Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

“Certainly,” Sean said. “I’ve had some rooms prepared in the Governor’s Residence for you.”

“I’ll see my team to their barracks then join you,” Melvyn said.

“Right, bring a couple of them back with you,” Greg said.

“Carrying, but nothing heavy, the Tokarevs will do.”

“Sure thing.”

Greg picked up his flight bag and followed Sean into a circular lift, along with Charlotte, Suzi, Rick, and Michele Waddington. It started to descend slowly, Greg’s feet nearly left the floor. Gravity built steadily.

The doors opened on to another smooth tunnel carved through the living rock, a pair of moving walkways ran down the middle, two broad biolum strips were fixed to the ceiling, brighter than usual. Gravity felt normal. Greg looked along it, expecting to see it curve up out of sight, but there was a corner about eighty metres away, and another one behind him. The floor might have been slightly curved, it was hard to tell.

They took a walkway down to the corner, then another one. The layout reminded Greg of the Prezda arcology, people slotted neatly into regulated accommodation space. Hive mentality.

There was a policeman sitting behind a metal desk outside the door to the Governor’s Residence. He stood and saluted as Sean showed his card to the door.

The Governor’s Residence changed Greg’s mind about conformity. The interior seemed to have been lifted straight out of some eighteenth-century colonial trader’s mansion, a formal European layout, with modern Asian and Oriental furnishings. The rooms were spacious and airy, with high ceilings and white walls, pillars and arches dominated the architecture. He wondered how much it cost to lift all the wood up from Earth.

Suzi stood on the parquet floor of the hall, and whistled appreciatively. “Not half bad. You pay rent?”

“No, this is my official residence. It comes with the job. The King and Queen have slept here, and the PM.”

“No shit? Now us.” She nudged Greg playfully.

“Tell me about the Celestial Apostles,” he asked as Sean led them up the stairs to a broad landing.

Sean put on an unconvincing smile. “Bunch of religious nuts, mostly; though some technical types threw in with them. Their creed decrees space as the turning point in human destiny. No specifics, surprise surprise. Just generalities; space will save us, expand our spiritual horizon. Same kind of crap most loony cults spout. The main difference is that the leadership don’t live off the acolytes. By all accounts they’re quite genuine in their belief. They all live in the disused tunnels and empty storage chambers. I wouldn’t call them dangerous, exactly; but personally I’d just as soon send the police and security teams into the tunnels to round them up and deport them, yes? I mean, what happens in a real emergency situation, a pressure loss? Or an epidemic, how would they get vaccinated? I’d have to risk my people trying to help them. But of course they never consider that.”

“So why don’t you?” Greg asked.

“The police do catch a few. But Julia Evans says let them be, no big trawling operation. It’s not as if we’d drain the Colony’s police budget.”

Greg gave Suzi a satisfied grin, he’d known that kind of sentimentality was one of Julia’s traits. Suzi just rolled her eyes.

The bedroom was decorated in red and gold, with ornate hardwood marquetry furniture. Painted fabric screens had been used to partition off the bathroom and jacuzzi with forest scenes, black backgrounds with tall spindly trees, pale leaves. Metal-framed French windows opened out on a balcony with iron railings, a row of potted ferns was lined up along the front edge.

Greg dropped his flight bag on the bed, and pushed the windows open. Hyde Cavern’s air was warm, humid, ozone rich, and smelt of fresh blossom. He was looking out over a small deep valley, with a blunt dark massif of rock blocking the far end. A slim tubular sun blazed with blue-white virulency overhead, its glare haze blocking out any sight of what lay behind it. He followed the sides of the valley as they rose upwards, curving in like two giant green waves about to topple. If he used his hand to shield his eyes from the tubular sun, he could just make out the landscape directly above.

By then he was ready for the impossible sight. He’d been intellectually prepared for it, of course, but ground as sky was still a dismaying sight. The physical mass, pressing down.

He wasn’t quite sure what to call the involuntary phobic shudder running down his back, but it seemed as though the little cylindrical worldlet was about to constrict, crushing him at the centre.

He dropped his gaze again. The first four out of the five kilometres between him and the other endcap was lush green parkland. Hyde Cavern’s rock floor had been shaped with gentle undulations, silver streams meandered through the coombs, low waterfalls feeding calm lakes. There were copses of young saplings, tree-lined avenues of yellow pebbles wandered like serpents across the grass. White Hellenistic buildings were dotted about, each at the centre of its own garden. They were the focus of New London’s social life-theatres, restaurants, clubs, pubs, reception halls, churches, two sports amphitheatres. People didn’t live out in the Cavern, groundspace was too valuable; instead the lower fifth of the southern endcap housed the warren of living quarters, offices, light engineering factories, and hotels.

The last kilometre of Hyde Cavern was filled with the miniature sea, a band of salt water running round the foot of the northern endcap, its parkside coast wrinkled with secluded coves and broad beaches of white sand. Tiny islands studded the middle of the sea, covered by a dense shaggy thatch of vegetation. Just looking at it made Greg want to run over and dive in.

He gripped the balcony rail and peered over. They were about twenty metres above a broad rock roadway running round the base of the endcap; people in light clothes strolled about idly, the far side was a bicycle lane, nests of café tables with bright parasols sprawled out directly below him. Balconies stretched away on either side, vines with huge heart-shaped leaves twining round the iron support columns, long mauve flower clusters formed a fringe above his head, bunches of green grapes dangled on either side. He picked one; it tasted sweet, succulent, and seedless.

Suzi, Rick, and Charlotte had come out of the bedroom to join him. And even Suzi was quiet as she looked round.

“Where were you when you met the Celestial priest?” he asked Charlotte. The girl hadn’t put ten words together since they’d lifted off from Listoel. Her thought currents were tightly wound, slow but deliberate, there was a lot of concern and guilt accumulating inside her skull.

She frowned lightly, searching the shoreline. “There.” She pointed to a point high up on the right-hand curve. “It’s the fall-surf beach near the Kenton station.”

“Ah, tourist zone,” Sean said. “The beaches round there all have bars and sunbeds, game pits, that kind of thing. It’s popular with the younger ones.” He smiled at Charlotte.

“Do the Celestial Apostles often try recruiting there?” Greg asked.

“They vary. Routine would trap them, yes? But they do tend to prefer the tourist zones.”

Greg turned his back on the distracting vista of Hyde Cavern, gathering his thoughts. “OK, I want every available policeman assigned to foot patrol. Have them cover the kind of public areas the Celestials frequent. I’m looking for any kind of activity by the Celestials, recruiting, picking the fruit, whatever. Specifically, they’re to look out for older male Celestials. If they see anything they’re to report in, but under no circumstances apprehend. The last thing I want now is for them to go to ground.”