The Nano Flower

by Peter F. Hamilton

  "I'm not. It's just. . . I wish Father would trust me more."

  "He's a busy man right now." She moved her lips on to his spine, tasting warm saltiness. His downy hair brushing against her cheek. "And New London is going to be there for a long, long time."

  "Oh, Father's always busy."

  "He told me he'd got some very important contracts to tie up this week."

  "Crikey, you're not kidding. I'm not even allowed to use my terminal's datalink to the communication platforms. How am I supposed to get hold of the latest VR games, and the new videoke releases?"

  Charlotte stopped her featherlight kisses halfway down Fabian's back. She had been depending on him to provide her with a communication circuit to Baronski. Jason Whitehurst seemed to have thought of that too. God damn the man! "Isn't that unusual?"

  "I'll say so. There isn't a single satellite uplink free. I don't know what he can do with all the data that's being squirted on board. All of our cargo agents are plugged into the company management processor cores. He must be selling off an entire country."

  "Hey, can you see what they're downloading with all this gear of yours?" She made it come out casually, an impulse.

  Fabian twisted his head to look back over his shoulder at her. "Well, yes, I suppose I could. Technically, I mean. My gear could handle it." He looked straight ahead again. "I never have though."

  She started kissing his spine again. "It might be fun."

  "Father tells me everything about the business."

  "Everything?"

  "Think so." There were shades of defensiveness and doubt jumbled together in his voice.

  Charlotte reached his buttocks. "Turn over, Fabian."

  * * * *

  Charlotte pulled on a broad white cotton halter top, and a pair of running shorts. They were tight, making her look as if she was about to burst out of them. Partly clothed always excited men more than being naked.

  Fabian watched her getting dressed, wearing the serious face of someone at prayer. "You're so beautiful."

  She knelt down and put her hand under her chin. "You keep saying that."

  "Because you are."

  "And you're very chivalrous."

  He flipped his hair aside. "Just saying what I think. I can do that, can't I?"

  "The girls at Cambridge are going to go wild over you. Rich, young, clever, handsome, and a real gentleman; and that's before you take your clothes off."

  Fabian pulled away, staring at a science fiction saga on one of the flatscreens; wedge-shaped fighter-spaceplanes dog-fighting in the rings of a gas-giant planet. "I don't want any other girls," he said pertly. "I've got you."

  She cupped his ears, and gently bent forward to kiss him. He had listened devoutly to everything she'd told him, and remembered it all. If only he wasn't so young, or she wasn't so bloody old. One of the fighters exploded in a brilliant concussion of white and blue flames, dousing them in a tide of phosphor radiance.

  "There," she said as the explosion shrank. "See what kind of effect you have."

  "I love you, Charlotte."

  She gave his nose a quick kiss. "Have you ever skinnydipped in an ice-cold mountain tarn while there's a full moon in the sky?"

  "No. Never."

  "We'll try it tonight, then. I don't know about the moon and the ice, but the pool's there waiting."

  "Yes!" His head swivelled about, taking in the terminals and his miscellaneous 'ware modules, suddenly very determined. "I'm going to see what Father's doing. He's got some pretty strange contacts, you know, for business, for making sure he gets delivery contracts and things. But he's never done anything like this before." He tugged his outsize Superman T-shirt out from under some cushions, and fought his way into it.

  "Oh, well, I'm already out of my depth," Charlotte said. "I can never even balance my card accounts. I'll let you get on with it."

  "Right," he mumbled. Multicoloured graphics were already rising in the cubes of the terminal he was operating.

  She arranged the cushions in a loose nest, slumping into a beanbag at the bottom. Her cybofax displayed the London Times; the headline article was on the upcoming Welsh referendum.

  She couldn't concentrate on it. A mirage of Fabian shimmered above the little screen. It wasn't as if she hadn't formed strong bonds with a patron before. One of her favourites had been eighty-eight, Emile Hirchaur, a French count. There had never been any sex involved; he simply enjoyed watching her walk and swim and ride: she'd been a surrogate body for him. And she was an attentive listener, he could be quite funny. He had chortled delightedly at his scandalized relatives when they came to visit his chateau. Life had to be made fun at his age, it would have been so utterly pointless otherwise. He treated his senescence like a second childhood. Another real gentleman. She'd cried horribly when he died.

  And there had been younger, hotter lovers. Never anything serious, just physical, a relief from the feeble, tremulous sex of her patrons.

  But the two had never been combined. Not that Fabian could be called a patron, not really. He didn't understand the rules, the obligations. And she couldn't blame him for that.

  Why couldn't he be a snot-nosed brat she could hate as easy as breathing? Why a bright, shy, lonely boy? And most of all, why did he have to be cooped up on this bloody airship?

  "Got it," Fabian called.

  One of the wall-mounted flatscreens was showing an accountancy display, thick columns of green numbers moving from top to bottom in jittery stop-start sequences. "Oh, that's no use, hang on." He began to type quickly. A narrow red line appeared along the bottom of the flatscreen, gradually moving upwards; as the descending numbers reached it some of them would contract, then expand out as titles. "Decryption program," he said. The red line reached the top of the screen and stayed there.

  Charlotte put down her cybofax, and studied the neatly tabulated accountancy display. It was a big company, probably a kombinate, no one else had a monthly cash flow of two billion Eurofrancs. There were hundreds of subsidiaries, all tied together.

  Another flatscreen lit, showing the same sort of thing, a third.

  "That's all kombinate finance," she said. "Look at the amount of money involved."

  Fabian flipped his hair aside and looked at her cannily. "How would you know?"

  "I can read, thank you, Fabian. And I've picked up enough money talk in my life."

  He blushed. "Oh, yes, right."

  She walked over to him, and slipped her arms round him, resting her chin on his shoulder. "I said I knew what it was, not that I could interpret it."

  "Oh, well, it's just a confidential monthly performance review, nothing breathtaking."

  "You mean your father shouldn't have them?"

  "Anyone can get hold of them if they really want; that much data can't be kept hushed up. There are some commercial intelligence companies that actually produce nothing else but analyses of kombinates."

  "So what's he doing with them?"

  Fabian shrugged inside her arms, and tapped a finger on the terminal's cube. "One of our on-board lightware number crunchers is running a pattern-recognition program. I'd say he's probably running their finances through it, looking for money being spent on accumulating a stock of specific raw material, or invested in certain facilities."

  Charlotte ran the flat of her hands lightly across his chest. "Why?"

  "Placement. Father will have acquired some kind of rare cargo; and now he's searching for the best market." He cocked his head to one side as another set of monthly performance figures began to roll down the first screen. "You know, Charlotte, it must be a jolly important cargo for him to go to all this trouble."

  Chapter Fourteen

  As far as Suzi was concerned the deal was souring rapidly. Leol fucking Reiger turning up, that was serious bad news.

  She had planned on meeting Reiger again, sure, when she was in body armour, lugging some heavy-duty weapons hardware around with her. Be interesting to see how much the shit smiled then.
/>   He hadn't been smiling much when he'd backed off, him and that psychic tit, Chad. She was still trying to make sense of that; it was like waking from a dream she knew had been bad, but there was no straight memory of it. The only clue was the shape lurking behind her eyes, never fully visible, some dark animal, similar to a gene-tailored sentinel panther, except this one was bigger, hard, like a gargoyle that had come to life. Freaky.

  Greg had given her a double shock, first that he could do that, second that he would. Fifteen years of fruit farming stripped away, dumping him back on Peterborough's hot streets as if he'd never been away. One mean hardliner.

  She hadn't been so close to psychics when they'd clashed before. And one sample of that backwash was more than enough. It was too much like black sorcery.

  She snatched a glance at Greg as the three of them walked back towards the well. He was battling against his gland headache, face sliding back into remorse again. The soft years had returned to cloud him. But the old Greg was still there, buried under all that civilization. A good thought to hold on to if events freewheeled much further downhill.

  That was what got to her, rode her hard into a micro-storm of worry, the lack of professionalism about the deal. The urgency. Bugger Julia for hustling her into it, using Royan for emotional blackmail. She was mildly surprised she could still be twisted like this, an unrealized chink in her armour-plated heart. First Andria, now old friendships; might as well walk into Leol Reiger's bedroom stark bollock naked.

  Sharp cold sunlight fell into the well at a severe angle. Busy preoccupied faces swarmed past, a termite conveyor belt. There was something about arcology dwellers, clannish, almost cyborgs with smile circuitry. She could pick one out of a stadium rock crowd. The Prezda's well was just their kind of turf, all the primness and carefully calculated nookishness of the small franchise shops. Hardly surprising that visitors tended to use the big domed shopping mall outside.

  Greg walked right over to the balcony rail, gripping the smooth brass with both hands, gazing across the well. She followed his line.

  "There are two observers left on this level now," Greg said. "One straight ahead. And I tell you, he's getting jumpy. Male, thirty, ginger beard, wearing grey trousers, a mint-green polo shirt, sunshade band."

  She scanned the opposite side of the balcony. "Got him."

  "Yes," Malcolm said.

  "OK," said Greg. "Haul him in."

  They turned right, walking round towards the window. Malcolm headed in the other direction.

  "How you holding out?" she asked Greg.

  "Bloody painful. I haven't used that much neurohormone for ten years, not since we had organized poaching teams invading the peninsula."

  "What, lemon rustlers?" There was the most ridiculous image in her mind.

  "No. Deer, as in does and stags. There's a good herd of them in Armley Wood now."

  He sounded so serious. "Yeah, all right, Greg, spare me the juice. Point is, are you up to drilling this observer's brain?"

  "Yeah. Don't fret yourself. I'll find out who hired him."

  They were halfway towards the observer, walking past the window tables. The alps outside were brown wrinkled teeth, small caps of snow a gritty grey in colour. Suzi kept a surreptitious eye on the observer with the ginger beard ahead of them. He was beginning to drift towards the corridor entrance.

  She activated her cybofax. "Malcolm?"

  "Hearing you clear," the hardliner answered.

  "OK, checking."

  "Christ." Greg blurted. He took two fast steps to the balcony rail and leant over.

  When she joined him she saw he was watching one of the glass cage lifts rising smoothly. It was on the other side of the well, a couple of floors below. An escalator interrupted her view. "Is it Leol?"

  "Yep. And there's six others in there with him. Major hostiles."

  The lift emerged from behind an escalator. She looked directly at Leol Reiger, who saw her at the same time. His arms moved.

  "Shit!" Greg's hand slammed into her shoulder. As she fell she saw white spiderweb cracks blooming across the glass of the lift. The distinct warble of an electromagnetic rifle cut across the well's bustle. She landed painfully on her shoulder, Puma bag thumping into her side. Already rolling.

  A stipple sheet of orange flame erupted across the front of the delicatessen behind her. Fucking explosive-tip projectiles! Heat washed over the back of her neck. The toughened-glass windows of the delicatessen simply disintegrated, long, lethal crystalline shards raining down over the food displays and floor. Screams burst out all around the balcony, mixed with the crescendo of smashing glass. Terrified people around her diving for cover.

  Cold fury boiled up. Leol fucking Reiger, like a conditioned lab rat, see her and shoot, never mind there were hundreds of civilians about.

  A high-pitched alarm started to shrill. There was a man on his knees in front of the shattered delicatessen, hands held in front of his face, one of the shards transfixing his wrist. Blood was squirting out of the wound. Two young women in identical stewardess suits were clinging to each other, the fabric of their uniforms punctured as if they'd been peppered with buckshot, each hole the centre of a spreading red stain.

  Suzi rolled again, on to her chest, bringing her legs up, trainers scrabbling for purchase on the smooth tiles.

  "Corridor!" Greg roared above the bedlam. Another volley of electromagnetic rifle fire ripped the air. The plastic sign along the top of the delicatessen's window flared orange, then ruptured, showering the nearby section of the balcony with fragments of plastic and small chunks of smoking concrete. A fresh round of screaming broke out.

  "Tell Malcolm!" Greg shouted. Then he was running, stooping to keep his head below the level of the rail. Moving surprisingly fast.

  "Malcolm," she yelled into the cybofax. "The corridor, get into the corridor!"

  Running was easier for her, she didn't have to bend over as much as Greg. She began to catch him up. An escalator was mindlessly delivering prone bodies on to the balcony; frightened men, women and children, sobbing, holding their hands over their heads. As if that would do any good. She dodged round the outside of the logjam of petrified bodies, nearly tripping on outstretched legs.

  More electromagnetic rifle fire poured out of the lift. They were guessing where she and Greg were now. Projectiles twanged and whined off concrete and the metal of the escalators, bursting into bright fleurets.

  Twenty metres ahead of her, she saw the ginger-headed observer scurry into the corridor. Beyond him, Malcolm was pressed up against the balcony rail, the Tokarev pointing towards the lift railings. A dense ruby beam stabbed out of the pistol. She watched it strike the lift railings, just above the lift itself. There was a fantail plume of cherry-red sparks, a squirt of white molten metal. Suzi heard a grinding metallic shriek rising above the incessant alarm. It cut off with a crunch.

  The shop windows behind Malcolm detonated into flame and scything fragments as the electromagnetic rifles opened fire on him. He hunched down low as glass daggers whirred through the air all around him. Streaks of blood appeared over his suit.

  Suzi risked a glance over the balcony rail. The cage lift was stuck three metres below the balcony. She should have done that, flicked up the mechanism. Malcolm had done all right; security people normally played by the rules, but then, Malcolm was one of Victor's. Someone in the lift was swinging a rifle towards her. She ducked fast.

  Greg had made it to the entrance of the corridor. He was looking helplessly at Malcolm, who was lying beside the balcony rail, his face screwed up in pain.

  "Get him," Suzi yelled. She jerked the zip on her Puma bag, spilling the contents on to the floor. Saw the Browning. Grabbed it.

  Greg was edging cautiously towards Malcolm. Suzi flicked the Browning to rapid pulse, and twisted fast, hands over the railing, taking aim.

  There was no glass left in the lift. Leol Reiger's team were climbing through the open frame, dropping on to the balcony below. Two of them
had already made it. They were helping a third who was spread-eagled on the outside of the lift. The remaining four in the lift were covering the balcony with their rifles. Couldn't see which was Leol.

  She let off three maser pulses; moving the Browning in a slow arc, the way Greg had taught her to use beam weapons in some distant age. One of the figures inside the lift fell backwards, arms windmilling. A small circle of intense flame flared on the back of the man climbing down on to the balcony. She couldn't tell where the third pulse hit.

  Just as she dived back under cover she saw the man clinging to the outside of the lift begin to fall. She scuttled along behind the balcony rail, wincing as the electromagnetic rifle projectiles chewed at the shop fronts.

  People were moaning now, rather than screaming. Most of the wounds she could see looked superficial, clothing and skin cut by flying glass, smaller deeper fragmentation punctures.

  Greg had one arm around Malcolm, half dragging him towards the corridor. The hardliner's feet were skating about on the tiles, as if he didn't have full control over them.

  Suzi lifted the Browning over the balcony again. The tekmercs in the lift had hunched down in the bottom. There was no sign of the two on the balcony. She got off six pulses, holding the beam on the lift. Then she saw one of the tekmercs on the balcony raising his electromagnetic rifle above the railing. She crouched down and raced for the corridor, blazing projectiles chiselling long gouges into the wall above her.

  Greg and Malcolm collapsed on to the walkway leading down into the safety of the corridor. Suzi landed on the ribbed metal segments a couple of metres behind them. She realized how heavily she was breathing, air sucked into her lungs in fast gulps.

  "You OK?" Greg shouted back at her.

  "Yeah." The walkway seemed to be crawling along, no speed at all. The corridor's curve was too gentle, she could still see the entrance into the well. The moans and whimpers were fading, but the alarm was still howling away. "How's Malcolm?"

  "Functional," the security hardliner answered with a weak grin.