The Mandel Files (11 page)

“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 always 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.

CHAPTER 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 unbilicals 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.”

“So Event Horizon only has the two cyber-factory ships left out here now?” Greg asked.

“That’s right. There used to be nine of us out here a couple of years back, but the rest have left now. They’re docked in the Wash outside Peterborough. Their cyber-systems are being stripped out and reinstalled in factories on land. All part of the Event Horizon legitimization policy. They were all gear factories, except for Kenton and Costellow, those two used to specialize in producing the actual cyber-systems themselves. Real top of the range stuff; all our own designs, too. The old man kept research teams going ashore in Austria, they provided us with the templates; good enough to match any of the Pacific Rim gear. Bloody clever that.”

“Oh?”

“Don’t you see? Philip Evans has built up a capability to expand the company at an exponential rate. The cyber-systems are that sophisticated. All he needs is raw material, and financial backing. The factories will multiply like amoebas, yes?”

“You sound like you’re happy with Event Horizon.”

“Christ, I mean totally. Philip Evans is a genius. Event Horizon has so much potential, you know? A real crest-rider. And I’ve done my penance out here, ten years’ bloody hard graft. When Oscot docks I’m going to be in line for a divisional manager’s slot.”

The integrated Sanger was sitting at the end of the runway, white vapour steaming gently out of vent points on both orbiter and booster, glowing pink in the fast-fading light. Greg’s intuition made itself felt as he walked down the gantry arm towards the orbiter’s hatch. It wasn’t much, a ghost’s beckoning finger, distracting rather than alarming.

For a moment he was worried that it might be the orbiter. That’d happened before, a Mi-24 Hind G in Turkey which was going to take him and his squad on a snatch mission behind the legion lines, he’d balked as he was climbing in. It was a mindscent, the chopper smelt wrong. The Russian pilot had bitched like hell until a maintenance sergeant had noticed the gearbox temperature sensor was out. When they broke the unit open, it turned out the main transmission bearings were running so hot they’d melted the sensor.

But this touch of uncertainty was different, there was no intimation of physical danger. He knew that feeling, clear and strong, experiencing it time and again in Turkey.

He hesitated, getting an enquiring glance from Sean Francis.

“We’ve only had eight fatalities in twelve years of operations,” the Oscot’s captain said helpfully.

“It’s not the spaceplane,” Greg answered. Precisely how much his intuition was gland-derived was debatable, but when he did get a hunch this strong it usually squared out in the end. Even before he’d received the gland, Greg had believed in intuition. Every squaddie did to some degree, right back to Caesar’s footsoldiers. And now he had the stubborn rationale of neurohormones to back the belief, giving it near total credibility.

The rest of the security team were watching him. He gave them a weak grin and began walking again.

The orbiter’s circular hatch was a metre wide, with a complicated-looking locking system around the rim. Bright orange rescue instructions were painted on to the fuselage all around it. Greg shrugged out of his coverall and put his helmet on before he was helped through by the launch crew.

It was cramped inside, but he was expecting that, low ceiling, slightly curving walls, two biolum strips turned down to a glimmer. Another circular hatch in the centre of the rear bulkhead opened into the docking airlock.

“You the first-timer?” asked the pilot. He was twisted round in his seat, a retinal interface disk stuck over one eye, like a silver monocle. The name patch on his flightsuit said Jeff Graham.

“Yes,” Greg said as he sat in the seat directly behind the pilot. Puffy cushioning slithered under his buttocks like thick jelly.