The Mandel Files, Volume 2: The Nano Flower

by Peter F. Hamilton

  The mining machines Julia sent up to Earth’s new moonlet cut out a cylindrical chamber five kilometres long and three in diameter, Hyde Cavern. Rotation gave it an Earth-standard gravity. Solar furnaces liberated oxygen from New London’s rock. Event Horizon crews collected the shale smear, shoving it through giant distillation modules, refining all the chemicals necessary for a working biosphere.

  Hyde Cavern was given an atmosphere, water, light, warmth, gene-tailored food plants, insects, and soil bacteria. Engineering teams from Event Horizon and various kombinates’ space industry divisions moved in, and began refining the ore in earnest. Microgee-processing factories were boosted up from their low orbit to swarm in attendance; it was cheaper to use New London as a dormitory for the operating crews than costly habitation stations.

  Greg could see New London itself through Anastasia’s windscreen, a dark head to the archipelago of high-albedo orbs. The rock’s long axis was orientated north/south, so that it rolled along its orbit. A counter-rotating docking spindle extended a kilometre and a half out of the southern hub, supporting a diamond-shaped solar cell array four kilometres square. The northern hub had a similar spindle, ending in a concave circular solar mirror five kilometres in diameter. It was built up from hexagonal sections a hundred metres across, with a speckle pattern of tiny black spots showing the holes that had been torn in them down the years. A focusing mirror hung two kilometres over the centre, sending the collected beam back down through an aperture in the middle. As he watched, one of the orbs peeped slowly over the mirror’s rim like a small sun rising above the horizon.

  The orb was part of the excavation from the second chamber which was currently being hollowed out. A larger one than Hyde Cavern this time, eight kilometres long. The mining machines which cut through the ore crushed it into a residue of fine sand that was a mixture of metal powder and rock dust. It was impelled along the northern hub’s spindle into the foundry plant at its tip, where the mirror focus was aimed. The intense heat combined the rock and metal into a glutinous magma which the foundry crews called slowsilver. It was done for convenience, in freefall any liquid was easier to control and direct than a river of sand, and after mining came the problem of storage.

  The slowsilver was pumped through one of a bagpipe array of extrusion pipes out into space in the shadow of the mirror, where it was allowed to accrete until it formed a globe fifty metres in diameter. Then after the outer shell had cooled and solidified the pipe disengaged, setting it loose. The foundry produced a hundred and forty orbs a day, a constant emission of metallic spawn.

  Julia had no option but to store the second cavern detritus in this fashion, New London’s refineries and microgee materials-processing modules could only consume a fraction of the mining machines’ daily output. So the orbs accumulated in the archipelago, tens of thousands of them, like an elongated globular cluster staining space behind the asteroid. Some of them were nearly pure silver, others had abstract rainbow swirls frozen into their surface where exotic salts and minerals had curdled and reacted from the heat.

  Refinery complexes floated round the fringes of the archipelago; big cylindrical modules, two hundred metres long, forty wide, hanging behind a kilometre-wide solar mirror. Perspective was difficult out here, part of his mind saw the refineries as chrome water lilies drifting on a velvet ocean. Almost an op art canvas. Space hardware had an inherent harshness, he thought, every square centimetre was functional, precise, there were no cool shades nor half colours, white and silver ruled supreme.

  There was an annular tug departing one of the refineries, an open three-hundred-metre-diameter ring of girders with a drive unit at the centre, starting its three-month inward spiral to low Earth orbit. Ten foamedsteel lifting bodies were attached to the outside of the ring, blunt-nose triangles, massing three thousand tonnes, but with a density lighter than water. Space-born birds which would be dropped into the atmosphere and glide to a splashdown by one of the two permanent recovery fleets on station in the Pacific, or the one in the Atlantic.

  Anastasia was heading in for New London’s southern hub. This end of the asteroid was covered in long thermal-dump panels, radiating out from a central crater like aluminium impact rays. Two spherical Dragonflight transfer liners were docked halfway down the spindle. A steady flow of small tugs and personnel commuters was berthing and disengaging, carrying crews and cargoes between New London and the clusters of microgee modules holding station south of its main solar panel.

  Greg tried to draw the image of New London inside his mind, to capture its essence, sketching out the crumpled dusty surface, small high-walled craters. Hyde Cavern: gaping emptiness surrounded by thick shadow folds of solid rock, the second chamber, mushroom shaped, unfinished. Shafts and rail tunnels knitted the two chambers together, black gossamer lines cutting through the two-kilometre rock barrier, looping underneath the valley floors in complex twists; there were buried fresh-water reservoirs and surge chambers, caverns housing reserves of oxygen and nitrogen.

  The ghost image turned slowly behind his closed eyes, pulsing with the slow rhythm of life. Hyde Cavern a warm heart, a kernel of expectation and promise. He could sense the strength and determination it housed, a hazy aural glow spun out by the combined psyche of its inhabitants. The asteroid nestled at the centre of a spectral whirlpool of human dreams.

  He felt it then, a solitary discrepant thread impinging on the communion, not a contaminant, but aloof from the consensus, different. Alien.

  Anastasia’s cabin trickled back into existence around Greg as his mind let the phantasm slither away. ‘It’s here,’ he said. The asteroid’s southern end was sliding by outside the windscreen, ribbed thermal-dump panels pinned to the brown-grey rock by enormous pylons, a maze of yellow and blue thermal shunt conduits laid out underneath.

  Suzi cocked her head, her cap making her appear strangely skeletal. ‘What is?’

  ‘The alien, it’s inside New London.’

  ‘Shit. Where?’

  He tried to shrug, but the muscle movement simply pushed his shoulders away from the seat back. ‘You want specifics, use a crystal ball. My espersense is good for about half a kilometre if I really push it, and solid rock blocks it completely.’

  ‘So how the fuck do you know it’s there?’

  ‘Intuition.’

  She opened her mouth to shout. Reconsidered. ‘How about Royan? He there too?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  ‘Great. So what do we do?’

  ‘Stick with our original scenario. Find Charlotte’s priest.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Suzi waved her cybofax wafer. ‘Been updating on these Celestial Apostles. Beats me why Victor doesn’t just flush them out the airlock. Fucking weirdos.’

  ‘I think I detect Julia’s hand in that. She always allows a little looseness in human systems. The Celestials are harmless, and they support her long-range aims, if not her methods. As long as they don’t get out of control, why bother?’

  ‘You think they’re the ones in contact with the alien?’

  ‘It’s as good a guess as any. The psychology certainly fits. They’d treat it as a messiah. The only group of people who’d keep quiet about it, if it asked. Which prompts the question “How did it find them?” ’

  New London’s southern hub crater was a kilometre wide and three hundred metres deep, the walls perfectly flat. It had been cut out by the mining machines; the electron-compression devices had all been detonated at the northern end.

  Anastasia glided over the rim and its picket ring of radars. The floor below was a near solid disk of metal, massive circular bearings in the centre supported the two-hundred-metre-diameter spindle, outside that were tanks, lift rails, observation galleries, airlocks, three concentric rings of lights illuminating the rim walls, bulky incomprehensible machinery.

  Anastasia’s reaction-control thrusters fired. Greg’s visual orientation began to alter as the spaceplane turned. The crater floor tilted up slowly to become a wall, the rim wall shifted to
a valley floor curving up to the vertical and beyond. There was another sequence of drumbeat bursts from the reaction-control thrusters as the pilot changed Anastasia’s attitude again.

  Greg heard the unmistakable metallic rumbling of the undercarriage lowering. The crater wall curved up out of sight in front of Anastasia’s nose; it was moving, he could see a strip of small white lights running round the circumference, New London’s rotation carried them down the windscreen and under the spaceplane. To Greg it looked as if Anastasia was flying low above a smooth rock plain.

  There was a final burst from the reaction-control thrusters, and Anastasia began to descend. It was like touching down on a runway, the difference being Anastasia was stationary and the crater rim was moving. They landed with a gentle bump. Electric motors accelerated Anastasia’s undercarriage bogies, chasing New London’s rotation.

  Suzi’s jaws were clamped shut, her cheeks very pale, staring rigidly ahead. Greg could feel the spaceplane racing forward, yet their speed relative to the rim was visibly slowing. The starfield and spindle began to turn.

  ‘Down and matched,’ the pilot announced.

  Greg started to register the low gravity field. Blood was draining from his face, that annoying fluid puffiness abating.

  Anastasia taxied towards the circular wall of metal and a waiting airlock.

  They came out of the airlock tube into a rock-walled reception room. Greg walked carefully in the low gravity field, very conscious of inertia, each step carried him a metre and a half.

  New London’s Governor was waiting for him, flanked by two assistants. A tall, spare man who smiled expectantly, holding out his hand. Greg stared, frantically trying to place a name to the distantly familiar face.

  ‘Greg Mandel, good to see you again. It’s been over fifteen years, yes?’

  Now the memory came back. Sean Francis, one of Event Horizon’s younger generation of executives, a disturbingly ambitious one, if memory served. He was also superbly efficient, and keen, giving his total attention to every problem and request, no detail was too small to be reviewed. It was an attitude Greg had enjoyed the first time he’d met him, Sean Francis in person inspired confidence. Then after five minutes’ exposure, the unrelenting effusiveness began to grate.

  Greg shook his hand. ‘Seventeen years, would you believe? Seems like you’ve done all right for yourself. I’m surprised Event Horizon let you go.’

  Sean Francis grinned brightly. ‘I haven’t left. I’m just on sabbatical. You see, the English Government had to have a trained executive who was also completely conversant with the space industry in the hot seat, so Julia Evans loaned me out. Simple, yes?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Even after all this time Julia’s political expediency still never failed to gain his admiration. New London might be a Crown Colony on paper, but in realpolitik it was hers, and no messing.

  Sean Francis introduced his assistants. The man was Lloyd McDonald, an Afro-Caribbean, one of Victor’s people, whose job description was New London’s corporate security chief. Greg suspected his responsibility extended further than that, given the administrative hierarchy. The woman was Michele Waddington, the Governor’s secretary. Another on secondment from Event Horizon.

  ‘We’ve prepared a barracks facility for your team in the security quarters,’ Lloyd McDonald told Melvyn. ‘My people will take your gear down to it.’

  ‘Fine,’ Melvyn said.

  ‘Are you anticipating trouble?’ Sean asked.

  ‘There is a possibility,’ Greg admitted. ‘I’d like Lloyd McDonald here to step up his screening procedures for new arrivals. In particular for a man called Leol Reiger. He’s a tekmerc, very dangerous. And he might just be stupid enough to try and follow us up here.’

  ‘Reviewing visitors is the responsibility of the Immigration office,’ Sean said. ‘But I can have company security personnel deputized as backup, that’s within my brief.’ He turned to Michele Waddington. ‘Get the authorization lined up, please.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ She entered an order in her cybofax.

  ‘Got a profile of Reiger?’ Lloyd McDonald asked.

  Greg held up his cybofax, and squirted the data over to McDonald’s. The security chief glanced at it. ‘There are three more flights scheduled for today. I’ll make sure the passengers are isolated and identified before they’re allowed into the colony.’

  ‘If Reiger does come up he won’t be alone,’ Melvyn said. ‘Make sure your people are armed.’

  ‘Anything else?’ Sean asked.

  Greg looked at Melvyn, who shook his head.

  ‘Just somewhere for us to get changed,’ Greg said. ‘We’ll start hunting after that.’

  ‘Certainly,’ Sean said. ‘I’ve had some rooms prepared in the Governor’s Residence for you.’

  ‘I’ll see my team to their barracks then join you,’ Melvyn said.

  ‘Right, bring a couple of them back with you,’ Greg said. ‘Carrying, but nothing heavy, the Tokarevs will do.’

  ‘Sure thing.’

  Greg picked up his flight bag and followed Sean into a circular lift, along with Charlotte, Suzi, Rick, and Michele Waddington. It started to descend slowly, Greg’s feet nearly left the floor. Gravity built steadily.

  The doors opened on to another smooth tunnel carved through the living rock, a pair of moving walkways ran down the middle, two broad biolum strips were fixed to the ceiling, brighter than usual. Gravity felt normal. Greg looked along it, expecting to see it curve up out of sight, but there was a corner about eighty metres away, and another one behind him. The floor might have been slightly curved, it was hard to tell.

  They took a walkway down to the corner, then another one. The layout reminded Greg of the Prezda arcology, people slotted neatly into regulated accommodation space. Hive mentality.

  There was a policeman sitting behind a metal desk outside the door to the Governor’s Residence. He stood and saluted as Sean showed his card to the door.

  The Governor’s Residence changed Greg’s mind about conformity. The interior seemed to have been lifted straight out of some eighteenth-century colonial trader’s mansion, a formal European layout, with modern Asian and Oriental furnishings. The rooms were spacious and airy, with high ceilings and white walls, pillars and arches dominated the architecture. He wondered how much it cost to lift all the wood up from Earth.

  Suzi stood on the parquet floor of the hall, and whistled appreciatively. ‘Not half bad. You pay rent?’

  ‘No, this is my official residence. It comes with the job. The King and Queen have slept here, and the PM.’

  ‘No shit? Now us.’ She nudged Greg playfully.

  ‘Tell me about the Celestial Apostles,’ he asked as Sean led them up the stairs to a broad landing.

  Sean put on an unconvincing smile. ‘Bunch of religious nuts, mostly; though some technical types threw in with them. Their creed decrees space as the turning point in human destiny. No specifics, surprise surprise. Just generalities: space will save us, expand our spiritual horizon. Same kind of crap most loony cults spout. The main difference is that the leadership don’t live off the acolytes. By all accounts they’re quite genuine in their belief. They all live in the disused tunnels and empty storage chambers. I wouldn’t call them dangerous, exactly; but personally I’d just as soon send the police and security teams into the tunnels to round them up and deport them, yes? I mean, what happens in a real emergency situation, a pressure loss? Or an epidemic, how would they get vaccinated? I’d have to risk my people trying to help them. But of course they never consider that.’

  ‘So why don’t you?’ Greg asked.

  ‘The police do catch a few. But Julia Evans says let them be, no big trawling operation. It’s not as if we’d drain the Colony’s police budget.’

  Greg gave Suzi a satisfied grin, he’d known that kind of sentimentality was one of Julia’s traits. Suzi just rolled her eyes.

  The bedroom was decorated in red and gold, with ornate hardwood marquetry furniture. P
ainted fabric screens had been used to partition off the bathroom and jacuzzi with forest scenes, black backgrounds with tall spindly trees, pale leaves. Metal-framed French windows opened out on a balcony with iron railings, a row of potted ferns was lined up along the front edge.

  Greg dropped his flight bag on the bed, and pushed the windows open. Hyde Cavern’s air was warm, humid, ozone rich, and smelt of fresh blossom. He was looking out over a small deep valley, with a blunt dark massif of rock blocking the far end. A slim tubular sun blazed with blue-white virulency overhead, its glare haze blocking out any sight of what lay behind it. He followed the sides of the valley as they rose upwards, curving in like two giant green waves about to topple. If he used his hand to shield his eyes from the tubular sun, he could just make out the landscape directly above. By then he was ready for the impossible sight. He’d been intellectually prepared for it, of course, but ground as sky was still a dismaying sight. The physical mass, pressing down. He wasn’t quite sure what to call the involuntary phobic shudder running down his back, but it seemed as though the little cylindrical worldlet was about to constrict, crushing him at the centre.

  He dropped his gaze again. The first four out of the five kilometres between him and the other endcap was lush green parkland. Hyde Cavern’s rock floor had been shaped with gentle undulations, silver streams meandered through the coombs, low waterfalls feeding calm lakes. There were copses of young saplings, tree-lined avenues of yellow pebbles wandered like serpents across the grass. White Hellenistic buildings were dotted about, each at the centre of its own garden. They were the focus of New London’s social life – theatres, restaurants, clubs, pubs, reception halls, churches, two sports amphitheatres. People didn’t live out in the Cavern, groundspace was too valuable; instead the lower fifth of the southern endcap housed the warren of living quarters, offices, light engineering factories, and hotels.

  The last kilometre of Hyde Cavern was filled with the miniature sea, a band of salt water running round the foot of the northern endcap, its parkside coast wrinkled with secluded coves and broad beaches of white sand. Tiny islands studded the middle of the sea, covered by a dense shaggy thatch of vegetation. Just looking at it made Greg want to run over and dive in.