Reality Dysfunction - Emergence

trembling at her own daring. He was solid against her, wonderfully there , encouraging and praising.

“Tell me again,” she murmured. “Please, Joshua.”

“I love you,” he said, breath teasingly hot on her neck. Even his neural nanonics couldn’t banish the dawning guilt he felt at the words. Have I really been reduced to lying to trusting, hopelessly unsophisticated teenagers? Perhaps it’s because she is so magnificent, what we all want girls to be like even though we know it’s wrong. I can’t help myself. “I love you, and I’m coming back for you.”

She groaned in delirium as he entered her. Ecstasy brought its own special light, banishing the darkness of the loft.

Joshua only just managed to reach the manor’s hall in time to kiss or shake hands with members of the large group of staff and family (William Elphinstone was absent) who had come to wish him and Dahybi farewell. The horse-drawn carriage carried the two of them back to Colsterworth Station, where they boarded the train back to Boston along with the last batch of their cargo.

Melvyn Ducharme met them when they arrived back in the capital, and told them that over half of the cases were already up in the Lady Macbeth . Kenneth Kavanagh had used his influence with captains whose spaceplanes were being under-used for their own smaller cargos. It hadn’t generated much goodwill, but the loading was well ahead of schedule. Using Lady Mac ’s small spaceplane alone would have meant taking eleven days to boost all the cases into orbit.

They returned up to the starship straight away. When Joshua floated into his cabin, Sarha was waiting with the free-fall sex cage expanded, and a hungry smile in place. “No bloody chance,” he told her, and curled up into a ball to sleep for a solid ten hours.

Even if he had been awake he had no reason to focus the Lady Macbeth ’s sensors on departing starships. So he would never have seen that out of the twenty-seven thousand eight hundred and forty-six starships which had come to Norfolk, twenty-two of them experienced an alarming variety of severe mechanical and electrical malfunctions as they departed for their home planets.