Mindstar Rising

CHAPTER THIRTY

Greg drove into Peterborough. under a sky which the sun had transformed into a bitter saffron hemisphere raked with the occasional static pillar of cloud. He turned up the windscreen's opacity, muting its eye-smarting intensity. There was a taut thread of pain running through his cortex, the neurohormones' legacy.

It wasn't helped by wondering how he was going to square what he was doing with his promise to Eleanor. And then there was tonight's snatch looming large. Another unforeseen. Events were ganging up on him, dictating his actions.

The conspiracy was unnerving, tenaciously eroding any sensation of control over his life. He was a squaddie back in Turkey, utterly dependent on the wisdom of hidden enigmatic generals and the throw of God's dice. Never again, he'd sworn. Easy to say.

He blended the Duo into the arterial flux of traffic flowing through Peterborough's outlying suburbs; a dawn-to-dusk convoy hauling the city's lifeblood of goods from the industrial sectors to the port and the railway marshalling yard.

Hendaly Street was the same as all the rest in New Eastfield, a long straight gorge of white buildings with grand arched entrances, wide balconies, dark windows, and ranks of flags fluttering on high. Pagoda trees thrust up out of the pavements in the centre of brick tubs; people sat on the benches round them, pensioners soaking up the sun, youngsters with VR bands plugged into gamer decks. Eleanor would enjoy living here.

He had to stamp hard on the brake as the red light came on ahead of the Duo. Its meaning had almost been lost down the years. Working traffic lights, by God!

The frontage of the Castlewood condominium was eighty metres long, standing back from the other buildings along the street, and screened with a discreet row of tall Caucasian elms.

The entrance was below ground level, served by a private loop of road with card-activated barriers at each end.

Greg parked a hundred metres further down the street and showed his card to the meter, punching in for six hours.

"Six hours?" a voice queried. "I wish I had an expense account like that."

Greg turned, and smiled. "Victor. You're looking good."

Victor Tyo's baby-faced good looks smiled back. "Riding high, thanks to you. I was promoted up to captain after our Zanthus excursion, got assigned to the command division down by the estuary. I guess Walshaw must approve of me."

"You're my contact today?"

"Yes. Again. I was at the office when the call came in." He tipped a nod at the Castlewood. "We've had it under observation for twenty-five minutes now."

"We?"

"The rest of my squad. They're covering all possible exits. We wouldn't want our man to filter out without us knowing. I've already checked with the concierge, Ellis is at home right now. A human concierge, by the way, this place is definitely for premier-rankers. I couldn't afford to rent the broom cupboard in there."

Walshaw hadn't actually mentioned anything about a squad, but Greg could appreciate his reasoning. Ellis wasn't the end of the line, but he was near. His confidence rose a fraction. Backup wouldn't come amiss, not if they were as on-the-ball as young Victor.

"Will this be a long operation?" he was asking. "Some of the observation positions are improvised, temporary."

"It shouldn't take more than an hour, two at the outside."

"Fine, Did you fall down some stairs?"

Greg's hand went to the stiff white mould over his nose. "Not exactly. A run-in with a friend of Mr. Ellis."

"I see. Do you want a weapon before we go in?"

"Are you carrying?"

"Yes. A Lucas laser pistol."

"That ought to be enough. You keep it." Greg began to walk towards the Castlewood's nearest barrier.

"Fine." Victor showed a card to the gate beside the barrier. "Concierge's pass," he explained.

Greg lifted an appreciative eyebrow. And only a twenty-minute head start. Morgan Walshaw ought to start worrying for his job. "Will it open the apartment doors as well?"

Victor did his best not to appear smug. "Of course."

The Castlewood was built in a U-shape. The two wings had a conservatory-style glass roof slung between them, curving down to form a transparent wall at the open end. The glass was tinted amber, cooling the sunlight which shone down on a bowling green, tennis courts, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, and a separate diving pool. Four tiers of balconies made a giant amphitheatre of the enclosure. Their long strips of silvered sliding doors staring down on the athletically inclined with blank impersonality.

Charles Ellis owned a penthouse apartment on the fourth storey, at the tip of the east wing. One of the most expensive in the condominium. Victor stood outside the door, glancing at Greg for permission.

He held his hand up for the young security captain to wait, and probed with his espersense. There was only one mind inside, a muddled knot of everyday worries and conflicts. Not expecting trouble.

"He's alone," Greg said. "To the right as we go in." He pointed through the wall.

"Fine," Victor acknowledged respectfully. He showed the concierge card to the lock. There was a soft click.

The apartment was five large rooms laid out in parallel, with a hall running along the back of them. Surprisingly, the decor was old-fashioned throughout. Uninspiring, sober prints and dingy Victorian furnishings, all black wood and thick legs draped in cream-coloured lace. The internal doors were heavy varnished hardwood, with brass hinges and handles, opening into rooms with dark dressers and tables. Chairs were gilt-edged, upholstered in plain shiny powder-blue fabric, marble-top tables with bronze legs.

The lounge where they found Charles Ellis had six glass-fronted teak wall cabinets exhibiting hundreds of beautifully detailed porcelain figurines. There was a profusion of styles, with animals predominating; whoever owned them was obviously a dedicated collector. Rich, too, though Greg was no real judge, but money had its own special telltale radiance. And it haunted those shelves. He could feel the love and craftsmanship which had been expended in the fashioning of each exquisite piece.

Ellis was a small man in his early fifties, barely over one and a quarter metres tall. His body and limbs didn't quite seem to match, his torso was barrel-shaped, going to fat, but his legs and arms were long and thin, spindly. He had a narrow head, with tight-stretched skin, thin bloodless lips, and a prominent brow overhanging nicotine-yellow eyes. Lank oily hair brushed his collar, leaving a sprinkling of dandruff. He hadn't shaved for a few days, his stubble patchy and grey.

His imbalanced frame was wrapped in a paisley smoking jacket with a quilted green collar. He was sitting in a high-backed Buckingham chair watching a news channel on a big Philips flatscreen, thick velvet drapes hung on either side of it, like theatre curtains. The flatscreen was showing a rooftop view of some desert city, indefinably African; its streets were awash with refugee trains, twisters of black smoke rising from shattered temple domes. A chrome-silver fighter flashed overhead, discharging a barrage of area-denial submunitions; tiny parachutes mushroomed in mid-air, lowering the shoal of AP shrapnel mines gently on to the beleaguered city.

Charles Ellis turned his head towards Greg and Victor, disturbed by the draught as they opened the lounge door. His facial muscles twitched, pulling the skin even tighter over his jawbone.

The flatscreen darkened as he rose from the chair, curtains swishing across it; he had to push hard with his bandy arms to lift himself. "How did you get in?" he asked.

"Door was open," Greg said.

"You're lying. What do you want?"

"Data."

His expression was thunderstruck. "How did you know? Nobody knows I deal in data."

Greg gave him a lopsided apologetic smile. "Somebody does. Cover him."

Ellis swayed backwards as Victor produced his Lucas pistol. "No violence, no violence." It was almost a mantra.

Greg walked across the room and looked down on the Castlewood's dark blue diving pool. The lounge was on the corner of the building, two sides of it were glass. The balcony ran all the way round, one-third of it under the condominium's weather-resistant covering.

"Whoever you are, you're an idiot," Ellis said, "You have absolutely no conception of what you've gone and walked into. The kind of people I associate with can tread you back into the mire that gave you birth."

Greg smiled right back at him, baring his teeth. "I know. That's why we came, for your top-rank friends."

Whatever Ellis was going to say died on his tongue.

"Wolf," Greg said. Naked alarm rocked Charles Ellis's already fraught mind. "Medeor." It produced the same response. "Tentimes."

"Never heard of them."

"Wrong. I'm psychic, you see."

Ellis's face hardened, forestalling the onrush of fear and suspicion kindling behind his eyes.

"In fact, you are Wolf, aren't you?"

True, the mind before him blurted helplessly.

"Thank you," said Greg.

Ellis looked at him with revulsion and hatred.

"Do you know what these are?" Greg asked Victor casually. He rested a hand on one of the three grey football-sized globes that were sitting on a leather-topped Edwardian writing desk. A Hitachi terminal was plugged into each of them with flat rainbow ribbons of optical cable. "They're Cray hologram memories. You can store half of the British library in one of these."

Greg tapped the Hitachi's power stud. LCDs flipped to black across its pale-brown surface, forming a standard alphanumeric keyboard. The cube lit with the Crays' data storage management menu. "You'll note that they're kept in isolation, not plugged into the English Telecom grid. So nobody can hack in. After all, bytes are money, especially when you know how to market them as well as Medeor here."

"What are you going to do?" Ellis's voice was a grizzled rasp coming from the back of his throat.

"Whatever I have to." Greg read the menu codes and accessed the first Cray. "Sixty-two per cent capacity used up," he observed. "That's one fuck of a lot of data. Now I could go through a whole list of names I'm interested in and see which your mind flinches at, but that would be very time-consuming. So I'm just going to ask you to tell me instead. Who paid you to organise the blitz on the Event Horizon datanet?"

Ellis shook his skeletal head, jaw clenched shut. "No."

Greg showed his card to the Hitachi's photon key, using his little finger to activate it. The percentage figure began to unwind at an impressive speed as Royan's data-crash cancer exploded inside the Cray. He hadn't been totally sure it would work on lightware. Admitting now he should've had more faith. The percentage numerals vanished from the cube, sucked away down some electronic black hole. The cube placidly reverted to showing the menu.

"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.

Realisation 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 stabilise 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 galvanised 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 shell-shocked 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 cock-up."

"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 backup, 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 Miriam 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.