The Night's Dawn Trilogy (36 page)

“What were you expecting?” Joshua asked. “A Saturn V?” He was strapped into a restraint web behind a cyber-drone operations
console. The boxy drones ran along the rails which spiralled up the bay walls, giving them access to any part of the docked
ship. Three of them were currently clustered round an auxiliary fusion generator, which was being eased into its mountings
at the end of long white waldo arms. Engineers floated around it, supervising the cyberdrones which were performing the installation,
mating cables, coolant lines, and fuel hoses. Joshua monitored their progress through the omnidirectional AV projectors arrayed
around his console.

“More like a battle cruiser,” Meyer said. “I saw the power ratings on those nodes, Joshua. You could jump fifteen light-years
with those brutes fully charged.”

“Something like that,” he said absently.

Meyer grunted, and turned back to the starship. The MSV was returning from another trip to
Udat
, a pale green oblong box three metres long with small spherical tanks bunched together on the base, and three segmented waldo
arms ending in complex manipulators sprouting from the mid-fuselage section. It was carrying a packaged node, coasting down
towards one of the engineering shop airlocks.

Cherri Barnes frowned, peering forwards into the bay. “How many reaction drives has she got?” she asked. There seemed an inordinate
number of unbilicals jacked into the
Lady Macbeth
’s rear quarter. She could see a pair of fusion tubes resting in the wall brackets, fat ten-metre cylinders swathed with magnetic
coils, ion-beam injectors, and molecular-binding initiators.

Joshua turned his head fractionally, switching AV projectors. The new pillar shot a barrage of photons along his optical nerves,
giving him a different angle on the auxiliary fusion generator. He studied it for a while, then datavised an instruction into
one of the cyberdrones. “Four main drives.”

“Four?” Adamist ships usually had one fusion drive, with a couple of induction engines running off the generator as an emergency
back-up.

“Yeah. Three fusion tubes, and an antimatter drive.”

“You can’t be serious,” Cherri Barnes exclaimed. “That’s a capital offence!”

“Wrong!”

Joshua and Meyer both grinned at her, infuriatingly superior. There were smiles from the other five console operators in the
control centre.

“It’s a capital offence to
possess
antimatter,” Joshua said. “But there’s nothing in the Confederation space law about possessing an engine which uses antimatter.
As long as you don’t fill up the confinement chambers and use it, you’re fine.”

“Bloody hell.”

“It makes you very popular when there’s a war on. You can write your own ticket. Or so I’m told.”

“I bet you’ve got a real powerful communication maser as well. One that can punch a message clean through another starship’s
hull.”

“No, actually.
Lady Mac
has eight. Dad was a real stickler for multiple redundancy.”

Harkey’s Bar was on the thirty-first floor of the StMartha starscraper. There was a real band on the tiny stage, churning
out scarr jazz, fractured melodies with wailing trumpets. A fifteen-metre bar made from real oak that Harkey swore blind came
from a twenty-second-century Paris brothel, serving thirty-eight kinds of beer, and three times that number of spirits, including
Norfolk Tears for those who could afford it. It had wall booths that could be screened from casual observation, a dance floor,
long party tables, lighting globes emitting photons right down at the bottom of the yellow spectrum. And Harkey prided himself
on its food, prepared by a chef who claimed he had worked in the royal kitchens of Kulu’s Jerez Principality. The waitresses
were young, pretty, and wore revealing black dresses.

With its ritzy atmosphere, and not too expensive drinks, it attracted a lot of the crews from ships docked at Tranquillity’s
port. Most nights saw a good crowd. Joshua had always used it. First when he was a cocky teenager looking for his nightly
fix of spaceflight tales, then when he was scavenging, lying about how much he made and the unbelievable find that had just
slipped from his fingers, and now as one of the super-elite, a starship owner-captain, one of the youngest ever.

“I don’t know what kind of crap that foam is which you sprayed on the spaceplane, Joshua, but the bloody stuff just won’t
come off,” Warlow complained bitterly.

When Warlow spoke everybody listened. You couldn’t avoid it, not within an eight-metre radius. He was a cosmonik, born on
an industrial asteroid settlement. He had spent over sixty-five per cent of his seventy-two years in free fall, and he didn’t
have the kind of geneering bequeathed to Joshua and the Edenists by their ancestors. After a while his organs had begun to
degenerate, depleted calcium levels had reduced his bones to brittle porcelain sticks, muscles had atrophied, and fluid bloated
his tissues, impairing his lungs, degrading his lymphatic system. He had used drugs and nanonic supplements to compensate
at first, then supplements became replacements, with bones exchanged for carbon-fibre struts. Electrical consumption supplanted
food intake. The final transition was his skin, replacing the eczema-ridden epidermis with a smooth ochre silicon membrane.
Warlow didn’t need a spacesuit to work in the vacuum, he could survive for over three weeks without a power and oxygen recharge.
His facial features had become purely cosmetic, a crude mannequin-like caricature of human physiognomy, although there was
an inlet valve at the back of his throat for fluid intake. There was no hair, and he certainly didn’t bother with clothes.
Sex was something he lost in his fifties.

Although some cosmoniks had metamorphosed into little more than free-flying maintenance craft with a brain at the centre,
Warlow had kept his humanoid shape. The only noticeable adaptation was his arms; they forked at each elbow, giving him two
pairs of forearms. One set retained the basic hand and finger layout, the other set ended in titanium sockets, capable of
accepting a variety of rigger tools.

Joshua grinned and raised his champagne glass at the sleek-skinned two-metre-tall gargoyle dominating the table. “That’s why
I put you on it. If anybody can scrape it off, you can.” He counted himself lucky to get Warlow on his crew. Some captains
rejected him for his age, Joshua welcomed him for his experience.

“You should get Ashly to fly it on a bypass trajectory that grazes Mirchusko’s atmosphere. Burn it off like an ablative. One
zip and it’s all gone.” Warlow’s primary left forearm came down, palm slapping the table. Glasses and bottles juddered.

“Alternatively, you could plug a pump in your belly, and use your arse as a vacuum cleaner,” Ashly Hanson said. “Suck it off.”
His cheeks caved in as he made a slurping sound.

The pilot was a tall sixty-seven-year-old, whom geneering had given a compact frame, floppy brown hair, and a ten-year-old’s
wonderstruck smile. The whole universe was a constant delight for him. He lived for his skill, moving tonnes of metal through
any atmosphere with avian grace. His Confederation Astronautics Board licence said he was qualified for both air and space
operations, but it was three hundred and twenty years out of date. Ashly Hanson was temporally displaced; born into reasonable
wealth, he had signed over his trust fund to the Jovian Bank in 2229 in exchange for a secure zero-tau pod maintenance contract
(even then the Edenists had been the obvious choice as custodians). He alternated fifty years in entropy-free stasis, and
five years “bumming round” the Confederation.

“I’m a futurologist,” he told Joshua the first time they met. “On a one-way ride to eternity. I just get out of my time machine
for a look round every now and then.”

Joshua had signed him on as much for the tales he could tell as his piloting ability.

“We’ll just remove the foam according to the manual, thanks,” he told the bickering pair.

The vocal synthesizer diaphragm protruding from War-low’s chest, just above his air-inlet gills, let out a metallic sigh.
He shoved his squeezy bulb into his mouth and squirted some champagne into the valve. Drink was one thing he wasn’t giving
up, although with his blood filters he could sober up with astonishing speed if he had to.

Meyer leant across the table. “Any word on Neeves and Sipika yet?” he asked Joshua quietly.

“Yeah. I forgot, you wouldn’t know. They arrived back in port a couple of days after you left for Earth. They bloody nearly
got lynched. The serjeants had to rescue them. They’re in jail, waiting judicial pronouncement.”

Meyer frowned. “Why the wait? I thought Tranquillity processed the charges right away?”

“There’s a lot of bereaved relatives of scavengers who never came back who are claiming Neeves and Sipika are responsible.
Then there’s the question of compensation. The
Madeeir
is still worth a million and a half fuseodollars even after my axe work. I waived my claim, but I suppose the families are
entitled.”

Meyer took another sip. “Nasty business.”

“There’s talk about fitting emergency beacons to all the scavenger craft, making it an official requirement.”

“They’ll never go for that, they’re too independent.”

“Yeah, well, I’m out of it now.”

“Too true,” Kelly Tirrel said. She was sitting pressed up next to Joshua, one leg hooked over his, arm draped around his shoulders.

It was a position he found extremely comfortable. Kelly was wearing an amethyst dress with a broad square-cut neckline which
showed off her figure, especially from his angle. She was twenty-four, slightly shorter than medium build, with red-brown
hair and a delicate face. For the last couple of years she had been a rover correspondent for Tranquillity’s office of the
Collins news group.

They had met eighteen months earlier when she was doing a piece on scavengers for distribution across the Confederation. He
liked her for her independence, and the fact that she wasn’t born rich.

“Nice to know you worry about me,” he said.

“I don’t, it’s the dataloss when you detonate your brain across the cosmos in that relic you’re flying, that’s what I’m concerned
over.” She turned to Meyer. “Do you know he won’t give me the coordinates for this castle he found?”

“What castle?” Meyer asked.

“Where he found the Laymil electronics stack.”

A smile spread across Meyer’s whole face. “A castle. You didn’t tell me that, Joshua. Did it have knights and wizards in it?”

“No,” Joshua said firmly. “It was a big cube structure. I called it a castle because of the weapons systems. It was tough
work getting in, one wrong move and…” Grave lines scored his face.

Kelly squirmed a fraction closer.

“It was operational?” Meyer was enjoying himself.

“No.”

“So why was it dangerous?”

“Some of the systems still had power in their storage cells. So given how much molecular decay they’ve suffered out there
in the Ring, just brushing against them could have triggered off a short circuit. They would have blown like a chain reaction.”

“Electronic stacks,
and
functional power cells. That really was a terrific find, Joshua.”

Joshua glared at him.

“And he won’t tell me where it is,” Kelly complained. “Just think, something that big which survived the suicide could well
hold the key to the whole Laymil secret. If I could capture that on a sensevise, I’d be made. I could pick my own office with
Collins, then. Hell, I’d be in charge of my own office.”

“I’ll sell you where it is,” Joshua said, “it’s all up here.” He tapped his head. “My neural nanonics have got its orbital
parameters down to a metre. I can locate it any time in the next ten years for you.”

“How much are you asking?” Meyer asked.

“Ten million fuseodollars.”

“Thanks, I’ll pass.”

“Doesn’t it bother you, standing in the way of progress?” Kelly asked.

“No. Besides, what happens if the answer turns out to be something we don’t particularly like?”

“Good point.” Meyer raised his glass.

“Joshua! People have a right to know. They are quite capable of making up their own minds, they don’t need to be protected
from facts by people like you. Secrets seed oppression.”

Joshua rolled his eyes. “Jesus. Yo u just like to think reporters have a God-given right to stuff their noses in anywhere
they want.”

Kelly tipped a glass to his lips, encouraging him to sip the champagne. “But we do.”

“You’ll get it bitten off one day, you see. In any case, we will know what happened to the Laymil. With the size of the research
team Tranquillity employs, results are inevitable.”

“That’s you, Joshua, the eternal optimist. Only an optimist would even think about going anywhere in that ship of yours.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the
Lady Mac
,” Joshua bridled. “You ask Meyer, those systems are the finest money can buy.”

Kelly fluttered long dark lashes enquiringly at Meyer.

“Oh, absolutely,” he said.

“I still don’t want you to go,” she said quietly. She kissed Joshua’s cheek. “They were good systems when your father was
flying her, and they were newer then. Look what happened to him.”

“That’s different. Those orphans on the hospital station would never have made it back here without the
Lady Mac
. Dad had to jump while he was too close to that neutron star.”

Meyer let out a distressed groan, and drained his glass.

Joshua was up at the bar when the woman approached him. He didn’t even see her until she spoke, his attention was elsewhere.
The barmaid’s name was Helen Vanham, she was nineteen, with a dress cut lower than Harkey’s normal, and she seemed eager to
serve Joshua Calvert, the starship captain. She said she finished work at two in the morning.

“Captain Calvert?”

He turned from the pleasing display of cleavage and thigh. Jesus, but that title felt good. “You got me.”

The woman was black, very black. There couldn’t have been much geneering in her family, he decided, although he was suspicious
about that deep pigmentation; she was fifty centimetres shorter than him, and her short beret of hair was frosted with strands
of silver. He reckoned she was about sixty years old, and ageing naturally.