Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

“You OK now?” an earnest young woman in a white jumpsuit shouted over the bedlam. Her face was pressed up close. A red cross on each arm.

Charlotte nodded. “I’m cold,” she said.

The woman smiled. “I’ll get you a thermal suit. But we’ll be closing and pressurizing in a minute. You’ll soon feel the difference.”

“Thank you.”

The man called Greg was sitting in a webbing seat opposite her, doing yoga breathing. He gave her a rueful grin.

Charlotte saw the motion long before the sound arrived. The Colonel Maitland was crumpling, prow and stern rising up, midsection splitting open. Long flames writhed out of the gondola windows.

“Father!” Fabian cried hoarsely. He was sitting next to her, she hadn’t even noticed.

The Colonel Maitland began to sink out of sight. Not falling, but a slow idle descent down to the water so far below. People were standing on the plane’s ramp, watching it go. She saw the little hardline woman among them, her fist punching the air. Smirking.

“Father!”

She put her arms round him as two of the white-clad medic team closed in. One of them was holding an infuser tube ready.

“Get away from him!” she shouted.

Fabian buried his head in her chest, sobbing uncontrollably.

“Just get away from him.” She rocked him gently, tears filling her own eyes.

The ramp hinged up.

The SETI office was livening up. Rick Parnell’s original staff of twelve had been complemented with twenty people from the Astronautics Institute’s astronomy department. The two teams were working together to realign Event Horizon’s radio and optical telescopes on Jupiter. The SETI people were elated at the prospect of practical hardware-orientated work at long last, the astronomers coldly angry at having their observations disrupted. Tempers were getting frayed. It didn’t help that Victor had called in Eddie Coghlan’s security programmers to prevent any possible data leakage from the new linkages being established between the observatories and the SETI office.

Victor stood in the doorway to Rick Parnell’s office, next to his bodyguard, and watched the shirtsleeved crew knuckle down. The tense hustle of activity was beginning to resemble a bank’s trading floor. It was always the same routine: one of the terminal operators would sit up straight and wave a hand in some unknown sign language, then a knot of technicians and managers would form around them, arguing hotly. Tiger teams, loaded with authority and practical knowledge-in theory. There would be data requests fired into the terminal, thick folders broken open and consulted, cybofaxes performing simple calculations. When the decision was finally made the knot would break up, and another would form around a different terminal.

Victor was irksomely familiar with the scene, crisis management, or more often damage assessment and limitation. It was going to be a long afternoon for the SETI office, and an even longer night.

It said a lot for Julia’s management that when something as outré as a search of Jupiter did spring up out of the blue, she could simply plug the appropriate division into the top of the company’s command structure and get results. He was even mildly surprised at the way Rick had coped with the unexpected burden. Give the man his due, he hadn’t started swaggering round like a mini-Napoleon.

Rick was sitting at his desk, jacket draped over the back of his chair, its collar getting more crumpled every time he leaned back. Both his terminal cubes were alive with whirling graphics. Every now and then he would nod encouragingly at them.

“What happens to the radio telescope data after you receive it?” Victor asked.

Rick looked up. “It’s squirted direct into one of the Institute’s lightware crunchers. We’ve been sponsoring university groups to write signal analysis programs in preparation for Steropes. All we have to do is pull them from our memory core, load them into the cruncher, and run the raw signal data through them. Of course, establishing their integrity in the lightware cruncher is going to take time; but my people are on top of it. We should be ready to start in a couple of hours.”

“And the optical data?”

“Standard image comparison technique. Take two pictures of the same patch of sky a week apart, and see what’s changed, if there’s anything new appeared. We’re in luck there. Aldrin did its last Jupiter survey five years ago, and it’s all on file in the Institute’s library. Galileo mission control is going to repeat that survey for me, starting in three and a half hours. So if your alien has arrived in the last five years, we should be able to spot it-providing it’s larger than a hundred metres in diameter.”

“How long is the comparison going to take?”

“Virtually instantaneous, given the processing power we’ve got available these days.” He held up a hand, palm outward. “But the survey itself will take a couple of days.”

Victor didn’t say anything. He’d been expecting the whole process to take at least a week. Astronomy had always seemed a glacial science to him; impressive incomprehensible machinery focusing on remote segments of the sky, providing building blocks for abstruse papers on cosmology. Arguments about how the universe was put together invariably went way over his head, but Julia thought it was important enough to finance to the tune of fifty million New Sterling each year.

“They were none too happy about that,” Rick said.

Victor roused himself. “Who?”

“Galileo mission control. I’ve screwed up their observation schedule good and proper. There are items that were requested five years ago on that schedule.”

“Tough. We all work for the same lady, pure science departments are no different to anyone else. It’s her telescope, it looks at whatever she wants.”

Rick clasped his hands together, grinning. “Lord save us from these heathen hordes.”

Victor sat in front of the desk, staring up at the big hologram of Steropes. “Is the data from the radio telescopes coming through all right? Requisitioning astronomical signals isn’t exactly a familiar field for my people.”

“Yes, quite all right.” He put the cubes on hold and bent down to open a desk drawer. “You want a beer?”

“No, thanks.”

Rick produced a can of Ruddles bitter. “That Julia Evans, she’s quite something.”

“Yes.”

“I mean, not just smart, attractive with it.” He tugged the can’s tab back.

“Yes.”

He swallowed some beer and looked thoughtful. “Do you think Royan is still alive?”

“He was a week ago.”

“Right.” Rick took another swallow. “I want to ask you something. I meant to ask Julia Evans, but, well… I didn’t know quite where I stood with her. The thing is, I suppose she’s assembling some sort of team to contact this alien when we find it.”

“I’ve no idea; but put like that, somebody will have to meet it.”

“I want in,” Rick said quickly. He bent forwards over the desk, knuckles whitening as he gripped the Ruddles tightly. “Damn it, I’m loyal, I’ll even keep quiet about it afterwards if that’s what’s needed. But I want to be there.”

“I’ll tell her. I should think she would’ve included you anyway. Who else has spent a lifetime thinking about aliens?” He wondered if it had come out sarcastically; he hadn’t intended it to.

Rick searched his face intently for a moment, then sat back. “Thanks.”

Julia Evans Access Request, Victor’s processor node told him.

Expedite Channel.

Hello, Victor, how’s it going? Julia asked.

Surprisingly well. The astronomy department won’t be asking you to their Christmas party, their schedules have been shot to pieces; but the radio signal data is beginning to come in. Rick and his team are preparing to shove it through some kind of specialist analysis program. The optical review is going to take longer, couple of days, Rick says.