Peter F. Hamilton - The Nano flower

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CHAPTER ONE

Suzi crapped the Frankenstein cockroach into the toilet bowl, then pushed the chrome handle

halfway down

for a short flush.

She concentrated on the neural icon which seemed to hover at the periphery of her consciousness,

and marshalled her thoughts into a distinct instruction sequence. Activate Sense Linkage and

Directional Control, she ordered her bioware processor implant.

When she closed her eyes the ghostly image from the cockroach's infrared-sensitive retinas

intensified to its full resolution. There was a moment of disorientation as she interpreted the

picture being fed along the optical fibre plugged into her coccyx ganglion splice. It was a hazy

jumble of Möbius topology, shaded red, pink, and black, a convolution through which green moons

fell. The cockroach was clinging to the bottom of the sewer pipe directly underneath a shower of

droplets from the toilet downpipe. Directional graphics superimposed themselves across the

picture, resembling an aircraft pilot's command display.

Suzi guided the cockroach up the side of the sewer pipe until it was out of the water channel,

then set it walking. Optical fibre began to unspool behind it, thinner than a cobweb.

Perspective was tricky. She allowed herself to believe she was walking through some baroque nether-

world cathedral. The fluted walls had a black-mirror sheen, carved with a fabulous abstract glyph.

Above her, the curving roof was punctured by elliptical ebony holes, all of them spitting

phosphene-green globules. A small river slithered down the concave floor, bearing away

unidentifiable lumps of pale fibrous matter. She was suddenly very glad Jools the Tool hadn't

stitched any olfactory receptors into the Frankenstein cockroach when he was putting it together

for her.

Pressure-sensitive cell clusters detected the rush of air,

2

PETER F. HAMILTON

warning her of the approaching flush. She scuttled the cockroach right up to the roof of the

sewer. The burst of water churned past underneath her. A turd the size of a cargo ship rode the

wavefront, trailing ribbons of disintegrating paper.

She waited until the surge had gone, then brought the cockroach back down the curving pipe and

carried on forwards. Fungal growths were blooming out of cracks in the concrete, moonscape

mattresses of slime. The cockroach clambered over the humps without even slowing, all the while

spinning out its gossamer thread.

Up ahead, where the pipe contracted to a black vanishing point, she thought she saw something

move.

In a way, Suzi considered the Morrell deal as a vindication of the way she had lived the last

twelve years. There was no violence involved, not even a hint of it. Violence had launched her

into the tekmerc game after she got out of prison. Organized violence, deliberately and precisely

applied. It was her trade, all she knew.

Her teens and early twenties had been spent in the Trinities, an anti-PSP gang operating out of

the Mucklands Wood estate in Peterborough during the years when the People's Socialism Party

controlled the country, a long dark decade of near-Maoist dictatorship just after the Greenhouse

Effect ran riot.

She had joined up the day after a squad of PSP Card Carriers ransacked her parents' hotel,

stripping out the fittings, stealing the booze. Her father had been pistol whipped, a beating

which left him partially paralyzed down his right side. Her mother had been gang-raped, a trauma

she never recovered from. They were middle-aged middle-class suburbanite innocents, well-to-dos

who couldn't believe what was happening to their green and pleasant England, and didn't know how

to stop it.

The only reason Suzi had been there when it happened was because the PSP had shut down Welbeck

College, the British Army's officer cadet boarding school. A military career was all she had

wanted for as long as she could remember.

THE NANO FLOWER

3

An ambition subtly reinforced by her slightly disreputable maternal grandfather who spun enticing

stories of glory and honour back in the days when he'd served in the Falkiands and the Gulf.

Gaining one of the fiercely contested places at Welbeck, despite her physical stature, had been

the zenith of her young life.

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She had wanted to fight that afternoon when the Party militia came, young struts with their red

armbands and bright new cards that had President Armstrong's signature bold along the bottom to

say whatever they did was official. Fresh from her four terms of unarmed combat classes and rifle

shooting and square bashing she considered herself invincible. But her father, bigger and

stronger, had forced her into a storeroom and locked her in. Suzi hammered on the door in rage and

humiliation until sounds of the looting penetrated, the crash of breaking glass merging with

anguished screams. Then she shrank into a corner, hugging herself in the dark, and praying nobody

smashed down the door to find her.

The police discovered her the next morning, all cried out. As she saw the wreckage that was once

her home and her parents, rage turned to demonic hatred. She could have prevented it, she knew. if

she'd just been given the chance, been given the weapons hardware to complement her determination

and amplify her size.

The Trinities were led by an ex-British Army sergeant, Teddy La Croix, called Father by the kids

under his command. He put her to work as a runner.

Peterborough in those days had a raw frontier-town edge to it. Over fifty thousand people had

descended on the city, one step ahead of the rising sea that was slowly devouring the Fens, and

more were on the way. The polar melt and thermally expanded oceans eventually sent the muddy water

to lap at the city's eastern suburbs, turning the lush Nene valley into an estuary. This on top of

an indigenous population still struggling to adapt to the year-round heat, the imminent collapse

of public gas, electricity, and water grids, food rationing, and austerity economics.

Suzi flittered about the congested streets, soaking up the buzz of grim determination everyone

seemed to possess. She

PETER F. HAMILTON

4

watched the old temperate vegetation die in the steambath atmosphere exhaled by the Fens quagmire,

only to be replaced by the newer more vigorous tropical plants with their exotic blooms. She

walked entranced along the rows of stalls which sprang up along each road as the traffic faded

away, stealing often, eating well, and fighting with the barrow boys.

Nobody noticed her, one more kid running wild in a city teeming with thousands of her kind. She

thrived in her environment, but all the while she moved with purpose, keeping tabs on Party

members, watching who went in and out of the town hall, acting as a sentry for raids on Party

offices. At nights she would be there in the riots organized by the Trinities, an incongruously

small skinny figure compared to the rest of her platoon, which aimed for muscle bulk and favoured

combat fatigues and leathers.

She learned tradecraft from Greg Mandel, another cx-Army man working with Father to overthrow PSP

oppression; how to make Molotovs that didn't go out when they were thrown, how a platoon should

deploy to jump a police snatch squad, what to use against assault dogs, the correct way to break

riot shields, a long interesting list of tactics and weapons no one had ever mentioned at Welbeck.

She killed her first man at sixteen; a People's Constable who was lured out of a warm pub on to a

dark building site by a halter top, a mini skirt, and a smile that promised. The rest of her

platoon were waiting for him with clubs and a Smith and Wesson. They were all blooded that night.

Suzi threw up afterwards, with Greg holding her until the shudders subsided.

'You can go home now,' he said. 'You've had your revenge.'

But she glanced at the broken body, and answered, 'No, this is just the hand, not the head.

They've all got to go, or what we're doing will be pointless.'

Greg had looked terribly.sad, but then he always did when anyone talked about vengeance, or let

their grief show. It wasn't until years later she found out why he always seemed to be hurt so

much by other people's pain.

The next morning she cut her hair, spiked it, and dyed it

THE NANO FLOWER 5

purple. Standard procedure; a lot of people in the pub would have given her description to the

Constables.

The Trinities taught her discipline and self-confidence, as well as a hell of a lot about weapons,

filling in all the technical gaps Welbeck had left. She was young enough to be good at it, and

smart enough to use her anger as inspiration rather than let it rule her.

There were gangs like the Trinities in every town in the country, battling to overthrow the PSP.

Suzi considered herself to be part of a crusade, making everything she did right.

Then they won. President Armstrong was killed, the PSP was routed, the Second Restoration returned

the royal family to the throne, the first elections gave the New Conservatives a huge majority,

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and everything suddenly became complicated. The PSP relics, their Constables and apparatchiks,

banded together as the Blackshirts, went underground, and turned to ineffectual civil disobedience

that petered out after a few years. The Trinities fought them, naturally. But it wasn't

appreciated any more. They were too crude, too visible; people were looking to cut free from the

past.

It ended as it had run on for ten years~ in bloodshed. A two-day firefight between the Trinities

and the Blackshirts that left Mucklands Wood and Walton in ruins. The government had to call out

the army to put a halt to it.

Suzi survived to be picked up by the army. Her barrister was the best available, paid for by

sympathizers of the antiPSP cause, of which there were plenty. She got a twenty-five-year

sentence, because the New Conservative government wanted to demonstrate it was showing no

favouritism. On appeal, held quietly and unpublicized by a co-operative press, it was reduced to

five. She served eighteen months, fifteen in an open prison that allowed weekend leave.

The closed universe of the sewer was familiar enough now for any abnormality to register; Suzi had

almost forgotten the limp reality which lay outside. And there was definitely something else in

the pipe with her. A cool pulse of

6

PETER F. HAMILTON

excitement slipped along the optical fibre as the cockroach hurried onwards.

In front of her the bloated hump which was blocking a quarter of the pipe glowed a rich crimson,

flecked by weaker claret smears. It was a rat, gnawing at some fetid titbit clasped between its

forepaws. Huge glass-smooth hemispherical eyes turned to look at Suzi, the nose twitched.

She remembered all those fantasy quest novels she used to read as a child, princess sorcerers and

fell beasties. Grinning wryly, none of them had ever gone up against dragon-sized rodents.

Initiate Defence Mode.

A pair of flexible antennae deployed on either side of the cockroach's head, swinging forward,

long black rods curved like callipers. The rat hadn't moved, staring seemingly in surprise at the

intruder in its domain. Suzi halted twenty centimetres away, antennae quivering at the ready.

It came at her with a fast fluid grace, mouth widening to reveal serrated tombstone teeth, forepaw

reaching out to pin her down, black talons extended. The descending paw brushed against the

cockroach's erect antenna tips. Suzi's vision was wiped out in an explosion of sparkling white

light as the electroplaque cells below the cockroach's carapace discharged through the antennae.

'When the purple mist cleared she could just see the rat's beefy hindquarters pumping furiously,

tail held high, whipping from side to side.

A quick systems check showed she had enough charge left in the electroplaque cells to fend off two

more assaults. Guidance graphics told her there was another twelve metres to go before she reached

the junction she wanted.

Suzi moved forwards. This underworld was no different to her own, she thought, except it was more

honest. Down here you either ate or got eaten, and everything knew where it stood in relation to

everything else, the knowledge sequenced into its DNA. In her world nothing was so simple,

everybody wore a chameleon coat these days, status unknown.

THE NANO FLOWER

After prison she had picked up work on the hardline side of tekmerc deals, the combat missions

which were launched when covert penetrations and clandestine data snatches had failed.

At first it had been as part of a team, then as word got around about her competence and

reliability she commanded her own. She began to add dark specialists to her catalogue

- hotrods, 'ware spivs, pilots, Frankenstein surgeons, sac psychics. Companies with problems

sought her out to organize the whole deal for them. She was the interface between corporate

legitimacy and the misbegotten, the cut-off point.

She had picked up the Morrell deal four months ago. It was straightforward enough, a simple data

snatch. Morrell was a small but ambitious microgee equipment company in Newcastle, a subcontractor

supplying components to the giant kombinates for their space operations.

Space was in vogue now, the new boom industry; ever since the Event Horizon corporation had

captured a nickel-iron asteroid and manoeuvred it into orbit forty-five thousand kilometres above

the Earth.

Because Event Horizon was registered in England, the rock came under the jurisdiction of the

English parliament, who named it New London and established a Crown Colony in the hollowed-out

core. New London ushered in an era of ultra-cheap raw materials, which were eagerly consumed by

the necklace of microgee factories in low orbit above the equator, doubling their profitability

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virtually overnight. Mining chunks of rock from New London was easy enough, but refining metals

and minerals out of the ore in a freefall environment presented difficulties, that was where the

real money lay.

It was a problem which had led Suzi to a second-floor bistro in Peterborough's New Eastheld

district on a muggy day in January. She was thankful for the bistro's smokedglass windows and air

conditioning; the building opposite was buffed white stone, inlaid by balconies with mock-

Victorian ironwork. It gleamed like burnished silver from the low sun. The street below was a flux

of people, men in spruce shirts and shorts, salon-groomed women in light dresses, most of

PETER F. NAMILTON

8

them with wide-brimmed hats, all of them with sunglasses. Silent cars glided down the rain-slicked

road, bumper to bumper Mercs, Jags, and Rollers. New Eastfleld had been ascendant even in the PSP

years, but since Event Horizon cracked giga-conductor technology and reindusmalization went into

overdrive the district had become a beacon for the smart money and the brittle, propitious

lifestyle which went with it.

'Morrell have developed a cold-fusion solution to ionic streaming,' said the man sitting opposite

her. He was in his late thirties, with a gym-installed muscle-tone to compliment his salon

manicure. An image as tabloid as his power-player attitude. The name he gave her was Taylor

Faulkner.

Suzi's tame hotrod, Maurice Picklyn, had run a tracer on him for her, and that actually was his

name. Working for Johal HF in their orbital refinery division, executive rather than technical.

'Cold fusion?' Suzi asked.

'Pie in the sky,' Faulkner sighed. 'Too good to be true. But somehow they've done it, boosted

efficiency and lowered power consumption at the same time. Old story; small companies have to

innovate, they don't have the research budget that shaves off a percentage point each year.'

She sipped at her orange juice. 'And you want to know what they've got?'

'Yes. They've finished the data simulation, now they're starting to assemble a prototype. Once

that's been demonstrated, they'll be given access to kombinate-level credit facilities by the

banks and finance houses. They've already asked for proposals from several broker cartels; which

is how we found out what they're working on.'

'Humm.' Suzi used her processor implant to review the data profile Maurice Picklyn had assembled

on Johai HF; a fifth of their cashflow came from refining New London's rock. 'What's my budget?'

'Four hundred K, New Sterling.'

'No, seven hundred. The licence alone would cost you that, even if Morrell grant you one, and then

you'd be paying them royalties straight out of your profits.'

THE NANO FLOWER

'Very well.'

She took a week to review Morrell's security layout. The company had taken a commercial unit on a

landfill site that used to be one of the Tyne's shipyards. Its research labs and prototype

assembly shop were physically isolated, a cuboid composite building sitting at the centre of a

quadrangle formed by offices and cybernetics halls. And there was a lot of weapons hardware in the

gap. The only way in to the research section was through the outer structure, then over a small

bridge, clearing five security checks on the way. A team of psychic nulls working in relay

prevented any espersense intrusion. The research division mainframe wasn't plugged in to any

datanet, so no hotrod could burn in. She had to admit it was a good set up. The only way to breach

it physically would be an airborne assault. That lacked both finesse and an acceptable probability

of success.

She started to review personnel, which led to the discovery of the company's blind spot. Because

it was impossible to physically carry data out of the research building, Morrell security only

vetted the workers once a year, a full data and espersense scan.

Maurice Picklyn found her three possibles from the ionic streaming project's research team, and

she selected Chris Brimley, a programmer specializing in simulating vacuum exposure stresses:

unmarried, twenty-nine, unadventurous, a Round Tabler whose main interest was fishing. He lived by

himself in Jesmond, renting a flat in a converted terrace house. A perfect pawn.

Suzi did a deal with Josh Laren, a local small-time hood who owned a nightclub, L'Amici, which had

a gambling licence. She set up Col Charnwood, a native Geordie and one of her regular team, with a

stash of narcotics any pusher would envy. Paid Jools the Tool to stitch together the cockroach.

Then to complete the operation, she called Amanda Dunkley up to Newcastle. Amanda Dunkley had a

body specifically rebuilt for sin, with a small rechargeable sac at the base of her brain which

fed themed neurohormones into her synaptic clefts. The psychic trait which the neurohormones

stimulated was a very weak ESP, giving her an

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10

uncanny degree of empathy. Maurice Picklyn manufactured a fresh identity for her, and Suzi got her

a secretarial job at the city council building.

Three days after Chris Brimley bumped into Amanda in his local pub, his old girlfriend had been

dumped. Two days after that Amanda had moved into his flat. In the house on the other side of the

street, which Suzi had leased as a command post, she and the rest of her team settled down in

front of the flatscreens and enjoyed themselves watching the blue and grey photon-amp images of

Chris Brimley's bedroom. It took Amanda a week and a half to corrupt his body with her peerless

sexual talent. After long nights during which his whole body seemed to be singing hosannas he told

her he wanted them to be together for ever, to get married, to live happily in a picturesque

cottage in a rural village, for her to have ten babies with him. Corrupting his mind took a little

longer.

Chris Brimley slowly came to the realization that his life didn't offer much in the way of

interest to his newfound soul mate. They began to venture out at the weekends, then it was two or

three nights a week. They discovered L'Aznici, which Amanda loved, which made him happy. Col

Charnwood introduced himself, so delighted to be their friend he gave them a gift. Nibbana, one of

the most expensive designer drugs on the market, though Chris Brimley didn't know that.

He tried a few chips on the table, egged on by an excited Amanda. It was fun. The manager was

surprisingly relaxed about credit.

After two months Chris Brimley had a nibbana habit that needed three regular scores a day to

satisfy, and a fifty-thousand-pound New Sterling debt with L'Amici. They couldn't afford to go out

any more, and now Amanda cried a lot in the evening, showering him with concern. Chris Brimley had

actually slapped her once when she found him searching her bag for money.

Josh Laren's office was a dry dusty room above L'Amici, the only furniture his teak desk, three

wooden chairs, and an antique metal filing cabinet. Ten cases of malt whisky, smuggled over the

Scottish border, were stacked against one wall.

THE NANO FLOWER

Col Charnwood spent an hour going over the room with a sensor pad, sweeping for bugs. It wasn't

that Suzi mistrusted Josh Laren; in his position she would have wired it up.

The trembling Chris Brimley who walked into that office was unrecognizable as the clean-cut lad of

two months previously. Suzi even felt a stab of guilt at his condition.

'I thought-' Chris Brimley began in confusion.

'Sit,' Suzi told him.

Chris Brimley lowered himself into the seat on the other side of the desk from her.

'You came here to discuss your debt, right?' she asked.

'Yes. But with Josh.'

'Shut the fuck up. For a welsh this size Josh has come to me.'

'Who-'

Suzi split her lip in a winter grin. 'You really wanna know?'

'No,' he whispered.

'Good, maybe you're beginning to realize how deep you're in, boy. Let me lay it out for you, we're

gonna get that money back, every penny. My people had a lot of practice at that, never failed yet.

Why we get called in. TWo ways, hard and soft. Hard: first we clean you out, flat, furniture,

bank, the same with that little slut you hang out with, then we start working down your family

tree. We see that Morrell gets to know, they fire you, you're instant unemployable.'

'Oh, Jesus.' Chris Brimley covered his face with his hands, rocking back and forth in the chair.

'Think maybe I'd better tell you the soft before you piss yourself,' Suzi said.

Suzi halted the cockroach below a toilet downpipe. Her implant's time function told her it was

eleven thirty-eight. Ninety seconds behind schedule, not bad at all.

Climbing up the downpipe was slow going. She had to concentrate hard, picking ridges for a secure

foothold. Two metres. There was a rim where the concrete pipe slotted into a stainless-steel one.

She stood the cockroach on its back legs, pressing it against

PETER F. HAMILTON

12

the smooth vertical wall of stainless steel. Her perspective made it seem at least a kilometre

high. Three snail-skirt buds on the cockroach's underbelly flared out and stuck to the silvery

metal. It began to slide up the featureless cliff face.

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'Pull the ionic streaming data from Morrell's research mainframe and squirt it into your cybofax,'

Suzi told an aghast Chris Brimley.

'What? I can't do that!'

'Why? Codes too tough?'

'No. You don't understand. I can't take a cybofax into the research block. Hell, we're not even

allowed to wear our own clothes inside; security makes us change into company overalls before we

enter. We're scanned in and out.'

'Yeah, Morrell security's got a real fetish about isolation. But you've got the use of a cybofax

in the research building, aintcha?'

'A company one,' Chris Brimley answered.

'Good. And you can pull the data from the terminals no sweat?' Sun persisted.

'Yes, my access codes are grade three. My work is applicable to every component of the refiner.

Loading it into a cybofax would be unusual, but nobody would question it. But I can't bring it

out.'

'Not asking you to. Point is, you can move that data around anywhere you like within the research

building.'

Without the directional graphics providing constant guidance updates, Suzi would never have made

it round the U-bend. The water confused the cockroach's infrared vision, and there were too many

curves.

It was eleven forty when the cockroach rose out of the water, clinging to the side of the

stainless-steel toilet bowl. She wondered what it must look like to Chris Brimley, a demon insect

sliding up silently to bite his arse.

The infrared cut out, leaving her at the bottom of a giant silver crater; a uniform sky of pink-

white biolum light shone

THE NANO FLOWER

overhead. She saw something moving above her, dark and oblong, expanding rapidly. Brimley's

cybofax. There was a flash of red laser light way down on the borderline of visibility. An

answering pulse from the Frankenstein cockroach.

Loading Data, her implant reported; its memory clusters began to fill up.

Suzi knew Chris Brimley was saying something, the cockroach's pressure-sensitive cells were

picking up a pattern of rapid air compression. But there was no way of telling what the words

were, not without proper discrimination programs. She just hoped there was no one in the next

cubicle.

Loading Complete.

She slackened the snail skirts' grip on the stainless steel. There was a blurred swirl of silver

and pink-white streaks as the cockroach fell back down to the bottom of the bowl. Chris Brimley

pressed the flush, and the world vibrated into black.

Initiate Internecine Procedure.

The electroplaque cells discharged straight into the body of the Frankenstein cockroach, roasting

it in a millisecond.

Disengage Optical Lead.

Suzi's coccyx interface sealed. The end of the optical fibre dropped into her toilet bowl. She

pressed the chrome handle for a full flush, then tugged her panties and skirt back up.

The elapsed time was seven minutes, her bioware implant told her as she left the toilets. Outside

she was Karren Naughton again, one of eight hopeful candidates for a job on Morrell's main

reception desk.

She rejoined the other girls sitting in the personnel department waiting-room. It was in the outer

ring of buildings, a low-security area where visitors came and went all day.

It was still the tea break. Earlier on the candidates had been given assessment tests, now it was

the separate interviews. Suzi wanted to skip them, plead a queasy stomach and leg it out on to the

street. The stolen data seemed to gleam like a sun-lanced diamond in her brain. Everyone would be

able to see it. She held her place, discipline was something Father had drilled into her all those

years ago. Unless you are about to be blown, don't ever break cover. Chris Brimley didn't know it

was her on the other end of the optical fibre,

PETER F. HAMILTON

14

didn't know where the Frankenstein had been infiltrated into the sewer system.

Karren Naughton was third to be called. She sat in a glass-walled office being sincere to a woman

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whose big lapel badge said her name was Joanna.

Twenty minutes later, after being told she was first-rate material Suzi walked out of the sliding

glass doors and into the wall of hwnidity rolling off the Tyne.

Col Charnwood picked her up, driving a navy-blue low-slung Lada Sokol with one-way glass.

'Well, pet?' he asked after the gull-wing door hinged down.

Suzi allowed herself a smile, breath coming out of her in a rush. 'In the bag.'

'All right." Col Charnwood flicked the throttle and accelerated into the thick stream of traffic

along the base of the river's embankment. The huge slope was covered by the thick heart-shaped

leaves of delicosa plants that had twined around the rocks.

'I'll squirt it down to Maurice, let him give it a once-over first,' Suzi said.

'Ya think he'll know if it's kosher?'

'Maybe not, but he'll know if it's connected with ionic streaming. I'm no 'ware genius. Brimley

could've palmed us off with the data construct of a steam engine for all I know.'

There was a serpent of red tail-lights growing in front. Col Charnwood swore at them as he slowed.

The road was contraflowed ahead, long rows of cones stretched across the thermo-hardened cellulose

surface. Suzi could see heavy yellow-painted contractors' machinery moving slowly along the

embankment. They were stripping the shell of rock and vegetation from the mound, exposing the dark

blue-grey coal slag underneath.

'Canna leave anything alone,' Col Charnwood muttered.

Suzi didn't say anything. She knew Col had been one of the thousands who had built the embankment

over a quarter of a century ago. A third of Newcastle's population had signed on with the city

council's labour crews as the West Antarctic ice-sheet went into slushdown, and most of the rest

had contributed at some time or another. Men, women, and

THE NANO FLOWER

15

children using JCBs, wheelbarrows, spades, picks, sacks, anything they could lay their hands on to

haul the slag out of the barges, dumping it on the fifteen-metre-high mounds along the Tyne's

banks. They rolled the rocks into place on top of the slag with ropes and pulleys, a protective

crust against wave erosion. Working round the clock for a solid nine months to save their city

from the rising sea level.

'Never been anything like it,' Col Charnwood had told Suzi and the team late one night when they

had tired of Ainanda's gymnastic antics. 'Like something out of the Third World, it was. Bloody

thousands of us, there were. Swarming like flies over the muck. Didna matter who you were, not

then. We all worked ten-hour shifts. The money was the same as you'd get paid by the benefit

office for being on the dole. But it was our city we were protecting. That meant something in them

days, ya know?'

Now the embankment was being refurbished, centimetre by centimetre. Tracked machinery that

crunched up the rock, heated it, spun it into fibres, then laid it down over the slag mounds which

had been re-profiled for improved hydrodynamic efficiency, a glassy lava flow that would hold back

the 'T~ne for a century.

'Cutting our heart out of it,' Col said sadly.

Suzi looked closely at the machinery as they passed, seeing the small Event Horizon logo on each

of the lumbering rock smelters, a blue concave triangle sliced with a jet-black flying V.

'We unplugging from the deal, pet?' Col asked.

Suzi visualized Chris Brimley, shorn of all dignity, helpless eyes pleading with her. A victim of

deliberately applied psychological violence. 'Not straight away, no. I want Ainanda to put Brimley

back together again first. The money from this will pay his debts to L'Amici. She can get him to

break his habit. After that I'll pull her out. He'll have a chance at life again.'

Col shot her an uncertain glance.

'Where's your sense of style, Col?' she asked, smiling. 'We make a soft exit. This way Morrell

doesn't find out for at least another five months. Maybe never. People have a way of

PETER F. HAMILTON

16

forgetting the worst, glossing over the nightmares. Morrell's security psychics might not spot his

guilt next time they vet him. Be nice to think.'

'Well, you're paying, pet.'

'Yeah, I'm paying.' An expensive treaunent to wipe the memory of that broken man with the bowed

head in Josh Laren's dim echoing office. Buying off her own guilt.

This time it was a pub in Longthorpe, a long wood-panelled, glass-fronted room originally built to

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serve the Thorpe Wood golf-course as a clubhouse. Now it looked out over the Ferry Meadows estuary

where the golf-course used to be. Taylor Faulkner had taken a window table, staring across the

grey-chocolate mud-flats which the outgoing tide had uncovered. He was dressed in an expensive

white tropical-weave suit, toying with a tall half-pint glass of lager.

Suzi slid on to the bench opposite him. The barman had glanced at her when she came in, drawn by

her size, about to object to a schoolgirl waltzing in, then he met her gaze.

'We hadn't heard,' Taylor Faulkner said. 'It's been very quiet in Newcastle.'

'You want combat, find yourself a general.'

'No offence.'

'For seven hundred K, offend away.'

Taylor Faulkner looked pained. He held up a platinum Zurich card, and showed it to the Amex which

Suzi produced, using his thumb to authorize the transfer. She watched the Amex's grey digits rise,

and smiled tightly.

'May I see what I've bought?' he asked.

'Sure.' She scaled a palm-sized cybofax wafer across the table to him. 'The code is: Goldpan. No

hyphen. Anything else will crash wipe, OK?'

'Yes.' He pocketed the cybofax.

'Nice knowing you, Mr Faulkner.'

He turned to the window and the gulls scratching away at the mud.

Suzi rose and made for the door. The sight of the figure in black cotton Levi's standing at the

bar drinking German

THE NANO FLOWER

beer from a bottle made her stop. Leol Reiger, another tekmerc commander. They'd worked together

on a couple of deals, hadn't got on. Not at all. Leol fancied himself as very big time. He was

into running spoilers on kombinates, burning Japanese banks. Rumour said he'd even snatched data

from Event Horizon. Suzi knew that wasn't true; he was still alive. And he hadn't been there when

she came in.

She sat on a stool next to him, feet half a metre off the floor, putting their heads at almost the

same level. Ordinarily she didn't mind having to look up at people. But not Leol Reiger.

'Slumming, Leol?'

Leol Reiger lowered his bottle, amber eyes set in a pale face stared at her. He had designer

stubble and a receding hairline, oiled and slicked back. 'Never learn, do you, Suzi. Four months

for a soft penetration, that's four months' worth of exposure risk.'

'Bollocks. What the luck do you know about it?' she asked, feeling a kick of dismay. How the hell

did Leol Rieger know about her deal with Johal HF? He would never work for a company like Morrell,

they were too small, too insignificant.

'Know you checked the wrong people. You were looking down, Suzi. Then, down is where you come

from. Once a Trinity~ always a Trinity. Nothing more. You don't have what it takes to make

tekmerc, you never did.'

'Lifted my data, and the target doesn't even know it's gone. Not like you. Your deals, all that's

left is smoking craters in the ground and bodies. Your catalogue's getting pretty thin these days,

Leol, right? Word's around, not so many troops want in on your deals.'

'That so?' Leol Reiger gestured with the beer bottle.

Two men were sitting with Taylor Faulkner. Both of them hardline troops, Suzi could tell.

Leol Reiger took another sip. 'You should've looked up, Sun. A real tekmerc would've looked up. A

real tekmerc would've seen how much that ionic streaming trick is really worth to Johal HF.'

She looked at Taylor Faulkner again, seeing how relaxed he was, smiling wanjy out of the window.

With sick certainty

PETER F. HAMILTON

18

she knew she'd been switchbacked, the knowledge was like bile.

'You were real careful looking down,' Leol Reiger was saying. 'Went through all Morrell's

personnel. But you should've been looking up, maybe got your hotrod to crack a few Johal HF files

open. Done that, you'd have found our Faulkner here. Not a perfect specimen of humanity, our

Faulkner.' Leol Reiger finished his bottle, putting it on the bar.

Sun had to look up at him.

'Five million New Sterling, Suzi. That's what me and my partner are going to get from Johal HF

this afternoon when we deliver the ionic streaming data. I paid you out of petty cash.' He turned

to the barman. 'Get the little lady a drink, whatever she wants. My treat.'

She watched Leol Reiger walk over to Taylor Faulkner, clap him on the shoulder. The two of them

laughed. Fury and helplessness rooted her to the bar stool. That shit Leol Reiger had been right,

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that was the real source of the pain, not the money. She should've checked, should've ripped

Taylor Faulkner a-fucking-part, built a proper profile, not just a poxy indent check

'What'll it be?' the barman asked.

Suzi picked up Leol Reiger's empty beer bottle and hurled it at the row of optics.

CHAPTER TWO

M

onaco at dusk was bathed in thick copper-red light as the dome diffused the last rays of the sun

into a homogeneous glow, banishing shadows. Buildings seemed to shine of their own accord.

Charlotte Fielder admired the town's tasteful stone-fronted buildings through the window of the

chauffeured Aston Martin. Monaco's architecture was a counterfeit of the late nineteenth century,

a blend of French and Spanish; hacienda mansions, apartment blocks with elegant white façades,

black railings, red clay tiles, verandas festooned with scarlet-flowering geraniums growing out of

pots.

It was the kind of flawless recreation which only truly idle money could achieve. Hardly any of

the town was more than twenty years old, so little had survived the razing, when the citizens of

Nice had marched on the principality in search of food. Charlotte had been three years old when it

happened. But she'd seen AV recordings of the aftermath at school; they reminded her of bombed-out

towns from some war zone. Dunes of rubble, where a few walls and archways had endured the maddened

assault to jut skywards like pagan altars, soot-blackened bricks, burnt spikes of wood, wisps of

smoke twisting lazily. The heat-expanded Mediterranean sea had risen to swirl around that part of

the town built on landfill sites, its filth-curdled water pushing a grisly tideline of bodies and

seaweed along the crumpled streets. Even the colours had leached out of the images, fixing the

scene in her mmd as grainy black and white desolation.

The destruction had been spectacular even by the standards of a Europe which had almost collapsed

into anarchy in those first few years of climatical tumult engendered by the Warming.

Charlotte retained only vague recollections of her early chjl~j}~oo~ when the world was plunged

into chaos, dream sequences of places and faces, a seemingly endless procession

PETER F. HAMILTON

20

of days when it was too hot and there was never enough to eat. Half of her waking hours had been

spent roaming London's wide bicycle-clogged streets, scavenging food from markets and street

stalls. She had lived with her aunt Mavis, a woman in her late forties, with a round haunted face,

always wearing floral-print dresses and pink slippers. Aunt Mavis never had a job; by design a

lifetime dole dependant, she only took Charlotte in for the extra food allocation. Charlotte never

saw any of it; her ration cards were traded with the spivs for bootleg gin, which Aunt Mavis would

sit and drink in front of the big flatscrecn on the lounge wall, curtains perpetually drawn.

The woman had exchanged reality for Globecast's soaps, where formatted plots always rewarded a

hard life with the glitter trappings of materialism and golden sunsets, love and caring. The

channels offered her a glimpse of salvation from the Warming and the PSP, a world twisted out of

recognition, becoming an electronic religion-substitute. Worshipped ceaselessly.

One evening, when she was seven, Charlotte had returned home to find her aunt pressed against the

flatscreen, knocking on it tearfully and pleading with the handsome smiling characters to let her

in. She had been put in an orphanage not long after. The hunger ended then, replaced by work in

the kitchens, peeling vegetables, washing crockery.

That was when her life really began, the normality of school and other children. The only link

with her past was a solid thread of determination never to be hungry again. Then Dmitri Baronski

had come into her world when she was fifteen, and he made his offer, opening a door into a semi-

magical realm where nobody ever lacked for anything.

The Aston Martin reached Monaco's perimeter road, where the seamless translucent shell of the dome

rose out of the concrete sea wall, curving gradually overhead, massive enough to hold up the sky.

She could see a couple of jetties on the outside, sleek white-painted yachts bobbing gently at

their moorings. Large circular tidal-turbine lagoons of gene-tailored coral mottled the quiet sea

all the way out to the

THE NANO FLOWER

21

darkening horizon. Monaco still refused to plug into France's electrical grid, remaining

resolutely independent.

On the other side of the road were dignified hotels with black-glass lobby doors and long

balconies. She watched them go past, feeling a vague sense of amusement that a town which had so

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meticulously recreated the ambience of long-lost imperialistic elegance in its fabric and culture

should seek shelter by huddling under a hyper-modern structure like the dome. It was a failing of

the set she moved through, she thought, that they never strived for anything new The talent and

resources deployed here could just as easily have been used to create something bold and

innovative. Instead, they turned automatically to the past, drowning themselves in the safety of

their genteel heritage.

Yet, for her, the replication was less than perfect. She recognized the quality of crispness in

the lines of the buildings, a cold efficiency in the determinedly handsome layout which betrayed

the mentality of its originators. Monaco was a compact bundle of wealth, its borders jealously

guarded. It had become an enclave, a fortified castle of the rich, complete with drawbridge.

Even with her whiter than white passport and prepaid hotel reservation the Immigration officials

had taken their time before allowing her in. Permanent residency within the principality was

strictly limited; you had to be proposed by three residents and demonstrate assets in excess of

four million Eurofrancs before you could even register for consideration.

So Charlotte stood in the airport arrivals lounge in a queue of impatient, nervous people watching

enviously as resident card holders zipped through their channel without any fuss. She had been

afraid the hard-nosed woman behind the customs desk would open the flower box in her flight bag,

ask questions about it. But the customs and immigration setup seemed more like a ritual than

anything else. The wait, the questions, underlining that Monaco was different, not Some common

tourist resort or gambling state.

It was while she was standing there that she saw the man for the second time that day. He was in

the same queue, ten

PETER F. HAMILTON

22

places behind her. There was something about him, the way his cool eyes were never looking at her

when she turned round, his phlegmatic indifference to queueing, which set him slightly apart,

creepy almost. At any other time she would have guessed him to be a hardline bodyguard for some

Monaco plutocrat, coming home after a holiday. But she had seen him earlier in the day at the Cape

Town spaceport, mingling among the crowd of friends and relatives that had greeted the other

passengers on her spaceplane flight. If she had seen him in the departure lounge, waiting for the

connecting flight to Monaco, then it would only be natural for him to be standing in the queue

behind her. But what had he been doing in the crowd waiting for the spaceplane?

Finally, her passport had been cleared, her invitation and hotel reservation validated by the

Immigration officer, a matronly woman in a stiff blue uniform. Charlotte obediently thumbprinted

the declaration on the officer's terminal, confirming that she had read and would abide by the

principality's laws. She received her temporary visa from the unsmiling woman. Their eyes had met

for a second, and Charlotte read the uniquely female contempt for the thousandth time. She had

worn a scarlet Ashmi jumpsuit for her flight back to Earth, tucked into black leather cowboy

boots, gold Arnstrad cybofax wafer clipped into her top pocket, Ferranti sunglasses. About as

expensively casual as you could get; she en~oyed the look in the mirror, a designer test-pilot.

Then the Immigration bitch went and smashed her mood.

It was an appropriate entrance to Monaco, she thought later; scorn and suspicion dogging her

steps.

The El Harhari hotel wasn't much different to the others ringing the inside of the dome. A little

larger, perhaps. Its colonnaded frontage a pearl-white marble that glowed pink in the

directionless sunset. The Aston Martin swept smoothly up a looped drive lined by tall, bushy-

.topped palm trees. There was a stream of cars ahead of it, disgorging passengers outside the

hotel's main entrance.

The El Harhari was hosting the annual Newfields ball, a charity that sponsored educational courses

for underprivileged children throughout l3urope. There was nothing

THE NANO FLOWER

23

remarkable about the charity, or the ball. At least haifa dozen similar fund-raising events were

held in Monaco every night. But Newfields rose far above the ordinary by having Julia Evans on its

board of trustees, making its ball the social event of the month. Tickets were seven thousand

Eurofrancs apiece; touts charged twenty and cursed their scarcity.

Dmitri Baronski, Charlotte's sponsor, had managed to get her one, shaking his head in dismay when

she phoned him with the request. What on Earth do you want to go to that function for?' he'd

asked. His thin, lined face seemed more fragile than usual, white hair drooping limply. The valley

outside the Prezda arcology where he lived was visible through his apartment's picture window

behind him.

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Peter F. Hamilton - The Nano flower

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