The Long War

Jack winked at Fox. ‘Good question. OK, we do have stashes. Gold, silver, jewellery. Even a little paper money, if you must know – we accept all this if there’s no other way for a person to pay, who’s desperate enough. We’re not monks here, enslaved to a rule book. We cheat a little. Whatever works. But basically we’re self-sufficient, locally; almost all of it is favours.’

Allen eyed him. ‘So you do take dollars. But you won’t take dollars from us. From members of the US armed forces.’

Jack laughed in his face. ‘Listen, you and your paymasters in Washington forfeited any right to help from me and my community when you cut us off a dozen years ago. When you trashed Pioneer Support, and impounded my life savings. You even fired poor old Bill, here.’

Lovell grinned. ‘Don’t bring me into it. I’m doing fine.’

‘And none of the “Aegis rights and responsibilities” crap spouted by President Cowley cuts any ice with me,’ Jack said. ‘Yes, Lieutenant, I’ll give you water to relieve the discomfort of these children you’re leading astray. Other than that – I could take your dollars, but I won’t, because I don’t like you, or the Datum government you represent, and I want to see the back of you.’

Nathan could see Lieutenant Allen’s temperature rising, like a volcano on slow heat. ‘This is all bullshit!’

Fox said earnestly, ‘With respect, sir, it’s not. This kind of meeting of minds is precisely why—’

‘Shut your cakehole, sailor.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Fox shrank back immediately.

Allen produced a fold of currency from an inside pocket, hundred-dollar bills. He set this on Jack’s homemade desk. ‘I’m asking you to take this, sir. Or face the consequences.’

Jack, totally at ease, just faced him. ‘What is it that poor troll said, when the likes of you tried to take her cub away?’

‘That was nothing to do with the US military—’

‘I will not

.’ He repeated the phrase, backing it up with troll sign language. ‘I will not, sir. I will not.’

Allen glowered. ‘Ensign Fox, cuff this man.’

Jack just laughed. Fox sat frozen, indecisive.

There was a flurry in the corner where the guys were playing Scrabble. ‘McKibben, you butthole, there is no way under the sun that DUCTTAPE is a single word . . .’

‘I don’t think cuffing is an appropriate response, Lieutenant Allen,’ Nathan said calmly.

Allen stalked out of the house, furious.

Nathan wondered how the hell he was going to explain all this to Captain Kauffman.

When he did try, the first thing she did was to put Lieutenant Sam Allen off her ship, the first opportunity she got.

The second thing she did was to ask to meet this character Jack Green, so she could learn all about this business of the favours for herself.

20

I

N THE MINE Belt, the Valientés aboard Gold Dust witnessed a crisis.

The airship fleet had stopped a couple of times over the arid worlds of this band, to take on board ore of various kinds – not just bulky stuff like bauxite, or even obviously precious metals like silver and gold, but a slew of minerals that were scarce now on the Datum, or at any rate hugely valuable: germanium, cobalt, gallium.

But it wasn’t a colonized world where the incident happened.

The family happened to be making one of their visits to the wheelhouse at the time, and Helen and Dan saw it all. The twain had slowed because they were approaching a notorious Joker, some eighty thousand steps from the Datum, and the pilot knew to take care, driving them forward at only a couple of steps a minute. When they finally stepped into the Joker, the landscape of the neighbouring world – a sparse green with forest clumps and prairie – vanished to reveal bare, brick-red, dust-strewn rock. Even the local Mississippi was reduced to a rusty trickle, striped down the centre of a valley that looked much too wide for it. From unknown causes, this Joker happened to be suffering from some kind of global desertification. It was like a landscape on Mars.

And here was the downed ship.

She was called the Pennsylvania. She had been caught in a dust storm when she tried, cautiously, to cross the Joker, and then one of her helium sacs, maybe already carrying a fault, split open at the sudden expansion caused by the heat of the Joker’s dry air. The leak had been quick but the crash slow, relentless; it must have been a terrifying experience. The Gold Dust passengers saw the wreck now through a veil of windblown dust that hissed against the windows, the remnants of the storm that had killed the ship. From the air it was a six-hundred-foot reef already half covered by drifting red sand.