Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

“I did the right thing, didn’t I, Greg?” Julia asked.

“Yeah, both ways. I’ve had to sit back and endure what happened between you and Royan, my friends. That hurt, Julia. And this thing,” he waved a hand at the windscreen. The alien was retreating from New London, still growing, ten-fifteen kilometres across now, at least. That made it hard to believe it was leaving. It was such an overwhelming presence, breaking down his conviction of a neatly completed deal. “Look at it. We couldn’t have let that loose in the solar system. It’s too powerful. You can’t ignore it; either it would have engulfed us, or we would have abused it, little people twisting it to serve parochial needs. And there are a lot of little people in the world, Julia. Maybe that’s why you stand out so much.”

“Maybe.”

Size was the killer, forcing him to accept his own insignificance. New London was big, but the asteroid was something that had been tamed, he could admire that. But now he could finally appreciate Royan’s internal defeat, his broken soul. Royan had known what was at stake, that was why he’d been prepared to use the gamma mines.

The alien had become two-dimensional, a veil of titanium atoms that lacked the substance of a mirage. He guessed there must be a net of cables to support the sail and provide some degree of control. But they were probably no thicker than a gossamer thread. Invisible and irrelevant.

A hundred and twenty kilometres in diameter, and it didn’t even seem to be slowing down. A flat white-hole eruption.

Maria backed the Falcon eighty kilometres away, a leisurely thirty-minute manoeuvre. When they stopped, the alien was two hundred and sixty kilometres in diameter.

The measurement had to come from the Falcon’s sensors, its dimensions defeated the human eye. Such vastness perturbed his comfortable visual references, cheating him into believing the sail was down. In his mind it had become a featureless silver landscape; not an artifact or a living creature. Logic warring with belief. He was truly in alien country now.

Four hundred kilometres in diameter. The sail engulfed half of the universe; powerful waves of sunlight would roll across it, washing over the Falcon and dazzling Greg before the windscreen’s electrochromic filters cut in.

He experienced the figment kiss as the sail reached five hundred kilometres in diameter. A strand of thought spun out from the knot of cells at the centre of the sail, the one he couldn’t see, but knew was there. Julia’s teasing lips brushed his.

And he was standing on a beach of white sand with the deep blue ocean before him, stretching his arms wide in primal welcome to the rising sun, soaking his naked body with its warmth. He dived cleanly into the water, striking out for the shore beyond the far horizon, abandoning the past with giddy joy.

The ghost haze of solar ions gusted against the alien sail, beginning the long push out to the stars.

The Frankenstein wasp crawled round the metal bar of the conditioning grill, and poised on the cliff-like edge of copper paint facing into the office. Greg could make little sense of what it saw, just smeared outlines, as if he was wearing a glitched photon amp. But the wasp was aware of the empty space ahead, and somewhere out there were flowers, pollen. Sugar tugged at it like a tidal force.

Greg used his espersense to locate the mind he wanted; four metres from the wasp, slightly below. He pushed the wish into the insect’s instinct-governed brain. A need to fly towards the man sitting at the desk. Wings blurred furiously.

“You just want the stinger changed?” Jools the Tool had asked Greg curiously that morning. He was a small man, dressed all in black. Round gold-rimmed glasses shielded his damp eyes with pink-tinted lenses. His chalk-white skin looked unhealthy, though Greg wrote it off as partly due to the time of day. The sun hadn’t risen when he rang the pet shop’s bell.

“Yeah,” Greg said. “That’s all.”

“So how are you going to control it?”

“I’m a gland psychic.”

Jools the Tool nodded a grudging acknowledgement, and led him past the cages of sleeping animals to his cubbyhole surgery at the rear of the shop.

The operation hadn’t taken long. Greg stood behind the little Frankenstein surgeon, watching the microscope’s flatscreen over his shoulder. It showed the wasp, magnified to thirty centimetres long, held down with silk binding sheaths. Micro-surgical instruments delicately amputated its stinger, and stitched in a wicked-looking hollow dagger to replace it. Blades and clamps danced with hypnotic agility around the yellow-and-black striped abdomen, responding to the waldo handles which Jools the Tool was caressing.

“I’ve primed it with a shot of AMRE7D,” he told Greg as the artificial stinger was filled with a clear fluid. “It’s a neurotoxin, one of the best. Once it’s in the bloodstream, you’ve got a maximum of twenty seconds before death occurs.”

The back of the man’s head was distinguishable now, hair like a logjam, lunar mare of skin. Greg guided the wasp down to the nape of the neck, allowing the insect’s own instincts to take over for the landing. When the warmth of the skin pressed against its legs, his mind shouted out the compulsion. The wasp thrust its composite stinger into the skin, expelling the AMRE7D in a single blast.

Clifford Jepson’s hand swatted the wasp, his yell of surprise and pain rattling round the office.

Greg focused himself on the boiling thought currents. I want you to know something before you die, Jepson, his mind whispered. I want you to know why.

Clifford Jepson’s muscles had locked rigid, maybe from terror, maybe from the neurotoxin. Greg looked out through bugged eyes, feeling throat muscles like iron bands, hands clawing at the chair’s leather arms.

You were offered an honourable chance to end the madness over atomic structuring. You refused it because you thought you could squeeze more money from the deal. You were greedy, Jepson. And that greed killed my friend. It might have been your psycho-cyborg Reiger who pulled the trigger, but you loaded his program, you ran him. Now you’re going to die because of it. I’m glad, and I hate you for that as well.

Greg cancelled the gland’s secretion, and opened his eyes. He was sitting in the passenger seat of a navy-blue Lada Sokol, parked in the shade of a Japanese umbrella pine in a big open-air car park. Fifty metres in front of him, the ornate carved stone of the stately home which Globecast used as its European headquarters burned brightly in the mid-morning sun. A flock of white birds were flying through Kent’s cloudless azure sky overhead.

“Did you close the deal?” Col Charnwood asked.

“Yeah.”

“Good.” Col Charnwood flicked the Lada Sokol into gear and drove carefully out of the car park.

Some time after midnight Charlotte pulled on a white silk robe and went out on to the balcony to enjoy the cool breeze that blew in from the Fens basin. It was so refreshing after the sweltering heat of the day. She let it ruffle her hair as she gazed up at the night sky. The alien solar sail was definitely smaller tonight. It had been crawling away from New London over the last few days, now it was low in the south-east, while the fuzzy patch of the asteroid’s archipelago glowed above the western horizon.

According to the channel newscasts, light pressure from the Sun was constantly accelerating it. She hadn’t known that light could exert pressure; apparently it could. A tiny pressure, but the sail’s surface area was the size of a small country, making the overall force colossal. In another twenty days it would reach solar escape velocity; after that it could go wherever it chose in the galaxy. Several times since returning from New London, Charlotte had found herself thinking what it must be like having that much freedom. What a wonderful thing to be able to roam the universe at will, searching out wonders and horrors. And to voyage so majestically, sailing on a sunbeam.