The Mandel Files Read Online Free PDF

unlikely that is. The alternative is bad.”
    “What are you going to do?”
    “Sit and think. They’ve been gnawing away at us for eight bloody months, a few more days won’t kill us. But we’re taking a quarter of a million Eurofranc loss per day, it’s got to stop, and stop dead. I have to know the people I put on it are reliable.”
    They couldn’t afford major losses, Julia knew. Philip Evans’s post-Second Restoration expansion plans were stretching the company’s resources to breaking point. Microgee products were the most profitable of all Event Horizon’s gear, but the space station modules tied up vast sums of capital; even with the Sanger spaceplanes, reaching orbit was still phenomenally expensive. They needed the income from the memox crystals to keep up the payments to the company’s financial backing consortium.
    The fact that he’d admitted the problem to her and her alone had brought a wonderful sensation of contentment. They’d always been close, but this made the bond unbreakable. She was the only person he could really trust in the whole world. And that was just a little bit scary.
    She’d promised faithfully to run an analysis of the security monitor programs through her nodes for him, to see if the Codes could be cracked, or maybe subverted. But she’d delayed it while she went horse riding with Adrian and Kats, then again as the three of them went swimming, and now subverting the manor’s security circuits.
    Guilt added itself to the shame she was already feeling from spying on the lovers. She’d been appallingly selfish, allowing a juvenile infatuation to distract her. Betraying Grandpa’s trust.
    Access HighSteal.
    Sight, sound, and sensation fell away, isolating her at the centre of a null void. Numbers filled her mind, nothing like a cube display, no coloured numerals; this was elemental maths, raw digits. The processor nodes obediently slotted them into a logic matrix, a three-dimensional lattice with data packages on top, filtering through a dizzy topography of interactive channels that correlated and cross-indexed. Hopefully the answer should pop out of the bottom.
    She thought for a moment, defining the parameters of the matrix channels, allowing ideas to form, merge. Any ideas, however wild. Some fruiting, some withering. Irrational. Assume the monitors are unbreakable: how would I go about concealing the loss? An inverted problem, outside normal computer logic, its factors too random. Her processor nodes loaded the results into the channel structures.
    The columns of numbers started to flow. She began to inject tracer programs, adding modifications as she went, probing for weak points.
    Some deep level of her brain admitted that the metaphysical matrix frightened her, an eerie sense of trepidation at its inhuman nature. She feared herself, what she’d become. Was that why people kept their distance? Could they tell she was different somehow? An instinctive phobia.
    She cursed the bioware.
    Philip Evans’s scowling face filled her bedside phone screen. “Juliet?” The scowl faded. “For God’s sake, girl, it’s past midnight.”
    He looked so terribly fragile, she thought, worse than ever. She kept her roguish smile firmly in place—school discipline, thank heavens. “So what are you doing up, then?”
    “You bloody well know what I’m doing, girl.”
    “Yah, me too. Listen, I think I’ve managed to clear security over the monitor programs.”
    He leaned in towards the screen, eyes questing. “How?”
    “Well, the top rankers anyway,” she conceded. “We make eighteen different products up at Zanthus, and each of the microgee production modules squirts its data to the control centre in the dormitory. Now the control-centre ‘ware processes the data before it enters the company data net so that the relevant divisions only get the data they need—maintenance requirements to procurement, consumables to logistics, and performance figures to finance. But the