learned something from this sorry little episode. Don’t ever lower your guard, Juliet, not for an instant.’ She dropped her eyes to the table. ‘You will try, won’t you?’ she asked Waishaw. ‘Yes, Julia, I’ll try.’ ‘Me too.’ She pressed her lips together in a thin determined line. ‘You’ll do nothing, .girl,’ Philip said. ‘They nearly ruined us, Grandpa I Everything you’ve built. We’ve got to know who. I’ve got to know who. If I’m going to stand any chance, I need the name.’ ‘Doesn’t mean you go gallivanting about chasing will-o’the-wisps.’ ‘I’ll do whatever I can,’ Julia said with stubborn dignity. She subsided into a sulk, certain that Walshaw would be silently censuring her outburst. Well, let him, she thought. Anger was an improvement on boredom. If only she didn’t feel- so apprehensive with it. CHAPTER EIGHT T he laser grid scanned slowly down Greg’s body, a net of fine blue light that flowed round curves and filled hollows. He was quietly thankful he kept in trim: this kind of clinical catechisiii was humbling enough, suppose he’d got a beer gut? He’d spent an hour in the Dragonflight crew centre, out on one of the spaceplane barges. An annexe of tl.e payload facility room, composite-walled cells filled with gear-module stacks, most of them medical. The medical staff had been anxious to test him for exceptional susceptibility to motion sickness; space-adaptation syndrome, they called it. ‘If you do suffer, we have drugs that can suppress it for a couple of days,’ the doctor in charge had said. ‘But no more than a week.’ ‘I’ll be up there a day at the most,’ Greg told him. He was confident enough about that. The interviews at Stanstead had gone well. After Angie Kirkpatrick had cracked it’d been a simple matter of cross-referencing names. The laser grid sank to his feet, then shut off. Greg stepped out of the tailor booth, and a smiling Bruce Parwez handed him his clothes. A long-faced man with bright black eyes. Dark hair cut close, just beginning to recede from the temples. His broad-shouldered build was a give-away, marking him down as a hardliner. ‘Your flightsuit will be ready this afternoon,’ the technician behind the booth’s console said, not even looking up. Greg thanked him and left, glad to be free of the ordeal. Sean Francis was waiting for them outside. ‘The medics have given you a green light,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think we’ve ever sent up anyone with so little free fall training before.’ Francis had been markedly relieved when Greg had cleared his ship’s modest security team, taking it upon himself to see him through his pre-flight procedures. He had been grateful PETER F. HAMILTON 78 for the assistance, but found the man irritating after a while. He supposed it was culture clash. In age they were contemporaries. But after that, there was nothing. Francis was a dedicated straight arrow, high-achiever. It made Greg pause for what might’ve been. ‘I’ve got several hundred hours’ microlight ifiglu time,’ Greg said. ‘That’ll have to do then, yes?’ ‘We’ll take care of you,’ Bruce Parwez said. ‘Just move slowly and you’ll be all right.’ ‘You had many tours up at Zanthus?’ Greg asked. ‘I’ve logged sixteen months now.’ ‘Is there ever much trouble up there?’ ‘Tempers get a bit frayed. Bound to happen in those conditions. Mostly we just separate people and keep them apart until they cool off. There’s no real violence, which is just as well. We’re only allowed stunsticks, no projectile or beam weapons, they’d punch clean through the can’s skin.’ They walked along a corridor made of the same off-white composite as the crew centre, bright biolums glaring, rectangular cable channels along both walls. Then they were out into a sealed glass-fronted gallery running the length of the hangar’s high bay, half-way up the wall. Greg looked down at the Sanger booster stage being ifightprepped below. It was a sleek twin-fin delta-wing craft, eighty-four metres long with a forty-one-metre wingspan. The fuselage skin was a metalloceramic composite, an all-over blue-grey except for the big scarlet dragon escutcheons on the wings. Power came from a pair of- hydrogen-fuelled turbo-expander-ramjets which accelerated it up to Mach six for staging. Greg had only seen the spaceplane on the channels before; up close it was a monster, an amalgamation of streamlined beauty and naked energy. Fantastic. ‘How many Sangers does Dragonflight operate?’ Greg enquired as the three of them moved down the gallery to see the orbiter stage being prepped in its big clean room behind the high bay. ‘Four booster stages, and seven orbiters,’ Francis said. ‘And MIND$TAR RISING 79 they’re working at full stretch right now. The old man has ordered another booster and two more orbiters from MBB, they ought to arrive before the end of the year. Which will be a big help. Strictly speaking, we can’t afford to take an orbiter out of the commercial schedules for a Merlin launch, although I appreciate his reasoning behind the exploration programme. I just regard it as somewhat quixotic, that’s all. Still, it’s his money, yes?’ The orbiter, which rode the booster piggyback until staging, was a smaller, blunter version of its big brother; thirty-five metres long, rocket-powered, and capable of lifting four and a half tonnes into orbit, along with ten passengers. Clean-room technicians dressed in baggy white smocks were riding mobile platforms round the open upper-fuselage doors. The Merlin had been removed from its environment-stasis capsule overnight, now it was being lowered millimetre by millimetre into the orbiter’s payload bay. The probe was surprisingly compact; cylindrical, a metre and a half wide, four long. Its front quarter housed the sensor clusters, their extendable booms retracted for launch; two communication dishes were folded back alongside, like membranous golden wings. The propulsion section was made up of three subdivisions; a large cadmium tank, the isotope power source, shielded by a thick carbon sheli, and six ion thrusters at the rear. It was all wrapped in a crinldy silver-white thermal