“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.”
Erick turned back to the empty bay. The cradle was sinking slowly back towards the floor. Blue light washed down as the Lady Macbeth ’s ion thrusters took over from the verniers.
“Son of a bitch,” he muttered numbly.
There were four separate life-support capsules in the Lady Macbeth , twelve-metre spheres grouped together in a pyramid shape at the very heart of the ship. With the expense of fitting them out coming to a minute fraction of the starship’s overall cost, they were well appointed.
Capsules B, C, and D, the lower spheres, were split into four decks apiece, with the two middle levels following a basic layout of cabins, a lounge, galley, and bathroom. The other decks were variously storage compartments, maintenance shops, equipment bays, and airlock chambers for the spaceplane and MSV hangars.
Capsule A housed the bridge, taking up half of the upper middle deck, with consoles and acceleration couches for all six crew-members. Because neural nanonics could interface with the flight computer from anywhere in the ship, it was more of a management office than the traditional command centre, with console screens and AV projectors providing specialist systems displays to back up datavised information.
Lady Macbeth was licensed to carry up to thirty active passengers, or if the cabin bunks were removed and zero-tau pods installed, eighty people travelling in stasis. With only Joshua and five crew on board, there was a luxurious amount of space available. Joshua’s cabin was the largest, taking up a quarter of the bridge deck. He refused to change it from the layout Marcus Calvert had chosen. The chairs were from some luxury passenger ship decommissioned over half a century ago, hinged black-foam sculptures which looked like giant seashells in their folded positions. A bookcase held acceleration-reinforced leather-bound volumes of ancient star charts. An Apollo command module guidance computer (of dubious provenance) was displayed in a transparent bubble. But the major feature, from his point of view, was the free-fall-sex cage, a mesh globe of rubberized struts which deployed from the ceiling. You could bounce around happily inside that without any danger of crashing into inconvenient (and sharp) pieces of furniture or decking. He intended to get into full practice with Sarha Mitcham, the twenty-four-year-old general systems engineer who had taken Erick Thakrar’s place.
Everyone was strapped in their bridge couch when Joshua lifted the Lady Macbeth off bay 0–330’s cradle. He did it with instinctive ease, he did it like a chrysalis opening its wings to the sun, he did it knowing this was what his spiralling DNA had been reconfigured to do.
Flight vectors from the spaceport traffic control centre insinuated their way into his mind, and ion thrusters rolled the ship lazily. He took them out over the edge of the giant disk of girders using the secondary reaction drive, then powered up the three primary fusion drives. The gee-force built rapidly, and they headed up out of Mirchusko’s gravity well towards the green crescent of Falsia, seven hundred thousand kilometres away.
The shakedown flight lasted for fifteen hours. Test programs ran systems checks; the fusion drives were pushed up to producing a brief period of seven-gee thrust, and their plasma was scanned for instabilities; life-support capacity was tested in each capsule. The guidance systems, the sensors, fuel tank slosh baffles, thermal insulation, power circuits, generators . . . the million components that went into making up the starship structure.
Joshua inserted Lady Mac into orbit two hundred kilometres above the craterous lifeless moon while they took a rest for ninety minutes. After a final, formal report confirming overall performance efficiency matched the Confederation Astronautics Board’s requirements, he powered up the fusion drives again, and accelerated back in towards the hazy ochre gas giant.
Adamist starships lacked the flexibility of voidhawks not only in manoeuvrability, but also in their respective methods of faster than light translation. While the bitek craft could tailor their wormholes to produce a terminus at the required location irrespective of their orbit and acceleration vector, ships like the Lady Macbeth jumped along their orbital track without any leeway at all. It was that limitation which cost captains a great deal of time between jumps. The starship had to align itself directly on its target star. In interstellar space it wasn’t so difficult, simply a question of adjusting for natural error. But the initial jump out of a star system had to be as accurate as humanly possible to prevent emergence point inaccuracies from growing out of hand. If a starship was departing an asteroid that was heading away from its next port of call, the captain could spend days reversing his orbit, and the cost in delta-V reserve was horrendous. Most captains simply employed the nearest available planet, giving them the choice of jumping towards any star in the galaxy once every orbit.
Lady Macbeth fell into a circular orbit a hundred and eighty-five thousand kilometres above Mirchusko, a ten-thousand-kilometre safety margin. Gravity distortion prohibited Adamist starships from jumping within a hundred and seventy-five thousand kilometres of gas giants.
The flight computer datavised the vector lines into Joshua’s mind. He saw the vast curved bulk of quarrelling storm bands below, the black cave-lip of the terminator creeping towards him. Lady Mac ’s trajectory was a tube of green neon rings stretching out ahead until they merged into a single thread which looped round behind Mirchusko’s darkside. The green rings swept past the hull at a dizzying velocity.
Rosenheim showed as an insignificant point of white light, bracketed by red graphics, rising above the gas giant.
“Generators on line,” Melvyn Ducharme reported.
“Dahybi?” Joshua asked.
“Patterning circuits are stable,” Dahybi Yadev, their node specialist, said in a calm voice.
“OK, looks like we’re go for a jump.” He ordered the nodes to power up, feeding the generators’ full output into the patterning circuits. Rosenheim was rising higher and higher above the gas giant as Lady Mac raced round her orbit.
Jesus, an actual jump.