The words warmed Dhjerga. Colm missed the twins as much as he did. “We’ll rescue them,” he said, wondering how on earth this chaotic collection of parts was ever going to turn into a spaceship. He pushed the doubts away. Colm could do it.
“Yeah, well, you’re going to need to go back to Barjoltan,” Colm said.
“What?”
“Fuel. I asked for LH2 and LOX. You didn’t bring any.”
“Oh. The queazel said there wasn’t any at that place. It shouldn’t be a problem, though. That kind of thing is always lying around …”
“Is that what he said? Sure, it’s always lying around where he comes from.”
Dhjerga did not even know what LH2 was. His ignorance frustrated him. He attempted to change the subject. “Have you seen Janz?”
“Yeah, he was just here.” Colm pulled the list Dhjerga had brought back with him out of his pocket. He tapped it without unfolding it. “The O isn’t a problem. There’s oxygen all around us. We’ve got to liquefy it anyway, so I’ll build the equipment, run it on air, and use a fractionating column to separate out the gasses. There’s our oxidizer. But hydrogen? Oxygen boils at 90 degrees Kelvin. Hydrogen boils at 20 Kelvin.”
“That doesn't sound like much of a difference.”
“I know, but hydrogen is incredibly difficult to liquefy, and fucking dangerous. It leaks out of everything, embrittles metals. The cracks allow more of it to escape into open air, and then things go bang. I really don’t want to mess with it. Did you at least bring the cryo-compression system?”
“I think so.”
“Well, maybe I can make ethanol and react it with high-temperature steam.” Colm unfolded the list. A few dark, dry leaf fragments fell to the floor. He said casually, “No meds, either?”
“The queazel said you didn’t really need them.” Dhjerga was looking at those leaf fragments. By Scota’s grave, he hoped those weren’t what they looked like.
“That goddamn furball.” Colm helped himself to more mead.
A procession of slaves entered the factory floor, lugging ingots of aluminium. Colm jumped up and went to meet them.
Dhjerga picked up the leaf fragments. He rubbed them between his fingers and sniffed them. It was as he had feared. They were doire leaves. And Colm hadn’t said anything to him about it. This was not good.
Janz came up to him. “My lord.”
“There you are,” Dhjerga said with a grin, attempting to conceal his shock. Janz looked thin—almost transparent, in fact. He was no longer the strapping champion who had accompanied Dhjerga, in a hundred thousand bodies, from one battle theater to the next. Bloody Diejen! She must have been using him profligately. Dhjerga had been going to make a new copy of him on the spot, but now he realized he could not take the risk. “You look as if you need some time off.”
“Indeed, my lord, I’d rather not.” Janz looked panic-stricken. “I’d be bored.”
“Well, then, I’ve got the perfect assignment for you. Become Lord Mackenzie’s bodyguard.” He accorded Colm the honorary title out of habit, although if his suspicions were correct, Colm did not deserve it. “Whenever he leaves the steelworks, if I’m not there, I want you to accompany him. Follow him wherever he goes … and when he takes his meals, you are to tell me what he eats, to the last mouthful.”
A gleam of approval appeared in Janz’s eyes. “That I can do, sir.” He glanced across the factory floor at Colm. “Do I have your leave to start now?”
“Certainly.”
“It’s only I heard him talking about liquid hydrogen, my lord, and I thought I’d suggest kerosene for the first stage.”
CHAPTER 22
COLM WORKED HIS ASS off every watch. He had adapted to using the imprecise Ghost unit of ‘watch’ for a human waking period, what he used to call a ‘day.’ During the ‘sleeps,’ when his artisans and slaves got their heads down in the houses he had commandeered for them—when he could get away from reviewing the blueprints with woefully ignorant mages, or inspecting materials fetched from the ends of Kisperet—he went to the zoo.
He would’ve preferred to go alone, but Janz was always with him. Dhjerga said it was necessary for his safety. After all, he was now the most indispensable man on Kisperet. Colm appreciated the thought, but he felt like Janz was watching him, and taking note of any changes in his habits.
He still wasn’t eating the salads. Instead, whenever he could manage it without Janz seeing him, he pulled handfuls of leaves off the not-oak tree. He never had caught its name. He called it, to himself, the noak tree. He stuffed them into his pocket to consume later, alone. But usually Janz stuck to him so closely that he didn’t dare to approach the tree. On these occasions, he contented himself with visiting the limethion, the dragon-like alien he had met on his first visit to the zoo. It was only too eager for company, now that it was being fed pigs instead of criminals. Colm would sit in front of its cage and listen to its reminiscences of life on Mitheikua. “We’ll get you home someday,” he promised, while he was privately beset by a feeling that he and the limethion were in the same plight. He did not live in a cage, but he too was a prisoner.
Guards surrounded every power source in the steelworks, vigilant for any attempt at invasion. A defensive perimeter enclosed the entire complex. Occasional probes from Atletis were met with volleys of fire that killed the invaders before they could see anything. The mages were sanguine, but it felt to Colm like they were under siege.
He had a place of his own now: an office at the steelworks, which he had equipped with a bed, chair, and desk. The bed was a typically fancy piece of Kisperet furniture, the headboard and footboard carved in the form of trees that met overhead and dangled diaphanous canopies around him. He would lie in there chewing noak leaves and thinking about Diejen until he felt sick.
Then his esthesia implant would come to life, and when he shut his eyes, he could feel the power flowing into the computer on his desk. Further away, he could feel the electron beam furnace, the hot isostatic press, his newly built milling machine for the hull plates, his die presses, and his new arc welding kits.
So there was definitely something happening. But when he pictured Bridget, all he could see was the glimpse that the Magus had shown him. Drop jerrycans, roll into cover, fire. Drop, roll, fire. That was not the Bridget he knew. She worked at a camping goods company. She’d married one of the sales guys, an Englishman. What had happened to her? What was happening to her right now? And what about his parents? And what about everyone he’d left in the Betelgeuse system? Axel, Sully, Meg … Gil …
Alone in the dark, after Janz finally went to bed, he would juggle or play the spoons until his fingers ached. No dice.
If the noak leaves contained a natural version of the key active ingredient in tropodolfin, it wasn’t as strong. Maybe he had to build up a certain amount of the chemical in his bloodstream, and he couldn’t get to the noak tree often enough to get enough leaves.
They’d stopped serving him salads.
“But you don’t like them,” Dhjerga had said, the one time he asked why.
So all he could do was throw himself into his work.
The computer Dhjerga had stolen from the Fleet came with the standard public knowledge base, containing petaflops of information about everything. Colm had been counting on this. Knowing a fair bit about early human spaceflight, he was basing his spaceship on the Saturn V, the rocket that had taken humanity to the moon for the first time ever.
Slowly, a copy of that historical marvel took shape in the yard in the middle of the steelworks. It looked more or less like the photos on the computer. In reality it was an unholy mash-up. Sentrienza electronics nestled in mechanical cradles fashioned by armorers and swordsmiths. Modern spaceships were precision-cast or printed by the module; Colm’s ship was sewn together with thousands and thousands of arc welds. Son Of Saturn, he was calling it. A private, black joke. SOS.
*
He sometimes had to throw parties at the steelworks to keep
the Families on board. The mages were very keen on parties. The wilder the better. They made a polite show of interest in the rocket, and then fell upon the food and drink laid on by Dhjerga, who spent most of his time struggling to feed their horde of workers and armed guards. He sent forage carts overland to plunder fields and orchards scouted out by the Lizp cousins. One of the cousins had recently hit the jackpot: an apiary. Bees made honey. Honey made mead. Mead, served up by the pint, in silver flagons cooled with ice straight from the snowy north, made Dhjerga and Colm the most popular men in Ilfenjium.
A few days ago Colm had held a static fire test of the SOS’s main engine. He had adopted Janz’s suggestion of using kerosene, in preference to ramping up several additional industries in order to get liquid hydrogen. The engine had not exploded. That was something. But the residues left in the combustion chamber and engine bell horrified him. His kerosene just wasn’t pure enough to meet the rocket fuel standard. He’d run the whole lot over a bed of carbonized millet husks to get the sulfur out of it, but that might actually have made it worse. If he fired the engine for longer than a few seconds, it would clog the lines. Goodbye, Atletis. Goodbye, Earth. Goodbye, Diejen. The computer could not tell him how to get rocket fuel out of lamp oil.
He spooned up pork and turnip stew, brooding over the problem. Around him, the mages caroused. He had had tables and benches set out in the courtyard of the steelworks, where the test had been held. The rocket stage, in its wooden scaffold—minus the engine assembly, which he’d had removed for cleaning—towered above the throng. Summer had come to Kisperet: it was warm enough to sit out in shirtsleeves, and less windy than usual. Rho Cassiopeiae shone brilliantly overhead. Atletis was a crescent at the zenith. Cerriwan, in its usual place, glowered through the top of the SOS’s scaffold. You didn’t even need lanterns on a ‘three-moon’ night like this.
The scraping squeals of a fiddle penetrated the chatter. Colm smiled in relief—the ceilidh was starting. Now he wouldn’t have to think about kerosene residues for a while. He hurriedly gobbled the rest of his meal. Janz hadn’t been able to stop him grabbing some salad amidst the free-for-all of a Ghost dinner party. The bitterness of the noak leaves turned his mouth inside-out, and warmed his stomach. Now he could feel the electricity in the buildings around him. The fiddler launched into a fast-paced tune. A second later a percussionist joined in, climbing up on a table to whack on a skin drum rather like a bodhran.
The Ghosts loved music. All the mages could play some instrument, and they formed bands at the drop of a hat. Soon a harpist and another drummer joined in. The tables were pushed back and the mages began to dance. They stood in two lines, the men facing the women; they high-stepped in and out and changed partners with formal solemnity. The women wore ankle-length split skirts that belled as they moved, with wrap-around blouses that exposed quite a lot of skin to the air. The men wore tight trousers and colorful shirts with sleeves as wide as the women’s skirts. Around the edges of the courtyard, freemen and even slaves danced too, men partnering men as there were not enough women to go around. All the mages wore a great deal of jewelry. When you could just copy it, there was no reason not to have three gold necklaces and diamond earrings the size of quail eggs. Even Colm wore several bracelets on each wrist, to fit in. The fiddle screamed, the drums hammered, high heels rattled on the cobbles, and Colm nodded his head in time with the music.
For an instant he thought he saw Diejen coming towards him. His heart turned over. But it was only one of the Lizp cousins, Sethys, who looked rather like her. “Come and dance, my lord!”
“Not yet, my lady,” Colm said, smiling at her. “On Earth, we don’t dance unless we’re drunk.”
“Then you must have another drink.”
The mead worked its magic and before long he was shaking it with the others. The formal dances had ended by now and people were just stumbling around, yelling at the musicians to play faster, louder, more. Teenagers danced on the tables, stepping in the uneaten food. A swordfight broke out. More than one couple were having sex in the open air, up against a wall.
“Are parties on Earth this much fun?” Sethys said, swaying against him. Her hair had tumbled down. She was utterly captivating.
“There usually aren’t any swordfights.”
“Let’s go somewhere quieter. Show me the factory floor.”
So he did. The tour ended in his room. They could still hear the music and shouting from the courtyard. Sethys walked him backwards until he bumped into the bed and sat down. She plopped onto his lap. His head was spinning. He grasped her waist and pressed his face into her warm, sweaty cleavage. Her voice vibrated joyfully. “Now we will have fun.”
“What would your husband say?” He knew that her husband was in the Mage Corps, away on one of the colony worlds.
“What do husbands say on Earth?”
“On Earth, we don’t sleep with other people’s wives.”
He was making Earth out to be a place of morally upstanding perfection. But the truth was that Sethys was right. In some ways, Kisperet was more fun.
CHAPTER 23
COLM HAD BEEN CELIBATE for over a year. The woman in his arms could have been anyone, but in the dark, he caught himself imagining a face he hadn’t seen in a long time. He cried out, “Ah, Diejen!”
Sethys Lizp laughed breathlessly under him. “I do look like her, don’t I? Everyone says so.”
“Sorry.”
“If you are really sorry, you must make it up to me. Do that … yes, that … oh, yes!”
Some minutes later, as they lay drained, cuddling, the diaphanous canopies were ripped away from the bed. A man stood silhouetted in the faint starlight that fell from the skylight.
Colm had not heard the door opening, because it hadn’t opened. The whole building was now so cluttered with cables, or lifelines as the Ghosts called them, that doors were obsolete: mages could pop up anywhere. He frantically reached for his gun. Then he recognized Dhjerga.
“That you, Sethys?” Dhjerga said. “Get out.”
Sethys fled, leaving the air laced with her scent. Colm pawed around on the bed for his breeches.
“Did you know she’s married?” Dhjerga said, his voice heavy with disgust.
Humiliation and outrage urged Colm to take a swing at him. But finding his trousers was a higher priority. By the time he got them on, his unthinking anger had worn off. He said coldly, “Yes, actually, I’m aware of that. Does it matter?”
He brushed past Dhjerga and hurried after Sethys, hoping to catch her and apologize. He reached the courtyard but she was gone. Cerriwan shone coldly on the debris of the party. The harpist was throwing up in the shadow of the launch tower. A pool of blood glimmered black on the cobbles; the swordfight must’ve ended badly. Colm wandered along the tables, lifting flagons and putting them down, drinking from any that still had mead in them.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” Dhjerga said, behind him.
“What business is it of yours what I do?” Colm knew, in fact, that he shouldn’t have done it. But Dhjerga’s anger seemed disproportionate. It was as if Colm had personally betrayed him.
“You’re supposed to be working on the spaceship.”
“I can’t work on it around the clock. Anyway, it’s hopeless. We may as well scrap the thing.”
“Scrap it?”
“I explained about the kerosene residues, didn’t I? It was a good idea but it isn’t going to work.”
That, in fact, was why he’d got drunk and had drunken sex with a married woman. He was trying to adjust to the idea that he might never get off Kisperet. He was trying to decide if he could stand it here forever.
“Maybe you should have chosen a different design,” Dhjerga said.
“Good God,” Colm said sarcastically, slapping his forehead, “why didn’t I think of that before?”
Of course, he had considered different designs at first. It would have been nice to go with the propulsion system he knew best, the standard Flee
t nuclear plasma drive. But he wasn’t mad enough to think he could build a water-xenon plasma engine with 19th-century technology. As for a thorium reactor, he didn’t like the idea of Dhjerga and fissile material on the same planet. Colm had never forgotten the home-made nukes that wiped out millions of people on Majriti IV. Dhjerga had been on that planet at the time. He acted ignorant, but …
“It was either solid propellant or liquid propellant,” Colm said. “And solid rocket boosters aren’t reusable. Call me crazy, but I want to have at least a chance of getting back.”
“Then we need a different rocket fuel,” Dhjerga said.
“Give the man a gold star.”
“You’re the rocket scientist. You’re supposed to be able to solve these problems!”
Colm laughed. “I’m not a rocket scientist. I’m just a guy with a computer. But as it happens, I do know exactly where we can get fuel.” He pointed up. “What do you think that’s made of, eh?”
“Cerriwan?”
“Bingo. If it’s like other gas giants, and I’ve no reason to believe it’s not, it’s made of hydrogen, that’s what. There’s normally a sea of liquid hydrogen under the clouds of any gas giant. So you just fill a tank and fetch it back … before the gravity makes you drop like a rock to the center of the planet … and you die from the radiation … and by the way, you can’t breathe, so you’re dead anyway. Easy as falling off a log.”
“All right,” Dhjerga said. “I’ll do it.”
Colm stared at him. “I was joking.”
“Well, I’m not.” Anger radiated off Dhjerga like esthesia heat off a generator. He raised his hands to unpin his cape at the neck, as if getting ready to flit to Cerriwan this very minute.
Colm rushed at him and grabbed his arms. “What the hell is your problem? Have you got a death wish?” As he spoke Colm realized that Dhjerga had had a pretty thankless time of it recently. Perhaps his pent-up frustration was boiling out under the influence of alcohol and Colm’s unwise taunting. Colm knew quite well that Dhjerga was very touchy about his own ignorance regarding technology. All the other mages were equally clueless but they just laughed it off or rambled on in a snooty fashion about the superiority of the old ways. Dhjerga cared. “Don’t do it,” Colm begged.
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