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, Mar-jorie.
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 mid-summer. 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 dogged-ness. 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. Yo u 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 Ka-vanagh 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 space-planes 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 space-worthiness 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 star-ship’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
Vi l -leneuve’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
Vil -leneuve’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.