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“He would have killed you,” Erick said in a quiet voice; he lowered his left arm. Everyone in the bar seemed to be staring at the offending limb.
“What did you do to him?” a horrified Harry Levine asked.
Erick shrugged.
“Screw that,” Andrй Duchamp rasped. There was blood running out of his left nostril, and his eye was swelling rapidly. “Come on.”
“You can’t just go!” Hasan Rawand shouted. “You killed him.”
Andrй Duchamp tugged Bev Lennon to his feet. “It was self-defence. That Anglo bastard tried to kill one of my crew.”
“That’s right,” Desmond Lafoe rumbled. “It was attempted murder.” He waved Erick on towards the door.
“I’ll call the cops,” Hasan Rawand said.
“Yes, you would, wouldn’t you?” Andrй Duchamp sneered. “That’s your level, Anglo . Lose and weep, run to the law.” He fixed the shock-frozen barkeeper with a warning stare, then jerked his head for his crew to go through the door. “Why were we fighting, Hasan? Ask yourself that. The gendarmes certainly will.”
Erick stepped out into the rock tunnel which connected the Catalina with the rest of the vertical city’s corridors and lifts and lobbies, helping a white-faced Desmond Lafoe to limp along.
“Run and hide then, Duchamp,” Hasan Rawand’s voice echoed after them. “And you, murderer. But this universe isn’t so large. Remember that.”
True night, with its darkness and lordly twinkling stars, had come and gone above Cricklade. It lasted less than eight minutes before the red blaze of Duchess-night began, and even those scant minutes hadn’t been particularly dim. The ring of orbiting starships had looked spectacular, dominating the cloudless northern sky with their cold sparkle. Joshua had gone out onto the manor’s balcony with the Kavanagh family to see the bridge of heaven after they’d finished their five-course dinner. Louise had worn a cream dress with a tight bodice; it had come alive with a pale blue fire under the cometary light showering down. The amount of attention she had shown him during the meal verged on the embarrassing, it was almost as bad as the hostility he got from William Elphinstone. He was rather looking forward to being shown round the estate by her tomorrow. Grant Kavanagh had been enthusiastic about the idea once it was announced. Without consulting his neural nanonics he couldn’t be quite sure who had brought the subject up at the dinner table.
There was a light knock on his bedroom door, and it opened before he could say anything. Hadn’t he turned the key?
He rolled over on the bed where he’d been lying watching the holoscreen with its inordinately bland drama programmes. Everything was set on Norfolk, where nobody swore and nobody screwed and nobody scrapped; even the one news programme he’d caught earlier was drearily parochial, with only a couple of references to the visiting starships and nothing at all about Confederation politics.
Marjorie Kavanagh slipped into the room. She smiled and held up a duplicate key. “Scared of things that go bump in the night, Joshua?”
He grunted in dismay, and flopped back down on the bed.
They had met for the first time just before dinner, a formal drinks session in the drawing-room. If the line hadn’t been so antique and passй he would have said: “Louise didn’t tell me she had an elder sister.” Marjorie Kavanagh was a lot younger than her husband, with thick raven hair and a figure which showed that even Louise had still got quite a way to go yet. Thinking about it logically, he should have realized that someone as rich and aristocratic as Grant Kavanagh would have a beautiful young wife, especially on a planet where status ruled. But Marjorie was also a flirt, which her husband seemed to find highly amusing, especially as she delivered her teasing innuendos while clinging to his side. Joshua didn’t laugh; unlike Grant he knew she was serious.
Marjorie came over to stand by the side of the bed, looking down at him. She was wearing a long blue silk robe, loosely tied around her waist. The heavy curtains were drawn against the red gleam of Duchess-night, but he could see enough of her cleavage to know she wasn’t wearing anything underneath.
“Er . . .” he began.
“Not sleeping? Something on your mind, or southwards of there?” Marjorie asked archly; she looked pointedly at his groin.
“I have a lot of geneering in my heritage. I don’t need much sleep.”
“Oh, goodie. Lucky me.”
“Mrs Kavanagh—”
“Knock it off, Joshua. Playing the innocent doesn’t suit you.” She sat on the edge of the bed.
He raised himself up on his elbows. “In that case, what about Grant?”
A long-fingered hand ran back through her hair, producing a dark cascade over her shoulders. “What about him? Grant is what you might call a man’s man. He excels in the more basic male pursuits of hunting, drinking, filthy jokes, gambling, and women. If you haven’t yet noticed, Norfolk isn’t exactly a model of social enlightenment and female emancipation. Which gives him full licence to indulge himself while I sit at home playing the good wifey. So while he’s off rogering a pair of teenage Romany girls he spotted helping out in the groves this afternoon, I thought: Fuck it, I’m going to have some fun myself for once.”
“Do I get a say?”
“No, you’re too perfect for me. Big, strong, young, handsome, and gone in a week. How could I possibly let that opportunity go by? Besides, I’m fiercely protective when it comes to my daughters, a proper hax bitch.”
“Er . . .”
“Ah ha!” Marjorie grinned. “You’re blushing, Joshua.” Her hand found the hem of his shirt, and slid across his abdomen. “Grant can be so very idiotic when it comes to the girls. He had quite a chortle at the way Louise took to you at dinner. He doesn’t think, that’s his problem. You see, here on Norfolk they are in no danger at all from the local boys, they don’t need chaperones for dances nor guardian aunts when they stay with friends. Their name protects them. But you’re not a local boy, and I saw exactly what was going on inside that testosterone-fuelled mind of yours. No wonder you and Grant get on so well together, I can barely tell you apart.”
Joshua squirmed from her hand as she stroked the sensitive skin at the side of his ribs. “I think Louise is very sweet. That’s all.”
“Sweet.” Marjorie smiled softly. “I was just eighteen when I had her. And I’ll thank you not to work out how old that makes me! So you see I know exactly what she’s thinking right now. Captain Romance from beyond the sky. Norfolk girls of my class are virgins in more ways than one. I’m not about to let some over-sexed stranger ruin her future, she has a slim enough chance of a happy one as it is, what with arranged marriages and minimal education, which is the lot of females on this planet, even for our class. And I’m doing you a favour into the bargain.”
“Me?”
“You. Grant would kill you if you ever laid a finger on her. And, Joshua, I don’t mean metaphorically.”
“Er . . .” He couldn’t believe that; not even in this society.
“So I’m going to sacrifice my virtue to save both of you.” She undid the belt, and slipped the robe from her shoulders. Sultry red light gleamed on her body, embellishing the erotic allure. “Isn’t that just so terribly noble of me?”
The emergent snowlily plants were starting to be a problem around the village jetties along the length of the Juliffe and its multitudinous tributaries. The tightly clumped red-brown fronds occupied the shallows, the banks, and the mud-banks. None of which affected the Isakore as it sailed its unerringly straight course along the Zamjan towards the Quallheim Counties, carrying its boisterous passenger complement of four Confederation Navy Marines, and three Kulu ESA tactical operation agents. Isakore hadn’t put ashore once since it left Durringham. It was an eighteen-metre-long fishing boat, with a carvel hull of mayope, sturdy enough for its original owners to take it down to the mouth of the Juliffe and catch sea fish in their nets. Ralph Hiltch had ordered its thermal-conversion furnace to be taken out, and got the boatyard to install the micro-fusion generator which the Kulu Embassy used as its power reserve. With one high-pressure gas canister of He3 and deuterium for fuel, Isakore now had enough power to circumnavigate the globe twice over.
Jenny Harris was lying on her sleeping-bag under the plastic awning they had rigged up over the prow, out of the light drizzle sweeping the river. The sheeting didn’t make much difference, and her shorts and white T-shirt were soaking. Four days of sailing without a break from the humidity left her vainly trying to remember whether she had ever been dry.
A couple of the marines were on their sleeping-bags beside her, Louis Beith and Niels Regehr, barely out of their teens. They were both ’vising their personal MF players, eyes closed, fingers tapping out chaotic rhythms on the deck. She envied their optimism and confidence. They treated the scouting mission with an almost schoolboyish enthusiasm; although she admitted they were well trained and physically impressive with their boosted muscles. A tribute to their lieutenant, Murphy Hewlett, who had kept his small squad’s morale high even on a dead-end posting like Lalonde. Niels Regehr had confided they all thought the mission upriver was a reward not a punishment.
Her communication block datavised that Ralph Hiltch was calling. She got to her feet and walked out from under the awning, giving the young marines some privacy. The dampness in the air wasn’t noticeably increased. Dean Folan, her deputy, waved from the wheel-house amidships. Jenny acknowledged him, then leant on the gunwale and accepted the channel from the communication block.
“I’m updating you on the Edenist agents,” Ralph datavised.
“You’ve found them?” she queried. It had been twenty hours since they had gone off air.
“Chance would be a fine thing. No, and the observation satellite images show that Ozark village is being abandoned. People are just drifting away—walking into the jungle, as far as we can tell. We must assume they have been either sequestrated or eliminated. There is no trace of the boat they were using, the Coogan , the satellite can’t see it anywhere on the river.”
“I see.”
“Unfortunately, the Edenists knew you were coming upriver behind them.”
“Hellfire!”
“Exactly, so if they have been sequestrated the invaders will be watching out for you.”
Jenny ran a hand over her head. Her ginger hair had been shaved down to a half-centimetre stubble, the same as everyone else on board. It was standard procedure for jungle missions, and her combat shell-helmet would make better contact. But it did mean anyone who saw them would immediately know what they were. “We weren’t exactly inconspicuous anyway,” she datavised.
“No, I suppose not.”
“Does this change our mission profile?”
“Not the directive, no. Kelven Solanki and I still want one of these sequestrated colonists brought back to Durringham. But the timing has certainly altered. Where are you now?”
She datavised the question into her inertial guidance block. “Twenty-five kilometres west of Oconto village.”
“Fine, put ashore at the nearest point you can. We’re a little worried about the boats coming out of the Quallheim and Zamjan tributaries. When we reviewed the satellite images we found about twenty that have set off downriver in the last week, everything from paddle-steamers to fishing ketches. As far as we can make out they’re heading for Durringham, they certainly aren’t stopping.”
“You mean they’re behind us as well?” Jenny asked in dismay.
“It looks that way. But, Jenny, I don’t leave my people behind. You know that. I’m working on a method of retrieving you that doesn’t include the river. But only ask if you really need it. There are only a limited number of seats,” he added significantly.
She stared across the grey water at the unbroken jungle, and muttered a silent curse. She liked the marines, a lot of trust had been built up between the two groups in the last four days; there were times when the ESA seemed too duplicitous and underhand even for an Intelligence agency. “Yes, boss, I understand.”
“Good. Now, remember; when you put ashore, assume everyone is hostile, and avoid all groups of locals. Solanki is convinced it was sheer numbers which overwhelmed the Edenists. And, Jenny, don’t let prejudice inflate your ego, the Edenist operatives are good.”
“Yes, sir.” She signed off and picked her way past the wheel-house to the little cabin which backed onto it. A big grey-green tarpaulin had been rigged over the rear of the boat to screen the horses. She could hear them snorting softly. They were agitated and jumpy after so long cooped up in their tiny enclosure. Murphy Hewlett had kept them reasonably comfortable, but she’d be glad when they could let them loose on land again. So would the team which had to shovel their crap overboard.
Murphy Hewlett was sheltering in the lee of the tarpaulin, his black fatigue jacket open to the waist, showing a dark green shortsleeved shirt. She started to explain the change in schedule.
“They want us to go ashore right now?” he asked. He was forty-two years old, and a veteran of several combat campaigns both in space and on planets.
“That’s right. Apparently people are deserting the villages in droves. Picking one of them up shouldn’t be too big a problem.”
“Yeah, you’re right about that.” He shook his head. “I don’t like this idea that we’re already behind enemy lines.”
“I didn’t ask my boss what the situation was like in Durringham right now, but to my mind this whole planet is behind the lines.”
Murphy Hewlett nodded glumly. “There’s real trouble brewing here. You get to recognize the feeling after a while, you know? Combat sharpens you, I can tell when things ain’t right. And they’re not.”
Jenny wondered guiltily if he could guess the essence of what Ralph Hiltch had said to her. “I’ll tell Dean to look out for a likely landing spot.”
She hadn’t even reached the wheel-house before Dean Folan was shouting urgently. “Boat coming!”
They went to the gunwale and peered ahead through the thin grey gauze of drizzle. The shape slowly resolved, and both of them watched it sail past with shocked astonishment.
It was a paddle-steamer which seemed to have ridden straight out of the nineteenth-century Mississippi River. Craft just like it were the inspiration behind Lalonde’s current fleet of paddle-boats. But while the Swithland and her ilk were bland distaff inheritors utilizing technology instead of engineering craftsmanship, this grande dame could have been a true original. Her paintwork was white and glossy, black iron stacks belched out a thick, oily smoke, pistons hissed and clanked as they turned the heavy paddles. Happy people stood on the decks, the handsome men in suits with long grey jackets, white shirts, and slender lace ties, their elegant women in long frilly dresses, casually twirling parasols on their shoulders. Children ran about, sporting gaily; the boys were in sailor suits, and the girls had ribbons in their flowing hair.
“It’s a dream,” Jenny whispered to herself. “I’m living a dream.”
The stately passengers were waving invitingly. Sounds of laughter and merrymaking rang clearly across the water. Earth’s mythical golden age had come back to nourish them with its supreme promise of unspoilt lands and uncomplicated times. The paddle-steamer was taking all folk of good will back to where today’s cares would cease to exist.
The sight was tugging at the hearts of all on board the Isakore. There wasn’t one of them who didn’t feel the urge to jump into the river and swim across the gulf. The gulf: between them and bliss, an eternal joy of song and wine which waited beyond the cruel divide which was their own world.
“Don’t,” Murphy Hewlett said.
Jenny’s euphoria shattered like crystal as the discordant voice struck her ears. Murphy Hewlett’s hand was on hers, pressing down painfully. She found her arms were rigid, tensed, ready to propel her over the side of the fishing boat.
“What is that?” she asked. At some deep level she was bemoaning the loss, being excluded from the journey into a different future; now she would never know if the promise was true . . .
“Don’t you see?” he said. “It’s them, whatever they are. They’re growing. They don’t care about us seeing them unmasked any more, they don’t fear us.”
The colourful solid mirage sailed on regally down the river, its wake of joyous invocation tarrying above the brown water like a dawn mist. Jenny Harris stayed at the gunwale for a long time, staring into the west.
The grove was a site of intense activity. Over two hundred people were working their way along the rows, positioning the collection cups around the weeping roses. It was early Duke-day; Duchess had just set, leaving a slight pink fringe splashing the western horizon. Between them, the two suns had banished all trace of moisture from the torrid air. Most of the men and women tending the big weeping roses wore light clothes. The younger children ran errands, bringing new stacks of collection cups to the teams, or supplying iced fruit juice from large jugs.
Joshua was feeling the heat despite being dressed in a burgundy sleeveless T-shirt and black jeans. He sat on the back of his horse watching the cupping teams at work. The cups that were being hung so carefully were white cardboard cones, with a waxed shiny inner surface, thirty centimetres wide at the open end, tapering down to a sealed point. Stiff hoops pasted onto the side were used to wire them onto the trellis below the weeping rose flowers. Everyone he could see carried a thick bundle of wires tucked into their belt. It didn’t take more than thirty seconds for them to fix each cup.
“Is there one collection cup for every single flower?” he asked.
Louise was sitting on her horse next to him, dressed in jodhpurs and a plain white blouse, hair held by a single band at the back. She had been surprised when he accepted her invitation to take the horses rather than use a carriage to get about the estate. Where would a starship captain learn how to ride? But ride he could. Not as well as her, which gave her a little thrill, that she should be better than a man at anything. Especially Joshua. “Yes,” she said. “How else could you do it?”
He gave the stacks of collection cups piled up at the end of each row a puzzled frown. “I don’t know. Jesus, there must be millions of them.”
Louise had grown accustomed to his casual swearing now. It had shocked her a little at first, but people from the stars were bound to have slightly different customs. Coming from him it didn’t seem profane, just exotic. Perhaps the most surprising thing was the way he could suddenly switch from being himself to using the most formal mannerisms.
“Cricklade alone has two hundred groves,” she said. “That’s why there are so many cuppers. It has to be done entirely in the week before midsummer when the roses are in bloom. Even with every able-bodied person in the county drafted in there’s only just enough to get it finished in time. A team like this takes nearly a day to complete a grove.”
Joshua leant forwards in the saddle, studying the people labouring away. It all seemed so menial, yet every one of them looked intent, devoted almost. Grant Kavanagh had said that a lot of them worked through half of Duchess-night, they would never have got the work finished otherwise. “I’m beginning to see why a bottle of Norfolk Tears costs so much. It’s not just the rarity value, is it?”
“No.” She flicked the reins, and guided the horse along the end of the rows, heading for the gate in the wall. The foreman touched his wide-brimmed hat as she passed. Louise gave a reflex smile.
He rode beside her after they left the grove. Cricklade Manor’s protective ring of cedars was just visible a couple of miles away across the wolds. “Where now?” It was parkland all around, sheep clustering together under the lonely trees for shade. The grass was furry with white flowers. Everywhere he looked there seemed to be blooms of some kind—trees, bushes, ground plants.
“I thought Wardley Wood would be nice, you can see what wild Norfolk looks like.” Louise pointed at a long stretch of dark-green trees a mile away, following the bottom of a small valley. “Genevieve and I often walk there. It’s lovely.” She dropped her head. As if he would be interested in the glades with their multicoloured flowers and sweet scents.
“That sounds good. I’d like to get out of this sunlight. I don’t know how you can stand it.”
“I don’t notice it, really.”
He spurred his horse on, breaking into a canter. Louise rode past him easily, moving effortlessly with her horse’s rhythm. They galloped across the wolds, scattering the somnolent sheep, Louise’s laughter trilling through the heavy air. She beat him easily to the edge of the wood, and sat there smiling as he rode up to her, panting heavily.
“That was quite good,” she said. “You could be a decent rider if you had a bit of practice.” She swung her leg over the saddle and dropped down.
“There are some stables on Tranquillity,” he said, dismounting. “That’s where I learnt, but I’m not there very often.”
A big mithorn tree stood just outside the main body of the wood, its coin-sized dark red flowers sprinkling the end of every twig. Louise wrapped the reins round one of its lower branches, and started off into the wood along one of the little animal tracks she knew. “I’ve heard of Tranquillity. That’s where the Lord of Ruin lives, Ione Saldana. She was on the news last year; she’s so beautiful. I wanted to cut my hair short like hers, but Mother said no. Do you know her?”
“Now that’s the trouble when you really do know someone famous; no one ever believes you when you say yes.”
She turned round, eyes wide with delight. “You do know her!”
“Yes. I knew her before she inherited the title, we grew up together.”
“What’s she like? Tell me.”
An image of a naked sweaty moaning Ione bent over a table while he was screwing her appeared in his mind. “Fun,” he said.
The glade she led him to was on the floor of the valley; a stream ran through it, spilling down a series of five big rock-pools. Knee-high flower stems with tubular yellow and lavender blooms clotted the ground, giving off a scent similar to orange blossom. Water-monarch trees lined the stream below the pools, fifty yards tall, their long, slender branches swaying in the slight breeze, fernlike leaf fronds drooping. Birds flittered about in the upper boughs, uninspiring dun-coloured bat-analogues with long, powerful forelimbs for tunnelling into the ground. Wild weeping roses boiled over the stones along the side of two of the pools; years of dead petrified branches overlaid by a fresh growth of new living shoots to produce hemispherical bushes. Their flowers were crushed together, disfigured as they vied for light.
“You were right,” Joshua told her. “It is lovely.”
“Thank you. Genevieve and I often bathe here in the summer.”
He perked up. “Really?”
“It’s a little place of the world that’s all our own. Even the hax don’t come here.”
“What’s a hax? I heard someone mention the name.”
“Father calls them wolf-analogues. They’re big and vicious, and they’ll even attack humans. The farmers hunt them in the winter, it’s good sport. But we’ve just about cleared them out of Cricklade now.”
“Do the hunters all get dressed up in red jackets and charge around on horses with packs of hounds?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“Lucky guess.”
“I suppose you’ve seen real monsters on your travels. I’ve seen pictures of the Tyrathca on the holoscreen. They’re horrible. I couldn’t sleep for a week afterwards.”
“Yes, the Tyrathca look pretty ferocious. But I’ve met some breeder pairs; they don’t think of themselves like that. To them we’re the cruel alien ones. It’s a question of perspective.”
Louise blushed and ducked her head, turning away from him. “I’m sorry. You must think me a frightful bigot.”
“No. You’re just not used to xenocs, that’s all.” He stood right behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. “But I would like to take you away from here some time and show you the rest of the Confederation. Some of it is quite spectacular. And I’d love to take you to Tranquillity.” He looked round the glade, thoughtful. “It’s a bit like this, only much much bigger. I think you’d like it a lot.”
Louise wanted to squirm away from his grip, men simply shouldn’t act in such a familiar fashion. But his customs were surely different, and he was massaging her shoulder muscles gently. It felt nice. “I always wanted to fly on a starship.”
“You will, one day. When Cricklade is yours you can do anything you want.” Joshua was enjoying the touch of her. Naпvety, a voluptuous body, and the knowledge that he should never, ever be even thinking about screwing her were combining to form a potent aphrodisiac.
“I never thought of that,” she said brightly. “Can I charter the Lady Macbeth ? Oh, but it will be simply ages yet. I don’t want Father to die, that would be an absolutely awful thing to think. Will you still be coming to Norfolk in fifty years’ time?”
“Of course I will. I have two things tying me here now. Business, and you.”
“Me?” It came out as a frightened squeak.
He turned her round to face him, and kissed her.
“Joshua!”
He put two fingers over her lips. “Shush. No words, only us. Always us.”
Louise stood rigidly still as he unbuttoned her blouse, all kinds of strange emotions battling in her head. I ought to run. I ought to stop him.
Sunlight fell onto her bare shoulders and back. It was a peculiar sensation, a tingling warmth. And the expression on his face as he gazed at her was scary, he looked so hungry, but anxious at the same time.
“Joshua,” she murmured, half nervous, half amused. Her shoulders had hunched up of their own accord.
He pulled his T-shirt off over his head. They kissed again, his arms going around her. He seemed very strong. His skin pressing against her had started a trembling in her stomach that nothing was able to stop. Then she realized her jodhpurs were being peeled down.
“Oh God.”
His finger lifted her chin up. “It’s all right. I’ll show you how.” And his smile was at least as warm as the sun.
She took her black leather riding boots off herself, then helped him with the jodhpurs. Her brassiere and knickers were plain white cotton. Joshua removed them slowly, savouring the drawn-out exposure.
He spread their clothes out and laid her down. She was terribly tense to start with, her lower lip clamped between her teeth, narrow eyes peeking down fearfully at the length of her body. It took a long, pleasant time of soft caresses, kisses, stealthy whispers, and tickles before she began to respond. He coaxed a giggle from her, then another, then it was a squeal, a groan. She touched his body, curious and suddenly bold, a hand sliding down his belly to cup his balls. He shuddered and repaid her by massaging her thighs. There was another long interval while their hands and mouths explored each other. Then he slid above her, looking down at dishevelled hair, drowsy eyes, dark nipples standing proud, legs parted. He moved into her carefully, the damp warmth enveloping and squeezing his cock an erotic splendour. Louise writhed tempestuously below him, and he began a slow, provocative stroke. He used neural nanonic overrides to restrain his own body’s responses, sustaining his erection as long as he wanted it, determined that she should reach a climax, that it should be as perfect for her as he could possibly make it.
After an age he was rewarded by her complete loss of control. Louise threw away every last inhibition as her orgasm built, shouting at the top of her voice, her body arching desperately below him, lifting his knees from the ground. Only then did he allow himself any release, joining her in absolute bliss.
Post-coital languor was a sweet time, one of tiny kisses, stroking individual strands of sticky hair from her face, single compassionate words. And he had been quite right all along, forbidden fruit tasted the best.
“I love you, Joshua,” she whispered into his ear.
“And I love you.”
“Don’t leave.”
“That’s unfair. You know I’m coming back.”
“I’m sorry.” She tightened her grip around him.
He moved his hand up to her left breast and squeezed, hearing a soft hiss of indrawn breath. “Are you sore?”
“A bit. Not much.”
“I’m glad.”
“Me too.”
“Do you want to have that swim now? Water can be a lot of fun.”
She grinned cautiously. “Again?”
“If you want.”
“I do.”
Marjorie Kavanagh came to his bedroom again that Duchess-night. The prospect of Louise sneaking through the red-shaded manor to be with him and discovering him with her mother added a spice to his lovemaking that left her exhausted and delighted.
The next day Louise, eyes possessively agleam, announced at breakfast that she would show Joshua round the county roseyard, so he could see the casks being prepared for the new Tears. Grant declared this a stupendous idea, chuckling to himself that his little cherub was having her first schoolgirl crush.
Joshua smiled neutrally, and thanked her for being so considerate. There were another three days to go until midsummer.
At Cricklade, and all across Norfolk, they marked the onset of Midsummer’s Day with a simple ceremony. The Kavanaghs, Colsterworth’s vicar, Cricklade Manor’s staff, the senior estate workers, and representatives from each of the cupper teams gathered at the nearest grove to the manor towards the end of Duke-day. Joshua and Dahybi were invited, and stood at the front of the group that assembled just inside the shabby stone wall.
The rows of weeping roses stretched out ahead of them; blooms and cups alike upturned to a fading azure sky, perfectly still in the breathless evening air. Time seemed to be suspended.
Duke was falling below the western horizon, a sliver of pyrexic tangerine, pulling the world’s illumination down with it. The vicar, wearing a simple cassock, held his arms up for silence. He turned to face the east. On cue, a watery pink light expanded across the horizon.
A sigh went up from the group.
Even Joshua was impressed. There had been about two minutes of darkness the previous evening. Now there would be no night for a sidereal day, Duchess-night flowing seamlessly into Duke-day. It wouldn’t be until the end of the following Duchess-night that the stars would come out again for a brief minute. After that it would be the evenings when the two suns overlapped, and the morning darkness would grow longer and longer, extending back into Duchess-night until Norfolk reached inferior conjunction and only Duke was visible: midwinter.
The vicar led his flock in a brief Harvest Thanksgiving service. Everybody knew the words to the prayers and psalms, and quiet, murmuring voices banded together to be heard right across the grove. Joshua felt quite left out. They finished by singing “All Creatures Great and Small”. At least his neural nanonics had that in a memory file; he joined in heartily, surprised by just how good he felt.
After the service, Grant Kavanagh led his family and friends on a rambling walk along the aisles between the rows. He touched various roses, feeling their weight, rubbing petals between his thumb and forefinger, testing the texture.
“Smell that,” he told Joshua as he handed over a petal he had just picked. “It’s going to be a good crop. Not as good as five seasons ago. But well above average.”
Joshua sniffed. The scent was very weak, but recognizable, similar to the smell which clung to a cork after a bottle of Tears had been opened. “You can tell from this?” he asked.
Grant put his arm around Louise as they sauntered along the aisle. “I can. Mr Butterworth can. Half of the estate workers can. It just takes experience. You need to be here for a lot of summers.” He grinned broadly. “Perhaps you will be, Joshua. I’m sure Louise will ask you back if no one else does.”
Genevieve shrieked with laughter.
Louise blushed furiously. “Daddy!” She slapped his arm.
Joshua raised a weak smile and turned to examine one of the rose plants. He found himself facing Marjorie Kavanagh. She gave him a languid wink. His neural nanonics sent out a volley of overrides to try and stop the rush of blood to his own cheeks.
After the inspection walk the manor staff served up an outdoor buffet. Grant Kavanagh stood behind one of the trestle tables, carving from a huge joint of rare beef, playing the part of jovial host, with a word and a laugh for all his people.
As Duchess-night progressed the rose flowers began to droop. It happened so slowly that the eye could detect no motion, but hour by hour the thick stems lost their stiffness, and the weight of the large petals and their central carpel pod made gravity’s triumph inevitable.
By Duke-morning most of the flowers had reached the horizontal. The petals were drying out and shrivelling.
Joshua and Louise rode out to one of the groves close to Wardley Wood, and wandered along the sagging plants. There were only a few cuppers left tending the long rows, straightening the occasional collection cup. They nodded nervously to Louise and scurried on about their business.
“Most people have gone home to sleep,” Louise said. “The real work will begin again tomorrow.”
They stood aside as a man pulled a wooden trolley past them. A big glass ewer, webbed with rope, was resting on it. Joshua watched as he stopped the trolley at the end of a row and lifted the ewer off. About a third of the rows had a similar ewer waiting at the end.
“What’s that for?” he asked.
“They empty the collection cups into those,” Louise said. “Then the ewers are taken to the county roseyard where the Tears are casked.”
“And they stay in the cask for a year.”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
“So that they spend a winter on Norfolk. They’re not proper Tears until they’ve felt our frost. It sharpens the taste, so they say.”
And adds to the cost, he thought.
The flowers were wilting rapidly now, the stems curving down into a U-shape. Their sunlight-fired coronal cloak had faded away as the petals darkened, and with it had gone a lot of the mystique. They were just ordinary dying flowers now.
“How do the cuppers know where to wire the cups?” he asked. “Look at them. Every flower is bending over above a cup.” He glanced up and down the aisle. “Every one of them.”
Louise gave him a superior smile. “If you are born on Norfolk, you know how to place a cup.”
It wasn’t just the weeping roses which were reaching fruition. As they trotted the horses over to Wardley Wood Joshua saw flowers on the trees and bushes closing up, some varieties leaning over in the same fashion as the roses.
In their peaceful glade the wild rose bushes along the rock pools seemed flaccid, as if their shape was deflating. Flowers lolled against each other, petals agglutinating into a quilt of pulp.
Louise let Joshua undress her as he always did. Then they spread a blanket down on the rocks below the weeping roses and embraced. Joshua had got to the point where Louise was shuddering in delighted anticipation as his hands roved across her lower belly and down the inside of her thighs when he felt a splash on his back. He ignored the first one and kissed Louise’s navel. Another splash broke his concentration. It couldn’t be raining, there wasn’t a cloud in the barren blue sky. He twisted over. “What—?”
Norfolk’s roses had begun to weep. Out of the centre of the carpel pod a clear fluid was exuded in a steady monotonous drip. It was destined to last for ten to fifteen hours, well into the next Duchess-night. Only when the pod was drained would it split open and release the seeds it contained. Nature had intended the fluid to soften the soil made arid by weeks without rain, allowing the seeds to fall into mud so they would have a greater chance of germination. But then in 2209 a woman called Carys Thomas, who was a junior botanist in the ecological assessment mission, acting against all regulations (and common sense), put her finger under a weeping pod, then touched the single pearl of glistening fluid to her tongue. Norfolk’s natural order came to an immediate end.
Joshua wiped up the dewy bead from his skin and licked his finger. It tasted coarser than the Norfolk Tears he’d so relished back in Tranquillity, but the ancestry was beyond doubt. A roguish light filled his eyes. “Hey, not bad.”
A snickering Louise was moved round until she was directly underneath the lax hanging flowers. They made love under a shower of sparkling droplets prized higher than a king’s ransom.
The cuppers returned to the groves as the next Duchess-night ended. They cut away the collection cups, now heavy with Tears, and poured their precious contents into the ewers. It was a task that would take another five days of intensive round-the-clock labour to complete.
Grant Kavanagh himself drove Joshua and Dahybi down to the county roseyard in a four-wheel-drive farm ranger, a powerful boxy vehicle with tyres deep enough to plough through a shallow marsh. The yard was on the outskirts of Colsterworth, a large collection of ivy-clad stone buildings with few windows. Beneath the ground was an extensive warren of brick-lined cellars where the casks were stored throughout their year of maturation.
When he drove through the wide entrance gates the yard workers were already rolling out the casks of last year’s Tears.
“A year to the day,” he said proudly as the heavy ironbound oak cylinders rattled and skipped over the cobbles. “This is your cargo, young Joshua. We’ll have it ready for you in two days.” He braked the farm ranger to a halt outside the bottling plant where the casks were being rolled inside. The plant supervisor rushed out to meet them, sweating. “Don’t you worry about us,” Grant told him blithely. “I’m just showing our major customer around. We won’t get in the way.” And with that he marched imperiously through the broad doorway.
The bottling plant was the most sophisticated mechanical set-up Joshua had seen on the planet, even though it lacked any real cybernetic systems (the conveyor belts actually used rubber pulleys!). It was a long hall with a single-span roof, full of gleaming belts, pipes, and vats. Thousands of the ubiquitous pear-shaped bottles trundled along the narrow belts, looping overhead, winding round filling nozzles, the racket of their combined clinking making conversation difficult.
Grant walked them along the hall. The casks were all blended together in big stainless-steel vats, he explained. Stoke County’s bouquet was a homogenized product. No groves had individual labels, not even his.
Joshua watched the bottles filling up below the big vats, then moving on to be corked and labelled. Each stage added to the cost. And the weight of the glass bottles reduced the amount of actual Tears each starship could carry.
Jesus, what a sweet operation. I couldn’t do it better myself. And the beauty of it is we’re the ones most eager to cooperate, to inflate the cost.
At the end of the line, the yard manager was waiting with the first bottle to come off the conveyor. He looked expectantly at Grant, who told him to proceed. The bottle was uncorked, and its contents poured into four cut-crystal glasses.
Grant sniffed, then took a small sip. He cocked his head to one side and looked thoughtful. “Yes,” he said. “This will do. Stoke can put its name to this.”
Joshua tried his own glass. It chilled every nerve in his throat, and burst into flames in his stomach.
“Good enough for you, Joshua?” Grant clapped him on the back.
Dahybi was holding his glass up to the light, staring at it with greedy enchantment.
“Yes,” Joshua declared staunchly. “Good enough.”
Joshua and Dahybi took it in turns to oversee the cases the roseyard put together for them. For space travel the bottles were hermetically sealed in composite cube containers one metre square, with a thick lining of nultherm foam to protect them (more weight); the roseyard had its own loading and sealing machinery (more cost). There was a railway line leading directly from the yard to the town’s station, which meant they were able to dispatch several batches to Boston every day.
All this activity severely reduced the amount of time Joshua spent at Cricklade Manor, much to Louise’s chagrin. Nor was there any believable reason why she should take him riding over the estate again.
He arranged the shifts with Dahybi so that he worked most of Duchess-night at the roseyard, which meant his tussles with Marjorie were curtailed.
The morning of the day he was leaving, however, Louise did manage to trap him in the stables. So he had to spend two hours in a dark, dusty hay loft satisfying an increasingly bold and adventurous teenager who seemed to have developed a bottomless reserve of physical stamina. She clung to him for a long time after her third climax, while he whispered assurances of how quickly he would come back.
“Just for business with Daddy?” she asked, almost as an accusation.
“No. For you. Business is an excuse, it would be difficult otherwise on this planet. Everything’s so bloody formal here.”
“I don’t care any more. I don’t care who knows.”
He shifted round, brushing straw from his ribs. “Well, I do care; because I don’t want you to be treated like a pariah. So show a little discretion, Louise.”
She ran her fingertips over his cheeks, marvelling. “You really care about me, don’t you?”
“Of course I do.”
“Daddy likes you,” she said uncertainly. Now probably wasn’t the best time to press him on their future after he returned. He must have a lot on his mind with the awesome responsibility of the starflight ahead of him. But it did seem as though her father’s plaudit was like an omen. So few people ever met with Daddy’s approval. And Joshua had said how much he adored Stoke County. The kind of land I’d like to settle in: his exact words.
“I’m rather fond of the old boy myself. But God he’s got a temper.”
Louise giggled in the dark. Down below the horses were shuffling about. She straddled his abdomen, her mane of hair falling around the two of them. His hands found her breasts, fingers tightening until she moaned with desire. In a low, throaty voice he told her what he wanted her to do. She strained her body to accommodate him, trembling at her own daring. He was solid against her, wonderfully there , encouraging and praising.
“Tell me again,” she murmured. “Please, Joshua.”
“I love you,” he said, breath teasingly hot on her neck. Even his neural nanonics couldn’t banish the dawning guilt he felt at the words. Have I really been reduced to lying to trusting, hopelessly unsophisticated teenagers? Perhaps it’s because she is so magnificent, what we all want girls to be like even though we know it’s wrong. I can’t help myself. “I love you, and I’m coming back for you.”
She groaned in delirium as he entered her. Ecstasy brought its own special light, banishing the darkness of the loft.
Joshua only just managed to reach the manor’s hall in time to kiss or shake hands with members of the large group of staff and family (William Elphinstone was absent) who had come to wish him and Dahybi farewell. The horse-drawn carriage carried the two of them back to Colsterworth Station, where they boarded the train back to Boston along with the last batch of their cargo.
Melvyn Ducharme met them when they arrived back in the capital, and told them that over half of the cases were already up in the Lady Macbeth . Kenneth Kavanagh had used his influence with captains whose spaceplanes were being under-used for their own smaller cargos. It hadn’t generated much goodwill, but the loading was well ahead of schedule. Using Lady Mac ’s small spaceplane alone would have meant taking eleven days to boost all the cases into orbit.
They returned up to the starship straight away. When Joshua floated into his cabin, Sarha was waiting with the free-fall sex cage expanded, and a hungry smile in place. “No bloody chance,” he told her, and curled up into a ball to sleep for a solid ten hours.
Even if he had been awake he had no reason to focus the Lady Macbeth ’s sensors on departing starships. So he would never have seen that out of the twenty-seven thousand eight hundred and forty-six starships which had come to Norfolk, twenty-two of them experienced an alarming variety of severe mechanical and electrical malfunctions as they departed for their home planets.
“What did you do to him?” a horrified Harry Levine asked.
Erick shrugged.
“Screw that,” Andrй Duchamp rasped. There was blood running out of his left nostril, and his eye was swelling rapidly. “Come on.”
“You can’t just go!” Hasan Rawand shouted. “You killed him.”
Andrй Duchamp tugged Bev Lennon to his feet. “It was self-defence. That Anglo bastard tried to kill one of my crew.”
“That’s right,” Desmond Lafoe rumbled. “It was attempted murder.” He waved Erick on towards the door.
“I’ll call the cops,” Hasan Rawand said.
“Yes, you would, wouldn’t you?” Andrй Duchamp sneered. “That’s your level, Anglo . Lose and weep, run to the law.” He fixed the shock-frozen barkeeper with a warning stare, then jerked his head for his crew to go through the door. “Why were we fighting, Hasan? Ask yourself that. The gendarmes certainly will.”
Erick stepped out into the rock tunnel which connected the Catalina with the rest of the vertical city’s corridors and lifts and lobbies, helping a white-faced Desmond Lafoe to limp along.
“Run and hide then, Duchamp,” Hasan Rawand’s voice echoed after them. “And you, murderer. But this universe isn’t so large. Remember that.”
True night, with its darkness and lordly twinkling stars, had come and gone above Cricklade. It lasted less than eight minutes before the red blaze of Duchess-night began, and even those scant minutes hadn’t been particularly dim. The ring of orbiting starships had looked spectacular, dominating the cloudless northern sky with their cold sparkle. Joshua had gone out onto the manor’s balcony with the Kavanagh family to see the bridge of heaven after they’d finished their five-course dinner. Louise had worn a cream dress with a tight bodice; it had come alive with a pale blue fire under the cometary light showering down. The amount of attention she had shown him during the meal verged on the embarrassing, it was almost as bad as the hostility he got from William Elphinstone. He was rather looking forward to being shown round the estate by her tomorrow. Grant Kavanagh had been enthusiastic about the idea once it was announced. Without consulting his neural nanonics he couldn’t be quite sure who had brought the subject up at the dinner table.
There was a light knock on his bedroom door, and it opened before he could say anything. Hadn’t he turned the key?
He rolled over on the bed where he’d been lying watching the holoscreen with its inordinately bland drama programmes. Everything was set on Norfolk, where nobody swore and nobody screwed and nobody scrapped; even the one news programme he’d caught earlier was drearily parochial, with only a couple of references to the visiting starships and nothing at all about Confederation politics.
Marjorie Kavanagh slipped into the room. She smiled and held up a duplicate key. “Scared of things that go bump in the night, Joshua?”
He grunted in dismay, and flopped back down on the bed.
They had met for the first time just before dinner, a formal drinks session in the drawing-room. If the line hadn’t been so antique and passй he would have said: “Louise didn’t tell me she had an elder sister.” Marjorie Kavanagh was a lot younger than her husband, with thick raven hair and a figure which showed that even Louise had still got quite a way to go yet. Thinking about it logically, he should have realized that someone as rich and aristocratic as Grant Kavanagh would have a beautiful young wife, especially on a planet where status ruled. But Marjorie was also a flirt, which her husband seemed to find highly amusing, especially as she delivered her teasing innuendos while clinging to his side. Joshua didn’t laugh; unlike Grant he knew she was serious.
Marjorie came over to stand by the side of the bed, looking down at him. She was wearing a long blue silk robe, loosely tied around her waist. The heavy curtains were drawn against the red gleam of Duchess-night, but he could see enough of her cleavage to know she wasn’t wearing anything underneath.
“Er . . .” he began.
“Not sleeping? Something on your mind, or southwards of there?” Marjorie asked archly; she looked pointedly at his groin.
“I have a lot of geneering in my heritage. I don’t need much sleep.”
“Oh, goodie. Lucky me.”
“Mrs Kavanagh—”
“Knock it off, Joshua. Playing the innocent doesn’t suit you.” She sat on the edge of the bed.
He raised himself up on his elbows. “In that case, what about Grant?”
A long-fingered hand ran back through her hair, producing a dark cascade over her shoulders. “What about him? Grant is what you might call a man’s man. He excels in the more basic male pursuits of hunting, drinking, filthy jokes, gambling, and women. If you haven’t yet noticed, Norfolk isn’t exactly a model of social enlightenment and female emancipation. Which gives him full licence to indulge himself while I sit at home playing the good wifey. So while he’s off rogering a pair of teenage Romany girls he spotted helping out in the groves this afternoon, I thought: Fuck it, I’m going to have some fun myself for once.”
“Do I get a say?”
“No, you’re too perfect for me. Big, strong, young, handsome, and gone in a week. How could I possibly let that opportunity go by? Besides, I’m fiercely protective when it comes to my daughters, a proper hax bitch.”
“Er . . .”
“Ah ha!” Marjorie grinned. “You’re blushing, Joshua.” Her hand found the hem of his shirt, and slid across his abdomen. “Grant can be so very idiotic when it comes to the girls. He had quite a chortle at the way Louise took to you at dinner. He doesn’t think, that’s his problem. You see, here on Norfolk they are in no danger at all from the local boys, they don’t need chaperones for dances nor guardian aunts when they stay with friends. Their name protects them. But you’re not a local boy, and I saw exactly what was going on inside that testosterone-fuelled mind of yours. No wonder you and Grant get on so well together, I can barely tell you apart.”
Joshua squirmed from her hand as she stroked the sensitive skin at the side of his ribs. “I think Louise is very sweet. That’s all.”
“Sweet.” Marjorie smiled softly. “I was just eighteen when I had her. And I’ll thank you not to work out how old that makes me! So you see I know exactly what she’s thinking right now. Captain Romance from beyond the sky. Norfolk girls of my class are virgins in more ways than one. I’m not about to let some over-sexed stranger ruin her future, she has a slim enough chance of a happy one as it is, what with arranged marriages and minimal education, which is the lot of females on this planet, even for our class. And I’m doing you a favour into the bargain.”
“Me?”
“You. Grant would kill you if you ever laid a finger on her. And, Joshua, I don’t mean metaphorically.”
“Er . . .” He couldn’t believe that; not even in this society.
“So I’m going to sacrifice my virtue to save both of you.” She undid the belt, and slipped the robe from her shoulders. Sultry red light gleamed on her body, embellishing the erotic allure. “Isn’t that just so terribly noble of me?”
The emergent snowlily plants were starting to be a problem around the village jetties along the length of the Juliffe and its multitudinous tributaries. The tightly clumped red-brown fronds occupied the shallows, the banks, and the mud-banks. None of which affected the Isakore as it sailed its unerringly straight course along the Zamjan towards the Quallheim Counties, carrying its boisterous passenger complement of four Confederation Navy Marines, and three Kulu ESA tactical operation agents. Isakore hadn’t put ashore once since it left Durringham. It was an eighteen-metre-long fishing boat, with a carvel hull of mayope, sturdy enough for its original owners to take it down to the mouth of the Juliffe and catch sea fish in their nets. Ralph Hiltch had ordered its thermal-conversion furnace to be taken out, and got the boatyard to install the micro-fusion generator which the Kulu Embassy used as its power reserve. With one high-pressure gas canister of He3 and deuterium for fuel, Isakore now had enough power to circumnavigate the globe twice over.
Jenny Harris was lying on her sleeping-bag under the plastic awning they had rigged up over the prow, out of the light drizzle sweeping the river. The sheeting didn’t make much difference, and her shorts and white T-shirt were soaking. Four days of sailing without a break from the humidity left her vainly trying to remember whether she had ever been dry.
A couple of the marines were on their sleeping-bags beside her, Louis Beith and Niels Regehr, barely out of their teens. They were both ’vising their personal MF players, eyes closed, fingers tapping out chaotic rhythms on the deck. She envied their optimism and confidence. They treated the scouting mission with an almost schoolboyish enthusiasm; although she admitted they were well trained and physically impressive with their boosted muscles. A tribute to their lieutenant, Murphy Hewlett, who had kept his small squad’s morale high even on a dead-end posting like Lalonde. Niels Regehr had confided they all thought the mission upriver was a reward not a punishment.
Her communication block datavised that Ralph Hiltch was calling. She got to her feet and walked out from under the awning, giving the young marines some privacy. The dampness in the air wasn’t noticeably increased. Dean Folan, her deputy, waved from the wheel-house amidships. Jenny acknowledged him, then leant on the gunwale and accepted the channel from the communication block.
“I’m updating you on the Edenist agents,” Ralph datavised.
“You’ve found them?” she queried. It had been twenty hours since they had gone off air.
“Chance would be a fine thing. No, and the observation satellite images show that Ozark village is being abandoned. People are just drifting away—walking into the jungle, as far as we can tell. We must assume they have been either sequestrated or eliminated. There is no trace of the boat they were using, the Coogan , the satellite can’t see it anywhere on the river.”
“I see.”
“Unfortunately, the Edenists knew you were coming upriver behind them.”
“Hellfire!”
“Exactly, so if they have been sequestrated the invaders will be watching out for you.”
Jenny ran a hand over her head. Her ginger hair had been shaved down to a half-centimetre stubble, the same as everyone else on board. It was standard procedure for jungle missions, and her combat shell-helmet would make better contact. But it did mean anyone who saw them would immediately know what they were. “We weren’t exactly inconspicuous anyway,” she datavised.
“No, I suppose not.”
“Does this change our mission profile?”
“Not the directive, no. Kelven Solanki and I still want one of these sequestrated colonists brought back to Durringham. But the timing has certainly altered. Where are you now?”
She datavised the question into her inertial guidance block. “Twenty-five kilometres west of Oconto village.”
“Fine, put ashore at the nearest point you can. We’re a little worried about the boats coming out of the Quallheim and Zamjan tributaries. When we reviewed the satellite images we found about twenty that have set off downriver in the last week, everything from paddle-steamers to fishing ketches. As far as we can make out they’re heading for Durringham, they certainly aren’t stopping.”
“You mean they’re behind us as well?” Jenny asked in dismay.
“It looks that way. But, Jenny, I don’t leave my people behind. You know that. I’m working on a method of retrieving you that doesn’t include the river. But only ask if you really need it. There are only a limited number of seats,” he added significantly.
She stared across the grey water at the unbroken jungle, and muttered a silent curse. She liked the marines, a lot of trust had been built up between the two groups in the last four days; there were times when the ESA seemed too duplicitous and underhand even for an Intelligence agency. “Yes, boss, I understand.”
“Good. Now, remember; when you put ashore, assume everyone is hostile, and avoid all groups of locals. Solanki is convinced it was sheer numbers which overwhelmed the Edenists. And, Jenny, don’t let prejudice inflate your ego, the Edenist operatives are good.”
“Yes, sir.” She signed off and picked her way past the wheel-house to the little cabin which backed onto it. A big grey-green tarpaulin had been rigged over the rear of the boat to screen the horses. She could hear them snorting softly. They were agitated and jumpy after so long cooped up in their tiny enclosure. Murphy Hewlett had kept them reasonably comfortable, but she’d be glad when they could let them loose on land again. So would the team which had to shovel their crap overboard.
Murphy Hewlett was sheltering in the lee of the tarpaulin, his black fatigue jacket open to the waist, showing a dark green shortsleeved shirt. She started to explain the change in schedule.
“They want us to go ashore right now?” he asked. He was forty-two years old, and a veteran of several combat campaigns both in space and on planets.
“That’s right. Apparently people are deserting the villages in droves. Picking one of them up shouldn’t be too big a problem.”
“Yeah, you’re right about that.” He shook his head. “I don’t like this idea that we’re already behind enemy lines.”
“I didn’t ask my boss what the situation was like in Durringham right now, but to my mind this whole planet is behind the lines.”
Murphy Hewlett nodded glumly. “There’s real trouble brewing here. You get to recognize the feeling after a while, you know? Combat sharpens you, I can tell when things ain’t right. And they’re not.”
Jenny wondered guiltily if he could guess the essence of what Ralph Hiltch had said to her. “I’ll tell Dean to look out for a likely landing spot.”
She hadn’t even reached the wheel-house before Dean Folan was shouting urgently. “Boat coming!”
They went to the gunwale and peered ahead through the thin grey gauze of drizzle. The shape slowly resolved, and both of them watched it sail past with shocked astonishment.
It was a paddle-steamer which seemed to have ridden straight out of the nineteenth-century Mississippi River. Craft just like it were the inspiration behind Lalonde’s current fleet of paddle-boats. But while the Swithland and her ilk were bland distaff inheritors utilizing technology instead of engineering craftsmanship, this grande dame could have been a true original. Her paintwork was white and glossy, black iron stacks belched out a thick, oily smoke, pistons hissed and clanked as they turned the heavy paddles. Happy people stood on the decks, the handsome men in suits with long grey jackets, white shirts, and slender lace ties, their elegant women in long frilly dresses, casually twirling parasols on their shoulders. Children ran about, sporting gaily; the boys were in sailor suits, and the girls had ribbons in their flowing hair.
“It’s a dream,” Jenny whispered to herself. “I’m living a dream.”
The stately passengers were waving invitingly. Sounds of laughter and merrymaking rang clearly across the water. Earth’s mythical golden age had come back to nourish them with its supreme promise of unspoilt lands and uncomplicated times. The paddle-steamer was taking all folk of good will back to where today’s cares would cease to exist.
The sight was tugging at the hearts of all on board the Isakore. There wasn’t one of them who didn’t feel the urge to jump into the river and swim across the gulf. The gulf: between them and bliss, an eternal joy of song and wine which waited beyond the cruel divide which was their own world.
“Don’t,” Murphy Hewlett said.
Jenny’s euphoria shattered like crystal as the discordant voice struck her ears. Murphy Hewlett’s hand was on hers, pressing down painfully. She found her arms were rigid, tensed, ready to propel her over the side of the fishing boat.
“What is that?” she asked. At some deep level she was bemoaning the loss, being excluded from the journey into a different future; now she would never know if the promise was true . . .
“Don’t you see?” he said. “It’s them, whatever they are. They’re growing. They don’t care about us seeing them unmasked any more, they don’t fear us.”
The colourful solid mirage sailed on regally down the river, its wake of joyous invocation tarrying above the brown water like a dawn mist. Jenny Harris stayed at the gunwale for a long time, staring into the west.
The grove was a site of intense activity. Over two hundred people were working their way along the rows, positioning the collection cups around the weeping roses. It was early Duke-day; Duchess had just set, leaving a slight pink fringe splashing the western horizon. Between them, the two suns had banished all trace of moisture from the torrid air. Most of the men and women tending the big weeping roses wore light clothes. The younger children ran errands, bringing new stacks of collection cups to the teams, or supplying iced fruit juice from large jugs.
Joshua was feeling the heat despite being dressed in a burgundy sleeveless T-shirt and black jeans. He sat on the back of his horse watching the cupping teams at work. The cups that were being hung so carefully were white cardboard cones, with a waxed shiny inner surface, thirty centimetres wide at the open end, tapering down to a sealed point. Stiff hoops pasted onto the side were used to wire them onto the trellis below the weeping rose flowers. Everyone he could see carried a thick bundle of wires tucked into their belt. It didn’t take more than thirty seconds for them to fix each cup.
“Is there one collection cup for every single flower?” he asked.
Louise was sitting on her horse next to him, dressed in jodhpurs and a plain white blouse, hair held by a single band at the back. She had been surprised when he accepted her invitation to take the horses rather than use a carriage to get about the estate. Where would a starship captain learn how to ride? But ride he could. Not as well as her, which gave her a little thrill, that she should be better than a man at anything. Especially Joshua. “Yes,” she said. “How else could you do it?”
He gave the stacks of collection cups piled up at the end of each row a puzzled frown. “I don’t know. Jesus, there must be millions of them.”
Louise had grown accustomed to his casual swearing now. It had shocked her a little at first, but people from the stars were bound to have slightly different customs. Coming from him it didn’t seem profane, just exotic. Perhaps the most surprising thing was the way he could suddenly switch from being himself to using the most formal mannerisms.
“Cricklade alone has two hundred groves,” she said. “That’s why there are so many cuppers. It has to be done entirely in the week before midsummer when the roses are in bloom. Even with every able-bodied person in the county drafted in there’s only just enough to get it finished in time. A team like this takes nearly a day to complete a grove.”
Joshua leant forwards in the saddle, studying the people labouring away. It all seemed so menial, yet every one of them looked intent, devoted almost. Grant Kavanagh had said that a lot of them worked through half of Duchess-night, they would never have got the work finished otherwise. “I’m beginning to see why a bottle of Norfolk Tears costs so much. It’s not just the rarity value, is it?”
“No.” She flicked the reins, and guided the horse along the end of the rows, heading for the gate in the wall. The foreman touched his wide-brimmed hat as she passed. Louise gave a reflex smile.
He rode beside her after they left the grove. Cricklade Manor’s protective ring of cedars was just visible a couple of miles away across the wolds. “Where now?” It was parkland all around, sheep clustering together under the lonely trees for shade. The grass was furry with white flowers. Everywhere he looked there seemed to be blooms of some kind—trees, bushes, ground plants.
“I thought Wardley Wood would be nice, you can see what wild Norfolk looks like.” Louise pointed at a long stretch of dark-green trees a mile away, following the bottom of a small valley. “Genevieve and I often walk there. It’s lovely.” She dropped her head. As if he would be interested in the glades with their multicoloured flowers and sweet scents.
“That sounds good. I’d like to get out of this sunlight. I don’t know how you can stand it.”
“I don’t notice it, really.”
He spurred his horse on, breaking into a canter. Louise rode past him easily, moving effortlessly with her horse’s rhythm. They galloped across the wolds, scattering the somnolent sheep, Louise’s laughter trilling through the heavy air. She beat him easily to the edge of the wood, and sat there smiling as he rode up to her, panting heavily.
“That was quite good,” she said. “You could be a decent rider if you had a bit of practice.” She swung her leg over the saddle and dropped down.
“There are some stables on Tranquillity,” he said, dismounting. “That’s where I learnt, but I’m not there very often.”
A big mithorn tree stood just outside the main body of the wood, its coin-sized dark red flowers sprinkling the end of every twig. Louise wrapped the reins round one of its lower branches, and started off into the wood along one of the little animal tracks she knew. “I’ve heard of Tranquillity. That’s where the Lord of Ruin lives, Ione Saldana. She was on the news last year; she’s so beautiful. I wanted to cut my hair short like hers, but Mother said no. Do you know her?”
“Now that’s the trouble when you really do know someone famous; no one ever believes you when you say yes.”
She turned round, eyes wide with delight. “You do know her!”
“Yes. I knew her before she inherited the title, we grew up together.”
“What’s she like? Tell me.”
An image of a naked sweaty moaning Ione bent over a table while he was screwing her appeared in his mind. “Fun,” he said.
The glade she led him to was on the floor of the valley; a stream ran through it, spilling down a series of five big rock-pools. Knee-high flower stems with tubular yellow and lavender blooms clotted the ground, giving off a scent similar to orange blossom. Water-monarch trees lined the stream below the pools, fifty yards tall, their long, slender branches swaying in the slight breeze, fernlike leaf fronds drooping. Birds flittered about in the upper boughs, uninspiring dun-coloured bat-analogues with long, powerful forelimbs for tunnelling into the ground. Wild weeping roses boiled over the stones along the side of two of the pools; years of dead petrified branches overlaid by a fresh growth of new living shoots to produce hemispherical bushes. Their flowers were crushed together, disfigured as they vied for light.
“You were right,” Joshua told her. “It is lovely.”
“Thank you. Genevieve and I often bathe here in the summer.”
He perked up. “Really?”
“It’s a little place of the world that’s all our own. Even the hax don’t come here.”
“What’s a hax? I heard someone mention the name.”
“Father calls them wolf-analogues. They’re big and vicious, and they’ll even attack humans. The farmers hunt them in the winter, it’s good sport. But we’ve just about cleared them out of Cricklade now.”
“Do the hunters all get dressed up in red jackets and charge around on horses with packs of hounds?”
“Yes. How did you know?”
“Lucky guess.”
“I suppose you’ve seen real monsters on your travels. I’ve seen pictures of the Tyrathca on the holoscreen. They’re horrible. I couldn’t sleep for a week afterwards.”
“Yes, the Tyrathca look pretty ferocious. But I’ve met some breeder pairs; they don’t think of themselves like that. To them we’re the cruel alien ones. It’s a question of perspective.”
Louise blushed and ducked her head, turning away from him. “I’m sorry. You must think me a frightful bigot.”
“No. You’re just not used to xenocs, that’s all.” He stood right behind her and put his hands on her shoulders. “But I would like to take you away from here some time and show you the rest of the Confederation. Some of it is quite spectacular. And I’d love to take you to Tranquillity.” He looked round the glade, thoughtful. “It’s a bit like this, only much much bigger. I think you’d like it a lot.”
Louise wanted to squirm away from his grip, men simply shouldn’t act in such a familiar fashion. But his customs were surely different, and he was massaging her shoulder muscles gently. It felt nice. “I always wanted to fly on a starship.”
“You will, one day. When Cricklade is yours you can do anything you want.” Joshua was enjoying the touch of her. Naпvety, a voluptuous body, and the knowledge that he should never, ever be even thinking about screwing her were combining to form a potent aphrodisiac.
“I never thought of that,” she said brightly. “Can I charter the Lady Macbeth ? Oh, but it will be simply ages yet. I don’t want Father to die, that would be an absolutely awful thing to think. Will you still be coming to Norfolk in fifty years’ time?”
“Of course I will. I have two things tying me here now. Business, and you.”
“Me?” It came out as a frightened squeak.
He turned her round to face him, and kissed her.
“Joshua!”
He put two fingers over her lips. “Shush. No words, only us. Always us.”
Louise stood rigidly still as he unbuttoned her blouse, all kinds of strange emotions battling in her head. I ought to run. I ought to stop him.
Sunlight fell onto her bare shoulders and back. It was a peculiar sensation, a tingling warmth. And the expression on his face as he gazed at her was scary, he looked so hungry, but anxious at the same time.
“Joshua,” she murmured, half nervous, half amused. Her shoulders had hunched up of their own accord.
He pulled his T-shirt off over his head. They kissed again, his arms going around her. He seemed very strong. His skin pressing against her had started a trembling in her stomach that nothing was able to stop. Then she realized her jodhpurs were being peeled down.
“Oh God.”
His finger lifted her chin up. “It’s all right. I’ll show you how.” And his smile was at least as warm as the sun.
She took her black leather riding boots off herself, then helped him with the jodhpurs. Her brassiere and knickers were plain white cotton. Joshua removed them slowly, savouring the drawn-out exposure.
He spread their clothes out and laid her down. She was terribly tense to start with, her lower lip clamped between her teeth, narrow eyes peeking down fearfully at the length of her body. It took a long, pleasant time of soft caresses, kisses, stealthy whispers, and tickles before she began to respond. He coaxed a giggle from her, then another, then it was a squeal, a groan. She touched his body, curious and suddenly bold, a hand sliding down his belly to cup his balls. He shuddered and repaid her by massaging her thighs. There was another long interval while their hands and mouths explored each other. Then he slid above her, looking down at dishevelled hair, drowsy eyes, dark nipples standing proud, legs parted. He moved into her carefully, the damp warmth enveloping and squeezing his cock an erotic splendour. Louise writhed tempestuously below him, and he began a slow, provocative stroke. He used neural nanonic overrides to restrain his own body’s responses, sustaining his erection as long as he wanted it, determined that she should reach a climax, that it should be as perfect for her as he could possibly make it.
After an age he was rewarded by her complete loss of control. Louise threw away every last inhibition as her orgasm built, shouting at the top of her voice, her body arching desperately below him, lifting his knees from the ground. Only then did he allow himself any release, joining her in absolute bliss.
Post-coital languor was a sweet time, one of tiny kisses, stroking individual strands of sticky hair from her face, single compassionate words. And he had been quite right all along, forbidden fruit tasted the best.
“I love you, Joshua,” she whispered into his ear.
“And I love you.”
“Don’t leave.”
“That’s unfair. You know I’m coming back.”
“I’m sorry.” She tightened her grip around him.
He moved his hand up to her left breast and squeezed, hearing a soft hiss of indrawn breath. “Are you sore?”
“A bit. Not much.”
“I’m glad.”
“Me too.”
“Do you want to have that swim now? Water can be a lot of fun.”
She grinned cautiously. “Again?”
“If you want.”
“I do.”
Marjorie Kavanagh came to his bedroom again that Duchess-night. The prospect of Louise sneaking through the red-shaded manor to be with him and discovering him with her mother added a spice to his lovemaking that left her exhausted and delighted.
The next day Louise, eyes possessively agleam, announced at breakfast that she would show Joshua round the county roseyard, so he could see the casks being prepared for the new Tears. Grant declared this a stupendous idea, chuckling to himself that his little cherub was having her first schoolgirl crush.
Joshua smiled neutrally, and thanked her for being so considerate. There were another three days to go until midsummer.
At Cricklade, and all across Norfolk, they marked the onset of Midsummer’s Day with a simple ceremony. The Kavanaghs, Colsterworth’s vicar, Cricklade Manor’s staff, the senior estate workers, and representatives from each of the cupper teams gathered at the nearest grove to the manor towards the end of Duke-day. Joshua and Dahybi were invited, and stood at the front of the group that assembled just inside the shabby stone wall.
The rows of weeping roses stretched out ahead of them; blooms and cups alike upturned to a fading azure sky, perfectly still in the breathless evening air. Time seemed to be suspended.
Duke was falling below the western horizon, a sliver of pyrexic tangerine, pulling the world’s illumination down with it. The vicar, wearing a simple cassock, held his arms up for silence. He turned to face the east. On cue, a watery pink light expanded across the horizon.
A sigh went up from the group.
Even Joshua was impressed. There had been about two minutes of darkness the previous evening. Now there would be no night for a sidereal day, Duchess-night flowing seamlessly into Duke-day. It wouldn’t be until the end of the following Duchess-night that the stars would come out again for a brief minute. After that it would be the evenings when the two suns overlapped, and the morning darkness would grow longer and longer, extending back into Duchess-night until Norfolk reached inferior conjunction and only Duke was visible: midwinter.
The vicar led his flock in a brief Harvest Thanksgiving service. Everybody knew the words to the prayers and psalms, and quiet, murmuring voices banded together to be heard right across the grove. Joshua felt quite left out. They finished by singing “All Creatures Great and Small”. At least his neural nanonics had that in a memory file; he joined in heartily, surprised by just how good he felt.
After the service, Grant Kavanagh led his family and friends on a rambling walk along the aisles between the rows. He touched various roses, feeling their weight, rubbing petals between his thumb and forefinger, testing the texture.
“Smell that,” he told Joshua as he handed over a petal he had just picked. “It’s going to be a good crop. Not as good as five seasons ago. But well above average.”
Joshua sniffed. The scent was very weak, but recognizable, similar to the smell which clung to a cork after a bottle of Tears had been opened. “You can tell from this?” he asked.
Grant put his arm around Louise as they sauntered along the aisle. “I can. Mr Butterworth can. Half of the estate workers can. It just takes experience. You need to be here for a lot of summers.” He grinned broadly. “Perhaps you will be, Joshua. I’m sure Louise will ask you back if no one else does.”
Genevieve shrieked with laughter.
Louise blushed furiously. “Daddy!” She slapped his arm.
Joshua raised a weak smile and turned to examine one of the rose plants. He found himself facing Marjorie Kavanagh. She gave him a languid wink. His neural nanonics sent out a volley of overrides to try and stop the rush of blood to his own cheeks.
After the inspection walk the manor staff served up an outdoor buffet. Grant Kavanagh stood behind one of the trestle tables, carving from a huge joint of rare beef, playing the part of jovial host, with a word and a laugh for all his people.
As Duchess-night progressed the rose flowers began to droop. It happened so slowly that the eye could detect no motion, but hour by hour the thick stems lost their stiffness, and the weight of the large petals and their central carpel pod made gravity’s triumph inevitable.
By Duke-morning most of the flowers had reached the horizontal. The petals were drying out and shrivelling.
Joshua and Louise rode out to one of the groves close to Wardley Wood, and wandered along the sagging plants. There were only a few cuppers left tending the long rows, straightening the occasional collection cup. They nodded nervously to Louise and scurried on about their business.
“Most people have gone home to sleep,” Louise said. “The real work will begin again tomorrow.”
They stood aside as a man pulled a wooden trolley past them. A big glass ewer, webbed with rope, was resting on it. Joshua watched as he stopped the trolley at the end of a row and lifted the ewer off. About a third of the rows had a similar ewer waiting at the end.
“What’s that for?” he asked.
“They empty the collection cups into those,” Louise said. “Then the ewers are taken to the county roseyard where the Tears are casked.”
“And they stay in the cask for a year.”
“That’s right.”
“Why?”
“So that they spend a winter on Norfolk. They’re not proper Tears until they’ve felt our frost. It sharpens the taste, so they say.”
And adds to the cost, he thought.
The flowers were wilting rapidly now, the stems curving down into a U-shape. Their sunlight-fired coronal cloak had faded away as the petals darkened, and with it had gone a lot of the mystique. They were just ordinary dying flowers now.
“How do the cuppers know where to wire the cups?” he asked. “Look at them. Every flower is bending over above a cup.” He glanced up and down the aisle. “Every one of them.”
Louise gave him a superior smile. “If you are born on Norfolk, you know how to place a cup.”
It wasn’t just the weeping roses which were reaching fruition. As they trotted the horses over to Wardley Wood Joshua saw flowers on the trees and bushes closing up, some varieties leaning over in the same fashion as the roses.
In their peaceful glade the wild rose bushes along the rock pools seemed flaccid, as if their shape was deflating. Flowers lolled against each other, petals agglutinating into a quilt of pulp.
Louise let Joshua undress her as he always did. Then they spread a blanket down on the rocks below the weeping roses and embraced. Joshua had got to the point where Louise was shuddering in delighted anticipation as his hands roved across her lower belly and down the inside of her thighs when he felt a splash on his back. He ignored the first one and kissed Louise’s navel. Another splash broke his concentration. It couldn’t be raining, there wasn’t a cloud in the barren blue sky. He twisted over. “What—?”
Norfolk’s roses had begun to weep. Out of the centre of the carpel pod a clear fluid was exuded in a steady monotonous drip. It was destined to last for ten to fifteen hours, well into the next Duchess-night. Only when the pod was drained would it split open and release the seeds it contained. Nature had intended the fluid to soften the soil made arid by weeks without rain, allowing the seeds to fall into mud so they would have a greater chance of germination. But then in 2209 a woman called Carys Thomas, who was a junior botanist in the ecological assessment mission, acting against all regulations (and common sense), put her finger under a weeping pod, then touched the single pearl of glistening fluid to her tongue. Norfolk’s natural order came to an immediate end.
Joshua wiped up the dewy bead from his skin and licked his finger. It tasted coarser than the Norfolk Tears he’d so relished back in Tranquillity, but the ancestry was beyond doubt. A roguish light filled his eyes. “Hey, not bad.”
A snickering Louise was moved round until she was directly underneath the lax hanging flowers. They made love under a shower of sparkling droplets prized higher than a king’s ransom.
The cuppers returned to the groves as the next Duchess-night ended. They cut away the collection cups, now heavy with Tears, and poured their precious contents into the ewers. It was a task that would take another five days of intensive round-the-clock labour to complete.
Grant Kavanagh himself drove Joshua and Dahybi down to the county roseyard in a four-wheel-drive farm ranger, a powerful boxy vehicle with tyres deep enough to plough through a shallow marsh. The yard was on the outskirts of Colsterworth, a large collection of ivy-clad stone buildings with few windows. Beneath the ground was an extensive warren of brick-lined cellars where the casks were stored throughout their year of maturation.
When he drove through the wide entrance gates the yard workers were already rolling out the casks of last year’s Tears.
“A year to the day,” he said proudly as the heavy ironbound oak cylinders rattled and skipped over the cobbles. “This is your cargo, young Joshua. We’ll have it ready for you in two days.” He braked the farm ranger to a halt outside the bottling plant where the casks were being rolled inside. The plant supervisor rushed out to meet them, sweating. “Don’t you worry about us,” Grant told him blithely. “I’m just showing our major customer around. We won’t get in the way.” And with that he marched imperiously through the broad doorway.
The bottling plant was the most sophisticated mechanical set-up Joshua had seen on the planet, even though it lacked any real cybernetic systems (the conveyor belts actually used rubber pulleys!). It was a long hall with a single-span roof, full of gleaming belts, pipes, and vats. Thousands of the ubiquitous pear-shaped bottles trundled along the narrow belts, looping overhead, winding round filling nozzles, the racket of their combined clinking making conversation difficult.
Grant walked them along the hall. The casks were all blended together in big stainless-steel vats, he explained. Stoke County’s bouquet was a homogenized product. No groves had individual labels, not even his.
Joshua watched the bottles filling up below the big vats, then moving on to be corked and labelled. Each stage added to the cost. And the weight of the glass bottles reduced the amount of actual Tears each starship could carry.
Jesus, what a sweet operation. I couldn’t do it better myself. And the beauty of it is we’re the ones most eager to cooperate, to inflate the cost.
At the end of the line, the yard manager was waiting with the first bottle to come off the conveyor. He looked expectantly at Grant, who told him to proceed. The bottle was uncorked, and its contents poured into four cut-crystal glasses.
Grant sniffed, then took a small sip. He cocked his head to one side and looked thoughtful. “Yes,” he said. “This will do. Stoke can put its name to this.”
Joshua tried his own glass. It chilled every nerve in his throat, and burst into flames in his stomach.
“Good enough for you, Joshua?” Grant clapped him on the back.
Dahybi was holding his glass up to the light, staring at it with greedy enchantment.
“Yes,” Joshua declared staunchly. “Good enough.”
Joshua and Dahybi took it in turns to oversee the cases the roseyard put together for them. For space travel the bottles were hermetically sealed in composite cube containers one metre square, with a thick lining of nultherm foam to protect them (more weight); the roseyard had its own loading and sealing machinery (more cost). There was a railway line leading directly from the yard to the town’s station, which meant they were able to dispatch several batches to Boston every day.
All this activity severely reduced the amount of time Joshua spent at Cricklade Manor, much to Louise’s chagrin. Nor was there any believable reason why she should take him riding over the estate again.
He arranged the shifts with Dahybi so that he worked most of Duchess-night at the roseyard, which meant his tussles with Marjorie were curtailed.
The morning of the day he was leaving, however, Louise did manage to trap him in the stables. So he had to spend two hours in a dark, dusty hay loft satisfying an increasingly bold and adventurous teenager who seemed to have developed a bottomless reserve of physical stamina. She clung to him for a long time after her third climax, while he whispered assurances of how quickly he would come back.
“Just for business with Daddy?” she asked, almost as an accusation.
“No. For you. Business is an excuse, it would be difficult otherwise on this planet. Everything’s so bloody formal here.”
“I don’t care any more. I don’t care who knows.”
He shifted round, brushing straw from his ribs. “Well, I do care; because I don’t want you to be treated like a pariah. So show a little discretion, Louise.”
She ran her fingertips over his cheeks, marvelling. “You really care about me, don’t you?”
“Of course I do.”
“Daddy likes you,” she said uncertainly. Now probably wasn’t the best time to press him on their future after he returned. He must have a lot on his mind with the awesome responsibility of the starflight ahead of him. But it did seem as though her father’s plaudit was like an omen. So few people ever met with Daddy’s approval. And Joshua had said how much he adored Stoke County. The kind of land I’d like to settle in: his exact words.
“I’m rather fond of the old boy myself. But God he’s got a temper.”
Louise giggled in the dark. Down below the horses were shuffling about. She straddled his abdomen, her mane of hair falling around the two of them. His hands found her breasts, fingers tightening until she moaned with desire. In a low, throaty voice he told her what he wanted her to do. She strained her body to accommodate him, trembling at her own daring. He was solid against her, wonderfully there , encouraging and praising.
“Tell me again,” she murmured. “Please, Joshua.”
“I love you,” he said, breath teasingly hot on her neck. Even his neural nanonics couldn’t banish the dawning guilt he felt at the words. Have I really been reduced to lying to trusting, hopelessly unsophisticated teenagers? Perhaps it’s because she is so magnificent, what we all want girls to be like even though we know it’s wrong. I can’t help myself. “I love you, and I’m coming back for you.”
She groaned in delirium as he entered her. Ecstasy brought its own special light, banishing the darkness of the loft.
Joshua only just managed to reach the manor’s hall in time to kiss or shake hands with members of the large group of staff and family (William Elphinstone was absent) who had come to wish him and Dahybi farewell. The horse-drawn carriage carried the two of them back to Colsterworth Station, where they boarded the train back to Boston along with the last batch of their cargo.
Melvyn Ducharme met them when they arrived back in the capital, and told them that over half of the cases were already up in the Lady Macbeth . Kenneth Kavanagh had used his influence with captains whose spaceplanes were being under-used for their own smaller cargos. It hadn’t generated much goodwill, but the loading was well ahead of schedule. Using Lady Mac ’s small spaceplane alone would have meant taking eleven days to boost all the cases into orbit.
They returned up to the starship straight away. When Joshua floated into his cabin, Sarha was waiting with the free-fall sex cage expanded, and a hungry smile in place. “No bloody chance,” he told her, and curled up into a ball to sleep for a solid ten hours.
Even if he had been awake he had no reason to focus the Lady Macbeth ’s sensors on departing starships. So he would never have seen that out of the twenty-seven thousand eight hundred and forty-six starships which had come to Norfolk, twenty-two of them experienced an alarming variety of severe mechanical and electrical malfunctions as they departed for their home planets.