The Nano Flower Part 24

Julia leaned back in her chair after he finished. 'Now you've jogged my memory, I do remember hearing about the flu theory,' she said slowly. 'Years ago, probably when I was back at school. But why do you a.s.sume these microbes come from the stars? I would have thought Jupiter itself is a more obvious choice. The chemistry and the energy exists to support microbic life forms in its atmosphere, surely some spoors could have leaked out to the rings, maybe even riding up the Jo flux-tube.'

Victor watched the last of Rick's a.s.surance crumple. Of course, an interstellar origin was so much easier for him to believe in, more important, more dramatic. It gave the whole SET! discipline that edge of certainty, respectability. The same reason people wanted to believe in flying saucers rather than swamp gas.

'The origin is irrelevant to our present situation,' Victor said. 'The point is, when he heard the microbes existed, or might exist, Royan had a probe built to investigate them.'

Julia looked at him blankly, as if the words he'd spoken had come out wrong. 'When?'

'He approached me about sixteen months ago,' Rick said. 'I expect that was because I suggested a probe to verify Matoyau's findings as soon as you appointed me. It was turned down.'

Julia's expression became cool, she didn't say anything. Rick swallowed and went on, 'After Royan came to us, my office advised the design team on the kind of sensors required to locate the microbes.'

'There's no record of this,' Julia said. Her eyes were closed. Victor knew she was using her nodes, probably talking to her NN cores, running tracers through Event Horizon's memory cores. He had done it himself on the flight back from the Astronautics Inst.i.tute, and drawn a complete blank. But if there were any bytes on the probe hidden in the company's memory cores, Julia would find them. He always thought it a considerable irony that the boss of Event Horizon was one of the greatest hotrods on the planet.

'I watched it being built,' Rick said, a shade defensively. 'It was a.s.sembled in Building One, you could actually see it from my office window.'

'A Jupiter probe?' Julia asked. 'Built in full view, and n.o.body said anything?'

'Best place to hide something,' Victor said. 'One more s.p.a.ce project in an Inst.i.tute that boots five thousand tonnes of hardware into orbit every week. Who'd notice, who'd even care?'

'Mr Tyo is quite right,' Rick said. 'Unmanned planetary exploration isn't of much interest to Inst.i.tute personnel. Not since the Mars and Mercury landings. There was nothing 212.

special about Kiley, the components were all standard apart from the microbe detection sensors and sampling waldos.'

'Kiley?' Julia asked.

'Yes. Royan chose the name. It's a kind of boomerang,' Rick explained.

'A boomerang? You mean Kiley was a sample-return mission?'

'Yes.'

'Has it returned?' she demanded.

'I couldn't tell you. That would depend on how long it stayed in orbit around Jupiter. But I will tell you this, it was built for speed. The probe itself only ma.s.sed about two tonnes, the propulsion section came in at over forty tonnes. It filled a Clarke-cla.s.s s.p.a.ceplane payload bay. There were five stages, throwaway reaction-ma.s.s tanks and gigaconductor cells. That raised a few eyebrows at the Inst.i.tute. Whoever heard of throwing away giga-conductor cells? Royan was certainly in a hurry for it to get on Jupiter.'

The corner of Julia's mouth turned down. 'Nothing new in that, he was always in a hurry. So how long would it take to get there?'

'Launched at an optimal conjunction, ten weeks,' Rick said.

'And presumably the same time to return?'

'Yes, possibly a week or so less. The Sun's gravity field would accelerate it, you see.'

'Do you know when it was launched?'

'Not to the day, no. But Kiley was rolled out of Building One eight months ago, last November.'

Julia gave him a long hard look, holding her body immobile.

Victor knew her mood well enough, contemplative, but Rick was visibly wilting under such a direct contact.

'Did he ever say why he was so keen to examine these microbes?' Victor asked. 'What was so important about them?'

'No,' Rick said. 'He never confided in me. Sorry.'

Victor glanced enquiringly at Julia.

"Fraid not,' she shook her head fractionally.

213.

'Care to guess?'

'I don't think I could. I'm beginning to realize how little of him I ever did know.'

Rick cleared his throat cautiously. 'Er, are we, the Inst.i.tute, that is, in trouble for a.s.sembling the probe? Royan did have all the funding clearance, and we knew he's your husband-' He broke off miserably.

Julia favoured him with a thin grin. 'Oh, yes, he's mine all right. And no, I don't hold the Inst.i.tute to blame. Royan has the authority to use whatever Event Horizon facility he wishes to.'

'Even if he can't be bothered to tell us,' Victor said. It came out with more feeling than he intended, and Julia registered a flicker of pain. Julia's choice had always baffled him, although he and Royan had always been careful never to show any animosity towards each other. If anything, they'd always been scrupulously polite, to the point of excess, it became a ritual. Perhaps the mistrust he felt was just a security man's instinct. But he always considered Royan a flaw in Julia's otherwise meticulous life; it was always her devotion, her money. All Royan had brought with him were his hotrod programs. Love was never reasonable.

'Something I'd like to ask,' Victor said, evading Julia's critical eye. 'Seeing as how I don't believe in coincidence: Royan builds a Jupiter probe to investigate alien life, then he turns up warning us about alien life. Would it make sense for our aliens to use Jupiter as a base?'

'You mean, could their s.h.i.+p be in orbit around Jupiter?' Julia asked.

'Just an idea,' Victor said. It was one he'd had on the ifight back to Wilholm. He had wanted to pursue it with Rick, but then Greg bad called and he wound up getting sidetracked with safeguarding Andria Landon.

'A good one,' said Rick. 'However advanced their technology, a starflight would deplete on-board resources, certainly on a slower-than-light s.h.i.+p. Jupiter would be an excellent resupply point. Minerals and metal in its ring, ice on Europa, He3 in its atmosphere.'

214.

'Can you at least run a search of Jupiter for us?' Victor asked.

'I keep telling you,' Rick said irritably. 'SET! is not a hardware-orientated department. All we have is an office, and access to the Inst.i.tute's lightware cruncher. That's it, the total, what we are.'

'Not any more; Julia said. 'As of now, I am placing every deep-s.p.a.ce sensor facility Event Horizon owns under the control of the SET! department.' Her eyes went distant. 'Your role will mainly be co-ordination, but then that's what you're used to. Tell the visible- and radio-astronomy departments what you require, I'll see you have the clearance by the time you get back to the Inst.i.tute. You can also get the visible-astronomy staff to interpret any recent visual records of Jupiter. There's our own Galileo telescope, as well as the lAP's Aldrin. Victor, you handle any image purchases from the Aldrin. Go through some fronts, I don't want anyone to know Event Horizon is the end user, not at this stage.'

'This is all very sudden,' Rick said slowly. He kept glancing at Victor for confirmation of what was actually happening. 'Funny, nothing like the contact scenarios we were prepared for. We always a.s.sumed it would be non-material contact, almost archaeological, digging through the electronic remains of a culture, signals broadcast before the human race had even learnt how to knap flints. Now' this, a stars.h.i.+p finally arrives, then it hides from us. Crazy.'

'I'm sure you can cope,' Julia said, there was a line of steel in her voice.

Rick jerked back out of his daydream. 'Yes, of course, absolutely no problem.'

'Good. You're searching for two things. Firstly, any sign of an alien stars.h.i.+p. Secondly, this Kily probe of Royan's. I want to know if it's still in Jupiter orbit, or if it's en route back to Earth. Got that?'

'Yes.' Rick bobbed his head.

'There's a third option on Kiley,' Victor reminded her. 'The most likely, that it's already returned.'

'How would we know?' Julia asked. 'Royan's wiped or 215.

guarded any reference in the company memory cores. Even I can't find any traces,' she added significantly.

'We do it the old-fas.h.i.+oned way. Ask people instead of machines,' he said with a slow smile. Investigative techniques, cross-indexing and correlating data, bad been a part of his original training. Unused for well over a decade, ever since security simply became a question of correct data retrieval. It would be good to actually use his brain on a problem again, satisfying, that and being out in the field for a change. 'We can start with Rick here?'

'Me?' the startled SET! director asked.

'Yes.'

'But I've told you everything I know about Kiley, every byte.'

'Not quite. For a start, which bay the Kiley was a.s.sembled in?'

'F37, I think.'

'Right, Julia would you ask your team to access the records for that bay, see if they can work out how Royan glitched the cores to hide what he's been doing?'

'Good idea,' she said.

'In the mean time, Rick and I will get back to the Inst.i.tute, start talking to the team that a.s.sembled Kiley, and more important, see if we can locate the s.p.a.ceplane crew that launched it.'

'What for?' Rick asked.

'Because if it has returned, their familiarity with the system would make them the logical choice to perform the recovery ffight.'

J.

ulia watched the study door close behind the two men. Rick Parnell had been more or less what she'd expected, except for his physical size; an intellectual, socially out of his depth. Wasn't royalty supposed to be able to put anyone at their ease? That was one trick she had never mastered. It always took three or four meetings with people before they started to relax around her. Apart from Victor, of course, she couldn't think of a time when Victor had been reticent around her. Always honest, that was Victor's big attraction. And loyal, which went far beyond professional integrity. Julia quickly put a brake on that stray thought.

You shouldn't be so dishonest with yourseff, Juliet, her grandfather said gently.

She hadn't realized the NN cores were still plugged in.

I wasn't being dishonest, just practical.

Poor Juliet, so many problems, so many unknowns.

You're getting quite dismally sentimental in your old age.

Listen, my girl. I know this is immortality, but it's tasteless, odourless, and numb; and it isn't going to gct any better. Maybe I should have gone for the angels and demons deal after alL You don't have glands, Grandpa, you don't need the outside world.

No, but 1 like It.

Oh, all right, anything for peace and quiet.

Load OtherEyes. She felt the package squirt into one of her processor nodes, it was a fragment of her grandfather, a sub-personality, formatting her sensory impulses and relaying them back to his NN core. In effect, he was riding her nervous system, a tactual tourist.

Happy now? Julia asked. She gave him access to her sensorium about once a week; he always claimed he needed to receive the physical sensations to stop himself going insane. Julia doubted it, her two NN cores never made the same

CHAPTER SIXTEEN.

217.

request, and her grandfather had skipped the last four months of both her pregnancies.

'Too b.l.o.o.d.y weird, Juliet,' he had told her. 'Remember this is a lad who grew up in the sixties - the Beatles, Apollo moonshots, and black and white telly - that's my stomping ground, simple times. Looking round this brain-wrecked world half of me thinks I'm in h.e.l.l already.'

That's better, thank you, Juliet His silent voice always sounded closer when OtherEyes was loaded, which was impossible. She stretched her arms, wriggling her fingers, then breathed in deeply.

Oh, terrific, that grand old smell of chilly conditioned air. Can't beat it. You live in a b.l.o.o.d.y s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p, you do, girl.

She laughed. I'll take a walk out in the garclens for you later. Danieila and Matthew are in the pool, I could join them.

An eerie wisp of pride slithered through her brain at the mention of her children. Not hers, not the usual background of paternal pride.

They're good kids, they are, Juliet. My great-grandchildren. Even if they do keep taking Brutus into the pool.

Oh, not again! I've told Qoi not to let them.

There was a mental chuckle. Brutus doesn't harm anybody, it's not as if he's got fleas. Besides, I remember a little girl who would have stabled her horse in her bedroom if I'd let her.

If you're going to get all asinine maudlin, you can go back where you came from.

So cold and ruthless we are now, Juliet, how we've grown.

The communication channel widened to incorporate her two NN cores.

We've found Jason Whitehurst's airs.h.i.+p, NN core one said. There was a brief impression of excitement. We didn't even have to go extralegaL Stratotransit PLC holds the Euro-flight Agency franchise for traffic control, and Event Horizon owns twelve per cent of Stratotransit, so our request for a memory squirt was perfectly legitimate.

Good, so where are they?

Stratotransit tracked the Colonel Maitland leaving Monaco and flying west across the Mediterranean, then out into the Atlantic over the Straits of Gibraltar. That's where radar coverage ends, so we've been relying on our Earth Resource platforms to track her from there.

One of the terminal cubes in front of her lit up. Julia recognized the Iberian peninsula and north-west Africa, both glowing in various shades of red. The sea was a light green.

You are seeing an enhanced infrared image, NN core one explained. The image expanded, centring on the Straits of Gibraltar. Julia could make out the drop flow, a tongue of emerald green that seemed to s.h.i.+mmer. A blue dot crept into the picture.

There they are. They crossed at night, which is significant. It was the only time they were in sight of land after leaving Monaco.

The image was expanding again, s.h.i.+fting west and south. The Colonel Maidand flew north of the Canaries, then out over the ocean.

The Colonel Maitland is currently seven hundred kilo-metres due west of the Cape Verde islands, and holding station, NN core one said. That's the absolute middle of nowhere. For the last ten hours, all it's done is compensated for the wind.