"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 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, 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 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 humidity 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 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 Amanda'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 Tyne 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 Amanda 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 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 treatment 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 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.