Mindstar Rising

CHAPTER SIX

Greg had never been in an airship before. In fact the last time he'd been airborne in anything other than the ghost wing was in the Northern European Alliance's retreat from Turkey. The experience had left him with unsavoury memories of air travel.

As with all retreats it was chaos bordering on utter shambles. Only the RAF emerged with any credit, commandeering anything with wings that didn't flap in one last ball-busting effort to get the squaddies out before the fall of eternal night. Greg wound up jammed between two blood-soaked medevac cases in a severely overloaded Antonov-74M, watching pinpoint nova flares floating serenely through the air in a desperate bid to lure the Jihad legion's Kukri missiles from the jet exhausts.

There was a universe of difference. The Alabama Spirit was a Lakehurst-class ship on the Atlantic run; a leviathan, first-class passengers had individual cabins, three lounges, their own dining room, a casino, and twenty-four-hour steward service.

He'd taken a Dornier tilt-fan shuttle up from Stanstead the previous evening, after he'd finished interviewing the furnace operators and the Zanthus managers. It had been dark when they embarked above the English channel, all he'd seen through the Dornier's cabin window was an oval of darkness blotting our the wisps of pale moonlit cloud. The airship's outer skin was one giant solar collector, providing electricity for the internal systems. Hydrogen-burning MHD generators powered a pair of large fans at the rear. He was looking forward to reaching Listoel in daylight and seeing the Alabama Spirit unmasked.

Morgan Walshaw had sent six security personnel along with him. Five hardliners, Bruce Parwez, Evan Hams, Jerry Masefield, Isabel Curtis, and Glen Ditchett to handle the arrests, they'd all had duty tours up at Zanthus before, knew how to handle themselves in free-fall. He'd checked them out, satisfied with what he'd found, tough, well-trained professionals. The staff lieutenant was Victor Tyo, a twenty-five-year-old Eurasian, who looked so fresh-faced he could've passed himself off as a teenager without much trouble. It was his third field assignment, first in an executive capacity, and he was determined to make it a success.

Greg watched the approach to Listoel from the gondola's Pullman observation lounge, right up at the prow. Two kilometres below the lounge's curving transparent walls the deep blue Atlantic rollers stretched away to merge with the sky at some indefinable distance. The ride was unbelievably smooth.

"Have you ever been up to Zanthus before?" he asked Victor Tyo.

"Yes, I went up last year. The company launched a new microgee module, a vaccine lab. I helped interface our security monitor programs with its supervisor gear. It's my familiarity with the monitor programs which got me assigned to the case. Part of my brief is to upgrade them."

"That and the fact you've been cleared yourself. I'm supposed to vet the security staff out at Listoel and Zanthus, too. Until then, they're on the suspect list along with the furnace operators and managers."

Victor Tyo shifted uncomfortably. "That's some pretty powerful voodoo you've got there. Did you actually read my mind to clear me?"

"Relax, I can't read minds direct. I sense moods readily enough, but that's not quite good enough. For instance I can see guilt, but most people have something to be guilty about. Petty criminals are the worst for that—the bloke fiddling his lunch expenses, accepting payola. Simply because they are so petty it gnaws at them, becoming a dominant obsession."

Victor's mind began to unwind, relieved he wasn't an open book for Greg to flick through at leisure. "Do I have much guilt?"

"More like anxiety," Greg reassured him. "That's perfectly normal, pre-mission nerves. You must lead a commendably sinless life." He turned back to the window; the ocean below was turning green.

Most of the Alabama Spirit's first-class passenger complement had been drifting into the Pullman lounge for the last few minutes. A flock of stewards descended, offering complimentary drinks to the adults, and explaining the docking procedure to the excitable children.

The sickly green tint of the water was darkening, reminding Greg of overcooked pea soup. Even the foam of the white horses was a putrid emerald colour.

Listoel was straight ahead, a stationary flotilla of some forty-odd cyber-factory ships safely outside territorial waters, where hard-core ideological rhetoric wasn't worth hard-copying, and there were no politicians demanding kickbacks. They were big, mostly converted oil tankers by the look of them, forming a cluster twenty kilometres across, with the spaceplane runway at their centre, a concrete strip three and a half kilometres long. Approach strobes bobbed in the water, firing a convergent series of red and white pulses at the end of the concrete. Four large barges, supporting cathedral-sized hangars, were docked to the other end. Another thirteen floated nearby. Greg spotted five with the Event Horizon logo, a blue concave triangle sliced with a jet-black flying V, painted on their superstructure.

Each of the cyber-factory ships was venting a torrent of coffee-coloured water from pipes at their stern. They were the outflows of the thermal-exchange generators. Every ship dangled an intake pipe right down to the ocean bed, where the water was ice-cold and thick with sediment nutrients. The generators' working fluid was heated to a vapour by the ocean's warm surface water, passed through turbines, then chilled and condensed by the water from the bottom. The system would function with a temperature difference over fifteen degrees, although the efficiency increased proportionally as the difference rose.

The nutrient-rich water between the cyber-factory ships churned with activity; nearly a hundred breeder and harvester ships followed each other in endless circular progression. Fish were hatched, they gorged themselves on the rich bloom of algae, they were killed; the complete cycle of life embedded between two rusting hulls. Pirate miners were docked with some of the cyber-factories, distinguishable from ordinary cargo ships by the spiderwork crane gantries which lowered their remote grabs on to the ocean bed to collect the abundant ore nodules lying there.

Riding high above the anchorage was a squadron of tethered blimps, reminding Greg of pictures of London during World War II. He stood up at the front of the gondola in the midst of a silently fascinated crowd of children and their equally intrigued parents, watching a long probe telescoping out of the Alabama Spirit's tapering nose. The increasingly frantic whine of the small directional thrust fans was penetrating the gondola as they manoeuvred the bulbous probe tip into the docking collar mounted on the rear of the stationary blimp.

They were close enough now for Greg to make out the blimp's slender monolattice tether cables. A clear flexible pipe ran up one of them, refracting rainbow shimmers along its entire length. Hydrogen electrolysed from seawater by the thermal-exchange generators would be pumped up it, refilling the Alabama Spirit's MHD gas cells.

The probe shuddered into the collar, which closed about it with a loud clang, reverberating through the Alabama Spirit's fuselage struts. Greg had seen those struts when he embarked, arranged in a geodesic grid, no wider than his little finger. The fibres were one of the superstrength monolattice composites extruded in microgee modules up at Zanthus or one of the other orbital industry parks. It was only after those kind of materials had been introduced that airships became a viable proposition once again.

Greg and Victor Tyo took a lift up to the Alabama Spirit's flight deck, a recessed circle in the middle of the upper fuselage. The other five members of the security team were waiting for them, along with a cluster of Event Horizon personnel who were beginning their three-month duty tour at Listoel.

A handling crew were loading a matt-black environment-stasis capsule into the cargo hold of the tilt-fan standing in the centre of the flight deck. Greg could see radiation-warning emblems all over the cylinder. He knew it contained a Merlin, a small multi-sensor space probe riding a nuclear ion-drive unit, designed to prospect the asteroids. Philip Evans had been launching them at a rate of one a month for the last three years. Greg had listened to him explaining the programme at his dinner party, clearly in his element, with an audience which hung on every word.

"Investing in the future," the old billionaire had said over after-dinner brandy. "I'll never see a penny back from them, but young Juliet here will. I envy her generation, you know. We're poised on the brink of great times. Our technology base is finally sophisticated enough to begin the real exploitation of space. My generation missed out on that; we were hopelessly stalled by the crises at the turn of the century—the Energy Crunch, the Credit Crash, the Warming, the disaster of the PSP. They all put paid to anything but the immediate. But now things are stabilising again, we can plan further ahead than next week, set long-range goals, the ones with real payoffs. Unlimited raw materials and energy, they're both out there waiting for her. Just think what can be achieved with such treasure. The wealth it'll create, spreading down to benefit even the humblest. Fantastic times."

Philip Evans's corporate strategy had Event Horizon flourishing into one of the leaders in deep-space industry. And the Merlins were an important part of his preliminary preparations; prospecting the Apollo Amor asteroids for him, a class of rocks well inside the main belt and the most easily accessible from Earth. The Merlins sent back a steady stream of securely coded information on their mineral and ore content.

When the consortium of German, American, and Japanese aerospace companies finally rolled their scramjet-powered spaceplane out, launch costs would take a quantum leap downwards. The single-stage launcher would open up a whole panoply of previously uneconomical operations. One of which was asteroid missions.

And with its carefully accumulated knowledge of extraterrestrial resources Event Horizon would be in the vanguard of the mining projects, so Philip Evans said. In a prime position to feed refined chemicals back to the constellations of microgee material-processing modules projected to spring up in Earth orbit.

Greg had been aware of an undercurrent of dry humour in the old man's mind as he expanded his dream, as though he was having some giant joke on his guests. But the Merlin was real enough. It was just that the whole enterprise seemed whimsical, or at best premature. There had been rumours about the spaceplane, now eleven years behind schedule; some said scramjet technology just couldn't be made to work, and even if it could the cost savings would be minimal.

Greg's status earned him a seat at the front of the tilt-fan's cramped cabin, looking over the pilot's shoulder. She lifted them straight up for fifty metres then rotated the fans to horizontal and banked sharply to starboard.

He'd been right. In the light of day the Alabama Spirit was spectacular. A huge jet-black ellipse framed by the dreaming sky, like a hole sliced direct into intergalactic night. It was four hundred metres long, eighty deep, sixty broad. Two contra-rotating fans were spinning slowly on the tail, keeping its nose pressed firmly into the refuelling blimp.

Their descent in the tilt-fan was a long spiralling glide. Even here, where energy shortage was a totally redundant phrase, the pilot was reluctant to burn fuel. She must've been a European, Greg thought, obsessive conservation was drilled into EC citizens from birth.

They flattened out at the bottom of the glide and lined up on one of the big cyber-factory ships, swinging over the bow and pitching nose-up as the fans returned to the vertical. Greg read the name Oscot painted on the rusting bow in big white lettering.

The Dornier settled amidships with minimum fuss, its landing struts absorbing any jolts.

Greg tapped the pilot's shoulder. "Smooth ride. Thanks."

She gave him a blank look.

He shrugged and climbed out.

Sean Francis, Oscot's manager, nominally captain, was waiting at the foot of the airstairs. He was tall and lean, dressed in a khaki shirt and shorts, with canvas-top sneakers, broad sunglasses covering his eyes.

Greg dredged his name up from Morgan Walshaw's briefing file. Thirty-two years old, joined Event Horizon straight out of university, some sort of engineering administration degree, fully cleared for company confidential material up to grade eleven, risen fast, unblemished reputation for competence.

He reminded Greg of Victor Tyo; the resemblance wasn't physical, but both of them had that same hard knot of urgency, polite and determined.

The security team spilled out of the tilt-fan to stand behind Greg, waiting impassively. Sean Francis looked at them with a growing frown.

"My office was told you're here to check on our spaceflight operations, yes?" Sean Francis said. "I'm afraid I don't understand, the Sangers are a mature system. I rather doubt their flight procedures can be improved after all this time."

Greg produced the card Walshaw had provided, which Francis promptly waved away. "It's not your identity I'm questioning," he said, "merely your purpose. OK?"

"This is not the place," Greg said quietly. "Now would you please verify my card."

Francis held out his cybofax, and Greg showed his card to the key. There was an almost subliminal flash of ruby light as the two swapped polarised photons.

He took his time checking the authorisation before nodding sadly. "I see. Perhaps my office would be a more suitable venue. Yes?"

The seven of them started down the length of the deck towards the superstructure, drawing curious glances from Oscot's crew.

Instinct made Greg look up towards the south-west. There was a black dot expanding rapidly out of the featureless sky, losing height fast. It was a returning Sanger orbiter, curving in a long shallow arc, pitched up to profile its sable-black heatshield belly. Greg tracked its descent, working out that it would reach zero altitude right at the end of the floating runway. He held his breath.

The orbiter straightened out three hundred metres from the runway, wings levelling. It smacked down on the concrete, blue-white plumes of smoke spurting up from the undercarriage. Small rockets fired in the nose, slowing its speed.

"What if it missed?" Greg asked. The orbiters didn't have a jet engine, they couldn't go around.

"They don't," Sean Francis said.