Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

Charlotte gave her hair a final rinse and turned off the shower. She wrapped a big towel around herself, then used another to dry her hair. The robe she’d worn over her bikini to walk about in through the gondola was lying on the damp tiles, soaking up the condensation the shower had thrown out. It could stay there now. The maid could clean it. Bitch.

She sat down in front of the mirror, and combed out her hair. Her cabin hadn’t got that stale stuffy taste in the air like Fabian’s. It gave her room to breathe, room to move. Having her own cabin was the only real plus of this assignment. She liked the times she was on her own, an interval when she could be reflective, when every move and word wasn’t an effort.

She looked at the image in the mirror, stretching, wriggling her toes. “Gawd luv us, ducks. See ‘ow grand we is nahdays.” She giggled. Funny, it was harder to do that accent now than the upper-middle-class one Baronski had patiently coached her in. The past really had died.

Charlotte got up and searched through her bedside cabinet. Her gold Amstrad cybofax was in the second drawer. She took it out and sat on the bed, curling her legs up. “Phone function,” she told the wafer, then gave it Baronski’s number. He probably couldn’t help her out of her predicament straight away, but she could vent a lot of her frustration on him. It was something he was always good at, always there as a shoulder to cry on. Everyone needed someone like that, life would be unlivable otherwise. And in any case, she needed to tell him she wouldn’t be going to Odessa. He liked his girls to keep in touch.

UNABLE TO ACQUIRE SATELLITE LINKAGE, the cybofax screen printed.

Charlotte stared at it. Unable? She climbed off the bed and walked over to the window. The jet-black solar envelope hull of the airship curved away above her like a medium-sized moon. No wonder the cybofax’s signal couldn’t reach the geostationary antenna platform.

There was a standard terminal on the other side of the bed, but she shied away. If she was going to have a decent rant at Baronski about Whitehurst she didn’t want to do it on the man’s own ‘ware. More than one of her patrons had routinely recorded calls.

Charlotte began looking through drawers for her Ashmi jumpsuit. She could go up to the landing pad, the cybofax would work from there.

Maybe if she stuck out this assignment for another month, push Fabian away gradually. That might work, no hard feelings on either side, and a wonderful memory of first love for the rest of his life. But another month of this? At least in French Guiana there would be the beach bars, and some decent nightlife.

Charlotte was zipping up the jumpsuit when there was a rap at the door. The maid came in.

“Mr Jason would like to see you,” she said.

“OK, I’ll be about twenty minutes.”

“He said now.” There was a definite gloat in the voice.

Fabian had shown her where his father’s study was, in the midsection of the lower gondola deck, but they hadn’t gone in. Now Charlotte found it was equipped with ultra-modern fittings, the first she’d seen on board. Walls, floor, and ceiling were a silver-white composite; flatscreens showed homolographic maps of the globe, coastlines glowing sharply, cities and ports tagged with ten-digit codes. Jason Whitehurst was sitting behind a smoked-glass desk that resembled a rectangular mushroom. She could see tiny red and green lights inside the glass top, squiggling like trapped fireflies. It was the only piece of furniture in the room.

The heels of her leather ankle boots clicked loudly as she walked towards him.

“Chair,” Jason Whitehurst said. A circle of floor in front of his desk turned grey. It extruded upwards, a smooth cylinder at first, then it began to flow, like something organic caught by time-lapse photography.

Charlotte sat tentatively in the curving scoop chair which formed. It felt as hard as rock under her fingernails.

“You attempted to use your cybofax to make an external call,” Jason Whitehurst said.

“Yes.”

“I must ask you not to do that again. I am conducting some very delicate negotiations at the moment.”

“I won’t interrupt them. It was just a call to a friend.”

“You called Baronski.”

Charlotte began to wonder if it had been the bulk of the airship hull which had blocked the call, after all. “That’s right. He likes to know where I am, and as we’re not going to Odessa-”

“He likes to know what you hear.”

“Pardon me?”

“Baronski deals in the information you supply him. That will not be the case on this voyage.”

“I wasn’t going to say anything about you. I don’t know anything about you.”

“Nor will you. I purchased you purely to provide Fabian with some amusement, nothing more. Now that is all.”

It took a moment for the dismissal to sink in. Charlotte rose on legs which were suddenly trembling. Once the door had slid shut behind her she rubbed her eyes. Her knuckles seemed to be very damp.

The Pegasus carrying Victor Tyo to Duxford settled on to the rooftop pad with a slight rocking motion as the undercarriage absorbed the plane’s weight. The stewardess opened the belly hatch, and Victor trotted down the stairs. His bodyguard followed a few paces behind.

He supposed the necessity of having a bodyguard was an oblique compliment to his own efficiency. The latest generation of tekmercs tended to take failure personally, regarding their activities as something companies should tolerate, like fires or bad debts. If their deals got blown, it wasn’t their fault. Like petulant children caught shoplifting.

It was a problem which meant simply blowing the covert operations they mounted against Event Horizon wasn’t good enough any more. He had to root out the whole nest of them involved every time.

The current price for assassinating Victor Tyo was half a million Eurofrancs, offered by Eugene Selby after his attempt to snatch research data on magnetic logic circuits ended with his hotrods being backtracked and taken out by a couple of Foxhound missiles. The price for killing that assassin should he or she prove successful was a million Eurofrancs. A quarter of a million Eurofrancs could be picked up by anyone who cared to reveal Eugene Selby’s present geographical coordinates.

Victor’s life was nearly all tangled up in deterrent circles like that these days. It didn’t particularly bother him. All part of the game. His choice to be a player had been made long ago.

Right back when he joined the security division, Morgan Walshaw had told him, “Once in, never out; this job is for always.” He’d been young enough then to nod seriously and say, “Yes, sir, I understand perfectly.” Understand, but not completely appreciate. Always was turning out to be a long time.

Lately he’d taken to saying the same thing to recruits himself. His division had grown in proportion with the commercial side of Event Horizon; it matched national intelligence agencies in size, possessing the tactical strike power equal to a couple of RAF squadrons.

The three major opposition parties at Westminster were constantly demanding enquiries into tekmerc-planted rumours of his activities, and even the New Conservatives were becoming nervous. If it hadn’t been for the fact that ministers needed Julia on their side over Wales, incidents like the Selby deal could well result in the police taking a more active interest. As if they had the capacity to deal with tekmercs, but try telling that to politicians. Event Horizon security wasn’t the cause of problems, it was the result of them.

His staff were currently monitoring eighteen separate tekmerc deals being mounted against the company. There was definitely a leak somewhere inside the biochemical division, which even the psychics couldn’t pin down. And now he had aliens coming at him.