Julia put her arms round him and rested her head on his shoulder. “I didn’t know it was going to finish up like this, Greg.”
“That’s OK.” He stroked the long hair down her back. “Tell you, I’m just sorry about Rachel and the other three.”
Julia nodded silently, giving him a lonely smile. “Rachel’s been with me for twenty years. I know her father and her brother. They were all so proud she was doing well for herself. Personal assistant to the mighty Julia Evans. Now I’ve got to tell them she’s dead. She was out of hardlining, Greg. Clean away, then I made her go back.”
“This wasn’t hardlining. Not really. It was just crazy. There was no need for it, the Pegasus wasn’t armed.”
“We really have made a mess of today, haven’t we?”
“I got you Charlotte Fielder. Nothing that important ever comes cheap.”
“Yes. Well, that girl had better bloody well start telling me what I want to know.”
“Tomorrow,” Greg said. Even without his espersense he could tell Julia was feeling the strain, and that was with all the protection the NN cores threw around her. Chasing after Fielder wasn’t all this deal involved by the look of it. “She’s had a rough time of it this afternoon. So’s young Fabian, come to that.”
Julia stepped away from him. “Yeah, I know, I was there.”
“So you were.” Greg looked at Victor. “Did Leol Reiger survive?”
“We don’t know. We’ve been monitoring the air-sea rescue traffic. The Nigerian coast guard have picked up quite a few of the Colonel Maitland’s crew from their escape pods. I haven’t got a list yet, my Lagos office will squirt one over in a couple of hours.”
“What about Baronski?”
“Snuffed, along with the girl who was with him. There were three people killed when Reiger’s tekmercs opened fire on you in the Prezda well, another thirty-eight injured, seven seriously. I’ve never known anyone like this Reiger; he’s a mad dog, absolute mad dog. I’ve been in touch with the Tricheni security chief, that’s the kombinate which owns the Prezda, we’re launching a joint search-and-destroy deal.”
The big man standing behind Victor was looking more and more uncomfortable.
“Good,” Greg said, surprised by his own anger. “Did you find out who’s behind Reiger?”
“Yes,” Victor said. “We’ve got quite a bit to tell you about that.”
The conference room had a broad silvered window looking out over the rest of the oceanic energy field. It showed the other generator platforms as oblong ochre silhouettes on the darkening horizon, navigation lights winking steadily.
He sat with Julia, Victor and Rick Parnell at one end of a long black composite table, listening to Victor give a review of Royan’s Kiley probe, and the waiting personality packages.
The office’s three teleconference flatscreens were on, plugging the three NN cores into the discussion, two showing images of Julia, while Philip Evans filled the third. Julia’s grandfather had synthesized an image of himself at fifty, a thin face with a healthy tan and silver hair.
Greg could see that Rick Parnell was having trouble coping with the NN cores, glancing up at the screens then back down at the table. The blunt hardline talk about Leol Reiger wasn’t helping to settle him either. He wasn’t quite out of his depth, but he was certainly having his world-view shaken today.
“If Clifford Jepson already has the data on the nuclear force generator, why would he want to find Royan?” Greg asked after Julia finished telling him about the two partnership offers she’d received. “Especially, why go to this much trouble to find Royan? I’d say hiring Leol Reiger was almost an act of desperation.”
“To make sure Royan doesn’t plug me into the alien, and do a deal direct. Clifford would be left with nothing then, Globecast can’t develop the nuclear force generator by itself.”
“But Globecast doesn’t have a monopoly on the generator data,” Greg said. “Mutizen’s offering you the same deal.”
Julia looked up at the screens, arching an eyebrow.
“Buggered if I know, girl,” Philip Evans grunted.
“It is odd,” Julia’s NN core one image agreed.
Greg turned to Rick. “Are we sure Royan’s alien is the source of the atomic structuring technology?”
“No idea,” said the SETI director. “It’s conceivable that the microbes could live on the outside of a starship, that they were brought here rather than drifted across interstellar space. But that would mean the alien has been here a long time; a couple of centuries before the Matoyaii probe was launched, at least. Remember, we’ve now inspected just two rocks out of all the millions which make up Jupiter’s ring, and both of them had microbe colonies. No matter how vigorous they are, it would take a long time to spread that far.”
“Is that significant?” Victor asked.
“I think it must be,” Rick said. “If the aliens have been here, been watching us for so long, why make contact now?”
“Because we discovered them,” Julia said.
“No, we didn’t,” Rick said. “Without all this hardline chasing around and the appearance of atomic structuring technology we would have cheerfully believed the microbes were interstellar travellers. There is nothing to make us suspect they came on a starship. And in any case, any aliens with starship-level technology could quite easily have tampered with Matoyaii. One very simple robot probe operating alone six hundred million kilometres from mission control, we have the technology to fool it. if there is a starship, then we were deliberately allowed to know about the microbes. But don’t ask me why.”
“I think we have to assume Royan’s alien is the source,” Victor said. “There’s just too much interest being shown in his whereabouts, by too many people, for any other conclusion.”
“No messing,” Greg muttered. He took a salmon sandwich from a plate on the table, surprised at how hungry he was. “Have you come up with a proper profile on that maid, Nia Korovilla?”
“Not a thing,” Julia’s NN core image said. “The only data we have on her is the file my personality package squirted out of the Colonel Maitland’s ‘ware. You saw it, it tells us very little.”
Greg finished the sandwich, and started on another. There was a jumble of impressions cluttering up his mind, all the knowledge he’d picked up today. There was no order to it, not yet. But there could be. He was sure of that. Intuition. Something would link it all together, a key, a connecting factor, some word or phrase. It was just a question of looking at it from the right angle, afterwards it would be obvious. Of course, he could force it, use the gland. One of the Mindstar psychologists involved with his training had called his intuition a foresight equal to everyone else’s hindsight.
He swallowed the last of the salmon sandwiches, and started on the beef ones. It was almost completely dark outside now, the platforms had switched on floodlights to illuminate their superstructure. “What about the observation team in the Prezda well?” he asked.
“I’m afraid you and Suzi are the only ones who saw them,” Victor said. “Certainly Prezda security has no knowledge of them.”
“So we’ve no idea who this third party is?”
“None,” Victor agreed.
“Someone who can afford to keep a sleeper on the Colonel Maitland for eight years,” Greg observed pensively.
“Expensive,” Victor said. “I wonder if her controller was behind the observers in the Prezda?”
“If it wasn’t, then there’s a fourth organization involved,” Greg said.
“Too many. You think Korovilla was tied in with the Prezda observers rather than Reiger and Jepson?”
“I would say yes,” Julia said. “She was anxious to avoid Contact with Reiger’s tekmerc squad.”
“So who was she working for?” Greg asked.
“The organization that took the sample from the flower?” Julia suggested.