Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

“I really would like you to leave the Colonel Maitland after us.”

“Yes, quite. Good idea. Sixty-five million, you say?”

“Yeah, sixty-five.”

Suzi let out a disgusted hiss of breath, rolling her eyes.

“Very well, Mr Mandel. We have a deal.”

Greg fished around in his jacket pocket, and produced the ident card Julia had given him: pure white, except for the LCD display and a small triangle and flying-V logo filling the top right corner.

“You have the authority for the transfer itself?” Jason Whitehurst asked.

Greg scaled the card over the desk to him. “No messing. Julia and I go back a long way. I help her out now and then.”

Jason Whitehurst picked up the card, glancing at it briefly. “Event Horizon’s central account, no less. You sound like a chap it would be a good idea to know.”

Greg stood up. “Charlotte Fielder, is she on board?”

“Indeed she is, yes.” Jason Whitehurst’s fingers sketched hieroglyphic symbols on the smooth surface of the desk.

Greg still couldn’t make out the graphics, but they were changing below his hand.

“You really gonna?” Suzi asked. She had risen to stand beside him. Her mind appalled and fascinated. “Sixty-five million?”

Greg imagined his own thoughts must be similar. Sixty-five million. He knew there was a tingle of magic in his relationship with Julia, but this kind of money wasn’t chicken feed, even for her. He wondered who he would trust with that much, not many. There were levels of trust; Suzi would be utterly dependable in a scrap, but hand her sixty-five million for safekeeping and it would be a goodbye that would last beyond the end of the world.

“I have set up the credit transfer order,” Jason Whitehurst said.

The desk let out a piercing whistle. Greg saw a whole section of the incomprehensible graphics turn red and scurry into frantic motion. His cybofax bleeped, and he reached for it automatically.

There was the unmistakable crump of an explosion, distant and muted. The hazy blue world outside the study’s broad windows remained unchanged.

Julia’s face filled the cybofax screen, there was no background behind her, as if she was starless space. “Greg!” she called. “I’m registering an electronic warfare alert.”

Suzi was sprinting to the nearest window. The distinctive double thunderclap of a sonic boom rocked the Colonel Maitland. Greg could feel the vibration through his feet.

“Nothing here,” Suzi shouted. She was pressed up against the window, Browning in her hand. “Shit, it must be above us.”

An alarm was shrilling in the corridor outside. The two hardliners burst into the study, weapons drawn.

“Put them down,” Jason Whitehurst said sharply.

They lowered the handguns reluctantly. Racal IR laser carbines, Greg noted absently, restricted to military sales only.

“What’s happening?” he asked.

“Someone’s thrown a jamming field around the airship,”

Julia’s image said. “It’s fluctuating, as if the source is moving. I can’t get a message out.”

The desk stopped whistling. “The plane that flew over,” Jason Whitehurst said; both his hands were pressed against the glass surface, almost as though he was communing with it. “It attacked your Pegasus.” One of the homolographic maps on a wall-mounted flatscreen flicked off, replaced by a view from a camera on the Colonel Maitland’s tail fin, looking down the fuselage towards the prow.

Greg stared in horror at the ruined landing pad. The Pegasus had been ripped almost in two along the length of its cabin. It had collapsed on to the landing pad, spewing black oily smoke from its rear quarter. Intense flares of blue-white light writhed continually inside the buckled fuselage, the giga-conductor cells shorting out. As he watched, flames began to lick out of the gashes.

No one could have survived that blast. Through the shock, all he could think of was that he never even knew the pilot’s name.

“The plane is returning,” Jason Whitehurst said with deliberate calm. “Subsonic, and slowing.”

“Can the Colonel Maitland hold it oft?” Greg asked.

“We have some ECM systems naturally,” Jason Whitehurst said. “But this is not a warship. I consider my staff more than adequate to deter any normal kidnapping attempt.”

Greg was still gaping at the ruined Pegasus when a thin column of air above the landing pad seemed to sparkle for an instant. The hangar blister and whatever plane was inside disintegrated into a vivid plume of white fire. A shock wave thumped the wreckage of the Pegasus into the rim around the pad, flinging out a flurry of debris. The incandescent tumour of light swelling out of the ruptured hangar had turned the flatscreen image black and white. Large strips of the solar cell envelope all around the landing pad were curling up like autumn leaves, edges crisping, exposing the thin monolattice struts of the fuselage.

The sound of the blast rolled around the airship’s flanks and hammered against the study’s windows a couple of seconds later.

This time the Colonel Maitland shuddered perceptibly. There was a long drawn out series of agonizing creaks and groans reverberating through the geodetic framework.

“Leol flicking Reiger,” Suzi said. She flinched at a loud metallic twang. “Gotta be.”

“I think you might be right,” Greg said. He turned from the flatscreen to see Jason Whitehurst slumped nervelessly in his chair, a vein throbbing on his temple. “Apart from the landing pad, how do you get on board?” he asked.

“There are access hatches on the top of the fuselage,” Jason Whitehurst said. “I suppose they could break in there. The plane would have to hover, though. It would be difficult.”

“Not to tekmercs,” Greg said. He thought fast, no question that they were here for Charlotte Fielder, so there would be no indiscriminate shooting. Not until after they snatched her, anyway. “What about escape systems? Lifeboats? Parachutes? Something to bail out in?”

“There’s an emergency survival pod in every lower deck cabin.”

“It shouldn’t come to that,” Julia’s image said. “My security crash team will be on the way.”

“You sure?” Greg asked.

“The Pegasus was in constant contact with Event Horizon’s security division. As soon as that jammer cut the satellite link the crash team launched. I promised I’d back you up.”

“How long till they get here?”

“Twenty minutes, maybe a little less.”

“You hear that, Suzi? Twenty minutes’ evasion and decoy.”

“Yeah. If these security people of Victor’s are any use. So what do you wanna do about the girl, meantime?”

“Where is she?” Greg asked Jason Whitehurst.

“On board somewhere, with Fabian. Probably in his cabin. Get her away from him, Mr Mandel, get her well away.”

“Are you coming with us?”

Jason Whitehurst glanced round the study, blinking leadenly. His thought currents had slowed drastically; the attack had shaken him badly, fissures of insecurity were opening in his mind, allowing subconscious fears to rise and clog his thoughts. “Go where?”

“Shit. OK, order your crew into the emergency pods. That plane might try to puncture the gasbags, force everyone out so they can pick up Fielder.”

Jason Whitehurst debated with himself for a moment, then acquiesced. “Yes, all right.” He stretched a hand out over his desk, stirring the light patterns. “Fabian must get into a pod by himself; he’ll be safe then. That’s all that matters now.”

“Greg!” Suzi yelled frantically. She was pointing out of the window.

The plane was descending into view about two hundred metres away, a delta planform with a long bullet nose. Not easy to see, an elusive light-grey stealth coating seemed to slither when he tried to focus on it, pulling the uniform blueness of sea and sky around the flat fuselage like a cloak.