He still suspected there was a lot more to this than he was being told, and he had no doubt he was and would continue to be both manipulated and used, but providing the price they were paying him was right, that didn't bother him, and at least the job itself sounded simple enough.
He'd taken the precaution of checking up on the story his uncle had told him about the disappearing trillion-year-old sun and the orbiting artifact. Sure enough, there it was; a semi-mythological story set way back in the archives, one of any number of weird-sounding tales with frustratingly little evidence to back them up. Certainly nobody seemed able to explain what had happened in this case. And of course there was nobody around to ask anymore. Except for the lady he was travelling to talk to.
The captain of the good ship Problem Child had indeed been a woman; Zreyn Tramow. Honorary Contact Fleet Captain Gart-Kepilesa Zreyn Enhoff Tramow Afayaf dam Niskat-west, to give her her official title and Full Name. The archives held her picture. She'd looked proud and capable; a pale, narrow face, with close-set eyes, centimetre-short blonde hair and thin lips, but smiling, and with what appeared to him at least to be an intelligent brightness to those eyes. He liked the look of her.
He'd wondered what it would be like to have been Stored for two-and-a-bit millennia and then be woken up with no body to return to and a man you'd never seen before talking to you. And trying to steal your soul.
He'd stared at the photograph for a while, trying to see behind those clear blue mocking eyes.
They played another two games of batball; Fivetide won those as well. Genar-Hofoen was quivering with fatigue by the end. Then it was time to freshen up and head for the officers" mess, where there was a full-dress uniform celebration dinner that evening because it was Commander Kindrummer VI's birthday. The carousing went on long into the night; Fivetide taught the human some obscene songs, Genar-Hofoen responded in kind, two Atmosphere Force Wing Captains had an only semi-serious duel with grater muffs — much blood, no limbs lost, honour satisfied — and Genar-Hofoen did a tightrope walk over the commander's table pit while the scratchounds howled beneath. The suit swore it hadn't contributed to the feat, though he was sure it had steadied him a couple of times. However, he didn't say anything.
Around them, the Kiss The Blade and its two escorts powered their way through the spaces between the stars, heading for Tier habitat.
IV
Ulver Seich woke up in the best possible way. She surfaced with a languorous slowness through fuzzy layers of luxurious half-dreams and memories of sweetness, sensuality and sheer carnal bliss… to find it all merging rather splendidly into reality, and what was happening right now.
She toyed with the idea of pretending she was still asleep, but then he must just have touched exactly the right spot and she couldn't help making a noise and moving and clenching and so she rolled over and took his face in her hands and kissed it.
"Oh no," she croaked, laughing. "Don't stop; that's a fine way to say good morning."
"Nearly afternoon," the young man breathed. He was called Otiel. He was tall and very dark-skinned and he had fabulously blond hair and a voice that could raise bumps on your skin at a hundred metres, or, better still, millimetres. Metaphysics student. Swam a lot and free-climbed. The one she'd set her heart on the previous evening. The leg-liker. Long, sensitive fingers.
"Hmm… Really? Well… you know… maybe you can say that later, but meantime you just keep right on — WHAT?"
Ulver Seich jerked to a sitting position, eyes wide open. She slapped the young man's hand away and stared wildly around. She was in what she thought of as her Romantic bed. It was more of a chamber, really; a ruched, pavilion-ceilinged five-metre crimson hemisphere filled with billowy bolsters and slinky sheets which blended into puffy paddings forming the single wall of the chamber and which swelled out in places to form various projections, shelves, straps and little seat-like things. She had other beds; her childhood bed, still stuffed with toys; her Just Sleep bed, comfy and surrounded by nocturne plants; a huge grandly formal and terribly old-fashioned canopied Reception bed, for when she wanted to receive friends, and an oil bed, which was basically a four-metre sphere of warm oils; you had to put little nose-plug things in and the air was Displaced into you. Not to everybody's taste, sadly, but very erotic.
Her neural lace had woken up already with the adrenaline rush. It told her it was half an hour to noon. Shit. She'd thought she'd set an alarm to wake her an hour ago. She'd meant to. Must have slipped her mind due to the fun; hormonal re-prioritisation. Well, it happened.
"What…?" Otiel said, smiling. He was looking at her oddly. Like he was wondering whether this was part of some game. Twinkle in the eye. He reached out for her.
Damn, the gravity was still on. She commanded the bed controls to switch to one-tenth G. "Sorry!" she said, blowing him a kiss as the apparent gravity cut by ninety per cent. The padding beneath their bodies suddenly had a lot less weight to support; the effect was to produce a very gentle, padded pat on the bottom which was enough to send them both floating fractionally upwards. He looked surprised; it was such a sweet, boyish, innocent expression she almost stayed.
But she didn't; she jumped out of the bed, kicking up through the air and raising her arms above her head to dive through the loose gatherings of the chamber's tented ceiling and out into the bedroom beyond, arcing out over the padded platform around the bed chamber and falling gently back into the clutches of its standard gravity. She ran down the curved steps to the bedroom floor and almost bumped into the drone Churt Lyne.
"I know!" she yelled, flapping one hand at it.
It lifted out of her way, then turned smoothly and followed her across the floor of the bedroom towards the bathroom, its fields formal blue but tinged with a rosy humour.
Ulver broke into a run. She'd always liked big rooms; the bedroom one was twenty metres square and five high. One wall was window. It looked out onto a tightly curved landscape of fields and wooded hills dotted with towers and ziggurats. This was Interior Space One, the central and longest cylinder of a cluster of independently revolving five-kilometre diameter tubes which formed the main living areas in the Rock.
"Anything I can do?" the drone asked as Ulver ran into the bathroom. Behind it, there was a shout and then a series of curses as the young man tried to exit the bed chamber in the same way Ulver had and got the gravity-transition wrong. The drone turned briefly towards the disturbance, then swivelled back as Ulver's voice floated out through the noise of rushing fluids. "Well, you could throw him out… Nicely, mind."
"What?" Ulver screamed. "You get me to ditch a luscious new guy after one night, you make me scrap all my engagements for a month and then you won't even let me take a few pets? Or a couple of pals?"
"Ulver, can I talk to you alone?" Churt Lyne said calmly, rotating to point at a room off the main gallery.
"No you can't!" she yelled, throwing down the cloak she'd been carrying. "Anything you have to say to me you can damn well say in front of my friends."
They were in the outer gallery of Iphetra, a long reception area lined with windows and old paintings; it looked out to the formal gardens and Interior Space One beyond. A couple of traveltubes waited beyond doors set into the wall full of portraits. She'd told everybody to rendezvous here. She'd missed the noon deadline by over an hour, but there were certain things about one's toilet that simply couldn't be rushed, and — as she'd told a briefly but fetchingly incandescently furious Churt Lyne from her milk-bath — if she was really that important to all these top-secret plans, SC had no choice but to wait. As a concession to the urgency of the situation she had left her face unadorned, tied her hair back into a simple bun and slipped into a conservatively patterned loose pants and jacket combination; even choosing her jewellery for the day had taken no more than five minutes.