The Mandel Files

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Greg, a little faster, please,” Julia said out of his cybofax. There was an edge in her voice.

  “Right.” He began to step out.

  A rip gun was fired behind them, the sound of its shot rumbling round the engineering bay. It was the signal for a whole barrage to begin.

  “What’s that?” Charlotte asked, raising her voice above the clamour.

  “Rip guns.”

  “Crikey,” said Fabian, he squinted at Greg with his one good eye. “You mean a neutral-beam weapon?”

  “No messing.”

  They reached the hull. A silent rank of drones was drawn up beside the transverse frame ladder. Greg didn’t have time to question their presence. He turned on to the walkway that led towards the prow, sandwiched between the gasbag and the solar cell envelope. It curved away ahead of him, fading to grey.

  The rip guns had stopped firing.

  “Get going,” Julia said. The drones began to move out on to the engineering bay girders.

  Fabian watched them go curiously. “Do you have hotrods working for Event Horizon?” he asked.

  “One or two,” Julia answered.

  “Fabian, not now,” Charlotte said.

  “Sorry.”

  The walkway made Greg think of the eidolonic loop he’d left Chad in. The engineering bay had disappeared from sight behind, and more walkway kept unfolding in front, seemingly endless. They were moving at a jog now. Charlotte’s panting was loud in his ears. His own breathing wasn’t too good either.

  There were five rip-gun shots fired in rapid succession. The sound barely audible.

  “Last of the drones gone,” Julia said. The cybofax wafer was in his top pocket again, banging on his chest. “The three tekmercs are covering all the options. One has gone down the transverse frame ladder, another is climbing up.”

  “And the third’s coming after us,” Suzi finished.

  “Right,” said Julia.

  “Run faster?” Greg asked.

  “He’ll still be able to catch you. You’re only a hundred and eighty metres ahead of him.”

  “The next transverse ladder?”

  “No, you’d be sitting ducks on that.”

  “Stand and fight. The Tokarev might penetrate the armour.”

  “No,” Julia said. “I’ve got your escape route mapped out. Keep going, twenty metres. Stop by the next doughnut gasbag.”

  The only way Greg found it was because of the deep concave fold in the plastic where the two bags pressed together. He came to a halt, breathing hard. Charlotte stopped behind him, her face drained.

  “Are you all right?” she asked Fabian.

  The boy flipped some of his ragged hair off his face. “Yes.” They still hadn’t let go of each other’s hands.

  “What now?” Greg asked. He kept his nerves alert for the sound of the tekmerc, wondering if he should order another gland secretion after all.

  “Start hyperventilating,” Julia said.

  “What’s this bollocks, you hustle us along here for exercise classes?” Suzi snapped. “Have you glitched?” She was the only one who wasn’t breathing heavily.

  “No, listen,” Julia said. “I want Greg to slice open the doughnut gasbag with his Tokarev. Then you hold your breath, and slide down the inside. You will stop right above the keel walkway. Greg cuts the plastic again, and you drop out.,

  Suzi gave Greg an imploring look. “If both of us fire at once, we can snuff that tekmerc.”

  Greg wasn’t so sure. Suzi’s idea was all down to chance. Julia’s had logic behind it. Machine logic, admittedly. And of course, she didn’t have to do it herself.

  “The tekmerc can just follow us down the doughnut,” he said.

  “No,” Julia said. “It’ll tear like paper under the weight of the armour. He’d fall straight out of the airship.”

  “All right, we’ll try it.”

  “Shit,” Suzi said. “Fluid.”

  Greg looked at Charlotte and Fabian. “Do you two understand?”

  They both nodded, both looked scared.

  “Whatever you do, don’t breathe in while you’re inside the doughnut,” Julia said. “Helium isn’t toxic, but there’s no oxygen. You’ll asphyxiate.”

  Greg got his breathing back under control, and drew the Tokarev. “Everybody ready?”

  “Do it,” Suzi said.

  He aimed at a point level with his own head. “Breathe in now, and follow me straight away.” He hoped to hell the two kids would do as they were told, Suzi would have trouble bullying both of them. Or maybe not.

  The vivid red beam pierced the plastic, and Greg swung it down to the walkway, opening up a two-metre slit. With the Tokarev held in his right hand, he sat on the walkway grid, pushing his feet into the open gash. The blackness inside the doughnut was impenetrable, it almost seemed to slop out on to the walkway. He ducked his head under the hand rail, and pushed off.

  The Messerschmitt exploded without warning. Julia had to replay the external camera memories to understand the sequence of events.

  Two Typhoon air-superiority fighters arrowed in from the north, silver-grey needles with wings retracted, using the airship as a radar shield. Not that the Messerschmitt would have had many options even if it had detected them, not when they travelled at Mach eleven. One went over the Colonel Maitland, the second went under. Three Kinetic Energy Kill missiles slammed into the Messerschmitt at Mach seventeen. Then the fighters were gone.

  A fireball enveloped the Messerschmitt, billowing out. It was slapped by the supersonic backwash from the two fighters; invisible hands compressing it back into a lenticular shape. Chunks of flaming wreckage spewed out from the ragged edges, spinning through the air, arching down towards the distant ocean.

  The Colonel Maitland was shaken violently by the Typhoons’ passage. Julia monitored the buffeting they inflicted on the already damaged fuselage framework. Stress sensors reported a dangerous amount of weakening in the midsection.

  She sounded the evacuation alarm before the bridge crew had a chance to evaluate the situation; klaxons blaring out all through the airship. The hatches on the survival pods popped open.

  The Messerschmitt’s halo of ionized flame contracted, wrapping itself around the broken fuselage. The plane rolled lazily, then began the long fall towards the water.

  External camera, starboard fuselage. Two Event Horizon transports were decelerating fast; big XCV-77 Titan stealth hypersonics with a cranked delta planform. They were virtually standing on their tails to aerobrake, underbellies glowing cerise; airflow vortices created spiral vapour trails that streamed off each wingtip, as if they were stretching out giant white springs behind them.

  With the jamming blanket lifted, Julia opened a communication link to the lead Titan. Her living self was plugged into the transport plane’s sensors, anxious for information. She compiled a summary of events since the Messerschmitt’s attack, and squirted it over.

  Get Greg and company back into the gondola, her living self said, I’ll brief the crash team to lift them.

  OK.

  Tekmerc squad inter-suit radio communication.

  Tekmerc eight, female: “Oh, Jesus wept. The deal’s been burnt. Event Horizon planes, big buggers.”

  Leol Reiger: “Ian, Keith, Danny, get back to the gondola. Move!”

  Tekmerc five: “Coming, Leol.”

  Julia: “Last chance, Leol Reiger. Put down your weapons, deactivate your armour. It’s all over.”

  Leol Reiger: “Screw you. Everybody, Charlotte Fielder is to be snuffed. If you see her, kill her. How do you like that, rich bitch? You tell your people to stand off, I’ll let her live.”

  Julia: “No deal.”

  External cameras, overview. Both Titans were slowly circling the Colonel Maitland like prowling wolves, disgorging the security crash team from their open loading ramps. The hovering armour-suited figures formed an encircling necklace around the airship, electronic senses sweeping it for signs of tekmerc activity. When their depl
oyment manoeuvre was complete, they began to close on the gondola.

  Survival pods were dropping out of the bottom of the gondola, small white spheres with strobes flashing urgently. Two hundred metres below the airship their red and white striped parachutes bloomed, lowering them gently towards the ocean.

  A rip-gun bolt, fired from inside the gondola, speared one of the approaching armour suits. The security hardliner disappeared in a plume of blue-white flame. Another bolt stabbed out.

  The crash team let off a fusillade of plasma bolts at the gondola window where the rip-gun bolts had come from.

  Internal camera, gondola lower-deck cabin. Leol Reiger was running from the bedroom, barging through the open doorway out into the central corridor. Plasma bolts smashed into the cabin behind him, igniting the furniture and fittings. An inferno was raging inside within seconds.

  The armour suit’s speaker emitted a demented peal of laughter as Reiger ran towards the stern.

  Suzi wanted to scream. She was in freefall, hurtling through black eternity. The plastic surface of the doughnut gasbag had disappeared as soon as she jumped, the fissure of weak light from the gash drying up almost at once. There was nothing she could orientate on, no reference point. Time seemed to be expanding. It was like being plunged into sensory deprivation. Leol Reiger would be laughing his flicking head off if he could see her now, all panicky like this.

  Standing and fighting would have made a fucking site more sense than this. They could have shot the walkway out from under the tekmerc, no need to penetrate the muscle armour, just flush him out of the airship. Too late now. And what the hell did some warped ‘ware package know about tactics anyway?

  A thunderclap penetrated the closed universe of the doughnut gasbag. The sound rumbled around her, a drawn out tortured roar. Explosion. Then came the multiple sonic booms, the grating sound of the airship’s fuselage bending and flexing. Definitely some snaps of breaking frames. Christ!

  Something flicked up her back. She began to spin. Then she was skittering and sliding down the curving plastic wall of the gasbag, totally out of control. Her injured knee twisted viciously as she reeled round, nearly making her cry out loud. It was all she could do to keep her mouth clamped shut.

  There was an electric flare of deep vermilion light ahead of her. The scene it uncovered was weird, two-tone, red and black. A huge curved cylindrical cavern, slick walls printed with a black hexagonal web pattern, palpitating softly. Jonah must have seen something like this, she thought. She’d always liked that story back in the Trinities; their preacher, Goldfinch, could make it sound real somehow when he was delivering his sermons.

  Fabian Whitehurst was visible ten metres in front of her, sliding down the bottom of the doughnut’s curve, jouncing about madly. She stretched her arms out, trying to slow her speed. The light went out.

  She could still hear the fuselage protesting loudly.

  The angle of the gasbag’s slope began to shallow out, reducing her speed. There was a stark slice of hoary light shining out of the floor fifteen metres away. She saw Fabian on all fours, scrabbling towards it. He vanished abruptly, as though he’d been sucked down.

  Suzi came to a halt about three metres from the cut, and started crawling towards it. She could hear her heart pumping fast, the need to take a breath rising. Her knee was alive with stabs of pain as it pressed into the plastic.

  She reached the cut, and grasped the melted edge with her hands, pulling her body through and down. A half-somersault and she was standing on the walkway.

  Fabian was on his knees, coughing roughly. Charlotte Fielder stood behind him, arm around his shoulder, looking anxious. Suzi let some beautifully clean air flood into her lungs.

  Five metres down the walkway, three drones were working on the composite panels that made up the roof of the gondola. Greg stood over them, watching keenly.

  “Cutting us a way into the cabins,” he said when Suzi went over to him.

  “My security crash team has arrived,” Julia announced from the cybofax peeping out of his jacket pocket. “They’ll be inside any minute now.”

  There was another groan from the fuselage framework. Suzi thought she saw a ripple run along the walkway. The drones lifted up a strut they had disconnected, and began to use their lasers on the composite.

  “There are two tekmercs left in the gondola, both on the lower deck searching the cabins, and three more in the fuselage,” Julia said. “They’re operating on shoot-to-kill instructions now.”

  “Where’s Leol Reiger?” Suzi asked.

  “He’s in the gondola.”

  “Forget it,” Greg said curtly.

  She wanted to tell him where to shove it. But her knee was throbbing alarmingly now, and the fuselage was frightening the shit out of her the way it kept creaking and moving-though she wasn’t going to admit that to anybody. Leol Reiger was toting a Lockhead rip gun, and fully armoured. Besides, she’d been running around in this creepy half-gloom with its clammy cold air for what seemed like hours. “Yeah,” she said. But it was an expensive concession.

  The circle of composite which the drones had been working on fell away with a clatter. A surprisingly bright shaft of light shone up from the cabin below.

  Suzi heard a rip gun being fired, answered with the fast zip of a plasma-pulse rifle. A lot of plasma-pulse rifles.

  “You go first,” Greg told her. “Fabian, you’re next.”

  She slithered through the hole and dropped to the floor. Her leg nearly gave way altogether. This time she couldn’t help the yelp as red hot skewers of pain pierced her knee.

  It was a bedroom suite; dustsheets over all the furniture. Fabian’s jeans and trainers appeared above her. She caught sight of armoured shapes racing through the air outside the window. The silhouette of a Titan transport in the distance.

  Fabian dropped into the cabin, landing awkwardly. Suzi limped over to help him up. Someone in the gondola was firing a rip gun almost continuously. It was getting louder.

  Charlotte’s long shapely legs came through the hole; she landed easily, rolling as she hit. Suzi wondered where she’d learnt that. The girl’s white top and shorts were streaked with dirt. Fabian caught her hand as she got up, and she smiled gratefully at him.

  Two of Event Horizon’s security crash team rose to hover outside the cabin’s window; their jetpack efflux a steady thrum. One of them pressed a power blade to the glass. It sliced through cleanly, and the armoured figure tilted his jockey-stick, heading towards the stern, sliding the blade along as he went.

  Greg landed in the cabin with a hefty thump, sprawling gracelessly on to his side.

  “Ah, the old paratroop training, always useful.” Suzi grinned at him. The weary tension in her muscles was slackening off. Her knee was a solid knot of pain.

  Greg stood up, shaking his head like a dog coming out of the water. “Bloody hell.”

  “Yeah,” she agreed. She was surprised by how glad she was that he’d come through OK. Every byte out of the combat manual thrown at him, and he was still upright. She should never have doubted, not Greg.

  A big rectangle of glass fell outwards, letting in the full howl of the jetpack noise. The crash team began to fly into the cabin.

  Suzi started to laugh, lost in a burn of elation as dustsheets took flight and her short hair whipped about, shellsuit trousers flapping wildly round her legs. It was always the same, relief at being alive at the end of the day boosting her higher than syntho ever could. Dangerously addictive.

  Fabian and Charlotte were taken out first. She felt armoured arms close around her, and the security hardliner lifted her with a precision she could only envy. Then there were just the blues of water and sky, the giddiness which accompanied height.

  Leol Reiger was very good. Julia hadn’t expected that. Rip-gun bolts tore into cameras and fibre optic cable channels. Her coverage of the gondola’s lower deck was being systematically broken down. Fire was spreading from the cabin her crash team had shot at. Halogen ex
tinguishers in the ceiling came on, squirting out thick columns of white mist into the central corridor, degrading the camera images still further.

  She relayed Leol Reiger’s exact co-ordinates to the crash team.

  Internal camera, gondola lower-deck central corridor. Dark smoke oozed along the ceiling, smothering the biolum strips. Flames fluoresced the halogen a lurid amber. She watched one of the crash team step out of Jason Whitehurst’s study into the inflamed miasmatic cyclone, plasma rifle held ready.

  Leol Reiger turned with a speed she couldn’t believe. The rip-gun bolt was aimed with incredible accuracy, lancing straight into the security hardliner’s chest.

  If she had a stomach, she would have been sick at that point.

  Leol Reiger stood still and amid the churning halogen smog, legs slightly apart, and pointed his rip gun up at the ceiling. He blew a wide hole in the composite, and kept on firing. His suit’s jockey-stick deployed, swinging into place below his left arm. The jetpack compressor wound up.

  He launched himself like an old-style space rocket, straight up.

  Internal camera, gondola upper-deck central corridor. Leol Reiger came through the floor, and vanished through a hole in the ceiling.

  Internal camera, fuselage keel. Rip-gun bolts had vaporized a three-metre section of the walkway, leaving the smoking ends drooping on to the gondola roof. There was a gaping rent in the spherical gasbag overhead. Leol Reiger flashed past.

  That was where Julia’s coverage ended. The only sensors she had inside the gasbag were the ones to detect temperature, contamination, and pressure levels.

  The Colonel Maitland’s flight control systems reported a heavy helium vent from the gasbag Leol Reiger had taken refuge in. External cameras showed her rip-gun bolts flying out of the upper fuselage, leaving long breaches in the solar cell envelope.

  Tekmerc squad inter-suit radio communication.

  Leol Reiger: “Scuttle it. Shred this flicker.”

  Tekmerc five: “You’re crazy, Leol.”

  Leol Reiger: Laughter. “No way. They’ve blown it. The mayday beacons on board are shrieking so loud every emergency service on the planet will be picking them up. There’s no jammer now. Air-sea rescue is going to be here in minutes.”