Part 9 (1/2)

'Lucina you know I respect you. I couldn't have come this far without you, but we agreed it's to be my operation. I choose who. If that's not the case please say so now and I'll forget it. And I'm not being a silly girl. Please treat me with the same respect as I treat you. I can't run this operation if you're going to be interfering all the time.'

'Me interfere! You're very stupid if you think me interfering. Who do you think I am, ne? I Lucina always keeps her promises. I promise you this young lady, don't you dare think I interfere! Who do you think you're dealing with? I am Lucina Dodona, not some person from the street!'

Lucina tossed her fine head and made to stalk off towards the house. Penny did not move but was beside herself with anger. They were both angry. She shouted after Lucina, 'I resign, okay! Have it your own way Mrs. The Great Dodona! Do it your way, but you do it without me! I quit!' she waited a second or two and then added. 'I get sole charge without being nursemaided by New York or that's it!'

Lucina turned back to face her, her eyes smiling, a wry expression on her face. 'I'm sorry I make you angry my cuckoo, but you make me angry to doubt me.' Suddenly she was all sweetness and light. 'I only want the best for JNO the same as you. See here, I'll make deal. You take Hep on my recommendation. Believe me I know. You need him. Without Hep you'll fail. In all else you shall have full control of anything you want, my dear,' she said winningly. 'But you must have Hep. Without him you will fail my sweet. Hep will truly be a great help. You will like him and he you. Take Hep and I will never...hmm... interfere. Is it a deal?'

She'd agreed. What else could she do? As it turned out Hep was happy to be a kind of general consultant to the enterprise as a whole. She grew to adore him, and like everyone else was in awe of his manipulation of matter, his grasp of physics and mathematics. But still at the root of her, she was wary. In the same way as she had acquiesced to the upbringing of Alexander through Mnemosyne, Penny had been content to accept what she knew would be invaluable a.s.sistance. She never however, gave herself up completely to any of the people she met who were connected directly to Lucina.

To have inexplicably left her mother, her friends and her previous life for Lucina, after giving herself so utterly to Alexis all those years ago, had been enough giving of herself. It had left her with a fierce need for independence and an absolute fear of dependency. Her contact with Lucina had reinforced the wisdom of this att.i.tude. She hoped Alexander's independent spirit would make him react the same way.

As she left the JNO limousine and made her way to the main entrance at Markham, she was sure 'they' had already been talking to him - beginning with yesterday's visitation by Lucina.

Of course they had brought him up for their own reasons. She had not forgotten Lucina holding the new born infant to her breast. She was afraid they would involve him in their activities for reasons that were beyond her understanding. Paradoxically this knowledge only reinforced her resolve. If they had Alexander under their authority, she would work even harder than before to accomplish her work by her own efforts. Having Alexander meant they had everything of hers. They couldn't ask any more of her. She couldn't stop them. But she could distance herself from them.

She had reached a point in her work now, albeit with Hep's help, that even if Lucina was to explain everything, she was sure she would refuse to be involved. It was essential that she kept herself and her work within herself, in bounds which she could control. She had no desire nor any actual need to think beyond this. Knowing nothing of the Chronosphere, she found it best to keep these potent people at a respectful distance.

She gave them the respect due to their influence which she was unable to deny but that was all. JNO's projects were supervised on a day to day basis by Ric Trefoil her Project Manager. Hep had invented the electronic system which backed them up, but it was Penny and Ric who made it all work, who met the people, ironed out the day to day problems and developed the Firm.

Only she, Hep and Ric, knew to what extent GAIANET scooped into its vast electronic maw the endless swathes of raw data, tirelessly swirling round the globe. In many ways that had been the easier part. The biggest problem had been sifting the huge ma.s.s of material and making useful sense of it by distilling out coherent information about the ways people affected the environment. The really important breakthrough was Hep's creation of HIGO. This interpreted and then predicted the effects of this knowledge.

When the world went digital, Penny had seen to it that as much information as possible, made its way through all the pathways that could be tapped and funnelled into to her information base to test the interpretation skills of HIGO. And if she were HIGO's queen, Ric was its king. Not even Hep, its inventor, had the same level of skill in it's use as they had.

Unaware of the Chronosphere, they did not know that he already had all the access he needed of his own on this parallel, vastly superior, primordial, system.

So amid the beginning of a growing buzz on the 'sphere, and the building up of knowledge through HIGO, a wary Penny and a preoccupied Hep, crossed the courtyard to the entrance door of Markham, followed by a wondering Alexander. The entrance door led into the same dark panelled lobby where Alexander had sought the keys to his room on his coming of age party. Now a reception counter prevented further entry. Uninvited visitors could go no further but were received with courtesy by well trained receptionists who made sure the surveillance system had them tagged all the time they were in or near Markham. The tagging system invented by Hep for security, discrete and unseen, logged onto anybody or anything, which entered a five mile perimeter. It checked everything about the intruding presence that it could and was capable of rendering any life form helpless, at a simple voice command.

The receptionist pa.s.sed them through into an ante-room off the main hall of the house. Hidden GAIANET scanners probed them for recognition, noted the genetic patterns linking Alexander to Penny and to Hep, and set up some pertinent questions on the monitor of the Chief of Security, who met the trio in the crush-hall.

Penny re-introduced Alexander to Marina as chief of security. Now a young woman, she was as less like a chief of security as it was possible to be. Hep nodded his h.e.l.lo while again Alexander was unable to take his eyes off her.

The rest of his world simply ceased to exist, there was only this woman filling his mind and its horizons. If he never saw her again, he thought, he would remember her always. Somewhere in the deepest recesses of his mind he recalled the human race emanated from Africa. He felt now he might be in the presence of the first woman herself. Although she was not tall, about five feet-six inches, she was perfectly proportioned, radiating a lithe muscular power which he found groin-rendingly sensual. A clinging red and gold, two-piece suit accentuated her tuned, well contoured body. Her confident posture gave her an irresistible presence and her large candid eyes and the broad planes of her face, invited one to honesty, as if to lie would invite a disapproval hardly to be endured. Alexander was totally mesmerised by her. She seemed to fill all the s.p.a.ce of his gaze. He was acutely aware of her restrained but intense s.e.xuality, while her personal authority said look all you like, but don't touch. He sensed she was aware of the effect she had on him, and he wondered if it was just him or whether she did this to all men.

'I shall have to vet Alexander,' she observed, matter of factly, gazing directly at Penny, as if expecting her to object in some way. 'You know the rules.' Alexander couldn't wait to be vetted alone with her whatever it was she had to do.

'Okay,' said Penny. 'We'll go on ahead to meet Ric at the HIGO centre, bring him along after you've done.'

Alexander followed Marina into to a small room behind the reception area, made him sit on a chair, placed a light plastic helmet on his head and shone two laser beams at each of his temples. She installed herself behind a bank of monitors. Alexander expected to feel something from helmet clamped to his head, but the whole process was entirely without sensation. He was disappointed. What went on in his head had changed since his awareness of the Chronosphere. He at first thought this Marina was one of 'Them' but she wasn't. He somehow knew that. But he now expected her to tune him into new experiences by her manipulation of his thoughts by this machinery. The electrodes however seemed merely to scan his brain activity to check, what precisely? He had no idea. He was glad however, without quite knowing why, that this wonderful woman was clearly not one of 'Them.'

Had he seen what Marina could see, he would have been more satisfied with the potency of the machinery. While it was immediately apparent to her that he was security clear in that he shared DNA patterns with his mother, his reading was quite unlike hers. The only other patterns she had ever seen which remotely resembled Alexander's were Hep's and Thea's and all three were unlike that of any other of the hundreds of people she had scanned. The only logical conclusion was that Alexander shared common ancestry with Hep and Thea and she wondered if Penny knew. She had been surprised about Thea's, which was different in inexplicable ways from the others and which had resembled nothing of Penny and which was also allied to Alexander and Hep. Her detective's brain logged this knowledge and when she gave Alexander clearance on the data base she noted this remarkable information and secretly marked the file by a code she alone knew, to indicate something unusual to be followed up if necessary.

'Okay. That's it. You're clear. If you would be so good as to follow me, we'll catch up with your mother and Hep over in the HIGO wing.'

They crossed a the main hall which was empty of activity and mounted a wide wooden staircase to a long gallery leading towards the main bedrooms. As he followed Marina, he was captivated by the movement of her figure and followed the flexing of the muscles of her b.u.t.tocks and hips, conscious of the stirring in his loins.

Marina, made sure he came up alongside her at the top of the stairs, regarded him up and down, smiled, so that his belly turned to water and walked him down the long gallery to a door at the end on which she knocked. She entered, announced him cleared by security and left briskly, her smile lingering in his after vision. A few moments pa.s.sed before he could refocus his attention.

The room he entered was pleasantly light and airy, tall windows gave a clear view of the rolling parkland beyond. Under one of the windows a bank of computer screens flickered round a console at which sat a man of middle years. Rangy and sinewy, he had long sensitive hands, straggling but greying fair hair, which fell still thickly over his eyes.

He swung his revolving chair round when Marina knocked and pierced Alexander with china-blue eyes. Standing with him were Penny and Hep, the three of them had evidently been staring intently at something on the screen. Penny motioned Alexander over to them, pointed him to a chair and ignoring him totally, continued with Hep and the other man to pore over the screen.

'There it is again,' said the tall, bony man, evidently Ric. 'I've asked the senior staff to come in today specially to set up a trace. It will take hours, maybe days and even then we may never get any more than a smell of it'.

'I can't see anything,' Penny frowned.

'You have to know what you're searching for,' said Ric. 'There, see how the cursor flashes out of sync for a brief beat. Watch, I'll bring up today's s.h.i.+pping movements.'

He hit the keyboard a few times and the pattern changed. Figures scrolled in one corner, while lines moved about on a map of the world.

'See there, that's the coffee s.h.i.+pment figures and main traffic directions at this moment. We'll see when changes of information trigger a response. Note how the security pattern hologram at the bottom of the screen revolves, see there, it hesitated a nano-second, it could be my eyesight playing tricks but I don't think so. Hep do you see it?' Hep was staring out of the window, he seemed not to be paying attention.

'I see it,' he spoke gruffly, 'What do you see?' asked Penny. 'You seem sure, more sure than Ric.'

'I see, I am sure' he replied. 'I do not know what I see exactly, but like Ric...I see.'

'Does Marina know?' asked Penny.

'No, not about this', said Ric. 'But I've asked her to double check the security around the building and grounds.'

'What does it mean?' Penny an anxious edge to he voice.

'I don't know exactly,' said Ric, turning to her. 'In general it probably means someone knows we are monitoring world trade movements and is curious. That in itself is not out of the way, we get the usual hackers as you know. If anyone gets into a system the anti-bug locks on immediately, feeds it enough innocuous information to keep it busy until we can identify and deal with it. Then we can turn it....and if they have stuff we can use we give them something to keep them happy and we check them out. It's fascinating, you'd be surprised who's hacking, everybody from gung-ho teenagers with a gift for it, to whole offices in IBC and other multi-nationals. But this has a different feel about it. Whoever it is, is not actually getting in. They're not even trying to get in, it's kind of licking at us....sniffing, like a dog to check us out. A hacker is always trying to get in, kind of burrowing, or dancing round, seeking an opening, like a burglar sussing out the security weak points. This is different, it's just sniffing around all our systems at once. Kind of sizing it up, getting a sense of what's there, and ....I guess....what isn't.'

Alexander felt a quiver from the net in his pocket. Without thinking he said 'Perhaps it doesn't want to get in.' He then glanced fleetingly at Hep, to check that he wasn't speaking out of place. The three of them turned to him as one, surprised at the voice of a fourth person they had forgotten in their preoccupation.

'Ric, I haven't introduced Alexander to you. Alexander this is Ric Trefoil, he's in charge of GAIANET and HIGO, that's the part of the system which takes raw data and makes it intelligible to the likes of you and me. Alexander has been given clearance from Lucina to get involved at the highest levels, so you can take it he is here with me and this is his part of his induction to the Firm.'

Ric nodded, security was not his business, if Penny said the lad was okay, he was okay.

'Why do you think it doesn't want to get in?' Penny surprised, asked Alexander.

'Well I only thought that instead of searching for motives which may not be there, what if we took Mr. Trefoil's a.n.a.lysis at face value, it might offer better explanations than looking up a gum tree for a hacker, which he's pretty clear this isn't.'

'The lad's right', observed Ric over his half gla.s.ses, impressed. 'Call me Ric, son, everyone does. This is like no hacker I ever saw. It's more like a presence all round the system. We've already fully scanned the whole system and its not just poking around at random, it's detectable everywhere. Like Alexander just said, I really don't think it's trying to get in, it's surrounded us and seems to want to know what we are, rather than what we've actually got. My money is on another Firm just checking out how big we are. Though who it could be is beyond me. I don't know anyone except us big enough to have the computing power or a framework well enough designed to do this. After all we have covered our tracks as a conglomerate, n.o.body knows we are a single ent.i.ty, except us in this room and Thea, Lucina and Zarian. Someone else seems to be trying to find out though....I'm worried.'

Penny felt a falling sensation in the pit of her stomach, this was news she had dreaded from day one. She had spent millions to pre-empt anyone getting close to them. Even the possibility, however remote, that another Firm was trying to find out that she had any kind of operation going at all threatened her plans. She was so close to having enough control of the information highway to turn the economic tide towards sustaining rather than polluting the Earth, that a rival was quite out of the question and in any case she had no time to handle such a diversion. That such a thing could actually exist was unthinkable.

'They not find out what they want. They puzzled,' growled Hep, he continued to gaze out of the window as if all the answers were to be found in the trees on the far horizon.

'What do you mean?' Penny's voice was sharp. She was aware that not since those early, confused days on Ios, was she so close to losing her cool, unless she counted her confrontation with Lucina over Hep. But now her vision was blurring and she thought she might faint. She gripped onto the back of Ric's swivel chair for support. Hep, apparently lost in his own thoughts simply repeated himself with his usual heavy deliberation. She was conscious of the presence of Ric, who knew nothing of her vulnerability in this area though he picked up that something was affecting her composure.

'Ric, do you think this might be detectable over at the GAIANET wing, maybe it would be clearer there? Do me a favour, get over there and check on their procedures, Hep and I'll monitor things here and if there's anything we can cross check. I'd be happier if you'd go in person, things are too worrying to allow anyone outside this room to get any inkling. You can put a simple gloss on it over there if they've spotted anything.' When he had gone Penny turned pale and angrily to Hep.

'Hep, I'm not a mind reader!' she hissed between clenched teeth. 'What do you mean. 'They're puzzled' Who in the name of all that's holy are 'They'! I'm more than puzzled I'm b.l.o.o.d.y scared and I need some explanations, and I need them now! Do you read me?'