Ralph scowled at the map on the screen. “Bugger, you’re right. Hell, this planet is bloody pitiful.”

“Convenient, though. One of the few places in the Confederation where a thousand kilometres makes a mockery of our usual transportation systems. We’re so used to instantaneous response, it spoils us.”

“Yes. Well, if any planet can bring us back to fundamentals, it’s Lalonde.”

The bundle of mayope trunks on the payload-handling truck had been assembled by the ground crew in one of the spaceport’s hangars. A simple enough job, even for this planet’s meagre cargo-preparation facilities; the trunks were almost perfectly cylindrical, a metre wide, cut to the same fifteen-metre length. Bright yellow straps held them together; ten load pins had been spaced correctly around the outside. Yet so far, two of the bundles had fallen apart when Ashly used the MSV’s waldo arm to manoeuvre them from the spaceplane into the Lady Macbeth ’s hold. The delay had cost them eight hours, and replacement wood had to be ordered and paid for.

Since then Warlow had inspected every bundle before it was loaded into the McBoeing. He’d sent three back to the hangar to be reassembled after he found loose straps, his enhanced audio senses picking up the ground crew’s grumbles when they thought they were out of earshot.

But this bundle seemed satisfactory. The grapple socket plugged into his lower left arm closed around the last loading pin. He braced himself on the truck’s base, and tried to shift the pin. The metal below his feet emitted a hesitant creak as his boosted muscles exerted their carefully measured force. The pin remained perfectly steady.

“OK, load it in,” he told the waiting ground crew. His grapple socket disengaged, and he jumped down onto the rough tarmac.

The truck driver edged the vehicle back under the waiting McBoeing. Hydraulics began to slide the bundle into the lower fuselage cargo hold. Warlow stood beside the spaceplane’s rear wheel bogies, in the shade. His body’s thermal-distribution system had more than enough capacity to cope with Lalonde’s blue-white sun, but he felt cooler here.

A power bike rounded the corner of the hangar and turned towards the spaceplane. Two people were riding on it, Marie Skibbow and a young man wearing a check shirt and khaki shorts. She drew to a halt in front of Warlow, giving the big cosmonik a breezy grin.

Cradles in the spaceplane’s hold started to snap shut around the bundle’s load pins. The truck’s payload-handling mechanism slowly withdrew.

“How’s it going?” Marie asked.

“One more flight after this, and we’ll be finished,” Warlow said. “Ten hours, maximum.”

“Great.” She swung her leg over the bike’s saddle. The young man dismounted a moment later. “Warlow, this is Quinn Dexter.”

Quinn smiled amicably. “Warlow, pleasure to meet you. Marie here tells me you’re heading for Norfolk.”

“That’s right.” Warlow watched the truck drive off back to the hangar; the bright orange vehicle looked strangely washed out. His neural nanonics reported a small data drop-out from his optical sensors, and he ordered a diagnostics program interrogation.

“This could be fortunate for both of us, then,” Quinn Dexter said. “I’d like to buy passage on the Lady Macbeth , Marie said you’re licensed for passengers.”

“We are.”

“OK, fine. So how much is a berth?”

“You want to go to Norfolk?” Warlow asked. His optical sensors had come back on line, the diagnostics had been unable to pinpoint the glitch.

“Sure.” Quinn’s happy smile broadened. “I’m a sales agent for Dobson Engineering. It’s a Kulu company. We produce a range of basic farm implements—ploughshares, wheel bearings for carts, that kind of thing. Suitable for low-technology worlds.”

“Well, you definitely came to the right place when you came to Lalonde,” Warlow said, upping the diaphragm’s bass level, his best approximation of irony.

“Yes. But I think I need to wait another fifty years before Lalonde even gets up to low technology. I haven’t been able to break into the official monopoly, not even with the embassy’s help, so it’s time to move on.”

“I see. One moment.” Warlow used his neural nanonics to open a channel to the spaceplane’s flight computer, and requested a link to the Lady Macbeth .

“What is it?” Joshua datavised.

“A customer,” Warlow told him.

“Give me a visual,” he said when Warlow finished explaining.

Warlow focused his optical sensors on Quinn’s face. The smile hadn’t faded, if anything it had expanded.

“Must be pretty keen to leave if he’s willing to buy passage on Lady Mac rather than wait for his berth on a company ship,” Joshua said. “Tell him it’s forty-five thousand fuseodollars for a zero-tau passage.”

There were times when Warlow regretted losing the ability to give a really plaintive sigh. “He’ll never pay that,” he retorted. If Joshua didn’t always try to extort clients they might win more business.

“So?” Joshua shot back. “We can haggle. Besides he might, and we need the money. The expenses I’ve shelled out on this bloody planet have just about emptied our petty cash account. We’ll be breaking into our Norfolk fund if we’re not careful.”

“My captain is currently charging forty-five thousand fuseodollars for a zero-tau flight to Norfolk,” Warlow said out loud.

“Zero-tau?” Quinn sounded puzzled.

“Yes.”

He glanced at Marie, who remained impassive.

Warlow waited patiently while the spaceplane’s cargo hold doors began to swing shut. His neural nanonics relayed the background chitter of the pilot running through the flight-prep sequence.

“I don’t want to travel in zero-tau,” Quinn said woodenly.

“Got him. Fifty-five thousand for a real-time cabin,” Joshua datavised.

“Then I’m afraid cabin passage will cost you fifty-five thousand,” Warlow recited laboriously. “Consumables, food, environmental equipment maintenance, it all adds up.”

“Yes, so I see. Very well, fifty-five thousand it is then.” Quinn produced a Jovian Bank disk from his shorts pocket.

“Jesus,” Joshua datavised. “This guy has an expense account a Saldana princeling would envy. Grab the money off him now, before he comes to his senses, then send him up on the McBoeing.” The channel to Lady Macbeth closed.

Warlow took his own Jovian Bank credit disk from a small pouch in his utility belt, and proffered it to Quinn Dexter. “Welcome aboard,” he boomed.

Oenone reduced and refocused its distortion field, allowing the wormhole terminus to close behind it. It looked round curiously with its many senses. Norfolk was a hundred and sixty thousand kilometres away; and the contrasting light from two different stars fell upon its hull. The upper hull was washed in a rosy glow from Duchess, the system’s red-dwarf sun two hundred million kilometres away, darkening and highlighting the blue polyp’s elaborate purple web pattern. Duke, the K2 primary, shone a strong yellowish light across the environmentally stabilized pods clasped in Oenone ’s cargo bay from a hundred and seventy-three million kilometres in the opposite direction.

Norfolk was almost in direct conjunction between the binary pair. It was a planet that was forty per cent land, made up of large islands a hundred to a hundred and fifty thousand square kilometres each, and uncountable smaller archipelagos. Oenone hung over the only sliver of darkness which was left on the surface; for the approaching conjunction had banished night to a small crescent extending from pole to pole, measuring about a thousand kilometres wide at the equator, almost as if a slice had been taken out of the planet. Convoluted seas and winding straits sparkled blue and crimson in their respective hemispheres, and cloud swirls were divided into white and scarlet. Under Duke’s glare the land was the usual blend of browns and greens, cool and welcoming, whereas the land illuminated by Duchess had turned a dark vermilion, creased with black folds, a harshly inhospitable domain in appearance.