The Mandel Files (65 page)

And it had worked. His memories operated in a perfect duplicate of his neural pathways, providing a continuation of personality. Julia had never heard the NN core utter a single out-of-character remark. It was Grandpa.

He had plugged himself into Event Horizon’s datanet, orchestrating the company’s expansion with an efficiency far in excess of any ordinary managerial system. Seventy years of experience, knowledge, and business guile put into practice by a mind with more spare processing capacity than a lightware number cruncher. No detail was too small to escape his scrutiny, every operational aspect could be overseen with one hundred per cent attention. With him to guide her faltering steps it was no surprise that Event Horizon had flourished the way it had. Poor old Patrick with his dusty academic degree could never hope to match her when it came to business tactics. In tandem with her grandfather she made more commercial and financial decisions in a day than he would make in the next ten years working for his family organization.

And at the end of the day she could confide in Grandpa totally. He always understood. The invisible friend of childhood imagination, upgraded for the rigours of adult life, infallible, and virtually omnipotent. It was wonderfully reassuring.

The empty office Julia and Ranasfari wound up commandeering overlooked Building One’s giant central assembly hall. Even today, with half of the hall’s staff attending the roll out ceremony, there was a lot of activity on the floor. Integration bays around the inner wall were brightly lit, showing white-coated technicians manoeuvring large sections of machinery into place, or crowded round terminal display cubes. Little flat-top cyber trucks followed colour-coded guidance strips along alleyways formed by bungalow-sized blocks of equipment. The spaceplane production line dominated the centre of the hall. The way the craft in various stages of construction were pressed nose to tail along its length was reminiscent of some biological growth process, Julia thought, a cyber-queen’s birth passage, straight out of one of those big-budget channel horror shows. At the far end were skeletal outlines, triangles of naked ribs and spars which caged spherical tanks and contoured systems modules coated in crinkled gold foil. As the spaceplanes progressed down the line, sections of the metalloceramic hull had been fitted, the wheel bogies added, engines installed. Three almost complete craft were parked in the test bays right in front of the doors, people walking over their wings, big ribbed hoses and power cables plugged into open inspection hatches, polythene taped over various vents and inlets.

Julia sat in the swivel chair behind the desk, a black imitation-wood affair with an Olivetti terminal linked into a complicated CAD drafting board. The office belonged to a middle-manager in the microgee module power systems bureau. Rachel checked it out, then closed the door behind her, standing sentry duty. Dr Ranasfari sank into the cheap thickly padded chair in front of the desk.

“What is it, Cormac?” Julia asked.

He gave another nervous grimace. “Perhaps I should have gone to Mr Walshaw, but I really feel this must be taken up at the highest level. And the Prime Minister is here, he will listen to you.”

Julia moved from studious interest to outright fascination. Ranasfari never showed the slightest concern for anything outside his work.

Open Channel To NN Core.

Hello, Juliet, what’s the problem? I thought you’d be enjoying yourself today, Philip Evans said soundlessly into her mind.

It’s Ranasfan, she told him. I’d like you to listen in on this. I might want your opinion.

“That sounds very drastic, Cormac,” she said out loud. “But you know I’ll help in whatever way I can.”

He nodded, squeezing the knuckles of his left hand. “Thank you. It concerns Dr Edward Kitchener. You know I used to be one of his students?”

“I didn’t know that, no. But I’ve heard of Edward Kitchener.” Even as she said it she remembered: Kitchener’s gruesome murder had dominated the newscasts three days ago, even managing to nudge Scotland off the premier bulletins on Friday night. She couldn’t remember seeing much else about it since, although there had been an update this morning, some poor detective in the hot seat, unable to satisfy the incessant questions that reporters were flinging at him.

Grandpa, have they caught the killer yet?

No.

Ah. I think I see where we’re leading.

“His death was a tragedy,” she said hurriedly.

“Yes. And the culprit still has not been brought to justice. That is what I want Miss Evans, justice. Kitchener was a brilliatit man. Brilliant. He had flaws, weaknesses, we all do. But his genius is undeniable. Simple dignity demands that his murderer is caught. I’m not asking for vengeance. I do not want the return of the death penalty. Nor do I want this barbarian quietly eliminated. But I do want him caught and tried, Miss Evans. Please. The police…, they’ve had three days. I’m sure they’re doing their best, but after all Oakham is just a provincial station. You must impress the Prime Minister, and through him the Home Secretary, on the absolute urgency of this case.”

Tricky one, Juliet. According to finance division records, we were paying Dr Edward Kitchener for research work.

What? I don’t remember that.

It was a contract issued by Ranasfan.

Bloody hell.

Damn right, girl. You start pushing Marchant for action now, and people will accuse you of meddling in police affairs. There’s enough allegations about you and Event Horizon having undue influence over the New Conservatives as it is.

“What project was Dr Kitchener working on for us?” she asked Ranasfari.

He stopped playing with his hands. “I didn’t think it was worth bringing to your attention,” he said evasively.

She decided to go all out on the friendship routine. “Cormac, you know you have my full confidence. That’s why your budget doesn’t have to be cleared through the finance division first, I don’t want you having to justify yourself to accountants. I genuinely do appreciate the value of pure research.”

Seductress! Mental laughter echoed faintly.

“Well, thank you.” Ranasfari ducked his head. “I asked Edward to look into wormholes for me. It corresponds with his field of interest. He was quite intrigued by the prospect. We discussed a fee, but he was more interested in the specialist programs our software division could provide for his light-ware processor than actual money. He agreed to take the contract, and I would channel his software requests through my laboratory. The money was just a token.”

Access General Encyclopedia. Query: Wormholes, Category Physics.

A neat little precis emerged from the processor.

“When you say wormholes, you mean the instantaneous connections through space-time, I take it?” she asked.

“Yes. Wormholes are quite permissible under Einsteinian relativity.”

“I know it’s off the point, but what exactly is your interest in these wormholes?”

“I thought, Miss Evans,” he said stiffly, ‘I thought that there might be a possible application in interstellar transit.”

“A stardrive?” she said in a surprised whisper.

He nodded, thoroughly miserable.

“Faster than light travel?”

Another brief nod.

“Bloody hell,” said Julia. She summoned up a logic matrix from the processor node, feeding in the relevant bytes. The combination of irrational brain and coldly precise nodes gave her an ability to dissect problems from oblique angles, fusing intuition and syllogism in a way no pure computer could match. Data packages flowed and merged through the mental construct, budding into ideas. Most she rejected, the remainder opened up interesting options.

“Who else would know that Kitchener was working for us?” she asked.

“Secrecy was not something I would wish to impose on Edward. But he was not naturally communicative, certainly not to the media. His students would know, of course, probably several high-level theoretical cosmologists. He maintained contacts throughout the physics community, in fact academia in general. The free exchange of ideas is vital in such a field.”

She ignored the defensive tone.

How about it, Grandpa? Could Event Horizon be tied in?

You mean, was he killed to prevent us from obtaining a stardrive?

Yes.

It’s a probability, Juliet, you know it is. But I can’t see anyone getting so worked up about it that they’d butcher the old boy, not for something that hypothetical. Besides, if it is possible to build an FTL stardrive, then ultimately it will be built. Kitchener might have been a wild card, but plodders have their place too. I expect Ranasfari could crack it if he put enough time in.

Lord, I hope he doesn’t. I rather wanted that direct thermocouple.

What are you going to do, Juliet?

Well, we can’t ignore Kitchener’s murder now. If there is someone that paranoid about Event Horizon walking round loose, then I want them behind bars pronto.

Attagirl.

She put her elbows on the desk, and pressed her palms together. “I will have Morgan Walshaw contact the Home Office directly,” she said. “I think I can see how we can get this terrible crime solved quickly.”

“How?” Ranasfari asked.

“The Home Office can authorize local police stations to hire specialist advisers when the circumstances warrant it.”

“What sort of specialist?”

She smiled. “I was thinking a psychic might be appropriate.”

CHAPTER 4

Greg stood behind the moss-covered stone wall of his farmyard and watched a swarm of bilious clouds buffet the southern sky, blocking out the clean gold and orange colours of the low morning sun. Fast, cool gusts of air chased random wave-patterns in the shaggy grass around the lime saplings, twitching the slate-grey water of the reservoir into small peaks.

In the long thistle-mottled field running between the groves and Hambleton Wood he could see the rabbits venturing out of their huge warrens hidden below the dead trees. Small tawny mounds sloping through the nettle clumps and spindly mildewed forget-me-nots which flourished around the rank of perished hawthorn bushes marking the boundary of the wood. There must have been over eighty of them. He and Eleanor went out on rabbit shoots two nights each week, infrared laser hunting-rifles picking off fifty at a time. It never seemed to make the slightest difference to their numbers the next morning.

The hot climate had expanded their breeding season to ten months of the year, and the impenetrable tangle of lush undergrowth in the wood meant he couldn’t reach their warrens to cull them properly. A Forestry Commission logging team was scheduled to fell the dead trunks in a couple of years, replanting with Chinese pines, otherwise he would probably have torched the wood at the height of summer, and to hell with the owner. The rest of the peninsula’s citrus farmers certainly wouldn’t object.

Rabbits were a countrywide problem; despite the massive shooting and trapping campaigns which had turned them into a cheap staple meat, they were making serious inroads into England’s food crops. The Ministry of Agriculture was holding discussions with the Farmers’ Union about releasing a new virulent strain of myxomatosis. It was a nasty virus, but Greg couldn’t see an alternative.

He shrugged his black leather jacket over a dark-blue short sleeve cotton sports shirt. His olive-green trousers had a tropical weave, which should keep him from sweating. He would have preferred shorts, but that was pushing it. At least he could wear comfortable suede ankle boots today, the Armani suit and shiny black leather shoes Eleanor had made him put on for the roll out ceremony had been a torture. Too stiff, too hot. It reminded him of the dress uniforms he had had to wear for regimental dinners. But at least they had been introduced to Prince Harry at the VIP reception, which made up for a lot. Then Julia waylaid him with her oh-so-reasonable favour.

He shook his head at the memory. He was irritated, more by the fact that she had automatically assumed he would help the police than being dragged back into that kind of work, but he couldn’t honestly say there was any real anger. In any case, the idea of a killer as psychotic as Kitchener’s stalking the district wasn’t a particularly welcome one. Just so long as this wasn’t going to set a precedent. The citrus groves were his life now, and hopefully children before too long.

Eleanor came out of the front door and blipped the lock. She was wearing a navy-blue waiter-cut jacket over an embroidered Indian cotton blouse, deep purple culottes. Her gaze ran over the windows she had been painting before the weekend; the frames were coated in a dull-pink undercoat, waiting for the white gloss finish. She crinkled her nose up.

“Maybe I should stay,” she said, sounding unconvinced.

“Not a chance, if I have to go, so do you. I’ve still got those limes to plant. And our neighbouring army of killer bunnies is waiting for a chance to eat the ones I did put in, look.”

She glared at the mounds of brown fur bopping about through the undergrowth. “Perhaps we ought to torch the wood after all.”

He opened the EMC Ranger’s door, and climbed in behind the wheel. “It’s too near Hambleton, and it’s not the real solution anyway.”

“I suppose.” She sat in the passenger seat. “I hate the idea of myxamatosis.”

He drove up the slope, and into the village. The broken windows on the Collisters’ cottage had already been boarded up with clean sheets of plywood and a heavy padlock held the front door shut. Someone had picked all the ripe brambles from the hedge.

Eleanor gave it a sombre look as they went past, but didn’t say anything.

The EMC Ranger’s fat, deep-tread tyres made short work of the slushy vegetation matting the peninsular link road. Monday night’s rains had left the flat fields beside the road looking like rice paddies. They were planted with gene-tailored barley, a design which utilized the increased level of atmospheric carbon dioxide to produce high yields. Long lines of verdant green shoots as thick as his thumb were poking up through silver poois of water; flocks of gulls waded up and down the ranks, pecking up the bounty of worms which had risen to the surface.