18

Joshua Calvert was surprised to find himself enjoying the train journey. He had almost expected to see a nineteenth-century steam engine pumping out clouds of white smoke and clanking pistons spinning iron wheels. Reality was a sleek eight-wheel tractor unit with magnetic axle-motors powered from electron matrices, pulling six coaches.

The Kavanaghs had provided him with a first-class ticket, so he sat in a private compartment with his feet up on the opposite seat, watching the sprawling forests and picturesque hamlets go past. Dahybi Yadev sat next to him, eyelids blinking heavily as a mild stimulant program trickled through his neural nanonics. In the end they had decided that Ashly Hanson should remain behind to operate the Lady Mac’s MSV as the crew emptied the mayope from her cargo holds. Dahybi had volunteered to take his place quickly enough, and as the nodes had been glitch free on the trip to Norfolk, Joshua had agreed. The rest of the crew had been detailed to maintenance duty. Sarha had sulked at the prospect, she’d been looking forward to an extended leave exploring the gentle planet.

The train compartment’s PA came on to announce they were pulling in to Colsterworth Station. Joshua stretched his limbs, and loaded a formal etiquette program into his neural nanonics. He had found it in Lady Mac’s memory cores; his father must have visited the planet at some time, though he had never mentioned it. The program might well turn out to be a saviour, country-dwelling Norfolk was supposed to be even more stuffy than swinging cosmopolitan Boston. Pursing his lips at the prospect, Joshua shook Dahybi Yadev’s shoulder. “Come on, cancel the program. We’ve arrived.”

Dahybi’s face lost its narcotic expression, and he squinted out of the window. “This is it?”

“This is it.”

“It looks like a field with a couple of houses in it.”

“Don’t yell that kind of comment about, for God’s sake. Here.” He datavised a copy of the etiquette program over. “Keep that in primary mode. We don’t want to annoy our benefactor.”

Dahybi ran through some of the social jurisprudence listed in the program. “Bloody hell, I think Lady Mac fell through a time warp to get here.”

Joshua rang for the steward to carry their cases. The etiquette program said the man should be tipped five per cent of the ticket price, or a shilling, whichever was the larger sum.

Colsterworth Station consisted of two stone platforms, covered with broad wooden canopies supported by ornate wrought-iron pillars. The waiting-room and ticket office were built from red brick, and a row of metal brackets along the front wall were used to hold big hanging baskets full of bright flowering plants. Appearance was a priority to the stationmaster; the scarlet and cream paintwork was kept gleaming the whole year round, brasswork was polished, and his staff were always smartly turned out.

Such persistence had paid off handsomely today. He was standing next to the heir to Cricklade herself, Louise Kavanagh, who had remarked how nice it all looked.

The morning train from Boston pulled in slowly, and the stationmaster checked his watch. “Thirty seconds late.”

Louise Kavanagh inclined her head graciously at the stout little man. On her other side William Elphinstone shuffled his feet impatiently. She silently prayed for him not to make a complete mess of things. He was so impetuous at times, and he looked totally out of place in his grey suit; field working clothes were much more apposite on him.

For herself, she’d carefully chosen a pale lavender dress with puff sleeves to wear. Nanny had helped to pleat her hair into an elaborate weave at the back of her head which ended in a long pony-tail. Hopefully the combination would give her a suitably dignified appearance.

The train halted, its first three coaches taking up the entire length of the platform. Doors banged open noisily, and passengers started to climb down. She straightened her back to get a better look at the people emerging from the first-class coach.

“There they are,” William Elphinstone said.

Louise wasn’t entirely sure what she’d been expecting, although she was pretty sure in her own mind that starship captains were wise, serious, and mature responsible men, perhaps a bit like her father (except without the temper). Who else would be entrusted with such a fearsome responsibility? What a captain did not look like, even in her most fantastical dreams, was a young man with strong regular features, six foot tall, wearing a smart, exotically stylish uniform that emphasized his powerful build. But there was the silver star on his shoulder, plain for all the world to see.

Louise swallowed hard, tried to remember the words she was supposed to say, and stepped forwards with a polite smile in place. “Captain Calvert, I’m Louise Kavanagh; my father apologizes for not being here to greet you in person, but the estate is very busy right now and requires his full attention. So I’d like to welcome you to Cricklade myself, and hope you enjoy your stay.” Which was almost what she’d rehearsed, but there was something about enjoying his train journey which had been missed out. Oh, well . . .

Joshua took her hand in an emphatic grip. “That’s very kind of you, Louise. And I must say I consider myself most fortunate that your father is so occupied, because there simply cannot be a nicer way of being welcomed to Cricklade than by a young lady as beautiful as yourself.”

Louise knew her cheeks would be colouring, and wanted to turn and hide. What a juvenile reaction. He was only being polite. But so utterly charming. And he sounded sincere. Could he really think that about her? Her discipline had gone all to pieces. “Hello,” she said to Dahybi Yadev. Which was so dreadfully gauche. Her blush deepened. She realized Joshua was still holding her hand.

“My starflight engineering officer,” Joshua said, with a slight bow.

Louise recovered, and introduced William Elphinstone as an estate manager, not mentioning he was only a trainee. Which he should have been grateful for, but she got the distinct impression he wasn’t terribly impressed with the starship captain.

“We have a carriage laid on to take you to the manor,” William said. He signalled to the driver to take Joshua’s bags from the steward.

“That’s really most thoughtful of you,” Joshua told Louise.

Dimples appeared in her cheeks. “This way.” She gestured to the platform exit.

Joshua thought the waiting carriage looked like an oversized pram fitted with modern lightweight wheels. But the two black horses moved it along at a fair clip, and the ride over the rutted track was comfortably smooth. There hadn’t been much to Colsterworth, it was a rural market town with very few industries; the countryside economy revolved around the farms. Its houses were mostly built from locally quarried stone with a bluish tinge. Doors and windows were almost always arched.

When they rode down the busy High Street, pedestrians nudged one another and glanced over as the carriage went by. At first Joshua thought they were looking at him and Dahybi, but then he realized it was Louise who drew their attention.

Outside Colsterworth the rolling countryside was a patchwork of small fields separated by immaculately layered hedges. Streams wound down through the gentle valleys, while spinneys clung to the rounded heights and deeper folds. The wheat and barley had already been harvested, he saw. Plenty of haystacks were dotted about, steeply sloping tops netted against the expected winter winds. Tractors were ploughing the stubble back into the rich red soil before drilling the second crop. There would be just enough time for the stalks to ripen before the long autumn and winter seasons began.

“You don’t have any proscription against power tractors, then?” Joshua asked.

“Certainly not,” William Elphinstone replied. “We’re a stable society, Captain, not a backward one. We use whatever is appropriate to maintain the status quo, and give people a decent standard of living at the same time. Using horses to plough every field would be pure drudgery. That’s not what Norfolk is about. Our founders wanted pastoral life to be enjoyable for all.” To Joshua’s ears he sounded defensive, but then he had been on edge since they’d been introduced.

“Where does all the power come from?” Joshua asked.

“Solar cells are sufficient for domestic utilities, but ninety per cent of the electricity used for industry and agriculture is geothermal. We buy in thermal-potential fibres from the Confederation and drill them three or four miles down into the mantle. Most towns have five or six heat shafts; they’re virtually maintenance free, and the fibres last for a couple of centuries. It’s a much neater solution than building hydro dams everywhere and flooding valleys.”

Interesting how he said Confederation, Joshua thought, almost as if Norfolk wasn’t a part of it.

“All this must seem terribly cumbersome to you, I expect,” Louise said.

“Not at all,” Joshua answered. “What I’ve seen so far is admirable. You should visit some of the so-called advanced worlds I’ve been to. Technology comes with a very high price in terms of society, they have dreadful levels of crime and vice. Some urban areas have decayed into complete no-go zones.”

“Three people were murdered on Kesteven last year,” Louise said.

William Elphinstone frowned as if to object, but let it pass.

“I think your ancestors got your constitution about right,” Joshua said.

“Hard on people who are sick,” Dahybi Yadev observed.

“There aren’t many illnesses,” William Elphinstone said. “Our lifestyle means we’re a very healthy people. And our hospitals can cope with most accidents.”

“Including cousin Gideon,” Louise said slyly.

Joshua pressed down on a smile as William Elphinstone gave her a curtly censorious look. The girl wasn’t quite as meek as he’d first supposed. They were sitting opposite each other in the carriage, which gave him a good opportunity to study her. He had thought that she and William pain-in-the-arse Elphinstone were an item, but judging from the way she virtually ignored him it didn’t seem too likely. William Elphinstone appeared none too happy with the cold-shoulder treatment, either.

“Actually, William isn’t being entirely honest,” she went on. “We don’t catch diseases because most of our first-comer ancestors were recipients of geneering before they settled here. It stands to reason, on a planet which deliberately excludes the most advanced medical treatments it’s wise to protect yourself in advance. So in that respect we don’t quite match up to the simplistic pastoral ideal. You probably couldn’t have built a society as successful as Norfolk before geneering; people would have insisted on continuing technical and medical research to better their lot.”

William Elphinstone made a show of turning his head and staring out over the fields.

“Fascinating idea,” Joshua said. “You can only have stability once you’ve passed a certain technological level, and flux is the natural order until that happens. Are you going to take politics at university?”

Her lips depressed fractionally. “I don’t think I’ll be going. Women don’t, generally. And there aren’t many universities anyway; there’s no research to be done. Most of my family go to agricultural colleges, though.”

“And will you be joining your relatives there?”

“Maybe. Father hasn’t said. I’d like to. Cricklade is going to be mine one day, you see. I want to be more than just a figurehead.”

“I’m sure you will be, Louise. I can’t imagine you as just a figurehead for anything.” He was surprised at how earnest his voice had become.

Louise cast her eyes down to see she was knotting her fingers in her lap in a most unladylike manner. Whatever was making her babble like this?

“Is this Cricklade now?” Joshua asked. The fields had given way to larger expanses of parkland between the small woods. Sheep and cattle were grazing placidly, along with some xenoc bovine-analogue that looked similar to a very hairy deer, with fat legs and hemispherical hoofs.

“We’ve been riding through the Cricklade estate since we left town, actually,” William Elphinstone said snidely.

Joshua gave Louise an encouraging smile. “As far as the eye can see, is it?”

“Yes.”

“Then I can see why you love it so much. If I ever settle down, I’d want it to be in a land like this.”

“Any chance we can see some roses?” Dahybi Yadev asked loudly.

“Yes, of course,” Louise said, suddenly brisk. “How dreadfully remiss of me. Cousin Kenneth said this was your first time here.” She turned round and tapped the driver on his shoulder. The two of them exchanged a few words. “There’s a grove beyond the forest up ahead,” she said. “We’ll stop there.”

The grove took up ten acres on a northern-facing slope. To catch the suns, Louise explained. It was marked out by a dry-stone wall that was host to long patches of moss-analogue which sprouted miniature pink flowers. The flat stones themselves were often crumbling from frost erosion; little attempt had been made at repairs except in the worst sections of subsidence. In one corner of the grove there was a long barn with a thatched roof; moss had clawed its way into the reeds, loosening the age-blackened bundles. New wooden pallets stacked with what looked like thousands of conical white plant pots were just visible through the barn’s open doorway.

Still, dry air magnified the grove’s placid composure, adding to the impression of genteel decay. If it hadn’t been for the perfectly regimented rows of plants, Joshua would have believed the grove had been neglected, simply treated as a hobby by an indulgent landowner rather than the vital industry it was.

Norfolk’s weeping rose was unarguably the most famous plant in the Confederation. In its natural state it was a thornless rambling bush that favoured well-drained peaty soil. But when cultivated and planted in groves it was trained up wire trellises three metres high. The jade-green leaves were palm sized, reminiscent of terrestrial maples with their deep serrations, their tips coloured a dull red.

But it was the flowers which drew Joshua’s scrutiny; they were yellow-gold blooms, twenty-five centimetres in diameter with a thick ruff of crinkled petals hugging a central onion-shaped carpel pod. Each plant in the grove had produced thirty-five to forty flowers, standing proud on fleshy green stems as thick as a man’s thumb. Under Duke’s unremitting glare they had acquired a spectral lemon-yellow corona.

The four of them walked a little way down the mown grass between the rows. Careful pruning of the bushes had ensured that each flower was fully exposed to the sunlight, none of them overlapped.

Joshua pressed his toe into the wiry grass, feeling the solid earth. “It’s very dry,” he said. “Will there be enough water to fill them out?”

“It never rains at midsummer,” Louise said. “Not on the inhabited islands, anyway. Convection takes all the clouds up to the poles; most of the ice-caps melt under the deluge, but the temperature is still only a couple of degrees above freezing. It’s considered frightfully bad luck if it even drizzles here in the week before Midsummer’s Day. The roses store up all the moisture they need for fruition in their roots during springtime.”

He reached up and touched one of the big flowers, surprised by how stiff the stem was. “I had no idea they were so impressive.”

“This is an old grove,” she said. “The roses here are fifty years old, and they’re good for another twenty. We replant several groves each year from the estate’s nurseries.”

“That sounds like quite an operation. I’d like to see it. Perhaps you could show me, you seem very knowledgeable about their cultivation.”

Louise blushed again. “Yes, I do; I mean, I will,” she stammered.

“Unless you have other duties, of course. I don’t wish to impose.” He smiled.

“You’re not,” she assured him quickly.

“Good.”

She found herself smiling back at him for no particular reason at all.

Joshua and Dahybi had to wait until late afternoon before they were introduced to Grant Kavanagh and his wife, Marjorie. It was an opportunity for Joshua to be shown round the big manor house and its grounds, with Louise continuing her role of informative hostess. The manor was an impressive set-up; an unobtrusive army of servants was employed to keep the rooms in immaculate condition, and a lot of money had been spent making the decor as tasteful as possible. Naturally enough, the style was based prominently on the eighteenth-century school of design, history’s miniature enclave.

Thankfully, William Elphinstone left them, claiming he had to work in the groves. They did, however, meet Genevieve Kavanagh as soon as their carriage drew up outside the entrance. Louise’s young sister tagged along with them for the entire afternoon, giggling the whole time. Joshua wasn’t used to children that age, in his opinion she was a spoilt brat who needed a damn good smack. If it wasn’t for Louise he would have been mighty tempted to put her over his knee. Instead he suffered in silence, making the most of the way Louise’s dress fabric shifted about as she moved. There was precious little else to absorb his attention. To the uninitiated eye the estate beyond the grounds was almost deserted.

Midsummer on Norfolk was a time when almost everybody living in the countryside helped out with the weeping rose crop. The travelling Romany caravans were in high demand, with estates and independent grove owners competing for their labour. Even school terms (Norfolk didn’t use didactic laser imprints) were structured round the season, giving children time off to assist their parents, leaving winter as the principal time for studying. As the whole Tear crop was gathered in two days, preparation was an arduous and exacting business.

With over two hundred groves in his estate (not counting those in the crofts), Grant Kavanagh was the most industrious man in Stoke County during the days leading up to midsummer. He was fifty-six years old; modest geneering had produced a barrel-chested physique, five feet ten inches tall, with brown hair that was already greying around his mutton-chop sideboards. But a lifetime of physical activity and keeping a strict watch on what he ate meant he retained the vigour of a man in his twenties. He was able to chase up his flock of junior estate managers with unnerving doggedness. Which, as he knew from sore experience, was the only way of achieving anything in Stoke County. Not only did he have to supervise the teams which went round the groves setting up the collection cups, but he was also responsible for the county’s bottling yard. Grant Kavanagh did not tolerate fools, slackers, and family sinecurists, which in his view described a good ninety-five per cent of Norfolk’s population. Cricklade estate had run smoothly and profitably for the last two hundred and seventy years of its distinguished three-hundred-year existence, and by God that superb record wasn’t going to end in his lifetime.

An afternoon spent in the saddle riding round some of the rosegroves closest to the manor, with the eternally enduring Mr Butterworth accompanying him, did not put him in the best frame of mind for trotting out glib niceties to dandies like visiting starship captains. He marched into the house slapping dust from his riding breeches and shouting for a drink, a bath, and a decent meal.

Having this red-faced martinet figure bearing down on him across the large airy entrance hall put Joshua in mind of a Tranquillity serjeant—only lacking the charm and good looks.

“Bit young to be skippering a starship, aren’t you?” Grant Kavanagh said when Louise introduced them. “Surprised the banks gave you the loan to fly one.”

“I inherited Lady Mac, and my crew made enough money in our first year of commercial flying to make the run to this planet. It’s the first time we’ve been, and your family turned somersaults to give me three thousand cases of the best Tears on the island. What criteria would you judge my competence by?”

Louise closed her eyes and wished herself very, very small.

Grant Kavanagh stared at the utterly uncompromising expression of the young man who had answered him back in his own home, and burst out laughing. “By Christ, now that’s the sort of attitude we could do with a hell of a lot more of around here. Well done, Joshua, I approve. Don’t give ground, and bite back every time.” He put a protective arm around both his daughters. “See that, you two rapscallions? That’s what you’ve got to have to run commercial enterprises; starships or estates, it doesn’t matter which. You just have to be the boss man each and every time you open your mouth.” He kissed Louise on her forehead, and tickled a giggling Genevieve. “Glad to meet you, Joshua. Nice to see young Kenneth hasn’t lost his touch when it comes to judging people.”

“He puts together a tough deal,” Joshua said, sounding unhappy.

“So it would seem. This mayope wood, is it as good as he says? I couldn’t shut him up about it when he was on the phone.”

“Yes, it’s impressive. Like a tree that’s grown out of steel. I brought some samples with me, of course, you can have a look for yourself.”

“I’ll take you up on that later.” The manor’s butler came into the hall carrying Grant’s gin and tonic on a silver tray. He picked it up and took a sip. “I suppose this damned Lalonde planet will start charging a premium once they know how valuable it is to us?” he said in a disgruntled tone.

“That depends, sir.”

“Oh?” Grant Kavanagh widened his eyes with interest at the humorously furtive tone. He let go of Genevieve, and patted her fondly. “Run along, poppet. It looks like Captain Calvert and I have something to discuss.”

“Yes, Daddy.” Genevieve capered past Joshua, giving him a sidelong glance, and breaking into giggles again.

Louise showed him a lopsided grin as she started to walk away. She had seen the other girls at school do that when they wanted to be coquettish with their boys. “You will be joining us for dinner, won’t you, Captain Calvert?” she asked airily.

“I imagine so, yes.”

“I’ll tell cook to prepare some iced chiplemon. You’ll like that; it’s my favourite.”

“Then I’m sure I’ll like it too.”

“And don’t be late, Daddy.”

“Am I ever?” Grant Kavanagh retorted, enchanted as ever by his little girl’s playfulness.

She rewarded them both with a sunlight smile, then skipped off across the hall tiles after Genevieve.

An hour later Joshua was lying on his bed, fathoming the mysteries of the planet’s communication system. His bedroom was in the west wing, a large room with en suite bathroom, its walls papered with a rich purple and gold pattern. The bed was a double, with a carved oak headboard and a horribly solid mattress. It required very little imagination on his part to picture Louise Kavanagh lying on it beside him.

There was a phone on the bedside table, but the impossibly antique gadget didn’t have a standard processor; he couldn’t use his neural nanonics to datavise the communication net control computer. It didn’t even have an AV pillar, just a keyboard, a holoscreen, and a handset. He did think that Norfolk had written a wonderfully realistic Turing program into the exchange’s processor array to deal patiently with requests, until he finally realized he was actually talking to a human operator. She patched him into the geostationary relay satellite circuit and opened a channel to Lady Macbeth. What the call must be costing Grant Kavanagh was an item he managed to put firmly at the back of his mind. Humans operating a basic computer management routine!

“We’ve unloaded a third of the mayope already,” Sarha said; the link was audio only, no visual. “Your new merchant friend Kenneth Kavanagh has hired half a dozen spaceplanes from other starships to ferry it down to the surface. At this rate we’ll be finished by tomorrow.”

“Great news. I don’t want to sound premature, but after this run is over it looks like we’ll be coming back here to finalize that arrangement we were kicking around earlier.”

“You’re making progress, then?”

“Absolutely.”

“What’s Cricklade like?”

“Astonishing, it’s enough to make a Tranquillity plutocrat jealous. You’d love it.”

“Thanks, Joshua. That really makes me feel good.”

He grinned and took another sip of the Norfolk Tears his thoughtful host had provided. “How are you and Warlow coping with the maintenance checks?”

“We’ve finished.”

“What?” He sat up abruptly, nearly spilling some of the precious drink.

“We’ve finished. There isn’t a system on board that isn’t as smooth as a baby’s bum.”

“Jesus, you must have been working your arses off.”

“It took us five hours, grand total. And most of that was spent waiting for the diagnostics programs to run. There’s nothing wrong with Lady Mac, Joshua. Her performance rating is as good as the day the CAB awarded us our spaceworthiness certificate.”

“That’s ridiculous. We were so glitch prone after Lalonde we were lucky to get here at all.”

“You think I don’t know how to load a diagnostics program?” she asked, her voice sounding very tetchy.

“Of course you know your job,” he said in a conciliatory tone. “It just doesn’t make a lot of sense, that’s all.”

“You want me to datavise the results down to you?”

“No. You can’t, anyway; this planet’s net couldn’t handle anything like that. What does Warlow say, is Lady Mac up to a CAB inspection?”

“We’ll pass with flying colours.”

“OK, I’ll leave it up to the pair of you what you do.”

“We’ll get the inspectors up here tomorrow morning. Norfolk’s CAB office only runs stage D checks in any case. Our own diagnostics are stricter than that.”

“Fine. I’ll call tomorrow for an update.”

“Sure. ’Bye, Joshua.”

Tehama asteroid was one of the most financially and industrially successful independent industrial settlements in the New Californian star system. A stony iron rock twenty-eight kilometres long and eighteen wide, tracing an irregular fifty-day elliptical orbit within the trailing Trojan point of Yosemite, the system’s largest gas giant, it had all the elements and minerals necessary to support life, barring hydrogen and nitrogen. But that deficiency was made good from a snowball-shaped carbonaceous chondritic asteroid, one kilometre wide, which had been nudged into a fifty-kilometre orbit around Tehama in 2283. Since then its shale had been mined and refined; hydrogen was combined with oxygen to produce water, plain and simple; nitrogen underwent more complex bonding procedures to form useable nitrates; hydrocarbons were an essential. They were all introduced to the caverns being bored out of Tehama’s metallic ore, producing a habitable biosphere capable of supporting the increasing population.

By 2611 there were two major caverns inside Tehama; and its small companion had been reduced to a sable lump two hundred and fifty metres wide, with a silver-white refinery station, almost as large, clinging to it barnacle-fashion.

The Villeneuve’s Revenge jumped into an emergence zone a hundred and twenty thousand kilometres away, and began its approach manoeuvres. After months tending the starship’s ageing, failure-prone systems, Erick Thakrar was grateful for any shore time. Shipboard life was one long grind, he’d lost count of how many times he’d falsified the maintenance log so they could avoid CAB penalties and keep flying. There was no doubt about it, the Villeneuve’s Revenge was operating dangerously close to the margin, both mechanically and financially. Genuine independence was proving an elusive goal; Captain Duchamp was in debt to the banks to the tune of a million and a half fuseodollars, and charters were hard to find.

Some small part of Erick felt sorry for the old boy. Commercial starflight was a viciously tough business, a tightly woven web of large cartels and monopolies that resented the very existence of independent traders. Starships like the Villeneuve’s Revenge forced the major carrier fleets to keep their own prices down, reducing profits. They retaliated with semi-legal syndicates in an attempt to lock out small ships.

Duchamp was an excellent captain, but his business acumen was highly questionable. His crew was loyal, though, and Erick had heard enough stories of past missions to know they had few qualms about how they earned money. If he wanted to, he could have had them arrested within a week of coming on board—neural-nanonics recorded conversation was admissible evidence in court. But he was after bigger prizes than a worn-out ship with its loser crew. The Villeneuve’s Revenge was his access code to whole strata of illegal operations. And it looked like Tehama was going to be the start of the game.

After docking at the asteroid’s non-rotating axis spaceport, four crew members from the Villeneuve’s Revenge descended on the Catalina bar in the Los Olivos cavern, the first to be dug, a cylindrical hollow nine kilometres long and five in diameter. The Catalina was one of the spaceport crew bars, with aluminium tables and a small stage for a band. At three in the afternoon, local time, it was almost dead.

The bar was a cave drilled into the cavern’s vertical cliff-face endwall, one of thousands forming an interconnected cave city, producing a band of glass windows and foliage-wrapped balconies that encircled the base of the endwall. Like an Edenist habitat, nobody lived on the cavern floor itself, it was a communal park and arable farm. But there the resemblance stopped.

Erick Thakrar sat at an alcove table near the balcony window with two of his shipmates, Bev Lennon and Desmond Lafoe, and their captain, André Duchamp. The Catalina was near the top of the city levels, giving it a seventy-five per cent gravity field, and a good view out into the cavern. Erick wasn’t impressed by what he could see. The axis was taken up by a hundred-metre diameter gantry, most of which was filled by the thick black pipes of the irrigation-sprinkler nozzles. It was ringed at two hundred and fifty metre intervals by doughnut-shaped solartubes that shone with a painful blue-white intensity. They lacked the warm incandescence of an Edenist habitat’s axis light-tube, which was dramatically illustrated by the plants far below. The cavern floor’s grass shaded towards the yellow, while trees and shrubs were spindly, missing their full complement of leaves. Even the fields of crops were hungry looking (one reason why imported delicacies were so popular and profitable in all asteroid settlements). It was as though an unexpected autumn had visited the tropical climate.

The whole cavern was cramped and clumsy, a poor copy of a bitek habitat’s excellence. Erick found himself thinking back to Tranquillity with nostalgia.

“Here he comes,” André Duchamp muttered. “Be nice to the Anglo, remember we need him.” The captain came from Carcassonne, a die-hard French nationalist, who blamed the ethnic English in the Confederation for everything from failed optical fibres in the starship’s flight computer to his current overdraft. At sixty-five years old his geneered DNA maintained his physique in the lean mould which was the staple criterion of the space adapted, as well as providing him with a face that was rounded all over. When André Duchamp laughed, everyone in the room found themselves smiling along, so powerful was the appeal; he had the same emotional conviction as a painted clown.

Right now he put on his most welcoming smile for the man sidling anxiously up to the table.

Lance Coulson was a senior flight controller in Tehama’s Civil Astronautics Bureau; in his late fifties, he lacked the political contacts necessary to gain senior management ranking. It meant he was stuck in inter-system tracking and communications until retirement now; that made him resentful, and agreeable to supplying people like André Duchamp with information—for the right price.

He sat at the table and gave Erick Thakrar a long look. “I haven’t seen you before.”

Erick started recording his implant-enhanced sensorium directly into a neural nanonics memory cell, and ordered a file search. Image: of an overweight man, facial skin a red tinge of brown from exposure to the cavern solartubes; grey suit with high circular collar, pinching the neck flesh; light brown hair, colour-embellished by follicle biochemical treatments. Sound: of slightly wheezy breathing, heartbeat rate above average. Smell: sour human sweat, beads standing out on a high forehead and the back of chubby hands.

Lance Coulson was nerving himself up. A weakling ruffled by the company he kept.

“Because I haven’t been here before,” Erick replied, unyielding. His CNIS file reported a blank, Lance Coulson wasn’t a known criminal. Probably too petty, he thought.

“Erick Thakrar, my systems generalist,” André Duchamp said. “Erick is an excellent engineer. Surely you don’t question my judgement when it comes to my own crew?” There was just enough hint of anger to make Lance Coulson shift round in his seat.

“No, of course not.”

“Excellent!” André Duchamp was all smiles again; he clapped Lance Coulson on the back, winning a sickly smile, and pushed a glass of Montbard brandy over the scratched aluminium slab to him. “So what have you got for me?”

“A cargo of micro-fusion generators,” he said softly.

“So? Tell me more.”

The civil servant rolled the stem of his glass between his thumb and finger, not looking at the captain. “A hundred thousand.” He slid his Francisco Finance credit disk across the table.

“You jest!” André Duchamp said. There was a dangerous glint to his eyes.

“There were . . . questions last time. I’m not doing this again.”

“You’re not doing it this time at that price. If I had that kind of money do you think I would be here crawling to a tax-money leech like you?”

Bev Lennon put a restraining hand on Duchamp’s shoulder. “Easy,” he said smoothly. “Look, we’re all here because money is tight, right? We can certainly pay you a quarter of that figure in advance.”

Lance Coulson picked up his credit disk and stood up. “I see I have been wasting my time.”

“Thank you for the information,” Erick said in a loud voice.

Lance Coulson gave him a frightened look. “What?”

“That’s going to be enormously useful to us. How would you like to be paid? Cash or commodities?”

“Shut up.”

“Sit down, and stop fucking about.”

He sat, checking the rest of the tables with twitchy glances.

“We want to buy, you want to sell,” Erick said. “So let’s stop the drama queen tactics, assume you’ve shown us what a tough negotiator you are, and we’re all shitting bricks. Now what’s your price? And be realistic. There are other flight controllers.”

He overcame his agitation for just long enough to shoot Erick a look of one hundred per cent hatred. “Thirty thousand.”

“Agreed,” André Duchamp said immediately. He held out his Jovian Bank disk.

Lance Coulson gave a last furtive glance round before shoving his own disk in André’s direction.

“Merci, Lance.” André’s grin was scathing as he received the datavised flight vector.

The four crewmen watched the civil servant retreating, and laughed. Erick was congratulated for calling the other man’s bluff, Bev Lennon fetching him half a litre of of imported Lübeck beer.

“You had me panicking!” the wiry fusion specialist protested as he dropped the tankards down on their table.

Erick took a sip of the icy beer. “I had me panicking.”

It was going well, they accepted him, reservations (and he knew some still had them) were fading, breaking down. He was becoming one of the lads.

Along with Bev Lennon and Desmond Lafoe, the ship’s node specialist, a brawny two-metre-tall bear of a man, Erick spent the next ten minutes talking trivia while André Duchamp sat back with a blank expression reviewing the vector he had just bought.

“I don’t see any problem,” the captain announced eventually. “If we use a Sacramento orbit to jump from we can rendezvous any time in the next six days. Fifty-five hours from now would be the ideal . . .” His voice trailed off.

Erick turned to follow his gaze. Five men wearing copper-coloured one-piece ship-suits walked into the Catalina bar.

Hasan Rawand caught sight of André Duchamp as he was about to sit at the bar. He tapped Shane Brandes, the Dechal’s fusion engineer, on the side of his arm and flicked a finger in the direction of the master of Villeneuve’s Revenge. His other three crew-members, Ian O’Flaherty, Harry Levine, and Stafford Charlton, caught the gesture and turned to look.

The two crews regarded each other with mutual hostility and antagonism.

Hasan Rawand walked over to the window booth table, his crew right behind him. “André,” he said with mock civility. “So nice to see you. I trust you have brought my money. Eight hundred thousand, wasn’t it? And that’s before interest. It has been seventeen months after all.”

André Duchamp gazed straight ahead, his hands cupping his beer tankard. “I owe you no money,” he said darkly.

“I think you do. Cast your mind back; you were carrying plutonium initiators from Sab Biyar to the Isolo system. Dechal waited in Sab Biyar’s Oort cloud for thirty-two hours for you, André. Thirty-two hours in stealth mode, with freezing air and iced food, pissing into tubes that leaked, not even allowed a personal MF player in case the navy ships picked up its electronic emission. That’s not nice, André; it’s about as close as you can get to a Confederation penal colony without being shot down to the surface in a drop capsule. We waited for thirty-two hours in the stinking dark for you to show so we could take the initiators in, doing your dirty work for you and carrying all the risk. And when we got back to Sab Biyar what did I find?”

André Duchamp grinned round at his own crew, trying to brazen it out. “I’m sure you’ll tell me, Anglo.”

“You went to Nuristan and sold the initiators to one of their naval contractors, you Gallic shithead! I was left trying to explain to the Isolo Independence Front where their nukes had gone, and why their poxy rebellion was going to fail because they hadn’t got the fire-power to back up their demands.”

“You can show me the contract?” André Duchamp asked mockingly.

Hasan Rawand glared down at him, lips compressed in rage. “Just hand over the money. A million will see you clear.”

“To hell with you, Anglo filth. I, André Duchamp, owe nobody money.” He stood up and tried to barge past the Dechal’s captain.

It was the move Erick Thakrar was waiting for and dreading. Sure enough, Hasan Rawand shoved André Duchamp back in the booth. The back of the older captain’s knee struck a seat which almost tipped him off balance. He recovered and launched himself at Hasan Rawand, fists flying.

Desmond Lafoe rose to his feet drawing a frantic gasp from Ian O’Flaherty when his size, weight, and strength became apparent. Huge hands reached forward, and Ian O’Flaherty was jerked off his feet. He kicked out wildly, toecap striking Desmond Lafoe’s shin. The giant merely grunted, and then threw his victim across the room. He landed awkwardly on one of the aluminium tables, his shoulder taking the brunt of his momentum before he crashed down backwards onto a pair of chairs.

Erick felt a hand close around the neck fabric of his ship-suit. It was Shane Brandes who was hauling him out of the booth; a forty-year-old with a bald head and small gold earrings, smiling with ugly anticipation. The unarmed combat file in Erick’s neural nanonics went into primary mode. His instinctive thought routines were superseded by logic-based patterns, calculating inertia and intent with an ease surpassing any kung fu master. Nanonic supplement boosted muscles powered up.

Shane Brandes was surprised how easy it was to pull his opponent out of the booth. Gratification became alarm when he kept on coming. Shane had to backstep to keep balance, his own neural nanonics assuming command of his mass positioning. He cocked a fist back to smash into Erick’s face, only to have a nanonic warning blare in his mind as Erick’s forearm swung up with incredible speed. His punch was blocked, arm chopped painfully to one side. A furious kick to Erick’s groin—his knee nearly fractured from the impact of the counter-kick. He reeled to one side, banging into Harry Levine and Bev Lennon, who were locked together.

Erick slammed an elbow into Shane’s ribs, hearing bone break. He let out an agonized grunt.

The unarmed combat file said that speed was essential, take out your opponent as soon as possible. His neural nanonics analysed Shane’s movements, the half twist as he clutched at his ribs, bending over. The motion was projected two seconds into the future. Interception points were computed. A list materialized in his consciousness, and he selected a blow that would cause temporary incapacitation. His right leg shot out, booted foot aiming for a patch of empty air. Shane’s head fell into it.

A threat assessment sub-routine shifted his peripheral senses into priority focus. André Duchamp and Hasan Rawand were still battering away at each other on the side of the booth’s table. Neither was inflicting much damage in the confined space.

Harry Levine had got Bev Lennon into a head lock. The two of them were on the floor, squirming round like theatrical wrestlers, sending chairs spinning. Bev Lennon sent a flurry of elbow jabs into Harry Levine’s stomach, attempting to knock his navel into his spine.

Stafford Charlton obviously had a boosted musculature. He was standing in front of Desmond Lafoe, landing blow after blow on the big man, arms moving with programmed efficiency. He had almost doubled up from the pain, his right arm hung limply, the shoulder broken. Blood ran out of his flattened nose.

Ian O’Flaherty rose behind Desmond Lafoe, berserk loathing contorting his face, a pocket fission blade in his right hand. With his enhanced retinas on full amplification, the yellow haze emitted by the activated blade dazzled Erick for an instant. The threat assessment sub-routine activated the defensive nanonic implant in his left hand. A targeting grid of fine blue lines flipped up across his vision. A rectangular section flashed red, and wrapped itself around Ian O’Flaherty, adapting to his movements like elastic thread.

“Don’t!” Erick Thakrar shouted.

Ian O’Flaherty had already raised the blade high above his head when the shout came. In his wired state he probably wouldn’t have obeyed even if he heard. Erick saw the muscles in his lower arm begin to contract, the knife quivered as it started on its downward slash.

The neural nanonics program reported that even with boosted muscles Erick couldn’t reach Ian O’Flaherty in time. He made his decision. A small patch of skin above the second knuckle of his left hand dilated, and the implant spat out a dart of nanonic circuitry, barely as large as a wasp stinger. It struck the bare skin of Ian O’Flaherty’s neck, penetrating to a depth of six millimetres. The fission blade had already descended twenty centimetres towards Desmond Lafoe’s broad back. As soon as it sensed it was buried inside the flesh, and its momentum was spent, the dart sprouted a fur of microscopic filaments. They quested round on a preprogrammed search pattern for nerve strands, tips wriggling between the close-packed honeycomb of cells. Ganglions were located, and the sharp filament tips forced their way through gossamer membranes sheathing the individual nerves. At this time the knife had descended twenty-four centimetres. Ian O’Flaherty’s right eyelid gave an involuntary twitch at the small sting from the dart’s entry. The dart’s internal processor analysed the chemical and electrical reactions flashing along the nerves; it began to broadcast its own signal into the brain. His neural nanonics detected the signal at once, but the circuitry was powerless to help, it could only override natural impulses originating from within the brain.

Ian O’Flaherty had brought the blade thirty-eight centimetres down towards Desmond Lafoe when he felt a million lacework rivulets of fire igniting inside his body. The blade fell another four centimetres before his muscles were convulsed by the besieging deluge of impulses. His nerves were burning out, overloaded by the nanonic dart’s diabolical signal, ordering the massive uncontrolled release of energy along each strand, a simultaneous chemical detonation inside every neuron cell.

Breath rasped out of his wide mouth, aghast eyes looking round the room in a final plea for life. His skin turned red, as if afflicted by instant sunburn. His muscles lost all strength, and he toppled limply onto the floor. The fission blade skittered about, shaving flakes of rock from the floor whenever it touched.

No one else was fighting any more.

Desmond Lafoe gave Erick a puzzled, pain-filled glance. “What . . .”

“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,” André 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.”

André 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?” André 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 passé 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. Naïvety, 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.