He had always been like this before a big deal, when things were reaching a point of culmination. Been a while, though.
This was crazy. What was he doing, risking everything? You never risked everything; you risked as little as possible. You sold the idea of risking everything to the sort of idiot who thought that was how you got rich, but you kept your own risks to an absolute minimum. That way if you did make a mistake – and everybody made mistakes, or they weren’t really trying – it didn‘t finish you. Let others ruin themselves – there were always rich pickings in the wreckage – but don’t ever risk too much yourself.
Except now he was.
Well, he sort of had before, he supposed; the space mirror deal he’d gone into along with Grautze could have bankrupted him and the whole family if it had unravelled at the wrong time. That was why he’d had to set Grautze up, so that if it did go badly Grautze and his family would catch the blame and the shame, not he and his.
Originally he hadn’t even meant for Grautze to suffer if it did go well, but then he’d realised that the same mechanisms he’d set up to protect himself if it went sour could equally easily double his payoff if all went according to plan, so that he would come out of it with all the money, all the shares, all the companies and instruments and power. It had just been too good a trick to resist. Grautze should have seen it, but he hadn’t. Too trusting. Too gullible. Too blinded by loyalties he thought were shared, or at least mutual. Mug.
Poor fucker’s daughter had been more properly ruthless than her father had been. Veppers stroked his nose; the tip was almost grown back now, though it was still a little thin and red-looking and tender to the touch. He could still feel the little bitch’s teeth closing round it, biting. It made him shiver. He hadn’t been back to the opera house since. He’d need to get back, appear fully in public again, before it became some sort of ridiculous phobia. As soon as his nose was fully healed.
The deal would complete, all would go well and he’d end up with even more than he already had. Because he was who he was. A winner. The fucking winner. It had always worked out in the past; it would work out this time. Okay, so the war fleet had been discovered a few days early; that wasn’t such a disaster. And he’d been right still to stall. He hadn’t told Bettlescroy’s message boy where to attack yet. And he wouldn’t; not until the ships were genuinely ready to go. And they would be ready. They were too close to completion for anybody to stop them now. The Culture mission in the Disk was being dealt with and apparently even the incoming Culture warship could be taken on and neutralised. He just hoped the GFCF knew what the fuck they were doing. But then they probably felt the same way about him.
So don’t worry, don’t panic and just keep your fucking head. Get everything ready at this end and have the courage to see it through to the end, no matter what the cost. Cost didn’t matter if you could afford it and the reward was going to be inestimably greater.
He reached up, switched the laser rifle off and sat back. No, he didn’t want to hunt, or fuck, or get stoned or anything else.
Really, he supposed, he just wanted to be back at the house. Well, he could do something about that.
He clicked a seat control.
“Sir?” the pilot said.
“Never mind terrain-hugging,” he told her. “Just get us there as fast as you can.”
“Sir.”
The aircraft started to rise immediately, pulling up from the trackway beneath. He felt heavy again for a moment, but then the ride started to smooth out.
The flash came first. He saw it light up the landscape underneath the aircraft, and wondered momentarily if some coincidence of a gap in the clouds and a gap in the ridge to the east was letting a single strong beam of sunlight through to shine so brightly on the trees and low hills beneath. The light seemed to blink, then get brighter and brighter, all in less than a second.
“Radiation aler—” a synthesised voice started to say.
Radiation? What was—?
The aircraft bucked like a dinghy thrown by a tsunami. Veppers was crushed down into his seat so hard he felt and heard himself make a sort of involuntary grunting, groaning noise as the air was forced out of his compressing lungs. The view – wildly, insanely bright – started to spin like emptied buckets of fluorescent paint swirling round a plug hole. A titanic bang resounded, seeming to come from somewhere inside his head. He glimpsed clouded sky, the clouds’ under-surfaces garishly lit from below, then distant, too-brightly shining hills and forests, then – just for an instant – a vast boiling cloud of fire and smoke, rising on a thick dark stem above a mass of darkness shot through with flame.