Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

“How many Sangers does Dragonflight operate?” Greg enquired as the three of them moved down the gallery to see the orbiter stage being prepped in its big clean room behind the high bay.

“Four booster stages, and seven orbiters,” Francis said. “And they’re working at full stretch right now. The old man has ordered another booster and two more orbiters from MBB, they ought to arrive before the end of the year. Which will be a big help. Strictly speaking, we can’t afford to take an orbiter out of the commercial schedules for a Merlin launch, although I appreciate his reasoning behind the exploration programme. I just regard it as somewhat quixotic, that’s all. Still, it’s his money, yes?”

The orbiter, which rode the booster piggyback until staging, was a smaller, blunter version of its big brother; thirty-five metres long, rocket-powered, and capable of lifting four and a half tonnes into orbit, along with ten passengers.

Clean-room technicians dressed in baggy white smocks were riding mobile platforms round the open upper-fuselage doors. The Merlin had been removed from its environment-stasis capsule overnight, now it was being lowered millimetre by millimetre into the orbiter’s payload bay.

The probe was surprisingly compact; cylindrical, a metre and a half wide, four long. Its front quarter housed the sensor clusters, their extendable booms retracted for launch; two communication dishes were folded back alongside, like membranous golden wings. The propulsion section was made up of three subdivisions; a large cadmium tank, the isotope power source, shielded by a thick carbon shell, and six ion thrusters at the rear. It was all wrapped in a crinkly silver-white thermal protection blanket.

Greg let his gland start its secretion again, beginning to get a feedback from the technicians’ emotional clamour. It was the first time he’d ever encountered the space industry. These people were devoted. It went far beyond job satisfaction. They shared an enormous sense of pride, it was bloody close to being a religious kick.

The Merlin had finally settled on its cradle inside the orbiter’s payload bay. As the overhead hoist withdrew, the mobile platforms converged, allowing the huddles of white-suited technicians to begin the interface procedure. The pallet which would deploy the spacecraft in orbit was primed, attachment struts clamped to load points, power and datalink unbilicals plugged in. Monitor consoles were hive-cores of intense activity.

Greg nodded down at the little robot probe and its posse of devotees. “What happens next?”

“We mate the orbiter to the top of the booster. After that the barge will dock with the airstrip. Your launch window opens at half-past eight, lasting six minutes.”

The payload bay doors hinged shut, bringing Greg one step closer to Zanthus. And it still didn’t seem real.

From Oscot’s deck the western horizon was a pastel-pink wash flecked with gold; the east a gash into infinity, not black, but dark, insubstantial, defying resolution, a chasm you could fall down for ever. Greg watched the crescent of darkness expanding as the Atlantic rolled deeper into the penumbra; occlusion slipping over the sky, giving birth to the stars. There was no air movement at all, dusk bringing its own brand of Stasis. The world holding its breath as it slid across the gap between its two states.

Greg was wearing a baggy coverall over his new flightsuit. The coppery coloured garment fitted him perfectly, a one-piece of some glossy silk-smooth fabric, knees and elbows heavily padded. It had a multitude of pockets, all with velcro tags; small gear modules adhered to velcro strips on his chest-atmosphere pressure/composition sensor, medical monitor, Geiger counter, communicator set. He’d even been given a new company cybofax, capable of interfacing with Zanthus’s ‘ware, which was in the big pocket at the side of his leg. There was also a lightweight helmet, which he felt too self-conscious to put on before getting into the Sanger.

The first real stirrings of excitement rose as he led the security team towards the waiting tilt-fan at the prow, the realization 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 day-time 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 legitimization policy. They were all gear factories, except for Kenton and Costellow, those two used to specialize 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.