Daylight on Iron Mountain (19 page)

P’eng interrupted him brutally. ‘I think you’ve backed a dud, Master Lahm. It’s Ebert’s money, I know, but if I were him…’

He made a gesture of pulling the plug. The others in the circle laughed.

Lahm took a long breath, then met P’eng’s eyes again. ‘But you are
not
him… fortunately…’ He bowed, then stepped away. ‘Forgive me,
ch’un tzu
, but—’

Again P’eng interrupted. ‘And the suits… immersion suits, I believe they’re called… old, worn-out technology…’

Lahm checked himself. P’eng had a reason for this. He
wanted
to draw Lahm into an argument. Wanted him to make a scene.

‘Another time, P’eng Chuan,’ he said, with an air of great civility. ‘Why don’t you come and see me. I would be glad to talk of such matters.’

P’eng watched him bow, then bowed in return. ‘Time will tell, neh, Master Lahm? Time will tell.’

As Lahm made his way across the crowded hall, looking for Ch’eng So Yuan, so the Sixth Dragon’s words took on the shape of a threat.

You’re up to something, you bastard. You and your agents.

Should he warn Ebert? Or was he just being paranoid?

Later
, he told himself.
I’ll speak to him later
.

As for P’eng Chuan, the man could fuck himself, long and hard.

‘Kurt… slow things down. One-tenth speed… and Kurt?’

‘Yes, Jake?’

‘Cut the sound. All but the discreet channel. I’ll lift my arm and wave when we need to be retrieved.’

Jake smiled to himself. He knew Kurt hated being out of touch. He was one of those Chief Techs who liked to talk everything through. It reassured him. But Jake wanted to concentrate, and how could he do that with the Chief Tech’s voice in his ear all the time?

Besides, harsh as it was, what Gustav had said earlier was right. They really could do with a new Chief Tech. Someone who could juggle things a lot better than Kurt did. Someone with a lot more mental agility.

Jake turned slowly. Now that they had fine-tuned it, it was like being in free fall, a non-gravity environment. But that would have to change, because gravity was yet another of those factors they couldn’t rule out. It existed in the outside world, so it had to be in here, too.

Only he liked this. Liked how it made him feel.

Ebert was on the far side of the giant bio-morph, checking to see if it mapped. Making sure they had left nothing out. Jake could see the bottom
of his legs, drifting beneath the outrageous shape.

He made to speak, then realized that Kurt had closed the channels down already. It was silent in the datscape – eerily silent.

At one-tenth speed, the pulse within the living cells was slow now – more a gradual change of colour than a pulse.

Slow it down some more and you’ll be able to see the precise nature of each chemical reaction
.

Which is just what Gustav wanted, and the reason why he spent half of his time now inside the immersion.

Jake smiled. For all his coldness, he liked Gustav Ebert. Liked the purity of the man, his obsessive streak. Ebert wasn’t one for half measures. When he went for something, he went for it hook, line and sinker.

Which was why, only two hours back, he had allocated a further billion
yuan
to the project.

The figure staggered Jake. After all, what was this but some kind of super-toy?

That was unfair, of course, because who knew what seeing biochemical reactions like this might do? And if a man as outrageously talented as Gustav Ebert thought it might work – might stimulate whole new branches of study – then who was he to argue? He was just a web-dancer, after all.

Right now Ebert was very still, watching something very carefully. Jake had not been with him inside that often, but he knew how still he went when he was concentrating. Like he was hibernating, his burning eyes the only sign of life.

Slowly Jake drifted round, following a lazy curve that arced behind Ebert’s back.

This one was like a giant jellyfish, its skin thick and translucent, threads of ever-changing red and blue running through it.

He and Ebert had talked it all through, earlier. Of the need to have two or three, maybe even a dozen of these datscapes up and running, with teams of experts, each specializing in some separate branch of biochemistry, working the immersions.

It was a huge commitment. A massive investment of time and money.

GenSyn could afford it. Of course they could.

Only it’s a gamble. A huge fucking gamble.

Ebert knew that too. He’d said as much to his brother.

Wolfgang Ebert was the cautious one of the two, the businessman, but after a gruelling four-hour meeting, even he was convinced. This could well be the future, and GenSyn couldn’t afford
not
to invest in it.

Jake opened the discreet channel.

‘Is it all there?’

Gustav made the slightest movement. For a moment he didn’t answer, then he gave a little grunt. ‘I don’t know. Something’s missing. Something’s nagging at me, but I don’t know what.’

The bio-morph was incredibly complex. Much more complex than the enzyme they had studied days before. It was one of Gustav’s experimental biomechanisms, an adaptation of the Hox gene clusters which were found in the genes of creatures with segmented body plans. They were a universal thing, so Gustav said, but he had given them a tweak or two to make them specific. He claimed that he was trying to reinvent evolution by coming up with different answers to common biochemical questions.

Only something was missing.

He drifted level with Ebert, studying the huge, glaucous object that hung there. He couldn’t read it. Not yet. It would probably be months before he could. Only that wasn’t the point. He was here to train up those who could. To turn budding young biochemists into athletes – the gymnasts of the datscape.

There was the faintest flicker, to his left.

Jake turned his head to look. A delay. He felt it. Like grit beneath a sliding door, hampering its movement.

‘Gustav…?’

The sudden surge jolted him. The whole datscape pulsed.

Jake made to lift his arm. Couldn’t.

Cut the fucking thing now!

He felt the left arm of his suit go numb, the left side of his body, down to the hip. Jake tried to speak, but that too was shut down.

The fucking suit’s malfunctioning!

It couldn’t be. They’d had it checked out. Debugged it.

There was another flicker. Faint, barely noticeable. And then the power surged through him again, like a burning in his veins.

Oh, shit!

He blacked out. When he came to there was a chatter in his head, Kurt’s
voice close to panic. Across from him two black-suited techs part jerked, part swam towards him, their movements awkward.

Jake sniffed. Nothing. He couldn’t smell a thing. But his skin felt strangely dry. It tingled, like he’d been too long under the ultraviolet.

‘What the fuck…?’

Kurt answered him. ‘Jake? Are you conscious?’

He ignored the obviousness of the answer.

‘What the fuck happened?’

Some movement had returned to the suit. Only he felt like a cripple, able only to jerk himself round a bit at a time.

‘Kurt? Are you all right?’

Christ! Was the man crying?

‘He’s dead, Jake. Gustav’s dead!’

There was no arguing with it. Gustav was dead. Someone had put 50,000 volts through him and fried him like a piece of pei ching duck. That flicker, the moment before the power surge, Jake recognized it from before, from that day years ago when it had all fallen apart. Someone had intruded on their system. Created a wormhole somehow and jumped right in there with them, then opened up the power tap. Jake had only survived because the surge had been directed straight at Ebert.

Jake lay there now, in the sterile suit, suspended in the hammock-like emergency web, pumped full of painkillers. His skin was crisped black in places, a bright unhealthy orange in others and his eyes hurt, like the onset of a migraine. But compared to Ebert he had got off lightly.

Which of GenSyn’s rivals might have done this? Which of them would have benefited most?

Dozens of them. Every last biochemical company there was, in fact. Only Jake wasn’t sure that this
was
a simple case of industrial espionage. Whoever had done this hadn’t underestimated GenSyn’s capabilities. They had wanted Ebert not merely dead but unreconstructable.

GenSyn’s own security had arrived within minutes, shutting things down and hauling people off for questioning, a distraught Wolfgang Ebert supervising every last detail of the investigation.

While that was happening, the medics had seen to Jake; had dosed him
up and let the neurosurgeon take a look at what the surge had done to his brain. Now he waited for the news.

Mary arrived an hour later, masked up and wearing a sterile suit. She winced as she saw the extent of Jake’s injuries.

‘Oh, Jake…’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Is he dead?’ she asked. ‘There have been rumours… on the news channels…’

‘Yes.’

‘Ah…’ She took a step towards him and then stopped. ‘I’m not supposed to come any closer.’

He gave the faintest nod.

‘What’s going to happen, Jake?’

‘I don’t know.’ He paused, looking past her. Mary turned. It was Alison. She stood there in the doorway, masked up, her sterile suit identical to Mary’s.

Her cold blue eyes were concerned. ‘Are you okay, Jake?’

‘Yeah, I… Mary, this is Alison… Alison…’

The two women nodded to each other.

Alison switched her attention back to Jake. ‘Does it hurt?’

‘I can’t tell… I’m feeling numb right now. What’s happening out there?’

‘Things are bad.’

‘How d’you mean?’

She was quiet a moment.

‘
What?
’ he asked.

‘I suppose you’ll hear it sooner or later…’

‘Hear
what
?’ Mary asked, a hardness in her voice.

Alison kept her eyes on Jake. ‘It’s Wolfgang. He blames you. I know, it’s irrational, but he’s been saying that if you hadn’t shown Gustav the potential of this he’d not have been so vulnerable.’

‘How the fuck did we know he was vulnerable? I thought this was a closed circuit. I didn’t think anyone else
had
access!’

‘Well, they clearly did. And more to the point, it’s not the first time it’s happened, is it?’

‘I didn’t warn him at all. I thought…’

Jake stopped, took a breath. Alison was looking at him strangely. She clearly had more news, and none of it good.

‘So what’s he going to do? Sue me? Look at me. Do I look as if I had anything to do with it? I could have died in there, too!’

Alison looked down again. ‘He wanted to sack you, Jake. Cast you off without a single
yuan
in compensation, but I got you a package. It’s not enough to maintain the lifestyle you’ve got, but…’

‘You think I should take it, yes?’

Alison nodded. ‘I think you should. You don’t fight a man like Wolfgang Ebert. You can’t possibly win. But I did what I could for you, Jake. I got you the best deal possible, in the circumstances.’

Jake looked to Mary. ‘What do you think?’

She hesitated. ‘I think you should take it.’

‘So that’s it, then? Finished. Just like that?’

‘I’m sorry, Jake. I really am. But things are bad right now. Losing Gustav… it wiped 40 per cent off our share price at a stroke. We’ll survive. Only it’ll take some while for us to recover. It was a massive blow. Whoever did this knew what they were doing.’

‘You have no idea who it was?’

She hesitated, then shook her head, only there was something in her eyes that argued otherwise – that she knew
precisely
who had done this.

Which meant that she couldn’t say, not with the cameras watching.

Jake took a long, shuddering breath. He was tired now. He wanted to sleep. A deal… yes, he’d take their deal. Take it and get out of there. Once he was better. Once the skin grafts had taken and he could move again.

Lahm was sitting in the back of the craft and humming an old Polish folk tune to himself as he returned home, when the news came through.

He sat there for a long while afterwards, stunned, unable to come to terms with what this meant for his plans.

His enemies had struck a damaging blow. The deals he’d hoped to make had unravelled in a moment. Without GenSyn he had nothing. Or as good as nothing. For who would oversee the project, now that Gustav was dead?

No. GenSyn without Gustav Ebert were no better than a dozen other companies in the same field. They might have a slight advantage now – what with their more
specialized
items – but how long would that last?

Not long, if what the market thought had any influence on it. Rumour
had it that two of their major rivals had already made bids to try to buy GenSyn out, while they were at their weakest.

And Reed?

Reed now was simply an embarrassment. He was the man who had delivered Ebert up to his enemies. Not that he’d known that. Not that any of them had known.

Not true
, he thought.
P’eng Chuan had known
.

Lahm nodded slowly. Yes, that was what lay behind all of his unpleasantness earlier. He had known about this. Someone had tipped him off. But who?

Lahm considered it a while, identifying three possible men who might have ordered it, then let it go. What was done was done. Even so…

‘Wu Chi…?’

Wu Chi’s voice answered him at once, filling the darkness of the craft.

‘Yes, Master?’

‘Reed… have someone deal with him. And be discreet. I don’t want any trails leading back to me, understand?’

‘Yes, Master. It is as good as done.’

Lahm leaned back and closed his eyes. He would have to begin again. To rebuild, slowly, patiently, as was his way. It was no good panicking. No good letting men like P’eng Chuan get to him. He had not come this far by making over-hasty decisions. He would sit back and wait for those he knew to come to him, to ask him what to do, now that things had changed.