“What is it with mobs and fire?” Thalia said aloud, trying to coax a response from Sparver. “So you can start a fire. Congratulations. You’ve achieved the first step to civilisation. Get back to us when you’ve invented paper and irrigation.”
“Malkmus,” Sparver said, ignoring her.
The Chief Constable was coming up the final flight of steps which led to the platform. She was stooping with exertion, sweat plastering her hair to her forehead. At the top of the steps she paused, hand on the rail, gathering her breath before carrying on.
As was the case with most of the citizen constabularies, she wore no uniform beyond a black armband; no enforcement equipment beyond a few items strapped to a utility belt. The constables rarely had to deal with anything more serious than a domestic argument or the occasional public fracas. Although her clothes were suited to the demands of her assignment, they were civilian garments. Only a double strip of gold on the armband marked her as the chief.
“Chief Malkmus?” Thalia said. “I’m Prefect Ng. This is Prefect Bancal. Looks like you have a bit of a problem here.”
“We’d have a bit less of one if you’d come sooner,” Malkmus said. “My constables are only just holding the polling core, and all they have are stun-truncheons and sonic-cannon.”
“We’re here now,” Thalia said.
“My deputy’s waiting with a car at the base of the stairs,” Malkmus said tersely. “That only leaves two passenger seats. Can the rest of you follow on foot, if we get the two of you into the main disturbance as quickly as possible?”
“The rest of us?” Thalia asked.
Something dawned in Malkmus’s face. “Don’t tell me you’re all there is.”
Sparver unclipped the first of the two whiphounds he was carrying. “We’re a lot better than nothing, Chief Constable.”
They descended the openwork staircase, Thalia losing count of the flights as they wound their way down from the reception platform. At the bottom waited a wheeled car in fluted grey metal, open-topped, with only a forward windshield for protection. She and Sparver took their seats behind the two constables, buckling in as the car whirred off. They took a zig-zagging course through steeply graded woodland, the second constable steering via a tiller.
Malkmus twisted around to speak to them, raising her voice over the rumble of wheels.
“I’ve never had any time for Devon Garlin. Still don’t. But when Garlin says that Panoply only offers its protection when it suits it … I find it hard not to agree with him.”
“Begging your pardon, Chief Malkmus,” Thalia said, struggling to keep a diplomatic tone. “But Devon Garlin would be the first to complain if Panoply acted firmly, wouldn’t he? He’d say that was a heavy-handed over-reaction, and start going on about his freedom of expression, how we’re abusing his rights. Next, he’d be grandstanding about how we’ve grown too powerful, how we need to be cut back, our numbers reduced. You can’t win with men like him. You’re either doing too much or too little, and there’s never a middle way.”
“So your boss thinks the soft touch is the way to solve it, does she?” Malkmus asked.
Thalia started to answer, but Sparver jumped in ahead of her, leaning forward so his snout was only a few centimetres from Malkmus. “I don’t care what you do or don’t think of the Supreme Prefect, Constable Malkmus. But I’ll tell you this. One day in her shoes and you’d be huddling in a corner, sucking your thumb and weeping from every orifice you know about, plus a few more that you don’t.”
“What my deputy means to say—” Thalia began.
Malkmus swivelled back to face the road. “There’s no need, Prefect. He made himself perfectly clear.”
Thalia turned to Sparver. She glared at him, but with a great force of will managed to hold her tongue.
The car levelled out and they sped through tree-lined back roads, keeping away from the fires and obvious trouble spots. Off in the distance, but looming ever larger, was a silver-coloured, bronze-edged building shaped like a very steep-sided pyramid, surrounded by a cluster of smaller structures like the minor foothills crowding a mountain. Wisps of smoke rose up from several different spots around the complex.
“That’s the epicentre of the trouble,” the second constable said, striking a keen, conciliatory note. He was a sandy-haired young man with very pink, almost pig-like ears. “Devon Garlin made his big speech on the outskirts of the civic grounds, and then started moving in for the core, gathering numbers all the while.”
“Your polling core is located in that structure?” Thalia asked, still bristling at Sparver’s tactlessness, which had inflamed an already strained situation.
“Yes, and we’ve moved as many constables as we can inside to secure the core, as well as implementing a local lockdown. We’ve also got a squad on the outside, just in case anyone’s foolish enough to try and break through.”
“Good,” Thalia said, thinking that if she could keep this one man on her side, that was better than nothing. “Hopefully the mob will get bored and hungry when they realise they can’t reach the core, and start drifting off back to their homes. You’ve done well here, constables.”
“It’s a bit late for the grudging praise,” Malkmus said.
They rode on in silence, skirting around the edges of the worst areas. Now and then Thalia caught sight of elements of the mob, groups of citizens moving in their dozens, many of them carrying improvised implements such as torn-up fence posts or uprooted saplings. Off in the distance, on a patch of lawn between two arena-like civic buildings, she spotted a ragged, shifting brawl going on, involving somewhere between fifty and a hundred individuals. Once or twice, squinting, she made out someone wearing an armband, trying to contain the unrest. But the constables were vastly outnumbered, able to do little more than issue demands for a restoration of order.
The pyramidal building was very much closer now, and Thalia easily picked up the smell of smoke, as well as the sweeter tang of the pacification gases, now mostly dispersed. The car slowed as they approached a trio of constables waiting out of sight of the trouble. Sparver still had his whiphound unholstered. Thalia unclipped hers, feeling that a show of confident authority could do little harm at this stage.
The car stopped. The still-sweating Malkmus got out without saying a word and bounded over towards her colleagues. The driver shot Thalia a sympathetic look and followed after Malkmus, straightening the hem of his tunic as he walked.
Thalia got out of the passenger seat slowly. They were out of earshot for the moment.
“None of that was called for,” she said in a low voice.
Sparver was looking down at his whiphound handle, adjusting the setting dials.
“It wasn’t?”
“We need these people on our side.”
“They’re on our side whether they like it or not.”
“Look at the state of this place, Sparver. We’re too late to offer more than a token effect. Someone should have gone in sooner.”
“Doesn’t give her the right to criticise Aumonier.”
“She was voicing an opinion—and a reasonable one, on the evidence. Couldn’t you see how tired she was, after climbing all those steps to meet us? That’s after a day of trying to keep this whole place from sliding into all-out carnage.”
“I should cut her some slack, is that it?”
“I think you should cut most of us some slack,” Thalia answered, turning away from him to walk over to the five constables. She heard an unimpressed grunt, then the sound of Sparver’s feet behind her.
“Do we have an update?” she called out.
“Chief Malkmus says you’re all we’re getting,” answered one of the first trio, a scholarly looking man with a high forehead and silver at his temples.
“For now,” Thalia said. “But you’ve taken all the essential steps with regard to the core, and Prefect Bancal and I will do our best to help you disperse the troublemakers.”
“With just those little whips of yours?”
asked a strong-jawed woman, a heavy fringe of red hair masking her eyes. “Haven’t you got guns?”
“Be glad we don’t,” Sparver said. “Then you’d know you’re really in trouble.”
“And this isn’t trouble?” Malkmus asked.
Sparver flicked out his whiphound’s filament. “Trouble? No, this is a fun day out. All right, point me towards Garlin.”
“We don’t touch Garlin,” Thalia said sharply, no longer caring if she gave him a public reprimand. “The constables were right to show restraint, and we have to abide by the same consideration if we aren’t to make things worse.” She flicked out her own filament. “We’ll initiate a soft containment and dispersal protocol. And you can dial back from full lethality, Deputy Bancal—we’re not here to draw blood for the sake of it.”
“We’re just going to ignore him, are we?” Sparver said, making a bad-tempered show of resetting the force calibration dial.
“No, we’ll approach and cordon Garlin. His safety is also our concern, and at least half the people running rampage in this place want to dance on his bones. In the process we’ll contain and disperse without resorting to the second edge.”
“Follow us,” said the scholarly man. “We’ll get you close to the main mob, near the main entrance to the core. We’ve managed to keep the counter-elements away from the immediate area, so at least you aren’t dealing with fighting on several fronts.”
“Thank you, Constable,” Thalia said. Then, to her whiphound: “Forward scout mode. Ten-metre secure zone. Maintain at sub-lethal discretionary force.”
The whiphound nodded its compliance, then slinked away to establish the moving secure zone. Sparver delivered an identical instruction to his own whiphound, the two units coordinating their efforts like a pair of well-trained beagles. Both prefects still had a second whiphound clipped to their belts, and for once Thalia was glad to feel that extra burden.
The prefects and constables walked slowly but confidently. The whiphounds were defining an arc ahead of them, a pair of zig-zagging blurs forming a semicircular space with a radius of ten metres. They would respond if a threat impinged on that moving front, or attempted to cut in from the rear.
They turned a corner, following a broad path along the base of one of the core’s outlying buildings. Thalia’s hand was never far from her second whiphound, a gesture of intent as much as reassurance for her own sake. They had gone another hundred metres when a group of citizens spilled into view, crossing an intersecting path and engaged in their own business until they noticed the prefects. The citizens halted. There were a dozen of them and at least half of their number carried improvised tools or weapons, with some of them carrying burning torches.
Thalia maintained her pace. But she touched her throat and relayed her voice through to her whiphound at amplified volume.
“This is Prefect Ng. You are under Panoply observance. Lay down your implements and make no sudden or threatening movements.”
She kept on walking, with the moving front of the whiphounds pushing ahead. The citizens were clearly taken aback, two or three of them casting aside their weapons and torches, but the remainder still needed some convincing.
Deciding that this was an outlier to the main mob, Thalia said: “I repeat, lay down your implements. The whiphounds will respond to an aggressive posture or sign of intent. Go peacefully and you may return to your homes, unprocessed. This is your final warning.”
The whiphounds were now only twenty paces from the gathering. Two citizens broke away, nervously at first, then with quickening footsteps. The whiphounds locked their heads onto them, tracking them until they were deemed to have passed out of the area of interest. Then they locked back onto the remaining citizens.
“Drop them,” Sparver said.
One more citizen complied, lowering a sharp-tipped fence post, but a second made the rash error of tossing her torch at the whiphounds, rather than the ground.
Thalia did not need to give an order; what ensued was well within the whiphounds’ permitted sphere of autonomous, discretionary action. Coordinating their response, one whiphound veered to the torch, flicked its tail around it, and flung it away from the path, treating it as it would a grenade or incendiary device. The second whiphound skidded to a halt, gathered itself into a compressed spring and flung itself at the woman, uncoiling as it tumbled through the air. Like a flung skipping rope its arc seemed uncontrolled and haphazard, but that illusion persisted only until the moment of contact with the target. The whiphound curled its tail around the woman’s knees, bringing her down with a distinct and gut-wrenching crunch. The woman started moaning. Its work done, the whiphound slithered off her and resumed its zig-zagging patrol, the front encroaching closer and closer to the remaining members of the mob. The entire process, from the flinging of the torch to the incapacitation, had taken perhaps four seconds.
The point had been made, though, and within another few seconds the remaining citizens had seen the wisdom of dropping their tools and dispersing. The whiphounds snapped after a couple of the laggards, but only for a few threatening paces. Then they fell back into the patrol formation. Thalia, Sparver and the constables stepped over the abandoned weapons and torches, Thalia pausing only to kneel beside the still-moaning woman.
“Something to keep in mind next time,” she said, unclipping a medical pouch from her belt and digging out an anaesthetic patch. “When a prefect gives you a final warning, heed it.”
She administered the patch, stood up, and rejoined the others. They were just turning another corner.
Sparver slowed in his stride, looking ahead beyond the zig-zagging cordon. They were at one end of a broad path which led straight to the front steps of the large pyramidal building, its main doors sealed to prevent access to the polling core somewhere inside. But between them massed a mob that had to be closer to a thousand strong than a dozen.
Thalia scanned the unruly gathering, picking out a handful of constables trying to enforce some kind of order on its ragged periphery. A small number of citizens seemed to be listening to the constables, drifting off in sullen ones and twos, content to lick their wounds back home. But this meagre flow was easily outweighed by random troublemakers swaggering in from other directions, sometimes bloodied and usually equipped with some sort of makeshift weapon.
Thalia spotted Garlin. He was raised head and shoulders above the mob, much nearer to the doors of the building, shouting and gesticulating with all the fist-clenching rage of a baby tyrant. It was her first sight of him in the flesh, although she was all too familiar with his face and body language from the numerous public broadcasts. His voice, too, cut across the noise of the mob and the relentless background of sirens and emergency instructions. There was a loathsome cadence to his proclamations, a certain metrical rise and fall which was as calculated as it was undeniably effective.
Thalia knew what she wanted to do with Devon Garlin. She wanted to squash his face down in the dirt with her boot; she wanted to make him drool and cry and beg for clemency.
She squared her shoulders. The whiphounds pushed ahead. The outer elements of the mob were starting to take notice of the approaching party.
“This is Prefect Ng,” she said again. “You are under Panoply observance. Stand aside to allow us free passage.”
12
Dreyfus stepped into the palely glowing cave of the specimen section, waiting a moment for his eyes to adjust to the pastel gloom of the upright glass flasks, their coloured support fluids, and the gentle twinkle of numerous monitoring systems. It was as well, perhaps, that his eyes needed that period of adjustment. It gave his nerves time to settle down after the initial discomfiture of seeing so many disembodied heads and parts of heads, so many brains and parts of brains, many of which were still being fed by oxygen and nutrient flows, still being listened to via a flickering network of wires and probes. There were the parts of sixty-one human heads in this room, and only a little over a year ago each and every one of these heads would
have been attached to a walking, talking person, all of them going about their free and easy lives as citizens of the Glitter Band. Now they resembled the pieces of some grisly, barely solvable jigsaw puzzle, made up of flesh and bone and various colourless grades of cerebral matter.
There were sixty-one heads, but more than sixty-one flasks had things in them, and there were still empty flasks stretching away in neat regiments, ready for the cases to come.
“You’re either an optimist or a pessimist, Doctor,” Dreyfus called out, sensing that Demikhov must be either in the room or one of the adjoining areas.
There was silence, except for the quiet murmur of pumps and filtration systems.
Dreyfus walked on a bit further, careful not to disturb the equipment set up around the flasks.
“Doctor Demikhov?”
“Oh, do allow the poor man his rest. He’s not a machine, unlike some of us.”
He turned around, startled by the voice. It was faint, with a muffled, liquid quality to it. His heart raced, even as his mind rushed ahead and processed the obvious truth of who was addressing him, speaking through one of the flask-bound heads.
“You can’t be here.”
“Can’t or shouldn’t?”
She had selected a woman’s head to puppet, but in no other respect was there any similarity between the face and her own. Still, the tone of address was all the introduction he needed.
The eyes were open, but scarcely regarding him. It was just stagecraft, he decided; she didn’t need those eyes to be aware of him, but it suited the theatricality of her presence. Nor was the voice emanating from the mouth of the dead woman, although the mouth had cracked open enough to suggest some whisper or dream utterance. No, the sounds were coming from the adjacent equipment, hooked up to the head and brain by some means, and presumably capable of stimulating and reading back nerve impulses and implant signals.