‘Cutler would have been the first to fire. Without hesitation and the most enthusiastic. Wouldn’t such a man be a useful weapon? Captain, Cutler is here as a means of controlling you, in certain circumstances.’

‘Hmm . . .’

Maggie had no way to check this out, not without turning the ship around. The only long-range communications system that spanned the inhabited Long Earth was the outernet, a kind of mixture of internet and drop-boxes mediated by the chance passage of travellers and twains – reliable, but slow and in no way secure, and it didn’t function too far out anyhow. And there was no ship faster than the Armstrong itself to serve as a courier. Maggie was going to have to continue with her mission without access to her command chain, for better or worse.

She took out her frustration on the cat, not for the first time. ‘You’re damn suspicious, for a bunch of random sparks of electricity in a half-pound of Black Corporation gel.’

‘I’ll take that as a compliment. But I’m right to be suspicious. You should be. There are all sorts of secrets being kept from you on this ship. And if you admitted that to yourself, you might have an evens chance of spotting some of them.’

7

WITH THE STEPPING RATE upped to two a second during operational hours, and with plenty of downtime for testing and system shakedown, the Armstrong and Cernan were able to cover the best part of a hundred thousand steps a day. So, ten days after Cowley’s speech in Madison West 5, the airships were already passing Earth West 1,000,000, and were entering the more exotic band of worlds known to the early explorers as the High Meggers.

Cautiously Maggie allowed herself to relax. Her in-tray of problems both technical and human was dwindling. Despite Mac’s gloomy analysis that the true purpose of the mission was power projection by the federal government, she was collecting no issues from the ground either. And after five long years of labour in the Low Earths and the Datum, she was no longer locked into the huge, ongoing and utterly dispiriting relief effort that still spanned much of Yellowstone-blighted Datum America.

She was thinking, in fact, of giving Harry Ryan his head and letting him open up the throttle to full, ahead of the test schedule, and see just what this baby could do.

That was when Douglas Black knocked on the door of her sea cabin.

After an embarrassed introduction by Nathan Boss, Black sat down opposite her, stiffly. The man who stood behind him, no more than thirty years old, close-shaven, glared at her like a recruiting-ground sergeant at a private.

Nathan got out of there as fast as he could.

Maggie hadn’t even known Black was aboard, and she resentfully remembered Shi-mi’s hints of secrets on this voyage. She had only ever seen this man, Douglas Black, the most powerful, indeed probably the richest industrialist in all the worlds of mankind, from a distance: on stage with the President like back in Madison, or on some media channel, plugging his latest technological initiative, or testifying to yet another senate committee investigating allegations of corporate malpractice. He was smaller than he looked on TV, she thought immediately. Slimmer, older. He wore a plain-looking black business suit and tie. He might have been handsome once, but now his bald pate was liver-spotted, his features, his nose, ears, were old-man prominent, and his eyes were rheumy behind the dark glasses he continued to wear indoors.

Black caught her studying him, and laughed. ‘You needn’t pull your punches, Captain. I know I’m no oil painting, and a let-down compared with the way the TV people prettify me digitally. Still, check out my youthful smile.’ He grinned widely, showing her rows of perfect teeth. ‘Decent choppers – one thing money can buy, these days.’

His accent was Bostonian, she thought, old school, like JFK in grainy black-and-white TV clips. Old school, but not particularly old money. Everybody knew Black’s story, how he had parlayed a grandfather’s oil-money bequest into fortune and power through dazzling technological innovations, and had acquired a comet-tail of enemies in the process.

‘Mr Black,’ she began.

‘Call me Douglas.’

‘I’d rather not. You can call me Captain Kauffman. I had no idea you were even on this vessel until you announced your presence to my wretched XO.’

‘Ah, yes. I’m afraid we rather caught that young man by surprise, didn’t we? Couldn’t be helped, I’m afraid. I was smuggled aboard before launch and locked into my private cabin, tucked away in a corner of the gondola – you must come visit. The issue is security, as you can imagine. You must know I am rather, well, vulnerable, and I have accreted rather a lot of opponents. So this unhappy subterfuge was cooked up – with the cooperation of your Admiral Davidson and my security people, all mediated by staff from the office of President Cowley. Everybody’s been very helpful.’ He smiled again, self-satisfied.

Maggie was coldly furious. ‘Helpful? Mr Black, from my point of view you’re a stowaway.’

He was quite unperturbed. ‘How exciting! And at my age. In that case I should say that I do come with some baggage.’

‘Baggage?’

‘There’s Philip here, and a small staff – my personal physician, a few scientific advisers, a planetologist, a climatologist. And some specialized equipment. In addition to the general fragility of age, I have endured a number of transplants, and my regime of anti-rejection drugs compromises my immune system. I need protection, you see. Luckily you have a roomy hold.’

‘Good grief. How many tons of deadweight does all that represent? And all smuggled aboard without my knowledge.’

‘True. Yet here we are. I don’t imagine you’re about to throw me overboard?’

‘No. But I may do that to this goon of yours, if he doesn’t stop staring me down.’

‘Philip, be polite.’ The man Philip dropped his eyes, but otherwise didn’t move a muscle. ‘I’m afraid he must stay at my side. Another condition of my security people concerning your kind offer of a berth. Well, not your offer, rather the President’s . . .’ He smiled again after dropping that ultimate name, evidently content to wait while she absorbed all this.

‘Well, Mr Black, I can’t say I’m not surprised – astonished – to find you here, aboard my ship.’

‘That’s because you don’t know me, yet. I’ve always been rather more adventurous than my public persona might suggest.’

‘I know you pumped a lot of money into these vessels.’

‘Yes. Actually I pretty much bankrolled their development – save for the Chinese stepper technology, of course. I’ve always been glad to support the industries that sustain our armed forces.’

‘I know that.’ She remembered being shocked at discovering to what extent Black Corporation fingerprints had been all over the fabric of the Benjamin Franklin, for instance. She had always suspected that Black must use his infiltration of the military, from the level of his contacts with the senior commanders who approved his enormous contracts, down to the implantation of his devices in every ship of the line, every tank and armoured car and plane – even in the bodies of some of the troops themselves – to garner information at the very least, or more likely to exert subtle control. ‘It must have cost you billions, but I guess you bought yourself a berth on this tub.’

‘I’m so glad you’re taking it this way.’

‘Do I have a choice?’

He ignored that. ‘You know, I’ve always followed your career with great interest.’

‘I’ve no doubt you have.’ You and others, she thought, remembering the mysterious ‘Doctor George Abrahams’ who had shown up to offer her troll-call translation technology just when she had needed it, in the course of her mission aboard the Franklin – and then had bragged about the way he had manipulated various situations to advance her career. Oh, and he’d then given her a talking robot cat. She believed Black, like Abrahams, represented a node of a wider web of such control and communication. But this was her ship, and she felt the need to regain command of the situation. ‘Mr Black, what is it you actually want? Just a ride across the Long Earth?’