Peter Hamilton - The Mandel Files

“No!” Ellis howled, an unpleasant high-pitched wheezing sound. He ignored Victor’s unwavering Lucas pistol to stumble frantically across the lounge to the antique writing desk, looking down in consternation at the cube display. “Oh my God! Do you know what you have done?” His hands came up to claw at Greg, stopping impotently in midair. His face was contorted with fury. “There were seven million personnel files in there, everybody of the remotest interest in the country. Seven million of them! Irreplaceable. God curse you, gland freak.”

“Kendric di Girolamo,” Greg said calmly.

Stark horror leapt into his mind at the name.

It was very strange; a circle of bright orange flame suddenly burst from Ellis’s head to crown him with a blazing halo. For one fleeting moment his mind inveighed utter incomprehension, wild eyes beseeching Greg for an answer. Then the flickering mind was gone, extinguished in an overwhelming gale of pain. The corpse was frozen upright, steaming blood spewing fitfully out of its nose and ears. Its corona evaporated, there was no more hair to burn; the skull blackened, crisping. He heard the iron snap of bone cracking open from thermal stress.

Realization penetrated Greg’s numbed thoughts as the reedy legs began to buckle, pitching the body towards him.

“Down!” he screamed. And he was dancing with the corpse, slewing its momentum to keep it between himself and the silvered balcony door as he flung himself on to the fringed Wilton rug. They crashed on to the worn navy-blue weave together. There was a drawn-out sound of glass smashing as Victor tumbled to the floor behind him.

Greg was flat on his back, the throat-grating stench of singed hair and charred flesh filling his nostrils. A wiry hand twitched on his thigh, not his. Ellis’s dense curved weight pressed into his abdomen.

“Jesus,” Victor bawled. “Jesus, Jesus.”

‘Shut up. Keep still.”

The air heaved, alive with raucous energy; creaking and groaning as it battled to stabilize itself. A pile of paper forms took flight from the Edwardian desk, rustling eerily as they fluttered about the invisible streamers of boiling ions. The end of the discharge came with an audible crack which jumped the carpet fibres to rigid attention, dousing them in a phosphorescent wash of St Elmo’s fire.

Greg sent his espersense whirling, perceiving the star sparks of minds swilling through the concrete beehive maze of the Castlewood. Seeing the galvanized ember of victory fleeing.

“OK, they’ve gone,” he croaked through the backlash of neurohormone pain. Even that sliver of sound seemed distant.

Victor was kneeling beside him, a rictus grimace on his face, rolling Ellis’s body off. The back of the skull had cleaved open, a fried jelly offal spilling out.

Victor wrenched aside and vomited; coughing, dry retching, and sobbing for an age. When his convulsions finished he was on all fours, his hair hanging in tassels down his forehead, skin sallow and filmed with cold sweat. “Jesus, what did that to him?”

Greg looked at the wall opposite the balcony door; it was criss-crossed by narrow black scorch marks. Glass fragments from the cabinets were heaped on the carpet, figurines glowed a faint cherry pink on smouldering shelves. “Maser,” he said. “Probably a Raytheon or a Minolta, something packing enough power to penetrate the silvering on the glass.”

“Bloody hell. What now?”

Greg wriggled his legs from under the small of Ellis’s back, and propped himself up on his elbows, gulping down air. Looking anywhere but at the ruined flesh at his feet. The world was a mirage, wavering nauseously. “Cover up. Call your squad, this apartment has got to be scrubbed clean, there must be nothing left to prove we ever visited. You’ll have to take the body out tonight-cleaning truck, something like that. And get these Crays to Walshaw. Lord knows how long it’ll take to go through their contents, though.”

“No police?”

“No police. We need the Crays’ data. Besides, I’d hate to try and explain what we were doing here. Let Ellis become another unperson, nobody’s going to ask questions.”

“Oh. Yes.” Victor was dazed, moving and thinking with a Saturday night drunk’s shellshocked apathy.

“Call your squad now.”

“Right.” He tugged his cybofax out of an inner pocket. “Your nose is bleeding.”

Greg dabbed at the flow with some of Ellis’s tissues while Victor yammered out increasingly urgent instructions. Flies were beginning to feed on the open skull. Greg pulled a white lace tablecloth over Ellis, and collapsed into one of the low chairs, exhausted.

“On their way,” said Victor. “You want to flit, find a doctor or something?”

“No. I think I’ll just sit here for a minute. Oh, and be sure to have this place swept for bugs.” His nose had stopped bleeding.

Victor hovered anxiously, head swivelling round the apartment, missing the body each time. “Bloody hell, what a cockup.”

“Not your fault. But it proves one thing.

“What’s that?”

Greg gave him a battle-weary smile. “I’m close.”

“Yeah, but Greg…What have you got left now?”

“A name. Confirmation.”

“That di Girolamo character you mentioned?”

“Yep. It was beautiful the way Ellis’s mind funked out. You should’ve seen it.”

“If you say so. This is all way above my head. Surveillance and back up, Walshaw says. You sit there and take it easy for a while. I’ll see to the clean up.”

“Sure.” Greg drew his cybofax out of his leather jacket’s inside pocket, taking care not to make any sudden motions. His brain sloshed from ear to ear each time his head moved.

He flipped the cybofax open, and keyed the phone function with difficulty. His fingers were stiff, devoid of feeling.

The cybofax bleeped for an incoming call. Unsurprised, he let it through. Knowing.

Gabriel’s face appeared on the little screen. “No,” she said, with ominous resolution.

“I’m sorry, but you have to. There’s no one else.”

“No, Gregory.”

“Look at me, a proper look. Right now I couldn’t even sense a tiger’s brain if it was biting me.”

“Tell you, I’ve got to have psi coverage to get that girl out. You’ll be saving lives, Gabriel. The Trinities will bloodbath the Mirriam without perfect intelligence information-where Katerina is, where the crew are, and what they’re tooled up with.”

“You’re a bastard, Mandel.”

“No messing. See you at the briefing.”

After that, it was the difficult call. Eleanor.

True to prediction, one of the yachts docked at the same quay as the Mirriam was hosting a party. A brassy, high-wattage rave; hysterical guests spilling out on to the quay itself, dancing, drawing syntho, swilling down champagne. Perfect cover. By two o’clock in the morning it still hadn’t peaked.

At five minutes past two Greg walked down the quay with Suzi, the pair of them holding hands and laughing without a care in the world. He wore a dinner jacket that felt as though it was made of canvas, and reeked of starch. Suzi had slipped into a 1920s gold lamé dress, low cut with near invisible straps, a blonde bob wig covering her gelled-down spikes. With her size and figure she looked impossibly young-fourteen, fifteen, something like that. He reckoned that as a couple they fitted the scene perfectly. Anyone would think it was fathers and daughters night. Thank heavens for café society, immutable in a fluid world.

They infiltrated the party fringes, anthropoid chameleons.

Big Amstrad projectors were mounted on the yacht, firing holographic fireworks into the night. Upturned faces were painted in spicy shades of scarlet and green by carnation bursts of ephemeral meteorites.