The Night's Dawn Trilogy (85 page)

“Daddy likes you,” she said uncertainly. Now probably wasn’t the best time to press him on their future after he returned.
He must have a lot on his mind with the awesome responsibility of the starflight ahead of him. But it did seem as though her
father’s plaudit was like an omen. So few people ever met with Daddy’s approval. And Joshua had said how much he adored Stoke
County. The kind of land I’d like to settle in: his exact words.

“I’m rather fond of the old boy myself. But God he’s got a temper.”

Louise giggled in the dark. Down below the horses were shuffling about. She straddled his abdomen, her mane of hair falling
around the two of them. His hands found her breasts, fingers tightening until she moaned with desire. In a low, throaty voice
he told her what he wanted her to do. She strained her body to accommodate him, trembling at her own daring. He was solid
against her, wonderfully
there
, encouraging and praising.

“Tell me again,” she murmured. “Please, Joshua.”

“I love you,” he said, breath teasingly hot on her neck. Even his neural nanonics couldn’t banish the dawning guilt he felt
at the words. Have I really been reduced to lying to trusting, hopelessly unsophisticated teenagers? Perhaps it’s because
she is so magnificent, what we all want girls to be like even though we know it’s wrong. I can’t help myself. “I love you,
and I’m coming back for you.”

She groaned in delirium as he entered her. Ecstasy brought its own special light, banishing the darkness of the loft.

Joshua only just managed to reach the manor’s hall in time to kiss or shake hands with members of the large group of staff
and family (William Elphinstone was absent) who had come to wish him and Dahybi farewell. The horse-drawn carriage carried
the two of them back to Colsterworth Station, where they boarded the train back to Boston along with the last batch of their
cargo.

Melvyn Ducharme met them when they arrived back in the capital, and told them that over half of the cases were already up
in the
Lady Macbeth
. Kenneth Kavanagh had used his influence with captains whose spaceplanes were being under-used for their own smaller cargos.
It hadn’t generated much goodwill, but the loading was well ahead of schedule. Using
Lady Mac
’s small spaceplane alone would have meant taking eleven days to boost all the cases into orbit.

They returned up to the starship straight away. When Joshua floated into his cabin, Sarha was waiting with the free-fall sex
cage expanded, and a hungry smile in place. “No bloody chance,” he told her, and curled up into a ball to sleep for a solid
ten hours.

Even if he had been awake he had no reason to focus the
Lady Macbeth
’s sensors on departing starships. So he would never have seen that out of the twenty-seven thousand eight hundred and forty-six
starships which had come to Norfolk, twenty-two of them experienced an alarming variety of severe mechanical and electrical
malfunctions as they departed for their home planets.

Graeme Nicholson sat on his customary stool beside the bar in the Crashed Dumper, the one furthest away from the blaring audio
block, and listened to Diego Sanigra, a crewman from the
Bryant
, complain about the way the ship had been treated by Colin Rexrew. The
Bryant
was a colonist-carrier starship that had arrived at Lalonde two days ago, and so far not one of its five and a half thousand
colonists had been taken out of zero-tau. It was a ruinous state of affairs, Diego Sanigra claimed, the governor had no right
to refuse the colonists disembarkation. And the energy expenditure for every extra hour they spent in orbit was costing a
fortune. The line company would blame the crew, as they always did. His salary would suffer, his bonus would be non-existent,
his promotion prospects would be reduced if not ruined.

Graeme Nicholson nodded sympathetically as his neural nanonics carefully stored the aggrieved ramblings in a memory cell.
There wasn’t much which could be used, but it was good background material. How the big conflict reached down into individual
lives. The kind of thing he covered so well.

Graeme had been a reporter for fifty-two of his seventy-eight years. He reckoned no journalist didactic course could teach
him anything new, not now. With his experience he should have been formatting didactic courses, except there wasn’t a news
company editor in existence who would want junior reporters corrupted to such an extent. In every sense he was a hack reporter,
with an unerring knack of turning daily misfortune into spicy epic tragedy. He went for the human underbelly every time, highlighting
the suffering and misery of little people who were trampled on, the ones who couldn’t fight back against the massive uncaring
forces of governments, bureaucracies, and companies. It was not from any particular moral indignation, he certainly didn’t
see himself as championing the underdog. He simply felt emotions laid raw made for a better story, with higher audience ratings.
To some degree he had even begun to look like the victims he empathized with so well; it was partly reflexive, they were less
suspicious of someone whose clothes never quite fitted, who had thick ruddy skin and watery eyes.

His brand of sensationalism went down well with the tabloid broadcasts, but by concentrating on the seedy aspects he knew
best, building a reputation as a specialist of dross, he found himself being squeezed out of the more prestigious assignments;
he hadn’t covered a half-decent story for a decade. Over the last few years his neural nanonics had been used less for sensevise
recording and more for running stimulant programs. Time Universe had given him a roving assignment eight years ago, pushing
him off onto all the shabby little fringe jobs that no one else with a gram of seniority would cover. Anything to keep him
out of a studio, or an editorial office where his contemporaries had graduated to.

Well, no more. The joke was on the office has-beens now. Graeme Nicholson was the only man on the ground, the one with the
clout, the one with the kudos. Lalonde was going to earn him the awards he’d been denied all these years; then maybe after
that one of those nice cosy office seats back home on Decatur.

He had been on Lalonde for three months to do a documentary-style report on the new world frontier, and gather general sensevise
impressions and locations for the company library’s memory cores. Then this wonderful calamity had fallen on Lalonde. Calamitous
for the planet and its people, for Rexrew and the LDC career administration staff; but for Graeme Nicholson it was manna from
heaven.
It
being war, or an Ivet rebellion, or a xenoc invasion, depending on who you were talking to. He had included accounts of all
three theories on the fleks
Eurydice
had taken to Avon last week. But it was strange that after two and a half weeks the Governor had still made no official announcement
as to exactly what was happening up in the Quallheim and Zamjan Counties.

“That executive assistant of Rexrew’s, Terrance Smith, he’s talking about sending us to another phase one colony world,” Diego
Sanigra grumbled. He took another gulp of bitter from his tankard. “As if that’s going to be any help. What would you say
if you were a colonist who paid passage for Lalonde and came out of zero-tau to find yourself on Liao-tung Wan? That’s Chinese-ethnic,
you know, they wouldn’t like the EuroChristian-types we’ve got stored on board.”

“Is that where Terrance Smith suggested you take them?” Graeme Nicholson asked.

He gave a noncommittal grunt. “Just giving you an example.”

“What about fuel reserves? Have you got enough He3 and deuterium to get to another colony world and then return to Earth?”

Diego Sanigra started to answer. Graeme Nicholson wasn’t listening too hard, he let his eyes wander round the hot crowded
room. One of the spaceport shifts had just come off duty. At the moment there were few McBoeing flights. Only the three cargo
ships orbiting Lalonde were being unloaded; the six colonist-carriers were waiting for Rexrew to decide what to do with their
passenger complements. Most of the spaceport crews simply turned up at the start of each shift so they could keep claiming
their pay.

I wonder what they feel about the end of overtime, Graeme asked himself. Might be another story there.

The Crashed Dumper certainly wasn’t suffering from the troubles afflicting the rest of the city; this outlying district didn’t
protest or riot over Rexrew and the Ivets, it housed too many LDC worker families. There were a lot of people in tonight,
drowning their sorrows. The waitresses were harried from one end of the long room to the other. The overhead fans were spinning
fast, but made little impression on the heat.

Graeme heard the audio block falter, the singer’s voice slowing, deepening to a weird bass rumble. It picked up again, turning
the voice to a girlish soprano. The crowd clustered round started laughing, and one of them brought his fist down on it. After
a moment the loud output returned to normal.

Graeme saw a tall man and a beautiful teenage girl walk past. Something about the man’s face was familiar. The girl he recognized
as one of the Crashed Dumper’s waitresses, although tonight she was dressed in jeans and a plain cotton blouse. But the man—he
was middle-aged with a neat beard and small pony-tail, wearing a smart leather jacket and ash-grey shorts, and he was very
tall, almost like an Edenist.

The glass of lager dropped from Graeme’s numb fingers. It hit the mayope planks and smashed, soaking his shoes and socks.
“Holy shit,” he croaked. The fright constricting his throat prevented the exclamation being more than a whisper.

“You all right?” Diego Sanigra asked, annoyed at being interrupted in mid-complaint.

He forced himself to look away from the couple. “Yes,” he stammered. “Yes, I’m fine.” Thank Christ nobody was paying any attention,
if he had looked round… He reddened and bent down to pick up the shards of glass. When he straightened up the couple were
already at the bar. Somehow they had cut straight through the crush.

Graeme ran a priority search program through his neural nanonics. Not that he could possibly be mistaken. The public figures
file produced a visual image from a memory cell, recorded forty years ago. It matched perfectly.

Laton!

Lieutenant Jenny Harris twitched the reins, and the dun-coloured horse gave the big qualtook tree a wide berth. Her only previous
experience with the animals was her didactic course and a week in the saddle five years ago during an ESA transportation training
exercise back on Kulu. Now here she was, leading an expedition through one of the toughest stretches of jungle in the Juliffe
tributary network and trying to avoid the attention of a possible military invasion force at the same time. It wasn’t the
best reintroduction to the equestrian art. She thought the horse could sense her discomfort, he was proving awkward. A mere
three hours’ riding and every muscle in her lower torso was crying for relief; her arms and shoulders were stiff; her backside
had gone from soreness to numbness and finally settled for a progressive hot ache.

I wonder what all this bodily offensive is doing to my implants?

Her neural nanonics were running an extended sensory analysis program, enhancing peripheral vision and threshold audio inputs,
and scrutinizing them for any signs of hidden hostiles. Electronic paranoia, basically.

There had been nothing remotely threatening, except for one sayce, since they left the
Isakore
, and the sayce hadn’t fancied its chances against three horses.

She could hear Dean Folan and Will Danza plodding along behind her, and wondered how they were getting on with their horses.
Having the two ESA G66 Division (Tactical Combat) troops backing her up was a dose of comfort stronger than any stimulant
program could provide. She had been trained in general covert fieldwork, but they had virtually been bred for it, geneering
and nanonic supplements combining to make them formidable fighting machines.

Dean Folan was in his mid-thirties, a quiet ebony-skinned man with the kind of subtle good looks most of the geneered enjoyed.
He was only medium height, but his limbs were long and powerful, making his torso look almost stunted by comparison. It was
the boosted muscles which did that, Jenny knew; his silicon-fibre-reinforced bones had been lengthened to give him more leverage,
and more room for implants.

Will Danza fitted people’s conception of a modern-day soldier; twenty-five, tall, broad, with long, sleek muscles. He was
an old Prussian warrior genotype, blond, courteous, and unsmiling. There was an almost psychic essence of danger emanating
from him; you didn’t tangle with him in any tavern brawl no matter how drunk you were. Jenny suspected he didn’t have a sense
of humour; but then he’d seen action in covert missions three times in the last three years. She’d accessed his file when
the jungle mission was being assembled; they had been tough assignments, one had earned him eight months in hospital being
rebuilt from cloned organs, and an Emerald Star presented by the Duke of Salion, Alastair II’s first cousin, and chairman
of the Kulu Privy Council’s security commission. He had never talked about it on the journey upriver.

The nature of the jungle started to change around them. Tightly packed bushy trees gave way to tall, slender trunks with a
plume of feather-fronds thirty metres overhead. A solid blanket of creepers tangled the ground, rising up to hug the lower
third of the tree trunks like solid conical encrustations. It increased their visibility dramatically, but the horses had
to pick their hoofs up sharply. High above their heads vennals leapt between the trees in incredible bounds, streaking up
the slim trunks to hide in the foliage at the top. Jenny couldn’t see how they clung to the smooth bark.

After another forty minutes they came to a small stream. She dismounted in slow tender stages, and let her horse drink. Away
in the distance she could see a herd of danderil bounding away from the trickle of softly steaming water. White clouds were
rolling in from the east. It would rain in an hour, she knew.