Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

“And what does it want our money for anyway?” Victor chipped in. “Repairs? Set up a base in the solar system? What? You’re the expert, Rick.”

“Jesus.” Rick’s fists clenched and unclenched. “I don’t know. if we just go and ask it-”

“I won’t be more than a couple of hours tomorrow,” Greg said smoothly. “I’ll go first thing, and after that we’ll find out where Charlotte Fielder was given the flower.”

Greg watched the coast of Greenland sliding across the flatscreen on the cabin’s forward bulkhead. A stark slate-grey line of rocky cliffs with grimy water churning against their base. Away to the north a fast-flowing river was spurting into the sea, spitting out irregular lumps of translucent white ice.

The Pegasus could easily have been the same one that he’d been using yesterday, the cabin had the same type of seats, same colour scheme, same tasteless air, the Event Horizon logo cut into each of the crystal tumblers behind the rose-wood bar. Except today there was only Melvyn Ambler sitting quietly beside him instead of Malcolm Ramkartra and Pearse Solomons.

He thought he’d learnt to deal wth the memories of the dead. There had been enough in Turkey, and on Peterborough’s chthonic streets. Hold on to the names, treat them with respect, and remember they’d be cheering you on.

He must have been out of practice, that or he’d softened down the years. The Pegasus had taken twelve minutes to reach Greenland from Listoel, and each lonely one had been spent thinking about the two security hardliners and Rachel. A sudden flare of light and heat swelling around them, penetrating the cabin. Maybe not even that. It had been very fast.

The sun hadn’t risen yet, which made the dark undulating plains they were flying over seem even more forbidding, a barren expanse of grit and boulders, slicked with dew, features blurring as they lost height.

He couldn’t work up any real enthusiasm about the meeting. It would be nice to see Vassili again, but talking about Event Horizon and the alien would sour the reunion.

The handset on Greg’s armrest chimed. He picked it up.

“We’ve just lost our escort,” Catherine Rushton said.

Catherine Rushton was the pilot. The first thing he’d done after coming through the belly hatch was go into the cockpit to meet her. It was an overreaction verging on the childish, but it assuaged him, identifying her as a person.

“We’re safe then, are we?” he asked with a hint of mordancy. Three Typhoon air-superiority fighters had escorted them from Listoel. It looked like he wasn’t the only one overreacting this morning. Julia had been worried about the kind of weapons which Clifford Jepson could supply to Leol Reiger; an arms merchant and a tekmerc was a real bastard of a combination.

“Yes,” she answered. “The Russian zone Air Defence Regiment command is tracking us. We’ll be landing at Nova Kirov in two minutes.”

“Fine.” He pulled his leather jacket off an empty seat.

The flatscreen was showing a tract of emerald-green land below, marked off into square fields by wire fencing. Even with the high vantage point and anaemic light he could tell the vegetation wasn’t grass, too low, too uniform, almost like a golf course fairway. And it was lumpy; whatever the plant was, it flowed over boulders and rock outcrops like a film of liquid. There were sheep grazing on it, though.

Nova Kirov was the Wild West reinvented for the twenty-first century, a frontier town in aluminium and pearl-white composite. There were no trees anywhere, Greg noticed. No timber for houses and barns. These pioneers weren’t as independent as the ones who’d hit the Oregon trail two hundred years earlier. To set up a homestead in Greenland you either needed to be rich, or have rich sponsors.

The town was spread out over a kilometre along the rocky southern bank of a white-water river. He could see big lumps of glass-smooth ice bobbing about amid the spray and foam. A broad single-span bridge connected the town with a dirt road that ran parallel with the north bank.

There was a large patch of ground on the east of the town which remained free of the vegetation mat. Five An-995 subsonic heavylift cargo planes were parked on it, fat cylindrical bodies with a rear wing and canard configuration, all of them in blue and white Air Russia colours. A long two-storey office block sat on one side of the makeshift airport. Satellite dishes were scattered along its solar collector roof, pointing south; a tall microwave antenna tower stood at one end, an array of horns covering the surrounding countryside.

The Pegasus curved round the town and slid over the An-995s to land close to the office block. Greg caught sight of a small reception committee standing waiting. Dull grey dust swirled up, obscuring the camera image.

The belly hatch opened, and Melvyn Ambler stood up, zipping his blue and red check woollen jacket up to his neck.

“General Kamoskin and I will probably have a private talk in his office,” Greg said. “You’ll have to stay outside, OK?”

“Sure thing,” the hardline captain said easily.

Greg skipped lightly down the metal stairs. Powdery grey sand crunched below his desert boots. It was cool outside, a crisp clean humidity that came from morning ground frosts. Greg relished it for the sheer novelty value. His breath was turning to thin white vapour.

One day he’d have to bring the kids here, give them just a taste of the wind from ages past, how the world used to be. It would be terrible for them never to know.

General Vassili Kamoskin was standing at the front of the five-man reception committee, beaming broadly, his arms thrown wide. He was a solid stereotypical Russian, black hair receding from his temples, full face, thick neck. He wore his Russian Army uniform, dark green with scarlet epaulettes, knife-edge creases, five bands of medal ribbons. And they weren’t show decorations, Greg knew, Vassili had earned them. Three of them in Turkey where they had served together.

He stepped into a bear hug, Vassili laughing in his ear.

“Gregory, as always it is too long. How is Eleanor?”

Greg released him. Vassili’s hair was thinner than he remembered. It must have been five years since he’d visited Hambleton, just before Ricky was born. They’d kept in touch because the kind of friendships formed in combat weren’t the ones you could let go. There was too much pain and effort invested. “Expecting again,” Greg said.

Vassili clapped him delightedly on the shoulder. “You never sent word,” he accused. “How many is that now?”

“This’ll be the fifth.”

“You devil, you. Do you give lessons?”

“How’s Natalia keeping?”

“Bah,” Vassili waved a hand dismissively towards the town. “She’s an Army wife, she doesn’t complain. Sometimes I think she should.”

Greg looked at Nova Kirov. There was a cluster of warehouses behind the airport office block, tractors were already moving round them, tugging flat-bed trailers loaded with bales of wool. The buildings of the town proper were mostly single storey, spaced well apart, made up from standardized panels clipped on to a simple framework. An aluminium church stood by itself on a plateau above the river. Streets were wheel-rutted blue-grey mud. There were a couple of dogs running about.

Even without his espersense engaged, Greg could detect the buzz of optimism running through the place. The settlement was creating its own future, that always inspired.

“Looks pretty good to me,” he said.

“Gregory,” Vassili shoved out his arms theatrically. “It’s a retirement posting. They pushed me out to grass, the bastards.”

“Don’t tell me you’d prefer to be shuffling bytes in Moscow?”