The Mandel Files, Volume 2: The Nano Flower

  ‘Can’t be helped. These reassignments are supposed to be ultra-hush, I don’t want them to become open knowledge to the tekmercs. OK?’

  ‘You’re the boss,’ Eddie Coghlan said glumly. ‘When do you want it done?’

  ‘Today.’

  ‘Christ!’

  ‘Sorry, but that’s the way it goes. I’ll see if I can assign some psychic empaths to you. Have them interrogate the tekmerc members you do nab, that way you should get a reasonably complete list.’ He stepped off the walkway at an intersection, and started to ride an escalator down.

  ‘Right you are,’ Eddie Coghlan said. ‘Is that why you’re here, to supervise the reassignments?’

  Victor liked that, no questions about what the reassignments were for. Eddie was a good security man. He started down the next escalator to the third floor. ‘No, I’m here to see Dr Parnell, actually.’

  Eddie Coghlan frowned, trying to place the name. ‘Not the SETI project director?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘I suppose he’ll be in by now.’

  Dr Rick Parnell’s personnel profile said he was thirty-seven, which surprised Victor. Himself apart, Event Horizon’s divisional chiefs were normally in their fifties. When he accessed the Astronautics Institute’s records he found out why. SETI was about the smallest project on Event Horizon’s books, with only twelve members. Julia funded it out of the pure science budget; the project was virtually a token, she was simply covering all aspects of space research, however remote.

  Victor certainly hadn’t known it existed, not until Julia suggested he go and see if they could come up with any suggestions about how to find the alien starship. She was anxious that Greg’s tenuous pursuit of the Newfields girl wasn’t the only option of making contact with them.

  The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence project had been allocated three offices on the inward side of Building One’s ring; the usual array of desks and terminals and holographic display cubes, worn dark-green carpet squares. Victor was mildly disappointed, expecting something more elaborate for this kind of project, at least. His own office wasn’t much different, larger with better furniture.

  He left Eddie Coghlan to organize the tekmerc busts and went in. The SETI staff gave him and his bodyguard inquisitive stares; all of them were in their twenties, he noted. An attractive female secretary directed him to Rick Parnell’s office.

  The room looked out over the assembly hall, an incomprehensible mini-city of cybernetic machinery, its roadways heavy with little white carts and drone cargo flat-tops following buried guidance tracks. On the far side he could see a curving row of integration bays where standard payload pods were fitted out, each bay a buzz of activity. More pods were hanging from the overhead hoists, like a series of white moonlets drifting along rectangular orbital paths.

  The wall behind the SETI director’s desk was covered with holograms of satellites. To Victor’s eye they were similar to the geosync antenna platforms, although he guessed the outsized dishes were radio observatories. There was one computer simulation of a mesh dish alongside New London; if he was reading the scale right it was over twenty kilometres in diameter.

  Dr Rick Parnell had his feet up on his desk, drinking a can of Ruddles bitter as he watched a data display in his terminal’s cube. He had been a varsity rugby player while he was at Oxford, half a head taller than Victor, with broad, sloping shoulders, and blond hair that was starting to thin. It looked like he worked hard to keep in trim. The body didn’t really belong in a white shirt and suit trousers, Victor thought, more like tennis kit.

  ‘Security chief?’ he asked after Victor showed his card. ‘What, you mean of the whole company?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You come to evict us?’

  ‘No. I’d like to talk to you.’

  Rick Parnell suddenly realized he was drinking a can of bitter in office hours. He drained it in a couple of gulps, crumpled it, and threw it into the bin. Perfect shot. ‘You don’t look old enough to be a security chief.’

  Victor sat in front of the desk. ‘There aren’t many old people in security. We don’t survive that long.’

  Rick Parnell managed a sickly smile. ‘What did you want to talk about?’

  ‘Firstly, let me remind you of the confidentiality undertaking you thumbprinted when you were employed by Event Horizon.’

  Rick Parnell coloured slightly. ‘Hey, now listen. I was told that was a formality. This project might not seem much to a guy like you, but we accomplish a lot, and most of that is because we’re mainly a co-ordination centre. Half our budget goes on grants to universities and agencies, we arrange international conferences, publish datasheets. You start restricting our output, and there’s no point to us even existing.’

  ‘I’m not interested in restricting the flow of ideas, I simply ask that our conversation is not bandied about.’

  ‘Otherwise I’m for the chop.’

  Victor sat back in the chair and gave Rick Parnell a searching look. ‘Tekmercs make threats, Mr Director. I work on the other side of the fence. We try and ensure that a dedicated researcher’s life’s work isn’t stolen from under their nose, that the pension fund you’ve paid into for forty years doesn’t get emptied by some hotrod with a smart decryption program. Now, you and I are employed by the same lady, and she suggested I ask your professional advice on a matter I’m involved with. Is that really so hard for you?’

  Rick Parnell twitched in discomfort. ‘No. Sorry, of course not. I’m just not used to the idea of the head of Event Horizon’s security division walking into my office. I didn’t think you people even knew we existed.’ He lifted his head, as if he was sniffing at the air. ‘Julia Evans herself told you to come here? The Julia Evans?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘For professional advice?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK, fire away.’

  ‘Hypothetically, if there was an alien spaceship in the solar system, how would I go about detecting it?’

  Rick Parnell opened his mouth, closed it, then started again. ‘If an alien spaceship came into the solar system, believe me, you’d know about it. Something like that would be a bigger event than the Second Coming.’

  Victor gazed thoughtfully at the hologram of the big dish. This was the second time he’d been told the arrival of aliens would be momentous. The prospect was beginning to worry him badly. ‘In what way?’

  ‘Spectacular. OK, look. There’s two ways of travelling between the stars. In a small ship going very fast, say about thirty or fifty per cent lightspeed. Or a big multi-generation ship, something the size of New London, travelling at one or two per cent lightspeed. Either way, it takes a colossal amount of energy to move them. If anything like that started decelerating into the solar system, the plasma from the reaction drive would scream like a nova across the radio bands. We’d spot it half a light-year out. It would stop radio astronomy stone dead across half of the sky.’

  ‘What if they didn’t use a reaction drive? What if they have some faster than light drive like the science fiction shows on the channels?’

  ‘Christ, you’re really serious, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Rick Parnell put his elbows on the desk, and rested his chin on his clasped hands. ‘Nick Beswick is the one you really should be asking about this, because it all fits in with quantum theory, but … FTL means producing wormholes through space-time large enough for a ship to pass through. Now wormholes are theoretically possible, but we haven’t got a clue how to open one.’

  ‘An advanced technology might be able to achieve it.’

  ‘Granted, an extremely fanciful technology could stress space to a degree that tears it open. However, even if you have that level of technology you still couldn’t enter the solar system without being detected. If the terminus of a wormhole on this scale erupted near Earth, its gravitational distortion would be of epic proportions. To my knowledge there are th
ree hundred and twenty functional gravity-wave detectors on this planet, fifteen of which are in orbit; astrophysicists use them to check out general relativity. They would have spotted it.’

  ‘What about an FTL system that used something other than wormholes?’

  Rick Parnell frowned sadly. ‘You know, my problem is usually convincing people that aliens do exist. Now you come in, and I have to persuade you what you’re saying doesn’t make any sense. This universe is no different for aliens than it is to us, it obeys the same physical parameters ten million light-years away as it does right in this office. That includes relativity.’

  ‘I was just trying to establish if there’s a third method of aliens arriving in the solar system.’

  ‘If there is, we can’t conceive it. Which would make them roughly the equivalent of angels.’

  ‘Fair enough. So just go back to my original question, we don’t know the method they used to get here, and we didn’t see them arrive. How do we locate them now?’

  ‘These hypothetical aliens, are they on Earth?’

  ‘No. We don’t believe they could get past the strategic defence sensors.’

  ‘Good point. But you’re giving me a tall order here, you know? The solar system is a big place, and that’s just staying in the plane of the ecliptic. They could easily be in a high inclination orbit. If you take Pluto’s orbital radius as the boundary, and extend your search to cover a spherical volume, that’s a quarter of a million cubic AUs to sift through. An electromagnetic sweep is the only practical method, assuming they’re emitting in that spectrum. There’s a good chance of picking up random noise leakage from their onboard systems, certainly with the power levels a starship will need to employ.’

  ‘Do you have that sort of equipment?’

  Rick Parnell gave a low laugh. ‘We’ve got six ten-million-channel receivers operating at the moment, although we only own them in partnership with various national science councils and space agencies. But they’re all assigned to specific sections of the sky. It’s the old nightmare, you listen to your section for eighteen months of deathly silence, then the day you move on to the next, there’s a genesis pulse.’

  ‘What’s a genesis pulse?’

  ‘Special message, a shout that says “Here we are!” to the universe at large. You use a dish like the Arecibo to beam a strong signal at a star cluster with a high quota of Sol-like stars. Put in plenty of data about local life and culture, star coordinates – you do that by triangulating with known quasars. We send out a couple every year. Give it a millennium, we might even get an answer.’

  ‘So there’s no way you can run a search for me, then?’

  Rick Parnell swivelled his chair, and tapped the hologram of the giant dish. ‘This is Steropes, we’ve spent twenty per cent of our budget and three years refining the design. You persuade our lovely lady boss to part with two billion pounds New Sterling and in five years I’ll have it up and running for you. If you’ve lost a hydrogen atom inside the solar system, this beauty will be able to find it for you.’

  Victor held back on the urge to shout. ‘I meant, starting today.’

  ‘God, no. No way, sorry.’

  ‘Shit.’

  Rick Parnell clenched his hands tight, as if he was praying. ‘OK, I’ve been straight with you. Now, what have you got? What made you come in here and ask me this?’

  ‘We are in possession of certain evidence which suggests that first contact has already been initiated.’

  Rick Parnell’s lips moved around the words, repeating them silently. ‘Oh, God. What evidence?’ he croaked.

  ‘An artefact.’

  ‘What fucking artefact?’

  ‘A biological one.’

  Rick Parnell lent right over the desk, fired by excitement and trepidation. ‘High order?’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  ‘I mean, more advanced than the microbes?’ His hands spun for emphasis, urging Victor on like a football coach.

  Victor felt a real tingle of alarm. Greg had once explained to him how his intuition manifested itself, a cold that wasn’t physical. This was something similar. ‘Slow down. Which microbes are we talking about?’

  Rick Parnell let out a groan and flopped back into his chair. ‘After the turn of the century the Japanese NASDA agency sent an unmanned probe called Matoyaii out to Jupiter. It was designed to measure the near-Jupiter environment, from the ionosphere out to Io’s plasma torus. That’s a pretty active area, saturated with radiation, the planetary radio emissions; and then there’s the magnetosphere, the flux-tube, small moons, the ring bands. Fascinating to see how they all interact. Thing was, when mission control manoeuvred the Matoyaii in close to a ring particle the on-board spectroscope started to register some pretty odd hydrocarbon patterns. Nothing conclusive, nothing final, you understand. Intensive analysis wasn’t possible, the sensors weren’t designed for microscopic examination. And the hydrocarbon deposits were minute. Specks really, like dust motes. If they were microbes, they could’ve been captured by the gravity field, and settled on the ring particles.’

  ‘They were alive?’ Victor asked.

  ‘More than likely. The theory’s been around since the middle of the twentieth century. High-order organic forms couldn’t survive interstellar transit, they couldn’t contain enough energy, not for the time-scales and distances involved. But something like a microbe or a germ, they might just make it. Go into a kind of suspended animation between stars, they’re small enough to withstand freezing. The microbes were even put forward as an hypothesis for flu epidemics, literally a plague from space.’

  ‘So there is life on other planets,’ Victor said, half to himself.

  ‘Now you question it!’ Rick Parnell exclaimed in exasperation.

  ‘What we found might have been a joke, an elaborate bioware construct. But not any more, not with you telling me this.’

  Rick Parnell smiled affably. ‘Well, we’ll know about the microbes for certain when Royan gets back, of course.’

  Victor looked up sharply, meeting a sincere expectant gaze.

  11

  The bishop was from the trendier wing of the Church of England, a Campaign for Orbital Disarmament badge prominent on his lapel. His wiry grey hair blew about in the light breeze as he stood at the microphone at the front of the stage. He kept slipping youth-culture sound bites into his speech in an effort to hold the younger members of the audience.

  It sounded bizarre to Julia, like a Victorian toff getting enthusiastic about the lifestyle of New Age communes. Her early years had been spent with the First Salvation Church in Arizona; it was more cult than religion, but she had picked up a basic belief in Christian teachings and ethics which had never been discarded. She found the bishop squirm-inducing, almost making her feel ashamed about her faith.

  She’d chosen to sit with the rest of the parents, in a plastic chair set out on the browning grass of Oakham School’s playing fields. The governors had wanted her up on the makeshift wooden platform with the bishop and other dignitaries, or at least in the front row of the seats. She turned that down with a flatness which left them thinking they’d mortally offended her. Worried glances had flown like startled sparrows.

  People were so stupidly sensitive. Did they think she was some sort of mafia princess who kept a black book?

  There were about five hundred parents listening to the speeches and waiting for the prizegiving. The men in grey tropical-weave suits, putting a brave face on the bishop’s verbal meandering; wives in light colourful dresses and elaborate hats, smiling brittlely.

  She had deliberately fled into the middle of them, seeking anonymity; sitting with Eleanor in the hope she would blend in. Some chance. Between the two of them, she and Eleanor had six children to manage, then there were her seven hardliner bodyguards. Her party had taken over an entire row of the hard chairs.

  Eleanor fanned herself with the programme, glancing at her slim Rolex. ‘He can’t go on for much longer,’ she muttered out of
the corner of her mouth.

  ‘No, they’ll lynch him soon,’ Julia agreed.

  ‘Will the hardliners do it?’ Matthew, her eight-year-old son, asked eagerly.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ Anita Mandel told him imperiously. ‘Aunty Julia was being sarcastic. Don’t you know what sarcastic is?’

  ‘Of course—’ Matthew began fiercely.

  Julia and Eleanor silenced them before the argument got out of hand. Julia put her arm round her son, and gave him a hug. He resembled his father so closely, a constant raw-nerve reminder of all she was missing.

  Eleanor took another look at her Rolex. ‘They’ll be in Monaco now.’

  ‘I didn’t want to ask Greg to do this, you know.’

  ‘I know,’ Eleanor said wearily. She put her hand on her belly and shifted uncomfortably in the chair.

  Julia felt even more guilt crystallizing around her, it was like a prison cell she had to carry round.

  The bishop sat down to a sharp burst of applause. The headmaster rose and began his introduction to the prizes. Julia gave Daniella a final check over to make sure her uniform was tidy. Daniella had won her year’s history prize. Julia was secretly thankful it wasn’t the economics prize; that would’ve been too much like Daniella bursting a gut for the subject she believed her mother wanted her to excel in. Not that she would be unhappy if Daniella showed a natural inclination towards the qualities necessary for a career in Event Horizon, she just didn’t want the girl to feel constrained.

  Julia leaned in towards Eleanor. ‘It’s foolish of me, in a way. I’m relying on Royan as a psychological crutch. Find him, and the world is going to be at rights again. Fat chance. Find him, and we find the flower’s origin. Our problems will only just be beginning.’

  ‘There’s no going back now,’ Eleanor said. ‘Like it or not, the human race isn’t alone any more.’

  ‘Yes, but why all this secrecy? Why not just land on the White House lawn like they do in the channel shows?’

  ‘The eco-warriors would laser them dead for bringing a million gruesome new varieties of bugs to the planet.’