Mellanie wasn’t quite the most beautiful girl he’d ever bedded, her chin was slightly too long, her nose too blunt, to be awarded that title. But with that lanky, broad-shouldered body of hers trained to the peak of gymnastic fitness, she was certainly one of the most physically satisfying. Although, truly, it was her age that excited him in a way he’d never reached with any of his Silent World encounters. Even in this liberally-inclined society, a rejuve seducing a first-lifer was regarded as being over the edge of civilized behavior—which simply added intensity to the experience. He could afford to ignore the disapproval of others.
This was what he was now, one of the rich and powerful, rising above the norm, the mundane. He lived his personal and professional lives in the same way, if there was something he wanted in either of them, he got it. Empire building became him, allowing him to thrive. Compared to his first mediocre century he was truly alive now.
“Go in and get changed,” he told her eventually. His e-butler summoned the dresser and the beautician to help get the girl ready. “Resal is expecting us on the boat in an hour. I don’t want to be too late, there are people coming that I need to meet tonight.”
“It’s not all business, is it?” Mellanie asked.
“Of course not, there’ll be fun people there as well. People your own age, and people older than me. Now please, we need to get moving.”
“Yes, Morty.” Mellanie caught sight of the two women waiting for her, and turned back to him. “What would you like me to wear?”
“Always: something that shows you off.” His virtual vision was displaying recent clothing purchases the dresser had made. “That gold and white thing you were fitted for on Wednesday. That’s small enough.”
She nodded eagerly. “Okay.” Then she hugged him again, the kind of tight reassurance-seeking embrace a child would give a parent. “I love you, Morty, really I do. You know that, don’t you?” Her eyes searched his face, hunting for any sign of confirmation.
“I know.” His older, earlier self would probably have experienced a twinge of guilt at that adulation. It was never going to last. He knew that, even though she would never be able to see it. In another year or so some other stray beauty would catch his eye, and the sweet heat of the chase would begin again. Mellanie would be gone in a flood of tears. But until then …
He gave her bum a quick gentle slap, hurrying her back into the penthouse. She squealed in mock-outrage before scampering in through the wide doors. The two women followed her in.
His e-butler brought up a list of items that he hadn’t finished working on during the day. He surveyed them all, taking his time to add comments, demand more information, or approve them for action. It was always the way; no matter how complex the management smartware a company employed, executive decisions were inevitably made by a human. An RI could eliminate a whole strata of middle management, but it lacked the kind of creative ability that a true leader possessed.
When he’d tidied up the office work, the butler brought him another sparkling gin. Morton leaned on the steel balcony rail to sip the drink, gazing out at the city below as the sun fell below the horizon. He could outline sections of it in his mind, entire districts that Gansu had built, where their government-licensed subsidiaries now provided utility and civic services—his innovation, that. There were other areas, as well, that drew his eye. Old plantations and orchards that now formed the outskirts, green parquetry flocking around the base of the mountains. Gansu’s architects had drawn up plans for beautiful buildings that would fit snugly into those crumpled mini-valleys, expensive exclusive communities providing for Oaktier’s increasingly affluent population. Already, the farmers were being tempted with financial offers and incentives.
When he looked up to the darkening sky the stars were starting to twinkle. If everything went to plan, his influence would soon stretch out to them, far exceeding the small subcontracts their offplanet offices currently achieved. He controlled Gansu’s board now. The increased business and rising stock price he’d achieved for them over the last decade had given him near-regal status. There would be no timidity in his expansion plans. The opportunities that lay out there were truly staggering. Entire civil infrastructures to be built. The new phase three junction worlds that would one day rival the Big15. Now was the best time to live.
He lowered his gaze again to scan the city rooftops. One old medium-sized tower caught his attention. It was the apartment block he and Tara had lived in for most of their marriage; he’d never realized he could see it from his roof garden. There were no details from this distance, twilight transformed it into a gray slab with parallel lines of light shining out through the windows. He took another sip of the cocktail as he stared at it. His memory couldn’t even provide an image of the apartment’s interior. When he’d gone in for rejuvenation six years after the divorce he’d edited away everything but the basic information from his secure store. Now, that life was almost like a series of notes in a file—not real, not something he’d lived through. And yet … Twenty years ago, when he’d heard of Tara’s re-life procedure, something about it had nagged at him. It was out of character to go and see her, yet he had. The semineurotic woman in her new clone body wasn’t anyone he recognized, certainly not the kind of woman he could form an attachment to. He put that down to shock and psychological trauma from the re-life.
Then the news about Cotal had been filtered out of the unisphere media streams by his e-butler, which had caught the connection to Tara. He’d stopped work in his office—an unheard of event—and worried about how strange the coincidence was. His staff had made a few discreet inquiries, the results of that had been enough for him to call the police. Their subsequent report on the case had annoyed him with its vagueness and lack of conclusion. Rather than kick up a fuss himself, which would draw comment, he’d spoken to some of the senior members of the Shaheef family.
He hadn’t quite expected someone as renown as Chief Investigator Myo herself to be assigned the case. But it was a pleasing development; if anyone could sort out what had actually happened, it would be her. His thoughts slipped to her compact body again, and the high possibility of her needing to visit Silent World.
“Morty.”
He turned around. The dresser and beautician had worked their usual magic. Mellanie was standing silhouetted in the light from the living room, her auburn hair dried and straightened so it fell down her back, the tiny dress exposing vast amounts of toned young flesh. His disquiet over Tara and Cotal vanished at once as he contemplated what new indecencies he would tutor her in later tonight.
“Do I look all right?” she asked cautiously.
“Perfect.”
TEN
Oscar Monroe and McClain Gilbert took the early-morning express from Anshun, passing through StLincoln, then Earth-London before arriving at Kerensk. The CST planetary station there operated the gateway to the High Angel, but there was no train. Instead they disembarked from the express and walked back up the platform to the main concourse. Next was a series of security checks to get into the High Angel transfer section; CST operated the first, a standard deep body scan and luggage examination, before passing them over to the Commonwealth Diplomatic Police Directorate who reviewed all visitor details. The High Angel was the one place where free entry was not a guaranteed right for Commonwealth citizens. As well as all personal details being reviewed by the Diplomatic Police for any criminal record, the file was also forwarded to the High Angel who possessed the ultimate veto on who could enter.
Oscar waited with a fluttering stomach as the policeman accepted the citizenship ID file from his e-butler and ran a DNA scan to confirm he matched the certified data. He’d never been to the High Angel before, there was always a chance it would refuse him entry or, worse, say why. “You ever been before?” he asked Mac. It was an attempt to appear casual in front of the policeman.
“Five times now,” McClain said. “Forward teams train in the zero-gee sections so we’re ready for any type of
space encounter.”
“Damn, all these years on the job, and I never knew that.”
McClain grinned at his friend. They’d known each other for ten years, working together in Merredin’s CST exploratory division; after that much time in a high-pressure profession if you didn’t develop a mutual respect then somebody had to leave. Chain of command was always a nominal concept in the division, you trusted people to do their job right. “Oh, great, I’ve been risking my life under an Operations Director that doesn’t have a clue what’s going on.”
“I saw that tar-pit monster coming, didn’t I?”
“Gentlemen,” the policeman said, “you’re clear to proceed.”
They walked through into the transfer section lounge. A steward gave them each a one-piece overall made of light breathable fabric, with fuseto footpads and cuffs. “It’s just for the shuttle,” he told them. “Wear it over your clothes, it stops anything flying loose. And please don’t forget your helmets before you go through, safety regulations will not allow us to fly unless all passengers are wearing them.”
Several other people were in the lounge, all of them shrugging their way into the white overalls. Anyone with long hair was fastening it back with bands that the stewards were handing out. Mac nudged Oscar. “Isn’t that Paula Myo over there?”
Oscar followed his gaze. A young-looking woman was fixing her straight black hair with the bands. Her companion was an overweight man in a smart suit who could barely fit into his overall. “Could be. She must have come out of rejuve recently. I remember accessing the Shayoni case about six or seven years back, the one where she tracked down the arms seller who’d supplied kinetics to the Dakra Free State rebels. Four days she waited in that house for them to show up. That is what I call dedication.”
“My wife studied her cases when she was in the academy, that’s how I know her. I’m sure it’s her.”
“Wonder who she’s after this time?”
“You know, we should have her in the crew.”
Oscar gave Mac a startled look. “As what? Do you think we’re going to start killing each other on the voyage?”
“Living in close proximity with your farts for a year, more than likely. But she solves problems, right, that’s what her whole brain’s wired for. She’s exactly the kind of talent we should be taking with us.”
“There are different kinds of problems, you know; and we’re heading for the wrong sort.” Oscar clapped Mac’s shoulder. “Keep trying, one day you’ll be command material.”
“The day before you, pal.”
“Right. And by the way, what does your wife think about you going off and leaving her for a year?”
“Angie? She’s fairly cool about it. We talked about splitting up, but that’s being unduly pessimistic. We’ll just leave it and see what happens. If she finds someone else while I’m gone, fair enough. Our partnership contract allows for that.”
“Nice contract.”
“Yeah, so what about you? How are you going to cope for a year? Seen any possibilities among the recruits?”
“Haven’t really thought about it. I’ve got enough OCtattoos for a very high-resolution TSI, I’ll just make do with a harem of nicely shaped pixels.”
Mac shook his head in sad dismay. “Brother, you have got to get out more.”
A steward led five of them, including Paula and her companion, into the departure corridor at the far end of the lounge. Everybody’s feet made crunching sounds as the fuseto pads tried to anchor them on the floor. They were all handed a protective helmet as they went through, the steward making sure they put it on. “Are you familiar with zero gee?” the steward asked.
“I am nowadays,” Oscar told him grumpily. The helmet was identical to those they used at the starship complex on Anshun. He still hated his trips to the assembly platform, but Wilson was a real believer in hands-on management—obviously a relic of his gung-ho NASA days. There wasn’t a week since Oscar had joined the project that he hadn’t been on some kind of inspection tour.
“The gateway itself is marked by the black rim,” the steward said, pointing ahead down the corridor. “After that you’re in zero gee; please use the fusetos and do not float free. Your shuttle is waiting at dock five. Now if you’ll all follow me.” As he arrived at the black line, he reached forward and touched his fuseto cuff on the wall. He eased himself gracefully across the line and his feet floated off the floor. Oscar grimaced in resignation, and followed suit.
After five meters, the corridor opened out into the middle of a hemisphere measuring fifty meters across. There were no windows, only eight big airlocks set equidistantly around the rim. Number five was open. The steward led them carefully along the curving surface, adhering to it from his wrists and toes, like some giant insect. He waited by the airlock, ready to give assistance as they stopped to maneuver themselves through into the shuttle.
The little craft was a basic tube, ten meters long, with a double line of couches. Oscar strapped himself in, and looked up. Five thick windows were set into what passed as the fuselage ceiling above him. All he could see was the curving outer wall of the departure port.
There were only fifteen passengers on board. Their steward went along the couches, checking that everyone was settled, then the airlock irised shut. “High Angel does not permit CST to put a gateway inside itself,” the steward said. “So we’re about fifty kilometers away. The journey over will take approximately fifteen minutes. If anyone has any real difficulty, please let me know. I have some strong sedatives which will probably help. In the meantime please familiarize yourself with the sanitary tube on the seatback in front of you.”
Oscar grimaced at the flexible hose with its freshly replaced nozzle. Still, it was an improvement on the bags he’d taken to carrying with him around the starship platform.
The shuttle vibrated quietly as it disengaged from the locking mechanism, chemical reaction control rockets nudged it away from the docking port. After drifting for a few seconds, the more powerful main rockets flared, accelerating them away. As they retreated from the port, more and more of the structure flowed into view through the shuttle windows, until after a minute Oscar could see the entire gateway station. It reminded him of a quartz cluster, long hexagonal tube sections all rising up out of a central disk; with the twin shuttle departure and arrival ports extending out from the disk’s rim. The end of the hexagonal tubes were giant airlocks where cargo tugs delivered their shipments; sealed pods containing completed satellites, sophisticated solid-state devices, compounds, crystals, and biologicals that could only be fabricated in microgee environments. Cargo tugs also used the airlocks to load up with consumer goods and food that the gateway delivered, ferrying them over to the High Angel.
The rest of the archipelago drifted into view through the window; over a hundred free-flying factories ranging from tiny independent research capsules barely larger than the shuttle up to the corporate macrohubs, kilometer-wide webs with production modules sitting on each junction where they glinted like jewels of prismatic chrome. Behind them the gas giant world, Icalanise, dominated the starfield as the little shuttle rotated slowly. Their orbital position showed it to them as a massive crescent striped by saffron and white cloud bands whose fluctuating edges locked together by counterspiral curlicues, as if each was extending talons into the other. A pair of small black circles were close together on the equator, eclipse shadows thrown by two of the gas giant’s thirty-eight moons.
After ten minutes, the shuttle turned again, aligning itself for the deceleration burn. Oscar found himself looking straight at the High Angel.
The exploratory division wormhole that opened in the star system in 2163 was unable to locate any H-congruous planet, and the Operations Director was almost about to close it and move on when the dish picked up a powerful, regular microwave pulse from Icalanise. They obtained a position lock to a point orbiting half a million kilometers above the brimstone atmosphere, and shifted the wormhole in for a closer look. I
t was a confusing image at first. The telescope had centered on a dark, rocky moonlet sixty-three kilometers long, and up to twenty wide. But it appeared to be sprouting petals of pearl-white light—an angel’s wings. Moving in, and refining the focus, revealed the rock was actually the host body to twelve giant artificial domes of crystal sitting on the end of tall metallic stalks. Not all of the domes were translucent and radiant; five were clear, revealing the alien cities contained inside. Street grids were illuminated in ruby, turquoise, and emerald light, while thousands of windows set into the strange architectural silhouettes of towers, hoops, cones, and spheres blazed away in the spectrums of many different suns.
What they’d found was a starship, a living behemoth capable of FTL travel. It was not any kind of life that humanity understood, being neither a machine that had risen to sentience nor a spaceborn life-form that had evolved or been engineered into its current nature. However, the High Angel wasn’t forthcoming about its origin, saying only that its purpose was to provide a habitable environment to the planet-based species it encountered in the hope of learning about them. It was “resting” in orbit around Icalanise—for how long was also not divulged. After some negotiation over a radio channel it agreed to open three of its domes to humans, who would use the space primarily as a dormitory town for the astroengineering companies. The two most prominent clauses in the settlement agreement were High Angel’s veto on visitors and settlers, and its promise to inform its new human residents before it took flight again, whenever that might be.
The Commonwealth Saga 2-Book Bundle Page 33