“Captain Calvert?”

He turned from the pleasing display of cleavage and thigh. Jesus, but that title felt good. “You got me.”

The woman was black, very black. There couldn’t have been much geneering in her family, he decided, although he was suspicious about that deep pigmentation; she was fifty centimetres shorter than him, and her short beret of hair was frosted with strands of silver. He reckoned she was about sixty years old, and ageing naturally.

“I’m Dr Alkad Mzu,” she said.

“Good evening, Doctor.”

“I understand you have a ship you’re fitting out?”

“That’s right, the Lady Macbeth . Finest independent trader this side of the Kulu Kingdom. Are you interested in chartering her?”

“I may be.”

Joshua skipped a beat. He took another look at the small woman. Alkad Mzu was dressed in a suit of grey fabric, a slim collar turned up around her neck. She seemed very serious, her features composed in a permanent expression of resignation. And right at the back of his mind there was a faint tingle of warning.

You’re being oversensitive, he told himself, just because she doesn’t smile doesn’t mean she’s a threat. Nothing is a threat in Tranquillity, that’s the beauty of this place.

“Medicine must pay very well these days,” he said.

“It’s a physics doctorate.”

“Oh, sorry. Physics must pay very well.”

“Not really. I’m a member of the team researching Laymil artefacts.”

“Yeah? You must have heard of me, then, I found the electronics stack.”

“Yes, I heard, although memory crystals aren’t my field. I mainly study their fusion drives.”

“Really? Can I get you a drink?”

Alkad Mzu blinked, then slowly looked about. “Yes, this is a bar, isn’t it. I’ll just have a white wine, then, thank you.”

Joshua signalled to Helen Vanham for a wine. Receiving a very friendly smile in return.

“What exactly was the charter?” he asked.

“I need to visit a star system.”

Definitely weird, Joshua thought. “That’s what Lady Mac does best. Which star system?”

“Garissa.”

Joshua frowned, he thought he knew most star systems. He consulted his neural nanonics cosmology file. That was when his humour really started to deflate. “Garissa was abandoned thirty years ago.”

Alkad Mzu received her slim glass from the barmaid, and tasted the wine. “It wasn’t abandoned, Captain. It was annihilated. Ninety-five million people were slaughtered by the Omutan government. The Confederation Navy managed to get some off after the planet-buster strike, about seven hundred thousand. They used marine transports and colonist-carrier ships.” Her eyes clouded over. “They abandoned the rescue effort after a month. There wasn’t a lot of point. The radiation fallout had reached everyone who survived the blasts and tsunamis and earthquakes and superstorms. Seven hundred thousand out of ninety-five million.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

Her lips twitched around the rim of the glass. “Why should you? An obscure little planet that died before you were born; for politics that never made any sense even then. Why should anybody remember?”

Joshua shot the fuseodollars from his Jovian Bank credit card into the bar’s accounts block as the barmaid delivered his tray of champagne bottles. There was an oriental man at the far end of the bar who was keeping an unobtrusive watch on himself and Dr Mzu over his beer mug. Joshua forced himself not to stare in return. He smiled at Helen Vanham and added a generous tip. “Dr Mzu, I have to be honest. I can take you to the Garissan system, but a landing given those circumstances is out of the question.”

“I understand, Captain. And I appreciate your honesty. I don’t wish to land, simply to visit.”

“Ah, er, good. Garissa was your homeworld?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s the third time you’ve said that to me.”

“One of those evenings, I guess.”

“How much would it cost me?”

“For a single passenger, there and back; you’re looking at about five hundred thousand fuseodollars. I know it’s a lot, but the fuel expenditure will be the same for one person as a full cargo hold. And the crew time is the same as well, they all need paying.”

“I doubt I can raise your full charter fee in advance. My research position is a comfortable one, but not that comfortable. However, I can assure you that once we reach our destination adequate funds will be available. Does that interest you?”

Joshua gripped the tray tighter, interested despite himself. “It may be possible to come to an arrangement, subject to a suitable deposit. And my rates are quite reasonable, you won’t find any cheaper.”

“Thank you, Captain. Can I have a copy of your ship’s handling parameters and cargo capacity? I need to know whether the Lady Macbeth can fulfil my requirements, they are rather specialized.”

Jesus, if she needs to know how big the cargo hold is, just what is she planning on bringing back? Whatever it is, it must have been hidden for thirty years.

His neural nanonics reported she had opened a channel. “Sure.” He datavised over the Lady Mac ’s performance tables.

“I’ll be in touch, Captain. Thank you for the drink.”

“My pleasure.”

At the other end of the bar, Onku Noi, First Lieutenant serving in the Oshanko Imperial Navy, and assigned to the C5 Intelligence arm (Foreign Observation Division), finished his beer and paid the bill. The audio discrimination program in his neural nanonics had filtered out the bar’s chatter and background music, allowing him to record the conversation between Alkad Mzu and the handsome young starship captain. He stood up and opened a channel into Tranquillity’s communication net, requesting access to the spaceport’s standard commercial reference memory core. The file on the Lady Macbeth and Joshua Calvert was datavised into his neural nanonics. What he accessed caused an involuntary twitch in his jaw muscle. Lady Macbeth was a combat-capable starship, complete with antimatter drive and combat-wasp launch-rails, and she was being capaciously refurbished. Pausing only to confirm Joshua Calvert’s visual profile was filed correctly in his neural nanonics memory cell, he followed Dr Mzu out of Harkey’s Bar, keeping an unobtrusive thirty seconds behind her.

Joshua, interested before, was now outright fascinated as he surreptitiously watched the three men trailing after the diminutive Dr Mzu almost collide in the doorway. His intuition had been right again.

Jesus, who is she?

Tranquillity would know. But then Tranquillity would know she was being tailed as well, and who the tails were. Which meant that Ione would know.

He still hadn’t resolved his feelings about Ione. There couldn’t be anyone in the universe who was better at sex, but knowing that Tranquillity was looking at him out of those enchanting sea-blue eyes, that all those fluffy girlish mannerisms were wrapped around thought processes cooler than solid helium, was more than a little disconcerting. Though never inhibiting. She had been quite right about that, he simply couldn’t say no. Not to her.

He returned to her every day, as instinctively as a migrating bird to an equatorial continent. It was exciting screwing the Lord of Ruin, a Saldana. And the feel of her body pressed against his was supremely erotic.

The male ego, he often reflected these days, was a puppet master with a very black sense of humour.

Joshua didn’t have any time to ponder the puzzle of Dr Mzu before someone else hailed him. He turned with a slightly pained expression on his face.

A thirty-year-old man in a slightly worn navy-blue ship’s one-piece was pushing through the throng, waving hopefully. He was just a few centimetres shorter than Joshua with the kind of regular features below short black hair that suggested a good deal of geneering. There was a smile on his face, apprehensive and keen at the same time.