“Did you assign Royan a genetics laboratory?”
“Yes. He wanted one for himself. It’s a bit unusual, but his authority rating entitled him. There were a few complaints when we reshuffled.”
“What happened afterwards?”
“After what?”
“After he left. Was there any equipment he left behind? Who moved into the laboratory? What happened to his research subjects?”
Eliot Haydon pulled his cybofax out of his shorts pocket and asked it a couple of questions. He consulted the screen, then gave Victor a thoughtful look. “According to our records, his lab is still unoccupied. That isn’t right at all, lab space is at a premium in the station. The management cores are programmed to reassign it as soon as it became available again.”
Victor had been expecting something like it, resentful of the way he was being led about like a cyborg. “I’d like to see it, please.”
The little cylindrical submarine had a transparent hemispherical nose. Victor sat beside Eliot Haydon in the front as the farm director piloted them away from the platform, using a steering-wheel which could have come from a car. It was designed to ferry twenty people down to the Farm’s main underwater station, but there was only him and his bodyguard on board.
The water was surprisingly clean. Eliot Haydon explained that the water fruit itself was responsible, its matted root system holding down the sand. A variety Event Horizon’s geneticists had developed.
Ripe globes of fruit hung a metre above the sea bed, suspended on a twisted ropy chord, like a squadron of tethered balloons. They were swinging rhythmically in the slow pulse of currents. Thirty Frankenstein dolphins, with long dextrous flippers, swam among the rows. He watched one wriggle underneath a water fruit, its powerful snout cutting clean through the cord. It gripped the globe with its flippers, and carried it to a big net bag at the end of the field, dropping it through the open neck with the accuracy and panache of a basketball player.
The main station loomed beyond the fields, a fat yellow-painted saucer sixty metres in diameter, with portholes round the rim. It stood fifteen metres off the sea bed on three sturdy cylindrical legs. Eliot Haydon steered the sub underneath it, manoeuvring up to an airlock set in the keel. They docked with a loud clunk. Pumps started to whirr.
“We keep the station’s internal pressure at one atmosphere,” Eliot Haydon said, as he ran the powerdown program through the sub’s control ‘ware. “That way once we’re docked, we stay docked. Opposite of spacecraft.”
“What exactly goes on in this station?” Victor asked.
Eliot Haydon stood up and walked back down the sub to the airlock set in the ceiling. He checked the seal display before starting to turn the lock wheel. “Some practical work; investigating sea bed growing techniques, methods of harvesting. Several of the food combine farms use drones to pick the water fruit; we found the Frankenstein dolphins are just as efficient. But mainly it’s a genetics research facility. We improve the water fruit species, modify fish. One team is working on coral; we wanted to give the field reefs small caves, like Swiss cheese, so we could breed crustaceans in them. The pilot scheme is quite successful.”
The circular airlock opened with a hissing sound. A small shower of water sprinkled down on Eliot Haydon’s head. He started to climb up the metal ladder.
The laboratory was GD7, a rectangular chamber on the edge of the station. Three portholes looked out over the fields and reefs, some chemical aspect of the thick material turning them a deep blue-green. Fans of jade light poured in, dancing across the white-topped benches which ran along the wall.
GD7 appeared to be a standard set up. The benches were crowded with specialist terminals and composite equipment modules, long crystalline glassware arrays and culture vats. A rack of empty aquariums stood along the back wall. There was a section given over to an electron microscope. All of it was clean, unused, switched off. Waiting, Victor thought.
Kiley was resting on a pedestal in the centre. An octagonal framework two metres in diameter, half a metre high, its side panels covered in crumbling, grey thermal/particle protection foam. Thimble-sized cold gas thruster nozzles poked out above the foam, along with three sets of star-tracker sensors, a couple of slim conical omnidirectional antennas, tarnished-silver electrical umbilical sockets, and an interface key. Seven corners sprouted a square dull-copper thermal radiator fin. The eighth had a long grapple pin for the remote manipulator arm on Newton’s Apple to grab during retrieval.
A metre-high truss structure on top had held the probe’s collection flask. It was empty now, mounting points trailing a spaghetti tangle of severed power lines and fibre optic cable. Above that was the communication dish, a gossamer-thin umbrella of silver foil, badly crumpled and torn.
Victor looked round, and saw the collection flask on one of the benches, a titanium rugby ball, split into two halves. Empty. There was a plain white card resting against it. He picked it up.
I’ll bet it’s you, Victor-
The handwriting was Royan’s. He crumpled it into a tight ball. It was a superbly equipped lab. What had Royan done here?
“What is this thing?” Eliot Haydon asked, he was walking cautiously round Kiley, staring. “A space probe?”
“Yes. A Jupiter sample return.”
“Gods, what’s it doing here?”
“That’s a bloody good question.”
Open Channel to Julia Evans NN Core. I’ve found Kiley, or at least what’s left of it.
Great. Where?
It’s in the Farm’s main underwater station, laboratory GD7. That’s a genetics lab. But there’s nothing else left, he’s cleaned it out.
Hang on, I’ll access that lab’s memory cores again. They’ve already been reviewed once.
Victor thought he detected a hint of resentment in the soundless voice. “When Royan left, what did he take with him, can you remember?” he asked.
Eliot Haydon was still looking at Kiley, left hand stroking one of the thermal radiator panels. “Just a standard air cargo pod.” He brought his hand away, rubbing his fingers together. “Oh, and a plant. Funny looking thing, like a cross between a cacti and a palm. He was carrying it when he got on the plane, that’s why I remember.”
Victor felt a tingle of alarm. “Was it flowering?”
“Was it…” Eliot Haydon trailed off into uncertain bemusement.
“Flowering? Did it have any flowers?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
I still can’t locate anything, Victor, NN core one said.
He turned a full circle. The personality package had to be here. Royan would expect him to work it out, to come in and see the obvious.
Start with the basics, he told himself. A data construct has to be stored in ‘ware. And it has to be obvious. Royan wasn’t hiding anything, they were supposed to be warnings. A location proof against accidental discovery, but not obscure.
He wanted Greg and his intuition here in the lab. Greg would have seen it straight off.
Victor turned slowly and looked at Kiley. The tiny glass eye of the interface key stared back at him. He pulled his cybofax out of his inside jacket pocket and held it up.
CHAPTER 29
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.