"Hamilton, Peter F - Greg Mandel 01 - Mindstar Rising" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hamilton Peter F)

be hadn't even believed existed until afterwards. More handsome than Adrian, wittier than a channel comedian, with the culture and manners of a Royal. But most of them had no real money - executive assistants, flavour-of-the-month artists, impoverished aristocracY, men who could make deals to retire on if they just had backing. They haunted the fringes of society, sharks who homed in on her name, her money like fresh meat, which in a way she was. She had been too young, to stupidly blind with the whirlwind of holiday romance. And in bed his immaculate body had made her scream out in glory. Only afterwards did she find out she was simply part of his grand scheme.
She had fled from one extreme to the other. Back to her exclusive Swiss school, and into Joel's arms, a boarder at the boys' school down the road. He was the same age as her, the sensitive type, mild-mannered, caring, just perfect for a true first love, she knew he would never exploit her. And in bed he was an utter disaster; she would lie in his twitchy embrace and remember how sensational sex could be. Thankfully it had fizzled out soon enough, her leaving her school, him returning to France, neither making much effort to keep in touch.
The soul-bruising knocks and disappointments had set up a barrier, a psychological flinch. And the boys seemed aware of her mistrust, finding it difficult to breach. Anyone who could was too smooth, those that couldn't would be like Joel.
What she wanted more than anything was one good-looking boy who didn't know who she was to look at her and think:
yeah!
Then Kats had come to stay at Wilholm, injecting some much-needed laughter to the long procession of warm, wet, bormg days; and she'd brought Adrian with her. Adrian: who fitted the bill as though he had been born for her, mature, athletic, no doubt very experienced in bed, fun, intelligent, not at all arrogant. And when he had smiled and said hello there had been no barrier, no hesitancy at all. It would've been utterly sensational, if Kats hadn't enchanted him first.
Julia shivered slightly at the involuntary recollection of
PITIR P. HAMILTON
Primate Marcus and the cult. She'd been ten wh~ ~ upheaval came, the big Texan, known later as Uncle Horace had arrived to take her away. Over the sea to a near-mytjljcaj Europe and a grandfather she'd never even known she had. Lady Fauntleroy, the other commune kids had teased before she went, bowing, curtseying. She'd giggled with them, play.. ing along, secretly terrified of leaving the gently curving sand.. stone passages with their broad light-wells and the eternal magnificent desert above. Her mother had stayed with the cult, her father had accompanied her.
The bioware processors helped Julia suppress the name,
the whole concept of father, pushing him below conscious
ex~min~tion, a fast, clean exorcism. He brought too much pain. Childhood ignorance was a blissful existence, she reflected.
Europe and Philip Evans, her grandfather; and the astonishing revelation of Event Horizon. A company to rival a kom binate in size, heroically battling the British PSP, which surely made Grandpa a saint. Socialism was the ultimate Antichrist.
Her grandfather had sent her to the school in Switzerland, where starchy tutors had crammed her with company law, management procedures, finance; twittery grande dames teaching her all the social graces, etiquette and deportment, refining her. She'd dropped her American accent, adopting a crystal-cut English Sloane inflection to lend a touch of class. A proper Lady. Then on her sixteenth birthday she'd left the school and spent a month in Event Horizon's ultra-exclusive Austrian clinic.
She was given five bioware implants, nodes of ferredoxin protein meshed with her synaptic clefts: three memory-cell clusters, two data processors; a whole subsidiary brain to cope with the vast dataflows generated by Event Horizon. The parallel mentality didn't make her a genius, but it did make her analytical, objective. A conflation of logic and human inspiration, she was capable of looking at a problem from every conceivable angle until she produced a solution. An irrational computer.
'It's the only way, Juliet,' Philip had told her. 'I'm losing
MINOSTAR RISING
acic of the company, it's slipping away from me. All I ever
to see in cubes are the summaries of summaries, a shallow get ~ That's not enough. Inertia and waste are building


inevitably, I suppose. Department heads just don't have the drive. It's a job to them, not a life. Maybe these nodes will enable you to control it properly.'
Julia let desire war with her conscience. How did you captivate a boy like Adrian?
Access Surveillance Camera: West Wing, Guest Suite Seven.
A laughing Kats was straddling Adrian, playing with him, her hands caressing, tongue working slowly down his chest. He was spreadeagled across the mattress, clutching the brass bedposts with a strength which came close to bending them, face warped in agony and ecstasy, pleading with her.
Commit AmourKats.
Julia had never done anything like this, not leading, not making all the moves. She wasn't sure she would have the nerve. Kats seemed so totally uninhibited. Shameless. Was that the key? Could boys home in on abandon? Kats sat back on Adrian's abdomen, then crossed her arms and gripped the hem of the camisole. She peeled it languidly over her head, shaking her hair out. Julia felt a sharp spasm of envy at seeing her friend's well-developed body. That was one reason why Kats had Adrian, she acknowledged bitterly, they looked like godlings together. At least she had longer legs than Kats. Skinny, though; nothing like as shapely, two beanpoles really.
Exit Surveillance Camera.
Her mental yell was contaminated with anger and disgust.
Peeking on the lovers had seemed like a piece of harmless fun. Certainly using the security cameras to spy on the manor's servants had been pretty enlightening. But this wasn't the gentle romantic love-making she'd been expecting. Nothing near.
Pandora's box. And only a fool ever opens it.
Anger vanished to be replaced with sadness. Alone again, tuore than ever now she knew the truth.
BOyS were j tist about the only subject she never discussed
22 PUTIR P. HAMILTON


with her grandfather. It never seemed fair somehow. He'4 taken over every other parental duty, a solid pillar of comfo~ support, and love. She couldn't burden him with more.
now. Certainly not now.
Part of the reason for her being at Wilholm was so she could be his secretary. Philip Evans needed a secretary like he needed another overdraft, but the idea was to give her execu. tive experience and acquaint her with Event Horizon minutiae, preparing her to take it over. A terrifying, yet at the same time exhilarating prospect.
Then this morning at breakfast he'd taken her into his confidence, looking even more haggard than usual. 'Someone is running a spoiler operation against Event Horizon,' he'd said. 'Contaminating thirty-seven per cent of our memox crystals in the furnaces.'
'Has Waishaw found out who was behind it?' she'd asked, assuming she was being told after the security chief had closed down the operation. It was the way their discussions of the company usually went. Her grandfather would explain a recent problem, and they'd go over the solution, detail by detail, until she understood why it'd been handled that particUlar way. Remote 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 from the microgee crystal furnaces up at Zanthtis. 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 ihe 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
MINDSTAR RISING
23
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 js pure boliocks. The furnaces weren't performing that badly at start-UP, and we're way down the learnng 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?'