"As it says quite clearly in your information kit, operating costs for the Clarke-class spaceplane work out at four hundred pounds New Sterling per tonne lifted into low Earth orbit. if you know anyone who can offer a cheaper price, I'm sure the Prime Minister would be interested to hear from them." She took a pace back and turned sharp right as soon as she finished speaking, gesturing to Prince Harry and David Marchant towards Building One. A posse of aides and management staff instinctively clustered round, isolating her. Nobody else got a chance to shout any more questions.
Access GeneralBusiness. She loaded a note to postpone the announcement about the new cyber factories for a couple of weeks. There were eighteen of them, due to be built under stage twelve of Event Horizon's expansion programme, ranging from a precision machinery shop to a large-scale composite structures plant, employing nearly thirty-five thousand people when they were complete.
Exit GeneralBusiness. It would never do for people to draw any unwarranted connections between the waste-disposal contract and the siting of all eighteen factories in marginal constituencies.
The VIP reception was held in Building One, a spacious rectangular lounge on the second floor. Chairs had been pushed back against one wall, leaving room for the caterers to set up their table opposite. The seafood buffet was proving popular with the guests. Waiters circulated with glasses of Moët champagne on silver trays. A loud purr of conversation was drowning out the pianist
Julia stood by the window wall sipping some of the champagne, watching the crowd of spectators traipsing round the spaceplane below. It was mainly family groups, parents leading eager children, stopping to take pictures under the nose. Five different channel news teams were recording their reporters using the spaceplane as a backdrop.
Patrick left the buffet table and came over. "You should eat something," he said around a mouthful of shrimp and lettuce.
"I didn't think you liked fat girls," she retorted.
"I don't." There was a gleam in his eye she knew well enough. "How long have we got to stay here?"
"Another hour, at least. Be patient. It could be rewarding."
"Could be?"
"Yah," she drawled.
"All right." He gave her a hungry look.
She grinned back. It would have been exciting to sneak off into one of the disused offices upstairs. But there were security cameras everywhere, and experience had taught her that Rachel would never let her get out of the lounge alone.
"I suppose I'd better do my eager hostess act," she said in resignation. Most of the people in the lounge were so much older than her, which meant she'd have to stick with small talk, or business. So boring. She had seen Katerina and Antonia and Laura milling about earlier, along with their boys. But they would all be chatting to the channel celebs. She didn't fancy that either; the silver-screen magic tarnished rapidly in real life, she found. Greg and Eleanor were over on the other side of the lounge, talking to Morgan Walshaw and Gabriel Thompson, the woman he lived with. Greg looked uncomfortable and serious, but then he hated having to wear a suit and tie. She started towards them, at least she could tease Greg.
"Miss Evans."
The urgency in the voice surprised her. It clashed with the day's mood. She turned.
It was Dr Ranasfari. Julia sighed inwardly, very careful not to show any disappointment. She couldn't even make small talk with Dr Ranasfari. The tall, wiry physicist was forty-five years old, neatly turned out, as always, in a light-grey suit, white shirt, and a pink tie that matched her own suit's colour. His dark face looked strained, brown eyes blinking incessantly, glossed back raven hair shone a spectral blue under the lounge's bright biolum panels.
Dr Ranasfari was another of those people Julia always felt she had to impress. Though she doubted many people could impress Ranasfari. He was the genius in charge of the research team which had produced the giga-conductor for Event Horizon. It had taken him ten years; but her grandfather had never doubted he could do it.
"The man's dedicated," Philip Evans had told her once. "Bloody boring, mind, Juliet, but dedicated. That's what makes him special. He'll spend his life on a project if needs be. We're lucky to have him."
After the giga-conductor was unveiled to the world, and the need for total security was abolished, she had built Ranasfari a laboratory complex in Cambridge, and gave him a budget of twenty million pounds New Sterling a year to spend on whatever projects he wanted. He was currently working on a direct thermocouple, a solid-state fibre which would convert thermal energy straight into electricity, eliminating any need for conventional turbines and generators. The potential applications for geothermal power extraction alone were colossal. If he asked for fifty million a year she would grant it.
"No drink, Cormac?" she asked lightly. He never actually objected to her using his first name, although she was always Miss Evans to him. "You really ought to have one glass at least, this is as much your day as it is mine."
His lips twisted nervously, showing a flash of snow-white teeth. "Thank you, no. Miss Evans, I really must speak with you."
She had never seen him so agitated before. Her humour spiralled down. "Of course." She signalled to Rachel.
Julia supposed she ought to be grateful Ranasfari had come directly to her, it was a silent acknowledgement of her authority. There were dozens of premier-grade executives who supervised Event Horizon's innumerable divisions, but ultimately they all answered to her. The company wasn't just hers in name, she took sole responsibility for its management, to the amazement and increasing fascination of the world at large. Responsibility, but not the burden of organization, that was shared, quietly, unobtrusively.
The Neural Network bioware core was the final gamble of a dying billionaire, a bid for immortality of the mind. It had to be a billionaire, nobody else could afford the cost. Philip Evans had spliced his sequencing RNA into the bioware, replicating his own neuronic structure. When the NN core had grown to its full size his memories had been squirted out of his dying brain and into their new titanium-cased protein circuitry.
And it had worked. His memories operated in a perfect duplicate of his neural pathways, providing a continuation of personality. Julia had never heard the NN core utter a single out-of-character remark. It was Grandpa.
He had plugged himself into Event Horizon's datanet, orchestrating the company's expansion with an efficiency far in excess of any ordinary managerial system. Seventy years of experience, knowledge, and business guile put into practice by a mind with more spare processing capacity than a lightware number cruncher. No detail was too small to escape his scrutiny, every operational aspect could be overseen with one hundred per cent attention. With him to guide her faltering steps it was no surprise that Event Horizon had flourished the way it had. Poor old Patrick with his dusty academic degree could never hope to match her when it came to business tactics. In tandem with her grandfather she made more commercial and financial decisions in a day than he would make in the next ten years working for his family organization.
And at the end of the day she could confide in Grandpa totally. He always understood. The invisible friend of childhood imagination, upgraded for the rigours of adult life, infallible, and virtually omnipotent. It was wonderfully reassuring.
The empty office Julia and Ranasfari wound up commandeering overlooked Building One's giant central assembly hall. Even today, with half of the hall's staff attending the roll out ceremony, there was a lot of activity on the floor. Integration bays around the inner wall were brightly lit, showing white-coated technicians manoeuvring large sections of machinery into place, or crowded round terminal display cubes. Little flat-top cyber trucks followed colour-coded guidance strips along alleyways formed by bungalow-sized blocks of equipment. The spaceplane production line dominated the centre of the hall. The way the craft in various stages of construction were pressed nose to tail along its length was reminiscent of some biological growth process, Julia thought, a cyber-queen's birth passage, straight out of one of those big-budget channel horror shows. At the far end were skeletal outlines, triangles of naked ribs and spars which caged spherical tanks and contoured systems modules coated in crinkled gold foil. As the spaceplanes progressed down the line, sections of the metalloceramic hull had been fitted, the wheel bogies added, engines installed. Three almost complete craft were parked in the test bays right in front of the doors, people walking over their wings, big ribbed hoses and power cables plugged into open inspection hatches, polythene taped over various vents and inlets.