The Nano Flower

CHAPTER FOUR

For ten months of the year Hambleton village slumbered tranquilly under the scorching English sun, the rural idyll of a nineteenth century that existed only in wishful daydreams and apocryphal historical dramas. It was nestled at the western end of a long whale-back peninsula which jutted out into the vast Rutland Water reservoir, surrounded by a quilt of lush citrus groves which had sprung up in the aftermath of the Warming. Through those quiet ten months the groves were maintained by a handful of labourers who lived locally. But twice a year the trees fruited, and the peninsula played host to an invasion of travellers which quadrupled the population overnight. Such an influx could never be anything other than a rumbustious fiesta, awaited with a mixture of trepidation and delight by the residents.

This July the convoy of travellers hunting work at the groves stretched the entire length of the road which ran along the peninsula spine. There were genuine horse-drawn gypsy caravans, brightly painted in primary colours with elaborate trim; twentieth-century vans with long strips of bright chrome, bulky custom-built trailers towed by four-wheel-drive Rangers, converted buses, and sleek ultra-modern land cruisers. Kids screamed and ran among the stationary vehicles, playing their incomprehensible games. Dogs barked excitedly and tripped the children. Goats and donkeys added their querulous cries to the hullabaloo. Adults stood in groups round the cabs talking in quiet murmurs. Smells of cooking drifted through the stifling air.

From where Greg Mandel stood at the gate of the camp field it looked like a real carnival. He always enjoyed the first two weeks of July, blistering heat, fruit hanging ripe in the groves, the campfire meals, music and dancing under the stars. There were even the odd days when they got some picking done.

"Roll it through," he yelled up at the driver in the trailer cab. The vehicle had been converted from a redundant Army AT Hauler chassis, eight metres long, with six wheel sets. It rumbled into the field, leaving deep ruts in the mud.

"How many is that?" he asked Christine, his eldest daughter.

"Nineteen. Room for lots more yet, no messing." She grinned happily. The twice-yearly picking seasons were dizzy times for the four Mandel children. New faces, old friends, no school, late nights, extra money for helping with the crop.

"How many teams do you want this year?" Derek Peters asked. He was standing beside Greg, a grizzled old family chief, wearing dungarees and a porkpie hat. He was the first traveller to arrive looking for work when Greg and Eleanor moved into the rundown farm sixteen years ago. Since then he'd been back each time, in summer for the oranges and limes, and November for the smaller tangerine crop. He knew most of the travellers, advising Greg who to take on, who the trouble makers were.

"About thirty-five," Greg said. "That ought to see us through. There was a lot of blossom in the east grove this year."

"You'll make it to kombinate level yet," Derek said.

Greg shrugged, inwardly pleased by the compliment. The year he and Eleanor began converting the farm's old meadows, he had struggled to plant two groves in time for his first crop; now he had nearly fifty hectares of the Hambleton peninsula covered with gene-tailored citrus trees. All of them on the prime southern slope where they received the most sunlight.

There were eleven other citrus plantations on the peninsula, taking advantage of the reservoir's superabundance of water to irrigate the thirsty trees. But the Mandel plantation was easily the largest, which meant Greg was invariably elected chairman of the local Citrus Growers' Association. His cosy lifestyle, his respectability, was something he looked upon with a strong sense of irony. Not that he would ever consider abandoning the groves, not now.

When he and Eleanor set up their new home on the peninsula he hadn't been at all sure of the idea. Up until then his life had been given over almost exclusively to combat or conflicts of one kind or another. A professional soldier, he had joined the Army at eighteen, serving in a paratroop regiment until the joint services' psi-assessment test found him to be esp positive; whereupon he wound up with a hurried transfer to the newly formed Mindstar Brigade. After the Army came the Trinities, and a hot brutal decade slugging it out against the People's Constables on Peterborough's streets. But unlike the majority of the Trinities he made an attempt to cut free once the PSP fell; living in an old timeshare estate chalet on the shore of the reservoir, trying to make ends meet as a private detective. A role his espersense made him ideal for.

Two years spent grubbing away on desultory poorly paid cases and enduring lonely bachelor nights. Two years trying to build a reputation for professionalism and competence.

And ultimately it paid off. He was hired by Event Horizon to track down the source of a security violation in their orbital factory. The case grew in size and complexity until he was finally confronting some PSP relics who had squirted a virus into Philip Evans's NN core. At the same time Eleanor came into his life. The two events combining to change his mundane world out of all recognition.

An extremely grateful Julia paid him a ridiculously lavish fee for resolving the case. They could have lived quite comfortably off the interest alone, which made the prospect of carrying on as a detective seem stupid. But they had to do something, aristocratic lotus-eating, endless parties, and global tourism didn't appeal to either of them. So they bought the farm: Greg had been a picker before often enough, a good supply of ready cash during the PSP years; and Eleanor grew up on an agricultural kibbutz.

By and large, it had been a good choice. Apart from one relapse, when Julia had used something approaching moral blackmail to coerce him into helping the police with a murder investigation which threatened to tarnish Event Horizon's esteem, his previous life drifted away from him. He was happy to let it. The old memories of violence and sorrow grew progressively more inaccessible, veiled by a cold. discouraging fog.

The next vehicle trundled up to the camp field's gate. Greg reckoned this year's convoy was the largest yet. With the New Conservatives giving road repair a high priority, traffic in general was on the increase. Another ten years would have people worrying about gridlock again—he had to explain the word to Christine, a relic of his own youth. To someone who had grown up with roads that were little more than moss-clogged tracks it was an unbelievable concept. But three years ago the big Transport Department remoulder vehicle had laid a thermo-hardened cellulose strip over Hambleton peninsula's crumbling tarmac road, and she had fallen into thoughtful silence. That was one part of the post-Warming boom he could do without. But with each of Hambleton's plantations taking on pickers the convoy families should all find work this summer. He ought to bring that up at the next Association meeting; if they ever had to start turning away large numbers it could lead to resentment. Maybe he could sound Derek out about it first. He scrawled a quick note on his cybofax wafer.

"Hey wow," Christine growled.

Greg looked up at the new arrivals. Two boys driving an old blue-sprayed ambulance, he could just make out the words Northampton Health Authority down the side.

"Alan and Simon," Derek said. "Cousins."

Everybody was a cousin or an in-law, if they weren't they didn't get past the gate. Greg never could work out what qualified them as family, it certainly wasn't anything as simple as genetics.

"First year by themselves," Derek added.

Greg could see that for himself, they were both about twenty, fresh-faced and apprehensive. The ambulance's tyres were bald. "You ever done any picking before?" he asked.

"Yes, sir," the driver said. "Ever since I could climb a ladder, maybe before, too."

"And you are?"

"Simon, sir."

"Can you do anything else?" Christine asked. There was a purring challenge in her voice.

Simon broke into a sudden ingratiating smile. From his position in the passenger seat, Alan was craning over Simon's shoulder, staring.

Greg sent out a silent prayer. Christine was fifteen years old, and developing a figure as grand as her mother's. The lime-green cap-sleeve T-shirt she was wearing proved that; and now he thought about it, her cut-off jeans were high and tight. None of her clothes were exactly little-girlish any more. He supposed that one day he really ought to talk to her about boys and sex, except that he had always sort of assumed Eleanor would do that. Coward, he told himself silently.

Simon's mouth had opened to answer her, but then he took in Greg's impassive expression and Derek's scowl, and decided not to chance it. "We can help with the cooking. And I have an HGV licence," he offered.

"Any mechanical problems, and I'm your man," Alan added. "City and Guilds diploma in transport power systems."

Greg made a note on his cybofax.

"Mr. Mandel lets you in, then you work from dawn to dusk," Derek said. "I told him you was good boys; you fuck up, you make me a liar, you disgrace your family."

From anyone else it would have been absurdly over the top. But Simon and Alan suddenly looked panicky.

"We want to work," Simon insisted. "We didn't drive two hundred klicks for fun."

Greg ordered a low-level secretion from his gland. In his imagination it was a slippery lens of black muscle, pumping away enthusiastically, oozing milky liquids. It was an illusion he had somehow never quite managed to shake off. Reality was far more banal. The gland was an artificial endocrine node which the Army had implanted in his skull, absorbing blood, and refining a devilish cocktail of psi-enhancing neurohormones to exude into his synapses.

The Army saw psychics forming a super-intelligence-gathering task force, pinpointing enemy locations, divining their generals' strategies, opening up a whole chapter of information that would ensure victory. The Mindstar Brigade never quite lived up to those initial hopes, although it retained a fearsome reputation. Psi wasn't an exact science, human brains were stubbornly recalcitrant, and not everybody could take the psychological pressure.

After his encouraging test results, the project staff had expected Greg to develop a formidable sixth sense, seeing through brick walls, seeking out tactical data over twenty kilometres. Instead, he wound up with the ability to perceive people's emotions, their fears and hopes, knowing instantly when someone was lying. It was useful for counter-intelligence work, but hardly justified the expense.

His gland also cultivated a strong intuitive sense, although official opinion was divided on that. Greg knew it was real. One time in Turkey during the Jihad Legion conflict, he had tried to convince his company commander it was too risky crossing a valley floor. The major hadn't listened, putting it down to the usual squaddie superstition about open ground.

Eight of the company had been lost when the Apache attack helicopters swam out of the cloudless sky, another fifteen were stretcher cases.

Greg felt his perception altering as the neurohormones bubbled through his brain, the world receding slightly, becoming grey and shadowy. The tightly wound thought currents of the two boys in the ambulance shone out at him. It was like watching fluid neon streamers swirling in surreal patterns, a cryptic semaphore message he alone could read.

He always checked over newcomers, just to make sure he wasn't letting any vipers into Hambleton's rustic peace. But neither of the boys were harbouring anything sinister, no malice or secret disdain, there was just a flutter of nerves as they waited for his answer, a genuine urge to work. And in Alan's case, a high-voltage sparkle of admiration for Christine.

The one thing Greg never used his espersense for was checking up on his own children. He'd always promised himself that. Paranoid parents were the last thing a growing kid needed. So he stopped short of seeing how interested Christine really was with the two boys, preferring trust instead.

Besides, she already had three serious boyfriends that he knew of.

Christine brushed some of her long titian hair aside, tucking it behind her ear. "Two hundred kilometres; where have you come from?" she asked the boys.

"York," Alan said.

"Oh, I think that's such a wonderful city. I always love visiting it."

"We'll give it a shot," Greg said hurriedly, trying to regain control.

"Thank you, sir," Simon said, grinning broadly. "We'll show you haven't made a mistake."

"Right. Park down beside the torreya tree. Make sure to put some wood underneath your wheels, the ground's wet. OK? And don't cut down any trees in the copse." He pointed at the block of Chinese pine saplings beyond the groves. "We provide logs."

"Yes, sir."

The ambulance's hub motors engaged with a light whine.

"And don't you piss in the reservoir," Derek yelled after them. Simon's hand waved from the open window.

"You've never been to York," Greg said to Christine.

She started giggling. "Oh, Dad, what's that got to do with anything?"

Greg gave up. "Right, that's twenty. Who's next?"

A pair of hands were placed over his eyes. "I thought you always told me it was impossible to creep up on a psychic," a woman's voice said in his ear.

Christine squealed. "Aunty Julia!"

Greg turned round to see Christine hugging Julia Evans. He gave her a lame grin. "Listen, you, it's more than possible when a psychic is having a day like this one."

"I know the feeling." Julia gave him a kiss, just a little bit longer than politeness dictated.

Greg slapped her bottom. "Behave yourself." When Julia was seventeen she'd had a mild crush on him, a psychic detective and ex-hardline resistance fighter was so far outside her usual experience she thought it terribly romantic, the ultimate in mysterious strangers. Greg was suddenly aware of Derek shuffling uncomfortably. He introduced Julia, privately amused by Derek's consternation when he realized that, yes, it really was the Julia Evans. "Did you bring Daniella and Matthew with you?" he asked.

"Yes, I've just picked them up from Oakham School. They went on into the house."

"Picked them up from school," Greg chuckled. "Just an ordinary working mum, huh?"

Julia grinned. "Looks like you've got a good crop this year," she said.

"Best yet." He caught sight of Victor Tyo, Event Horizon's security chief, standing respectfully a couple of metres behind Julia. A slender Euroasian with an adolescent's face and thick black hair, he had slung his suit jacket over one shoulder, white shirt undone at the collar. At forty years old, he was young for the job, but Greg had worked with him on the virus case, Victor Tyo had what it took. That too young face was a misdirection, the brain behind could have been made from solid bioware. There weren't many tekmercs who chanced going up against Event Horizon these days.

Greg shook Victor's hand warmly. "Where are Julia's bodyguards? You're far too old for hardlining now."

"Hey," Victor Tyo spread his arms. "You speak for yourself." He gestured with one hand. A nineteen-fifties Rolls Royce Silver Shadow was parked on the drive just above the farmyard, two sober-faced hardliners in ash-grey suits standing beside it.

Greg rolled his eyes. "My God, it's the camouflage detachment." On the road at the top of the drive a flock of children was forming, plotting dark misdeeds.

A horse-drawn caravan had pulled up in front of the gate, painted bright scarlet with yellow and blue trim. Greg recognized Mel Gainlee holding the reins, a spry pensioner who'd been coming to Hambleton for almost as long as Derek. He waved hopefully to Greg.

"Christine."

She was staring across the field to where the ambulance was parking.

"What?" she asked guiltily.

Greg handed her his cybofax wafer, glancing at the logo on the bottom right corner. Thankfully it was Event Horizon's triangle and flying-V. That could have been embarrassing. "You and Derek sort the rest of the teams out for me, OK?" His intuition had been sending out subtle warnings since he saw Victor Tyo had accompanied Julia. Victor was a good friend, but he didn't make social calls in the middle of the working week. Neither did Julia, come to that.

Christine's face coloured slightly. "Sure, Dad," she agreed seriously.

Greg felt a burst of pride. She really was growing up.

"She's quite something," Julia said as she and Victor Tyo walked with Greg down the rough track back to the farmhouse. Her bodyguards had fallen in a regulation ten paces behind. The kids on the road were letting off wolf-whistles.

"Yeah." Greg couldn't stop smiling.

"Sorry if we interrupted. I'd forgotten what a pandemonium Hambleton is at picking time."

"No problem. Derek knows who to let through. I only put in an appearance for form's sake."

"Where do they all come from?" She gazed back towards the heat-soaked convoy.

"From all over, of course."

The E-shaped farmhouse had been added to and extended over the years, bricks and stone and composite sheeting were all in there somewhere, hidden under a shaggy coat of reddish-green ivy. The steeply angled roof was made entirely from polished black solar panels. A couple of satellite dishes were mounted on the western gable end, pointing into the southern sky. The larger of the two was faded and scratched, obviously second hand, with a complicated-looking aluminum receiver at the focus.

A gaggle of geese scattered, honking loudly as the five of them walked into the farmyard.

"That's new," said Julia, pointing at the satellite dishes.

"Oliver put it up," Greg explained. "The boy's gone astronautics crazy. He picks up all sorts of spacecraft communication traffic on it. Wants to go and live in New London. So Anita's decided she's going to live in a Greenland commune."

Oliver and Anita were eleven-year-old twins, and took a savage joy in trying to be total opposites.

Greg had planted evergreen magnolias around two sides of the farmyard, the third side was defined by a long wooden barn. The planks for which had come from the dead deciduous trees in Hambleton Wood. It was full with white kelp-board boxes ready for the picking, the stacks reaching up to the roof. Three tractors were drawn up outside, their wheels thick with mud.

Julia looked at them pensively. "I really ought to have remembered this was the main fruit season."

"No reason why you should. Fruit picking isn't something Event Horizon has cybernated."

"Oh, you!" She poked him in mock exasperation as Victor Tyo laughed.

It was cooler inside the house, conditioners filling the air with a slightly clammy refrigerated chill. Greg led Julia and Victor Tyo into the sun lounge, checking quickly to see if any of the children's toys were lying about underfoot. The room had a white-tile floor, furnished with a pair of twisted-cane frame chairs and a three-seater settee. Benji, the family parrot, was climbing delicately over the outside of his cage.

A broad bay window looked out over the huge southern prong of Rutland Water. White wooden hireboats from the fishing lodge at Normanton bobbed about on the blue water, windsurfers and sailing yachts zipped round them. Red-faced cyclists pedalled along a narrow track just above the far shoreline, sweltering in the tropical heat of the English summer.

Greg relished the view, he had grown up in the small arabic county, lived on the shore of the reservoir for over twenty-five years. The Berrybut time-share estate was almost directly opposite the farm; in the evening he and Eleanor would watch the nightly bonfire blaze in the centre of the horseshoe of chalets, remembering earlier, simpler times.

Eleanor came into the sun lounge, walking carefully, stiffbacked from her seven-month pregnancy.

Greg caught Victor Tyo throwing him a startled glance as Eleanor and Julia embraced. It added to his growing sense of unease.

"Victor." Eleanor was smiling as she kissed the security chief. "Never see enough of you. Found a girl you can settle down with yet?"

"Eleanor," Greg protested.

"There is someone," Victor agreed defensively.

"Good, you can bring her round to dinner. We'd love to meet her."

"You never mentioned her to me," Julia said.

Victor Tyo sent a silent dismayed appeal to Greg.

"Sit down," Greg said. "And you two, behave; stop trying to embarrass Victor." He snagged Eleanor round her waist and urged her over to the settee.

"Oliver, Anita and Richy are out in the stables," Eleanor said. "I sent Matthew and Daniella out to find them. One of the mares has just foaled."

Julia groaned. "They'll only want to bring it back to Wilholm with them."

Greg put his arm around Eleanor, enjoying the feel of her as she leant in against him. "So what did you come for?" he asked.

Julia had the grace to look mildly guilty. "Royan."

"You've heard from him?" Eleanor asked.

"Sort of."

She handed Greg a slim white box, explaining about the unknown girl at the Newfields ball.

The trumpet flower inside was drooping, its light fuzz of hairs curling up. Greg's intuition strummed a quiet string of warning. Something about the flower was desperately wrong. He couldn't begin to guess what.

"And there was just the one card with it?" he asked.

"Yes."

He gave the box to Eleanor.

"I don't recognize it," Eleanor said. "What sort is it?"

Julia shot Victor Tyo a nervous questioning glance. The security chief shrugged.

"That's where the real problem begins," Julia said. "My NN cores ran a search through every botanical memory core they could access. Nothing. They drew a complete blank. No big deal about that, there are a lot of new gene-tailored varieties on the market; can't keep track of everything. Still, I sent it down to the lab for genetic sampling, see if we could find what it was derived from, the parent species." She drew a breath, pressing her palms together. "It's extraterrestrial."

"Alien?" Greg felt a fast twist of cold fear. Gone. With his sensitivity, no wonder the flower had triggered a mild wave of xenophobia. He stared at the flower; intuition shouting loud and clear what Julia was going to ask him to do next.

Eleanor's weight pressed against him, she was giving Julia a doleful accusing look.

"It can't be," Eleanor said. "It's no different to any other flower."

Greg could sense a stiff form of revulsion growing in her mind; she wanted to reject the whole notion.

"A flower is a very simple organism," Julia said, the slightest quaver in her voice betraying the severe fright Greg was observing in her thoughts. "It attracts insects to assist in pollination, nothing more. Naturally an alien flower will look similar to our own."

"So this planet it came from has bees as well, does it?"

"The individual species of plants and animals won't resemble ours, but given a planet with anything remotely approaching Earth's climate they will certainly be analogous. Evolutionary factors will remain pretty constant throughout the universe, the simplest solution always applies. Think how many plants have developed since life began on Earth, all of them variants on a central theme."

"What rubbish."

"Please, Eleanor," Julia said painfully. "I wish you were right, I really do. I wanted the geneticists to be completely wrong. But the flower has nothing like our DNA. The chromosome-equivalents are toroidal, arranged in concentric shells. My geneticists say the sphere they form is unholy complex, and definitely not from this solar system."

"For complex, read 'advanced'," Victor Tyo said. "The geneticists estimate the source planet could be anything up to a couple of billion years further up the evolutionary ladder than Earth. The gene sphere is much larger than terrestrial DNA strands."

It didn't really register with Greg, nonsense numbers. He ordered a gland secretion, concentrating inwards. There was no truth to be gained from intuition, only a sense of what might be, hints. He scrambled round for a sign of fear, that the flower was dangerous. But there was only the original tremendous unease, amplified to a cloying presence. He imagined this was what being haunted must be like.

He rose from the near-trance state.

"The flower," Greg said. "It's not lethal, but I get a sense of weight behind it, a pressure building up."

"The aliens?" Victor Tyo asked.

"No," Greg gave him a wry smile. "No spaceships, no Martian invasion fleet. But there's something… biding time."

"There is a ship, something had to bring it here," Victor said. "They're close, watching us, hell they're probably even down here among us. How would we know? We've no idea what they look like, what they're capable of. God Almighty, entities from another planet." Perhaps it was just the emphasis his boyish face gave to any deeply felt emotion, but Victor's dismay seemed to be on the point of crushing him.

"Aliens might have the technological advantage over us," Greg said. "But I'd be very surprised if they could land on Earth without the strategic defence networks picking them up. Am I right, Julia?"

She gave a subdued nod. "Yes. The sensor coverage is good, it has to be given the potential for kinetic assaults. You could orbit a ship two hundred thousand kilometres out without being spotted, fair enough, but the chances of detection increase with every kilometre you travel closer to Earth. Once you're within fifteen thousand kilometres of the surface you're visible. It doesn't matter how good your stealth technology is, any physical body passing through the planetary magnetosphere generates a flux that the sensors will pick up. We're tracking hundreds of thousands of objects up there, anything from discarded solar panels to composite bolts."

"So where did the flower come from?" Eleanor asked.

Julia shook her head slowly. "I don't know. And that's what really worries me. I can't believe even aliens have the ability to circumvent our technology to that extent."

"You said you could feel a pressure," Victor said. "What kind of pressure?"

Greg shrugged, uncertain how to express it in words. "Something waiting."

"Look," Julia said. "We know there's been some kind of first contact; that there is, or has been, a ship visit the Earth, or at least the solar system. That's your presence; no big mystery there. What I want to know is, how is Royan tied in? That's what I came for, Greg. Where is he?"

"I don't know. But you were right about the flower being a message. It might even be a warning."

"Then why didn't he say so?" she asked hotly.

Greg realized how much worry and concern was bottled up behind her tawny eyes.

"Wrong question," he said. "We should be asking: what's he warning us about? And why such a baroque warning? If he had enough liberty to send off flowers, why not just give you a call? At the very least he could squirt us a data package."

"Bugger your questions, Greg! I want to know what's happened to Royan."

"Well, what did you expect? A séance?" He cursed as soon as he said it.

Julia blushed.

"No," Eleanor said levelly, her eyes never leaving Julia. "You want the girl, don't you? The one who gave Rachel the box."

The blush deepened, she nodded once. "She's the link. The only one we've got."

Greg looked at Eleanor, then back to Julia. "I can't," he said, appalled at how much it cost to say. "Not me, not any more. Sorry."

"Bloody right you can't," Eleanor said coolly. She fixed Julia with a stare. "Look around you; four children, a fifth on the way, the farm, the picking season."

"I know," Julia whispered. "But… aliens, Eleanor. It goes beyond me and Royan, though I wish to God it didn't. Who else can I trust? Who would you trust? You want these aliens to contact the religious fundamentalist movements first? One of the South American dictatorships? We have to find him, quickly and quietly. Greg's a gland psychic, worth ten of these new sac users, and he's had proper training. The best there is, and my friend, Royan's friend. Who else can I ask?"

Greg narrowed his eyes. Julia's compulsion had always been stronger than any psychic power. And combine it with logic as well…

"Give me a name, Greg, someone better; Lord, someone your equal would do."

"How the bloody hell would I know?" he snapped. "I left that game sixteen years ago. Victor? You must have whole memory cores full of psychics."

"I do," Victor said quietly. "And we reviewed them, that's why we're here. I'm sorry. These modern sac users are good, but they don't have your training, your strength. Mindstar hunted out people with the highest potential. Today, anyone who has a minor flash of talent can take a themed neurohormone and think he's some kind of warlock. In a lot of respects themed neurohormones are a step backwards; and no one ever developed one to boost intuition."

"Jesus wept!"

"Royan's out there, Greg," Julia said. "Negotiating with aliens, holding them off, leading them in. Lord, I don't know which. But I have got to find out, Greg. Please?"

He looked helplessly at Eleanor. She fumbled for his hand, and gave him a squeeze. He tightened his grip round her shoulder.

"He is a friend," Eleanor said in a tiny voice. She sounded as though she was trying to convince herself and failing miserably.

"Yeah, he is that."

"You're not hardlining, Gregory," Eleanor said firmly. "Not at your age."

He twisted under the look in her eyes, wanting to object, or at least have it said in private. The trouble was she was quite right. At fifty-two he would be hopelessly outclassed by today's youngsters. Logic and intuition were in concord over that, worst luck. And if there was one certainty about all of this, there was going to be trouble. Royan's method of contact alone was evidence of that.

Nothing ever simple, nothing ever straightforward. His bloody life story.

"No problem in that direction, at all," Victor said smoothly. "One of Event Horizon's security crash teams will be on permanent alert to assist you. With hypersonic transport, they can be anywhere on the globe within forty minutes. And of course you'll have as many of my hardliners accompanying you as you want. All you have to do is ask the questions."

"No," Greg said. "If I'm doing this then I want someone I know watching my back. Someone who's reliable, someone who's good."

"Of course," Victor said.

"I'll take Suzi."

"What?" Julia sat upright in her chair.

Eleanor stiffened inside his encircling arm.

Greg resisted the impulse to smile.

"She is one of the more competent tekmercs," Victor said grudgingly.

"Yeah," Greg said. "She ought to be. I trained her."

Victor raised an eyebrow. "I think you'll find she's grown a bit since those days. Reputation-wise, that is."

"I'm sure Event Horizon can afford her," Greg said.

"We certainly can," Julia agreed. "There will be one of Event Horizon's executive jets here for you first thing tomorrow morning. I've already cleared your entry into Monaco."

Eleanor's features hardened, spiking Julia with a voodoo glare.

"Fine," Greg said phlegmatically. Had there ever been a time when Julia didn't get her way? "We'd better visit Suzi this afternoon."

"You might find you need more backup than Suzi by herself," Julia said.

Greg gave her a hard look, he was rapidly tiring of revelations. Why?"

"The girl at Newfields, or somebody else, they took a sample out of the flower as well."

"You sure?"

"Yes. The lab pointed it out as soon as they saw it. One of the stamens had been cut off. And it was definitely a cut, not a break."

"Would a stamen be enough for a genetic test?" Greg asked. "I mean, this unknown who took it, are they likely to know the flower is extraterrestrial?"

"Yes. Theoretically, all you need is a single cell. A stamen is more than sufficient."

Greg rubbed a hand across his temple. "I doubt it would be the girl who took the sample."

"Why not?" Eleanor asked.

"Purely because she is just the courier, especially if Rachel is right about her being a whore."

"Courtesan," Julia corrected. "Don't fall into the mistake of thinking she's a dumb go-between. Believe you me, at that level there's a difference. She'll be smart, well educated, and knowledgeable."

"OK," said Victor. "But smart or not, courtesans don't own genetic labs."

"I agree," said Greg. "Somebody else apart from us knows about the alien. But until we know more about the girl, I couldn't even begin to guess who."

"Exactly," said Julia. "So will you take some extra hardliners?"

"Maybe a couple. But they stay in the background."

"I'll brief them myself," said Victor.

Eleanor rested her head well back on top of the settee's cushioning, eyes slitted as she stared at the ceiling. "What did the government say about the alien?" she asked.

Greg watched Julia flinch at the question. He'd never seen her do that before, not in seventeen years.

"They don't know yet," Julia mumbled reluctantly.

"When were you planning on telling them?"

"As soon as the situation requires it."

"You don't think it does yet?" Eleanor asked.

"All we have is supposition, so far."

"And the genes. They convinced you."

"The point is, what could the government do that I can't? Order a strategic defence network alert? I really don't think neutral particle beam weapons and pulsed X-ray lasers are going to be an awful lot of use against the kind of technology which moved a ship between stars, and did so undetected. Besides, think of the panic."

"All right," Eleanor said uncertainly. "But we have to make some preparations."

"Event Horizon is preparing," said Victor. "We're assembling a number of dark specialist teams, spreading them through our facilities, kitting them out with top-line equipment."

"What use is that?" Eleanor demanded indignantly.

"Listen, I can't believe we're facing some kind of military action," Julia said. "But so far these aliens have been acting in a very clandestine fashion. If push comes to shove, then Earth is going to lose. No question about it. So we roll with the punch; if we can't fight interstellar technology, we acquire it for ourselves, and fire it right back at them."

Greg turned to watch the sailors on the reservoir. There was something cheerfully reassuring about the brightly coloured triangles of cloth slicing across the water. A nice homely counterbalance to this vein of raw insanity which had erupted into his life.

He didn't like the connotations interstellar technology was sparking off in his intuition. Though he had to admit Julia had the right idea. If they couldn't be beaten with hardware, use innate human treachery against them.

And what does that say about us as a species?