Today was the day she would shut those whining know-nothings up for good. She wanted to sing and shout for the sheer joy of it. If nothing else, Patrick was in for the night of his life tonight.
Building One's vast car park was full to capacity with company minibuses and rank after rank of scooters—private cars were still a rarity. The Rolls drove past it, and out on to the concrete desert on the other side of the building. Three long temporary seating stands had been erected on the apron, covered from possible showers by red and white striped canvas awnings; they formed a broad avenue, leading away from Building One's huge multi-segment sliding doors. There were seven thousand invited guests waiting for her: Institute personnel and their families, premier-grade executives from most of the kombinates, channel celebrities, politicians, the Prime Minister, Prince Harry, even a few friends.
A press stand had been built at the far end of the avenue. Every place was taken, which gave her a final heart-flutter of nerves. She had secretly hoped the reporters would all still be up in Scotland after the momentous weekend.
Over a hundred cameras swivelled round as the Rolls drew up beside the VIP podium at the side of Building One's doors. Julia took a breath as the Institute's general manager scuttled forwards to open the door, then climbed out with a professional smile in place.
Julia was thankful that the usual January heat was tempered by scrappy clouds and a full breeze. If it was up to her there wouldn't even be a ceremony, but politics dictated otherwise, and the workforce needed some kind of recognition for their efforts. So she sat patiently while the bunting flapped noisily overhead and overdressed women kept a surreptitious hand on wide hats.
The Prime Minister, David Marchant, made the first speech; he was a dignified fifty-two-year-old in a blue-grey suit, the embodiment of calm competence. He praised Philip Evans and Julia for their foresight and optimism, then moved on to the workforce and complimented their professionalism, followed up by a couple of political points against the three main parliamentary opposition groups. Julia found herself envying his delivery; he avoided rhetoric and theatrical emphasis, the words just flowed. When it was her turn she accessed the speech and let her words glide straight from the node to her vocal cords, promising that her commitment to funding the space programme remained unchanged, giving a brief outline of projects that would be initiated over the next three years—the larger low Earth orbit dormitory station, expanded science programme, constructing a manned asteroid-survey craft—and managed to get in a joke about one of the engineering apprentices who had been strung up from a hoist by his mates a couple of months ago. She had been on an inspection tour of Building One at the time. It brought an appreciative cheer from the section of the stands where the workers and their families were sitting.
She handed over to Prince Harry for the actual roll out. He got more applause than she had. But then royalty always did. Since the Second Restoration people saw them as a continuity jump-lead to the past; they were a symbol of good times, when there was no Warming and no PSP. Now they were back, and life was picking up again.
Building One's doors slid open ponderously when Prince Harry pressed the button on the pedestal, somewhat predictably a band struck up the 'Zarathustra' theme, and the Clarke-class spaceplane emerged into the afternoon sunlight, escorted by a troupe of engineers in spotless white overalls. It had a swept delta planform with a fifty-metre span, sixty metres long; the metalloceramic hull was an all-over frost-white, except for the scarlet Dragonflight escutcheons on the fin. Three streamlined cylindrical nacelles blended seamlessly with the underbelly, air-scoop ramps closed; reaction-control thruster clusters on the nose and around the wedge-shaped clamshell doors at the rear were masked by protective covers, remove before flight tags dangling.
Julia clapped along with everyone else, impressed despite herself. The spaceplane was giga-conductor powered, the first of its kind, capable of lifting fifty tonnes into orbit without burning a single hydrocarbon molecule to injure the diseased atmosphere any further. Event Horizon already had orders for two hundred and twenty-seven, with options on another three hundred.
It was an icon to the new age which the giga-conductor was ushering in. The power-storage system was the ideal cheap, easy to manufacture Green solution to the energy problems of the post-Warming world, where hostility to petrol and coal was a tangible, occasionally fatal, aspect of life. And Event Horizon held the worldwide patent; every kombinate, company, and state factory on the planet paid her for the privilege of manufacturing it. The royalty revenue was already over two billion Eurofrancs a year, and it had only been available for twenty-three months. Every nation was racing to restructure their transport systems around it.
She had seen artists' impressions of the commercial hypersonic jets which kombinate aerospace divisions were developing, long arrow-finned needles that looked like scaled-up missiles, cutting the transit time between continents to less than an hour. Car companies, those which had survived, were eager to bring out new vehicles, retooling factories which had lain idle for nearly fifteen years. Scooter sales were already booming.
Julia walked down the VIP podium's steps, accompanying the Prime Minister and Prince Harry, lesser dignitaries trailing after them. She kept a beautifully straight face as she showed them round the spaceplane, pointing out features of interest; for once grateful for the steely discipline she had learnt at her Swiss boarding school. But it was hard—this is the air scoop, these are the wheels.
They posed under the flattened bullet nose as the press gathered for a video bite opportunity.
"I would just like to say how immensely proud I am to be here today," David Marchant told the gaggle of reporters and channel crews. A forest of arms thrust AV recorders towards him. "This spaceplane is a quite tremendous achievement by the Event Horizon company. A clear sign that our social market policies are the right ones to put England back on its feet again. And my New Conservative government wishes to demonstrate its firm commitment to the space industry by awarding Dragonflight the contract to dispose of eleven thousand tonnes of radioactive waste. This waste is made up of the cores and ancillary equipment of redundant nuclear reactors, currently being stored at great public expense around the country. And we hope that ultimately all the old reactors in this country will be broken up and disposed of in a similar fashion."
His aide stepped forward and handed him a sheaf of paper. He smiled and passed it to Julia. The contract's datawork had been completed a week ago, but they had both decided to give it a high profile. The roll out was a golden opportunity. With the elections due in two months it would be a valuable campaign issue for the New Conservatives, supporting industry without direct PSP-style subsidies, and showing a practical commitment to the environment.
"Thank you very much, Prime Minister," she said as the reporters shouted questions. "I'll just give you a brief clarification of what the contract entails. Firstly Event Horizon will be vitrifying the waste into ten-tonne blocks in our Sunderland plant. Dragonflight will then lift them into orbit, where they will be assembled into clusters of five and attached to a solid rocket booster which will launch them into the Sun. This way we shall be getting rid of the waste once and for all. Something I'm sure we all have cause to celebrate."
"How much is the contract worth, Julia?" someone shouted. Too loud to pretend she hadn't heard.