You shouldn't be so dishonest with yourself, 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 get 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 I 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 request, and her grandfather had skipped the last four months of both her pregnancies.
"Too bloody 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 hell 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 bloody spaceship, you do, girl.
She laughed. I'll take a walk out in the gardens for you later. Daniella 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 airship, 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 shimmer. 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, shifting west and south. The Colonel Maitland flew north of the Canaries, then out over the ocean.
The Colonel Maitland is currently seven hundred kilometres 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.
Julia stared at the blue dot, virtually equidistant from both landmasses, Africa and South America. You mean only someone with our resources could locate the Colonel Maitland right now?
Yes, for all its size, the damn thing is tiny on an oceanic scale. Unless you have access to the same Stratotransit and satellite data as we do, there's no way you could find it.
What about the usual communication links? she asked. Call Jason Whitehurst up and locate him via a transponder.
Jason is too wily for that; pulling transponder co-ordinates out of Intelsat is an ancient hotrod trick. There's no transponder response to his number.
You mean he's totally incommunicado?
Far from it; one of security's ELINT satellites has an orbit which passes close enough to scan the Colonel Maitland. We waited until the latest results were squirted over to us before telling you we'd found Jason. It turns out the Colonel Maitland is operating some kind of localized jammer.
Is that why we can't get any response from Charlotte Fielder's cybofax?
Could well be, if she's on board. But Jason Whitehurst certainly hasn't been struck dumb. He's using his own comsat to squirt data about among his cargo agents, and the bit rate is approaching maximum capacity. And the uplink to geosync orbit is a very tight beam; but the ELINT intercepted a portion while it was overhead. Jason Whitehurst is receiving a vast amount of kombinate finance reviews which his agents have bought from commercial intelligence companies.
Julia looked at the cube again, translating the blue dot into an airship drifting idly over the ocean. What had Victor said? No such thing as coincidence. And Greg said the same thing often enough.
Grandpa, do you notice the similarity here? I'm looking for this Charlotte Fielder girl, and I've also initiated a search through kombinate finance records because of the offers Mutizen and Clifford Jepson have made to me. Jason Whitehurst has got Charlotte Fielder, and what's he busy doing?
Spot on, Juliet. Notice something else as well?
What?
This atomic structuring technology cropped up more or less at the same time as Royan warned us about aliens. A technology that is so different it isn't even a breakthrough in the usual sense of the word, because nobody's even been working on it. A technology whose origins are bloody difficult to track down.
"Bugger," she said out loud. He was right. Which was precisely what made him so indispensable, not just his experience, but an alternative viewpoint.
We should've realized that, she said to her two NN cores.
Yes, was the curiously hollow answer. A fragment of resentment.
Right, let's make up for the lapse. One of you contact Peter Cavendish, tell him to start putting some pressure on Eduard Muller and Mutizen. Explain to them that we've had a counter-offer for a partnership in atomic structuring, and they'll have to put in a revised bid if they want Event Horizon as a partner. Then I want one of our Atlantic antenna platforms reprogrammed to plug into the Colonel Maitland's satellite circuits. I want to talk to Jason Whitehurst, get him to accept a visit from Greg and Suzi.
No problem, said NN core two. I'm redirecting one of the dish foci now.
Fine. What about Jason Whitehurst's profile?