The Mandel Files, Volume 1

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘Keep going,’ Colin 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. Colin must keep the map scrupulously 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 ten-kilometre band of countryside visible around the outside.

  Willet flashed Greg a despairing glance. Greg gave him a fast gesture: carry on.

  ‘The woman he was living with left him when he was appointed station political officer. There was talk of him and one of the apparatchik women on the town’s PSP committee …’

  ‘Here,’ Colin 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?’

  Colin’s forefinger was pointing at Walton.

  22

  Greg’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 Westland 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 cloying 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 like a laser fired at a fractured mirror, bounced straight back down. Two 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 fuck 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 half klicks from the east shore now, starting to descend. Morgan? Any air traffic yet?’

  ‘Negative, Greg,’ Morgan said, his voice sounding muffled in Greg’s earpiece. ‘There’s some tilt-fan activity in New Eastfield, but the fog has shut down ninety per cent of the city’s usual movements.’

  That was one sliver 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.

  The mission had taken a day to set up. Naturally, Julia had wanted to send the police in, all legal and above board. She hadn’t quite grasped what they were up against. Someone – some organization? – methodical enough to guard against the remotest chance of a query being raised about the death of a girl ten years in the past. Paranoia or desperation – either way, they had it in massive quantities. And they didn’t shy away from positive action to eliminate threats.

  Even with the channels working themselves into hysterics over the Scottish reunion question, a police operation on a scale large enough to successfully arrest a single man in Walton would attract wide newscast coverage. The Blackshirts would resist the police incursion, there would be riots, sniper fire, a lot of people hurt. After that, leaks would be inevitable, and Julia’s name would be foremost among them.

  His way was much quieter, safer. Reducing the risk until it focused on just two people.

  He would have been happier if Eleanor had shouted at him, put her foot down, told him he was being macho stupid. At least he would have been able to shout back, or argue, vent a bit of feeling. Instead she had stuck to being silent and sorrowful. Which made it harder. Which put him on edge. Which wasn’t good.

  Gabriel had been reassuringly scathing, but that had taken on the quality of a ritual, she trusted his intuition almost more than he did. Morgan was frankly sceptical about the whole notion. And Greg had to admit even he was having trouble seeing how Clarissa Wynne’s vaguely suspicious drowning could be connected to Kitchener’s murder.

  With the cocoon of fog acting like a mild form of sensory deprivation his thoughts were free to roam through wilder realms of possibility, fantasy equivalents of Gabriel’s tau lines. But even among the more fanciful possibilities he conjured up there really was no getting round that memory of Nicholas walking so calmly into Kitchener’s bedroom. Maybe the ambiguity he felt so strongly was focused on the boy’s motive? Everyone assumed Nicholas had murdered Kitchener because he was overwrought over Isabel. But there was the question of the method. Maybe Launde harboured some dark secret instead?

  Yeah sure. Ghosts and ghoulies and bumps in the night, he told himself mockingly. Secret monsters would be too easy. Somebody wiped all those cores. Three and a half years before Nicholas Beswick ever set eyes on Launde Abbey.

  He gave up, pushing the load into the future and squarely on Maurice Knebel’s shoulders. Alarmed at just how much he was coming to depend on the absconded detective to provide him with answers when they finally came face to face.

  One thing, there was no going back. There never bloody was; his character flaw.

  His guido put him seven hundred metres out from the city’s easterly shore, height one hundred and fifty metres. Closing fast. Fog split around the leading edge of the wing, re-forming instantly behind the trailing edge. A slick coating of minute droplets was deposited on the leathery membrane, streaming backwards and shaking free in a horizontal rain.

  The photon amp was boosted up to its highest resolution. He still couldn’t see anything.

  ‘Virtual overlay,’ he told the guido ’ware. Translucent green and blue and red petals flipped up into the retinal feed from the photon amp. He looked out across a city built from frozen laserlight.

  Morgan’s people had built the virtual simulation up from the afternoon’s satellite passes. Accurate to ten centimetres, more compre
hensive than any memory in the city council’s planning office data cores.

  A flood of neutral pixels darkened and hardened below him, resolving into a solid black plane. He felt the illusion of space opening up around him again. Tremendously reassuring.

  He just prayed that the simulation’s alignment was correct.

  The shoreline buildings of the Gunthorpe district formed a flat abrupt wall of dimensionless green dead ahead. It was the only eastern district to expand since the Warming; a quirk of fate had placed it alongside a low triangular promontory jutting a couple of kilometres out into the basin. The fields and pastures which had survived the deluge had been swiftly covered in blocks of flats.

  Two hundred metres off the promontory’s tip was a patch of spiky indigo waveforms, as though an iceberg had endured the Warming and sought shelter in the basin. It was Eye, a village still in the process of being subsumed by the sluggish currents of the mire, reduced to an erratic formation of mud dunes and crumbling brick walls.

  The guido ’ware printed a trajectory graphic for him. A tunnel of slender orange rings snaking away from him, round the north side of the urbanized promontory, and curving down to touch Walton.

  Greg swung himself to one side, lining up the ghost wing in the centre of the tunnel. Orange rings flashed past silently.

  Morgan had wanted to send one of his security division hardliners along on the penetration mission. Greg turned him down politely, hoping he wouldn’t make an issue of it. They were tough and well trained, but there was a world of difference between corporate clashes and all-out combat. He needed someone he could rely on totally.

  Back in Turkey, Greg had been in charge of a tactical raider squad when they were cut off and pinned down in a mountain village by Legion fire. Half of the men had wanted to make a break for it, but Greg made them stay put. Teddy was in charge of the back-up team.

  He had spent the next three hours cowering under a dusty sky as bullets thudded into the sandstone walls of dilapidated hovels, and mortar rounds fell all around. Time had stretched out excruciatingly, but he never let go of that tenuous trust in his huge sergeant.

  Teddy had eventually turned up in their ageing Belgian Air Force Black Hawk support helicopter, flown by a shaken, terrified pilot. Greg didn’t learn until much later how Teddy persuaded the man to fly into the heart of a grade three fire zone. There would have been a court martial, except the pilot refused to testify.

  Eleanor’s right, I do dwell on Turkey too much.

  But he was bloody glad it was Teddy in the second ghost wing.

  The orange circles took him round the north of Gunthorpe. Here the basin mud had surged along a slight depression between Walton and Werrington, engulfing roads and buildings. It was only a metre deep, but the relentless pressure eroded bricks and concrete, exploiting every crack and crevice. Foundations were eaten away, day by day, year by year, cement pulverized, reinforcement prongs corroded, bricks sucked out. Roofs had collapsed, the abraded walls sagged then fell. Even now the piles of rubble were still being assaulted from below, dragged down by the unstable alluvial substratum, a pressure that wouldn’t end until the entire zone was levelled. Weeds and reeds choked the rolling mounds in a mouldy mat of entwined tendrils. The satellite image had shown the whole area crisscrossed by paths worn by adventurous children, glimmers of metal detritus peeking through the limp foliage.

  The virtual simulation had shaded it in as a lightly rucked pink desert.

  One hundred metres in altitude; and five hundred metres up ahead the tunnel of rings had dipped down at a steep angle, narrowing like a whirlwind to touch the apex of an old factory warehouse.

  Greg dimmed the simulation, reducing it to a geometric lithograph. He banked the Westland to starboard, preparing to overfly the warehouse roof. The tunnel twisted into an impossible helix. He throttled back the propeller speed to idle, and glided in.

  At last he thought he saw something through the scudding fog. Down below, a pale blur, broken by dark irregular smudges. According to the simulation he ought to be over the factory’s yard. Big squares of cracked concrete with abandoned gutted lorries, a scattered cluster of railway van bogies in one corner.

  With a bit of imagination the dark smudges below could be rusted cabs.

  The simulated green skeletal outline of the warehouse was upon him. If it corresponded with the actual structure the Westland should take him six metres above the roof apex.

  Solid surfaces suddenly materialized between the green lines, as if the building had been edged in neon tubes. Greg received a fast impression of breeze blocks smeared in rheumy ribbons of algae, and a corrugated roof, red oxide paint flaking away. He laughed as he twisted the throttle grip, shooting back up into the veil of fog.

  ‘Morgan? Tell your programming team they’ve got a big drink coming. The guido virtual is perfect. I’ve just surveyed the landing site.’

  ‘Glad to hear it. Could you see anybody waiting?’

  ‘No. It looks clear. I’m going around.’

  He made a leisurely turn, and headed back towards the warehouse. This time he came in lower. The orange tunnel stretched out ahead, perfectly level. It terminated halfway up the slope of the roof.

  He saw the corrugated panels again, four seconds before he reached them. Legs running in mid-air. Then the rubber soles of his desert boots slapped down.

  Every nerve was raw-edged with tension. If the panels couldn’t take his weight he was in deep shit and no messing. The satellite image interpreters swore they would hold.

  The noise of his running feet sounded like a drum beat after the graveyard silence of flight. He could feel the panels bending slightly under his heels. The apex was three metres ahead of him. Still the panels held.

  He yanked savagely at the throttle grip, reversing the propeller pitch. Tilting the wing back up as he fought to kill his forward momentum. The sudden backward impetus nearly toppled him.

  ‘Shitfire! Tell you, next time we do as Julia says and send in the cavalry.’

  ‘Greg?’ Teddy called. ‘You down, boy?’

  He was crouched a metre short of the apex, balancing the wing precariously. Fog swirled beyond the guttering, cutting off any view of the yard below.

  ‘Yeah. Wait one.’

  He killed the virtual simulation overlay then activated the Westland’s retraction catch. There was a wet slithering sound as the wing folded. The steering bar hinged up and back. He grappled with the frame, slapping the harness release. The ghost wing finished up as a fat damp cylinder three metres long, which he could just hold under one arm.

  He scrambled up to the apex, and walked down to the end. When he peered over he could just make out the base of the wall, lined with tufts of grass and sickly dandelions. There was a monotonous dripping from the broken guttering. The roof would give them ample clearance for a swoop launch after they had completed the mission, a genuine running jump. Of course, they had both been trained to launch from a much lower height, and a shallower slope. But those lessons had been an uncomfortably long time ago now.

  ‘OK, Teddy. The panels are solid, and our take-off run is clear. I’m on the southern end of the roof. Come in when you’re ready.’

  ‘Gotcha.’

  Greg unslung his pack, and riffled through it, looking for the climbing gear. The propeller noise of Teddy’s Westland was just audible as he overflew the warehouse on his guido check pass.

  ‘Hell, Morgan, this ’ware is ultra-cool,’ Teddy exclaimed. ‘The virtual matches clean down the line.’

  ‘All Event Horizon gear works like that.’ Morgan sounded slightly indignant.

  ‘Yeah? Man, I wish we’d had this in Turkey. Would’ve shown ’em Legion bastards.’

  Greg found the vibration knife, a slim black plastic handle with a telescoping blade. He crouched down and pressed it against the breeze block just below the edge of the roof. Grey dust spurted out as the blade drove in, buzzing like an ireful wasp.

  ‘Comin’ round,’ Teddy sa
id. ‘Here we go. Jesus Lord protect your dumb-ass servant.’

  Greg shoved an expander crampon into the hole. It clicked solidly, locking into place.

  Teddy’s feet banged loudly on the roof, an elephant charging across sheet metal.

  ‘Teddy!’

  ‘Jeeze.’ Teddy was wheezing; an indistinct figure slouched over the apex. ‘Greg, I ain’t no fucking bat.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  ‘Everything all right?’ Morgan asked.

  ‘We’re down,’ Greg said. He clipped a climbing rope into the crampon’s eye, and let the coil fall down the side of the wall. Behind him he could hear Teddy folding his Westland ghost wing.

  ‘Roger,’ said Morgan. ‘The security team is on alert.’

  ‘We’ll shout if we want them,’ Greg said. Just knowing the hard-line crash recovery team was waiting, that their tilt-fan could be with him in minutes if he hit any hazards, was a heady boost. Rule one: always sort out your escape route first.

  He fed the rope through the krab attached to his belt, then swung himself out over the edge, and abseiled down to the yard.

  Teddy landed lightly on the rucked concrete and unclipped the rope. He was dressed in matt-black combat leathers, a tiny Trinities emblem on his epaulette, ’ware modules attached to his belt, the slim metallic-silver photon amp band around his eyes, navy blue skull helmet. There was an AK carbine strapped tightly to his chest, an Uzi hand laser in a shoulder holster.

  Greg was dressed the same, except he was carrying an Armscor stunshot instead of an AK. He wondered what the pair of them would look like to some poor unsuspecting sod who saw them emerge out of the fog.

  He had considered wearing civilian clothes, but decided they were impractical; there was too much gear to carry. Besides which, the fog and the night should provide enough cover. The Blackshirts guarded their territory’s boundaries tightly, but inside Walton they could move about with a reasonable degree of freedom. And his espersense would warn them of any random patrols.