The Mandel Files

by Peter F. Hamilton

  The youth’s sneer faded when he saw the Trinities card Greg was holding. “Where you get that?”

  “Same place as you.”

  “No shit?” He pulled out his own card and showed it to the one in Greg’s open palm. Confusion twisted his features as his card acknowledged Greg’s authenticity. “I don’t know your face.”

  “I don’t know yours,” Greg said.

  “Don’t smartarse me!” he shouted.

  “Greg’s one of us, Des,” a throaty female voice said from behind Eleanor. Out of the corner of her eye she saw a small figure with spiky mauve hair, wearing tourniquet-tight leopard-skin jeans and a sleeveless black singlet. The girl’s age was indefinable; thin-faced, she could’ve been anywhere between fifteen and thirty. She was cradling a big gauss-pulse carbine casually across one arm. Bandolier straps crossed her flat chest, loaded with red-tipped slugs. Additional power magazines were clipped to her belt. Her face was one big smirk.

  “Shut the fuck up, Suzi,” shouted the boy confronting them. “Hear me? You could drive a fucking tank through that mouth of yours. This is my turf, I’m the Man here. These could be Party.”

  Eleanor held on to Greg’s forearm with her free hand, pinching. Suppose the card wasn’t good enough?

  Greg grinned faintly. “Hi, Suzi.”

  The mauve-haired girl gave him an impish thumbs up.

  Des’s face darkened. “You know these?” his jabbed at Greg.

  “Sure,” said Suzi. “Greg’s been Trinity from way back… Taught me all kindsa things.” Her eyes met Eleanor. “Good, too, isn’t he?”

  Eleanor kept her face perfectly blank, emotions frozen, just as they’d been for all those years in the kibbutz. “Depends on the material he’s got to work with, dear.” Not the greatest comeback in the world, but pretty bloody good, considering. Even Greg seemed vaguely surprised; approving, too, she suspected. Suzi started laughing.

  “So why the big reunion?” Des asked.

  “I’m here to see Son,” said Greg.

  “Christ, Des, let the man through.”

  “Last fucking warning, Suzi, I’ll rip you good if you don’t shove it.”

  “Just ask Father,” Greg said. “He’ll tell you my credit is good.”

  “Yeah? So what about her?” Des pointed at Eleanor. “I don’t see no card.”

  “She’s with me.”

  “No shit?”

  “Des, the man has our card, that makes him one of us.”

  The new voice was deep, it didn’t seem loud, but it carried to everyone. Authoritative, Eleanor decided. The Trinities were suddenly still and attentive. There was a hint of irritation in the voice, which she was very grateful wasn’t directed at her.

  When she looked round she saw a tall black man picking his way over the cracked concrete footings of a stillborn employment workshop. She thought he looked about the same age as Greg, moved the same way too, dangerous grace. Most of his two-metre frame was muscle. He was wearing combat fatigues, clean, with knife-edge creases, a blue beret sporting a single silver star; she recognized it as an old-style British Army regimental insignia. Greg’s memory cores at the chalet were full of military trivia like that.

  “Shit, yeah, Father. But-” Des began.

  “But nothing! Man with a card is one of us, always. We don’t all dress like crap. You got that?”

  Des’s head lolled about like a moody nodding doll. “Sure, OK, Father. I just didn’t want to take no chances, y’know?”

  The tension had evaporated from the other Trinities. Some of them grinned publicly at Des’s squirming, led by Suzi.

  “I know, boy. Now, is it going to happen again?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I don’t hear you so good.” The big man’s eyes flashed round the circle of Trinities.

  “No, sir!” they yelled gleefully.

  “Dismissed,” he barked. Suzy flipped Greg a jaunty wave as the troop filtered away over the barren artificial moonscape.

  Greg and the black man were bearhugging each other.

  Muscles slackened all over Eleanor’s body in one convulsive shiver, she hadn’t been aware how tightly wired she’d become. So many weapons, and not even Greg could’ve protected them if that animal Des had got it into his mind to shoot. Mucklands Wood was like nothing she’d heard of before, undiluted anarchy. The cold flush pricking her skin wouldn’t abate now until she was back in the safe sanity of the Duo, heading out.

  Greg and his friend released each other, both smiling broadly.

  “Man, you’ve been AWOL a long time.”

  “That’s the way it goes.” Greg shrugged. “I can’t afford to be seen with the likes of you nowadays, I’m a respectable professional now, legitimate.”

  “Legitimate, shit. Soft, that’s what.”

  “Yeah. Teddy, meet Eleanor. Mate of mine.”

  Teddy’s smile got wider as he swept her with an appraising gaze, then he pulled his beret off in a gesture of hopeless gallantry. “Christ, officers always did steal the best of everything.” He offered his hand, and drew her knuckles to his lips. The ultimate stamp of approval. It cleared the air marvelously.

  “Bit jumpy, aren’t they?” Greg said as the three of walked towards the nearest tower.

  “Yeah, sorry about that,” Teddy growled. “We had us chunk of extra-parliamentary action against some Party hacks two days back. Couple of my troops got hit. They’re keeping alert. Can’t blame ‘em for that.”

  “You expecting some retaliation?” Greg asked.

  Teddy shrugged. “Dunno. The war isn’t nearly over, Greg. There are tens of thousands of card carriers out there. Smart, well organized, and tough with it. They’ll do it to us all again if we let ‘em.”

  “Are the Blackshirts making any serious moves?”

  “No bullshitting, Greg, they are screwing this city. Almost as bad as we did. Trouble most nights, police are stretched to the limit. Inquisitors can’t seem to get on top of ‘em, Black-shirts have got Walton sewn up tight and hard, nobody in, nobody out unless they say so. We sit and eyeball each other over the A15; and I keep pissing myself over what they’re cooking up in there. Son watches what he can, of course, but even he’s got limits. What I’d like is some Spiral-armed MI-24s, go in and beach-head the place, flush the bastards out. Just like the good old days.”

  “This isn’t the good old days, Teddy. We got rid of them, and they aren’t coming back. The Blackshirts are just a bunch of zombies, don’t know they’re dead yet.”

  “I know how to tell ‘em.”

  “How many of them are in there now?”

  “Maybe two hundred regular Blackshirts, five if they called in the hardliners they’ve got scattered about the county. But it’s the rest who give me sleepless nights. Half of ‘em still work in city chambers. If they get their act together they could cause a lotta pain. This inflation is stirring people up, man, lotsa grumbling about the New Conservatives. And you bet they’ve got it all planned out, fucking Party always loved plans. I can’t fight that, Greg. That ain’t physical, man. Physical I can handle. I gotta leave ‘em to the New Conservative inquisitors. More fucking bureaucrats. I tell you, it plain drives me nuts.”

  “People won’t fall for the PSP twice,” Eleanor said. “They’re not that daft.”

  Teddy smiled softly down at her. “Gal, I sure as shit hope you’re right. Cos it ain’t just here, every town in the country is the same. Party ain’t got the power no more, but that don’t mean they don’t want it again. Bad. But whichever way it tilts we’re ready for ‘em, AKs loaded and Bibles to hand. You bet.”

  “So how is Goldfinch, anyway?” Greg asked…

  Teddy rolled his eyes, sighing in despair. “Crazy as ever. Man, you should hear his sermons now. He’s overloading on the vengeance routine, hot for it he is, and slick with it. Keeps the kids in line but good, they know they’re fighting for what’s right. Time just floats on by when he’s in that pulpit. Even been getting civvies from Mucklands comin
g, too. You want to see him?”

  “I’ll pass. It’s Royan I’m here for.”

  “Thought so. See you’re loaded up with his rubbish.”

  Two Trinities stood guard at the doors into the tower. They saluted smartly as Teddy walked by, never even giving Eleanor the eye. The hall belied the appearance of the building’s external decay, clean and tidy, if somewhat spartan.

  She thought she saw Greg wink at a tiny camera lens peeking out of the top of the doorframe.

  “I won’t come up,” said Teddy. “Your rap’s probably big hush anyway.”

  “Not from you,” Greg said.

  “Thanks, man. Anything you need the Trinities for?”

  “It isn’t shaping up that way. But if it does.”

  “We’re here, Greg, always here. Ain’t got no place else to go. You come in and say goodbye before you go.”

  “Right.”

  Teddy gave Eleanor another fast smile and disappeared into the old warden’s flat. She got a blink of maps and screens on the wall, heavy-duty communication gear on boxy desks, and an enormous colour print of Marilyn Monroe.

  The lift doors opened, and Eleanor leant heavily on the rear wall. She let out a hefty relieved breath, and gave Greg a hard stare. “Perhaps you were right about me not coming,” she said.

  “Hey, I apologize about Des, I didn’t know that was going to happen.” He punched for the top floor, and the lift began to hum upwards.

  “Maybe you didn’t, but I should’ve. This estate, it saps hope, breeds people like that.”

  “You’re wrong there. Mucklands Wood is one of the safest places to live in Peterborough.”

  She snorted disbelief.

  “Straight up. Providing you’re a resident. The Trinities don’t tolerate theft and violence against their own.”

  “Vigilantes.”

  “Call them what you like. Just don’t forget those troops are the ones who stood against the PSP’s Constables when the violence was at its worst.”

  “I’m sorry, Greg. I didn’t mean to knock them, I see how deep your involvement goes. And I am glad I came. When my nerves calm down I’ll be able to express it better.”

  “Tell you, you did all right out there. Lot of people would’ve run.”

  “Me too, if I’d thought it would’ve done any good. Was Teddy being serious about the PSP still being active in Walton?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, why doesn’t the government do something?”

  “Like what? We’re living under a judicial system now. The rule of law is paramount. Being a member of a political party isn’t an offence in this new, fair England. Being in the Trinities, doing what they do, now that is a crime.”

  She shook her head in wonder. “It’s all so wrong. Stupid.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  CHAPTER 20

  The lift halted with knee-bending suddenness, and chimed metallically as the door slid open. The corridor outside was narrow, its walls unpainted breeze blocks; a greening biolum strip ran down the length of the ceiling. Greg and Eleanor walked down to the end, and he knocked on the familiar panelboard door of 206. There was a brief flicker of guilt; he hadn’t visited for weeks. Now he’d come because he wanted something.

  Qoi opened the door. A thirteen-year-old Chinese girl dressed in a blue silk Mao suit with red and gold fantasy serpents embroidered on her sleeves. She bowed deeply. “He is expecting you,” she said in a voice pitched as high as birdsong.

  206 was a dole family’s accommodation module, three rooms and a cupboard-sized hall. It was on the corner of the tower, which gave it two windows. Being a bachelor, Royan wasn’t entitled to it; but as he wasn’t listed on the council’s occupancy register they were unlikely to insist he vacate it.

  The door to Royan’s room slid open and a gush of hot humid air, rich with the smell of humus, spilled out. The interior was a bastard offspring of a botanical garden and an experimental CAD-CAM shop.

  Thirty blue-white solaris spots shone down on four rows of red clay troughs which grew clumps of orchids, fuchsias, cyclamen, African violets, gloxinias, and jasmine; tall standard hyacinths towered over them, giving off a thick cloying perfume.

  A little wheeled robot scuttled along the alleys between the troughs. It was a patchwork of miscellaneous components, Something a surrealist sculptor might’ve built in a fit of hallucinogenic dementia. A droopy flexible hose which ended in a Copper watering-can spout hung out of one side, sprinkling milky water over the sphagnum moss that frothed across the surface of the troughs’ loam.

  One wall was covered from floor to ceiling in TV screens, not modern flatscreens but the antique glass vacuum-tubes of the last century. They’d been taken out of their casings and stacked edge to edge, like bricks, in a metal frame. Some were showing channel programmes, some relayed images from cameras dotted around the tower, others had reams of green script unfurling in a constant cascade from top to bottom.

  An aluminium tripod stood in the middle of the floor, its camera silently tracking Greg as he ducked round the hanging baskets full of busy Lizzies and fleshy trailing nasturtiums. Twin fibre-optic cables fell from the back of the camera, snaking across the abraded brown limo to Royan’s nineteen-sixties vintage dentist’s chair; they terminated in the black modem balls filling his eye-sockets.

  Greg sensed the gag-reflex of Eleanor’s mind as she fought to control her revulsion and shock, barely managing to contain a phobic groan.

  He forced himself to grin and nod at Royan’s bloated, T-shirted torso. Royan didn’t have any legs; and his arms ended just below the elbows, their stumps capped with grey plastic cups which sprouted fibre-optic cables, plugging him into various ‘ware cabinets about the room.

  All the screens went blank. Then words began to form, metre-high letters, phosphor green, strangely fragmented by the reticulation of black rims.

  HELLO, GREG. WHO’S THE LADY?

  Royan was fifteen that night six years ago, Greg’s last street fight. Set up as a march on Peterborough’s council hall protesting about the latest protein rationing. The Trinities were infiltrating the crowd, thirsting for aggro. It was a big crowd, ugly. The Party called out the People’s Constables.

  People’s Constables: a replacement for Special Constables. Greg could just remember them from his youth; weekend policemen, who used to dress up in their smart dark uniforms and make an enthusiastic cock-up of directing traffic at the Rutland county fair.

  People’s Constables were in a different league. A different fucking universe, as far as Greg was concerned. Recruited from the ranks of extreme-left shock-troops and black-flag warriors who’d kicked police and beat up press photographers at rallies and marches, it was the biggest case of role-reversal since Dracula turned vegan. The People’s Constables came under the direct authority of local PSP committees, employed to smash heads whenever people complained about the latest drop in living standards. Basic Party militia.

  Their favourite weapon was a bullwhip, with a lash of monolattice carbon. They were taught to go for the legs first.

  Royan, flush with the élan of youth, was in the crowd’s front rank. He was caught in the first charge. The crowd retreated leaving their downed behind. People’s Constables clustered like angry wasps about each of the inert bodies, slashing with hot fury.

  It was the Trinities who retaliated, prepared by Teddy and him, driving the Constables back with a berserker bombardment of molotovs, lighting the night sky with a lethal fallout of fireballs.

  Greg had dragged Royan out of the flames, far, far too late. He often wondered if he’d have done the boy a bigger favour by going for a beer instead.

  “This is Eleanor,” Greg said.

  HI ELEANOR. YOU ARE VERY PRETTY.

  “Go ahead,” Greg told her. “Just speak normally, he can hear.”

  Royan’s ears were the only sensory input he had, lying in hospital, his sole means of clinging to sanity. It was a month before he was given an optical modem, and another
fortnight before he got his forearm axon splice. The axon splice gave him the ability to communicate, the nerve impulses intended for his amputated hand feeding a computer input. Whenever he visited, Greg thought of ghostly transparent hands typing a keyboard in some incorporeal alien dimension.

  Eleanor cleared her throat self-consciously. “Hello, Royan. Glad to meet you.”

  I LIKE YOU. YOU DIDN’T YELL, OR ANYTHING.

  “Hands off,” Greg warned. “She’s mine.”

  LUCKY. LUCKY. LUCKY. GREG IS VERY LUCKY.

  “I know. Brought some junk for you.”

  EVERY LITTLE HELPS.

  He directed Eleanor to tip out her bag of redundant gear on to a big flat-top workbench. Royan had fixed up two obsolete General Electric car-factory Waldo arms beside the bench, their spot-welding tips replaced with multi-segment talon-like grippers. Greg could never understand how the floor took the weight of the brutes.

  They telescoped out with juddering clumsy motions and began sorting through the pile. He put the Sanyo VCR down next to the scuffed glass bubble which held Royan’s micro-assembly rig.

  JACKPOT. LOTS OF GOOD BITS IN THAT THANKS TO BOTH OF YOU.

  It never mattered what he brought, Royan would eventually find a way to use it. Patiently tinkering with nominally incompatible modules until they could be fused together and incorporated into his cybernetic grotto.

  Another of the pot-pourri robots rolled up to Greg and Eleanor, a Pyrex jug full of steaming coffee balanced on its roof.

  HELP YOURSELVES.

  Greg sipped gingerly as the waldos whirred away industriously behind him. The coffee was excellent, as always. Royan fiddled it out of the inventory computer of a plush New East-field delicatessen, directing its delivery van to a Trinities safe house in Bretton. Eleanor’s eyes widened in appreciation as she tasted the brew.

  “Job for you,” Greg said.

  PARTY INVOLVED?

  “Don’t think so. But the person who’s hired me hates them more than you do.”

  IMPOSSIBLE. WHO IS IT?

  “Tell you in a minute. First part of your help is answering questions for me. I need to know the kind of information floating round the circuit at the moment. Will you do that?”