A Quantum Murder

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Did you now?

  Yes yes yes. Would you like me to put out a snuff contract on Jakki Coleman?

  I would truly love you to put out a snuff contract on that bitch.

  Really?

  The only trouble is, everyone would know I was behind it. Lord, I hope nothing does happen to her! I never thought of that before. The way conspiracy theories are flying round at the moment ...

  Guilty guilty guilty. Chuckle. Serves you right.

  Yes. Well, you would spring me from jail, wouldn't you?

  For a price.

  Thanks a bunch, some friend you are.

  Seriously, I could glitch her 'cast something chronic. How about superimposing a blue AV recording? Give the porno starlet her face.

  Julia had to rub her hand over her mouth to stifle the laugh. Rachel didn't look this time, she had probably guessed what was going on.

  Don't tempt me! Julia implored. I'll get that Coleman slag, one day. You see if I don't. It won't be public, but she'll know and I'll know. And that's what truly counts.

  Let me know if you need a hand.

  Yes, I will. Thanks.

  I've been going through the Launde Abbey security 'ware for Greg and Eleanor.

  Yes, and ...?

  You were really looking out for Kitchener, weren't you?

  Not me, I didn't even know a thing about him until two days ago. Apparently Cormac Ranasfari insisted on upgrading the security at the Abbey. He's always been concerned that Kitchener didn't have adequate protection, and this was a perfect opportunity to insist.

  Oh. Well, that security system your people installed is top grade. The guardian bytes are hot hot hot stuff.

  You can't melt through?

  Didn't say that. I could. And possibly another five or six people in the country could. But its tough.

  Oh, so that takes the tekmerc penetration mission out of the possible, and into the improbable.

  Looks like it.

  Thanks for telling me. Do you want to sit in on the conference?

  Yes yes yes.

  * * * *

  Wilholm itself was a splendid eighteenth-century manor house. A broad grey stone façade with pink and yellow roses climbing the sturdy trelliswork on either side of the overhanging portico. The long windows were fitted with silvered glass against the heat. Julia saw a hundred tiny reflections of herself climbing out of the Rolls. Lucas, her butler, was walking down the steps to greet her.

  There were a couple of other cars parked outside. Morgan's caramel-coloured Rover and a cobalt-blue Ford which she guessed was Ranasfari's.

  "A pleasant morning, ma'am?" Lucas asked. He was in his mid-sixties, wearing a tailcoat with bright brass buttons, wonderfully dignified. The PSP had kept him on the dole for ten years, saying personal service was a humiliating anachronism, and they'd find him proper employment. The day after Philip Evans bought Wilholm he had cycled out from Peterborough and asked for a job. The manor functioned so smoothly under his supervision; and he'd never attended corporate management-training courses.

  She handed him her raincoat and boater. "Let's say, I covered a lot of ground."

  He inclined his head. "Yes, ma'am. Mr and Mrs Mandel have just passed the gatehouse, they will be here shortly."

  "Great. Show them up to the study as soon as they arrive." She raced up the steps and through the big double doors. Most of her major friends together, working on a problem, and including her. It looked like being a great afternoon.

  The study was on the first floor. Julia took her deep-purple blazer off as she went up the curving staircase. She was still undoing her slim bow tie as she barged into the study. Morgan Walshaw and Cormac Ranasfari were waiting, along with Gabriel Thompson.

  Gabriel was the only person Julia knew who was ageing in reverse. The woman was another ex-Mindstar officer Greg had introduced her to. Her gland had been taken out two years ago, the precognition faculty it educed having brought too many psychological problems. Seeing into the future, Gabriel lived in perpetual fear of watching her own death drawing steadily closer. After leaving the army she had gone to seed, badly.

  Now, with the gland out, she was taking care of her appearance again; she watched her diet, kept up her health, and was beginning to expand her interests. After starting out as a dowdy spinster who looked about fifty-five, she had worked her way down to become a pleasant-faced forty-five-year-old, with a pretty brisk attitude to life. Although Julia had detected some brittleness on more than one occasion.

  Officially Gabriel was acting as adviser to Event Horizon's security division while Morgan set up a team of psychics—Greg had refused the assignment point-blank. The two of them had moved into the same house eighteen months ago.

  "Hello, Gabriel," Julia said brightly. She gave Morgan a quick peck on the cheek as she carried on down the long oak table which filled the centre of the study. "Thank you for coming, Cormac."

  Cormac had half risen from his own armchair; he ducked his head before reseating himself.

  Julia plopped down in the hard chair at the head of the table, and activated the terminal in front of her. "I asked Royan to attend, is that all right?" she asked Morgan. He didn't strictly approve of Royan.

  "Certainly."

  Her fingers pecked at the terminal's keyboard, loading the familiar code. Above the stone fireplace, the flatscreen she used for videoconferencing flickered dimly.

  PLUGGED IN, it printed in bold orange letters.

  Royan always refused to use a vocal synthesizer; the closest he came was the silent speech when her nodes were interfaced with the 'ware stacks in his room. Eleanor had described him to her once. Ever since, Julia had experienced a subtle guilt at her relief that she would never actually have to meet him. Although a bleak presence always seemed to float on the periphery of their electronic link, as if he was struggling to project himself through at her.

  You're paranoid, girl, she told herself.

  Another code and Grandpa was there, plugged into the study's systems. She talked banalities with the three of them as the first raindrops of the afternoon began to speckle the lead-framed windows. Sluggish grey clouds lumbered over the Nene valley, making the oak-panelled study seem funereal. Wall-mounted biolum globes came on, giant luminous pearls on curving tubular brass arms.

  Lucas's unmistakable soft knock sounded on the door. He ushered Greg and Eleanor in.

  Julia listened to their résumé of the case, trying to conceal a shudder when Greg ran through his interview with Liam Bursken. She could see he was still wound up about it, and it took a lot to affect Greg. Whenever she glanced at Cormac, he had the same politely attentive expression in place.

  Can't fool me, Cormac, she thought, not any more. His aloofness was a defence against the craziness and stupidity of the world, as much as his physical retreat into his laboratory complex. But now the world had pierced clean through and bitten him.

  With some surprise, she realized she was actually feeling sorry for him.

  After Eleanor finished talking Julia asked Greg to squirt all the police files stored in his cybofax into the NN core. "Grandpa can run correlation exercises for us," she said.

  "That's right, bloody skivvy I am," Philip muttered. "Nice to know why I was invited."

  Greg smiled thinly and aimed his cybofax at her terminal. Eleanor added the bytes she'd built up.

  "So it's definitely not one of the students," Gabriel said thoughtfully.

  "Yes, I'm sure they didn't kill Kitchener," said Greg. "Although how my opinion would stand up in court, I'm not so certain about. But the physical evidence does tend to corroborate my interviews. Besides, none of them had a mind anything like Bursken's."

  "Your opinion is good enough for me," Morgan said.

  "Even your new friend Rosette Harding-Clarke is in the clear," Eleanor flashed Greg a spartan grin. "Her family is very rich, and according to Julia's legal office the child wouldn't get a penny out of Kitchener's estate. If the Harding-Clarkes were poor, Rosette mig
ht have been able to apply for a maintenance order against the estate. However, the question doesn't arise."

  "Then it must have been a tekmerc snuff," Morgan said.

  YOUR SECURITY GEAR PROTECTING LAUNDE ABBEY WAS THE BEST NO ONE ON THE CIRCUIT HAS HEARD OF ANYBODY WANTING TO BUY THE KIND OF PROGRAMS WHICH COULD BURN THROUGH.

  Morgan turned his head to look at the flatscreen. "How reliable are your sources?"

  VERY VERY VERY

  "Somebody got in."

  "I still maintain it would be difficult for anyone to get in and out of the Chater valley that night," Greg said.

  "Then who did do it?" Walshaw asked, his voice had risen a notch.

  Gabriel caught his eye, a silent rebuke.

  "Logically, it was a tekmerc snuff," Greg said unhappily. "Nobody else would have the know-how and operational expertise to get in and out without leaving a trace. That's what I find incredible. There wasn't a single trace, not one." He shook his head.

  "We're missing method and motive at the moment," Eleanor said.

  MOTIVE I HAVE PLENTY OF

  "What?" Julia asked.

  ACCORDING TO THE CIRCUIT KITCHENER WAS WORKING ON A BORON PROTON REACTOR FOR YOU.

  "Edward was doing no such thing," Cormac objected.

  Philip chortled, the sound reverberating out of hidden speakers, directionless. "Ah, but it fits, m'boy. Doesn't it? Kitchener's speciality was atomic and molecular interaction. A successful boron proton reaction would be almost as worthwhile as giga-conductor. Look at it from an economic point of view, a successful boron proton fusion produces energized helium, that's all, no pollutants, no radioactive emission. It's a bloody marvel, or it would be if we could build one. Kitchener is just the kind of man to iron out the bugs involved in getting a smooth fusion process going."

  "It would be a logical assumption," Morgan said grudgingly. "If someone was aware Kitchener was contracted to Event Horizon, was receiving money from us, they could well think it was for energy research. Especially if they knew it was coming from Cormac's office, the inventor of the giga-conductor."

  Eleanor rapped a knuckle lightly on the table, and tilted her head to look at Julia. "How are you going to power Prior's Fen?"

  It took a second for her thoughts to jump between subjects. "I'm considering two options. The first is an Ocean Thermal generator system, with floating platforms anchored out in the Atlantic, and bringing the electricity ashore with superconductor cables. Second is to drill a couple of hundred deep bore holes across the Fens basin, then insert direct thermocouple cables down them, siphon energy right out of the mantle. The tower and the projected cyber precincts certainly can't be powered from existing mainland sources, the capacity simply doesn't exist. Costwise, direct coupling has the edge, naturally since there are no moving parts to maintain once the holes have been sunk. In engineering terms, ocean thermal is a more mature technology. So at the moment I'm just waiting to see if Cormac makes any significant progress on direct thermocoupling in the next ten months. We don't have to make the actual selection until the end of the year."

  "I'd like it to be earlier," Philip muttered.

  "Behave, Grandpa." She found the camera lens, above the flatscreen, and gave it a stern look.

  "So it would make a lot of sense for you to be working on third, fourth, even fifth alternatives," Eleanor mused.

  "Yes, absolutely. But we're not."

  "What other embryonic technologies could supply the rise in industrial demand?" Greg asked. "And more importantly, who is working on them?"

  "Grandpa?"

  "Easy enough, m'girl. There are really only five viable candidates. Jetstream turbines, when you tether large vacuum bubbles twelve kilometres up and fit them out with giant rotor blades. The wind velocities up there are pretty impressive. Next, you've got cold fusion."

  Cormac grunted disparagingly. But when Julia looked at him, he just moued and went back to gazing out of the window.

  "Well they might crack it," Philip said grumpily. "I'm just listing options."

  "Go on, Grandpa."

  "Microfusion reactors, which is a sort of advanced version of cold fusion, using molecular-scale compression techniques to fuse extremely small clusters of deuterium atoms in a gizmo the size of a processor chip. Something that small does away with the heat sink problems you get in tokamaks, but you'd need to group a lot of reactors together to produce a decent output. Ocean current turbines. But there's a question mark over which currents. Gulf Stream, Mozambique current, the Kuro Shio, East Australian current, Cape Horn current; they're all possibles, but they're all remote from Europe. Then there's solar satellites. Cheap and practical, especially now we've got the Clarke spaceplane. But there isn't a government in the world that'll grant a licence to site a receiver array. Too many environmental—or rather environmentalist—problems when it comes to beaming energy through the atmosphere."

  "Who is researching them?" Greg asked.

  "Apart from the powersats, just about every kombinate, plus dozens of universities under government contract. The whole world needs an energy source which won't add to the Greenhouse effect."

  Julia clasped her hands together, mind devouring the problem eagerly. She didn't even need to bring the nodes on line. "Grandpa, are there any research teams working on boron proton fusion?"

  "Yes, several."

  "OK, compile a list of the twenty-five most promising research and design teams for boron proton reactors, and each of the other projects you mentioned, then cross-reference them with Diessenburg Mercantile."

  "Gotcha, girl."

  "Isn't that one of our banks?" Morgan asked.

  "Yes." She told them about the conversation with Karl Hildebrandt;

  "Interesting," Greg said. "I wish I'd been there."

  "Got one, Juliet," Philip said. He sounded slightly apprehensive, which was unusual. "The Randon company. They have a loan package of eight hundred and fifty million Eurofrancs with Diessenburg Mercantile, two hundred million New Sterling. Two-thirds of it was spent constructing a laboratory complex outside Reims, which is dedicated to investigating microfusion techniques."

  "Has to be," Morgan said quietly.

  "Randon also sponsor Nicholas Beswick," Philip said flatly. Greg sat up straight, staring at the terminal at the head of the table.

  "No such thing as coincidence," Gabriel said. It came out almost as a challenge.

  Greg glanced at her fleetingly. "No," he said firmly.

  "Oh, come on, Greg. Psi isn't perfect."

  "Tell you, if it had been any one of the others, I would have said, maybe. But Beswick, no chance."

  "If you say so," she looked away, uninterested.

  "This is all based on very spurious assumptions," Cormac said.

  "Yeah, maybe," Greg said. He sounded troubled. "Royan, this rumour about Kitchener working on boron proton fusion, did it exist before he was snuffed?"

  YES YES YES. HEAVY DUTY SPECULATION AS SOON AS EVENT HORIZON PAYMENTS WERE MADE TO HIS BANK ACCOUNT

  "For Christ's sake," Morgan said tightly.

  SORRY BUT PEOPLE LIKE KITCHENER ARE ALWAYS BEING SCANNED BY HOTRODS. HIS WORK IS INTERESTING, NOT TO MENTION COMMERCIAL.

  "But nobody knew for certain what he was doing, right?" Greg persisted.

  RIGHT THE LIGHTWARE CRUNCHER AT LAUNDE WASN'T PLUGGED INTO ANY DATANETS. KITCHENER PROBABLY DIDN'T WANT TO RISK HAVING DATA-SNATCHES RUN AGAINST HIM. SMART MAN. THAT'S WHY THERE WAS THE INTEREST IN HIM.

  The lines on Greg's face deepened, he looked down at the table, lost in contemplation. Eleanor gave him a concerned glance.

  Julia found the level of almost unconscious devotion between them was utterly enchanting. Chiding herself for peeking.

  "It couldn't be Nicholas Beswick," Eleanor said, "because he knew Kitchener wasn't working on boron proton fusion for Event Horizon. So he wouldn't have wiped the Bendix, would he?"

  Greg let out a relieved sounding sigh, and smiled at her. "I think I'll put a bonus in your wa
ge packet."

  She grinned back.

  "Exactly what was Kitchener working on for you?" Gabriel asked.

  "Wormhole physics." Cormac started to explain.

  Julia was moderately surprised Morgan hadn't told Gabriel about the research contract. He must take need-to-know far more seriously than she'd ever imagined. She didn't know whether to be amused at the notion or not.

  "A stardrive!" Gabriel said incredulously when Ranasfari finished. She looked at Julia for confirmation.

  "Yes, 'fraid so." Schooldays discipline rescued her once again. But Gabriel's expression did look so funny, probably the same as hers when Cormac had first confronted her about having the murder solved.

  "Royan," Greg said slowly. "Was there any hint of that on the circuit?"

  NO NO NO. NO! WOW A STARDRIVE, ULTRA EXCLAMATION MARK. HOW FAR HAD HE GOT?

  "There was no prospect of him ever developing a stardrive mechanism," Cormac Ranasfari said, distaste at the idea showing on his compact face. "Edward was simply working on the physics which could open the opportunity for theoretical instantaneous transit."

  "Did this research involve neurohormones at all?" Greg asked.

  "Most certainly. Edward was attempting to formulate a themed neurohormone which would enable him to investigate the possibility of CTCs existing. He and I considered that to be the most promising route to verification."

  "CTCs?" Greg clicked his fingers. "Nicholas Beswick mentioned them. What is one?"

  Cormac maintained a blankly impassive expression. Julia knew he was disappointed, having to explain concepts which were so obvious.

  "A Closed Timelike Curve is a loop through space-time."

  "No messing?" Greg appeared so innocently interested.

  "It has been postulated that they exist on a sub-microscopic scale, forming space-time; approximately ten to the minus power thirty-five metres wide and stretching back ten to the minus power forty-two seconds. Theoretically you could use one to travel into the past."

  "What about creating a paradox?" Gabriel asked, there was bright interest in her eyes. "Killing your own grandfather?"

  "If you killed him ten to the minus forty-two of a second ago instead of right here in the present, how would you know?" Morgan asked mildly. "I don't think you'd notice a vast difference."