Charlotte stopped her featherlight kisses halfway down Fabian's back. She had been depending on him to provide her with a communication circuit to Baronski. Jason Whitehurst seemed to have thought of that too. God damn the man! "Isn't that unusual?"

"I'll say so. There isn't a single satellite uplink free. I don't know what he can do with all the data that's being squirted on board. All of our cargo agents are plugged into the company management processor cores. He must be selling off an entire country."

"Hey, can you see what they're downloading with all this gear of yours?" She made it come out casually, an impulse.

Fabian twisted his head to look back over his shoulder at her. "Well, yes, I suppose I could. Technically, I mean. My gear could handle it." He looked straight ahead again. "I never have though."

She started kissing his spine again. "It might be fun."

"Father tells me everything about the business."

"Everything?"

"Think so." There were shades of defensiveness and doubt jumbled together in his voice.

Charlotte reached his buttocks. "Turn over, Fabian."

Charlotte pulled on a broad white cotton halter top, and a pair of running shorts. They were tight, making her look as if she was about to burst out of them. Partly clothed always excited men more than being naked.

Fabian watched her getting dressed, wearing the serious face of someone at prayer. "You're so beautiful."

She knelt down and put her hand under her chin. "You keep saying that."

"Because you are."

"And you're very chivalrous."

He flipped his hair aside. "Just saying what I think. I can do that, can't I?"

"The girls at Cambridge are going to go wild over you. Rich, young, clever, handsome, and a real gentleman; and that's before you take your clothes off."

Fabian pulled away, staring at a science fiction saga on one of the flatscreens; wedge-shaped fighter-spaceplanes dog-fighting in the rings of a gas-giant planet. "I don't want any other girls," he said pertly. "I've got you."

She cupped his ears, and gently bent forward to kiss him. He had listened devoutly to everything she'd told him, and remembered it all. If only he wasn't so young, or she wasn't so bloody old. One of the fighters exploded in a brilliant concussion of white and blue flames, dousing them in a tide of phosphor radiance.

"There," she said as the explosion shrank. "See what kind of effect you have."

"I love you, Charlotte."

She gave his nose a quick kiss. "Have you ever skinnydipped in an ice-cold mountain tarn while there's a full moon in the sky?"

"No. Never."

"We'll try it tonight, then. I don't know about the moon and the ice, but the pool's there waiting."

"Yes!" His head swivelled about, taking in the terminals and his miscellaneous 'ware modules, suddenly very determined. "I'm going to see what Father's doing. He's got some pretty strange contacts, you know, for business, for making sure he gets delivery contracts and things. But he's never done anything like this before." He tugged his outsize Superman T-shirt out from under some cushions, and fought his way into it.

"Oh, well, I'm already out of my depth," Charlotte said. "I can never even balance my card accounts. I'll let you get on with it."

"Right," he mumbled. Multicoloured graphics were already rising in the cubes of the terminal he was operating.

She arranged the cushions in a loose nest, slumping into a beanbag at the bottom. Her cybofax displayed the London Times; the headline article was on the upcoming Welsh referendum.

She couldn't concentrate on it. A mirage of Fabian shimmered above the little screen. It wasn't as if she hadn't formed strong bonds with a patron before. One of her favourites had been eighty-eight, Emile Hirchaur, a French count. There had never been any sex involved; he simply enjoyed watching her walk and swim and ride: she'd been a surrogate body for him. And she was an attentive listener, he could be quite funny. He had chortled delightedly at his scandalized relatives when they came to visit his chateau. Life had to be made fun at his age, it would have been so utterly pointless otherwise. He treated his senescence like a second childhood. Another real gentleman. She'd cried horribly when he died.

And there had been younger, hotter lovers. Never anything serious, just physical, a relief from the feeble, tremulous sex of her patrons.

But the two had never been combined. Not that Fabian could be called a patron, not really. He didn't understand the rules, the obligations. And she couldn't blame him for that.

Why couldn't he be a snot-nosed brat she could hate as easy as breathing? Why a bright, shy, lonely boy? And most of all, why did he have to be cooped up on this bloody airship?

"Got it," Fabian called.

One of the wall-mounted flatscreens was showing an accountancy display, thick columns of green numbers moving from top to bottom in jittery stop-start sequences. "Oh, that's no use, hang on." He began to type quickly. A narrow red line appeared along the bottom of the flatscreen, gradually moving upwards; as the descending numbers reached it some of them would contract, then expand out as titles. "Decryption program," he said. The red line reached the top of the screen and stayed there.

Charlotte put down her cybofax, and studied the neatly tabulated accountancy display. It was a big company, probably a kombinate, no one else had a monthly cash flow of two billion Eurofrancs. There were hundreds of subsidiaries, all tied together.

Another flatscreen lit, showing the same sort of thing, a third.

"That's all kombinate finance," she said. "Look at the amount of money involved."

Fabian flipped his hair aside and looked at her cannily. "How would you know?"

"I can read, thank you, Fabian. And I've picked up enough money talk in my life."

He blushed. "Oh, yes, right."

She walked over to him, and slipped her arms round him, resting her chin on his shoulder. "I said I knew what it was, not that I could interpret it."

"Oh, well, it's just a confidential monthly performance review, nothing breathtaking."

"You mean your father shouldn't have them?"

"Anyone can get hold of them if they really want; that much data can't be kept hushed up. There are some commercial intelligence companies that actually produce nothing else but analyses of kombinates."

"So what's he doing with them?"

Fabian shrugged inside her arms, and tapped a finger on the terminal's cube. "One of our on-board lightware number crunchers is running a pattern-recognition program. I'd say he's probably running their finances through it, looking for money being spent on accumulating a stock of specific raw material, or invested in certain facilities."

Charlotte ran the flat of her hands lightly across his chest. "Why?"

"Placement. Father will have acquired some kind of rare cargo; and now he's searching for the best market." He cocked his head to one side as another set of monthly performance figures began to roll down the first screen. "You know, Charlotte, it must be a jolly important cargo for him to go to all this trouble."