"Reality Dysfunction - Emergence" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Peter F.)

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.

The lack of any spaceport outside the endcap, plus the circumfluous salt-water sea lapping around the base on the inside, meant that there was little activity on its curving slopes. The first two kilometres above the coves were terraced like an ancient hill farm, planted with flowering bushes and orchards tended by agronomy servitors. Above the terraces a claggy soil clung to the ever-steepening polyp wall, a vast annular meadow land of thick grasses, whose roots strove to counteract gravity and keep the soil in place. Both grass and soil stopped short three kilometres from the hub, where the polyp was virtually a vertical cliff. Right at the axis, the light-tube emerged, running the entire length of the massive habitat: a cylindrical mesh of organic conductors, their powerful magnetic field containing the fluorescent plasma which brought light and heat to the interior.

Michael Saldana had decided that the quiet, semi-secluded southern endcap would be an ideal site for the research project into the Laymil. Its offices and laboratories now sprawled over two square kilometres of the lower terraces, the largest cluster of buildings inside the habitat, resembling the campus of some wealthy private university.

The project director’s office was on the top floor of the five-storey administration building, a squat, circular pillar of copper-mirror glass ringed with grey stone colonnaded balconies. It sat on the terrace at the back of the campus, five hundred metres above the circumfluous sea, giving it an unsurpassed view of the cycloramic sub-tropical parkland stretching away into misty distance.

The view was something Parker Higgens was immensely proud of, easily the finest in Tranquillity, another fitting perk due to the research project’s eighth director—along with the scrumptious office itself, with its deep-burgundy coloured ossalwood furniture that had come from Kulu in the days before the abdication crisis. Parker Higgens was eighty-five. His appointment had come nine years ago, almost the last act of the Lord of Ruin, and by the grace of God (plus an ancestor wealthy enough to afford some decent geneering) he would keep the post for another nine. He had left actual research behind twenty years ago to concentrate on administration. It was a field he excelled in; building the right teams, massaging mercurial egos, knowing when to push, when to ease off. Genuinely effective scientific administrators were rare, and under his leadership the project had functioned reasonably smoothly, everyone acknowledged that. Parker Higgens liked to keep his world neat and tidy, it was one of his formulas for success, which was why he was particularly shocked to come into work one morning and find a young blonde-haired girl lounging in the deep cushioning of his straight-backed chair behind his desk.

“Who the bloody hell are you?” he shouted. Then he saw the five serjeants standing to attention around the room.

Tranquillity’s serjeants were the habitat’s sole police force, sub-sentient bitek servitors controlled via affinity by the personality, enforcing the law with scrupulous impartiality. They were (intentionally) intimidating humanoids, two metres tall, with a reddish-brown exoskeleton, limb joints encased by segmented rings permitting full articulation. The heads had a sculpted appearance, with eyes concealed in a deep horizontal crease. Their hands were their most human characteristic, with leathery skin replacing the exoskeleton. It meant they could use any artefact built for a human, with emphasis on weapons. Each of them carried a laser pistol and a cortical jammer on their belts, along with restraint cuffs. The belt was their sole article of clothing.

Parker Higgens glanced round dumbly at the serjeants, then back at the girl. She was wearing a very expensive pale blue suit, and her ice-blue eyes conveyed an unnerving impression of depth. Her nose . . . Parker Higgens might have been a bureaucrat, but he wasn’t stupid. “You?” he whispered incredulously.

Ione gave him a faint smile and stood up, extending her hand. “Yes, Mr Director. Me, I’m afraid. Ione Saldana.”

He shook the hand weakly, it was very small and cool in his. There was a signet ring on her finger, a red ruby carved with the Saldana crest: the crowned phoenix. It was the Kulu Crown Prince’s ring, Michael hadn’t bothered to return it to the keeper of the crown jewellery when he was sent into exile. Parker Higgens had last seen it on Maurice Saldana’s finger.

“I’m honoured, ma’am,” Parker Higgens said; he had come very close to blurting: but you’re a girl. “I knew your father, he was an inspiring man.”

“Thank you.” There was no trace of humour on Ione’s face. “I appreciate you’re busy, Mr Director, but I’d like to inspect the project’s major facilities this morning. Then I shall require each division’s senior staff to assemble summaries of their work for a presentation in two days’ time. I have tried to keep abreast of the findings, but remote viewing through Tranquillity’s senses and having them explained in person are two different things.”

Parker Higgens’s whole universe trembled. A review, and like it or not this slip of a girl held the purse strings, the life strings of the research project. What if . . . “Of course, ma’am, I’ll show you round myself.”

Ione started to walk round the desk.

“Ma’am? May I ask what your policy towards the Laymil research project is? Previous Lords of Ruin have been very—

“Relax, Mr Director. My ancestors were quite right: unravelling the Laymil mystery should be given the highest priority.”

The prospect of imminent disaster retreated from his view, like rain-clouds rolling away to reveal the sun. It was going to be all right after all. Almost. A girl! Saldana heirs were always male. “Yes, ma’am!”

The serjeants lined up into an escort squad around Ione. “Come along,” she said, and swept out of the office.

Parker Higgens found his legs racing in an undignified manner to catch up. He wished he could make people jump obediently like that.

There is a third Lord of Ruin.

The news broke thirty-seven seconds after Ione and Parker Higgens walked into the laboratory block housing the Laymil Plant Genetics Division. Everybody who worked for the project was fitted with neural nanonics. So once the instinctive flash of guilt and the accompanying shock of having the director and five serjeants walk in unannounced ten minutes into the working day had worn off, and the introductions began, professors and technicians alike opened channels into the habitat’s communication net. Nearly every datavise began: You’re not going to believe this—

Ione was shown AV projections of Laymil plant genes, sealed propagators with seed shoots worming their way up through the soil, and large fern-analogue plants with scarlet fronds growing in pots, and given small shrivelled black fruits to taste.

After friends, relatives, and colleagues were brought up to speed, it took another fifteen seconds before anyone thought of contacting the news company offices.

Ione and Parker Higgens walked on from the plant genetics laboratory to the Laymil Habitat Structure Analysis office. People were lining the stone path, trampling on the shrubs. Applause and cheers followed her like a wave effect, wolf-whistles were flung boisterously. The serjeants had to gently push aside the more enthusiastic spectators. Ione started to shake hands and wave.

There were five major Confederationwide news companies who maintained offices in Tranquillity, and all of them had been told about Ione’s arrival at the research project campus within ninety seconds of her tour beginning. The disbelieving assistant editor at Collins immediately asked the habitat personality if it was true.

“Yes,” Tranquillity said simply.

The scheduled morning programmes were immediately interrupted to carry the news. Reporters sprinted for tube carriages. Editors frantically opened channels to their contacts in the Laymil project staff, seeking immediate on-the-ground coverage. Datavises became sensevises, relaying optical and auditory nerve inputs directly to the studio. After twelve minutes, eighty per cent of Tranquillity’s residents were hooked in, either watching Ione’s impromptu walkabout on the AV broadcasts, or receiving the sensevise direct through neural nanonics.

It’s a girl, the Lord of Ruin is a girl. God, the Royal Saldanas will go mad over that, there’s not a chance of reconciliation with the Kingdom now.

There were two Kiint working in the physiology laboratory; one of them came into the glass-walled lobby to greet Ione. It was an impressive and moving sight, the slight human girl standing in front of the huge xenoc.

The Kiint was an adult female, icy-white hide glimmering softly in the bright morning light, almost as if she was wearing a halo. She had an oval cross-section body nine metres long, three wide, standing on eight fat elephantlike legs. Her head was as long as Ione was tall, which was slightly intimidating as it reminded her of a primitive shield; a bony, slightly convex, downward pointing triangle with a central vertical ridge which gave it two distinct planes. There were a pair of limpid eyes halfway up, just above a series of six breathing vents, each of which had a furry fringe that undulated with every breath. The pointed base of the head served as her beak, with two smaller hinged sections behind.

Two arm-appendages emerged from the base of her neck, curving round the lower half of her head. They looked almost like featureless tentacles. Then tractamorphic muscles rippled below the skin, and the end of the right arm shaped itself into a human hand.

You are much welcome here, Ione Saldana,the Kiint spoke into her mind.

Kiint could always use the human affinity band, but Edenists had found it almost impossible to sense any form of private Kiint communication. Perhaps they had a true telepathic ability? It was one of the lesser mysteries about the enigmatic xenocs.

Your interest in this research venture does you credit,the kiint continued.

My thanks to you for assisting us,ione replied. I’m told the analysis instruments you have made available here have been an immeasurable help.

How could we refuse your grandfather’s invitation? Foresight such as his is a rare quality among your race.

I would like to speak with you about that sometime.

Of course. But now you must complete your grand progress.there was a note of lofty amusement behind the thought.

The Kiint extended her new-formed hand, and they touched palms briefly. She inclined her massive head in a bow. Murmurs of surprise rippled round the others in the lobby.

Hell, look at that, even the Kiint’s bowled over by her.

After the tour Ione stood alone in one of the orchards outside the campus, surrounded by trees rigorously pruned into mushroom shapes, their branches congested with a fleece of blossom. Petals swirled slowly through the air about her, sprinkling the ankle-length grass with a snowy mantle. She had her back to the habitat, so that the entire interior appeared to curve around her like a pair of emerald waves, their peaks clashing in a long, straight flame of scintillating white light far overhead.

“I want to tell you of the faith I have in everybody who lives in Tranquillity,” she began. “Out of nothing a hundred and seventy-five years ago we have built a society that is respected throughout the Confederation. We are independent, we are virtually crime free, and we are wealthy, both collectively and individually. We can be justifiably proud in that achievement. It was not given to us, it was bought with hard work and sacrifices. And it will continue only by encouraging the industry and enterprise that has generated this wealth. My father and grandfather gave their wholehearted support to the business community, in creating an environment where trade and industry enrich our lives, and allow us to aspire for our children. In Tranquillity, dreams are given a greater than average chance to become real. That you will continue to pursue your dreams is the faith I have in you. To this end I pledge that my reign will be devoted to maintaining the economic, legal, and political environs which have brought us to the enviable position we find ourselves in today and enable us to look forward to the future with courage.”

The image and voice faded from the news studios, along with the aromatic scent of blossom. But not the shy half-smile, that lingered for a long time.

Christ: young, pretty, rich, and smart. How about that!

By the end of the day, Tranquillity had received eighty-four thousand invitations for Ione. She was wanted at parties and dinners, she was asked to give speeches and present prizes, her name was wanted on the board of interstellar companies, designers offered their entire portfolio for her to wear, charities begged her to become their patron. Old friends treated her as though she was a reincarnated messiah. Everyone wanted to be her new friend. And Joshua—Joshua got very grumpy when she spent the first evening reviewing Tranquillity’s summaries of the incredible public reaction rather than spending it in bed with him.

He was also none too happy that Lady Macbeth ’s refit was still a fortnight short of completion. Over the next twenty hours, seventy-five charter flights were organized to carry recordings of Ione around the Confederation. The news company offices were engaged in a ferocious ratings war; they were desperate to break the scoop on as many worlds as possible, as soon as possible. Starship captains cursed their earlier binding contracts to deliver mundane cargoes, and some even broke them. Those that didn’t have immediate contracts named wholly unreasonable prices to the news companies, which were paid without question.

Right across the Confederation, the sensation-hungry devoured Ione, rekindling an avid interest in the black sheep branch of the Saldana family; and even briefly pushing the old Laymil enigma into the limelight again.

Merchants became extremely wealthy on Ione fashions and Ione accessories. Bluesense directors remodelled their female meat to look and feel like her. Mood Fantasy bands composed tracks about her. Even Jezzibella announced she looked cute, and said she’d like to fuck her one day.

The news agencies on Kulu and its Principality worlds treated her appearance as a minor footnote. The royal family didn’t believe in censoring the press, but the court certainly didn’t see her appearance as anything to celebrate. Black-market sensevise recordings of her sold for an absolute fortune right across the Kingdom.

It was one of the abandoned cargo contracts which brought Joshua his first charter two days later.

Roland Frampton was a merchant friend of Barrington Grier, which was how he heard of the Lady Macbeth and how she would be ready to depart in fourteen days.

“When I get my hands on that bastard Captain McDonald I’ll have him broken up for transplant meat,” Roland said angrily. “The Corum Sister won’t get another cargo contract this side of Jupiter, that I do promise.” Joshua sipped his mineral water and nodded sympathetically. Harkey’s Bar didn’t have the same appeal by day, although the term was ambiguous in a starscraper. But people’s biorhythms were in tune with the habitat light-tube; his body knew this was midmorning.

“I paid good rates, you know, not like I was ripping him off. It was a regular run. Now this bloody girl comes along, and everyone goes berserk.”

“Hey, I’m glad we’ve got a Saldana back running things,” Barrington Grier protested. “If she’s half as good as the last two Lords, this place is going to be swinging.”

“Yeah, well, I haven’t got no quarrel with her,” Roland Frampton said hurriedly. “But the way people react.” He shook his head in bemusement. “Did you hear what the news companies were offering captains for the Avon run?”

“Yeah. Meyer and the Udat got the Time Universe charter to Avon,” Joshua said with a grin.

“The point is, Joshua, I’m up shit creek,” Roland Frampton said. “I’ve got my clients screaming for those nanonic medical supplements. There are a lot of wealthy old people in Tranquillity, the medical industry here is big business.”

“I’m sure we can come to an arrangement.”

“Cards on the table, Joshua, I’ll pay you three hundred and fifty thousand fuseodollars for the flight, with an extra seventy thousand bonus if you can get them back here in five weeks from today. After that, I can offer you a regular contract, a flight to Rosenheim every six months. Not to be sneered at, Joshua.”

Joshua glanced at Melvyn Ducharme, who was stirring his coffee idly. He had come to rely a lot on his fusion engineer during Lady Mac ’s refit; he was forty-eight, with over twenty years’ solid starflight experience behind him. The dark-skinned little man gave a small nod.

“OK,” Joshua said. “But you know the score, Roland, the Lady Mac doesn’t leave that bay until I’m happy she’s integrated properly. I’m not rushing it and botching it just for the sake of a seventy-thousand-dollar bonus.”

Roland Frampton gave him an unhappy look. “Sure, Joshua, I appreciate that.”

They shook on it and started to work out details.

Kelly Tirrel arrived twenty minutes later, dropped her bag on the carpet, and sat down with an exaggerated sigh. She called a waitress over and ordered a coffee, then gave Joshua a perfunctory kiss.

“Have you got your contract?” she asked.

“We’re working on it.” He gave the bar a quick scan. Helen Vanham wasn’t anywhere to be seen.

“Good for you. God what a day! My editor’s been having kittens.”

“Ione caught you all on the hop, did she?” Barrington Grier asked.

“And then some,” Kelly admitted. “I’ve been researching for the last fifteen hours without a break, going through the Saldana family history. We’re putting together an hour-long documentary for tonight. Those royals are one bunch of weird people.”

“Are you going to present it?” Joshua asked.

“No chance. Kirstie McShane got it. Bitch. She’s sleeping with the current affairs editor, you know, that’s why. I’ll probably wind up as fashion correspondent or something. If only we’d had some advance warning, I could have prepared, found an angle.”

“Ione wasn’t sure about the timing herself,” he said. “She’s only been thinking about public appearances for the last fortnight.”

There was a murderous silence as Kelly’s head slowly turned to focus on Joshua. “What?”

“Er . . .” He felt as though he’d suddenly been dumped into free fall.

“You know her? You’ve known who she is?”

“Well, sort of, in a way, I suppose, yes. She did mention it.”

Kelly stood up fast, the motion nearly toppling her chair. “Mention it! You SHIT, Joshua Calvert! Ione Saldana is the biggest story to hit the whole Confederation for three years, and you KNEW about it, and you didn’t tell me! You selfish, egotistical, mean-minded, xenoc-buggering bastard! I was sleeping with you, I cared . . .” She clamped her mouth shut and snatched her bag up. “Didn’t that mean anything to you?”

“Of course. It was . . .” He accessed his neural nanonics’ thesaurus file. “Stupendous?”

“Bastard!” She took two paces towards the door then turned round. “And you’re shit-useless in bed, too,” she shouted.

Everyone in Harkey’s Bar was staring at him. He could see a lot of grins forming. He closed his eyes for a moment and let out a resigned sigh. “Women.” He swivelled round in his chair to face Roland Frampton. “About the insurance rates . . .”

The cavern wasn’t like anything Joshua had seen in Tranquillity before. It was roughly hemispherical, about twenty metres across, with the usual level white polyp floor. But the walls’ regularity was broken up by organic protuberances, great cauliflower growths that quivered occasionally as he watched; there were also the tight doughnuts of sphincter muscles. Equipment cabinets, with a medical look, were fused into the polyp; as though they were being extruded, or osmotically absorbed. He couldn’t tell which.

The whole place was so biological. It made him want to squirm.

“What is it?” he asked Ione.

“A clone womb centre.” She pointed to one of the sphincters. “We gestate the servitor housechimps in these ones. All of the habitat’s servitors are sexless, you see, they don’t mate. So Tranquillity has to grow them. We’ve got several varieties of chimps, and the serjeants, of course, then there are some specialist constructs for things like tract repair and light-tube maintenance. There are forty-three separate species in all.”

“Ah. Good.”

“The wombs are plumbed directly into the nutrient ducts, there’s very little hardware needed.”

“Right.”

“I was gestated in here.”

Joshua’s nose wrinkled up. He didn’t like to think about it.

Ione walked over to a waist-high, steel-grey equipment stack standing on the floor. Green and amber LEDs winked at her. There was a cylindrical zero-tau pod recessed into the top, twenty centimetres long, ten wide; its surface resembled a badly tarnished mirror. She used her affinity to load an order into the stack’s bitek processors, and the pod hinged open.

Joshua watched silently as she placed the little sustentator globe inside. His son. Part of him wanted to put a stop to this right now, to have the child born properly, to know him, watch him grow up.

“It is customary to name the child now,” Ione said. “If you want to.”

“Marcus.” His father’s name. He didn’t even have to think about that.

Her sapphire eyes were damp, reflecting the soft pearl light from the electrophorescent strips in the ceiling. “Of course. Marcus Saldana it is, then.”

Joshua’s mouth opened to protest. “Thank you,” he said meekly.

The pod closed and the surface turned black. It didn’t look solid, more like a fissure which had opened into space.

He stared at it for a long time. You just can’t say no to Ione.

She slipped her arm through his and steered him out of the clone womb centre into the corridor outside. “How’s the Lady Macbeth coming along?”

“Not so bad. The Confederation Astronautics Board inspectors have cleared our systems integration. We’re starting to reassemble the hull now, it should be finished in another three days. One final inspection for the spaceworthiness certificate, and we’re away. I’ve got a contract with Roland Frampton to collect some cargo from Rosenheim.”

“That’s good news. So I’ve got you to myself for another four nights.”

He pulled her a bit closer. “Yeah, if you can fit me in between engagements.”

“Oh, I think I might manage to grant you a couple of hours. I’ve got a charity dinner tonight, but I’ll be finished before eleven. Promise.”

“Great. You’ve done beautifully, Ione, really, you just blew them away. They love you out there.”

“And nobody’s packed up and left yet, none of the major companies, nor the plutocrats. That’s my real success.”

“It was that speech you made. Jesus, if there were elections tomorrow you’d be president.”

They reached the tube carriage waiting in the little station. Two serjeants stood aside as the door opened.

Joshua looked at them, then looked into the ten-seater carriage. “Can they wait out here?” he asked innocently.

“Why?”

He leered.

She clung to him tightly afterwards, trembling slightly, their bodies hot and sweaty. He was sitting right on the edge of one of the seats, with her as the clinging vine, legs bent up behind his back. The carriage’s air-conditioning fans made a loud whirring sound as they recycled the unusually humid air.

“Joshua?”

“Uh huh.” He kissed her neck, hands stroking her buttocks.

“I can’t protect you once you leave.”

“I know.”

“Don’t do anything stupid. Don’t try to beat anything your father did.”

His nose nuzzled the base of her chin. “I won’t. I’m no death wisher.”

“Joshua?”

“What?”

She pulled her head back and looked straight into his eyes, trying to make him believe. “Trust your instincts.”

“Hey, I do.”

“Please, Joshua. Not just about objects, people too. Be careful of people.”

“Yes.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise.”

He rose up, with Ione still wrapped round his torso. She could feel him getting hard again.

“See those hand hoops?” he asked.

She glanced up. “Yes.”

“Catch hold, and don’t let go.”

She reached up with both hands and gripped a pair of the steel loops on the ceiling. Joshua let go of her, and she yelped. Her toes didn’t quite reach the floor. He stood in front of her, grinning, and gave her a small shove, starting her swinging.

“Joshua!” Ione forked her legs at the top of the arc.

He moved forward, laughing.

Erick Thakrar floated into bay MB 0-330’s control centre towing his bag. He stopped himself with an expert nudge against a grab loop. There was an unusually large number of people grouped round the observation bubble. He recognized all of them, engineers who had worked on the Lady Macbeth ’s refit. All of them had been working long shifts together for the last couple of weeks.

Erick didn’t mind the work, it meant he had won his place on the Lady Macbeth ’s crew. A stiff back and perpetual tiredness was a price worth paying for that. And in another two hours he would be on his way.

The buzz of voices faded away as people became aware of him. A vacant slot around the observation bubble materialized. He steadied himself and looked out.

The cradle had telescoped up out of the bay, taking the Lady Macbeth with it. As he watched, the starship’s thermo-dump panels unfolded from their recesses in the lustreless grey hull. Cradle umbilical couplings withdrew from the rear quarter.

“You are cleared for disconnection,” the bay supervisor datavised. “Bon voyage , Joshua. Take care.”

Orange candle-flames ignited around the Lady Macbeth ’s equator, and the chemical verniers lifted her clear of the cradle with a dexterity only a master pilot could ever achieve.

The engineering team whooped and cheered.

“Erick?”

He looked round at the supervisor.

“Joshua says to say sorry, but the Lord of Ruin thinks you’re an arsehole.”

Erick turned back to the empty bay. The cradle was sinking slowly back towards the floor. Blue light washed down as the Lady Macbeth ’s ion thrusters took over from the verniers.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered numbly.

There were four separate life-support capsules in the Lady Macbeth , twelve-metre spheres grouped together in a pyramid shape at the very heart of the ship. With the expense of fitting them out coming to a minute fraction of the starship’s overall cost, they were well appointed.

Capsules B, C, and D, the lower spheres, were split into four decks apiece, with the two middle levels following a basic layout of cabins, a lounge, galley, and bathroom. The other decks were variously storage compartments, maintenance shops, equipment bays, and airlock chambers for the spaceplane and MSV hangars.

Capsule A housed the bridge, taking up half of the upper middle deck, with consoles and acceleration couches for all six crew-members. Because neural nanonics could interface with the flight computer from anywhere in the ship, it was more of a management office than the traditional command centre, with console screens and AV projectors providing specialist systems displays to back up datavised information.

Lady Macbeth was licensed to carry up to thirty active passengers, or if the cabin bunks were removed and zero-tau pods installed, eighty people travelling in stasis. With only Joshua and five crew on board, there was a luxurious amount of space available. Joshua’s cabin was the largest, taking up a quarter of the bridge deck. He refused to change it from the layout Marcus Calvert had chosen. The chairs were from some luxury passenger ship decommissioned over half a century ago, hinged black-foam sculptures which looked like giant seashells in their folded positions. A bookcase held acceleration-reinforced leather-bound volumes of ancient star charts. An Apollo command module guidance computer (of dubious provenance) was displayed in a transparent bubble. But the major feature, from his point of view, was the free-fall-sex cage, a mesh globe of rubberized struts which deployed from the ceiling. You could bounce around happily inside that without any danger of crashing into inconvenient (and sharp) pieces of furniture or decking. He intended to get into full practice with Sarha Mitcham, the twenty-four-year-old general systems engineer who had taken Erick Thakrar’s place.

Everyone was strapped in their bridge couch when Joshua lifted the Lady Macbeth off bay 0–330’s cradle. He did it with instinctive ease, he did it like a chrysalis opening its wings to the sun, he did it knowing this was what his spiralling DNA had been reconfigured to do.

Flight vectors from the spaceport traffic control centre insinuated their way into his mind, and ion thrusters rolled the ship lazily. He took them out over the edge of the giant disk of girders using the secondary reaction drive, then powered up the three primary fusion drives. The gee-force built rapidly, and they headed up out of Mirchusko’s gravity well towards the green crescent of Falsia, seven hundred thousand kilometres away.

The shakedown flight lasted for fifteen hours. Test programs ran systems checks; the fusion drives were pushed up to producing a brief period of seven-gee thrust, and their plasma was scanned for instabilities; life-support capacity was tested in each capsule. The guidance systems, the sensors, fuel tank slosh baffles, thermal insulation, power circuits, generators . . . the million components that went into making up the starship structure.

Joshua inserted Lady Mac into orbit two hundred kilometres above the craterous lifeless moon while they took a rest for ninety minutes. After a final, formal report confirming overall performance efficiency matched the Confederation Astronautics Board’s requirements, he powered up the fusion drives again, and accelerated back in towards the hazy ochre gas giant.

Adamist starships lacked the flexibility of voidhawks not only in manoeuvrability, but also in their respective methods of faster than light translation. While the bitek craft could tailor their wormholes to produce a terminus at the required location irrespective of their orbit and acceleration vector, ships like the Lady Macbeth jumped along their orbital track without any leeway at all. It was that limitation which cost captains a great deal of time between jumps. The starship had to align itself directly on its target star. In interstellar space it wasn’t so difficult, simply a question of adjusting for natural error. But the initial jump out of a star system had to be as accurate as humanly possible to prevent emergence point inaccuracies from growing out of hand. If a starship was departing an asteroid that was heading away from its next port of call, the captain could spend days reversing his orbit, and the cost in delta-V reserve was horrendous. Most captains simply employed the nearest available planet, giving them the choice of jumping towards any star in the galaxy once every orbit.

Lady Macbeth fell into a circular orbit a hundred and eighty-five thousand kilometres above Mirchusko, a ten-thousand-kilometre safety margin. Gravity distortion prohibited Adamist starships from jumping within a hundred and seventy-five thousand kilometres of gas giants.

The flight computer datavised the vector lines into Joshua’s mind. He saw the vast curved bulk of quarrelling storm bands below, the black cave-lip of the terminator creeping towards him. Lady Mac ’s trajectory was a tube of green neon rings stretching out ahead until they merged into a single thread which looped round behind Mirchusko’s darkside. The green rings swept past the hull at a dizzying velocity.

Rosenheim showed as an insignificant point of white light, bracketed by red graphics, rising above the gas giant.

“Generators on line,” Melvyn Ducharme reported.

“Dahybi?” Joshua asked.

“Patterning circuits are stable,” Dahybi Yadev, their node specialist, said in a calm voice.

“OK, looks like we’re go for a jump.” He ordered the nodes to power up, feeding the generators’ full output into the patterning circuits. Rosenheim was rising higher and higher above the gas giant as Lady Mac raced round her orbit.

Jesus, an actual jump.

According to his neural nanonics physiological monitor program his heart rate was up to a hundred beats a minute and rising. It had been known for some first-time crew-members to panic when the actual moment came, terrified by the thought of the energy loci being desynchronized. All it took was one glitch, one failed monitor program.

Not me! Not this ship.

He datavised the flight computer to pull in the thermo-dump panels and the sensor clusters.

“Nodes fully charged,” Dahybi Yadev said. “She’s all yours, Joshua.”

He had to grin at that. She always had been.

Ion thrusters flickered briefly, fine tuning their trajectory. Rosenheim slid across the vector of green rings, right into the centre. Decimals spun down to zero, tens of seconds, hundredths, thousandths.

Joshua’s command flashed through the patterning nodes at lightspeed. Energy flowed, its density racing to achieve infinity.

An event horizon rose from nowhere to cloak the Lady Macbeth ’s hull. Within five milliseconds it had shrunk to nothing, taking the starship with it.

Erick Thakrar took the StMichelle starscraper’s lift down to the forty-third floor, then got out and walked down two flights of stairs. There was nobody about on the forty-fifth floor vestibule. This was office country, half of them unoccupied; and it was nineteen hundred hours local time.

He walked into the Confederation Navy bureau.

Commander Olsen Neale looked up in surprise when Erick entered his office. “What the hell are you doing here? I thought the Lady Macbeth had departed.”

Erick sat down heavily in the chair in front of Neale’s desk. “She has.” He explained what happened.

Commander Neale rested his head in his hands, frowning. Erick Thakrar was one of half a dozen agents the CNIS was operating in Tranquillity, trying to insert them on independent traders (especially those with antimatter drives) and blackhawks in the hope of getting a lead on pirate activity and antimatter production stations.

“The Lord of Ruin warned Calvert?” Commander Neale asked in a puzzled tone.

“That’s what the maintenance bay supervisor said.”

“Good God, that’s all we need, this Ione girl turning Tranquillity into some kind of anarchistic pirate nation. It might be a blackhawk base, but the Lords of Ruin have always supported the Confederation before.” Commander Neale glanced round the polyp walls, then stared at the AV pillar sticking out of his desk’s processor block, half expecting the personality to contact him and deny the accusation. “Do you think your cover’s blown?”

“I don’t know. The refit team thought it was all a big joke. Apparently Joshua Calvert signed on some girl to replace me. They said she was rather attractive.”

“Well, it certainly fits what we know about him; he could very easily have dumped you for a doxy and a quick leg-over.”

“Then why the reference to the Lord of Ruin?”

“God knows.” He let out a long breath. “I want you to keep trying for a berth on a ship; you’ll find out soon enough if you have been blown. I’m going to put all this on the diplomatic report flek, and let Admiral Aleksandrovich worry about it.”

“Yes, sir.” Erick Thakrar saluted and left.

Commander Neale sat in his chair for a long time, watching the starfield rotate past the window. The prospect of Tranquillity going renegade was horrifying, especially given the one particular status quo it had maintained for twenty-seven years. Eventually he accessed his neural nanonics file on Dr Mzu, and started to check through the circumstances under which he was authorized to have her assassinated.