Mindstar Rising

by Peter F. Hamilton

  "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 immobilised. Don Howarth jabbed a shockrod into his neck.

  Greg had recognised the mental genotype as soon as he appeared: fissures of lassitude, leprous self-loathing. One of the kamikazes. 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 Masefield 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.

  "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-filament 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 gee-gees. 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 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. Greg winced, he knew that was something he'd never get used to. The thermal stabilisation 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.

  "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 microgee 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 realised 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

  Julia 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 rattails. 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 confirmed 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 GregTime#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 racing. "Greg, the Sanger flights are well documented. Their cargo manifests are finalised 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 Eurofrancs, 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 goose bumps 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.

  She fired off a tracer program as soon as the simulacrum materialised. "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 Walshaw, 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 scrutinised before the contract was finalised.

  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

  Stanstead 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 post-war dream, only to find itself betrayed like the rest of the country.

  Greg looked down on the architectural shambles from an office on the top floor of Event Horizon's glass-cube administration block, and wondered how many times that cycle would turn down the centuries. Hopes and aspirations of each new age lost under the weight of human frailties and plain bloody-mindedness.

  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.

  Only Morgan Walshaw and Victor Tyo were in the office, 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 organised 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 for him to explain where the memox crystals originated from. Oh, 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."