“I paid you,” Marie said in a frail voice. “All the way to Durringham.”
“That won’t cover our costs, lovie. We told you, it’s expensive travelling this river. You have to work your passage.”
“No.”
There was nothing of the bumptious nature left in the huge woman. “We can put you off. Right here.”
Marie shook her head. “I can’t.”
“Course you can. Pretty girl like you.” Gail wrapped a weighty hand around Marie’s forearm. “Come on, lovie,” she coaxed.
“Old Lennie, he knows how to treat his brides right.”
Marie put one foot forward.
“That’s it, lovie. Down you come. It’s all laid out here, look.”
There was a white cotton negligee on the galley table. Gail led her over to it. “You just slip this on. And don’t let’s hear
any more silly talk about can’t.” She held it up against Marie. “Oh, you’re going to look a picture in this, aren’t you?”
She glanced down numbly at it.
“Aren’t you?” Gail Buchannan repeated.
“Yes.”
“Good girl. Now put it on.”
“Where?”
“Here, lovie. Right here.”
Marie turned her back to the gross woman, and began to pull her T-shirt off over her head.
Gail chortled thickly. “Oh, you’re a one, lovie, you really are. This is going to be a chuckle.”
The negligÉe’s hem barely came below Marie’s buttocks, but if she tried to pull it down any further her breasts would fall
out of the top. She had felt cleaner when she was covered in dirt from the jungle.
Still chortling, and giving her little nudges in her back, Gail followed her into the cabin where Len was waiting dressed
in an amber towelling robe. A single electric lamp hanging on the ceiling cast a halo of yellow light. Len’s mouth split in
a jagged smile as he took in the sight of her.
Gail sank down onto a sturdy stool by the door, puffing in relief. “There now, don’t you worry about me, lovie, I only ever
watch.”
Marie thought that perhaps with the sound of the lapping water and the close wooden walls she could pretend it was Karl and
the
Swithland
again.
She couldn’t.
The Ly-cilph had been travelling for over five billion years when it arrived at the galaxy which was home to the Confederation,
although at that time it was the dinosaurs which were Earth’s premier life-form. Half of its existence had been spent traversing
intergalactic space. It knew how to slip through the wormhole interstices; a creature of energy, the physical structure of
the cosmos was no mystery to it. But its nature was to observe and record, so it sped along at a velocity just short of lightspeed,
extending its perceptive field around the outcast hydrogen atoms on their aeons-long fall towards the bright, distant star
whorls. Each one was unique, an existence to be treasured, extending the knowledge base, its history placed in the transdimensional
storage lattice which provided the Ly-cilph with its identity focus. The Ly-cilph was the section of space through which it
passed with less disturbance than a neutrino. Like a quantum black hole, it had almost no physical size, yet within was an
entire universe. A carefully patterned universe of pure data.
After it arrived at the rim stars it spent millions of years drifting among them, categorizing the life-forms which rose and
fell on their planets, indexing the physical parameters of the multitudinous solar systems. It witnessed interstellar empires
that bloomed and failed, and planet-bound civilizations that were lost to the final night as their stars cooled to frozen
iron. Saint-like cultures and the most bestial savagery; all clicking neatly into place within its infinite interior.
It progressed inwards on a loose line towards the scintillating glow of the galactic core. And in doing so, arrived at the
volume of space populated by the Confederation. Lalonde, freshly discovered, and on the edge of the territory, was the first
human world it encountered.
The Ly-cilph arrived at the star’s Oort cloud in 2610. After it passed through the band of circling, sleeping comets, occasional
laser and microwave emissions impinged on its perception field boundary. They were weak, random fragments of overspill from
the communication beams of starships entering orbit above Lalonde.
A preliminary survey showed the Ly-cilph two centres of sentient life in the solar system: Lalonde itself with the human and
Tyrathca settlers, and Aethra, the young Edenist habitat in its solitary orbit above Murora.
As always in cases of life discovery, it first performed analytical sweeps of the barren planets. The four inner worlds: sunblasted
Calcott and the colossal Gatley with its immense lethal atmosphere, then skipping past Lalonde to review airless Plewis and
the icy Mars-like Coum. The five gas giants followed, Murora, Bullus, Achillea, Tol, and distant Puschk with its strange cryochemistry.
All of them had their own moon systems and individual milieux requiring examination. The Ly-cilph took fifteen months to classify
their composition and environment, then swooped in towards Lalonde.
The search through the jungle took eight hours. Three-quarters of Aberdale’s adult population turned out to help. They found
Gwyn Lawes fifteen minutes after Rennison had set below the horizon. Most of him.
Because it was a sayce which had killed him; because the ropes had been taken off his wrists and ankles, and the gag removed
from his mouth; because his electromagnetic rifle and all his other possessions were accounted for, everyone accepted it was
a natural, if horrible, death.
It was the Ivets who were assigned to dig the grave.
The
Udat
slid over the surface of Tranquillity’s non-rotating spaceport as though it was running on an invisible wire. A honeycomb
of deep docking-bays flashed past below the blue and purple hull; the spherical fuselages of Adamist star-ships nested inside,
glinting dully under the rim floodlights. Meyer watched through the blackhawk’s sensors as a fifty-five-metre-diameter clipper-class
starship manoeuvred itself onto a cradle that had risen out of a bay, orange balls of chemical flame spitting out of its vernier
nozzles. He could see the ubiquitous intersecting violet and green loops of the Vasilkovsky Line bold across the forward quarter.
It touched the cradle, and pistonlike latches engaged, slipping into sockets around the hull. Umbilical gantries swung round,
plugging it into the spaceport’s coolant and environmental circuits. The starship’s thermo-dump panels retracted, and the
cradle started to descend into the bay.
So much effort just to arrive,
Udat
observed.
Quiet down, you’ll hurt people’s feelings,
Meyer told it fondly.
I wish there were more ships like me. Your race should stop clinging to the past. These mechanical ships belong in a museum.
My race, is it? There are human chromosomes in you, don’t forget.
Are you sure?
I think I accessed it in a memory core somewhere. There are in voidhawks.
Oh. Them.
Meyer grinned at the overtone of disparagement.
I thought you liked voidhawks.
Some of them are all right. But they think like their captains.
And how do voidhawk captains think?
They don’t like blackhawks. They think we’re trouble.
We have been known.
Only when money is short,
Udat
said, gently reproachful.
And if there were more blackhawks and fewer Adamist starships, money would be even tighter. I have wages to pay.
At least we’ve paid off the mortgage you took out to buy me.
Yes.
And there’s money to save to buy another when you’re gone. But he didn’t let that thought filter out of his mind.
Udat
was fifty-seven now; seventy-five to eighty was the usual blackhawk lifespan. Meyer wasn’t at all convinced he would want
another ship after
Udat
. But there was a quarter of a century of togetherness to look forward to yet, and money wasn’t such a problem these days.
There was only life-support-section maintenance and the four crew members to pay for. He could afford to pick and choose his
charters now. Not like the first twenty years. Now those had been wild days. Fortunately the power compressed into the big
asymmetric teardrop shape of
Udat
’s hull gave them a terrific speed and agility. They had needed it on occasion. Some of the more covert missions had been
hazardous in the extreme. Not all their colleagues had returned.
I’d still like more of my own kind to talk to,
Udat
said.
Do you talk to Tranquillity?
Oh, yes, all the time. We’re good friends.
What do you talk about?
I show it places we visit. And it shows me its interior, what humans get up to.
Really?
Yes, it’s interesting. This Joshua Calvert who chartered us, Tranquillity says he’s a recidivist of the worst kind.
Tranquillity is absolutely right. That’s why I like Joshua so much. He reminds me of me at that age.
No. You were never that bad.
Udat
’s nose turned slightly, gliding delicately between two designated traffic streams congested with He3 tankers and personnel
commuters. The bays in this section of the mammoth spaceport disk were larger, it was where the repairs and maintenance work
was carried out. Only half of them were occupied.
The big blackhawk came to a halt directly over bay MB 0-330, then slowly rotated around its long axis so that its upper hull
was pointing down over the rim. Unlike void-hawks, with their separate lower hull cargo hold and upper hull crew toroid,
Udat
had all its mechanical sections contained in a horseshoe which embraced its dorsal bulge. The bridge and individual crew
cabins were at the front, with the two cargo holds occupying the wings, and an ion-field flyer stored in a small hangar on
the port side.
Cherri Barnes walked into the bridge compartment. She was
Udat
’s cargo officer, doubling as a systems generalist: forty-five years old, with light coffee skin and a wide face prone to
contemplative pouts. She had been with Meyer for three years.
She datavised a series of orders into her console processors, receiving images fed from the electronic sensors mounted on
the hull. The three-dimensional picture which built up in her mind showed her
Udat
hanging poised thirty metres over the repair bay, holding its position steady.
“Over to you,” Meyer said.
“Thanks.” She opened a channel to the bay’s datanet. “MB 0-330, this is
Udat
. We have your cargo paid for and waiting. Ready for your unload instructions. How do you want to handle it, Joshua? Time
is money.”
“Cherri, is that you?” Joshua datavised back.
“No one else on board will lower themselves to talk to you.”
“I wasn’t expecting you for another week, you’ve made good time.”
Meyer datavised an access order into his console. “You hire the best ship, you get the best time.”
“I’ll remember that,” Joshua told him. “Next time I have some money I’ll make sure I go for a decent ship.”
“We can always take our nodes elsewhere, Mr Hotshot Starship Captain who’s never been outside the Ruin Ring.”
“My nodes, genetic throwback who’s too scared to go in the Ruin Ring and earn a living.”
“It’s not the Ruin Ring which worries me, it’s what the Lord of Ruin does to people who skip outsystem before they register
their finds in Tranquillity.”
There was an unusually long pause. Meyer and Cherri shared a bemused glance.
“I’ll send Ashly out with the
Lady Mac
’s MSV to pick up the nodes,” Joshua said. “And you’re all invited to the party tonight.”
“So this is the famous
Lady Macbeth
?” Meyer asked a couple of hours later. He was in bay 0–330’s cramped control centre with Joshua, his left foot anchored by
a stikpad, looking out through the glass bubble wall into the bay itself. The fifty-seven-metre ship resting on the cradle
in the middle of the floor was naked to space. Its hull plates had been stripped off, exposing the systems and tanks and engines,
fantastically complex silver and white entrails. They were all contained inside a hexagonal-lattice stress structure. Jump
nodes were positioned over each junction. Red and green striped superconductor cabling wormed inwards from each node, plugged
directly into the ship’s fusion generators. Meyer hadn’t thought about it before, but the lenticular nodes were almost identical
to the voidhawk profile.
Engineers wearing black SII suits and manoeuvring packs were propelling themselves over the open stress structure, running
tests and replacing components. Others rode platforms on the end of multi-segment arms which were fitted out with heavy tools
to handle the larger systems. Yellow strobes flashed on all the bay’s mobile equipment, sending sharp-edged amber circles
slicing over every surface in crazy gyrating patterns.
Hundreds of data cables were stretched between the ship and the five interface couplings around the base of the cradle. It
was almost as though
Lady Macbeth
was being tethered down by a net of optical fibres. A two-metre-diameter airlock tube had concertinaed out from the bay wall,
just below the control centre, giving the maintenance team access to the life-support capsules buried at the core of the ship.
Brackets on the bay walls held various systems waiting to be installed. Meyer couldn’t see where they could possibly fit.
Lady Macbeth
’s spaceplane clung to one wall like a giant supersonic moth, wings in their forward-sweep position. The additional tanks
and power cells Joshua had strapped on for flights to the Ruin Ring were gone; a couple of suited figures and a cyberdrone
were trying to remove the thick foam from the fuselage with a solvent spray. Crumbling grey flakes were flying off in all
directions.