watched closely. He grinned at them and grasped one of ceiling handholds. His legs developed a momentum all of their own, pulling his torso along until he was lying flat against the ceiling. Stomach muscles were the key, Greg decided, keep the,. body straight and rely on his arms to pull him about. He hauled himself towards the rear bulkhead, remembering to ~ take inertia into account as he stopped. There was a ripple of applause. The rest of the team were swimming out of their seats. Jerry Masefield had opened the airlock hatch and disappeared inside. Greg swung slowly round the rim and followed him into the can.
Greg couldn’t quite figure out the section of the dormitory can he’d emerged into, a tunnel with a hexagonal cross-section, three and a half metres wide, bright bioluni strips every five metres, hoops protruding everywhere. Logically, it ought to have been a connecting corridor, except it was full of people. They lingered near the walls, aligned with their feet towards him, a foot or hand hooked casually round the hoops, all of them wearing flightsuits and helmets. A large proportion were eating; their food resembled pizza sandwiches, the same pale spongy dough, tacky fillings. No crumbs, Greg realized, and no need for plates and cutlery. Twenty metres away, four exercise bikes were fixed to the walls, riders pedalling away furiously. There was a sign opposite the airlock, an old London Underground station strip: Piccadilly Circus. It was the noise that got to him first. Conversations were shouted, air-conditioning was a steady buzz, cybofax alarm bleepers were going off continuously, the PA kept up a steady stream of directions. Then there was the air – warm, damp and stale. He began to appreciate Angie Kirkpatrick’s point of view. The dormitory commander, Lewis Pelham, and Event Horizon’s Zanthus security captain, Don Howarth, were waiting for him. Lewis Peiham didn’t attempt to shake hands, holding . on firmly to one of the hoops as the rest of the security learn I MINDSTAR RISING 89 boiled out of the airlock. ‘My orders are to afford you full cooperation,’ he said. He had that same flat professionalism as Victor Tyo and Sean Francis, Greg noted, Did Philip Evans have a clone vat churning them out? ‘Somewhere private,’ he suggested, raising his voice above the din. Peiham smiled, big lips peeling back, a round face. ‘Sure.’ ‘It’s shift change,’ Howarth said. ‘Not like this all the time, don’t worry.’ His face was fluid-filled, too, a ruddy complexion. They slapped the hoops, moving off up the tunnel, skimming along effortlessly. Greg climbed after them doggedly, one hoop at a time. A few cheers and jeers pursuing his progress. ‘Five days,’ Howarth said, ‘and you’ll be outflying a hummingbird.’ He was waiting by an open hatch. ‘Through here.’ It was a toroidal compartment, wrapped round the central tunnel. A space station as Greg understood it, consoles with flatscreens and cubes flashing graphics and data columns, bulky machinery bolted on to the walls, lockers with transparent doors. Five beds were staggered round what Greg thought of as the floor, assuming the entrance hatch was in the ceiling. Lewis Pelbani had orientated himself the same way as Greg, holding the edge of a bed to maintain his position. The security team followed suit as they came in. ‘This is the sick bay,’ Pelhain said. ‘Nobody in today. Will it do?’ ‘Do you have a brig?’ Greg asked. Peiham and Howarth exchanged a glance. ‘We can clear the suit-storage cabin if it’s really urgent,’ said the security captain. ‘Good enough.’ His gland began its secretions. ‘Close the hatch, Bruce,’ he said. Bruce Parwez elevated himself, and spun the lock handle. Lewis Petham regarded Greg without humour. Greg closed his eyes as the compartment became insubstantial. Minds crept out of the shadow veils bordering his perception, a swarm of pale translucent pearls, compositional 90 PETER F. HAMILTON
emotions woven tautly into penumbra nuclei. He focused on the two strangers before him. ‘Now, to start with, do either of you know anything about the excessive memox-crystal con1 tamination?’ CHAPTER NINE J ulia flung herself at the problem as she took her horse Tobias on their morning ride. There was a strong sense of urgency pushing her to find a solution now, almost one of despair. Greg Mandel had located the person who’d circumvented the security monitors, and the five guilty memox-furnace operators up at Zanthus. The replacement operators were flying up today, their Sanger bringing the security team and the prisoners down. It would be over soon, congratulations all round, and a small security office left intact to track down one of the tekmercs. A vague hope, even less of finding the team leader and through him the backers. Julia didn’t even bother to open her eyes in the saddle. Tobias knew their route, down the edge of the manor’s rear garden, past the spinney at the end of the trout lake, and into the meadows beyond. The horse’s lumbering rhythm was soothing, rocking her gently back and forth on his back. Normally she enjoyed Wilholm’s grounds. The landscape crew hadn’t been given much time after the communal farmers moved out, but they’d managed to recreate quite a reasonable approximation of a traditional English country-house garden. The flat lawns were clipped low, showing broad cricket-pitch stripes, young staked trees poked up at regular intervals, moated with colourful begonia borders. There was a citrus grove in the old walled orchard where apples and pears used to grow. Long winding rose-covered walks. Ancient-seeming statues. Even her grandfather had been impressed. ‘The plants aren’t the same, of course,’ he’d told her on their first inspection. He’d been in fine form that day, she remembered, genial and outgoing. It was a day or two after they’d moved in, a small treasured hiatus before the illness really took hold. He never spoke to anyone else as he did to hers never opened himself. ‘You wouldn’t find any of these in Victorian gardens, 92 PETER F. HAMILTON not outside the conservatories. That was the zenith of the art, Juliet. But it’s a damn good copy for all that, I can almost believe I’m back in my youth. I wish you’d seen England as it was, girl. We all said we hated it, the wet and the cold. Pure bollocks. You could no more hate the country than you could your own mother. Weather made Englishmen.’ The way he painted the land before the Warming had made her envious of his memories. Try as she might she just couldn’t visualize Wilholm under a metre of snow. But he seemed reasonably content with the facsimile. And he always had the roses and honeysuckle, immortal. Now she ignored both varieties of the fragrant flowering plants while whirlpools of data rotated lazily in the open-ended logic matrix her augmented mind had assembled. It was a simulacrum of Event Horizon’s Zanthus operations, a vast web of data channels incorporating every activity, programmed to review the entire previous twelve months, the first three giving her a baseline for comparison. Byte packages slid smoothly along the matrix channels, interacting at the nodes, dividing, recombining. The convoluted phantasm reminded her of a brass clock she’d seen in London once, sitting on a pedestal in the window of a Fuiham Road antique shop. A real clock in a glass dome, every working part visible. She’d stood for ten minutes watching the little cogs clicking round, superbly balanced ratchet arms rocking fluidly, fascinated by the delicate intricacy. Then the minute hand had reached the hour, and it began to make twanging sounds, like a broken spring uncoiling; cogs on the outside of the mechanism shot out on telescoping axles gyrating wildly. The whole thing had looked like it was exploding. Julia had clapped her hands and laughed delightedly as it folded itself back together, ready for the quarter-hour strike. There was that same elegance and effortless precision in the matrix function. She needed the knowledge it would produce. The fact that someone could wound Event Horizon so badly had frightened her more than she liked to acknowledge. It went deeper than mere corporate damage; what little control she had over her MINOSTAR RISING 93 life was being manipulated, cut away. Her future was being decided right now by how well other people could defend her and Grandpa from unseen enemies. Fighting shadows. It was the claustrophobic sense of not being able to do anything which was the worst. If she just knew. The simulacrum was intended to give her some part in the struggle, to make the reliance less than absolute. She was going to start at the beginning, the furnaces, then work right back through the company, cross-reference every connection, examine every link, however tenuous. Somewhere, in all that hellishly convoluted maze of data, there would be anomalies, a mistake, a clue to the origin of the spoiler. Nobody was perfect enough to cover their tracks entirely. She’d find it. Data was her medium, a universe where she reigned. Processing power cost nothing, there was only time challenging her now. New channels began to branch from the bottom of the matrix; how the microgee products were used, sales, maintenance, personnel, finance arrangements, tie-ins with other companies. The Zanthus matrix became the tip of a rapidly growing pyramid. Queries began to surface. A memox-furnace operator who’d left suddenly around the dine the spoiler started. Julia plugged into Event Horizon’s iatanet, squirting a tracer program into the company’s data ~ores. The woman had been four months pregnant, skipped tier contraceptive in orbit. Doctors were worried about the baby’s bone structure, it’d spent two months developing in free fall. Faulty ionizer grids in the memox furnaces three months ago had slowed production. But the batch had affected other companies as well, Boeing Marietta had paid compensation. There was a small but regular fluctuation in monolatuce filament output, starting nine months ago. A three per cent shortfall every month, and always in one batch. According to production records the filament extrusion ratio was incorrect, each time. Julia cross-referenced it with the memox data. It fitted like a jigsaw. Whenever the monolanice filament output dipped, PETER F. HAMILTON 94 the memox crystal output rose to compensate, maintaining total production losses at a level thirteen point two per cent. She’d found it. Though what the hell it was, she hadn’t got a clue. End HighSteal#Two. Her processor nodes sucked the data mirage back into nothingness. There was a brief impression of free fall, dropping back into the world of primary sensations. The clammy late March heat, blouse sticking to her back, tight sweaty Levis, smell of horse breath, birds trilling, red pressure on her eyelids. Julia blinked, focusing slowly. A cloud of midges were orbiting the brim of her tatty boater. She was in what she called the crater field. Two acres of small steep-sided hummocks and hollows, like the earth had been bombed or something. Buttercups smothered the rich emerald-coloured grass all across the slopes. A twitch on Tobias’s reins, and he plodded towards the derelict tea plantation. The communal farmers had tried to grow it on a PSP grant. Tea was fetching a good price after the Sri Lankan famine reduced the global harvest by a third, and England’s new climate provided near ideal conditions for cultivation. But these were gene-tailored trees, and some nameless State lab had screwed up the DNA modification. The shoots were fast-growing all right, but the leaves ruptured into bulbous cherry blisters before they were ripe enough for picking. The plantation had gone the way of most PSP initiatives, abandoned and left to rot. Julia dismounted, letting Tobias nuzzle round in the clover. The shire horse was becoming unfortunately flatulent in his old age. Poor dear. He was another legacy of the communal farm, too old for plough work any more. The labourers had left him behind for Philip Evans to knacker, a trifling expense for a multibillionaire. Julia had found him alone in the stables as she explored Wilholm the day they moved in. She’d fallen for the great shaggy animal at first sight. lie was woefully thin, his coat MINDSTAR RISING 95 caked in mud, covered in sores from the plough harness. And he’d looked at her so mournfully, as if he knew what the future held. That had been the last time anyone at Wilholm, including Grandpa, had dared to mention the knackers. She refused to ride anything else, and ignored the snickers and winks of the staff when they saw her on the back of the huge plodding beast. ‘You’ll have to lose that sentiment of yours, girl,’ Philip Evans had scolded. ‘Can’t run Event Horizon on sentiment.’ Except she knew damn well he would have done the same thing. The tea trees had been laid out in unerringly straight rows. Nearly a third of them had died, but the remainder, left untended, had spread wildly, swamping the gaps, rising up to merge overhead. Julia left Tobias behind, walking a little way down one of the long tunnels of black branches. Her trainers crushed the crisp dead leaves littering the ground, making sharp popping sounds. For one moment she almost believed they heralded the long lost autumn, an end to England’s eternal Indian summer, when frost would fall and pull down white-fringed leaves. She missed the snow. It had been such a long time since a flake had fallen on her outstretched palm. In Switzerland even the Alps had occasionally been denuded of their sparkling white caps. She sat with her back to the smooth bole of one of the Living trees. The temperature had dropped appreciably in the orange-hued shade. She fanned her face with the boater and pulled out her cybofax. When Greg’s face formed on the little screen it didn’t match her memory of him. Free fall had swollen his cheeks, his eyes seemed enlarged, but even through the slightly distorted features he looked dispirited. Something she would never have imagined. She’d been a little bit afraid of him the other night. Physically he wasn’t exceptionally big, the same height as Adrian, but there’d been an impression of strength; the way he moved, clean and unhurried, knowing nothing would be in his way. And he’d never smiled, not meaning it anyway. Like 96 PETER F. HAMILTON he was only play-acting civilized. He’d seemed a very cold fish, hard. Which, on reflection, was an interesting kind of challenge. What would make him take notice of someone, respond with kindness? And if he did, how safe that person would feel with such a guardian angel. ‘Miss Evans,’ he said, expectant. Julia wedged the cybofax into a fork on the gnarled branch in front of her, and put her boater back on. ‘Julia, please.’ ‘Julia. What can I do for you?’ ‘I called about the spoiler operation.’ ‘You can tell your grandfather I’ve got all the guilty furnace operators under custody, and the person who destreamed the microgee module squirts.’ Tell Grandpa, indeed. Like she was some sort of second-rate office messenger. ‘Oh, yah. Is Norman Knowles under sedation yet? Mr Tyo’s report said he put up quite a struggle.’ ‘How the bloody hell did you know that?’ ‘My executive code gives me access to all the security division communications.’ She regretted saying it instantly, flinching inwardly at how pompous she must’ve sounded. ‘Oh. Well anyway, Knowles isn’t going to be any more trouble. It’s finished now, we’re due down in another six hours.’ ‘It isn’t finished, Greg.’ He frowned, inviting explanation. She began to reel off her research findings, praying he wouldn’t think she was talking down to him. The girls at school always said she talked as though she was delivering a lecture. But he listened intently, not interrupting like most people. ‘You discovered this yourself?’ he asked when she’d finished, and there was definitely a tone of respect in his voice. ‘Yah. The data was all there, it’s just a question of running the right search program.’ Julia knew her cheeks would be red, but didn’t care. ‘How much is the monolattice filament worth?’ he asked. ‘That’s what doesn’t make sense,’ she admitted. ‘The total oss is only nine hundred thousand Eurofrancs.’ ‘And that bothers you?’ MINOSTAR RISING 97 ‘Yah! It’s ridiculous. Why go to all that trouble? The memox spoiler works perfectly, there’s no need to add the monolattice filament to it.’ Greg didn’t exactly smile, but she could sense his tension easing. ‘Tell you,’ he said, ‘I knew something about this spoiler operation was funny. You believe in intuition?’ The question was sharp, as though the answer really mattered to him. Julia forgot the tea plantation, the bark pressing into her back, muggy air. She felt real good talking to him like this, treated as an equal, not the patronized boss’s granddaughter, not a scatty teenage rich girl. Right now she was a real person, for the first time in a long time. Maybe the moment would stretch and stretch. Commit GregTime. To sip and savour whenever she felt down. ‘I had to keep working on the Zanthus data,’ she said carefully. ‘Like it wouldn’t let me go.’ He nodded, satisfied with her response. ‘It’s up here. I can feel it, no messing.’ Which sounded pretty strange. Was that what he’d meant by intuition? ‘What’s up there?’ ‘The twist. We’re overlooking something, Julia.’ He paused, eyes closed, an impression of effort. ‘What was the monolattice filament intended for, anything important? Are you going to get clobbered with penalty clauses for non-delivery?’ Julia used the nodes to plug into the company datanet, remonstrating with herself, it was an obvious question. She traced the monolattice-filainent contracts, running a quick analysis. ‘Not that I can find,’ she said. ‘But I’ll have the lawyer’s office double check to be on the safe side,’ ‘Right. In the mean time, I’ll start interviewing the monolattice-filament module people.’ He let out a long breath, rubbing his nose. ‘Lord, how many of them are there?’ ‘Seven. We don’t make much monolattice filament.’ ‘That’s something. You’d better call Morgan Walshaw; bring him up to date, and have him round up those on their furlough. I’ll have to vet them once I get down.’ ‘Right.’ PETER F. HAMILTON 98 ‘That was a terrific piece of work, Julia. Exactly the sort of proof I needed.’ Julia watched his image intently. His camouflage of emotional detachment had slipped fractionally, he was keen now, animated. He looked much nicer this way, she decided. ‘What proof?’ ‘That the spoiler doesn’t conform.’ ‘But how does knowing it’s odd help? That just makes it more confusing to me.’ He winked. ‘Have faith. Now I know, I’ll keep looking. And I can look in the weirdest places.’ ‘Where?’ she demanded eagerly. ‘Right in my own heart. Now you’ll have to excuse me, I’ve got to get Victor Tyo organized.’ ‘Right, sure.’ Granting him a favour. End Greglime. His image winked out, what might have been a smile tantalizing her. She reached out and plucked the cybofax from the tree. Grinning stupidly, feeling wonderful. One of Wilholm’s sentinel panthers was looking at her five metres away, violet saucer eyes unblinking. She clicked her fIngers and it padded over. Warm damp breath fell on her cheek. ‘Good girl.’ She stroked it behind pointed flattened ears. It yawned lazily at the affection, pink tongue licking its double row of shark-heritage teeth. Tobias snorted disapproval, shaking his thick neck, then went back to foraging the grass. Right in his own heart? CHAPTER TEN A lexius McNamara dropped through the sick bay’s hatch, dressed in the sky-blue flightsuit which all the microgee module workers wore. His jowls overflowed his helmet strap, fingers resembled sausages. It was the last week of his shift. ‘Grab him,’ Greg said simply. He’d soon learnt to speak in a half shout, sound didn’t carry far in free fall. Victor Tyo and Isabel Curtis were already anchored to the chamber’s walls on either side of the hatch. They clamped him between them with the efficiency of a tag-wrestling team, his legs and arms immobilized. Don Howarth jabbed a shockrod into his neck. Greg had recognized the mental genotype as soon as he appeared: fissures of lassitude, leprous self-loathing. One of the kamiltazes. He wasn’t taking chances with them any more. His interview with Norman Knowles, one of the five managers, had finished badly. Greg had sensed Knowles was the one who’d circumvented the security monitors at the same time as Knowles worked out he had a gland. Unfortunately, Greg hadn’t sensed Knowles was one of the kamikazes in time. Jerry Masefleld had taken the brunt of the attack before he had been subdued. There was something uniquely disquieting about small globules of blood spraying about in free fall. ‘Fuck you!’ McNamara shouted. The shockrod dug deeper. Don Howarth was a man worried for his position and pension. McNamara snarled. Greg pushed off the wall, and stopped himself ten centimetres from him. They were inverted, and Greg sensed how that irritated the man. The Zanthus crew put a lot of stock in orientating themselves to a universal visual horizon. ‘Spit at me, and I’ll shove that shockrod up your arse, no messing,’ Greg said calmly. McNamara gave a start, thought about it, and swallowed. 100 PETER F. HAMILTON ‘That’s right. They sent me up here because I have a gland.’ Frightened eyes peered at Greg from within wells of flaccid flesh. ‘You’ve been screwing around with the monolattice-ftlament extruder ‘ware, McNamara. Writing off perfectly good fibres. How long have you been doing it?’ ‘Hey, psycho freak, your gland gives you cancer, know that? You’ll die rotting.’ ‘Don’t,’ said Greg. ‘The whole nine months? Eight? Seven?’ He sighed. ‘Seven it is.’ ‘Bastard.’ ‘How did they get a lever on you?’ ‘Eat shit and die, boy-lover.’ ‘We have this sweep going between us, you see. A flyer each, so you can understand we’re anxious to know. With a lot it’s sex. Drugs are quite popular. Then there’s the geegees. Some are just cracking apart, can’t take the stress. But I think you’re a straight money man, McNamara. Greed, that’s your bang, isn’t it? Pure greed.’ Greg could smell breath heavy with herb seasoning. ‘Did they tell you why?’ ‘What?’ McNamara was clenching his muscles rigid, trembling, his face hot. ‘Why they only wanted that three per cent taken out? Why not go for the jackpot like the memox furnaces?’ There was nothing in his mind, no indication that he knew an answer, even the reference to the memox furnaces had surprised him. The tekmerc team had been good, Greg acknowledged, textbook. The furnace operators didn’t know who’d circumvented the security monitors, McNamara hadn’t known about the furnace operators. Tight thinking all the way down the line. He stopped his gland secretion, and turned wearily to Bruce Parwez. ‘OK, I’m through with him. Stash him in the suit cabin.’ ‘Right.’ He began to truss McNamara with nylon restrainer bands, arms, ankles, knees. The seething man was eventually hauled out of the sick bay by Isabel Curtis and Lewis Pelham. ‘It must be getting crowded in that cabin, five furnace MINDSTAR RISING 101 operators, now two from the filament modules,’ Greg said to Victor Tyo. ‘Tough.’ ‘Yeah. How many more?’ ‘McNamara was the last. Unless you want to work through the other microgee products.’ ‘Christ, don’t. Morgan Walshaw or Julia Evans would’ve been in contact if any other products were involved with the spoil.’ ‘Yes, the last word I got from Walshaw was that he’d got up a team to analyse the output of every module.’ Victor fought against a smile. ‘I don’t think he was too happy that Julia Evans had found another security breach.’ Greg wedged his foot under one of the beds. His first impulse was to sit down, but the position made his stomach muscles ache. Everything about free fall was unnatural. There was a fish bowl on the wall beside the bed, a sealed metre-wide globe with a complicated-looking water filter grafted on to one side. Ten guppies were swimming slowly round. Even they were all keeping their bellies towards the wall, though the angle made it look as if they were standing on their broad rainbow tails. ‘What was bothering him?’ Greg asked. ‘That it was another breach, or that Julia Evans found it?’ ‘Both, I think.’ ‘What’s wrong with Julia?’ ‘Nothing. I met her once, nice kid.’ Victor popped a mint out of a tube with his thumb, snagging the spinning white disk in midair with his tongue. ‘Except we’re all a bit worried about her grandfather. She’s sort of young to be taking over a company like this. There are eighty thousand of us, you know. Most have dependants. That’s a lot of responsibility for a teenage girl.’ ‘Yet she’s quicker off the mark than the whole of the security division.’ Victor smiled boyishly. His face seemed almost unaffected by free fall. ‘There is that.’ The sick bay suddenly rang as if it’d been hit by a hammer. 102 PETER F. HAMILTON Greg winced, he knew that was something he’d never get used to. The thermal stabilization went on for fifteen minutes every time the dormitory crossed the terminator, the can’s metal skin expanding or contracting, protesting the adjustments with loud groans and shrieks. ‘Shall I tell the pilot we’re still OK for our original departure time?’ Victor asked. ‘Yes. We’ll get the first flight off anyway, and make sure McNamara is included. He’s not the type I want up here a moment longer than necessary. You and I will go down in the second flight.’ ‘McNamara’s that bad?’ ‘Total nutcase, no messing.’ ‘Right, I’ll assign all our hardliners to go down on that flight, five of them, five of us; Knowles can go down with them as well. We can borrow a couple of hardliners from Howarth to come with us.’ ‘How long can we delay the second flight?’ ‘You’re the boss; as long as you want. Physically the Sanger can stay up here for thirty-six hours, but it’d be cheaper to send it down and wait for another.’ ‘Plan for that, then. If anyone objects, tell them to contact Walshaw. And if he wants to know what the deal is, tell him to call me.’ ‘Do you think there are some more tekmerc plants up here?’ ‘Unlikely.’ ‘Why are we staying, then?’ ‘To find out why the monolattice-filament output was being tampered with.’ Greg wasn’t too keen on having to explain his instinct to Victor. The security lieutenant was a programmer, confined to the physical universe where everything was precisely arrayed and answers were logical, black and white. Perhaps he was being unfair. But empathy was the tangible half of his gland-enhanced psi ability. Intuition, on the other hand, was a track leading down the black-ice slope to the hinterlands of magic, witchery. The province of prophets and demons. Julia Evans was young enough to be impressionable. Victor, he suspected, would be a mite sceptical. MINDSTAR RISING 103 ‘I thought the tekmercs were holding the filament extruders in reserve,’ Victor said. ‘Then after we pulled the furnace operators, they just bring them into line.’ ‘No. The tekmercs would know we’d check the other micro-gee modules eventually. And you’ve toughened up the security monitors yourself; there won’t be a recurrence. There’s no way they could ever hope to pull the same stunt twice in a row. They’re too professional for that.’ ‘Right.’ Victor thumbed his communication set, and began talking to the Sanger pilot docked to the can. The guppies were chasing tiny grains of food which the filter unit was pumping into their globe. Greg rubbed his eyes, yawning, a faint throbbing of a neurohormone hangover making itself felt at the back of his head. The last decent sleep he’d had was on the Alabama Spirit. Two – no, three nights ago. But the idea of sleep was foreign, he knew his body well enough to tell when he needed to bunk down. Ever since they’d arrived at Zanthus he’d been on the verge, time stretched up here, knocking biorhythms along with the rest of normality. It was his mind that needed to wind down, a whole stack of accumulated Zanthus-time memories pressing in on him. Voices percolated through the sick-bay hatch, interspaced by a salvo of plangent creaks from the can shell. Piccadilly Circus was filling up, the shifts changing over again. Greg realized his gland was active again, though he couldn’t remember a conscious decision to use it. The secretions brought on an unaccustomed dreamy sensation; it felt good, warmth and confidence washing through him, lifting the depression Alexius McNamara had left behind. The answer was close now, a surety. He heard a protracted clanging as one of the Swearingen commuters docked with the can, hums and whines took over. Another wave of voices broke, the high, restless kind people used when they’d just come off work. The answer clicked. CHAPTER ELEVEN J ulia raced out of the bathroom just as Adela was about to pick up her cybofax. ‘I’ll get it,’ she called over the shrill bleeping. She tightened the belt on her robe and threw away the big yellow towel she’d been drying her hair with. Adela shrugged, and began to close the curtains. Torrential rain was beating against the thick windows. Julia dropped on to the bed and picked up the cybofax. Greg’s face appeared on the screen. She flushed scarlet. ‘Give me a moment, Adela, please.’ Adela picked the towel off the carpet, giving her a meaningful look before closing the bathroom door behind her. ‘Are we secure?’ Greg asked. Julia pushed back some of her hair, it was all rat tails. Why did he have to call when she looked like this? ‘Yah.’ ‘Great. I know what the twist is.’ Julia stared at him numbly. ‘And you called me first?’ ‘Yeah. You see, I need it confirming before I go to Walshaw or your grandfather. So I thought you could do some research for me.’ ‘Me?’ ‘You uncovered the monolattice filament discrepancy. It’s as much your discovery as mine. I thought you’d want to see it through.’ ‘I do,’ she said quickly. Commit Greglime#Two. ‘Right then,’ Greg said. ‘It’s a Luxemburg-registered company that has to be checked out. Can you do that for me?’ ‘Of course. But, Greg, what’s the twist?’ He smiled, and she noticed how drawn he looked. ‘I think the memox crystals are being shipped down to Earth.’ ‘Oh,’ was all she said, because the jolt sent her thoughts MINDSTAR RISING 105 racing. ‘Greg, the Sanger flights are well documented. Their cargo manifests are finalized weeks in advance. It’d be awfully difficult to sneak anything on board, certainly on a regular basis.’ She didn’t like puncturing his idea like that, he seemed so keen about it. But Greg’s smile just broadened. ‘Forty-eight million Euro-francs, Julia. When I took the case, we thought the crystals were being contaminated, dumped. But they’re not contaminated, are they? They’re perfect. For forty-eight -million, it’s worth trying to bring them down, even if you couldn’t get away with it. Tell you, I’d try. If it’s possible, those tekmercs will’ve done it; maybe they’ve found a psychic who can teleport the stuff back to Earth for them.’ ‘Teleport?’ she squawked in alarm. ‘Old Mindstar joke, sorry.’ ‘Ah.’ The goosebuinps on Julia’s forearms began to settle. ‘The thing is, to find the flights the crystals went down on, Event Horizon would have to run a computer search through past spaceplane flights up to Zanthus. Say, over the period of a couple of months.’ ‘God, Greg, do you know how many spaceplane flights rendezvous with Zanthus in one day, let alone a month?’ ‘Today there were twenty-three. That’s where my problem lies. I’m convinced it’s happening, but getting Morgan Walshaw to mount an investigation on that scale, with just my intangible hearsay to go on, would be difficult. That’s even if the spacelines would co-operate and open their data cores to you, which is doubtful, and assuming the tekmercs haven’t wiped the records anyway.’ ‘So what’s this company you want me to check out?’ ‘The weak link. There’s always one.’ ‘I know,’ she whispered fervently. ‘Yes? Well, anyway, memox crystals, good or bad, are taken from the furnace modules to the servicing docks. From there, they’re either loaded into a Dragonflight Sanger, or included in a waste-dump stack, depending on how the batch was coded. Ample scope there for hanky-panky.’ Access HighSteal#Two. 106 PETIR P. HAMILTON She fired off a tracer program as soon as the simulacrum materialized. ‘It’s a contractor!’ she shouted excitedly. ‘Right. Event Horizon doesn’t own any inter-orbit craft. There are three specialist transport companies based up at Zanthus to serve the manufacturers. You pay High Shunt to move your cargo around, and to perform your waste dumps.’ ‘It’s got to be them.’ ‘No messing. Now if you’d just care to prove it for me.’ He was grinning at her. She beamed right back, it was like they had some sort of affinity bond or something. And she’d been the one he’d come straight to. Not Morgan Waishaw, not Grandpa. Her. ‘Coming up,’ she said. It wasn’t even difficult. Event Horizon’s commercial intelligence division compiled a survey of every company they did business with. Large or small, each of them was scrutinized before the contract was finalized. Julia’s executive code plugged her right in. High Shunt’s daedal aspects expanded in her mind, a comprehensive listing of its history, management structure, performance, assets, personnel. It was a respectable company, formed eight years ago, good safety record, developing as Zanthus grew. List Ownership. A stream of banks, pension schemes, trust funds, and individuals flooded through her, giving percentages and acquisition dates. One of them leaped out at her as if it was haloed in flashing red neon. Thirty-two per cent of High Shunt was owned by the di Girolamo family house. ‘Gotcha, Kendric,’ she whispered. CHAPTER TWELVE S tanstead airport was subtly depressing. New developments were erupting like shiny volcanic cancers in the middle of abandoned jet-age structures, vibrant young challengers. But the chances for inspiration which new materials and energy technologies provided, the opportunities to learn from the past and build a commercial enterprise which complemented the local environment, had all been lost; the steel and composite structures worshipped scale, not Gaia. They had neither grace nor art, simply history repeating itself. Stanstead had originally been built on the promise of the postwar dream, only to find itself betrayed like the rest of the country. Greg looked down on the architectural shambles from an )ffice on the top floor of Event Horizon’s glass-cube adniinis~ration block, and wondered how many times that cycle would turn down the centuries. Hopes and aspirations of each new ige lost under the weight of human frailties and plain bloodymindedness. The airport’s ancient hangars were dilapidated monstrosities, corrugated panels flapping dangerously as they awaited the reclamation crews. Next to them were six modern cargo terminals made from pearl-white composite; a constant flow of Dornier tilt-fans came and went from the pads outside. Black oval airships drifted high overhead. He could see an old An-225 Mriya at the end of the barely serviceable runway. The Sanger orbiter he’d returned in yesterday had been hoisted on top by a couple of big cranes. The configuration was undergoing a final inspection before flying back to Listoel. He heard Philip Evans’s querulous voice behind him, and closed the grey-silver louvre blinds which ran along the window wall, shutting out the sight of the tilt-fans hovering outside. The glass was sound-deadened, blocking the incessant high-frequency whine of their turbines. PETER P. HAMILTON Only Morgan Waishaw and Victor Tyo were in the oflfce, sitting in hotel lobby silicon-composite chairs at a big oval conference table. There was a large flatscreen on the wall at the head of the table, showing Julia and Philip Evans in the study at Wilholm. Julia’s hair was tied back severely, and she was wearing a double-breasted purple suit-jacket over a cream blouse. Going for an executive image. It didn’t quite come off; her face, despite its current solemnity, was far too young. People would underestimate her because of that, he knew. He had. But it was Philip who worried him. The old man looked just awful; a heavy woollen shawl wrapped round his thin frail shoulders, eyes that were yellow and glazed. His deterioration even over the five short days since the dinner party was quite obvious. He seemed to be having a great deal of trouble following the proceedings, his attention intermittent. Julia shared Greg’s opinion, judging by her expression. Her pretty oval face was pale and drawn, crestfallen. It looked as though she hadn’t slept for days, her big tawny eyes were red-rimmed, never leaving her grandfather. He wondered if he’d asked too much from her, especially at this time. ‘It was Kendric di Girolamo who organized the spoiler operation,’ Greg said. ‘The evidence which Julia has unearthed for us puts it beyond doubt.’ The corners of her lips lifted in acknowledgement. ‘My girl,’ Philip rumbled. ‘We had two problems arise out of what we discovered,’ said Greg, ‘which when taken together cancel each other out. We already knew that with his control of High Shunt, Kendric could divert the memox crystals from the waste dump. But that left us with the question of how he could get hold of a Sanger to bring them back down to Earth. At five hundred million Eurofrancs each, it’s too expensive for him to buy one, besides we’d know if the di Girolamo family house owned a spaceplane. And to hire one from a legitimate spaceline he would’ve had to list the cargo manifest, both for the operator and the spaceport authority, It would’ve been impossible br him to explain where the memox crystals originated from. Oh, MIND$TAR RI$INO 109 he might’ve been able to do it once, or even twice. But not on a regular basis. The space industry is close knit, it knows itself. If he was bringing down three flights of memox crystals a month, the pilots and payload handlers would’ve started to ask questions. ‘Then we have the second problem: why did he bother with the monolattice filament when he’d already corrupted the memox-furnace operators? Julia found the answer to that.’ ‘After I found High Shunt was owned by the di Girolamo house, I took a closer look at all the other companies working up at Zanthus,’ she said, reading from her cube. Her voice was like a construct, level and droning. ‘The clincher was a company called Siebruk Orbital. It’s the smallest one up at Zanthus, consisting of a single standard microgee module staffed by two technicians. They’re listed as a research team investigating new vacuum-fabrication techniques.’ ‘So?’ Philip asked. ‘Fabrication techniques,’ Greg said. ‘I think they’re turning the monolattice filament into small re-entry capsules inside that module. Then they fill them with memox crystals and hand them back to High Shunt for a waste dump, retroburning them so they fall into the atmosphere.’ ‘Siebruk Orbital belongs to Kendric?’ ‘Siebruk Orbital is registered in Zurich, which gives total anonymity for the owner,’ said Julia. ‘But the Sanger which launched the module was a Lufthansa charter. It was put up ten months ago, which, incidentally, fits the timing perfectly. Payment for the flight came from Siebruk Orbital’s company account at the Credit Corato bank in Italy. All perfectly legal and above board. However, the di Girolamo family finance house has a thirty-five per cent stake in Credit Corato. It’s supposition, of course.’ ‘Has to be,’ Philip said softly. He was looking at something off screen, wistful. Victor Tyo activated the terminal on the table in front of him, the cubes lit. ‘After Greg came to me with this, I ordered a review of data from our Earth Resources platforms, specilically the oceans under Zanthus’s orbital track. There are three 110 PETER F. HAMILTON designated areas for waste dumps, all over water in case burn-up isn’t complete. Two over the Pacific, one over the Atlantic.’ An image formed in one of the cubes, a white dot on a blue background. The dot began to move, trailing a white line behind it. After a minute the centre of the image was a near-solid blob of white. ‘What you’re seeing is a movement record built up over the last two months of a ship in the Atlantic, two hundred kilometres east of the waste dump area. As you can see, it stays within a patch of ocean about fifty kilometres in diameter. We did a computer simulation of a non-lifting-body profiled descent trajectory, two hundred kilometres is well within the established criteria. I believe the ship is Mr di Girolamo’s recovery vessel.’ The cube display changed, showing an overhead view of a ship at sea. ‘This was taken at first light this morning with a platform’s high-definition photon amp.’ The angle of the cube image shifted in increments until the ship appeared to be leaning over at forty-five degrees. The name Weslin was visible on the side. ‘According to Lloyd’s data core, Weslin is owned by MDL Maritime,’ Julia said. ‘MDL Maritime is another Zurich-registered company. Credit Corato handles its account.’ ‘Bingo,’ Morgan Walshaw said quietly. Philip’s eyes found the camera, looking down at Greg. Confusion distorted his enervated features. ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘Kendric di Girol.axno has a l~rge legitimate financial interest in Event Horizon through his family finance house. He was hurting himself with the spoiler.’ ‘The spoiler made him forty-eight million Eurofrancs; and as to Event Horizon’s suffering, he wouldn’t lose a thing, not in the long run,’ Greg said. ‘You see, he wasn’t looking to make a killing from the crystals directly, they were a means. With Event Horizon’s declining profits on top of your health situation he would have gained enough leverage with the other members of the backing consortium to have himself appointed to the board of trustees you’ve arranged to run Event Horizon until Julia comes of age.’ ‘It’s a reasonable enough request,’ Julia put in reluctantly. ‘The consortium are entitled to a representative. I doubt we could keep their nominee off. Not legally.’ MINDSYAR RISINO 111 Philip nodded slowly. ‘The consortium has mentioned it . . . Someone . . . to oversee their interests.’ His voice sounded terribly weak. Julia was looking at him, almost in pain with what she saw. His head turned from the camera again. Greg thought he was looking out of the study window. ‘Then what?’ he whispered. ‘This is just theory, you understand, based on what you told me about Kendric trying to muscle in on the management side of Event Horizon. But after Kendric landed his boardroom seat I’d say that he simply planned to close down the spoiler, bringing Event Horizon’s accounts back to their usual profit level. He’d disguise the link of course, make it an issue; shuffle personnel, target resources at the furnace maintenance division, but that kind of high-profile result would guarantee him the chairmanship. Now, because Event Horizon is a family company, he can never own it. But as chairman he could oversee a massive asset-stripping raid, presumably by his own front companies. That sort of money he is most definitely interested in. Julia and the consortium would be left with nothing.’ Julia had listened raptly the night before, after she’d pulled the information about Siebruk Orbital for him. ‘So simple,’ she’d said, when he’d finished explaining. ‘I had all the pieces before you and I didn’t put them together. If you hadn’t had your suspicions that the memox crystals were being brought down, we would never have uncovered Kendric’s involvement.’ It was his intuition, of course. A foresight equal to everyone else’s hindsight. He hadn’t told her that. Let her go on thinking he was a magician. Event Horizon might have a few more jobs coming up, and they paid bloody well. ‘I see,’ said Philip. ‘Either way, Kendric wins. How typical.’ ‘What are we going to do about di Girolamo?’ Victor asked. ‘The options are regrettably limited,’ said Waishaw. ‘Our respective Scottish operations are almost fully integrated. We can hardly untangle them now, certainly not with the Scottish PSP so cLose to falling. A replacement for Kendric would be hard to find.’ 112 PETER F. HAMILTON Julia cleared her throat. ‘The ship in the Atlantic.’ ‘Yes,’ Walshaw said. ‘I can arrange a hardliner assault. We might even retrieve some more of our memox crystals.’ ‘See to it,’ said Philip. ‘You’ve done some good work for me here, Greg, I won’t forget. You too, boy.’ Victor ducked his head. Julia took her grandfather’s hand, steadying the shaking fingers. ‘That’s enough, Grandee.’ ‘I’ll get back to you later,’ Waishaw said. Julia gave him a vaguely remorseful nod before the image blanked out. Greg spent another ten minutes filling in details for Walshaw before saying goodbye. He’d been away from Eleanor for too long. ‘There’s a permanent job for you at Event Horizon if you want it,’ the Security Chief said as Greg reached the door. ‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ Greg said. He didn’t even have to think about it. 0111cc hours, suit, tie, the same people day after day. He had wanted something regular, but not regimented. ‘I’m not ready for that yet.’ The nineteen-fifties Rolls-Royce was waiting for him on Stanstead’s buckling grey concrete as he came out of the administration block, chauffeur already opening the door.