The Mandel Files (148 page)

A brief flash of alien flowers blossoming in Wilholm’s borders. She almost had it, the impression was vivid, crystalline.

Then the idea was gone.

We’ve found him, NN core two said.

This time the burst of emotion was absent as Royan materialized in her mind. Adoration would have been too painful.

Hello, Snowy. I suppose It must be getting bad. Tracking down this package means I screwed up, right?

I don’t know. I’m looking for an alien starship.

His image appeared thoughtful. Do you think I can help you?

You warned me about it.

Sorry, I don’t have any memory of that. It must be in my future.

When were you recorded?

June.

What have you been doing since the probe returned?

Made progress. Once I confirmed Kiley had brought back some microbes I had three more processor nodes implanted.

Oh, Royan, she said despairingly. How many times had they argued over implants? He had wanted them so badly after he was recovered and showing an interest in helping her with Event Horizon. She grudgingly paid for four, two processors, two memory stores.

I can handle it he said calmly. I knew you’d complain about that.

I’m not going to argue with a package, she said. What happened to the microbes?

I loaded my implants with biochemistry and genetics data, and started to map their chromosomes.

The package squirted an image of the microbe’s genetic structure. It looked like a Christmas tree bauble, a softly gleaming metallic-purple sphere hanging in the null-space of the node universe. As it grew larger she saw the surface was mottled with minute rings, it began to resemble a twined ball of chain.

Familiarity overwhelmed her. Dear Lord, that’s the same genetic structure as the flower.

What flower, Snowy?

You sent me a flower, an alien flower. It has toroidal chromosome-equivalents stacked in concentric shells. Just like that.

I don’t understand. The flower came from a starship?

I... Yes, no, something. Greg said there was something behind the flower, waiting. He must have sensed the starship. What else could it be?

And I warned you about it?

That’s right. She thought furiously, summoning up a logic matrix from her processor node. The question was simple enough, trying to formulate a correlation between the microbes Kiley returned and a starship, it couldn’t be coincidence. Her processor reduced the question to equations, naked digits, feeding them into the matrix’s channels. The construct wasn’t the kind of prismatic graphics a terminal cube projected, more an instinctive awareness of maths, the true properties of numbers. Colourless, almost without form, she needed the bioware to analogize it for her.

The equations flowed through the matrix channels, fusing, interacting, offering solutions. Could the microbes have been part of a waste dump? she asked. If an alien starship has been orbiting Jupiter for any respectable length of time, the entire ring and moon system would be contaminated by now.

No, I don’t believe that’s your answer, Snowy.

Why not?

I managed to identify some of the toroid sequences. I’ll show you.

She watched the gleaming purple sphere turn. The chain was beginning to unwind. It was like a magician’s trick, pulling a line of handkerchiefs out of one hat, a line that just kept coming. The chain spiralled round her perception point, forming a near-solid cylindrical wall, etched with a black groove.

This is just the outer shell, Snowy.

Dear Lord. The cylinder stretched out above and below her, there were no ends in sight. And you thought you could tame this?

It’s all a question of processing power. Everything is solveable given time. I taught you that, remember?

So what have you solved?

Below her, the colour began to change. Fans of pale light were shining into the cylinder, as if slots had appeared in the wall of chain letting in the dawn sun. They began to build, moving up towards her. When they were level, she could see it was lengths of the chain itself that were brightening. Individual toroids in the lengths glowed, becoming translucent; in some cases there were only twenty or thirty of them strung together, in others there were over a hundred. They were filled with alphanumeric codes.

It’s funny, Royan said. Only the outer shell was active.

What do you mean?

The genes which dictate the microbe’s structure are all contained in the outer shell The rest, the inner shells, are inactive. It’s all spacing. Waste toroids, nonsense.

They have no purpose?

The inner shells aren’t part of the microbe, no. In that respect this genetic structure is similar to human DNA. Ninety per cent of our DNA is rubbish, filling up the spaces between the active genes, the ones that make us what we are, give us our hair colour and height and blood type, every characteristic. But our active genes are strung out all the way along the DNA helix. Whereas in the alien microbe, they’re only on the outside. And I can’t think why.

Is it important?

I’m not sure. it doesn’t affect the microbe in any way.

What’s the significance of the sequences you have managed to identify? Why do they show the microbe isn’t part of a waste dump?

It’s not impossible, Snowy, I didn’t say that, just highly unlikely. You see, I’ve found the sequences for the mechanism which breaks down minerals in rock The genetic mother-lode.

A lot of the glowing toroids reverted to purple, the majority of the ones that were left were situated in a broad band of the cylinder above her perception point. These ones, Royan said. It’s like an osmotic process, but dry. The microbe envelope can be made porous to selected molecules, and gradually they diffuse across. And these—the glowing toroids began to blank out, others came on to replace them, scattered the whole length of the cylinder. These control its thermal absorption mechanism. The microbe becomes functional in a temperature gradient, one side hotter than the other. Perfect energy utilization for a space environment.

She observed in silence as the identified toroids flashed at her like a mad nightclub lighting stack. Royan reeling off their functions, proud and possessive.

The point is, he said, it lives in a vacuum, it’s perfectly adapted for surviving interstellar transit, then multiplying on the asteroids and interplanetary dust orbiting a star. It’s not a faecal parasite, Snowy. It’s not something you have on board a starship.

I’ll grant you that, but there has to be a connection. Could it live on the starship’s hull?

Hey, yes. That might be it. On the ball, Snowy, as always.

The cylinder dissolved around her, leaving only the lustrous purple sphere.

So what was this package recorded for? she asked. What are you here to tell me?

That I’ve cracked it. It’s all there, just like I said, Snowy. The potential. Think of it; a clump of cells you can smear on an asteroid, they’d grow, cover the whole rock in a photosynthetic membrane, and inside they’ll be grazing on the ore, fruiting pods of solid minerals and metaL You could seed a hundred rocks, a thousand, turn the entire asteroid belt into a living mine. Then we’d launch a fleet of Dragonflight’s cargo ships to pick up the pods, bring them back to Earth. Enough wealth for everyone to live like a king. Imagine that, Snowy.

Yeah. Imagine that.

Cancel Integrity Monitored Link to Processor Node One. Squirt Package into NN Core Two.

The patio shimmered into place around her. Matthew’s damp towel was lying in a heap on the York slabs, she picked it up and hung it over his chair.

Same as last time, she told the NN core. Review the package memories; but this time I want that microbe’s genetic structure compared to the flower’s. They obviously come from the same planet. See if you can find out how close the relationship is.

Right.

Cancel Channel to SelfCores.

Being free of the electronic voices and pictures in her mind was like an escape from prison. She could hear the children laughing and yelling, Brutus barking. When she looked round the stone pillar at the end of the patio she saw they were playing with one of the big colourful inflatable balls on the lawn. It looked like a grand game.

Her cybofax began to shrill.

CHAPTER 23

Listoelhad changed since the last time Greg had visited, seventeen years ago, investigating his first Event Horizon case. Now he sat behind the Titan’s pilot watching their approach through the cockpit windscreen. They were due west of Ireland, flying subsonically, descending slowly. Below him, the ocean was completely green. It was a ragged patch over a hundred kilometres wide, its shape varying according to currents and wind. Today it looked like a bloated comet, with a tail which streamed away to the south, broadening and diluting to invisibility three hundred kilometres distant.

He could see dirty-yellow specks floating at the centre of the discolouration, neatly arranged in a square formation, each one a couple of kilometres from its neighbour. That made the specks huge. Lights were twinkling on all of them as the sun sank towards the horizon.

Philip Evans had started the mid-Atlantic anchorage twenty-five years ago, a refuge for his cyber-factory ships. The old man had put together a rag-tag fleet of converted oil-tankers and ore carriers, even an ex-US Marine Corps Harrier carrier, all floating with legal impunity in international waters during the entire PSP decade. The household gear they manufactured was smuggled into England, helping to kick-start the country’s black market, worsening the economy, weakening the PSP.

Kombinates had been swift to recognize the potential of the tax-free anchorage, and more cyber-factories began to arrive. Investment poured in; banks and finance houses were running scared of the political and physical turbulence on mainland Europe. For a few brief glory-years Listoel was a centre of innovation rivalling Silicon Valley and the Shanghai special economic zone.

The cyber-factory ships had been equipped with thermal generators, sucking up cool water from the bottom of the ocean trench and running it through a heat exchanger, self-powering, virtually eternal. There had been pirate miners too, Greg recalled, scooping up the ore nodules that lay on the ocean bed to supply the cyber-factories. Marine harvesters, exploiting the bloom of aquatic life which the nutrient-rich ocean-trench water fuelled. But the most memorable aspect had been the spaceport; a floating concrete runway for the hydrogen-fuelled Sanger spaceplanes which ferried ‘ware chips down from orbital industry parks so they could be incorporated into the cyber-factories’ gear.

At its peak, Listoel had had the industrial output of a small European nation, exporting its gear right across the globe.

That all changed after the fall of the PSP. Philip Evans brought his cyber-factories ashore, beginning England’s industrial regeneration. A new generation of giga-conductor powered spaceplanes turned the Sangers into museum pieces overnight. The global economy started to struggle out of the recession which had followed the Warming, and kombinates found they could virtually dictate their own taxes as governments vied for their investment, making exo-national manufacturing redundant.

Listoel would have been abandoned if Julia hadn’t recognized the enormous demand for electricity which the resurgent land-based industries would exert on national grids. Solar-panel roofing could supply the domestic market, but it was woefully inadequate for the new cyber-precincts and arcologies. She also faced the problem of powering revitalized transport networks; Event Horizon was counting on its new giga-conductor being incorporated in planes and cars and trains and ships and lorries. They all needed electricity to run. But no politician, bought or otherwise, was going to permit her to burn oil and coal to generate it. Fusion remained hugely expensive. A return to nuclear fission was out; too many stations had been sited on the coast, overrun by the rising sea. Salvage and decontamination operations had cost governments a fortune at a time when it was a struggle just to feed people. A large proportion of Dragonflight’s revenue still came from the R&D fund, lifting vitrified blocks of salvaged radioactive waste into orbit where they were attached to solid-rocket boosters and fired into the Sun.

The Titan switched to VTOL mode, coming down for a landing on one of Listoel’s platforms. It was a triangle, two hundred and fifty metres to a side, made up out of concrete flotation sections bolted together. There were three ocean thermal generator buildings made out of pearl-white composite running along each side; the centre was clotted with an irregular collection of hangars, offices, maintenance sheds, and crew quarters, the blue rectangle of a swimming-pool. Nine large discharge pipes were venting brown water into the Atlantic from each generator building; there were other pipes, Greg knew, unseen, dangling kilometres below the platform, pumping up the icy water of the trench to cool the generator’s working fluid.

A non-polluting and totally renewable energy source, for as long as the sun kept shining. Listoel supplied gigawatts of cheap electricity to England and mainland Europe via high-temperature superconductor cables laid across the ocean floor.

But despite its legitimate power industry, Listoel was still outside the jurisdiction of national governments. Greg knew one of the platforms housed the production line for Julia’s electron-compression warheads. Another, or the same one, was Victor’s principal hardline base. The whole anchorage was heavily defended; he’d seen the Typhoons flying escort on the two crash-team Titans, there were definitely null psychics shielding it. Rumour said there were submarines and strategic defence lasers, secret weapon labs, prisons, bullion vaults. He’d laughed when he’d heard that on a tabloid newscast. Maybe he shouldn’t have. The crash team was so effectively organized—Titans, Typhoons, super-grade armour and weapons, all of them on permanent stand-by, if Julia and Victor went to that much trouble...

The Titan settled easily on its undercarriage, and a section of wall on the generator building ahead split open. They began to taxi forwards.

Melvyn Ambler, the crash team’s captain, tapped Greg on the shoulder. He had removed his muscle-armour suit during the flight, dressing in olive-green one-piece fatigues with Event Horizon’s logo on his breast pocket. “The platform’s clinic has been alerted, we’re all ready for you, sir.”