Meyer let out a distressed groan, and drained his glass.

Joshua was up at the bar when the woman approached him. He didn’t even see her until she spoke, his attention was elsewhere. The barmaid’s name was Helen Vanham, she was nineteen, with a dress cut lower than Harkey’s normal, and she seemed eager to serve Joshua Calvert, the starship captain. She said she finished work at two in the morning.

“Captain Calvert?”

He turned from the pleasing display of cleavage and thigh. Jesus, but that title felt good. “You got me.”

The woman was black, very black. There couldn’t have been much geneering in her family, he decided, although he was suspicious about that deep pigmentation; she was fifty centimetres shorter than him, and her short beret of hair was frosted with strands of silver. He reckoned she was about sixty years old, and ageing naturally.

“I’m Dr Alkad Mzu,” she said.

“Good evening, Doctor.”

“I understand you have a ship you’re fitting out?”

“That’s right, the Lady Macbeth . Finest independent trader this side of the Kulu Kingdom. Are you interested in chartering her?”

“I may be.”

Joshua skipped a beat. He took another look at the small woman. Alkad Mzu was dressed in a suit of grey fabric, a slim collar turned up around her neck. She seemed very serious, her features composed in a permanent expression of resignation. And right at the back of his mind there was a faint tingle of warning.

You’re being oversensitive, he told himself, just because she doesn’t smile doesn’t mean she’s a threat. Nothing is a threat in Tranquillity, that’s the beauty of this place.

“Medicine must pay very well these days,” he said.

“It’s a physics doctorate.”

“Oh, sorry. Physics must pay very well.”

“Not really. I’m a member of the team researching Laymil artefacts.”

“Yeah? You must have heard of me, then, I found the electronics stack.”

“Yes, I heard, although memory crystals aren’t my field. I mainly study their fusion drives.”

“Really? Can I get you a drink?”

Alkad Mzu blinked, then slowly looked about. “Yes, this is a bar, isn’t it. I’ll just have a white wine, then, thank you.”

Joshua signalled to Helen Vanham for a wine. Receiving a very friendly smile in return.

“What exactly was the charter?” he asked.

“I need to visit a star system.”

Definitely weird, Joshua thought. “That’s what Lady Mac does best. Which star system?”

“Garissa.”

Joshua frowned, he thought he knew most star systems. He consulted his neural nanonics cosmology file. That was when his humour really started to deflate. “Garissa was abandoned thirty years ago.”

Alkad Mzu received her slim glass from the barmaid, and tasted the wine. “It wasn’t abandoned, Captain. It was annihilated. Ninety-five million people were slaughtered by the Omutan government. The Confederation Navy managed to get some off after the planet-buster strike, about seven hundred thousand. They used marine transports and colonist-carrier ships.” Her eyes clouded over. “They abandoned the rescue effort after a month. There wasn’t a lot of point. The radiation fallout had reached everyone who survived the blasts and tsunamis and earthquakes and superstorms. Seven hundred thousand out of ninety-five million.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

Her lips twitched around the rim of the glass. “Why should you? An obscure little planet that died before you were born; for politics that never made any sense even then. Why should anybody remember?”

Joshua shot the fuseodollars from his Jovian Bank credit card into the bar’s accounts block as the barmaid delivered his tray of champagne bottles. There was an oriental man at the far end of the bar who was keeping an unobtrusive watch on himself and Dr Mzu over his beer mug. Joshua forced himself not to stare in return. He smiled at Helen Vanham and added a generous tip. “Dr Mzu, I have to be honest. I can take you to the Garissan system, but a landing given those circumstances is out of the question.”

“I understand, Captain. And I appreciate your honesty. I don’t wish to land, simply to visit.”

“Ah, er, good. Garissa was your homeworld?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s the third time you’ve said that to me.”

“One of those evenings, I guess.”

“How much would it cost me?”

“For a single passenger, there and back; you’re looking at about five hundred thousand fuseodollars. I know it’s a lot, but the fuel expenditure will be the same for one person as a full cargo hold. And the crew time is the same as well, they all need paying.”

“I doubt I can raise your full charter fee in advance. My research position is a comfortable one, but not that comfortable. However, I can assure you that once we reach our destination adequate funds will be available. Does that interest you?”

Joshua gripped the tray tighter, interested despite himself. “It may be possible to come to an arrangement, subject to a suitable deposit. And my rates are quite reasonable, you won’t find any cheaper.”

“Thank you, Captain. Can I have a copy of your ship’s handling parameters and cargo capacity? I need to know whether the Lady Macbeth can fulfil my requirements, they are rather specialized.”

Jesus, if she needs to know how big the cargo hold is, just what is she planning on bringing back? Whatever it is, it must have been hidden for thirty years.

His neural nanonics reported she had opened a channel. “Sure.” He datavised over the Lady Mac ’s performance tables.

“I’ll be in touch, Captain. Thank you for the drink.”

“My pleasure.”

At the other end of the bar, Onku Noi, First Lieutenant serving in the Oshanko Imperial Navy, and assigned to the C5 Intelligence arm (Foreign Observation Division), finished his beer and paid the bill. The audio discrimination program in his neural nanonics had filtered out the bar’s chatter and background music, allowing him to record the conversation between Alkad Mzu and the handsome young starship captain. He stood up and opened a channel into Tranquillity’s communication net, requesting access to the spaceport’s standard commercial reference memory core. The file on the Lady Macbeth and Joshua Calvert was datavised into his neural nanonics. What he accessed caused an involuntary twitch in his jaw muscle. Lady Macbeth was a combat-capable starship, complete with antimatter drive and combat-wasp launch-rails, and she was being capaciously refurbished. Pausing only to confirm Joshua Calvert’s visual profile was filed correctly in his neural nanonics memory cell, he followed Dr Mzu out of Harkey’s Bar, keeping an unobtrusive thirty seconds behind her.

Joshua, interested before, was now outright fascinated as he surreptitiously watched the three men trailing after the diminutive Dr Mzu almost collide in the doorway. His intuition had been right again.

Jesus, who is she?

Tranquillity would know. But then Tranquillity would know she was being tailed as well, and who the tails were. Which meant that Ione would know.

He still hadn’t resolved his feelings about Ione. There couldn’t be anyone in the universe who was better at sex, but knowing that Tranquillity was looking at him out of those enchanting sea-blue eyes, that all those fluffy girlish mannerisms were wrapped around thought processes cooler than solid helium, was more than a little disconcerting. Though never inhibiting. She had been quite right about that, he simply couldn’t say no. Not to her.

He returned to her every day, as instinctively as a migrating bird to an equatorial continent. It was exciting screwing the Lord of Ruin, a Saldana. And the feel of her body pressed against his was supremely erotic.

The male ego, he often reflected these days, was a puppet master with a very black sense of humour.

Joshua didn’t have any time to ponder the puzzle of Dr Mzu before someone else hailed him. He turned with a slightly pained expression on his face.

A thirty-year-old man in a slightly worn navy-blue ship’s one-piece was pushing through the throng, waving hopefully. He was just a few centimetres shorter than Joshua with the kind of regular features below short black hair that suggested a good deal of geneering. There was a smile on his face, apprehensive and keen at the same time.

“Yes?” Joshua asked wearily, he was only halfway back to his table.

“Captain Calvert? I’m Erick Thakrar, a ship’s general systems engineer, grade five.”

“Ah,” Joshua said.

Warlow’s thousand-decibel laugh blasted out, silencing the bar for an instant.

“Grade ratings are mostly down to logged flight hours,” Erick said. “I did a lot of time in port maintenance. I’m up to grade three level in practice, if not more.”

“And you’re looking for a berth?”

“That’s right.”

Joshua hesitated, He still had a couple of berths to fill, and one of them was for a systems generalist. But that itchy sensation of discomfort had returned, much stronger than it had been with Dr Mzu.

Jesus, what’s this one, a serial killer?

“I see,” he said.

“I would be a bargain, I’m only asking grade five pay.”

“I prefer to make flight pay a percentage of the charter fee, or a percentage of profits if we trade our own cargo.”

“Sounds pretty good to me.”

Joshua couldn’t fault his attitude. Youthful, enthusiastic, no doubt a good worker, obviously willing to accept the rule bending necessary to keep independent ships flying. Ordinarily, a man you’d want at your back. But that intimation of wrongness wouldn’t leave.

“OK, let me have your CV file, and I’ll look it over,” he said. “But not tonight, I’m in no fit state to make command judgements tonight.”

In the end he invited Erick Thakrar back to the table to see how he got on with the other three crew members. He shared their sense of humour, had some good stories of his own, drank a lot, but not excessively.

Joshua watched it happen through the increasingly rosy glow fostered by the champagne, occasionally having to push Kelly to one side for a proper view of the table. Warlow liked him, Ashly Hanson liked him, Melvyn Ducharme, the Lady Mac ’s fusion specialist, liked him, even Meyer and the Udat crew liked him. He was one of them.

And that, Joshua decided, was the problem. Erick fitted into his role a little too perfectly.

At quarter past two in the morning, feeling very smug, Joshua managed to give Kelly the slip, and sneaked out of Harkey’s Bar with Helen Vanham. She lived by herself in an apartment a couple of floors below Harkey’s. It was sparsely furnished, the walls of the lounge were bare white polyp; big brightly coloured cushions had been scattered around on a topaz moss floor, several aluminium cargo-pods served as tables with bottles and glasses, a giant AV projector pillar occupied one corner. The archways into different rooms all had folding silk screens for doors. Someone had been painting outlines of animals on them, there were paint pots and brushes lying on one of the pods. Joshua saw new tumours of polyp pushing up through the moss like rock mushrooms: furniture buds starting the slow growth into the form Helen wanted.

There was a food secretion panel on the wall opposite the window; a row of teats, like small yellow-brown rubber sacks, were standing proud, indicating regular use. It had been a long time since Joshua had used a panel for food, though a few years ago when money was tight they had been a godsend.

Every apartment in Tranquillity had one. The teats secreted edible pastes and fruit juices synthesized by a series of glands in the wall behind. There was nothing wrong with the taste, the pastes were indistinguishable from real chicken, and beef, and pork, and lamb, even the colours were reasonable. It was the constituency, like viscid grease, which always put Joshua off.

The glands ingested a nutrient fluid from a habitatwide network of veins which were fed from Tranquillity’s mineral digestion organs in the southern endcap. There was also a degree of recycling, human wastes and organic scraps being broken down in specialist organs at the bottom of each starscraper. Porous sections of the shell vented toxic chemicals, preventing any dangerous build-up in the habitat’s closed biosphere.

There was no such thing as starvation in bitek habitats, though both Edenists and Tranquillity’s residents imported vast quantities of delicacies and wines from across the Confederation. They could afford it. But Helen obviously couldn’t. Despite its size, the full teats and absence of materialism marked the apartment down as student digs.

“Help yourself to a drink,” Helen said. “I’m getting out of this customer-friendly dress.” She walked through an archway into the bedroom, leaving the screen folded back.

“What else do you do apart from serve bar at Harkey’s?” he asked.

“I’m studying art,” she called back. “Harkey’s is just for funtime money.”

Joshua broke off from examining the bottles and gave the screens with their animals a more appraising look. “Are you any good?”

“I might be eventually. My tutor says I have a good feel for form. But it’s a five-year course, we’re still on basic sketching and painting. We don’t even get to AV technology until next year, and mood synthesis is another year after that. It’s a drag, but you need to know the fundamentals.”

“So how long have you been at Harkey’s?”

“A couple of months. It’s not bad work, you space industry people tip well, and you’re not a pain like the finance mob. I worked at a bar over in the StPelham for a week. Crapoodle!”

“Have you ever seen Erick Thakrar before? He was sitting at my table, thirtyish, in a blue ship-suit.”

“Yes. He’s been in most nights for a fortnight or so. He’s another good tipper.”

“Do you know where he’s been working?”

“Out in the dock; the Lowndes company, I think. He started a couple of days after he arrived.”

“Which ship did he arrive on?”

“The Shah of Kai. ”

Joshua opened a channel into Tranquillity’s communication net, and datavised a search request into the Lloyd’s office. The Shah of Kai was a cargo vessel registered to a holding company in the New Californian system. It was an ex-navy transport ship, with a six-gee fusion drive; one hold was equipped with zero-tau pods for a company of marines, and it had proximity-range defence lasers. An asteroid assault craft.

Gotcha, Joshua thought.

“Did you ever meet any of the crew?” he asked.

Helen reappeared in the bedroom archway. She was wearing a long-sleeved net body-stocking, and white suede boots which came halfway up her thighs.

“Tell you later,” she said.

Joshua gave his lips an involuntary lick. “I’ve got a great location file to match that costume, if you want to try it.”

She took a step into the room. “Sure.”

He accessed the sensenviron file, and ordered his neural nanonics to open a channel to Helen. A subliminal flicker crossed his optic nerves. Her sparse apartment gave way to the silk walls of a magnificent desert pavilion. There were tall ferns in brass urns around the entrance, a banquet table along one side was laid out with golden plates and jewelled goblets, and exotic, intricate drapes swung slowly in the warm, dry breeze that blew in from the crimson desert outside. Behind Helen was a curtained-off section, with the silk drawn apart just enough to show them a huge bed with purple sheets and a satin canopy which rose behind the scarlet-tasselled pillows like a sunrise sculpted from fabric.

“Nice,” she said, glancing round.

“It’s where Lawrence of Arabia pleasured his harem back in the eighteenth century. He was some sort of sheik king who fought the Roman Empire. Absolutely guaranteed genuine sensevise recording from old Earth. I got it from a starship captain friend of mine who visited the museum.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Old Lawrence had about a hundred and fifty wives, so they say.”

“Wow. And he pleasured all of them himself?”

“Oh, yeah, he had to, there was an army of eunuchs to protect them. No other men could get in.”

“Does the magic linger?”

“Wanna find out?”

Ione’s mind encompassed the entirety of Helen Vanham’s bedroom, the photosensitive cells in the bare polyp walls, floor, and ceiling giving her a complete visualization. It was a thousand times more detailed than an AV projection. She could move through the bedroom as if she was there, which in a way she was.

The bed was simply a plump mattress on the floor. Helen lay across it, with a naked Joshua straddling her. He was slowly and deliberately tearing the body-stocking off her.

Interesting,ione observed.

If you say so,tranquillity replied coolly.

Helen’s long booted legs kicked the air behind his back. She was giggling and squealing as more and more strips of her stocking were ripped away.

I don’t mean the sex, though judging by the way he’s turned on I’ll have to try wearing something like that for him myself one day. I was thinking of the way he latched on to Erick Thakrar.

His alleged psychic ability again?

He has had twelve applicants for the post of ship’s general systems engineer so far. All of them legitimate. Yet the minute Erick asked for the berth, he was suspicious. Are you going to maintain it was nothing but luck?

I acknowledge Joshua’s actions do indicate a degree of prescience on his part.

At last! Thank you.

This means you will be going ahead with the zygote extraction, then?

Yes. Unless you have an objection.

I would never object to receiving your child into me, no matter who was the father. It will be our child, too.

And I’ll never know him, she said sadly, not really, just for a few years of his childhood, like I saw Daddy. Sometimes I think our way is too harsh.

I will love him. I will tell him of you when he asks.

Thank you. I shall have other children, though. And I’ll know them.

With Joshua?

Possibly.

What are you going to do about him and Dr Mzu?

Ione sighed in exasperation. The image of Helen’s bedroom rippled away. She glanced round her own study; it was cluttered with dark wooden furniture, centuries old, brought from Kulu by her grandfather. Her whole environment was steeped in history, reminding her who she was, her responsibilities. It was a depressing burden, one which she’d managed to avoid for a long time. But even that would have to end soon.

I’m not going to say anything to him, not now, anyway. Joshua is the seventh captain Mzu has approached in the last five months, she’s just testing the water, seeing what sort of reaction she generates.

She is giving all the Intelligence operatives a bad case of the jitters.

I know. That’s partly my fault. They don’t know what will happen if she tries to leave. There isn’t a Lord of Ruin they can ask, all they have is Daddy’s promise.

And that holds true?

Yes, of course it does. She cannot be allowed to leave. The serjeants must be used to restrain her if she ever attempts it. And if she does get into a ship, you’re going to have to use the strategic defence weapons.

Even if that ship is the Lady Macbeth?

Joshua wouldn’t try to take her out, especially if I asked him not to.

But if he does?

Ione’s fingers curled about the small silver crucifix round her neck. Then you shoot her out of space.

I’m sorry. I can feel the pain in you.

It’s a null situation. He won’t do it. I trust Joshua. Money isn’t his prime motivation. He could have told people I exist. That reporter woman, Kelly Tirrel, she would have paid him a fortune for a scoop like that.

I don’t think he will accept Dr Mzu’s charter, either.

Good. All this is making me think. People do need some kind of reassurance that there is an authority figure behind you. Do you think I’m old enough to start making public appearances yet?

Mentally, you have been mature enough for years. Physically, possibly; you are old enough to face motherhood, after all. Although I think a more suitable mode of attire would help. Image is the paramount issue in your case.

Ione glanced down. She was wearing a pink bikini and a small green beach jacket, ideal for the swim in the cove she took each evening.

I think you may have a point there.

Tranquillity had no blackhawk docking-ledges on its southern endcap. The polyp which made up that hemisphere was twice the usual thickness of the shell so that it could incorporate the massive mineral-digestion organs, as well as several lake-sized hydrocarbon reservoirs. These were the organs which produced the various nutrient fluids circulating in the shell’s vast network of ducts, sustaining the mitosis layer which regenerated the polyp, the starscraper apartment food-secretion glands, the ledge pedestals which fed the visiting blackhawks and voidhawks, as well as various specialist organs responsible for environmental maintenance. Access passages to the outer shell would have been difficult to route through such a tightly packed grouping of titanic viscera.

There was no non-rotational spaceport either. The external hub was taken up by a craterlike maw, fifteen hundred metres in diameter. Its inner surface was lined with tubular cilia, hundred-metre spikes that impaled the asteroidal rubble which ships boosted out of Mirchusko’s inner ring. Once in the maw, the rocks were coated by enzymes ejected from the cilia and broken down into dust and gravel, more manageable chunks which could be ingested and consumed with ease.

The lack of any spaceport outside the endcap, plus the circumfluous salt-water sea lapping around the base on the inside, meant that there was little activity on its curving slopes. The first two kilometres above the coves were terraced like an ancient hill farm, planted with flowering bushes and orchards tended by agronomy servitors. Above the terraces a claggy soil clung to the ever-steepening polyp wall, a vast annular meadow land of thick grasses, whose roots strove to counteract gravity and keep the soil in place. Both grass and soil stopped short three kilometres from the hub, where the polyp was virtually a vertical cliff. Right at the axis, the light-tube emerged, running the entire length of the massive habitat: a cylindrical mesh of organic conductors, their powerful magnetic field containing the fluorescent plasma which brought light and heat to the interior.

Michael Saldana had decided that the quiet, semi-secluded southern endcap would be an ideal site for the research project into the Laymil. Its offices and laboratories now sprawled over two square kilometres of the lower terraces, the largest cluster of buildings inside the habitat, resembling the campus of some wealthy private university.

The project director’s office was on the top floor of the five-storey administration building, a squat, circular pillar of copper-mirror glass ringed with grey stone colonnaded balconies. It sat on the terrace at the back of the campus, five hundred metres above the circumfluous sea, giving it an unsurpassed view of the cycloramic sub-tropical parkland stretching away into misty distance.

The view was something Parker Higgens was immensely proud of, easily the finest in Tranquillity, another fitting perk due to the research project’s eighth director—along with the scrumptious office itself, with its deep-burgundy coloured ossalwood furniture that had come from Kulu in the days before the abdication crisis. Parker Higgens was eighty-five. His appointment had come nine years ago, almost the last act of the Lord of Ruin, and by the grace of God (plus an ancestor wealthy enough to afford some decent geneering) he would keep the post for another nine. He had left actual research behind twenty years ago to concentrate on administration. It was a field he excelled in; building the right teams, massaging mercurial egos, knowing when to push, when to ease off. Genuinely effective scientific administrators were rare, and under his leadership the project had functioned reasonably smoothly, everyone acknowledged that. Parker Higgens liked to keep his world neat and tidy, it was one of his formulas for success, which was why he was particularly shocked to come into work one morning and find a young blonde-haired girl lounging in the deep cushioning of his straight-backed chair behind his desk.

“Who the bloody hell are you?” he shouted. Then he saw the five serjeants standing to attention around the room.

Tranquillity’s serjeants were the habitat’s sole police force, sub-sentient bitek servitors controlled via affinity by the personality, enforcing the law with scrupulous impartiality. They were (intentionally) intimidating humanoids, two metres tall, with a reddish-brown exoskeleton, limb joints encased by segmented rings permitting full articulation. The heads had a sculpted appearance, with eyes concealed in a deep horizontal crease. Their hands were their most human characteristic, with leathery skin replacing the exoskeleton. It meant they could use any artefact built for a human, with emphasis on weapons. Each of them carried a laser pistol and a cortical jammer on their belts, along with restraint cuffs. The belt was their sole article of clothing.

Parker Higgens glanced round dumbly at the serjeants, then back at the girl. She was wearing a very expensive pale blue suit, and her ice-blue eyes conveyed an unnerving impression of depth. Her nose . . . Parker Higgens might have been a bureaucrat, but he wasn’t stupid. “You?” he whispered incredulously.

Ione gave him a faint smile and stood up, extending her hand. “Yes, Mr Director. Me, I’m afraid. Ione Saldana.”

He shook the hand weakly, it was very small and cool in his. There was a signet ring on her finger, a red ruby carved with the Saldana crest: the crowned phoenix. It was the Kulu Crown Prince’s ring, Michael hadn’t bothered to return it to the keeper of the crown jewellery when he was sent into exile. Parker Higgens had last seen it on Maurice Saldana’s finger.

“I’m honoured, ma’am,” Parker Higgens said; he had come very close to blurting: but you’re a girl. “I knew your father, he was an inspiring man.”

“Thank you.” There was no trace of humour on Ione’s face. “I appreciate you’re busy, Mr Director, but I’d like to inspect the project’s major facilities this morning. Then I shall require each division’s senior staff to assemble summaries of their work for a presentation in two days’ time. I have tried to keep abreast of the findings, but remote viewing through Tranquillity’s senses and having them explained in person are two different things.”

Parker Higgens’s whole universe trembled. A review, and like it or not this slip of a girl held the purse strings, the life strings of the research project. What if . . . “Of course, ma’am, I’ll show you round myself.”

Ione started to walk round the desk.

“Ma’am? May I ask what your policy towards the Laymil research project is? Previous Lords of Ruin have been very—

“Relax, Mr Director. My ancestors were quite right: unravelling the Laymil mystery should be given the highest priority.”

The prospect of imminent disaster retreated from his view, like rain-clouds rolling away to reveal the sun. It was going to be all right after all. Almost. A girl! Saldana heirs were always male. “Yes, ma’am!”

The serjeants lined up into an escort squad around Ione. “Come along,” she said, and swept out of the office.

Parker Higgens found his legs racing in an undignified manner to catch up. He wished he could make people jump obediently like that.

There is a third Lord of Ruin.

The news broke thirty-seven seconds after Ione and Parker Higgens walked into the laboratory block housing the Laymil Plant Genetics Division. Everybody who worked for the project was fitted with neural nanonics. So once the instinctive flash of guilt and the accompanying shock of having the director and five serjeants walk in unannounced ten minutes into the working day had worn off, and the introductions began, professors and technicians alike opened channels into the habitat’s communication net. Nearly every datavise began: You’re not going to believe this—

Ione was shown AV projections of Laymil plant genes, sealed propagators with seed shoots worming their way up through the soil, and large fern-analogue plants with scarlet fronds growing in pots, and given small shrivelled black fruits to taste.

After friends, relatives, and colleagues were brought up to speed, it took another fifteen seconds before anyone thought of contacting the news company offices.

Ione and Parker Higgens walked on from the plant genetics laboratory to the Laymil Habitat Structure Analysis office. People were lining the stone path, trampling on the shrubs. Applause and cheers followed her like a wave effect, wolf-whistles were flung boisterously. The serjeants had to gently push aside the more enthusiastic spectators. Ione started to shake hands and wave.

There were five major Confederationwide news companies who maintained offices in Tranquillity, and all of them had been told about Ione’s arrival at the research project campus within ninety seconds of her tour beginning. The disbelieving assistant editor at Collins immediately asked the habitat personality if it was true.