Erick’s brow crinkled in surprise.
Olsen Neale gave a modest smile. “Yes, a blackhawk. They’re fast, they’re good. And Laton will ultimately have them too if we don’t stop him. Their captains are just as unnerved by him as we are.”
“All right.” Erick gave up. “I’ll go.”
“Anything. Any piece of data. What he’s done out in the Lalonde hinterlands. Where the Yaku went. Just anything.”
“I’ll get whatever I can.”
“You could try asking this journalist, Graeme Nicholson.” He shrugged at Erick’s expression. “The man’s smart, resourceful. If anyone on that planet had the presence of mind to track the Yaku ’s jump coordinate, it’ll be him.”
Erick rose to his feet. “OK.”
“Erick . . . take care.”
The heavy curtains in Kelly Tirrel’s bedroom were drawn across the two oval windows. Ornate wall-mounted glass globes emitted a faint turquoise light. It made the white bedsheets shimmer as if they were the surface of a moonlit lake; human skin was dark and tantalizing.
Kelly let Joshua run his hands over her, parting her legs so he could probe the damp cleft hidden below her tangle of pubic hair.
“Nice,” she purred, squirming over the rumpled sheets.
His teeth shone as he parted his lips. “Good.”
“If you take me with you, there will be five days of this. Nonstop; and in free fall, too.”
“A powerful argument.”
“Money as well. Collins will pay triple rate for my passage.”
“I’m already rich.”
“So get richer.”
“Jesus, you’re a pushy bitch.”
“Is that a complaint? Did you want to be with someone else tonight?”
“Er, no.”
“Good.” Her hand slid round his balls. “This is the one for me, Joshua. This is my make or break chance. I blew the Ione story because of someone not a million kilometres from here.” Her fingers tightened slightly. “Opportunities like this don’t come to a place like Tranquillity three times in a life. If I pull it off I’ll be made; top of the seniority table, good assignments, a decent bureau posting, a real salary. You owe me this, Joshua. You owe me very big.”
“Suppose the mercenaries don’t want you with them?”
“You leave them to me. The way I’ll pitch it at them, they’ll eat up the offer. Heroes up against frightening odds helping to flatten Laton, rogues with a heart of gold, sensevised into every home in the Confederation. Come on!”
“Jesus.” There was still an uncomfortable pressure round his balls, long red nails touching his scrotum, a little too sharply to be described as tickling. She wouldn’t. Would she? Her smart, expensive grey-blue Crusto suit was folded neatly over a chair by the dresser. It had been taken off with military regimentation as she prepared for sex.
She probably would. Jesus.
“Of course I’ll take you.”
Thumb and forefinger nipped one ball impishly.
“Yow!” His eyes watered. “You don’t think you’re getting carried away with this idea, do you? I mean, there are career moves and career moves. Landing on a hostile planet behind enemy lines is pushing company loyalty to extremes.”
“Crap.” Kelly rolled onto one elbow and glared at him. “Did you see who Time Universe had introducing their studio segments? Matthias bastard Rems, that’s who. Just because he was in the right place at the right time. That lucky little shit. He’s younger than me, barely out of his nursery pen. And they gave him three days prime scheduling time. And market research says he’s popular because he’s boyish. Some women like that, it turns out. Eighty-year-old virgins, I should think. The reason Time Universe won’t let him record sensevises is because then we’d all know for sure he hasn’t got any balls.”
“Not a problem in your case, is it?”
It came out before he could think. Kelly spent a hot violent twenty minutes making him wish it hadn’t.
The nineteen starships under Terrance Smith’s command assembled a thousand kilometres beyond Tranquillity’s spaceport: the Gemal with five thousand general troops, three cargo clippers carrying their equipment and supplies, and fifteen combat-capable ships, six of which were blackhawks.
Tranquillity watched their drives come on, and the flotilla moved in towards Mirchusko at one gee. The Adamist starships employed a single-file formation (with Gemal leading) which the blackhawks encircled insolently. Strategic-defence sensor-platforms detected a vast amount of encrypted data traffic being exchanged between the ships as communication channels were tested and combat tactics exchanged.
They curved around the gas giant, heading towards its penumbra. Their drive exhausts shortened and vanished while they were still a hundred and eighty-four thousand kilometres above the unruly cloudscape, coasting towards the jump co-ordinate. Tranquillity saw the faint blue flickers of ion jets perfecting their orbital tracks; then the thermo-dump panels and sensor clusters began to withdraw. The blackhawks rushed away from the main convoy, freed of the constraints imposed by their Adamist partners, expanding in a perfectly spaced rosette. Then the bitek starships performed their swallow manoeuvre, jumping on ahead to scout for any possible trouble. Space reverberated with the gravity-wave backwash of their wormhole interstices snapping shut behind them, impinging on the habitat’s sensitive mass-detection organs.
Gemal jumped. Tranquillity noted its spacial location and velocity vector. The trajectory was aligned exactly on Lalonde. One by one the remaining starships fell into the same jump coordinate and triggered their energy patterning nodes, squeezing themselves out of space-time.
Chapter 05
Since the advent of its independence in 2238, Avon’s government had contracted civil astroengineering teams to knock fifteen large (twenty– to twenty-five-kilometre diameter) stony iron asteroids into high orbit above the planet using precisely placed and timed nuclear explosions. Fourteen of them followed the standard formula of industrialization adopted throughout the Confederation. After their orbits were stabilized with a perigee no less than a hundred thousand kilometres, their ores had been mined out and the refined metal sent down to the planet below in the form of giant lifting bodies which coasted through the atmosphere to a splash-glide landing in the ocean. The resulting caverns were expanded, regularized into cylindrical shapes, the surface sculpted into a landscape, sealed, then turned into habitable biospheres. At the same time the original ore refineries would gradually be replaced by more sophisticated industrial stations, allowing the asteroid’s economy to shift its emphasis from the bulk production of metals and minerals to finished micro-gee engineered products. The refineries moved on to a fresh asteroid in order to satisfy the demand of the planetary furnaces and steel mills, keeping the worst aspects of raw-material exploitation offplanet where the ecological pollution on the aboriginal biota was zero.
Anyone arriving at a terracompatible planet in the Confederation could tell almost at a glance how long it had been industrialized by the number of settled asteroids in orbit around it.
Avon had been opened for colonization to ethnic Canadians in 2151 during the Great Dispersal, and conformed to the usual evolutionary route out of an agrarian economy into industrialization in slightly less than a century. A satisfactory achievement, but nothing remarkable. It remained a pedestrian world until 2271 when it played host to the head of state conference called to discuss the worrying upsurge in the use of antimatter as a weapon of mass destruction. From that conference was born the Confederation, and Avon seized its chance to leapfrog an entire developmental stage by offering itself as a permanent host for the Assembly. Without any increase in exports, foreign currency poured in as governments set up diplomatic missions; and the lawyers, interstellar companies, finance institutions, influence peddlers, media conglomerates, and lobbyists followed, each with their own prestige offices and staff and dependents.