The Nano Flower gm-3

by Peter Hamilton

  "That fits," Greg said. "I should have thought of that one myself. Baronski mentioned it."

  "Fits how, exactly?" Julia asked.

  "Tell you, we're up against a premier-grade Russian dealer here, right?"

  "Yes."

  "OK, so he finds out about the Fielder girl somehow, that she's a courier of some kind, so he takes a sample of the flower and discovers it's extraterrestrial. Assume Jason Whitehurst does business with him—God knows the kind of trading Jason does is complicated enough to need dodgy contacts—he owes the dealer a few favours. The dealer tells Jason Whitehurst to lift Charlotte Fielder from Monaco after she's completed the delivery to you, and bring her to Odessa where he can take over. That's where Baronski thought she was going, he arranged it, he was the go-between. But then Jason Whitehurst realizes how big a deal this is, and decides to play his own game. So he puts Charlotte Fielder up for sale. That's why there were watchers in the Prezda; our Russian dealer didn't know where she was either. And Baronski was the obvious link, we all wound up going to him, If there was anybody who knew where she was, it was going to be him. A pimp always keeps track of his girls."

  "Sounds feasible," Victor said.

  "What about Mutizen?" Julia asked.

  "Dunno. Maybe that's where our Russian dealer found out about the alien."

  "Could be," she said.

  "Nia Korovilla still bothers me," Victor said. "Eight years is a hell of a long time in the hardline game. Any deal over a year is a long time for us."

  "You think she was a government intelligence agency sleeper?" Greg asked.

  "Bloody Reds," Philip Evans said. "Never did trust the little buggers. Reagan was quite right."

  "Oh, Grandpa, don't be so paranoid; Russia doesn't even have a strong Socialist party in parliament any more, let alone represent a military threat. If anything they're more entrepreneurial than us these days."

  "This is what happens when you have thought routines that are formulated and frozen in the twentieth century," Julia's NN core two image remarked, amused.

  "Ha bloody ha, girl. Maybe they're not Commies, but they're still clannish, still hold the ideal of the Motherland close to their hearts. How far do you think they'd go to secure atomic structuring technology for themselves, eh? Every asset would be thrown in, corporate and state. Eight-year sleepers included."

  Julia sucked in a deep breath, obviously undecided. She looked at Greg. "Well?"

  "It could go either way," Greg said. "It's all down to Jason Whitehurst's trading. Somebody in Russia wanted to keep an eye on him. What did he export?"

  "Gold, silver, and timber were the main cargoes from the East Europe Federation, along with some bulk chemicals, and ores," Julia's NN core one image said. "He tended to trade them for industrial cybernetics."

  "Who supplied the exports?"

  "There are fifteen mining and chemical companies listed as his main suppliers, three in Moscow, two in Odessa, the rest scattered through the Federation republics. But he didn't limit himself to those. You know Jason, any cargo; and our lists will hardly be complete. I doubt there are official records of half of his transactions."

  Greg pulled his cybofax out of his jacket pocket. "Squirt me a list of the companies, and as much financial profile as you've got on them, please."

  The wafer's screen lit, and he began to scan through the data.

  "Cross-index the export companies with Mutizen," Julia told the NN cores. "See if they supply Mutizen with any raw materials."

  "Isn't the Narodny Bank state owned?" Greg asked.

  Julia gave a tiny nod. "Yes. After the USSR was dismantled, their industries went private, but the Russian parliament kept control of the Narodny. It was used like the Japanese used their MITI after World War II, providing money for targeted industries, unofficial subsidies really. It's been quite successful, too, done wonders for their car and heavy plant manufacturers."

  "You guessed that right," Julia's NN core two image said. "Twelve of those export companies provide material to Mutizen."

  Julia absorbed the news silently. But she looked worried, Greg thought.

  "Could this hypothetical dealer be the Russian government itself?" she asked.

  "It's a possibility," Greg conceded.

  "I don't have many assets in Russia," Victor said. "It would take a while to activate them and find out what's going down."

  "I still can't see where Mutizen fits in," Julia said. "Whoever he, she, or it is, the Russian dealer knew about the alien before me, yet Mutizen was the first to inform me about atomic structuring. By rights, they should have done everything they could to keep the knowledge from me."

  "Loose ends," Greg said, half to himself. "We still don't know enough about the Russian dealer to figure out what kind of stunt he's trying to pull."

  "He's trying to keep Event Horizon from developing a nuclear force generator," Julia said. "It's bloody obvious."

  "Maybe," Greg said. "But he's going about it in a very strange way, actually making you aware of its existence in the first place. We know he's used Mutizen to make you an offer. Would you take it up? I mean, does it have to be Clifford Jepson you take as a partner?"

  "Certainly not."

  "OK, I might be able to help clear the air a little here. There's someone I know, a military man; I can ask him if it is the Russian government that's behind all this. If it is them, then maybe he can negotiate a deal for you, find out what it'll take to get them off your back. Don't forget, they must be pretty desperate for atomic structuring technology. We're close to Royan, now, that means you stand a good chance of acquiring the generator data without bringing anyone else in on it. If that happens, there will be three teams working on it, Clifford Jepson and his partner, Mutizen and their partner, and Event Horizon by itself. A straight race to turn those bytes into working hardware and slap down the patent. You with all your resources stand a pretty good chance of winning it anyway, but if you can arrange a combination with Mutizen and obtain the backing of the English and Russian governments on your own terms, you'll have Clifford Jepson in a box, and no messing."

  Julia clasped her hands, and rested her chin on the whitened knuckles. "This military friend of yours, will he tell you the truth?"

  "He'll be honest with me; either tell me, or say he can't talk about it. He won't lie. If he won't talk, you'll have to use the English Foreign Office to find out what's going on in Russia."

  "I'd be better off using Associated Press," she muttered.

  "But what about the alien?" Rick asked. "If you're going to spend tomorrow chasing after someone in Russia, when can we go after it? I mean, once we've met it, you can just buy a nuclear force generator blueprint from it and save all that research and development money."

  "The lad's got a point there, Juliet," Philip Evans said. "If this alien's parcelling out data you could save yourself a tidy packet."

  "Unless the alien files a patent for itself," Julia said.

  "Interesting legal question," Julia's NN core two image said. "Would the alien be legally able to file a patent?"

  "And what does it want our money for anyway?" Victor chipped in. "Repairs? Set up a base in the solar system? What? You're the expert, Rick."

  "Jesus." Rick's fists clenched and unclenched. "I don't know. if we just go and ask it—"

  "I won't be more than a couple of hours tomorrow," Greg said smoothly. "I'll go first thing, and after that we'll find out where Charlotte Fielder was given the flower."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Greg watched the coast of Greenland sliding across the flatscreen on the cabin's forward bulkhead. A stark slate-grey line of rocky cliffs with grimy water churning against their base. Away to the north a fast-flowing river was spurting into the sea, spitting out irregular lumps of translucent white ice.

  The Pegasus could easily have been the same one that he'd been using yesterday, the cabin had the same type of seats, same colour scheme, same tasteless air, the Event Horizon logo cut into each of the c
rystal tumblers behind the rose-wood bar. Except today there was only Melvyn Ambler sitting quietly beside him instead of Malcolm Ramkartra and Pearse Solomons.

  He thought he'd learnt to deal with the memories of the dead. There had been enough in Turkey, and on Peterborough's chthonic streets. Hold on to the names, treat them with respect, and remember they'd be cheering you on.

  He must have been out of practice, that or he'd softened down the years. The Pegasus had taken twelve minutes to reach Greenland from Listoel, and each lonely one had been spent thinking about the two security hardliners and Rachel. A sudden flare of light and heat swelling around them, penetrating the cabin. Maybe not even that. It had been very fast.

  The sun hadn't risen yet, which made the dark undulating plains they were flying over seem even more forbidding, a barren expanse of grit and boulders, slicked with dew, features blurring as they lost height.

  He couldn't work up any real enthusiasm about the meeting. It would be nice to see Vassili again, but talking about Event Horizon and the alien would sour the reunion.

  The handset on Greg's armrest chimed. He picked it up.

  "We've just lost our escort," Catherine Rushton said.

  Catherine Rushton was the pilot. The first thing he'd done after coming through the belly hatch was go into the cockpit to meet her. It was an overreaction verging on the childish, but it assuaged him, identifying her as a person.

  "We're safe then, are we?" he asked with a hint of mordancy. Three Typhoon air-superiority fighters had escorted them from Listoel. It looked like he wasn't the only one overreacting this morning. Julia had been worried about the kind of weapons which Clifford Jepson could supply to Leol Reiger; an arms merchant and a tekmerc was a real bastard of a combination.

  "Yes," she answered. "The Russian zone Air Defence Regiment command is tracking us. We'll be landing at Nova Kirov in two minutes."

  "Fine." He pulled his leather jacket off an empty seat.

  The flatscreen was showing a tract of emerald-green land below, marked off into square fields by wire fencing. Even with the high vantage point and anaemic light he could tell the vegetation wasn't grass, too low, too uniform, almost like a golf course fairway. And it was lumpy; whatever the plant was, it flowed over boulders and rock outcrops like a film of liquid. There were sheep grazing on it, though.

  Nova Kirov was the Wild West reinvented for the twenty-first century, a frontier town in aluminium and pearl-white composite. There were no trees anywhere, Greg noticed. No timber for houses and barns. These pioneers weren't as independent as the ones who'd hit the Oregon trail two hundred years earlier. To set up a homestead in Greenland you either needed to be rich, or have rich sponsors.

  The town was spread out over a kilometre along the rocky southern bank of a white-water river. He could see big lumps of glass-smooth ice bobbing about amid the spray and foam. A broad single-span bridge connected the town with a dirt road that ran parallel with the north bank.

  There was a large patch of ground on the east of the town which remained free of the vegetation mat. Five An-995 subsonic heavylift cargo planes were parked on it, fat cylindrical bodies with a rear wing and canard configuration, all of them in blue and white Air Russia colours. A long two-storey office block sat on one side of the makeshift airport. Satellite dishes were scattered along its solar collector roof, pointing south; a tall microwave antenna tower stood at one end, an array of horns covering the surrounding countryside.

  The Pegasus curved round the town and slid over the An-995s to land close to the office block. Greg caught sight of a small reception committee standing waiting. Dull grey dust swirled up, obscuring the camera image.

  The belly hatch opened, and Melvyn Ambler stood up, zipping his blue and red check woollen jacket up to his neck.

  "General Kamoskin and I will probably have a private talk in his office," Greg said. "You'll have to stay outside, OK?"

  "Sure thing," the hardline captain said easily.

  Greg skipped lightly down the metal stairs. Powdery grey sand crunched below his desert boots. It was cool outside, a crisp clean humidity that came from morning ground frosts. Greg relished it for the sheer novelty value. His breath was turning to thin white vapour.

  One day he'd have to bring the kids here, give them just a taste of the wind from ages past, how the world used to be. It would be terrible for them never to know.

  General Vassili Kamoskin was standing at the front of the five-man reception committee, beaming broadly, his arms thrown wide. He was a solid stereotypical Russian, black hair receding from his temples, full face, thick neck. He wore his Russian Army uniform, dark green with scarlet epaulettes, knife-edge creases, five bands of medal ribbons. And they weren't show decorations, Greg knew, Vassili had earned them. Three of them in Turkey where they had served together.

  He stepped into a bear hug, Vassili laughing in his ear.

  "Gregory, as always it is too long. How is Eleanor?"

  Greg released him. Vassili's hair was thinner than he remembered. It must have been five years since he'd visited Hambleton, just before Ricky was born. They'd kept in touch because the kind of friendships formed in combat weren't the ones you could let go. There was too much pain and effort invested. "Expecting again," Greg said.

  Vassili clapped him delightedly on the shoulder. "You never sent word," he accused. "How many is that now?"

  "This'll be the fifth."

  "You devil, you. Do you give lessons?"

  "How's Natalia keeping?"

  "Bah," Vassili waved a hand dismissively towards the town. "She's an Army wife, she doesn't complain. Sometimes I think she should."

  Greg looked at Nova Kirov. There was a cluster of warehouses behind the airport office block, tractors were already moving round them, tugging flat-bed trailers loaded with bales of wool. The buildings of the town proper were mostly single storey, spaced well apart, made up from standardized panels clipped on to a simple framework. An aluminium church stood by itself on a plateau above the river. Streets were wheel-rutted blue-grey mud. There were a couple of dogs running about.

  Even without his espersense engaged, Greg could detect the buzz of optimism running through the place. The settlement was creating its own future, that always inspired.

  "Looks pretty good to me," he said.

  "Gregory," Vassili shoved out his arms theatrically. "It's a retirement posting. They pushed me out to grass, the bastards."

  "Don't tell me you'd prefer to be shuffling bytes in Moscow?"

  Vassili grunted. "No. No you're right at that, Gregory. I have a responsibility here, some independence from our glorious knowledgeable Marshals. I'd never get the Defence Minister post anyway, I lack the politics. So here I am, tsar of sixty thousand square kilometres, even if three-fifths of it is still under the ice."

  The glacier was visible on the western horizon, a pristine white line disrupting the fusion of land and sky. It was beginning to shoot out orange-pink reflections of the rising sun. The image had a dream clarity about it. Greg stared, fascinated.

  "Does it keep you busy, Vassili?" he asked.

  "Bah, we're here to guarantee the zemstvo's boundaries until it's granted full independence by the UN. We've got the Indian zone to the north, and the French to the south. I don't think either of them is going to invade us, do you, Gregory?"

  "No."

  "All we are is a glorified police force, saving the zemstvo from paying for their own. Not that the colonists could afford a police force, anyway. My troops spend their evenings stopping fights between drunks. That's all the farmers do, Gregory, plant their gene-tailored arable moss over this desolation during the day, and drink at night. They come out here with such high hopes, stars in their eyes. Then they see the true reality of Greenland. A desert of grubby shingle, and rivers of sterile water colder than yeti's blood. This land they have bought will take a century to transform into the garden they were promised. They expected freedom, and they've found they've indentured their childre
n. Of course they drink, but I forgive them for it. What else can I do?"

  "Dreams are never cheap, Vassili."

  "I know. But it saddens me to see so much heartache. They are so naïve. Never trust a man with stars in his eyes, Gregory. Never."

  Greg was still facing the distant glacier. There was a cool wind gusting off it, ruffling his hair. The air was so clear.

  He knew Event Horizon had funded a couple of settlements in the English zone. But Julia never mentioned them being a problem; Perhaps her smallholders had been equipped with drone planters. She did favour technological solutions to everything. But then colonizing Greenland was a very technical proposition. The idea behind the UN opening it up to settlers in the wake of the retreating ice was to turn it into a giant arable country. There was no ecology that would be destroyed by gene-tailored crops, no indigenous species to be usurped. Even the soil was devoid of bacteria. The farmers could use intensive cultivation techniques over every square metre with impunity.

  He rubbed his arms. "It's cold here. I'd forgotten what real mountain air could be like."

  "You English are wimps. It's too hot, it's too cold, it's too wet. Never satisfied."

  "Yeah, right," Greg turned back to Vassili. "At least we're allowed to complain."

  Vassili made a farting sound. "Now we've found the glories of democracy, when do Russians ever do anything else?"

  Greg glanced at the four young officers standing blank-faced behind Vassili. "I need to talk with you, Vassili."

  "Bah, one phone call telling me you're coming. Then another from the Defence Ministry itself telling me to be vigilant this morning, there are to be no unaccountable accidents in my airspace. So I ask myself, all this for my old orange farmer friend?"

  "I'm not farming right now. It's the middle of the bloody picking season, and I've been dragged away."

  "They never leave us alone, do they, Gregory?" Vassili said soberly.