It should have been, he decided later, golden-age space travel, slow and leisured. The only possible equivalent was a voyage in a 1930s-vintage airship, although those would probably have better food. And a decent view.
Perfect, if he could just have forgotten about her. But the loneliness and relative isolation contrived to tweak every tiny memory into a full-on reverie. The color of a graphic display reminded him of a certain dress she wore, exactly that shade of turquoise. Food was a meal they had shared once. Menus on the multimedia library brought back the hours they spent accessing together, curled up in each other's arms on the couch in his den.
Starflight, the desire of his life, was made wretched by the love of his life. Ironies didn't come much worse.
Earth, however, did not disappoint. During the orbital transit flight from Glencoe Star, McArthur's Lagrange point base, he spent almost the whole time pressed up against one of the ship's four viewports watching the planet grow larger—blissfully unaware of the radiation threat. He'd thought his departing view of Amethi to be the most wondrous sight of his life, with its surface features of ocher, ash and white, and Nizana's dusky radiance reflected from Barclay's Glacier. But Earth with its vibrant montage of living colors made his heart ache as it grew closer and brighter. He landed in a Xianti, bitter at the spaceplane's lack of windows.
McArthur's principal spaceport was Gibraltar, the Rock's inhabitants still stubbornly clinging to their independence from Spain, if not the European Federation. Their government council had negotiated a deal with McArthur, involving liberal taxes in exchange for infrastructure investment and a mutual noninvolvement/liability clause.
The politics went clean over Lawrence's head. Once he was out of the spaceplane and through the arrivals hall (where he generated a brief flurry of interest from security— uneasy at allowing a Board family member to wander around unaccompanied), all he wanted to do was get outside and experience the romance of the Old World. He walked away from the terminal building that now occupied the site of the ancient RAF base and went down to the huge spaceplane runway that the company had built, a five-kilometer strip of concrete stabbing out into the Med. For hours, he simply stood in wonder on the boulders that skirted the concrete, looking out across the water. Spain was on one side, an unbroken swath of urbanization that ran along the shoreline right over the horizon, with the mottled brown slopes of low mountains rising up behind the tumbling sprawl of whitewashed buildings. Africa haunted the other side of the sea, a dark, featureless stripe highlighting the boundary between water and sky.
For some strange reason, given how he'd actually flown across half of Amethi, this planet seemed much larger. He simply couldn't get used to the scale of the elements. So much water, lapping and frothing around his feet. It gave off the most potent smell, hundreds of subtle scents blending together in a harsh salt zest. And the air... nothing had ever been so warm in his life, he was sure of it, not even the tropical domes. The heat and humidity made it hard to breathe.
It wasn't until the sun fell and the lights from the Costa twinkled over the swelling water that he turned around and made his way into Gibraltar town. Money wasn't too much of a problem; his Amethi credits were easily changed at the bank for EZ Dollars. With the resulting balance he'd be able to stay in any average hotel for several months before even thinking about getting a job. That wasn't what he wanted.
He remained in Gibraltar for several days, spending nearly all of the time accessing the global datapool, filling in significant gaps in his political education. The one thing Roselyn had been truthful about, he was relieved to discover, was Zantiu-Braun. Most companies were reducing their starflight operations to an essential minimum: keeping in contact with existing colonies and asset-realization missions on planets newly acquired from their struggling founder companies. While almost alone, Z-B maintained a small exploration fleet, and was still establishing colonies through their portals. Although even they weren't building any new starships. All the Lagrange shipyards had either been mothballed or turned into service and maintenance bays.
Starflight really was an era that was drawing to a close. But it wasn't over yet Even at its current wind-down rate, there would be ships flying for decades.
A week after arriving on Earth, he took a train to Paris and walked into Zantiu-Braun's headquarters. The personnel division, like McArthur security before them, were slightly flustered by his origin. However, the AS and human supervisor managed to convince him his best way into the exploration fleet was through their general Astronautics Division. He didn't, they pointed out, have enough money to buy himself an initial stake in Z-B large enough to select his career path. What he should do, like hundreds of thousands before him, was get in on the bottom rung and earn the stake necessary to make the transition. As an added advantage, people who applied from in-house were always given preferential selection over those coming from outside. His lack of a university education was dismissed as unimportant at this stage: Z-B always offered educational sabbaticals to any staff member eager to progress up through the company structure. And as it happened, there were openings in an Astronautics Division that would serve as an excellent primer to their starship officer college. Had he ever thought of a career in strategic security?
Two days later he was on the train to Toulouse.
Eight months after that, he was in space again, heading for the Kinabica system. He and Colin Schmidt, the two newest members of Platoon 435NK9, were held in pretty high contempt by their fellow squaddies.
Kinabica was one of the earliest star systems to be settled, and in two and a half centuries it'd achieved a respectable socioeconomic status, with a high-level technology base. Quite how and why its founding company, Kaba, had divested itself of such a primary asset was never detailed in the briefings the platoon were given. Kinabica with its population of seventy million was now effectively self-supporting. All the principal investment had been made. There was no more heavy-duty industrial plant to be shipped out, no more biochemical factories or food refineries required, no mining equipment that couldn't be built locally. Everything was there, in place, wired up and chugging away merrily.
"It's because there's no dividend," Corporal Ntoko told Lawrence one day during the flight. Like every newbie, Lawrence was filling his day with questions, though he asked a lot more than Colin. Ntoko had taken some pity on him and supplied him with a few answers. It did at least stop the questions for a while. "Kaba has poured money into Kinabica ever since its discovery, and it's getting virtually nothing in return. The whole place is a rotten stake for investors on Earth."