The Nano Flower

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Listoel had changed since the last time Greg had visited, seventeen years ago, investigating his first Event Horizon case. Now he sat behind the Titan's pilot watching their approach through the cockpit windscreen. They were due west of Ireland, flying subsonically, descending slowly. Below him, the ocean was completely green. It was a ragged patch over a hundred kilometres wide, its shape varying according to currents and wind. Today it looked like a bloated comet, with a tail which streamed away to the south, broadening and diluting to invisibility three hundred kilometres distant.

He could see dirty-yellow specks floating at the centre of the discolouration, neatly arranged in a square formation, each one a couple of kilometres from its neighbour. That made the specks huge. Lights were twinkling on all of them as the sun sank towards the horizon.

Philip Evans had started the mid-Atlantic anchorage twenty-five years ago, a refuge for his cyber-factory ships. The old man had put together a rag-tag fleet of converted oil-tankers and ore carriers, even an ex-US Marine Corps Harrier carrier, all floating with legal impunity in international waters during the entire PSP decade. The household gear they manufactured was smuggled into England, helping to kick-start the country's black market, worsening the economy, weakening the PSP.

Kombinates had been swift to recognize the potential of the tax-free anchorage, and more cyber-factories began to arrive. Investment poured in; banks and finance houses were running scared of the political and physical turbulence on mainland Europe. For a few brief glory-years Listoel was a centre of innovation rivalling Silicon Valley and the Shanghai special economic zone.

The cyber-factory ships had been equipped with thermal generators, sucking up cool water from the bottom of the ocean trench and running it through a heat exchanger, self-powering, virtually eternal. There had been pirate miners too, Greg recalled, scooping up the ore nodules that lay on the ocean bed to supply the cyber-factories. Marine harvesters, exploiting the bloom of aquatic life which the nutrient-rich ocean-trench water fuelled. But the most memorable aspect had been the spaceport; a floating concrete runway for the hydrogen-fuelled Sanger spaceplanes which ferried 'ware chips down from orbital industry parks so they could be incorporated into the cyber-factories' gear.

At its peak, Listoel had had the industrial output of a small European nation, exporting its gear right across the globe.

That all changed after the fall of the PSP. Philip Evans brought his cyber-factories ashore, beginning England's industrial regeneration. A new generation of giga-conductor powered spaceplanes turned the Sangers into museum pieces overnight. The global economy started to struggle out of the recession which had followed the Warming, and kombinates found they could virtually dictate their own taxes as governments vied for their investment, making exo-national manufacturing redundant.

Listoel would have been abandoned if Julia hadn't recognized the enormous demand for electricity which the resurgent land-based industries would exert on national grids. Solar-panel roofing could supply the domestic market, but it was woefully inadequate for the new cyber-precincts and arcologies. She also faced the problem of powering revitalized transport networks; Event Horizon was counting on its new giga-conductor being incorporated in planes and cars and trains and ships and lorries. They all needed electricity to run. But no politician, bought or otherwise, was going to permit her to burn oil and coal to generate it. Fusion remained hugely expensive. A return to nuclear fission was out; too many stations had been sited on the coast, overrun by the rising sea. Salvage and decontamination operations had cost governments a fortune at a time when it was a struggle just to feed people. A large proportion of Dragonflight's revenue still came from the R&D fund, lifting vitrified blocks of salvaged radioactive waste into orbit where they were attached to solid-rocket boosters and fired into the Sun.

The Titan switched to VTOL mode, coming down for a landing on one of Listoel's platforms. It was a triangle, two hundred and fifty metres to a side, made up out of concrete flotation sections bolted together. There were three ocean thermal generator buildings made out of pearl-white composite running along each side; the centre was clotted with an irregular collection of hangars, offices, maintenance sheds, and crew quarters, the blue rectangle of a swimming-pool. Nine large discharge pipes were venting brown water into the Atlantic from each generator building; there were other pipes, Greg knew, unseen, dangling kilometres below the platform, pumping up the icy water of the trench to cool the generator's working fluid.

A non-polluting and totally renewable energy source, for as long as the sun kept shining. Listoel supplied gigawatts of cheap electricity to England and mainland Europe via high-temperature superconductor cables laid across the ocean floor.

But despite its legitimate power industry, Listoel was still outside the jurisdiction of national governments. Greg knew one of the platforms housed the production line for Julia's electron-compression warheads. Another, or the same one, was Victor's principal hardline base. The whole anchorage was heavily defended; he'd seen the Typhoons flying escort on the two crash-team Titans, there were definitely null psychics shielding it. Rumour said there were submarines and strategic defence lasers, secret weapon labs, prisons, bullion vaults. He'd laughed when he'd heard that on a tabloid newscast. Maybe he shouldn't have. The crash team was so effectively organized—Titans, Typhoons, super-grade armour and weapons, all of them on permanent stand-by, if Julia and Victor went to that much trouble…

The Titan settled easily on its undercarriage, and a section of wall on the generator building ahead split open. They began to taxi forwards.

Melvyn Ambler, the crash team's captain, tapped Greg on the shoulder. He had removed his muscle-armour suit during the flight, dressing in olive-green one-piece fatigues with Event Horizon's logo on his breast pocket. "The platform's clinic has been alerted, we're all ready for you, sir."

"Fine, thank you. How are Fielder and Whitehurst?"

"The medics gave the girl a second anaesthetic for her fingers and some treatment for the swelling. She's exhausted, but physically she's in good shape, nothing the clinic can't fix up. The boy is still in shock from the death of his father."

Greg nodded, he'd let Fabian think Jason Whitehurst had died as the airship crashed, it was a lot kinder than knowing the truth. "And what about Suzi?"

Melvyn Ambler couldn't quite keep his face straight. "All right, though the doctor says her knee's going to need some work. She's been telling us about how tough it all was in the old days."

Greg let out a small groan. "Back when hardliners were real hardliners?"

"Yes, sir."

"The name's Greg, thanks." Sir reminded him of the Army.

"Right."

Greg stood up slowly, pleased to find his neurohormone hangover had run its course. He thanked the pilot and followed Melvyn Ambler back through the Titan's fuselage. Charlotte Fielder was being helped down the ramp, she was wrapped up in a bright orange padded suit, as if she was wearing a polar sleeping bag. Fabian Whitehurst was walking ahead of her, his eyes dead to the world.

Greg watched Suzi being lifted into a wheelchair by a couple of the crash team. Her teeth were gritted.

"Just a flesh wound?" Greg asked innocently.

"Bollocks!" she shouted back, then shrugged. "I landed wrong back there in the airship."

"Never mind, Julia will pay for a new knee, no doubt."

Suzi grinned. "You finished with me for today? I've' got me a date with good old Leol Reiger."

"I think you'd better put that off for a day or two."

"Come on, Greg, we've got the Fielder girl."

"Yeah, and it's where she's going to lead Julia to that worries me, no messing."

"Right. Suppose I'd better stick around, then. But, Greg, it's not going to be for ever."

The generator building served as a hangar for several Typhoon fighters as well as three Titans. Greg saw a Pegasus parked at the far end as he came down the loading ramp. Julia and Victor were waiting for him, along with a large blond-haired man wearing a crumpled suit jacket.

Julia put her arms round him and rested her head on his shoulder. "I didn't know it was going to finish up like this, Greg."

"That's OK." He stroked the long hair down her back. "Tell you, I'm just sorry about Rachel and the other three."

Julia nodded silently, giving him a lonely smile. "Rachel's been with me for twenty years. I know her father and her brother. They were all so proud she was doing well for herself. Personal assistant to the mighty Julia Evans. Now I've got to tell them she's dead. She was out of hardlining, Greg. Clean away, then I made her go back."

"This wasn't hardlining. Not really. It was just crazy. There was no need for it, the Pegasus wasn't armed."

"We really have made a mess of today, haven't we?"

"I got you Charlotte Fielder. Nothing that important ever comes cheap."

"Yes. Well, that girl had better bloody well start telling me what I want to know."

"Tomorrow," Greg said. Even without his espersense he could tell Julia was feeling the strain, and that was with all the protection the NN cores threw around her. Chasing after Fielder wasn't all this deal involved by the look of it. "She's had a rough time of it this afternoon. So's young Fabian, come to that."

Julia stepped away from him. "Yeah, I know, I was there."

"So you were." Greg looked at Victor. "Did Leol Reiger survive?"

"We don't know. We've been monitoring the air-sea rescue traffic. The Nigerian coast guard have picked up quite a few of the Colonel Maitland's crew from their escape pods. I haven't got a list yet, my Lagos office will squirt one over in a couple of hours."

"What about Baronski?"

"Snuffed, along with the girl who was with him. There were three people killed when Reiger's tekmercs opened fire on you in the Prezda well, another thirty-eight injured, seven seriously. I've never known anyone like this Reiger; he's a mad dog, absolute mad dog. I've been in touch with the Tricheni security chief, that's the kombinate which owns the Prezda, we're launching a joint search-and-destroy deal."

The big man standing behind Victor was looking more and more uncomfortable.

"Good," Greg said, surprised by his own anger. "Did you find out who's behind Reiger?"

"Yes," Victor said. "We've got quite a bit to tell you about that."

The conference room had a broad silvered window looking out over the rest of the oceanic energy field. It showed the other generator platforms as oblong ochre silhouettes on the darkening horizon, navigation lights winking steadily.

He sat with Julia, Victor and Rick Parnell at one end of a long black composite table, listening to Victor give a review of Royan's Kiley probe, and the waiting personality packages.

The office's three teleconference flatscreens were on, plugging the three NN cores into the discussion, two showing images of Julia, while Philip Evans filled the third. Julia's grandfather had synthesized an image of himself at fifty, a thin face with a healthy tan and silver hair.

Greg could see that Rick Parnell was having trouble coping with the NN cores, glancing up at the screens then back down at the table. The blunt hardline talk about Leol Reiger wasn't helping to settle him either. He wasn't quite out of his depth, but he was certainly having his world-view shaken today.

"If Clifford Jepson already has the data on the nuclear force generator, why would he want to find Royan?" Greg asked after Julia finished telling him about the two partnership offers she'd received. "Especially, why go to this much trouble to find Royan? I'd say hiring Leol Reiger was almost an act of desperation."

"To make sure Royan doesn't plug me into the alien, and do a deal direct. Clifford would be left with nothing then, Globecast can't develop the nuclear force generator by itself."

"But Globecast doesn't have a monopoly on the generator data," Greg said. "Mutizen's offering you the same deal."

Julia looked up at the screens, arching an eyebrow.

"Buggered if I know, girl," Philip Evans grunted.

"It is odd," Julia's NN core one image agreed.

Greg turned to Rick. "Are we sure Royan's alien is the source of the atomic structuring technology?"

"No idea," said the SETI director. "It's conceivable that the microbes could live on the outside of a starship, that they were brought here rather than drifted across interstellar space. But that would mean the alien has been here a long time; a couple of centuries before the Matoyaii probe was launched, at least. Remember, we've now inspected just two rocks out of all the millions which make up Jupiter's ring, and both of them had microbe colonies. No matter how vigorous they are, it would take a long time to spread that far."

"Is that significant?" Victor asked.

"I think it must be," Rick said. "If the aliens have been here, been watching us for so long, why make contact now?"

"Because we discovered them," Julia said.

"No, we didn't," Rick said. "Without all this hardline chasing around and the appearance of atomic structuring technology we would have cheerfully believed the microbes were interstellar travellers. There is nothing to make us suspect they came on a starship. And in any case, any aliens with starship-level technology could quite easily have tampered with Matoyaii. One very simple robot probe operating alone six hundred million kilometres from mission control, we have the technology to fool it. If there is a starship, then we were deliberately allowed to know about the microbes. But don't ask me why."

"I think we have to assume Royan's alien is the source," Victor said. "There's just too much interest being shown in his whereabouts, by too many people, for any other conclusion."

"No messing," Greg muttered. He took a salmon sandwich from a plate on the table, surprised at how hungry he was. "Have you come up with a proper profile on that maid, Nia Korovilla?"

"Not a thing," Julia's NN core image said. "The only data we have on her is the file my personality package squirted out of the Colonel Maitland's 'ware. You saw it, it tells us very little."

Greg finished the sandwich, and started on another. There was a jumble of impressions cluttering up his mind, all the knowledge he'd picked up today. There was no order to it, not yet. But there could be. He was sure of that. Intuition. Something would link it all together, a key, a connecting factor, some word or phrase. It was just a question of looking at it from the right angle, afterwards it would be obvious. Of course, he could force it, use the gland. One of the Mindstar psychologists involved with his training had called his intuition a foresight equal to everyone else's hindsight.

He swallowed the last of the salmon sandwiches, and started on the beef ones. It was almost completely dark outside now, the platforms had switched on floodlights to illuminate their superstructure. "What about the observation team in the Prezda well?" he asked.

"I'm afraid you and Suzi are the only ones who saw them," Victor said. "Certainly Prezda security has no knowledge of them."

"So we've no idea who this third party is?"

"None," Victor agreed.

"Someone who can afford to keep a sleeper on the Colonel Maitland for eight years," Greg observed pensively.

"Expensive," Victor said. "I wonder if her controller was behind the observers in the Prezda?"

"If it wasn't, then there's a fourth organization involved," Greg said.

"Too many. You think Korovilla was tied in with the Prezda observers rather than Reiger and Jepson?"

"I would say yes," Julia said. "She was anxious to avoid contact with Reiger's tekmerc squad."

"So who was she working for?" Greg asked.

"The organization that took the sample from the flower?" Julia suggested.

"Good point," Greg said. "It could be easily the same organization. But then where does Jason Whitehurst fit in? He was obviously acting independently. Yet he knew how valuable Fielder was, that she was linked with atomic structuring, but not the nature of that link. He certainly hadn't heard about the alien. So how did he find out she was valuable?"

"Jesus!" The word came out like a bark from Rick. He looked round the table, his neck jerking mechanically. "I'm sorry, but you people… You're making it all so complicated. Who's this bloke working for, these two are plugged in together, where does she fit in? It doesn't matter! There's an alien here, in our own solar system, making contact. God knows, it's a strange kind of contact, but it wants to talk to us. Just ask this Fielder girl where Royan is, and go. Where's the problem?"

"Atta, boy," Philip Evans said. "You tell 'em."

Julia at the table, and the Julias on the screens all scowled together. "Behave, Grandpa," they chorused.

Philip Evans rolled his synthesized eyes.

Greg looked at Rick, knowing exactly how he felt. Itching to do something positive, to see some action. He'd been like that himself when he joined the Army. Physical got everything solved, and you could see it happening. That particular fallacy took a long time and a lot of grief to unlearn. "It's like this," he said sympathetically. "Charlotte Fielder's in a bad way. She's a twenty-three-year-old girl who's known nothing but the good life for the last five years. All that got shattered today; she's been threatened, chased, shot at, had her fingers broken, seen her patron killed, and found out someone's snuffed her sponsor. Right now she just wants to curl up into a ball and shut out the outside world. If I start interrogating her now, she isn't going to co-operate, her mind will close up like a night-time flower. I'll miss things; good as I am, I'm not infallible. But if we wait until tomorrow, she'll have started to bounce back. She'll want to help, she'll want revenge on whoever terrorized her, she'll open right up to us. And when that happens, I need to know the right questions to ask her."

"Listen to him, Rick," Philip Evans said. "He knows more about how people's minds work than a pub full of shrinks."

Julia gave Greg an impish glance. "And the fact that she's devastatingly beautiful has nothing at all to do with wanting to go easy on her."

Greg flashed her a feline smile, and snatched another sandwich. Victor was chuckling.

The tight fabric of Rick's jacket rippled as he offered a shrug. "Sorry, I'm not used to this."

"We need to go through it, Rick," Julia said. "I've got to have the complete picture before I decide what responses to initiate. And right now there are too many unknowns involved. There will be a common thread linking these faceless dealers. If we can correlate the data we've amassed so far we should be able to find it."

Greg smiled inwardly. Julia was doing the same thing as him. Tearing into the problem from all sides until she came up with a solution. The only difference was that she used the logic her nodes supplied, he used intuition.

He ordered a tiny secretion from his gland, not enough for an espersense effusion, but just animating his grey cells, tweaking them above the ordinary. A dreamy calmness settled round him, almost a physical veil, dimming the conference room, muting the voices. He let the images of the day slipstream through his mind. There were faces and places, vaporous collages. An overwhelming sense of certainty rose.

"Russia," he said. "Russia is the connection."

"How?" Julia asked.

"Tell you, intuition is always better than logic." He cancelled the gland secretion.

"Greg!" she snapped.

"Spit it out, boy," Philip Evans said.

"Nia Korovilla and Dmitri Baronski."

Victor clicked his fingers. "Bloody hell, they're both Russian emigres."

"No messing," Greg swung his chair round to face the three teleconference screens. "Run a search program," he told the NN cores. "Every profile you've assembled today, every person, place, and company involved. I want to know every and any link they have with Russia, however tenuous."

"We're on it," Julia's NN core two image said. She and Philip Evans froze.

"Thank you, Greg," Julia said.

"I want Royan back too."

A horizontal flicker line ran down the teleconference screens. The images returned to life. "Greg was right. There are two more references, possibly three."

"Go ahead," Julia said.

"Thirty-two per cent of the Mutizen kombinate is owned by Moscow's Narodny Bank. And nearly twenty-five per cent of Jason Whitehurst's trade is with the East Europe Federation, half of that with Russia itself."

"And the third connection?" Victor asked.

"It is somewhat more speculative, but the Colonel Maitland had originally filed a flight plan from Monaco to Odessa, it was changed the night Charlotte Fielder was lifted from the principality. Odessa is in Ukraine, also part of the East Europe Federation."

"That fits," Greg said. "I should have thought of that one myself. Baronski mentioned it."

"Fits how, exactly?" Julia asked.

"Tell you, we're up against a premier-grade Russian dealer here, right?"

"Yes."

"OK, so he finds out about the Fielder girl somehow, that she's a courier of some kind, so he takes a sample of the flower and discovers it's extraterrestrial. Assume Jason Whitehurst does business with him—God knows the kind of trading Jason does is complicated enough to need dodgy contacts—he owes the dealer a few favours. The dealer tells Jason Whitehurst to lift Charlotte Fielder from Monaco after she's completed the delivery to you, and bring her to Odessa where he can take over. That's where Baronski thought she was going, he arranged it, he was the go-between. But then Jason Whitehurst realizes how big a deal this is, and decides to play his own game. So he puts Charlotte Fielder up for sale. That's why there were watchers in the Prezda; our Russian dealer didn't know where she was either. And Baronski was the obvious link, we all wound up going to him, If there was anybody who knew where she was, it was going to be him. A pimp always keeps track of his girls."

"Sounds feasible," Victor said.

"What about Mutizen?" Julia asked.

"Dunno. Maybe that's where our Russian dealer found out about the alien."

"Could be," she said.

"Nia Korovilla still bothers me," Victor said. "Eight years is a hell of a long time in the hardline game. Any deal over a year is a long time for us."

"You think she was a government intelligence agency sleeper?" Greg asked.

"Bloody Reds," Philip Evans said. "Never did trust the little buggers. Reagan was quite right."

"Oh, Grandpa, don't be so paranoid; Russia doesn't even have a strong Socialist party in parliament any more, let alone represent a military threat. If anything they're more entrepreneurial than us these days."

"This is what happens when you have thought routines that are formulated and frozen in the twentieth century," Julia's NN core two image remarked, amused.

"Ha bloody ha, girl. Maybe they're not Commies, but they're still clannish, still hold the ideal of the Motherland close to their hearts. How far do you think they'd go to secure atomic structuring technology for themselves, eh? Every asset would be thrown in, corporate and state. Eight-year sleepers included."

Julia sucked in a deep breath, obviously undecided. She looked at Greg. "Well?"

"It could go either way," Greg said. "It's all down to Jason Whitehurst's trading. Somebody in Russia wanted to keep an eye on him. What did he export?"

"Gold, silver, and timber were the main cargoes from the East Europe Federation, along with some bulk chemicals, and ores," Julia's NN core one image said. "He tended to trade them for industrial cybernetics."

"Who supplied the exports?"

"There are fifteen mining and chemical companies listed as his main suppliers, three in Moscow, two in Odessa, the rest scattered through the Federation republics. But he didn't limit himself to those. You know Jason, any cargo; and our lists will hardly be complete. I doubt there are official records of half of his transactions."

Greg pulled his cybofax out of his jacket pocket. "Squirt me a list of the companies, and as much financial profile as you've got on them, please."

The wafer's screen lit, and he began to scan through the data.

"Cross-index the export companies with Mutizen," Julia told the NN cores. "See if they supply Mutizen with any raw materials."

"Isn't the Narodny Bank state owned?" Greg asked.

Julia gave a tiny nod. "Yes. After the USSR was dismantled, their industries went private, but the Russian parliament kept control of the Narodny. It was used like the Japanese used their MITI after World War II, providing money for targeted industries, unofficial subsidies really. It's been quite successful, too, done wonders for their car and heavy plant manufacturers."

"You guessed that right," Julia's NN core two image said. "Twelve of those export companies provide material to Mutizen."

Julia absorbed the news silently. But she looked worried, Greg thought.

"Could this hypothetical dealer be the Russian government itself?" she asked.

"It's a possibility," Greg conceded.

"I don't have many assets in Russia," Victor said. "It would take a while to activate them and find out what's going down."

"I still can't see where Mutizen fits in," Julia said. "Whoever he, she, or it is, the Russian dealer knew about the alien before me, yet Mutizen was the first to inform me about atomic structuring. By rights, they should have done everything they could to keep the knowledge from me."

"Loose ends," Greg said, half to himself. "We still don't know enough about the Russian dealer to figure out what kind of stunt he's trying to pull."

"He's trying to keep Event Horizon from developing a nuclear force generator," Julia said. "It's bloody obvious."

"Maybe," Greg said. "But he's going about it in a very strange way, actually making you aware of its existence in the first place. We know he's used Mutizen to make you an offer. Would you take it up? I mean, does it have to be Clifford Jepson you take as a partner?"

"Certainly not."

"OK, I might be able to help clear the air a little here. There's someone I know, a military man; I can ask him if it is the Russian government that's behind all this. If it is them, then maybe he can negotiate a deal for you, find out what it'll take to get them off your back. Don't forget, they must be pretty desperate for atomic structuring technology. We're close to Royan, now, that means you stand a good chance of acquiring the generator data without bringing anyone else in on it. If that happens, there will be three teams working on it, Clifford Jepson and his partner, Mutizen and their partner, and Event Horizon by itself. A straight race to turn those bytes into working hardware and slap down the patent. You with all your resources stand a pretty good chance of winning it anyway, but if you can arrange a combination with Mutizen and obtain the backing of the English and Russian governments on your own terms, you'll have Clifford Jepson in a box, and no messing."

Julia clasped her hands, and rested her chin on the whitened knuckles. "This military friend of yours, will he tell you the truth?"

"He'll be honest with me; either tell me, or say he can't talk about it. He won't lie. If he won't talk, you'll have to use the English Foreign Office to find out what's going on in Russia."

"I'd be better off using Associated Press," she muttered.

"But what about the alien?" Rick asked. "If you're going to spend tomorrow chasing after someone in Russia, when can we go after it? I mean, once we've met it, you can just buy a nuclear force generator blueprint from it and save all that research and development money."

"The lad's got a point there, Juliet," Philip Evans said. "If this alien's parcelling out data you could save yourself a tidy packet."

"Unless the alien files a patent for itself," Julia said.

"Interesting legal question," Julia's NN core two image said. "Would the alien be legally able to file a patent?"

"And what does it want our money for anyway?" Victor chipped in. "Repairs? Set up a base in the solar system? What? You're the expert, Rick."

"Jesus." Rick's fists clenched and unclenched. "I don't know. if we just go and ask it—"

"I won't be more than a couple of hours tomorrow," Greg said smoothly. "I'll go first thing, and after that we'll find out where Charlotte Fielder was given the flower."