"Sean Francis?" Greg couldn't keep the reproach from showing in his voice. Cursed himself silently. "But he's years older than her."
Gabriel's grin was wicked. "He's three years younger than you. And she doesn't regard you as out of reach, now does she?"
Years of experience prevented him from showing the slightest ire. "The girl's got a silly crush, that's all. I can handle that. But Sean Francis, marrying the boss's granddaughter, well, that's . . ."
"Shocking? But Julia isn't the heir any more, she is the boss now." Gabriel put her hand over her heart, sighing fulsomely. "I think its romantic, myself."
"Does he? No, don't answer that, I don't want to know."
"Julia's really got you in a tizz, hasn't she?"
"Can we get back to the case, please?"
She chuckled. "Certainly, Gregory. You can forget about Sean Francis, he really is a clean-cut square, his only failing is his ambition. He looks at every problem to see how he can benefit from it."
"That's no crime."
There was a knock on the door, Martin Wallace poked his head round. "Dr. Ranasfari's here."
"Show him in," Greg said, and mouthed Kid gloves to Gabriel, suddenly wishing he'd thought to warn her in advance.
Dr. Ranasfari was in a foul mood. He looked like he hadn't slept for days. His eyes were red-rimmed, his hair was hanging limply, small flakes of dandruff dusted his collar. Creases crisscrossed his white shirt. There was no tie. Even the Institute's regulation security tag was missing.
His mind reflected his physical appearance; dull, shot through with frissons of agitation. The prospect that his creation had failed, coupled with the blitz against his patron, had come as a severe shock, Greg guessed. Jolting the secure academic world through which he moved. And now he had to answer impertinent questions. He wore hostility like a hedgehog coat.
"I'll be as quick as I can," Greg said. "I'm sure you have to get back to the Merlin."
No response.
"Have you ever told anyone about Philip Evans's NN core?"
"Certainly not."
"What about the giga-conductor?"
"No." Ranasfari sounded uninterested.
"Unintentionally perhaps, a slip of the tongue? One mistake would be all it'd take. People place a lot of weight on your words."
"Please, Mr. Mandel. Ask your questions, reassure yourself. But don't attempt to ingratiate yourself. I fully appreciate the emphasis Philip Evans places on your investigation, I have already discussed it with him. That is why I agreed to see you. Your conclusions from a minimum data source during your earlier instance of employment indicate your professional competence. Although, I personally suspect a degree of intuition was involved on your part."
"It was."
"Interesting. Is that part of your psi-enhancement?"
"It seems to be, although it's very much a secondary facet. Now, a loose word?"
"No. I don't make that sort of mistake."
"You of all people must appreciate the logic that there has been a serious leak within Event Horizon. Knowing about both the giga-conductor and the core logically makes you a suspect. However, now I'm satisfied you are not the origin of any leak"—Ranasfari smiled thinly—"that leaves the team which grew the core, and your own giga-conductor researchers."
The physicist's thin lips compressed dolefully. "I realise this. It . . . is difficult to accept that one of my people is responsible. I hope you are not asking me to point an accusatory finger?"
"No. But I'd appreciate any other leads from your department. For instance, the lightware cruncher you used to design the original cryogenic giga-conductor with, could that have been hacked?"
"No, it is isolated from the Event Horizon datanet."
Greg paused for a moment, waiting for any ideas to surface from his subconscious. He was aware of a background ache behind his temple. Options were converging at an alarming rate, he had a growing sense of conviction that the assistants weren't going to be the leak origin. Perhaps he'd picked the assumption off Gabriel. She was sitting on the bottom tier of seats, eyes closed, lost among the Tau multiplicities.
"Exactly how serious is this Merlin failure?" Greg asked, intuition prompting.
"Unless the cause can be determined precisely then it will be a major setback to both programmes," Ranasfari answered.
"Both?"
"Yes, the Merlin prospecting missions, and the commercial production of the giga-conductor."
"When did the Merlin actually fail?"
Ranasfari picked up on the flash of excitement in his voice. "I think I see what you are driving at. Yes. The Merlin failed yesterday morning, eight twenty-four, to be precise."
"After the blitz."
"Correct; approximately ten hours. Do you believe the two events are connected?"
Greg was certain of the connection. But there was a fragment of bedlam jarring what would otherwise have been an immaculate fusion of disjointed thoughts. The implication that it wasn't an obvious union. Yet it seemed straightforward. He almost let out a groan; this was as bad as the memox spoiler.
"The attack against Philip Evans could've been a blind," Greg ventured. "Remember the blitz was perpetrated against the whole Event Horizon network; one of the hackers could easily have tampered with the Merlin control programs while it was going on."
"But why the delay?"
"An attempt at disassociating the events? No, wait a minute, how much altitude could the Merlin add in ten hours? Would it make recovery more difficult?"
"Altitude increase over ten hours would be approximately one thousand five hundred kilometres; you have to remember that at the start of the flight the Merlin masses four times as much as it will when it rendezvouses with its target asteroid. That means a low initial acceleration. But certainly that additional fifteen hundred kilometres would add considerably to the cost of recovery. Its current three-and-a-half-thousand-kilometre orbit is way above the Sanger ceiling. An inter-orbit tug would have to be chartered specially, which is a totally uneconomic prospect. Physical recovery was well down our option list. In fact, given normal circumstances, it wouldn't be considered unless a second Merlin suffered a similar failure. There are a great many conceivable reasons for the shutdown; the giga-conductor cell is not the only new component in series-four models. Few components are common to every Merlin, its development is a continual process of evolution. And, of course, the giga-conductor cells performed perfectly in the space environment simulation tests, they were most extensive."
"But in the meantime a question mark hangs over introducing the giga-conductor cell."
"Yes, unfortunately. A Ministry of Defence team from Boscombe Down has already arrived to review our fault-analysis data."
"What has happened to the Merlin? Is it a total breakdown?" Greg asked.
"It looks like it. The propulsion system has shut down, and the communication link has been severed. It won't even respond to signals directed at its omnidirectional antenna."
"Could its state have occurred by transmitting a rogue set of instructions, ordering it to shut down?"
"Indeed," Ranasfari agreed. "Providing you had the correct codes."
"Which, presumably, are stored here in the Institute's memory cores."
"Yes."
"And are they isolated from the Event Horizon datanet?"
"No."
"So the attack could be an attempt to discredit Event Horizon's giga-conductor, which at the very least would delay military funding of your production lines, giving your rivals an opportunity to make up lost ground."
"That is certainly a theoretical possibility." The shadowy overtones of worry were lifting from Dr. Ranasfari's mind. "I congratulate you, Mr. Mandel."
Greg felt a weight of relief lifting. "I'd like to be kept informed of your progress on analysing the Merlin failure."
"Certainly."
"And if you can't find anything concrete may I suggest chartering an inter-orbit tug to recover it."
"I dou
bt the expense would be authorised."
"Mission planning will cost nothing. And if I don't come up with any positive leads I'll press Philip Evans to cough up the money."
"I'm sure someone as persuasive as yourself will have no trouble. Good day, Mr. Mandel." Dr. Ranasfari exited with what might have been the ghost of a smile on his mouth.
Gabriel gave him a slow laconic clap, the sound echoing hollowly in the empty gallery, Her eyes were still closed. "I am impressed. That was one of the slickest pieces of seduction I've seen for many a year. Poor Eleanor couldn't have stood a chance."
Greg ignored the crack. "Simple logic. You want wholehearted co-operation, get them on your side. And empathy does have its uses. Like charm, some of us have it."
He slouched on the journalists' seats next to her, letting the foam below the black imitation leather mould itself to his buttocks, and stretched his legs out. Beyond the glass, dismay seemed to be tightening its grip.
"How goes it with Ranasfari's team?"
"Total washout." Her eyes fluttered open. "If you interviewed every one of them all you'd find is a couple who've got a nice racket flogging off Event Horizon equipment and five synthoheads. You were right, Morgan Walshaw knows how to handle security."
"Has to be either the Ministry of Defence, or a mole, then."
"Shaping up that way," she agreed. "So what now?"
"Elimination. My intuition says the Merlin failure and the blitz are related in some way. At the moment the only way I can reconcile the two is if the attack on Philip Evans was intended to divert his attention while the Merlin was hashed up to discredit the giga-conductor."
"That's pretty tenuous, Greg. A few giga-conductor cells which may or may not have failed aren't going to bring the whole enterprise to a grinding halt. The breakdown could've been some kind of freak overspill from the attack on the NN core. That would be a connection of sorts."
"No, the Merlin breakdown wasn't an accident."
Gabriel didn't respond. At least she never questioned his intuition.
"Can you see the result of the failure analysis?" he asked.
"Sorry. Too far in the future from where we are."
"Well, not to worry, we'll find out in due course. It might all turn out to be empty hypothesis, Lord knows psi intuition isn't stone-scripted. But I'd put a great deal of money on that connection. I'll decide for sure after we've interviewed the NN core team. Walshaw should have reeled them in by the day after tomorrow. By the way, what can you see of Ranasfari?"
"Oh, God." She let out a long contemptuous breath. "Definitely a contender for the world's most boring human being. He just doesn't have any interests outside his professional work, I'm sure it can't be healthy."
"Leaves him open to blackmail?"
"I shouldn't think so. What could you possibly corrupt him with? In any case, he doesn't do anything remotely incriminating for the next few days, make that a week. And you've already cleared him."
"True." He pushed all the suspicions emanating from intuition out of his mind, cancelling the gland secretions, trying to sketch in a wholly logical course on the resultant virgin whiteness. "I want to take you to Wilholm and meet Philip Evans sometime."
"What for this time?"
"Two things. Give the staff the once-over to see if they knew about the NN core. And see if there's going to be another attack on him. If there is, it would mean I'm wrong about the opposition aiming at the giga-conductor. We'd be back to vengeance, Kendric di Girolamo, and the mole."
"Makes sense. When?"
"Tomorrow afternoon. I'm busy in the morning."
"So you are."
He couldn't tell whether her carefully neutral tone was disguising anger or amusement. Her mind gave the impression of total indifference. A balance of the two, perhaps?
"Will Julia be at Wilholm in the afternoon?" he asked.
A broad smile spread across Gabriel's chubby face. "You know, I do believe she will."
Chapter Nineteen
Ninety per cent of England's road network had been abandoned in the PSP decade; the energy crunch put paid to most private travel, and the incendiary sun steadily deliquesced the tarmac to a worthless residue. A pre-Warming style maintenance programme was out of the question, economically unfeasible, environmentally unsound. Motorways and critical link roads were kept open, but the rest was left to waste away. People who could afford cars bought them configured to cope with the rough terrain. The A47 was one of the roads the PSP was forced to refurbish; it was an essential transport artery between Peterborough and the A1, and the PSP desperately needed the goods which the city manufactured. It meant that the A47's traffic levels were high, and most of the vehicles commercial. Driving down it was a new experience for Eleanor; she began to realise how different England's city life had become from the pastoral existence of the countryside and smaller market towns. It was almost as though the country was developing a split personality. Of course, the gulf was more pronounced here than anywhere else.
Peterborough struck her as a tripartite Babylon, the old, the new, and the water-bound condemned by adverse circumstances to live with each other, rival siblings cooped up in the same house. It sat on the shore of the gigantic salt quagmire which used to be the most fertile soil basin in all of Europe. The Lincolnshire Fens were originally marshes, drained over centuries to provide a rich black loam which could grow any crop imaginable. They were perfectly flat, like Holland; on clear days you could see for forty or fifty kilometres over them, so some of Oakham's refugees had told her. The trouble was, the Fens' average height above sea level was two metres; in some places, like the Isle of Ely, they were actually below sea level. When the Antarctic ice melted they never stood a chance.
Peterborough absorbed nearly two-thirds of the population displaced by the rising water; the city had no choice, it was hemmed in between the new sludge to the east and a shabby band of tent towns on the high ground to the west. None of the refugees was going to move; they had lost their homes, they had found a functioning urban administration, and they were through with running, so they sat and waited for government to get off its arse and do something. The three attempts the PSP mounted to disperse them ended in riots. So the Party was left with no choice. They poured money into permanent accommodation projects, as well as allowing in foreign investment to ease the load on the Treasury, and as a result it became one of the most prosperous cities in England. Huge housing estates mushroomed to serve vast industrial precincts, a crazy mismatch of developments sprawling venomously over the green belt. A deep-water port was built above the drowned cathedral; dredgers reopened the Nene, gouging out a new laser-straight channel directly into the Wash.
Trade links, determination, and money, lots of money; that was the giddy synergy brew. Peterborough became England's Hong Kong, a unique city-state of refugees determined to carve themselves a new life. High on that special energy which crackles around Fresh Start frontiers. Everybody was on the up and up, on the make, on the take. If you couldn't find it in Peterborough, it didn't exist. A philosophy completely out of phase with the rest of the country's lethargy. The PSP city hall apparatchiks just couldn't move fast enough to keep track of the construction chaos that boiled out from the suburbs. Half of the economy was underground, Eurofrancs only; smuggling was rife; spivs bought themselves penthouses in New Eastfield. A resurgent Gomorrah, her father had called it.
Eleanor followed a big methane-powered articulated lorry down the gentle slope towards the bloated Ferry Meadows estuary, née Park, the Duo's suspension thrumming smoothly on the tough thermo-cured cellulose surface. The A47 turned left at the bottom of the slope, running along the top of a small embankment above the filthy, swirling water. After the lorry rumbled round the bend, she could see a string of ten barges moored across the mile-wide estuary between the base of the embankment and Orton Winstow. Artificial islands of rock and concrete were rising beside each of them.
She watched a crane swinging its load of rock from a bar
ge across to the centre of an island, dropping it with a low rumbling sound. A cloud of dust billowed up. When it cleared, she could see a gang of men swarming over the pile, rolling rocks down on to flat-topped carts so they could be packed behind the encircling wall of concrete.
The idea for an eddy-turbine barrage had been started back when the PSP was in power. They were generators that looked like propeller blades, mounted in narrow nacelles and tethered between the islands where the current spun them as it ebbed and flowed.
Peterborough's post-Warming industrial base had been founded on light engineering and gear production, easily served by the city's electricity allocation from the National Commerce Grid, and supplemented by solar panels. But the explosion of manufacturing had begun to attract heavier industries, pushing the power demand close to breaking point. Then after the Second Restoration the newly legitimised Event Horizon arrived. With its wholly modern industries, Peterborough was the obvious choice to supply the cyber-factories with components once Philip Evans brought them ashore. The already vigorous city went into overdrive. But its expanded fortunes brought it up against infrastructure capacity limits. The eddy-turbine barrage was intended to relieve the now-chronic energy shortage, one of a dozen projects rushed into construction to cope with the excessive demands Event Horizon was placing.
The traffic was snarled up in front of the Duo. Eleanor slowed, and saw a bus in front of the lorry had stopped to let out its passengers. They were all men in rough working clothes, carrying or wearing hard hats. They joined a group of about seventy waiting on the embankment below the road, level with the line of barges. There was a small jetty at the bottom of the embankment. A boat had just cast off, ferrying some of the men out to the islands. She could see a clump of men who'd been left behind on the jetty arguing hotly with a pair of foremen.
"They'll be lucky," Greg murmured as the Duo drove past the crowd milling aimlessly on the embankment.
"Why?"
"Tell you, the eddy-turbine barrage is a council project, right. Unless you're on the city council labour register, there's no way you'll get to work on it."