An afternoon spent in the saddle riding round some of the rosegroves closest to the manor, with the eternally enduring Mr Butterworth accompanying him, did not put him in the best frame of mind for trotting out glib niceties to dandies like visiting starship captains. He marched into the house slapping dust from his riding breeches and shouting for a drink, a bath, and a decent meal.
Having this red-faced martinet figure bearing down on him across the large airy entrance hall put Joshua in mind of a Tranquillity serjeant—only lacking the charm and good looks.
“Bit young to be skippering a starship, aren’t 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. It’s the first time we’ve 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 that’s the sort of attitude we could do with a hell of a lot more of around here. Well done, Joshua, I approve. Don’t give ground, and bite back every time.” He put a protective arm around both his daughters. “See that, you two rapscallions? That’s what you’ve got to have to run commercial enterprises; starships or estates, it doesn’t 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 hasn’t 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 couldn’t shut him up about it when he was on the phone.”
“Yes, it’s impressive. Like a tree that’s grown out of steel. I brought some samples with me, of course, you can have a look for yourself.”
“I’ll take you up on that later.” The manor’s butler came into the hall carrying Grant’s 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, won’t you, Captain Calvert?” she asked airily.
“I imagine so, yes.”
“I’ll tell cook to prepare some iced chiplemon. You’ll like that; it’s my favourite.”
“Then I’m sure I’ll like it too.”
“And don’t be late, Daddy.”
“Am I ever?” Grant Kavanagh retorted, enchanted as ever by his little girl’s 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 planet’s 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 didn’t have a standard processor; he couldn’t use his neural nanonics to datavise the communication net control computer. It didn’t 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 exchange’s 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!
“We’ve 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 we’ll be finished by tomorrow.”
“Great news. I don’t want to sound premature, but after this run is over it looks like we’ll be coming back here to finalize that arrangement we were kicking around earlier.”
“You’re making progress, then?”
“Absolutely.”
“What’s Cricklade like?”
“Astonishing, it’s enough to make a Tranquillity plutocrat jealous. You’d 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?”
“We’ve finished.”
“What?” He sat up abruptly, nearly spilling some of the precious drink.
“We’ve finished. There isn’t a system on board that isn’t as smooth as a baby’s 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. There’s nothing wrong with Lady Mac , Joshua. Her performance rating is as good as the day the CAB awarded us our spaceworthiness certificate.”
“That’s ridiculous. We were so glitch prone after Lalonde we were lucky to get here at all.”
“You think I don’t 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 doesn’t make a lot of sense, that’s all.”
“You want me to datavise the results down to you?”
“No. You can’t, anyway; this planet’s net couldn’t handle anything like that. What does Warlow say, is Lady Mac up to a CAB inspection?”
“We’ll pass with flying colours.”
“OK, I’ll leave it up to the pair of you what you do.”
“We’ll get the inspectors up here tomorrow morning. Norfolk’s CAB office only runs stage D checks in any case. Our own diagnostics are stricter than that.”
“Fine. I’ll 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 system’s 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 Tehama’s metallic ore, producing a habitable biosphere capable of supporting the increasing population.