The Mandel Files

It's the 21st century and global warming is here to stay, so forget the way your country used to look. And get used to the free market, too - the companies possess all the best hardware, and they're calling the shots now. In a world like this, a man open to any offers can do just fine. A man like Greg Mandel for instance, who's psi-boosted, wired into the latest sensory equipment and carrying state-of-the-art weaponry. He's also been part of the English Army's Mindstar Battalion.

Dr Edward Kitchener was a brilliant researcher into quantum cosmology... but he's found dead, lungs spread on either side of his open chest. His employers, Event Horizon, now want to know what happened - and fast. Many were anxious to stop Kitchener's work, and could have paid an assassin's fee. And only a mercenary could've breached Launde Abbey's premier-grade security system. Yet why would a professional waste time ritually slaughtering the target?

Julia Evans, billionaire owner of Event Horizon, is in trouble. For fifteen years she's been the power behind England's economic renaissance, but this won't help her now. Her husband is missing and rival companies claim to have acquired an incredible new technology - something impossibly superior to what has come before. So she has no time to notice a single flower, delivered anonymously. But this flower possesses genes millions of years in advance of any terrestrial DNA.