Groener made a little bow to his receding back. "I shall be there, Provost," she said, snapping her heels together uselessly. "Early..." For a moment, her face took on an expression of hopelessness, then she shook her head and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, she stared musingly at the Carescrian for a long moment. "Buy you a drink, Mr. Brim?" she asked, resting against the bar and conspicuously thrusting her magnificent bust toward him.
Brim looked into her eyes for a moment, then boldly stared down at the breasts straining at her tunic.
"Depends," he said.
"On what?" she asked with a slight frown.
"On what you had in mind for after the reception," he said. "Perhaps I won't even want a drink."
Suddenly, he felt her hand on his thigh. It traveled slowly to his crotch. And even though she did smell of TimeWeed, he felt his breathing begin to grow deeper. "Come to think about it, Inge," he said, feeling his pulse quicken, "I guess I'm not terribly interested in another drink—but you do have something I want a lot more than meem."
"As have you," she whispered.
Brim shook his head. "Your embassy or mine?" he asked. "I seem to have inherited a car."
She looked at him with an honest grin and shook her head in irony. "Wilf Brim," she laughed, "I have actually been on assignments where I tried to penetrate your xaxtdamned Imperial Embassy."
"I'm afraid this assignment will get you only as far as a room in the visitor's sleeping wing," he said.
"That will be fine," she laughed, "—and a lot better than I managed on my own." She shook her head ruefully. "I never was cut out for this business of war. I suppose I'm simply more of a Helmsman than a penetrator."
Brim took her arm and helped her to her feet. "Let's go find that car of mine, Inge," he said with a grin.
"I'm both a Helmsman and a penetrator."
"Ah yes," she laughed happily, "I was counting on that."
Uadn'aps was much higher in Dahlem's morning sky than Brim had planned when an embassy car delivered him to the race complex at Lake Tegeler. Three new Leaguer battleships brooded just off the far bank. This morning, however, Brim was more interested in the Leaguer's shed. An empty gravity pad sat in front of its doors. True to her word, Inge Groener must have reported for work early. He only hoped she shared the glow he felt from their lovemaking. The athletic beauty had proven herself both gentle and violent—and always precisely at the right times. He shook his head as the car sped along the apron. People like Inge Groener made it difficult to make blanket statements about Leaguers. He wondered how many other nice ones there might be.
Neither Moulding nor the redhead were among the colorful gathering of Imperials taking the morning air.
Nearby, the M-4 hovered on its gravity pad looking for all the Universe like a teardrop resting on two fat needles. A small army of technicians still swarmed over her brilliantly polished hullmetal, making last-moment changes to controls and rigging. In spite of himself, Brim's first glimpse of the graceful little ship brought back Admiral Anak's dire query: I don't suppose there is any way to deter you from that sort of vainglorious nonsense?
He hurried to the locker room and changed into the latest issue Imperial battle suit—tinted yellow instead of blue to de-emphasize the ISS's many ties to the Imperial Fleet. Then he strode out to meet Valerian on the apron. But Anak's frowning countenance refused to leave his mind's eye: Engineers from both Gantheisser and Gorn-Hoff have calculated that the two Lyon Napiers in your M-four will interact with destructive resonance flutter when you reach approximately eighty-two M LightSpeed.
Clad in his usual tweeds, the designer looked up and smiled when Brim was within haling distance. "How does she look to you?" he asked.
Brim forced himself to smile. "She looks beautiful," he said truthfully, climbing to the rim of the gravity pad with the breeze full in his face. The morning smelled of high summer—fresh-cut grass and water—blended with the odors of hot metal, fresh sealant, ozone, and heated logics from the ship. "How do you feel about her?" he asked.
Valerian shrugged and pursed his lips. "She's solid enough," he said. "I've been with the crew all night and watched just about every fastener slide home and lock." He turned his hands palms up. "I guess she's as ready to go as I can make her. You want to do a walkaround?"
"I'm inclined to take your word, Mark," Brim said. "For this particular bird, you've got to be the greatest Crew Chief in the known Universe."
"Well," Valerian drawled with a grin, "she was all right when I looked her over ten cycles ago—but there's no telling what might have gone wrong since then."
They spent the next metacycle checking drain plugs, access doors, panel tracks, and plumbing mazes before they were finished; each was important—and each was flawless. But the inspection came nowhere near answering the burning question Kabul Anak had planted in Brim's mind the night before.
Ultimately, the Carescrian capitulated to his doubts. "How about resonance flutter between those two big Lyon Napiers?" he asked Valerian. "Is the ship really well enough braced for all that power?"
"Resonance flutter," Valerian mused with a nod. "I wondered if there wasn't something bothering you."
He scratched his head. "Well, I'll have to admit it's a possibility, all right. Those two big crystals will be putting out some powerful oscillations—especially in the mass component..."
"And at exactly the same frequency," Brim finished for him. He shook his head. "How much clearance is there between them?"
Valerian closed his eyes a moment while he pinched the bridge of his nose. "Fifteen point nine three five irals, virtual center to virtual center," he said presently. "It's close, but I think it ought to be enough."
Brim made his own mental calculations. "That means I'm safe at least to eighty M LightSpeed, doesn't it?" he asked.
"Probably a little faster even," Valerian assured him. "And, of course, there may be no flutter till twice that speed. Voot's beard, you might never get any at all." He shook his head in mock confusion. "It mostly has to do with the shape of the side lobes they radiate—and these particular beauties ought to be specially safe to work with. Their energy lobes stretch aft—not sideways where they can interact at high time constants. Besides," he added, "the League won it last year for sixty-seven point two M's, so you ought to be able to make a race of it this year for not much more than eighty M's, give or take a few LightSpeeds."
At that moment, a sleek, white Gantheisser GA 209V-2 thundered out of the morning sky, turned gracefully onto final, and descended to the water, skimming the surface in an arrow-straight cascade of spume for nearly a c'lenyt. Brim grinned as it came to a hover above its gravity foot. If Inge Groener's landfall were any indication of her condition, she had a great glow going for her. Then his musing was interrupted by a blue-clad messenger rushing from the shed at a dead run, calling his name at the top of her voice.
"They timed Inge Groener from one of our observation ships this morning," she shouted when she reached the gravity pad, "and it looks like the new Gantheisser's a lot faster than any of us thought it would be."
Brim felt a cold finger of dread trace his spine. He glanced for a moment at Valerian, then knelt on one knee and looked down at the messenger. "How many M's?" he asked.