Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

She felt Andria’s fingers running lightly round her chin. “You could always set up as a corporate security consultant, your experience must count for-” the girl began.

“Bollocks. Kombmate security wouldn’t touch me with a bargepole. Besides, I want right out, the whole way. Got the money, too.”

“But what would you do?”

“Get conventional. Shit, I know it sounds fucking stupid. Right? But I’d like to give convention a go. I thought a pub or a hotel, maybe a club.”

“If a consultancy wouldn’t give you the excitement, then I don’t think a pub would be what you need.”

“I know someone,” Suzi whispered. “Someone who used to do this kind of crap, a real hardliner. He got out, clean and sweet. Jesus wept, one person. One out of all the thousands.”

Andria kissed her throat lightly, trying to give comfort through intimacy. “And he did it through being conventional?”

“Yeah.” That image came back to spook her again. Greg and Eleanor walking down the aisle of Hambleton’s dinky little church, both of them smiling radiantly at each other, not seeing anyone else. Suzi hadn’t wanted to go, hadn’t known what to wear, hadn’t known what present to get. Like a flicking savage figuring out a cybofax. It had come as a harsh shock, finding out just how far she’d regressed from society. “He’s got a wife, kids, farm, the whole flicking works. And he never came back.”

“Was he your lover?”

“No. Yes. Not really. Good mates, that’s all.”

“And you think you can follow him?”

Suzi stroked the damp strands of hair from Andria’s forehead. She always wanted to be tender afterwards, make up for her earlier fierceness, show the girl she really cared. She knew sex was another of her failings, needing to be on top when it was boys, making the girls submit. She wanted to stop, to be normal. Didn’t know how; couldn’t figure how the other ways could possibly work like everyone said, all that giving and sharing bollocks. Sex was power.

“Fuck-all chance of doing anything else,” Suzi said. “I mean, tekmercs, we screw convention, deliberately. That’s what we are. But this jobs and family buflshit, it works, for billions of people, it sodding works. If I just had something that I could commit myself to, something I could feel a bit of pride in.” Her voice had risen without her realizing. “Shit, maybe Leol Reiger was right about me when he said I haven’t got what it takes. Sometimes I hope he is. But I need something to anchor me to that kind of world. Kid would do that.”

“Yes,” Andria said simply. “You’ll do it?”

“Of course I will. I love you, Suse.”

Andria was still watching the hypersonic above them. The balconies on the eastern end of the Soreyheath condominium looked out over New Eastfleld’s marina and the gleaming structures of Prior’s Fen Atoll away in the lazy distance beyond. They were arranged in tiers, which meant Suzi could see any of the balconies below her, but not the two above. A concrete-enforced statement about social position, she always thought.

The tip of the hypersonic’s nose was sticking over the end of the roof, like a bird of prey crouched ready to pounce on the supine bodies laid out invitingly below it.

Access Concierge. Identify Incoming Plane Ownership.

Suzi took a drink of orange from her glass. She was skipping alcohol right now, it wasn’t fair on Andria.

Pegasus G-ALPH Registered with Event Horizon Corporation. Suzi glanced thoughtfully at the white nose cone.

The phone shrilled.

Andria pressed the sound-only button. “Yes?”

“Guests for you, Miss Landon,” the concierge ‘ware’s construct voice said. “Julia Evans and Greg Mandel.”

Suzi heard Andria’s indrawn breath at the mention of Julia, she smiled at the girl’s innocent enquiring gaze, and began hunting round for her robe. “Well, send ‘em in, then.”

Suzi hadn’t seen Greg for over six months, though she did make an effort to stay in touch. Sort of. Julia she hadn’t talked to for nearly three years. The multibillionairess was only a couple of years older than Suzi. When she came through the front door, Suzi couldn’t find any appreciable signs of ageing. Julia still looked like a young twenty-five-year-old. And she didn’t possess the kind of conceit which would send her scurrying to the surgeons. Rich and youthful; there just wasn’t any justice.

Greg gave her a quick hug and a kiss. Julia seemed at a loss what to do, kiss, shake hands, wave…

“I thought you aristo types always knew what to do in every social situation,” Suzi scoffed. “Inbred etiquette along with all the other deviances.”

Julia screwed up her face and stuck her tongue out.

Suzi turned the white presentation box over in her hands. Flowers weren’t her thing, though she had to admit it was a bid odd. But-”Extraterrestrial?”

“Yes.” Julia was sitting on one of the lounge’s white-leather pillow chairs. A real close look showed she had stress lines around her eyes and mouth.

Suzi shot Greg a look. “And what do you make of it?” She’d always been awed, and not a little envious of his intuition. If she had anything like it, no way would Leol Reiger ever have taken her so easily. What Greg said about the flower she’d be happy to go along with.

Aliens were something so far outside her norm she hadn’t got a clue how to react at all-except maybe scream and run. But if Julia was right about them arriving in the solar system, they were behaving fucking odd. And what did they look like? More important, what did they want? Why all this secrecy?

Just thinking about it made her ache inside.

“The flower is real enough,” Greg said. “But as to what the aliens are like, I’ve no idea.”

“Shit. You’re a big help.”

“Forget the implications, if it makes you feel any easier,” Greg said. “Concentrate on the immediate. All we’re going to do tomorrow is track down the courier girl, find out where she got the flower from. Julia takes over from there.” He kept glancing out at the balcony where Andria was lying on the lounger.

“I’ll bet you take over,” Suzi muttered. “Starship technology should bring in a bundle, even by your standards.”

Julia played nervously with her fingers in her lap. “I just want Royan back,” she said. “That’s all.”

That name was an omen, all bad. Suzi could feel it shackling her to the past, reeling her in. Greg was the same, she figured, all edgy underneath. He really wasn’t up to any of this any more, not at his age, he’d been out of it for too long, things had changed. Respect was gone, violence was on the up. Trouble was, they all owed Royan in a big way. Without him, his hotrod expertise, the Trinities would have been wiped off the map.

“You really going looking for the little pillock?” she asked Greg.

“Yeah.”

“Oh, bollocks, count me in.”

On top of everything else, this. Julia came down the hypersonic’s stairs in a foul mood. It was the children’s speech day at school, she never missed that, and wasn’t about to start now.

The wind on the top of the Event Horizon tower was cool, blowing off the land. Down below, a thick milky mist covered the quagmire and the deep-water channels, even rising high enough to claim the interlocking metro rail lines. The sun was an anaemic pink nebula hovering somewhere out over the Wash.

Kirsten McAndrews waited for her at the side of the landing pad. “Is Mutizen’s negotiator here yet?” Julia asked her.

“Yes, he arrived on the metro right after you called to set up the meeting.” Kirsten cleared her throat delicately. “The Welsh delegation are waiting as well.”