The Mandel Files, Volume 2: The Nano Flower

  They were inside the orbit of Io now, Kiley sliding through the penumbra, falling in towards the gas giant. Perspective altered, Jupiter was definitely below now. Something so vast could never be overhead. Its curvature was flattening out, edges merging with distance, cloudscape expanding into an unending plane. If she looked up she could see Io; a volcano’s mushroom fountain of sulphur just north of the equator belching upwards. A cold dragon flame cascading in glorious low gravity slow motion.

  The stormband below Kiley was a pallid rust-yellow, ocean-sized elliptical cyclones and anti-cyclones of ammonium hydrosulfide grinding in conflict, buffeted by supersonic jet-streams. Clots of white cloud bloomed as whirlwind vortices sucked frozen ammonia crystals up from the hidden depths. They spilled into the churning cyclone walls like cream into coffee, diffusing and dispersing.

  Then the terminator was ahead of them, a shadow straddling the nearly flat horizon. Firefly lights twinkled beyond.

  Was I such a challenge to you? Julia asked sadly. I thought you were the one person in the world who saw me as me, as Snowy, not some plutocrat bitch. I was alive then, when you held me.

  Your heritage is the challenge, the barrier. Not you. You, Snowy, you I love. Did you need to be told that?

  I could give it all up. For you.

  No, no, no.

  No.

  You are the one who is complete, Snowy. I envy you that. Me, I still have to find your peak. And I can. I can.

  Kiley glided into the umbra. It was night below, but not dark. Lightning twisted between the imperious cloud mountains, tattered dazzling streamers that illuminated thousands of square kilometres with each elemental discharge. Comets sank down gracefully amid the storms, rocky detritus from the rings sucked in by the monstrous gravity field, braked by the ionosphere, flaring purple, spitting a tail of slowly dimming sparks.

  Kiley began its deceleration burn, sending out a five-hundred-metre spear of plasma. The top of the atmosphere was only seventy-five kilometres below now. Julia could sense the massive flux currents seedling through the thin fog of molecules, glowing red veins pulsing strongly.

  The burn ended abruptly. The image juddered as explosive bolts fired. Empty spherical hydrogen tanks and lenticular giga-conductor cells separated, tumbling away. Small chemical thrusters fired, stabilizing the modules which remained. Kiley began its coast up to the rings.

  Do you see now, Snowy? The silent savagery of this place, its hostility. Yet amid all this, there is life.

  Kiley found the microbes?

  Oh, yes.

  Is that all it found?

  How could there be more?

  A spaceship, a starship.

  No. Is that what you are dealing with, a starship? Your trouble.

  I don’t know, Royan, I really don’t. I’ve got people working on it, Greg, Victor, Suzi.

  The old team. That’s nice. They’re good, they’ll find you an answer.

  They need to find you, Royan. Where are you?

  I don’t know. How could I?

  Then why were you left in storage? What are you here to warn me about?

  Potential. The potential of the microbes. But I was so sure. I had it all worked out.

  Show me.

  The rock reminded her of Phobos. It had that same barren grey-yellow colour, a battered potato outline. Except it was much smaller, barely a hundred metres long, sixty wide. Kiley hovered beside it, optical sensor images degraded by the dry mist of ring particles. Wavering braids of dust motes and sulphur atoms shimmered in the raw sunlight, moving sluggishly.

  Jupiter’s crescent eclipsed the starfield a hundred and twenty thousand kilometres away. Even from this height, the dancing lights of the darkside were easily seen. Like Earth’s cities, she thought, the idea momentarily distorting scale.

  Kiley’s close-range sensors were stirring, focusing on the rock. It had worn down over the aeons, its surface abraded by the gentle unceasing caress of dust. Impact craters and jagged fracture cliffs smoothed down to soft curves. One end was scarred by a white splash-pattern of methane frost, tapering rays extending their grip over a third of its length.

  Lasers swept the rock from end to end, building a cartographic profile within the on-board lightware processors. Cold gas precision positioning thrusters fired, moving the probe closer in centimetre increments. When it hovered a metre above the rock, microfocus photon amps telescoped out of their cruise phase sheaths, aligning themselves on the surface.

  The image changed, a lunar mare strewn with boulders; Julia knew she was seeing the dust motes sticking to the rock. Kiley’s lightware processors began to run a spectrographic analysis program. She watched the image alter, as if it had been overlaid with a grid of square lenses. Data began to flow back into the probe’s lightware as the blurred squares were examined one by one.

  Kiley’s photon amps quartered a square metre of the rock’s surface a millimetre at a time, then it fired its cold gas thrusters and moved to the next section. Again. Again.

  The fourth time, one of the photon-amp grid squares flared red. The eight surrounding ones were immediately reviewed by the spectrographic program. It registered carbon, hydrogen, and various trace minerals.

  The block of squares expanded to fill her vision, regaining their focus.

  There, Royan said in awe. In the middle of a desolation more profound than Gomorrah: life itself. And what life.

  The photon-amp focus was at its ultimate resolution, centred on a clump of microbes. They looked like a smear of caviare, tiny spheres, tar-black, sticky; they glistened with a dull pink light thrown by Jupiter’s albedo.

  Call it Jesus, call it Gaia, call it Allah, said Royan. Whatever name you wish to bestow, but don’t tell me God doesn’t exist. The true miracle of this universe is life itself. Left to fate, to random chance groupings of amino acids in the primal soup, it could never happen. Never! We may evolve as Darwin said, man may not have been made in God’s image; but that spark, that very first spark of origin from which we grew, that was not nature. That was a blessing. We are not a side product of an uncaring cosmos, a chemical joke.

  You’re preaching to the converted, remember? She wasn’t surprised by his outburst, nor its intensity; both of them had a strong quasi-religious background; her at the First Salvation Church, him with the Trinities, it was another thread in their bond.

  Kiley’s sampling waldo slid out, micromanipulator claws closing around the clump of microbes. It retracted and placed them delicately inside the probe’s collection flask.

  Cold gas thrusters fired again, backing Kiley away from the rock. The lightware processors began to check over the propulsion systems.

  You did this for me? Julia asked.

  I did. Do you see now, Snowy? Do you see the why of it?

  Kiley’s chemical thrusters fired for a long time, lifting it out of the ring’s inclination, into free space where the plasma drive could be used. Star trackers locked on to their target constellations, orientating the probe for its flyby manoeuvre burns.

  No, she said, inexplicably humbled by the admission. She could sit and think, run a logic matrix, tear the problem apart. Answers never eluded her when she was in that state, a determined computer/human fusion. But somehow just the thought of expending all that effort inhibited her. Perhaps this appalling vastness of the gas giant’s domain had numbed her into dormancy.

  Kiley was shedding mass, discarding its primary mission modules, the sampling waldos, precision attitude thrusters, photon-amp booms, laser scanners, all peeling off like mounting scales. She watched them go, oblong boxes and spidery cybernetic arms, adding to the gas giant’s ring. In a few thousand years vacuum ablation would reduce them to tissue flakes, a swarm of slowly dissipating metallic confetti.

  The melancholia had really gripped now. The Kiley memory was its own Trojan, draining her.

  It’s like this, Snowy: the theorists, Rick Parnell and his merry band, they all say the microbes survived their flight between stars because they
are simple primitive organisms. They’re wrong. I know they’re wrong. How could they be primitive? They are life’s pinnacle, separated from amoebas by billions of years of evolution. These microbes, Snowy, came from a dying world, travelling Christ knows how far to get here – certainly there are no burnt-out stars in our immediate section of the galaxy. Think of it, their planet, its sun growing cold, a freezing atmosphere bleeding off into space, oceans evaporated, mountains fallen. Anything that could adapt to survive such a decaying environment would have to be the toughest, most forbidding, most ruthless form of life imaginable. Then, when whatever it was that eventually triumphed – plant, or algae, or even animal – was all that was left, it made the final jump. It adapted to space. It abandoned its birthworld and achieved species immortality. That’s what we all strive for, Snowy, deep down. Continuation, the biological imperative. It drives us, preordains our movements from before we are born, it is universal and irrefutable. That, if you like, is our spiritual burden.

  I think I see now, she said. The microbes are a stronger form of life than any on Earth, more potent.

  And more, he said, eagerness swelling like a wave. They live – thrive – in a vacuum. I want to tame them, Snowy. I want to put them to use, make them work for us. Extraterrestrial bioware, a kind of green space technology, and all at your disposal. My wedding present, at last.

  Kiley’s plasma drive came on, a two-minute burn, nudging the probe in towards Jupiter and the flyby. A slingshot manoeuvre that would fling it out of the gas giant’s gravity field and back to Earth.

  Is that what you did when the microbes got back? she asked. Manipulate them?

  So I believe, that’s certainly what I intended when I left this package for you.

  There must be more, then.

  Yes. A diary. A daily package, so you could see my progress. And then if anything went wrong, you’d be able to see what I was working on before it happened.

  Daily?

  Perhaps not. But there will be accounts, lab notes, reviews, explanations, tables of results.

  Where, Royan? I need them. Today. Now.

  If you’re following me, you’ll find them.

  Oh, God, she called out, furious, frightened. What have you done, what are you doing? The chaos you’ve caused.

  The smile reappeared. That’s me, Snowy. The king of misrule. You know that’s me. You loved that part of me, it excited you, as your power did to me. Opposites.

  God damn you! You’ve no right.

  Don’t cry, not for me. I’m not worth it. If I’ve screwed up, you’ll put me back together again. You’re so good at that.

  When I find you, I won’t patch you up, I’ll tear you to bloody pieces.

  That’s my Snowy. He laughed.

  Cancel Integrity Monitored Link to Processor Node One. Squirt Package into NN Core Two.

  The study materialized about her again. The light pouring through the windows was oppressively harsh after Jupiter’s gloaming. She blinked rapidly.

  What do I want with him? NN core two asked peevishly.

  Run a total review of Kiley’s sensor memories.

  Oh yes, Io’s volcanos.

  That sort of affinity had unnerved her for a week or so after the first NN core had come on line. Now she just took it for granted. The NN core would comb through Kiley’s sensor memories, running comparisons against existing star maps. That was how Io’s volcanos had been discovered, by accident, reviewing old Voyager pictures for a guidance plot. Maybe, just maybe, Kiley had recorded the starship.

  Julia pushed the chair back, and pulled her shoes off. She walked over to the window. Daniella and Matthew were still splashing about in the pool. And they had got that damn dog in with them. The times she’d told them.

  She pressed her cheek against the window, watching them. The worry which her entrancement with Jupiter had suppressed was beginning to rise. Microbes and starships. Which was she supposed to be looking for? And Royan, uncertain enough to leave her warnings, perhaps the most chilling aspect of the whole affair. He was always so cocksure.

  It wasn’t as if she could offload the burden, confess to someone. ‘Bugger you, Royan,’ she snapped.

  The terminal on the desk bleeped for attention. Now what? She braced herself and turned.

  Her personality package had returned from Eienso’s mainframe. Clifford Jepson had paid the money into Leol Reiger’s account.

  17

  The Pegasus was spiralling down towards the Colonel Maitland. Greg watched the vast bulk of the airship appear on the bulkhead flatscreen, its contra-rotating fans dawdling in a doldrum calm. Their shallow approach angle showed it as a large black oval above the glistening deep-blue of the ocean. He found it disconcerting, the absorptive black surface, sharp edges, it didn’t seem to belong here at the centre of nature’s passive domain, an intrusive foreigner.

  ‘So why the guilty smile?’ Suzi asked.

  Greg clamped his lips together, he hadn’t realized he was smiling. ‘Nothing.’

  He and Eleanor had taken their honeymoon on one of the Lakehurst-class airships, that was back in the days when all long-distance flights were made by airships. Two weeks spent circling around Greenland and back down Canada’s east coast. A first-class cabin to themselves, day trips to resort centres, the eager buzz of third-class passengers on their way to a new life on homesteads springing up behind the retreating permafrost. The black shape was evocative, tripping his mind’s gates, delicious memories spilling out along his synapses.

  Above all was the gentleness, time spent entwined, time spent floating above fresh landscapes, above sunsets and dawns, gourmet meals, idle chatter, laughter. It had been stately.

  He rued the day of the airship’s passing, replaced with hypersonic planes powered by Julia’s all-pervasive giga-conductor. The last commercial trans-Atlantic airship flight had rated half a column in The Times one morning; he’d passed the cybofax over the breakfast table to Eleanor who quirked her lips in remorse. They had always said they would repeat the trip, but then there had been the kids, the groves to tend, responsibilities. Now all it ever could be was a sunny memory.

  Greg had never really adapted to hypersonics, the second age of air travel; two-and-a-quarter hours to New Zealand from England; Japan a hundred-minute streak over the slushy remnants of the North Pole. Where could you escape in a world like that?

  Jason Whitehurst had found the answer the hard way. The Pegasus had broken away from the Italian mainland over Genoa, hitting Mach eight above the Ligurian Sea. They were passing over the Straits of Gibraltar fifteen minutes later without slowing down, curving round north-west Africa to line up on the Cape Verde islands. Total elapsed time from Julia sending him the co-ordinates to arrival at the Colonel Maitland was forty-seven minutes.

  ‘We’ve just been given landing clearance by the captain,’ Pearse called.

  ‘Fine,’ Greg said. ‘Take her down.’ He stood up as Pearse spoke into the handset. Suzi got to her feet beside him. He noticed she used her arms to push herself up out of the deep chair. ‘You OK?’

  She pulled a face. ‘Sod it, yeah, I’ll do.’

  The leg of her shellsuit was torn, stained with a ribbon of blood, blue dermal seal visible through the open fabric. And what would Jason Whitehurst make of that?

  Greg’s face still stung, but he’d checked it in the toilet mirror. Appearance-wise it wasn’t too bad. His leather jacket had deflected a lot of the glass splinters. Out of the three of them, he had come off best. Even his neurohormone hangover had run its course.

  Two converging lines of bright strobe lights were flashing along the top of the Colonel Maitland, leading them in towards the recessed landing pad. At the front edge of the pad a large blister rose out of the fuselage, which he guessed was a hangar for Jason Whitehurst’s own plane.

  Greg walked forward as the Pegasus descended, compensating for the inclined deck. The chair at the front of the cabin had been straightened and tilted horizontal. Malcolm was lying on i
t; all he had on were jockey shorts, his brown skin mottled with big patches of dermal seal. Diagnostic probes were stuck to his torso and the nape of his neck, the medical unit’s screen showing an ecorche representation of his body, large sections coloured amber, two red pinpoints near his spine.

  ‘Is he going to be all right?’ Greg asked Rachel.

  She looked up from the plasma bladder’s LCD. ‘Yes. Nothing critical punctured or broken, just blood-loss trauma. But we got the plasma into him in time. He might need some skin replacement for his back, otherwise fine.’

  ‘Thank Christ for that.’

  ‘Never thought I’d be doing this again.’

  ‘Yeah, you and me both,’ he said.

  The Pegasus touched down with a slight tremor.

  Greg shrugged out of his jacket. ‘Pearse, give me a Tokarev and shoulder holster.’

  ‘Right.’ The hardliner went to one of the lockers. ‘Suzi, do you want a holster for your Browning?’

  ‘Nah, I stowed it.’

  Greg glanced at her. The Puma bag had been lost in the Prezda’s well. Her shellsuit wasn’t all that baggy, though. He didn’t ask.

  Pearse handed him the holster. ‘You want me to come with you?’

  ‘No,’ Greg said, velcroing the holster’s straps. ‘The deal is for me and Suzi. We shouldn’t be more than half an hour, forty minutes at the outside. Buy the girl and bring her back. After that we zip Malcolm here straight to a decent medical facility.’

  ‘Buy the girl,’ Pearse repeated. ‘That sounds so … God, I don’t know. Medieval?’

  ‘Something like that.’ Greg checked the Tokarev’s charge before slotting it into the holster. ‘But it’s preferable to the alternative, for her and us.’ He pulled his jacket back on, and pressed the belly hatch activation button.

  There were two people waiting for them on the pad. Hardliners, dressed in dark grey trousers and light jade V-neck sweaters, as if they were cabin stewards.