He might be bright, she thought, but he had a grasshopper mind. ‘I think we might, yes.’
Fabian scrunched up the choc-ice wrapper and lobbed it in the direction of the bin, then bounced on to the bed beside her. ‘I forgot, you’re incredibly sexy too.’ He said it timidly, as though he was swearing in church.
‘Thank you.’ Charlotte straightened her legs, and lay on her side next to him. ‘Remember what I like?’ She kissed him, hand running over his belly. Her voice deepened. ‘How to make me ask you for more?’
Watching her face closely, Fabian reached out and undid the bikini top. He smiled greedily as the triangular scraps of fabric came free in his hands, and began to stroke the length of her ribcage the way she’d taught him. ‘What’s it like in space?’
Charlotte groaned, the mood spoilt. ‘Oh, heavens, Fabian. I’ve told you all I possibly can. If you want to know any more, you’ll have to go there.’
‘No. I meant, you know, that … freefall sex.’
‘Oh. Unearthly delights.’
‘What?’ he choked.
‘Unearthly delights, that’s what the New Londoners call it.’
‘Wizard! So what’s it like?’
‘I don’t know. Never had the chance to try it.’
‘No?’
She could read him like a book. He didn’t believe her. ‘No. But I admit I was thinking of it; I met a nice local boy while I was there. But I cut four days off the end of my holiday and came home early. So I never got the chance in the end. I expect it’s overrated, tourist board propaganda.’
‘You packed up a holiday in space early! Whatever for?’
Charlotte swore silently. This airship flight was affecting her more than she liked, her self-discipline was going all to hell. ‘I had to get back for some business, and then there was the Newfields ball. Why? Would you rather I was still up there?’
‘No! Crikey, Charlotte,’ he said, genuinely indignant. ‘Don’t say things like that.’
She ran a hand over his chin, momentarily confounded by the lack of stubble.
Fabian drew a quick breath. ‘Hey, listen, I’ve just had a tremendous idea. We can go up to New London together. Right? You heard Father say I could go in a couple of years. Well, I will. It’ll be wizard. We could spend the whole time in freefall. Unearthly delights!’ He giggled and clapped his hands exultantly.
It took a supreme effort to maintain her light smile. Dear God, he was a besotted teenager who thought she was going to stay with him till death us do part, amen. Sex equals love, they all thought that at his age. How could she have been so stupid, getting herself into this situation? It could only ever end in heartbreak now.
Fabian was waiting, flushed and deliriously expectant.
‘A couple of years is a long time to wait.’ She took hold of his hands, and placed them firmly on her breasts. ‘And I know some pretty good earthly delights.’
Charlotte let the shower’s hot spray play over her back, soapy water running down her thighs and calves. It felt good, relaxing her. The sharp jets of water pounded into her skin like a scratchy massage. Steam swirled around, warming her all the way through.
What the hell was she going to do about Fabian? He wasn’t a bad kid, certainly he deserved a lot better than her and his father. The obvious thing to do was cut and run as soon as she reached French Guiana. He was young, resilient, he’d get over her fast enough. Except she knew how much it would hurt him. How much she would hurt him.
She couldn’t bear the thought of that trusting, mischievous face screwed up in misery. In itself an unusual, and disturbing, admission.
God damn Jason Whitehurst for not bringing up his son properly. And God damn Baronski for not knowing what Jason Whitehurst had wanted her for. The old boy was normally so careful about what he got his girls into.
Charlotte gave her hair a final rinse and turned off the shower. She wrapped a big towel around herself, then used another to dry her hair. The robe she’d worn over her bikini to walk about in through the gondola was lying on the damp tiles, soaking up the condensation the shower had thrown out. It could stay there now. The maid could clean it. Bitch.
She sat down in front of the mirror, and combed out her hair. Her cabin hadn’t got that stale stuffy taste in the air like Fabian’s. It gave her room to breathe, room to move. Having her own cabin was the only real plus of this assignment. She liked the times she was on her own, an interval when she could be reflective, when every move and word wasn’t an effort.
She looked at the image in the mirror, stretching, wriggling her toes. ‘Gawd luv us, ducks. See ’ow grand we is nahdays.’ She giggled. Funny, it was harder to do that accent now than the upper-middle-class one Baronski had patiently coached her in. The past really had died.
Charlotte got up and searched through her bedside cabinet. Her gold Amstrad cybofax was in the second drawer. She took it out and sat on the bed, curling her legs up. ‘Phone function,’ she told the wafer, then gave it Baronski’s number. He probably couldn’t help her out of her predicament straight away, but she could vent a lot of her frustration on him. It was something he was always good at, always there as a shoulder to cry on. Everyone needed someone like that, life would be unlivable otherwise. And in any case, she needed to tell him she wouldn’t be going to Odessa. He liked his girls to keep in touch.
UNABLE TO ACQUIRE SATELLITE LINKAGE, the cybofax screen printed.
Charlotte stared at it. Unable? She climbed off the bed and walked over to the window. The jet-black solar envelope hull of the airship curved away above her like a medium-sized moon. No wonder the cybofax’s signal couldn’t reach the geostationary antenna platform.
There was a standard terminal on the other side of the bed, but she shied away. If she was going to have a decent rant at Baronski about Whitehurst she didn’t want to do it on the man’s own ’ware. More than one of her patrons had routinely recorded calls.
Charlotte began looking through drawers for her Ashmi jumpsuit. She could go up to the landing pad, the cybofax would work from there.
Maybe if she stuck out this assignment for another month, push Fabian away gradually. That might work, no hard feelings on either side, and a wonderful memory of first love for the rest of his life. But another month of this? At least in French Guiana there would be the beach bars, and some decent nightlife.
Charlotte was zipping up the jumpsuit when there was a rap at the door. The maid came in.
‘Mr Jason would like to see you,’ she said.
‘OK, I’ll be about twenty minutes.’
‘He said now.’ There was a definite gloat in the voice.
Fabian had shown her where his father’s study was, in the midsection of the lower gondola deck, but they hadn’t gone in. Now Charlotte found it was equipped with ultra-modern fittings, the first she’d seen on board. Walls, floor, and ceiling were a silver-white composite; flatscreens showed homolographic maps of the globe, coastlines glowing sharply, cities and ports tagged with ten-digit codes. Jason Whitehurst was sitting behind a smoked-glass desk that resembled a rectangular mushroom. She could see tiny red and green lights inside the glass top, squiggling like trapped fireflies. It was the only piece of furniture in the room.
The heels of her leather ankle boots clicked loudly as she walked towards him.
‘Chair,’ Jason Whitehurst said. A circle of floor in front of his desk turned grey. It extruded upwards, a smooth cylinder at first, then it began to flow, like something organic caught by time-lapse photography.
Charlotte sat tentatively in the curving scoop chair which formed. It felt as hard as rock under her fingernails.
‘You attempted to use your cybofax to make an external call,’ Jason Whitehurst said.
‘Yes.’
‘I must ask you not to do that again. I am conducting some very delicate negotiations at the moment.’
‘I won’t interrupt them. It was just a call to a friend.’
‘You called Baronski.’
> Charlotte began to wonder if it had been the bulk of the airship hull which had blocked the call, after all. ‘That’s right. He likes to know where I am, and as we’re not going to Odessa—’
‘He likes to know what you hear.’
‘Pardon me?’
‘Baronski deals in the information you supply him. That will not be the case on this voyage.’
‘I wasn’t going to say anything about you. I don’t know anything about you.’
‘Nor will you. I purchased you purely to provide Fabian with some amusement, nothing more. Now that is all.’
It took a moment for the dismissal to sink in. Charlotte rose on legs which were suddenly trembling. Once the door had slid shut behind her she rubbed her eyes. Her knuckles seemed to be very damp.
10
The Pegasus carrying Victor Tyo to Duxford settled on to the rooftop pad with a slight rocking motion as the undercarriage absorbed the plane’s weight. The stewardess opened the belly hatch, and Victor trotted down the stairs. His bodyguard followed a few paces behind.
He supposed the necessity of having a bodyguard was an oblique compliment to his own efficiency. The latest generation of tekmercs tended to take failure personally, regarding their activities as something companies should tolerate, like fires or bad debts. If their deals got blown, it wasn’t their fault. Like petulant children caught shoplifting.
It was a problem which meant simply blowing the covert operations they mounted against Event Horizon wasn’t good enough any more. He had to root out the whole nest of them involved every time.
The current price for assassinating Victor Tyo was half a million Eurofrancs, offered by Eugene Selby after his attempt to snatch research data on magnetic logic circuits ended with his hotrods being backtracked and taken out by a couple of Foxhound missiles. The price for killing that assassin should he or she prove successful was a million Eurofrancs. A quarter of a million Eurofrancs could be picked up by anyone who cared to reveal Eugene Selby’s present geographical coordinates.
Victor’s life was nearly all tangled up in deterrent circles like that these days. It didn’t particularly bother him. All part of the game. His choice to be a player had been made long ago.
Right back when he joined the security division, Morgan Walshaw had told him, ‘Once in, never out; this job is for always.’ He’d been young enough then to nod seriously and say, ‘Yes, sir, I understand perfectly.’ Understand, but not completely appreciate. Always was turning out to be a long time.
Lately he’d taken to saying the same thing to recruits himself. His division had grown in proportion with the commercial side of Event Horizon; it matched national intelligence agencies in size, possessing the tactical strike power equal to a couple of RAF squadrons.
The three major opposition parties at Westminster were constantly demanding enquiries into tekmerc-planted rumours of his activities, and even the New Conservatives were becoming nervous. If it hadn’t been for the fact that ministers heeded Julia on their side over Wales, incidents like the Selby deal could well result in the police taking a more active interest. As if they had the capacity to deal with tekmercs, but try telling that to politicians. Event Horizon security wasn’t the cause of problems, it was the result of them.
His staff were currently monitoring eighteen separate tekmerc deals being mounted against the company. There was definitely a leak somewhere inside the biochemical division, which even the psychics couldn’t pin down. And now he had aliens coming at him.
I wonder what old Walshaw would make of that one?
It wasn’t that life had been easier in his day, but at least the battle lines were a hell of a lot clearer.
It was hot outside the hypersonic, although Duxford was spared Peterborough’s swamp humidity; that was something he’d never acclimatized to. The plane had landed on the roof of Building One at the Event Horizon Astronautics Institute. It was typical of the space industry to use that kind of nomenclature, he thought, reflecting the medium they dealt in. Cold, vast, and soulless.
Building One was a five-storey ring of offices and laboratories, eight hundred metres in diameter. The circular space they enclosed was covered by a domed solar collector roof, rising up beside him like a crack into space, sucking light and heat from the air. Looking the other way, Victor could just make out the stone buildings of Cambridge’s colleges, trembling in the heat haze. The rest of the city was a pastiche of red brick and black solar panels. Hardly any modern buildings. It made a pleasant change.
Building Two was a clone of Building One, sitting a kilometre away, on the site of the old War Museum buildings, its green-silver glass wall bouncing spears of tinted sunlight at him. Building Three was the big brother of the first two, its outer ring fifteen storeys high, sixteen hundred metres in diameter. A mile, back in Birmingham where Victor grew up, where they still clung to the real England of pints and inches with the obstinacy of people frightened by the seemingly perpetual flux which the Warming had brought early in the millennium. Searching for the sanctuary of stability in erstwhile customs.
Spaceplanes hummed gracefully through the sky, big swept-wing delta shapes; arriving from the west and landing, departures racing away to the east. The long line of pads that accommodated them had been built along Duxford’s old runway, he remembered. The War Museum’s original geography was all very vague in his mind now. He could barely recall the lie of the land before Building One had gone up, seventeen years ago. Change hadn’t stopped after the Greenhouse Effect plateaued, if anything it had redoubled its confusion.
Building Four was half completed, another one the size of Three; the first three storeys of glass already in place, as if the green-silver panes were organic, a crust that grew up the naked concrete and composite structure. And he knew that Julia had begun preliminary discussions with the bankers and finance houses for Building Five.
Even after all this time, after penetrating the Evans mystique, seeing her angry, frightened, sad, and drunk, he still looked on Julia as a figure of awe. People were fascinated by her because of her money, blinded by it. Nobody understood, she had a thousand critics, snipers, detractors. All of them claiming they could do the job better. He knew different, Julia actually cared about the country. In that she was almost unique in an era of multinationalism, the abrasion of significant borders; but she insisted the critical divisions of Event Horizon were all sited in England. The software writers, the research teams, product designers, the factories which produced the ’ware chips. Other countries were given the assembly lines, the metal-bashing subsidiaries, but the heart of every piece of Event Horizon gear was built in England. That was where the real work lay, the real challenge, real money. The principal reason England’s trade balance was permanently in the black.
And Duxford was the grand prize. Over half of the company’s giga-conductor royalties had been invested here. The Institute pulled together every human engineering discipline, taxed ingenuity to its limits, gave England an unbeatable technological and economic edge over the rest of the European Market Alliance nations. Space hardware subcontracts were only placed with English companies. The external supply industry that had risen to support Julia’s space programme provided secure jobs for over a million people, the Institute itself employed a hundred and fifty thousand at Duxford alone, and more in orbit and up at New London.
The money she poured into orbital materials processing modules and the New London project was frightening. She’d been doing it for a solid fifteen years without ever showing weakness or doubt. And only now was she beginning to get anything like a decent return. Nobody else had that sort of faith; in their own vision, in the scientists, technicians, and astronauts who’d captured the asteroid. Victor knew that if it’d been up to him, he would’ve abandoned space to the kombinates and government agencies a long time ago.
Without Julia Evans the world would be a much poorer place. She cared about people, and nobody appreciated it. Except him.
Victor put a halt
on that line of thought. You ridiculous fool, he told himself.
Eddie Coghlan, the Institute’s security division manager, was standing by the open stair door at the edge of the pad. Victor could see the man reviewing his own recent performance in his mind, desperately trying to think why his boss should pay an unexpected visit.
Victor shook Eddie Coghlan’s hand. ‘You can relax now, Eddie, I’m not here to chase you.’
Eddie Coghlan smiled crisply. ‘That’s something, you had me worried there for a minute.’
They went down the stairs, talking amicably. Eddie Coghlan was glad to have the opportunity to discuss a few points, and Victor listened readily enough, making suggestions. He didn’t go for the intimidating approach, a fear figure. He knew there were some company security chiefs who ran their departments on those lines, and wasn’t much impressed. Security was a delicate, complex job; bawling orders like a sergeant-major might look good for the board, but like all dictatorships it was ultimately ineffective.
Access Astronautics Institute Building One Floor Plan, he told his processor node. The three-dimensional glass image formed in his mind.
Display Route from Landing Pad Three to SETI Office. A red dot appeared on the landing pad, and extended a line down the stairs. Perspective shifted to keep the tip of the line in front of his perception point; directional graphics blinked up, naming the sections it was passing through.
When he came out of the stairwell on to the fifth floor’s central corridor, he stepped unerringly on to a moving walkway. He was in an administrative segment, glass walls on either side showing him big open-plan offices with staff bent over desk terminals.
‘There’s going to be a rush of reassignment orders for the Institute’s research staff coming through over the next few days,’ he told Eddie Coghlan as they slid past the canteen. ‘Top grades, the real thinker types. So I want you to blow Meterski’s deal, and Kellaway’s.’
‘But we haven’t identified all the team members,’ Eddie Coghlan said. ‘If we blow the ones we know, the rest will pull the cutouts and vanish.’
The Mandel Files, Volume 2: The Nano Flower Page 16
