The Mandel Files, Volume 1

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘You were dead ten paces ago,’ a gravelly female voice said in her ear.

  Eleanor turned. It was Suzi.

  The Trinities girl only came up to the base of Eleanor’s neck; she was slim to the point of androgyny, with spiked purple hair and a bony face. She wore a pair of tight black jeans, and a brown singlet under a new leather biker jacket which had the Trinities symbol stamped on the right breast – a fist closed round a thorn cross, drops of blood falling. Her age was impossible to pin down, though Greg said she was in her mid-twenties. In a girlie summer frock she could have passed for fifteen.

  She was grinning up at Eleanor.

  ‘I saw you skulking about as soon as I got out of the Ranger,’ Eleanor said, making it as condescending as possible. ‘I just didn’t want to hurt your ego, that’s all.’

  ‘Bollocks!’

  Eleanor laughed, and scrupulously refrained from ruffling Suzi’s hair. For all her butch swagger, Suzi could get very touchy about her lack of centimetres.

  She had met the Trinities girl back when Greg took his first Event Horizon case. It was her first, and please God last, experience of hardlining. Both of them had been hurt during the mission, although Suzi had suffered by far the worst injuries.

  Eleanor still wasn’t quite sure if they were friends; Suzi had a very frugal social behaviour pattern. Relationship wasn’t a word or concept which featured heavily in an urban predator’s mental lexicon. But there was certainly a degree of respect, which was a big step; non-urban-predators were universally regarded with complete contempt.

  ‘What have you come for?’ Suzi asked as they walked up the slope towards the Mucklands Wood estate.

  ‘I need to have a rap with Royan.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  Eleanor grinned at the blatant curiosity. ‘Greg’s working on a case again.’

  ‘No shit. I thought you weren’t going to let him do that again.’

  ‘I wasn’t. But Julia asked him to.’

  Suzi chuckled delightedly. ‘Christ, that girl bypasses their brains and plugs directly into their balls. What’s she got that I haven’t?’

  ‘Ten trillion pounds and a medieval virgin princess’s hairstyle.’

  They laughed together.

  As they approached the housing estate Suzi drew a large Luger maser pistol from a shoulder holster, carrying it quite openly.

  Mucklands Wood always reminded Eleanor of old Soviet-style cities in the last century. It was a cultural and architectural throwback to prudent realism: low-cost council housing, the PSP’s contribution to the refugee crisis, a magnet for the underclass who couldn’t hope to get into one of the overseas-funded projects. Rich with the nutrients that bred resentment, the starkness and dejection of lives condemned to the dole.

  Fifteen identical tower-blocks, twenty storeys high, sheer concrete walls hidden beneath a scale of cheap, low-efficiency solar panels. Crushed limestone covered the ground around them, sticky with a tar of mud; weeds and nettles grew in defiant clumps, the only vegetation. A few small single-storey workshops had been built by the council, earmarked for PSP skill-training projects. But they were all empty shells, burnt out, breeze-block walls already alarmingly concave; another couple of years would see entropy and vandalism reduce them to rubble.

  Eleanor always hated coming to Mucklands. It infected aspirations and dignity like a cancer. You could never rise out of Mucklands, you could only fight. The Trinities exploited that ruthlessly.

  She caught glimpses of people lurking among the workshops, walking between the towers. All urban predator types, leather jeans, camouflage jackets, and AK carbines. Even though she had a Trinities card, she always called in advance, waited until there was someone to escort her in.

  ‘Do the kids here go to school?’ she asked Suzi.

  ‘Yeah. Father makes sure they do. It’s a pain, some of ’em make good scouts. Who’s gonna suspect a nine-year-old?’

  ‘You’ll cope.’

  Suzi gave her a glum look. ‘I know what you’re thinking. Get ’em out, fill ’em with smarts, break the poverty cycle.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Brilliant. Then who’s going to carry on the fight?’

  The fight against their nemesis the Blackshirts was everything for the Trinities, the reason for their existence. Black-shirts were the remnants of the People’s Constables with whom they had fought a running war for nearly a decade along Peterborough’s cluttered frantic streets. And the two were still fighting as if nothing had changed, as if the PSP was still in power. There were too many dead, too many old scores to settle.

  ‘You can’t fight for ever,’ Eleanor said, knowing it was a waste of time. Trinities lived for combat, lived for death. It was sequenced into their genes now, unbreakable.

  ‘Try me,’ Suzi growled dangerously.

  Two guards stood outside the tower’s door, saluting sharply as Suzi walked through. Eleanor didn’t even feel a reflex laugh coming on, it was too sad. The inside of the tower was kept meticulously clean, a sharp contrast to the external atrophy.

  Suzi knocked once on the door of the old warden’s flat and went straight in. The far end of the room was lined with dilapidated metal desks supporting a range of communication gear; six Trinities, all girls, were operating the systems. Seven flatscreens were fixed to the wall above them, showing images fed from cameras which had to be perched on the top of the towers. Five of them displayed a panoramic view of Mucklands Wood, scanning slowly; while the remaining two were zoomed in on Walton, two kilometres away on the other side of the A15, a dense conurbation of rooftops and chimneys, interspaced with the tapering tops of evergreen pines. The quagmire of the Fens basin was just visible in the background, a grubby brown plain vanishing into the distorted haze line which occluded the horizon.

  Walton was to the Blackshirts what Mucklands was to the Trinities: headquarters, barracks, recruiting ground, armoury, police and public no-go zone. Both areas were resented by the rest of the city. Even the reserve of gratitude people felt for the Trinities, in their role as focal point for local opposition to the PSP, had withered to nothing over the last four years. Peterborough’s residents wanted the guerrilla war stopped, wanted to be rid of the urban predators, wanted to get on with their lives without the constant threat of violence and anarchy hovering in the background. The city council was already talking of implementing a clampdown, maybe even sending in the army to flush Mucklands and Walton clean of undesirables.

  Eleanor knew it would never end that way. You couldn’t drive the Trinities and Blackshirts any further underground. Long before any clean-out operation finished the bureaucracy-stultified preparation phase the two of them would have it out, head to head, straight on, putting everything they’d got into one final hardline strike.

  The communication gear operatives were emitting a constant murmur as they talked into their throat mikes, occasionally switching the flatscreens to different cameras. It looked like a very professional operation.

  The instigator of it all sat at a desk behind the operators, command position. Teddy La Croix, an ex-English army sergeant whom the Trinities had named Father, swivelled round in his chair and grinned broadly. He seemed to get bigger each time she met him, easily two metres tall, with at least two-thirds of his bodyweight made up from muscle, probably more, she couldn’t imagine anything as soft and vulnerable as human organs being a part of Teddy’s make up. Biolum light glinted dully on the dark ebony skin of his bald scalp. He was dressed in his usual combat fatigues, cleaned and ironed as though they had only been out of the laundry for an hour.

  Boa constrictor arms circled round her, and he gave her a hug, kissing her cheek. ‘Goddamn, gal, you finally did it, you left him and ran away to me.’

  ‘Stop it,’ she giggled and slapped at his shoulder. ‘I’m legally hitched to him till death do us part, you were at the wedding. So behave yourself.’

  He gave a theatrical sigh and put her down. ‘You’re looking good, Eleanor.’
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  ‘Thanks.’

  They stood and looked at each other for a long moment. Teddy was one of Greg’s oldest friends; they had both served together back in Turkey. She had been secretly thrilled at gaining Teddy’s trust; approval like that came hard, but it brought her orbit just that fraction closer to Greg’s.

  ‘What’s that?’ She pointed to his left hand. It was covered in a thin flexible foam of blue dermal seal.

  ‘Bit of extra-parliamentary action couple o’ days back. Nothing bad.’

  Eleanor heard Suzi’s soft snort. She could guess just how fierce it had been.

  ‘Oh, Teddy.’

  He rolled his eyes. ‘Yeah, yeah, I know. I’ll be careful.’

  ‘That’ll be the day.’

  He put his arm round her shoulder, and walked to the back of the room, away from the communications operators. ‘Tell me something. You’re here to see Royan, right?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Special visit, coming by yourself. This some sort o’ deal Greg’s working on?’ He sat on the edge of a wooden table covered in maps and thick folders, resting his buttocks on the edge. The legs let out little creaks of stress.

  ‘Yes.’

  Teddy’s expression turned serious, forbidding. ‘He’s outta that, gal. He’s got the farm, he’s got you. You got a job now, you gotta keep him out. He’s made it, clean free. Outta all this shit.’

  She put a hand on his forearm. ‘No hardlining, Teddy. I wouldn’t let him do that again, you know I wouldn’t. This is just a case for Julia. It’s puzzling, and it’s ever so slightly bloody weird, but it’s nothing physical. OK?’

  Teddy worried at his front teeth with a fingernail. ‘Julia?’ The tone was indecisive.

  ‘Yes. She needs his espersense.’

  ‘There’s other psychics. This themed shit they’s shovelling out these days.’

  ‘Name one as good as Greg.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he growled. ‘Well, you tell that rich bitch from me, it’s her ass if anything happens to Greg.’ His eyebrows lifted in emphasis. ‘Or you.’

  She stood on tiptoes and planted a kiss on his forehead. ‘You’re gorgeous.’

  ‘Jesus, shit.’

  Was he actually blushing?

  ‘What is this fucking case, anyway? Gotta be heavy duty shit for her to ask in the first place. Last time we rapped, she’s as hot as me for Greg to quit.’

  ‘Edward Kitchener. She needs to know who killed him.’

  ‘The physics guy? Why?’

  ‘He was working on something for her.’ She put her hands up in surrender. ‘Don’t ask me what. I don’t understand a word of it.’

  ‘Yeah, well, I can see why you need to rap with Son. Crap like that, right up his alley. Now don’t you go tie up all his capacity, we need him too, more’n ever right now.’

  Her lips turned down. ‘Teddy …’

  ‘No choice, gal.’ He waved at the two screens covering Walton. ‘Fucking Party’s crawling like ants down there. Someone gotta stomp on ’em. Don’t see no police doing it. Or this new fucking wonder government we got lumbered with. You ask Julia, you don’t believe me. Three o’ her factories hit by thermal bombs this month, not five klicks from here.’

  She nodded weakly. Trinities and Blackshirts; it was all a far more deadly version of the apparatchiks and Inquisitors game, a game with no rules, nor time limit, nor physical boundary. She knew from bitter experience that it wasn’t something which could be solved by police, the due process of law; Greg’s last Event Horizon case had shown her that. In that respect the world terrified her, there was too much subterranean activity, too much hidden from public view. Dark circuitry wiring subliminal power shifts. Ignorance could be a blissful thing, almost enviable.

  He patted her gently. ‘Don’t you fret so, gal. You ain’t got the face for it. Now then, been too long, you gotta stop by more often.’

  ‘You know where the farm is, Teddy. I’d like you to come and see it some time. Stay over for a few nights. You know how much Greg would love that.’

  ‘Turtle out of its shell, gal.’ He glanced about the room, taking his time, as if he hadn’t seen it for a while, checking to see that everything was in its proper place. ‘ ’Sides, won’t be here much longer.’ His voice dropped to a doleful whisper. ‘Not long now. I can feel it coming, gal, like summer heat. Ain’t nobody got no respect for the Trinities no more. Time was, you could walk down any street in this town, and you’d get treated like a superhero. Well, that time’s over now. But we know what we gotta do ’fore we go. Bibles in hand, AKs primed, yes sir. We ain’t gonna turn tail now. Gonna finish what we started. Gonna finish those Card Carrying sons of bitches, gonna finish them but good.’

  ‘I’ll give this a miss,’ Suzi said when the lift opened on the tower’s top floor.

  ‘There’s nothing that ultra-hush about it,’ Eleanor protested.

  ‘Nah, ’sall right. I’ll be downstairs when you want out.’ She pressed the button for the ground floor, forcing Eleanor to hop out. The lift doors slid shut, cutting off Suzi’s wave and wolfish grin; and any chance to argue.

  Eleanor thought she knew the real reason. Julia’s Austrian clinic had been good, repairing all the physical damage both of them had suffered. But the memories of its infliction were hard to suppress. Royan could act as an all too potent reminder.

  The corridor was narrow, windowless. A long ceiling-mounted biolum strip, with an emission decaying into the green edge of the spectrum, lit her way. She stopped outside 206, and knocked.

  Qoi opened the door, a fifteen-year-old Oriental girl in a blue silk robe. She bowed deeply. ‘Pleasure to see you again, Miss Eleanor.’ Her voice was high-pitched and scratchy.

  Eleanor followed her into the tiny hall, as always slightly uncomfortable at Royan’s combination nurse and guardian angel. The door to the lounge slid open, and Qoi ushered her through, doll-like face smiling politely.

  The air was hot, saturated with a smell of vegetation that was almost fungal, a dozen braids of flower perfume clotted together. Long plant troughs were laid out on the floor, hosting a fabulous collection of flowers, vivid primary colours shining under the glare of the ceiling’s Solaris spots. Little wheeled robots roamed among them; they looked as if they had been cobbled together out of a dozen different cybertoy kits by someone working from a very distant memory of a cartoon-channel mechanoid. Forks, copper watering roses, and secateurs protruded with no sense of rationale.

  One wall was completely obscured by the glass bricks of ancient television screens, removed from their cases and bolted into a grid of metal struts. They were all switched on, showing a multitude of channel ’casts and data sheets. A broad workbench was piled high with gear modules, parts of gear modules, individual components, circuit boards, pieces of mechanical junk; two big waldo arms stood silent sentry duty at each end.

  A camera on an aluminium tripod followed her cautious steps round the troughs. It acted as Royan’s eyes, fibre-optic cable plugged into the black modem balls in his eye sockets. He was sitting on a metallic green nineteen-fifties dentist’s chair in the centre of the room. Sitting wasn’t quite the right word: propped up, wedged in by cushions. Royan had no legs or arms; plastic cups covered the end of each stump, axon splices, trailing more fibre-optic cables to banks of ’ware cabinets next to the bench. His torso was covered by a white T-shirt spotted with food stains down the front.

  Greg had told her Royan was a victim of the People’s Constables, a street riot years ago. He’d been there the night it happened, although he never went into details. Despite his youth and agility Royan just hadn’t been fast enough to escape the bullwhips of the Constables as they charged the protesters. He had been badly burnt, too, in the cascade of molotovs which followed.

  Every time she came, she thought she’d be immune to the sight of him, exposure building up a protective crust around her emotions. Every time he affected her just as badly as the first. Coldness flickered through her, dendritic frost fingers t
wisting up her stomach.

  The images and datasheets on the old television tubes vanished, replaced by metre-high green letters which moved right to left across the wall, delineation frequently interrupted by the individual screen rims.

  HI, ELEANOR, YOU LOOK LOVELY LOVELY LOVELY TODAY.

  ‘Hello, flatterer. What have you been up to then?’ She spoke fairly loud, trying not to make it obvious; slow clear words always made her think of the way people addressed the retarded. Royan was anything but. His audio nerves were about the only genuine sensory input he retained, everything else was electronic, enhanced by the modules he had gradually cocooned himself in. Gear had become his interest, his obsession, his speciality. His comprehension of ’ware systems was probably equivalent to a degree, Greg reckoned, maybe even better. His hands-on experience was total, he had to learn simply to survive, and he had nothing else to do but learn, sit passively and absorb the bytes flowing through the country’s datanets, day after day after day. And once he had mastered his art, he returned to the fray with a vengeance, fuelled by a cold malevolent hatred whose compulsive power only Greg could fully perceive. He became Son to the other Trinities, their digital oracle, a passive presence backing up each campaign with the smartest intelligence data, tracing Blackshirt positions and strength through every memory core in the city and beyond, exposing them wherever they were hiding.

  BEEN OUT DANCING, SURFBOARDING, CYCLING. THE USUAL.

  ‘I brought you these,’ she said, and pulled the envelope of seeds out of her jeans pocket. ‘They’re orchids, Ludisia discolor, they’ve got red leaves and a white flower. I think you’ll like them.’

  His lips parted to reveal a few bucked yellow teeth. THANKS THANKS THANKS.

  Qoi stepped forwards and took the envelope, bowing slightly.

  Greg always brought bits and pieces of gear for him, but she preferred cuttings or seeds. He went to a lot of trouble nurturing his little garden, there wasn’t an unhealthy plant anywhere.

  After Qoi disappeared into the kitchen Eleanor ducked round a hanging basket of pink begonias, and sat herself in a plain oak admiral’s chair.