The Nano Flower

CHAPTER TEN

The Pegasus carrying Victor Tyo to Duxford settled on to the rooftop pad with a slight rocking motion as the undercarriage absorbed the plane's weight. The stewardess opened the belly hatch, and Victor trotted down the stairs. His bodyguard followed a few paces behind.

He supposed the necessity of having a bodyguard was an oblique compliment to his own efficiency. The latest generation of tekmercs tended to take failure personally, regarding their activities as something companies should tolerate, like fires or bad debts. If their deals got blown, it wasn't their fault. Like petulant children caught shoplifting.

It was a problem which meant simply blowing the covert operations they mounted against Event Horizon wasn't good enough any more. He had to root out the whole nest of them involved every time.

The current price for assassinating Victor Tyo was half a million Eurofrancs, offered by Eugene Selby after his attempt to snatch research data on magnetic logic circuits ended with his hotrods being backtracked and taken out by a couple of Foxhound missiles. The price for killing that assassin should he or she prove successful was a million Eurofrancs. A quarter of a million Eurofrancs could be picked up by anyone who cared to reveal Eugene Selby's present geographical coordinates.

Victor's life was nearly all tangled up in deterrent circles like that these days. It didn't particularly bother him. All part of the game. His choice to be a player had been made long ago.

Right back when he joined the security division, Morgan Walshaw had told him, "Once in, never out; this job is for always." He'd been young enough then to nod seriously and say, "Yes, sir, I understand perfectly." Understand, but not completely appreciate. Always was turning out to be a long time.

Lately he'd taken to saying the same thing to recruits himself. His division had grown in proportion with the commercial side of Event Horizon; it matched national intelligence agencies in size, possessing the tactical strike power equal to a couple of RAF squadrons.

The three major opposition parties at Westminster were constantly demanding enquiries into tekmerc-planted rumours of his activities, and even the New Conservatives were becoming nervous. If it hadn't been for the fact that ministers needed Julia on their side over Wales, incidents like the Selby deal could well result in the police taking a more active interest. As if they had the capacity to deal with tekmercs, but try telling that to politicians. Event Horizon security wasn't the cause of problems, it was the result of them.

His staff were currently monitoring eighteen separate tekmerc deals being mounted against the company. There was definitely a leak somewhere inside the biochemical division, which even the psychics couldn't pin down. And now he had aliens coming at him.

I wonder what old Walshaw would make of that one?

It wasn't that life had been easier in his day, but at least the battle lines were a hell of a lot clearer.

It was hot outside the hypersonic, although Duxford was spared Peterborough's swamp humidity; that was something he'd never acclimatized to. The plane had landed on the roof of Building One at the Event Horizon Astronautics Institute. It was typical of the space industry to use that kind of nomenclature, he thought, reflecting the medium they dealt in. Cold, vast, and soulless.

Building One was a five-storey ring of offices and laboratories, eight hundred metres in diameter. The circular space they enclosed was covered by a domed solar collector roof, rising up beside him like a crack into space, sucking light and heat from the air. Looking the other way, Victor could just make out the stone buildings of Cambridge's colleges, trembling in the heat haze. The rest of the city was a pastiche of red brick and black solar panels. Hardly any modern buildings. It made a pleasant change.

Building Three was a clone of Building One, sitting a kilometre away, on the site of the old War Museum buildings, its green-silver glass wall bouncing spears of tinted sunlight at him. Building Three was the big brother of the first two, its outer ring fifteen storeys high, sixteen hundred metres in diameter. A mile, back in Birmingham where Victor grew up, where they still clung to the real England of pints and inches with the obstinacy of people frightened by the seemingly perpetual flux which the Warming had brought early in the millennium. Searching for the sanctuary of stability in erstwhile customs.

Spaceplanes hummed gracefully through the sky, big swept-wing delta shapes; arriving from the west and landing, departures racing away to the east. The long line of pads that accommodated them had been built along Duxford's old runway, he remembered. The War Museum's original geography was all very vague in his mind now. He could barely recall the lie of the land before Building One had gone up, seventeen years ago. Change hadn't stopped after the Greenhouse Effect plateaued, if anything it had redoubled its confusion.

Building Four was half completed, another one the size of Three; the first three storeys of glass already in place, as if the green-silver panes were organic, a crust that grew up the naked concrete and composite structure. And he knew that Julia had begun preliminary discussions with the bankers and finance houses for Building Five.

Even after all this time, after penetrating the Evans mystique, seeing her angry, frightened, sad, and drunk, he still looked on Julia as a figure of awe. People were fascinated by her because of her money, blinded by it. Nobody understood, she had a thousand critics, snipers, detractors. All of them claiming they could do the job better. He knew different, Julia actually cared about the country. In that she was almost unique in an era of multinationalism, the abrasion of significant borders; but she insisted the critical divisions of Event Horizon were all sited in England. The software writers, the research teams, product designers, the factories which produced the 'ware chips. Other countries were given the assembly lines, the metal-bashing subsidiaries, but the heart of every piece of Event Horizon gear was built in England. That was where the real work lay, the real challenge, real money. The principal reason England's trade balance was permanently in the black.

And Duxford was the grand prize. Over half of the company's giga-conductor royalties had been invested here. The Institute pulled together every human engineering discipline, taxed ingenuity to its limits, gave England an unbeatable technological and economic edge over the rest of the European Market Alliance nations. Space hardware subcontracts were only placed with English companies. The external supply industry that had risen to support Julia's space programme provided secure jobs for over a million people, the Institute itself employed a hundred and fifty thousand at Duxford alone, and more in orbit and up at New London.

The money she poured into orbital materials processing modules and the New London project was frightening. She'd been doing it for a solid fifteen years without ever showing weakness or doubt. And only now was she beginning to get anything like a decent return. Nobody else had that sort of faith; in their own vision, in the scientists, technicians, and astronauts who'd captured the asteroid. Victor knew that if it'd been up to him, he would've abandoned space to the kombinates and government agencies a long time ago.

Without Julia Evans the world would be a much poorer place. She cared about people, and nobody appreciated it. Except him.

Victor put a halt on that line of thought. You ridiculous fool, he told himself.

Eddie Coghlan, the Institute's security division manager, was standing by the open stair door at the edge of the pad. Victor could see the man reviewing his own recent performance in his mind, desperately trying to think why his boss should pay an unexpected visit.

Victor shook Eddie Coghlan's hand. "You can relax now, Eddie, I'm not here to chase you."

Eddie Coghlan smiled crisply. "That's something, you had me worried there for a minute."

They went down the stairs, talking amicably. Eddie Coghlan was glad to have the opportunity to discuss a few points, and Victor listened readily enough, making suggestions. He didn't go for the intimidating approach, a fear figure. He knew there were some company security chiefs who ran their departments on those lines, and wasn't much impressed. Security was a delicate, complex job; bawling orders like a sergeant-major might look good for the board, but like all dictatorships it was ultimately ineffective.

Access Astronautics Institute Building One Floor Plan, he told his processor node. The three-dimensional glass image formed in his mind.

Display Route from Landing Pad Three to SETI Office. A red dot appeared on the landing pad, and extended a line down the stairs. Perspective shifted to keep the tip of the line in front of his perception point; directional graphics blinked up, naming the sections it was passing through.

When he came out of the stairwell on to the fifth floor's central corridor, he stepped unerringly on to a moving walkway. He was in an administrative segment, glass walls on either side showing him big open-plan offices with staff bent over desk terminals.

"There's going to be a rush of reassignment orders for the Institute's research staff coming through over the next few days," he told Eddie Coghlan as they slid past the canteen. "Top grades, the real thinker types. So I want you to blow Meter ski’s deal, and Callaway’s."

"But we haven't identified all the team members," Eddie Coghlan said. "If we blow the ones we know, the rest will pull the cutouts and vanish."

"Can't be helped. These reassignments are supposed to be ultra-hush, I don't want them to become open knowledge to the tekmercs. OK?"

"You're the boss," Eddie Coghlan said glumly. "When do you want it done?"

"Today."

"Christ!"

"Sorry, but that's the way it goes. I'll see if I can assign some psychic empaths to you. Have them interrogate the tekmerc members you do nab, that way you should get a reasonably complete list." He stepped off the walkway at an intersection, and started to ride an escalator down.

"Right you are," Eddie Coghlan said. "Is that why you're here, to supervise the reassignments?"

Victor liked that, no questions about what the reassignments were for. Eddie was a good security man. He started down the next escalator to the third floor. "No, I'm here to see Dr Parnell, actually."

Eddie Coghlan frowned, trying to place the name. "Not the SETI project director?"

"Yes."

"Oh, right." He glanced at his watch. "I suppose he'll be in by now."

Dr Rick Parnell's personnel profile said he was thirty-seven, which surprised Victor. Himself apart, Event Horizon's divisional chiefs were normally in their fifties. When he accessed the Astronautics Institute's records he found out why. SETI was about the smallest project on Event Horizon's books, with only twelve members. Julia funded it out of the pure science budget; the project was virtually a token, she was simply covering all aspects of space research, however remote.

Victor certainly hadn't known it existed, not until Julia suggested he go and see if they could come up with any suggestions about how to find the alien starship. She was anxious that Greg's tenuous pursuit of the Newfields girl wasn't the only option of making contact with them.

The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence project had been allocated three offices on the inward side of Building One's ring; the usual array of desks and terminals and holographic display cubes, worn dark-green carpet squares. Victor was mildly disappointed, expecting something more elaborate for this kind of project, at least. His own office wasn't much different, larger with better furniture.

He left Eddie Coghlan to organize the tekmerc busts and went in. The SETI staff gave him and his bodyguard inquisitive stares; all of them were in their twenties, he noted. An attractive female secretary directed him to Rick Parnell's office.

The room looked out over the assembly hall, an incomprehensible mini-city of cybernetic machinery, its roadways heavy with little white carts and drone cargo flat-tops following buried guidance tracks. On the far side he could see a curving row of integration bays where standard payload pods were fitted out, each bay a buzz of activity. More pods were hanging from the overhead hoists, like a series of white moon-lets drifting along rectangular orbital paths.

The wall behind the SETI director's desk was covered with holograms of satellites. To Victor's eye they were similar to the geosync antenna platforms, although he guessed the outsized dishes were radio observatories. There was one computer simulation of a mesh dish alongside New London; if he was reading the scale right it was over twenty kilometres in diameter.

Dr Rick Parnell had his feet up on his desk, drinking a can of Ruddles bitter as he watched a data display in his terminal's cube. He had been a varsity rugby player while he was at Oxford, half a head taller than Victor, with broad, sloping shoulders, and blond hair that was starting to thin. It looked like he worked hard to keep in trim. The body didn't really belong in a white shirt and suit trousers, Victor thought, more like tennis kit.

"Security chief?" he asked after Victor showed his card. "What, you mean of the whole company?"

"That's right."

"You come to evict us?"

"No. I'd like to talk to you."

Rick Parnell suddenly realized he was drinking a can of bitter in office hours. He drained it in a couple of gulps, crumpled it, and threw it into the bin. Perfect shot. "You don't look old enough to be a security chief."

Victor sat in front of the desk. "There aren't many old people in security. We don't survive that long."

Rick Parnell managed a sickly smile. "What did you want to talk about?"

"Firstly, let me remind you of the confidentiality undertaking you thumbprinted when you were employed by Event Horizon."

Rick Parnell coloured slightly. "Hey, now listen. I was told that was a formality. This project might not seem much to a guy like you, but we accomplish a lot, and most of that is because we're mainly a co-ordination centre. Half our budget goes on grants to universities and agencies, we arrange international conferences, publish datasheets. You start restricting our output, and there's no point to us even existing."

"I'm not interested in restricting the flow of ideas, I simply ask that our conversation is not bandied about."

"Otherwise I'm for the chop."

Victor sat back in the chair and gave Rick Parnell a searching look. "Tekmercs make threats, Mr. Director. I work on the other side of the fence. We try and ensure that a dedicated researcher's life's work isn't stolen from under their nose, that the pension fund you've paid into for forty years doesn't get emptied by some hotrod with a smart decryption program. Now, you and I are employed by the same lady, and she suggested I ask your professional advice on a matter I'm involved with. Is that really so hard for you?"

Rick Parnell twitched in discomfort. "No. Sorry, of course not. I'm just not used to the idea of the head of Event Horizon's security division walking into my office. I didn't think you people even knew we existed." He lifted his head, as if he was sniffing at the air. "Julia Evans herself told you to come here? The Julia Evans?"

"Yes."

"For professional advice?"

"Yes."

"OK, fire away."

"Hypothetically, if there was an alien spaceship in the solar system, how would I go about detecting it?"

Rick Parnell opened his mouth, closed it, then started again. "If an alien spaceship came into the solar system, believe me, you'd know about it. Something like that would be a bigger event than the Second Coming."

Victor gazed thoughtfully at the hologram of the big dish. This was the second time he'd been told the arrival of aliens would be momentous. The prospect was beginning to worry him badly. "In what way?"

"Spectacular. OK, look. There's two ways of travelling between the stars. In a small ship going very fast, say about thirty or fifty per cent lightspeed. Or a big multi-generation ship, something the size of New London, travelling at one or two per cent lightspeed. Either way, it takes a colossal amount of energy to move them. If anything like that started decelerating into the solar system, the plasma from the reaction drive would scream like a nova across the radio bands. We'd spot it half a light-year out. It would stop radio astronomy stone dead across half of the sky."

"What if they didn't use a reaction drive? What if they have some faster than light drive like the science fiction shows on the channels?"

"Christ, you're really serious, aren't you?"

"Yes."

Rick Panel put his elbows on the desk, and rested his chin on his clasped hands. "Nick Beswick is the one you really should be asking about this, because it all fits in with quantum theory, but… FTL means producing wormholes through space-time large enough for a ship to pass through. Now wormholes are theoretically possible, but we haven't got a clue how to open one."

"An advanced technology might be able to achieve it."

"Granted, an extremely fanciful technology could stress space to a degree that tears it open. However, even if you have that level of technology you still couldn't enter the solar system without being detected. If the terminus of a wormhole on this scale erupted near Earth, its gravitational distortion would be of epic proportions. To my knowledge there are three hundred and twenty functional gravity-wave detectors on this planet, fifteen of which are in orbit; astrophysicists use them to check out general relativity. They would have spotted it."

"What about an FTL system that used something other than wormholes?"

Rick Parnell frowned sadly. "You know, my problem is usually convincing people that aliens do exist. Now you come in, and I have to persuade you what you're saying doesn't make any sense. This universe is no different for aliens than it is to us, it obeys the same physical parameters ten million light-years away as it does right in this office. That includes relativity."

"I was just trying to establish if there's a third method of aliens arriving in the solar system."

"If there is, we can't conceive it. Which would make them roughly the equivalent of angels."

"Fair enough. So just go back to my original question, we don't know the method they used to get here, and we didn't see them arrive. How do we locate them now?"

"These hypothetical aliens, are they on Earth?"

"No. We don't believe they could get past the strategic defence sensors."

"Good point. But you're giving me a tall order here, you know? The solar system is a big place, and that's just staying in the plane of the ecliptic. They could easily be in a high inclination orbit. If you take Pluto's orbital radius as the boundary, and extend your search to cover a spherical volume, that's a quarter of a million cubic AUs to sift through. An electromagnetic sweep is the only practical method, assuming they're emitting in that spectrum. There's a good chance of picking up random noise leakage from their on-board systems, certainly with the power levels a starship will need to employ."

"Do you have that sort of equipment?"

Rick Parnell gave a low laugh. "We've got six ten-million-channel receivers operating at the moment, although we only own them in partnership with various national science councils and space agencies. But they're all assigned to specific sections of the sky. It's the old nightmare, you listen to your section for eighteen months of deathly silence, then the day you move on to the next, there's a genesis pulse."

"What's a genesis pulse?"

"Special message, a shout that says "Here we are!" to the universe at large. You use a dish like the Arecibo to beam a strong signal at a star cluster with a high quota of Sol-like stars. Put in plenty of data about local life and culture, star co-ordinates—you do that by triangulating with known quasars. We send out a couple every year. Give it a millennium, we might even get an answer."

"So there's no way you can run a search for me, then?"

Rick Panel swivelled his chair, and tapped the hologram of the giant dish. "This is Steropes, we've spent twenty per cent of our budget and three years refining the design. You persuade our lovely lady boss to part with two billion pounds New Sterling and in five years I'll have it up and running for you. If you've lost a hydrogen atom inside the solar system, this beauty will be able to find it for you."

Victor held back on the urge to shout. "I meant, starting today."

"God, no. No way, sorry."

"Shit."

Rick Parnell clenched his hands tight, as if he was praying. "OK, I've been straight with you. Now, what have you got? What made you come in here and ask me this?"

"We are in possession of certain evidence which suggests that first contact has already been initiated."

Rick Parnell's lips moved around the words, repeating them silently. "Oh, God. What evidence?" he croaked.

"An artefact."

"What fucking artefact?"

"A biological one."

Rick Parnell lent right over the desk, fired by excitement and trepidation. "High order?"

"Pardon me?"

"I mean, more advanced than the microbes?" His hands spun for emphasis, urging Victor on like a football coach.

Victor felt a real tingle of alarm. Greg had once explained to him how his intuition manifested itself, a cold that wasn't physical. This was something similar. "Slow down. Which microbes are we talking about?"

Rick Parnell let out a groan and flopped back into his chair. "After the turn of the century the Japanese NASDA agency sent an unmanned probe called Matoyaii out to Jupiter. It was designed to measure the near-Jupiter environment, from the ionosphere out to it's plasma torus. That's a pretty active area, saturated with radiation, the planetary radio emissions; and then there's the magnetosphere, the flux-tube, small moons, the ring bands. Fascinating to see how they all interact. Thing was, when mission control manoeuvred the Matoyaii in close to a ring particle the on-board spectroscope started to register some pretty odd hydrocarbon patterns. Nothing conclusive, nothing final, you understand. Intensive analysis wasn't possible, the sensors weren't designed for microscopic examination. And the hydrocarbon deposits were minute. Specks really, like dust motes. If they were microbes, they could've been captured by the gravity field, and settled on the ring particles."

"They were alive?" Victor asked.

"More than likely. The theory's been around since the middle of the twentieth century. High-order organic forms couldn't survive interstellar transit, they couldn't contain enough energy, not for the time-scales and distances involved. But something like a microbe or a germ, they might just make it. Go into a kind of suspended animation between stars, they're small enough to withstand freezing. The microbes were even put forward as an hypothesis for flu epidemics, literally a plague from space."

"So there is life on other planets," Victor said, half to himself.

"Now you question it!" Rick Parnell exclaimed in exasperation.

"What we found might have been a joke, an elaborate bioware construct. But not any more, not with you telling me this."

Rick Parnell smiled affably. "Well, we'll know about the microbes for certain when Royan gets back, of course."

Victor looked up sharply, meeting a sincere expectant gaze.