"What about your pre-flight medical?" Walshaw asked. "You must've known the drugs would show up."
"Maybe I wanted it to," Angie said. "Deep down. You know how strict Event Horizon is about narcotics abuse. Give Philip Evans that, he wants us healthy. Others have been caught, they got transferred, they were given therapy, kept their pay grade. We get a good medical cover deal, you know? But they found me before the furlough ended."
"Names?" Greg asked.
"Kurt Schimel. But he didn't talk with a German accent."
"That's all?"
"No, there were a couple more with him, a man and a woman. No names." She began to describe them.
Access Company Personnel File: Kirkpatrick, Angie. Zanthus Microgee Furnace Operator.
Julia stopped listening: Angie's file was unfolding in her mind. A data profile of names, dates, figures, promotions, training grades, personal biography, medical reports, biannual Security reviews, her ex-husband. Her daughters were called Jennifer and Diana, there were even pictures. Ordinary, she was so ordinary. That was what struck Julia most. It was a big disappointment, she'd wanted to understand the woman, her motivations. Knowing the enemy. But now she didn't know whether to hate the she-demon who'd tried to wreck everything her grandfather had built, or pity the pathetic woman who'd screwed her own life beyond redemption.
"They offered to flush my blood system clean," she was saying. "There'd be no trace of the drugs left when I went for the medical. They also smoothed out my bank account so the balance wouldn't show all those cash purchases when security ran its six-month review. And I'd only have to fox the crystal furnace 'ware for a year; their money would've been enough to let me get out afterwards. Just me and the girls, go and live quietly somewhere. God, you don't know what kind of deal that was to me."
"I do," Greg said.
Angie shuddered, hugging her arms across her chest.
Greg was staring into space above her head. "You said fox the furnace 'ware. I get some interesting implications from that. Would you elaborate on that for me, please."
Julia returned her attention to the interview. She would never have picked up on that detail. What kind of an impression had Greg seen? She wanted to ask him: What do minds look like? Didn't think she'd ever have the courage.
"Nothing much to it," Angie said. "Schimel gave me a program to load into the furnace's 'ware, it adjusts the quality inspection sensor records."
"The memox crystals weren't actually contaminated, then," Greg said thoughtfully.
"No. That wouldn't have worked. The security monitors would trip if more than thirty-seven per cent came out bad, see? No way could we ever be allowed to go over the magic figure, that'd blow the whole gaff, right. Reconfiguring the injector mechanism each time you wanted to ruin a batch wasn't on, you'd never get a fine enough control over the output. It's not like flicking on a switch, you know. It takes time to make the blend perfect again, and the time varies. Some of those furnaces are a bitch to run. Then you've got the genuine duff batches to consider. What Schimel's program did was start with the genuine percentage of failures then forge the rest."
Julia sat bolt upright, her tea forgotten. Frustration manifested as a surge of hot blood. She wanted to take Angie by the throat and shake the stupid tart till she rattled. Forty-eight million Eurofrancs' worth of perfectly good memox crystals deliberately dumped into the atmosphere to burn up. It was an appalling thought. Event Horizon's cash reserve reduced to incendiary molecules in the ionosphere.
Walshaw was giving her an entomologist's stare, deciding exactly how worthless she was. And it took a lot to get the coldly civil security chief riled.
Greg was shaking his head in bemusement. "You mean you just chuck away good crystals?"
"Yes," she whispered dully.
Walshaw opened his cybofax. "I want the names of all the other furnace operators you know that are involved."
"Do I have to?" she asked. "I mean you'll find them anyway, won't you?"
"Don't piss me off any further," Walshaw said in a tired voice. "Names."
Julia heard a metallic scrape behind her, and turned in the chair. The manor staff were supposed to leave her alone when she was in here. But it was her father, Dillan, who was opening the library door.
She watched the wrecked man move dazedly into the room, hating herself for the pain she felt at the sight of him. He was wearing jeans and a bright yellow sweatshirt, with elasticated plimsolls on his feet. At least he'd remembered to shave, or someone had reminded him. There were a couple of male nurses on permanent call at the manor, for when he got difficult, and when he had nightmares. He wasn't much trouble, not physically, spending most of his days in a small brick-walled garden that backed on to the kitchen wing. There was a bench by the fishpond for him when the weather was fine, and a Victorian summerhouse for when it rained. He would read poetry for hours, or tend to the densely packed flower borders, throw crumbs to the goldfish.
And that was it, she thought, holding her face into that well-practised expressionless mask. All he was capable of, reading and weeding. The nurses gave him three shots of syntho a day.
If we were poor, she thought, they'd lock us all away as crazy, the whole Evans family, all three of us, three generations. A dying man with grandiose aspirations for the future, a syntho addict, and a girl with an extra brain who can't make friends with anybody. We probably deserve it.
Dillan Evans smiled as he caught sight of his daughter. "Julie, there you are."
She rose smoothly from the admiral's chair, switching off the flatscreen and its images of treachery. Her father walked towards her, taking his time over each step. He was trying to hide a bunch of flowers behind his back.
She couldn't despise him, all she ever felt was a kind of bewilderment mingling with heartbreaking shame. For all his total syntho dependency, she was his one focal point on the outside world, his last grip on reality. He'd come with her to Europe, not caring about the location, not even caring about having to live in the same house as his father again, just so long as he was with her. Even the First Salvation Church had been glad to get him off their hands, and they recruited new bodies with the fervour of medieval navies.
"For you," Dillan Evans said, and produced the flowers. They were fist-sized carnations—mauve, scarlet, and salmon-pink.
Julia smelt them carefully, enjoying the fresh scent. Then she kissed him gently on the cheek. "Thank you, Daddy. I'll put them in a vase on the table, here look, so I can see them while I'm working."
"Oh, Julie, you shouldn't be working, not you, not when it's a bright sunny day. Don't get yourself tangled up in the old bastard's schemes. They'll leach the life out of you. Dry dusty creatures, they are. There's no life in what he pursues, Julie. Only suffering."
"Hush," she said, and took his hand. "Have you had lunch yet?"
Dillan Evans blinked, concentrating hard. "I don't remember. Oh, God, Julie, I don't remember." His eyes began to water.
"It's all right," she said quickly. "It's all right, Daddy, really it is. I'm going to have my lunch in a little while. You can sit with me."