The Mandel Files, Volume 2: The Nano Flower

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Alex Lahey began to unplug the fibre-optic cables. ‘Your knee shouldn’t be a problem,’ he said as Suzi emerged. ‘The suit will support it.’

  ‘Great.’ She dropped lightly on to the floor, and promptly flexed her leg, rubbing at the bioware sheath.

  ‘Could you thumbprint this, please?’ He proffered a cybofax. ‘It’s the release authorization for the suit.’

  Greg looked at the bare concrete of the ceiling, offering up a small prayer.

  ‘You betcha.’

  Suzi was smiling acid sweet as she pressed her thumb against the cybofax’s sensitive pad. She eyed the weapons rack. ‘I’d like one of those Honeywell pulsed plasma carbines; a Konica rip gun, plus eight power magazine cells; five Loral fifteen-centimetre pattern-homing missiles, programmable from my implant; and ten directed lance charges with timed and remote detonators. And have you recharged my Browning?’

  Alex Lahey sagged in place, his watery eyes giving Suzi a disbelieving stare.

  ‘What’s up? Do you need another thumbprint?’

  ‘Whatever the lady wants, Alex,’ Melvyn Ambler said in a pained tone. ‘Put it all in with the rest of our gear.’

  ‘You’re a gent,’ Suzi grinned.

  Greg turned round to see the crash team captain standing behind him.

  ‘The spaceplane will be here in five minutes,’ Melvyn said. ‘We’ll load our gear and launch straight away.’ He held up two maroon flight bags. ‘I’ve got your shipsuits. Put your clothes in the bag, you can wear them again in New London. Do either of you need an anti-nausea infusion for the flight?’

  ‘Not me,’ Greg said. ‘I’ve been in freefall before. Didn’t suffer then.’

  ‘I’ll take one,’ Suzi said brightly.

  ‘Right.’ Melvyn Ambler hesitated. ‘Are we likely to meet a hazard up there?’

  ‘I’ll give you a full briefing on the spaceplane,’ Greg said. ‘But you’re along mainly for your deterrence value.’

  ‘Thank you. Mr Tyo said you are in complete control of the operation.’

  ‘He’s got to be fucking kidding,’ Suzi muttered.

  Spaceplane shipsuits seemed to have improved. The last time Greg had gone into orbit the rubber garment they gave him looked like it was sprayed on. You needed to be a mesomorph to wear one with any dignity. This time Melvyn had provided him with a comfortable, fairly loose, ginger-coloured one-piece with elasticated wrist and ankle bands; the wide pinned-back lapels taken straight off the kind of jacket a nineteen-thirties flying ace would’ve worn. A multifunction ’ware wafer was clipped into its pocket on his upper right arm, monitoring his physiological functions, along with the atmospheric pressure, temperature, gas composition, and radiation levels.

  He carried his maroon flight bag out to Anastasia, the Orion-class spaceplane that had landed in the centre of the generator platform. The twenty-strong crash team were trooping into the airlock in front of him, all of them in the same ginger one-piece, a cyborg army. Charlotte and Fabian walked behind, talking in low tones.

  Anastasia was a simple delta shape, twenty-six metres long, built around a pair of induction rams; convergent tubes which compressed incoming air, heated it with a battery of radio-frequency induction coils, and blasted it out through expansion nozzles. A simple, clean propulsion system which took over from the fans at Mach seven and boosted the spaceplane up to orbital velocity. There was also an auxiliary reaction drive fitted which made her capable of lifting twenty-five tonnes of payload direct to New London. Her pearly lofriction fuselage glinted bright and cool under the mid-morning sun. Big scarlet dragon escutcheons were painted on the fin.

  A convoy of five small drone lorries had drawn up underneath, and the crash team’s armourers were loading pods of equipment into the rear cargo bay through hatches in the tail cone.

  Greg ordered a small neurohormone secretion as he waited at the foot of the airstair. His intuition didn’t say much about anything, a grudging sense of inevitability was the best it could manage. He always thought of the ability as being slightly timeloose, a weak form of precognition. That ought to mean death should ring out loud and clear.

  ‘Anything?’ Suzi asked. She knew how he relied on it.

  ‘No. Not a thing.’ He turned to Charlotte and Fabian. The ginger shipsuit looked stunning on the girl. ‘Time to go,’ he told her.

  She bent down and gave Fabian a long, lingering kiss.

  Greg shifted uncomfortably; Suzi chortled and started up the airstairs, swinging her flight bag jauntily.

  Charlotte eventually broke off the embrace. ‘This won’t take long,’ she murmured in a voice so quiet Greg could barely make out the words. She and Fabian looked as if they were being parted for eternity. Fabian flipped some hair out of his eyes. ‘Come back to me,’ he pleaded mournfully.

  ‘You know I will.’ Charlotte planted a final kiss on his brow, and went up the stairs in a hurry. Greg tugged his cap on, a close-fitting padded dome that came down over his ears, protection against hard corners when he was in freefall. He followed Charlotte up the stairs; when he looked back Fabian was sprinting for the crew quarters, a hardline bodyguard in pursuit.

  Anastasia seated forty passengers in her cabin. It was compact, but not cramped. The walls were covered in a quilt of grey padding, even the deck was slightly springy as Greg walked down the aisle. A biolum strip ran along the centre of the ceiling, fabric hoops hanging on either side, reminding him of the handholds for standing passengers on a bus. At the rear of the cabin was a galley and a couple of toilet cubicles. He eyed them warily, a series of unwelcome memories surfacing, painfully tight tubes and suction holes that pinched. Best to wait until New London.

  There was no separate cockpit. The pilot sat behind the narrow curving windscreen, dressed in the same kind of shipsuit as Greg, except his was silvery grey. He didn’t even have a flight console, no controls of any kind. Sitting with arms neatly folded across his lap, eyes half-closed in some zen-like contemplation. Multicoloured geometric spiderwebs rolled across the windscreen itself. Greg guessed the pilot must use a processor node to interface with the spaceplane’s flight ’ware.

  He didn’t enjoy the idea. When he was in the army he used to fly parafoils and microlites; direct physical control, you shifted your weight and the wing banked in response. It was something you could feel, solid and dependable. Real flying.

  Surely the spaceplane must have some kind of manual fallback? The pilot would probably laugh if he asked. He looked young, mid-twenties; a generation that wasn’t so much ’ware literate as ’ware addicted.

  The crash team were choosing their seats noisily, like a small-town rugby club on their way to a match, all jokes and laughs. Two stewards helped to stow their flight bags in the lockers under the seats.

  Suzi was sitting in one of the seats behind the pilot. Greg claimed the one next to her, where he could see out of the graphic-etched windscreen. He touched the activation stud on his armrest, and the seat cushioning slid round his legs, gripping gently.

  Charlotte and Melvyn Ambler were sitting across the aisle from them, Rick in the row behind. The security captain leaned forward. ‘That’s everyone,’ he told the pilot.

  ‘OK. Flight time will be about three and a half hours, we should rendezvous with New London somewhere over South America.’ The airlock hatch closed, cutting off the thrum of the platform’s thermal generators.

  Greg heard the compressors wind up. There was a tremble of motion, and the corner of the thermal generator building was dropping out of sight through the windscreen.

  ‘You told Eleanor where we were going?’ Suzi asked.

  ‘Yeah. She’ll worry about it, but she’d worry more if she found out and I hadn’t told her. I said the crash team was providing hardline cover now. That ought to help.’

  ‘Mean she’ll be happier that you’re not dependent on me no more.’

  Anastasia shifted to horizontal flight mode, deck tilted at fifteen degrees as it climbed, pushing eastwards, aiming
for the Bay of Biscay. Greg sniffed at the air; the pervasive sulphur smell of the thermal generator vent pipes was missing, filtered out by the life-support system. The spaceplane’s purified air was curiously empty, an absence of scent more than anything.

  ‘Why do all the women in my life give me such a hard time?’ he complained.

  Suzi laughed. ‘Eleanor’s not a problem. You two, fucking lucky, you are.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re moaning about. Andria seemed like a nice girl.’

  Suzi glanced over at Charlotte and Melvyn Ambler, her voice dropped. ‘The greatest, Greg. No shit. Me and her, it’s happening. Funny, I mean, what I am, who’d want me? But she does.’

  He didn’t need his gland to see how earnest she was. Suzi taking life that seriously would take some getting used to. ‘You’ll have to bring her out to the farm some time.’

  ‘She’s pregnant.’

  ‘So’s Eleanor. They’ll get on all right.’

  ‘Right.’ She whistled through her teeth. ‘Greg? I’m gonna get out after this. For the kid, you know? So, like, if you hear of anything coming up on the market, pub or something, let me know.’

  ‘Sure.’ He ought to have a word with Julia, see if she could find a likely club, sell it to Suzi through a front. He settled back into the seat. Attention to detail, that’s what it was all about. He’d put a note in his cybofax, later, when Suzi couldn’t see.

  Anastasia switched to her induction rams three hundred kilometres south-west of the Scilly Isles. Greg heard a crackling roar build until it was loud enough to block ordinary talking. He was pressed down in the seat, estimating the G-force at about one and three-quarters. There was a disorientating sensation as the deck began to level out once they reached thirty-five kilometres altitude, yet at the same time the growing acceleration effect made it seem like the angle was increasing. Perhaps he should have taken that infusion after all.

  The pale azure sky began to darken beyond the windscreen.

  It took seven minutes after the induction rams came on to reach their orbital transfer trajectory, slicing cleanly through the mesosphere and into the rarefied lower chemosphere where the power-to-thrust ratio decayed drastically. The induction rams cut off over Egypt. Anastasia was doing Mach twenty-nine, coasting gently upwards.

  The stars had come out, burning steadily in the night sky. Earth was a fringe of blue-white light along the bottom of the windscreen.

  Greg let out an alarmingly damp burp as the nearly forgotten sensation of freefall buoyed his stomach up towards his sternum.

  ‘We’ll be performing our New London flight trajectory burn in eighty seconds – mark,’ the pilot said.

  The silence Greg had been expecting was punctuated by sharp snapping sounds of the induction ram linings contracting as they shed their thermal load. Electrohydrostatic actuators whined on the threshold of hearing.

  Suzi pulled a sour face. ‘Bollocks, three more hours of this.’

  ‘Isn’t the infusion working?’ Greg asked.

  ‘Yeah. But that only holds your gut together, it doesn’t stop this whole scene from being a major downer. Floating about like this ain’t right, Greg. I’m not a fucking fish.’

  A small portion of his mind was secretly glad there was something he could handle better than her. Of course, he’d done a lot of flying in his Army days, burning the nausea out.

  ‘It took me a day to get up to New London last time,’ Charlotte said. ‘I went up on a transfer liner.’

  ‘I was in one of the low Earth orbit stations for a week,’ Rick said. ‘Checking out a radio telescope before it was boosted out to Ell Two behind the moon. It beats the hell out of dieting, I must have lost a couple of kilos.’

  ‘How about you, Melvyn?’ Greg asked. ‘You ever been up here before?’

  ‘Sure. Victor Tyo likes us to familiarize ourselves with every possible environment we’re likely to operate in. I get rotated up to New London for a month every two years.’

  ‘That sounds like Victor,’ Greg said.

  Anastasia’s reaction-control thrusters fired suddenly, a rapid burst of pistol shots. Greg saw the Earth’s coronal haze slide off the bottom of the windscreen.

  ‘Stand by,’ the pilot called out.

  Greg tried to make some sense out of the graphics scrawling across the windscreen, flexible holographic wormholes of blue and green, red cubes rotating, yellow lines in wavering grid patterns. Nothing was bloody labelled.

  The auxiliary reaction drive came on. A pair of bell-shaped nozzles in Anastasia’s tail. Water was pumped into their vaporization chambers where it was energized directly from the giga-conductor cells. It emerged from the nozzles as a brilliant flame of ions.

  Greg was pushed back into his seat again. Anastasia appeared to be standing vertically. The G-force was much lower this time, about a third.

  New London followed a slightly elliptical orbit high above the Earth, with an apogee of forty-five thousand kilometres and a perigee of forty-two thousand kilometres. Anastasia rose out towards it in a long flat arc.

  New London was visible from Earth even during the day, a fuzzy oval patch of light, far brighter than the Moon. During most of the approach it was a sharp-edged nebula, building in size and magnitude.

  Greg spent the last hour in his seat, watching the rock and its attendant archipelago resolve. The angle of their approach, virtually straight up, meant that the archipelago grew longer the whole time, stretching out along the rock’s orbital track. At first it looked like the rock was the head of a strangely stable comet, one possessing a solid diamanté tail; then he began to make out the individual orbs.

  The asteroid Julia had chosen to carry the torch of her new world industrial order was sixteen kilometres long, with an irregular width varying between five and eight kilometres, one end flared out into an asymmetrical bulge. One of her Merlin probes had surveyed it fourteen years ago; until then it had been a smear of light in a telescope, and a catalogue number: 2040BA. A fleet of the little robot prospecting craft had been amassing compositional data on the Apollo Amour asteroids for nearly a decade. It was a project Philip Evans had started even before the PSP fell; he had predicted the development of the space industry, and wanted to use the probes to give Event Horizon a data monopoly. Julia had carried on with the Merlin project after his death, launching up to fifteen a year. 2040BA was her reward for persistence; a nickel-iron asteroid orbiting two hundred million kilometres out from the Sun, no different to a hundred others the Merlins had examined. Except at some time in the distant past it had struck a carbonaceous chondritic asteroid. The collision had deposited a thick smear of shale, eight kilometres long, down the flank of 2040BA. It was a sticky tar, rich with nitrogen and carbon and hydrogen, millions of tonnes of them.

  They were the chemicals which made New London possible. By itself a nickel-iron asteroid was worth trillions for the metal contained in its ores, but the cost of supporting the teams of miners and refinery operators would have been prohibitive. Every consumable would have to be lifted into orbit for them; even with giga-conductor spaceplanes it would be a marginal venture. To make the investment attractive, a mining team would have to be self-sustaining. At the lowest level that meant hydroponics and vat-grown-meat. At the other end of the scale, space activists dreamt of capturing both nickel-iron and carbonaceous chondritic asteroids and using them in combination to build cylindrical O’Neill colonies, twenty kilometres long, orbiting Gardens of Eden, revitalizing the Earth physically and spiritually.

  2040BA allowed Julia to compromise between the two.

  The relays of astronaut crews she sent out to 2040BA took two years to capture it. They detonated strategically-placed ten-megaton electron-compression devices at its bulbous end, altering its orbital track and increasing its long-axis rotation.

  ‘I wanted to use nukes,’ Julia had confided to Greg and Eleanor once the mission was underway. ‘Use up all the old superpower arsenals. That would have given people something they cou
ld understand and appreciate. The old age visibly going out in a blaze of glory to usher in the new. Now wouldn’t that be a sight?’

  She needn’t have worried. People interpreted the asteroid’s arrival as the symbol of the new age. It brought hope to a psychologically leaden world. A technophilic coup d’état, signalling the end of the worst aspects of the Warming. When you looked up you could see that there was somebody who had the guts and the drive to achieve something again, instead of just muddling through the way things had been going for nearly two decades. The somebody being Julia. It was the capture mission more than anything else – her inheritance, the giga-conductor monopoly, Peterborough’s incredible renewal – that catapulted her into the global public limelight.

  The last three months of 2040BA’s journey became the greatest spectator event in human history. Greg had always wondered if it was coincidence that the final electron-compression device was detonated above night-time Europe. Julia working a subtle PR ploy, or Royan crowning their achievement with a typical brass neck gesture? Whichever, after that Julia’s kudos hit the stratosphere.

  He could still remember the Last Blast party, it was countrywide. New Year’s Eve plonked down in the middle of a sultry cloudless August night. Hambleton had hosted a street barbecue, the whole village sitting round trestle tables in front of the church. Christine had been about five, but they’d let her stay up.

  Eleven thirty-seven: the time was tattooed in his mind. 2040BA was a star brighter than Venus, then the last electron-compression device went off, stabilizing its orbit. A ten-megaton explosion, jetting out an incandescent plume of vaporized rock. The discharge had lasted for about a minute, growing as broad as a full moon before fading to violet and dispersing. They had all watched in silence, children, adults, pensioners, looking straight up; Greg inanely waiting to hear a distant rumble from the explosion.