The first real stirrings of excitement rose as he led the security team towards the waiting tilt-fan at the prow, the realisation that he was actually going into space finally gripping. Oscot's deck was a bustle of tautly controlled activity. The ever-present grumble of the thermal generators' coolant water was being complemented by the lighter braying of mobile service units. Five Lockheed YC-55 Prowlers were already on the deck. They were ex-Canadian Air Force stealth troop/cargo transports. Their shape was a cousin of the original B2 bomber, a stumpy, swept bat-wing, with an ellipsoid lifting-body fuselage; the entire surface had a radar-nullifying matt-black coating. There were no roundels, not even serial numbers. True smugglers' craft. Greg watched as the sixth rose silently up out of its daytime sanctuary, an old oil tank converted into a split-level hangar. The big elevator platform halted at deck level with dull metallic clangs which rumbled away into the gloaming. The stealth transporters seemed to draw a thick veil of cloying shadow around themselves, eerily other-worldly.
Sean Francis caught Greg staring. "Neat machines. Yes?"
"I didn't know you still used them," Greg said.
"Sure. Their avionics are a bit outdated now, but they're more than adequate to infiltrate Scottish airspace. That's our main target, their PSP is pretty shaky right now. It'll only take a small push and they'll fall."
Greg watched large pallets of domestic gear systems being loaded through the Prowlers' rear cargo doors. "You build all that stuff here?"
"Yes. It's a pretty broad range—crystal players, home terminals, microwaves, fridges, bootleg memox albums—that kind of thing. Our sister ship, Parnell, churns out more of the same, along with a whole host of specialist chemicals for our microgee modules up at Zanthus."
"So Event Horizon only has the two cyber-factory ships left out here now?" Greg asked.
"That's right. There used to be nine of us out here a couple of years back, but the rest have left now. They're docked in the Wash outside Peterborough. Their cyber-systems are being stripped out and reinstalled in factories on land. All part of the Event Horizon legitimisation policy. They were all gear factories, except for Kenton and Costellow, those two used to specialise in producing the actual cyber-systems themselves. Real top-of-the-range stuff; all our own designs, too. The old man kept research teams going ashore in Austria, they provided us with the templates; good enough to match any of the Pacific Rim gear. Bloody clever that."
"Oh?"
"Don't you see? Philip Evans has built up a capability to expand the company at an exponential rate. The cyber-systems are that sophisticated. All he needs is raw material, and financial backing. The factories will multiply like amoebas, yes?"
"You sound like you're happy with Event Horizon."
"Christ, I mean totally. Philip Evans is a genius. Event Horizon has so much potential, you know? A real crest-rider. And I've done my penance out here, ten years' bloody hard graft. When Oscot docks I'm going to be in line for a divisional manager's slot."
The integrated Sanger was sitting at the end of the runway, white vapour steaming gently out of vent points on both orbiter and booster, glowing pink in the fast-fading light. Greg's intuition made itself felt as he walked down the gantry arm towards the orbiter's hatch. It wasn't much, a ghost's beckoning finger, distracting rather than alarming.
For a moment he was worried that it might be the orbiter. That'd happened before, a Mi-24 Hind G in Turkey which was going to take him and his squad on a snatch mission behind the legion lines, he'd balked as he was climbing in. It was a mindscent, the chopper smelt wrong. The Russian pilot had bitched like hell until a maintenance sergeant had noticed the gearbox temperature sensor was out. When they broke the unit open, it turned out the main transmission bearings were running so hot they'd melted the sensor.
But this touch of uncertainty was different, there was no intimation of physical danger. He knew that feeling, clear and strong, experiencing it time and again in Turkey.
He hesitated, getting an enquiring glance from Sean Francis.
"We've only had eight fatalities in twelve years of operations," the Oscot's captain said helpfully.
"It's not the spaceplane," Greg answered. Precisely how much his intuition was gland-derived was debatable, but when he did get a hunch this strong it usually squared out in the end. Even before he'd received the gland, Greg had believed in intuition. Every squaddie did to some degree, right back to Caesar's foot soldiers. And now he had the stubborn rationale of neurohormones to back the belief, giving it near-total credibility.
The rest of the security team were watching him. He gave them a weak grin and began walking again.
The orbiter's circular hatch was a metre wide, with a complicated-looking locking system around the rim. Bright orange rescue instructions were painted on to the fuselage all around it. Greg shrugged out of his coverall and put his helmet on before he was helped through by the launch crew.
It was cramped inside, but he was expecting that, low ceiling, slightly curving walls, two biolum strips turned down to a glimmer. Another circular hatch in the centre of the rear bulkhead opened into the docking airlock.
"You the first-timer?" asked the pilot. He was twisted round in his seat, a retinal interface disk stuck over one eye, like a silver monocle. The name patch on his flightsuit said Jeff Graham.
"Yes," Greg said as he sat in the seat directly behind the pilot. Puffy cushioning slithered under his buttocks like thick jelly.
"OK, only one thing to remember. That's your vomit lolly." Jeff Graham pointed to a flexible ribbed tube clipped to the forward bulkhead in front of Greg. Its nozzle was a couple of centimetres wide, a detachable plastic cylinder with REPLACE AFTER USE embossed in black. "You even feel a wet burp coming on, then you suck on that. Got it? The pump comes on automatically."
"Thank you."
The rest of the security team were strapping themselves in; they were the only ones in the cabin. Greg fastened his own straps.
Jeff Graham returned his attention to the horseshoe-shaped flight console. The hatch swung shut, making insect-clicking noises as the seal engaged.
"Is there a countdown?" Greg asked Isabel Curtis who was sitting across the aisle.
She gave him a brief acknowledging smile. A wiry, attractive thirty-year-old woman with bobbed blonde hair. He could make out the mottled pink flesh of an old scar, beginning below her right ear and disappearing under the collar of her blue flightsuit. "No. You want to hear flight control, it's channel four. Give you some idea."
Greg peered down at his communicator set, fathoming its unfamiliar controls, and switched it to channel four. The voices murmuring in the headset were professionally bland, reassuringly so.
He followed the procedure: gantry-arm retracting, the switch to internal power, umbilicals disconnecting, fuel-pressure building, APU ignition. Half-remembered phrases from current-affairs programmes.
The take-off run was a steady climb of acceleration, turbo-expander ramjets felt rather than heard, an uncomfortable juddering in his sternum. The build through the Mach numbers, night sky devoid of reference points, floor tilted up at an easy angle.