“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.

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 Villeneuve’s Revenge jumped into an emergence zone a hundred and twenty thousand kilometres away, and began its approach manoeuvres. After months tending the starship’s ageing, failure-prone systems, Erick Thakrar was grateful for any shore time. Shipboard life was one long grind, he’d lost count of how many times he’d falsified the maintenance log so they could avoid CAB penalties and keep flying. There was no doubt about it, the Villeneuve’s 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.

Some small part of Erick felt sorry for the old boy. Commercial starflight was a viciously tough business, a tightly woven web of large cartels and monopolies that resented the very existence of independent traders. Starships like the Villeneuve’s Revenge forced the major carrier fleets to keep their own prices down, reducing profits. They retaliated with semi-legal syndicates in an attempt to lock out small ships.

Duchamp was an excellent captain, but his business acumen was highly questionable. His crew was loyal, though, and Erick had heard enough stories of past missions to know they had few qualms about how they earned money. If he wanted to, he could have had them arrested within a week of coming on board—neural-nanonics recorded conversation was admissible evidence in court. But he was after bigger prizes than a worn-out ship with its loser crew. The Villeneuve’s Revenge was his access code to whole strata of illegal operations. And it looked like Tehama was going to be the start of the game.