‘I know. Brought some junk for you.’ EVERY LITTLE HELPS. He directed Eleanor to tip out her bag of redundant gear on to a big flat-top workbench. Royan had fixed up two obsolete General Electric car-factory Waldo arms beside the bench, their spot-welding tips replaced with multi-segment talon-like grippers. Greg could never understand how the floor took the weight of the brutes. They telescoped out with juddering clumsy motions and began sorting through the pile. He put the Sanyo VCR down next to the scuffed glass bubble which held Royan’s micro-assembly rig. JACKPOT. LOTS OF GOOD BITS IN THAT THANKS TO BOTH OF YOU. It never mattered what he brought, Royan would eventually find a way to use it. Patiently tinkering with nominally incompatible modules until they could be fused together and incorporated into his cybernetic grotto. Another of the pot-pourri robots rolled up to Greg and Eleanor, a Pyrex jug full of steaming coffee balanced on its roof. HELP YOURSELVES. Greg sipped gingerly as the waldos whirred away industriously behind him. The coffee was excellent, as always. Royan fiddled it out of the inventory computer of a plush New East-field delicatessen, directing its delivery van to a Trinities safe house in Bretton. Eleanor’s eyes widened in appreciation as she tasted the brew. ‘Job for you,’ Greg said. PARTY INVOLVED? ‘Don’t think so. But the person who’s hired me hates them more than you do.’ IMPOSSt~LE. WHO IS IT? ‘Tell you in a minute. First part of your help is answering questions for me. I need to know the kind of information floating round the circuit at the moment. Will you do that?’ SHOOT ‘Have you heard about the blitz against the Event Horizon datanet?’ MINDSTAR RISING CHUCKLE CHUCKLE. THE CIRCUIT HAS BEEN BUZZING WITH NOTHING ELSE FOR THE LAST THREE DAYS. BIGGEST DEAL SINCE MINISTRY OF PUBLIC ORDER MAINFRAME WAS CRASHED. “Who set it up?’ NO iDEA. BIG PUZZLE RECRUITING NOT DONE THROUGH THE CIRCUIT. ODD ODD ODD. ‘Could the hotrod pack have been foreigners?’ NO. CIRCUIT KNEW ABOUT iT TOO SOON. HINTS DROPPED. NO NAMES THOUGH. UNUSUAL. iFI~D TAKEN PART I’D WANT PEOPLE TO KNOW MY HANDLE. THAT KIND OF BURN PUSHES THE GOING RATE UP, MAYBE EVEN DOUBLES IT SILENCE WOULD HAVE TO BE BOUGHT LOTS OF MONEY INVOLVED. ‘So how would I go about recruiting without using the circuit?’ GOOD QUEST/ON. TEKMERC WHO HAS WORKED WITH SOLO HOTRODS BEFORE. SHRUG. THEYD HAVE TO HAVE GOOD CONTACTS. The little robot that’d been watering the troughs ran across the floor to a tap on a wall and eased itself underneath. Water poured into its tank. Greg watched the operation over the rim of his cup. ‘Tell me about Philip Evans.’ HE WAS THE OWNER OF EVENT HORIZON. DiED A MONTH BACK. RICH. RICH. RICH. ‘That’s it?’ NO. THERE’S WHOLE MEMORY CORES LOADED WITH BIOGRAPHICAL DATA. YOU WANT A PRINT OUT? ‘No thanks. What I meant was, is there anything current?’ OPPOSITION MPS PROTESTED ABOUT COST OF HIS FUNERAL. THA T’S THE LAST ENTRY. ‘OK, I’ve got a big hush for you. Philip Evans’s memories have been stored.’ AH HA. ‘Tell me how you’d go about doing that.’ BEST WAY WOULD BE IN A BlO WARE NEURAL NETWORK. FERREDOXIN HAS THE POTENT/AL. YOU’D HAVE TO SPLICE EVANS’S SEQUENCING RNA INTO THE NODES, DUPLICATE HIS BRAIN STRUCTURE, THEN 202 PETER F. HAMILTON SQUIRT HIS MEMORIES INTO THE CORE WITH A NEUROCOUPLING. THE COST WOULD BE UTTERLY LOONY. BUT I SUPPOSE PHILIP EVANS COULD AFFORD IT AFTER ALL, THA T’S ONE WAY OF TAKING iT WITH YOU. RIGHT? ‘Right.’ Greg thought for a moment. ‘So all you’d have to know to deduce the nature of Evans’s core was that his memories had been translocated, nothing else?’ YES. IT’S BEEN RAPPED ABOUT FOR YEARS. HAMBURG UNIVERSiTY LOADED A TURING PERSONALITY INTO THEIR BIO WA RE CRUNCHER A FEW YEARS BACK; ITS RESPONSES REALLY WERE INDiSTINGUISHABLE FROMA HUMAN’S. ALL ITLACKED WERE BACKGROUND MEMORIES. I RAPPED WITH IT ONCE. CREEPY CREEPY CREEPY. ‘If you knew of a bioware core which housed some kind of sophisticated personality responses program, how would you set about disabling it?’ MACRO DATA SQUIRT FORCE THE PERSONALITY PROGRAM OUT OF THE CORE. ‘Did you think of that yourself, or was it something you picked off the circuit?’ ALL MINE, CROSS HEART IT’S OBVIOUS SOLUTION. ‘Does that mean it wasn’t a personal attack against Evans?’ Eleanor asked. Intense interest had resulted in her coffee going cold. She’d either forgotten, or had accommodated, Royan’s state, acting perfectly naturally. There weren’t many who could do that. Royan would’ve noticed, too; he was an acute observer within his small kingdom. For some obscure reason Greg was delighted. He ~vanted them to be friends, to approve of each other. It meant a lot to him, although he couldn’t say exactly why. The bloody quacks would have lots of psychobabble about resolving the past, no doubt. He poured himself another coffee. ‘It’s a possibility,’ he admitted. ‘Any hacker observing the Event Horizon datanet would know a lot of management decisions were originating from that one core. Whether or not they knew it was Philip Evans himself, I’m not sure.’ IF IT WASN’T FOR VENGEANCE, THEN IT WAS PROB MINDSTAR RISING 203 ABLY CONNECTED WITH EVENT HORIZON’S GIGA-CONOUCTOR. AM / RiGHT. OR WHAT? ‘You’re right.’ Greg wasn’t surprised; Royan kept himself well plugged in to the circuit, trading data whenever it was to his advantage. ‘Philip Evans believes the blitz was an attempt at a spoiler; reducing Event Horizon’s ability to market the giga-conductor by removing his managerial experience. So how did you find out about the giga-conductor?’ EVENT HORIZON HAVE A GIGA-CONDUCTOR DEVELOPMENT CONTRACT WITH THE MINISTRY OF DEFENCE. ‘My God,’ said Eleanor, ‘Does everyone know about the country’s military secrets?’ NOT NECESSARiLY. BUT THE GIGA-CONDUCTOR IS SUCH A BIG DEAL IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO KEEP IT UNDER WRAPS. WEAPONS APPLICATION PROJECT DETAILS HAVE BEEN LOADED INTO THE MINISTRY OF DEFENCE MAINFRAME. THAT MAKES THEM AVAILABLE TO PEOPLE LIKE ME, AND THERE ARE A LOT OF PEOPLE LIKE ME. CHUCKLE CHUCKLE. WELL NOT QUITE Greg considered that; Event Horizon’s giga-conductor wasn’t half as secret as Morgan Walshaw had believed, yet the Ministry of Defence had only been brought in after the patent was filed. He still couldn’t believe a kombinate would bother with a spoiler like the blitz, not after the chance of filing their own patent had been lost. ‘When did you find out about the giga-conductor?’ THiRD WEEK IN DECEMBER. MINISTRY OF DEFENCE BEGAN A NEW ULTRA-SECURE FILE AT THE START OF THE MONTH, I WAS INTERESTED. TOOK A COUPLE OF DAYS TO BURN. He used the teaspoon to lift the skin off his coffee, running the dates through his mind. If he assumed another hotrod had burnt open the Ministry file around the same time as Royan, then the blitz could well be a kombinaze operation. But how had they discovered the NN core existed? He was back to the question of the mole’s existence again. ‘Could you pull data from Event Horizon’s security division memory cores without tripping any alarms?’ IF YOU ASKED ME TO, I MIGHT CHANCE IT BUT I’D 204 PETER F. HAMILTON