If at First by Peter F. Hamilton Read Free Book Online

hands-on training, he’d joked.
    ‘Walshaw doesn’t know about this,’ Philip Evans had answered grimly. ‘Nobody knows apart from me. I noticed our cash reserves had fallen pretty drastically in the last quarterly financial summaries. Forty-eight million Eurofrancs down, Juliet, that’s fifty-seven million New Sterling for Christ’s sake. Our entire reserve is only nine hundred million Eurofrancs. So I started checking. The money is being used to cover a deficit fromthe microgee crystal furnaces up at Zanthus. Standard accounting procedure; the loss was passed on to the finance division to make good for our loan-repayment schedule. They’re just doing their job. The responsibility lies with the microgee division, and they’ve done bugger all about it.’
    She’d frowned, bewildered. ‘But surely someone in the microgee division should’ve spotted it? Thirty-seven per cent! What about the security monitors?’
    ‘Nothing. They didn’t trip. According to the data squirt from Zanthus, that thirty-seven per cent is coming out of the furnace as just so much rubbish, riddled with impurities. They’ve written it off as a normal operational loss. And that is pure bollocks. The furnaces weren’t performing that badly at start-up, and we’re way down the learning curve now. A worst-case scenario should see a five per cent loss. I checked with the Boeing Marietta consortium which builds the furnaces, no one else is suffering that kind of reject rate. Most of ’em have losses below two per cent.’
    The full realization struck her then. ‘We can’t trust security?’
    ‘God knows, Juliet. I’m praying that some smartarse hotrod has found a method of cracking the monitor’s access codes, however unlikely that is. The alternative is bad.’
    ‘What are you going to do?’
    ‘Sit and think. They’ve been gnawing away at us for eight bloody months, a few more days won’t kill us. But we’re taking a quarter of a million Eurofranc loss per day, it’s got to stop, and stop dead. I have to know the people I put on it are reliable.’
    They couldn’t afford major losses, Julia knew. Philip Evans’s post-Second Restoration expansion plans were stretching the company’s resources to breaking point. Microgee products were the most profitable of all Event Horizon’s gear, but the space station modules tied up vast sums of capital; even with the Sanger spaceplanes, reaching orbit was still phenomenally expensive. They needed the income from the memox crystals to keep up the payments to the company’s financial backing consortium.
    The fact that he’d admitted the problem to her and her alone had brought a wonderful sensation of contentment. They’d always been close, but this made the bond unbreakable. She was the only person he could really trust in the whole world. And that was just a little bit scary.
    She’d promised faithfully to run an analysis of the security monitor programs through her nodes for him, to see if the codes could be cracked, or maybe subverted. But she’d delayed it while she went horse riding with Adrian and Kats, then again as the three of them went swimming, and now subverting the manor’s security circuits.
    Guilt added itself to the shame she was already feeling from spying on the lovers. She’d been appallingly selfish, allowing a juvenile infatuation to distract her. Betraying Grandpa’s trust.
    Access High Steal .
    Sight, sound, and sensation fell away, isolating her at the centre of a null void. Numbers filled her mind, nothing like a cube display, no coloured numerals; this was elemental maths, raw digits. The processor nodes obediently slotted them into a logic matrix, a three-dimensional lattice with data packages on top, filtering through a dizzy topography of interactive channels that correlated and cross-indexed. Hopefully the answer should pop out of the bottom.
    She thought for a moment, defining the parameters of the matrix channels, allowing ideas to form, merge. Any