Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

He wanted a sensory extension that went way beyond his usual short-range emotion perception. To find it he retreated inward, ignoring his blood heat, heartbeats, breathing. The state waited for him right down at the bottom of the mental well, a fragile central pool. Gaseous shapes meandered below its surface. He slipped softly below the interface.

Greg perceived shadows, treacherous grey cobwebs congealing into misleading forms, aching empty gaps of grainy mist. The vision was silent, neither hot nor cold. Through it all, minds shone like diamond-point mirages, a flat cyclonic swirl of fireflies with himself at the tranquil storm-eye. He concentrated, seeking the opaque distortion of Mirriam, the familiar signature of one mind.

The water resolved as a sheet of black ice, a dead zone; he drifted across it, stretching out close to his absolute limit. Mirriam’s hull rose above him, a cliff of insubstantial gauze. Passing through.

The three figures were cloudy alien protrusions into his lonely universe; their shape fuzzy, a pseudo-locus rippling around a solid kernel. Kendric and Hermione slid fluidly over and round Katerina, the three together a tightly knit serpentine coil.

Katerina was a soul in torment, hating herself for what she was doing, unable to refuse. She closed out the degradations Hermione performed, warm with the conviction her reward would come.

Greg observed her arousal growing as Kendric pleasured himself with her, his mind leaking distorted pictures of Julia. Fissures of intense rapture multiplied through her mind, interlacing, spreading to conquer, reducing her to animal abandon. Orgasm brought a blazing concussion of frenzied ecstasy, a neural nova.

Instinct and dusty memory fused within Greg’s tarnished cranium, and at last he knew what Kendric had done to her.

The intangible universe twisted, spectral images elongating and spiralling down to a tightly wound vanishing point. The marina’s sights and sounds boiled up around him, solid and loud.

“Let’s go home,” he said weakly. Sustaining such a vast psi-effusion was severely debilitating. Gravity seemed to have quadrupled.

“Bout time,” Suzi grumbled, slamming down the cowling and locking the catches with a vicious twist. “You look like shit, you know?”

“Thank you.” The sky overhead was jaundiced, its turbidity fluctuating in time to his heartbeat.

“That gland must really take it out of you.” Her foot pressed down on the accelerator pad.

“It does.”

“Thought so, you were thrashing about like you were having a nightmare. Get what you want?”

“Yes.”

“Hey, your nose has started bleeding again.”

“It’ll stop in a minute.”

“Of course Kendric wouldn’t know Wolf’s name,” Eleanor snapped irritably. “He’s the man at the top, the one with the cleanest hands in town. He buys people who buy people who buy Wolf. That’s why there was no response to the name, there’ll be a whole chain of tekmercs between him and the cutting edge of the operation to get rid of Philip Evans. It’s like that precaution you use in gear, what do you call it? And keep still.”

“Cut offs.” Greg’s voice had a throaty rasp to it.

She’d got his hands spread out on the chalet’s kitchen bar, spraying his knuckles with Colman’s dermal seal. From her own past experience she knew it stung, but it was the best on the market. The treacly salve fizzed over his grazes, quickly solidifying into a flexible powder-blue membrane which would enhance tissue repair, moulting after a couple of days.

Eleanor concentrated on keeping her hand steady as she moved the can back and forth, getting an even deposit. Her shoulders ached, and her back was cramped from hunching over him for three-quarters of an hour. She was getting tired, and her temperament showed it.

The lion roar of the Triumph bike trailing the Duo into the Berrybut estate had triggered some kind of premonition in her. She’d come running from the shore as Des helped Greg out of the Duo. There seemed to be blood all over him, his Stewart sweater was torn, he couldn’t walk without leaning on Des.

She’d felt resentful as Suzi and Des carried him into the chalet: an invasion of her personal space. The chalet was symbolic with all that was good in life right now. They were violating that, harbingers of pain and violence. She knew she’d always associate them with disruption now, no matter how much Greg praised them.

They’d seen Greg on to the lounge sofa and departed on the Triumph, Suzi, surprisingly, as awkward as she was. Who would have thought the girl possessed that much sensitivity?

Eleanor had been thankful for her animal husbandry courses, it let her deal with his injuries without the vapours, keeping a rigid leash on her nausea. She’d frozen his nose and clotted the burst blood vessels inside, painted numb-all on his swollen left eye, immobilized his left ankle in a thick sock of quik-set medical polymer, and generally cleaned him up. The clothes would have to go, though; she’d throw them on the bonfire tonight.

“You’re right,” he said. “Tell you, I thought I’d got it all sussed. I thought Kendric would light up like a Christmas tree when I mentioned Wolf. It was the proof I’d need to convince Morgan Walshaw. And I’ve got to convince him somehow. Kendric is absolutely jungle crazed about Julia.”

“I know,” she said. “I reviewed the surveillance memox the Trinities made.”

“That’s not the half of it. Kendric really is-” He broke off, letting out a long painful breath. “That’s why I went on board. I’m worried about Julia, what he’ll do. Stupid of me. Breaking all the rules about personal involvement. So you wind up with me looking like this. Sorry. Not a nice sight for you.”

She’d never heard him sound so dejected. She leant over the bar and touched her lips to his face. “I couldn’t live with the kind of man who felt nothing for her. You wouldn’t be human.”

“That’s been said before.”

“Not by me.” She began spraying again. “Besides, this is nothing; superficial apart from the ankle, and that’ll be all right in a week.”

“Good. Anyway, my visit wasn’t a complete disaster. You remember Katerina Cawthorp?”

Eleanor paused, flipping through her mental files. “Friend of Julia’s?”

“Got it. Well, right now she’s living with Kendric and Hermione.”

“And Hermione?”

That brought a weak grin to his lips. “Yeah. That’s how Kendric must’ve found out about Philip Evans’s NN core. He would be bound to question Katerina about every aspect of her relationship with Julia, and that includes her time at Wilholm. She told him about the NN core. There is no mole, never has been.”

“So how did Kendric get hold of the Zanthus security monitor programs?”

“A topnotch solo hotrod burnt into Walshaw’s cores. Kendric could afford it.”

She finished spraying on the dermal seal, and inspected his hand. “But what about the buyout?”

“Yeah,” he admitted. “I still don’t understand that, But the blitz was definitely a vengeance act. Katerina proves that; she’s the link, the common factor. God, Eleanor, you wouldn’t believe what he’s done to that poor kid. Tell you, she’s a virtual cyborg, no messing.” He flexed his fingers gingerly, watching the dermal-seal stretch over his knuckles.

“Has he drugged her?” she asked.

“Sort of. That’s something else we’ll have to sort out when this is finished. Christ, as if we didn’t have enough to do identifying Wolf and the remaining hotrods.”

“You know, if you wanted to flush some compromising evidence out of Kendric’s brain you should’ve asked him how much the blitz had cost him. Then you’d have seen the guilt, clear-cut and irrefutable. I’ll have to bind that forefinger.”