Ragnarok 03 - Resonance by John Meaney Read Free Book Online Page A

identity in the file.’
    â€˜That’s not good.’ Max looked at Rhianna. ‘His survival is good news, but not the circumstances by which he arrived in our hands.’
    Together, the three of them went through the logs and reports from the watch-squadron placed on Fulgor surveillance, along with background on one Piet Gunnarsson, who seemed to have a knack for causing disaster, although Rhianna knew that careful, rigorous statistical analysis was always required to distinguish guilt from unlucky coincidence.
    And then Max played a segment from Tannier’s debriefing interview, held on board a Pilot’s vessel in realspace, in which Tannier described his confrontation with Helsen, how she dropped through a cracked-open sky-city hull, in what looked like suicide at first, except that a silver-and-scarlet Pilot’s ship had been hovering underneath, waiting to catch her.
    â€˜Schenck,’ said Clayton, at the first mention of the ship’s colours. ‘Bound to be Schenck.’
    â€˜Shit,’ muttered Rhianna. ‘Too bad the bitch got to live.’
    They replayed the footage of the Zajinet ship launching a torpedo like tube, which of course contained a comatose Tannier, while Piet Gunnarsson interpreted the action as an attack and launched a strike that destroyed the Zajinets.
    â€˜That’s a more immediate concern.’ Max closed down the holo. ‘If you were a Zajinet in authority, to whatever extent they have such a thing, how would you interpret Gunnarsson’s actions?’
    Only one answer came to Rhianna’s mind.
    â€˜I’d call it an act of war.’
    As if the Anomaly and Schenck’s renegades were not trouble enough.

EIGHT
    EARTH, 2033 AD
    Lucas was not sure about the cyberphysics gathering in Denver. Was it the smallest important scientific conference he had ever attended? Or the minor conference with the highest opinion of itself? But Gus had wanted him to be here, and she was his new boss as well as friend.
    Back at Imperial, his former colleague Fatima once said that Lucas clearly possessed an innate sense of entitlement. What she meant was, he would walk up to anyone he admired to tell them so – people that others would be scared to approach. Over the years, that had included two Nobel laureates and the Irish prime minister. Lucas disagreed: it was not entitlement, it was other people who were desperate for a celebrity’s approval, even though fame was nonsense.
    Whatever the reason, he found it easy to be friends with Augusta ‘Gus’ Calzonni, the rich and often feared scientist-turned-entrepreneuse (as the smarter zines had it) who had discovered mu-space. For some it remained a metaphor – a visualisation to aid understanding of the equations – while others believed she had uncovered something real: the actual ur-continuum, the ultimate context.
    â€˜Consider the universe as a net curtain, if you’ve ever seen such a thing,’ Lucas said in the hotel’s lounge to a handful of attendees, ‘which is what you get if spacetime is quantised at the Planck length and time. Now drape it across a pointy landscape, so miniature mountain peaks insert through some of the holes, giving the curtain the possibility of shape. That’s what context means, in this, er . . . context.’
    One of the group – her fluorescing name-badge read JacquiKhan – stared at him with the deepest, most intelligent gaze he had ever experienced. She was a little overweight and not pretty, but as they abandoned the mu-space discussion, standing up in response to the next talk being announced, as everyone’s qPads chimed in time, Lucas could not take his eyes off her.
    Not pretty, but beautiful.
    The next speaker was a computer scientist, a grey-haired fellow Brit with a background in cyber-forensics who might have been in his fifties, though he looked so fit it was hard to tell. His name was Gavin Case, and he