Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

“But I was wondering if you could help me.”

“I enquired about you after our first encounter. I know what you are. A gland psychic. A Mindstar veteran. You were not going to ask me anything, you were going to uncover. Event Horizon’s truthfinder general, sent to pry by your whore daughter mistress.”

Greg held his dismay in check. “Any answers you give would be entirely voluntary. I can’t read people’s thoughts.”

“So you claim, and other people fervently hope. It is a particular human weakness you pry on, Mandel; we want, need, to believe we are secure against you. But I have a vast repository of confidential commercial information in my brain. I choose not to believe the word of a repulsive grotesquery, a failed laboratory experiment.”

Greg let the neurohormones discharge into his brain, desperately searching round with his intuition. There was guilt here, a strong scent; Kendric and Julia were tied together, hating each other, feeding off each other. With a shock he knew she was as guilty as Kendric. Both of them wilfully stimulating the other’s black obsession, a perverted symbiosis.

He was jerked out of his meditative analysis by hands like a pair of vices clamping round his upper arms. The bodyguards were standing on either side of him.

“Mark, Toby, throw him off,” Kendric said.

“I’m going,” Greg told them. He sensed rather than saw Mark’s smirk.

“Too right,” the bodyguard said.

Greg contracted his espersense, neglecting the other minds arrayed around the Mirriam, focusing on Kendric alone. “Wolf,” he shouted.

There was no reaction. No guilt, fright, consternation, panic. The name hadn’t registered. Instead, a band of mild puzzlement tapered through Kendric’s mind. It was followed by a rising tide of wry satisfaction when he realized how shaken Greg was by the negative.

Toby and Mark frogmarched him off the aft-deck and down the side of the superstructure, Kendric’s laughter chasing him all the way.

He was dropped abruptly at the top of the gangplank, stumbling. Something with the force of a runaway train slammed into his backside. He tried to curl up into the trusty old paratroop landing crouch, but it didn’t seem to work very well. He saw a fast, confusing snapshot sequence of yachts and water and sky at impossible angles, each black interstice punctuated by a new burst of pain that mercifully shut off almost as soon as it registered, leaving a patch of numbness. The bioware node spliced into his cortex which regulated his gland was also programmed to blank out nervous impulses above a predetermined pain level. Mindstar had included the limiter as an experiment to try and alleviate shock in combat injury cases, but the Army had never brought it into widespread use, there was too much danger of squaddies ignoring the damage they’d received and making it worse.

The unyielding concrete of the quay arrested his helter-skelter momentum with a sickeningly loud slap. His brain seemed to be floating at the centre of a closed insensate universe. There was harsh laughter from afar followed by running feet. Hands grasped him, hauling him upright.

“Shit. You OK? Can you walk?”

Tactile sensation eased back, the cortical node reopening enough nerve channels for him to regain control over his limbs. Bruises throbbed sharply across his legs, arms, and back. His left leg was shaking. Both hands smarted from wide slashes of grazed skin, filming over with blood. Tunnel vision showed his suede desert boots at some vast distance. He couldn’t breathe through his nose, it was full of warm sticky liquid.

“Come on, lean on us.” That was Suzi.

Greg did so, gratefully.

“You want those pillocks taken out?” There was a note of hope colouring her voice.

“No.” He shook his head. Big mistake. The world reeled alarmingly, acid bile rose, scouring his throat.

“Green south, green south, stand down. We’re bringing Thunderchild in. Gold west, cover please.”

There was a small Cambridge-blue three-wheel sweeper-float ahead of him now, its front roller brushes retracted, inclined at forty-five degrees, looking like rusty felt mandibles. The name GUS’S SANITIZING was written down the side in bold yellow letters.

Greg was urged on to the narrow seat in the Perspex-bubble cab, and Des climbed in behind the wheel while Suzy rode shot-gun on the footplate. The two Trinities were both wearing jaunty red shirts and matching trousers, complemented with Gus’s company caps, burger-bar uniforms.

Des swooped the float into a hard turn, and set off back down the quay at a good five kilometres per hour, squirting a thick spray of bubbly detergent in their wake. He fumbled with the dash switches and cut the rain of cleanliness, cursing hotly.

“I’ve got to go back,” Greg said, pinching his nose between thumb and forefinger.

“Fuck that,” Des said. “We’ve blown cover hauling you out. I’ve gotta get my squad safeguarded. Standard procedure; you should know that, Mr Military Hotshot. This operation is now over.”

“What the hell do you want to go back for?” Suzi asked.

“I have to see something.”

They shot out on to the promenade, and Des tilted the joystick sharp left. Pedestrians hopped out of the way, hurling abuse.

“Listen,” Des said. “You wanna go back, that’s fucking fine by me. I’ll stop right now and you can walk. But you’re on your own. We’ve been burning our arses off for you, and I don’t see anything to show for it.”

“OK, drop me here.”

“Shit.” Suzi and Des exchanged anxious befuddled glances. “You can’t,” said Suzi. “Come on, Greg, you can’t hardly walk. We’ll bring you back in a couple of days, when it’s cooler.”

“It has to be now.”

“The photon amps are still in place, how about we take you back to Angelica’s? You can watch from there.”

Greg probed his nose tenderly, it didn’t feel broken, and it’d stopped bleeding. “Not that sort of watching, not visual. I want to use my espersense on them.”

“Jesus,” Des spat. “You Mindstar?”

“Yeah.”

“Bloody hell,” Suzi muttered. “I knew there was something about you. Father never said nowt.”

Greg said nothing, he had always held back from mentioning it to the Trinities. People developed funny attitudes to psychics, kids especially. Let them just think he was lucky, outfits like that put a lot in superstition.

“Jesus,” Des said. “Fucking Mindstar active in Peterborough. Think on it. Party always pissed itself over you people. Look, just what is going down on that yacht?”

“If I knew for sure I wouldn’t have to go back.”

“Shit, just how close do you have to get?”

They compromised. Des drove into the maze of service alleys behind the promenade shops, and swapped clothes with Greg. Then he went off to organize the squad’s withdrawal, leaving Suzi to drive Greg. There’d be no more retrieval posses if Toby and Mike came after them; but the snipers would remain in place until Greg had finished.

Suzi drove back out on to the promenade and deployed the brushes before moving up the quay next to the Mirriam’s mooring. Seagull crap dissolved into creamy puddles, frizzy bristles whisking it away into the float’s tanks.

“Stop here,” Greg told her once they were opposite Kendric’s yacht.

She climbed out of the little cab. “Don’t be too long,” she implored, and lifted the engine cowling.

Greg relaxed, sinking back into the thin cushioning of the bench, and instructed the cortical node to shut out the sharp throbs of pain his nerves were reporting loyally.

The gland: stressed, taut like a marathon runner’s calf on the home straight. A sluice of neurohormones bubbled out amongst his axons.