The Mandel Files, Volume 2: The Nano Flower

  ‘Fine,’ Greg muttered, raiding the first aid kits for a diagnostic sensor and antiseptic sprays. He handed Pearse an infuser tube, which the hardliner pressed against Malcolm’s neck.

  The belly hatch slid shut.

  ‘Where to?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘Out,’ Suzi said. ‘Now. We should have some co-ordinates coming from Julia in a little while. But just get us out.’

  Rachel snatched up the handset.

  Suzi started worrying about Leol Reiger’s transport. Himself, a psychic, and at least six hardliners; whatever he’d arrived in it had to be big, and probably loaded with defence hardware, knowing Leol.

  ‘Grab hold of something,’ Rachel called.

  The flatscreen showed the Pegasus turning towards one of the lift platforms. Suzi could hear the compressors surging. With a rush of childish delight she knew what the pilot was going to do. She sank quickly into one of the chairs. Her knee was giving her hell.

  There was a push of acceleration, and the Pegasus began its run for the platform. Hangar staff rushed to get clear. She felt the drop as they shot over the edge, her belly suddenly freefalling. The grassy valley floor with its railway lines and twin autobahns filled the flatscreen. Then they were bottoming out, swooping up again above the Prezda’s dome.

  ‘Is this plane fitted with an ECM system?’ she asked.

  Rachel looked up from the handset. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell the pilot to use it, and fly an evasion pattern through the mountains. We might be followed.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Suzi!’ Greg called. ‘Take over from me, will you?’

  She rose from the chair, the pain in her knee more acute. Malcolm was unconscious; Pearse had got his jacket and shirt off, and was spraying the wounds with antiseptic. The clear oily liquid mixed with blood, forming runnels across Malcolm’s ribs, splashing on the chair fabric.

  Suzi checked the data the diagnostic was displaying on its screen. Her guess about the blood had been right, he was losing too much. She found a plasma bladder, and pulled out its bioware leech patch. The patch resembled a flattened snail, a hard carapace with a soft spongy underside, connected to the plasma bladder with a plastic tube. She held Malcolm’s forearm and pressed the leech pad against his skin. There was a soft sucking sound as it adhered. The pattern of yellow and green LED on the bladder’s pump changed as the leech patch inserted its needle probes into his blood vessels, then it began feeding plasma into him.

  Greg sat down gingerly in one of the chairs, and gave Victor Tyo’s number to his cybofax.

  Suzi heard the security chief say, ‘Bloody hell, what happened to you?’

  ‘Tell you, we’re not the only people looking for Charlotte Fielder.’ He started to fill Victor in on the events in the Prezda.

  Suzi began spraying dermal seal on Malcolm’s lacerations; the foam sizzled as it touched the skin, rapidly solidifying into a pale blue membrane. She was continually bracing herself as the plane banked and rose. Malcolm’s back had been badly slashed by the flying glass. She had to use flesh tape on the wider cuts. Pearse was working on his legs, using a small sensor pad to find any buried glass fragments.

  ‘Hey,’ she said quietly. ‘He did all right, your mate. Stopped those tekmercs dead.’

  ‘Reason he was chosen,’ Pearse grunted.

  ‘Yeah, right.’ Suzi heard Greg rounding up, and asked Rachel to finish for her. She limped back to where Greg was sitting. A glance at the bulkhead flatscreen showed a continual blur of rock.

  ‘You too?’ Victor asked when Greg handed her the cybofax.

  Suzi sat heavily in one of the chairs, grimacing. The hand she was holding the cybofax with was filmed in dried blood, and not all of it was Malcolm’s. ‘Yeah. But you should see the opposition.’

  ‘I know, Greg told me.’

  ‘Listen, Leol Reiger, I know him. He’s a prize turd, but the bastard’s good.’

  ‘I’m reviewing his profile now, Suzi. But I was aware of the name. Have you got any idea who employed him, any rumours?’

  ‘Nope, sorry. Gave me a fuck of a shock seeing him there.’ She stared at Victor’s concerned young-seeming face, her instincts rebelling against confiding in him. Security man. But she had hardlined with him once, seventeen years ago, some weird case Greg was working on for Julia. It was just she hated opening herself to anyone. ‘Victor, there’s this girl. Name’s Andria Landon. She’s in my apartment at the Soreyheath condominium; not a hardliner, not even tekmerc. Means she can’t look out for herself. So if Leol Reiger wants to hit me, she’s the obvious choice. You got a safehouse she can stay at till I get back?’

  ‘No problem, I’m dispatching a couple of my people, they’ll have her out of there in twenty minutes.’ He said it all crisp and efficient, which she figured was his way of not showing surprise.

  ‘They’ve got to be good, Victor.’

  He was looking at something off-screen, typing. ‘They will be. Call her now and tell her they’re coming: Howard Lovell, and Katie Sansom. Got the names?’

  ‘Yeah. Thanks, Victor.’

  15

  Victor came down out of the Pegasus on to Wilholm Manor’s lawn. He was greeted by a rich scent of honeysuckle in the moist air. The sprinklers had been on, drenching the lawns, keeping the grass lush and green. His shoes were swiftly coated in the artificial dew.

  The Manor in front of him was a long classical grey-stone building, three stories high. It dated back to the eighteenth century, although it had undergone considerable modernization and refurbishment over the years. The last major overhaul had come when Julia and Philip Evans bought it, right after PSP fell, ousting the communal farmers and virtually gutting the interior before returning it to an opulence of a bygone age.

  Wilholm estate was a rare enclave of gracious living, Victor always thought, out of sync with the present and all its digital bustle. A true English country house, basking in an eternal Indian summer. Birds always singing, flowers always in bloom. Time slowed down here.

  Rick Parnell trotted down the stairs out of the executive hypersonic’s belly hatch, carrying his suit jacket over his shoulder. When he was clear of the plane he turned a full circle, gawping at the grounds like an overawed tourist. ‘Bloody hell, you mean somebody actually lives here? It looks like a theme park.’

  ‘It’s your boss who lives here, just remember,’ Victor said.

  Rick Parnell was staring at the trout lake at the bottom of the gardens; now the hypersonic’s compressors had wound down the noise of the waterfall on the far side was clearly audible. Beyond the dark water was a dense stretch of woodland. Tall Chinese yew and virginciana trees were draped in a lacework of dark green ivy and clematis vines, clusters of plate-sized red and lilac flowers dangling. They had survived the spring hurricanes again, the few trunks that had keeled over adding to the rustic authenticity of the spinney. It was hard to believe that the grounds were only eighteen years old.

  Paths crisscrossed the lawn, fenced by topiary drimys and japonicas, elaborate cockerels, dogs, bears, concentric spheres, and one giant pair of shears. A wide lily pond had a statue of Venus in the centre, shooting a fountain five metres into the air. Boxy orange drones crawled along the flower borders, digesting faded roses and forking out weeds.

  Victor started off towards the manor, Rick Parnell following reluctantly. Daniella and Matthew were playing in the big outdoor pool. They’d got Brutus, their sheepdog, in with them. Victor watched Matthew slide down the water chute along one side, nearly landing on top of the excited animal. Qoi, their nanny, was sitting at a table on the patio behind the pool, reading her cybofax, and occasionally glancing up to check on her wayward charges.

  Victor liked the children; Julia had brought them up well, deliberately ensuring they didn’t have the hauteur of their contemporaries. She had almost gone too far in Matthew’s case, the boy could be a bit of a pain at times. Though what he probably needed was a father. Daniella was growing up along similar lines to her mother,
tall and slim, through her hair was darker, and not worn as long. Nice kid, occasionally very serious, as if she was suffering bouts of premature adulthood. She waved, smiling, and shouted something at him. He guessed it was an invitation to join them, but the barking dog made it hard to tell. He gave her an exaggerated shrug and walked into the drawing room through open French doors.

  ‘Open house here, isn’t it?’ Rick said.

  ‘Oh no, nothing like. If you weren’t with me you wouldn’t have made it off the bottom step of the Pegasus. Julia just doesn’t like the security hardware to spoil the look of the place.’

  ‘I can believe that. What this place must have cost to build.’

  Victor opened the door. ‘She’s entitled.’

  They came out into a big hall hung with oil paintings. Victor led the way up a broad curving stairway and on to the landing. Rick struggled into his jacket on the way up.

  The door to Wilholm’s study was solid teak, with a simple polished brass handle. Victor turned it and pushed. ‘Lion’s den,’ he said with a grin.

  Rick gave him a thanks-for-nothing glance, and walked in still adjusting his tie.

  The room was oak panelled, its lead-glazed windows looking out over the Manor’s rear lawns. There was a long oak table down the centre, with ten black wooden chairs along each side. Julia sat at the head, studying the data displayed in the cubes of an elaborate terminal in front of her.

  Rick’s greeting died unspoken. Victor was expecting it, a reaction he had seen a thousand times before. Julia in the flesh did that to people. She belonged on channel newscasts, in gossipcasts, there was even a university which included her management of Event Horizon as part of its business finance course. She wasn’t real.

  ‘Dr Rick Parnell,’ Victor said innocently. ‘Your SETI director.’

  Julia offered her hand. ‘Do sit down, though I have to say I don’t quite understand why Victor brought you.’

  Victor pulled out a chair for himself, and sat on one side of Julia. ‘I brought him because Royan’s been playing silly buggers with our memory cores. Tell her about the microbes, Rick.’

  Rick settled in the chair on the other side of Julia, his bulk filling it dangerously. Victor listened to him launch into an explanation of the Matoyaii probe, its unsubstantiated discovery in Jupiter’s rings. Rick’s usual bluster had vanished, replaced by a boyish eagerness.

  Julia leaned back in her chair after he finished. ‘Now you’ve jogged my memory, I do remember hearing about the flu theory,’ she said slowly. ‘Years ago, probably when I was back at school. But why do you assume these microbes come from the stars? I would have thought Jupiter itself is a more obvious choice. The chemistry and the energy exists to support microbic life forms in its atmosphere, surely some spoors could have leaked out to the rings, maybe even riding up the Io flux-tube.’

  Victor watched the last of Rick’s assurance crumple. Of course, an interstellar origin was so much easier for him to believe in, more important, more dramatic. It gave the whole SETI discipline that edge of certainty, respectability. The same reason people wanted to believe in flying saucers rather than swamp gas.

  ‘The origin is irrelevant to our present situation,’ Victor said. ‘The point is, when he heard the microbes existed, or might exist, Royan had a probe built to investigate them.’

  Julia looked at him blankly, as if the words he’d spoken had come out wrong. ‘When?’

  ‘He approached me about sixteen months ago,’ Rick said. ‘I expect that was because I suggested a probe to verify Matoyaii’s findings as soon as you appointed me. It was turned down.’

  Julia’s expression became cool, she didn’t say anything. Rick swallowed and went on, ‘After Royan came to us, my office advised the design team on the kind of sensors required to locate the microbes.’

  ‘There’s no record of this,’ Julia said. Her eyes were closed. Victor knew she was using her nodes, probably talking to her NN cores, running tracers through Event Horizon’s memory cores. He had done it himself on the flight back from the Astronautics Institute, and drawn a complete blank. But if there were any bytes on the probe hidden in the company’s memory cores, Julia would find them. He always thought it a considerable irony that the boss of Event Horizon was one of the greatest hotrods on the planet.

  ‘I watched it being built,’ Rick said, a shade defensively. ‘It was assembled in Building One, you could actually see it from my office window.’

  ‘A Jupiter probe?’ Julia asked. ‘Built in full view, and nobody said anything?’

  ‘Best place to hide something,’ Victor said. ‘One more space project in an Institute that boots five thousand tonnes of hardware into orbit every week. Who’d notice, who’d even care?’

  ‘Mr Tyo is quite right,’ Rick said. ‘Unmanned planetary exploration isn’t of much interest to Institute personnel. Not since the Mars and Mercury landings. There was nothing special about Kiley, the components were all standard apart from the microbe detection sensors and sampling waldos.’

  ‘Kiley?’ Julia asked.

  ‘Yes. Royan chose the name. It’s a kind of boomerang,’ Rick explained.

  ‘A boomerang? You mean Kiley was a sample-return mission?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Has it returned?’ she demanded.

  ‘I couldn’t tell you. That would depend on how long it stayed in orbit around Jupiter. But I will tell you this, it was built for speed. The probe itself only massed about two tonnes, the propulsion section came in at over forty tonnes. It filled a Clarke-class spaceplane payload bay. There were five stages, throwaway reaction-mass tanks and giga-conductor cells. That raised a few eyebrows at the Institute. Whoever heard of throwing away giga-conductor cells? Royan was certainly in a hurry for it to get on Jupiter.’

  The corner of Julia’s mouth turned down. ‘Nothing new in that, he was always in a hurry. So how long would it take to get there?’

  ‘Launched at an optimal conjunction, ten weeks,’ Rick said.

  ‘And presumably the same time to return?’

  ‘Yes, possibly a week or so less. The Sun’s gravity field would accelerate it, you see.’

  ‘Do you know when it was launched?’

  ‘Not to the day, no. But Kiley was rolled out of Building One eight months ago, last November.’

  Julia gave him a long hard look, holding her body immobile.

  Victor knew her mood well enough, contemplative, but Rick was visibly wilting under such a direct contact.

  ‘Did he ever say why he was so keen to examine these microbes?’ Victor asked. ‘What was so important about them?’

  ‘No,’ Rick said. ‘He never confided in me. Sorry.’

  Victor glanced enquiringly at Julia.

  ‘ ’Fraid not,’ she shook her head fractionally.

  ‘Care to guess?’

  ‘I don’t think I could. I’m beginning to realize how little of him I ever did know.’

  Rick cleared his throat cautiously. ‘Er, are we, the Institute, that is, in trouble for assembling the probe? Royan did have all the funding clearance, and we knew he’s your husband—’ He broke off miserably.

  Julia favoured him with a thin grin. ‘Oh, yes, he’s mine all right. And no, I don’t hold the Institute to blame. Royan has the authority to use whatever Event Horizon facility he wishes to.’

  ‘Even if he can’t be bothered to tell us,’ Victor said. It came out with more feeling than he intended, and Julia registered a flicker of pain. Julia’s choice had always baffled him, although he and Royan had always been careful never to show any animosity towards each other. If anything, they’d always been scrupulously polite, to the point of excess, it became a ritual. Perhaps the mistrust he felt was just a security man’s instinct. But he always considered Royan a flaw in Julia’s otherwise meticulous life; it was always her devotion, her money. All Royan had brought with him were his hotrod programs. Love was never reasonable.

  ‘Something I’d like to ask,’ Victor said, evadi
ng Julia’s critical eye. ‘Seeing as how I don’t believe in coincidence: Royan builds a Jupiter probe to investigate alien life, then he turns up warning us about alien life. Would it make sense for our aliens to use Jupiter as a base?’

  ‘You mean, could their ship be in orbit around Jupiter?’ Julia asked.

  ‘Just an idea,’ Victor said. It was one he’d had on the flight back to Wilholm. He had wanted to pursue it with Rick, but then Greg had called and he wound up getting sidetracked with safeguarding Andria Landon.

  ‘A good one,’ said Rick. ‘However advanced their technology, a starflight would deplete on-board resources, certainly on a slower-than-light ship. Jupiter would be an excellent resupply point. Minerals and metal in its ring, ice on Europa, He3 in its atmosphere.’

  ‘Can you at least run a search of Jupiter for us?’ Victor asked.

  ‘I keep telling you,’ Rick said irritably. ‘SETI is not a hardware-orientated department. All we have is an office, and access to the Institute’s lightware cruncher. That’s it, the total, what we are.’

  ‘Not any more,’ Julia said. ‘As of now, I am placing every deep-space sensor facility Event Horizon owns under the control of the SETI department.’ Her eyes went distant. ‘Your role will mainly be co-ordination, but then that’s what you’re used to. Tell the visible- and radio-astronomy departments what you require, I’ll see you have the clearance by the time you get back to the Institute. You can also get the visible-astronomy staff to interpret any recent visual records of Jupiter. There’s our own Galileo telescope, as well as the IAF’s Aldrin. Victor, you handle any image purchases from the Aldrin. Go through some fronts, I don’t want anyone to know Event Horizon is the end user, not at this stage.’

  ‘This is all very sudden,’ Rick said slowly. He kept glancing at Victor for confirmation of what was actually happening. ‘Funny, nothing like the contact scenarios we were prepared for. We always assumed it would be non-material contact, almost archaeological, digging through the electronic remains of a culture, signals broadcast before the human race had even learnt how to knap flints. Now this, a starship finally arrives, then it hides from us. Crazy.’