Mindstar Rising

CHAPTER TEN

Alexius McNamara dropped through the sick bay's hatch, dressed in the sky-blue flightsuit which all the microgee module workers wore. His jowls overflowed his helmet strap, fingers resembled sausages. It was the last week of his shift.

"Grab him," Greg said simply. He'd soon learnt to speak in a half-shout, sound didn't carry far in free fall.

Victor Tyo and Isabel Curtis were already anchored to the chamber's walls on either side of the hatch. They clamped him between them with the efficiency of a tag-wrestling team, his legs and arms immobilised. Don Howarth jabbed a shockrod into his neck.

Greg had recognised the mental genotype as soon as he appeared: fissures of lassitude, leprous self-loathing. One of the kamikazes. He wasn't taking chances with them any more. His interview with Norman Knowles, one of the five managers, had finished badly. Greg had sensed Knowles was the one who'd circumvented the security monitors at the same time as Knowles worked out he had a gland. Unfortunately, Greg hadn't sensed Knowles was one of the kamikazes in time. Jerry Masefield had taken the brunt of the attack before he had been subdued. There was something uniquely disquieting about small globules of blood spraying about in free fall.

"Fuck you!" McNamara shouted.

The shockrod dug deeper. Don Howarth was a man worried for his position and pension. McNamara snarled.

Greg pushed off the wall, and stopped himself ten centimetres from him. They were inverted, and Greg sensed how that irritated the man. The Zanthus crew put a lot of stock in orientating themselves to a universal visual horizon.

"Spit at me, and I'll shove that shockrod up your arse, no messing," Greg said calmly.

McNamara gave a start, thought about it, and swallowed.

"That's right. They sent me up here because I have a gland."

Frightened eyes peered at Greg from within wells of flaccid flesh.

"You've been screwing around with the monolattice-filament extruder 'ware, McNamara. Writing off perfectly good fibres. How long have you been doing it?"

"Hey, psycho freak, your gland gives you cancer, know that? You'll die rotting."

"Don't," said Greg. "The whole nine months? Eight? Seven?" He sighed. "Seven it is."

"Bastard."

"How did they get a lever on you?"

"Eat shit and die, boy-lover."

"We have this sweep going between us, you see. A flyer each, so you can understand we're anxious to know. With a lot it's sex. Drugs are quite popular. Then there's the gee-gees. Some are just cracking apart, can't take the stress. But I think you're a straight money man, McNamara. Greed, that's your bang, isn't it? Pure greed." Greg could smell breath heavy with herb seasoning. "Did they tell you why?"

"What?" McNamara was clenching his muscles rigid, trembling, his face hot.

"Why they only wanted that three per cent taken out? Why not go for the jackpot like the memox furnaces?"

There was nothing in his mind, no indication that he knew an answer, even the reference to the memox furnaces had surprised him. The tekmerc team had been good, Greg acknowledged, textbook. The furnace operators didn't know who'd circumvented the security monitors, McNamara hadn't known about the furnace operators. Tight thinking all the way down the line.

He stopped his gland secretion, and turned wearily to Bruce Parwez. "OK, I'm through with him. Stash him in the suit cabin."

"Right." He began to truss McNamara with nylon restrainer bands, arms, ankles, knees. The seething man was eventually hauled out of the sick bay by Isabel Curtis and Lewis Pelham.

"It must be getting crowded in that cabin, five furnace operators, now two from the filament modules," Greg said to Victor Tyo.

"Tough."

"Yeah. How many more?"

"McNamara was the last. Unless you want to work through the other microgee products."

"Christ, don't. Morgan Walshaw or Julia Evans would've been in contact if any other products were involved with the spoil."

"Yes, the last word I got from Walshaw was that he'd got up a team to analyse the output of every module." Victor fought against a smile. "I don't think he was too happy that Julia Evans had found another security breach."

Greg wedged his foot under one of the beds. His first impulse was to sit down, but the position made his stomach muscles ache. Everything about free fall was unnatural. There was a fish bowl on the wall beside the bed, a sealed metre-wide globe with a complicated-looking water filter grafted on to one side. Ten guppies were swimming slowly round. Even they were all keeping their bellies towards the wall, though the angle made it look as if they were standing on their broad rainbow tails.

"What was bothering him?" Greg asked. "That it was another breach, or that Julia Evans found it?"

"Both, I think."

"What's wrong with Julia?"

"Nothing. I met her once, nice kid." Victor popped a mint out of a tube with his thumb, snagging the spinning white disk in midair with his tongue. "Except we're all a bit worried about her grandfather. She's sort of young to be taking over a company like this. There are eighty thousand of us, you know. Most have dependants. That's a lot of responsibility for a teenage girl."

"Yet she's quicker off the mark than the whole of the security division."

Victor smiled boyishly. His face seemed almost unaffected by free fall. "There is that."

The sick bay suddenly rang as if it'd been hit by a hammer. Greg winced, he knew that was something he'd never get used to. The thermal stabilisation went on for fifteen minutes every time the dormitory crossed the terminator, the can's metal skin expanding or contracting, protesting the adjustments with loud groans and shrieks.

"Shall I tell the pilot we're still OK for our original departure time?" Victor asked.

"Yes. We'll get the first flight off anyway, and make sure McNamara is included. He's not the type I want up here a moment longer than necessary. You and I will go down in the second flight."

"McNamara's that bad?"

"Total nutcase, no messing."

"Right, I'll assign all our hardliners to go down on that flight, five of them, five of us; Knowles can go down with them as well. We can borrow a couple of hardliners from Howarth to come with us."

"How long can we delay the second flight?"

"You're the boss; as long as you want. Physically the Sanger can stay up here for thirty-six hours, but it'd be cheaper to send it down and wait for another."

"Plan for that, then. If anyone objects, tell them to contact Walshaw. And if he wants to know what the deal is, tell him to call me."

"Do you think there are some more tekmerc plants up here?"

"Unlikely."

"Why are we staying, then?"

"To find out why the monolattice-filament output was being tampered with." Greg wasn't too keen on having to explain his instinct to Victor. The security lieutenant was a programmer, confined to the physical universe where everything was precisely arrayed and answers were logical, black and white. Perhaps he was being unfair. But empathy was the tangible half of his gland-enhanced psi ability. Intuition, on the other hand, was a track leading down the black-ice slope to the hinterlands of magic, witchery. The province of prophets and demons.

Julia Evans was young enough to be impressionable. Victor, he suspected, would be a mite sceptical.

"I thought the tekmercs were holding the filament extruders in reserve," Victor said. "Then after we pulled the furnace operators, they just bring them into line."

"No. The tekmercs would know we'd check the other microgee modules eventually. And you've toughened up the security monitors yourself; there won't be a recurrence. There's no way they could ever hope to pull the same stunt twice in a row. They're too professional for that."

"Right." Victor thumbed his communication set, and began talking to the Sanger pilot docked to the can.

The guppies were chasing tiny grains of food which the filter unit was pumping into their globe. Greg rubbed his eyes, yawning, a faint throbbing of a neurohormone hangover making itself felt at the back of his head. The last decent sleep he'd had was on the Alabama Spirit. Two—no, three nights ago. But the idea of sleep was foreign, he knew his body well enough to tell when he needed to bunk down. Ever since they'd arrived at Zanthus he'd been on the verge, time stretched up here, knocking biorhythms along with the rest of normality. It was his mind that needed to wind down, a whole stack of accumulated Zanthus-time memories pressing in on him.

Voices percolated through the sick-bay hatch, interspaced by a salvo of plangent creaks from the can shell. Piccadilly Circus was filling up, the shifts changing over again.

Greg realised his gland was active again, though he couldn't remember a conscious decision to use it. The secretions brought on an unaccustomed dreamy sensation; it felt good, warmth and confidence washing through him, lifting the depression Alexius McNamara had left behind. The answer was close now, a surety.

He heard a protracted clanging as one of the Swearingen commuters docked with the can, hums and whines took over. Another wave of voices broke, the high, restless kind people used when they'd just come off work.

The answer clicked.