The Mandel Files, Volume 1

by Peter F. Hamilton

  Stoneygate wasn’t somewhere Ade O’Donal went even in daytime, loaded with freaked-out psychos. Five tribes protecting Leicester’s syntho vats, from the police and from each other, that district was wound up but tight.

  Ade O’Donal dropped the Alitalia bags, making a dull slap on the hall tiles. ‘Brune?’ it came out all wavery, like a whimper. And the broken thing on the floor was Brune, a puddle of blood spreading from a jagged rip in the dermal membrane. An ocean of blood, glistening sickly.

  ‘Tentimes?’ asked the Stoney.

  ‘Shit, like no way, I ain’t never heard of him.’

  ‘Lying, O’Donal, dey squirt me yo’ file.’

  ‘Shit, man, I never told those two nothing, not a byte.’

  ‘No crap, Tentimes. No interested.’

  Ade O’Donal closed his eyes, didn’t want to see the gun, or knife or whatever. Praying it would be quick.

  ‘Job for yo’.’

  He risked a peek, ready to slam his eyes shut again. The Stoney was looking at him contemptuously.

  ‘Say what?’

  ‘Job. Burn.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘Yay.’

  ‘All you want is like a fucking burn, and you waste Brune for that! You syntho-crashed shit.’ Ade O’Donal wanted to smash the Stoney with his fists, pound him into a pulp. His life was exploding into the all-time downer. People out of his nightmares kept coming for him, like every shitty deal in the world was his fault.

  There was a tiny click, and a matt-grey ten-centimetre blade appeared a centimetre from Ade O’Donal’s eye, diamond tip reflecting tiny slivers of cold blue light. ‘Don’ gi’ me lip, I slice yo’.’

  ‘Sure, OK, no problem, just cool it, man, right?’

  ‘Where yo’ terminal?’

  The temptation to let the Stoney open the door was near overwhelming. But he was wearing leather gloves, the charge might not be enough to penetrate. Too dangerous. ‘Down here,’ Ade O’Donal sighed.

  The Stoney took in the wine cellar’s hardware with a stoic gaze. ‘Alien,’ he murmured.

  Ade O’Donal crumpled into his chair behind the table that held his terminals. ‘What’s the burn?’

  ‘Wolf say finish Event Horizon, d’ core. Suit yo’?’

  ‘How?’

  A shrug.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Be good. I break cover fo’ yo’.’

  Cover? What the hell did that mean? No way could this arsehole be Wolf in person. This was getting extreme deep, the kind of deep he wasn’t likely to climb out from. ‘Hey, listen, how are you gonna know if I take out the core? I mean, you’re gonna leave me alone if I pull this off, right?’

  ‘Friends, dey watching.’

  ‘And if it works?’

  ‘Yo’ still jiving tomorrow.’

  Ade O’Donal nodded slowly, as low as he’d ever been. But the Stoney needed him. If he did the burn there was a chance. Small, though, fucking small. Brune drowning in blood.

  There were only two terminals on line, that psychic hardline bastard had screwed the Hitachi and the Akai, the super cancer from the gate had crashed the Burrows; that just left the Event Horizon and the Honeywell, And no way was he going to use the Event Horizon terminal, that name was too much bad karma right now.

  Ade O’Donal tapped the Honeywell’s power stud, slipping its throat mike round his neck; muttering, typing, eyes locked into the cube. A melt virus got him into Event Horizon’s datanet, disguised as a civil engineering contractor’s bid for a new flatscreen factory at Stafford. He loaded a memox Wolf had given him for the blitz, studying company procedure. Bids would be processed by the finance division, the lowest three forwarded to the freaky Turing core for a final decision.

  He pulled a memox from the shelves, one he’d planned on taking with him. ‘This is like the best I’ve ever written, you know,’ he said, a sudden urge to explain, to let the Stoney know he was dealing with a real pro hotrod. ‘It scrambles databus management programs. That’s the beauty of it, man; once it’s in, you can’t access the system to flush it out. Total internal communication shutdown. The core will be sliced right out of the datanet, along with anything it’s interfaced with.’

  ‘Dat sound sweet.’

  ‘OK.’ Ade O’Donal pushed the memox into the Honeywell’s slot, hands quivering.

  The cube showed the bid’s data package wrapping around the virus, geometric tentacles choking a crystalline egg. Ade O’Donal probed the finished Trojan with tracer programs. There was no chink in the covering, nothing that hinted at the black treasure beneath the surface. Smooth. And he had made the quotes for the factory ridiculously low, the bid package would be shunted to the core, no sweat.

  Idiotically, pride overrode his depression. This was it, his construct, all his own, a solo hotrod burn. Tentimes had made solo.

  O’Donal fed the Trojan an activation code keyed to the core’s dump order. It would pass clean through the finance division processors, then once they’d forwarded it to the core the fucker would detonate, digital H-bomb. Wipe-out time.

  Index finger tapped: download.

  The cube emptied.

  ‘Might take a while,’ O’Donal said.

  ‘No matter.’

  The diamond-tipped blade clicked softly.

  34

  Julia had insisted on relieving the nurse at Katerina’s bedside in the afternoon, keeping a solitary vigil over her brain-wasted friend. She hated every second of it, knowing she deserved it. Pushing Kats towards Kendric had seemed so clever at the time, an elegant solution. Everybody would wind up with what they wanted, no tears, no heartache.

  Greg was right, she’d only thought of the deed, never the consequences. Too shallow and self-obsessed. Still a child. Idiot savant.

  Katerina stirred, turning, her sleep troubled. Dr Taylor had given her a trauma suppressor. Short-term amnesiac, the woman had explained, it’ll kill the craving for now; but she’d made sure Katerina was infused with tranquillizers throughout the day, only leaving a few periods of brief semi-lucidity for eating and going to the toilet.

  Julia had been the one spooning soup into her. Katerina had swallowed automatically, incapable of coherent speech. Compounding the anguish.

  Julia had got three of Event Horizon’s premier-grade executives working flat out on securing Katerina that Caribbean treatment, trying to buy a place in the detox clinic. They’d been told there was an eight-month waiting list. Julia refused to let that bother her, pulling in the company’s favours, bullying the clinic with financial and political pressure. Dr Taylor had warned her that Katerina’s cranial blood vessels were saturated with the symbiont; if its grip was ever going to be broken then it would have to be done swiftly.

  She’d buy that bloody Caribbean island if necessary. Anything. Anything at all. She just wanted Kats back to her old self. Frivolous, vaguely annoying, and utterly carefree.

  The sun had nearly dropped below the horizon, fluorescing a cloud-slashed western sky to a royal gold, fading to black at its zenith. Julia watched it from the bedroom window, seeing the shadows pool in hollows and nooks across Wilholm’s grounds, spilling out over the grass. The fountain in the lily pond died down spluttering, its light sensors switching off the pump.

  Julia activated a single wall-mounted biolum, then crossed the room and drew the heavy Tudor curtains across both windows. When she’d first left America and the desert she’d been entranced by dawn and dusk in Europe, cool blues and greens gleaming dully under fiery skies, always different. It’d been magical, the expected sadness that she’d miss the desert’s beauty never materializing.

  Tonight the sight left her totally unmoved. Her emotions seemed to have shut down. The climax would come tonight, she was sure of it. The game had ceased to be a game. And she was responsible, she and Grandpa. Kendric’s manoeuvrings and power ploys had been thwarted at every stage. She’d stalemated him all across the board. There was nothing left to him now but the physical. Kendric would have no qualms
about that.

  Strangely, even Greg had warned her about the danger. Greg the liar. Greg the betrayer. His name was the only one capable of piercing the wrap of numbness around her feelings. She’d believed in him like nobody before. Worshipped from afar, flirted. Opened her soul to him. Confessed the darkest, most shameful secret.

  And he’d lied to her.

  Just like all the rest. Men must look on her as some kind of victim waiting to be abused. Except for Adrian, a bleak inner voice said, Adrian adored her female side. He was immune to her money. So far. But knowing her luck …

  She still couldn’t believe she’d been so mistaken about Greg. He’d said she was beautiful. And she couldn’t be fooled by smooth talk any more, not after Kendric.

  Then why? Why the lie?

  Access BlitzCulmination. So called because it brought all aspects of the case together. The homogenized data packages unfolded within her glacial mind, rotating the bedroom and Katerina one hundred and eighty degrees from her cognizance. Her processor nodes marshalled it into precise channels once more, a construct that incorporated hard facts, assumptions, suspicions.

  She ran the logic matrix once more, the fifth time today. It produced a single diamond-hard conviction. No matter how many times she ran it, how much slackness and wishful thinking she incorporated into the matrix channels, the answer was always the same.

  Liar. Traitor. Thief. Heartbreaker.

  Cancel BlitzCulmination. One thing it never told her was why Greg would do such a thing. She didn’t understand human nature well enough to guess. And now she’d probably never know.

  Katerina had sunk into an innocent dreamless sleep. Julia pulled the frilly snowdrop-pattern duvet up around her shoulders.

  Open Channel to NN Core. Load OtherEyes Limiter#Five.

  She felt her grandfather snuggle into her mind, welcoming his touch. The last person on the whole planet she still trusted. And what a sad comment on her life that was.

  How are we doing? she asked.

  Greg hasnt moved for three hours now. I think Wisbech must be their nesting ground. Clever that. So close, yet so far away. I’m not sure how they got across the Fens basin; too slow for a tilt-fan, possibly a hovercraft.

  I trusted him, Grandpa. Really trusted him. Everything he did and said was always right. He made me believe in him. I thought I was safe.

  I know you did, Juliet It must hurt. I’m so sorry.

  It doesn’t hurt. I don’t feel anything. I’m not human any more.

  Course you are, girl. Don’t talk nonsense. You’re seeing Adrian again this weekend, aren’t you? What you do with him is pretty bloody human. And I approve. He’s a nice boy.

  If I’m still around by the weekend.

  Hey, that’s no Evans talking. Wilholm is well protected, and I’m hooked into all the security sensors. Ain’t nobody going to sneak up on you, girl.

  Suppose it’s one of the staff, Walshaw even?

  No, Juliet, not Morgan. He’s been with me for fifteen years, almost since you were born.

  Stake your life on it, huh? She let the irony filter back to him.

  That’s my girl. Keep shining through. But don’t you worry, I’m even watching Morgan. No strain on my capacity.

  Julia found herself looking down at the wood-panelled study, initially confused by the unusual perspective, a fly on the ceiling. Walshaw was sitting at the long table databasing with his customized terminal; the bald patch on his crown was larger than she’d realized before. Then the incoming squirt from Event Horizon’s datanet bloomed in her mind. Walshaw was reviewing the Cray memories as they were being extracted by the security division programming team. All the memories had been run through search and classification programs as they came out, analysed and indexed. He was running through the categories, accessing every mention of Wolf and Event Horizon, double checking.

  He’s been doing that for hours, her grandfather said. Hunting down that clue Greg was talking about. Hardly the act of a turncoat, now is it?

  I suppose. It would be nice to believe in him at least, Julia thought. But this was her life she was gambling with now. And the list of her mistakes when it came to dealing with people was a long one.

  Suddenly she was inundated with a rapid-motion tour of Wilholm through the security sensors, visual, infrared, magnetic, electromagnetic, UV laser-radar. Millisecond slices of security division hardliners patrolling the corridors; sentinels prowling the grounds; Tobias in his stables; owls snapped in mid-flight, wings motionless; fieldmice twitching their tiny damp noses in the night air; deserted tracts of landscape, fields and woodland. A kaleidoscope of bright-hued luminous colours, and conflicting geometries.

  See, Juliet? All quiet on the western front.

  Her heart began to beat faster. Why is Walshaw bothering with the Crays? We know Kendric has plugged in with the PSP, that the card carriers organized the blitz.

  You and I know, yes, Juliet. But I don’t think Morgan has put it together yet.

  But it’s obvious! she exclaimed.

  To you.

  Oh, Grandpa! What if Greg hasn’t worked it out, either? What if I was wrong about him? He was so tired, I mean totally run down. He’s been through hell; and it was Kendric who had him beaten up.

  Relax, girl. First thing I thought of.

  What then?

  If he’s innocent, why are the two of them in Wisbech? And why didn’t Gabriel warn us about him? She’s in it with him.

  Oh.

  Sorry, Juliet.

  The depression enveloped her again, its return total. She could see the world simply now, black and white, no right, no wrong, there was just survival which mattered. Instinctive self-preservation, primaeval, the only complexity lay in method. The acceptance decided her.

  When can you hit them? she asked.

  Every hundred and eight minutes, starting in seventy-two minutes – mark.

  Do it. Her lips synchronized with her thoughts, but no sound emerged.

  OK, Juliet. Why don’t you take a break? Katerina isn’t going anywhere.

  No, I’ll stay here. It wouldn’t be right leaving her, not now.

  I’ll give you a status check nearer the time.

  ‘Love you, Grandee.’

  Wipe OtherEyes Limiter#Five. Exit NN Core.

  Julia sat down on the barrel-like Copenhagen chair beside the bed, hand automatically sliding down the side of the cushion. Her fingers touched the hard plastic casing, reassuring her. She drew out the weapon. An ash-grey cylinder thirty centimetres long and three wide, a thin grooved handle at one end. It resembled a fat, long-barrelled pistol, weighing about one and a half kilos. The discharge end was solid, with a small circular indentation, gritted with minute carbonized granules. ARMSCOR was printed along the side in black lettering.

  She’d stolen it from Greg after he’d brought Kats back to the finance division offices, slipping it off Walshaw’s desk and into her bag as soon as the desolating revelation of his betrayal had sunk in. She’d been horribly afraid of him, what he might do.

  When she’d got back to Wilholm she’d accessed the manor library’s memory core, looking up what she’d got. A stunshot, capable of immobilizing an adult at forty-five metres. Four shots would kill.

  The power unit was charged to ninety-five per cent capacity, giving her almost two hundred shots. She’d spent the morning familiarizing herself with it – safety catch, grip, aiming. Kept at it until she was satisfied she could do it by touch alone. It tended to wobble unless she used both hands. The library said there was no recoil.

  And nobody knew she’d got it, not even Morgan Walshaw. Her last line of defence. Its solidity and weight injecting a primitive kind of confidence into a badly demoralized psyche. She wished it would be Kendric himself who came. There’d be no inhibition holding her back then. Sending all ninety-five per cent into his jerking, burning body.

  But it would be some tekmerc hardliner, anonymous, a fast-moving shadow in the dark. Her one advantage was that he�
�d have to come to her; a slight advantage, but it might make the difference between life and death. The odds were impossible for the nodes to compute, too many variables, thank the Lord. That sort of foreknowledge was something she could do without.

  Julia sat back in the Copenhagen chair, putting the Armscor on her lap, resting her chin on her hands. Looking at Kats she realized she’d even been emptied of envy, her friend’s beautiful face meant nothing. In fact when Kats grew older she would’ve lost far more. You can’t lose what you haven’t got.

  35

  The water-fruit field stretched on for ever, a perfect example of perspective, parallel rows of creamy-white globes merging at some grey distance. Eleanor felt around underneath the next globe and cut the thick rope root with her knife. Inky sap puffed out, lost in the reservoir’s slow current. She lifted the globe and steered it slowly into the neck of her net bag. There were another twenty water-fruit inside. Almost full. Turning back to the row.

  A dolphin snout pushed her hand. The knife missed the root. She looked at her hand, puzzled. Tried again. Two hard bumps on the back of her wrist, almost painful.

  Annoyance began to register in her sluggish thoughts. She held up her hand, palm outwards, pushing twice: back off.

  It was Rusty. He didn’t budge, guarding the water-fruit. Dark shapes slithered effortlessly through the water behind her, churning up a small cloud of silt. When she turned she saw another pair of dolphins had got hold of the net bag, pulling it away.

  Angry now, her steady rhythm had been broken. Hanging a metre off the reservoir bed, motionless, trying to outstare a dolphin. How odd.

  Now the monotony of harvesting was broken she began to realize just how tired she was, muscles whispering their protest into her cortex – arms, legs, shoulders, back, all laced with fatigue toxins.

  Exactly how long had she been doing this? The soft green light was fading fast overhead, lowering visibility to less than fifty metres. A cold flash of realization pinched her mind. She hadn’t quite fallen into the trap of blue lost, but her soul had migrated, fleeing the memories of guilt and pain. Now they rushed back in to her empty brain, unmitigated.