Free Phase Space by Stephen Baxter Page B

was a good bet that before long more substantial evidence of a conspiracy to murder would come to light.
    And yet …
    And yet, he liked to think he had retained something of the instincts of the coppers of London past.
    Something didn’t smell right.
    ‘I think,’ he said, ‘that somebody’s lying here.’
    He told the Angel to put him through to Asaph Seebeck, who was being held at Westminster Police Station.
    When Morhaim came to haunt Seebeck, the cell’s softwalls carried only images from a movie – the centenary remake of Casablanca, with a coloured, hologram Bogart growling through his modernized lines to a sulky Pamela Anderson. Morhaim knew that the cell’s electronic confinement, hemmed around by software firewalls, would be far more enclosing, to a man like Seebeck, than the physical cage.
    In his disposable paper coveralls, Seebeck looked young and scared.
    Morhaim questioned Seebeck, aware that the man’s Angel was also being pumped for data by intelligent search agents in a ghostly parallel of this interrogation.
    Seebeck denied any involvement with the murder of Desargues, over and over.
    ‘But you must see the motive that can be imputed,’ said Morhaim. ‘Desargues said she had a key competitive edge over you guys. She was planning a global comms network which wouldn’t suffer from the transmission delays your systems throw up, because of having to bounce signals all the way to geosynch orbit and back –’
    ‘Which will allow us to merge communities separated by oceans, or even the full diameter of the planet. Which will allow us finally to establish the global village. Which will make comsats obsolete … All those grandiose claims. Blah, blah.’
    ‘If Desargues was right – if her new technology could have put your company out of business –’
    ‘But it wouldn’t,’ Seebeck said. ‘That’s the whole point. Don’t you see? Satellite technology will not become obsolete overnight. We’ll just find new uses.’
    ‘Like what?’
    ‘I’ll show you.’
    With Morhaim’s permission, Seebeck called up one of his company’s Virtual brochures.
    … And Morhaim found himself standing in a windy field in Northumberland. He quailed a little at the gritty illusion of outdoors; Holmium had devoted billions to the petabytes behind this brochure.
    He wondered vaguely when was the last time he had been out of doors in RL.
    Bizarrely, he was looking at a flying saucer.
    The craft was maybe twenty metres across, sitting on the wiry grass. Its hull was plastered with Coca-Dopa ad logos; Morhaim absently registered them to his quota.
    ‘What am I seeing here, Seebeck?’
    ‘This is a joint venture involving a consortium of comsat companies, Coke-Boeing, and others. It’s a technology which will make it possible for any shape of craft to fly – a saucer, even a brick – regardless of the rules of traditional aircraft design. And in some respects a saucer shape may even be the best. The idea is fifty years old. It’s taken this long to make it work –’
    ‘Tell me.’
    There was a rudimentary countdown, a crackle of ionization around the craft’s rim, and the saucer lifted easily off the ground, and hovered.
    The secret, said Seebeck, was an air spike: a laser beam or focused microwave beam fitted to the front of a craft which carved a path through the air. The airflow around a craft could be controlled even at many times the speed of sound, and the craft would suffer little drag, significantly improving its performance.
    ‘Do you get it, Inspector? The ship doesn’t even have a power plant. The power is beamed down from a test satellite, microwave energy produced by converting solar radiation, billions of joules flowing around up there for free. It propels itself by using magnetic fields at its rim to push charged air backwards …’
    ‘Why the saucer shape?’
    ‘To give a large surface area, to catch all those beamed-down microwaves. We’re still facing a lot of practical problems