Greg couldn't quite figure out the section of the dormitory can he'd emerged into, a tunnel with a hexagonal cross-section, three and a half metres wide, bright biolum strips every five metres, hoops protruding everywhere. Logically, it ought to have been a connecting corridor, except it was full of people. They lingered near the walls, aligned with their feet towards him, a foot or hand hooked casually round the hoops, all of them wearing flightsuits and helmets. A large proportion were eating; their food resembled pizza sandwiches, the same pale spongy dough, tacky fillings. No crumbs, Greg realised, and no need for plates and cutlery. Twenty metres away, four exercise bikes were fixed to the walls, riders pedalling away furiously. There was a sign opposite the airlock, an old London Underground station strip: Piccadilly Circus.
It was the noise that got to him first. Conversations were shouted, air-conditioning was a steady buzz, cybofax alarm bleepers were going off continuously, the PA kept up a steady stream of directions. Then there was the air—warm, damp and stale. He began to appreciate Angie Kirkpatrick's point of view.
The dormitory commander, Lewis Pelham, and Event Horizon's Zanthus security captain, Don Howarth, were waiting for him. Lewis Pelham didn't attempt to shake hands, holding on firmly to one of the hoops as the rest of the security team boiled out of the airlock. "My orders are to afford you full cooperation," he said.
He had that same flat professionalism as Victor Tyo and Sean Francis, Greg noted. Did Philip Evans have a clone vat churning them out? "Somewhere private," he suggested, raising his voice above the din.
Pelham smiled, big lips peeling back, a round face. "Sure."
"It's shift change," Howarth said. "Not like this all the time, don't worry." His face was fluid-filled, too, a ruddy complexion.
They slapped the hoops, moving off up the tunnel, skimming along effortlessly. Greg climbed after them doggedly, one hoop at a time. A few cheers and jeers pursuing his progress.
"Five days," Howarth said, "and you'll be outflying a hummingbird." He was waiting by an open hatch. "Through here."
It was a toroidal compartment, wrapped round the central tunnel. A space station as Greg understood it, consoles with flatscreens and cubes flashing graphics and data columns, bulky machinery bolted on to the walls, lockers with transparent doors. Five beds were staggered round what Greg thought of as the floor, assuming the entrance hatch was in the ceiling. Lewis Pelham had orientated himself the same way as Greg, holding the edge of a bed to maintain his position. The security team followed suit as they came in.
"This is the sick bay," Pelham said. "Nobody in today. Will it do?"
"Do you have a brig?" Greg asked.
Pelham and Howarth exchanged a glance. "We can clear the suit-storage cabin if it's really urgent," said the security captain.
"Good enough." His gland began its secretions. "Close the hatch, Bruce," he said.
Bruce Parwez elevated himself, and spun the lock handle.
Lewis Pelham regarded Greg without humour.
Greg closed his eyes as the compartment became insubstantial. Minds crept out of the shadow veils bordering his perception, a swarm of pale translucent pearls, compositional emotions woven tautly into penumbra nuclei. He focused on the two strangers before him. "Now, to start with, do either of you know anything about the excessive memox-crystal contamination?"
CHAPTER NINE
Julia flung herself at the problem as she took her horse Tobias on their morning ride. There was a strong sense of urgency pushing her to find a solution now, almost one of despair. Greg Mandel had located the person who'd circumvented the security monitors, and the five guilty memox-furnace operators up at Zanthus. The replacement operators were flying up today, their Sanger bringing the security team and the prisoners down. It would be over soon, congratulations all round, and a small security office left intact to track down one of the tekmercs. A vague hope, even less of finding the team leader and through him the backers.
Julia didn't even bother to open her eyes in the saddle. Tobias knew their route, down the edge of the manor's rear garden, past the spinney at the end of the trout lake, and into the meadows beyond. The horse's lumbering rhythm was soothing, rocking her gently back and forth on his back.
Normally she enjoyed Wilholm's grounds. The landscape crew hadn't been given much time after the communal farmers moved out, but they'd managed to recreate quite a reasonable approximation of a traditional English country-house garden. The flat lawns were clipped low, showing broad cricket-pitch stripes, young staked trees poked up at regular intervals, moated with colourful begonia borders. There was a citrus grove in the old walled orchard where apples and pears used to grow. Long winding rose-covered walks. Ancient-seeming statues.
Even her grandfather had been impressed. "The plants aren't the same, of course," he'd told her on their first inspection. He'd been in fine form that day, she remembered, genial and outgoing. It was a day or two after they'd moved in, a small treasured hiatus before the illness really took hold. He never spoke to anyone else as he did to her, never opened himself. "You wouldn't find any of these in Victorian gardens, not outside the conservatories. That was the zenith of the art, Juliet. But it's a damn good copy for all that, I can almost believe I'm back in my youth. I wish you'd seen England as it was, girl. We all said we hated it, the wet and the cold. Pure bollocks. You could no more hate the country than you could your own mother. Weather made Englishmen."
The way he painted the land before the Warming had made her envious of his memories. Try as she might she just couldn't visualise Wilholm under a metre of snow.
But he seemed reasonably content with the facsimile. And he always had the roses and honeysuckle, immortal.
Now she ignored both varieties of the fragrant flowering plants while whirlpools of data rotated lazily in the open-ended logic matrix her augmented mind had assembled.
It was a simulacrum of Event Horizon's Zanthus operations, a vast web of data channels incorporating every activity, programmed to review the entire previous twelve months, the first three giving her a baseline for comparison. Byte packages slid smoothly along the matrix channels, interacting at the nodes, dividing, recombining.
The convoluted phantasm reminded her of a brass clock she'd seen in London once, sitting on a pedestal in the window of a Fulham Road antique shop. A real clock in a glass dome, every working part visible. She'd stood for ten minutes watching the little cogs clicking round, superbly balanced ratchet arms rocking fluidly, fascinated by the delicate intricacy. Then the minute hand had reached the hour, and it began to make twanging sounds, like a broken spring uncoiling; cogs on the outside of the mechanism shot out on telescoping axles gyrating wildly. The whole thing had looked like it was exploding. Julia had clapped her hands and laughed delightedly as it folded itself back together, ready for the quarter-hour strike. There was that same elegance and effortless precision in the matrix function.
She needed the knowledge it would produce. The fact that someone could wound Event Horizon so badly had frightened her more than she liked to acknowledge. It went deeper than mere corporate damage; what little control she had over her life was being manipulated, cut away. Her future was being decided right now by how well other people could defend her and Grandpa from unseen enemies. Fighting shadows.
It was the claustrophobic sense of not being able to do anything which was the worst. If she just knew.
The simulacrum was intended to give her some part in the struggle, to make the reliance less than absolute. She was going to start at the beginning, the furnaces, then work right back through the company, cross-reference every connection, examine every link, however tenuous. Somewhere, in all that hellishly convoluted maze of data, there would be anomalies, a mistake, a clue to the origin of the spoiler. Nobody was perfect enough to cover their tracks entirely. She'd find it. Data was her medium, a universe where she reigned. Processing power cost nothing, there was only time challenging her now.