inevitably, I suppose. Department heads just don’t have the drive. It’s a job to them, not a life. Maybe these nodes will enable you to control it properly.’ Julia let desire war with her conscience. How did you captivate a boy like Adrian? Access Surveillance Camera: West Wing, Guest Suite Seven. A laughing Kats was straddling Adrian, playing with him, her hands caressing, tongue working slowly down his chest. He was spreadeagled across the mattress, clutching the brass bedposts with a strength which came close to bending them, face warped in agony and ecstasy, pleading with her. Commit AmourKats. Julia had never done anything like this, not leading, not making all the moves. She wasn’t sure she would have the nerve. Kats seemed so totally uninhibited. Shameless. Was that the key? Could boys home in on abandon? Kats sat back on Adrian’s abdomen, then crossed her arms and gripped the hem of the camisole. She peeled it languidly over her head, shaking her hair out. Julia felt a sharp spasm of envy at seeing her friend’s well-developed body. That was one reason why Kats had Adrian, she acknowledged bitterly, they looked like godlings together. At least she had longer legs than Kats. Skinny, though; nothing like as shapely, two beanpoles really. Exit Surveillance Camera. Her mental yell was contaminated with anger and disgust. Peeking on the lovers had seemed like a piece of harmless fun. Certainly using the security cameras to spy on the manor’s servants had been pretty enlightening. But this wasn’t the gentle romantic love-making she’d been expecting. Nothing near. Pandora’s box. And only a fool ever opens it. Anger vanished to be replaced with sadness. Alone again, tuore than ever now she knew the truth. BOyS were j tist about the only subject she never discussed 22 PUTIR P. HAMILTON
with her grandfather. It never seemed fair somehow. He’4 taken over every other parental duty, a solid pillar of comfo~ support, and love. She couldn’t burden him with more. now. Certainly not now. Part of the reason for her being at Wilholm was so she could be his secretary. Philip Evans needed a secretary like he needed another overdraft, but the idea was to give her execu. tive experience and acquaint her with Event Horizon minutiae, preparing her to take it over. A terrifying, yet at the same time exhilarating prospect. Then this morning at breakfast he’d taken her into his confidence, looking even more haggard than usual. ‘Someone is running a spoiler operation against Event Horizon,’ he’d said. ‘Contaminating thirty-seven per cent of our memox crystals in the furnaces.’ ‘Has Waishaw found out who was behind it?’ she’d asked, assuming she was being told after the security chief had closed down the operation. It was the way their discussions of the company usually went. Her grandfather would explain a recent problem, and they’d go over the solution, detail by detail, until she understood why it’d been handled that particUlar way. Remote hands-on training, he’d joked. ‘Walshaw doesn’t know about this,’ Philip Evans had answered grimly. ‘Nobody knows apart from me. I noticed our cash reserves had fallen pretty drastically in the last quarterly financial summaries. Forty-eight million Eurofrancs down, Juliet, that’s fifty-seven million New Sterling for Christ’s sake. Our entire reserve is only nine hundred million Eurofrancs. So I started checking. The money is being used to cover a deficit from the microgee crystal furnaces up at Zanthtis. Standard accounting procedure; the loss was passed on to the finance division to make good for our loan-repayment schedule. They’re just doing their job. The responsibility lies with ihe microgee division, and they’ve done bugger all about it.’ She’d frowned, bewildered. ‘But surely someone in the microgee division should’ve spotted it? Thirty-seven per cent! What about the security monitors?’ ‘Nothing. They didn’t trip. According to the data squirt MINDSTAR RISING 23 from Zanthus, that thirty-seven per cent is coming out of the furnace as just so much rubbish, riddled with impurities. They’ve written it off as a normal operational loss. And that js pure boliocks. The furnaces weren’t performing that badly at start-UP, and we’re way down the learnng curve now. A worst-Case scenario should see a five per cent loss. I checked with the Boeing Marietta consortium which builds the furnaces, no one else is suffering that kind of reject rate. Most of ’em have losses below two per cent.’ The full realization struck her then. ‘We can’t trust security?’ ‘God knows, Juliet. I’m praying that some smartarse hotrod has found a method of cracking the monitor’s access codes, however unlikely that is. The alternative is bad.’ “What are you going to do?’ ‘Sit and think. They’ve been gnawing away at us for eight bloody months, a few more days won’t kill us. But we’re taking a quarter of a million Eurofranc loss per day, it’s got to stop, and stop dead. I have to know the people I put on it are reliable.’ They couldn’t afford major losses, Julia knew. Philip Evans’s post-Second Restoration expansion plans were stretching the company’s resources to breaking point. Microgee products were the most profitable of all Event Horizon’s gear, but the space station modules tied up vast sums of capital; even with the Sanger spaceplanes, reaching orbit was still phenomenally expensive. They needed the income from the memox crystals to keep up the payments to the company’s financial backing consortium. The fact that he’d admitted the problem to her and her alone had brought a wonderful sensation of contentment. They’d always been close, but this made the bond unbreakable. She was the only person he could really trust in the whole world. And that was just a little bit scary. She’d promised faithfully to run an analysis of the security monitor programs through her nodes for him, to see if the Codes could be cracked, or maybe subverted. But she’d delayed it while she went horse riding with Adrian and Kats, then 24 PUTIR F. HAMILTON again as the three of them went swimming, and now subverting the manor’s security circuits. Guilt added itself to the shame she was already feeling from spying on the lovers. She’d been appallingly selfish, allowing a juvenile infatuation to distract her. Betraying Grandpa’s trust. Access HighSteal. Sight, sound, and sensation fell away, isolating her at the centre of a null void. Numbers filled her mind, nothing like a cube display, no coloured numerals; this was elemental maths, raw digits. The processor nodes obediently slotted them into a logic matrix, a three-dimensional lattice with data packages on top, filtering through a dizzy topography of interactive channels that correlated and cross-indexed. Hopefully the answer should pop out of the bottom. She thought for a moment, defining the parameters of the matrix channels, allowing ideas to form, merge. Any ideas, however wild. Some fruiting, some withering. Irrational. Assume the monitors are unbreakable: how would I go about concealing the loss? An inverted problem, outside normal computer logic, its factors too random. Her processor nodes loaded the results into the channel structures. The columns of numbers started to flow. She began to inject tracer programs, adding modifications as she went, probing for weak points. Some deep level of her brain admitted that the metaphysical matrix frightened her, an eerie sense of trepidation at its inhuman nature. She feared herself, what she’d become. Was that why people kept their distance? Could they tell she was different somehow? An instinctive phobia. She cursed the bioware.