Her words triggered his own instinct, a feedback reinforcing misgivings. Another reason Gabriel lived alone, even he had to take her in small doses. What she saw, rambled about, there was no escape from knowing it was all true. Suppose she was to hint the approach of his own death?
There was a work crew laying the last stretch of paving slabs between the yard and the main building. A clump of bedraggled and confused daffodils were sprouting in one of the concrete troughs beside the entrance.
"Ready?" he asked just before they went in. "Shouldn't take long."
"You're telling me this?"
He grinned at the old reliably cranky Gabriel and waved the magic card at the door pillar.
Ten minutes later Greg was standing beside the front rank of seats in a deserted ten-tier press gallery, looking out into the institute's Merlin mission control. It was the final humbling, he was a small bewildered child permitted a privileged glimpse of adults playing some marvellously intricate game, understanding nothing.
On the other side of the tinted glass, concentric semicircles of consoles faced big wall-mounted flatscreens showing pictures of alien worlds. Young shirtsleeved controllers sat behind them, studying cubes full of undulating graphics, muttering instructions into throat mikes. The central display was a map of the inner solar system, a snarl of coloured vector lines showing the disposition of the Merlin fleet.
The scene should've been generating a flood of urgency and excitement. Greg hadn't forgotten the emotion of the Sanger crew out at Listoel. Instead he received an impression of tension, his espersense confirming the mass anxiety.
Nervous knots of the controllers were forming at random amid the gear consoles, talking in low, concerned tones, breaking up to reform with different members, human Brownian motion.
"Bit of a flap on at the moment, I'm afraid," said Martin Wallace. He was an Institute security officer who'd been summoned in a hurry by the authority vested in Greg's card. A stocky Afro-Caribbean in his late thirties, uncomfortable with Greg and Gabriel's appearance and what it implied. "Trouble in orbit. One of the Merlins has packed up for no apparent reason. The flight management teams are shitting bricks," he stopped and flinched. "Sorry, ma'am."
Gabriel bit back a smile.
Greg peered through the glass, recognising one of the figures in conference around the flight chief's desk. "How long before we can see Dr. Ranasfari?" he asked as he rapped his knuckles on the thick glass.
"Shouldn't be long." Wallace stood at attention, upset by Greg's breach of etiquette.
Greg rapped again, harder.
Irked faces turned to look. Greg beckoned to Sean Francis. The young executive started, then nodded and headed for the door to the press gallery, brushing off protests from the cluster of senior controllers he was in deep conversation with.
"This is as good a place as any," Greg said. "We'll do our interviews here. You see that we're not disturbed."
"Right," Wallace backed out, not exactly bowing, but coming close.
"Macho," Gabriel drawled. "Any orders for me, Captain?"
"Yeah, now you mention it, Major, start skipping through the giga-conductor team. All the possible interviews I could have with them, see which of them, if any, leaked the information."
Her good humour darkened. "Don't want much, do you?"
"I'm not asking you to stretch. Just find what you can. I'll be satisfied with anything, even a string of negatives."
"All right."
Sean Francis bustled in. Completely unchanged, still pleasant, firm, capable, eager. Annoying.
"What brings you here?" he asked after Greg introduced him to Gabriel.
"I'm investigating the hackers' assault on Event Horizon's data network."
"Really? You believe someone here is involved, yes?"
"Could be. What are you doing here? I thought you were bound for greater things. Julia told me you'd made the management board."
Greg's first-name terms with his boss didn't escape Sean Francis's notice; a sharp spike of interest rose in his mind at the mention of her name. Outwardly, his positive cheeriness expanded. "Ah, but this is greater things. Miss Evans appointed me as an independent management examiner after Oscot anchored in the Wash for decommissioning. I travel round company installations and report back directly to the trustees. This way I build up a working knowledge of Event Horizon second to none. Means I'm going to be on line for a top-rank management position in a couple of years, yes? Opportunities like that only happen once in a lifetime. I grasped it. And, well, here I am."
"Doing?"
"Troubleshooting. Miss Evans has given the Merlin project a high priority rating. I'm here to hustle them along."
"So what's the problem?" Greg asked. His gland began the neurohormone infusion. Sean's mind swam into a sharper focus.
"Merlin malfunction. Number eighteen, it's the first series-four model. Lot of high hopes riding on it. But the bitch is stalled in Earth orbit, three and a half thousand kilometres up. Absolutely dead in the water. Disaster time. We're talking reputations on the line here."
"Ranasfari's?" Gabriel asked sharply.
Francis cocked his head to one side to look at her. "Why do you ask?"
"Humour us, Sean," Greg said, and showed him his new Event Horizon card.
The sight didn't flummox him quite like it had Wallace, but his mind tightened appreciatively. "So? I'm impressed. This attack on the datanet is being taken seriously, yes?"
"The Trustees attach a certain importance to it," Greg said. "Now, what about Ranasfari?"
"Do you know what he's been working on?" Sean Francis asked cautiously.
"Room-temperature giga-conductor."
"Fine, OK, had to be sure. You understand? Can't just shout my mouth off, yes?"
"We understand," said Gabriel.
Francis caught the undertone of irony. "The series-four Merlin is fitted with giga-conductor power cells. Thing is, Event Horizon has put in a bid to fit the RAF's Matador AGM-404 exospheric interceptors with the same marque of cells. If it is the giga-conductor which has screwed up then we're really up the old creek, yes?"
"And is it?" Greg asked.
"Too soon to say. They're still running the fault analysis." Sean Francis's mind betrayed a lot of apprehension. Greg wrote it off as the pressure. Failure this soon after his promotion would send him tumbling right back down to the obscurity he'd clawed his way up from.
"Why do you need giga-conductor power cells on a nuclear-powered spaceprobe?" Greg asked.
"The isotopes only power the thrusters during the flight phase, lifting the Merlin out of Earth orbit and boosting it along its interception trajectory. Once it's matched velocities with its target asteroid they're jettisoned along with the shielding, which reduces the total mass to just over a tonne. Manoeuvring becomes a lot simpler and faster without all that surplus mass to shift around. The giga-conductor cells charge off the solar panels and provide power to the thrusters for the final approach phase, as well as moving the Merlin around the surface after rendezvous. Some of these Apollo Amor rocks are quite large, we need forty or fifty sample points to build up an accurate picture of the ore composition."
Greg could see the little group of flight controllers round the chief's desk craning their necks in his direction, impatience registering in their surface thoughts.
"You'd better be getting back," he told Sean Francis. "Glad to see you're getting ahead. One last thing: did you know Philip Evans is still alive?"
From an academic viewpoint Francis's reaction was a fascinating emotional evolution. His initial stare was pure disgust; from there Greg's espersense read him progressing through disbelief and into contempt, then back into worry, and finishing up plain confused.