Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

The envelope had already been opened; she drew out the handwritten card.

Take care, Snowy,

I love you always,

Royan.

Julia’s eyes watered. It was his handwriting, and nobody else called her Snowy.

With her eyes still on the card she asked, “Where did it come from?”

“Some girl handed it to me at the Newfields ball last night.”

Rachel sounded worried. “I don’t know who she was, but she knew me. Never gave her name, just shoved it in my hands and told me to pass it on to you.”

Julia looked up. “What sort of girl? Pretty?”

“She was a whore.”

“Rachel!”

“She was, I know the type. Early twenties, utterly gorgeous, impeccably dressed, manners a saint couldn’t match, and lost eyes.”

There was no arguing, Julia knew, Rachel was good at that kind of thing, her years as a hardline bodyguard, constantly vigilant, had given her an almost psychic sense about people. Besides, Julia knew the sort of girl she was talking about, courtesans were common enough at events like the Newfields ball.

Her nodes reported that the flower species wasn’t indexed in their files.

Open Channel to SelfCores. Get me a match up for this, would you? she asked silently. It was important she knew what he had chosen for her.

She looked back to the card, its bold script with over-large loops. She could remember him perfecting his writing, sitting at a narrow wooden table in her island bungalow, the sea swishing on the beach outside, his brow furrowed in concentration.

And the flower, the flower was the sealer. Royan adored flowers, and she always associated them with him, ever since the day when they finally met in the flesh.

Access RoyanRecovery. She had node referenced the memory because she knew it would always be special, wanting to guard the details from entropic decay down the years.

Six of them had walked into the Mucklands Wood estate that afternoon fifteen years ago, all of them wearing English Army uniforms. Morgan Walshaw, Event Horizon’s security chief at the time, who was quietly furious with her. It was the first (and last) time she had ever defied him over her own safety, Greg Mandel, who was as close to Royan as she was, and who’d agreed to lead them as soon as he’d heard she was going in. Rachel, who was her bodyguard back then, and two extra hardliners, John Lees and Martyn Oakly.

Mucklands Wood was the home of the Trinities, a bleak tower block housing estate which the city council had thrown up in the first couple of years after the Fens flooded. It stood on the high ground to the west of the A1, looking down on Walton where the Blackshirts were based. Two mortal enemies, separated by a single strand of melting tarmac and the luckless residential district of Bretton.

Rescuing Royan was more than a debt. Two years before, he had saved Philip Evans from a virus that PSP leftovers had squirted into the NN core. One of the best hackers on the circuit, he had written an antithesis which purged the virus. He had never asked for payment. A strange kind of bond had developed between them afterwards. Both of them powers in their respective fields, both feared, both near friendless, both wildly different. The attraction/fascination was inevitable, affection wasn’t, but it had come nevertheless. There was nothing sexual about the relationship, given the circumstances there couldn’t be. Neither of them ever expected to meet in the flesh. But the association was mutually rewarding. Royan had helped Julia safeguard Event Horizon’s confidential commercial data from his peers on the circuit, while Julia supplied the Trinities with weapons to Continue their fight against the Blackshirts. She hated the Blackshirts almost as much as Royan did.

But only now was she seeing the real cost of sponsoring the Trinities. Nothing like the intellectual exercise of arranging Shipments through Clifford Jepson. An action whose only reaction was the occasional item on the evening newscasts. She didn’t have distance between her and the Trinities any more. Mucklands Wood wasn’t the adventure-excitement she had expected, the little scary thrill of visiting the darkside. This was raw-nerve fear.

The struggle was all over now. There were no more Trinities, no more Blackshirts. Fires still burnt in both districts, sending up pillars of thick oily smoke to merge with the low bank of smog occluding the sky above the city. Half a squadron of Army tilt-fans orbited the scene slowly, alert for any more trouble.

Peterborough’s usual dynamic sparkle had vanished, shops closed, factories shut. The city’s frightened, shocked citizens were barricaded in their homes, waiting for the all-clear to sound. Both sets of protagonists had known this was the last time, the showdown, they hadn’t held back.

Julia walked over hard-packed limestone. The whole estate was a barren wasteland. There were no trees or shrubs, even weeds were scarce; a greasy blue-grey moss slimed the brick walls of abandoned roofless employment workshops. The Trinities symbol was sprayed everywhere, raw and challenging, a closed fist gripping a thorn cross, blood dripping.

Two of the estate’s high-rise blocks had been razed in the battle, toppling over after a barrage of anti-tank missiles had blown out the bottom floors. Julia’s little group threaded its way past one, a long mound of broken twisted rubble, with metal girders sticking out at low angles. Squaddies picked their way over it gingerly, helping city firemen with their thermal-imaging sensors. Futile gesture really. She could see pieces of smashed furniture crushed between the jagged slabs of concrete, torn strips of brightly coloured cloth flapping limply, splinters of glass everywhere, dust thick in the air. A long row of bodies lay at the foot of the tower, covered in blankets. Some had dark wet stains.

Morgan Walshaw looked at her as they marched past. But she forced herself into an expression of grim endurance, and never broke stride.

A two-man patrol halted them. The squaddies in their dark-grey combat leathers and equipment webs didn’t even seem human. Sinister cyborg figures cradling stub-barrelled McMillan electromagnetic rifles, bulbous photon-amp lenses giving their helmet visors an insect appearance, there wasn’t a square centimetre of skin visible. She couldn’t understand half of the gear modules clipped to their webs, and didn’t bother consulting her nodes. She didn’t want to know. All she’d come for was Royan.

Greg and Morgan Walshaw exchanged a few words, and the squaddies waved them on. They had been guarding the approach to a field hospital, three inflated hemispheres of olive-green plastic. Land Rovers and ambulances stood outside, orderlies hurrying between the bloody figures lying on stretchers. The empty white plastic wrappers of disposable first aid modules littered the ground; the oddest impression of the day, a dusting of giant snowflakes.

For the first time, Julia heard the sounds of the aftermath. The moans and screams of the wounded. Guilt sent icy spikes into her belly.

“Morgan,” she said in a small voice.

He glanced back at her, and she saw the genuine worry in his face. Despite the forty years between them, she had always considered him one of her closest friends.

“What?” he asked. There was an edge in his voice. He was ex-military himself. She wondered, belatedly, what sort of memories their visit must be raking up.

“I’d like to do something for the survivors. They’ll need proper medical treatment after the Army triage. Lawyers too, probably.”

“I’ll get on to it when we’re finished here.” He dropped back to walk beside her. “You holding out all right?”

“I’ll manage.”

His arm went round her shoulder, giving her a quick comforting shake.

“Tell you, this is the one,” Greg said over his shoulder. He was indicating the high-rise block straight ahead.