“Er . . .” He felt as though he’d suddenly been dumped into free fall.

“You know her? You’ve known who she is?”

“Well, sort of, in a way, I suppose, yes. She did mention it.”

Kelly stood up fast, the motion nearly toppling her chair. “Mention it! You SHIT, Joshua Calvert! Ione Saldana is the biggest story to hit the whole Confederation for three years, and you KNEW about it, and you didn’t tell me! You selfish, egotistical, mean-minded, xenoc-buggering bastard! I was sleeping with you, I cared . . .” She clamped her mouth shut and snatched her bag up. “Didn’t that mean anything to you?”

“Of course. It was . . .” He accessed his neural nanonics’ thesaurus file. “Stupendous?”

“Bastard!” She took two paces towards the door then turned round. “And you’re shit-useless in bed, too,” she shouted.

Everyone in Harkey’s Bar was staring at him. He could see a lot of grins forming. He closed his eyes for a moment and let out a resigned sigh. “Women.” He swivelled round in his chair to face Roland Frampton. “About the insurance rates . . .”

The cavern wasn’t like anything Joshua had seen in Tranquillity before. It was roughly hemispherical, about twenty metres across, with the usual level white polyp floor. But the walls’ regularity was broken up by organic protuberances, great cauliflower growths that quivered occasionally as he watched; there were also the tight doughnuts of sphincter muscles. Equipment cabinets, with a medical look, were fused into the polyp; as though they were being extruded, or osmotically absorbed. He couldn’t tell which.

The whole place was so biological. It made him want to squirm.

“What is it?” he asked Ione.

“A clone womb centre.” She pointed to one of the sphincters. “We gestate the servitor housechimps in these ones. All of the habitat’s servitors are sexless, you see, they don’t mate. So Tranquillity has to grow them. We’ve got several varieties of chimps, and the serjeants, of course, then there are some specialist constructs for things like tract repair and light-tube maintenance. There are forty-three separate species in all.”

“Ah. Good.”

“The wombs are plumbed directly into the nutrient ducts, there’s very little hardware needed.”

“Right.”

“I was gestated in here.”

Joshua’s nose wrinkled up. He didn’t like to think about it.

Ione walked over to a waist-high, steel-grey equipment stack standing on the floor. Green and amber LEDs winked at her. There was a cylindrical zero-tau pod recessed into the top, twenty centimetres long, ten wide; its surface resembled a badly tarnished mirror. She used her affinity to load an order into the stack’s bitek processors, and the pod hinged open.

Joshua watched silently as she placed the little sustentator globe inside. His son. Part of him wanted to put a stop to this right now, to have the child born properly, to know him, watch him grow up.

“It is customary to name the child now,” Ione said. “If you want to.”

“Marcus.” His father’s name. He didn’t even have to think about that.

Her sapphire eyes were damp, reflecting the soft pearl light from the electrophorescent strips in the ceiling. “Of course. Marcus Saldana it is, then.”

Joshua’s mouth opened to protest. “Thank you,” he said meekly.

The pod closed and the surface turned black. It didn’t look solid, more like a fissure which had opened into space.

He stared at it for a long time. You just can’t say no to Ione.

She slipped her arm through his and steered him out of the clone womb centre into the corridor outside. “How’s the Lady Macbeth coming along?”

“Not so bad. The Confederation Astronautics Board inspectors have cleared our systems integration. We’re starting to reassemble the hull now, it should be finished in another three days. One final inspection for the spaceworthiness certificate, and we’re away. I’ve got a contract with Roland Frampton to collect some cargo from Rosenheim.”

“That’s good news. So I’ve got you to myself for another four nights.”

He pulled her a bit closer. “Yeah, if you can fit me in between engagements.”

“Oh, I think I might manage to grant you a couple of hours. I’ve got a charity dinner tonight, but I’ll be finished before eleven. Promise.”

“Great. You’ve done beautifully, Ione, really, you just blew them away. They love you out there.”

“And nobody’s packed up and left yet, none of the major companies, nor the plutocrats. That’s my real success.”

“It was that speech you made. Jesus, if there were elections tomorrow you’d be president.”

They reached the tube carriage waiting in the little station. Two serjeants stood aside as the door opened.

Joshua looked at them, then looked into the ten-seater carriage. “Can they wait out here?” he asked innocently.

“Why?”

He leered.

She clung to him tightly afterwards, trembling slightly, their bodies hot and sweaty. He was sitting right on the edge of one of the seats, with her as the clinging vine, legs bent up behind his back. The carriage’s air-conditioning fans made a loud whirring sound as they recycled the unusually humid air.

“Joshua?”

“Uh huh.” He kissed her neck, hands stroking her buttocks.

“I can’t protect you once you leave.”

“I know.”

“Don’t do anything stupid. Don’t try to beat anything your father did.”

His nose nuzzled the base of her chin. “I won’t. I’m no death wisher.”

“Joshua?”

“What?”

She pulled her head back and looked straight into his eyes, trying to make him believe. “Trust your instincts.”

“Hey, I do.”

“Please, Joshua. Not just about objects, people too. Be careful of people.”

“Yes.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise.”

He rose up, with Ione still wrapped round his torso. She could feel him getting hard again.

“See those hand hoops?” he asked.

She glanced up. “Yes.”

“Catch hold, and don’t let go.”

She reached up with both hands and gripped a pair of the steel loops on the ceiling. Joshua let go of her, and she yelped. Her toes didn’t quite reach the floor. He stood in front of her, grinning, and gave her a small shove, starting her swinging.

“Joshua!” Ione forked her legs at the top of the arc.

He moved forward, laughing.

Erick Thakrar floated into bay MB 0-330’s control centre towing his bag. He stopped himself with an expert nudge against a grab loop. There was an unusually large number of people grouped round the observation bubble. He recognized all of them, engineers who had worked on the Lady Macbeth ’s refit. All of them had been working long shifts together for the last couple of weeks.

Erick didn’t mind the work, it meant he had won his place on the Lady Macbeth ’s crew. A stiff back and perpetual tiredness was a price worth paying for that. And in another two hours he would be on his way.

The buzz of voices faded away as people became aware of him. A vacant slot around the observation bubble materialized. He steadied himself and looked out.

The cradle had telescoped up out of the bay, taking the Lady Macbeth with it. As he watched, the starship’s thermo-dump panels unfolded from their recesses in the lustreless grey hull. Cradle umbilical couplings withdrew from the rear quarter.

“You are cleared for disconnection,” the bay supervisor datavised. “Bon voyage , Joshua. Take care.”

Orange candle-flames ignited around the Lady Macbeth ’s equator, and the chemical verniers lifted her clear of the cradle with a dexterity only a master pilot could ever achieve.

The engineering team whooped and cheered.

“Erick?”

He looked round at the supervisor.

“Joshua says to say sorry, but the Lord of Ruin thinks you’re an arsehole.”