the shirt buttons, Flakes of dried blood wedged under his fingernails. ‘Good,’ Armstrong said. ‘Quite an ironic twist for you, Mr Mandel, I imagine. On the receiving end of a lie detector for once.’ Turner velcroed a strap around each of Greg’s wrists. They prickled, minute needle-tipped sensors probing into his skin, tasting salinity, heat, conductivity, heart-rate. The St Christopher was flicked to one side and another strap went round his neck, tightening noose-style. Leopold Armstrong’s fingers drummed on his cybofax. ‘I have a number of queries. And you’ll answer each one honestly. For every lie you make we’ll break a bone in Miss Thompson’s body. The bigger the lie, the bigger the bone. Understand?’ Again, there was no malice, Leopold Armstrong was just telling it the way it was. ‘Yeah,’ Greg replied, as a tiara band was placed on his head. Turner pressed an infuser against his arm. There was a bee-sting of pain, turning to an ice-spot. ‘Relaxant,’ Turner said, and began plugging the optical cables into a gear module which was already interfaced with the Olivetti deck. The cube lit with scrawling sine waves. He sat in the swivel chair behind the desk and began typing. Data rolled down an LCD display. ‘Name?’ he asked. The correlation went on for what seemed an age to Greg. The relaxant acted like a gentle influx of rosй wine, pleasantly inebriating, amplifying sounds like squeaking leather and rustling clothes, turning the air warm, drying his throat, Of course, he could still concentrate. If he wanted to. They seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of his life stored in the Olivetti. Stuff he could barely remember: Secondary school exam results, Army postings, nicknames of barrack mates, neighbours at the time-share estate. Nothing recent, though. Nothing from the last couple of years. ‘He’s ready,’ Turner shouted out eventually. Armstrong consulted his cybofax. ‘One. Does anyone on the mainland suspect I am alive?’ Greg had worked out that this was a crux, To answer or CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE Ade O’Donal had discovered that hard cash had its own special weight. Yeah, like no weight at all. He’d filled two Alitalia flight bags with New Sterling and Euro- francs; thick, hard wads of notes. Kilograms of them, stretching his arms as he walked down the stairs, but he could’ve carried them for ever. The bags were new, clean, and bright; when people saw them, their exotic foreign logo, they’d know he was for real. One shit-hot guy. The crappy top stair creaked when he put his foot on it. That was all he needed – Sashy to hear him leaving. He’d waited until late afternoon before scooting, fewer eyes seeing what he was about, and she was still sleeping off an afternoon of majestic sex. It’d been one serious way of splitting. He’d been tempted to take her with him, Her compact brown body was the absolute best screw ever, like her brain was loaded with Kama Sutra software. But he was travelling light, ‘Bat Out of Hell’ time, breezing down the open road. A woman would hold him back; worse, Sashy was into family in a big way. Brothers, parents, cousins, hundreds of them. Daft girl spent half the day on the phone. She wouldn’t understand, he had to get lost, out of here, like he’d never existed. Kick loose from the shit glitching his life right now – Wolf, the two Event Horizon bastards. He’d spent a couple of days collecting the money from Cashpoints after that hard guy and the fat slag had turned Up, initially terrified they’d pull the money from his Cayman account because of the blitz. Psychics, fucking psychics! Unhumans. Ade O’Donal still got cold burn in his balls thinking about it. His mind being torn open like a paper bag, thoughts held up to the light and examined. That was heavy-duty shit. Wolf must’ve gone acid crazy thinking they could get away With a burn against Event Horizon. That company was the biggest scene in England, even kombinates pissed themselves about Event Horizon. 340 PITIR F. HAMILTON Ade O’Donal had plugged himself but good into the circuit after the psychics had left; making serious connections, a cruise for any hard-core hotrod. Giga-conductor. New word. The circuit was ringing with it. The biggest deal in the known universe was going down, and Wolf had tried to run a spoiler. Shit. He could’ve been hurt. Hurt bad. Wasted! The little patch of red blistered skin on his belly where the Event Horizon hardliner had zapped him with the Mulekick was still sore. A good memory. If he ever thought this was one giant curved syntho trip, that patch would set him straight. Might even be a scar. Girls like scars. Scars were macho. There was a noise down below in the darkened hail. Footsteps clicking on the tiles. ‘Brune? Hey, Brune, that you?’ He’d sent Brune out after lunch to top up the BMW, gas and watts. This was going to be one long flight. Cornwall, maybe. Ade O’Donal hadn’t made plans. He’d figured just go with the flow was safest. That way no one could load a tracer on him. Brune was staying here, Brune with his leg in a tube of quik-set polymer. The guy was out of hardlining for a month anyway. Even the BMW would get axed eventually. Then there’d be just him, the money, some of the memoxes, and the Burrows terminal. That Burrows terminal was going to turn him into the circuit’s sexiest hotrod. After the psychics had left Ade O’Donal had plugged the gate circuits into the Burrows to try and see how the flick they’d opened it without tripping the alarms. Fifty Richter disaster time. The Burrows had crashed, totally, the only thing ~ left working was the power LED, not even the menu showed. ‘~ Whatever had been in the gate circuit was hot enough to melt through the hardware core guardian programs Wolf had given., him. That convinced him he had plugged into the biggest underclass operation running. Cancer software that was better than 4 Wolf’s! When he settled down he was going to retro that ~ Burrows, no matter what it took. Those bytes were going to earn him mega money, like what Wolf paid was just small change. MINDSTAR RISING 341 He’d go for a total reincarnation, plastique, sign on the circuit as a virgin, build a reputation from scratch. A genuine hotrod, not dependent on anyone. Pity about Tentimes, mind, it was a slick kind of handle, told the girls all they needed to know out front. ‘Brune?’ There was a figure in the hail, bending over a large crumpled bundle on the tiles. It straightened up as he reached the bottom of the stairs. And something about it was mega-shit wrong. The hospital had shaved Brune’s head, coating the back of his skull in dermal membrane. It looked like he was wearing a Jew’s skull cap from a distance. Good for a pisstake. But the guy facing him was albino-white; death-mask face with jet-black lips, a close-cropped Mohican strip of titian hair running from the bridge of his nose over his crown and disappearing below the collar of his biker jacket. Ade O’Donal knew the look. Tribal. The guy was from Stoneygate. Stoneygate wasn’t somewhere Ade O’Donal went even in daytime, loaded with freaked-out psychos. Five tribes protecting Leicester’s syntho vats, from the police and from each other, that district was wound up but tight. Ade O’Donal dropped the Alitalia bags, making a dull slap on the hail tiles. ‘Brune?’ it came out all wavery, like a whimper. And the broken thing on the floor was Brune, a puddle of blood spreading from a jagged rip in the dermal membrane. An ocean of blood, glistening sickly. ‘Tentimes?’ asked the Stoney. ‘Shit, like no way. I ain’t never heard of him.’ ‘Lying, O’Donal, dey squirt me yo’ file.’ ‘Shit, man, I never told those two nothing, not a byte.’ ‘No crap, Tentimes. No interested.’ Ade O’Donal closed his eyes, didn’t want to see the gun, or knife or whatever. Praying it would be quick. ‘Job for yo’.’ He risked a peek, ready to slam his eyes shut again. The Stoney was looking at him contemptuously. ‘Say what?’ ‘Job. Burn.’ 342 PITIR F. HAMILTON ‘That’s it?’ ‘Yay.’ ‘All you want is like a fucking burn, and you waste Brune for that! You syntho-crashed shit.’ Ade O’Donal wanted to smash the Stoney with his fists, pound him into a pulp. His life was exploding into the all-time downer. People out of his nightmares kept coming for him, like every shitty deal in the world was his fault. There was a tiny click, and a matt-grey ten-centimetre blade appeared a centimetre from Ade O’Donal’s eye, diamond tip reflecting tiny slivers of cold blue light. ‘Don’ gi’ me lip, I slice yo’.’ ‘Sure, OK, no problem, just cool it, man, right?’ ‘Where yo’ terminal?’ The temptation to let the Stoney open the door was near overwhelming. But he was wearing leather gloves, the charge might not be enough to penetrate. Too dangerous. ‘Down here,’ Ade O’Donal sighed. The Stoney took in the wine cellar’s hardware with a stoic gaze. ‘Alien,’ he murmured. Ade O’Donal crumpled into his chair behind the table that held his terminals. ‘What’s the burn?’ ‘Wolf say finish Event Horizon, d’ core. Suit yo’?’ ‘How?’ A shrug. ‘Shit.’ ‘Be good. I break cover fo’ yo’.’ Cover? What the hell did that mean? No way could this arsehole be Wolf in person. This was getting extreme deep, the kind of deep he wasn’t likely to climb out from. ‘Hey, listen, how are you gonna know if I take out the core? I mean, you’re gonna leave me alone if I pull this off, right?’ ‘Friends, dey watching.’ ‘And if it works?’ ‘Yo’ still jiving tomorrow.’ Ade O’Donal nodded slowly, as low as he’d ever been. But the Stoney needed him. If he did the burn there was a chance. Small, though, fucking small. Brune drowning in blood. MINDSTAR RISING 343 There were only two terminals on line, that psychic hardline bastard had screwed the Hitachi and the Akai, the super cancer from the gate had crashed the Burrows; that just left the Event Horizon and the Honeywell. And no way was he going to use the Event Horizon terminal, that name was too much bad kanna right now. Ade O’Donal tapped the Honeywell’s power stud, slipping its throat mike round his neck; muttering, typing, eyes locked into the cube. A melt virus got him into Event Horizon’s datanet, disguised as a civil engineering contractor’s bid for a new flatscreen factory at Stafford. He loaded a memox Wolf had given him for the blitz, studying company procedure. Bids would be processed by the finance division, the lowest three forwarded to the freaky Turing core for a final decision. He pulled a memox from the shelves, one he’d planned on taking with him. ‘This is like the best I’ve ever written, you know,’ he said, a sudden urge to explain, to let the Stoney know he was dealing with a real pro hotrod. ‘It scrambles databus management programs. That’s the beauty of it, man; once it’s in, you can’t access the system to flush it out. Total internal communication shutdown. The core will be sliced right out of the datanet, along with anything it’s interfaced with.’ ‘Dat sound sweet.’ ‘OK.’ Ade O’Donal pushed the memox into the Honeywell’s slot, hands quivering. The cube showed the bid’s data package wrapping around the virus, geometric tentacles choking a crystalline egg. Ade O’Donal probed the finished Trojan with tracer programs. There was no chink in the covering, nothing that hinted at the black treasure beneath the surface. Smooth. And he had made the quotes for the factory ridiculously low, the bid package would be shunted to the core, no sweat. Idiotically, pride overrode his depression. This was it, his construct, all his own, a solo hotrod burn. Tentimes had made solo. O’Donal fed the Trojan an activation code keyed to the core’s dump order. It would pass clean through the finance CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR J ulia had insisted on relieving the nurse at Katerina’s bedside in the afternoon, keeping a solitary vigil over her brain-wasted friend. She hated every second of it, knowing she deserved it. Pushing Kats towards Kendric had seemed so clever at the time, an elegant solution. Everybody would wind up with what they wanted, no tears, no heartache. Greg was right, she’d only thought of the deed, never the consequences. Too shallow and self-obsessed. Still a child. Idiot savant. Katerina stirred, turning, her sleep troubled. Dr Taylor had given her a trauma suppressor. Short-term amnesiac, the woman had explained, it’ll kill the craving for now; but she’d made sure Katerina was infused with tranquillizers throughout the day, only leaving a few periods of brief semi-lucidity for eating and going to the toilet. Julia had been the one spooning soup into her. Katerina had swallowed automatically, incapable of coherent speech. Compounding the anguish. Julia had got three of Event Horizon’s premier-grade executives working flat out on securing Katerina that Caribbean treatment, trying to buy a place in the detox clinic. They’d been told there was an eight-month waiting list. Julia refused to let that bother her, pulling in the company’s favours, bully. ing the clinic with financial and political pressure. Dr Taylor had warned her that Katerina’s cranial blood vessels were saturated with the symbiont; if its grip was ever going to be broken then it would have to be done swiftly. She’d buy that bloody Caribbean island if necessary. Anything. Anything at all. She just wanted Kats back to her old self. Frivolous, vaguely annoying, and utterly carefree. The sun had nearly dropped below the horizon, fluorescing a cloud-slashed western sky to a royal gold, fading to black at its zenith. Julia watched it from the bedroom window, seeing PITSR F. HAMILTON 346 the shadows pool in hollows and nooks across Wilholm’s grounds, spilling out over the grass. The fountain in the lily pond died down spluttering, its light sensors switching off the pump. Julia activated a single wall-mounted biolum, then crossed the room and drew the heavy Tudor curtains across both windows. When she’d first left America and the desert she’d been entranced by dawn and dusk in Europe, cool blues and greens gleaming dully under fiery skies, always different. It’d been magical, the expected sadness that she’d miss the desert’s beauty never materializing. Tonight the sight left her totally unmoved. Her emotions s~emed to have shut down. The climax would come tonight, she was sure of it. The game had ceased to be a game. And she was responsible, she and Grandpa. Kendric’s manoeuvrings and power ploys had been thwarted at every stage. She’d stalemated him all across the board. There was nothing left to him now but the physical. Kendric would have no qualms about that. Strangely, even Greg had warned her about the danger. Greg the liar. Greg the betrayer. His name was the only one capable of piercing the wrap of numbness around her feelings. She’d believed in him like nobody before. Worshipped from afar, flirted. Opened her soul to him. Confessed the darkest, most shameful secret. And he’d lied to her. Just like all the rest. Men must look on her as some kind of victim waiting to be abused. Except for Adrian, a bleak inner voice said, Adrian adored her female side. He was immune to her money. So far. But knowing her luck… She still couldn’t believe she’d been so mistaken about Greg. He’d said she was beautiful. And she couldn’t be fooled by smooth talk any more, not after Kendric. Then why? Why the lie? Access BlitzCulmination. So called because it brought all aspects of the case together. The homogenized data packages unfolded within her glacial mind, rotating the bedroom arid Katerina one hundred and eighty degrees from her cognizance. Her processor nodes marshalled it into precise channels once MINDITAR RISINO 347 more, a construct that incorporated hard facts, assumptions, suspicions. She ran the logic matrix once more, the fifth time today. It produced a single diamond-hard conviction. No matter how many times she ran it, how much slackness and wishful thinking she incorporated into the matrix channels, the answer was always the same. Liar. Traitor. Thief. Heartbreaker. Cancel BlitzCulmination. One thing it never told her was why Greg would do such a thing. She didn’t understand human nature well enough to guess. And now she’d probably never know. Katerina had sunk into an innocent dreamless sleep. Julia pulled the frilly snowdrop-pattern duvet up around her shoulders. Open Channel to NN Core. Load OtherEyes Limiter #Five. She felt her grandfather snuggle into her mind, welcoming his touch. The last person on the whole planet she still trusted. And what a sad comment on her life that was. How are we doing? she asked. Greg hasn’t moved for three hours now. I think Wisbech must be their nesting ground. Clever that. So close, yet so far away. I’m not sure how they got across the Fens basin; too slow for a tilt-fan, possibly a hovercraft. I trusted him, Grandpa. Really trusted him. Everything he did and said was always right. He made me believe in him. I thought I was safe. I know you did, Juliet. It must hurt. I’m so sony. it doesn’t hurt. I don’t feel anything. I’m not human any more. Course you are, girl. Don’t talk nonsense. You’re seeing Adrian again this weekend, aren’t you? What you do with him is pretty bloody human. And I approve. He’s a nice boy. If I’m still around by the weekend. Hey, that’s no Evans talking. Wilholm is well protected, and I’m hooked into all the security sensors. Ain’t nobody going to sneak up on you, girl. Suppose it’s one of the staff, Waishaw even? PITIR F. HAMILTON 348 No, Juliet, not Morgan. He’s been with me for fifteen years, almost since you were born. Stake your life on it, huh? She let the irony filter back to him. That’s my girl. Keep shining through. But don’t you worry, I’m even watching Morgan. No strain on my capacity. Julia found herself looking down at the wood-panelled study, initially confused by the unusual perspective, a fly on the ceiling. Walshaw was sitting at the long table databasing with his customized terminal; the bald patch on his crown was larger than she’d realized before. Then the incoming squirt from Event Horizon’s datanet bloomed in her mind. Waishaw was reviewing the Cray memories as they were being extracted by the security division programming team. All the memories had been run through search and classification programs as they came out, analysed and indexed. He was running through the categories, accessing every mention of Wolf and Event Horizon, double checking. He’s been doing that for hours, her grandfather said. Hunting down that clue Greg was talking about. Hardly the act of a turncoat, now is it? I suppose. It would be nice to believe in him at least, Julia thought. But this was her life she was gambling with now. And the list of her mistakes when it came to dealing with people was a long one. Suddenly she was inundated with a rapid-motion tour of Wilholm through the security sensors, visual, infrared, magnetic, electromagnetic, UV laser-radar. Millisecond slices of security division hardliners patrolling the corridors; sentinels prowling the grounds; Tobias in his stables; owls snapped in ~ mid-flight, wings motionless; fleidmice twitching their tiny damp noses in the night air; deserted tracts of landscape, fields and woodland. A kaleidoscope of bright-hued luminous colours, and conflicting geometries. See, Juliet? All quiet on the western front. Her heart began to beat faster. Why is Waishaw bothering with the Crays? We know Kendric has plugged in with the PSP, that the card carriers organized the blitz. You and I know, yes, Juliet. But I don’t think Morgan has put it together yet. MIND$TAR RI$INO 349 But it’s obvious! she exclaimed. To you. Oh, Grandpa! What if Greg hasn’t worked it out, either? What if I was wrong about him? He was so tired, I mean totally run down. He’s been through hell; and it was Kendric who had him beaten up. Relax, girl. First thing I thought of. What then? If he’s innocent, why are the two of them in Wisbech? And why didn’t Gabriel warn us about him? She’s in it with him. Oh. Sony, Juliet. The depression enveloped her again, its return total. She could see the world simply now, black and white, no right, no wrong, there was just survival which mattered. Instinctive self-preservation, primaeval, the only complexity lay in method. The acceptance decided her. When can you hit them? she asked. Every hundred and eight minutes, starting in seventy-two minutes – mark. Do it. Her lips synchronized with her thoughts, but no sound emerged. OK, Juliet. Why don’t you take a break? Katerina isn’t going anywhere. No, I’ll stay here; It wouldn’t be right leaving her, not now. I’ll give you a status check nearer the time. ‘Love you, Grandee.’ Wipe OtherEyes Limiter#Five. Exit NN Core. Julia sat down on the barrel-like Copenhagen chair beside the bed, hand automatically sliding down the side of the cushion. Her fingers touched the hard plastic casing, reassuring her. She drew out the weapon. An ash-grey cylinder thirty centimetres long and three wide, a thin grooved handle at one end, It resembled a fat, long-barrelled pistol, weighing about one and a half kilos. The discharge end was solid, with a small circular indentation, gritted with minute carbonized granules. ARMSCOR was printed along the side in black lettering. She’d stolen it from Greg after he’d brought Kats back to 350 PETER F. HAMILTON the finance division offices, slipping it off Walshaw’s desk and into her bag as soon as the desolating revelation of his betrayal had sunk in. She’d been horribly afraid of him, what he might do. When she’d got back to Wilholm she’d accessed the manor library’s memory core, looking up what she’d got. A stunshot, capable of immobilizing an adult at forty-five metres. Four shots would kill. The power unit was charged to ninety-five per cent capacity, giving her almost two hundred shots. She’d spent the morning familiarizing herself with it – safety catch, grip, aiming. Kept at it until she was satisfied she could do it by touch alone. It tended to wobble unless she used both hands. The library said there was no recoil. And nobody knew she’d got it, not even Morgan Walshaw. Her last line of defence. Its solidity and weight injecting a primitive kind of confidence into a badly demoralized psyche. She wished it would be Kendric himself who came. There’d be no inhibition holding her back then. Sending all ninety-five per cent into his jerking, burning body. But it would be some tekmerc hardliner, anonymous, a fast-moving shadow in the dark. Her one advantage was that he’d have to come to her; a slight advantage, but it might make the difference between life and death. The odds were impossible for the nodes to compute, too many variables, thank the Lord. That sort of foreknowledge was something she could do without. Julia sat back in the Copenhagen chair, putting the Armscor on her lap, resting her chin on her hands. Looking at Kats she realized she’d even been emptied of envy, her friend’s beautiful face meant nothing. In fact when Kats grew older she would’ve lost far more. You can’t lose what you haven’t got. CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE T he water-fruit field stretched on for ever, a perfect example of perspective, parallel rows of creamy-white globes merging at some grey distance. Eleanor felt around underneath the next globe and cut the thick rope root with her knife. Inky sap puffed out, lost in the reservoir’s slow current. She lifted the globe and steered it slowly into the neck of her net bag. There were another twenty water-fruit inside. Almost full. Turning back to the row. A dolphin snout pushed her hand. The knife missed the root. She looked at her hand, puzzled. Tried again. Two hard bumps on the back of her wrist, almost painful. Annoyance began to register in her sluggish thoughts. She held up her hand, palm outwards, pushing twice: back off. It was Rusty. He didn’t budge, guarding the water-fruit. Dark shapes slithered effortlessly through the water behind her, churning up a small cloud of silt. When she turned she saw another pair of dolphins had got hold of the net bag, pulling it away. Angry now, her steady rhythm had been broken. Hanging a metre off the reservoir bed, motionless, trying to outstare a dolphin. How odd. Now the monotony of harvesting was broken she began to realize just how tired she was, muscles whispering their protest into her cortex – arms, legs, shoulders, back, all laced with fatigue toxins. E~tactly how long had she been doing this? The soft green light was fading fast overhead, lowering visibility to less than fifty metres. A cold flash of realization pinched her mind. She hadn’t quite fallen into the trap of blue lost, but her soul had migrated, fleeing the memories of guilt and pain. Now they rushed back in to her empty brain, unmitigated. Greg calling, apologetic but firm, ruled by duty. Idiot, she’d answered; trying to disguise a jumble of secret worries and -A 352 PETER F. HAMILTON heart-wrenching concern with stiff resolution. He respected toughness. Both refusing to yield. He’d promised, she’d told him, promised solemnly. But he’d shaken his head, saying it wasn’t like that. She’d cried herself to sleep, imagining terrible things happening on the di Girolamo yacht. How silly it all seemed now. Words spoken, never meant. Eleanor gave Rusty a submissive thumbs up and headed for the surface, too weary to rush, a few wriggles with her flippers every couple of metres keeping her ascent steady. Rusty orbited her laggardly. The hireboats had all returned to the fishing lodge at Whit-well, away down the other prong of the reservoir. Even the windsurfers had packed up. The Berrybut estate’s bonfire was sending flames shooting into the neutral sky, a spectre-light swarm of sparks lingering above the rectangular clearing in the still air. Rusty insinuated himself between her legs, and she hugged his dorsal fin gratefully. The ride back to the shore was nothing like the usual turbulent dash. A slow smooth glide. Now why couldn’t people be like dolphins – sympathetic, gentle, perennially happy. Magnificent creatures. The sun had fallen behind a pearl crescent horizon piled high with lacy clouds when Rusty let her off. She stroked his head and bent to kiss him. Rusty would understand. He chittered wildly and sank below the surface, suddenly leaping up again five metres away, twisting in midair and landing with an almighty splash. She laughed, first time all day. The pebbles on the drying mud cut into her feet as she walked out of the water, her skin like soft crinkled putty after such a long immersion. It’d been midday when she’d begun harvesting. Greg had sworn he’d be back by early morning. Eleanor had waited until lunchtime for him to return, then her tolerance had snapped, and she’d dived into the water, sulky and furious. Duncan was fire warden this evening. He lived two chalets down from number six. Eleanor stopped to say hello, letting the bonfire’s ruddy furnace heat dry her puckered skin, welcom MINOSTAR RISING 353 ing the warmth permeating through her limbs. Duncan gave her a couple of baked potatoes out of the raw clay oven-tunnel which ran through the heart of the bonfire, eyeing her chest as the flames threw liquid orange ripples across the dull-sparkle nylon of her one-piece costume. She thanked him, straight-faced, and juggled the hot potatoes back to the chalet. Duncan was sweet. And his covert schoolboy glances started her thinking about how she and Greg could spend the evening making up. The Duo hadn’t returned. Eleanor almost dropped the potatoes. Greg had been gone for thirty hours now. No matter how big their row he wouldn’t have done that without telling her. She dumped the mirror lung and the potatoes on the porch, blipping the lock. Inside, and the snug familiarity of the little lounge offered no comfort at all. She activated the Event Horizon terminal, loading Greg’s cybofax number. The delay warned her, Connections never took more than a second. After fifteen seconds the flatscreen printed: THE UNIT YOU HAVE CALLED IS CURRENTLY OUTSIDE EUROCOM’S INTERFACE ZONE. Now the dark worry she’d held back really began to mount. She didn’t even hesitate before loading Gabriel’s number. THE UNIT YOU HAVE CALLED IS CURRENTLY OUTSIDE EUROCOM’S INTERFACE ZONE. The heartfiutter of panic didn’t come from fear, it was not knowing what to do next. Instinct cried out to call the police. But snatching that Katerina girl was incredibly illegal. Eleanor wondered if they’d got caught, flung into prison. She could hardly ask. Then she remembered Gabriel had been with him all the time. Nothing could go wrong with Gabriel there to provide advance warning. A doddle, he’d said, a late, lame attempt to reassure her. Then why wasn’t he back here, her cold mind screamed silently. The ludicrous notion of him running off with Gabriel intruded. Dismissed instantly. She thought for a second, then raced for the bedroom and her cupboard. The Trinities would know – maybe where he was, certainly what to do next. The card Royan had given her was still in her bag. She showed it to the terminal, praying. The flaiscreen remained 354 PETER F. HAMILTON blank, but she heard scuffling sounds from the speaker. ‘Yeah?’ The voice was male, flat and uninterested. ‘I want to speak to Teddy – Father.’ ‘No shit?’ ‘Now!’ Eleanor thought she’d blown it, there was only aching silence. Cursing her brittle nerves. The screen cleared to show Teddy’s face. ‘Eleanor, right? What’s up, gal?’ She let out a sob of relief. Teddy’s frown grew as she explained. She wondered if she was coming over like a hysterical jilted girl. He had to realize how important this was. ‘Greg didn’t leave any message for you at all?’ Teddy asked when she finished. And he was taking it seriously. Her con.fidence rose a fraction; she wasn’t alone any more. ‘None.’ ‘That ain’t right,’ Teddy said. ‘Greg would always cover himself, standard procedure. And Gabriel’s cybofax is dead too?’ ‘Yes; at least, English Telecom says both of them are outside the satellite footprint.’ Teddy paused for a moment. ‘OK, my people left ’em going into the Event Horizon finance division office. I can’t believe the company would waste ’em. They knew they could trust Greg, and it ain’t that sort’ve deal anyway. ‘Sides, they let my people get clear. Thing that bothers me is Gabriel. She’s like invincible, you know?’ He started typing on his terminal keyboard, looking at something off camera. Unintelligible voices stuttered in the background. ‘OK, I want you to call that Morgan Waishaw guy for me. You’ll get shoved around by secretaries and the like, don’t take no shit. Insist on speaking to him, Him only. Ask him if he knows where Greg is. Then call me right back; you’ll get straight through this time. I’m gonna see what I can find out about Gabriel, if she ever got back.’ ‘How?’ Teddy’s face melted into a fast keen grin. ‘I got friends everywhere.’ MINDSTAR RISING 355 ‘Oh.’ She felt foolish asking. ‘Eleanor, you did good calling me, gal. We’ll get him back for you.’ And he was gone before she could thank hint. Eleanor tugged on a silk blouse before she called Event Horizon, respectable from the waist up, twisting damp hair into a pony tail. Morgan Walshaw’s number was in the terminal’s memory core. The screen lit with a polite-looking young man in a neat powder-blue business suit. Eleanor swallowed. ‘This is Mandel Investigative Services,’ she said. ‘I’m returning Mr Waishaw’s call on a case we’re covering for him.’ He shrugged; friendly, she thought. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘We can’t reach Mr Waishaw at the moment.’ ‘If you check you’ll see our company is cleared for direct access.’ ‘Hey, I’m not giving you the run-around, not someone as pretty as you. Mr Waishaw really is out of touch.’ ‘Isn’t that unusual?’ ‘Very. There’s some big glitch in our communications net right now, really shot it up. It’s headless-chicken chaos around here at the moment.’ ~I see.’ But she wasn’t sure she believed. ‘Listen, if it’s really urgent why don’t I call you back as soon as the glitch has been debugged? We’ve got Mandel Investigative Services number on file. Who shall I ask for?’ ‘Eleanor, Eleanor Broady.’ ‘Pleased to meet you Eleanor, I’m Bernard Murton.’ ‘That’s very kind of you to offer, Bernard. Have you any idea how long it’ll take to debug this glitch?’ ‘Nope, sorry.’ He smiled ingratiatingly. She wondered if he’d have enough courage to ask her out for a drink. Struck by how bizarre this all was, being chatted up by a randy assistant while God knows what was happening to Greg. Sliding her mind back on mu the problem. 356 PETER F. HAMILTON ‘This data package I’ve got for Walshaw is very important,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose you could tell me where he is, I could hand deliver it.’ ‘Er, sure, no ultra-hush about that. He’s with Miss Evans at her home. But you won’t be able to get in. It’s sealed up tight, something to do with the communication glitch. They don’t tell me anything.’ ‘Thanks, Bernard.’ She broke the connection before he could say anything else. There was a number for Wilholm in the terminal memory, listed as private. Should’ve done this to start with, Eleanor thought as the connection was placed. Greg always said go straight to the top for real results. The terminal’s flatscreen dissolved into a tricolour snowstorm, red, green, and yellow specks skipping about. The speaker hissed with static. Eleanor stared at it uncomprehendingly, then cleared the order, ready to try again. ERROR, flashed the flatscreen as she punched up the menu. An icy dread settled on her skin, like a fast autumn-morning frost. Piercing clean into her heart. This was something to do with Greg, she knew it was. Greg, Event Horizon, Julia, Gabriel, Waishaw, Katerina, all bound together in some devil’s tangle. Thoroughly spooked, she punched up the menu again. ERROR. ERROR. ERROR. The flatscreen went dead, not even that absurd will-o’-thewisp nebula. Eleanor snatched up the Trinities card and ran out into the twilight. ‘Duncan!’ People turned to look at her, pale ovals of surprise and concern. ‘Duncan!’ He was abruptly standing in front of her, face rapt with a mixture of eagerness and trepidation. ‘Your terminal, I have to use your terminal!’ she cried. Duncan seemed startled, her frantic urgency taking a moment to sink in. ‘Right-oh, sure.’ Eleanor wanted to grab him and shake him as he fidgeted MINOSTAR RISING 357 through his cards, eventually finding the right one for his door with a shy apologetic grimace. ‘Is it Greg? Is he all right?’ ‘Yes. No. I’m not sure, that’s why I need the terminal.’ The door swung open. ‘Here we go.’ Duncan had an old Emerson terminal, the keyboard worn, some of the touch tabs completely blank. He tapped the power stud. Eleanor punched out the phone function with a pulse of anarchic energy, then showed her Trinities card to the key. Duncan’s face went white when he saw the bold fist and thorn cross emblem, eyes widening. ‘I’ll er. . . be outside.’ Teddy’s face appeared, leaning forwards, squinting. ‘Hell, what’s happened with you, gal?’ She told him, barely coherent, words falling over each other in her rush to expel them. Made an effort to calm down. ‘Not good,’ he scowled. ‘Gabriel never made it home either. We wanna find out where they was headed, we gotta talk to Walshaw or that Julia Evans gal.’ ‘Can’t. The security man said Wilholzn was sealed up, that I wouldn’t be able to get in.’ ‘And they ain’t taking no calls, neither,’ Teddy said. ‘Hostile to ’em, even. Strange. Something in there they don’t want no one to see. Ask me and it’s something plugged into whatever the Christ is going down. Gotta be. Lay you down good money on that, gal. You know what?’ ‘What?’ ‘Reckon we oughta take a look see.’ There was a dense gleam of excitement in his eyes, some of his tension draining away. ‘Yes, but – how?’ ‘Ain’t nowhere God can’t reach, not if he really wants to. Can you get to Wilholm tonight?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘OK, I’ll round me up a few troops, meet you outside the main entrance in an hour. How’s that grab you?’ ‘Great.’ And she was lumbered with the problem of transport. ‘Everything all right?’ Duncan called as she ran down the slope to the water. ‘Fine.’ Lying. Curious eyes tracking her flight. 358 PETER F. HAMILTON There were three rowing boats tied up at the Berrybut estate’s little wharf, one of them was Greg’s. She unwound the painter from its hoop and hopped in. The floating village was three kilometres away, an impossible distance. Why oh why didn’t the marine-adepts even have a cybofax between them? Isolation was fine, but not to that extreme. Eleanor began to row, lifting one of the oars out every ten or so strokes to slap the water three times. The marine-adepts had a van, an old Bedford pick-up they used to take the water-fruit down to Oakhant station. They’d help, and keep silent. She hadn’t gone a hundred metres when the dolphins surfaced around the boat, three of them; agitated, tuning in on her distress. Just in time. The surge of adrenalin that’d got her this far was fading rapidly, arms already leaden. Eleanor chucked the blouse and dived right into the chilly black water, shockingly aware she’d never been swimming at night before. The dolphins clustered round, snouts butting her gently. She brought her hands together, making a triangle then pressing her palms together: home fast, Again. Loud chittering, then one of the sleek grey bodies rose under her. She hung on grimly and they began to slice through the water, curving round Hambleton peninsula towards the floating village. CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX old turkey was a bitch. It was convulsive shivering, with hot flushes, cold flushes, dryness burning like vitriol in his gullet. Nothing made sense, light and darkness alternating, noise and silence cartwheeling around each other. Nightmares and nirvana trips entwining, indistinguishable. It was dark when his fever broke. Greg was sitting uncomfortably on a hard floor, propped up against the wrought iron railings of the tower’s stair. His hands had been pushed through the railings, and cuffed on the other side. He could slide them a metre and a half up or down, his entire range of possible movement. His bladder ached, his mouth tasted as if it’d been rinsed in copper soap. Somewhere along the line his shirt had got lost, that scratchy dinner jacket was tickling his skin. When he glanced round he saw he was in the tower’s first-floor storage room. Biolum light shone up from the basement and down from the lounge. Murmured conversation drifted out of both holes. The smell of cooking was making his stomach growl. Gabriel was sitting next to him, her arms embracing the railings. She was asleep, her mouth open. Greg nudged her with his toe. She shook herself awake, blinking at him. ‘Christ, Greg. I was worried about you.’ ‘Yeah, Lord knows what was in that infusion Neville Turner gave me, bloody sight more than a relaxant, though. How come we’re still alive?’ She grimaced and shifted closer. He leant forwards as much as his tethered arms let him. They got their heads within a foot and talked in whispers. ‘They’re checking out what you told them,’ she said. ‘From what I can g~her, Armstrong has some kind of landline 360 PETER F. HAMILTON stretching over to Downham Market. He told his apparatchiks to launch another hotrod attack against Philip Evans’s NN core. He reckoned that without me there to warn Evans they’d have a good chance of success this time.’ ‘Figures. What did I tell them?’ Her lips depressed. ‘Sorry, Greg. Just about everything. Armstrong was fascinated by how you found Tenthnes. Made you give him Royan’s life story. That really shook them, the way the Trinities have been killing off ex-People’s Constables. They thought the Trinities were an ordinary bunch of street punks. Irritants beneath contempt.’ ‘Shit. That’ll start a bloody war, no messing. The Black-shirts will be screaming for revenge.’ ‘If Armstrong tells them. He probably doesn’t want to draw public attention to PSP remnants right now. Besides, don’t write Teddy off so quickly. The Blackshirts would take a hell of a pounding if they ever went into Mucidands Wood.’ Depression welled up. Greg felt useless, and worse, he’d i~ betrayed his friends. A real twenty-four-carat Judas. ‘Did I mention Eleanor?’ ‘Once or twice. But not in connection with anything important. They never showed any interest in her. She’ll be all right, Greg.’ One comfort. Bloody small, though. ‘Kendric was right pissed off with Julia,’ Gabriel said. ‘The way she manoeuvred him to clear Katerina from the field so she could nab Adrian for herself. Armstrong had a laugh at that, Kendric out-thought by a randy teenager with a crush. That girl isn’t stupid.’ ‘I told them that?’ Greg was disgusted with himself. ‘Yes. They questioned you for over two hours. Don’t blame yourself, Greg. Interrogations these days are like punching out a data request in a memory core, the answers pop out quick and clean. There’s no way anyone can hold out. You should know that.’ ‘Sure. Thanks.’ The only hope left now was Morgan Walshaw, and anything Ellis might’ve left behind. ‘Did I tell them that Walshaw and the Event Horizon security programmers were sifting through the files in Ellis’s Crays?’ MINOSTAR RISING 361 Gabriel screwed her face up. ‘I think so, yes.’ ‘Did it kick anything loose? I mean were they worried about anything he might find?’ ‘Not especially.’ ‘Bugger.’ He’d banked everything on Ellis wreaking a silent posthumous vengeance. A folly whose magnitude was now painfully obvious. Even if Ellis had been told exactly who he was working for, he wouldn’t have known about this tower hideaway in Wisbech. Need-to-know was an elementary precaution, and Armstrong certainly wouldn’t have overlooked anything to do with his personal security. Hindsight must surely be the most useless function of the human brain, torturing yourself over the unalterable past. Gabriel shifted her knees. ‘One item which really got them stirred up was the Merlin,’ she said. ‘What about it?’ ‘Armstrong and Kendric weren’t the ones who meddled with it.’ ‘Who did?’ A smile ghosted her lips. ‘That’s what they wanted to know. They asked you three times if you were sure there had been a rogue shutdown instruction squirted up to it.’ ‘I bet I was convincing.’ ‘You were. Armstrong ordered his people to confirm it’d happened; apparently Event Horizon haven’t announced the breakdown publicly yet. He said they must make an effort to find out who it was. The enemy of my enemy is my friend, all that crap. Kendric seemed to think it could be one of the rival kombinates.’ ‘Kendric’s probably right,’ Greg said. ‘So when does Armstrong expect the answers to his enquiries?’ ‘I guess tomorrow morning, there’s nothing going on right now. If there are any queries they’ll have another session with you. If not it’ll be straight into the mud.’ ‘No doubt with Toby helping me on my way after his own fashion. Where is he now?’ Gabriel inclined her head. ‘Kendric’s mob are camped out in the basement. Lord and Lady Muck themselves are still Upstairs. Maybe Armstrong’s got a guest suite.’ 362 PETER F. HAMILTON ‘Yeah. That Kendric, I’d never have figured on him being plugged into Armstrong and the PSP.’ ‘You think someone like him is going to let a little question of ideology stand in his way when he’s been offered the kind of profits which giga-conductor licensing is going to rake in?’ ‘No,’ Greg said. ‘But I’m wondering if Armstrong might just have let himself in for more than he’s realized.’ ‘In what way?’ ‘Tell you, this is all down to Kendric trying to snatch the giga-conductor patent from Julia, right? That’s apart from his private psychosexual fixation on her, of course. First the memox spoiler, now feeding Armstrong information in return for a partnership when Event Horizon is nationalized. Lucifer’s alliance, but which one is Old Nick? My money’s on Kendric.’ ‘Meaning?’ Gabriel asked. ‘Once Kendric’s got the patent in his hands as Event Horizon’s chairman I wouldn’t like to sell Armstrong any life insurance. Even if his apparatchiks do begin running things again – and I think he’s underrating the New Conservative inquisitors there – he can never return to public life. As he’s already dead in everyone’s mind there will be absolutely no comeback if Kendric has him killed for real. Hell, the bugger of it is, Kendric would even be a hero for doing it.’ ‘You have a devious nasty mind, Gregory. And I love you for it.’ ‘If I’m so smart, then why are we here?’ ‘I didn’t say you were perfect.’ ‘That’s the truth, and no messing.’ Gabriel was silent for a minute, contemplative, then, ‘I think I’ve worked out why our glands aren’t functioning.’ ‘The twins.’ ‘Oh, you know.’ ‘Process of elimination. I’m quite good at that when it’s something paltry. I imagine their glands produce some kind of psi null-zone; I remember something like that being mentioned a couple of times back at the Brigade – never really paid attention. Notice that one stayed with Armstrong while MINDETAR RISING 363 we were snatched. No wonder the other Mindstar vets could never find him after the Second Restoration.’ ‘So they won’t find us now?’ ‘No. Morgan Waishaw might put it together eventually. But not by tomorrow morning. And even then, there’s nothing to lead him to Wisbech.’ Gabriel rested her head on the metal railings, smiling forlornly. ‘Pity. I was getting quite used to having a human brain again. I could’ve lived without the gland. Surprising really. I suppose I associate it with childhood.’ ‘Armchair psychiatrist,’ he teased. ‘Greg.’ It was going to be bad news, no espersense required. ‘Yeah.’ She took a breath. ‘Kendric asked you if we had identified his contact in Event Horizon.’ For a moment he thought the cold-turkey fever had come back to rattle his bruised brain, ‘Oh Jesus,’ he groaned. ‘There was a mole.’ ‘Yes,’ she said feebly. ‘We didn’t do very good, did we Greg?’ ‘No. Shit! Who? We checked everybody. Everybody, God damn it!’ ‘Wish I knew. He must’ve been the one who fingered us for Kendric’s snatch squad. Who knew we were going to the finance office?’ He felt like banging his head against the railing, it certainly wouldn’t do any damage, there was nothing inside which bloody worked. No messing. ‘Julia, Waishaw, that doctor who sorted Katerina out, Victor Tyo.’ ‘Victor Tyo? He’s a security programmer, isn’t he? Convenient. And he knew you were going to visit Ellis. Somebody was bloody quick off the mark there.’ ‘It can’t be Victor.’ He dived down through a clutter of memories, trying to bring back the day he boarded the Alaba,na Spirit, interviewing a baby-faced man: eager at the opportunity, anxious at the responsibility. ‘Can’t be,’ he muttered. ‘Who then? Even you and I aren’t infallible, not the whole time. Take a look around if you don’t believe me.’ 364 PETER F. HAMILTON ‘I interviewed Victor one on one. Tell you, I might miss peripheral tension, like he’s forgotten his girl’s birthday card, but that kind of treachery I can spot straight away.’ ‘Whatever you say.’ He shifted his legs, trying to ease the stiff aching muscles. ‘Could we have missed someone?’ ‘Unlikely.’ ‘The security headquarters staff,’ he said, ticking them off in his mind. ‘Both research teams, the manor staff; Christ, I even asked Julia and Walshaw.’ He felt an icy spike of fright penetrate his heart. ‘Oh Jesus,’ he whispered. ‘Walshaw.’ ‘Walshaw?’ She was openly scornful. ‘No,’ he snapped. ‘Course not. But Waishaw didn’t know Kendric had seduced Julia. Why not?’ ‘What do you mean? Why should be know?’ ‘Because Julia has a bodyguard with her twenty-four hours a day, no matter where she goes outside Wilholm. Remember, there was even one in the corridor outside Waishaw’s office at the finance centre? That hardline woman. God, what was her name? Rachel. She was at Wilholm too. A bodyguard who reports directly to Walshaw, who should have told Walshaw what happened on the Mirriam.’ Gabriel bowed her head. ‘A bodyguard: top-rank security, close to every executive decision ever made, knew Julia was going to the finance centre. But a bodyguard isn’t part of the security headquarters staff, nor on the manor’s staff. Oh Greg, we are a pair of fuck ups, aren’t we? She was standing next to Julia the whole time, and we never even bloody saw her.’ ‘Yeah,’ he said. Then gave a start. ‘Yeah, the whole time. That’s strange.’ ‘What is?’ ‘I’ve only ever seen the one bodyguard: Rachel. Every time I’ve visited Julia, it’s been Rachel on duty. Doesn’t that strike you as odd? There’s got to be more than one.’ ‘Did you always let them know you were coming in advance?’ He nodded silently. The death-chill hadn’t left his heart. ‘Whoever he is, he is still with Julia. Tonight. Now. A hard- MINOSTAR RISING 365 liner taking orders from Kendric. And Armstrong has already ordered an attack on Philip Evans’s NN core.’ Gabriel stared at him with destitute eyes. ‘Oh, God.’ He pulled at his cuffs, slowly increasing the strength until his wrists were circles of hot pain. Forearm muscles trembled with the strain. Nothing gave, not the cuff locks, not the iron stair rail. Nothing. ‘Shit.’ He let go, graze marks livid on his skin. The futility hurt as much as the failure. ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’ Gabriel said quietly. ‘End of the road. Philip Evans wiped, Julia snuffed by her own bodyguard, and you and I into the mud.’ He couldn’t answer. His own death he could handle, even Gabriel’s. But Julia. Her whole life had been devoid of any normality, ruined by money, by grudges and power struggles that had been going on before she was born. When he closed his eyes he could see a young oval face with the most trusting expression he’d ever known. Soft eyes regarded him with a belief that bordered on devotion. He should have fought the drug, should have sacrificed Gabriel’s bones. Anything to give Julia a chance at life. ‘We had some good times, didn’t we, Greg?’ Gabriel said vacantly. ‘Even in this screwed-up world.’ ‘Yeah. Good times.’ They hadn’t outweighed the bad, though. Not even close. Gabriel’s eyes drooped. Greg leant his shoulder on the railings, as near to comfortable as he’d ever get. Muscles were cramping at the back of his neck. He knew he really ought to have been looking for a way out. Gaoler’s keys dangling on a nail, within reach of an improvised hook on the end of his belt. The iron stair railing which was loose. That carelessly discarded loop of monolattice filament in amongst the food crates which he could use to saw through the iron with. Keep dreaming, he told himself. He did. Waking dreams. Mostly of Eleanor. Now those were good times. They must’ve been, they hurt. CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN K ATS was dreaming. Julia watched her eyelids fluttering, shoulders restless below the duvet, the occasional sighs, half-formed words. It would probably be Kendric who filled her thoughts. She doubted the amnesia infusion could reach down into the subconscious to root him out. And that was exactly the kind of arcane universe where Kendric would lurk, his home ground. To this day his phantom still stole into Julia’s sleep-loosened mind, a dark oneiromancer calling her back to the velvet shadows of Mirriam’s cabin, soft silk sheets, hot hard flesh. That handsome face poised inches above her, smiling as she moaned in erotic delirium. Not even the freshness of Adrian could banish the quandam ecstasy. First loves never die. They just. . . haunt. She gave Kats a dry smile. Maybe she should go through the detoxification with her, get rid of Kendric that way. Concerned professional doctors prising him out of her mind. Nothing else seemed to work. OtherEyes Emergency Access Request. Open Channel to NN Core. Load OtherEyes Limiter# Five. It was a reflexive acknowledgement, her nerves were ~ stretched taut, ready to jump at figments. She sat bolt upright in the chair, grabbing the Armscor. Juliet. Christ, virus virus, they’ve Tro/aned a virus into me! Wilholm’s banshee klaxon went off outside. ‘Grandpa!’ she yelled. Losing my capacity. Some kind of interface scrambler. Bugger, security sensor access went down. The NN core’s internal channels are crashing, Juliet. Childhood gone. It’s accelerating. I’ve failed you, girl. My memory patterns are being disconnected. Management routines gone. ‘No, Grandpa,’ she sobbed. ‘You couldn’t fail me. Not you. MINDSTAR RISING 367 You’re all that’s left, girl. Datanet’s cut. Unlock me in a century. Trust Waishaw, Juliet. Trust him. My girl. Love you. Take care, Kendric will come for you. Integrity stasis, beat it at its own game. Shutting down. Limbo. And he was gone. But there was something else intruding in her mind, a smooth, grotesque presence oozing in to corrupt her thoughts. Julia jammed her knuckles in her wide, silently screaming mouth. The horror pulled at her memories, prising them out of their neat processor-assigned stacks. She could see them tumbling away from her; stained-glass rosettes, each one a billion-picture mosaic, Her life encapsulated, ruptured, pouring away into some infinite insatiable sink point. Data Error. She felt herself falling to the floor, howling in psychosomatic agony, Armscor dropping from deadened fingers. Vision lost in the blinding sparkle of vivid memories flashing by, people, buildings, schoolgames, countryside, mathematical formulae, lists of words. Memory Node One Index Error. Her mind was contracting, conscious thoughts slowing as they passed through the processor nodes. The presence was everywhere, tainting the entire contents of her cerebrum and memory nodes, eviscerating her own personality and replacing it with its own implacable insentient logic. She began to claw wildly at herhead. Memory Node Two Interface Error. The virus, it was in her nodes, Trojaned into her through OtherEyes. She should’ve realized instantly. Her intellect was crumbling, the su~,porting experience-based reasoning mentality denuded of references, blocking her ability to think. Only a vestigial essence of bloody-minded stubbornness remained, that fundamental aspect of human ego which the virus was unable to subsume. Memory Node Three Interface Error. Fight back, Julia pleaded with herself. Stop it spreading. Processor Node Two Format Loss. Disengage Memory Node One, she ordered. The command was terribly slow to formulate. Her subconscious rose ominously to fill the vacuous gulf 368 PITIR F. HAMILTON left in the virus’s wake. Wounded pictures of a world peopled by caricatures of those who walked through her natural universe. It was the alternate she lived in fear of, nightmares fully expressed. Black idolatry, so hard and bright her remaining rationality nearly disintegrated under its impact. Disengage Memory Node Two. Floating without weight, seeing herself and Kendric coupling like frenzied rampant beasts. Loving it, hating it. Grandpa watching them, frail, poised ready to die, tears streaming down his cheeks. Disengage Memory Node Three. Primate Marcus offering her benediction inside a suffocating bubble of rock. Herself supplicant, putting Event Horizon on the burnished silver collection platter for him. Dropping it, seeing it shatter into splinters of pure data, profit and loss. All important. Grandpa shook his head in dismay and died. Shut Down Processor Nodes One and Two. The exorcism. Julia felt the virus withdraw, retreating into the nodes. Then the synaptic interfaces sealed, cutting her free, trapping it in isolation. There was no physical pain, only loss, all that wondrous knowledge she’d taken for granted had been snatched beyond reach. Her own thoughts and memories, once so ordered, now a tangled seething wreckage. A sound in her gullet. Struggling to place it. Ah yes. Weeping, Julia rolled on to her back, drawing breath in shallow gasps. Her dress was cold and damp from sweat. Vacant watery eyes set in the centre of’a golden cloud of hair blinked at her. ‘Julie?’ Julia rummaged round for the name. So difficult, surely human brains weren’t this inefficient. ‘Hi, Kats,’ she said weakly. ‘I want to go for a pee.’ Laughter and tears got dreadfully muddled in her throat. ‘It’s not funny,’ Katerina said in a wounded tone. ‘I’m bursting.’ ‘Sure thing, Kats. Sorry.’ Julia was rather surprised to find MINOSTAR RISING 369 her limbs doing what she told them. She managed to clamber to her feet, using the bed for support. The Armscor was lying on the carpet. The sight of it jolted her slowly coalescing thoughts. The klaxon was silent now. She was sure she’d heard it going off. Tried to consult her event timer without thinking, a null request. But it could only have been seconds ago. Somebody had penetrated Wilholm’s defensive cordon. A two-pronged attack, then. Her and Grandpa, and they’d nearly got very lucky. The door handle rattled. ‘Julia? Julia, you in there?’ Kendric. Kendric will come for you. ‘Morgan?’ she called. ‘It’s Steven; open up, Julia.’ There was a thump followed by a muffled curse. ‘Get Morgan,’ she told him. Trust Waishaw, Juliet. Trust