Having this red-faced martinet figure bearing down on him across the large airy entrance hall put Joshua in mind of a Tranquillity serjeantonly lacking the charm and good looks.
Bit young to be skippering a starship, arent you? Grant Kavanagh said when Louise introduced them. Surprised the banks gave you the loan to fly one.
I inherited Lady Mac , and my crew made enough money in our first year of commercial flying to make the run to this planet. Its the first time weve been, and your family turned somersaults to give me three thousand cases of the best Tears on the island. What criteria would you judge my competence by?
Louise closed her eyes and wished herself very, very small.
Grant Kavanagh stared at the utterly uncompromising expression of the young man who had answered him back in his own home, and burst out laughing. By Christ, now thats the sort of attitude we could do with a hell of a lot more of around here. Well done, Joshua, I approve. Dont give ground, and bite back every time. He put a protective arm around both his daughters. See that, you two rapscallions? Thats what youve got to have to run commercial enterprises; starships or estates, it doesnt matter which. You just have to be the boss man each and every time you open your mouth. He kissed Louise on her forehead, and tickled a giggling Genevieve. Glad to meet you, Joshua. Nice to see young Kenneth hasnt lost his touch when it comes to judging people.
He puts together a tough deal, Joshua said, sounding unhappy.
So it would seem. This mayope wood, is it as good as he says? I couldnt shut him up about it when he was on the phone.
Yes, its impressive. Like a tree thats grown out of steel. I brought some samples with me, of course, you can have a look for yourself.
Ill take you up on that later. The manors butler came into the hall carrying Grants gin and tonic on a silver tray. He picked it up and took a sip. I suppose this damned Lalonde planet will start charging a premium once they know how valuable it is to us? he said in a disgruntled tone.
That depends, sir.
Oh? Grant Kavanagh widened his eyes with interest at the humorously furtive tone. He let go of Genevieve, and patted her fondly. Run along, poppet. It looks like Captain Calvert and I have something to discuss.
Yes, Daddy. Genevieve capered past Joshua, giving him a sidelong glance, and breaking into giggles again.
Louise showed him a lopsided grin as she started to walk away. She had seen the other girls at school do that when they wanted to be coquettish with their boys. You will be joining us for dinner, wont you, Captain Calvert? she asked airily.
I imagine so, yes.
Ill tell cook to prepare some iced chiplemon. Youll like that; its my favourite.
Then Im sure Ill like it too.
And dont be late, Daddy.
Am I ever? Grant Kavanagh retorted, enchanted as ever by his little girls playfulness.
She rewarded them both with a sunlight smile, then skipped off across the hall tiles after Genevieve.
An hour later Joshua was lying on his bed, fathoming the mysteries of the planets communication system. His bedroom was in the west wing, a large room with en suite bathroom, its walls papered with a rich purple and gold pattern. The bed was a double, with a carved oak headboard and a horribly solid mattress. It required very little imagination on his part to picture Louise Kavanagh lying on it beside him.
There was a phone on the bedside table, but the impossibly antique gadget didnt have a standard processor; he couldnt use his neural nanonics to datavise the communication net control computer. It didnt even have an AV pillar, just a keyboard, a holoscreen, and a handset. He did think that Norfolk had written a wonderfully realistic Turing program into the exchanges processor array to deal patiently with requests, until he finally realized he was actually talking to a human operator. She patched him into the geostationary relay satellite circuit and opened a channel to Lady Macbeth . What the call must be costing Grant Kavanagh was an item he managed to put firmly at the back of his mind. Humans operating a basic computer management routine!
Weve unloaded a third of the mayope already, Sarha said; the link was audio only, no visual. Your new merchant friend Kenneth Kavanagh has hired half a dozen spaceplanes from other starships to ferry it down to the surface. At this rate well be finished by tomorrow.
Great news. I dont want to sound premature, but after this run is over it looks like well be coming back here to finalize that arrangement we were kicking around earlier.
Youre making progress, then?
Absolutely.
Whats Cricklade like?
Astonishing, its enough to make a Tranquillity plutocrat jealous. Youd love it.
Thanks, Joshua. That really makes me feel good.
He grinned and took another sip of the Norfolk Tears his thoughtful host had provided. How are you and Warlow coping with the maintenance checks?
Weve finished.
What? He sat up abruptly, nearly spilling some of the precious drink.
Weve finished. There isnt a system on board that isnt as smooth as a babys bum.
Jesus, you must have been working your arses off.
It took us five hours, grand total. And most of that was spent waiting for the diagnostics programs to run. Theres nothing wrong with Lady Mac , Joshua. Her performance rating is as good as the day the CAB awarded us our spaceworthiness certificate.
Thats ridiculous. We were so glitch prone after Lalonde we were lucky to get here at all.
You think I dont know how to load a diagnostics program? she asked, her voice sounding very tetchy.
Of course you know your job, he said in a conciliatory tone. It just doesnt make a lot of sense, thats all.
You want me to datavise the results down to you?
No. You cant, anyway; this planets net couldnt handle anything like that. What does Warlow say, is Lady Mac up to a CAB inspection?
Well pass with flying colours.
OK, Ill leave it up to the pair of you what you do.
Well get the inspectors up here tomorrow morning. Norfolks CAB office only runs stage D checks in any case. Our own diagnostics are stricter than that.
Fine. Ill call tomorrow for an update.
Sure. Bye, Joshua.
Tehama asteroid was one of the most financially and industrially successful independent industrial settlements in the New Californian star system. A stony iron rock twenty-eight kilometres long and eighteen wide, tracing an irregular fifty-day elliptical orbit within the trailing Trojan point of Yosemite, the systems largest gas giant, it had all the elements and minerals necessary to support life, barring hydrogen and nitrogen. But that deficiency was made good from a snowball-shaped carbonaceous chondritic asteroid, one kilometre wide, which had been nudged into a fifty-kilometre orbit around Tehama in 2283. Since then its shale had been mined and refined; hydrogen was combined with oxygen to produce water, plain and simple; nitrogen underwent more complex bonding procedures to form useable nitrates; hydrocarbons were an essential. They were all introduced to the caverns being bored out of Tehamas metallic ore, producing a habitable biosphere capable of supporting the increasing population.
By 2611 there were two major caverns inside Tehama; and its small companion had been reduced to a sable lump two hundred and fifty metres wide, with a silver-white refinery station, almost as large, clinging to it barnacle-fashion.
The Villeneuves Revenge jumped into an emergence zone a hundred and twenty thousand kilometres away, and began its approach manoeuvres. After months tending the starships ageing, failure-prone systems, Erick Thakrar was grateful for any shore time. Shipboard life was one long grind, hed lost count of how many times hed falsified the maintenance log so they could avoid CAB penalties and keep flying. There was no doubt about it, the Villeneuves Revenge was operating dangerously close to the margin, both mechanically and financially. Genuine independence was proving an elusive goal; Captain Duchamp was in debt to the banks to the tune of a million and a half fuseodollars, and charters were hard to find.