The map room was a plain white cube, three metres to a side, windowless. It put Eleanor in mind of Kitchener’s computer room. Sparky wasn’t allowed in. The biolum panels came on to show a circular flatscreen mounted on one wall. There was a single ‘ware module on the floor in a corner. Cohn gave a voice command to the ‘ware, and a map of England appeared on the flatscreen. He stood in front of it, both hands pressed on the bulb of his stick, and looked the outline up and down, nodding in satisfaction. ‘h’s there, Greg, I can still do it, by God!’ His voice was a weak growl. ‘That’s why I came,’ Greg said. ‘Nobody else in your class.’ She could detect a tremor in his voice. When she looked his eyes were dark with pain. She fumbled for his hand. ‘Talk to me, young Keith,’ Cohn said. Willet twitched uncomfortably. ‘What about, sir?’ ‘This dreadful Maurice Knebel chap, of course. I need your mind’s image of him to work on.’ ‘Sir?’ ‘Tell us about an incident you remember,’ Greg said. ‘A station cricket match where he got caught out. What did he wear? Bad habits, good habits. What sort of food did he eat? Who were his friends?’ I A QUANTUM MURDER 311 ‘Yes, sir. Well, there was one suit which he always wore, this would be around the time of the Wynne girl’s death I suppose. Brown and grey, check, it was. Used to get some stick about it.’ Eleanor filtered out what the sergeant was saying. It was almost unfair to make someone so stolid and reliable relate trivial tales from the past. Cohn had become preternaturally still. His stare had developed that distance of all gland users, seeing at ninety degrees to the real universe. The old man had been a major in an English army infantry regiment at the time when the Mindstar Brigade was being formed. He was fifty-five and due for imminent retirement when the blanket service psi-assessment tests gave him the excuse he needed to extend his beloved commission. Mind-star hadn’t intended to take anyone his age, but his farsight rating was one of the highest they recorded. Fortunately his ESP faculty had almost developed as it was intended. Willet was droning on about Maurice Knebel and his fondness for Indian food when Colin leant forwards and deftly pressed his open palm against the flatscreen. The map image shifted instantly, expanding the area around his hand. It was centred on Peterborough, she noticed with a start. The vivid featureless turquoise of the Fens Basin had bitten into a third of the screen. Willet had stopped talking. ‘Keep going,’ Cohn instructed. ‘Sir. Curries were his favourite…’ Eleanor could see a lone yellow dot in the basin, just east of Peterborough. Prior’s Fen, she realized. Cohn must keep the map scrupuloushy updated. He had spent most of the PSP years in France, charging kombinates a small fortune for his services. ‘Too old to join the fight against Armstrong,’ he had told her bitterly. He touched the map again. This time Peterborough jumped up to occupy half of the flatscreen, leaving a tenkilometre band of countryside visible around the outside. WihIet flashed Greg a despairing glance. Greg gave him a fast gesture: carry on. 312 PETER F. HAMILTON
‘The woman he was living with heft him when he was appointed station political officer. There was talk of him and one of the appararchik women on the town’s PSP committee…’ ‘Here,’ Cohn said. His forefinger touched the map in a positive jab. A district turned a shade lighter, its scarlet boundary line flashing insistently. He stood right up against the screen, face coated in a backwash of artificial blue and yellow radiance, deepening the folds of flesh. ‘That’s where he is. I can’t get any more precise than that. Not from this distance.’ Eleanor could feel a groan of dismay building in her gullet. She was afraid to let it out in case it sounded too much like a whimper. ‘Figures,’ Greg said. ‘He’s PSP, where else would he be perfectly safe right now?’ CoIn’s forefinger was pointing at Walton. CHAPTER TWENTY.TWO
G reg’s existence had collapsed to a flimsy universe five metres in diameter. Night-time flying was always bad. But night-time and fog, that was shit awful. He was hanging in a nylon web harness below a Westhand ghost wing, gossamer blade propeller humming efficiently behind him. The photon amp band across his eyes bestowed an alien blue tinge to every surface, the glow of electron orbits in decay. A column of neat chrome-yellow figures shone on the right-hand side of his vision field: time, grid reference, altitude, direction of flight, power levels, airspeed. The guido ‘ware placed him eight hundred metres high, two kilometres out from Peterborough above the Fens basin. Prior’s Fen, and the Event Horizon security division tilt-fan which had ferried him and Teddy out there, was twenty minutes behind, isolated by treacherously fluctuating walls of stone-grey vapour. The loneliness which had insinuated itself into his thoughts in that time was total, tricking his brain into finding shapes among the grey-blue desolation, the grinning spectres of nightmare clamouring in on an unwary mind. He used to be able to put his feelings on hold for missions, concentrate on details and their application to the immediate. It was the army way, training and discipline could overcome every human frailty given time. But he’d lost it. Leaking slowly out of his psyche during endless sunny days beside the reservoir, smoothed away by Eleanor’s kisses. Now he could feel the unfamiliar and enervating stirrings of panic as the wing membrane murmured to itself in the squally air. His sole link to reality was a slim microwave beam punching up through the doying seaborne mist to strike Event Horizon’s private communication satellite in geosync orbit. Directional, scrambled, ultra-secure. ‘You there, Teddy?’ The modulated question slicing upwards, hitting the satellite’s phased array antenna, splitting 314 PETER F. HAMILTON like a laser fired at a fractured mirror, bounced straight back down. iWo beams: one received at the Event Horizon headquarters building in Westwood, the second targeted on another ephemeral five-metre bubble somewhere in the vast emptiness behind him. ‘Where the flick else?’ Teddy’s gruffness carried a trace of anxiety which Greg was learning to recognize from his own voice. ‘Hey, you remember when we used to get paid for this?’ ‘Yeah. Nothing fucking changes. Weren’t no fun in them days, neither.’ ‘True. OK, I’m one and a hail klicks from the east shore now, starting to descend. Morgan? Any air traflic yet?’ ‘Negative, Greg,’ Morgan said, his voice sounding muffled in Greg’s earpiece. ‘There’s some tilt-fan activity in New Eastfiehd, but the fog has shut down ninety per cent of the city’s usual movements.’ That was one shiver of joy, he didn’t have to worry about colliding with low-flying planes. ‘Roger. Going down.’ He shifted his weight slightly, feeling the angle of the slipstream change. The fog density remained the same. According to Event Horizon’s Earth Resource platforms it was a belt ninety kilometres wide, extending westwards almost all the way to Leicester. They had watched it boil up out of the North Sea through most of the afternoon. Perfect cover.