The Night's Dawn Trilogy (94 page)

The impenetrable water of the Zamjan shimmered with long orange reflections. Garrett was turning the boat, aiming the prow
downriver.

“What about the Kulu team?” Louis asked. He’d taken his shell-helmet off, showing a face glinting with sweat. His breathing
was heavy.

“I think that was a sonic boom we heard this afternoon,” Murphy said, raising his voice above the flames. “Those Kulu bastards,
always one move ahead of everyone else.”

“They’re soft, that’s all,” Garrett shouted from the wheel-house. “Can’t take the pressure. We can. We’re the fucking Confed
fucking Navy fucking Marines.” He whooped.

Murphy grinned back at him; fatigue pulled at every limb. He’d been using his boosted muscles almost constantly, which meant
he’d have to make sure he ate plenty of high-protein rations to regain his proper blood energy levels. He loaded a memo into
his neural nanonics.

His communication block let out a bleep for the first time in five hours; the datavise told him that there was a channel to
the navy ELINT satellite open.

“Bloody hell,” Murphy said. He datavised the block: “Sir, is that you, sir?”

“Christ, Murphy,” Kelven Solanki’s datavise gushed into his mind. “What’s happening?”

“Spot of trouble, sir. Nothing we can’t handle. We’re back on the boat now, heading downriver.”

Louis gave an exhausted laugh, and flopped onto his back.

“The Kulu team evacuated,” Kelven Solanki reported. “Their whole embassy contingent upped and left in the
Ekwan
this evening. Ralph Hiltch called me from orbit to say there wasn’t enough room on the spaceplane to pick you up.”

Murphy could sense a great deal of anger lying behind the lieutenant-commander’s smooth signal. “Doesn’t matter, sir; we got
you a prisoner.”

“Fantastic. One of the sequestrated ones?”

Murphy glanced over his shoulder. Jacqueline Couteur was sitting on the deck with her back to the wheel-house. She gave him
a dour stare.

“I think so, sir, she can interfere with our electronics if we give her half a chance. She’s got to be watched constantly.”

“OK, when can you have her back in—” Kelven Solanki’s datavise vanished under a peal of static. The communications block reported
the channel was lost.

Murphy picked up his TIP carbine and pointed it at Jacqueline Couteur. “Is that you?”

She shrugged. “No.”

Murphy looked back at the fire on the bank. They were half a kilometre away now. People were walking along the shoreline where
the
Isakore
had been anchored. The big cherry oak was still standing, intact, a black silhouette against the blanket of flame.

“Can they affect our electronics from here?”

“We don’t care about your electronics,” she said. “Such things have no place in our world.”

“Are you talking to them?”

“No.”

“Sir!” Garrett yelled.

Murphy swung round. The people on the shore were standing in a ring, holding hands. A large ball of white fire emerged from
the ground in their midst and curved over their heads, soaring out across the river.

“Down!” Murphy shouted.

The fireball flashed overhead, making the air roil from its passage, bringing a false daylight to the boat. Murphy ground
his teeth together, anticipating the strike, the pain as it vaporized his legs or spine. There was a clamorous
BOOM
from behind the wheel-house, the boat rocked violently, and the light went out.

“Oh shit, oh shit.” Garrett was crying.

“What is it?” Murphy demanded. He pulled himself onto his feet.

The boxy wooden structure behind the wheel-house was a smoking ruin. Fractured planks with charred edges pointed vacantly
at the sky. The micro-fusion generator it had covered was a shambolic mass of heat-tarnished metal and dripping plastic.

“You will come to us in time,” Jacqueline Couteur said calmly. She hadn’t moved from her sitting position. “We have no hurry.”

The
Isakore
drifted round a bend in the river, water gurgling idly around the hull, pulling the fire from view. A duet of night and silence
closed over the boat, a void surer than vacuum.

Ione wore a gown of rich blue-green silk gauze. A single strip of cloth which clung to her torso then flared and flowed into
a long skirt, it forked around her neck, producing two ribbonlike tassels that trailed from each shoulder. Her hair had been
given a damp look, it was bound up and held in place at the back by an exquisite red flower brooch, its tissue-thin petals
carved from some exotic stone. A long platinum chain formed a cobweb around her neck.

The trouble with looking so elegant, Joshua thought, was that part of him just wanted to stare at her, while the other part
wanted to rip the dress to shreds so he could get at the body beneath. She really did look gorgeous.

He ran a finger round the collar on his own black dinner-jacket. It was too tight. And the butterfly tie wasn’t straight.

“Leave it alone,” Ione said sternly.

“But—”

“Leave it. It’s fine.”

He dropped his hand and glowered at the lift’s door. Two Tranquillity serjeants were in with them, making it seem crowded.
The door opened on the twenty-fifth floor of the StOuen starscraper, revealing a much smaller lobby than usual. Parris Vasilkovsky’s
apartment took up half of the floor, his offices and staff quarters took up the other half.

“Thanks for coming with me,” Joshua said as they stood in front of the apartment door. He could feel the nerves building in
the base of his stomach. This was the real big time he was bidding for now. And Ione on his arm ought to impress Parris Vasilkovsky.
Precious little else would.

“I want to be with you,” Ione murmured.

He leant forward to kiss her.

The muscle membrane opened, and Dominique was standing behind it. She had chosen a sleeveless black gown with a long skirt
and a deep, highly revealing V-neck. Her thick honey-blonde hair had been given a slight wave, curling around her shoulders.
Broad scarlet lips lifted in appreciation as she caught the embrace.

Joshua straightened up guiltily, though his errant eyes remained fixed on Dominique’s cleavage. A host of memories started
to replay through his mind without any assistance from his neural nanonics. He’d forgotten how impressive she was.

“Don’t mind me,” Dominique said huskily. “I adore young love.”

Ione giggled. “Evening, Dominique.”

The two girls kissed briefly. Then it was Joshua’s turn.

“Put him down,” Ione said in amusement. “You might catch something. Heaven only knows what he got up to on Norfolk.”

Dominique grinned as she let go. “You think he’s been bad?”

“He’s Joshua; I
know
he’s been bad.”

“Hey!” Joshua complained. “That trip was strictly business.”

Both girls laughed. Dominique led the way into the apartment. Joshua saw her skirt was made up from long panels, split right
up to the top of her hips. The fabric swayed apart as she walked, giving Joshua brief glimpses of her legs, and a pair of
very tight white shorts.

He held back on a groan. It was going to be hard to concentrate tonight without that kind of distraction.

The dining-room had two oval windows to show Mirchusko’s dusky crescent—south of the equator two huge white cyclone swirls
were crashing, in a drama which had been running for six days. Slabs of warmly lit coloured glass paved the polyp walls from
floor to ceiling, each with an animal engraved on its surface by fine smoky grooves. Most of them were terrestrial—lions,
gazelles, elephants, hawks—though several of the more spectacular non-sentient xenoc species were included. The grooves moved
at an infinitesimal speed, causing the birds to flap their wings, the animals to run; their cycles lasted for hours. The table
was made from halkett wood (native to Kulu), a rich gold in colour, with bright scarlet grain. Three antique silver candelabras
were spaced along the polished wood, with slender white candles tipped by tiny flames.

There were six people at the dinner. Parris himself sat at the head of the table, looking spruce in a black dinner-jacket.
The formal evening attire suited him, complementing his curly silver-grey hair to give him a distinguished appearance. At
the other end of the table was Symone, his current lover, a beautiful twenty-eight-year-old whose ge-neered chromosomes had
produced a dark walnut skin and hair a shade lighter than Dominique’s, a striking and delightful contrast. She was eight months
pregnant with Par-ris’s third child.

Joshua and Dominique sat together on one side of the table. And Dominique’s long legs had been riding up and down his trousers
all through the meal. He had done his best to ignore it, but his twitching mouth had given him away to Ione, and, he suspected,
Symone as well.

Opposite them were Ione and Clement, Parris’s son. He was eighteen, lacking his big sister’s miscreant force, but quietly
cheerful. And handsome, Ione thought, though not in the mould of Joshua’s wolfish ruggedness; his younger face was softer,
framed with fair curly hair that was recognizably Parris’s. He had just returned from his first year at university on Kulu.

“I haven’t been to Kulu yet,” Joshua said as the white-jacketed waiter cleared the dessert dishes away, assisted by a couple
of housechimps.

“Wouldn’t they let you in?” Dominique asked with honeyed malice.

“The Kulu merchants form a tight cartel, they’re hard to crack.”

“Tell me about it,” Parris said gruffly. “It took me eight years before I broke in with fabrics from Oshanko, until then my
ships were going there empty to pick up their nanonics. That costs.”

“I’ll wait until I get a charter,” Joshua said. “I’m not going to try head-butting that kind of organization. But I’d like
to play tourist sometime.”

“You did all right penetrating Norfolk,” Dominique said, eyes wide and apparently innocent over her crystal champagne glass.

“Hey, neat intro,” he said enthusiastically. “We just slid into that subject, didn’t we? I never noticed.”

She stuck her tongue out at him.

“You got off lightly, Joshua,” Parris said. “Me, I get lumbered with her subtlety all day every day.”

“I would have thought she was old enough to have left home by now,” he said.

“Who’d have her?”

“Good point.”

Dominique lobbed a small cluster of grapes at her father.

Parris caught them awkwardly, laughing. One went bouncing off across the moss carpet. “Make me an offer for her, Joshua, anything
up to ten fuseodollars considered.”

He saw the warning gleam in Dominique’s eye. “I think I’ll decline, thanks.”

“Coward.” Dominique pouted.

Parris dropped the grapes onto a side plate, and wiped his hand with a napkin. “So how did you do it, Joshua? My captains
don’t get three thousand cases, and the Vasilkovsky line has been making the Norfolk run for fifty years.”

Joshua activated a neural nanonics memory cell. “Confidentiality coverage. Agreed?” His gaze went round the table, recording
everyone saying yes. They were legally bound not to repeat what they heard now. Although quite what he could do about Ione
was an interesting point, since her thought processes were Tranquillity’s legal system. “I traded something they needed: wood.”
He explained about the mayope.

“Very clever,” Dominique drawled when he finished, though there was a note of respect in amongst the affected languor. “Brains
as well as balls.”

“I like it,” Parris said. He studied his cut-crystal glass. “Why tell us?”

“Supply and demand,” Joshua said. “I’ve found a valuable hole in the market, and I want to fill it.”

“But the
Lady Macbeth
hasn’t got the capacity to do it by herself,” Clement said. “Right?”

Joshua had wondered how smart the lad was. Now he knew. A real chip off the Vasilkovsky block. “That’s right. I need a partner,
a big partner.”

“Why not go to a bank?” Dominique asked. “Charter some ships for yourself.”

“There’s a loose end which needs tying up.”

“Ah,” Parris, showing some real interest at last, leant forward in his seat. “Go on.”

“The power mayope has over Norfolk lies in keeping it a monopoly, that way we can keep the price high. I have a provisional
arrangement with a distributor on Norfolk who’s agreed to take as much as we can ship in. What we need to do next is pin down
the supply to a single source, one that only we can obtain. That is going to take upfront money, the kind which can’t be explained
away to bank auditors.”

“You can do that?”

“Parris, I have never been on a planet more corrupt than Lalonde. It’s also very primitive and correspondingly poor. If you,
with all your money, went there, you would be its king.”

“No, thank you,” Parris said sagely.

“Fine, but with money pushed into the right credit disks we can guarantee that no one else gets an export licence. OK, it
won’t last for ever, administration people move on, traders will offer counter-bribes when they find what we’re doing; but
I figure we ought to get two of Norfolk’s conjunctions out of it. Two conjunctions where your ships are filled to capacity
with Norfolk Tears.”

“Every ship? I do have quite a few.”

“No, not every ship. We have to walk a fine line between greed and squeeze. My Norfolk distributor will give us most favoured
customer status, that’s all. It’ll be up to us to work out exactly how much we can squeeze them for before they start to protest.
You know how jealously they guard their independence.”

“Yes.” Parris nodded thoughtfully.

“And what about Lalonde?” Ione asked quietly. Her glass was dangling casually between thumb and forefinger, she rocked it
from side to side, swirling the champagne around the bottom.

“What about Lalonde?” Joshua asked.

“Its people,” Symone said. “It doesn’t sound as though they get a very good deal out of this. The mayope is their wood.”

Joshua gave her a polite smile. Just what I need, bleeding hearts. “What do they get at the moment?”

Symone frowned.

“He means they get nothing,” Dominique said.