news group.
They had met eighteen months earlier when she was doing a piece on scavengers for distribution across the Confederation. He liked her for her independence, and the fact that she wasn’t born rich.
“Nice to know you worry about me,” he said.
“I don’t, it’s the dataloss when you detonate your brain across the cosmos in that relic you’re flying, that’s what I’m concerned over.” She turned to Meyer. “Do you know he won’t give me the coordinates for this castle he found?”
“What castle?” Meyer asked.
“Where he found the Laymil electronics stack.”
A smile spread across Meyer’s whole face. “A castle. You didn’t tell me that, Joshua. Did it have knights and wizards in it?”
“No,” Joshua said firmly. “It was a big cube structure. I called it a castle because of the weapons systems. It was tough work getting in, one wrong move and . . .” Grave lines scored his face.
Kelly squirmed a fraction closer.
“It was operational?” Meyer was enjoying himself.
“No.”
“So why was it dangerous?”
“Some of the systems still had power in their storage cells. So given how much molecular decay they’ve suffered out there in the Ring, just brushing against them could have triggered off a short circuit. They would have blown like a chain reaction.”
“Electronic stacks, and functional power cells. That really was a terrific find, Joshua.”
Joshua glared at him.
“And he won’t tell me where it is,” Kelly complained. “Just think, something that big which survived the suicide could well hold the key to the whole Laymil secret. If I could capture that on a sensevise, I’d be made. I could pick my own office with Collins, then. Hell, I’d be in charge of my own office.”
“I’ll sell you where it is,” Joshua said, “it’s all up here.” He tapped his head. “My neural nanonics have got its orbital parameters down to a metre. I can locate it any time in the next ten years for you.”
“How much are you asking?” Meyer asked.
“Ten million fuseodollars.”
“Thanks, I’ll pass.”
“Doesn’t it bother you, standing in the way of progress?” Kelly asked.
“No. Besides, what happens if the answer turns out to be something we don’t particularly like?”
“Good point.” Meyer raised his glass.
“Joshua! People have a right to know. They are quite capable of making up their own minds, they don’t need to be protected from facts by people like you. Secrets seed oppression.”
Joshua rolled his eyes. “Jesus. You just like to think reporters have a God-given right to stuff their noses in anywhere they want.”
Kelly tipped a glass to his lips, encouraging him to sip the champagne. “But we do.”
“You’ll get it bitten off one day, you see. In any case, we will know what happened to the Laymil. With the size of the research team Tranquillity employs, results are inevitable.”
“That’s you, Joshua, the eternal optimist. Only an optimist would even think about going anywhere in that ship of yours.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the Lady Mac ,” Joshua bridled. “You ask Meyer, those systems are the finest money can buy.”
Kelly fluttered long dark lashes enquiringly at Meyer.
“Oh, absolutely,” he said.
“I still don’t want you to go,” she said quietly. She kissed Joshua’s cheek. “They were good systems when your father was flying her, and they were newer then. Look what happened to him.”
“That’s different. Those orphans on the hospital station would never have made it back here without the Lady Mac . Dad had to jump while he was too close to that neutron star.”
Meyer let out a distressed groan, and drained his glass.
Joshua was up at the bar when the woman approached him. He didn’t even see her until she spoke, his attention was elsewhere. The barmaid’s name was Helen Vanham, she was nineteen, with a dress cut lower than Harkey’s normal, and she seemed eager to serve Joshua Calvert, the starship captain. She said she finished work at two in the morning.
“Captain Calvert?”
He turned from the pleasing display of cleavage and thigh. Jesus, but that title felt good. “You got me.”
The woman was black, very black. There couldn’t have been much geneering in her family, he decided, although he was suspicious about that deep pigmentation; she was fifty centimetres shorter than him, and her short beret of hair was frosted with strands of silver. He reckoned she was about sixty years old, and ageing naturally.
“I’m Dr Alkad Mzu,” she said.
“Good evening, Doctor.”
“I understand you have a ship you’re fitting out?”
“That’s right, the Lady Macbeth . Finest independent trader this side of the Kulu Kingdom. Are you interested in chartering her?”
“I may be.”
Joshua skipped a beat. He took another look at the small woman. Alkad Mzu was dressed in a suit of grey fabric, a slim collar turned up around her neck. She seemed very serious, her features composed in a permanent expression of resignation. And right at the back of his mind there was a faint tingle of warning.
You’re being oversensitive, he told himself, just because she doesn’t smile doesn’t mean she’s a threat. Nothing is a threat in Tranquillity, that’s the beauty of this place.
“Medicine must pay very well these days,” he said.
“It’s a physics doctorate.”
“Oh, sorry. Physics must pay very well.”
“Not really. I’m a member of the team researching Laymil artefacts.”
“Yeah? You must have heard of me, then, I found the electronics stack.”
“Yes, I heard, although memory crystals aren’t my field. I mainly study their fusion drives.”
“Really? Can I get you a drink?”
Alkad Mzu blinked, then slowly looked about. “Yes, this is a bar, isn’t it. I’ll just have a white wine, then, thank you.”
Joshua signalled to Helen Vanham for a wine. Receiving a very friendly smile in return.
“What exactly was the charter?” he asked.
“I need to visit a star system.”
Definitely weird, Joshua thought. “That’s what Lady Mac does best. Which star system?”
“Garissa.”
Joshua frowned, he thought he knew most star systems. He consulted his neural nanonics cosmology file. That was when his humour really started to deflate. “Garissa was abandoned thirty years ago.”
Alkad Mzu received her slim glass from the barmaid, and tasted the wine. “It wasn’t abandoned, Captain. It was annihilated. Ninety-five million people were slaughtered by the Omutan government. The Confederation Navy managed to get some off after the planet-buster strike, about seven hundred thousand. They used marine transports and colonist-carrier ships.” Her eyes clouded over. “They abandoned the rescue effort after a month. There wasn’t a lot of point. The radiation fallout had reached everyone who survived the blasts and tsunamis and earthquakes and superstorms. Seven hundred thousand out of ninety-five million.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”
Her lips twitched around the rim of the glass. “Why should you? An obscure little planet that died before you were born; for politics that never made any sense even then. Why should anybody remember?”
Joshua shot the fuseodollars from his Jovian Bank credit card into the bar’s accounts block as the barmaid delivered his tray of champagne bottles. There was an oriental man at the far end of the bar who was keeping an unobtrusive watch on himself and Dr Mzu over his beer mug. Joshua forced himself not to stare in return. He smiled at Helen Vanham and added a generous tip. “Dr Mzu, I have to be honest. I can take you to the Garissan system, but a landing given those circumstances is out of the question.”
“I understand, Captain. And I appreciate your honesty. I don’t wish to land, simply to visit.”
“Ah, er, good. Garissa was your homeworld?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s the third time you’ve said that to me.”
“One of those evenings, I guess.”
“How much would it cost me?”
“For a single passenger, there and back; you’re looking at about five hundred thousand fuseodollars. I know it’s a lot, but the fuel expenditure will be the same for one person as a full cargo hold. And the crew time is the same as well, they all need paying.”
“I doubt I can raise your full charter fee in advance. My research position is a comfortable one, but not that comfortable. However, I can assure you that once we reach our destination adequate funds will be available. Does that interest you?”
Joshua gripped the tray tighter, interested despite himself. “It may be possible to come to an arrangement, subject to a suitable deposit. And my rates are quite reasonable, you won’t find any cheaper.”
“Thank you, Captain. Can I have a copy of your ship’s handling parameters and cargo capacity? I need to know whether the Lady Macbeth can fulfil my requirements, they are rather specialized.”
Jesus, if she needs to know how big the cargo hold is, just what is she planning on bringing back? Whatever it is, it must have been hidden for thirty years.
His neural nanonics reported she had opened a channel. “Sure.” He datavised over the Lady Mac ’s performance tables.
“I’ll be in touch, Captain. Thank you for the drink.”
“My pleasure.”
At the other end of the bar, Onku Noi, First Lieutenant serving in the Oshanko Imperial Navy, and assigned to the C5 Intelligence arm (Foreign Observation Division), finished his beer and paid the bill. The audio discrimination program in his neural nanonics had filtered out the bar’s chatter and background music, allowing him to record the conversation between Alkad Mzu and the handsome young starship captain. He stood up and opened a channel into Tranquillity’s communication net, requesting access to the spaceport’s standard commercial reference memory core. The file on the Lady Macbeth and Joshua Calvert was datavised into his neural nanonics. What he accessed caused an involuntary twitch in his jaw muscle. Lady Macbeth was a combat-capable starship, complete with antimatter drive and combat-wasp launch-rails, and she was being capaciously refurbished. Pausing only to confirm Joshua Calvert’s visual profile was filed correctly in his neural nanonics memory cell, he followed Dr Mzu out of Harkey’s Bar, keeping an unobtrusive thirty seconds behind her.
Joshua, interested before, was now outright fascinated as he surreptitiously watched the three men trailing after the diminutive Dr Mzu almost collide in the doorway. His intuition had been right again.
Jesus, who is she?
Tranquillity would know. But then Tranquillity would know she was being tailed as well, and who the tails were. Which meant that Ione would know.
He still hadn’t resolved his feelings about Ione. There couldn’t be anyone in the universe who was better at sex, but knowing that Tranquillity was looking at him out of those enchanting sea-blue eyes, that all those fluffy girlish mannerisms were wrapped around thought processes cooler than solid helium, was more than a little disconcerting. Though never inhibiting. She had been quite right about that, he simply couldn’t say no. Not to her.
He returned to her every day, as instinctively as a migrating bird to an equatorial continent. It was exciting screwing the Lord of Ruin, a Saldana. And the feel of her body pressed against his was supremely erotic.
The male ego, he often reflected these days, was a puppet master with a very black sense of humour.
Joshua didn’t have any time to ponder the puzzle of Dr Mzu before someone else hailed him. He turned with a slightly pained expression on his face.
A thirty-year-old man in a slightly worn navy-blue ship’s one-piece was pushing through the throng, waving hopefully. He was just a few centimetres shorter than Joshua with the kind of regular features below short black hair that suggested a good deal of geneering. There was a smile on his face, apprehensive and keen at the same time.
“Yes?” Joshua asked wearily, he was only halfway back to his table.
“Captain Calvert? I’m Erick Thakrar, a ship’s general systems engineer, grade five.”
“Ah,” Joshua said.
Warlow’s thousand-decibel laugh blasted out, silencing the bar for an instant.
“Grade ratings are mostly down to logged flight hours,” Erick said. “I did a lot of time in port maintenance. I’m up to grade three level in practice, if not more.”
“And you’re looking for a berth?”
“That’s right.”
Joshua hesitated, He still had a couple of berths to fill, and one of them was for a systems generalist. But that itchy sensation of discomfort had returned, much stronger than it had been with Dr Mzu.
Jesus, what’s this one, a serial killer?
“I see,” he said.
“I would be a bargain, I’m only asking grade five pay.”
“I prefer to make flight pay a percentage of the charter fee, or a percentage of profits if we trade our own cargo.”
“Sounds pretty good to me.”
Joshua couldn’t fault his attitude. Youthful, enthusiastic, no doubt a good worker, obviously willing to accept the rule bending necessary to keep independent ships flying. Ordinarily, a man you’d want at your back. But that intimation of wrongness wouldn’t leave.
“OK, let me have your CV file, and I’ll look it over,” he said. “But not tonight, I’m in no fit state to make command judgements tonight.”
In the end he invited Erick Thakrar back to the table to see how he got on with the other three crew members. He shared their sense of humour, had some good stories of his own, drank a lot, but not excessively.
Joshua watched it happen through the increasingly rosy glow fostered by the champagne, occasionally having to push Kelly to one side for a proper view of the table. Warlow liked him, Ashly Hanson liked him, Melvyn Ducharme, the Lady Mac ’s fusion specialist, liked him, even Meyer and the Udat crew liked him. He was one of them.
And that, Joshua decided, was the problem. Erick fitted into his role a little too perfectly.
At quarter past two in the morning, feeling very smug, Joshua managed to give Kelly the slip, and sneaked out of Harkey’s Bar with Helen Vanham. She lived by herself in an apartment a couple of floors below Harkey’s. It was sparsely furnished, the walls of the lounge were bare white polyp; big brightly coloured cushions had been scattered around on a topaz moss floor, several aluminium cargo-pods served as tables with bottles and glasses, a giant AV projector pillar occupied one corner. The archways into different rooms all had folding silk screens for doors. Someone had been painting outlines of animals on them, there were paint pots and brushes lying on one of the pods. Joshua saw new tumours of polyp pushing up through the moss like rock mushrooms: furniture buds starting the slow growth into the form Helen wanted.
There was a food secretion panel on the wall opposite the window; a row of teats, like small yellow-brown rubber sacks, were standing proud, indicating regular use. It had been a long time since Joshua had used a panel for food, though a few years ago when money was tight they had been a godsend.
Every apartment in Tranquillity had one. The teats secreted edible pastes and fruit juices synthesized by a series of glands in the wall behind. There was nothing wrong with the taste, the pastes were indistinguishable from real chicken, and beef, and pork, and lamb, even the colours were reasonable. It was the constituency, like viscid grease, which always put Joshua off.
The glands ingested a nutrient fluid from a habitatwide network of veins which were fed from Tranquillity’s mineral digestion organs in the southern endcap. There was also a degree of recycling, human wastes and organic scraps being broken down in specialist organs at the bottom of each starscraper. Porous sections of the shell vented toxic chemicals, preventing any dangerous build-up in the habitat’s closed biosphere.
There was no such thing as starvation in bitek habitats, though both Edenists and Tranquillity’s residents imported vast quantities of delicacies and wines from across the Confederation. They could afford it. But Helen obviously couldn’t. Despite its size, the full teats and absence of materialism marked the apartment down as student digs.
“Help yourself to a drink,” Helen said. “I’m getting out of this customer-friendly dress.” She walked through an archway into the bedroom, leaving the screen folded back.
“What else do you do apart from serve bar at Harkey’s?” he asked.
“I’m studying art,” she called back. “Harkey’s is just for funtime money.”
Joshua broke off from examining the bottles and gave the screens with their animals a more appraising look. “Are you any good?”
“I might be eventually. My tutor says I have a good feel for form. But it’s a five-year course, we’re still on basic sketching and painting. We don’t even get to AV technology until next year, and mood synthesis is another year after that. It’s a drag, but you need to know the fundamentals.”
“So how long have you been at Harkey’s?”
“A couple of months. It’s not bad work, you space industry people tip well, and you’re not a pain like the finance mob. I worked at a bar over in the StPelham for a week. Crapoodle!”
“Have you ever seen Erick Thakrar before? He was sitting at my table, thirtyish, in a blue ship-suit.”
“Yes. He’s been in most nights for a fortnight or so. He’s another good tipper.”
“Do you know where he’s been working?”
“Out in the dock; the Lowndes company, I think. He started a couple of days after he arrived.”
“Which ship did he arrive on?”
“The Shah of Kai. ”
Joshua opened a channel into Tranquillity’s communication net, and datavised a search request into the Lloyd’s office. The Shah of Kai was a cargo vessel registered to a holding company in the New Californian system. It was an ex-navy transport ship, with a six-gee fusion drive; one hold was equipped with zero-tau pods for a company of marines, and it had proximity-range defence lasers. An asteroid assault craft.
Gotcha, Joshua thought.
“Did you ever meet any of the crew?” he asked.
Helen reappeared in the bedroom archway. She was wearing a long-sleeved net body-stocking, and white suede boots which came halfway up her thighs.
“Tell you later,” she said.
Joshua gave his lips an involuntary lick. “I’ve got a great location file to match that costume, if you want to try it.”
She took a step into the room. “Sure.”
He accessed the sensenviron file, and ordered his neural nanonics to open a channel to Helen. A subliminal flicker crossed his optic nerves. Her sparse apartment gave way to the silk walls of a magnificent desert pavilion. There were tall ferns in brass urns around the entrance, a banquet table along one side was laid out with golden plates and jewelled goblets, and exotic, intricate drapes swung slowly in the warm, dry breeze that blew in from the crimson desert outside. Behind Helen was a curtained-off section, with the silk drawn apart just enough to show them a huge bed with purple sheets and a satin canopy which rose behind the scarlet-tasselled pillows like a sunrise sculpted from fabric.
“Nice,” she said, glancing round.
“It’s where Lawrence of Arabia pleasured his harem back in the eighteenth century. He was some sort of sheik king who fought the Roman Empire. Absolutely guaranteed genuine sensevise recording from old Earth. I got it from a starship captain friend of mine who visited the museum.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Old Lawrence had about a hundred and fifty wives, so they say.”
“Wow. And he pleasured all of them himself?”
“Oh, yeah, he had to, there was an army of eunuchs to protect them. No other men could get in.”
“Does the magic linger?”
“Wanna find out?”
Ione’s mind encompassed the entirety of Helen Vanham’s bedroom, the photosensitive cells in the bare polyp walls, floor, and ceiling giving her a complete visualization. It was a thousand times more detailed than an AV projection. She could move through the bedroom as if she was there, which in a way she was.
The bed was simply a plump mattress on the floor. Helen lay across it, with a naked Joshua straddling her. He was slowly and deliberately tearing the body-stocking off her.
Interesting,ione observed.
If you say so,tranquillity replied coolly.
Helen’s long booted legs kicked the air behind his back. She was giggling and squealing as more and more strips of her stocking were ripped away.
I don’t mean the sex, though judging by the way he’s turned on I’ll have to try wearing something like that for him myself one day. I was thinking of the way he latched on to Erick Thakrar.
His alleged psychic ability again?
He has had twelve applicants for the post of ship’s general systems engineer so far. All of them legitimate. Yet the minute Erick asked for the berth, he was suspicious. Are you going to maintain it was nothing but luck?
I acknowledge Joshua’s actions do indicate a degree of prescience on his part.
At last! Thank you.
This means you will be going ahead with the zygote extraction, then?
Yes. Unless you have an objection.
I would never object to receiving your child into me, no matter who was the father. It will be our child, too.
And I’ll never know him, she said sadly, not really, just for a few years of his childhood, like I saw Daddy. Sometimes I think our way is too harsh.
I will love him. I will tell him of you when he asks.
Thank you. I shall have other children, though. And I’ll know them.
With Joshua?
Possibly.
What are you going to do about him and Dr Mzu?
Ione sighed in exasperation. The image of Helen’s bedroom rippled away. She glanced round her own study; it was cluttered with dark wooden furniture, centuries old, brought from Kulu by her grandfather. Her whole environment was steeped in history, reminding her who she was, her responsibilities. It was a depressing burden, one which she’d managed to avoid for a long time. But even that would have to end soon.
I’m not going to say anything to him, not now, anyway. Joshua is the seventh captain Mzu has approached in the last five months, she’s just testing the water, seeing what sort of reaction she generates.
She is giving all the Intelligence operatives a bad case of the jitters.
I know. That’s partly my fault. They don’t know what will happen if she tries to leave. There isn’t a Lord of Ruin they can ask, all they have is Daddy’s promise.
And that holds true?
Yes, of course it does. She cannot be allowed to leave. The serjeants must be used to restrain her if she ever attempts it. And if she does get into a ship, you’re going to have to use the strategic defence weapons.
Even if that ship is the Lady Macbeth?
Joshua wouldn’t try to take her out, especially if I asked him not to.
But if he does?
Ione’s fingers curled about the small silver crucifix round her neck. Then you shoot her out of space.
I’m sorry. I can feel the pain in you.
It’s a null situation. He won’t do it. I trust Joshua. Money isn’t his prime motivation. He could have told people I exist. That reporter woman, Kelly Tirrel, she would have paid him a fortune for a scoop like that.
I don’t think he will accept Dr Mzu’s charter, either.
Good. All this is making me think. People do need some kind of reassurance that there is an authority figure behind you. Do you think I’m old enough to start making public appearances yet?
Mentally, you have been mature enough for years. Physically, possibly; you are old enough to face motherhood, after all. Although I think a more suitable mode of attire would help. Image is the paramount issue in your case.
Ione glanced down. She was wearing a pink bikini and a small green beach jacket, ideal for the swim in the cove she took each evening.
I think you may have a point there.
Tranquillity had no blackhawk docking-ledges on its southern endcap. The polyp which made up that hemisphere was twice the usual thickness of the shell so that it could incorporate the massive mineral-digestion organs, as well as several lake-sized hydrocarbon reservoirs. These were the organs which produced the various nutrient fluids circulating in the shell’s vast network of ducts, sustaining the mitosis layer which regenerated the polyp, the starscraper apartment food-secretion glands, the ledge pedestals which fed the visiting blackhawks and voidhawks, as well as various specialist organs responsible for environmental maintenance. Access passages to the outer shell would have been difficult to route through such a tightly packed grouping of titanic viscera.
There was no non-rotational spaceport either. The external hub was taken up by a craterlike maw, fifteen hundred metres in diameter. Its inner surface was lined with tubular cilia, hundred-metre spikes that impaled the asteroidal rubble which ships boosted out of Mirchusko’s inner ring. Once in the maw, the rocks were coated by enzymes ejected from the cilia and broken down into dust and gravel, more manageable chunks which could be ingested and consumed with ease.
So much effort just to arrive,Udat observed.
Quiet down, you’ll hurt people’s feelings,meyer told it fondly.
I wish there were more ships like me. Your race should stop clinging to the past. These mechanical ships belong in a museum.
My race, is it? There are human chromosomes in you, don’t forget.
Are you sure?
I think I accessed it in a memory core somewhere. There are in voidhawks.
Oh. Them.
Meyer grinned at the overtone of disparagement. I thought you liked voidhawks.
Some of them are all right. But they think like their captains.
And how do voidhawk captains think?
They don’t like blackhawks. They think we’re trouble.
We have been known.
Only when money is short,Udat said, gently reproachful.
And if there were more blackhawks and fewer Adamist starships, money would be even tighter. I have wages to pay.
At least we’ve paid off the mortgage you took out to buy me.
Yes.and there’s money to save to buy another when you’re gone. But he didn’t let that thought filter out of his mind. Udat was fifty-seven now; seventy-five to eighty was the usual blackhawk lifespan. Meyer wasn’t at all convinced he would want another ship after Udat . But there was a quarter of a century of togetherness to look forward to yet, and money wasn’t such a problem these days. There was only life-support-section maintenance and the four crew members to pay for. He could afford to pick and choose his charters now. Not like the first twenty years. Now those had been wild days. Fortunately the power compressed into the big asymmetric teardrop shape of Udat ’s hull gave them a terrific speed and agility. They had needed it on occasion. Some of the more covert missions had been hazardous in the extreme. Not all their colleagues had returned.
I’d still like more of my own kind to talk to,Udat said.
Do you talk to Tranquillity?
Oh, yes, all the time. We’re good friends.
What do you talk about?
I show it places we visit. And it shows me its interior, what humans get up to.
Really?
Yes, it’s interesting. This Joshua Calvert who chartered us, Tranquillity says he’s a recidivist of the worst kind.
Tranquillity is absolutely right. That’s why I like Joshua so much. He reminds me of me at that age.
No. You were never that bad.
Udat ’s nose turned slightly, gliding delicately between two designated traffic streams congested with He3 tankers and personnel commuters. The bays in this section of the mammoth spaceport disk were larger, it was where the repairs and maintenance work was carried out. Only half of them were occupied.
The big blackhawk came to a halt directly over bay MB 0-330, then slowly rotated around its long axis so that its upper hull was pointing down over the rim. Unlike voidhawks, with their separate lower hull cargo hold and upper hull crew toroid, Udat had all its mechanical sections contained in a horseshoe which embraced its dorsal bulge. The bridge and individual crew cabins were at the front, with the two cargo holds occupying the wings, and an ion-field flyer stored in a small hangar on the port side.
Cherri Barnes walked into the bridge compartment. She was Udat ’s cargo officer, doubling as a systems generalist: forty-five years old, with light coffee skin and a wide face prone to contemplative pouts. She had been with Meyer for three years.
She datavised a series of orders into her console processors, receiving images fed from the electronic sensors mounted on the hull. The three-dimensional picture which built up in her mind showed her Udat hanging poised thirty metres over the repair bay, holding its position steady.
“Over to you,” Meyer said.
“Thanks.” She opened a channel to the bay’s datanet. “MB 0-330, this is Udat . We have your cargo paid for and waiting. Ready for your unload instructions. How do you want to handle it, Joshua? Time is money.”
“Cherri, is that you?” Joshua datavised back.
“No one else on board will lower themselves to talk to you.”
“I wasn’t expecting you for another week, you’ve made good time.”
Meyer datavised an access order into his console. “You hire the best ship, you get the best time.”
“I’ll remember that,” Joshua told him. “Next time I have some money I’ll make sure I go for a decent ship.”
“We can always take our nodes elsewhere, Mr Hotshot Starship Captain who’s never been outside the Ruin Ring.”
“My nodes, genetic throwback who’s too scared to go in the Ruin Ring and earn a living.”
“It’s not the Ruin Ring which worries me, it’s what the Lord of Ruin does to people who skip outsystem before they register their finds in Tranquillity.”
There was an unusually long pause. Meyer and Cherri shared a bemused glance.
“I’ll send Ashly out with the Lady Mac ’s MSV to pick up the nodes,” Joshua said. “And you’re all invited to the party tonight.”
“So this is the famous Lady Macbeth ?” Meyer asked a couple of hours later. He was in bay 0—330’s cramped control centre with Joshua, his left foot anchored by a stikpad, looking out through the glass bubble wall into the bay itself. The fifty-seven-metre ship resting on the cradle in the middle of the floor was naked to space. Its hull plates had been stripped off, exposing the systems and tanks and engines, fantastically complex silver and white entrails. They were all contained inside a hexagonal-lattice stress structure. Jump nodes were positioned over each junction. Red and green striped superconductor cabling wormed inwards from each node, plugged directly into the ship’s fusion generators. Meyer hadn’t thought about it before, but the lenticular nodes were almost identical to the voidhawk profile.
Engineers wearing black SII suits and manoeuvring packs were propelling themselves over the open stress structure, running tests and replacing components. Others rode platforms on the end of multi-segment arms which were fitted out with heavy tools to handle the larger systems. Yellow strobes flashed on all the bay’s mobile equipment, sending sharp-edged amber circles slicing over every surface in crazy gyrating patterns.
Hundreds of data cables were stretched between the ship and the five interface couplings around the base of the cradle. It was almost as though Lady Macbeth was being tethered down by a net of optical fibres. A two-metre-diameter airlock tube had concertinaed out from the bay wall, just below the control centre, giving the maintenance team access to the life-support capsules buried at the core of the ship. Brackets on the bay walls held various systems waiting to be installed. Meyer couldn’t see where they could possibly fit. Lady Macbeth ’s spaceplane clung to one wall like a giant supersonic moth, wings in their forward-sweep position. The additional tanks and power cells Joshua had strapped on for flights to the Ruin Ring were gone; a couple of suited figures and a cyberdrone were trying to remove the thick foam from the fuselage with a solvent spray. Crumbling grey flakes were flying off in all directions.
“What were you expecting?” Joshua asked. “A Saturn V?” He was strapped into a restraint web behind a cyberdrone operations console. The boxy drones ran along the rails which spiralled up the bay walls, giving them access to any part of the docked ship. Three of them were currently clustered round an auxiliary fusion generator, which was being eased into its mountings at the end of long white waldo arms. Engineers floated around it, supervising the cyberdrones which were performing the installation, mating cables, coolant lines, and fuel hoses. Joshua monitored their progress through the omnidirectional AV projectors arrayed around his console.
“More like a battle cruiser,” Meyer said. “I saw the power ratings on those nodes, Joshua. You could jump fifteen lightyears with those brutes fully charged.”
“Something like that,” he said absently.
Meyer grunted, and turned back to the starship. The MSV was returning from another trip to Udat , a pale green oblong box three metres long with small spherical tanks bunched together on the base, and three segmented waldo arms ending in complex manipulators sprouting from the mid-fuselage section. It was carrying a packaged node, coasting down towards one of the engineering shop airlocks.
Cherri Barnes frowned, peering forwards into the bay. “How many reaction drives has she got?” she asked. There seemed an inordinate number of unbilicals jacked into the Lady Macbeth ’s rear quarter. She could see a pair of fusion tubes resting in the wall brackets, fat ten-metre cylinders swathed with magnetic coils, ion-beam injectors, and molecular-binding initiators.
Joshua turned his head fractionally, switching AV projectors. The new pillar shot a barrage of photons along his optical nerves, giving him a different angle on the auxiliary fusion generator. He studied it for a while, then datavised an instruction into one of the cyberdrones. “Four main drives.”
“Four?” Adamist ships usually had one fusion drive, with a couple of induction engines running off the generator as an emergency back-up.
“Yeah. Three fusion tubes, and an antimatter drive.”
“You can’t be serious,” Cherri Barnes exclaimed. “That’s a capital offence!”
“Wrong!”
Joshua and Meyer both grinned at her, infuriatingly superior. There were smiles from the other five console operators in the control centre.
“It’s a capital offence to possess antimatter,” Joshua said. “But there’s nothing in the Confederation space law about possessing an engine which uses antimatter. As long as you don’t fill up the confinement chambers and use it, you’re fine.”
“Bloody hell.”
“It makes you very popular when there’s a war on. You can write your own ticket. Or so I’m told.”
“I bet you’ve got a real powerful communication maser as well. One that can punch a message clean through another starship’s hull.”
“No, actually. Lady Mac has eight. Dad was a real stickler for multiple redundancy.”
Harkey’s Bar was on the thirty-first floor of the StMartha starscraper. There was a real band on the tiny stage, churning out scarr jazz, fractured melodies with wailing trumpets. A fifteen-metre bar made from real oak that Harkey swore blind came from a twenty-second-century Paris brothel, serving thirty-eight kinds of beer, and three times that number of spirits, including Norfolk Tears for those who could afford it. It had wall booths that could be screened from casual observation, a dance floor, long party tables, lighting globes emitting photons right down at the bottom of the yellow spectrum. And Harkey prided himself on its food, prepared by a chef who claimed he had worked in the royal kitchens of Kulu’s Jerez Principality. The waitresses were young, pretty, and wore revealing black dresses.
With its ritzy atmosphere, and not too expensive drinks, it attracted a lot of the crews from ships docked at Tranquillity’s port. Most nights saw a good crowd. Joshua had always used it. First when he was a cocky teenager looking for his nightly fix of spaceflight tales, then when he was scavenging, lying about how much he made and the unbelievable find that had just slipped from his fingers, and now as one of the super-elite, a starship owner-captain, one of the youngest ever.
“I don’t know what kind of crap that foam is which you sprayed on the spaceplane, Joshua, but the bloody stuff just won’t come off,” Warlow complained bitterly.
When Warlow spoke everybody listened. You couldn’t avoid it, not within an eight-metre radius. He was a cosmonik, born on an industrial asteroid settlement. He had spent over sixty-five per cent of his seventy-two years in free fall, and he didn’t have the kind of geneering bequeathed to Joshua and the Edenists by their ancestors. After a while his organs had begun to degenerate, depleted calcium levels had reduced his bones to brittle porcelain sticks, muscles had atrophied, and fluid bloated his tissues, impairing his lungs, degrading his lymphatic system. He had used drugs and nanonic supplements to compensate at first, then supplements became replacements, with bones exchanged for carbon-fibre struts. Electrical consumption supplanted food intake. The final transition was his skin, replacing the eczema-ridden epidermis with a smooth ochre silicon membrane. Warlow didn’t need a spacesuit to work in the vacuum, he could survive for over three weeks without a power and oxygen recharge. His facial features had become purely cosmetic, a crude mannequin-like caricature of human physiognomy, although there was an inlet valve at the back of his throat for fluid intake. There was no hair, and he certainly didn’t bother with clothes. Sex was something he lost in his fifties.
Although some cosmoniks had metamorphosed into little more than free-flying maintenance craft with a brain at the centre, Warlow had kept his humanoid shape. The only noticeable adaptation was his arms; they forked at each elbow, giving him two pairs of forearms. One set retained the basic hand and finger layout, the other set ended in titanium sockets, capable of accepting a variety of rigger tools.
Joshua grinned and raised his champagne glass at the sleek-skinned two-metre-tall gargoyle dominating the table. “That’s why I put you on it. If anybody can scrape it off, you can.” He counted himself lucky to get Warlow on his crew. Some captains rejected him for his age, Joshua welcomed him for his experience.
“You should get Ashly to fly it on a bypass trajectory that grazes Mirchusko’s atmosphere. Burn it off like an ablative. One zip and it’s all gone.” Warlow’s primary left forearm came down, palm slapping the table. Glasses and bottles juddered.
“Alternatively, you could plug a pump in your belly, and use your arse as a vacuum cleaner,” Ashly Hanson said. “Suck it off.” His cheeks caved in as he made a slurping sound.
The pilot was a tall sixty-seven-year-old, whom geneering had given a compact frame, floppy brown hair, and a ten-year-old’s wonderstruck smile. The whole universe was a constant delight for him. He lived for his skill, moving tonnes of metal through any atmosphere with avian grace. His Confederation Astronautics Board licence said he was qualified for both air and space operations, but it was three hundred and twenty years out of date. Ashly Hanson was temporally displaced; born into reasonable wealth, he had signed over his trust fund to the Jovian Bank in 2229 in exchange for a secure zero-tau pod maintenance contract (even then the Edenists had been the obvious choice as custodians). He alternated fifty years in entropy-free stasis, and five years “bumming round” the Confederation.
“I’m a futurologist,” he told Joshua the first time they met. “On a one-way ride to eternity. I just get out of my time machine for a look round every now and then.”
Joshua had signed him on as much for the tales he could tell as his piloting ability.
“We’ll just remove the foam according to the manual, thanks,” he told the bickering pair.
The vocal synthesizer diaphragm protruding from Warlow’s chest, just above his air-inlet gills, let out a metallic sigh. He shoved his squeezy bulb into his mouth and squirted some champagne into the valve. Drink was one thing he wasn’t giving up, although with his blood filters he could sober up with astonishing speed if he had to.
Meyer leant across the table. “Any word on Neeves and Sipika yet?” he asked Joshua quietly.
“Yeah. I forgot, you wouldn’t know. They arrived back in port a couple of days after you left for Earth. They bloody nearly got lynched. The serjeants had to rescue them. They’re in jail, waiting judicial pronouncement.”
Meyer frowned. “Why the wait? I thought Tranquillity processed the charges right away?”
“There’s a lot of bereaved relatives of scavengers who never came back who are claiming Neeves and Sipika are responsible. Then there’s the question of compensation. The Madeeir is still worth a million and a half fuseodollars even after my axe work. I waived my claim, but I suppose the families are entitled.”
Meyer took another sip. “Nasty business.”
“There’s talk about fitting emergency beacons to all the scavenger craft, making it an official requirement.”
“They’ll never go for that, they’re too independent.”
“Yeah, well, I’m out of it now.”
“Too true,” Kelly Tirrel said. She was sitting pressed up next to Joshua, one leg hooked over his, arm draped around his shoulders.
It was a position he found extremely comfortable. Kelly was wearing an amethyst dress with a broad square-cut neckline which showed off her figure, especially from his angle. She was twenty-four, slightly shorter than medium build, with red-brown hair and a delicate face. For the last couple of years she had been a rover correspondent for Tranquillity’s office of the Collins news group.
They had met eighteen months earlier when she was doing a piece on scavengers for distribution across the Confederation. He liked her for her independence, and the fact that she wasn’t born rich.
“Nice to know you worry about me,” he said.
“I don’t, it’s the dataloss when you detonate your brain across the cosmos in that relic you’re flying, that’s what I’m concerned over.” She turned to Meyer. “Do you know he won’t give me the coordinates for this castle he found?”
“What castle?” Meyer asked.
“Where he found the Laymil electronics stack.”
A smile spread across Meyer’s whole face. “A castle. You didn’t tell me that, Joshua. Did it have knights and wizards in it?”
“No,” Joshua said firmly. “It was a big cube structure. I called it a castle because of the weapons systems. It was tough work getting in, one wrong move and . . .” Grave lines scored his face.
Kelly squirmed a fraction closer.
“It was operational?” Meyer was enjoying himself.
“No.”
“So why was it dangerous?”
“Some of the systems still had power in their storage cells. So given how much molecular decay they’ve suffered out there in the Ring, just brushing against them could have triggered off a short circuit. They would have blown like a chain reaction.”
“Electronic stacks, and functional power cells. That really was a terrific find, Joshua.”
Joshua glared at him.
“And he won’t tell me where it is,” Kelly complained. “Just think, something that big which survived the suicide could well hold the key to the whole Laymil secret. If I could capture that on a sensevise, I’d be made. I could pick my own office with Collins, then. Hell, I’d be in charge of my own office.”
“I’ll sell you where it is,” Joshua said, “it’s all up here.” He tapped his head. “My neural nanonics have got its orbital parameters down to a metre. I can locate it any time in the next ten years for you.”
“How much are you asking?” Meyer asked.
“Ten million fuseodollars.”
“Thanks, I’ll pass.”
“Doesn’t it bother you, standing in the way of progress?” Kelly asked.
“No. Besides, what happens if the answer turns out to be something we don’t particularly like?”
“Good point.” Meyer raised his glass.
“Joshua! People have a right to know. They are quite capable of making up their own minds, they don’t need to be protected from facts by people like you. Secrets seed oppression.”
Joshua rolled his eyes. “Jesus. You just like to think reporters have a God-given right to stuff their noses in anywhere they want.”
Kelly tipped a glass to his lips, encouraging him to sip the champagne. “But we do.”
“You’ll get it bitten off one day, you see. In any case, we will know what happened to the Laymil. With the size of the research team Tranquillity employs, results are inevitable.”
“That’s you, Joshua, the eternal optimist. Only an optimist would even think about going anywhere in that ship of yours.”
“There’s nothing wrong with the Lady Mac ,” Joshua bridled. “You ask Meyer, those systems are the finest money can buy.”
Kelly fluttered long dark lashes enquiringly at Meyer.
“Oh, absolutely,” he said.
“I still don’t want you to go,” she said quietly. She kissed Joshua’s cheek. “They were good systems when your father was flying her, and they were newer then. Look what happened to him.”
“That’s different. Those orphans on the hospital station would never have made it back here without the Lady Mac . Dad had to jump while he was too close to that neutron star.”
Meyer let out a distressed groan, and drained his glass.
Joshua was up at the bar when the woman approached him. He didn’t even see her until she spoke, his attention was elsewhere. The barmaid’s name was Helen Vanham, she was nineteen, with a dress cut lower than Harkey’s normal, and she seemed eager to serve Joshua Calvert, the starship captain. She said she finished work at two in the morning.
“Captain Calvert?”
He turned from the pleasing display of cleavage and thigh. Jesus, but that title felt good. “You got me.”
The woman was black, very black. There couldn’t have been much geneering in her family, he decided, although he was suspicious about that deep pigmentation; she was fifty centimetres shorter than him, and her short beret of hair was frosted with strands of silver. He reckoned she was about sixty years old, and ageing naturally.
“I’m Dr Alkad Mzu,” she said.
“Good evening, Doctor.”
“I understand you have a ship you’re fitting out?”
“That’s right, the Lady Macbeth . Finest independent trader this side of the Kulu Kingdom. Are you interested in chartering her?”
“I may be.”
Joshua skipped a beat. He took another look at the small woman. Alkad Mzu was dressed in a suit of grey fabric, a slim collar turned up around her neck. She seemed very serious, her features composed in a permanent expression of resignation. And right at the back of his mind there was a faint tingle of warning.
You’re being oversensitive, he told himself, just because she doesn’t smile doesn’t mean she’s a threat. Nothing is a threat in Tranquillity, that’s the beauty of this place.
“Medicine must pay very well these days,” he said.
“It’s a physics doctorate.”
“Oh, sorry. Physics must pay very well.”
“Not really. I’m a member of the team researching Laymil artefacts.”
“Yeah? You must have heard of me, then, I found the electronics stack.”
“Yes, I heard, although memory crystals aren’t my field. I mainly study their fusion drives.”
“Really? Can I get you a drink?”
Alkad Mzu blinked, then slowly looked about. “Yes, this is a bar, isn’t it. I’ll just have a white wine, then, thank you.”
Joshua signalled to Helen Vanham for a wine. Receiving a very friendly smile in return.
“What exactly was the charter?” he asked.
“I need to visit a star system.”
Definitely weird, Joshua thought. “That’s what Lady Mac does best. Which star system?”
“Garissa.”
Joshua frowned, he thought he knew most star systems. He consulted his neural nanonics cosmology file. That was when his humour really started to deflate. “Garissa was abandoned thirty years ago.”
Alkad Mzu received her slim glass from the barmaid, and tasted the wine. “It wasn’t abandoned, Captain. It was annihilated. Ninety-five million people were slaughtered by the Omutan government. The Confederation Navy managed to get some off after the planet-buster strike, about seven hundred thousand. They used marine transports and colonist-carrier ships.” Her eyes clouded over. “They abandoned the rescue effort after a month. There wasn’t a lot of point. The radiation fallout had reached everyone who survived the blasts and tsunamis and earthquakes and superstorms. Seven hundred thousand out of ninety-five million.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”
Her lips twitched around the rim of the glass. “Why should you? An obscure little planet that died before you were born; for politics that never made any sense even then. Why should anybody remember?”
Joshua shot the fuseodollars from his Jovian Bank credit card into the bar’s accounts block as the barmaid delivered his tray of champagne bottles. There was an oriental man at the far end of the bar who was keeping an unobtrusive watch on himself and Dr Mzu over his beer mug. Joshua forced himself not to stare in return. He smiled at Helen Vanham and added a generous tip. “Dr Mzu, I have to be honest. I can take you to the Garissan system, but a landing given those circumstances is out of the question.”
“I understand, Captain. And I appreciate your honesty. I don’t wish to land, simply to visit.”
“Ah, er, good. Garissa was your homeworld?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry.”
“That’s the third time you’ve said that to me.”
“One of those evenings, I guess.”
“How much would it cost me?”
“For a single passenger, there and back; you’re looking at about five hundred thousand fuseodollars. I know it’s a lot, but the fuel expenditure will be the same for one person as a full cargo hold. And the crew time is the same as well, they all need paying.”
“I doubt I can raise your full charter fee in advance. My research position is a comfortable one, but not that comfortable. However, I can assure you that once we reach our destination adequate funds will be available. Does that interest you?”
Joshua gripped the tray tighter, interested despite himself. “It may be possible to come to an arrangement, subject to a suitable deposit. And my rates are quite reasonable, you won’t find any cheaper.”
“Thank you, Captain. Can I have a copy of your ship’s handling parameters and cargo capacity? I need to know whether the Lady Macbeth can fulfil my requirements, they are rather specialized.”
Jesus, if she needs to know how big the cargo hold is, just what is she planning on bringing back? Whatever it is, it must have been hidden for thirty years.
His neural nanonics reported she had opened a channel. “Sure.” He datavised over the Lady Mac ’s performance tables.
“I’ll be in touch, Captain. Thank you for the drink.”
“My pleasure.”
At the other end of the bar, Onku Noi, First Lieutenant serving in the Oshanko Imperial Navy, and assigned to the C5 Intelligence arm (Foreign Observation Division), finished his beer and paid the bill. The audio discrimination program in his neural nanonics had filtered out the bar’s chatter and background music, allowing him to record the conversation between Alkad Mzu and the handsome young starship captain. He stood up and opened a channel into Tranquillity’s communication net, requesting access to the spaceport’s standard commercial reference memory core. The file on the Lady Macbeth and Joshua Calvert was datavised into his neural nanonics. What he accessed caused an involuntary twitch in his jaw muscle. Lady Macbeth was a combat-capable starship, complete with antimatter drive and combat-wasp launch-rails, and she was being capaciously refurbished. Pausing only to confirm Joshua Calvert’s visual profile was filed correctly in his neural nanonics memory cell, he followed Dr Mzu out of Harkey’s Bar, keeping an unobtrusive thirty seconds behind her.
Joshua, interested before, was now outright fascinated as he surreptitiously watched the three men trailing after the diminutive Dr Mzu almost collide in the doorway. His intuition had been right again.
Jesus, who is she?
Tranquillity would know. But then Tranquillity would know she was being tailed as well, and who the tails were. Which meant that Ione would know.
He still hadn’t resolved his feelings about Ione. There couldn’t be anyone in the universe who was better at sex, but knowing that Tranquillity was looking at him out of those enchanting sea-blue eyes, that all those fluffy girlish mannerisms were wrapped around thought processes cooler than solid helium, was more than a little disconcerting. Though never inhibiting. She had been quite right about that, he simply couldn’t say no. Not to her.
He returned to her every day, as instinctively as a migrating bird to an equatorial continent. It was exciting screwing the Lord of Ruin, a Saldana. And the feel of her body pressed against his was supremely erotic.
The male ego, he often reflected these days, was a puppet master with a very black sense of humour.
Joshua didn’t have any time to ponder the puzzle of Dr Mzu before someone else hailed him. He turned with a slightly pained expression on his face.
A thirty-year-old man in a slightly worn navy-blue ship’s one-piece was pushing through the throng, waving hopefully. He was just a few centimetres shorter than Joshua with the kind of regular features below short black hair that suggested a good deal of geneering. There was a smile on his face, apprehensive and keen at the same time.
“Yes?” Joshua asked wearily, he was only halfway back to his table.
“Captain Calvert? I’m Erick Thakrar, a ship’s general systems engineer, grade five.”
“Ah,” Joshua said.
Warlow’s thousand-decibel laugh blasted out, silencing the bar for an instant.
“Grade ratings are mostly down to logged flight hours,” Erick said. “I did a lot of time in port maintenance. I’m up to grade three level in practice, if not more.”
“And you’re looking for a berth?”
“That’s right.”
Joshua hesitated, He still had a couple of berths to fill, and one of them was for a systems generalist. But that itchy sensation of discomfort had returned, much stronger than it had been with Dr Mzu.
Jesus, what’s this one, a serial killer?
“I see,” he said.
“I would be a bargain, I’m only asking grade five pay.”
“I prefer to make flight pay a percentage of the charter fee, or a percentage of profits if we trade our own cargo.”
“Sounds pretty good to me.”
Joshua couldn’t fault his attitude. Youthful, enthusiastic, no doubt a good worker, obviously willing to accept the rule bending necessary to keep independent ships flying. Ordinarily, a man you’d want at your back. But that intimation of wrongness wouldn’t leave.
“OK, let me have your CV file, and I’ll look it over,” he said. “But not tonight, I’m in no fit state to make command judgements tonight.”
In the end he invited Erick Thakrar back to the table to see how he got on with the other three crew members. He shared their sense of humour, had some good stories of his own, drank a lot, but not excessively.
Joshua watched it happen through the increasingly rosy glow fostered by the champagne, occasionally having to push Kelly to one side for a proper view of the table. Warlow liked him, Ashly Hanson liked him, Melvyn Ducharme, the Lady Mac ’s fusion specialist, liked him, even Meyer and the Udat crew liked him. He was one of them.
And that, Joshua decided, was the problem. Erick fitted into his role a little too perfectly.
At quarter past two in the morning, feeling very smug, Joshua managed to give Kelly the slip, and sneaked out of Harkey’s Bar with Helen Vanham. She lived by herself in an apartment a couple of floors below Harkey’s. It was sparsely furnished, the walls of the lounge were bare white polyp; big brightly coloured cushions had been scattered around on a topaz moss floor, several aluminium cargo-pods served as tables with bottles and glasses, a giant AV projector pillar occupied one corner. The archways into different rooms all had folding silk screens for doors. Someone had been painting outlines of animals on them, there were paint pots and brushes lying on one of the pods. Joshua saw new tumours of polyp pushing up through the moss like rock mushrooms: furniture buds starting the slow growth into the form Helen wanted.
There was a food secretion panel on the wall opposite the window; a row of teats, like small yellow-brown rubber sacks, were standing proud, indicating regular use. It had been a long time since Joshua had used a panel for food, though a few years ago when money was tight they had been a godsend.
Every apartment in Tranquillity had one. The teats secreted edible pastes and fruit juices synthesized by a series of glands in the wall behind. There was nothing wrong with the taste, the pastes were indistinguishable from real chicken, and beef, and pork, and lamb, even the colours were reasonable. It was the constituency, like viscid grease, which always put Joshua off.
The glands ingested a nutrient fluid from a habitatwide network of veins which were fed from Tranquillity’s mineral digestion organs in the southern endcap. There was also a degree of recycling, human wastes and organic scraps being broken down in specialist organs at the bottom of each starscraper. Porous sections of the shell vented toxic chemicals, preventing any dangerous build-up in the habitat’s closed biosphere.
There was no such thing as starvation in bitek habitats, though both Edenists and Tranquillity’s residents imported vast quantities of delicacies and wines from across the Confederation. They could afford it. But Helen obviously couldn’t. Despite its size, the full teats and absence of materialism marked the apartment down as student digs.
“Help yourself to a drink,” Helen said. “I’m getting out of this customer-friendly dress.” She walked through an archway into the bedroom, leaving the screen folded back.
“What else do you do apart from serve bar at Harkey’s?” he asked.
“I’m studying art,” she called back. “Harkey’s is just for funtime money.”
Joshua broke off from examining the bottles and gave the screens with their animals a more appraising look. “Are you any good?”
“I might be eventually. My tutor says I have a good feel for form. But it’s a five-year course, we’re still on basic sketching and painting. We don’t even get to AV technology until next year, and mood synthesis is another year after that. It’s a drag, but you need to know the fundamentals.”
“So how long have you been at Harkey’s?”
“A couple of months. It’s not bad work, you space industry people tip well, and you’re not a pain like the finance mob. I worked at a bar over in the StPelham for a week. Crapoodle!”
“Have you ever seen Erick Thakrar before? He was sitting at my table, thirtyish, in a blue ship-suit.”
“Yes. He’s been in most nights for a fortnight or so. He’s another good tipper.”
“Do you know where he’s been working?”
“Out in the dock; the Lowndes company, I think. He started a couple of days after he arrived.”
“Which ship did he arrive on?”
“The Shah of Kai. ”
Joshua opened a channel into Tranquillity’s communication net, and datavised a search request into the Lloyd’s office. The Shah of Kai was a cargo vessel registered to a holding company in the New Californian system. It was an ex-navy transport ship, with a six-gee fusion drive; one hold was equipped with zero-tau pods for a company of marines, and it had proximity-range defence lasers. An asteroid assault craft.
Gotcha, Joshua thought.
“Did you ever meet any of the crew?” he asked.
Helen reappeared in the bedroom archway. She was wearing a long-sleeved net body-stocking, and white suede boots which came halfway up her thighs.
“Tell you later,” she said.
Joshua gave his lips an involuntary lick. “I’ve got a great location file to match that costume, if you want to try it.”
She took a step into the room. “Sure.”
He accessed the sensenviron file, and ordered his neural nanonics to open a channel to Helen. A subliminal flicker crossed his optic nerves. Her sparse apartment gave way to the silk walls of a magnificent desert pavilion. There were tall ferns in brass urns around the entrance, a banquet table along one side was laid out with golden plates and jewelled goblets, and exotic, intricate drapes swung slowly in the warm, dry breeze that blew in from the crimson desert outside. Behind Helen was a curtained-off section, with the silk drawn apart just enough to show them a huge bed with purple sheets and a satin canopy which rose behind the scarlet-tasselled pillows like a sunrise sculpted from fabric.
“Nice,” she said, glancing round.
“It’s where Lawrence of Arabia pleasured his harem back in the eighteenth century. He was some sort of sheik king who fought the Roman Empire. Absolutely guaranteed genuine sensevise recording from old Earth. I got it from a starship captain friend of mine who visited the museum.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Old Lawrence had about a hundred and fifty wives, so they say.”
“Wow. And he pleasured all of them himself?”
“Oh, yeah, he had to, there was an army of eunuchs to protect them. No other men could get in.”
“Does the magic linger?”
“Wanna find out?”
Ione’s mind encompassed the entirety of Helen Vanham’s bedroom, the photosensitive cells in the bare polyp walls, floor, and ceiling giving her a complete visualization. It was a thousand times more detailed than an AV projection. She could move through the bedroom as if she was there, which in a way she was.
The bed was simply a plump mattress on the floor. Helen lay across it, with a naked Joshua straddling her. He was slowly and deliberately tearing the body-stocking off her.
Interesting,ione observed.
If you say so,tranquillity replied coolly.
Helen’s long booted legs kicked the air behind his back. She was giggling and squealing as more and more strips of her stocking were ripped away.
I don’t mean the sex, though judging by the way he’s turned on I’ll have to try wearing something like that for him myself one day. I was thinking of the way he latched on to Erick Thakrar.
His alleged psychic ability again?
He has had twelve applicants for the post of ship’s general systems engineer so far. All of them legitimate. Yet the minute Erick asked for the berth, he was suspicious. Are you going to maintain it was nothing but luck?
I acknowledge Joshua’s actions do indicate a degree of prescience on his part.
At last! Thank you.
This means you will be going ahead with the zygote extraction, then?
Yes. Unless you have an objection.
I would never object to receiving your child into me, no matter who was the father. It will be our child, too.
And I’ll never know him, she said sadly, not really, just for a few years of his childhood, like I saw Daddy. Sometimes I think our way is too harsh.
I will love him. I will tell him of you when he asks.
Thank you. I shall have other children, though. And I’ll know them.
With Joshua?
Possibly.
What are you going to do about him and Dr Mzu?
Ione sighed in exasperation. The image of Helen’s bedroom rippled away. She glanced round her own study; it was cluttered with dark wooden furniture, centuries old, brought from Kulu by her grandfather. Her whole environment was steeped in history, reminding her who she was, her responsibilities. It was a depressing burden, one which she’d managed to avoid for a long time. But even that would have to end soon.
I’m not going to say anything to him, not now, anyway. Joshua is the seventh captain Mzu has approached in the last five months, she’s just testing the water, seeing what sort of reaction she generates.
She is giving all the Intelligence operatives a bad case of the jitters.
I know. That’s partly my fault. They don’t know what will happen if she tries to leave. There isn’t a Lord of Ruin they can ask, all they have is Daddy’s promise.
And that holds true?
Yes, of course it does. She cannot be allowed to leave. The serjeants must be used to restrain her if she ever attempts it. And if she does get into a ship, you’re going to have to use the strategic defence weapons.
Even if that ship is the Lady Macbeth?
Joshua wouldn’t try to take her out, especially if I asked him not to.
But if he does?
Ione’s fingers curled about the small silver crucifix round her neck. Then you shoot her out of space.
I’m sorry. I can feel the pain in you.
It’s a null situation. He won’t do it. I trust Joshua. Money isn’t his prime motivation. He could have told people I exist. That reporter woman, Kelly Tirrel, she would have paid him a fortune for a scoop like that.
I don’t think he will accept Dr Mzu’s charter, either.
Good. All this is making me think. People do need some kind of reassurance that there is an authority figure behind you. Do you think I’m old enough to start making public appearances yet?
Mentally, you have been mature enough for years. Physically, possibly; you are old enough to face motherhood, after all. Although I think a more suitable mode of attire would help. Image is the paramount issue in your case.
Ione glanced down. She was wearing a pink bikini and a small green beach jacket, ideal for the swim in the cove she took each evening.
I think you may have a point there.
Tranquillity had no blackhawk docking-ledges on its southern endcap. The polyp which made up that hemisphere was twice the usual thickness of the shell so that it could incorporate the massive mineral-digestion organs, as well as several lake-sized hydrocarbon reservoirs. These were the organs which produced the various nutrient fluids circulating in the shell’s vast network of ducts, sustaining the mitosis layer which regenerated the polyp, the starscraper apartment food-secretion glands, the ledge pedestals which fed the visiting blackhawks and voidhawks, as well as various specialist organs responsible for environmental maintenance. Access passages to the outer shell would have been difficult to route through such a tightly packed grouping of titanic viscera.
There was no non-rotational spaceport either. The external hub was taken up by a craterlike maw, fifteen hundred metres in diameter. Its inner surface was lined with tubular cilia, hundred-metre spikes that impaled the asteroidal rubble which ships boosted out of Mirchusko’s inner ring. Once in the maw, the rocks were coated by enzymes ejected from the cilia and broken down into dust and gravel, more manageable chunks which could be ingested and consumed with ease.