Nights Dawn (№4) - Neutronium Alchemist - Conflict

“Joshua, you’re entering into an emergency situation.”

Two curling vortex waves recoiled off the canal walls to converge above him as he passed under the shed door. “No shit!” The waves closed over his head. Neural nanonics triggered a massive adrenaline secretion, enabling him to fight his way back to the surface with recalcitrant limbs. Distorted daylight and iron-hard foam crashed around him as he floundered back into the air.

“I’m serious, Joshua. The Organization has tampered with one of the ironbergs. They altered its aerobrake trajectory so that it will land on the foundry yard. If they can’t get Mzu offplanet with them, they want her dead so she’ll have to join the Organization that way. It’s timed to crash after the spaceplane pickup was scheduled, so that if anything went wrong they’d still win.”

The canal opened up ahead of Joshua, a rigid gully stretching away to the foundry building three kilometres distant. Water rampaged along it, a thundering white-water torrent which propelled him along helplessly. He wasn’t alone. Voi came close enough for him to touch if the pounding water hadn’t been so strong, snatching her away again immediately.

“Jesus, Sarha, this is after the spaceplanes were scheduled.”

“I know. We’re tracking the ironberg, it’s going to hit you in seven minutes.”

“What? Nuke the bastard, now, Sarha.”

The leading edge of the water reached the first section of scaffolding, a lattice of heavy walkways, cage lifts, and machinery platforms. It swept the lower members away, toppling the rest of the structure. The stronger segments held together for a few seconds as the spume rolled them along, then after a few revolutions they began to break apart, metal poles sinking to the bottom.

“We can’t, Joshua. It’s already in the lower atmosphere. The combat wasps can’t reach it.”

The water reached the second stretch of scaffolding. This was larger than the first, supporting big construction mechanoids and concrete hoppers. Their weight lent a degree of stability to the edifice as the water seethed around it; several members broke free, but it managed to remain relatively intact against the initial onrush.

“Don’t worry, Joshua,” Ashly datavised. “I’m on my way. Fifty seconds and I’ll be there. We’ll be airborne long before the ironberg crashes. I can see the sheds already.”

“No, Ashly, stay back, there are possessed here; a lot of them. They’ll hit the spaceplane if they see you.”

“Target them for me; I’ve got the masers.”

“Impossible.” He saw the scaffolding up ahead and knew this was his one chance. The physiological monitor program had been issuing cautions for some time: the cold was killing him. His muscles were already badly debilitated, slow to respond. He had to get out of the water while he had some strength left. “Everybody,” he datavised, “grab the scaffolding or just crash into it if that’s all you can manage. But make sure you don’t go past. We have to get out.”

The first rusty poles were coming up very fast. He reached out a hand. None of his fingers worked inside the medical package glove, not even when his neural nanonics commanded them. “Mzu?” he datavised. “Get to the scaffolding.”

“Acknowledged.”

It wasn’t much practical use to him, but the relief that she was still alive kept that small core flame of hope flickering. The mission wasn’t an utter disaster, he still had purpose. Surprisingly important right now.

Dahybi had already reached the scaffolding, hugging a post as the water stormed past. Then Joshua was there, trying to hook his arm around a V-junction and shift his head out of the way at the same time to avoid a crack on the temple. The metal banged against his chest, and he never even felt it.

“You okay?” Dahybi datavised.

“Fucking wonderful.”

Voi was flashing past, just succeeding in jamming an arm on a pole.

Joshua inched himself further into the shaking structure. There was a ladder two metres away, and he flopped against it. The water wasn’t quite so strong now, but it was rising fast.

Mzu came thumping into the end of the scaffolding. “Mother Mary, my ribs,” she datavised. Samuel landed beside her, and wrapped a protective arm around her.

Joshua clambered up the ladder, thankful it was at a low angle. Dahybi followed him. Two more operatives caught the scaffolding, then Monica snagged herself. Gelai and Ngong swam quite normally across the canal, the cold having no effect on them at all. They grabbed the scaffolding and started shoving the numb survivors up out of the water.

“Melvyn?” Joshua datavised. “Where are you, Melvyn?” He’d been one of the first to reach the canal after Ione blew the lock gate. “Melvyn?” There wasn’t even a carrier band from the fusion specialist’s neural nanonics.

“What’s happening?” Ashly datavised. “I can’t acquire any of you on the sensors.”

“Stay back, that’s an order,” Joshua replied. “Melvyn?”

One of the ESA operatives floated past, facedown.

“Melvyn?”

“I’m sorry, Captain Calvert,” Dick Keaton datavised. “He went under.”

“Where are you?”

“End of the scaffolding.”

Joshua looked over his shoulder, seeing the limp figure suspended in the crisscross of poles thirty metres away. He was alone.

Jesus no. Another friend condemned to the beyond. Looking back at reality and begging to return.

“That’s all of us, now,” Monica datavised.

Altogether six of the operatives from the combined Edenist/ESA team had survived along with her and Samuel. Eriba’s corpse was swirling past amid a scum of brown foam. Fifteen people, out of the twenty-three who had entered Disassembly Shed Four, more if you counted the two serjeants.

“What now?” Dahybi asked.

“Climb,” Joshua told him. “We’ve got to get up to the top of the scaffolding. Our spaceplane is on its way.”

“So is a bloody ironberg.”

“Gelai, where are the possessed?” Joshua croaked.

“Coming,” she said. “Baranovich is already out of the shed. He won’t let the spaceplane land.”

“I don’t have a weapon,” Monica said. “There’s only two machine guns left between all of us. We can’t hold them back.” Her body was trembling violently as she crawled along a narrow conveyer belt connected to one of the concrete hoppers.

Joshua went up another three rungs on the ladder, then sagged from the effort.

“Captain Calvert,” Mzu datavised. “I won’t give anybody the Alchemist no matter what. I want you to know that. And thank you for your efforts.”

She’d given up, sitting huddled limply in a junction. Ngong was holding her, concentrating hard. Steam began to spout out of her suit. Joshua looked around at the rest of them, defeated and tortured by the cold. If he was going to do anything to salvage this, it would have to be extreme.

“Sarha, give me fire support,” he datavised.

“Our sensor returns are being corrupted,” she replied. “I can’t resolve the foundry yard properly. It’s the same effect we encountered on Lalonde.”

“Jesus. Okay, target me.”

“Joshua!”

“Don’t argue. Activate the designator laser and target my communications block. Do it. Ashly, stand by. The rest of you: come on, move, we have to be ready.” He took another couple of steps up the ladder.

Lady Macbeth ’s designator laser pierced the wispy residue of snow clouds. A slim shaft of emerald light congested with hazy sparkles as gusting snowflakes evaporated inside it. It was aligned on a road three hundred metres away.

“Is that on you?” Sarha asked.

“No, track north-east, two-fifty metres.”

The beam shifted fast enough to produce a blurred sheet of green light across the sky.

“East eighty metres,” Joshua instructed. “North twenty-five.”

His retinal implants had to bring their strongest filters on line as the scaffolding was swamped by brilliant green light.

“Lock coordinate—mark. Preclude one-five-zero metres. Switch to ground-strike cannon. Spiral one kilometre. Scorch it, Sarha.”

The beam moved away, its colour blooming through the spectrum until it was a deep ruby-red. Then its intensity grew; snowflakes drifting into it no longer evaporated, they burst apart. Thick brown fumes and smoking pumice gravel jetted up from the disintegrating carbon concrete at its base. It changed direction, curving around to gouge a half-metre groove in the ground. A perfect circle three hundred metres in diameter was etched out in polluted flame, with the canal scaffolding at the centre. Then the beam began to speed up, creating a hollow cylinder of vivid red light which expanded inexorably. The ground underneath it ignited, vaporizing the cloak of snow into a rolling cloud which broiled the land ahead of the beam.

It slashed across the corner of Disassembly Shed Four. Cherry-red embers flew out of the panels up the entire height of the wall. A thin sliver of composite and metal began to peel away from the bulk of the shed. Then the laser struck it again. It cut a deeper chunk this time, which started to pitch over in pursuit of the first. Both of them were surrounded by a cascade of embers. The beam continued around on its spiral.

Disassembly Shed Four died badly, chopped into thin curving slices by the relentless laser. The individual wedges collapsed and crumpled against each other, softened and sagging from the immense thermal input to descend in slippery serpentine riots. When almost a fifth of it had gone, the remaining framework could no longer sustain itself. The walls and roof buckled groggily, twisting and imploding. Its final convulsions were illuminated by the laser, which continued to chop the falling wreckage into ribbons of slag. Steam geysers roared upwards as pyrexic debris slithered into the basin, flattening out to obscure the bubbling ruin in a virgin-white funeral shroud.

Nothing could survive the ground strike. The security police raced for their cars as soon as it began, only to be overtaken by the outwards spiral. Baranovich and his fellow possessed took refuge back in the Disassembly Shed under the assumption that anything that massive was bound to be safe. When that folly was revealed, some of them dived into the canal, only to be parboiled. A couple of hapless foundry yard staff on their way to investigate the noises and light coming from the mothballed shed were caught and reduced to a fog of granular ash.

The laser beam vanished.

Secure at the vestal centre of the remorseless sterilization he had unleashed, Joshua datavised the all-clear to Ashly. The spaceplane streaked out of the roiling sky to land beside the canal. Joshua and the others waited at the top of the scaffolding, hunched up as the warm wind created by the laser’s passage blew against them.

“Hanson evac service,” Ashly datavised as the airstairs slid out from the airlock. “Close shaves a speciality. Shift your arses, we’ve only got two minutes till it hits.”

Alkad Mzu was first up the airstairs, followed by Voi.

“I won’t take you as you are,” Joshua told Gelai and Ngong. “I can’t, you know that.” Monica and Samuel were standing behind the two ex-Garissans, machine guns cradled ready.

“We know,” Gelai said. “But do you know you will be in our position one day?”

“Please,” Joshua said. “We don’t have time for this. None of us are going to jeopardize Mzu now, not after what we’ve been through to get her. Not even me. They’ll shoot you, and I won’t try to stop them.”

Gelai nodded morosely. Her black skin faded to a pasty white as the possessing soul relinquished control, ruffled ginger hair tumbled down over her shoulders. The girl sank to her knees, jaw open to wail silently.

Joshua put his arms under her shoulders to carry her into the spaceplane. Samuel was doing the same for the old man who had been possessed by Ngong.

“Dick, give me a hand,” Joshua grunted as he reached the bottom of the airstairs.

“Sorry, Captain,” Dick Keaton said. “But this is where necessity dictates we part company. I have to say, though, it’s been quite an experience. Wouldn’t have missed it for anything.”

“Jesus, there’s an ironberg falling on us!”

“Don’t worry. I’ll be perfectly safe. And I can hardly come with you now my cover’s been blown, now can I?”

“What the fuck are you?”

“Closer, Captain.” He grinned. “Much closer, this time. Goodbye, and good luck.”

Joshua glared at the man—if that’s what he really was—and hauled the semi-conscious girl up the airstairs.

Keaton stood back as the spaceplane took off, its compressor efflux whipping his ice-speckled hair about. He waved solemnly as it pitched up and accelerated away over the ruined smoking land.

High in the western sky, a red dot glimmered malevolently, growing larger by the second.

The spaceplane cabin canted up sharply, slinging Joshua back into a chair. Acceleration was two gees and rising fast. “What’s our status, Ashly?”

“Good. We’ve got an easy twenty seconds left. Not even a real race against the clock. Did I tell you about the time when I was flying covert landings for the Marseilles Militia?”

“You told me. Pump the cabin temperature up, please, we’re freezing back here.” He accessed the spaceplane’s sensor suite. They were already two kilometres high, well out over the lacklustre grey sea. The ironberg was level with them, and sinking rapidly.

Joshua, who had grown up in a bitek habitat and captained a faster-than-light starship for a living, regarded it in dismayed awe. Something that big simply did not belong in the air. It was falling at barely subsonic velocity, spinning with slow elegance to maintain its trajectory. A thick braided vapour trail streaked away from its rounded tip, creating a perfectly straight line through the sky before rupturing two hundred metres higher up when the massive horizontal shock waves created by its turbulence crashed back together. Aerobrake friction made its scalloped base shine a baleful topaz at the centre, grading down to bright coral pink at the rim.

For the doomed staff left in the yard the strangest aspect of its drop was the silence. It was unreal, looking up at the devil’s fist as it descended upon you, and hearing nothing but the lazy squawking of seabirds.

The energy burst from seventy-five thousand tonnes of steel striking the ground at three hundred metres per second was cataclysmic. The blast wave razed the remaining Disassembly Sheds, sending hundreds of thousands of shattered composite panels ripping through the air. They were instantly ignited by the accompanying thermal release, crowning the maelstrom with a raging halo of flame. Last came the ground shock, a mini-quake which rippled out for several kilometres through the boggy soil, plucking the huge smelters from the skeletal remains of their furnace buildings and flinging them across the marshy wasteland at the rear of the yard. The sea retreated hastily from the catastrophe, deserting the shoreline in a series of huge breakers which fought against the incoming tide for several minutes. But in the end, the tremors ceased, and the water came rushing back to obliterate any last sign that the yard had ever existed.

“Ho, man, that is just orgasmic,” Quinn said. The bridge’s holoscreens were pumping out a blaze of white light as the first of the antimatter explosions blossomed above Nyvan. So much destruction excited him; he could see hundreds of combat wasps in flight above the nightside continents. “God’s Brother is helping us, Dwyer. This is His signal to start. Just look at those mothers go at it. There won’t be a single nuke left on the planet to fight off the fall of Night.”

“Quinn, the other nations are firing combat wasps at Jesup. We’re naked out here, we’ve got to jump.”

“How long till they arrive?”

“Three, four minutes.”

“Plenty of time,” Quinn said smoothly. He checked the communications displays to ensure the starship’s secure lasers were still linked with Jesup and the three abandoned asteroids. “An occasion like this, I ought to say something, but fuck it, I’m not in the dignity business.” He typed in the arming code and watched as the display symbology turned a beautiful dangerous red. His finger went straight to the execute command key and tapped it eagerly.

Ninety-seven fusion bombs detonated; the majority of them one-hundred-megaton blasts.

The sensors which were protruding above the fuselage of Mount’s Delta observed Jesup wobble. Quinn had ordered his trusted disciples to place the bombs in a line below the biosphere cavern where the rock was thinnest. Huge flakes of rock fell away from the asteroid’s crinkled outer surface, allowing jets of raw plasma to stab out. It was a precision application of force, splitting the rock clean open. The biosphere cavern was ruined instantly as nuclear volcanoes erupted out of the floor to exterminate all the life it sustained. Shock waves hurtled through the rock, opening up immense fracture patterns and shattering vast sections already weakened from centuries of mining.

Centrifugal force took over from the bombs to complete the destruction, applying intolerable torque stresses on the remaining sections of rock. Hill-sized chunks of regolith crumbled away, rotation flinging them clear. Tornadoes of hot, radioactive air poured into space, forming a thin cyclone around the fragmenting asteroid.

Quinn slammed a fist into his console. “Fucked!” he yelled victoriously. “Totally fucking fucked. I did it. Now they’ll know His might is for real. The Night is going to fall, Dwyer, sure as shit floats to the top.”

Sensors aligned on the three abandoned asteroids revealed similar scenes of devastation.

“But—Why? Why, Quinn?”

Quinn laughed joyfully. “Back on Earth we learned everything there was to know about climate, all those doomsdays waiting to bite our arses if we aren’t good obedient little Govcentral mechanoids. Don’t violate the environmental laws else you’ll wind up drowning in your own crap. Garbage like that. Everybody knows the entire flekload, the whole arcology from the tower nerds to the subtown kids. I heard about nuclear winters and dinosaur killers before I could walk.” He banged a finger on the holoscreen’s surface. “And this is it. Earth’s nightmare out of the box. Those rocks are going to pulverize Nyvan. Doesn’t matter if they smash down on land or water; they’re going to blast gigatonnes of shit up into the atmosphere. I’m not talking some crappy little smog layer up in the sky, it’s going to be the fucking sky. Wet black soot stretching from the ground to the stratosphere, so thick it’ll give you cancer just breathing it for five minutes. They’ll never see sunlight again, never. And when the possessed take over the whole fucking ball game down there, it still ain’t going to help them. They can shunt Nyvan out of the universe, but they haven’t got the power to clean the air. Only He can do that. God’s Brother will bring them light.” Quinn hugged Dwyer energetically. “They’ll pray to Him to come and liberate them. They can’t do anything else. He is their only salvation now. And I did it for Him. Me! I’ve brought Him a whole fucking planet to join His legions. Now I know it works, I’m going to do it to every planet in the Confederation. Every single one, that’s my crusade now. Starting with Earth.”

Secure communications lasers slid back down inside the fuselage, along with the sensors; and the Mount’s Delta vanished inside an event horizon. Behind it, the low-orbit battle ran its course, the protagonists unaware of the true holocaust growing above them. The four tremendous clouds of rocky detritus were expanding at a constant rate, watched by the horrified surviving asteroids. Seventy per cent of the mass would miss the planet. But that still left thousands of fragments which would rain down through the atmosphere over the next two days. Each one would have a destructive potential hundreds of times greater than the ironberg. And with their planet’s electronics reduced to trash, its spaceships smashed, its SD platforms vaporized, and its astroengineering stations in ruins, there was absolutely nothing Nyvan’s population could do to prevent the onrush. Only pray.

Just as Quinn prophesied.

Chapter 12

The Leonora Cephei ’s radar was switched to long-range scanning mode, searching for any sign of another ship. After five hours gliding inertly along its orbital path, there hadn’t been a single contact.

“How much longer do you expect me to muck in with this charade of yours?” Captain Knox asked scathingly. He indicated the holoscreen which was displaying the ship’s radar return. “I’ve seen Pommy cricket teams with more life in them than this bugger.”

Jed looked at the console; its symbology meant nothing to him, for all he knew the flight computer could be displaying schematics for Leonora Cephei ’s waste cycling equipment. He felt shamed by his own technological ignorance. He only ever came into the compartment when he was summoned by Knox; and the only summonses he got was when the captain found something new to complain about. He now made damn sure he brought Beth and Skibbow with him each time; it made the whole experience a little less like being humiliated by Digger.

“If this is the coordinate, they’ll be here,” Jed insisted. This was the right time for the rendezvous. So where was the starship? He didn’t want to look at Beth again. She didn’t appear entirely sympathetic to his plight.

“Another hour,” Knox said. “That’s what I’ll give you, then we head for Tanami. There are some cargoes for me there. Real ones.”

“We’ll wait a damn sight more than one hour, matey,” Beth said.

“You get what you paid for.”

“In that case we’ll be here for six months; that’s how much cash we bloody well shelled out.”

“One hour.” Knox’s pale skin was reddening again; he wasn’t used to his command decisions being questioned on his own bridge.

“Balls. We’re here for as long as it takes, pal. Right, Jed?”

“Er. Yes. We should wait a bit longer.” Beth’s silent contempt made him want to cringe.

Knox gestured broadly in mock-reasonableness. “Long enough for the oxygen to run out, or can we head for port before that?”

“You regenerate the atmosphere,” Beth said. “Stop being such a pain. We wait until our transport turns up. That’s final.”

“You flaming kids, you’re all crazy. You don’t see my children becoming Deadnights. Deadheads more like. What do you think is going to happen to you if you ever reach Valisk? That Kiera is bullshitting you.”

“No she’s not!” Jed said heatedly.

Knox was surprised at his resentment. “Okay, kid. I understand, I used to let my balls think for me when I was your age.” He winked at Beth.

She glowered back at him.

“We wait as long at it takes,” Gerald said quietly. “We are going to Valisk. All of us. That’s what I paid you for, Captain.” It was hard for him to be silent when people talked about Marie, especially the way they talked about her, as if she were some kind of communal girlfriend. Since the voyage started he had managed to hold his tongue. He found life a lot easier on board the small ship; the simple daily routine in which everything was laid out for him in advance was quite a comfort. So what they said about Marie, their idolization of the demon who controlled her, didn’t snarl him up with anguish. They spoke from ignorance. He was wise to that. Loren would be proud of him for exercising such control.

“All right, we’ll wait awhile,” Knox said. “It’s your charter.” It always embarrassed him when Skibbow spoke. The man had episodes , you never knew how he was going to behave. So far there had been no anger or violence. So far.

Fifteen minutes later, Captain Knox’s little quandaries and problems were banished as the radar detected a small object three kilometres away which hadn’t been there a millisecond before. There was the usual weird peripheral fuzz indicating a wormhole terminus, and the object was expanding rapidly. He accessed the Leonora Cephei ’s sensors to watch the bitek starship emerging.

“Oh, sweet Christ Almighty,” he groaned. “You crazy bastards. We’re dead meat now. Bloody dead!”

Mindor slipped out of the wormhole terminus and stretched its wings wide. Its head swung around so that one eye could fix the Leonora Cephei with a daunting stare.

Jed looked into one of the bridge’s AV pillars, seeing the huge hellhawk flap its wings in slow sweeps, closing the distance with deceptive speed. Disquiet gave way to a kind of reverence. He whooped enthusiastically and hugged Beth. She grinned indulgently back at him.

“That’s something, huh?”

“Sure is.”

“We did it, we bloody did it.”

A terrified Captain Knox ignored the babbling, insane kids and ordered the main communications dish to point at Pinjarra so he could call the Trojan cluster capital for help. Not, he guessed, that it would do the slightest good.

Rocio Condra was ready for it. After several dozen clandestine pickups he knew exactly how the captains reacted to his appearance. Out of the eight short-range defence lasers secured to his hull, only three were still functioning, and that was only because they utilized bitek processor control circuitry. The rest had succumbed to the vagaries of his energistic power, which he could never quite contain. He targeted the dish as it started to track around, and sent a half-second pulse into its central transmission module.

“Do not attempt to contact anyone,” he broadcast.

“I understand,” a shaken Knox datavised.

“Good. Are you carrying Deadnights for transfer?”

“Yes.”

“Stand by for rendezvous and docking. Tell them to be ready.”

The monster bird folded its wings as it manoeuvred closer to the spindly inter-orbit craft. Its outline began to waver as it rolled around its long axis; feathers giving way to dull green polyp, avian shape reverting to the earlier compressed-cone hull. There were changes, though: the scattered purple rings were now long ovals, mimicking its feather pattern. Of the three rear fins, the central one had shrunk, while the two outer ones had elongated and flattened back.

With the roll manoeuvre complete, Mindor ’s life-support module lay parallel to the Leonora Cephei . Rocio Condra extended the airlock tube. Now, he could sense the minds inside the inter-orbit ship’s life-support capsule. It contained the usual split between trepidatious crew and ridiculously exuberant Deadnights. This time there was an addition, a strange mind, dulled yet happy, with thoughts moving in erratic rhythms.

He watched with idle curiosity through the internal optical sensors as the Deadnights came aboard. The interior of the life-support module had come to resemble a nineteenth-century steamship, with a profusion of polished rosewood surfaces and brass fittings. According to the pair of possessed, Choi-Ho and Maxim Payne, who served as maintenance crew, there was also a fairly realistic smell of salt water. Rocio was pleased with the realism, which was far more detailed and solid than the possessed usually achieved. That was due to the nature of the hellhawk’s neuron cell structure which contained hundreds of subnodes arranged in processorlike lattices. They were intended to act as semi-autonomic regulators for his technological modules. Once he had conjured up the image he wanted and loaded it into a subnode it was maintained without conscious thought, and with an energistic strength unavailable to an ordinary human brain.

The last few weeks had been a revelation to Rocio Condra. After the initial bitter resentment, he had discovered that life as a hellhawk was about as rich as it was possible to have, although he did miss sex. And he’d been talking to some of the others about that; theoretically they could simply grow the appropriate genitalia (those that didn’t insist on imagining themselves as techno starships). If they accomplished that, there was no real reason to go back into human bodies. Which of course would make them independent of Kiera. For an entity that lived forever, the variety which would come from trying out a new creature’s body and life cycle every few millennia might just be the final answer to terminal ennui.

Accompanying the revelation was a growing resentment at the way Kiera was using them—to which the prospect of fighting for Capone was a worrying development. Even if he was offered a human body now, Rocio was doubtful he wanted to go with the habitat. He wasn’t frightened of space like the rest of the returned souls, not anymore, not possessing this magnificent creature. Space and all its emptiness was to be loved for its freedom.

Gravity returned slowly as Gerald drifted through the airlock tube, his shoulder bag in tow. The airlock compartment he landed in was almost identical to the one he had left behind. But it was larger, its technology more discreet, and outside the hatch Choi-Ho and Maxim Payne greeted him with smiles and comforting words where behind Knox and his eldest son had stood guard over their hatch with TIP carbines and scowls.

“There are several cabins available,” Choi-Ho said. “Not enough for everyone, so you’ll probably have to double up.”

Gerald smiled blankly, which came over more as a frightened grimace.

“Pick any one,” she told him kindly.

“When will we get there?” Gerald asked.

“We have a rendezvous in the Kabwe system in eight hours, after that we’ll be going back to Valisk. It should be about twenty hours.”

“Twenty? Is that all?”

“Yes.”

“Twenty.” It was said with deference. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, quite sure.” People were starting to bunch up in the airlock behind him; all of them curiously reluctant to push past. “A cabin,” she suggested hopefully.

“Come on, Gerald, mate,” Beth said breezily. She took his arm and pulled gently. He walked obediently down the corridor with her. He only stopped once, and that was to look over his shoulder and say an earnest, “Thank you,” to an oddly intrigued Choi-Ho.