She had seen artists’ impressions of the commercial hypersonic jets which kombinate aerospace divisions were developing, long arrow-finned needles that looked like scaled-up missiles, cutting the transit time between continents to less than an hour. Car companies, those which had survived, were eager to bring out new vehicles, retooling factories which had lain idle for nearly fifteen years. Scooter sales were already booming.
Julia walked down the VIP podium’s steps, accompanying the Prime Minister and Prince Harry, lesser dignitaries trailing after them. She kept a beautifully straight face as she showed them round the spaceplane, pointing out features of interest; for once grateful for the steely discipline she had learnt at her Swiss boarding school. But it was hard – this is the air scoop, these are the wheels.
They posed under the flattened bullet nose as the press gathered for a video bite opportunity.
‘I would just like to say how immensely proud I am to be here today,’ David Marchant told the gaggle of reporters and channel crews. A forest of arms thrust AV recorders towards him. ‘This spaceplane is a quite tremendous achievement by the Event Horizon company. A clear sign that our social market policies are the right ones to put England back on its feet again. And my New Conservative government wishes to demonstrate its firm commitment to the space industry by awarding Dragonflight the contract to dispose of eleven thousand tonnes of radioactive waste. This waste is made up of the cores and ancillary equipment of redundant nuclear reactors, currently being stored at great public expense around the country. And we hope that ultimately all the old reactors in this country will be broken up and disposed of in a similar fashion.’
His aide stepped forward and handed him a sheaf of paper. He smiled and passed it to Julia. The contract’s datawork had been completed a week ago, but they had both decided to give it a high profile. The roll out was a golden opportunity. With the elections due in two months it would be a valuable campaign issue for the New Conservatives, supporting industry without direct PSP-style subsidies, and showing a practical commitment to the environment.
‘Thank you very much, Prime Minister,’ she said as the reporters shouted questions. ‘I’ll just give you a brief clarification of what the contract entails. Firstly Event Horizon will be vitrifying the waste into ten-tonne blocks in our Sunderland plant. Dragonflight will then lift them into orbit, where they will be assembled into clusters of five and attached to a solid rocket booster which will launch them into the Sun. This way we shall be getting rid of the waste once and for all. Something I’m sure we all have cause to celebrate.’
‘How much is the contract worth, Julia?’ someone shouted. Too loud to pretend she hadn’t heard.
‘As it says quite clearly in your information kit, operating costs for the Clarke-class spaceplane work out at four hundred pounds New Sterling per tonne lifted into low Earth orbit. If you know anyone who can offer a cheaper price, I’m sure the Prime Minister would be interested to hear from them.’ She took a pace back and turned sharp right as soon as she finished speaking, gesturing to Prince Harry and David Marchant towards Building One. A posse of aides and management staff instinctively clustered round, isolating her. Nobody else got a chance to shout any more questions.
Access GeneralBusiness. She loaded a note to postpone the announcement about the new cyber factories for a couple of weeks. There were eighteen of them, due to be built under stage twelve of Event Horizon’s expansion programme, ranging from a precision machinery shop to a large-scale composite structures plant, employing nearly thirty-five thousand people when they were complete.
Exit GeneralBusiness. It would never do for people to draw any unwarranted connections between the waste disposal contract and the siting of all eighteen factories in marginal constituencies.
The VIP reception was held in Building One, a spacious rectangular lounge on the second floor. Chairs had been pushed back against one wall, leaving room for the caterers to set up their table opposite. The seafood buffet was proving popular with the guests. Waiters circulated with glasses of Moët champagne on silver trays. A loud purr of conversation was drowning out the pianist.
Julia stood by the window wall sipping some of the champagne, watching the crowd of spectators traipsing round the spaceplane below. It was mainly family groups, parents leading eager children, stopping to take pictures under the nose. Five different channel news teams were recording their reporters using the spaceplane as a backdrop.
Patrick left the buffet table and came over. ‘You should eat something,’ he said around a mouthful of shrimp and lettuce.
‘I didn’t think you liked fat girls,’ she retorted.
‘I don’t.’ There was a gleam in his eye she knew well enough. ‘How long have we got to stay here?’
‘Another hour, at least. Be patient. It could be rewarding.’
‘Could be?’
‘Yah,’ she drawled.
‘All right.’ He gave her a hungry look.
She grinned back. It would have been exciting to sneak off into one of the disused offices upstairs. But there were security cameras everywhere, and experience had taught her that Rachel would never let her get out of the lounge alone.
‘I suppose I’d better do my eager hostess act,’ she said in resignation. Most of the people in the lounge were so much older than her, which meant she’d have to stick with small talk, or business. So boring. She had seen Katerina and Antonia and Laura milling about earlier, along with their boys. But they would all be chatting to the channel celebs. She didn’t fancy that either; the silver-screen magic tarnished rapidly in real life, she found. Greg and Eleanor were over on the other side of the lounge, talking to Morgan Walshaw and Gabriel Thompson, the woman he lived with. Greg looked uncomfortable and serious, but then he hated having to wear a suit and tie. She started towards them, at least she could tease Greg.
‘Miss Evans.’
The urgency in the voice surprised her. It clashed with the day’s mood. She turned.
It was Dr Ranasfari. Julia sighed inwardly, very careful not to show any disappointment. She couldn’t even make small talk with Dr Ranasfari. The tall, wiry physicist was forty-five years old, neatly turned out, as always, in a light-grey suit, white shirt, and a pink tie that matched her own suit’s colour. His dark face looked strained, brown eyes blinking incessantly, glossed back raven hair shone a spectral blue under the lounge’s bright biolum panels.
Dr Ranasfari was another of those people Julia always felt she had to impress. Though she doubted many people could impress Ranasfari. He was the genius in charge of the research team which had produced the giga-conductor for Event Horizon. It had taken him ten years; but her grandfather had never doubted he could do it.
‘The man’s dedicated,’ Philip Evans had told her once. ‘Bloody boring, mind, Juliet, but dedicated. That’s what makes him special. He’ll spend his life on a project if needs be. We’re lucky to have him.’
After the giga-conductor was unveiled to the world, and the need for total security was abolished, she had built Ranasfari a laboratory complex in Cambridge, and gave him a budget of twenty million pounds New Sterling a year to spend on whatever projects he wanted. He was currently working on a direct thermocouple, a solid-state fibre which would convert thermal energy straight into electricity, eliminating any need for conventional turbines and generators. The potential applications for geothermal power extraction alone were colossal. If he asked for fifty million a year she would grant it.
‘No drink, Cormac?’ she asked lightly. He never actually objected to her using his first name, although she was always Miss Evans to him. ‘You really ought to have one glass at least, this is as much your day as it is mine.’
His lips twisted nervously, showing a flash of snow-white teeth. ‘Thank you, no. Miss Evans, I really must speak with you.’
She had never seen him so agitated before. Her humour spiralled down. ‘Of course.’ She signalled to Rachel.
Julia supposed she ought to be g
rateful Ranasfari had come directly to her, it was a silent acknowledgement of her authority. There were dozens of premier-grade executives who supervised Event Horizon’s innumerable divisions, but ultimately they all answered to her. The company wasn’t just hers in name, she took sole responsibility for its management, to the amazement and increasing fascination of the world at large. Responsibility, but not the burden of organization, that was shared, quietly, unobtrusively.
The Neural Network bioware core was the final gamble of a dying billionaire, a bid for immortality of the mind. It had to be a billionaire, nobody else could afford the cost. Philip Evans had spliced his sequencing RNA into the bioware, replicating his own neuronic structure. When the NN core had grown to its full size his memories had been squirted out of his dying brain and into their new titanium-cased protein circuitry.
And it had worked. His memories operated in a perfect duplicate of his neural pathways, providing a continuation of personality. Julia had never heard the NN core utter a single out-of-character remark. It was Grandpa.
He had plugged himself into Event Horizon’s datanet, orchestrating the company’s expansion with an efficiency far in excess of any ordinary managerial system. Seventy years of experience, knowledge, and business guile put into practice by a mind with more spare processing capacity than a light-ware number cruncher. No detail was too small to escape his scrutiny, every operational aspect could be overseen with one hundred per cent attention. With him to guide her faltering steps it was no surprise that Event Horizon had flourished the way it had. Poor old Patrick with his dusty academic degree could never hope to match her when it came to business tactics. In tandem with her grandfather she made more commercial and financial decisions in a day than he would make in the next ten years working for his family organization.
And at the end of the day she could confide in Grandpa totally. He always understood. The invisible friend of childhood imagination, upgraded for the rigours of adult life, infallible, and virtually omnipotent. It was wonderfully reassuring.
The empty office Julia and Ranasfari wound up commandeering overlooked Building One’s giant central assembly hall. Even today, with half of the hall’s staff attending the roll out ceremony, there was a lot of activity on the floor. Integration bays around the inner wall were brightly lit, showing white-coated technicians manoeuvring large sections of machinery into place, or crowded round terminal display cubes. Little flat-top cyber trucks followed colour-coded guidance strips along alleyways formed by bungalow-sized blocks of equipment. The spaceplane production line dominated the centre of the hall. The way the craft in various stages of construction were pressed nose to tail along its length was reminiscent of some biological growth process, Julia thought, a cyber-queen’s birth passage, straight out of one of those bigbudget channel horror shows. At the far end were skeletal outlines, triangles of naked ribs and spars which caged spherical tanks and contoured systems modules coated in crinkled gold foil. As the spaceplanes progressed down the line, sections of the metalloceramic hull had been fitted, the wheel bogies added, engines installed. Three almost complete craft were parked in the test bays right in front of the doors, people walking over their wings, big ribbed hoses and power cables plugged into open inspection hatches, polythene taped over various vents and inlets.
Julia sat in the swivel chair behind the desk, a black imitation-wood affair with an Olivetti terminal linked into a complicated CAD drafting board. The office belonged to a middle-manager in the microgee module power systems bureau. Rachel checked it out, then closed the door behind her, standing sentry duty. Dr Ranasfari sank into the cheap thickly padded chair in front of the desk.
‘What is it, Cormac?’ Julia asked.
He gave another nervous grimace. ‘Perhaps I should have gone to Mr Walshaw, but I really feel this must be taken up at the highest level. And the Prime Minister is here, he will listen to you.’
Julia moved from studious interest to outright fascination. Ranasfari never showed the slightest concern for anything outside his work.
Open Channel To NN Core.
Hello, Juliet, what’s the problem? I thought you’d be enjoying yourself today, Philip Evans said soundlessly into her mind.
It’s Ranasfari, she told him. I’d like you to listen in on this. I might want your opinion.
‘That sounds very drastic, Cormac,’ she said out loud. ‘But you know I’ll help in whatever way I can.’
He nodded, squeezing the knuckles of his left hand. ‘Thank you. It concerns Dr Edward Kitchener. You know I used to be one of his students?’
‘I didn’t know that, no. But I’ve heard of Edward Kitchener.’ Even as she said it she remembered: Kitchener’s gruesome murder had dominated the newscasts three days ago, even managing to nudge Scotland off the premier bulletins on Friday night. She couldn’t remember seeing much else about it since, although there had been an update this morning, some poor detective in the hot seat, unable to satisfy the incessant questions that reporters were flinging at him.
Grandpa, have they caught the killer yet?
No.
Ah. I think I see where we’re leading.
‘His death was a tragedy,’ she said hurriedly.
‘Yes. And the culprit still has not been brought to justice. That is what I want Miss Evans, justice. Kitchener was a brilliant man. Brilliant. He had flaws, weaknesses, we all do. But his genius is undeniable. Simple dignity demands that his murderer is caught. I’m not asking for vengeance. I do not want the return of the death penalty. Nor do I want this barbarian quietly eliminated. But I do want him caught and tried, Miss Evans. Please. The police … they’ve had three days. I’m sure they’re doing their best, but after all Oakham is just a provincial station. You must impress the Prime Minister, and through him the Home Secretary, on the absolute urgency of this case.’
Tricky one, Juliet. According to finance division records, we were paying Dr Edward Kitchener for research work.
What? I don’t remember that.
It was a contract issued by Ranasfari.
Bloody hell.
Damn right, girl. You start pushing Marchant for action now, and people will accuse you of meddling in police affairs. There’s enough allegations about you and Event Horizon having undue influence over the New Conservatives as it is.
‘What project was Dr Kitchener working on for us?’ she asked Ranasfari.
He stopped playing with his hands. ‘I didn’t think it was worth bringing to your attention,’ he said evasively.
She decided to go all out on the friendship routine. ‘Cormac, you know you have my full confidence. That’s why your budget doesn’t have to be cleared through the finance division first, I don’t want you having to justify yourself to accountants. I genuinely do appreciate the value of pure research.’
Seductress! Mental laughter echoed faintly.
‘Well, thank you.’ Ranasfari ducked his head. ‘I asked Edward to look into wormholes for me. It corresponds with his field of interest. He was quite intrigued by the prospect. We discussed a fee, but he was more interested in the specialist programs our software division could provide for his light-ware processor than actual money. He agreed to take the contract, and I would channel his software requests through my laboratory. The money was just a token.’
Access General Encyclopedia. Query: Wormholes, Category Physics.
A neat little précis emerged from the processor.
‘When you say wormholes, you mean the instantaneous connections through space-time, I take it?’ she asked.
‘Yes. Wormholes are quite permissible under Einsteinian relativity.’
‘I know it’s off the point, but what exactly is your interest in these wormholes?’
‘I thought, Miss Evans,’ he said stiffly, ‘I thought that there might be a possible application in interstellar transit.’
‘A stardrive?’ she said in a surprised whisper.
He nodded, thoroughly miserable.
‘Faster th
an light travel?’
Another brief nod.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Julia. She summoned up a logic matrix from the processor node, feeding in the relevant bytes. The combination of irrational brain and coldly precise nodes gave her an ability to dissect problems from oblique angles, fusing intuition and syllogism in a way no pure computer could match. Data packages flowed and merged through the mental construct, budding into ideas. Most she rejected, the remainder opened up interesting options.
‘Who else would know that Kitchener was working for us?’ she asked.
‘Secrecy was not something I would wish to impose on Edward. But he was not naturally communicative, certainly not to the media. His students would know, of course, probably several high-level theoretical cosmologists. He maintained contacts throughout the physics community, in fact academia in general. The free exchange of ideas is vital in such a field.’
She ignored the defensive tone.
How about it, Grandpa? Could Event Horizon be tied in?
You mean, was he killed to prevent us from obtaining a stardrive?
Yes.
It’s a probability, Juliet, you know it is. But I can’t see anyone getting so worked up about it that they’d butcher the old boy, not for something that hypothetical. Besides, if it is possible to build an FTL stardrive, then ultimately it will be built. Kitchener might have been a wild card, but plodders have their place too. I expect Ranasfari could crack it if he put enough time in.
Lord, I hope he doesn’t. I rather wanted that direct thermocouple.
What are you going to do, Juliet?
Well, we can’t ignore Kitchener’s murder now. If there is someone that paranoid about Event Horizon walking round loose, then I want them behind bars pronto.
Attagirl.
She put her elbows on the desk, and pressed her palms together. ‘I will have Morgan Walshaw contact the Home Office directly,’ she said. ‘I think I can see how we can get this terrible crime solved quickly.’