Звезда Пандоры

Carys opened her mouth to answer. There was a bright flash outside. Mark and Liz frowned in unison. There were no thunderclouds anywhere.

Out in the garden, Sandy was squealing as if she were in pain. Both parents jumped up and went through the open patio doors.

“What’s the matter, poppet?” Mark asked.

Panda was going berserk, barking, jumping up and down. Sandy ran to her mother, arms flung wide. “In the sky,” she wailed. “My eyes hurt. I see purple.”

Mark’s wrist array crashed. The sky to the southeast turned dazzling white. “Damn, what the hell…” All the autopickers had stopped. As had the tractors. Every bot he could see was motionless and silent.

The smear of silky light above the mountains was draining away to leave the normal blue sky in its wake. Then a vivid rose-gold sun climbed up from behind the peaks, its surface writhing with webs of black fire. It cast long moving shadows across the ground.

“Oh, my God,” Liz murmured.

The new sun was rising on a stalk of brilliant raging flame. All the remaining snow on the Regents vaporized in a single violent white explosion. The tops of the mountains looked as if they were vibrating. They started to crumble just as the ferocious vapor cloud swarmed around them, obliterating them from sight.

Sandy’s shrieks reached a crescendo.

“They nuked it,” Mark shouted in awe. “They nuked the detector station.” He watched the mushroom cloud swelling out, its color darkening, deepening as it spread its bruised perimeter across the clean sky. Then the sound blast reached them.

Mellanie ordered a light salad from room service before dressing in jeans and a coal-black sweatshirt from her own fashion line. She tied her hair back in a simple loose tail, just using moisturizer on her face, no makeup. It was important she looked serious for this call.

One of the scowling housemaids brought the salad while Dudley was splashing about cheerfully in the bathroom. She spent a couple of minutes clearing up the mess that was the two breakfast trays. Mellanie gave her a twenty-dollar tip. If anything the scowl was deeper when she left.

“Double screw you,” Mellanie told the door.

She picked at the salad for a while, sorting out the pitch in her mind, then sat at the bureau and used the room’s desktop array to place a call to Alessandra.

Alessandra’s image appeared on the array’s screen. She was sitting in the green room’s makeup chair, a paper bib around her neck to protect her fabulous dress. “Where the hell have you been?” she demanded.

“I’m on Elan.”

“Okay, in that case I’ll let you live. As it is, you’re this close to being fired.” She held her hand up, thumb and forefinger almost touching. “Don’t ever put a block on your unisphere address code again. Now: I need your follow-up report in an hour. And it better be a prize-winner, or that tiny little arse of yours will reach orbit.”

“I’m on to something.”

“What?”

Mellanie took a breath. “Paula Myo thinks the Starflyer is real.”

“You’re fucking unbelievable, you know that? I give you every chance, more than I’ve given anybody else, and not just because you’re good in bed. And this drivel is what you come up with?”

“Listen! She put me on to Dudley Bose.”

“Do you know where he is? Everybody in the biz is going apeshit trying to find him.”

“I’ve been fucking him for information, yeah.” She tossed her head, keeping her face expressionless as she looked at Alessandra’s image. “And like you say, I’m very good at it. I found something out.”

“All right, darling, have your fifteen seconds of fame. What have you got?”

“One of the charities that funded Bose’s observation of the Dyson Pair is a front organization. The Starflyer arranged for us to see the envelopment. It wanted us to investigate the barrier.”

“Proof?” Alessandra snapped.

“The charity had secret bank account funding,” she said, hoping to God it was slightly true, but she had to get Alessandra behind the investigation. “I checked through all its other donations; they’re tokens, validity in case anyone ran a quick review. And it was shut down right after the discovery. But the important thing is that Myo knew this years ago. Don’t you see what that means? All these years she never caught Johansson and Elvin, she knew all along. She might even be working with the Guardians!”

“This is your vendetta,” Alessandra said.

Mellanie could see the uncertainty, and pressed on doggedly. “But it will be your story. Give me a research team, let me work it. Hell, take charge of a research team yourself. That’s what Myo’s telling us. Us, the media. This is all public source information, verifiable if you know where to look. We can prove the Starflyer exists. For God’s sake, Wendy Bose actually met Bradley Johansson! Did that ever come out in any interview? This is real, Alessandra, I promise.”

“I want to talk to Bose.”

“Okay.”

The SI’s icon sprang up in Mellanie’s virtual vision. “Get on the floor behind the bed,” it told her.

“What?”