New channels began to branch from the bottom of the matrix; how the microgee products were used, sales, maintenance, personnel, finance arrangements, tie-ins with other companies. The Zanthus matrix became the tip of a rapidly growing pyramid.
Queries began to surface.
A memox-furnace operator who’d left suddenly around the time the spoiler started. Julia plugged into Event Horizon’s datanet, squirting a tracer program into the company’s data cores. The woman had been four months pregnant, skipped her contraceptive in orbit. Doctors were worried about the baby’s bone structure, it’d spent two months developing in free fall.
Faulty ionizer grids in the memox furnaces three months ago had slowed production. But the batch had affected other companies as well, Boeing Marietta had paid compensation.
There was a small but regular fluctuation in monolattice filament output, starting nine months ago. A three per cent shortfall every month, and always in one batch. According to production records the filament extrusion ratio was incorrect, each time.
Julia cross-referenced it with the memox data. It fitted like a jigsaw. Whenever the monolattice filament output dipped, the memox crystal output rose to compensate, maintaining total production losses at a level thirteen point two per cent.
She’d found it. Though what the hell it was, she hadn’t got a clue.
End HighSteal#Two. Her processor nodes sucked the data mirage back into nothingness. There was a brief impression of free fall, dropping back into the world of primary sensations. The clammy late March heat, blouse sticking to her back, tight sweaty Levis, smell of horse breath, birds trilling, red pressure on her eyelids.
Julia blinked, focusing slowly. A cloud of midges were orbiting the brim of her tatty boater.
She was in what she called the crater field. Two acres of small steep-sided hummocks and hollows, like the earth had been bombed or something. Buttercups smothered the rich emerald-coloured grass all across the slopes.
A twitch on Tobias’s reins, and he plodded towards the derelict tea plantation.
The communal farmers had tried to grow it on a PSP grant. Tea was fetching a good price after the Sri Lankan famine reduced the global harvest by a third, and England’s new climate provided near ideal conditions for cultivation. But these were gene-tailored trees, and some nameless State lab had screwed up the DNA modification. The shoots were fast-growing all right, but the leaves ruptured into bulbous cherry blisters before they were ripe enough for picking. The plantation had gone the way of most PSP initiatives, abandoned and left to rot.
Julia dismounted, letting Tobias nuzzle round in the clover. The shire horse was becoming unfortunately flatulent in his old age. Poor dear.
He was another legacy of the communal farm, too old for plough work any more. The labourers had left him behind for Philip Evans to knacker, a trifling expense for a multibillionaire.
Julia had found him alone in the stables as she explored Wilholm the day they moved in. She’d fallen for the great shaggy animal at first sight. He was woefully thin, his coat caked in mud, covered in sores from the plough harness. And he’d looked at her so mournfully, as if he knew what the future held. That had been the last time anyone at Wilholm, including Grandpa, had dared to mention the knackers. She refused to ride anything else, and ignored the snickers and winks of the staff when they saw her on the back of the huge plodding beast.
“You’ll have to lose that sentiment of yours, girl,” Philip Evans had scolded. “Can’t run Event Horizon on sentiment.”
Except she knew damn well he would have done the same thing.
The tea trees had been laid out in unerringly straight rows. Nearly a third of them had died, but the remainder, left untended, had spread wildly, swamping the gaps, rising up to merge overhead.
Julia left Tobias behind, walking a little way down one of the long tunnels of black branches. Her trainers crushed the crisp dead leaves littering the ground, making sharp popping sounds. For one moment she almost believed they heralded the long lost autumn, an end to England’s eternal Indian summer, when frost would fall and pull down white-fringed leaves. She missed the snow. It had been such a long time since a flake had fallen on her outstretched palm. In Switzerland even the Alps had occasionally been denuded of their sparkling white caps.
She sat with her back to the smooth bole of one of the living trees. The temperature had dropped appreciably in the orange-hued shade. She fanned her face with the boater and pulled out her cybofax.
When Greg’s face formed on the little screen it didn’t match her memory of him. Free fall had swollen his cheeks, his eyes seemed enlarged, but even through the slightly distorted features he looked dispirited. Something she would never have imagined. She’d been a little bit afraid of him the other night. Physically he wasn’t exceptionally big, the same height as Adrian, but there’d been an impression of strength; the way he moved, clean and unhurried, knowing nothing would be in his way. And he’d never smiled, not meaning it anyway. Like he was only play-acting civilized. He’d seemed a very cold fish, hard. Which, on reflection, was an interesting kind of challenge. What would make him take notice of someone, respond with kindness? And if he did, how safe that person would feel with such a guardian angel.
“Miss Evans,” he said, expectant.
Julia wedged the cybofax into a fork on the gnarled branch in front of her, and put her boater back on. “Julia, please.”
“Julia. What can I do for you?”
“I called about the spoiler operation.”
“You can tell your grandfather I’ve got all the guilty furnace operators under custody, and the person who destreamed the microgee module squirts.”
Tell Grandpa, indeed. Like she was some sort of second-rate office messenger. “Oh, yah. Is Norman Knowles under sedation yet? Mr Tyo’s report said he put up quite a struggle.”
“How the bloody hell did you know that?”
“My executive code gives me access to all the security division communications.” She regretted saying it instantly, flinching inwardly at how pompous she must’ve sounded.
“Oh. Well anyway, Knowles isn’t going to be any more trouble. It’s finished now, we’re due down in another six hours.”
“It isn’t finished, Greg.”
He frowned, inviting explanation.
She began to reel off her research findings, praying he wouldn’t think she was talking down to him. The girls at school always said she talked as though she was delivering a lecture. But he listened intently, not interrupting like most people.
“You discovered this yourself?” he asked when she’d finished, and there was definitely a tone of respect in his voice.
“Yah. The data was all there, it’s just a question of running the right search program.” Julia knew her cheeks would be red, but didn’t care.
“How much is the monolattice filament worth?” he asked.
“That’s what doesn’t make sense,” she admitted. “The total loss is only nine hundred thousand Eurofrancs.”
“And that bothers you?”
“Yah! It’s ridiculous. Why go to all that trouble? The memox spoiler works perfectly, there’s no need to add the monolattice filament to it.”
Greg didn’t exactly smile, but she could sense his tension easing. “Tell you,” he said, “I knew something about this spoiler operation was funny. You believe in intuition?” The question was sharp, as though the answer really mattered to him.
Julia forgot the tea plantation, the bark pressing into her back, muggy air. She felt real good talking to him like this, treated as an equal, not the patronized boss’s granddaughter, not a scatty teenage rich girl. Right now she was a real person, for the first time in a long time. Maybe the moment would stretch and stretch.