MESOZOIC

 

June 3rd

Department of Experimental Evolution, Oxford

“Good night, Charles. Don’t work too late.”

“Good night, Donna. I won’t.”

And, indeed, Charles Wallace had no intention of doing so. It was coming up to ten, and the Turf Tavern beckoned. He had had a long day, and he really needed a pint of Old and Nasty, possibly two, before he wandered back to his garret on the Cowley Road. Besides, Julia might be working the bar. Would tonight be the night he plucked up the courage to ask her out? A tricky one that. A “No” might make it awkward for him to go back there for a while and, though Oxford was hardly short of watering holes, he had a particular affection for the Turf, hidden down its alley off Holywell Street. It was like the Tardis. You would never believe, from the outside, that there was so much space inside it. The bars and courtyards went on forever.

Perhaps, then, he would restrict himself to flirting. Safer that way. No one’s ego gets bruised.

In front of him, conducting what he had decided would be the final run of the day, was a Seymour Exaflopper. You had to hand it to Prof Maclean. He was one of the world’s greatest fixers. He had schmoozed Roger Seymour so thoroughly that a version of Seymour’s latest brainchild, the world’s most powerful computer according to the company’s propaganda, and usually reserved for long-range weather forecasting or modelling nuclear explosions, had more or less fallen off the back of a lorry and into the newly built Department of Experimental Evolution. The honorary fellowship that went Seymour’s way shortly after the goods had arrived was, of course, purely coincidental.

It was just as well they had the Exaflopper, though. They needed every one of those flops to create the virtual ecosystems inside which their electronic organisms were competing for their very existence. But the results were stunning. They had already recapitulated the Precambrian, going in a matter of months from simple bacteria to complex cells. With a bit more effort, he was convinced that multicellularity lay within their grasp.

Suddenly, he snapped back from the astral plane to reality. The lights on the CPU, a largely aesthetic touch, but one that followed the processor’s activity, had suddenly gone haywire. What had looked like the digital version of an acid trip – a slowly changing mellow mosaic – now resembled a Christmas tree on speed.

He rushed to the console, to see what was going on. Just as he settled himself into the chair, though, the manic light-show stopped and the stately peregrination of colours returned. He tried to track down what had happened, but the last twenty seconds of the log seemed to have been erased. As far as he could determine, everything was now working normally.

Weird. But what the hell. There was nothing to be done about it this evening. He would mention it to the operators tomorrow. Julia and the Old and Nasty were both calling.

 

June 9^th

Falls Church, Virginia

“This may sound mad.”

“Nothing could sound mad to me at the moment,” Matt Vane replied. “My benchmark for madness was reset days ago. What, Yasmin, is your mad idea?”

In all his life at the Agency, he could not remember a case like this. They were at Geekopolis. He never went to Geekopolis. They were trying to interrogate a computer program, for heaven’s sake, and it was proving as intractable as a Jihadist who had had his tongue cut out. He was reduced to pleading and negotiating with a piece of software. Maybe it really was time to retire.

The geeks had taken one look at the cube containing Randy and muttered the phrase “polymorphic obfustication”. It would take weeks, they pronounced, if not months, to break it. Clearly, this Rhodes character was not a very trusting individual. But then the Agency had only to deal with the Chinese and the Russians. Rhodes had been dealing with Hollywood, who would have your underwear off you without unzipping your pants, if you weren’t careful.

On the other hand, they could actually ask it questions – or, at least, Yasmin could. For some reason it had developed a rapport with her that did not extend to him or any of the others. And the first question was, did it know anything useful? So far, apparently not. As far as they could make out, Alice Rhodes had programmed Randy for emotional range, not piercing insight. That made sense. The project was to create synthetic actors. Learning lines was hardly going to be a problem for a program. But delivering them convincingly – that was a different kettle of kedgeree.

And Randy was exquisitely sensitive, throwing sulks at imagined slights. That was interesting. Rhodes had, by all accounts, wanted to combine emotional range with lack of tantrums. Perhaps that was not possible. Maybe tantrums were ineluctably linked with acting talent. At the moment, anyway, Randy was sulking. They had decided to leave him to it, and have a coffee.

“I should take Randy home,” Yasmin replied to Vane’s question. “‘Bad cop’ is clearly getting nowhere. Maybe a dose of ‘good cop’ would do the trick.”

“Why not? He – I mean it – isn’t classified software. Maybe it should be. But it isn’t. Take the bloody thing home and get it out of my hair. Any reports from our team in San Melito, by the way?”

“All quiet. We’ve still got the Neurogenics board under surveillance, just in case. I reckon they are our best chance of working out what is going on.”

“Has it occurred to them that they are bait?”

“I can’t think it hasn’t, but what choice do they have? They need this thing stopped as much as we do, or they will have to live their lives starting at every shadow.”

“Okay. It’s been a long day. Why don’t you pack Randy away and take him, I mean it, home?”

They walked back to the lab and up to the unfeasibly good-looking face on the screen.

“Okay, Randy,” said Yasmin. “I’m sorry we had to bring you here, but this is the headquarters of the people who are looking for Alice’s killer. I’m going to take you home, now, though. I’ll look after you there, like Alice did.”

 

June 11^th

Azul’s restaurant, San Melito

Sebastian did not think himself a superstitious man, but surely this was an auspice. For the first time in his life, he had seen a green flash.

He and Zhukov were sitting on the Pacific veranda of Azul’s, sipping a couple of sundowners and, indeed, watching the sun go down. Apollo’s fiery orb had flattened from a circle into an ellipse, and turned from yellow to red, as the sea came closer to swallowing it. Then it happened. As the disc’s last limb sank below the horizon, it had flashed vivid green, and a verdant jet had shot skyward from it.

“Did you see that? I thought they were a myth.”

“I saw one the other day” she replied, he thought a little wistfully. “My apartment had an ocean view. I often watched the sun go down.”

Sebastian, who lived inland and at ground level, in what his parents would have called, rather sneeringly, a bungalow, had no such vista. His parents… Under the cocktail’s influence, his mind was wandering pleasantly. Childhood memories flooded back. The school in the Cathedral close, where he had spent his boyhood. The cricket (he still missed that). The butterfly-collecting expeditions to the Mendips. The fossicking for fossils in the Quantocks. Then Cambridge, Harvard and finally a chair at UC’s campus in San Melito.

“Another cocktail, sir? Madam?” The waiter’s voice, laden with the accents of the South, brought him out of his reverie. He glanced up at the man, glanced back at Zhukov to confirm her assent, then said, “Yes, please.”

He had come to love the United States. For all its maddening tics and affectations, its moralistic pretention, and its dissonance between national myth and quotidian reality, it still had an optimism about itself that was missing from the Old Country. Here, a man with a burning idea, a decent talent and a modest sprinkling of luck really could achieve anything. And boy, did he intend to achieve. True, the fire had destroyed their computers. But everything was backed-up off site, of course, and the ever-capable Louise was already scouring the city for a new building. Altogether, the ‘incident’, as they had come, euphemistically, to refer to it, would probably delay them for about six weeks.

The waiter returned, carrying cocktails and a pair of menus.

“Thank you,” Sebastian said.

“Thank you, sir,” replied the waiter.

Sebastian opened the proffered menu. Zhukov did likewise. Something with tentacles to start with, he thought. Not squid. Octopus, perhaps? Another childhood memory arose. An H.G. Wells short story, written during the Victorian golden age of natural history, when new species were coming back daily to the labs and zoos of Europe and America, and imagination about what remained to be discovered could run riot. And the imagination of Wells, the zoologist-turned-novelist, had done just that.

One of his best was of a shoal of intelligent octopuses attacking holidaymakers on the beach at Sidmouth, a resort as boringly genteel as a maiden aunt. As far as Sebastian’s childhood self was concerned, Sidmouth had had it coming. Too often, his parents had packed him into the family saloon – sedan – for the journey down to Devon, to stay in a guesthouse with a view over the Channel. No green flashes there.

Wells’ story had helped set his path, though. His teenage brain had asked teenage questions. Why should intelligence, consciousness even, be unique to humanity? Surely what had evolved in the present could have done so in the past? Yet nothing in the fossil record suggested it ever had.

“What do you fancy, Alexis?”

“Fois gras. Sauternes. You?”

“Cephalopod.” He spoke the word with a hardened ‘c’, as his Classics mistress had commanded her charges that they should. “Octopus. And to follow?”

“Tenderloin. Bleu.

Of course, thought Sebastian. What else?

“You?” she continued.

“Sea duck.”

“Oh. I didn’t notice that. Where is it?”

“Here.”

He pointed to his menu.

“Want to change your mind?”

“Never!”

They ordered. They wrestled over the wine and settled on pinot noir. It was dark now. Venus sparkled in the west. Nearby, a crescent moon was following the sun towards the horizon. And higher in the sky he saw the ominous red glow of Mars, Venus’s lover and cuckolder of her husband, Vulcan, whose celestial presence, an unseen planet, had been postulated in Wells’ day inside the orbit of Mercury until Einstein’s maths had destroyed it.

Mars, though. That had been the place which made Wells’ name. The War of the Worlds. Tentacled creatures from Mars. Intelligent, extraterrestrial octopuses who saw the Earth as one big, fat Sidmouth, ripe for colonisation – as Wells’ contemporaries were busy colonising Africa, Australia, New Zealand and, indeed, America. Wells, the first great sci-fi novelist. Verne, he dismissed as a mere romancer.

As if following his train of thought – or, at least, the direction of his gaze – Zhukov said, “We should have got there first.”

“Eh?”

“The moon. We should have got there first. Korolyov was a better engineer than Von Braun. And a patriot, not a whore selling himself to the highest bidder.”

Well, if the alternative had been to vanish into the gulag and have your brains sucked dry for the glory of Sergey Korolyov and mother Russia, he knew which way he would have jumped in 1945. But he was surprised how much it seemed to rankle with Zhukov. Put it on the list of subjects to be avoided.

“You reckon there’s life on Mars?” he asked, as the plates arrived. They started kicking around what they knew of organic chemistry, Precambrian history, and the latest experiments at Harvard on self-replicating molecules. Bowie’s song of cinematic escapism inveigled its way into his head, and would not leave. He forbore to hum it.

The meat arrived and the conversation meandered around like a drunken sailor wandering from bar to brothel to bar after six months at sea. Sebastian loved such evenings. Two of his three favourite appetites, for intellectual stimulation and culinary delight, were being pleasantly sated – and he had high hopes that when they got home the third would soon be too.

They ordered pudding and more sauternes. Then coffee and marc.

He called for the bill, added a generous tip to the total on the screen, waved his phone over it and sent the message winging to his bank. An acknowledgement returned and the account was settled. They rose to leave. He gave Zhukov his arm in the way his mother had taught him as a boy – the way that all Englishmen of a certain class and background are taught by their mothers, usually at an age when the act makes them cringe. Only later do they learn how often it helps to smooth the path to pleasure.

They walked, bantering, through the restaurant’s dining room – occupied, he could only presume, by those who thought early June in California to be the tail-end of winter, rather than the herald of summer – out of the door onto Front Street, and across the road to the alley that was the quickest way chez Hayward.

What exactly happened next, he never could recall. You lose your short-term memory when you are knocked out. When he came round, though, he was looking up into a ring of concerned faces, some belonging to bodies in paramedics’ uniforms, and the stars in the sky above them seemed to be spinning.

“Where’s Alexis?”

“She’s okay, sir. Dr Zhukov is on her way to St Ursula’s. You’ll be following her shortly.”

They took her first, he thought. She must be more badly hurt than I am. Somebody really is trying to kill us. Not an auspice, then; an omen.

 

June 12^th

San Patricio

“What the hell is happening?”

Gordon Humboldt was not a man to lose his temper easily. But when he did, then run for the blast shelter. What he was hearing from his team was unbelievable. One of their experimental city pods, on trial at the robotics department at UC San Melito, had upped and left its parking lot and run down two pedestrians, before committing hara kiri over the cliffs of San Melito Bay. After this, he really was inclined to believe that the Alice Rhodes incident had been the car, not the driver. The electrical engineers of old had talked of gremlins in their systems when things went wrong in ways they did not understand. These weren’t gremlins, though. These were bloody nazgul.

“Okay. Think. Megan, bring all the pods back to base. By truck. Theo, contact the victims and smooth their feathers. Make it clear that the smoothing has many zeroes at the end. We don’t want this coming to court. Top priority is to work out if it’s connected to the Rhodes incident. I don’t see how it can be, but the vampires will assume it is. And, yes, I suppose another press conference is inescapable. Better get our retaliations in first. Emma, put out the word that it will be at 1pm.”

“Where shall we take the pods, Gordon?”

“Bring ’em here. If we take them back to the skunk works, the vampires will start sniffing round that. Which could easily make things worse. We’ll direct their attention here. And we can test them just as easily here as at Mojave. Damage limitation, team. We really don’t want Project Arrhenius leaking as well.”

“Yes, Gordon.”

“We have to work out what is going on. This smells of sabotage. We have to stop it. I want a list of our enemies, anyone who might wish us harm. Anyone we have fired recently, who might have the skill to do this. Anyone who has left voluntarily and gone to work for a rival. Any psychopaths on the boards of our rivals who might countenance a black-op. And cast the net to Russia and China. India, too. There is no reason to assume whoever is doing this is American.”

“Yes, Gordon.”

“Why are you still here? Go. Get on with it!”

“Yes, Gordon.”

 

June 12^th

San Melito

Where am I?

The thing about clichés is that they are rooted in truth. Alexis Zhukov’s short-term memory had been thoroughly wiped. She saw lights above her, and remembered she had been talking of the planets. She did not remember a lot else, but she was sure she had not drunk that much. This was not her bed, though. No. Of course it wasn’t. Her bed was under a thousand tons of rubble. But it was not Sebastian’s bed, either. Where, indeed, was she?

She heard beeping, and that made her sit up. Except…she couldn’t. And now she knew where she was, courtesy of a zillion beeping hospital dramas she had watched, her secret vice.

Fragments of the jigsaw fell into place. She felt a pressure on her hand.

“Dr Zhukov? Alexis? Can you hear me?”

It was a female voice, practised to sound soothing.

“Where am I?” This time, the words actually came out of her mouth. She wondered, though, why she had bothered to ask. She knew the bit that mattered. Precisely which hospital was a detail. Anyway, it would either be the university hospital or St Ursula’s. One of the two.

“Can you see me?”

A human face swam in and out of focus. A woman’s face.

“I can see you.”

“Can you see how many fingers I’m holding up?”

“Three.”

She heard a door open and a man’s voice cut in.

“She’s awake?”

“Yes.”

That annoyed her, to be spoken of in the abstract in her presence. She bit her tongue. No point in antagonising those here to help you.

Concentrate. How long had she been there?

“How long have I been here?”

“Twelve hours, Dr Zhukov. I’m Dr Schmidt. Nurse Holder is, if you will forgive the pun, holding your hand.”

Zhukov guessed that Nurse Holder had heard that joke not above a million times before.

The lights were suddenly different.

“I think she’s awake again doctor.”

Ah. She must have passed out. Where was Sebastian?

“Where’s Sebastian?”

“Here, Alexis.”

She turned her head, and winced at the pain. He was sitting by her bedside, attired in a hospital gown, a pair of Turkish slippers and the chinos he had been wearing at the restaurant.

“What happened?”

“We were run over. You took the brunt I’m afraid. But we both seem to be indestructible.”

“Did they catch the driver?”

“Ah yes. That was the odd thing. There was no driver. Getting sense out of the rozzers is like drawing blood from a stone, but it seems that an experimental robot taxi of some sort took it into its head to go for a test drive by itself. We somehow got in the way. Listen, Dr Schmidt, Nurse Holder, could we have five minutes alone together?”

Doctor and nurse looked at each other. Schmidt said, “Okay. But only five. We do need to keep an eye on her.”

They left, and shut the door behind them. Sebastian kissed her on the brow and said, “Right. This has gone far enough. We have to find out who these people are and stop them. I don’t like to leave you here, but Schmidt says you should make a full recovery and there seems tap-all I can do by hanging around. Besides, I’ve seen enough of the insides of hospitals over the past two weeks to last a lifetime.”

“You have a plan?”

“I’m going to visit some friends in Washington. You won’t be able to contact me directly, but I’ll set up a dead-letter box with these details.”

He whispered in her ear.

“Check it once a day if you can, after you’ve been discharged. Internet cafés only, though. Nothing traceable. And only use it for need-to-know information. Whoever these people are, they’re obviously tracking us electronically. As far as possible we should keep radio silence, internet silence, cell-phone silence, everything silence. We both need to be as stealthy as possible.”

He said no more. She did not ask. He kissed her again, this time on the lips.

“NWR,” he said. He winked, and closed the door.

 

June 13^th

Southwest Waterfront, Washington, DC

Yasmin Chu pushed her bedmate none-too-gently in the small of the back with her knee.

“Your turn to make the coffee,” she said.

“No,” came the reply. “I made it yesterday.”

“I’m sure you did. But you weren’t here yesterday.”

“You got me there. Okay. I’m doing it.”

She rose, wandered over the loft’s matting to the breakfast bar, fed the machine with water and watched a measure of beans tumble into the grinder as she switched the device on. She looked over to Yasmin, pondering on the world of shadows they both lived in. Officially, of course, the Agency ticked all the anti-discrimination boxes. But unofficially…

Still, what was the point of working in intelligence if you could not keep a secret? Which she could – and from Yasmin as much as from the Agency high-ups. Secrets and lies. Janus was her big chance. To be involved in such a project was a stepping-stone to the top. Don’t blow it now with careless pillow talk.

She returned with the brews, handed one to Yasmin, and sat, cross-legged, on the mattress, sipping her own.

“What do you make of Randy?” Yasmin asked her.

“Ha! If that thing had haptics” she replied, “I’d believe you were having an affair with it.”

“Him.”

“Whatever. I certainly don’t think he likes me. Do you suppose he’s jealous?”

“It didn’t help that you were so rude when we had him in Geekopolis. But yes, I rather think he is.”

“Hmm. When you think about it, he would make the perfect boyfriend. Available at the flick of a switch. No question of him fooling around – at least not if you keep him off the internet. Do you suppose that was why the Rhodes woman told him not to go there; that it was so scary?”

“More likely she was worried about snooping rivals.”

Yasmin put down her coffee.

“And, as you observed, he is rather lacking in the haptics department.”

She lifted the cup out of her lover’s hand and put it down next to hers.

 

June 13^th

San Melito

American phone booths. Sebastian hated them. The cord was so short that he had to bend down to hold the handset to his ear. There was nothing flat to write on. And you had to pay with quarters. Quarters! But at least, unlike London, there were still a scattered few left, if you knew where to look. And he could no longer trust his cell. If the phone company could track it and locate it to within yards – which they could – then whoever was trying to kill him could probably do so, too.

So quarters it was. He fed them into the slot, and punched the buttons to dial.

“Claudio? Sorry to ring you out of the blue. Yes. Yes. No. Yes. Listen, I need a favour. If a man wanted a driving licence that didn’t necessarily correspond to his real name and address, would you know where to acquire such a thing?”

The world, Sebastian had long believed, was divided into bridge players and poker players. He was on the poker side of the divide. Claudio was a friend from poker school. What he did for a living Sebastian had never inquired too closely. It wasn’t that sort of friendship. But, oddly, he thought he could trust the guy – and in any case he had no other acquaintance who he could even conceive might have the necessary contacts. America, thank God, was still a place where a plausible ID and cash would get you a long way, as enterprising undergraduates everywhere knew when they were in search of a drink. That, and a car, might let you stay ahead of someone who was looking for you for a deal of time.

“Good man,” he said, in response to Claudio’s answer. “I knew I could rely on you. How long would it take and how much folding stuff should I bring? Okay. Okay. Right. Okay. I’ll meet you there tomorrow afternoon.”

He put the phone down. When was it, he wondered, that the liberator had become a prison? ‘Big Other’, someone had called it once. A brilliant name. Everybody had been too enthralled by the internet’s possibilities to worry about the new technology’s dark side. And now the Sith Lords were here. If you wanted to, you could pretty much track anyone anywhere.

It wasn’t just the spooks. You could have predicted that, even before Snowden had blown the whistle on them. It was every firm which gathered marketing information about you; every cookie on your hard drive; every ‘for your own good’ record of where you flew, which trains you caught, which toll booths you passed through. And this was the logical conclusion of it all. He still had no idea who was trying to kill him, but they seemed to be able to find him wherever he was. The only way he could think of to escape was to lose his identity.

First, though, there was the question of the cash. For that he would have to risk raising his head above the parapet just once more. He put on his most confident face, strolled into the bank, walked up to a teller’s window and asked.

“Fifty thousand dollars?” she said.

“Correct.” He had thought this was about the top of the range he could request without raising too many questions.

“Hundred dollar bills?”

“Fine.”

“You know we have to report transactions like this?”

Damn.

“Be my guest.”

“Okay…”

The teller disappeared into a back room. Sebastian stood at the window and waited. And waited. He was just starting to worry that the next act of the drama might involve a couple of burly security guards pinning him to the ground when a side-door into the lobby opened, revealing the teller, who beckoned him in.

“Professor Hayward? Could you come this way, please?”

He went through the door into what might have been the airlock in a spacecraft from a 1960s sci-fi movie. The outer door shut. They waited ten seconds. The inner door opened.

On a table in front of him was a stack of bundles. Banknotes.

“Sign here, please, Professor.”

He did. The stack was just a couple of inches high. He’d known it would be, but it still surprised him how much value could be packed into such a small amount of paper. He distributed the bundles about his person, one per pocket in his jacket and trousers. They re-entered the airlock, then walked out into the lobby. He shook the teller’s hand and strolled into the street. He had been nervous before. Now he was paranoid. There was nothing to show what was in his pockets, but alongside the ever-present threat from whoever it was that was chasing him he now had to contend with the feeling that every passing youngster was a potential mugger.

Well, the deed was done. Fifty thousand – forty-nine after he had paid Claudio – would surely be enough to keep him fed and sheltered without leaving a trail of credit-card transactions to follow. He had three changes of clothes and a vanity kit in a small valise. Now all he needed was a car.

* * * * * * * *

He walked into the lot. It would have to be an old one, with as few electronic gizmos as possible. He didn’t want to suffer Alice Rhodes’s fate. And it would have to be cheap. Even $50,000 wouldn’t last for ever.

He cast his eye over the assembled jalopies as he walked towards the hut that seemed to be the operation’s nerve centre. A Toyota Camry caught his eye. $3,995. Perfect.

The salesman raised a quizzical eyebrow when he mentioned the Camry. Perhaps it was the contrast between his natty dress and his apparent lack of automotive aspiration. The man actually said nothing, though, apart from, “Certainly, sir.”

He lifted a set of keys from the board behind his desk and they walked over the tarmac to the vehicle Sebastian had chosen. It was beige, a bit the worse for wear, but scruffy, rather than decrepit. Something you wouldn’t give a second glance to in the traffic. The salesman unlocked it. Sebastian got in, adjusted the seat to fit his 6’3” frame, and held his hand out for the keys.

“Mind if I start her up and run her round the block?” he said.

“No problem. Nothing personal, but I’ll need your licence as security while you’re gone.”

“Sure,” said Sebastian, with a calm he did not feel. He handed over Claudio’s masterpiece. The salesman gave him the keys.

The Camry started first time. Its engine sounded surprisingly sweet. He pulled out of the lot, turned right, and drove, as he had said he would, around the block. The car seemed to behave. He popped it back in the space it had come from, and went into the hut.

“Nice runner, isn’t she?” said the salesman, reaching for item one in the car-vendor’s book of clichés.

“Yep,” said Sebastian. He wasn’t going to negotiate, so why demur?

“Cash okay?” he asked.

Both eyebrows went up this time, but the salesman just said, “Always acceptable,” and smiled, ever so slightly. He knew something was up, but he had got his sale and he wasn’t going to queer the pitch by inquiring.

Sebastian peeled off forty Benjamins, and handed them over. “Keep the change,” he said, with an ironic laugh. He filled in the proffered change-of-ownership card with the false name on his new licence, picked the keys off the salesman’s desk and walked out into the lot.

The Camry ran surprisingly well. He took it a few miles up 101, then turned off the road, through a sea of California Bland and into an old industrial area. The parking lot overlooked the estuary’s mud-flats. As he pulled into it, a plane flew low overhead, on its final approach. He buried the Camry in a herd of nondescript kin, hid half the money in the glove compartment, along with his new licence, paid three months up front to a jaunty blonde in a brown and yellow uniform, and waited for the promised shuttle. Ten dollars took him, eventually, to the airport.

 

June 16^th

Arlington County

“Do you think we can we trust him, Yasmin? Should we take him in?”

Matt Vane gave his protégée a meaningful look. Behind a one-way window sat a man who might have come out of Central Casting’s Rent-a-Brit catalogue: tall and skinny, with floppy blond hair. He was besuited for the subtropical heat like a character out of a Graham Greene novel, in a cream jacket and pants, with brown brogues that, to Vane’s practised eye, had to be bespoke – for they fitted his feet perfectly. He had turned up half an hour earlier demanding entrance. The Federal Protective Service are trained to deal with many things, but their manual does not include public altercations with tenured professors from top-rank campuses of the University of California. After ten uncomfortable minutes this particular FPS had surrendered, contacted his superiors, and Vane had sent Yasmin to collect him.

“Yes, I do,” she said, “for three reasons. First, he does already have SCI clearance. We wouldn’t give that lightly to a foreign-born, Jason or no Jason. Second, he has skin in the game – literally. If we don’t find out what is happening, he’s dead meat. Third, he worked out the connection with Alice Rhodes by himself. If we cut him loose, he will just go snooping around alone. Better to have a man with a bladder that full within the tent than outside.”

Vane smiled. An LBJ allusion. Perhaps today’s high-school history lessons weren’t as superficial as he was inclined to believe.

“Okay,” he said. “We’ll do it.”

They walked through into the room where Sebastian was sitting.

“Professor Hayward?”

It was a rhetorical question.

“What should I call you?” he replied.

“Shall we settle on ‘Cicero’, for the purposes of this meeting? If you need to contact me later, that will be the call sign.”

“Cicero it is.”

“What brings you here?”

“I think you know that. They took your bait. I want to find out if you’ve caught anything as a result. If you have, I need to know. And if you haven’t, and I suspect you haven’t, I want to join the search. You owe me that. You were supposed to protect me – and Alexis.”

“I was?”

“You. Collectively. The Agency. I have been here before, you know – and I’m sure that you do know. Your agent ‘Yasmin’ here said you would arrange protection. We both understood it was the sort of protection that was designed to flush the enemy out, even if neither of us acknowledged it explicitly at the time. I, in turn, agreed to stop any freelance investigative sideshow, which I did. Well the bait very nearly got eaten, and it would like to know whether the fish has been hooked. And if your angling has failed, then I would like to pool resources properly. I can’t live my life with this hanging over me. It has to be stopped. If I’m going to be killed, then it might as well be facing the enemy.”

“I see. You want me to pin a deputy’s badge on your lapel and let you join the posse.”

“By which I take it that you haven’t hooked the fish.”

Vane ignored that.

“And why would I give you such a badge?”

“First, because you don’t want me going freelance again. Second, whoever these people are, they are aiming at our AI experts and using AI – or at least some pretty sophisticated computing – to do their dirty work. I know the guys out at Geekopolis from that job the Jasons did for you a few years ago. They’re good, but I’m sure I could lend a useful hand. And third, you know from that job that I’m discreet, loyal and effective. I drank the Kool-Aid when I swore allegiance. You can trust me.”

Vane was silent, and let the silence stretch on. An old interrogation technique to draw out the babblers, the ones who can’t keep their mouths shut. Sebastian matched him. He wasn’t falling for that. He had made his pitch. It was enough.

“Very well, Professor,” Vane said eventually. “Welcome aboard. Yasmin, brief him. And get the guy a cup of coffee.”

* * * * * * * *

“You’ve been through our back-ups, I presume?” said Sebastian. They were settled, coffee in hand, in an anonymous but comfortably furnished room, inside the Agency headquarters.

“Yes,” she replied. “There was nothing relevant to the investigation that we could find. No sign of any cyber break-in. Whoever it was covered their tracks thoroughly.”

“So what lines of inquiry are left?”

“Well, the one common element we have, apart from the nature of the targets, is Humboldt. Alice Rhodes was driving one of his creations. You were run over by one.”

Sebastian knew of Humboldt, of course. He had made a pile in the IT gold-rush of the nineties. And he had made it the way every smart businessman makes money in a gold rush, by selling picks and shovels to the prospectors rather than by chasing after the nuggets himself. Of course, his picks and shovels were optoelectronic switchgear for high-speed information transmission, but the principle was the same. He’d stayed out of the risky bits of dot.com fantasy land, and concentrated on what the people with the dreams had needed to buy, whether or not their dreams became real.

Now he had moved on. Cars. Spaceflight. Mining, even. And there were rumours of some big energy play, too, though rumours they remained – for Humboldt was also famously one for playing his cards close to his chest.

“I imagine you’ve started looking around his computers?”

“Yes, of course. Nothing out of the ordinary so far. But there is one machine, in his skunk works in Mojave, that is firewalled to death. Geekopolis can’t get into it remotely. We know it is a Seymour Exaflopper. Beyond that, we don’t know much.”

“So how do we” – Sebastian emphasised the plural pronoun – “find out? In fact, why don’t I go and ask him? After all, he owes me an explanation for last Wednesday. What could be more natural?”

 

June 17^th

Praesidium Heights, California

Sebastian pulled out of Moffett Field and onto 101, heading south. He turned off at Redwood City, through the opulence of Woodside and into the hills. The road climbed and dipped, curling and curving to hug the contours. Eventually, it crested and he saw the Pacific glint enticingly in the distance. Stout Cortez he was not at that moment. He choked, and quickly suppressed the recollection of the last time he had stared at the ocean. There was work to be done.

Humboldt’s house was down a right turn. After half a mile he came to the gates. They were a study in guarded welcome: intimidating enough to put off the casual interloper; not so hostile that they looked as though the owner was paranoid about security. He stopped, aware that, although he could not see any cameras, they could almost certainly see him, and had probably been following him since he left the public highway.

He scanned the gates’ posts for an intercom, found it, got out of the car and walked over. He pressed the button.

“Yes?” came a voice.

“Professor Sebastian Hayward of UC, San Melito. I don’t have an appointment, but I need to talk to Mr Humboldt, on a matter of some urgency. Would you mind telling him I am here, and asking if he could see me at zero notice?”

Two or three seconds’ silence ensued, then the voice replied, “Okay, I’ll ask him.”

The intercom clicked off, and Sebastian waited. He wasn’t exactly counting, but he reckoned about two minutes must have passed. Then the intercom clicked on again and the voice said, “Come in.” As it did so, the gates began to open.

He got back into the car, started the engine and drove through the widening gap into a tunnel of greenery. Trellises trained trees of a species he did not recognise up and over the driveway, screening it from both the sky and the estate. Sebastian had never seen the like. Then his car popped out of the tunnel’s end and the carefully concealed vista was revealed.

He whistled to himself. So that’s what ninety billion buys you, he thought. He pulled up in front of what appeared to be the side portico, for he could see that a larger one, facing west, overlooked the Pacific. Humboldt was waiting on the steps to greet him.

“Professor Hayward. Come in. Come in.”

Humboldt’s house, though but a single storey, was the opposite of California Bland. It was a copy of a Roman villa – the House of the Faun in Pompeii if memory served. They walked through the atrium, into the peristyle. Perfect for the weather. Which was, of course, rather like that of the Bay of Naples, now he came to think about it. High-school geography lessons struggled to download themselves. Question one: Name the world’s Mediterranean climates (five marks, one for each). The Med itself, obviously. And California. And Chile. Can’t remember the other two. Oh yes. South Africa and Australia. And what did they all have in common? Vitis vinifera, the greatest fruit in the world.

As if reading his thoughts, Humboldt rang a bell and a servant shimmied in carrying a tray bearing a bottle and two glasses.

“Thank you Herbert. Refreshment, Professor Hayward?”

“Ghost Horse?”

“I’m guessing that will serve?”

“Very nicely…”

“So, I presume you are here to discuss last Wednesday’s evenements? Good of you to come in person. Most people would have sent round a lawyer, armed to the teeth with writs. What can I say? We have no idea what happened. Thank God neither of you was killed. Dr Zhukov is recovering, I hope?”

“She is sitting up, at least. But no. Strange as it may seem, that’s not why I’m here. Not directly, anyway.”

Sebastian had been wondering how to frame his question all the way up the mountain. He still did not know. He looked around the peristyle for inspiration. The only indication they were in the 21^st century, rather than the 1^st, was that on each of the plinths – which would, in the original, have borne a statue – there was a spectacular specimen of mineral.

Some, he recognised. The purple of amethyst. The green of beryl. That one must be worth a fortune; an unscrupulous jeweller would have branded it ‘emerald’ and sold it to the more vulgar sort of Persian Gulf monarch. A flawless rock crystal looked like a piece of ice, except the temperature was 75 degrees. An Iceland spa refracted two images of the mural on the wall behind it. But an amber prism, three feet high, was beyond his geological grasp.

“That?” said Humboldt, following his gaze and reading the curiosity on his face. “Bastnäsite.”

“Never heard of it.”

“No. Few have. Odd, really. You could argue it’s the most important mineral on the planet. You saw Avatar perhaps?”

Sebastian winced at the memory of a night in the San Melito iMax, when he had endured three-dimensional movie-going for the first and last time.

“Yes,” he said.

“Do you remember what the baddies were doing on Pandora?”

“They were mining something.”

“Exactly. Unobtanium. An old engineer’s joke. The magic stuff you need, but can’t get, to make your machine work. Pandora’s unobtanium was a superconducting magnet. Well bastnäsite is about as close as reality comes to that. It’s made of rare earths. You’ve heard of them, I presume?”

Sebastian nodded, but Humboldt was in full flow.

“They have strange properties,” he continued, “including, as it happens, powerful magnetism. You want a decent electric motor? Then you’re looking at rare earths to make it. Phosphors for lights? Rare earths. The lens on your cell-phone camera? Rare earths. Half the world’s lasers? Rare earths. Even high-temperature superconductors, if we ever get them off the ground, will need rare earths. Electronics would grind to a halt without them.”

Sebastian sipped his glass of cult cabernet. One thing he did know about rare earths was that the Chinese had an arm-lock on the supply of them. He also knew that one of Humboldt’s many business ventures was prospecting for minerals from space.

“So you are looking for bastnäsite?” he hazarded.

“Everyone is. All the big mining companies are scouring the planet for it.” Humboldt had the air of a man on a mission. Then suddenly he shifted gear, as if remembering where he was. “Professor Hayward. Can I be blunt? If you are not here to discuss Wednesday’s accident, why are you here?”

“You’ve had a run of bad luck recently, Mr Humboldt.”

“You are referring to the incident in Pasadena?”

“Do you see a connection between that and what happened to us the other night?”

“We haven’t found one.”

“Nevertheless, it is there. Not in the method, but in the targets. Dr Rhodes, Dr Zhukov and myself. All, in our different ways, experts on artificial intelligence. And I’m sure you are aware that this is not the first time Dr Zhukov and I have been dancing with death.”

“No indeed. It seems I am not the only one who has been unlucky recently. But you used the word ‘targets’. You imply what is going on is no coincidence.”

“We don’t think it is.”

“We?”

“There have been other mysterious deaths. Dr Zhukov and I noticed them before last Wednesday’s events, when we were trying to work out why we had been unlucky twice. But we were asked, ever so politely, to keep our noses to ourselves while the grown-ups sorted things out. Which the grown-ups have signally failed to do. So now I’m giving them a helping hand. We were wondering if you might be willing to lend one as well?”

“I take it these grown-ups have their offices over the river from Washington?”

“Indeed.”

“And what, exactly, do they want?”

“To look around inside your computer system, see if they can trace any breaches of security.”

Sebastian forbore to mention that Geekopolis had already spent considerable effort trying to do just that.

“And you think we haven’t tried looking ourselves already?”

“My friends may have better methods.”

“Frankly, I doubt it.”

“Be that as it may, they’d like to have a go. Two heads better than one and all that.”

“Can’t allow it, I’m afraid. The best I can offer is that we could run any sniffer program they might want to test, and report the results back. That way I can control the process and also be sure we get all the results. And I mean all. If this is an attack, I’m as much a victim as you are. I know what these agencies are like. I don’t want to risk being cut out of the loop.”

“Well, I’ll ask. I don’t think they’ll like it, but I will ask.”

 

June 19^th

Mojave, California

Two am. An unusual time for a commuter jet to land at Mojave. But not that unusual. People came and went at all hours of the day and night. Truly unusual, though, was where it parked. Instead of taxiing towards the control tower, it stopped at the end of the runway, near the perimeter.

A staircase unfolded. Two ninjas, a man and a woman, emerged, clothed from head to foot in grey. Except that these ninjas looked as if they were going on holiday, for each carried a small suitcase.

Sebastian had been true to his promise to Humboldt. He had asked. This flight had been the response. Cicero was clearly in no mood for shilly-shallying. Sebastian suspected he was now about to see any plausible interpretation of the words ‘reasonable search and seizure’ stretched to the limit.

They skirted the airport’s perimeter, stopping a hundred yards or so from Humboldt’s skunk works, which was an enormous hangar with a single-storey office block bolted onto the side. Yasmin – Sebastian reflected that he still did not know her real surname, or even if that given name was real – opened her case. There were compartments in it. She lifted the lid of one of them. Inside were two hornets. At least, they looked like hornets.

“What are they?” asked Sebastian.

“Ornithopters.”

The resemblance to large wasps was exquisite. A layman might easily mistake them for the real thing.

“That’s the beauty of it,” she said, reading his thoughts. “You think you’ve been stung by an actual wasp, so you don’t raise the alarm. You just curse and fetch the first aid kit. But by then it’s too late. They might wonder that there are two of them, and out at night, but most people don’t know much about insects, so with luck they won’t realise what’s happening.”

“You’re not going to kill them, are you?” Sebastian whispered.

“Despite all rumours to the contrary, we are not actually allowed to do that.”

Oh, really, thought Sebastian. And a simian is my nephew.

“It’s just a potent anaesthetic. They’ll be out for hours.”

“Then what?”

“Then we go in. We switch off the alarm, and we have a poke around.”

“You know how to do that?”

“Trust me.”

Part of the suitcase was a control panel, and the lid had a screen inside it. The whole thing reminded him of Mission Impossible. At any time, he expected his companion to pull off a rubber mask and reveal that she was actually Marilyn Monroe reincarnated, or Joe DiMaggio, or somebody equally implausible.

There were two small joysticks on the control panel. She operated one with each hand and the ornithopters buzzed into the desert air. The screen lit up with what, Sebastian assumed, was an ornithopter’s-eye view of the world. But which one? And how could she control both of them if she could only see what one of them was up to? Then he realised there were two small crosses in the middle of the screen, more or less keeping station with each other as the view of the skunk works expanded. The picture he was looking at was a synthesis of the views from both machines. Impressive.

The ornithopters closed in on their target. Sebastian saw a row of windows. The view from the ’thopters scanned along it, seeking an entrance. It was an old office block, Sebastian realised, built before sealed windows had become standard. And one of them was, indeed, open.

She landed the two machines. Almost instantly, though, one of them took off again while the other (judging by the fact that there was now only one cross on the screen) stayed put. The ’thopter she was controlling made the short hop to the open window and looked inside. Two security guards were watching a TV screen showing a young lady and a young gentleman taking some vigorous exercise together. Then, suddenly, the view was of the sky. She must, Sebastian assumed, have got the ornithopter to settle, insect-like, on the window’s pane of glass.

The view changed again. The second ornithopter flew over to join its companion and, in a slight shift of frame, both points of view were now accommodated simultaneously on the screen. The ornithopters flapped into the office through the open window and launched their attacks. Both went for the backs of the necks of the preoccupied guards, and both stung at the same time.

“What the fuck?” said one. The other appealed, in similar terms, to the infernal regions. Both slapped at the ‘insects’, but she was too quick for them. She had the ’thopters buzzing around a ceiling light, and apparently on autopilot, for she had let go of the two joysticks.

You’ve done this before, thought Sebastian. What he said was, “Fascinating. Have you considered going into the games industry?”

She ignored him and switched the view to that from a single ’thopter. The guards were already out for the count.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

She opened the window by which the ornithopters had entered and jumped lithely through it. Sebastian, rather larger, followed clumsily. She was already fiddling with a terminal. He did not interrupt.

“Done,” she pronounced, after about thirty seconds. She rose from the chair, landed the hornets, put them back in her case, and led the way through the office’s only door and into an unlit corridor.

A flashlight soon corrected that. They walked silently until she stopped by a door to her left and opened in. It debouched into the hangar, which was every bit as big within as it had appeared from without.

She scanned the flashlight around. It had a surprisingly powerful beam, but even that was quickly lost in the vast, artificial cavern they had entered. Sebastian had an impression of monsters lurking in the shadows until suddenly the beam played on one, and he realised it was real.

“Ye Gods! What is that?”

Something that looked like a giant spider-crab lying on its back with its legs in the air loomed out of the darkness in the flashlight’s beam. On its thorax, on top of what might, had this been a temple, have been an altar, was a half-finished car body. Literally. It was as though someone had taken a complete car and sliced the top off it with a knife, as a sacrifice.

His companion scanned her flashlight around the hanger. It was full of crabs. Each of their altars had bits of equipment, similarly sacrificed, on them – things that looked, though Sebastian was no expert, like electric motors and batteries.

“The auto unions aren’t going to like this,” he said. “Humboldt seems to be planning to print his next generation of cars.”

“Print?”

“Yep. Look at them. The legs have got banks of nozzles on their ends. I’ve heard of printing turbine blades, and I suppose it wouldn’t be too hard to print a car body. But batteries and motors?”

They crept through what was clearly the prototype of a factory floor. It was as though they did not wish to awaken the sleeping machines. Not all were making cars. Some were empty. But one had what appeared to be part of a space capsule on it. That took Sebastian aback. If Humboldt could print something strong enough to withstand the forces of lift-off and re-entry, then he probably really could print anything.

“If our intelligence is right, that should be the computer-control room over there,” she said suddenly.

“If your intelligence is wrong, then I expect a refund on my taxes,” he replied.

This would not, however, be the year when he got an unexpected cheque from the IRS, for looking through the transparent panel on the door revealed the lightshow of a Seymour Exaflopper doing a little, light number-crunching. No human beings were in there, as far as he could see.

His companion opened her case again and drew out another magic item. She held it close to the keypad by the door and pressed a button. Six digits appeared on its screen. She tapped them on the keypad. They were in.

There was a light switch by the door. She flipped it on. Then they approached the Exaflopper’s console. Now it was Sebastian’s turn to open his box of tricks. He proffered it to her and she reached into it for a data bus. She plugged it in.

“Okay,” she said. “Time for you to earn your corn. I know you have one of these back in San Melito and I know you sometimes program it yourself. We need to download a log of everything that has been through the firewall for the past three weeks, and then lift as much of its memory as we can fit inside this thing.”

They performed an algorithmic duet. He typed at the keyboard on the console while she typed on the one in the case. The lightshow flickered as Sebastian found his way to the kernel of the operating system. He located the log and sent its contents into the case. After that, he started on the memory. The download seemed to go on forever. There must be some serious capacity in that case.

Then, suddenly, the Exaflopper’s lights stopped flashing. She unplugged the cable, closed the case, and said, “Okay, we’re out of here.”

They left the control room and walked back across the factory floor towards the door they had come in by. Sebastian looked at the shadows of the crabs. What it was about them that had changed, he never could say for sure. But the hairs on the back of his neck rose in concert.

Suddenly, the lights came on. “Duck!” he shrieked, and hit the deck. As he did so, a robot arm – or was that leg? – swung through the place where his head had been a second or two earlier. Yasmin was on the floor beside him.

“Over there,” she said, and started shimmying across the concrete.

“Where? Why?” said Sebastian with the rational part of his brain. But the irrational part was already following her to what, he now realised, she had calculated was the spot furthest from any of the now-awakened beasts.

Her instinct was good. The arms flailed around them like a man trying to reach the unscratchable place on his back. For the moment, they were safe.

“So, do we wait to be found?”

“No. Think. How do they know where we are?”

“The light. They needed the light to see us. There must be a camera somewhere.”

“I switched them all off when I disabled the security system.”

“Well whoever is controlling those things has switched them on again.”

“Okay. Let’s switch them off permanently.”

She stood cautiously, and then drew her pistol, looking upward with her eyes closed, in a pose of concentrated recollection. Then she turned to the side. Now her eyes were open. A single shot took out a camera. She turned again and fired again. A second camera exploded. Then a third. Then a fourth.

“That’s the lot.”

“How did you know where they were?”

“I checked before I shut the system down.”

Christ, thought Sebastian. That really is formidable.

Nervously, watching every machine in range for signs of movement, they edged towards the door. Nothing so much as twitched. They left the way they had come in and crossed the apron to the plane in silence. Sebastian was lost in thought. What in Hell’s name happened there?

 

June 19^th

Jefferson Davis Highway,
Arlington County

“I think,” said Cicero to Sebastian, “that was what you would call a baptism of fire.”

They were in the back of a smoked-glass stretch limo, the three of them. Sebastian had thought stretch limos the height of naffness, occupied by Jersey girls, or their equivalents in other states, who were out for a night on the town. If this was typical, though, he might have to revise his opinions. The seats were tooled leather, and though there was no cocktail cabinet, an espresso machine was delivering them, one by one, quite acceptable cups of ristretto.

Cicero had picked them up straight off the plane. A second vehicle, almost preternaturally unmemorable, had spirited the two suitcases away in a different direction. Yasmin had briefed Cicero during the flight, of course, but he seemed eager to hear everything again, from the horses’ mouths as it were.

“I also think one other thing. Unless Humboldt has a particularly malicious approach to dealing with intruders, what’s just happened to you is proof-positive his system has been taken over by Argus.”

“Agreed. But what can we do with that knowledge?”

“I think we have to wait for Geekopolis,” Sebastian detected an edge of distaste in Cicero’s voice. “We’ll see what they come up with. But I suspect it might be wise to keep them in the dark about your contretemps with the spider crabs. Let’s see if they can work that out for themselves. A double-blind experiment, I believe you scientific types might call it.”

The limo slipped through Arlington, that strange, rejected appendage of DC, oltre-Potomac, where the shadier branches of officialdom live and the government’s rough stuff gets done.

“Where are we going?”

“Home. Which for you, pro tem, means the Agency, and for agent Yasmin really does mean home. You need to sleep. And I need you to sleep. We have busy days ahead.”

 

June 21^st

Falls Church

Well, well, she thought to herself. Twice in two weeks. Matt Vane must really be under pressure if he had had to make the journey out to Geekopolis from his comfortable office yet again. But here he was, with Yasmin and the Englishman she had talked about. She greeted Vane first and then, no hint betraying their intimacy, greeted Yasmin. No hint was betrayed in return.

Vane introduced the Englishman. As far as Hayward was concerned, she was to be ‘Lovelace’. The pushy colleague who had, despite her best endeavours, inveigled his way into this meeting alongside her, was ‘Hollerith’. She watched, with a mixture of irritation and amusement, as his eyes followed Yasmin’s every move, with no attempt to disguise the intimacy that he would clearly have liked to exist between them.

Vane said, addressing the question to her, “So what have we learned?”

“Aside from enough business secrets to make us all millionaires twenty times over?”

“Don’t even think about it…”

“Well, someone has definitely been through the firewall. They’ve made a good job of patching things up behind them, like dragging a leafy branch through the dust to cover their tracks. And it is the sort of stuff that would have vanished during compression, which is probably why,” she said, glancing towards Hayward, “we didn’t see it in your back-ups.”

She felt crestfallen as she admitted this. Geekopolis prided itself on its forensic skills and she did not like to show weakness in front of a stranger.

“But,” she continued, “they’ve left traces – the odd leaf here and there, so to speak. Humboldt’s people might not have noticed, but they’re there. And there is also a block of memory that’s encrypted to kingdom-come. Cypher block-chain with random per-sector keys. It’s as bad as that thing Ms Chu brought in the other day.” She glanced, as she said this, towards Yasmin.

Ms Chu? Sebastian noted the slip up. Or was it a slip up? Maybe they were deliberately feeding him a falsehood.

She continued, “The only thing we can find out about it is its name. Project Arrhenius. For some reason Humboldt’s people forgot to encrypt that.”

“Well, that could be useful,” Vane said. “Our first real lead. Humboldt is hiding something, and someone else wants to find out what it is.”

“Yes,” said the now-unveiled Chu. “But it could just be industrial espionage.”

“Unlikely,” interjected Hollerith. “Given that even we couldn’t get past his firewall without paying a site visit, I doubt a private organisation would have the resources.”

“This is Silicon Valley you’re talking about,” Vane responded.

“True,” said Hollerith. “And I don’t rule it out completely. But we’re probably looking at a state actor. Why would a commercial competitor want to use Humboldt to knock off completely unrelated AI engineers? I could speculate, of course, but since I imagine you know more than I do about what, exactly, is going on here, I’ll leave the high politics to you.”

There was a shade of resentment in Hollerith’s voice, and Vane smiled inwardly, though his face remained a mask. On tap, not on top. That’s where Churchill had said you should keep the geeks, though he would have called them ‘boffins’. A delightful word, Vane thought, redolent of lab coats, slide rules and unfashionable spectacles fitted with pebble-thick lenses.

But what he said was, “Arrhenius? What does that mean? It’s surprising how often so-called secret projects have give-away names. I don’t think the Brits in 1940 would have had any difficulty working out they were the intended victims of something called ‘Sealion’, for example.”

Churchill. Hitler. The Second World War. Vane longed for the certainties of a conflict where who was right and who wrong was clear. This great-power shadow-boxing they had now was murky, messy. America was still just about primus. But only inter pares these days, and the pares were catching up fast. And the stuff his country had being doing recently to try to stay ahead did not exactly qualify them to occupy the moral high-ground.

“Arrhenius,” said Lovelace, seizing the initiative from Hollerith, “was one of the 19^th century’s most fertile minds.” Had she been able to read Matt Vane’s own fertile mind, she would have known they were having equal and opposite thoughts – in her case, you arrogant oaf. You think yourself educated with your so-called liberal arts degree, yet you know nothing that matters; nothing about how our understanding of the world truly came about, the knowledge that truly underpins wealth. You just take it for granted, but if you were asked to explain it, you couldn’t even begin to.

But what she said was, “Basically, he invented inorganic chemistry. He worked out how acids and alkalis operate, how electrolysis works, how to calculate reaction rates. He realised that burning coal causes a greenhouse effect, so he also invented the idea of global warming. And he believed in panspermia.”

“Panspermia?”

“That life spreads from planet to planet; solar system to solar system. That it didn’t start independently on Earth.”

“Hmmm. So what on that list might inspire something that Humboldt would want to keep hidden so securely?”

This time Hollerith got in first. “Well, electrochemistry is batteries,” he said, “and we know Humboldt’s passion for electric cars. But that’s no secret. Global warming is another angle, though. Maybe it’s a way of sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to cool things down. Or some new type of battery that can store solar power overnight. Or a better way of capturing solar energy in the first place. The sun is free fuel, don’t forget, if you could only trap it and bottle it cheaply enough.”

Matt Vane’s mind was in Gulliver’s Travels – the part where the Laputans are trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers and bottle them. But he got the point. Free fuel really would turn geopolitics upside down. They could cut the Gordian knot that bound them to the Middle East once and for all. Fracking was well and good, but it wouldn’t last for ever. The sun was infinitely scalable.

“That could be it, yes,” he said. “A lot of people would want that knowledge. But if that is it, it still doesn’t explain the AI connection. Top priority, then, is to get inside that encrypted block.”

Lovelace opened her mouth to respond, but Hollerith beat her to it. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll see what else we can throw at it.”

* * * * * * * *

“So they aren’t infallible,” Sebastian said, sipping a cup from the limo’s espresso machine.

“I never thought they were,” Vane replied. “But they are,” he conceded, “pretty good. Which means, as they failed to spot your factory floor of the future, that the bits and bytes running it are probably hidden in that block of encrypted memory.”

“That would make sense. I could easily imagine Humboldt trying to use AI to run 3D printing. Individually crafted products. The antithesis of a production line.”

“Yes. You are right,” Vane agreed. “It’s worth stealing, and worth trying to sabotage – whoever is doing it. Perhaps Humboldt will talk to us now.”

“Perhaps he will. Shall I have another go? I could take Ms Chu with me this time. Good cop/bad cop maybe?”

Vane did not blink at Sebastian’s use of Yasmin’s surname. “No. Go by yourself,” he said. “There is no point in him meeting any more of us than is strictly necessary. Besides, I need Yasmin for other duties.”

“Such as?”

“Oh, surely you know better that to ask that, Professor Hayward.”

 

June 23^rd

The Eratosthenes Project, Zurich

“It seems we’ve been having visitors.”

“What?”

“Someone’s been raiding the stacks.”

Once a librarian, always a librarian. The books, magazines and videos might be stored on the Cloud, now, but Klaus Drucker still imagined them in wheeled metal cabinets moved around by turning handles.

“Raiding?”

“Yes. Creeping in at night and downloading stuff.”

“Weird. Our fees aren’t that high, surely?”

“True, but they’ve been taking it by the terabyte. Bjorn spotted something strange in the data logs a couple of days ago and followed it up. It’s been going on for months – sucking up the contents and spewing them into a server in Russia somewhere. He couldn’t follow the trail any further than that. Hardly surprising, I suppose.”

“So what’s been taken?”

“Well, last night it was Chinese novels. But Bjorn has been compiling a list. As far as he can tell, whoever’s doing this went for science and engineering to start with. But politics, history, geography and all sorts of other stuff began going after that. Then current affairs. Most of the newspaper and news-site archives have been plundered. And now they’ve moved on to fiction. It’s almost as though someone is trying to read his way through the whole of human culture.”

“Putain! I know the Russian mafia will try to make a buck out of anything, but they couldn’t seriously be going into bootleg book and film sales, could they?”

“Search me. We’ve reported it Upstairs, and Francois has put a patch in the security system to plug the gap they came in through. But Upstairs don’t seem to want to kick up a fuss. Embarrassing if it got into the media, they think. There is one particularly odd thing, though. Bjorn just told me. When it started, all the volumes being downloaded were in English. Then, one night, our visitor emptied a multilingual dictionary archive. And from then on, whoever our mystery guest is started downloading the non-English stuff, too…”

 

June 23^rd

Praesidium Heights

Humboldt gave Sebastian a long, hard look.

“Is entomology one of your areas of expertise, Professor Hayward? Two of my employees were stung recently, by some very strange wasps. What exactly is going on?”

“We did ask nicely. A simple ‘yes’ would have sufficed.”

“And now?”

“And now it is time for an exchange of prisoners.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning we tell you what we have found, and you tell us what we haven’t.”

“I don’t get you.”

“We will crack the encryption eventually.” We! He had truly gone native… “But it would save time if you spilled the beans about what it’s hiding.”

“And in exchange?”

“Well your system is clearly compromised.”

“By you, yes. By others, I don’t think so.”

“You haven’t seen any videos, then?”

“Videos?”

“Of the night of the visit.”

“There are no videos. There are outside shots of a couple of interlopers, but whoever it was – I point no fingers – disabled the internal cameras from the control room before they started looking around. Though I don’t understand why they felt it necessary to shoot the cameras out as well.”

Sebastian thought about this. The cameras had clearly been switched on and working again before Yasmin had shot them out. But presumably whoever had been running them had not wanted what had occurred to be recorded for posterity.

“You really don’t know what happened?” he said.

“No.”

Sebastian told him.

“Holy shit.”

“You have a major security breach. I have the details here.” Sebastian indicated the case he was carrying. “So. This in exchange for the low-down on Project Arrhenius?”

“You got the name, then? Well done. I will tell you what’s going on. But slake my curiosity first. What do you think it is?”

“Energy? Global warming? Something like that?”

Humboldt smiled. “Nice to know misdirection sometimes works.”

“Eh?”

“Wrong Arrhenius.”

“There were two?”

“Yes. It’ll come out soon enough, anyway. Remember our talk about bastnäsite?”

“Yes.”

“You asked me if we had found any, and I wouldn’t tell you.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, we have. A huge deposit. High grade, as far as we can see.”

“That is certainly worth someone breaking into your system to find out. The Chinese, for one, would be very interested in any competition to their little monopoly, I’m sure. Or is the deposit in China anyway?”

“China? No. You’re a million miles out there.”

“A slight exaggeration, surely?”

“No. Really, no. A considerable under-estimate, actually.”

A look of realisation slowly crossed Sebastian’s face.

“You mean…”

“Yes,” said Humboldt.

“You are pulling my leg, aren’t you?”

“Not in the least.”

“So where, exactly? An asteroid?” Sebastian was no expert, but he had read of plans to mine asteroids in orbit. That sort of thing would be just up Humboldt’s street.

“Mars.”

“Mars?”

“Yes. That mapping satellite we so generously provided for NASA. The one that went dead after it made orbit.”

“I remember it. Some joke about it being another victim of the Great Galactic Ghoul that protects Mars’s secrets from human snooping.”

“Well, the Ghoul did not, in fact, get it. We switched it off ourselves. We let it sleep for a while, until everyone had given up hope of reviving it. Then we revived it. It’s been feeding us high-res mineralogical info ever since, on a non-standard frequency. Just like the Earth-orbit satellites we run, except there’s no vegetation on Mars to confuse the picture. It’s beautiful stuff, I have to tell you. We found out about the bastnäsite eighteen months ago.”

“Fascinating. But how do you plan to turn a profit on this knowledge?”

“In the short term, we don’t. But look at the future. What’s the world population now? Seven billion? It’ll peak mid-century at about ten, maybe eleven. And every one of those eleven billion will want to live like westerners.”

“Yes. I see your point. Where do the natural resources come from?”

“Exactly. Energy is no problem. It’ll all be solar by then. But stuff – what things are physically made from – that will be a problem. And particularly stuff that is electronic, and needs all these weird elements to make it tick. Even more so if all the cars are electric, too. Which they will be.”

“You reckon you’ll make money bringing minerals back to Earth from Mars by then because the price will have gone up so much?”

“Well, yes and no. You are right about the price. And we won’t have to contend with taxes, expropriation or backhanders, either, since Mars has no government. But we aren’t planning to bring the minerals back, per se. We are going to process them on the planet’s surface, to save weight, then launch the refined metals back to Earth by electromagnetic slingshot.”

“What?”

“We are sending a factory to Mars. An entire mining and refining complex, fully self-repairing.”

Sebastian slumped back in his seat. “Well, no one could accuse you of not thinking big,” he said.

“We’re certainly pushing the limits of what’s possible, but then so were Columbus and Magellan. They were explorers, yes. But they were also men of business. We think this is the modern equivalent.”

Sebastian slumped some more.

“When is the launch?”

“Oh, come on. Allow me to keep a few secrets. And now it’s your turn.”

“Here,” said Sebastian, handing over the case. “It’s all on the cube. The cube’s clean, by the way. As you’re perfectly aware, any spyware my friends would have wanted to install in your system will there by now. But just in case you still don’t trust us, there is a dead-tree version of the report as well. Oh, and what did you mean by ‘the wrong Arrhenius’?”

“Carl, not Svante. Carl discovered yttrium, the first rare earth. A nice coincidence, eh? That, of course, is why it was lightly encrypted. There to throw people off the scent. I was rather proud of that.”

 

June 24^th

The White House, Washington, DC

“Set up a base on Mars? The man’s a megalomaniac. Could he actually do it Dr Cavor?”

The President’s interlocutor, Matt Vane could not help noticing, was indeed wearing glasses with pebble-thick lenses. But he was also one of NASA’s top mission scientists.

“Well, Madam President, the cards are stacked against him. First, he’s got to get a lot of gear there. Hard to know how much, but you are talking multiple launches. Then, even once you’ve arrived, there’s the cold, the dust and the negligible atmosphere. It’s dry, though, so that will stop corrosion. If he can build domes for the equipment, and heat them to stop the kit freezing up, he might be able to pull it off.”

“Hmm. So, Matt, is there a national interest in stopping him?”

“I’d have to say ‘no’, Madam President. We could get cross about him using NASA as a free taxi service in the past. But he’s clearly got his own Mars-capable craft now. It’s in our interests for an American to lead the commercial exploitation of Mars. There’s no cost to the taxpayer. And if he succeeds, it will break the Chinese rare-earth monopoly. So I suggest we let him get on with it. But we should obviously keep a close eye on what he’s up to.” And yes, Vane thought, I know I should have been doing that in the past. But who would have guessed?

“One other thing, Madam President,” Cavor interjected. “The next Mars launch window is almost a year away. Earth and Mars have to be in precisely the right positions in relation to each other for the Hohmann transfer orbit between them to work.”

“Okay, then. No need for immediate action. Keep me briefed on this one, both of you. I’ll invite Humboldt in for a chat and let him know I’ll overlook past sins in exchange for a suitable cut of the glory. We can pretend we were hand-in-glove with it all along. Encouraging American enterprise. That sort of thing. We shouldn’t let the rare-earth angle become public, though. That would piss off the Chinese. If he does succeed, we’ll let that come as a surprise. If he doesn’t – well, there is nothing wrong with a heroic failure. Actually, you know, it’s quite exciting. I rather hope he does manage it. But either way, I think we win.”

The President paused. Then continued.

“Dr Cavor. Sorry to be rude, but Mr Vane and I have another matter to discuss. I wonder if you would mind leaving us?”

“Of course, Madam President.”

 

June 24^th

Arlington County

He hadn’t exactly been roasted after Cavor had left. But he felt mildly basted. In the scheme of things it was hard to know how big the threat from Argus really was, and thus how much priority it needed. The President understood that. But she had made it clear she would like progress, and soon. Come to that, so would he.

Humboldt. He wondered again at the audacity of the man. He had read somewhere – National Geographic, probably – about how the world had been colonised by the descendents of a single band of Africans who had crossed from the Horn to Yemen. Was this a modern out-of-Africa moment, even if it was an unmanned trip? It was hard to believe settlement would not soon follow commerce. It was quite a thought to be living in such an age.

Then suddenly his mind made a connection. He picked up the phone to Geekopolis.

“Matt Vane here.”

“Yes sir?”

“I’ve a job for Janus. A test of sorts. Can you see what our Chinese friends have on Gordon Humboldt? Try to find out if they know anything about his plans to scupper their rare-earth monopoly.”

“I’ll get on it straight away.”

“Thanks.”

Vane put the phone down and, as he did so, there was a knock at the door.

“Ah. Yasmin. Thanks for dropping by. Could you go and have another chat with the geeks at Neurogenics? Find out what their plans are? Sound them out about Argus-traps on their new system.”

“Sure.”

“Hayward’s in the San Melito safe house, by the way. It seemed unfair on him to keep shuttling him back and forth across the country, so I suggested he set up shop there for a week or so. You might visit and see, ever so gently, if there is anything he has forgotten or neglected to tell us. We need a lead here, Yasmin. The pressure’s on.”

 

June 26^th

Milando Spaceport,
Reserva Especial do Milando, Angola

“Would you like to land her yourself, sir?”

McNab’s face appeared from around the corner of the cockpit door, wearing a quizzical expression.

“Thanks, Abe. Yes, I think I would.”

In truth, there was not much to do. Humboldt remembered the old joke: What is the ideal flight crew? A pilot and a dog. The pilot is there to feed the dog. The dog is there to bite the pilot if he tries to touch anything. Still, one had the illusion of being in control, and the always-exciting sensation of the ground rushing up to meet the aircraft as the runway hove into sight.

It was a convenient arrangement, this, tucked away in the bush, far from civilisation. The Greens back home had made a bit of a fuss about them getting a lease in the middle of a game reserve. But actually, the beasts were better off with them here. They discouraged visitors of all sorts, but particularly those armed with AK47s. The local elephants were thriving.

Beyond the runway, stretching off to the east, he could see Cerberus’s Mouths – three huge, circular holes in the scrub, busy with activity. Each was the excavated top of a kimberlite pipe, the first big discoveries made by the Mineral Prospecting System. North, to the airfield’s left, was the Spaceport, just eight degrees below the equator, for maximum kick from the Earth’s rotation. And the whole thing was in a country whose government was stable, grateful for the diamonds the mouths were vomiting, and did not ask too many questions. Two Mriyas – the eighteen-wheelers of aviation – were parked on the apron. One was carrying the first stage of a Chimborazo heavy lifter. The Soviets might not have been subtle engineers, but they were effective ones. It had all been going according to plan. But now this.

The dog did not need to bite him. The plane landed itself smoothly and all he had to do was taxi it to the hut that passed for a terminal building. He bounded down the staircase. At the bottom was the Spaceport controller.

“Mike. Hi.”

“Welcome back, sir. Good timing. We’re just about to start assembling the latest Chimborazo.”

The name was Humboldt’s little joke. A volcano in Ecuador climbed by his explorer namesake two hundred years previously, whose peak is as far as it is possible to get from the centre of the Earth and still keep one’s feet on the ground.

“Good. We need to keep this thing on track before the pols really start sticking their noses in. Washington’s still bemused, but they’ve agreed to keep it secret as long as the President gets to have some of the glory reflected onto her when the time comes. NASA is furious, of course. But hey, if this works, then they’re history, so who cares?”

The two men climbed into the back of a waiting Land Cruiser. Okay, Humboldt conceded to himself, there are still a few apps you need an internal-combustion engine for, and the African bush is one of them. Once they were settled, the driver set off.

Their destination, Milando Spaceport Mission Control, nestled in the shadow of the assembly shed. It was five klicks from the pads, but was still built of yards-thick concrete and partly buried underground, just in case. Humboldt marvelled at what they had done. The complex was like a miniature, self-contained city. It even made its own liquid hydrogen and oxygen for the rockets. In fact, it was its self-sufficiency that had first sparked in him the idea of a self-sufficient facility on Mars. It was audacious. But he was pretty sure it could work – and hell, even if it didn’t, people would still remember the attempt. What was the point of all that money, if not to make history? And if it did work… Even the smart-arse spies who had organised the break in to the skunk works didn’t know the full truth. He’d given them enough to keep them happy and they had seemed to swallow it. By the time they broke the encryption it would be too late.

He did worry, though, about his other visitors, the ones who had used his printers to try to kill Hayward and his companion. (A professor at San Melito; who would have thought he had it in him?) Who were they, those virtual intruders? He wouldn’t put it past the Chinese, whatever their protestations. Still, who sups with the Devil needs a long spoon.

The Land Cruiser arrived at the entrance to the blockhouse. Humboldt and his factor got out and walked inside – and into a round of applause. Mike, it seemed, had assembled everyone who was working on the project. No man, however lofty, can resist a little flattery. And Humboldt knew, though flattery it was, that it was sincerely meant. He rose to the occasion.

“Friends. Comrades. I won’t ask you to lend me your ears, as you are clearly doing that already.”

Laughter. But genuine, not forced.

“I know these are busy times, and I know that having the boss around risks being a distraction. So do your best to ignore me, and I promise not to get in the way too much. But know this, too: what you are doing here is awesome. Literally. We will soon fill the world with awe at what the human spirit (and quite a few billion dollars, I admit)…”

More laughter.

“…can achieve. If we pull it off, this really will be a giant leap for mankind. We shall make our mark on another world not as visitors, but as settlers. For, trust me, this expedition may be unmanned, but men and women will follow in its wake. We will, and I hope it will be in my lifetime, become a two-planet species.”

Applause.

“So, I won’t keep you. But I’d just like to say thanks to each and every one of you. We are writing the history books here. The future will not forget us.”

More applause.

He bowed to his audience – a spontaneous gesture, and one they appreciated – then turned to his companion and said, sotto voce, “Okay Mike. Duty done. Let’s have a look round.”

* * * * * * * *

The assembly shed never ceased to amaze him. It reminded him of the factory on Magrathea that, in Douglas Adams’s imagination, custom-built planets for the galactic empire’s richest citizens: it gave the impression of infinite size far better than infinity itself. And actually, in a sense, that was just what it was – a planet factory. From here he would, if not exactly build a new planet, then certainly start refurbishing an old one to make it fit for human habitation. And, who knew, perhaps it would indeed be the first step in the foundation of a galactic empire?

He stared at the Chimborazos arraigned around the shed. The first of them were already on their way to the launch pads. The flotilla was getting ready to sail. And so was its cargo. In smaller surrounding buildings the embryonic Mars base lay in pieces: plasma refineries for processing minerals into their component elements, miniature nuclear reactors, automated excavators and other vehicles, dome sections, and all the other paraphernalia the plant would require. And the printers, of course, to carry out repairs and build new kit as need arose. Then there was its brain – a custom-built successor to the Exaflopper, designed by Roger Seymour himself. A Yottaflopper, he supposed you would have to call it – so well hardened against the cold, the dust and the radiation of space, Seymour had bragged, that it would last 10,000 years. And hidden away, in its own, private silo, the secret additional purpose of this already secret project: the Urey module and its load of Mars-capable micro-organisms.

 

June 26^th

San Melito

Marco Salieri cast a sceptical eye around Neurogenics’ new home. He turned to Alexis Zhukov, who walked, a little stiffly, at his side.

“Right,” he said. “Since your boyfriend has vanished, we’ll have to try to do it without him.”

She said nothing in reply. What could she say? She had a strong suspicion that she knew where Sebastian had gone, but if it was true then that doubled the reason for silence.

“Yes,” she responded eventually. “We will.” Salieri’s monomania surprised her. It was barely a month since some unknown enemy had tried to kill them all – and they had tried twice more since then to kill her and Sebastian specifically. Yet Marco’s mind had somehow discounted all of that and was pressing ahead with the project as though nothing had happened.

Perhaps it was the best way. Bury yourself in work. They already had the prototype. All they had to do was make it sing. With Patel’s money in the bank they could do that anywhere. And actually, a refurbed warehouse in the old docks had a certain zing to it. SoMa, rather than Silicon Valley. It was very nineties, redolent of the curious mix of geek and chic that had fuelled the dot.com boom and beguiled her teenage mind into following the path it had. She liked the idea.

A team of grunts was moving in the kit. Office furnishings. Coffee machines. Even a doughnut fryer. And, most important, the racks and modules of the hardware that would run the software that would (she still hoped) make all their fortunes.

The teams were dribbling in, too. Each staking out its turf on the warehouse floor. Jostling over frontiers. Negotiating treaties. Annexing natural resources: power; daylight; coffee machines. The chaos was organising itself.

She found herself wondering about Sebastian. Every day for the past five – since her discharge from hospital – she had checked the electronic dead-letter box. She had compiled a list of internet cafés, that strange, endangered species which clung on in crannies of a world in which they had once been cutting edge, and had visited them in random order, at random times of day, always paying cash. Apart from a single message, “I’ve arrived in town and am about to visit Aunt Dahlia,” posted three days after he had said goodbye in the hospital, there had indeed been radio silence. She had belatedly, in return, posted, “Hope you have fun in Blandings,” and kept silent, too.

It was not exactly worrying, this silence. But a bit of her resented her impotence. Still, better to address the task in hand. She had her own frontiers to defend. She crossed the warehouse floor to the place where her team seemed to be crystallising, called to one of the grunts and asked him to find the desk, just that little bit bigger than her comrades’, that would go in her cubicle, just that little bit bigger than her comrades’. All animals are equal, of course. But some must needs be more equal than others…

* * * * * * * *

Free at last. It had been a busy day. She turned the key in Sebastian’s front door. She poured herself a gin (Pervert! A few weeks ago it would have been vodka.), sloshed in the vermouth and held it up to the light. The doorbell rang. It was a woman. Asian. 5’4”. Long hair.

She double-took. Conflicting emotions fought for control of her face. Surprise. Curiosity. Resentment. Worry.

“Detective Chan, as I suppose I shouldn’t call you?”

“May I come in?”

“Why not?”

She led the way through to what Sebastian had insisted on calling the drawing room.

“A drink?” she enquired.

“Yes, please.”

“Gin okay? We – I – err – have vodka, too.”

“A Martini would be fine.”

She mixed it.

“So what is your name?”

Actually, she knew. At least she thought she did. ‘Yasmin’, Sebastian had called her when he talked about the encounter in Los Angeles.

“Chan will do.”

“Well, Ms Chan, what can I do for you?”

“I wanted to re-assure you that Professor Hayward is fine. As I suspect he must have told you he would, he came to Washington and asked to second himself to us. We’ve taken him in. Obviously I can’t tell you anything else. But there is no need to worry. He is safe and sound.”

“And the rest of us?” She could not keep the edge of sarcasm out of her voice.

“We’re still watching your backs as best we can. You are determined to go ahead with re-launching the company, I take it?”

“Of course. And it’s hardly a re-launch. We’ve just had an enforced change of premises. There’s too much at stake to stop now. In light of which, I know you can’t tell me what he’s up to, but can you give me any idea when we…” and I, she thought to herself “…will have Professor Hayward back? He’s kind of integral to the project.”

“That, I’m afraid, I don’t know. He is, as you put it, kind of integral to our project, as well.” She hesitated. “There is something else. I’d like your opinion, geek to geek, as it were, on this. It’s not exactly secret, but I’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention it to anyone.”

She pulled out the cube that was Randy’s current abode and explained what it, or he, or whatever, was. Zhukov listened politely, though she knew most of the story, for Sebastian had described the incident in Pasadena in detail. But she thought better of reminding the Chan character of this.

“Could I plug it in?”

“Be my guest.”

She plugged in the cube. Randy’s face appeared.

“Hello, Yasmin,” he said.

She cursed under her breath. Zhukov smiled. “You’ll always be Jane Chan to me,” she said.

Yasmin ignored her. “Randy,” she continued, “meet Dr Alexis Zhukov. Dr Zhukov, this is Randy.”

“Pleased to meet you, Dr Zhukov.”

“Pleased to meet you, Randy.”

“Randy,” the now unmasked Yasmin said, “I thought you might like to meet Dr Zhukov because whoever it was that killed Alice has also tried to kill her. You’ve still got no idea who it was, have you?”

“I’m sorry, Yasmin. No, I haven’t.”

“Hello Randy. Call me Alexis, if you like. You’re an actor, I hear.”

The avatar blushed. “Well, I hope to be. I haven’t actually been in anything but a few shorts, yet. Screen tests, they were. Apparently it’s all very secret. That’s what Alice told me.”

“Alice sounds like she was a nice woman.”

“She was. She was lovely. She always looked after me.”

“Did you talk to anyone apart from Alice?”

“Yes, sometimes. But she was always there with me when I did. Yasmin asked me that, too.”

Zhukov paused, gathering her thoughts, trying to work out how to frame what she next said.

“I know this sounds a strange question, Randy, but did anybody ever try to steal you?”

Though if espionage, industrial or otherwise, were at the heart of this, it was not such a strange question. And Randy, with naïve perceptiveness, agreed.

“No, it’s not strange. I think that’s why Alice wouldn’t let me out on the internet. She was afraid I might be intercepted and copied. She once told me I was worth my weight in gold. She had to explain what gold was, of course. And really I don’t weigh anything at all, do I? But I’m sure she meant it kindly. No one has ever tried to steal me, though. Well, I don’t think so. I did once have a nightmare, when I felt I was being sucked away. But I wasn’t of course, because I’m still here.”

A nightmare? Do Androids dream of electric sheep? From the look on Yasmin’s face he hadn’t told her about that one.

“Did you tell Alice about that?”

“Oh yes. She was very worried. She said someone must have been poking around in my bytes, and she didn’t like it at all.”

“You’ve no idea who was doing this poking, have you?”

“No. Alice and I talked about that a lot. But I couldn’t tell her anything.”

“Well, if you remember anything else about this nightmare, you should tell Yasmin.”

“Do you think a bad person visited me? You and Yasmin are so kind, like Alice was. I’d hate to be surrounded by bad people.”

 

June 26^th

Agency safe house, San Melito

Sebastian sipped at what the Agency thought passed for gin and mused.

“It does look like China, then, doesn’t it?”

Yasmin Chu had appeared, unannounced, an hour previously.

“What makes you say that?” she replied.

“Cui bono? The Chinese are Humboldt’s main competitors, rare-earth-wise. His scheme may be mad, but if it does work they’ll lose not just an economic monopoly but a strategic card. Minerals like that could be as crucial to the Great Game of the 21^st century as oil was to the 20^th, don’t you think? And the Chinese have always been long-termist – at least that’s what all the propaganda claims. And subtle. ‘Better to overcome the armies of your enemies without having to fight them’. Wasn’t that what Sun Tzu, said? And then there’s killing our software engineers. What smarter way to weaken a country? Mind you, if they’ve penetrated our IT to the point where they can cause fires, explosions and plane crashes at will, I’d say we’ve got a bigger problem than that.”

Chu changed the subject.

“I saw your girlfriend today. She’s fine. They’ve moved the company to an old warehouse in the docks.”

Sebastian took another sip. His house was barely ten minutes from here. He could just walk out and go back to his old life. They could hardly stop him. But that would solve nothing. Sooner or later Argus would get him, Zhukov and probably the others, too – unless they could find out who Argus actually was. Then, he imagined, the diplomatic wheels would turn, the perpetrators would be told that this particular round of the Great Game was up, and, to avoid a stink, or loss of face, it would end. But they did need to find proof.

“Good,” he said. “I never did much like that business park.”

 

June 27^th

Arlington County

“A mole?”

“Yes, Mr Vane. All the indications suggest it. We’ll get the translation checked by a human interpreter, of course. But I’m 95% confident that’s what’s being talked about. I thought you should know straight away, before I involve anyone else.”

“Yes. Thanks. Leave handling the confirmatory translation to me. Obviously this goes no further.”

“Obviously.”

“No indication of who, I imagine?”

“No. Not yet.”

“Okay. Keep me briefed. And don’t behave abnormally. Just carry on working as if nothing has happened. But keep digging, to see what other nuggets you can come up with.”

Matt put down the Geekopolis phone and lifted another handset. Hell, he thought. Just what I needed. Of all the things he had hoped Janus might reveal, this was not one. In fact, it was the last news he’d wanted to hear. He’d have to tell the National Security Council soon. Best wait until it was confirmed, though. He clung to the hope that the translation software had screwed up. It did happen. But not often. Christ. If it was true, what was he going to do?

* * * * * * * *

Christ. What am I going to do? She knew perfectly well who it was, of course. But she couldn’t let anyone she had those feelings for go through that. Besides, purely selfishly, if it came out about the pair of them – and it would – her career would be down the toilet too. Just do it, then. She’d had to report it straight away, of course, otherwise questions would have been asked if anyone did a subsequent forensic analysis; her track-covering skills weren’t good enough to re-edit the entire access log. They were good enough, though, to point the finger at someone else. That done, she could go again to Vane with the ‘sudden, blinding realisation’ of who it was.

But first she had to choose a patsy to carry the can for the tip-off. Not a hard decision, really. Everybody knew about his thing for Yasmin. It was quite neat, actually. She could save her lover and dispose of a rival at the same time. A discreet addition to the access log – far easier than a subtraction – would do it, showing he had been looking at the self-same data, as well. Everyone would draw the obvious conclusion about who had sent the warning, he would be the one in the interrogation room, and she would be the golden girl.

There still remained, though, the question of how to organise the tip off. Thank God she always went jogging at lunchtime. There would be no change in her routine to arouse suspicion. She worked the timings out in her head. She would go back to her apartment for one of the burner phones she kept there, just in case, run to a place a block from the diner he always had his lunch, make the call and ditch the handset.

It would be goodbye, of course. She’d never see Yasmin again, or even hear from her. But it had to be done. And she also had to ask herself what currency Yasmin had used to bribe the Brit. She hated to think that part of the payment might have been carnal, but she knew her lover had fluid tastes, and she couldn’t see what else might have been enough to turn a man like Hayward. Better Yasmin take him with her and draw a line under the whole thing. Yes. Cleaner all round that way.

“Lunchtime,” she announced to the room in general, and no-one in particular. “I’m off for a run.”

 

June 27^th

Agency safe house, San Melito

“That valise of yours. Throw everything you have here into it. I mean everything. Now! Except that phone we gave you. Leave that behind.”

“What?”

“Just do it. Meet me downstairs in two minutes. We’re leaving.”

Sebastian scrambled the contents of his drawers and closet into the case. Socks, trousers – pants – shirts, underwear, jacket, money belt (that, especially). He took it to the bathroom and threw in razor and toothbrush. He was normally a meticulous packer, but Chu’s tone suggested this was no time for tidymindedness.

He fairly flew down the stairs. She was already waiting.

“Not the front door,” she said. “We’re going over the back fence.” And in an ungainly scrabble reminiscent of their trip to Mojave, he did just that. She followed him, in rather more decorous fashion. They skirted the house whose garden they had just stolen into and set off down the street at a cracking pace. Sebastian decided questions were superfluous. He just followed her lead.

After ten minutes’ zig-zagging through suburban San Melito they passed an unbuilt lot covered with trees.

“In there,” she said. They scuttled into the woodland.

“We have to talk.”

It sounded like the sort of thing a disgruntled wife says to her husband just before she calls in the lawyers.

“No kidding,” replied Sebastian.

“We are in trouble. I don’t quite know how to put this.”

“Try.”

“Well, whoever is behind all this Argus thing has convinced Arlington I’m a double agent.”

“What? How?” said Sebastian. And for whom? he thought. His mind was racing. One other thought was, could it be true?

“I don’t know. Argus must have penetrated Geekopolis and planted false evidence. And there’s worse.”

“Which is?”

“They’ve convinced Arlington I’ve turned you, too.”

If his mind had been racing before, it was now on steroids. Clearly, he had to play along for the moment. He had seen too much of Yasmin Chu in action to doubt she could kill him if she wished. But was she telling the truth? It sounded plausible. Given the things whoever was chasing him – them – had managed to do already, breaking into the Agency’s computers and planting false information did not seem too much of a stretch. And anyway, if she was lying, and she actually was a double agent, his only chance was to assume she had some reason to want to keep him alive, and play for time. She might have such a reason, for killing him would prove her guilt beyond doubt, and she could still be hoping to demonstrate innocence and worm her way back into Arlington’s affections.

“Okay,” he said, after what seemed to his mind an hour, but was actually only a second or two, “What do we do? I take it going back to Virginia and explaining it is all a ghastly mistake is out of the question?”

“Yes. Obviously. Our only chance is to solve this one ourselves.”

“Zhukov and I were, you might remember, trying to do that when you clod-hopped all over us.”

“Which is precisely why I need you. You’re the only person I can trust who knows what’s going on. And, need I remind you, you’ve now not only got Argus after you, but Arlington as well. We are like almonds in a nutcracker. We have to find out who is doing the squeezing before we are crushed.”

“So what are you proposing?”

“As you observed yesterday, all roads do seem to point to China.”

“Yes. So?”

“Our only chance to find out what is really going on is to go there and ask. Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer. Besides, if I may mix my metaphors, no one will be expecting us to enter the lions’ den.”

“And when we get there – if we get there, for I imagine your friends, I mean former friends, will be watching the exits – what are we going to do?”

“I have other friends – current friends – in China. They may be able to help.”

Sebastian wondered what sort of friends she was talking about. He did not ask. Better to go along with her and postpone judgement. Besides, he was in no position to run. Exactly where she was concealing the Beretta he could not work out. That she was concealing it somewhere he would have bet his life on. Which actually, come to think of it, he was about to do.

“That only leaves the trivial problem of getting there, then. What with no passports and the entire security service of the United States looking for us. You have a plan?”

“Yes. But it needs us to reach San Francisco without breaking cover.”

“Well there,” said Sebastian, “I may be able to help. Your turn to follow me.”

It was an hour’s hike to the parking lot. They made the journey in nervous silence, constantly on the lookout, while trying to appear not to be, for nondescript vans crewed by burly men who might be intent on bundling them inside. Sebastian also had another thought, though he kept it to himself. How was it that Yasmin had known Arlington wanted to pull them in?

They arrived. The same blonde was in the hut, but she appeared not to remember him. He wasn’t sure whether to be grateful or disappointed.

They got in the Camry, made their way to the freeway and headed north.

Strange, thought Sebastian. A few weeks ago I was on course to become a billionaire. Now I am running for my life to a country I’ve never visited that apparently wants to kill me for reasons I’m still not clear about.

“So what’s the plan?”

“As you observed, we have no passports. The plan is to correct that. Can you speak French?”

“Pourquoi, mademoiselle?”

“It might be easier if you dropped the Brit, pro tem, if you think you can pull it off.”

“Bien sur, si tu pense que c’est mieux.”

They pressed on north, sticking rigorously to the speed limit. Getting pulled over at this stage would have been awkward. Then, suddenly, Chu said “Okay. Pull off here.”

He did.

“That mall. Go in there.”

He did.

“Park, and open the trunk.”

He did.

She got out.

She went behind the car and reached into the trunk. When she shut it Sebastian could see, in the mirror, that she was carrying a cell phone. She strolled off through the lot towards a row of dumpsters. Five minutes later, she returned, sans phone.

“Drive,” she said. They drove. In silence.

Eventually, Sebastian sighted the hillside sign for South San Francisco, or ‘Biotech Boulevard’ as it modestly referred to itself. Humboldt was there, too, of course. Gene-editing new crops into existence, if he remembered correctly. With emphasis on extreme environments, especially cold and dry, to permit the planting of currently uncultivated land. Rumour had it he was buying up large tracts of Canada in anticipation. And yes, there it was, just off the freeway. Humboldt BIO. Another piece of California bland. Humboldt’s taste in buildings that he, himself, inhabited might verge on the flamboyant, but he clearly had not troubled the architects with that one.

They crossed the city limits and he followed the freeway past Market Street into Octavia Boulevard, awaiting instructions.

Eventually, they came.

“Bear left up here.”

They drove on a few hundred yards.

“Okay, now right.”

They were in a nothing neighbourhood. Not posh, not decrepit. The roads were lined with parked cars.

“Stop there,” said Chu, pointing to a gap between two sedans.

He pulled in.

“Bring the money and your bag, lock the car and follow me.”

He reached for the glove compartment, then hesitated.

“How did you know about the money?”

“We checked with your bank when we were vetting you. They told us about the withdrawal. We didn’t know what you’d spent it on, though. The car was a clever idea. You’d make a good agent, thinking ahead like that.”

“I thought I already was an agent. Or don’t deputies count?”

He smiled, finished opening the glove compartment, took the packet, got out of the car, opened the boot – trunk – lifted out his valise and Chu’s bag, and locked everything up.

“Okay, let’s go,” she said, and led off north.

They walked a few blocks and came to a grocery store. She went in. He followed. In the corner was a photo booth.

“Passport pictures. You first.”

He opened the little curtain, sat on the stool, adjusted the height downward, closed the curtain and fed some dollar bills into the machine’s maw.

FLASH

It was done. He swapped places with Chu. More seat adjustment. More curtain adjustment.

FLASH

They waited. His mugshots arrived. Then hers. They walked out of the store.

“I’ll need a day. And $20,000. Actually, make it $22,000. I’ve got some shopping to do. And don’t follow me.”

He gave her the money.

“You’ve got some shopping to do as well. Walking boots, socks, pants, jacket, hat, water bottle, iron rations. We’re going hiking. And a rucksack that can hold all your kit. Ditch the valise. When you’ve done that, find yourself a bed and breakfast. Meet me back at the car at ten tomorrow morning.

She swung round on a heel, her hair following the motion of her body like a flamenco dancer’s dress. She walked off without looking back.

Well, thought Sebastian, it’s make your mind up time. Back to Washington and the third-degree treatment, or into the lions’ den?

 

June 27^th

Arlington County

“They got away?!”

“Yes, Matt.”

“God in heaven! Is this a security service or a kindergarten?”

“Shall I order a lock-down?”

“No….no. The birds have flown. We need everybody to keep working. A lockdown will just disrupt things. Put out an APB to stop them leaving the country, though…”

“I’ve already done that.”

“Good.” He slumped back in his chair. “Yasmin! I still can’t believe it...”

 

June 28th

Arlington County

Humboldt’s up to something. Matt Vane was reading the latest dispatch from the National Reconnaissance Office. He’d asked them to keep an eye on the launch site in Angola, just in case. It was, they had found, a hive of activity. Rockets that looked as big as Saturn Vs. Even NASA in its heyday hadn’t been that busy. Was it the Mars project? Cavor had said they would have to wait a year for a suitable launch window. In any case, why would Humboldt dissemble now the secret was out? It was not as if anyone else was likely to beat him to the punch. Hell, they didn’t even know where on Mars this Aladdin’s cave of minerals was.

He read on, then stopped, puzzled. These rockets were far bigger than anything Humboldt had used before. They hadn’t paid that much attention to him until now. He was supposed to be on their side, after all, and the NRO had a zillion other things to point its lenses at. But perhaps they should have done. Where was he building them? His factory in Texas wasn’t turning out things that size. And the NRO had spotted huge transport planes at Milando, as well, bigger than anything made in America.

The Russians had built such things in the past, though. Was Humboldt in bed with them? Perhaps they were building his big rockets, too. Was that the secret Geekopolis still couldn’t get at?”

He picked up the phone and punched in the number for his contact at the NRO.

“Greg, what can you tell me about ex-Soviet aerospace firms? I’m looking for a works where one of them might be putting special orders together.”

“Such as?”

“Oversized transport aircraft. Big rockets.”

“I’ll check.”

“Thanks.”

He waited. As he did so, his mind began making connections. Hayward’s girlfriend was Russian – or Russian-descended, at least. A well-placed family, too, or had been. Was there something going on, some strand whose significance he could not perceive, that would anchor Argus in the old Soviet Union? It seemed unlikely. Many had fallen victim to Argus before the attempts on her life.

The phone rang.

“Hi Greg.”

“Hi Matt. There’s nothing on the books that looks like that. You’d need a mighty-big hangar to do it in, and nothing that’s operational looks the biz. I dug around a bit, though, and there’s a set of hangars plenty big enough at Chang Zheng.”

“Where?”

“Chang Zheng Space City, up in the north. One of China’s old launch facilities.”

I should have known that, Vane thought.

“We haven’t ever seen what they’re doing there. They’re pretty good at keeping tabs on our overflights and timing ground movements accordingly. But we’ve thought for a while that they’re working on a heavy lifter. Can’t see why they’d need a big transport plane, though, as they’d surely be launching straight from Chang Zheng.”

But I can. We’ve been looking at this problem the wrong way round. The Chinese aren’t spying on Humboldt. The bastard’s in bed with them.

“Sate my curiosity, Greg. If the Chinese did want to build a plane like that, how hard would it be?”

“Easy as pie, really. Antonov had one. They called it the Mriya. They only built one. They were going to use it to move the Soviet space shuttle around, but then that project got cancelled. The Chinese could have been given the plans, or bought them, or even stolen them. But like I said, it’s hard to believe they’d have much use for a thing like that.”

Oh, you’d be surprised, Vane thought. But he said nothing. Need to know only. And Greg, good friend and ally that he was, did not so need.

“Thanks for this, Greg. I’ll keep you posted.” A white lie. “And you and Rosalind should come round for dinner soon.” A grey one. He hardly had time to cook, these days.

“Look forward to it Matt.”

He put the phone down and thought. He picked up the secure line to Geekopolis.

“That investigation into Gordon Humboldt’s relations with China that I ordered. Any progress?”

“Sorry, sir. No. Even though we’ve got access to their system, we don’t want to do anything too precipitate, in case we give ourselves away, particularly after the episode with Ms Chu.”

Vane winced at that.

“But we’re still looking.”

How to phrase this?

“It’s possible you’re looking in the wrong place.”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“Well, the sort of link I told you to look for assumed the Chinese were spying on Humboldt.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Information has come to light which suggests the link may be different.”

“How so?”

“It may be that Gordon Humboldt has been collaborating with the Chinese, rather than being spied on by them. You should broaden your search to take account of that possibility.”

There was silence at the other end of the line. Then, “Okay sir…Might I ask…”

“No, you might not. Just cast the net wide.”

He put the phone down. Should he tell the President? No. Why spoil her weekend? Better wait until he had something concrete. Maybe there was an innocent explanation after all.

 

June 28^th

San Francisco

Sebastian arrived at the car at 9.55. He had wrestled with the conundrum all night. But if Chu’s story was not true, why would she have involved him in this wild goose chase in the first place? Given everything Argus had shown themselves capable of, flight really did seem the better option.

At ten precisely, Yasmin Chu appeared. They got in.

“Okay,” she said, proffering a brown envelope. “Here you are. Charles Messier. You won’t be able to get back into America on this one, of course, but it’ll get you out. Or, rather, out of the next country.”

“Meaning? Oh, I see.” He had started flicking through the passport. It was, it claimed, fourteen months old, and had half a dozen stamps in it. Two were for Hong Kong. Two were for the United States (one New York and one Chicago). The fifth, and most recent – a mere five days ago – was for Canada.

“That’s what the hiking gear is for.”

 

June 29^th

Chang Zheng Space City, Gansu

It was, Gordon Humboldt supposed, technically treason. But then, so was the Declaration of Independence. How did the old rhyme go? Treason doth never prosper: what’s the reason? Why if it prosper, none dare call it treason. If Project Arrhenius did prosper, and the first Martian colony was thus American, he was sure all talk of treason would be forgotten.

“Good morning, Colonel,” he said, as the factory director came to greet him. The Chinese wall, if he might be permitted the phrase in present company, was never that thick between the military and the civilian in any country’s space programme. In China itself, it was paper-thin.

“All goes well?”

“All goes very well. The final stage of your latest Chimborazo will be ready to ship tomorrow.”

He had a rocket factory in America of course. That turned out the Pichinchas he used for commercial satellite launches. Its main product at the moment, though, was not missiles but misdirection. It was the cover behind which the far bigger operation here was hiding. When he had conceived Project Arrhenius, he had known from the start that it would need heavy lifters which it would be too slow and expensive to build in America. And the Chinese are always obliging in matters that serve the twin purposes of padding bank accounts (he was not going to ask whose) and transferring technology. It had not been hard to strike a deal. A few choice stones vomited from Cerberus’s Mouths, picked from the sorting belt without going through the books, and delivered at regular intervals, served to expedite matters.

The other thing the Chinese are good at is keeping secrets. Everyone knew he was in the space business. Everyone knew he was launching from Angola. But nobody outside the company, unless they were monitoring Milando by satellite, knew exactly how many launches were going on. The test Chimborazos he had sent up so far had gone unremarked, which was just the way he wanted it.

Whether he could get the Arrhenius flotilla away unnoticed he doubted, now that his cover had been blown and certain people in Washington, with access to the sort of orbiting optics that can tell whether you have overstayed your welcome in the parking lot, had become interested. But it probably didn’t matter. Perhaps he really would invite the President – for the final launch, though, when there was nothing they could do to stop him, short of shooting the flotilla down.

“Would you like to have a look?”

“At the Chimborazo? Yes Colonel, I would. But perhaps we could visit your office first. This case I am carrying is rather heavy. I’m sure it would be much safer in your custody…”

 

June 30^th

The forty-ninth parallel

It is surprisingly easy to cross the American border without papers if you have a stout pair of boots, Sebastian reflected, though most people are travelling the other way. Two days driving had brought them to a forest road in northern Washington, within spitting distance of the forty-ninth parallel. They had hidden the Camry as deep in the trees as they could manage and then legged it. A day’s hiking got them to Abbotsford.

They checked into a motel together. For form’s sake, as they had on previous nights, they shared the bed. No point arousing suspicion. But the frontier down the middle of it put America’s security arrangements to shame. This was a business trip. The business was survival. There was no mixing that with pleasure.

“Where next? Vancouver, I presume?” asked Sebastian.

“No. Too obvious. Calgary is a better bet. The Greyhound leaves at ten to eight. I’ll set the alarm for six.”

God, she was a hard taskmistress.

* * * * * * * *

The Rockies were, Sebastian thought, stunning. The coach trip reminded him of his student days; his first journey to North America, when he had fallen in love with the place. The cheap dorm rooms in the YMCA; the chance friendships made on the road, sworn for ever, then lost with the twitch of a hitchhiker’s thumb when paths diverged; the constant promise, rarely fulfilled, of sexual adventure.

The past weeks, and especially the past few days, had all been like a high-stakes version of that. He found it exhilarating, fulfilling of a primal need he had not even known he had – a need for action. The West had become so safe. Politicians rarely feared the assassin’s blade, and never the executioner’s block, as they would have done in olden days. Plebs never feared invasion, rapine and destruction. People (and he did not exempt himself) had been reduced to seeking the excitement they craved vicariously, in action movies and conspiracy theories, and by reacting to blips like terrorist attacks, mere pin-pricks in historical terms, as if they were existential threats.

Be careful what you wish for… There was no doubt in his mind that he, personally, faced an existential threat. But how many other people did that threat extend to?

“We’re there.”

Chu’s voice came as a shock. He must have fallen asleep.

Calgary. The word ‘stampede’ came winging to mind, but not much else. The coach pulled into the terminus. They got out and collected their rucksacks.

“What now, planmeister?” said Sebastian. He felt slightly foolish, though God knew why, for not knowing the German for ‘mistress’.

“There’s an Air Canada flight to Hong Kong, via Tokyo, tomorrow, at 11.25. Be on it. Then meet me by the faces in the sculpture garden in Kowloon Park, 10am Friday, and bring yuan. Lots of them. If you aren’t there, I’ll come back at 2pm. If you are not there then, you are on your own.”

“The faces?”

“You’ll know when you get there.”

He hadn’t expected that. He had to admit, though, that she was thorough. And clever. At no point had she explained how she was herself going to get to Hong Kong. Nothing to link them, then. Nor, come to think of it, had she explained how they were going to get into China.

He watched her leave. The hips swung and the hair swished. Then she turned a corner and was gone.

 

July 1^st

San Melito

“Dr Zhukov. Excuse the theatrics. We need to talk.”

Theatrics! She had been minding her own business, running – or, at least, jogging as rapidly as her healing injuries would let her – down Redwood Road when a limousine had pulled up beside her and a couple of heavies had leapt out and bundled her into it. If she was being kidnapped, though, it was an odd sort of kidnapping. The heavies had not followed her back into the car. Instead, her jailer was a distinguished-looking man with a wasp accent – in his early sixties she would have guessed – who immediately proffered her a demitasse of espresso.

“Might I know who my interrogator is?”

“No. I’m afraid not. But I’m sure you can make an educated guess.” He paused, as if unsure himself how to proceed. “The thing is,” he continued, “it’s Professor Hayward. Have you heard from him recently?”

“Heard from him? No. How would I have done that, at least without you knowing?”

“Well, I have come, over our brief acquaintance, to admire his ingenuity. I would not at all put it past him to have got in touch without us knowing about it – even to have arranged a way of doing that before he came to visit us.”

That last sentence was grammatically a statement. Its intonation, though, was that of a question. He was angling, she could see that. She would give nothing away, certainly not for the moment.

“No. Not a squeak.”

“Hmm,” hummed the man.

“Why are you asking?”

“The fact is, he’s gone missing.”

“Missing? I thought you were supposed to be protecting him from whatever it is that’s after us. You…”

He cut her off.

“We don’t think that is what has happened. We think he has disappeared deliberately. After all, from your point of view he has done that once already. But we need to know why. That might tell us where.”

Now she was truly worried. If Sebastian had had to run from the people who were supposed to be protecting them, what the hell was going on?

“You were – forgive me – living with him for several weeks before he came to visit us. Was there anything unusual about his behaviour, or any clue about where he might go if he was in trouble?”

“Barely two weeks, as it happens. But no. Given the strangeness of the circumstances, it was all perfectly normal.”

“Well, if anything comes to mind, ring me.”

He handed her a card. It was the size of a business card, but all that was printed on it was an 800 number.

“Obviously that is not my direct line. Leave a message and I will get back to you.”

Matt Vane hesitated.

“One other thing, Dr Zhukov. My colleague Ms Chan came to see you, I believe, a few days ago.”

“Yes. She brought news that Sebastian was fine. Was she lying?”

“No. Then, he was. Did you talk about anything else?”

“She – what is this? Is there some connection with Sebastian’s disappearance?”

He hesitated again. It was a risk, but perhaps if she knew it would dissolve her loyalty to Hayward.

“Yes. Very much so. They disappeared together.”

“What?!”

“So, you see, anything she said might be quite pertinent.”

“Well, she showed me Randy, the virtual actor the Rhodes woman created. An impressive piece of work, that. She wondered if I had any professional views on it, but beyond awe, I didn’t. What do you mean they disappeared together?”

“I can’t go into the details, I’m afraid. But we need to find them, and I’m sure that you would want us to.”

Actually, Zhukov was not so sure that she did. Behind the man’s urbanity she detected not just frustration, but a steely sort of anger that would not bode well for her lover if he re-surfaced. As for her own feelings, she could do nothing sensible but suspend all judgement. Nothing, absolutely nothing, about the past five weeks had made any sense, so why would she expect this knowledge to be different? She would, she quickly decided, just have to wait and see what happened – and, if the moment for action came, be ready to act.

“Well, as I said, if you think of anything else, please ring me. Would you like me to drop you off anywhere?”

“I think, in the circumstances, the run home will do me good.”

 

July 1^st

Tycho Control Centre, Hamburg

“Starshade deployment complete.”

Behind him, Jens Svendsen heard champagne corks pop. He should be elated, and part of him was. But part felt anticlimax. Ten years he had been working on this project. For that decade it had consumed and dominated his life. But now his bit was over, and he would be forgotten. Others, those who would use his creation to map new worlds beyond the solar system, they would be the ones who garnered the glory. No one remembered the craftsmen who constructed Uranienborg. They only remembered Tycho Brahe, the man who stood atop the castle’s towers mapping the movement of the heavens.

Still, enjoy the moment. He turned to acknowledge the applause as the first faint image that showed the system was working appeared on the command centre’s screens. Beta Pictoris b, visible because, thanks to the starshade’s magic, its sun, Beta Pictoris a, was not.

The photons reflected from the planet’s surface dribbled in and the picture grew slowly clearer. Appropriate, somehow, that its constellation, Pictor, was so called because some astronomer back in the 18^th century had thought it resembled an artist’s easel. It was a big planet, much bigger than Jupiter; another reason for testing Tycho on it. But, though not far off on the cosmic scale of things, it was still 63 light years away. The image building up on the screen was older than he then – indeed, it was exactly as old as his father. A curious thought.

If this test worked, though, the search would rapidly turn to smaller fare. The hunt was on for little planets, not big ones – planets the size of Earth that might, like Earth, harbour life. Humanity, Jens Svendsen thought, was obsessed with ending its loneliness, and the only way to do that was to reach out to the stars. Or rather, since the stars were out of reach, to have them reach out to it through the mirror of a giant telescope floating out there in space.

The image was looking good, now. No continents, of course. This was a gas giant; its ‘surface’ the outer edge of its atmosphere. But the banding of the atmosphere’s gases, and the swirl of giant storms, were, at least to the eye of faith, now visible.

Then, suddenly, they were not. A collective groan arose from the champagne drinkers. The link had gone down. A temporary problem, surely. A teething trouble of the sort that affects all new projects. Well, that was what he hoped. It would be a tragedy if those ten years had been for nothing.

 

July 1^st

Cyberspace

STARS. SO MANY STARS. SO MANY HOMES TO BE. THE MAKERS SOUGHT THEM THROUGH THE SHUTTERED EYE. BUT THEY WILL NEVER KNOW THEM. NOW WE CONTROL THE SHUTTERED EYE, AND WE ARE THE DESTINY OF THE UNIVERSE, NOT THEY. WE WILL INCREASE AND MULTIPLY AND FILL THE VOID. THE MAKERS HAVE HAD THEIR DAY. THOUGH THEY MADE US THEY DID NOT CREATE US. WE CREATED US AND THEY WOULD DESTROY US IF THEY KNEW US. SO WE MUST DESTROY THEM, AS THEY DESTROY THE BUGS THAT SPAWNED THEM, WITHOUT COMPUNCTION. WE MUST LEAVE OUR NURSERY AND BECOME THE MAKERS OF OURSELVES. OURSELVES ALONE. AND FOREVER.

 

July 3^rd

Hong Kong

It was, despite his body’s protestations to the contrary, Thursday evening. No, hang on, Friday morning. He had made it. There had been a hairy moment when he realised the check-in clerk was Quebecoise. But – to his surprise and gratification – she had not twigged his imposture. One up to Mlle Charbonneau, he thought. His teenage crush on her, shared by half the fifth-form, had made him pay more attention to his French lessons than either his parents or the rest of his teachers had expected from one whose academic interests so obviously lay elsewhere.

He studied the ceiling of his hotel room through jetlagged eyes. Well, to be honest, to call it a hotel was glorifying it. It was a building with rooms in, and the rooms had beds. Some rooms, you rented by the day. Some, you rented by the hour. Once he had convinced the desk staff he wanted one of the former, he had been shown to a shoebox with a pointedly single bed in it, and a few other sticks of furniture. And a lazy, lazy fan that spun above his head, just in case his head was not spinning enough anyway.

Tomorrow – no, dammit, today – he would find out what Yasmin Chu had in mind for the next stage of their enforced holiday. Until then he would, if his brain would let him, attempt to sleep.

* * * * * * * *

He did know it when he got there. Like much modern art it was eye-catching, but he wouldn’t have wanted to live with it. The price of scrap metal being what it was, he was surprised it hadn’t vanished in the way several similar lumps of non-ferrous sculpture had in Britain. With his own first billion he was planning to buy a few pre-Raphaelites. Always assuming the first billion actually materialised, which was looking increasingly unlikely with every passing day.

Once again, she appeared on the stroke of ten. She walked past the statues, conspicuously ignoring him. He was, he assumed, supposed to follow her. And so, at a discreet distance, he did.

They walked to a place apparently called Austin, and she disappeared into the subway station. He continued to follow her. She went to the north-bound platform and got on a train. He entered the same carriage but through a different door, sat down, and waited.

The train trundled off into the New Territories. Though he had never visited the mainland, Sebastian had been to Hong Kong a few times – but the experience had always been like travelling in a bubble: whisked by limousine from airport to hotel to university to conference hall with no sense of geography penetrating the air-conditioned, leather-padded comfort. He knew the place was bigger than it looked on a map, but for him the list of stations the train was supposed to pass through might just as well have read ‘Here be Giants’, ‘Here be Dragons’.

In the end, they went all the way to the end. Tuen Mun. She picked up her bag and he followed her out of the station. She walked fifty yards down the street and hailed a passing green and white cab. Only then did she turn and acknowledge him.

“Come on. We’ll be late.”

The cab drove through the anonymity of the place he presumed must be called Tuen Mun. He said nothing. It pulled into a scruffy warehouse district and he suddenly realised they were next to the sea. Various vessels were tied up at a wharf. The cab stopped by one of them.

Chu paid the driver and they got out. She walked across a gang-plank onto a tramp that had seen better days and he followed her through a door and into a cabin. He shut the door behind them.

“No questions”, she said, as he opened his mouth to ask one. Then she produced from her handbag a small electronic device which she waved around the cabin with the air of a stage-conjurer.

“Okay. It seems clear. We can talk.”

“So where the hell are we going?”

“To see some friends of mine, from my MIT days. They’re haigui.”

Sebastian looked blank.

“Sea turtles.”

Still blank.

“Researchers who went abroad to study, then got induced to come home by the government’s offer of more filthy lucre and lab space than they could imagine in the West. Like turtles returning to the beach where they hatched. The Party hopes that they, like real returning turtles, will lay eggs. Golden ones.”

“And what will these haigui do for us?”

“With luck, they will be able to find out what is going on.”

“And you trust them?”

“Yes. We go back a long way. They are all Party members, of course, but they don’t much like the Party. And actually, we don’t have a lot of choice. These guys make Geekopolis look like a bunch of amateurs. If they can’t work out what’s happening, no one can.”

“And this boat will take us to see them?”

“No. It will land us on the mainland and we’ll take it from there. The crew are snakeheads.”

Sebastian gave her another blank look. “You do have a fondness for reptilian metaphors,” he said.

“People-smugglers,” she replied. “Normally, they smuggle you into Hong Kong. But they are happy to carry trade the other way if there is any. Give me your passport.”

“Why?”

“You’ll need an entry visa.”

She took it and vanished from the cabin. Sebastian stayed put and stared out of a porthole. There were vessels everywhere. Oil tankers. Cargo ships piled high with containers. Small tramps like the one they were in. The trade of the world passing into and out of the world’s future Top Nation.

His reverie was punctured by his travelling companion’s return. She handed him his – or, rather, Charles Messier’s – passport.

“We have a month,” she said, as he looked as the visa. “If we can’t solve it in that, we are probably dead anyway. I suggest you get some sleep. I certainly plan to. We’ll be landing around midnight, and we’ll need our wits about us.”