After docking at the asteroid’s non-rotating axis spaceport, four crew members from the Villeneuve’s Revenge descended on the Catalina bar in the Los Olivos cavern, the first to be dug, a cylindrical hollow nine kilometres long and five in diameter. The Catalina was one of the spaceport crew bars, with aluminium tables and a small stage for a band. At three in the afternoon, local time, it was almost dead.

The bar was a cave drilled into the cavern’s vertical cliff-face endwall, one of thousands forming an interconnected cave city, producing a band of glass windows and foliage-wrapped balconies that encircled the base of the endwall. Like an Edenist habitat, nobody lived on the cavern floor itself, it was a communal park and arable farm. But there the resemblance stopped.

Erick Thakrar sat at an alcove table near the balcony window with two of his shipmates, Bev Lennon and Desmond Lafoe, and their captain, André Duchamp. The Catalina was near the top of the city levels, giving it a seventy-five per cent gravity field, and a good view out into the cavern. Erick wasn’t impressed by what he could see. The axis was taken up by a hundred-metre diameter gantry, most of which was filled by the thick black pipes of the irrigation-sprinkler nozzles. It was ringed at two hundred and fifty metre intervals by doughnut-shaped solartubes that shone with a painful blue-white intensity. They lacked the warm incandescence of an Edenist habitat’s axis light-tube, which was dramatically illustrated by the plants far below. The cavern floor’s grass shaded towards the yellow, while trees and shrubs were spindly, missing their full complement of leaves. Even the fields of crops were hungry looking (one reason why imported delicacies were so popular and profitable in all asteroid settlements). It was as though an unexpected autumn had visited the tropical climate.

The whole cavern was cramped and clumsy, a poor copy of a bitek habitat’s excellence. Erick found himself thinking back to Tranquillity with nostalgia.

“Here he comes,” André Duchamp muttered. “Be nice to the Anglo , remember we need him.” The captain came from Carcassonne, a die-hard French nationalist, who blamed the ethnic English in the Confederation for everything from failed optical fibres in the starship’s flight computer to his current overdraft. At sixty-five years old his geneered DNA maintained his physique in the lean mould which was the staple criterion of the space adapted, as well as providing him with a face that was rounded all over. When André Duchamp laughed, everyone in the room found themselves smiling along, so powerful was the appeal; he had the same emotional conviction as a painted clown.

Right now he put on his most welcoming smile for the man sidling anxiously up to the table.

Lance Coulson was a senior flight controller in Tehama’s Civil Astronautics Bureau; in his late fifties, he lacked the political contacts necessary to gain senior management ranking. It meant he was stuck in inter-system tracking and communications until retirement now; that made him resentful, and agreeable to supplying people like André Duchamp with information—for the right price.

He sat at the table and gave Erick Thakrar a long look. “I haven’t seen you before.”

Erick started recording his implant-enhanced sensorium directly into a neural nanonics memory cell, and ordered a file search. Image: of an overweight man, facial skin a red tinge of brown from exposure to the cavern solartubes; grey suit with high circular collar, pinching the neck flesh; light brown hair, colour-embellished by follicle biochemical treatments. Sound: of slightly wheezy breathing, heartbeat rate above average. Smell: sour human sweat, beads standing out on a high forehead and the back of chubby hands.

Lance Coulson was nerving himself up. A weakling ruffled by the company he kept.

“Because I haven’t been here before,” Erick replied, unyielding. His CNIS file reported a blank, Lance Coulson wasn’t a known criminal. Probably too petty, he thought.

“Erick Thakrar, my systems generalist,” André Duchamp said. “Erick is an excellent engineer. Surely you don’t question my judgement when it comes to my own crew?” There was just enough hint of anger to make Lance Coulson shift round in his seat.

“No, of course not.”

“Excellent!” André Duchamp was all smiles again; he clapped Lance Coulson on the back, winning a sickly smile, and pushed a glass of Montbard brandy over the scratched aluminium slab to him. “So what have you got for me?”

“A cargo of micro-fusion generators,” he said softly.

“So? Tell me more.”

The civil servant rolled the stem of his glass between his thumb and finger, not looking at the captain. “A hundred thousand.” He slid his Francisco Finance credit disk across the table.

“You jest!” André Duchamp said. There was a dangerous glint to his eyes.

“There were . . . questions last time. I’m not doing this again.”

“You’re not doing it this time at that price. If I had that kind of money do you think I would be here crawling to a tax-money leech like you?”

Bev Lennon put a restraining hand on Duchamp’s shoulder. “Easy,” he said smoothly. “Look, we’re all here because money is tight, right? We can certainly pay you a quarter of that figure in advance.”

Lance Coulson picked up his credit disk and stood up. “I see I have been wasting my time.”

“Thank you for the information,” Erick said in a loud voice.

Lance Coulson gave him a frightened look. “What?”

“That’s going to be enormously useful to us. How would you like to be paid? Cash or commodities?”

“Shut up.”

“Sit down, and stop fucking about.”

He sat, checking the rest of the tables with twitchy glances.

“We want to buy, you want to sell,” Erick said. “So let’s stop the drama queen tactics, assume you’ve shown us what a tough negotiator you are, and we’re all shitting bricks. Now what’s your price? And be realistic. There are other flight controllers.”

He overcame his agitation for just long enough to shoot Erick a look of one hundred per cent hatred. “Thirty thousand.”

“Agreed,” André Duchamp said immediately. He held out his Jovian Bank disk.

Lance Coulson gave a last furtive glance round before shoving his own disk in André’s direction.

“Merci , Lance.” André’s grin was scathing as he received the datavised flight vector.

The four crewmen watched the civil servant retreating, and laughed. Erick was congratulated for calling the other man’s bluff, Bev Lennon fetching him half a litre of of imported Lübeck beer.

“You had me panicking!” the wiry fusion specialist protested as he dropped the tankards down on their table.

Erick took a sip of the icy beer. “I had me panicking.”

It was going well, they accepted him, reservations (and he knew some still had them) were fading, breaking down. He was becoming one of the lads.

Along with Bev Lennon and Desmond Lafoe, the ship’s node specialist, a brawny two-metre-tall bear of a man, Erick spent the next ten minutes talking trivia while André Duchamp sat back with a blank expression reviewing the vector he had just bought.

“I don’t see any problem,” the captain announced eventually. “If we use a Sacramento orbit to jump from we can rendezvous any time in the next six days. Fifty-five hours from now would be the ideal . . .” His voice trailed off.

Erick turned to follow his gaze. Five men wearing copper-coloured one-piece ship-suits walked into the Catalina bar.

Hasan Rawand caught sight of André Duchamp as he was about to sit at the bar. He tapped Shane Brandes, the Dechal ’s fusion engineer, on the side of his arm and flicked a finger in the direction of the master of Villeneuve’s Revenge . His other three crew-members, Ian O’Flaherty, Harry Levine, and Stafford Charlton, caught the gesture and turned to look.