“I was gestated in here.”
Joshua’s nose wrinkled up. He didn’t like to think about it.
Ione walked over to a waist-high, steel-grey equipment stack standing on the floor. Green and amber LEDs winked at her. There
was a cylindrical zero-tau pod recessed into the top, twenty centimetres long, ten wide; its surface resembled a badly tarnished
mirror. She used her affinity to load an order into the stack’s bitek processors, and the pod hinged open.
Joshua watched silently as she placed the little sustentator globe inside. His son. Part of him wanted to put a stop to this
right now, to have the child born properly, to know him, watch him grow up.
“It is customary to name the child now,” Ione said. “If you want to.”
“Marcus.” His father’s name. He didn’t even have to think about that.
Her sapphire eyes were damp, reflecting the soft pearl light from the electrophorescent strips in the ceiling. “Of course.
Marcus Saldana it is, then.”
Joshua’s mouth opened to protest. “Thank you,” he said meekly.
The pod closed and the surface turned black. It didn’t look solid, more like a fissure which had opened into space.
He stared at it for a long time. You just can’t say no to Ione.
She slipped her arm through his and steered him out of the clone womb centre into the corridor outside. “How’s the
Lady Macbeth
coming along?”
“Not so bad. The Confederation Astronautics Board inspectors have cleared our systems integration. We’re starting to reassemble
the hull now, it should be finished in another three days. One final inspection for the spacewor-thiness certificate, and
we’re away. I’ve got a contract with Roland Frampton to collect some cargo from Rosenheim.”
“That’s good news. So I’ve got you to myself for another four nights.”
He pulled her a bit closer. “Yeah, if you can fit me in between engagements.”
“Oh, I think I might manage to grant you a couple of hours. I’ve got a charity dinner tonight, but I’ll be finished before
eleven. Promise.”
“Great. You’ve done beautifully, Ione, really, you just blew them away. They love you out there.”
“And nobody’s packed up and left yet, none of the major companies, nor the plutocrats. That’s my real success.”
“It was that speech you made. Jesus, if there were elections tomorrow you’d be president.”
They reached the tube carriage waiting in the little station. Two serjeants stood aside as the door opened.
Joshua looked at them, then looked into the ten-seater carriage. “Can they wait out here?” he asked innocently.
“Why?”
He leered.
She clung to him tightly afterwards, trembling slightly, their bodies hot and sweaty. He was sitting right on the edge of
one of the seats, with her as the clinging vine, legs bent up behind his back. The carriage’s air-conditioning fans made a
loud whirring sound as they recycled the unusually humid air.
“Joshua?”
“Uh huh.” He kissed her neck, hands stroking her buttocks.
“I can’t protect you once you leave.”
“I know.”
“Don’t do anything stupid. Don’t try to beat anything your father did.”
His nose nuzzled the base of her chin. “I won’t. I’m no death wisher.”
“Joshua?”
“What?”
She pulled her head back and looked straight into his eyes, trying to make him believe. “Trust your instincts.”
“Hey, I do.”
“Please, Joshua. Not just about objects, people too. Be careful of people.”
“Yes.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
He rose up, with Ione still wrapped round his torso. She could feel him getting hard again.
“See those hand hoops?” he asked.
She glanced up. “Yes.”
“Catch hold, and don’t let go.”
She reached up with both hands and gripped a pair of the steel loops on the ceiling. Joshua let go of her, and she yelped.
Her toes didn’t quite reach the floor. He stood in front of her, grinning, and gave her a small shove, starting her swinging.
“Joshua!” Ione forked her legs at the top of the arc.
He moved forward, laughing.
Erick Thakrar floated into bay MB 0-330’s control centre towing his bag. He stopped himself with an expert nudge against a
grab loop. There was an unusually large number of people grouped round the observation bubble. He recognized all of them,
engineers who had worked on the
Lady Macbeth
’s refit. All of them had been working long shifts together for the last couple of weeks.
Erick didn’t mind the work, it meant he had won his place on the
Lady Macbeth
’s crew. A stiff back and perpetual tiredness was a price worth paying for that. And in another two hours he would be on his
way.
The buzz of voices faded away as people became aware of him. A vacant slot around the observation bubble materialized. He
steadied himself and looked out.
The cradle had telescoped up out of the bay, taking the
Lady Macbeth
with it. As he watched, the starship’s thermo-dump panels unfolded from their recesses in the lustreless grey hull. Cradle
umbilical couplings withdrew from the rear quarter.
“You are cleared for disconnection,” the bay supervisor datavised. “
Bon voyage
, Joshua. Take care.”
Orange candle-flames ignited around the
Lady Macbeth
’s equator, and the chemical verniers lifted her clear of the cradle with a dexterity only a master pilot could ever achieve.
The engineering team whooped and cheered.
“Erick?”
He looked round at the supervisor.
“Joshua says to say sorry, but the Lord of Ruin thinks you’re an arsehole.”
Erick turned back to the empty bay. The cradle was sinking slowly back towards the floor. Blue light washed down as the
Lady Macbeth
’s ion thrusters took over from the verniers.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered numbly.
There were four separate life-support capsules in the
Lady Macbeth
, twelve-metre spheres grouped together in a pyramid shape at the very heart of the ship. With the expense of fitting them
out coming to a minute fraction of the starship’s overall cost, they were well appointed.
Capsules B, C, and D, the lower spheres, were split into four decks apiece, with the two middle levels following a basic layout
of cabins, a lounge, galley, and bathroom. The other decks were variously storage compartments, maintenance shops, equipment
bays, and airlock chambers for the spaceplane and MSV hangars.
Capsule A housed the bridge, taking up half of the upper middle deck, with consoles and acceleration couches for all six crew-members.
Because neural nanonics could interface with the flight computer from anywhere in the ship, it was more of a management office
than the traditional command centre, with console screens and AV projectors providing specialist systems displays to back
up datavised information.
Lady Macbeth
was licensed to carry up to thirty active passengers, or if the cabin bunks were removed and zero-tau pods installed, eighty
people travelling in stasis. With only Joshua and five crew on board, there was a luxurious amount of space available. Joshua’s
cabin was the largest, taking up a quarter of the bridge deck. He refused to change it from the layout Marcus Calvert had
chosen. The chairs were from some luxury passenger ship decommissioned over half a century ago, hinged black-foam sculptures
which looked like giant seashells in their folded positions. A bookcase held acceleration-reinforced leather-bound volumes
of ancient star charts. An Apollo command module guidance computer (of dubious provenance) was displayed in a transparent
bubble. But the major feature, from his point of view, was the free-fall-sex cage, a mesh globe of rubberized struts which
deployed from the ceiling. You could bounce around happily inside that without any danger of crashing into inconvenient (and
sharp) pieces of furniture or decking. He intended to get into full practice with Sarha Mitcham, the twenty-four-year-old
general systems engineer who had taken Erick Thakrar’s place.
Everyone was strapped in their bridge couch when Joshua lifted the
Lady Macbeth
off bay 0–330’s cradle. He did it with instinctive ease, he did it like a chrysalis opening its wings to the sun, he did
it knowing this was what his spiralling DNA had been reconfigured to do.
Flight vectors from the spaceport traffic control centre insinuated their way into his mind, and ion thrusters rolled the
ship lazily. He took them out over the edge of the giant disk of girders using the secondary reaction drive, then powered
up the three primary fusion drives. The gee-force built rapidly, and they headed up out of Mirchusko’s gravity well towards
the green crescent of Falsia, seven hundred thousand kilometres away.
The shakedown flight lasted for fifteen hours. Test programs ran systems checks; the fusion drives were pushed up to producing
a brief period of seven-gee thrust, and their plasma was scanned for instabilities; life-support capacity was tested in each
capsule. The guidance systems, the sensors, fuel tank slosh baffles, thermal insulation, power circuits, generators… the million
components that went into making up the starship structure.
Joshua inserted
Lady Mac
into orbit two hundred kilometres above the craterous lifeless moon while they took a rest for ninety minutes. After a final,
formal report confirming overall performance efficiency matched the Confederation Astronautics Board’s requirements, he powered
up the fusion drives again, and accelerated back in towards the hazy ochre gas giant.
Adamist starships lacked the flexibility of voidhawks not only in manoeuvrability, but also in their respective methods of
faster than light translation. While the bitek craft could tailor their wormholes to produce a terminus at the required location
irrespective of their orbit and acceleration vector, ships like the
Lady Macbeth
jumped along their orbital track without any leeway at all. It was that limitation which cost captains a great deal of time
between jumps. The starship had to align itself directly on its target star. In interstellar space it wasn’t so difficult,
simply a question of adjusting for natural error. But the initial jump out of a star system had to be as accurate as humanly
possible to prevent emergence point inaccuracies from growing out of hand. If a starship was departing an asteroid that was
heading away from its next port of call, the captain could spend days reversing his orbit, and the cost in delta-V reserve
was horrendous. Most captains simply employed the nearest available planet, giving them the choice of jumping towards any
star in the galaxy once every orbit.
Lady Macbeth
fell into a circular orbit a hundred and eighty-five thousand kilometres above Mirchusko, a ten-thousand-kilometre safety
margin. Gravity distortion prohibited Adamist starships from jumping within a hundred and seventy-five thousand kilometres
of gas giants.
The flight computer datavised the vector lines into Joshua’s mind. He saw the vast curved bulk of quarrelling storm bands
below, the black cave-lip of the terminator creeping towards him.
Lady Mac
’s trajectory was a tube of green neon rings stretching out ahead until they merged into a single thread which looped round
behind Mirchusko’s darkside. The green rings swept past the hull at a dizzying velocity.
Rosenheim showed as an insignificant point of white light, bracketed by red graphics, rising above the gas giant.
“Generators on line,” Melvyn Ducharme reported.
“Dahybi?” Joshua asked.
“Patterning circuits are stable,” Dahybi Yadev, their node specialist, said in a calm voice.
“OK, looks like we’re go for a jump.” He ordered the nodes to power up, feeding the generators’ full output into the patterning
circuits. Rosenheim was rising higher and higher above the gas giant as
Lady Mac
raced round her orbit.
Jesus, an actual jump.
According to his neural nanonics physiological monitor program his heart rate was up to a hundred beats a minute and rising.
It had been known for some first-time crew-members to panic when the actual moment came, terrified by the thought of the energy
loci being desynchronized. All it took was one glitch, one failed monitor program.
Not me! Not this ship.
He datavised the flight computer to pull in the thermo-dump panels and the sensor clusters.
“Nodes fully charged,” Dahybi Yadev said. “She’s all yours, Joshua.”
He had to grin at that. She always had been.
Ion thrusters flickered briefly, fine tuning their trajectory. Rosenheim slid across the vector of green rings, right into
the centre. Decimals spun down to zero, tens of seconds, hundredths, thousandths.
Joshua’s command flashed through the patterning nodes at lightspeed. Energy flowed, its density racing to achieve infinity.
An event horizon rose from nowhere to cloak the
Lady Macbeth
’s hull. Within five milliseconds it had shrunk to nothing, taking the starship with it.
Erick Thakrar took the StMichelle starscraper’s lift down to the forty-third floor, then got out and walked down two flights
of stairs. There was nobody about on the forty-fifth floor vestibule. This was office country, half of them unoccupied; and
it was nineteen hundred hours local time.
He walked into the Confederation Navy bureau.
Commander Olsen Neale looked up in surprise when Erick entered his office. “What the hell are you doing here? I thought the
Lady Macbeth
had departed.”
Erick sat down heavily in the chair in front of Neale’s desk. “She has.” He explained what happened.
Commander Neale rested his head in his hands, frowning. Erick Thakrar was one of half a dozen agents the CNIS was operating
in Tranquillity, trying to insert them on independent traders (especially those with antimatter drives) and blackhawks in
the hope of getting a lead on pirate activity and antimatter production stations.
“The Lord of Ruin warned Calvert?” Commander Neale asked in a puzzled tone.