Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

“The contamination has been quite high,” Angie said.

“Wrong answer,” said Greg. “How long have you been working the spoiler?”

“What?”

“The whole eight months?”

“I don’t know-”

“Seven months?”

“Listen!”

“Six?”

“Hey, you can’t just-”

“Five?”

“Start accusing me-”

Greg leaned back in his chair and smiled. Julia was very glad she wasn’t receiving that smile, it was predatory.

“Five months,” said Greg, a simple statement of fact.

“This…What is this?” Angie demanded. She was looking straight at Morgan Walshaw.

“It’s word association,” Greg said. “I say a word, and I watch to see how your mind reacts. Is there stress and guilt, or is there merely innocent confusion? It doesn’t matter what your verbal answer is, your thoughts don’t lie.”

Julia almost felt a pang of sympathy for the woman. Betrayed by her own soul. Greg’s ability was eerie, silent, unfelt, and devastatingly accurate. A whole heritage of fear was built around people who could divine thoughts. Quite rightly, surely everyone was entitled to some core of privacy. She pulled her cardigan tighter over her shoulders.

“Stress and guilt, that’s what peaked at five months,” Greg said.

“You’ve got a gland,” Angie said. Her defiance had gone.

“That’s right.”

She flushed hard. “I…I hadn’t got any choice. They knew. Things. About me. Christ, I don’t know how they found out.”

“Just give us the details,” said Walshaw, sounding bored, or perhaps weary.

“What’ll happen?” Angie asked.

“To you? We probably won’t prosecute, if you’re being truthful about them blackmailing you. But you won’t ever work in orbit again, not for anyone, we’ll make quite sure of that.”

“I didn’t have any choice!”

“You could’ve come to us, we could’ve set a counter trap.”

“I don’t know. There’s no difference between you, any of you. People like me, well, it’s not fair.”

“Never is,” Walshaw muttered.

Watching Angie hunching in on herself, Julia realized the woman had already submitted, the fight had gone out of her. She was going to do exactly what Walshaw told her to. What an awesome reputation psychics had, that even their presence could sap the will like that. No wonder the PSP had been so troubled about the animosity of the Mindstar Brigade veterans.

“How did they turn you?” Greg asked.

Angie flinched when he spoke. “Are you still looking into my mind?”

“Yes.”

She nodded reluctantly. “OK. I was doing some uppers. Zanthus, it gets to you, you know? Four months in a dormitory can, everyone crammed together at night, recycled piss to wash with, can’t taste your food. It just gets to you. It’s no High Frontier dream, only sounds that way from down here. Anyway, it gets to the stage where you’ve really got to force yourself to turn up at Stanstead at the end of your furlough. I’ve got two daughters, see, they’re beautiful kids, really-smart, happy. I take care of them when I’m on furlough, my ex has them when I’m up there. I hate the idea of him having them at all, but some choice, right? So seven years of this shit is too much; my eldest, she’s fifteen, she’s got a boyfriend, she’s got exams this year. I should be there. Saying goodbye, it hurts like hell. So six months ago I’ve got to take something to ease the pain.”

“What about your pre-flight medical?” Waishaw 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.”