The Mandel Files, Volume 2: The Nano Flower

by Peter F. Hamilton

  ‘Yes, I’ve just picked them up from Oakham School. They went on into the house.’

  ‘Picked them up from school,’ Greg chuckled. ‘Just an ordinary working mum, huh?’

  Julia grinned. ‘Looks like you’ve got a good crop this year,’ she said.

  ‘Best yet.’ He caught sight of Victor Tyo, Event Horizon’s security chief, standing respectfully a couple of metres behind Julia. A slender Euroasian with an adolescent’s face and thick black hair, he had slung his suit jacket over one shoulder, white shirt undone at the collar. At forty years old, he was young for the job, but Greg had worked with him on the virus case, Victor Tyo had what it took. That too young face was a misdirection, the brain behind could have been made from solid bioware. There weren’t many tekmercs who chanced going up against Event Horizon these days.

  Greg shook Victor’s hand warmly. ‘Where are Julia’s bodyguards? You’re far too old for hardlining now.’

  ‘Hey,’ Victor Tyo spread his arms. ‘You speak for yourself.’ He gestured with one hand. A nineteen-fifties Rolls Royce Silver Shadow was parked on the drive just above the farmyard, two sober-faced hardliners in ash-grey suits standing beside it.

  Greg rolled bis eyes. ‘My God, it’s the camouflage detachment.’ On the road at the top of the drive a flock of children was forming, plotting dark misdeeds.

  A horse-drawn caravan had pulled up in front of the gate, painted bright scarlet with yellow and blue trim. Greg recognized Mel Gainlee holding the reins, a spry pensioner who’d been coming to Hambleton for almost as long as Derek. He waved hopefully to Greg.

  ‘Christine.’

  She was staring across the field to where the ambulance was parking.

  ‘What?’ she asked guiltily.

  Greg handed her his cybofax wafer, glancing at the logo on the bottom right corner. Thankfully it was Event Horizon’s triangle and flying-V. That could have been embarrassing. ‘You and Derek sort the rest of the teams out for me, OK?’ His intuition had been sending out subtle warnings since he saw Victor Tyo had accompanied Julia. Victor was a good friend, but he didn’t make social calls in the middle of the working week. Neither did Julia, come to that.

  Christine’s face coloured slightly. ‘Sure, Dad,’ she agreed seriously.

  Greg felt a burst of pride. She really was growing up.

  ‘She’s quite something,’ Julia said as she and Victor Tyo walked with Greg down the rough track back to the farmhouse. Her bodyguards had fallen in a regulation ten paces behind. The kids on the road were letting off wolf-whistles.

  ‘Yeah.’ Greg couldn’t stop smiling.

  ‘Sorry if we interrupted. I’d forgotten what a pandemonium Hambleton is at picking time.’

  ‘No problem. Derek knows who to let through. I only put in an appearance for form’s sake.’

  ‘Where do they all come from?’ She gazed back towards the heat-soaked convoy.

  ‘From all over, of course.’

  The E-shaped farmhouse had been added to and extended over the years, bricks and stone and composite sheeting were all in there somewhere, hidden under a shaggy coat of reddish-green ivy. The steeply angled roof was made entirely from polished black solar panels. A couple of satellite dishes were mounted on the western gable end, pointing into the southern sky. The larger of the two was faded and scratched, obviously second hand, with a complicated-looking aluminium receiver at the focus.

  A gaggle of geese scattered, honking loudly as the five of them walked into the farmyard.

  ‘That’s new,’ said Julia, pointing at the satellite dishes.

  ‘Oliver put it up,’ Greg explained. ‘The boy’s gone astronautics crazy. He picks up all sorts of spacecraft communication traffic on it. Wants to go and live in New London. So Anita’s decided she’s going to live in a Greenland commune.’ Oliver and Anita were eleven-year-old twins, and took a savage joy in trying to be total opposites.

  Greg had planted evergreen magnolias around two sides of the farmyard, the third side was defined by a long wooden barn. The planks for which had come from the dead deciduous trees in Hambleton Wood. It was full with white kelpboard boxes ready for the picking, the stacks reaching up to the roof. Three tractors were drawn up outside, their wheels thick with mud.

  Julia looked at them pensively. ‘I really ought to have remembered this was the main fruit season.’

  ‘No reason why you should. Fruit picking isn’t something Event Horizon has cybernated.’

  ‘Oh, you!’ She poked him in mock exasperation as Victor Tyo laughed.

  It was cooler inside the house, conditioners filling the air with a slightly clammy refrigerated chill. Greg led Julia and Victor Tyo into the sun lounge, checking quickly to see if any of the children’s toys were lying about underfoot. The room had a white-tile floor, furnished with a pair of twisted-cane frame chairs and a three-seater settee. Benji, the family parrot, was climbing delicately over the outside of his cage.

  A broad bay window looked out over the huge southern prong of Rutland Water. White wooden hireboats from the fishing lodge at Normanton bobbed about on the blue water, windsurfers and sailing yachts zipped round them. Red-faced cyclists pedalled along a narrow track just above the far shoreline, sweltering in the tropical heat of the English summer.

  Greg relished the view, he had grown up in the small arable county, lived on the shore of the reservoir for over twenty-five years. The Berrybut time-share estate was almost directly opposite the farm; in the evening he and Eleanor would watch the nightly bonfire blaze in the centre of the horseshoe of chalets, remembering earlier, simpler times.

  Eleanor came into the sun lounge, walking carefully, stiff-backed from her seven-month pregnancy.

  Greg caught Victor Tyo throwing him a startled glance as Eleanor and Julia embraced. It added to his growing sense of unease.

  ‘Victor.’ Eleanor was smiling as she kissed the security chief. ‘Never see enough of you. Found a girl you can settle down with yet?’

  ‘Eleanor,’ Greg protested.

  ‘There is someone,’ Victor agreed defensively.

  ‘Good, you can bring her round to dinner. We’d love to meet her.’

  ‘You never mentioned her to me,’ Julia said.

  Victor Tyo sent a silent dismayed appeal to Greg.

  ‘Sit down,’ Greg said. ‘And you two, behave; stop trying to embarrass Victor.’ He snagged Eleanor round her waist and urged her over to the settee.

  ‘Oliver, Anita and Richy are out in the stables,’ Eleanor said. ‘I sent Matthew and Daniella out to find them. One of the mares has just foaled.’

  Julia groaned. ‘They’ll only want to bring it back to Wilholm with them.’

  Greg put his arm around Eleanor, enjoying the feel of her as she leant in against him. ‘So what did you come for?’ he asked.

  Julia had the grace to look mildly guilty. ‘Royan.’

  ‘You’ve heard from him?’ Eleanor asked.

  ‘Sort of.’

  She handed Greg a slim white box, explaining about the unknown girl at the Newfields ball.

  The trumpet flower inside was drooping, its light fuzz of hairs curling up. Greg’s intuition strummed a quiet string of warning. Something about the flower was desperately wrong. He couldn’t begin to guess what.

  ‘And there was just the one card with it?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  He gave the box to Eleanor.

  ‘I don’t recognize it,’ Eleanor said. ‘What sort is it?’

  Julia shot Victor Tyo a nervous questioning glance. The security chief shrugged.

  ‘That’s where the real problem begins,’ Julia said. ‘My NN cores ran a search through every botanical memory core they could access. Nothing. They drew a complete blank. No big deal about that, there are a lot of new gene-tailored varieties on the market; can’t keep track of everything. So I sent it down to the lab for genetic sampling, see if we could find what it was derived from, the parent species.’ She drew a breath, pressing her p
alms together. ‘It’s extraterrestrial.’

  ‘Alien?’ Greg felt a fast twist of cold fear. Gone. With his sensitivity, no wonder the flower had triggered a mild wave of xenophobia. He stared at the flower; intuition shouting loud and clear what Julia was going to ask him to do next. Eleanor’s weight pressed against him, she was giving Julia a doleful accusing look.

  ‘It can’t be,’ Eleanor said. ‘It’s no different to any other flower.’

  Greg could sense a stiff form of revulsion growing in her mind; she wanted to reject the whole notion.

  ‘A flower is a very simple organism,’ Julia said, the slightest quaver in her voice betraying the severe fright Greg was observing in her thoughts. ‘It attracts insects to assist in pollination, nothing more. Naturally an alien flower will look similar to our own.’

  ‘So this planet it came from has bees as well, does it?’

  ‘The individual species of plants and animals won’t resemble ours, but given a planet with anything remotely approaching Earth’s climate they will certainly be analogous. Evolutionary factors will remain pretty constant throughout the universe, the simplest solution always applies. Think how many plants have developed since life began on Earth, all of them variants on a central theme.’

  ‘What rubbish.’

  ‘Please, Eleanor,’ Julia said painfully. ‘I wish you were right, I really do. I wanted the geneticists to be completely wrong. But the flower has nothing like our DNA. The chromosome-equivalents are toroidal, arranged in concentric shells. My geneticists say the sphere they form is unholy complex, and definitely not from this solar system.’

  ‘For complex, read “advanced”,’ Victor Tyo said. ‘The geneticists estimate the source planet could be anything up to a couple of billion years further up the evolutionary ladder than Earth. The gene sphere is much larger than terrestrial DNA strands.’

  It didn’t really register with Greg, nonsense numbers. He ordered a gland secretion, concentrating inwards. There was no truth to be gained from intuition, only a sense of what might be, hints. He scrambled round for a sign of fear, that the flower was dangerous. But there was only the original tremendous unease, amplified to a cloying presence. He imagined this was what being haunted must be like.

  He rose from the near-trance state.

  ‘The flower,’ Greg said. ‘It’s not lethal, but I get a sense of weight behind it, a pressure building up.’

  ‘The aliens?’ Victor Tyo asked.

  ‘No,’ Greg gave him a wry smile. ‘No spaceships, no Martian invasion fleet. But there’s something … biding time.’

  ‘There is a ship, something had to bring it here,’ Victor said. ‘They’re close, watching us, hell they’re probably even down here among us. How would we know? We’ve no idea what they look like, what they’re capable of. God Almighty, entities from another planet.’ Perhaps it was just the emphasis his boyish face gave to any deeply felt emotion, but Victor’s dismay seemed to be on the point of crushing him.

  ‘Aliens might have the technological advantage over us,’ Greg said. ‘But I’d be very surprised if they could land on Earth without the strategic defence networks picking them up. Am I right, Julia?’

  She gave a subdued nod. ‘Yes. The sensor coverage is good, it has to be given the potential for kinetic assaults. You could orbit a ship two hundred thousand kilometres out without being spotted, fair enough, but the chances of detection increase with every kilometre you travel closer to Earth. Once you’re within fifteen thousand kilometres of the surface you’re visible. It doesn’t matter how good your stealth technology is, any physical body passing through the planetary magnetosphere generates a flux that the sensors will pick up. We’re tracking hundreds of thousands of objects up there, anything from discarded solar panels to composite bolts.’

  ‘So where did the flower come from?’ Eleanor asked.

  Julia shook her head slowly. ‘I don’t know. And that’s what really worries me. I can’t believe even aliens have the ability to circumvent our technology to that extent.’

  ‘You said you could feel a pressure,’ Victor said. ‘What kind of pressure?’

  Greg shrugged, uncertain how to express it in words. ‘Something waiting.’

  ‘Look,’ Julia said. ‘We know there’s been some kind of first contact; that there is, or has been, a ship visit the Earth, or at least the solar system. That’s your presence; no big mystery there. What I want to know is, how is Royan tied in? That’s what I came for, Greg. Where is he?’

  ‘I don’t know. But you were right about the flower being a message. It might even be a warning.’

  ‘Then why didn’t he say so?’ she asked hotly.

  Greg realized how much worry and concern was bottled up behind her tawny eyes.

  ‘Wrong question,’ he said. ‘We should be asking: what’s he warning us about? And why such a baroque warning? If he had enough liberty to send off flowers, why not just give you a call? At the very least he could squirt us a data package.’

  ‘Bugger your questions, Greg! I want to know what’s happened to Royan.’

  ‘Well, what did you expect? A seance?’ He cursed as soon as he said it.

  Julia blushed.

  ‘No,’ Eleanor said levelly, her eyes never leaving Julia. ‘You want the girl, don’t you? The one who gave Rachel the box.’

  The blush deepened, she nodded once. ‘She’s the link. The only one we’ve got.’

  Greg looked at Eleanor, then back to Julia. ‘I can’t,’ he said, appalled at how much it cost to say. ‘Not me, not any more. Sorry.’

  ‘Bloody right you can’t,’ Eleanor said coolly. She fixed Julia with a stare. ‘Look around you; four children, a fifth on the way, the farm, the picking season.’

  ‘I know,’ Julia whispered. ‘But … aliens, Eleanor. It goes beyond me and Royan, though I wish to God it didn’t. Who else can I trust? Who would you trust? You want these aliens to contact the religious fundamentalist movements first? One of the South American dictatorships? We have to find him, quickly and quietly. Greg’s a gland psychic, worth ten of these new sac users, and he’s had proper training. The best there is, and my friend, Royan’s friend. Who else can I ask?’

  Greg narrowed his eyes. Julia’s compulsion had always been stronger than any psychic power. And combine it with logic as well …

  ‘Give me a name, Greg, someone better; Lord, someone your equal would do.’

  ‘How the bloody hell would I know?’ he snapped. ‘I left that game sixteen years ago. Victor? You must have whole memory cores full of psychics.’

  ‘I do,’ Victor said quietly. ‘And we reviewed them, that’s why we’re here. I’m sorry. These modern sac users are good, but they don’t have your training, your strength. Mindstar hunted out people with the highest potential. Today, anyone who has a minor flash of talent can take a themed neurohormone and think he’s some kind of warlock. In a lot of respects themed neurohormones are a step backwards; and no one ever developed one to boost intuition.’

  ‘Jesus wept!’

  ‘Royan’s out there, Greg,’ Julia said. ‘Negotiating with aliens, holding them off, leading them in. Lord, I don’t know which. But I have got to find out, Greg. Please?’

  He looked helplessly at Eleanor. She fumbled for his hand, and gave him a squeeze. He tightened his grip round her shoulder.

  ‘He is a friend,’ Eleanor said in a tiny voice. She sounded as though she was trying to convince herself and failing miserably.

  ‘Yeah, he is that.’

  ‘You’re not hardlining, Gregory,’ Eleanor said firmly. ‘Not at your age.’

  He twisted under the look in her eyes, wanting to object, or at least have it said in private. The trouble was she was quite right. At fifty-two he would be hopelessly outclassed by today’s youngsters. Logic and intuition were in concord over that, worst luck. And if there was one certainty about all of this, there was going to be trouble. Royan’s method of contact alone was evidence of that.

  N
othing ever simple, nothing ever straightforward. His bloody life story.

  ‘No problem in that direction, at all,’ Victor said smoothly. ‘One of Event Horizon’s security crash teams will be on permanent alert to assist you. With hypersonic transport, they can be anywhere on the globe within forty minutes. And of course you’ll have as many of my hardliners accompanying you as you want. All you have to do is ask the questions.’

  ‘No,’ Greg said. ‘If I’m doing this then I want someone I know watching my back. Someone who’s reliable, someone who’s good.’

  ‘Of course,’ Victor said.

  ‘I’ll take Suzi.’

  ‘What?’ Julia sat upright in her chair.

  Eleanor stiffened inside his encircling arm.

  Greg resisted the impulse to smile.

  ‘She is one of the more competent tekmercs,’ Victor said grudgingly.

  ‘Yeah,’ Greg said. ‘She ought to be. I trained her.’

  Victor raised an eyebrow. ‘I think you’ll find she’s grown a bit since those days. Reputation-wise, that is.’

  ‘I’m sure Event Horizon can afford her,’ Greg said.

  ‘We certainly can,’ Julia agreed. ‘There will be one of Event Horizon’s executive jets here for you first thing tomorrow morning. I’ve already cleared your entry into Monaco.’

  Eleanor’s features hardened, spiking Julia with a voodoo glare.

  ‘Fine,’ Greg said phlegmatically. Had there ever been a time when Julia didn’t get her way? ‘We’d better visit Suzi this afternoon.’

  ‘You might find you need more backup than Suzi by herself,’ Julia said.

  Greg gave her a hard look, he was rapidly tiring of revelations. ‘Why?’

  ‘The girl at Newfields, or somebody else, they took a sample out of the flower as well.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes. The lab pointed it out as soon as they saw it. One of the stamens had been cut off. And it was definitely a cut, not a break.’

  ‘Would a stamen be enough for a genetic test?’ Greg asked. ‘I mean, this unknown who took it, are they likely to know the flower is extraterrestrial?’