He opened his eyes. Even the light was gentle, pale pearl.
Rapid blinking resolved the blurred shapes around him.
He was lying on his back looking up at an ivory-coloured ceiling with inset bioluin strips. A young man in a white medical-style coat was removing an electrode hoop from his forehead.
“Welcome back, Mr Mandel,” he said.
That humourless tone, his intent professionalism. He had to belong to Event Horizon.
“There is no need to worry,” the doctor assured Greg. “You are a patient in Event Horizon’s Liezen clinic-that’s in Austria.”
“Who’s worrying?”
The doctor nodded earnestly. “Ah, good. Sometimes there is disorientation following a prolonged somnolence induction.”
“What do you call prolonged?”
“Eight days. In addition to your physical injuries you were suffering from advanced cerebral stress due to an overdose of neurohormones. I’ve loaded a prohibition order into your cortical node preventing any gland secretions. Come back in three months, and I’ll wipe the order; or you might consider having the gland itself extracted.” His nose twitched. “I don’t approve of them, personally.”
“Thank you, Doctor.” Julia’s cut-crystal voice chopped off any further admonishments. “That will be all.”
The doctor sighed resignedly, and backed away.
Greg turned his head, He was in a small tidy room with plenty of medical gear modules stacked beside the bed. A picture window looked out over sunny parkland dotted with grazing llamas.
The bed was elevating him smoothly into a sitting position. His arms lay outside the ochre blankets. A chalky-coloured bioware bladder had been inflated around his left hand, trailing scores of fine fibre-optic cables to the gear modules, its nutrient fluid veins pulsing rhythmically. Just as well, he didn’t particularly fancy looking at the hand.
Julia was wearing a crinkled navy-blue sundress. The skirt was shorter than her usual, its hem hovering well above her knees. She was watching him with silent diligence.
“The hair’s nice,” Greg told her. Tiny corkscrew curls had fluffed it out into a candyfloss cloud. A chain of minute blue flowers formed a delicate tiara above her brow. Given a posy of primroses she would’ve made a good bridesmaid, he thought.
“Oh, you think so?” A dainty long-fingered hand lifted to pat a few of the more wayward strands. “Adrian likes it this way.”
“Lucky old Adrian.”
The door closed behind the doctor.
Julia’s face fell, giving him a woeful stare. “I’m so sorry, Greg. Really I am. None of this need have happened. It’s all my fault.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“But it is.”
Greg listened as she launched into an explanation about the Cray files, her mistrust, the St Christopher. There was no energy in him to power any strong feelings about it, one way or the other, anger or despair. The issue seemed an abstract. It was over, all it could ever be now was an exercise in ‘what if’. The whole bloody great cock-up was down to his over-reliance on mystic intuition, treating it as infallible, giving logical thought the big elbow. His own stupid fault.
He let out a long dispirited sigh, and said, “Forgiven. Besides, you were right, I should’ve seen Ellis’s connection with the PSP. And I missed Steven as well. That’s got to make us quits.”
“Really? Did you really mean you forgive me?” She was studying his face, trepidation lurking in her expressive tawny eyes.
Julia wanted absolution, so he smiled and said, “Yeah, I really do. No messing.” He’d sought it for himself often enough. He could hardly deny her.
She flashed him a hundred-watt grin and sat on the edge of the bed. “I’ve been terrified of you waking up all week. You were the last loose end. I’ve made my peace with everyone else.”
“Everyone?” His thoughts moved slowly. “Hey, what about Gabriel?”
“She’s all right. Everyone is all right now. Treating you all at the clinic was the least I could do.” Her lips came together pensively. “They took Gabriel’s gland out two days ago. She insisted, said it was part of her deal.”
That would take a while to sink in, Greg knew. Gabriel without her gland would be interesting. Maybe she’d even get back into shape, take part in life. Nice idea.
“How did you get us out?” Greg asked.
“Oh, Teddy and Morgan Walshaw jumped a Prowler over to Wisbech about twenty minutes after the blast. I wanted to go.” Her face hardened slightly at the memory. “They both said no. Only thing those two ever did agree on.”
“Teddy? How do you know Teddy?”
Julia’s smile was taunting. “You’ve got a bit of catching up to do. I’ll let Eleanor explain. I pulled rank to be here when they woke you, but I’d better not stay much longer or she’ll be bashing the door down to get at you. She’s good at that.”
The smile turned devilish. “I might’ve known you’d prefer the buxom type. And you’re lucky to have her, Greg. We’ve spent a lot of time talking this last week. I’ve got to know her quite well. She’s a smashing girl.”
“You think I don’t know?”
Julia nodded in satisfaction. “Good. You’ll be quite all right to have children, by the way. The Merlin’s isotopes were left in orbit, there was no radioactive fallout.”
“You did it. You shut it down.”
“Yah. It was all I had, Greg. I told you, I knew it was Kendric who was behind the blitz; somehow, somewhere along the line, he’d be there. I didn’t know who to trust. The Merlin was the one global-range weapon which was totally under my direct control, I didn’t have to go through anyone, ask anyone’s permission. My executive code gave me unlimited access to the Astronautics Institute’s memory cores. I pulled the Merlin’s command codes, and used them to put it into stasis. I was going to kill Kendric with it. When he was out at sea on the Mirriam, where no one else could get hurt. The Merlin can fly twelve million kilometres and find a rock two hundred metres across; dropping it three and half thousand kilometres on to a sixty-metre target is no problem. All I’d need to do was place a satellite call to Kendric, and I’d have Mirriam’s position down to a metre, constantly updated. Not that I needed a direct hit; even with its isotopes and ninety per cent of its fuel dumped, the Merlin still masses over a tonne. And, well, you saw how big a kinetic punch it packed travelling at that velocity.”
“Yeah, I saw. What did happen to Kendric? I survived.”
Julia glanced out at the grassland beyond the window, expression neutral. “They only brought you and Gabriel back. I didn’t ask. You can if you want.”
“No. Not necessary.” Not with Teddy in the rescue party. Walshaw too, come to that; maybe especially Walshaw.
Julia bent over and touched her lips to his, a soft dry kiss. “First time,” she murmured huskily. “Thank you, Greg.” There was a draught of some expensive Parisian scent, then she was standing up briskly. “Memento for you.” She hung the St Christopher on the bedpost. “Don’t worry, it doesn’t work any more.”
“Pity, I’d feel safer.”
“Must dash, got a lesson with Royan. He’s teaching me to write proper hotrod software.”
Greg almost asked. But settled for hearing it from Eleanor instead.
Julia opened the door. Eleanor stood outside, looking grand even in the shapeless white clinic robe she was wearing. There was something not quite right about the way she walked, and the skin on her face seemed to be peeling, except for two patches around her eyes.
The two girls exchanged a glance as they passed. Smiled knowingly.
“All yours,” said Julia.
A Quantum Murder
The Greg Mandel Trilogy Book 2
CHAPTER 1
It was the third Thursday in January, and after a fortnight of daily drizzles the first real storm of England’s monsoon season was due to arrive sometime in the late afternoon.
The necklace of Earth Resource platforms which the Event Hor
izon corporation maintained in low Earth orbit had observed the storm forming out in the Atlantic west of Portugal for the last two days: the clash of air fronts, the favourable combination of temperature and humidity. Multi-spectrum photon amps tracked the tormented streamers of cloud as they streaked towards England, building in power, in velocity. The satellite channels had started issuing the Meteorological Office warnings on the breakfast ‘casts. Right across the country, in urban and rural areas alike, people were hurrying to secure their property and homes, lead animals to shelter, and protect the crops and groves.
Had the Earth Resource platforms focused on the county of Rutland as the dawn rose, any observer would have been drawn to the eastern boundary, where the vast Y-shaped reservoir of Rutland Water was reflecting a splendid coronal shimmer of rose-gold sunlight back up into the sky. The Hambleton peninsula protruded from the reservoir like a surfaced whale, four kilometres long, one wide. Hambleton Wood was sprawled across a third of the southern slope, its oak and ash trees killed off by the torrid year-long heat of the Warming which had replaced the old seasons. The rotting trunks were now besieged by a tangled canopy of creepers and ivy, carrion plants feeding off the mulchy bark of the once sturdy giants they choked. Another, smaller, expired copse lay broken on the northern side, adding to the general impression of decay. But a good half of the remaining farmland had been converted to citrus groves, sprouting a vigorous green patina of life. The peninsula was an ideal location to grow fruit; Rutland Water provided unlimited irrigation water during the parched summer months. Hambleton itself, a hamlet of stone houses with a beautiful little church and one pub, nestled on the western side, the whale’s tail, above a narrow spit of land which linked it with the Vale of Catmose. There was a single road running precariously along the peninsular spine; grass and weeds nibbling away at the edges of the tarmac had reduced it to a barely navigable strip.
At quarter-past nine in the morning, Corry Furness turned off the road a kilometre past Hambleton, freewheeling his mountain bike down the sloping track to the Mandel farmhouse, tyres slipping dangerously on the damp moss and loose limestone.
Greg Mandel caught a glimpse of the lad from the corner of his eye, a slash of colour skidding down the last twenty metres of the slope into the farmyard, clutching frantically at the brakes. Greg had been out in the field since half-past seven, planting nearly thirty tall saplings of gene-tailored lime trees in the sodden earth, binding them to two-metre-high stakes which he hoped would given them enough anchorage to withstand the storms. When it was finished the lime grove would cover half a hectare of the ground between the farmhouse and the eastern edge of Hambleton Wood. The planting should have been safely completed a week ago, but the saplings had arrived late from the nursery, and the mechanical digger he was using had developed a hydraulic fault that took him a day to fix. He still had two hundred trees left to put in.
Greg had thought his early start would give him enough time to finish at least fifty before lunch: he was already resigned to carting the rest into the barn until the storm passed. Fit watching Corry barely miss the side of the barn, then shout urgently at Eleanor who was painting the ground-floor windows, he knew even that small hope had just vanished. Eleanor pointed at him, and Corry ran over the shaggy grass.
Greg switched off the little digger and climbed out of the cab, wellingtons squelching in the mud. He was on the last row, just twenty saplings and stakes left to go. They were all laid out ready. Patchy clouds tumbled across the sky, and the reservoir’s far shore gleamed from last night’s rain, wisps of mist already rising as the day’s heat began to build.
“Sir, sir, Dad sent me, sir,” Corry shouted. The lad was about ten or twelve, his face ruddy from exertion, fright and exhilaration burning in his eyes. “Please sir, they’re going to kill him, sir!” He slithered the last two metres, and Greg caught him.
“Kill who, Corry?”
Corry struggled to gulp down some air. “Mr Collister, sir. There’s everybody up there at his house now. They’re saying he used to be a Party Apache.”
“Apparatchik,” Greg corrected grimly.
“Yes, sir. He wasn’t, was he?”
Greg started walking towards the farm. “Who knows?”
“I liked Mr Collister,” Corry said insistently.
“Yeah,” Greg said. Roy Collister was a solicitor who worked in Oakham; an unobtrusive, pleasant man. He came into the village pub most nights. Someone who moaned about work and the price of beer and inflation. Greg had shared a pint with him often enough. “He’s a nice man.” And that’s always the worst thing about it, Greg thought. Four years after the People’s Socialism Party fell, ending ten years of a disastrous near-Marxist style government, people found it hard to forget, let alone forgive the misery and fear they had endured. Hatred was still simmering strongly below the surface of the nation’s psyche. As for Collister, Greg had seen it before: the allegations, the pointed finger. One hint, one whispered suspicion, was all it took: the serpent of guilt never rested after that, gnawing at people’s minds. Even the informants working for the People’s Constables weren’t as bad; at least they had to produce some kind of evidence before they got their blood money.
Eleanor was already backing the powerful four-wheel-drive English Motor Company Ranger out of the barn when he reached the yard. It was a grey-painted farm utility vehicle, with a squat boxy body on high, toughened suspension coils; the marque was the first of a new generation, powered by Event Horizon giga-conductor cells instead of the old-fashioned high-density polymer batteries.
She gave him a tight-lipped look which said it all. It took a lot to upset Eleanor.
They had been married just over a year. She had been twenty-one years old the day she walked down the aisle of Hambleton’s church, seventeen years younger than him, although that had never been an issue. Her face was heart shaped, liberally splattered with freckles; a petite nose and wide green eyes were framed by a mane of thick red hair which she brushed back from a broad forehead. Physically, she was an all-out assault on his preferences. An adolescence spent on a PSP-subsidized kibbutz where manual labour was emphasized and revered had given her the kind of robust figure a channel starlet would kill for. Eleanor didn’t see it quite in those terms, though she had come to accept his unending enthusiasm and compliments with a kind of bemused tolerance. Even now, dressed in a paint-splattered blue boiler suit, she looked tremendous.
Greg climbed into the Ranger’s passenger seat, and shut the door. “I want you to walk back into the village,” he told Corry. “Will you do that for me?’ He didn’t want the lad to wimess the lynch mob, whatever the outcome was.
“Yes, sir.”
“And don’t worry?”
“I won’t, sir.”
Eleanor steered the Ranger out of the farmyard and on to the track, moving expertly through the gears as the tyres fought for traction on the treacherous surface.
“Did you know about Collister?’ she asked.
“No.” Which was odd. Not even his intuition had given him an inkling. And it should have done. Intuition was one of his two psi faculties which were educed by neurohormones.
It was the English army which had given him a bioware endrocrine gland implant, a sophisticated construct of neurosecretory cells which consumed his blood and extravasated psi-stimulant neurohormones under the control of a cortical processor.
He had been transferred out of his old parachute regiment when the combined services’ assessment test graded him ESP positive and shoved straight into the newly formed Mindstar Brigade, along with five hundred other slightly befuddled recruits. Psi-stimulant neurohormones had been demonstrated the year before by the American DARPA office, and Mindstar was the Ministry of Defence’s eager response to the potential of psychics providing the perfect intelligence-gathering corps. An idea the tabloid channels swiftly dubbed ‘Mind Wars’. It was a pity nobody paid much attention to the number of qualifiers in the early DARPA press releases.
Bas
ed on the assessment test results, Mindstar expected Greg to develop an eldritch sixth sense, a continent-spanning X-ray sight which could locate enemy installations, no matter how well concealed. Instead he became empathic. It was a useful trait for interrogating captured prisoners, but hardly warranted the million and a half pounds invested in his gland and his training.
He wasn’t alone in disappointing the Mindstar brass. The assessment tests only indicated the general area of a recruit’s ability; how a brain’s actual psychic faculties would develop after a gland was implanted was beyond prediction. The results were extremely mediocre: very few Mindstar recruits produced anything like the performance expected. The brigade had been reluctantly disbanded a few months before the PSP took its ideological knife to the defence budget.
Greg’s claims that his intuition had also been enhanced by the gland were discounted by the sounder minds of the general staff as typical squaddie superstition. He shrugged and kept quiet: never volunteer for anything. But intuition had saved him and his tactical raider squad on more than one occasion when he saw action in Thrkey.
So why hadn’t it given him any forewarning about Ray Collister?
“Nobody expects you to be perfect,” Eleanor said quietly.
He nodded shortly. She could plug into his emotions with the same efficiency as his espersense rooted around in other people’s minds. “I’ll bet Douglas Kellam is leading the pack,” he said. Douglas Kellam, who fancied himself in the role of local squire, the village’s loudest anti-PSP Momus. Now it was safe to speak out.
“From the rear, yes,” she agreed.
He grunted wryly. “Who would have thought it, you and I rushing to rescue an apparachik.”
“But we are though, aren’t we? Instinctively. It’s not so much what Collister was, but what Kellam’s mob will do. There’ll be hell to pay the morning after, there always is.”
“Yeah.”
“But?”
“What if he turns out to be one of the high grades?”
The Mandel Files Page 46
