“New California.” She sipped her wine, peering at him over the rim of the glass.
Out of the corner of his eye, Meyer could see Cherri frowning. There were regular commercial flights to the New Californian system from Tranquillity three or four times a week, and more non-scheduled charter flights on top of that. The Laton scare hadn’t stopped any departures yet. He was suddenly very curious about Alkad Mzu.
OK, let’s see how badly she wants to get there. “That would be at least three hundred thousand fuseodollars,” he told her.
“I expected it to be about that,” she replied. “Once we arrive, I may wish to pick up some cargo to carry on to a further destination. Could you supply me with the Udat’s performance and handling parameters, please?”
“Yes, of course.” He was only slightly mollified. Taking a cargo on somewhere was a viable excuse for an exclusive charter. But why not travel to New California on a regular civil flight, then hire a starship after she arrived? The only reason he could think of was that she specifically wanted a blackhawk. That wasn’t good, not good at all. “But Udat is only available for civil flights,” he stressed the word lightly.
“Naturally,” Alkad Mzu said.
“That’s all right then.” He opened a channel to her neural nanonics and datavised the blackhawk’s handling capacity over.
“What sort of cargo would we pick up?” Cherri asked. “I’m the Udat’s cargo officer, I may be able to advise on suitability.”
“Medical equipment,” Alkad said. “I have some type-definition files.” She datavised them to Meyer.
The list expanded in his mind, resembling a three-dimensional simulacrum of magnified chip circuitry, with every junction labelled. There seemed to be an awful lot of it. “Fine,” he said, slightly at a loss. “We’ll review it later.” Have to run it through an analysis program, he thought.
“Thank you,” Alkad said. “The journey from New California will be approximately two hundred light-years, if you’d care to work out a quote based on the cargo’s mass and environmental requirements. I will be asking other captains for quotes.”
“We’ll be tough to beat,” he said smoothly.
“Is there any reason why we can’t know where we’re going?” Cherri asked.
“My colleagues and I are still in the preliminary planning stage of the mission. I’d prefer not to say anything more at this time. But I shall certainly inform you of our destination before we leave Tranquillity.” Alkad stood up. “Thank you for your time, Captain. I hope we see each other again. Please datavise your full quote to me at any time.”
“She hardly touched her wine,” Cherri said as the doctor departed.
“Yes,” Meyer said distantly. Five other people were leaving the bar. None of them space industry types. Merchants? But they didn’t look rich enough.
“Are we putting in a formal bid?”
“Good question.”
> Udat said hopefully.
>
> Udat relayed an image of whirling stars as seen from Tranquillity’s docking-ledge, speeded up, always tracing the same circles. The edge of the habitat’s spaceport disk started to grey, then crumbled and broke apart with age.
Meyer grinned. >
>
“I think we need to know a little bit more about this Mzu woman,” he said out loud. “No way is she on the level.”
“Oh, really?” Cherri cooed; she cocked her head on one side. “You noticed that, did you?”
Ione let go of the image. Her apartment rematerialized around her.
Augustine was walking determinedly across the dining-room table towards the remains of the salad she had pushed away, moving at a good fifty centimetres a minute. At the back of her mind she was aware of Alkad Mzu standing in the vestibule of the thirty-first floor of the StMartha starscraper waiting for a lift. There were seven Intelligence agency operatives hanging around in the park-level foyer above her, alerted by their colleagues in Harkey’s Bar. Two of them—a female operative from New Britain, and the second-in-command of the Kulu team—resolutely refused to make eye contact. Strange really. For the last three weeks they had spent most of their off-duty hours in bed together screwing each other into delirious exhaustion.
> Ione said.
> Tranquillity asked loyally.
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> she mused. A request for a charter fee quote to carry her to a star system, then picking up a cargo to take onwards. But never the same star system; and it was Joshua who was asked to quote for Garissa. Ione tried not to consider the implications of that. It had to be coincidence.
> Tranquillity said.
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Ione reached over to her discarded plate, and began shredding one of the lettuce leaves. Augustine crooned adoringly as he finally reached the pile of shreds, and started to munch at them.
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ntains her social propriety.>>
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Meyer and Cherri Barnes took a lift up from Harkey’s Bar to the StMartha’s foyer. He walked with her down a flight of stairs to the starscraper’s tube station, and datavised for a carriage.
“Are we going back to the hotel or Udat?” Cherri asked.
“My hotel flat has a double bed.”
She grinned, and tucked his arm round hers. “Mine too.”
The carriage arrived, and he datavised the control processor to take them to the hotel. There was a slight surge of acceleration as it got under way. Meyer sank deeper into his cushioning; Cherri still hadn’t let go of him.
His neural nanonics informed him a file stored in one of the memory cells was altering. Viral safeguard programs automatically isolated the cell.
According to the menu, the file was the cargo list Alkad Mzu had datavised to him.
The viral safeguard programs reported the change had finished; tracer programs probed the file’s new format. It wasn’t hostile. The file had contained a time-delay code which simply re-arranged the order of the existing information into something entirely different. A hidden message.
Meyer accessed the contents.
“Holy shit,” he muttered fifteen seconds later.
> Udat said excitedly.
Ombey was the newest of Kulu’s eight principality star systems. A Royal Kulu Navy scoutship discovered the one terracompatible planet in 2457, orbiting a hundred and forty-two million kilometres from its G2 star.
After an ecological certification team cleared its biosphere as non-harmful, it was declared a Kulu protectorate and opened for immigration by King Lukas in 2470. Unlike other frontier worlds, such as Lalonde, which formed development companies and struggled to raise investment, Ombey was funded entirely by the Kulu Royal Treasury and the Crown-owned Kulu Corporation. Even at the beginning it couldn’t be described as a stage one colony. It couldn’t even be said to have gone through a purely agrarian phase. A stony iron asteroid, Guyana, was manoeuvred into orbit before the first settler arrived, and navy engineers immediately set about converting it into a base. Kulu’s larger astroengineering companies brought industry stations to the system to gain a slice of the military contracts involved, and to take advantage of the huge start-up tax incentives on offer. The Kulu Corporation began a settlement on an asteroid orbiting the gas giant Nonoiut, which assembled a cloudscoop to mine He3. As always within the Kingdom, the Edenists were excluded from germinating a habitat and building an adjunct cloudscoop, a prohibition rationalized by the Saldanas on religious grounds.
By the time the first wave of farmers arrived, the already substantial government presence produced a large ready-made consumer base for their crops. Healthcare, communications, law enforcement, and didactic education courses, although not quite up to the level of the Kingdom’s more developed planets, were provided from day one. Forty hectares of land were given to each family, along with a generous low-interest loan for housing and agricultural machinery, with the promise of more land for their children. Basic planetary industrialization was given a high priority, and entire factories were imported to provide essentials for the engineering and construction business. Again, government infrastructure contracts provided a massive initial subsidy. The company and civil workers arriving during the second ten-year period was equal to the number of farmers.
In 2500 its population rose above the ten million mark, and it officially lost its protectorate status to become a principality, governed by one of the King’s siblings.
Ombey was a meticulously planned endeavour, only possible to a culture as wealthy as the Kulu Kingdom. The Saldanas considered the investment costs more than worthwhile. Although the Principality didn’t start to show a return for over ninety years, it allowed them to expand their family dynasty as well as their influence, both physical (economic and military) and political, inside the Confederation. It made their position even more secure, although by that time a republican revolution was virtually impossible. And it was all done without conflict or opposition with neighbouring star systems.
By 2611 there were twelve settled asteroids in orbit and two more on their way. Planetary population was a fraction under two hundred million, and the twelve settled asteroids in the system’s dense inner belt were home to another two million people. Subsidies and loans from Kulu had long since ended, self-sufficiency both industrially and economically had been reached in 2545, exports were accelerating. Ombey was a thriving decent place to live, bristling with justified optimism.
Captain Farrah Montgomery had expected the flight from Lalonde to take four days. By the time the Ekwan finally jumped into the Ombey system, emerging two hundred thousand kilometres above the planet’s surface, they had been in transit for eight. The big colonist-carrier had endured a multitude of irritating systems failures right from the very first minute of getting underway. Mechanical components had broken down, electrical circuits suffered a rash of surges and drop-outs. Her crew had been harried into short-tempered despair as they attempted patchwork repairs.
Most worrying, the main fusion tubes produced erratic thrust levels, adding to the difficulty of reaching plotted jump coordinates, and increasing the flight duration drastically.
Fuel levels, while not yet critical, were uncomfortably low.
Sensors slid out of their jump recesses, and Captain Montgomery performed a preliminary visual orientation sweep. Ombey’s solitary moon, Jethro, was rising above the horizon, a large grey-yellow globe peppered with small deep craters, and streaked with long white rays. They were above the planet’s night side; the Blackdust desert continent straddling the equator was a huge ebony patch amid oceans that reflected jaundiced moonlight. On the eastern side of the planet the coastline of the Espartan continent was picked out by the purple-white lights of towns and cities; there were fewer urban sprawls in the interior, declining to zero at the central mountain range.
After Captain Montgomery had cleared their arrival with civil flight control, Ralph Hiltch contacted the navy base on Guyana, and requested docking permission along with a code four status alert. Ekwan closed on the asteroid at one and a quarter gravities, holding reasonably steady.
The base admiral, Pascoe Farquar, after receiving Ralph’s request, backed by Sir Asquith, authorized the alert. Nonessential personnel were cleared from the habitation cavern the navy used. Commercial traffic was turned away. Xenobiology, nanonic, and weapons specialists began to assemble an isolation confinement area for Gerald Skibbow.
The Ekwan docked at Guyana’s non-rotating spaceport amid a tight security cordon. Royal Marines and port personnel worked a straight five-hour shift to bring the Ekwan’s three thousand grumbling, bewildered colonists out of zero-tau and assign them quarters in the navy barracks. Ralph Hiltch and Sir Asquith spent most of that time in conference with Pascoe Farquar and his staff. After he accessed sensorium recordings Dean Folan made during the jungle mission, as well as the garbled reports of Darcy and Lori claiming Laton was on Lalonde, the admiral decided to raise the alert status to code three.
Ralph Hiltch watched the last of the fifty armour-suited marines floating into the Ekwan’s large zero-tau compartment. They were all muscle boosted and qualified in free fall combat routines; eight of them carried medium-calibre automatic recoilless projectile carbines. The sergeants followed Cathal Fitzgerald’s directions and started positioning them in three concentric circles surrounding Gerald Skibbow’s zero-tau pod, with five on the decks either side in case he broke through the metal grids.
Extra lights had been attached to the nearby support girders, beams focused on the one pod in the compartment which was still encased by an absorptive blackness, casting a weird jumble of multiple shadows outside t
he encircling ring of marines.
Ralph’s neural nanonics were relaying the scene to the admiral and the waiting specialists. It made him slightly self-conscious as he anchored himself to a girder to address the marine squad.
“This might look excessive for one man,” he said to the marines, “but don’t drop your guard for an instant. We’re not entirely sure he is human, certainly he has some lethal energy-projecting abilities that come outside anything we’ve encountered before. If it’s any comfort, free fall does seem to unnerve him slightly. Your job is just to escort him down to the isolation area that’s been prepared. Once he’s there, the technical people will take over. They think the cell they’ve prepared will be able to confine him. But getting him there could get very messy.”
He backed away from the pod, noting the half-apprehensive faces of the first rank of marines.
God, they look young. I hope to hell they took my warning seriously.
He checked his own skull-helmet, and took a deep breath. “OK, Cathal, switch it off.”
The blackness vanished from the pod revealing the smooth cylindrical composite sarcophagus. Ralph strained to hear the manic battering which Skibbow had been giving the pod before the zero-tau silenced him. The compartment was quiet apart from the occasional scuffling of the marines as they craned for a glimpse.
“Open the lid.”
It began to slide back. Ralph braced himself for Skibbow to burst out of the opening like a runaway combat wasp with a forty-gee drive. He heard a wretched whimpering sound. Cathal gave him a puzzled glance.
God, did we get the right pod?
“All right, stay back,” Ralph said. “You two,” he indicated the marines with the carbines, “cover me.” He pulled himself cautiously across the grid towards the pod, still expecting Skibbow to spring up. The whimpering grew louder, interspersed with low groans.
Very, very carefully, Ralph eased himself up the side of the pod, and peeked in. Ready to duck down fast.
Gerald Skibbow was floating listlessly inside the curving cream-white composite coffin. His whole body was trembling. He clutched his shattered hand to his chest. Both eyes were red rimmed, blood was still oozing from his mashed nose. The smell of jungle mud and urine clogged in Ralph’s nose.