The rifle made a loud bang and a line of fire struck out from the barrel. The tiger roared and slumped into the foliage, taken down with a single shot.
Julius passed the rifle back to his brother. “If you expect me to be impressed that you put the bang and the flash into my head …” he started, but the words dried up on his lips. The fact was that Caleb had impressed him. Julius felt as if he had killed the tiger; as if there been more than just a symbolic function to the quickmatter rifle.
“Let’s see what else we can kill,” Caleb said.
Dreyfus waited until he had confirmation that the Heavy Medical Squad had departed the Shiga-Mintz Spindle with both the Bronner widow and the Ultra agent. He slept for three hours, waking ten minutes before the ship was due in, splashed cold tea down his throat, then washed and clothed himself before making his way down to the docking bay.
Ghiselin Bronner had been kept in a separate part of the ship, unaware of the other passenger, and the squad had the good sense to off-load her first. Dreyfus made a point of meeting her as soon as she was through the airlock. She looked older and thinner than the biographical images he had already seen, more than could be accounted for by the strain of the last couple of days.
“Thank you for your cooperation in coming here,” he said, adopting a suitably deferential tone. “It’s appreciated, especially after your ordeal, and coming so soon after the loss of your husband. You had every right to expect better protection.”
“Your operative seemed to imply I was lucky to have been helped at all.”
“My operative?” Dreyfus asked mildly, determined to keep things civil.
“The girl.”
Dreyfus smiled tightly. “I’m sure she meant well by it. We were certainly fortunate to reach you when we did. I’m glad we did, and glad we got that device off you before it inflicted any more discomfort.”
“Discomfort? That’s what you call it?”
“It was an Ultra device, and an Ultra agent was sent to deploy it. That’s unusual, Madame Bronner—wouldn’t you agree?”
“Is it? You tell me.”
“As a rule, they restrict their vendettas to other Ultras, or those among us who have business dealings that intersect with their own. Yet you attracted their attention. Can you think of a reason why?”
“Have you considered mistaken identity?”
“I’d be rash not to, and it’s always a possibility. But after your husband died, you seemed to fear for your own safety.”
“My husband was murdered.”
“Antal died, but we don’t know that it was murder. I can also say it’s highly unlikely there was Ultra involvement.”
“You can stand there and say that, after what happened to me?”
“Things aren’t always as they seem, Madame Bronner.”
She gave him a long, appraising look. “It’s true what they’re saying. Panoply isn’t serving us any more. It’s been failing us for years. Perhaps we’d all be better off without you after all.”
“The beauty of a free and open society,” Dreyfus said, “is that we’re allowed to hold differing views.”
“I want to speak to Antal.”
“I can’t permit it for the moment, I’m afraid—not until I’m certain there’s no risk of evidential cross-contamination. Rest assured that you’ll be looked after.”
He nodded at the prefects who were already waiting to escort Madame Bronner away from the dock. He was happy to let them handle the questioning. He had formed his opinion of her and did not expect to be proved wrong. She would trip herself up sooner or later, probably sooner, and it would not take his expertise to provoke her into a mistake.
It was the other guest that interested Dreyfus.
He waited until Madame Bronner had cleared the area, then had the Ultra brought to a windowless cell close to the docking area. They sat opposite each other, the Ultra under restraint, Dreyfus with his hands on the table, measuring up the shifty, guileless individual opposite him.
“Let’s cut to the chase, Theobald. We know your employment history. You’re a low-status button boy, operating out of the Parking Swarm. You’re not reliable enough to be trusted with the big fish, but someone like Madame Bronner, she’s right up your street. Do you have anything to say?”
Grobno lifted his chin in cocksure defiance. “What would you like me to say?”
“Tell me why you killed Antal Bronner.”
“That wasn’t me.”
“Really? The husband dies, and a little while later we find you with a fatal interrogation device strapped to his widow?” Dreyfus made a pained expression. “You expect me not to draw the obvious conclusion?”
“I didn’t do it.”
Dreyfus took out his whiphound and placed it on the table before him, rolling the handle back and forth so that it made a heavy rumbling sound. “I’ll be honest with you. I’ve got better things to be dealing with than this. I know you’d rather face justice in the Parking Swarm, where you have friends and handlers who’ll look out for you—”
“No,” Grobno said. “Not there.”
Dreyfus feigned surprise. “You’d rather submit to our justice? I can’t promise there’d be any grounds for leniency, Theobald. Even if you could persuade me that you had nothing to do with Antal Bronner’s death, you were trying to kill his widow … although I suppose one could make the case that you’d have removed the Painflower if Prefect Ng hadn’t disturbed you.”
Grobno leaned as far forward as his restraints would permit. “I didn’t kill the husband. I don’t know what happened to him, just that it wasn’t our doing. But given what the two of them were involved with—”
Dreyfus cut across him. “Which was?”
“You haven’t found out for yourselves?”
“Assume there are still some unanswered questions.” Dreyfus kept rolling the whiphound. “It’ll help your case, Theobald. I’ll stress that you were cooperative, and state my belief that you had no intention of murdering Ghiselin Bronner.”
“Is that a promise?”
Dreyfus nodded. “You have my word.”
“They were swindlers, both of them. The Bronners set themselves up as private brokers. They dealt with Ultras, acted as intermediaries for richer clients. Did it all at second- or third-hand, never needed to go near the Parking Swarm. Specialising in rare art goods from out-system. That worked for a while, only then the Bronners got greedy. Realised they could just as easily buy and sell to the Ultras alone.”
“How would that work?”
“By lying. Making up fake histories, fake provenances. Buy from one crew, inflate the value of an artefact, and then sell it back to another crew. Keep the margins small, not draw too much attention to what they were up to. Never deal with the same crews twice.”
“But eventually …?”
“They got found out. By then they had a lot of crews lined up to get back their losses. When Antal Bronner died, it looked like a hit—another crew making a move. Everyone assumed the widow would be next. So I was sent in to get to her first. Nail her down, squeeze her for information on hidden assets, lists of clients …”
Dreyfus put the whiphound away. “That’s helpful to me, thank you. We’ll dig into the widow’s finances—run a deep audit. I don’t suppose there’s any point in asking who sent you?”
Grobno slumped, as if some vital energy had just drained out of him.
“I’ve told you everything I know.”
“I suspect you have, Theobald.” Dreyfus stood from the table. “It’s unfortunate for you that you got snagged up in something much bigger than a simple grudge over a pair of small-time brokers.”
“What will happen to me now?”
“You’ll remain here for the time being. Once I’ve debriefed the other prefects, there’ll be a decision about how to proceed with you. Generally in these matters—matters to do with Ultras, I mean—they tend to follow my recommendations.”
“Then you’ll say that I shouldn’t go
back, won’t you? You were right, Prefect Dreyfus. I’m nothing to them—just a button boy. And now I’ve let them down …”
“You don’t fancy submitting yourself to their mercy.” Dreyfus put on a sympathetic look. “Well, I don’t blame you for that. Ultra justice can be a bit of a lottery.”
“Then you’ll keep to your word, won’t you? You won’t send me back.”
“I said I’d stress that you were cooperative,” Dreyfus answered. “I never said who I’d be stressing it to.”
He left the room.
As they completed their approach, Thalia got her first good view of Carousel Addison-Lovelace. It was an eight-spoked cogwheel, two kilometres in diameter, the rim of the wheel only a few hundred metres in cross-section, the outer surface pebbledashed in a continuous dark strip of compacted asteroidal rubble. The walls of the wheel were windowless, blank except for the occasional radiator or service port. Whatever went on in there was safe from prying eyes.
The spokes met at a circular hub, the main docking and utility core for the wheel. There were lights on, windows lit and ample evidence of ongoing activity. A dozen or so ships were already docked, clustered tight like a huddle of skyscrapers. They were construction and cargo haulers: ugly, utilitarian affairs, their skeletal frames wrapped around a gristle of engines, fuel tanks and freight modules.
A vacant port lay near the middle of the concentration.
“This will be tight,” Thalia said, using manual thruster control to synchronise the corvette’s axial spin with the habitat.
“You want some help?”
“No, thank you.”
Outside, the hulls of the cargo transports began to slide by, seemingly close enough to touch. An anti-collision caution alarm sounded. Thalia silenced it contemptuously, thinking it was just being over-cautious, then had to apply a pulse of corrective thrust as one of the hulls loomed in without warning.
“Rotation’s off-centre,” Sparver said.
“I noticed.”
She had it down now, anticipating the fore-and-aft movement of the surrounding hulls caused by the oddly lopsided spin. A few moments later the corvette clamped on with its nose lock, then extended safety bracing to the surrounding ships. Thalia sent a routine message back to Panoply, confirming their arrival, then floated to the stores locker to buckle on her whiphound.
Sparver was at the suitwall, waiting to go through.
“No need,” Thalia said. “Suits will only slow us down, and we can’t very well conduct interviews while wearing them. The hub’s pressurised and we shouldn’t need to go any deeper into the habitat. Unless you have other ideas?”
“I’m at your disposal,” Sparver said, moving to the normal lock.
Thalia eyed him, picking up a note of insubordination in his answer, then pushed on ahead, cycling through to the reception area on the other side.
It was a grubby, cluttered place, stuffed with boxes and half-abandoned equipment. About three dozen workers were waiting for them in the near-weightless area, stationed at odd angles and wearing a colourful motley of space suit components. Many of their suits had been decorated with customised paint jobs and welded-on refinements.
The workers had their helmets off, and some of them had undone their gloves, stretching their fingers and rubbing ointment into tired joints. Male, female, neutrois, a range of ages and ethnicities, but all with the same hardness in the eyes, all with the same look of lean, leathery toughness. Scars, grafts, prosthetics—a toll of damage earned, accepted, shrugged off as a necessary precondition of the work.
The place smelled of oil and old sweat.
“I am Prefect Ng,” she said. “This is Prefect Bancal. Thank you for gathering here ahead of our arrival. Is everyone now present?”
“This is the lot of us,” said a lean man with a taut, angular face, lavishly cobwebbed in tattoos. “You think one of us had it in for Terzet?”
“What is your name, sir?” she asked.
“Virac. Slater Virac.”
“Well, Mister Virac, I don’t think any of you were responsible for Terzet Friller’s death. But it happened under unusual circumstances, and the nature of that death is of interest to Panoply.”
Slater Virac gave a sceptical look to one of his colleagues. “Someone caring about us? That’s a first.”
“I’d like to know as much as you can tell me about Terzet Friller. Were they a good worker?”
Virac shrugged inside his suit. “Enough to depend on. But it’s not as if they’d been working on the team for years and years.”
Thalia nodded. “How long, exactly?”
“About a year, I’d say,” answered a woman sitting behind Virac. “A little longer.” She had a lazy drawl and a glittering green multifaceted artificial eye, jammed into her socket like a fat jewel. Her helmet, cradled in her hands, had a beaked protuberance which made it look like a turtle’s head. “Terzet and I worked together quite a lot. They cut a few corners now and then, but they were still someone you could trust.”
“And you are?” Thalia asked.
“Brig. Been on the squad about two years. I was a Skyjack before, but the pay’s better here.”
“Maybe not the working conditions, or the life expectancy,” said a deep, raw-throated voice from the back of the room. “But if I wanted a quiet life, guess I’d have signed up as a prefect.”
“Yes, it’s a bed of roses, being a prefect,” Thalia said. “Where is the body now?”
“Next door,” Brig said. She was doing something to her helmet, touching up an area of the artwork with a fine stylus. “Nothing we could do. That suit looked old to me, just waiting to go wrong. I kept telling Terzet to get it overhauled. You take enough chances out here as it is, no sense in not being able to depend on your suit.”
“What do you think went wrong?” Thalia asked.
“What it looked like, Prefect. Thermal control stopped working. Cooked Terzet like meat in an oven. Nothing pretty about it, either. Hope you’ve got strong stomachs …”
“We’ll worry about our stomachs.” Her tone turned colder, more formal. “Show us to the body, please.”
“Anyone want to draw the short one?” asked Virac.
“I’ll do it,” Brig said, snapping her stylus away into a sort of paintbox.
Thalia and Sparver followed Brig into an adjoining room that was sealed off by a pressure bulkhead. A long, rectangular equipment container had been converted into a makeshift mortuary slab. Terzet Friller’s spacesuited form was resting on the container, strapped down to prevent it drifting loose.
The bulkhead door had closed behind them. Thalia moved around the body, taking it in without comment. The suit was just as motley and colourful as the ones the others had been wearing, but Thalia did not think it looked significantly older or in less good repair. Maybe a few more dents, a few indications of parts being swapped or crudely repaired, but nothing that marked it out for imminent failure.
“Was there any warning, Brig? Did they feel unwell, strange, anything like that?”
“We never heard any warning. That was part of the problem, though. The comms were always dropping out.”
“Generally, or with this suit?”
“Both, but especially with Terzet’s equipment. Some loose circuit somewhere in that helmet, got worse and worse over time. Not that it mattered, mostly. We had our work assignments, and a lot of it didn’t depend on communication.”
Thalia thought of Terzet Friller experiencing the first warning signs of Wildfire, and being unable to call for help. What had happened to Antal Bronner was bad enough, but at least he had been surrounded by other people, able to communicate his distress even if no one could help him. But to be stuck in the iron bottle of a spacesuit, denied even the solace of one’s cries being heard …
“Did they have enemies, that you knew about?” Thalia asked.
“Look, I’ll be honest with you. We were on friendly terms, but no more than that. Even when Terzet was on the slab, getting wor
ked on, I was the one who had to keep the conversation going.”
“The slab?” Sparver asked.
“I get it,” Thalia said. “You were the one who painted all these spacesuits.”
“You don’t have to be too good to get this gig. Chirchik was the artist everyone used, until she got caught in the transfer wheel when it started moving. Because I cleaned up after her I got to inherit her paints and brushes.”
“You’re not so bad,” Thalia said, thinking of her father’s watercolours.
“Nothing too hard about it. They tell you what they want, you paint it for them. Chirchik left a book of designs. Most of the time they pick something from the book and you stencil it on.”
Thalia surveyed the artwork decorating Terzet Friller’s spacesuit, trying to find some common theme or sudden insight into their character. But there were too many disparate images for her to make easy sense of them. Burning skulls, flaming ships, clusters of stars and comets, other spacesuited figures, sketchy representations of artificial worlds and their interiors. An island with a single bony white tree, its angular branches holding white fruit.
She supposed the art commemorated earlier assignments, hard-won jobs and fallen comrades.
“We’ll need to remove the helmet,” Sparver said.
“Go ahead,” Brig said, sounding unsurprised.
The neck seal had been only loosely reconnected. Thalia snapped it wide, then tugged the helmet slowly back from the neck ring.
Although she had been preparing herself, the shock was still considerable. It was an acrid melange of spoilt meat, waste food, urine and sweat, left to mingle and amplify in the equivalent of a pressure cooker, for what smelled like weeks rather than hours.
She tightened her lips, hoping her natural revulsion did not show too strongly. “Did you ever hear of this sort of thermal overload before, Brig?”
“Once or twice, maybe.”
Thalia set the helmet aside on a friction surface. They could all see Terzet Friller’s head now. It was pale and puffed out, like a piece of bread crudely shaped to look like a person. Blood had burst from the nose, eyes, mouth and ears, and crusted dry. The mouth was open, the swollen features lending the corpse a sordid, cherubic appearance.