The air-conditioned darkness of the penthouse's bedroom revealed only the faintest of silhouettes, but Suzi knew the girl had a frown on her face. "Because it's a way out for me," she answered, shrinking inside for showing her vulnerability. "This shit I'm in, I know it's bad, but it's addictive. It gives me a high. I can't get out. There's nothing outside tekmerc territory that can give me the same buzz. I've seen 'em all, dopey bastards who say they'll quit when they've made their wad. Never do; they live wild for a few months, even a couple of years, then they come crawling back, and when they do their edge is all screwed up."
She felt Andria's fingers running lightly round her chin. "You could always set up as a corporate security consultant, your experience must count for—" the girl began.
"Bollocks. Kombinate security wouldn't touch me with a bargepole. Besides, I want right out, the whole way. Got the money, too."
"But what would you do?"
"Get conventional. Shit, I know it sounds fucking stupid. Right? But I'd like to give convention a go. I thought a pub or a hotel, maybe a club."
"If a consultancy wouldn't give you the excitement, then I don't think a pub would be what you need."
"I know someone," Suzi whispered. "Someone who used to do this kind of crap, a real hardliner. He got out, clean and sweet. Jesus wept, one person. One out of all the thousands."
Andria kissed her throat lightly, trying to give comfort through intimacy. "And he did it through being conventional?"
"Yeah." That image came back to spook her again. Greg and Eleanor walking down the aisle of Hambleton's dinky little church, both of them smiling radiantly at each other, not seeing anyone else. Suzi hadn't wanted to go, hadn't known what to wear, hadn't known what present to get. Like a flicking savage figuring out a cybofax. It had come as a harsh shock, finding out just how far she'd regressed from society. "He's got a wife, kids, farm, the whole flicking works. And he never came back."
"Was he your lover?"
"No. Yes. Not really. Good mates, that's all."
"And you think you can follow him?"
Suzi stroked the damp strands of hair from Andria's forehead. She always wanted to be tender afterwards, make up for her earlier fierceness, show the girl she really cared. She knew sex was another of her failings, needing to be on top when it was boys, making the girls submit. She wanted to stop, to be normal. Didn't know how; couldn't figure how the other ways could possibly work like everyone said, all that giving and sharing bollocks. Sex was power.
"Fuck-all chance of doing anything else," Suzi said. "I mean, tekmercs, we screw convention, deliberately. That's what we are. But this jobs and family bullshit, it works, for billions of people, it sodding works. If I just had something that I could commit myself to, something I could feel a bit of pride in." Her voice had risen without her realizing. "Shit, maybe Leol Reiger was right about me when he said I haven't got what it takes. Sometimes I hope he is. But I need something to anchor me to that kind of world. Kid would do that."
"Yes," Andria said simply.
"You'll do it?"
"Of course I will. I love you, Suse."
Andria was still watching the hypersonic above them. The balconies on the eastern end of the Soreyheath condominium looked out over New Eastfield's marina and the gleaming structures of Prior's Fen Atoll away in the lazy distance beyond. They were arranged in tiers, which meant Suzi could see any of the balconies below her, but not the two above. A concrete-enforced statement about social position, she always thought.
The tip of the hypersonic's nose was sticking over the end of the roof, like a bird of prey crouched ready to pounce on the supine bodies laid out invitingly below it.
Access Concierge. Identify Incoming Plane Ownership.
Suzi took a drink of orange from her glass. She was skipping alcohol right now, it wasn't fair on Andria.
Pegasus G-ALPH Registered with Event Horizon Corporation. Suzi glanced thoughtfully at the white nose cone.
The phone shrilled.
Andria pressed the sound-only button. "Yes?"
"Guests for you, Miss Landon," the concierge 'ware's construct voice said. "Julia Evans and Greg Mandel."
Suzi heard Andria's indrawn breath at the mention of Julia, she smiled at the girl's innocent enquiring gaze, and began hunting round for her robe. "Well, send 'em in, then."
Suzi hadn't seen Greg for over six months, though she did make an effort to stay in touch. Sort of. Julia she hadn't talked to for nearly three years. The multibillionairess was only a couple of years older than Suzi. When she came through the front door, Suzi couldn't find any appreciable signs of ageing. Julia still looked like a young twenty-five-year-old. And she didn't possess the kind of conceit which would send her scurrying to the surgeons. Rich and youthful; there just wasn't any justice.
Greg gave her a quick hug and a kiss. Julia seemed at a loss what to do, kiss, shake hands, wave…
"I thought you aristo types always knew what to do in every social situation," Suzi scoffed. "Inbred etiquette along with all the other deviances."
Julia screwed up her face and stuck her tongue out.
Suzi turned the white presentation box over in her hands. Flowers weren't her thing, though she had to admit it was a bid odd. But—"Extraterrestrial?"
"Yes." Julia was sitting on one of the lounge's white-leather pillow chairs. A real close look showed she had stress lines around her eyes and mouth.
Suzi shot Greg a look. "And what do you make of it?" She'd always been awed, and not a little envious of his intuition. If she had anything like it, no way would Leol Reiger ever have taken her so easily. What Greg said about the flower she'd be happy to go along with.
Aliens were something so far outside her norm she hadn't got a clue how to react at all—except maybe scream and run. But if Julia was right about them arriving in the solar system, they were behaving fucking odd. And what did they look like? More important, what did they want? Why all this secrecy?
Just thinking about it made her ache inside.
"The flower is real enough," Greg said. "But as to what the aliens are like, I've no idea."
"Shit. You're a big help."
"Forget the implications, if it makes you feel any easier," Greg said. "Concentrate on the immediate. All we're going to do tomorrow is track down the courier girl, find out where she got the flower from. Julia takes over from there." He kept glancing out at the balcony where Andria was lying on the lounger.
"I'll bet you take over," Suzi muttered. "Starship technology should bring in a bundle, even by your standards."
Julia played nervously with her fingers in her lap. "I just want Royan back," she said. "That's all."
That name was an omen, all bad. Suzi could feel it shackling her to the past, reeling her in. Greg was the same, she figured, all edgy underneath. He really wasn't up to any of this any more, not at his age, he'd been out of it for too long, things had changed. Respect was gone, violence was on the up. Trouble was, they all owed Royan in a big way. Without him, his hotrod expertise, the Trinities would have been wiped off the map.
"You really going looking for the little pillock?" she asked Greg.
"Yeah."
"Oh, bollocks, count me in."
CHAPTER SEVEN
On top of everything else, this. Julia came down the hypersonic's stairs in a foul mood. It was the children's speech day at school, she never missed that, and wasn't about to start now.
The wind on the top of the Event Horizon tower was cool, blowing off the land. Down below, a thick milky mist covered the quagmire and the deep-water channels, even rising high enough to claim the interlocking metro rail lines. The sun was an anaemic pink nebula hovering somewhere out over the Wash.
Kirsten McAndrews waited for her at the side of the landing pad. "Is Mutizen's negotiator here yet?" Julia asked her.
"Yes, he arrived on the metro right after you called to set up the meeting." Kirsten cleared her throat delicately. "The Welsh delegation are waiting a
s well."
"Bloody hell! What do they do, sleep here?"
Kirsten maintained a diplomatic silence.
Julia glanced back down at the Prior's Fen Atoll, where the Mutizen kombinate's arcology lifted out of the oily mist, up-draughts around its sloping walls stirred slow-moving eddies all around the base.
Open Channel to SelfCores. You three had better be right about this, she told them crisply.
We are, NN core one replied levelly. The Cambridge laboratory team has been up all night assessing the data; the concept is radically different from any current technology.
Julia paused at that. Different, or just more advanced?
Different, there's a whole new set of principles involved. Mutizen have come up with a real breakthrough, by the look of things. That's why we gave Peter Cavendish's message a priority one grading.
Right, thanks. She screwed some of the sleep out of her eyes with her knuckles. The Fens Basin was so much quieter at this time of day, passive and clean, less fraught. "I'd forgotten how refreshing a sea dawn can be," she told Kirsten McAndrews as they walked into the lift.
Royan had loved to sit on the beach and watch the dawn creeping up out of the Atlantic.
It had taken Event Horizon's Bristol clinic twenty months to rebuild him. They cloned his muscles, blood vessels, tendons, nerves, skin, and bones, a hundred diverse glands, organs, and cell clusters, then painstakingly stitched the components together into entire limbs. It was a hugely expensive procedure, not that the money meant anything to her. She had to buy the clinic an extra thirty clone vats, draft in a regiment of specialists. Their so-called Frankenstein department was already one of the most advanced in Europe, but they didn't have anything approaching the necessary capacity. None of the medical team had heard of a case where all four limbs had to be replaced. Normally amputees used kinaware prosthetics, but she wanted him whole again, human. She knew that was the only way he could ever hope to banish the past.
Julia visited once a week, never shirking, closing her ears to the pitiful pleas and wails, his demands just to end it all. Royan hated the clinic, it was a constant reminder of the time he had spent hospitalized after the riot, a helpless pain-racked dependant. At least in Mucklands Wood he had been somebody; Son, the one the Trinities depended on for information and technology, an electronic guru. Vital. Venerated. Now she had reduced him to a slab of meat again.
When the process of grafting his new limbs began, the clinic kept him in a near-permanent state of induced somnolence. The few times she visited when he was awake he hadn't been lucid, crying out at the pain, trapped in a looped nightmare of flames and black whips.
Then one day, more than a year after they rescued him from Mucklands, she walked into his room to find him standing, skinny paper-white hands gripping a zimmer frame, blue veins bulging. Pride and wonder illuminated his face. The nurses had to catch him almost straight away, but he'd wanted her to be the first to see him upright again. She had to turn quickly so he couldn't see her tears.
After that, the physiotherapists went to work on him, building the muscles, teaching him co-ordination. Even something as simple as lifting a spoon to his mouth had to be relearnt from scratch. They spent another two months bringing him up to full health with exercises and high-protein diets, massages and deep-heat toning. All the while, Royan's complaints growing louder and crabbier.
Then, when the last medical team had completed their final checks, Julia took him away from the clinic. They went to a small island she owned off Mahone Bay in Nova Scotia, her retreat from the world.
She had bought it a couple of years earlier. A desolate uninhabited place, barely two kilometres across. Grass had survived the Warming, as it always did; but all that remained of the stunted windswept trees were parched white branches lying on the marly soil. She got the island for a song; the hard-pressed Canadian ecological teams were still absorbed with reseeding the continental biosphere, replacing the forests and replanting the prairies. It would be decades before they got round to isolated regions like Mahone Bay.
Event Horizon's botanical crew moved in to reshape the island's habitat, transforming it into the kind of pre-Warming Bahamian paradise she'd seen on the channel shows.
There was a simple wooden bungalow set back from a long sandy beach, the only building. The two of them walked aimlessly along the shore the afternoon they arrived, exploring the gentle bluff behind the beach. A small dense selva forest was spreading out from the island's core, broad-leaved trees draped in pale grey and green epiphyte mosses, tied together by a filigree of vines. The company crew had hatched families of small colourful birds to fill out the ecology. Julia laughed in delight at their antics as they swooped in and out of the branches. Royan was entranced by the profusion of flowers in a natural habitat, smelling their exotic scents, picking them and holding them up to the sun. He reminded her of a child let loose in a spring garden after a long icebound winter.
They ate supper on the creaking veranda, and slipped off to bed as the last fragments of light drained from the day.
Royan had been moulded by her subconscious desire, tall, strong, broad-shouldered, exactly how she imagined the shell of his mind to be in her fantasies, a physique to match the intellect. There was something strangely enticing about a power which could incarnate a lover exactly as envisaged, making sure neither of them would be disappointed. Royan had never argued about the rehabilitation programme she'd selected, it was an anodyne to his previous state. Like her, he wanted his new self to be as far removed from the crippled husk in Mucklands as it was physically possible to get.
For three months they did nothing but laze in the sun and make love. Royan learned to swim. Julia learned to cook, or at least barbecue. Then she found she was pregnant with Daniella.
They returned to England flush with optimism and an inflated sense of omnipotence. It was the future they laid claim to; rich, young, and data smart, digital godlings forging their new bright empire.
She often thought, later, that they were both slightly crazy, the kind of hubristic crazy that always came when the power to build dreams was granted. But they had been a unique combination: her money, his hotrod talent; the result was synergistic. She gave him access to 'ware coming out of Event Horizon's research divisions, so new the security programmers didn't even know it existed. He rewarded her with the personality package, a digital micro-entity capable of functioning within any processor core, self-contained and self-determinative, its purpose reflected in its originator's thought processes.
Together they unleashed a deluge of the sprite-like composites in the global data networks, raiding the research cores of rival companies, adding to Event Horizon's technological base. Then they went for the big one, the electron-compression warhead. Their super-compressed packages squirted into the Sandia National Laboratories processor cores, established themselves within the management routines, and downloaded every file they could find.
The channels called electron compression the rich man's nuke; an explosive which produced a megaton blast without the radioactive fallout of nuclear weapons. Only America, the Russian republic, and China had mastered the technology, though there were rumours of Japan making a successful test under the Pacific.
Julia built the electron-compression warheads on a cyberfactory ship floating in international waters, and used them to knock New London into Earth orbit. The asteroid's mineral reserves, coupled with the giga-conductor royalties, gave Event Horizon a financial primacy which the kombinates could never match.
She gave Royan challenges he could never have conceived of back in Mucklands Wood, she gave him a love he'd never known before, she gave him the most exquisite pair of children. Then she had to stand beside him and watch him lose interest in each one of her gifts. It made her feel so small and destitute, for she had nothing else left to give. Finally, when he walked out without any explanation, she was left clinging desperately to the children in a reflex defence. They were all she had left of the good
times, and her sole hope for the future.
Three men were already in the office waiting for her. The first was Peter Cavendish, the director of Event Horizon's collaborative ventures office. A bulky fifty-year-old with snow-white hair, his charcoal suit showing signs of being worn too long. Accompanying him was Nicholas Beswick, a physics professor who unfailingly managed to set Julia's nerves on edge with his combination of eagerness and timidity. Nicholas Beswick was basically a complete nerd, but one whose understanding of quantum mechanics was unsurpassed, making him tremendously important to Event Horizon. It was his research team which five years ago had finally produced a processor that utilized one-dimensional wire to carry single electrons. The technology had invigorated the global 'ware industry to a degree which hadn't been seen since the late nineteen-eighties. The amount of money licensed production of quantum-wire processor chips raked in for Event Horizon was second only to that of the gigaconductor royalties.
Nicholas Beswick half bowed, half flinched when Julia entered the office. She gave him a gracious smile as she sat behind her desk, and turned down the window's opacity to let the wan early morning light flood the big room. There were no flowers in the vases yet, the tower's daytime maintenance crew were only just starting their shift.
"Thanks for coming in so quickly, Julia," Peter Cavendish said. "I know it was short notice, but I really do think this is important enough to warrant your personal attention."
"Yes, so I understand. Can you give me a summary of where we stand before Mutizen's negotiator arrives, please."
Peter Cavendish settled into one of the high-backed chairs in front of her desk. "Mutizen came to us yesterday with what is a pretty standard proposal. They claimed they have made a breakthrough in atomic structuring, and asked if we would go into partnership with them to develop and market the technology. They offered us a look at their data under a confidentiality contract. If we decide not to join them we can't research or sell the same technology for five years. Since we don't have any atomic structuring projects right now, I agreed. We were in a no-lose situation. That's what I thought."
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