“Cheer up, Grobno—you’re missing the view.”
Through the cutter’s forward windows, the Parking Swarm was a tight-packed ball of ships about a hundred kilometres across. Compared to the stately, regimented orbits of the Glitter Band, it appeared chaotic—but there was order here as well, just not as obvious to the eye. Near the middle, where the ships were packed the most densely, was the dark kernel of the central servicing facility, a habitat-sized space station in its own right. Shuttles and taxis buzzed about, flitting between the facility, the parked ships, and the wider environment beyond the Swarm. Movement of the larger interstellar vehicles was much rarer: whole days or weeks might go by without a departure or arrival. When Ultras came to trade with Yellowstone, they often measured their stopovers in months or even years, using the time to perform long-delayed repairs or upgrades to their battered, time-worn vessels.
The Swarm was not quite lawless, but it was certainly a law unto itself. Panoply’s technical reach encompassed even this volume of space, but the effectiveness of its authority here was at best debatable. In the past, prefects had paid the ultimate price for presuming they had immunity from harm within the Swarm.
Dreyfus had almost made that mistake himself. But now he took manual control and brought the cutter to a polite standstill, a few kilometres from the outer margin. He kept the cutter’s weapons sheathed and waited for the sweep of a traffic radar to confirm he had been noticed.
He flicked a control on the console. “Harbourmaster Seraphim? It’s Dreyfus. I came as agreed. Might I have approach permission?”
A few more minutes passed before he had the luxury of a response.
“Dreyfus,” said the voice buzzing from his console. “As good as your word, as ever.”
“I find it helps.”
“You’ve brought the package?”
Dreyfus shot Grobno a glance. “Yes. The package is sitting right next to me. We’ve had a merry old time.”
There was a silence. The cutter’s life-support system gave out a faint hush of white noise, broken only by the occasional chirp from the proximity sensors on the console.
“Bring him in,” Seraphim said.
They had met before, and communicated on many occasions, but that did not make the Harbourmaster any less strange in Dreyfus’s eyes. It was a strangeness tempered only by the knowledge that there were much odder varieties of human form among the Ultras, some of which stretched the definition of human to breaking point.
“Not quite the goodwill ambassador we might have chosen, in these strained times,” Seraphim observed, nodding at Grobno. “I trust you’ll accept that our mutual friend was conducting his business in an entirely unofficial capacity?”
“If it’s that or war, I know which I’d rather,” Dreyfus said.
They were facing each other in a plush-lined reception room, deep inside the central servicing facility. Displays set into the walls showed cycling views of a dense, needle-like thicket of ships. Grobno was secured and scowling in a corner, an improvised gag providing a welcome end to his interjections.
“War?” asked Seraphim, addressing Dreyfus from a huge, surgical-support chair, currently performing some sort of blood transfusion on its occupant.
“You allow your people to go around murdering innocent civilians in the Glitter Band, don’t be too surprised when it gets interpreted as an official policy. Things are tense enough as it is.”
“Yes, I’m aware of your recent difficulties,” Serephim said, voice buzzing from the metal grille which replaced his mouth. His head was small, the skin stretched tight over bony angles and contours. A tail of hair, carefully braided, hung down over his left shoulder. “Breakaway movements, dark rumours of a developing emergency. Quite a bit on your plate. How’s the tea?”
“I’ll take it over whatever you’re pumping into yourself.” Dreyfus sipped at the concoction that had been provided, doing his best not to pinch his features in distaste. “And I won’t take up any more of your time than I need to. Grobno’s dirt. But having gone to the trouble of bringing him here, I expect him to receive a fair trial.”
“They won’t look kindly on him, Dreyfus. It’s bad enough to go meddling in Glitter Band business. But to go meddling and fail …”
“Yes, a double black mark. But what I said stands. He didn’t kill Antal Bronner, and I’m minded to think he meant to leave Ghiselin alive. The constables were stunned, when he could have killed them.” Dreyfus directed a telling glance at the gagged Grobno. “He showed restraint. I expect there to be restraint in his trial. You’ll see to that for me, won’t you, Seraphim? I’m serious.”
“If I didn’t think you were serious,” Seraphim said, “you would not be enjoying our hospitality.” He paused to adjust a surgical line running into his arm. “Rest assured that your generous opinion of him will be … noted.”
“Good—I’ll be watching developments. While I’m here, too, you can set my mind at ease over a related matter.”
“By all means.”
“You knew about Ghiselin and Antal Bronner. I’m going to give you five other names.”
“Continue.”
“Cassandra Leng. Edouard Gresnick. Della de Marinus. Simon Morago. Terzet Friller.” Dreyfus paused and took a slip of paper from his uniform, passing it to Seraphim.
Seraphim looked doubtfully at the list.
“They’re just names, Dreyfus.”
“All I want from you is categoric assurance that none of these people are or were the subjects of any particular vendettas or grudges known to you or your Ultra associates.”
“Then these people … one may presume … are now dead?”
“Very,” Dreyfus said.
“I guarantee the safety of the ships and crews inside the Parking Swarm,” Seraphim answered. “I am not responsible for the individual actions of those crews.” Beneath him the chair hummed and gurgled as hidden pumps pushed fluid around. “But I will make enquiries. If actions have happened … actions that violate our own system of ethics …”
“You have ethics now?”
“I wouldn’t take such a combative tone—not when you come begging favours.” Seraphim cocked his head, studying him from a slightly different angle. “You seem a very troubled man—more than usual, if that was possible.”
“It comes with the times,” Dreyfus said.
While Sparver prepared the suits, Thalia used the corvette’s communications suite to call back to the Shiga-Mintz Spindle. The Heavy Medical Squad had left the Bronner residence when they brought Grobno and the widow back to Panoply, but a small forensic team was still on-site, completing a thorough sweep of the house.
“Prefect Boniface?” she said, recognising the face on the display. “This is Ng. I was at the Bronner residence before the medicals came in. I have a slightly unusual request.”
Boniface was indoors, gowned technicians working behind her. “How may I help, Prefect Ng?”
“Slip your goggles on, then send the feed through to me. I’d like you to go through to the first or second room from the front of the dwelling. Assuming nothing’s been disturbed since I was inside, there’s something I’d like to show my deputy.”
“Just a moment.” Boniface took out her goggles, fiddled with a setting, then pushed them over her eyes. After a second the scene switched to Boniface’s point of view. “Are you getting this, Prefect Ng?”
“Very clearly.” Thalia looked over her shoulder, suddenly aware Sparver was watching. “Go through, please, and pan around to the shelves or alcoves or whatever you find in those rooms.”
“What am I looking for?”
“Keep going. I’ll know when I see it.”
Sparver murmured: “And with luck, so will I.”
She twisted round to meet his eyes. “I saw what I thought was a white tree, on Friller’s suit. Brig says it’s a building, and I believe her. But I knew I’d seen that form somewhere else, and recently. It was in the Bronner residence.”
“A
white tree?” Sparver asked.
“No.” Thalia leaned closer to the console. “Hold that angle, please, Prefect Boniface.”
“It’s a candle-holder,” Boniface said. “There are others like it, now you mention it. I didn’t pay much attention to them before.”
“Nor did I,” Thalia said. “I just put it down to the Bronners’ taste in minimalist decor.’
“And now?” Boniface asked.
Thalia glanced back at Sparver. “Well? Do you agree that there’s a similarity?”
“It could be coincidence.”
“It’s more than that. You saw what was on Friller’s suit. A skeletal white tree, with a narrow trunk and branches holding some sort of weird white fruit. And now this. A skeletal white candelabra, with the candle-holders like white spheres. It’s a symbolic connection between two of the Wildfire cases—the first we’ve seen.”
“Maybe there’s something in it,” Sparver allowed.
Thalia turned back to the console. “Thank you, Prefect Boniface. Can you bag and tag those candelabra, please, and have them brought back to Panoply under an evidential docket?”
“You really think there’s a connection,” Sparver said, when she had closed the call.
“Maybe it’s nothing. But now I’m more determined than ever to have a look at the building inside the rim.”
Suited up, they returned inside and met Brig in the reception area, her beak-nosed helmet now clamped down over her neck ring. She waved them through a short warren of rooms and corridors until they reached one of the functioning spoke elevators. Brig made sure they were properly orientated, feet hooked into stirrups on what would become the floor as they travelled out to the rim from the weightless hub.
It only took a minute. The elevator shot up the spoke, then broke through into the enclosed volume of the rim, descending—or so it then felt—through a vertical glass tube that stretched from the rim’s ceiling to its floor level. Thalia couldn’t see much beyond the glass, only the vague, dreamlike impression of a darkened landscape, stretching and curving away.
“Tell me what you know about the building,” Thalia said on the suit-to-suit channel.
“Just that it’s there,” Brig said. “There are eight partitions around the rim, and we were all assigned different jobs. I didn’t ever work in chamber two, and that suited me fine. I don’t believe in ghosts, or bad spirits. But they still couldn’t have paid me enough to spend long in that place.”
“What was so bad about it?” Sparver asked.
“I don’t suppose either of you remember what it was like before the Eighty. There wasn’t much you couldn’t do in the Glitter Band, or down on Yellowstone. But then things changed. They tightened the laws, made lots of things illegal. Most places buckled under and accepted the new restrictions. But not all of them.”
“Like this one?” Thalia asked.
“Trick was to stay just the right side of the new regulations, while bending every rule as far as it would go. All those things you couldn’t do elsewhere, those services you couldn’t buy, those experiments no one could run—they could still do them here, if they paid well enough. It was all still legal—just. What went on here—you can’t call them crimes, exactly. But they were against something, and things like that leave a stain on a place. A sort of spiritual blemish—like a bad atmosphere. Are you superstitious, Prefect?”
“Not at all,” Thalia said.
“Then you haven’t been around long enough,” Brig said.
The elevator arrived. They stepped out, climbed a short pedestrian ramp, then stood in the barely lit silence of the chamber. A few service lights glimmered from the ceiling, just enough to throw a dismal, twilight pall over the surroundings. Thalia allowed her eyes to adjust to what light was available through her visor, slowly taking in the size and shape of the interior space. Bulkhead walls blocked her view in either direction around the rim’s curvature, each about half a kilometre away.
“Wasn’t it wasteful to dump all the air that was in this place?” she asked, noting the hard vacuum reading on her visor display.
“We didn’t,” Brig said. “This is chamber one. Behind us—that way—is chamber eight. That’s the one we’re using as a reservoir, holding all the air and water we pumped out of the other seven. Easier to work in vacuum, especially if you have to replace parts of the outer skin.”
“Does anyone still live here, apart from the reclamation crew?” Thalia asked.
“No; this place was abandoned thirty years ago—left to rot, more or less. Biome collapse, trophic cascades, oxygen balance gone haywire, the whole works. No one had deep enough pockets to fix it after the main sponsors cleared out.” Brig was going ahead, leading them along a raised path heading in the direction of the end wall separating chambers one and two. “Economy’s different now. Makes more sense to clean out and re-invest in a place like this, rather than build a new habitat from scratch. Not complaining—works for me. And there’s no one left here, apart from us and a handful of robots we haven’t flushed out yet.”
Thalia bristled, but kept her voice level. “Robots?”
“Oh, just some old monitoring servitors, still convinced they’ve got a job to do. Get under our feet now and then, but they’re harmless enough. You don’t have a problem with robots, do you?”
“Why would I?”
“Just asking,” Brig said.
The path was raised on stilts, meandering across a kind of glassy, solidified mudflat that was cracked like old varnish. The ground level was about three metres under the close-fitting planks of the path. Spiking out of the mudflat were the brittle remains of old vegetation, shock-frozen reeds and bulrushes. The mudflat had very clearly been a lake bed, with buildings dotted around it on their own islands.
“What happened to the people who lived here?” Thalia asked.
“There weren’t as many as you’d think,” Brig said. “Just a few thousand, across the whole habitat.”
“That’s hardly anything, for a place this large,” Sparver said. “I’d have expected a few hundred thousand, half a million, easily.”
“This wasn’t ever a place where people came to live. Ordinary folk—if you can call them that—visited, made use of the services, and left.” Brig pointed ahead, to where a spider-legged thing had scuttled up onto the walkway. “That’s one of the robots. It’s detected us and noted our presence. That’s all they do. If I had a gun I’d shoot it.”
Thalia regarded the robot. Previous encounters had given her a profound mistrust of such machines, but the spider-legged thing presented no obvious threat. It really was just an eye on a set of spindly, many-jointed legs, its unblinking lens staring back at her with a dumb reptile vigilance.
“Tell me more about these services,” she said.
“People think everything’s possible somewhere in the Glitter Band,” Brig said. “Really, though, that’s never been the case. There’ve always been limits, safeguards—usually for good reason.”
“You’re preaching to the choir,” Sparver said.
“Then you know what I mean. People don’t like being told what they can and can’t do.”
“Do you think Terzet Friller might have been one of those ordinary folk?” Thalia asked. “Someone who came here, made use of whatever it is they do here … and then came back because of unfinished business?”
“Like I said, Terzet wasn’t all that keen to talk about themself. I’ll ask again, Prefect—the same thing the others wanted to know. Why are you so damned interested in a single death on a reclamation project?”
“Would you rather we didn’t care?” Sparver asked.
“It’s not that. But we all know there aren’t many of you to go around. So when you do take an interest there’s a good reason for it. Usually to do with something bigger than a single death.”
“One unexplained death on our watch is one too many,” Sparver said.
“I wish I believed that, Prefect,” Brig said. “And I wish you believed it
, too.”
Ahead of them was another of the spindle, single-eyed robots. It watched for a few seconds than scuttled into darkness. Thalia felt a shiver of unease run down her spine, and told herself to snap out of it.
“Unidentified vehicle,” said a female Mendicant’s voice—calm but with an undercurrent of authority. “You are on a fast vector for our docking pole. You are of course welcome to visit our facility, but we would strongly encourage you to decelerate, disclose your identity, and clarify the purpose of your approach.”
“Sister,” he answered. “It’s Tom Dreyfus. Normally I come by civilian shuttle, but I happened to have Panoply business nearby. I apologise for the fast approach and the lack of a transponder signal—but I imagine you know why I’m here. Would you happen to have a docking slot available for me?”
The answer was a little while coming, as if the Mendicant on traffic duty needed to speak to someone in a senior position before giving her assent. “Yes, of course, Prefect Dreyfus. You should find a number of open docking slots. Make use of whichever one suits, and there’ll be a welcoming party waiting for you on the other side of the lock.”
“Thank you, Sister.”
Hospice Idlewild was a makeshift sort of place, but scrupulously well tended. It went back quite a way. The Mendicants had made it by joining together a pair of diamond hulls discarded by Ultras, fusing the cone-shaped forms at their wide end and lining the interior with rubble mined from Marco’s Eye. The habitat’s nearest pointed end, bristling with docking ports and servicing structures, loomed large. There were many ships parked there, some much larger than the cutter, but Dreyfus had no trouble finding somewhere to dock.
He released himself from the seat, but for a moment he did not leave the little ship. Dread and hope battled within him. It was still possible to go back. He could feign some emergency call from Panoply, and no one would be any the wiser.
Except, of course, Dreyfus himself.
Dreyfus left the ship. He pulled himself through the docking connector using the built-in rungs. Two Mendicants, a young man and an older woman, were waiting for him. Both wore the long-hemmed black vestments of their order, with wimples over their heads and metal snowflakes chained around their necks. The young man had an earnest, eager look. Dreyfus had never seen him before, but he nodded his recognition at the woman.