‘What if it missed?’ Greg asked. The orbiters didn’t have a jet engine, they couldn’t go around.
‘They don’t,’ Sean Francis said.
7
‘It’s impressive,’ Morgan Walshaw admitted. ‘One of the biggest tekmerc deals for quite some time. We estimate thirty to thirty-five of them were assembled to turn our memox-crystal furnace operators. As far as we can tell, they started last June, and they were still recruiting until November. That kind of involvement would take kombinate-level resources.’ There was a grudging note in his voice that implied respect, or even admiration.
Julia didn’t like that, the security chief was supposed to be guarding her and Grandpa, not paying compliments to their enemies. It was that bloody dividing line between the legal and illegal again, too thin, far too thin.
‘So it’s impressive,’ Philip Evans grunted. ‘So is your division’s budget, Morgan. Question is: what are you doing about it?’ He was sitting at the head of the table in the study with Julia and Morgan Walshaw on either side, facing each other.
Julia would’ve liked to voice her own criticism, but didn’t quite have the nerve. Morgan Walshaw was a forbidding figure, he’d always been stern around her, as if she didn’t match up to his expectations.
‘My priority at the moment is to halt the spoiler,’ Walshaw said. ‘Thanks to Greg Mandel we’ve rounded up all the guilty furnace operators who were on their furlough. Unfortunately none of the Zanthus management personnel he interviewed were responsible for circumventing the security monitors, we have to conclude the culprit is up there now. Mandel should be able to find him without any trouble.’
‘Told you that boy was just what we needed,’ Philip Evans said.
Walshaw remained unperturbed by the implied criticism, his composure mechanical. ‘Yes. We shall have to give serious consideration to employing gland psychics in security after this. The tekmercs seem to be making good use of them.’
Julia pulled a face. Her grandfather caught it and squeezed her hand softly.
‘Certainly, I believe the tekmerc team who ran the spoiler used them quite extensively on this occasion,’ Walshaw went on. ‘We’ve been running some deep analysis on our furnace operators, and there is overwhelming evidence that the tekmerc team assembled a comprehensive profile on every one of them. Bank accounts, medical records, past employers’ personnel files, they were all sampled by the team’s hotrods. I think we’d be correct in assuming that the likely candidates were also scanned by a psychic to see if they would be susceptible in the final instance. It’s very significant that not one of the furnace operators they approached ever came to us.’
‘How many did they turn?’ Philip Evans asked,
‘So far, we’ve nabbed fourteen, out of a total of eighty-three on furlough. Greg Mandel and Victor Tyo are due up at Zanthus tonight. Probability suggests there are between four and six furnace operators currently in orbit who’ve been turned. We’ve done our best to make sure no news of the round-up has leaked. Not that they can run, but there is the prospect of sabotage to consider. Out of the fourteen we’ve already got, two had consented to kamikaze if they were cornered up at Zanthus.’
‘Bloody hell!’ Philip shouted. ‘What kind of people do we employ? That’s damn near twenty per cent of them willing to sell us out at the drop of a hat!’
‘It’s over now, Grandee,’ Julia said in a small voice. ‘Please.’ She bowed her head so he wouldn’t see how upset she was. It’d been a good morning for him, he’d eaten well, and he wasn’t swearing like he usually did, even his colour was almost normal. But now she could see the pink spots burning on his cheeks, showing just how badly worked up he was, which wouldn’t do his heart any good.
There were some days when she wanted it all to be over, this pain-drenched clinging to life. And that wish only brought more guilt. Psychics would be able to see that clearly. Perhaps Walshaw would hold off using them until afterwards. She ought to have a word with him about that.
When she looked up the security chief was staring candidly out of the window.
‘All right, Juliet,’ her grandfather said in a calmer voice. ‘I’ll be good.’
She gave him a tentative smile.
‘I don’t believe the crystal-furnace operatives are representative of Event Horizon personnel as a whole, nor any of the other Zanthus workers for that matter,’ Walshaw said. ‘Theirs is an extraordinarily high-stress situation. There is an average of three fatalities a year, a significant chance of radiation poisoning, and the psychological pressures from living in such a closed environment are way above normal. Those factors came out time and again from all the interviewees.’
‘Yeah, OK,’ Philip Evans said grumpily. ‘I’m a no-good mill owner, exploiting his downtrodden workers. What else is new? You got any good news for me?’
‘Greg Mandel should’ve pulled the last of the furnace operators by this time tomorrow. We’ll be sending up the replacements on an afternoon flight, so from tomorrow evening the spoiler will be over. Plus, the memox crystals tagged as contaminated last week haven’t been dumped yet. That’s nearly two million Eurofrancs we’ll recover.’
‘Jesus, chucking away perfectly good crystals like a crap dump. That’s a bugger, that is.’ He gave Julia a forlorn smile.
Walshaw shrugged. ‘Only way to do it.’
‘What about the people who organized this?’ Julia asked. Walshaw hadn’t said anything about them, as if they didn’t matter. He lived for the game, not the players, she felt sure of it.
‘Difficult,’ he said.
‘Why?’ She made it come out flat and cold, and never mind if he disapproved.
‘This is what we call a finale deal. It’s all cut-offs, understand? The tekmercs who made the moves, turned our people, they’d be assembled by an old pro, someone with a reputation. This leader, he’s the only point of contact between the team and the backers, the ones who want Event Horizon spoiled. Now first we’d have to find one of the tekmercs. OK, maybe we could do that; they’ve all gone to ground right now, but a deal this size is going to leave traces, and we’ve got some pretty accurate descriptions. Once we get a tekmerc we extract the team leader’s name.’
‘How?’ she blurted, cursing herself instantly. This was why she’d never probed security before. The secret horror, and fascination. Right down at the bottom of all the smart moves were people who deliberately inflicted pain on each other, who chose to do that.
‘Not as bad as you might imagine,’ Morgan Walshaw said placidly. ‘Not these days. There are drugs, sense overload techniques, gland psychics. Greg Mandel would just read out a list of names to the tekmerc, and see which chimed a mental bell. But even if we obtain the name, it still doesn’t do us any good. That team leader, he’ll already have vanished off the face of the Earth. Finale, remember? He won’t put this deal together for anything less than a platinum handshake. New identity, a plastique reworking from head to toe – hell, even a complete sex change, it’s been known. You see, it’s not only us he’s hiding from now. His ex-employers, they know he’s the only link back to them, and that I’m going to be hunting him. They want him zapped.’
‘So why would he do the job in the first place?’ Julia asked.
Morgan Walshaw smiled gently. ‘Kudos. A finale is the top of the tree, Julia. If you’ve come far enough to be asked, you’re good enough to survive. No tekmerc ever turns down a finale. Take this one; for the rest of time, he’s going to be the one who burnt Event Horizon for forty-eight million Eurofrancs. He beat me, he beat your grandfather. And even if I catch him, or they catch him, nobody’s ever going to know. His reputation has made it clean.’
‘Bugger of a world, isn’t it, Juliet?’
She turned to her grandfather, surprised by his level questing stare.
‘You approve,’ she accused.
‘No, Juliet, I don’t approve. I regard tekmercs as pure vermin, dangerous and perennial. Doesn’t matter how many you stomp on, there’s alwa
ys more. All I hope is that you’ve learned something from this sorry little episode. Don’t ever lower your guard, Juliet, not for an instant.’
She dropped her eyes to the table. ‘You will try, won’t you?’ she asked Walshaw.
‘Yes, Julia, I’ll try.’
‘Me too.’ She pressed her lips together in a thin determined line.
‘You’ll do nothing, girl,’ Philip said.
‘They nearly ruined us, Grandpa! Everything you’ve built. We’ve got to know who. I’ve got to know who. If I’m going to stand any chance, I need the name.’
‘Doesn’t mean you go gallivanting about chasing will-o’-the-wisps.’
‘I’ll do whatever I can,’ Julia said with stubborn dignity. She subsided into a sulk, certain that Walshaw would be silently censuring her outburst. Well, let him, she thought. Anger was an improvement on boredom. If only she didn’t feel so apprehensive with it.
8
The laser grid scanned slowly down Greg’s body, a net of fine blue light that flowed round curves and filled hollows. He was quietly thankful he kept in trim: this kind of clinical catechism was humbling enough, suppose he’d got a beer gut?
He’d spent an hour in the Dragonflight crew centre, out on one of the spaceplane barges. An annexe of the payload facility room, composite-walled cells filled with gear-module stacks, most of them medical. The medical staff had been anxious to test him for exceptional susceptibility to motion sickness; space-adaptation syndrome, they called it.
‘If you do suffer, we have drugs that can suppress it for a couple of days,’ the doctor in charge had said. ‘But no more than a week.’
‘I’ll be up there a day at the most,’ Greg told him. He was confident enough about that. The interviews at Stanstead had gone well. After Angie Kirkpatrick had cracked it’d been a simple matter of cross-referencing names.
The laser grid sank to his feet, then shut off. Greg stepped out of the tailor booth, and a smiling Bruce Parwez handed him his clothes. A long-faced man with bright black eyes. Dark hair cut close, just beginning to recede from the temples. His broad-shouldered build was a give-away, marking him down as a hardliner.
‘Your flightsuit will be ready this afternoon,’ the technician behind the booth’s console said, not even looking up.
Greg thanked him and left, glad to be free of the ordeal.
Sean Francis was waiting for them outside. ‘The medics have given you a green light,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think we’ve ever sent up anyone with so little free-fall training before.’ Francis had been markedly relieved when Greg had cleared his ship’s modest security team, taking it upon himself to see him through his pre-flight procedures. He had been grateful for the assistance, but found the man irritating after a while. He supposed it was culture clash. In age they were contemporaries. But after that, there was nothing. Francis was a dedicated straight arrow, high-achiever. It made Greg pause for what might’ve been.
‘I’ve got several hundred hours’ microlight flight time,’ Greg said.
‘That’ll have to do then, yes?’
‘We’ll take care of you,’ Bruce Parwez said. ‘Just move slowly and you’ll be all right.’
‘You had many tours up at Zanthus?’ Greg asked.
‘I’ve logged sixteen months now.’
‘Is there ever much trouble up there?’
‘Tempers get a bit frayed. Bound to happen in those conditions. Mostly we just separate people and keep them apart until they cool off. There’s no real violence, which is just as well. We’re only allowed stunsticks, no projectile or beam weapons, they’d punch clean through the can’s skin.’
They walked along a corridor made of the same off-white composite as the crew centre, bright biolums glaring, rectangular cable channels along both walls. Then they were out into a sealed glass-fronted gallery running the length of the hangar’s high bay, half-way up the wall.
Greg looked down at the Sanger booster stage being flight-prepped below. It was a sleek twin-fin delta-wing craft, eighty-four metres long with a forty-one-metre wingspan. The fuselage skin was a metalloceramic composite, an all-over blue-grey except for the big scarlet dragon escutcheons on the wings. Power came from a pair of hydrogen-fuelled turbo-expander-ramjets which accelerated it up to Mach six for staging. Greg had only seen the spaceplane on the channels before; up close it was a monster, an amalgamation of streamlined beauty and naked energy. Fantastic.
‘How many Sangers does Dragonflight operate?’ Greg enquired as the three of them moved down the gallery to see the orbiter stage being prepped in its big clean room behind the high bay.
‘Four booster stages, and seven orbiters,’ Francis said. ‘And they’re working at full stretch right now. The old man has ordered another booster and two more orbiters from MBB, they ought to arrive before the end of the year. Which will be a big help. Strictly speaking, we can’t afford to take an orbiter out of the commercial schedules for a Merlin launch, although I appreciate his reasoning behind the exploration programme. I just regard it as somewhat quixotic, that’s all. Still, it’s his money, yes?’
The orbiter, which rode the booster piggyback until staging, was a smaller, blunter version of its big brother; thirty-five metres long, rocket-powered, and capable of lifting four and a half tonnes into orbit, along with ten passengers.
Clean-room technicians dressed in baggy white smocks were riding mobile platforms round the open upper-fuselage doors. The Merlin had been removed from its environment-stasis capsule overnight, now it was being lowered millimetre by millimetre into the orbiter’s payload bay.
The probe was surprisingly compact; cylindrical, a metre and a half wide, four long. Its front quarter housed the sensor clusters, their extendable booms retracted for launch; two communication dishes were folded back alongside, like membranous golden wings. The propulsion section was made up of three subdivisions; a large cadmium tank, the isotope power source, shielded by a thick carbon shell, and six ion thrusters at the rear. It was all wrapped in a crinkly silver-white thermal protection blanket.
Greg let his gland start its secretion again, beginning to get a feedback from the technicians’ emotional clamour. It was the first time he’d ever encountered the space industry. These people were devoted. It went far beyond job satisfaction. They shared an enormous sense of pride, it was bloody close to being a religious kick.
The Merlin had finally settled on its cradle inside the orbiter’s payload bay. As the overhead hoist withdrew, the mobile platforms converged, allowing the huddles of white-suited technicians to begin the interface procedure. The pallet which would deploy the spacecraft in orbit was primed, attachment struts clamped to load points, power and datalink umbilicals plugged in. Monitor consoles were hive-cores of intense activity.
Greg nodded down at the little robot probe and its posse of devotees. ‘What happens next?’
‘We mate the orbiter to the top of the booster. After that the barge will dock with the airstrip. Your launch window opens at half-past eight, lasting six minutes.’
The payload bay doors hinged shut, bringing Greg one step closer to Zanthus. And it still didn’t seem real.
From Oscot’s deck the western horizon was a pastel-pink wash flecked with gold; the east a gash into infinity, not black, but dark, insubstantial, defying resolution, a chasm you could fall down for ever. Greg watched the crescent of darkness expanding as the Atlantic rolled deeper into the penumbra; occlusion slipping over the sky, giving birth to the stars. There was no air movement at all, dusk bringing its own brand of stasis. The world holding its breath as it slid across the gap between its two states.
Greg was wearing a baggy coverall over his new flightsuit. The coppery coloured garment fitted him perfectly, a one-piece of some glossy silk-smooth fabric, knees and elbows heavily padded. It had a multitude of pockets, all with velcro tags; small gear modules adhered to velcro strips on his chest – atmosphere pressure/composition sensor, medical monitor, Geiger counter, communicator
set. He’d even been given a new company cybofax, capable of interfacing with Zanthus’s ’ware, which was in the big pocket at the side of his leg. There was also a lightweight helmet, which he felt too self-conscious to put on before getting into the Sanger.
The first real stirrings of excitement rose as he led the security team towards the waiting tilt-fan at the prow, the realization that he was actually going into space finally gripping. Oscot’s deck was a bustle of tautly controlled activity. The ever-present grumble of the thermal generators’ coolant water was being complemented by the lighter braying of mobile service units. Five Lockheed YC-55 Prowlers were already on the deck. They were ex-Canadian Air Force stealth troop/cargo transports. Their shape was a cousin of the original B2 bomber, a stumpy, swept bat-wing, with an ellipsoid lifting-body fuselage; the entire surface had a radar-nullifying matt-black coating. There were no roundels, not even serial numbers. True smugglers’ craft. Greg watched as the sixth rose silently up out of its day-time sanctuary, an old oil tank converted into a split-level hangar. The big elevator platform halted at deck level with dull metallic clangs which rumbled away into the gloaming. The stealth transporters seemed to draw a thick veil of cloying shadow around themselves, eerily other-worldly.
Sean Francis caught Greg staring. ‘Neat machines. Yes?’
‘I didn’t know you still used them,’ Greg said.
‘Sure. Their avionics are a bit outdated now, but they’re more than adequate to infiltrate Scottish airspace. That’s our main target, their PSP is pretty shaky right now. It’ll only take a small push and they’ll fall.’
Greg watched large pallets of domestic gear systems being loaded through the Prowlers’ rear cargo doors. ‘You build all that stuff here?’
‘Yes. It’s a pretty broad range – crystal players, home terminals, microwaves, fridges, bootleg memox albums – that kind of thing. Our sister ship, Parnell, churns out more of the same, along with a whole host of specialist chemicals for our microgee modules up at Zanthus.’