Brice brought the cab to a halt at the very apex of Andrew's Curve. "Well, here we are."
Nancy Becker got up from the seat and went to stand with her face almost pressed against the observation window. That wasn't as foolish as it seemed, because that was a real window, not a vid screen. Allowing for the various protective shields, she was looking at the vista beyond with her own eyes, not something relayed electronically.
Brice had thought she'd like that. He'd timed the trip so that they'd be in shade when they arrived. Ameta, along with its various moons (the smallest and certainly the most recent of which was Parmley Station), revolved around an F5 subgiant star, which was half again as massive as Old Earth's sun, had twice the diameter, and was almost eight times more luminous. Had the roller coaster cab been perched in direct sunlight, Brice would have had no choice but to use the vid screens. Even with the protective shields—which were cut-rate quality, forget state of the art—it would have been too risky to look at the vista directly.
But they'd be able to do so for at least two hours before the station's revolution around Ameta brought this portion of it back out of the shade.
Brice came to stand next to her. Ameta was on full display, with all of its cloud bands and rings. There seemed to be every shade of blue and green there, along with enough white bands to set them off perfectly. As a bonus—this was rather unusual—the moon Hainuwele was just peeking around the curve of the giant planet below. Most of the time, Brice wasn't fond of the moon. It was close enough to Ameta to be subject to pronounced tidal heating, and its blotchy red, yellow and orange surface was usually sick-looking. In its current location, however, it was far enough away for the ugly details to be unnoticeable. At that distance, its bright colors made a striking contrast to the much cooler shades of its mother planet.
Even Yamato's Nebula was on its best behavior at the moment. It was as if the entire sidereal universe had decided to give its full support to Brice's bold and risky endeavor. He knew that was a fantasy, of course. But it ought to be true.
"It's beautiful," Nancy said softly.
"Told you," said Brice. Then, spent a minute or so silently berating himself for being less suave than any human male since the extinction of Homo erectus.
But he did not concede defeat. Quaked, but did not lose heart. He'd been planning this campaign for months, and had warned himself over and over that there would be setbacks. Most of them caused by his clumsy tongue.
This was the first time the two of them had ever been alone, since they met on the tarmac of the spaceport. The months they'd spent since their escape from Mesa drifting on the Hali Sowle had been the equivalent of months spent in the most densely populated apartment in creation. You'd think that a freighter massing slightly over a million tons would have enormous empty reaches, but . . . it didn't. Or, rather, it did . . . but it was a working commercial vessel, nothing more. Despite the capaciousness of its huge cargo holds, the living quarters were small and Spartan. Neither Ganny nor Uncle Andrew would have reacted kindly if Brice had proposed that time be taken from the repair work needed to get the ship's drive working again to turn some of the freight compartments into additional living quarters so that he might have a chance to spend some time alone with Nancy, either. It was best not to even think how Zilwicki or Cachat would have reacted to that suggestion, and, just to complete the unfairness of the universe, there'd been the minor fact that every square meter of every cargo hold was covered by the bridge security and monitoring cameras. So even though there were all those vast stretches of space, Brice had been gloomily certain that any effort on his part to inveigle Nancy out into them would have been instantly discovered. Even if it would never have happened to anyone else, it would definitely—inevitably!—have happened to him. At which point his supposed best friends and the loving members of his family, with that dubious quality which supposedly served them—ha!—as a sense of humor would have made his life a living hell.
To be sure, had Brice and Nancy already established a clear relationship, they could have figured out a thousand ways to elude the informal chaperonage provided by Ganny and Nancy's mother . . . and those damned cameras! But that was precisely the task at hand. And while there were undoubtedly some fifteen-year-old boys somewhere in the galaxy who'd have the sheer nerve to try to start a romance by immediately proposing that the two of them disappear somewhere so they could . . .
Well. Brice was not one of them. His isolated upbringing as a member of the Butry clan had made him very self-confident in some situations, but very shy in others.
This was one of the others.
Nancy's head turned, her attention drawn by the sight of a shuttle heading toward the Hali Sowle.
"How soon are they going to be leaving, do you know?"
Brice shook his head. "I haven't heard anything definite yet. Uncle Andrew says they're still waiting for the proper replacement parts to arrive." He laughed suddenly. "I think he's a bit pissed off that they don't trust his repairs to get them there, but I sure don't blame them. 'Course part of the reason he's pissed is because he already had all the parts he needed, before we dumped 'em out to squeeze you and your mom in. Way he sees it, it was all their fault to start with, so they don't have any business turning their noses up at his custom-built parts."
Nancy returned his grin, and he shrugged.
"Anyway, the guys on the Custis"—EMS Custis was the Erewhonese repair ship which had been at the station as part of the ongoing work to turn Parmley Station into something that still looked like a decrepit and mostly abandoned amusement park but was actually quite a powerful fortress—"agreed to make a quick hop to get replacements for us. I think their skipper probably works for the people we got Hali Sowle from in the first place. Anyway, he obviously thinks we should use real parts to fix the hyper generator."
"How about us? How soon will we be going to Beowulf?" Nancy asked.
"I'm not sure about that either. I know Ganny wants us to go as soon as possible. Well, given the space available and where we are in the rotation."
That had been part of the deal. Every member of the clan still young enough was being transported to Beowulf in order to begin prolong treatments. The order in which they'd go was determined by their age. Those like Sarah Armstrong and Michael Alsobrook who were getting close to the limit would be sent first, of course. Brice and Ed and James were not at the top of the list, but he figured they'd be going pretty soon.
Best of all, Nancy would be going with them. It was too late for her mother Steph to undergo prolong, but not for Nancy herself.
Zilwicki had been as good as his word. Better, actually. The expense of paying for a complete suite of prolong treatments for her daughter was going to be at least as high as the expense of setting up Steph Turner in a new restaurant. But Anton hadn't blinked. "I'll cover the cost if Beowulf gets sticky about it."
From something Cachat had said, though, Brice thought Beowulf would probably just handle Nancy's treatments as part of the general arrangement they'd made with Ganny. When Brice had once expressed his concern over the issue to Victor, the Havenite had gotten a very cold smile on his face.
"I wouldn't lose any sleep over it, Brice. It's going to be a while yet—there are some other people we have to talk to first, for several reasons—but unless I miss my guess, you're going to see the rage of Beowulf unleashed in the universe sometime pretty damned soon now. They're not going to quibble over the cost of an extra prolong treatment while they're sinking a fortune into forging the weapons to finally take down Grendel. Which they surely will, once they learn the monster has a mother after all."
The last part of that hadn't meant anything to Brice, but the gist of it was clear enough.
Nancy went back to looking at Ameta. "It's so beautiful."
The moment had come. He was sure of it. Months of planning—he'd even practiced in a mirror—enabled him to slide his arm around Nancy's waist with no more clumsiness than a walrus calf taking its first waddle across the ice.
He held his breath, waiting for an explosion.
But she said nothing. Just continued to look at Ameta's glory, with a smile on her face. And about a minute later, nestled her head onto his shoulder.
Brice was utterly thrilled. This was, for sure and certain, the greatest exploit in his life. The greatest thus far, rather—in a life that would now last for centuries.
* * *
"I'm going to Torch, Andrew," Steph Turner said. "That's just the way it is." She leaned back from the table in the clan's mess hall on the station, setting her shoulders stubbornly. "And quit trying to claim you're doing anything but guessing. Me, I don't see any way this place is ever going to sustain enough of a clientele to keep a restaurant going."
His own shoulders were set almost as stubbornly as hers. Not quite.
"I don't know if I can get any work on Torch," he whined.
"Are you kidding? It won't be all that long, you numbskull, before the whole damn galaxy knows that Andrew Artlett is the mechanical wizard—the jackleg mechanic of all time—who got the Hali Sowle through on its desperate mission. Your problem won't be finding work, it'll be dodging Mesan assassination squads."
She got that twisted little smile on her face that Andrew found just as hard to resist now as he had the first time he'd seen it, less than a day after the Hali Sowle left orbit from Mesa. "And what better place to stay safe from those bastards than a Ballroom planet?"
"Well . . ."
"Make up your mind. I'm going to Torch. Are you coming with me or not?"
"I guess."
* * *
"I think the Republic owes us a stipend too, Victor. 'Course, I don't expect one as big as Beowulf's, much less as big as the one I figure I'll be squeezing out of the Star Kingdom." Friede Butry gave Victor Cachat a twisted smile of her own. "I realize you Havenites are the poor cousins in this part of the galaxy."
"I told you, you're just wasting your time. Sure, I'll put in a word for you. Be glad to. But after that, it'll work its way up the ladder until—don't hold your breath—it finally reaches Those Who Decide Such Things." Cachat shrugged. "After that . . . ? You've been around a lot longer than I have, Ganny. You know what bureaucrats are like."
She said nothing for a few seconds. Just studied him with an intensity Victor didn't understand and even found a little disturbing.
Then she said: "I forget sometimes, the way you're still a babe in the woods when it comes to certain things."
"What does that mean?"
"Victor Cachat, your days of being on the bottom rungs of the ladder—or of the totem pole, if that means anything to you—are coming to an end. In about as spectacular a manner as you could imagine. A few weeks from now—sure as hell, a few months from now—a 'word put in' by Victor Cachat will be putting fleets into motion. Or whatever the flamboyantly notorious galactic super secret agent equivalent of that is, anyway. So I figure you're good for the stipend—to which I will point out that you just agreed."
After a while, the frown on Victor's face faded. But by then, his complexion was beginning to get pale.
Ganny chuckled. "Didn't think of that, did you? I found out yesterday from one of the BSC people that Anton Zilwicki appeared in a widely broadcast vid documentary a while back. So you've got some catching up to do. And since he's already nailed down the monicker of 'Cap'n Zilwicki, Scourge of the Spaceways,' you'll need to come up with something different. For the documentaries they'll be doing about you, I mean. My own recommendation would be either 'Black Victor' or 'Cachat, Slaver's Bane.' "
"I'm a spy."
Ganny shook her head sympathetically. "No, Victor Cachat. You were a spy."