The Night's Dawn Trilogy (56 page)

Money’s no problem.
She could sense the dismay tweak of the crew at that blasÉ statement. They had all pooled their navy severance pay, and taken
out a big loan option from the Jovian Bank, in the hope of putting together a cargo deal with a Norfolk roseyard-association
merchant. Contrary to the firmly seated Adamist belief, the Jovian Bank did not hand out money to any Edenist on request.
Between them,
Oenone
’s crew had only just scraped together enough fuseodollars for a cash collateral.

I should be so lucky,
Eysk said.
Still, anything to help out an old naval hand. Do you know what you’re looking for?

I had some unlin crab once, they were gorgeous. Or-angesole, too, if you have some.

Futchi,
Cacus chipped in.

And silvereel,
Edwin said eagerly.

I think you’d better come down and have a tasting session,
Eysk said.
Give you a better idea of what we have available.

Right away. And do you know any other families who might have a surplus we can buy up?

I’ll ask round. See you for supper.

The affinity link faded.

Syrinx clapped her hands together. Ruben kissed her lightly. “You’re a marvel,” he told her.

She kissed him back. “This is only half the battle. I’m still relying on your contact once we get to Norfolk.”

“Relax, he’s a sucker for seafood.”

Oxley,
she called.
Break out the flyer, it looks like we’re in business.

Joshua hadn’t expected to feel like this. He lived for space, for alien worlds, the hard edge of cargo deals, an unlimited
supply of adventurous girls in port cities. But now Tranquillity’s drab matt-russet exterior was filling half of the
Lady Mac
’s sensor array visualization, and it looked just
wonderful
. I’m coming home.

A break from Ashly moaning about how much better life was two centuries ago, no more of Warlow’s grumpiness, an end to Dahybi’s
fastidious and perfidious attention to detail. Even Sarha was getting stale, free fall didn’t provide an infinite variety
of positions after all—and once you’d discounted the sex, there wasn’t much else between them.

Yes, a rest was most definitely what he needed. And he could certainly afford one after that Puerto de Santa Maria run. Harkey’s
Bar was going to resemble a pressure blow-out after he hit it this evening.

The rest of the crew were hooked into the flight computer via their neural nanonics, sharing the view. Joshua guided the ship
along the vector spaceport traffic control had datavised to him, keeping the ion-thruster burns to a strict minimum.
Lady Mac
’s mass distribution held no mysteries now, he knew how she would respond to the impact of a single photon.

She settled without a bounce on the cradle, and the hold-down latches clicked home. Joshua joined the rest of them in cheering.

Two serjeants were waiting for him when they came through the rotating pressure seal connecting the spaceport disk with the
habitat. He just shrugged lamely at his open-mouthed crew as the bitek servitors hauled him towards a waiting tube carriage,
all three of them skip gliding in the ten per cent gravity field, his shoulder-bag with its precious contents trailing in
the air like a half-inflated balloon.

“I’ll catch up with you tonight,” he called over his shoulder as the door slid shut.

Ione was standing on the platform when it opened again. It was the little station outside her cliff-base apartment.

She was wearing a black dress with cut-away sides and a fabulously tight skirt. Her hair was frizzed elaborately.

When he stopped looking at her legs and breasts in anticipation he saw there was a daunting expression on her face.

“Well?” she said.

“Er…”

“Where is it?”

“What exactly?”

A black shoe with a sharply pointed toe tapped impatiently on the polyp. “Joshua Calvert, you have spent over eleven months
gallivanting around the universe, without, I might point out, sending me a single memory flek to say how you were getting
on.”

“Yes. Sorry. Busy, you see.” Jesus, but he wanted to rip that dress off. She looked ten times more sexy than she did when
he replayed the neural nanonic memories. And everywhere he went people were talking about the new young Lord of Ruin. Their
fantasy figure was his girl. It just made her all the more desirable.

“So where’s my present?”

He almost did it, he almost said: “I’m your present.” But even as he started grinning he felt that little spike of anxiety
inside. He didn’t want anything to foul up this reunion. Besides, she was only a kid, she needed him. So best to leave off
the crappy jokes. “Oh, that,” he murmured.

Sea-blue eyes hardened. “Joshua!”

He twisted the catch on his shoulder-bag. She pulled it open eagerly. The sailu blinked at the light, looking up at her with
eyes that were completely black and stupendously appealing.

They were described as living gnomes by the first people to see them, thirty centimetres fully grown, with black and white
fur remarkably similar to a terrestrial panda. On their home world, Oshanko, they were so rare they were kept exclusively
in an imperial reserve. Only the Emperor’s children were allowed to have them as pets. Cloning and breeding programmes were
an anathema to the imperial court, they lived by natural selection alone. No official numbers of their population were given,
but strong rumour suggested there were less than two thousand of them left.

Despite the bipedal shape, they had a very different skeleton and musculature to terrestrial anthropoids. There were no elbows
or knees, their limbs bent along their whole length, making their movements incredibly ponderous. They were herbivores, and,
if official AV recordings of the Emperor’s family were to be believed, clingingly affectionate.

Ione covered her mouth with one hand, eyes alight with incredulity. The creature was about twenty centimetres high. “It’s
a sailu,” she said dumbly.

“Yes.”

She put a hand into the bag, extending one finger. The sailu reached for it in a graceful slow motion, deliciously silky fur
stroked against her knuckle. “But only the Emperor’s children are supposed to have these.”

“Emperor, Lord—what’s the difference? I got it because I thought you’d like it.”

The sailu had clambered upright, still holding itself against her finger. Its flat wet nose sniffed her. “How?” she asked.

Joshua gave her a precocious smile.

“No. I don’t want to know.” She heard a soft crooning, and looked down, only to lose herself in the adoring gaze. “It’s very
wicked of you, Joshua. But he’s quite lovely. Thank you.”

“Not sure about the ‘him’. I think there are three or four sexes. There’s not much on them in any reference library. But it
does eat lettuce and strawberries.”

“I’ll remember.” She eased her finger from the sailu’s grip.

“So what about my present?” Joshua asked.

Ione struck a pose, tongue licking her lips. “I’m your present.”

They didn’t make it to the bedroom. Joshua got her dress off just inside the door, and in return Ione tugged at his ship-suit
seal so hard it broke. The first time was on one of the alcove tables, after that they used the ornate iron stair railings
for support, then it was rolling around on the apricot moss carpet.

The bed did get used eventually, after a shower and a bottle of champagne. Hours later, Joshua knew he’d missed the party
in Harkey’s Bar, and didn’t much care. Outside the window the light filtering through the water had faded to a dusky green,
small orange and yellow fish were looking in at him.

Ione was sitting cross-legged on the rubbery transparent sheet with her back resting against some of the silk cushions. The
sailu was snuggled up in her hand as she fed it with the crinkled red and green leaves of a lollo lettuce. It munched them
daintily, gazing up at her.

Isn’t he adorable?
she said happily.

The sailu genus exhibit a great many anthropomorphic traits which endear them to humans.

I bet you’d be nicer if it wasn’t Joshua who brought him.

Removing the sailu from its home planet is not only in complete contravention of the planetary statutes, it is also a direct
personal insult to the Emperor himself. Joshua has put you in an invidious position. A typically thoughtless action on his
part.

I won’t tell the Emperor if you won’t.

I was not proposing to tell the Emperor, nor even the Japanese Imperium’s ambassador.

That old fart.

Ione, please, Ambassador Ng is a very senior diplomat. His appointment here is a mark of the Emperor’s respect towards you.

I know.
She tickled the sailu under its tiny chin. Face and body were both flattish ovals, joined by a short neck. Its legs curved
slowly, pressing the torso against her finger.

“I’m going to call him Augustine,” she announced. “That’s a noble name.”

“Great,” Joshua said. He leant over to the side of the bed and pulled the champagne bottle out of its ice bucket. “Flat,”
he said, after he tipped some into his glass.

“Proves you have staying power,” she said coyly.

He reached for her left breast, smiling.

“No, don’t,” she moved out of the way. “Augustine’s still feeding. You’ll upset him.”

He lay back, disgruntled.

“Joshua, how long are you staying this time?”

“Couple of weeks. I need to get a contract with Roland Frampton sorted out. Distribution, not a charter. We’re going for a
Norfolk run, Ione. We raised a lot of capital on some of our contracts; put that together with what I had left over from scavenging,
and we’ll have enough for a cargo of Norfolk Tears. Imagine that! A hold full of the stuff.”

“Really? That’s wonderful, Joshua.”

“Yeah, if I can swing it. Distribution isn’t the problem. Acquisition is. I’ve been talking to some of the other captains.
Those Norfolk roseyard-association merchants are tough nuts to crack. They won’t allow a futures market, which is pretty smart
of them actually. It would be dominated by offworld finance houses. You have to show up with a ship and the cash, and even
then it’s not a certainty you’ll get any bottles. You need a pretty reliable contact in the trade.”

“But you’ve never been there, you don’t have any contacts.”

“I know. First-time captains need a cargo to sell, a part-exchange deal. You’ve got to have something the merchants can’t
do without, that way you can get a foot in the door.”

“What sort of cargo?”

“Ah, now that’s the real problem. Norfolk is constitutionally a pastoral world, there’s hardly any high technology they’ll
allow you to import. Most captains take cordon bleu food, or works of antique art, fancy fabrics, stuff like that.”

Ione put Augustine down carefully on the other side of the silk pillows, and rolled onto her side facing him. “But you’ve
got something else, haven’t you? I know that tone, Joshua Calvert. You’re feeling smug.”

He smiled up at the ceiling. “I was thinking about it: something essential, and new, but not synthetic. Something all those
Stone Age towns and farms are going to want.”

“Which is?”

“Wood.”

“You’re kidding? Wood as in timber?”

“Yeah.”

“But they have wood on Norfolk. It’s heavily forested.”

“I know. That’s the beauty of it, they use it for everything. I’ve studied some sensevise recordings of the place; they make
their buildings with it, their bridges, their boats, Jesus they even make carts out of it. Carpentry is a major industry there.
But what I’m going to take them is a hard wood, and I mean really hard, like metal. They can use it in their furniture, or
for their tool handles, their windmill cogs even, anything that’s used every day, or rots or wears out. It’s not high technology,
yet it’ll be a real cost-effective upgrade. That ought to get me in with the merchants.”

“Hauling wood across interstellar space!” She shook her head in amazement. Only Joshua could come up with an idea so wonderfully
crazy.

“Yep,
Lady Mac
should be able to carry almost a thousand tonnes if we really pack the stuff in.”

“What sort of wood?”

“I checked in a botanical reference library file when I was in the New California system. The hardest known wood in the Confederation
is mayope, it comes from a new colony planet called Lalonde.”

Oenone
’s flyer was a flattened egg-shape, eleven metres long, with a fuselage that gleamed like purple chrome. It was built by the
Brasov Dynamics company on Kulu, who had been heavily involved with the Kulu Corporation (owned by the Crown) in pioneering
the ion-field technology which had sent panic waves through the rest of the Confederation’s as-troengineering companies. Spaceplanes
were on their way out, and Kulu was using its technological prowess to devastating political effect, granting preferential
licence production to the companies of allied star systems.

Standard ion thrusters lifted it out of
Oenone
’s little hangar and pushed it into an elliptical orbit that grazed Atlantis’s upper atmosphere. When the first wisps of molecular
fog began to thicken outside the fuselage, Oxley activated the coherent magnetic field. The flyer was immediately surrounded
by a bubble of golden haze, moderating the flow of gas streaking around the fuselage. Oxley used the flux lines to grab at
the mesosphere, braking the flyer’s velocity, and they dropped in a steep curve towards the ocean far below.

Syrinx settled back in her deeply cushioned seat in the cabin along with Ruben, Tula, and the newest member of the crew, Serina,
a crew toroid generalist who had replaced Chi. All of them were gazing keenly out of the single curving transparency around
the front of the cabin. The flyer had been customized by an industrial station at Jupiter, replacing Brasov’s original silicon
flight-control circuits with a bitek processor array; but the image from the sensors had a poor resolution compared to
Oenone
’s sensor blisters. Eyes were almost as good.