The Mandel Files

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “I’d like that, yes. But I don’t want you getting hurt trying to build some kind of impossible reputation.”

  “Tell you, there’s no worry on that score, I’ll be perfectly safe, Gabriel’s coming with me.”

  “I see.” It would have to be Gabriel he took along. Eleanor reckoned her psi ability was completely tabloid. But if she started protesting now he’d think she was just being childishly petulant. And she could hardly see the two of them running off together-Gabriel had to be at least ten years older than Greg. Whatever bond they had between them was locked safely in the past.

  “I’m only being practical,” he said. “Gabriel can spot trouble long before it starts. And whilst we’re on the subject of practical, you might care to look at the chalet walls some time. We’re providing a home for more insects than you’ll find at a natural history museum.”

  “Money,” she said in disgust. “It always boils down to money.”

  “The way the world’s built. Nothing to do with me.”

  She rested her head on his chest, listening to his heartbeat. I know. I wasn’t angry at you.”

  “There’s something else wrong, too,” he said. “I simply cannot believe a mole, no matter how highly placed, breached a security cordon which Morgan Walshaw set up; certainly not a security cordon around something as ultra-hush as the giga-conductor. The stuff is Event Horizon’s entire future. You haven’t met him, but take it from me, he’s as good as they come. Reliable, smart, experienced, he just doesn’t make elementary mistakes. If it had been breached at any time in the last ten years, he’d know.”

  Eleanor thought he was saying it mechanically, as though he was trying to convince himself with repetition. “So the mole isn’t an executive, he’s on the inside of the cordon.”

  He shifted his shoulders, restless. “Doubtful, Walshaw would arrange to have every one of Ranasfari’s research team vetted and constantly reviewed. And if the mole was on the inside, how come he knew of Philip Evans’s NN core?”

  “Oh, yes. Hey, what about a psychic? Surely someone with a gland could peer in on both the giga-conductor laboratory and the clinic where they spliced the NN core together?”

  “Unlikely, although I admit it’s possible. There aren’t many of us, not even worldwide. And the premier-grades, the ones whose esp is powerful enough to reach into Event Horizon’s research facilities from a distance, you can count them on one hand. Not that they’re used for anything so mundane as trawling in any case. It’s like this; to bring in a premier-grade psychic you have to know there’s something worthwhile for them to peek. Almost a catch twenty-two scenario. Normally, premier-grades are brought in to acquire specific items, like a formula or template. And as Event Horizon has already patented the giga-conductor that would seem to preclude their involvement. If a kombinate had acquired the giga-conductor’s molecular structure they would’ve slapped down the patent before Event Horizon. The blitz would never have happened.”

  “A prescient like Gabriel, then. One of them looked into the future and saw Event Horizon churning out the giga-conductor, and sold the information to a kombinate.”

  “Gabriel is the best prescient there is, and she didn’t know, not even with her own future interwoven with the giga-conductor.”

  Eleanor nearly said that it could’ve been a prescient who wasn’t so totally neurotic as Gabriel, but held her peace. Greg could get quite unreasonably defensive when it came to the silly woman. It was the military clique thing again. She knew she would never be able to appreciate the kind of combat traumas which they had been through together in Turkey.

  “So what are you trying to say?” she asked.

  “Just that it doesn’t ring straight. Blitzing the core out of spite isn’t kombinate behaviour.”

  “It was a vendetta, then.”

  He let out a long wistful sigh, frowning. “Wish I knew.”

  “Poor Greg.”

  She snuggled closer, brushing her breasts provocatively against his torso as she slid on top of him. Greg had a thing about big breasts, which she exploited ruthlessly when they were having sex. He glanced down owlishly, frown fading.

  “I was thinking,” he said. “Why don’t you come with me when I visit my contacts? There’s one in Peterborough I’ll probably visit.”

  She tried not to show any surprise. Nicole had dropped the occasional hint that he’d taken an active part in the events leading up to the Second Restoration, and she’d guessed that was tied up somewhere with his old Army mates in Peterborough. But he’d never offered to introduce them before.

  “I’d like that.” Short pause. “Will Gabriel be coming?”

  “Er, no. The contact I’m thinking of doesn’t like too many visitors. We can go the day after tomorrow; I fixed up to take Gabriel to Duxford in the morning, interview Ranasfari’s people. Shouldn’t take long.”

  “Right.” She thought it was about time to lighten the atmosphere, take him away from intrigue and human failings. She tapped a hard fingernail on his sternum. “Now what about this Julia? She sounds a bit of a handful to me.”

  “She is. You’ll never guess what she wanted me to do.”

  “What?” She couldn’t help the note of bright curiosity which bubbled into her voice.

  “I’ll show you.”

  CHAPTER 18

  LESS CHOICE LESS PRICE

  The crude placards lined the M11 for kilometres either side of Cambridge. Large kelpboard squares, sprayed with fluoro-pink lettering that dribbled like a window’s condensation. They flapped beneath sturdy sun-blistered road signs, themselves so old the few legible names had distances in miles.

  CAKE AND EAT IT NOW!

  “What’s the matter with them?” Gabriel exclaimed irritably as the Duo passed Little Shelford. “Do they want those bloody card carriers back in power?”

  KRILL DON’T HAVE BOLLOCKS

  THEY JUST TASTE LIKE THEM

  “You are deep into student country,” Greg told her, amused by her reaction. “What did you expect? They just don’t like governments, full stop. Any sort of government. Never have, never will. They think demonstrating political awareness is exciting. You should encourage questing young minds.”

  DIGNITY NOT ECONOMIC THEORY

  The Duo’s cooler was going full blast, grinding uncomfortable gusts of frigid air. Gabriel’s grunt was lost in the noise of the fans.

  “They can’t have it both ways,” she said. “Two years there wasn’t any food at all. Inflation is the price you pay [for] a free-market economy. Wages rise to cope, it’s cyclic.”

  “But do student grants rise as well?”

  “Christ, whose side are you on? If they’re so bloody aware they should know freedom isn’t perfect. If they’d tried protesting when Armstrong was running the country they would’ve become non-people before you could say community responsibility.”

  “So put up your own banners, tell them, not me.”

  The motorway was in surprisingly good condition. Dead sycamores with peeling bark and bleached wood rose out of the scrub tangle at the edge of the hard shoulder. Greg toed the brake as they approached a large densely packed patch of scarlet flowers shining with livid intensity under the Sahara-bright sun. He thought they were poppies at first, except they were too big. A single palm-sized petal, waxy; thousands of them waving in the breeze.

  “Someone agrees with you,” he said drily, inclining his head. Two young men in sombreros and dirty jeans were ripping down one of the kelpboard placards. Their bicycles lay on the fringe of the flamingo flower carpet. He spotted badges with the deep-blue crown of the New Conservative party emblem pinned on their T-shirts.

  Gabriel nodded with tight approval at this vandalism of graffiti. Greg returned to the tarmac ahead. Crazy world.

  He turned off the nearly deserted road at junction ten, on to the A505. There was a new brightly painted green and gold sign at the side of the sliproad.

  DUXFORD

  Event Horizon Astronautics Institut
e

  Freshly torn scraps of kelpboard littered the grass below it, flapping like broken butterflies in the hot dry breeze.

  The Astronautics Institute was an all-new construction that’d sprung up out of the ruins of the Imperial War Museum. Armstrong’s extremist followers had gleefully set about eradicating the museum’s exhibitions and aircraft collection after they’d come to power, calling it a war pornography monument. The cabinet declared that Duxford was to become the National Resource Reclamation Centre, intended as the prestigious mainstay of the PSP’s self-sufficiency policy. They said it would dismantle the war machines scrapped under their demilitarization programme and turn them into useful raw material for industry.

  Greg remembered the hundreds of APVs and Challenger IV tanks parked in the Chunnel marshalling yards after he got back from Turkey. All earmarked for Duxford and ignominy.

  But all Duxford had ever achieved was to smash up the beautifully restored aircraft displays, and the first few train-loads of redundant Army vehicles. The promised smelters had never materialized, and the dole-labour conscripts had rioted. For eight years the abandoned hammer-mangled wrecks on the runway had snowed rust flakes on to the concrete, oil and hydraulic fluid seeping through the cracks, poisoning the soil. Then after the PSP fell, Philip Evans chose the site to be the foundation of his dream.

  The Astronautics Institute had been visible as a gleaming blister on the horizon ever since the Duo passed junction eleven outside Cambridge. After that Greg found himself constantly readjusting his perspective to accommodate the size of the thing. It was huge.

  He’d spent a few minutes the previous evening reviewing the data which he’d been given at Wilholm. But it’d completely failed to prepare him for what he was seeing now.

  The main building was a five-storey ring of offices, research labs, and engineering shops, eight hundred metres in diameter, presenting a blank wall of green-silvered glass to the outside world. The area it enclosed had been capped by a solar-collector roof, giving the staff a voluminous hangar-like assembly hall for space hardware.

  Construction crews were still finishing it off; two motionless cranes stood on opposite sides, piles of scaffolding littered the raw packed limestone surround, ranks of silent contractor vehicles were drawn up across the parking yards. Standard transit containers full of Event Horizon’s own cybernetics were stacked outside the assembly hall’s sliding doors, waiting to be installed. A saucer-shaped McDonnell Douglas helistat hovered overhead, its five rotors generating an aggressive down-draught as it struggled to maintain its position against the light north-easterly wind. A container was being winched down out of its belly hold, swaying like a pendulum in the gusts. Two more heistats waited high overhead.

  Greg could see machinery and gear being moved from their temporary accommodation in patched-up Museum buildings into the Institute. With the bulk of the structure complete, Event Horizon’s research, design, and management teams were starting to take up permanent residence.

  A rag-tag army of scrap merchants had been let loose on the old airport, piling vans and horse-drawn carts high with the twisted shards of metal which were still strewn across the runway and taxi lanes. One of the merchants had modified an old street-cleaning lorry to sweep up the thick stratum of rust, and a dense cloud of orange dust foamed up from its bald tyres as it thundered up and down the concrete strip.

  Philip Evans had built his mindchild with an eye to the future. Its proximity to the University colleges had proved subversively addictive, offering finance and top-range research facilities to budget-starved faculties. A move which put the cream of the country’s intellect at his disposal.

  Physically, the Institute was a totally self-contained complex, taking the concept of centralization right to its extreme. It could design and fabricate mission hardware ranging from torque-neutralizing screwdrivers for orbital riggers right up to the refineries which would latch on to asteroids and leach out the ores, minerals, and metals. Independent and efficient. And with the money the giga-conductor royalties would bring in, Greg realized, quite capable of achieving the space-activist dream: exploiting the solar system’s wealth.

  It also housed the team which had cracked the giga-conductor. Philip Evans had brought Dr Ranasfari back to England after the Second Restoration, wanting to keep a tight rein on his Company’s resident genius. Setting him up at the Astronautics Institute had been Morgan Walshaw’s idea.

  With so many recently assembled research and design groups scattered throughout the old museum buildings while they waited for their new facilities to be completed, the place was in a constant state of flux. Ranasfari’s team could establish themselves in an office and laboratory unit at the centre and remain unnoticed amongst the flustered crowd. The lost in plain view concept had worked for two years.

  “No wonder Evans was so upset when the memox began to affect Event Horizon’s profit margin,” Greg said as they drew close to the Institute’s gates. “How much did this lunatic conceit cost him, for Christ’s sake?” The data squirted from Philip Evans’s NN core into his cybofax concerning the Institute had only given him generalities, PR gloss. No hard financial facts.

  Gabriel answered with a shrug. He sensed a cold trickle of intimidation damping her thought currents.

  The Institute was circled by a mushroom ring of ten geodesic spheres housing the satellite uplinks. On the eastern side was a peculiar horn-shaped antenna, unprotected from the elements. It had a temporary look to it. People were walking among the dove-grey Portacabins at its base, ant size. The damn thing must’ve been thirty metres high. Scale here something else again.

  Greg had a shrewd idea that that was the source of Gabriel’s dismay. She’d grasped the Institute at once. With him, the ego-ablating effect was taking time, a slow dawning of his own utter insignificance.

  A four-metre chain fence topped by razor-wire marked out the perimeter. There was a smaller fence inside, fine granite chippings between the two. A guard-dog run, or at least some form of hunt animal.

  The entrance road was split into five channels, each with a pole barrier. Greg chose number one. The Duo had to pass over ratchet spikes before they got to the red-and-white striped barrier.

  “What does he keep in here?” Gabriel muttered. “Crown jewels?”

  “Oh no, something far more valuable than that. Knowledge.”

  A company bus drew up in lane two, full of sanitized young technical types, all of them wearing pale shirts and neat ties. Greg showed his new Card to the white watchman pillar, and the barrier raised itself obediently.

  “But can we get out so easily?” Gabriel asked.

  “Your department.”

  There were three parking yards. He found a space in the first, in the shadow of a big JCB. Gabriel climbed out, twisting her pearls self-consciously. The air was stifling, so Greg slung his leather jacket over his shoulder.

  “We don’t belong here,” Gabriel declared. She’d turned a complete circle, taking in the strange conflation of creaky old buildings, chaotically jumbled wreckage, and new mega-structure with a childlike expression of awe. “You and I. It’s not our world.” Her mind state verged on depression.

  “Don’t be such a Luddite,” he said.

  She gave him a soft, pitying smile. “You don’t understand. This place, it has destiny. I can feel it, portent after portent, the weight of them pressing down, suffocating. Future history, eager to be enacted, glories waiting to be born.”

  Her words triggered his own instinct, a feedback reinforcing misgivings. Another reason Gabriel lived alone, even he had to take her in small doses. What she saw, rambled about, there was no escape from knowing it was all true. Suppose she was to hint the approach of his own death?

  There was a work crew laying the last stretch of paving slabs between the yard and the main building. A clump of bedraggled and confused daffodils were sprouting in one of the concrete troughs beside the entrance.

  “Ready?” he asked just before they went in
. “Shouldn’t take long.”

  “You’re telling me this?”

  He grinned at the old reliably cranky Gabriel and waved the magic card at the door pillar.

  Ten minutes later Greg was standing beside the front rank of seats in a deserted ten-tier press gallery, looking out into the institute’s Merlin mission control. It was the final humbling, he was a small bewildered child permitted a privileged glimpse of adults playing some marvellously intricate game, understanding nothing.

  On the other side of the tinted glass, concentric semicircles of consoles faced big wall-mounted flatscreens showing pictures of alien worlds. Young shirtsleeved controllers sat behind them, studying cubes full of undulating graphics, muttering instructions into throat mikes. The central display was a map of the inner solar system, a snarl of coloured vector lines showing the disposition of the Merlin fleet.

  The scene should’ve been generating a flood of urgency and excitement. Greg hadn’t forgotten the emotion of the Sanger crew out at Listoel. Instead he received an impression of tension, his espersense confirming the mass anxiety.

  Nervous knots of the controllers were forming at random amid the gear consoles, talking in low, concerned tones, breaking up to reform with different members, human Brownian motion.

  “Bit of a flap on at the moment, I’m afraid,” said Martin Wallace. He was an Institute security officer who’d been summoned in a hurry by the authority vested in Greg’s card. A stocky Afro-Caribbean in his late thirties, uncomfortable with Greg and Gabriel’s appearance and what it implied. “Trouble in orbit. One of the Merlins has packed up for no apparent reason. The flight management teams are shitting bricks,” he stopped and flinched. “Sorry, ma’am.”

  Gabriel bit back a smile.

  Greg peered through the glass, recognizing one of the figures in conference around the flight chief’s desk. “How long before we can see Dr Ranasfari?” he asked as he rapped his knuckles on the thick glass.