it followed the trackway trees into a slight hollow then powered upwards again. Veppers’ stomach lurched as they bottomed out and then zoomed again. A particularly large and fine spevaline rose wheeling out of the blizzard of dark leaves and somersaulting twigs behind, still sporting its mating season plumage. Veppers cradled the tripodded laser rifle, let the opticals grab the image of the bird and identify it as the largest moving entity in the viewfinder. The gun’s servos whined, lining it up, shaking it with what felt like a series of tiny spasms to allow for the aircraft’s movements. Veppers fired the instant the aiming grid flashed. A single shot passed straight through the great bird in a small explosion of feathers. The spevaline crumpled about itself like a man wrapping a cloak about him. It fell tumbling back into the forest.
“Oh, good shot, sir!” Lehktevi said, having to raise her voice only a little to make herself heard over the howling of the engines. The balcony was shielded from the slipstream by the bowed surface of ultraclear glass. The glass could be retracted to allow other weapons besides the laser rifles to be used against the birds and other animals, but that made the balcony a quite furiously noisy place to be, at any reasonable speed; you needed ear defenders, and the swirling slipstream caused total havoc to any hairstyle worth the name.
“Thank you,” Veppers said, smiling briefly at the achingly beautiful Lehktevi. He looked at the girl on his other side. “Crederre,” he said, nodding at the laser on its tripod in front of her. “Won’t you try a shot?”
The girl shook her head. “No, Joiler, I can’t. I feel sorry for the birds. I can’t shoot them.”
Crederre was young; still becoming a woman, really. Entirely legal, though. She was not bad-looking, though her wan, pale, blonde look was quite eclipsed by the dark magnificence of Lehktevi.
He’d watched the girl swim in the underground pool at the house just that morning.
The main indoor pool under the house took up some of the space where the rows and banks of computer servers had once stood, when the house had been even more the centre of the Veppers family power than it was now, and games and programs throughout the ever-expanding Sichultian Enablement had been controlled from there.
That amount of raw, bulky computational power was no longer necessary — you could build processing substrate into walls, hulls, carpets, chassis, ceiling tiles, monocoques; almost anything nowadays — so all that space under the mansion had come free, to be filled with storage, underground garages full of exotic machinery and a giant pool ornately decorated with waterfalls, giant naturally grown crystals the size of trees, perfume pools, bubble bays and water slides. Crederre’s slim, pale body had moved over the night black of the jet tiles on the pool’s floor, sinuous and quick.
He’d watched her, and known that she’d known he was watching her. Well, he watched all women he found attractive like that, and he’d thought no more about it.
Still, the girl might be a prize worth pursuing. He was aware that he hadn’t bedded — or even attempted to bed — anyone new since the unpleasantness which had resulted in that little scribbled-on slut biting the tip of his nose off. Too self-conscious, he supposed. He stroked the golden shield covering his nose.
He laughed gently. “Well, I feel sorry for the woodland creatures too, but then if it wasn’t for this sport then these trees wouldn’t be here in the first place. And there are an awful lot of trees and an awful lot of spevalines and other birds, and only me who really shoots them. Most people are like you: too squeamish. So they’re ahead on the deal, really,”
The girl shrugged. “If you say so.” She smiled at him. Quite a pleasant, winning smile, he thought. He wondered again why she’d chosen — and been allowed — to stay behind with him. She was of an age, of course; technically independent, an adult, but all the same. It amused him when his friends, acquaintances and business partners tried to pair him off with their daughters — or even wives. Perhaps that was the idea here. He doubted anyone still thought they could marry their females off to him, but even just a liaison, an affair, might be useful to somebody with ambitions.
Veppers looked round at Jasken, standing braced behind him, Oculenses on, holding on to a handle set into the bulkhead behind, his other arm still in its cast and supported by the sling. “Jasken, why don’t you come and show us how it’s done while I talk to Miss Crederre here.”
“Sir.”
“Lehktevi,” Veppers said, “why don’t you go and see how our pilot’s doing?”
“Certainly, sir.” Lehktevi swung out of her seat, long legs flashing beneath a short skirt, massed dark hair tumbling as she pivoted to disappear though the doorway leading to the aircraft’s main cabin.
Jasken sat in her seat. He pushed the Oculenses up his head, switched on the laser rifle in front of him and cradled it, one-armed. He got a shot off almost immediately, nailing a young blackbird in a detonation of indigo feathers. It fell back to the coppery foliage rushing past beneath.
“Aren’t you worried your mistress will distract the pilot?” Crederre asked Veppers. “This thing does fly awfully low, and she is, well, distracting.”
“Wouldn’t matter if she did,” Veppers said, nudging a button to bring his seat and Crederre’s closer together. Motors whined; the girl’s brows rose a little as she watched the gap between their seats shrink to nothing, padded armrests touching. “It’s all done automatically,” he explained. “Pilot’s redundant, almost irrelevant. Most critical operation they perform is punching in the destination coordinates. There are five separate terrain- following systems making sure we stay just above the scenery, without becoming part of it.”
“Five? My,” she said quietly, sounding conspiratorial and dipping her head towards him, her long straight blonde hair nearly touching the soft material of his shirt. Was she trying to flirt with him, or being sarcastic? He found it hard to tell the difference with young women sometimes, despite all his experience. “Why so many?” she asked.
“Why not?” he countered. “Always best to have lots of redundancy with something so critical. Doesn’t really cost, either; I own the company that makes them — makes the whole aircraft,” he said, glancing about them. Jasken blasted another blackbird, then another. “Actually, the pilots are there more for legal reasons than anything else.” He shrugged. “I blame the unions. Bane of my life. Though,” he said, tapping the girl on her bare forearm — she wore a knee-length, short-sleeved, soft-looking dress which appeared plain but expensive at the same time — “I should point out that Lehktevi isn’t a mistress.”
“More of a whore?”
Veppers smiled tolerantly. “She’s staff; a servant. It’s just that her duties are principally sexual in nature.” He looked thoughtfully at the door she’d gone through. “Dare say there’s a union for her profession too.” He looked back at Crederre, who appeared not to be following all this. “I don’t really hold with unions, not amongst the staff,” he explained. “Divided loyalties. Does mean I have to pay more for her services though.”
“How terrible for you,” she said.
He heard her stepmother, Jeussere, in the remark. She’d been one of his lovers, once. Too long ago for Crederre to be his, though.
“I know, isn’t it?” he said. He’d decided: it might be quite amusing to bed the girl. A sort of continuance. Jeussere might even have been intending it. She’d been a young woman of slightly odd and exotic sexual tastes in her time — who knew? “I have this frighteningly tiresome hearing this afternoon,” he said as Jasken fired again, downing something large and copper-coloured, “but I’m free this evening. Let me buy you dinner. Is there anywhere you’ve always wanted to go?”
“That’s very kind. I’ll let you choose. Just you and me?”
“Yes,” he said, smiling at her again. “Private room, I’d suggest. I’ll get my fill of crowds at the hearing this afternoon.”
“A court hearing?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“Why, have you done something terrible?”
“Oh, I’ve done many terrible things,” he confided, leaning over close to her. “Though probably not what I’m being accused of today. Well, possibly not. It’s hard to say.”
“Don’t you know?”
He grinned. “Honestly, I don’t.” He tapped his temple. “I am the most
“One hundred and seventy-eight, is that true?”
“One hundred and seventy-eight-ish,” he agreed. He held out his arms, looked down at his fit, taut, muscular frame. “And yet I look, well; you tell me. What would you say?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, looking down modestly. “Thirty?”
