The Nano Flower

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

The armoury was a long windowless concrete room, metal lockers along one wall and weapons racks along the other. There were ten tables running down the middle, fitted with test rigs and the various cybernetic tools the armourers used. The sight and warm oil smell of the place took Greg right back to his squaddie days. Even the pre-mission chatter of the security crash team was the same, brash with that unique brand of strained humour.

He was sitting on a bench watching Suzi being kitted out by Alex Lahey, one of the armourers. He had found a muscle armour suit small enough for her, and now he was programming it to accept motor neurone impulses from her implant. A thick bundle of fibre-optic cables ran from the 'ware interface socket on the suit's chest to the terminal he was operating on the table. Only the helmet had been left off, leaving Suzi's head sticking out of the black barrel-like torso.

"First there's healthy paranoia," Greg said. "And then there's obsessive psychosis. The dividing line is pretty thin."

"Bollocks. Leol got out of that hospital in Nigeria. You think he's going to give up on Charlotte now?"

"No. But how's he going to find her?"

Suzi gave a disparaging grunt. "The bastard's good, Greg. Give him that. And he's got Clifford Jepson's money behind him."

"Victor's better. And we've got Julia's money."

"Yeah, sure."

Alex Lahey looked up from the terminal he had plugged into Suzi's armour suit. "Could you raise your left arm, please."

She moved it up slowly until it was level with her shoulder, then it suddenly shot up to point at the ceiling. "Fuck's sake!"

"Sorry," Alex Lahey said. He studied the terminal cube, muttering to himself.

"Hey, can I lower it, or what?"

Alex Lahey didn't look up. "Yes, yes."

"This personalized tank, bit over the top, isn't it?"

Suzi's gauntleted left hand slapped her torso, producing a hollow thud. "I can face him now, Greg. No more running, no more evasion and decoy. Christ, that was fucking humiliating. You should try a suit out, gives your confidence an orgasm."

"No thanks, muscle armour was after my time. I'll stick to what I've got. Good old mystic intuition. It's kept me alive this long."

"Yeah? So what does it say about Royan?" Suzi asked.

"Tell you, he's up there." He surprised himself. The words had come out without any conscious thought, he hadn't ordered a gland secretion, either.

"Huh," Suzi grunted.

"Would you touch your toes, please," Alex Lahey said.

Greg kept his amusement in check at the slightly ridiculous sight of a muscle armour suit doing callisthenics as Suzi tested each limb's articulation. The rest of the crash team started to check out their weapons from the rack.

Suzi's armour suit split open down the side of the torso, and she began to wriggle her legs out. Her tracksuit fabric was heavily creased where the suit's spongy internal lining had contracted about her.

Alex Lahey began to unplug the fibre-optic cables. "Your knee shouldn't be a problem," he said as Suzi emerged. "The suit will support it."

"Great." She dropped lightly on to the floor, and promptly flexed her leg, rubbing at the bioware sheath.

"Could you thumbprint this, please?" He proffered a cybofax. "It's the release authorization for the suit."

Greg looked at the bare concrete of the ceiling, offering up a small prayer.

"You betcha."

Suzi was smiling acid sweet as she pressed her thumb against the cybofax's sensitive pad. She eyed the weapons rack. "I'd like one of those Honeywell pulsed plasma carbines; a Konica rip gun, plus eight power magazine cells; five Loral fifteen-centimetre pattern-homing missiles, programmable from my implant; and ten directed lance charges with timed and remote detonators. And have you recharged my Browning?"

Alex Lahey sagged in place, his watery eyes giving Suzi a disbelieving stare.

"What's up? Do you need another thumbprint?"

"Whatever the lady wants, Alex," Melvyn Ambler said in a pained tone. "Put it all in with the rest of our gear."

"You're a gent," Suzi grinned.

Greg turned round to see the crash team captain standing behind him.

"The spaceplane will be here in five minutes," Melvyn said. "We'll load our gear and launch straight away." He held up two maroon flight bags. "I've got your shipsuits. Put your clothes in the bag, you can wear them again in New London. Do either of you need an anti-nausea infusion for the flight?"

"Not me," Greg said. "I've been in freefall before. Didn't suffer then."

"I'll take one," Suzi said brightly.

"Right." Melvyn Ambler hesitated. "Are we likely to meet a hazard up there?"

"I'll give you a full briefing on the spaceplane," Greg said. "But you're along mainly for your deterrence value."

"Thank you. Mr. Tyo said you are in complete control of the operation."

"He's got to be flicking kidding," Suzi muttered.

Spaceplane shipsuits seemed to have improved. The last time Greg had gone into orbit the rubber garment they gave him looked like it was sprayed on. You needed to be a mesormorph to wear one with any dignity. This time Melvyn had provided him with a comfortable, fairly loose, ginger-coloured onepiece with elasticated wrist and ankle bands; the wide pinnedback lapels taken straight off the kind of jacket a nineteenthirties flying ace would've worn. A multifunction 'ware wafer was clipped into its pocket on his upper right arm, monitoring his physiologicaI functions, along with the atmospheric pressure, temperature, gas composition, and radiation levels.

He carried his maroon flight bag out to Anastasia, the Orion-class spaceplane that had landed in the centre of the generator platform. The twenty-strong crash team were trooping into the airlock in front of him, all of them in the same ginger one-piece, a cyborg army. Charlotte and Fabian walked behind, talking in low tones.

Anastasia was a simple delta shape, twenty-six metres long, built around a pair of induction rams; convergent tubes which compressed incoming air, heated it with a battery of radio-frequency induction coils, and blasted it out through expansion nozzles. A simple, clean propulsion system which took over from the fans at Mach seven and boosted the spaceplane up to orbital velocity. There was also an auxiliary reaction drive fitted which made her capable of lifting twenty-five tonnes of payload direct to New London. Her pearly lofriction fuselage glinted bright and cool under the mid-morning sun. Big scarlet dragon escutcheons were painted on the fin.

A convoy of five small drone lorries had drawn up underneath, and the crash team's armourers were loading pods of equipment into the rear cargo bay through hatches in the tail cone.

Greg ordered a small neurohormone secretion as he waited at the foot of the airstair. His intuition didn't say much about anything, a grudging sense of inevitability was the best it could manage. He always thought of the ability as being slightly timeloose, a weak form of precognition. That ought to mean death should ring out loud and clear.

"Anything?" Suzi asked. She knew how he relied on it.

"No. Not a thing." He turned to Charlotte and Fabian. The ginger shipsuit looked stunning on the girl. "Time to go," he told her.

She bent down and gave Fabian a long, lingering kiss.

Greg shifted uncomfortably; Suzi chortled and started up the airstairs, swinging her flight bag jauntily.

Charlotte eventually broke off the embrace. "This won't take long," she murmured in a voice so quiet Greg could barely make out the words. She and Fabian looked as if they were being parted for eternity. Fabian flipped some hair out of his eyes. "Come back to me," he pleaded mournfully.

"You know I will." Charlotte planted a final kiss on his brow, and went up the stairs in a hurry. Greg tugged his cap on, a close-fitting padded dome that came down over his ears, protection against hard corners when he was in freefall. He followed Charlotte up the stairs; when he looked back Fabian was sprinting for the crew quarters, a hardline bodyguard in pursuit.

Anastasia seated forty passengers in her cabin. It was compact, but not cramped. The walls were covered in a quilt of grey padding, even the deck was slightly springy as Greg walked down the aisle. A biolum strip ran along the centre of the ceiling, fabric hoops banging on either side, reminding him of the handholds for standing passengers on a bus. At the rear of the cabin was a galley and a couple of toilet cubicles. He eyed them warily, a series of unwelcome memories surfacing, painfully tight tubes and suction holes that pinched. Best to wait until New London.

There was no separate cockpit. The pilot sat behind the narrow curving windscreen, dressed in the same kind of ship-suit as Greg, except his was silvery grey. He didn't even have a flight console, no controls of any kind. Sitting with arms neatly folded across his lap, eyes half-closed in some zen-like contemplation. Multicoloured geometric spiderwebs rolled across the windscreen itself. Greg guessed the pilot must use a processor node to interface with the spaceplane's flight 'ware.

He didn't enjoy the idea. When he was in the army he used to fly parafoils and microlites; direct physical control, you shifted your weight and the wing banked in response. It was something you could feel, solid and dependable. Real flying.

Surely the spaceplane must have some kind of manual fallback? The pilot would probably laugh if he asked. He looked young, mid-twenties; a generation that wasn't so much 'ware literate as 'ware addicted.

The crash team were choosing their seats noisily, like a small-town rugby club on their way to a match, all jokes and laughs. Two stewards helped to stow their flight bags in the lockers under the seats.

Suzi was sitting in one of the seats behind the pilot. Greg claimed the one next to her, where he could see out of the graphic-etched windscreen. He touched the activation stud on his armrest, and the seat cushioning slid round his legs, gripping gently.

Charlotte and Melvyn Ambler were sitting across the aisle from them, Rick in the row behind. The security captain leaned forward. "That's everyone," he told the pilot.

"OK. Flight time will be about three and a half hours, we should rendezvous with New London somewhere over South America." The airlock hatch closed, cutting off the thrum of the platform's thermal generators.

Greg heard the compressors wind up. There was a tremble of motion, and the corner of the thermal generator building was dropping out of sight through the windscreen.

"You told Eleanor where we were going?" Suzi asked.

"Yeah. She'll worry about it, but she'd worry more if she found out and I hadn't told her. I said the crash team was providing hardline cover now. That ought to help."

"Mean she'll be happier that you're not dependent on me no more."

Anastasia shifted to horizontal flight mode, deck tilted at fifteen degrees as it climbed, pushing eastwards, aiming for the Bay of Biscay. Greg sniffed at the air; the pervasive sulphur smell of the thermal generator vent pipes was missing, filtered out by the life-support system. The spaceplane's purified air was curiously empty, an absence of scent more than anything.

"Why do all the women in my life give me such a hard time?" he complained.

Suzi laughed. "Eleanor's not a problem. You two, fucking lucky, you are."

"I don't know what you're moaning about. Andria seemed like a nice girl."

Suzi glanced over at Charlotte and Melvyn Ambler, her voice dropped. "The greatest, Greg. No shit. Me and her, it's happening. Funny, I mean, what I am, who'd want me? But she does."

He didn't need his gland to see how earnest she was. Suzi taking life that seriously would take some getting used to. "You'll have to bring her out to the farm some time."

"She's pregnant."

"So's Eleanor. They'll get on all right."

"Right." She whistled through her teeth. "Greg? I'm gonna get out after this. For the kid, you know? So, like, if you hear of anything coming up on the market, pub or something, let me know."

"Sure." He ought to have a word with Julia, see if she could find a likely club, sell it to Suzi through a front. He settled back into the seat. Attention to detail, that's what it was all about. He'd put a note in his cybofax, later, when Suzi couldn't see.

Anastasia switched to her induction rams three hundred kilometres south-west of the Scully Isles. Greg heard a crackling roar build until it was loud enough to block ordinary talking. He was pressed down in the seat, estimating the G-force at about one and three-quarters. There was a disorientating sensation as the deck began to level out once they reached thirty-five kilometres altitude, yet at the same time the growing acceleration effect made it seem like the angle was increasing. Perhaps he should have taken that infusion after all.

The pale azure sky began to darken beyond the windscreen.

It took seven minutes after the induction rams came on to reach their orbital transfer trajectory, slicing cleanly through the mesosphere and into the rarefied lower chemosphere where the power-to-thrust ratio decayed drastically. The induction rams cut off over Egypt. Anastasia was doing Mach twenty-nine, coasting gently upwards.

The stars had come out, burning steadily in the night sky. Earth was a fringe of blue-white light along the bottom of the windscreen.

Greg let out an alarmingly damp burp as the nearly forgotten sensation of freefall buoyed his stomach up towards his sternum.

"We'll be performing our New London flight trajectory burn in eighty seconds—mark," the pilot said.

The silence Greg had been expecting was punctuated by sharp snapping sounds of the induction ram linings contracting as they shed their thermal load. Electrohydrostatic actuators whined on the threshold of hearing.

Suzi pulled a sour face. "Bollocks, three more hours of this."

"Isn't the infusion working?" Greg asked.

"Yeah. But that only holds your gut together, it doesn't stop this whole scene from being a major downer. Floating about like this ain't right, Greg. I'm not a fucking fish."

A small portion of his mind was secretly glad there was something he could handle better than her. Of course, he'd done a lot of flying in his Army days, burning the nausea out.

"It took me a day to get up to New London last time," Charlotte said. "I went up on a transfer liner."

"I was in one of the low Earth orbit stations for a week," Rick said. "Checking out a radio telescope before it was boosted out to EU Two behind the moon. It beats the hell out of dieting, I must have lost a couple of kilos."

"How about you, Melvyn?" Greg asked. "You ever been up here before?"

"Sure. Victor Tyo likes us to familiarize ourselves with every possible environment we're likely to operate in. I get rotated up to New London for a month every two years."

"That sounds like Victor," Greg said.

Anastasia's reaction-control thrusters fired suddenly, a rapid burst of pistol shots. Greg saw the Earth's coronal haze slide off the bottom of the windscreen.

"Stand by," the pilot called out.

Greg tried to make some sense out of the graphics scrawling across the windscreen, flexible holographic wormholes of blue and green, red cubes rotating, yellow lines in wavering grid patterns. Nothing was bloody labelled.

The auxiliary reaction drive came on. A pair of bell-shaped nozzles in Anastasia's tail. Water was pumped into their vaporization chambers where it was energized directly from the giga-conductor cells. It emerged from the nozzles as a brilliant flame of ions.

Greg was pushed back into his seat again. Anastasia appeared to be standing vertically. The G-force was much lower this time, about a third.

New London followed a slightly elliptical orbit high above the Earth, with an apogee of forty-five thousand kilometres and a perigee of forty-two thousand kilometres. Anastasia rose out towards it in a long flat arc.

New London was visible from Earth even during the day, a fuzzy oval patch of light, far brighter than the Moon. During most of the approach it was a sharp-edged nebula, building in size and magnitude.

Greg spent the last hour in his seat, watching the rock and its attendant archipelago resolve. The angle of their approach, virtually straight up, meant that the archipelago grew longer the whole time, stretching out along the rock's orbital track. At first it looked like the rock was the head of a strangely stable comet, one possessing a solid diamanté tail; then he began to make out the individual orbs.

The asteroid Julia had chosen to carry the torch of her new world industrial order was sixteen kilometres long, with an irregular width varying between five and eight kilometres, one end flared out into an asymmetrical bulge. One of her Merlin probes had surveyed it fourteen years ago; until then it had been a smear of light in a telescope, and a catalogue number: 2040BA. A fleet of the little robot prospecting craft had been amassing compositional data on the Apollo Amour asteroids for nearly a decade. It was a project Philip Evans had started even before the PSP fell; he had predicted the development of the space industry, and wanted to use the probes to give Event Horizon a data monopoly. Julia had carried on with the Merlin project after his death, launching up to fifteen a year. 2040BA was her reward for persistence; a nickel-iron asteroid orbiting two hundred million kilometres out from the Sun, no different to a hundred others the Merlins had examined. Except at some time in the distant past it had struck a carbonaceous chondritic asteroid. The collision had deposited a thick smear of shale, eight kilometres long, down the flank of 2040BA. It was a sticky tar, rich with nitrogen and carbon and hydrogen, millions of tonnes of them.

They were the chemicals which made New London possible. By itself a nickel-iron asteroid was worth trillions for the metal contained in its ores, but the cost of supporting the teams of miners and refinery operators would have been prohibitive. Every consumable would have to be lifted into orbit for them; even with giga-conductor spaceplanes it would be a marginal venture. To make the investment attractive, a mining team would have to be self-sustaining. At the lowest level that meant hydroponics and vat-grown-meat. At the other end of the scale, space activists dreamt of capturing both nickel-iron and carbonaceous chondritic asteroids and using them in combination to build cylindrical O'Neill colonies, twenty kilometres long, orbiting Gardens of Eden, revitalizing the Earth physically and spiritually.

2040BA allowed Julia to compromise between the two.

The relays of astronaut crews she sent out to 2040BA took two years to capture it. They detonated strategically-placed ten-megaton electron-compression devices at its bulbous end, altering its orbital track and increasing its long-axis rotation.

"I wanted to use nukes," Julia had confided to Greg and Eleanor once the mission was underway. "Use up all the old superpower arsenals. That would have given people something they could understand and appreciate. The old age visibly going out in a blaze of glory to usher in the new. Now wouldn't that be a sight?"

She needn't have worried. People interpreted the asteroid's arrival as the symbol of the new age. It brought hope to a psychologically leaden world. A technophilic coup d'etat, signalling the end of the worst aspects of the Warming. When you looked up you could see that there was somebody who had the guts and the drive to achieve something again, instead of just muddling through the way things had been going for nearly two decades. The somebody being Julia. It was the capture mission more than anything else—her inheritance, the giga-conductor monopoly, Peterborough's incredible renewal—that catapulted her into the global public limelight.

The last three months of 2040BA's journey became the greatest spectator event in human history. Greg had always wondered if it was coincidence that the final electron-compression device was detonated above night-time Europe. Julia working a subtle PR ploy, or Royan crowning their achievement with a typical brass neck gesture? Whichever, after that Julia's kudos hit the stratosphere.

He could still remember the Last Blast party, it was country-wide. New Year's Eve plonked down in the middle of a sultry cloudless August night. Hambleton had hosted a street barbecue, the whole village sitting round trestle tables in front of the church. Christine had been about five, but they'd let her stay up.

Eleven thirty-seven: the time was tattooed in his mind. 2040BA was a star brighter than Venus, then the last electron-compression device went off, stabilizing its orbit. A ten-megaton explosion, jetting out an incandescent plume of vaporized rock. The discharge had lasted for about a minute, growing as broad as a full moon before fading to violet and dispersing. They had all watched in silence, children, adults, pensioners, looking straight up; Greg inanely waiting to hear a distant rumble from the explosion.

The mining machines Julia sent up to Earth's new moonlet cut out a cylindrical chamber five kilometres long and three in diameter, Hyde Cavern. Rotation gave it an Earth-standard gravity. Solar furnaces liberated oxygen from New London's rock. Event Horizon crews collected the shale smear, shoving it through giant distillation modules, refining all the chemicals necessary for a working biosphere.

Hyde Cavern was given an atmosphere, water, light, warmth, gene-tailored food plants, insects, and soil bacteria. Engineering teams from Event Horizon and various kombinates' space industry divisions moved in, and began refining the ore in earnest. Microgee-processing factories were boosted up from their low orbit to swarm in attendance; it was cheaper to use New London as a dormitory for the operating crews than costly habitation stations.

Greg could see New London itself through Anastasia's windscreen, a dark head to the archipelago of high-albedo orbs. The rock's long axis was orientated north/south, so that it rolled along its orbit. A counter-rotating docking spindle extended a kilometre and a half out of the southern hub, supporting a diamond-shaped solar cell array four kilometres square. The northern hub had a similar spindle, ending in a concave circular solar mirror five kilometres in diameter. It was built up from hexagonal sections a hundred metres across, with a speckle pattern of tiny black spots showing the holes that had been torn in them down the years. A focusing mirror hung two kilometres over the centre, sending the collected beam back down through an aperture in the middle. As he watched, one of the orbs peeped slowly over the mirror's rim like a small sun rising above the horizon.

The orb was part of the excavation from the second chamber which was currently being hollowed out. A larger one than Hyde Cavern this time, eight kilometres long. The mining machines which cut through the ore crushed it into a residue of fine sand that was a mixture of metal powder and rock dust. It was impelled along the northern hub's spindle into the foundry plant at its tip, where the mirror focus was aimed. The intense heat combined the rock and metal into a glutinous magma which the foundry crews called slowsilver. It was done for convenience, in freefall any liquid was easier to control and direct than a river of sand, and after mining came the problem of storage.

The slowsilver was pumped through one of a bagpipe array of extrusion pipes out into space in the shadow of the mirror, where it was allowed to accrete until it formed a globe fifty metres in diameter. Then after the outer shell had cooled and solidified the pipe disengaged, setting it loose. The foundry produced a hundred and forty orbs a day, a constant emission of metallic spawn.

Julia had no option but to store the second cavern detritus in this fashion, New London's refineries and microgee materials-processing modules could only consume a fraction of the mining machines' daily output. So the orbs accumulated in the archipelago, tens of thousands of them, like an elongated globular cluster staining space behind the asteroid. Some of them were nearly pure silver, others had abstract rainbow swirls frozen into their surface where exotic salts and minerals had curdled and reacted from the heat.

Refinery complexes floated round the fringes of the archipelago; big cylindrical modules, two hundred metres long, forty wide, hanging behind a kilometre-wide solar mirror. Perspective was difficult out here, part of his mind saw the refineries as chrome water lilies drifting on a velvet ocean. Almost an op art canvas. Space hardware had an inherent harshness, he thought, every square centimetre was functional, precise, there were no cool shades nor half colours, white and silver ruled supreme.

There was an annular tug departing one of the refineries, an open three-hundred-metre-diameter ring of girders with a drive unit at the centre, starting its three-month inward spiral to low Earth orbit. Ten foamedsteel lifting bodies were attached to the outside of the ring, blunt-nose triangles, massing three thousand tonnes, but with a density lighter than water. Spaceborn birds which would be dropped into the atmosphere and glide to a splashdown by one of the two permanent recovery fleets on station in the Pacific, or the one in the Atlantic.

Anastasia was heading in for New London's southern hub. This end of the asteroid was covered in long thermal-dump panels, radiating out from a central crater like aluminium impact rays. Two spherical Dragonflight transfer liners were docked halfway down the spindle. A steady flow of small tugs and personnel commuters was berthing and disengaging, carrying crews and cargoes between New London and the clusters of microgee modules holding. station south of its main solar panel.

Greg tried to draw the image of New London inside his mind, to capture its essence, sketching out the crumpled dusty surface, small high-walled craters. Hyde Cavern: gaping emptiness surrounded by thick shadow folds of solid rock, the second chamber, mushroom shaped, unfinished. Shafts and rail tunnels knitted the two chambers together, black gossamer lines cutting through the two-kilometre rock barrier, looping underneath the valley floors in complex twists; there were buried fresh-water reservoirs and surge chambers, caverns housing reserves of oxygen and nitrogen.

The ghost image turned slowly behind his closed eyes, pulsing with the slow rhythm of life. Hyde Cavern a warm heart, a kernel of expectation and promise. He could sense the strength and determination it housed, a hazy aural glow spun out by the combined psyche of its inhabitants. The asteroid nestled at the centre of a spectral whirlpool of human dreams.

He felt it then, a solitary discrepant thread impinging on the communion, not a contaminant, but aloof from the consensus, different. Alien.

Anastasia's cabin trickled back into existence around Greg as his mind let the phantasm slither away. "It's here," he said. The asteroid's southern end was sliding by outside the windscreen, ribbed thermal-dump panels pinned to the brown-grey rock by enormous pylons, a maze of yellow and blue thermal shunt conduits laid out underneath.

Suzi cocked her head, her cap making her appear strangely skeletal. "What is?"

"The alien, it's inside New London."

"Shit. Where?"

He tried to shrug, but the muscle movement simply pushed his shoulders away from the seat back. "You want specifics, use a crystal ball. My espersense is good for about half a kilometre if I really push it, and solid rock blocks it completely."

"So how the flick do you know it's there?"

"Intuition."

She opened her mouth to shout. Reconsidered. "How about Royan? He there too?"

"Dunno."

"Great. So what do we do?"

"Stick with our original scenario. Find Charlotte's priest."

"Hmm." Suzi waved her cybofax wafer. "Been updating on these Celestial Apostles. Beats me why Victor doesn't just flush them out the airlock. Fucking weirdos."

"I think I detect Julia's hand in that. She always allows a little looseness in human systems. The Celestials are harmless, and they support her long-range aims, if not her methods. As long as they don't get out of control, why bother?"

"You think they're the ones in contact with the alien?"

"It's as good a guess as any. The psychology certainly fits. They'd treat it as a messiah. The only group of people who'd keep quiet about it, if it asked. Which prompts the question 'How did it find them? "

New London's southern hub crater was a kilometre wide and three hundred metres deep, the walls perfectly flat. It had been cut out by the mining machines; the electron-compression devices had all been detonated at the northern end.

Anastasia glided over the rim and its picket ring of radars. The floor below was a near solid disk of metal, massive circular bearings in the centre supported the two-hundred-metre-diameter spindle, outside that were tanks, lift rails, observation galleries, airlocks, three concentric rings of lights illuminating the rim walls, bulky incomprehensible machinery.

Anastasia's reaction-control thrusters fired. Greg's visual orientation began to alter as the spaceplane turned. The crater floor tilted up slowly to become a wall, the rim wall shifted to a valley floor curving up to the vertical and beyond. There was another sequence of drumbeat bursts from the reaction-control thrusters as the pilot changed Anastasia's attitude again.

Greg heard the unmistakable metallic rumbling of the undercarriage lowering. The crater wall curved up out of sight in front of Anastasia's nose; it was moving, he could see a strip of small white lights running round the circumference, New London's rotation carried them down the windscreen and under the spaceplane. To Greg it looked as if Anastasia was flying low above a smooth rock plain.

There was a final burst from the reaction-control thrusters, and Anastasia began to descend. It was like touching down on a runway, the difference being Anastasia was stationary and the crater rim was moving. They landed with a gentle bump. Electric motors accelerated Anastasia's undercarriage bogies, chasing New London's rotation.

Suzi's jaws were clamped shut, her cheeks very pale, staring rigidly ahead. Greg could feel the spaceplane racing forward, yet their speed relative to the rim was visibly slowing. The starfield and spindle began to turn.

"Down and matched," the pilot announced.

Greg started to register the low gravity field. Blood was draining from his face, that annoying fluid puffiness abating.

Anastasia taxied towards the circular wall of metal and a waiting airlock.

They came out of the airlock tube into a rock-walled reception room. Greg walked carefully in the low gravity field, very conscious of inertia, each step carried him a metre and a half.

New London's Governor was waiting for him, flanked by two assistants. A tall, spare man who smiled expectantly, holding out his hand. Greg stared, frantically trying to place a name to the distantly familiar face.

"Greg Mandel, good to see you again. It's been over fifteen years, yes?"

Now the memory came back. Sean Francis, one of Event Horizon's younger generation of executives, a disturbingly ambitious one, if memory served. He was also superbly efficient, and keen, giving his total attention to every problem and request, no detail was too small to be reviewed. It was an attitude Greg had enjoyed the first time he'd met him, Sean Francis in person inspired confidence. Then after five minutes' exposure, the unrelenting effusiveness began to grate.

Greg shook his hand. "Seventeen years, would you believe? Seems like you've done all right for yourself. I'm surprised Event Horizon let you go."

Sean Francis grinned brightly. "I haven't left. I'm just on sabbatical. You see, the English Government had to have a trained executive who was also completely conversant with the space industry in the hot seat, so Julia Evans loaned me out. Simple, yes?"

"Yeah." Even after all this time Julia's political expediency still never failed to gain his admiration. New London might be a Crown Colony on paper, but in realpolitik it was hers, and no messing.

Sean Francis introduced his assistants. The man was Lloyd McDonald, an Afro-Caribbean, one of Victor's people, whose job description was New London's corporate security chief. Greg suspected his responsibility extended further than that, given the administrative hierarchy. The woman was Michele Waddington, the Governor's secretary. Another on secondment from Event Horizon.

We've prepared a barracks facility for your team in the security quarters," Lloyd McDonald told Melvyn. "My people will take your gear down to it."

"Fine," Melvyn said.

"Are you anticipating trouble?" Sean asked.

"There is a possibility," Greg admitted. "I'd like Lloyd McDonald here to step up his screening procedures for new arrivals. In particular for a man called Leol Reiger. He's a tekmerc, very dangerous. And he might just be stupid enough to try and follow us up here."

"Reviewing visitors is the responsibility of the Immigration office," Sean said. "But I can have company security personnel deputized as backup, that's within my brief." He turned to Michele Waddington. "Get the authorization lined up, please."

"Yes, sir." She entered an order in her cybofax.

"Got a profile of Reiger?" Lloyd McDonald asked.

Greg held up his cybofax, and squirted the data over to McDonald's. The security chief glanced at it. "There are three more flights scheduled for today. I'll make sure the passengers are isolated and identified before they're allowed into the colony."

"If Reiger does come up he won't be alone," Melvyn said. "Make sure your people are armed."

"Anything else?" Sean asked.

Greg looked at Melvyn, who shook his head.

"Just somewhere for us to get changed," Greg said. "We'll start hunting after that."

"Certainly," Sean said. "I've had some rooms prepared in the Governor's Residence for you."

"I'll see my team to their barracks then join you," Melvyn said.

"Right, bring a couple of them back with you," Greg said. "Carrying, but nothing heavy, the Tokarevs will do."

"Sure thing."

Greg picked up his flight bag and followed Sean into a circular lift, along with Charlotte, Suzi, Rick, and Michele Waddington. It started to descend slowly, Greg's feet nearly left the floor. Gravity built steadily.

The doors opened on to another smooth tunnel carved through the living rock, a pair of moving walkways ran down the middle, two broad biolum strips were fixed to the ceiling, brighter than usual. Gravity felt normal. Greg looked along it, expecting to see it curve up out of sight, but there was a corner about eighty metres away, and another one behind him. The floor might have been slightly curved, it was hard to tell.

They took a walkway down to the corner, then another one. The layout reminded Greg of the Prezda arcology, people slotted neatly into regulated accommodation space. Hive mentality.

There was a policeman sitting behind a metal desk outside the door to the Governor's Residence. He stood and saluted as Sean showed his card to the door.

The Governor's Residence changed Greg's mind about conformity. The interior seemed to have been lifted straight out of some eighteenth-century colonial trader's mansion, a formal European layout, with modern Asian and Oriental furnishings. The rooms were spacious and airy, with high ceilings and white walls, pillars and arches dominated the architecture. He wondered how much it cost to lift all the wood up from Earth.

Suzi stood on the parquet floor of the hall, and whistled appreciatively. "Not half bad. You pay rent?"

"No, this is my official residence. It comes with the job. The King and Queen have slept here, and the PM."

"No shit? Now us." She nudged Greg playfully.

"Tell me about the Celestial Apostles," he asked as Sean led them up the stairs to a broad landing.

Sean put on an unconvincing smile. "Bunch of religious nuts, mostly; though some technical types threw in with them. Their creed decrees space as the turning point in human destiny. No specifics, surprise surprise. Just generalities; space will save us, expand our spiritual horizon. Same kind of crap most loony cults spout. The main difference is that the leadership don't live off the acolytes. By all accounts they're quite genuine in their belief. They all live in the disused tunnels and empty storage chambers. I wouldn't call them dangerous, exactly; but personally I'd just as soon send the police and security teams into the tunnels to round them up and deport them, yes? I mean, what happens in a real emergency situation, a pressure loss? Or an epidemic, how would they get vaccinated? I'd have to risk my people trying to help them. But of course they never consider that."

"So why don't you?" Greg asked.

"The police do catch a few. But Julia Evans says let them be, no big trawling operation. It's not as if we'd drain the Colony's police budget."

Greg gave Suzi a satisfied grin, he'd known that kind of sentimentality was one of Julia's traits. Suzi just rolled her eyes.

The bedroom was decorated in red and gold, with ornate hardwood marquetry furniture. Painted fabric screens had been used to partition off the bathroom and jacuzzi with forest scenes, black backgrounds with tall spindly trees, pale leaves. Metal-framed French windows opened out on a balcony with iron railings, a row of potted ferns was lined up along the front edge.

Greg dropped his flight bag on the bed, and pushed the windows open. Hyde Cavern's air was warm, humid, ozone rich, and smelt of fresh blossom. He was looking out over a small deep valley, with a blunt dark massif of rock blocking the far end. A slim tubular sun blazed with blue-white virulency overhead, its glare haze blocking out any sight of what lay behind it. He followed the sides of the valley as they rose upwards, curving in like two giant green waves about to topple. If he used his hand to shield his eyes from the tubular sun, he could just make out the landscape directly above.

By then he was ready for the impossible sight. He'd been intellectually prepared for it, of course, but ground as sky was still a dismaying sight. The physical mass, pressing down.

He wasn't quite sure what to call the involuntary phobic shudder running down his back, but it seemed as though the little cylindrical worldlet was about to constrict, crushing him at the centre.

He dropped his gaze again. The first four out of the five kilometres between him and the other endcap was lush green parkland. Hyde Cavern's rock floor had been shaped with gentle undulations, silver streams meandered through the coombs, low waterfalls feeding calm lakes. There were copses of young saplings, tree-lined avenues of yellow pebbles wandered like serpents across the grass. White Hellenistic buildings were dotted about, each at the centre of its own garden. They were the focus of New London's social life—theatres, restaurants, clubs, pubs, reception halls, churches, two sports amphitheatres. People didn't live out in the Cavern, groundspace was too valuable; instead the lower fifth of the southern endcap housed the warren of living quarters, offices, light engineering factories, and hotels.

The last kilometre of Hyde Cavern was filled with the miniature sea, a band of salt water running round the foot of the northern endcap, its parkside coast wrinkled with secluded coves and broad beaches of white sand. Tiny islands studded the middle of the sea, covered by a dense shaggy thatch of vegetation. Just looking at it made Greg want to run over and dive in.

He gripped the balcony rail and peered over. They were about twenty metres above a broad rock roadway running round the base of the endcap; people in light clothes strolled about idly, the far side was a bicycle lane, nests of café tables with bright parasols sprawled out directly below him. Balconies stretched away on either side, vines with huge heart-shaped leaves twining round the iron support columns, long mauve flower clusters formed a fringe above his head, bunches of green grapes dangled on either side. He picked one; it tasted sweet, succulent, and seedless.

Suzi, Rick, and Charlotte had come out of the bedroom to join him. And even Suzi was quiet as she looked round.

"Where were you when you met the Celestial priest?" he asked Charlotte. The girl hadn't put ten words together since they'd lifted off from Listoel. Her thought currents were tightly wound, slow but deliberate, there was a lot of concern and guilt accumulating inside her skull.

She frowned lightly, searching the shoreline. "There." She pointed to a point high up on the right-hand curve. "It's the fall-surf beach near the Kenton station."

"Ah, tourist zone," Sean said. "The beaches round there all have bars and sunbeds, game pits, that kind of thing. It's popular with the younger ones." He smiled at Charlotte.

"Do the Celestial Apostles often try recruiting there?" Greg asked.

"They vary. Routine would trap them, yes? But they do tend to prefer the tourist zones."

Greg turned his back on the distracting vista of Hyde Cavern, gathering his thoughts. "OK, I want every available policeman assigned to foot patrol. Have them cover the kind of public areas the Celestials frequent. I'm looking for any kind of activity by the Celestials, recruiting, picking the fruit, whatever. Specifically, they're to look out for older male Celestials. If they see anything they're to report in, but under no circumstances apprehend. The last thing I want now is for them to go to ground."

"All right," Sean said. "It'll take a while to organize."

"No problem, but I want it started this afternoon. We'll take a look ourselves in a little while."

"I'd like something to eat, please," Charlotte said.

"Good idea," Greg said. "We'll get changed, have a bite." He checked his watch. "Meet back here in an hour, half-past three. OK?"

"Yes, thank you." Charlotte gave him a quick courteous smile.

"I'll have the cook rustle something up for you," Sean said.

"Send Melvyn Ambler and Lloyd McDonald straight in when they arrive," Greg said. "And Charlotte." She looked round, eyes wide and sad. "Don't go anywhere without your hardline guard. You're the single most important person on New London right now."

He got a brief flustered nod.

"I'll show you your room," Michele Waddington said, opening the door.

Suzi winked. "I'll stick with her till the hardliners arrive."

"Fine, thanks Suzi." He ran his hands back through his hair, it was sweaty and tangled after four hours of that tightfitting cap.

The jacuzzi came on at his voice command, and he began to take off the hot shipsuit.