Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

“It’s just a tool of the trade, dear. You and Julia have bioware nodes, I have a gland, Fielder has beauty.”

Suzi turned the display off, and tucked the wafer into her shellsuit’s top pocket. “Yeah, maybe. But it’s acid weird, wouldn’t catch me doing it.”

“I’d hope not,” he muttered.

The Pegasus was over a large town, shedding speed.

“Is that Salzburg?” Greg called forward to Pearse Solomons.

“Yes, sir. And we’ve got landing clearance for the Prezda.”

“Fine.” They were losing height rapidly, the Pegasus pitching its nose up at a respectable angle. Outside the town, the ecological-regeneration teams had triumphed. Rivers had been given gene-tailored coral banks to halt erosion. They were lined by surge reservoirs, like small craters, to cope with the sudden floods inflicted by Europe’s monsoon season. Valley floors were a lush green again, speckled with wild flowers; llamas and goats grazing peacefully. Dark green tracts of evergreen pines were rising up the side of the slopes once more. They were a gene-tailored variety, nitrogen-fixing to cope with the meagre soil, their roots splaying out like a cobweb, clinging to exposed rock with an ivy-derived grip.

He wondered how much it would cost to repair the whole of the country in this way, a Japanese water garden treatment.

The Prezda arcology had been built into a natural amphitheatre at the head of a valley, facing south. It was as if the rock had been ground down into a smooth curved surface and polished to a mirror finish. A cliff face of a hundred thousand silvered windows looked out down the valley, he could see the mountains and lush parkland reflected in them. The image wavered as the Pegasus drew closer, as though the windows were rippling.

Between the two silver arms of the residential section was a low dome housing the inevitable shopping mall and the business community, along with the leisure facilities. The cyber-factories were buried in the rock behind the apartments. Power for the city-in-a-building came from a combination of nearby hydroelectric dams and hot rock exchange generators, bore holes drilled ten kilometres down to tap the heat of the Earth’s mantle.

“Ant city,” Suzi said as the Pegasus headed in for a pad above the western arm.

“You live in a condominium,” Greg retorted.

“Yeah, but I get out to work and play.”

The Pegasus landed on the roof, and taxied on to a lift platform at the edge. They began to slide down the side of the silver wall to the hangar level.

“Does Event Horizon have a contact in Prezda security?” Greg asked the two security bardliners.

“Not on the payroll,” Pearse Solomons said. “But there is a commercial interests liaison officer, he deals with cases like data fencing, or bolt-hole suspects. He’ll allow us to tap a suspect’s communications, mount a surveillance operation, that kind of thing. You want me to call him?”

“No. We’ll keep him in reserve.”

There was a swift rocking motion as the Pegasus rolled forwards into the hangar. Greg stood up and made his way to the front of the plane.

“You think Baronski is going to co-operate?” Suzi asked as she followed him.

“According to his profile he goes out of his way not to annoy the big boys. Besides, he’s old, he’s not going to blow his chances of a golden retirement over something like a client’s identity, not when we start bludgeoning him with Julia’s name.”

The belly hatch opened, letting in a whine of machinery and the shouts of service crews.

“Malcolm, you come with us this time,” Greg said.

The hangar took up the entire upper floor of the Prezda, nearly two hundred metres wide, curving away into the distance. Bright sunlight poured through its glass wall, turning the planes parked along the front into black silhouettes. It was noisy and hot. Gusts of dry wind flapped Greg’s jacket as they made their way across the apron. Executive hypersonics and fifty-seater passenger jets were taxiing along the central strip, rolling on and off the lift platforms. Drone cargo trucks trundled around them, yellow lights flashing.

The back half of the hangar had been carved into living rock, the rear wall lined with offices, maintenance shops, and lounges. Biolum strips were used to beef up the fading sunlight.

Greg walked through the nearest lounge and called a lift. He held his cybofax up to the interface key in the wall beside it, requesting a data package of the Prezda’s layout. “Baronski lives seven floors down from here, and off towards the central well,” he said, reading from the wafer’s screen.

Suzi pressed for the floor and the lift door shut.

Greg tried to get an impression from his intuition. But all he got was that same pressure of time slipping away.

The lift doors opened on to a broad well-lit corridor with two moving walkways going in opposite directions. It was deserted, the only noise a low-pitched rumble from the walkways. They stepped on to the walkway going towards the centre of the arcology. There were deep side corridors every fifty metres on the right-hand side, ending in a floor-to-ceiling window that looked out across the valley.

The eighth walkway section brought them to the central well. A shaft at the apex of the amphitheatre, seventy metres wide, zigzagged with escalators. It was twenty storeys deep, Greg guessed the roof must be the hangar above. Each floor had a circular balcony, two-thirds of which was lined with small shops and bistros, the front third a gently curved window. The rails of glass-cage lifts formed an inner ribcage.

It was a busy time, the tables in front of the windows were nearly all full, smartly uniformed waitresses bustling about. People were thronging the concourse and the balconies, filling the escalators. Teenagers hung out. Strands of music drifted up from various levels, played by licensed buskers. Greg could see a team of clowns working through the window tables two storeys below, children laughing in delight.

“Baronski is back this way,” Greg said, and pointed back down the corridor. “Couple of doors.” That was when the ordered his gland secretion, seeing a flash of black muscle-tissue jerking. His espersense unfurled, freeing his thoughts from the prison of the skull. Minds impinged on the boundary as it swept outwards, deluging him with snaps of emotion, of tedium and excitement, the tenderness of lovers, and frustration of office workers. One fragment of thought had a hard, single-minded purpose that was unique in the whirl of everyday life about him. He stopped and searched round, seeking it again, knowing from irksome memory what it spelt.

“Wait,” he said.

Suzi almost bumped into him as he halted. “Now what?”

There was a flare of interest in the mind. And again, another one on the edge of perception, a couple of floors higher up.

“There’s a surveillance operation here,” Greg said. “I’ve got two people in range. Probably more outside.”

Suzi shifted her bag. “Targeting Baronski, do you think?”

“Dunno. They’re interested in us, though, the direction we’re heading.”

“What now?”

“Malcolm, there’s one on the other side of the well, opposite this corridor, not moving. Male. See if you can spot him.”

Malcolm Ramkartra turned slowly and leant back on the walkway, resting his elbows nonchalantly on the rail. “Think so. Bloke in a blue-grey shortsleeve sports shirt, late twenties, brown hair cut short. He’s outside a greengrocers, reading a cybofax.”

Greg looked down the corridor. A woman and her ten-year-old daughter were riding the walkway towards the well. Ordinary thought currents. There was no one else.

Two people in the well implied a sophisticated deal. They couldn’t stay there all the time, which meant a rotation, others held in reserve. Probably an AV spy disk covering Baronski’s door as well. More people to trail the old man if he went down the corridor to a lift.