“Well?” he asked, impatiently.
“Look, I’m willing to make love to you in return for you finding Ceri, so let’s leave my personal feelings out of it. You’ve never shown much regard for them before, so why start now?” She began undoing the knot in her cloth belt.
Milo held up a hand and said wearily, “Don’t bother. I was just testing you. For fun. I used up so much of myself today that my libido is as dead as a flat battery. I could no more make love to you now that I could fly. Nothing personal.”
She felt a simultaneous rush of relief and disappointment. “What about Ceri then?”
“Forget her,” he said coldly. “If she’s still alive she’s no doubt been transferred to the Perfumed Breeze by now.” He gestured at the lights of the other Sky Lord visible through the small window. The two great airships now floated side by side, secured by a network of cables. Flimsy wooden gangways connected the two hulls and earlier Jan and Milo had watched an exodus take place as streams of the Lord Pangloth’s defeated subjects were herded along these gangways into the Perfumed Breeze.
“You bastard,” said Jan, her eyes stinging. “You cruel bastard. How can I forget her? She means everything to me.”
Milo poured himself a glass of the drink called sake. He drained the cup, then said to her, “You’re going to have to be realistic. I’m risking my plans by even including you in them. There is no way three of us could make it.”
“Make it? Make it where?” she asked, frowning.
“Down to the ground. We’re going to jump ship. Not yet, of course, but in two days’ time when we’re approaching the ruins of the Armstrong spaceport.”
Jan was confused. “But why? I thought that was the place you wanted to reach. You told the warlord the communication device was located there.”
“You’re still so naive, Jan, in spite of everything,” he said with a sigh. “Do you think I would actually trust that man? As soon as he got what he wanted he would order my execution. I can imagine how it would happen too—he would invite me to have a celebratory meal or drink with him and suddenly those warriors of his with the automatic guns would appear and riddle me with bullets.” Milo smiled approvingly at the thought. “Besides, he is clearly operating with most of his lights out.”
“What?”
“I mean that his suspicions about his increasingly tenuous hold on reality are correct.” Milo poured more sake into his cup.
“I don’t understand,” Jan said. “All that you told him about the Sky Lord you saw up in the sky—wasn’t that true?”
“Oh yes. Every word.”
Milo had described to the warlord how he and the other people on the spacecraft from Mars had made their discovery. “It was after I had sabotaged the main fuel tank and the decision had been made to give up any hope of trying to make it to Starshine and to head for Earth instead. We were still about 15,000 miles away when we picked up a large object ahead of us on our radar. It was so big we thought it might be another habitat, even though there was no record of a fifth space habitat being built. Then our computer dredged up the solution to the mystery from its files. The object was Paradise, the name given to the huge factory facility where the Sky Angels had been constructed.”
“An argument broke out among us,” Milo had continued. “The majority wanted to use some of our remaining precious fuel to alter course and intercept Paradise. The idea was that the facility might contain stores of fuel that we could use. I argued against it, of course, because the last thing I wanted was to continue the journey to Starshine. But I was out-voted and had no option but to let the others do as they wanted.
“I had to admit, when we finally got into a matching orbit with the facility and drew closer to it, that Paradise was an impressive sight. A vast skeletal cylinder about a mile and a half in length and surrounded by an array of solar receptors. But the really astonishing thing was what we could see inside it—a Sky Angel.
“Then we got another surprise. As we got nearer to it we got a radio call from Paradise asking who we were. For a terrible moment I thought the place was inhabited, but it turned out to be a computer sending the signal. We identified ourselves and asked permission to dock, but when we couldn’t produce—not surprisingly—the correct authorization code the computer denied us permission.
“Meanwhile I was digging around in my dim memories about Paradise and getting some results. I remembered that Paradise had always operated almost completely automatically. There had been a few human supervisors around, but the construction of the Sky Angels had been done by robots under the control of a central computer.
“I also remembered that the facility had been abandoned well before the Gene Wars, when the demand for further Sky Angels seemed to have disappeared due to improving conditions in the Third World, thanks to the gene revolution. But I certainly didn’t remember anything about a finished Sky Angel being left in the facility.
“The only possible solution to the mystery was that the computer had continued with its construction program after the humans had gone. The facility was certainly alive on every level—the electromagnetic anti-meteor umbrella was still functioning and when we got closer we observed spider-like robots scuttling about the factory and on the hull of the Sky Angel itself. Also, when we made an attempt to dock on the facility the computer carried out evasive manoeuvres, making docking impossible. As we were running out of fuel we had no choice but to give up and continue onwards towards Earth, much to my relief.
“But in the years since then I’ve thought a lot about that virgin Angel up there. And something occurred to me. That computer running the facility is waiting for a signal from Earth telling it to send its finished Sky Angel off to its destination. The descent procedure, I remember, is also automatic. So, send the right signal, wait awhile, and then, lo and behold, a brand new Sky Angel will descend towards you from the sky. The problem, of course, is finding the right signal and the means of sending it.”
“And you believe you have a solution?” the warlord had asked Milo.
“I do now,” Milo replied. “Another thing I remembered about the Sky Angels was that they were controlled by a United Nations command centre. All I had to do was discover the whereabouts of the place, travel there and then beam the appropriate command up to Paradise.”
“But how do you know this command centre is still capable of functioning after all this time?” the warlord asked.
“Because I’ve established contact with it. Or rather with the computer running it. That’s what I was doing in the Pangloth’s control room when your warriors arrived. Ever since I was brought on board this airship I’d been trying to devise a method of getting access to the control room. I thought there was a chance that the Pangloth’s computer still had a communication link with the command centre. Trouble was I couldn’t think of a way, but then my little companion here came along and ingratiated herself with the Aristos. Through her I discovered a working terminal in the control room, which was very encouraging, but none of the variations on the possible access codes for getting a response from the command computer bore fruit. Either the command computer was ignoring the signal, or the signal wasn’t getting through because of faulty equipment on either the Pangloth or at the centre. I realized the hit-and-miss approach through Jan was going to take forever—I still needed to get to that terminal myself.”
“And when you and your Perfumed Breeze arrived on the scene today,” Milo told the warlord, “I at last had the perfect opportunity. It didn’t take me long to try all the various codes, and I received a response from the centre’s computer, just as I hoped. So I asked it where it was and it told me. The command centre is located at the Armstrong spaceport, which is only about twenty-four hours’ flying time from here on the East coast. Once we’ve come to an arrangement I’ll give you the exact coordinates.”