Antonio looked at the holoscreen which showed Pat Halahan running through the smoky ruins of Pamiers, blasting his bizarre
attackers to shreds of gore. “Great. Just what we need.”
• • •
This just wasn’t the way Ione had expected it to go. Joshua hadn’t even looked at her bedroom door when they arrived back
at the apartment, let alone show any eagerness. There had been times with him when she hadn’t made it to the bed before her
skirt was up around her waist.
Yet somehow she knew this wasn’t entirely due to the traumas of the mission. He was intent and troubled, not frightened. Very
unfamiliar territory as far as Joshua was concerned.
He’d simply had a shower and a light supper, then settled down in her big settee. When she sat beside him she was too uncertain
about the reaction to even rest her hand on his arm.
I wonder if it’s that girl on Norfolk?
she asked dubiously.
He has endured some difficult times,
Tranquillity answered.
You must expect his usual behaviour to be toned down.
Not like this. I can see he’s been shaken up, but this is more.
The human mind is constantly maturing. External events dictate the speed of the maturation. If he has begun to think harder
for himself because of Lalonde, surely this is no bad thing?
Depends what you want from him. He was so perfect for me before. So very uncomplicated, the roguish charmer who would never
try to claim me.
I believe you also mentioned something about sex on occasion.
Yeah, all right, that too. It was great, and completely guilt free. I picked him up, remember? What more could a girl with
my kind of responsibilities want? He was someone who was never going to try and interfere with my duties as the Lord of Ruin.
Politics simply didn’t interest him.
A husband would be preferable to a casual lover. Someone who is always there for you.
You’re my husband.
You love me, and I love you; it could never be anything else since I gave birth to you. But you are still human, you need
a human companion. Look at voidhawk captains, the perfect example of mental symbiosis.
I know. Maybe I’m just feeling jealous.
Of the Norfolk girl? Why? You know how many lovers Joshua has had.
Not of her.
Ione looked at Joshua’s profile as he stared out of the living room’s big window.
Of me. Me a year ago. The old story, you never know what you have until it’s gone.
He is right next to you. Reach out. I am sure he needs comfort as much as you.
He’s not there, not anymore. Not my original Joshua. Did you see that flying he did? Gaura’s memory of the Lagrange stunt
nearly gave me a heart attack. I never realized just how good a captain he is. How could I ever take that away from him? He
lives for space, for flying
Lady Mac
and what that can give him. Remember that last argument we had before he left for Lalonde? I think he was right. He’s achieved
his mÉtier. Flying is sequenced into his genes the way dictatorship is in mine. I can’t take that away from him any more than
he could take you away from me.
I think you may be stretching the metaphor slightly.
Maybe. We were young, and we had fun, and it was lovely. I’ve got the memories.
He had fun.You are pregnant. He has responsibilities to the child.
Does he? I don’t think mothers require a big tough hunter gatherer to support them nowadays. And monogamy becomes progressively
more difficult the longer we live. Geneering has done more to change the old till death do us part concept than any social
radicalism.
Doesn’t your child deserve a loving environment?
My baby will have a loving environment. How can you even question that?
I do not question your intentions. I am simply pointing out the practicalities of the situation. At the moment you are unable
to provide the child with a complete family.
That’s very reactionary.
I admit I am arguing on the extreme. I am not a fundamentalist, I simply wish to concentrate your thoughts. Everything else
in your life has been planned and accounted for, the child has not. Conception is something you have done all for yourself.
I do not wish it to become a mistake. I love you too much for that.
Father had other children.
Who were given to the Edenists so that they would be brought up in the greatest possible family environment. A whole world
of family.
She almost laughed out loud.
Imagine that, Saldanas became Edenists. We made the transition in the end. Does King Alastair know about that?
You are ducking the issue, Ione. One child of the Lord of Ruin is brought up with me as a parental, the heir. The others are
not. As a parent you have a responsibility to their future.
Are you saying I’ve been irresponsible conceiving this child?
Only you can answer that. Were you depending on Joshua to be a stay-at-home father? Even then you must have known how unlikely
that was.
God, all this argument just because Joshua looks moody.
I am sorry. I have upset you.
No. You’ve done what you wanted to do, made me think. For some of us it’s painful, especially if you’re like me and hadn’t
really considered the consequences of your actions. It gets me all resentful and defensive. But I’ll do the best for my child.
I know you will, Ione.
She blushed at the tenderness of the mental tone. Then she leaned against Joshua. “I was worried while you were gone,” she
said.
He took a sip of his Norfolk Tears. “You were lucky. I was scared shitless most of the time.”
“Yes. Lagrange Calvert.”
“Jesus, don’t you start.”
“If you didn’t want the publicity, you shouldn’t have sold
Lady Mac
’s sensor recordings to Collins.”
“It’s hard to say no to Kelly.”
Ione squinted at him. “So I gather.”
“I meant: it’s hard to refuse that kind of money. Especially given my situation. The fee I got from Terrance Smith isn’t going
to cover
Lady Mac’s
repairs. And I can’t see the Lalonde Development Company ever handing over the balance on our contract, given there isn’t
a Lalonde left to develop anymore. But the money I got from Collins will cover everything, and leave me happily in the black.”
“Not forgetting the money you made on the Norfolk run.”
“Yeah, that too. But I didn’t want to break into that, it’s kind of like a reserve I’m holding back for when everything settles
down again.”
“My hero optimist. Do you think the universe is going to settle down?”
Joshua didn’t like the way the conversation was progressing. He knew her well enough now; she was steering, hoping to angle
obliquely into the subject she wanted to discuss. “Who knows? Are we going to finish up talking about Dominique?”
Ione raised her head from his shoulder to give him a puzzled glance. “No. What made you ask that?”
“Not sure. I thought you wanted to talk about us, and what happens after. Dominique and the Vasilkovsky line played a heavy
part in my original plans from here on in.”
“There isn’t going to be an after, Joshua, not in the sense of returning to the kind of existence we had before. Knowing there’s
an afterlife is going to tilt people’s perception on life for ever.”
“Yeah. It is pretty deep when you think about it.”
“That’s your considered in-depth analysis of the situation is it?” For a moment she thought she’d gone and wounded him. But
he just gave a gaunt smile. Not angry.
“Yeah,” he said, quiet and serious. “It’s deep. I had three bloody narrow escapes inside two days on that Lalonde mission.
If I’d made one mistake, Ione, just one, I’d be dead now. Only I wouldn’t, as we now know, I’d be trapped in the beyond. And
if Shaun Wallace was telling the truth—and I suspect he was—then I’d be screaming silently to be let back in no matter what
the cost or who had to pay it.”
“That’s horrible.”
“Yes. I sent Warlow to his death. I think I knew that even before he went out of the airlock. And now he’s out there, or in
there—somewhere, with all the other souls. He might even be watching us now, begging to be given sensation. The trouble with
that is, I do owe him.” Joshua put his head back on the silk cushions, staring up at the ceiling. “Do I owe him big enough
for that, though? Jesus.”
“If he was your friend, he wouldn’t ask.”
“Maybe.”
Ione sat up and reached for the bottle to pour herself another measure of Norfolk Tears.
I’m going to ask him,
she told Tranquillity.
Surely you are not about to ask for my blessing?
No. But I’d welcome your opinion.
Very well. I believe he has the necessary resources to complete the task; but then he always has. Whether he is the most desirable
candidate still presents me with something of a dilemma. I acknowledge he is maturing; and he would not knowingly betray you.
Impetuosity does weigh against him, however.
Yes. Yet I value that trait above all.
I am aware of this. I even accept it, when it applies to your first child and my future. But do you have the right to make
that gamble when it concerns the Alchemist?
Maybe not. Although there might be a way around it. And I have simply got to do something.
“Joshua?”
“Yeah. Sorry, didn’t mean to go all moody on you.”
“That’s all right. I have a little problem of my own right now.”
“You know I’ll help if I can.”
“That’s the first part, I was going to ask you anyway. I’m not sure I can trust anyone else with this. I’m not even sure I
can trust you.”
“This sounds interesting.”
She took a breath, committed now, and began: “Do you remember, about a year ago, a woman called Dr Alkad Mzu contacted you
about a possible charter?”
He ran a quick check through his neural nanonics memory cells. “I got her. She said she was interested in going to the Garissa
system. Some kind of memorial flight. It was pretty weird, and she never followed it up.”
“No, thank God. She asked over sixty captains about a similar charter.”
“Sixty?”
“Yes, Tranquillity and I believe it was an attempt to confuse the intelligence agency teams who keep her under observation.”
“Ah.” Instinct kicked in almost immediately, riding a wave of regret. This was big-time, and major trouble. It almost made
him happy they hadn’t leapt straight into bed, unlike the old days (a year ago, ha!). For him it was odd, but he was simply
too ambivalent about his own feelings. And he could see how she’d been thrown by his just-old-friends approach, too.
Sex would have been so easy; he just couldn’t bring himself to do it with someone he genuinely liked when it didn’t mean what
it used to. That would have been too much like betrayal. I can’t do that to her. Which was a first.
Ione was giving him a cautious, inquiring look. In itself an offer.
I can stop it now if I want.
It was sometimes easy for him to forget that this blond twenty-year-old was technically an entire government, the repository
of state, and interstellar, secrets. Secrets it didn’t always pay to know about; invariably the most fascinating kind.
“Go on,” Joshua said.
She smiled faintly in acknowledgement. “There are eight separate agencies with stations here; they have been watching Dr Mzu
for nearly twenty-five years now.”
“Why?”
“They believe that just before Garissa was destroyed she designed some kind of doomsday device called the Alchemist. Nobody
knows what it is, or what it does, only that the Garissan Department of Defence was pouring billions into a crash-development
project to get it built. The CNIS have been investigating the case for over thirty years now, ever since they first heard
rumours that it was being built.”
“I saw three men following her when she left Harkey’s Bar that night,” Joshua said, running a search and retrieval program
through his neural nanonics. “Oh, hell, of course. The Omuta sanctions have been lifted; they were the ones who committed
the Garissa genocide. You don’t think she’d… ?”
“She already has. This is not for general release, but last week Alkad Mzu escaped from Tranquillity.”
“Escaped?”
“Yes. She turned up here twenty-six years ago and took a job at the Laymil project. My father promised the Confederation Navy
she would neither be allowed to leave nor pass on any technical information relating to the Alchemist to other governments
or astroengineering conglomerates. It was an almost ideal solution; everyone knows Tranquillity has no expansionist ambitions,
and at the same time she could be observed continually by the habitat personality. The only other alternative was to execute
her immediately. My father and the then First Admiral both agreed the Confederation should not have access to a new kind of
doomsday device; antimatter is quite bad enough. I continued that policy.”
“Until last week.”
“Yes. Unfortunately, she made total fools out of all of us.”
“I thought Tranquillity’s observation of the interior was perfect. How could she possibly get out without you knowing?”
“Your friend Meyer lifted her away clean. The
Udat
actually swallowed inside the habitat and took her on board. There was nothing we could do to stop him.”
“Jesus! I thought my Lagrange point stunt was risky.”
“Quite. Like I said, her escape leaves me with one hell of a problem.”
“She’s gone to fetch the Alchemist?”