Sparver redoubled his hold on the stun-truncheon. The whiphound was still flailing, still doing all that could be asked of it, but the surge of people had flowed around and past it, and the steps could no longer be defended. Sparver jabbed out with the truncheon, and citizens dropped like sacks as soon as they were touched. But there were always more. Dozens were already on the steps, oblivious to injury or the criminal nature of their actions, and hundreds pressed in from behind.
He stepped back again. The shade of the lobby was at his back. Two or three citizens were already through, their shouts gaining an echoing timbre as they entered the enclosed space. More came at him. He parried with the stun-truncheon, citizens dropping, the smell of burning skin and fabric ripe in his nose. Dozens were inside now, their footsteps drum-rolling into the distance as they sought the core. The stun-truncheon seemed to be losing its effectiveness under this sustained discharge. They were not dropping so quickly, and in any case the rush of citizens was beginning to overwhelm him, their combined momentum causing him to be pushed back, carried along on their seething front. Finally someone wrenched the truncheon from his two-fingered grip and an elbow smashed into his face.
Sparver blacked out.
Dreyfus buckled on his equipment and made his exit from the cutter. His belt felt tight under his belly, as if his guts had shifted during the re-entry. Hestia Del Mar was already striding around on the landing pad, wrinkling her nose as she sniffed at the fumes still lingering under the pad’s pressure-tight ceiling. She wore a white uniform with crisp black trim at the cuffs and collar, and carried no weapons or enforcement devices that he could make out.
“Did you push it a little harder than was wise, Field Prefect Dreyfus?”
Dreyfus shrugged. “I kept up, didn’t I?”
She looked doubtful. “I’d get that cladding looked at, if I were you.”
“I’ll make a note of it,” Dreyfus said, looking up into her face. “Look, Hestia … wouldn’t it be easier if we just put our professional differences aside for a few hours? I’m sure we’d turn out to have a lot in common. My name’s Tom—”
“I know your name.” She started walking away from the two ships, down a shallow ramp. “As you know mine. But I believe in the professional courtesies, Prefect Dreyfus. I feel it helps to have a clear sense of responsibilities. We’ll take my flier the rest of the way. You have fliers in the Glitter Band, don’t you?”
“And fire, and the wheel,” Dreyfus said.
At the base of the ramp stood a sleek, black flying machine, shaped like a cat’s paw. Del Mar beckoned for Dreyfus to climb into the volantor’s cabin and buckle in to one of the padded seats. Then she joined him and folded down the vehicle’s aerodynamic canopy, taking a seat next to his own.
Del Mar muttered something into her collar and the volantor took off and sped into a narrow, rock-lined tunnel.
“Before we get to the Shell House,” Del Mar said, “you should be aware that we take a very dim view of attempts to influence democratic process in the Glitter Band, however much the outcome might not be to your liking.”
“And if I told you that my interest in the Shell House is only incidental to the breakaway movement, would that change your mind?”
“You would need to persuade me first, Prefect Dreyfus.”
Rock walls hurtled by at great speed. Dreyfus’s back was sticky with sweat, forming too quickly to be absorbed by his clothing. He leaned forward, unpeeling himself from the seat. “We have a developing emergency involving random deaths. If your intelligence on us is as good as ours on you, then you’ll already know of it.”
“I don’t need intelligence. I just need to listen to the rumours.”
“You’re right—it’s already out there, and it’ll soon be beyond our ability to contain. But you must understand why we’ve tried to keep a lid on it.”
“And the relevance of … you call it ‘Wildfire.’ The relevance of all this to the Shell House?”
“The dead seem to have had some contact with a private medical facility in the Glitter Band, a clinic calling itself Elysium Heights. We think the money behind the clinic originated with the Shell House.”
She listened and nodded, and for the first time he had the impression he was being treated, if not as an equal, then not with complete contempt.
“It could be an attempt to damage the standing of Devon Garlin, by linking him to your crisis.”
“I’ve still got to look into the connection. Devon Garlin can hang himself for all I care. It’s the Wildfire deaths that I’m here to stop.”
“By identifying past clients of this clinic?”
“That’s our hope. We have a lead that suggests about two thousand clients in total, but we’re nowhere near identifying unique individuals, let alone figuring out their present whereabouts.”
“Two thousand is rather a lot of people, Prefect. You can’t even be sure that all of these individuals still live in the Glitter Band. There’d have been nothing to stop some of them emigrating to Yellowstone.”
“In which case you might have seen a few Wildfire cases of your own by now,” Dreyfus said. “Which we’d know if you had …”
“Would you?”
“Of course. You’d have shared that intelligence with us.”
“Well, naturally—but first we’d have to be sure of what we were dealing with. If, say, we were interested in the prior whereabouts of three individuals who had become of concern to us, and we asked for Panoply’s assistance with this matter …”
Dreyfus blinked against a sudden inrush of daylight as the volantor exited the tunnel into clear air. Mountain-sized buildings slipped by on either side.
“Did you make such a request?”
“You know that we did.”
“I don’t, and I’d have pushed for cooperation if I did.”
“Then it’s a pity you aren’t in a higher position of authority. Our request was roundly ignored.”
Dreyfus made the mistake of looking out and down. The buildings’ roots seemed to plunge an impossible distance, with tiered gardens and lakes reduced to tiny swatches of colour. No matter how far down he peered, he could see nothing that looked like ground level or bedrock.
Vertigo had him slumping into his seat.
“I can’t believe that Jane Aumonier would dismiss a lead relating to Wildfire.”
“We didn’t mention Wildfire. All we asked was that Panoply assist us in backtracking the movements of these individuals.”
“With, presumably, a cover story to explain your interest?”
“It was stated that they were fugitives. It was only a slight untruth. All three had had some involvement in semi-legal activity prior to their deaths. They had evaded justice; they had been fugitives in a technical sense.”
“If that’s your idea of a slight untruth …” But Dreyfus relented, knowing he needed to keep his host cooperative, at least for the next thirteen hours. “Knowing what you do now, would you describe them as risk-takers?”
“Conceivably. Why would you make that connection?”
“Because it shows up time and again in our Wildfire cases. Hedonism, pleasure-seeking, recklessly addictive behaviour, call it what you will. It’s the only pattern that was there from the start.”
“And the significance of this pattern?”
“I don’t know yet. But something happened to our victims in that clinic. They were treated for something—presumably voluntarily—and years later their heads explode. I’d have put it down to some unlikely side-effect, except that it works so well for Devon Garlin.”
“I see that it puts you in a bind.” Something tightened in her face—almost a grimace of sympathy, if Dreyfus read her correctly. “You’re of the opinion that Garlin engineered Wildfire as a boost to his separatist movement?”
“I’d have counted it as unlikely, until that link to the Shell House came up.”
“And now you hope to confirm your suspicions with some old-fashioned boots-on-the-g
round police work. I’m afraid you may be in for something of a disappointment, Prefect.” She turned to glance out the window, the tendons showing in her neck. “There was a man making … outlandish claims. An embittered former employee. His story was preposterous, but I looked into it anyway, and that meant I had to visit the Shell House.”
“What man?”
“You miss my point. I went there. It’s a crumbling, overgrown ruin, and it’s been that way for decades. There’s nothing there.”
The blood was still running from his nose when he came around, slumped with his back against the wall, the whiphound waiting next to him, loyally alert to his movements. He was in the lobby, exactly where he had fallen, citizens streaming through the open doorway, completely uninterested in him. Sparver reached out to the whiphound, using it for leverage as he regained his footing.
Still groggy, he clipped the retracted whiphound to his belt and staggered along the wall until he reached the doorway. Something had twisted in his knee when he went down, and each footfall sent a precise stiletto of pain jabbing up his thigh.
The area in front of the polling core building was a littered and smoking mess, but there could not have been more than a hundred citizens still out there. Some of them were fighting each other. There were bodies on the ground and fires stretching away, beacons proclaiming some total breakdown of civil order.
The majority of Garlin’s mob, without doubt, had gone inside.
He straightened up as best he could, wiped a sleeve under his nose to soak up the blood, and watched as the blood faded back into the stainless black fabric.
“This is Prefect Bancal,” he said, opening a channel to Panoply. “Request expedited backup. The mob has overrun the polling core building. Ng and I couldn’t hold them back. If they break through to the core itself, we may lose abstraction and comms services …” He paused, smearing his nose again. “Panoply? This is Prefect Bancal …”
He trailed off, because he had seen something. A single whiphound was defining an exclusion cordon around a curious humpbacked form on the ground, next to the toppled-over cleaning servitor. A second whiphound, outside the cordon, twitched and coiled in a single spot on the ground, like a snake with a severed head. Of the third whiphound, nothing was to be seen.
Sparver limped down the steps. A handful of constables were still trying to impose calm, but as soon as they pacified one group of citizens, a fight broke out elsewhere. Several were kneeling by the fallen and injured.
He hobbled to the cordon around the humped form. The circling whiphound detected his authority and allowed him to step into the area. He moved to the shape on the ground. It was Thalia, pressed down over Garlin, with her back to the sky. He immediately understood that she’d used her own body to protect Garlin, shielding him from any possible advance of the mob. He watched her guardedly, wondering why she had not pulled herself off Garlin now that the time of greatest danger had passed.
“Thalia?” he said.
She neither moved nor responded. Sparver mouthed an oath, realising that she must be injured or incapacitated. He knelt down next to her, praying for an obvious sign of life.
A ragged voice called to him.
He turned. It was Malkmus, looking as if she had just been through a military campaign. Dirt was sweat-plastered to her face. One eyelid was swollen.
She stood at the cordon’s edge.
“Prefect. Will it let me through?”
Sparver nodded, even as he reached out a hand to touch Thalia. Malkmus hesitated for an instant then took him at his word, stepping across the line grooved into the dirt by the hurtling whiphound. She joined him next to Thalia.
“Is she all right?”
“I don’t know.” He studied her carefully. “I think she’s breathing. What the hell happened out here?”
“They came in fast,” Malkmus said, catching her breath. “Started picking at the edge of Garlin’s crowd. I tried to call in more constables, but I couldn’t get a signal through.”
“You won’t,” Sparver said. “They’ve taken out the core. Everything rides on that—even our own comms back to Panoply.”
“But my constables inside the building—the lockdown shields …”
“None of it worked. The core was wide open from the moment those doors opened.”
“That isn’t how it’s meant to happen.”
“Story of our lives.” He had tugged up her sleeve enough to feel for a pulse, and believed he could feel one, albeit weakly. “Can you help me with Thalia?”
“Yes … yes, of course.” Together, with great care, they lifted her off Garlin’s form and laid her down on her side. Her uniform had stiffened across her back, forming a defensive shield from her neck to her hips, hard as a turtle’s shell. “She can’t be too badly hurt, can she?” Malkmus asked, touching a finger to Thalia’s lidded eyes.
“I don’t know. How well do you think you’d feel if a mob had just trampled over you?”
“I didn’t mean …”
“It’s all right,” Sparver said, not wanting to have snapped. “I know you see two prefects, two of us in uniform, coming to teach you how to run things. But that’s not how it was. Thalia’s my friend.”
“I … understand,” Malkmus said.
Sparver wanted to do something, but he knew that there was little he could offer that was not already being handled by the medical systems embedded in Thalia’s uniform. It would be sampling her blood chemistry, administering micro-dosages of tailored drugs, doing all it could to stabilise her condition before help arrived.
Malkmus left, then came back with an item of clothing that had been left on the ground. Gingerly she slipped it under Thalia’s head, so her face wasn’t in the dirt.
“Thank you,” Sparver said.
“I didn’t see much of what happened. I think they ran right over her, even with those whiphounds. And then when the others piled in, all they wanted to do was tear him apart.”
“She wasn’t kidding about taking him into protective custody,” Sparver said, shifting her body so she might be able to breathe more easily.
“He’s alive, I think,” Malkmus said.
“Good. I’d hate to miss the look on his face when he finds out who saved his life.”
“Yes,” she said, half a smile creasing into her dirt-smeared face. “I wouldn’t mind being there for that myself.”
Sparver unclipped his whiphound. “Run a medical scan on Prefect Ng and Julius Devon Garlin Voi. Coordinate with all remaining whiphounds and continue attempting to signal Panoply that we need a Heavy Medical Squad inbound at maximum priority.”
“How long will it be?”
“They’ll have gone to an emergency posture as soon as the core went down. But I don’t know how long it will take. Maybe an hour. Less if we’re lucky.”
Malkmus stood up, her hand on her stun-truncheon. She looked around at the chaos and smoke, the slumped bodies and the brawls still continuing. “Does it look like it’s our lucky day? I’m going to see if I can reach some of our own medical functionaries.”
“You’ll be safer in this cordon. Call in the rest of your constables, before they get too bruised and bloodied out there.”
“You took a few bruises for us today, Prefect. The least we can do is take our share.”
Sparver spoke to the still-circling whiphound. “Break cordon and provide protective escort to Chief Constable Glenda Malkmus. Accept orders from Glenda Malkmus under discretionary limits.”
She looked at the whiphound with unconcealed apprehension.
“What about you?”
“I’ll be fine,” Sparver said. “This one will shield us once it’s run the medical scans. The other whiphound will stay with you until you dismiss it.”
“I shouldn’t be long.”
“Take care out there, Constable Malkmus.”
“I almost forgot to ask. Are you going to be all right, Prefect?”
“Oh, I’m right as rain.” Sparver looked down at
his fallen colleague, resting a hand on her side, feeling her breathing, shallow but steady. “Like I said, just one big fun day out.”
Garlin had come around by the time Panoply’s reinforcements reached the habitat. By then Malkmus had returned with as many constables as she could mop up, as well as four fatigued-looking medical functionaries. They tended Thalia, treating her with a sort of wary reverence, as if Sparver might hold them accountable for any lapses. But he had complete faith in them, as he did in the Heavy Medicals who arrived shortly after, accompanied by twenty Field Prefects with dual whiphounds. They made a formidable presence, but Sparver was not a little surprised to see they were still carrying no weapons beyond the whiphounds. Given the severity of the declining situation in Fuxin-Nymburk, he had expected the Supreme Prefect to petition for the use of the heavy weapons still stored in Panoply’s vaults, ready to be released to the prefects for a period of exactly one hundred and thirty hours.
Either the petition had failed, or Lady Jane had decided the stakes were still not quite high enough to justify that measure.
Under the moderate restraint binding that Sparver had applied from his belt, Garlin moaned his way into semi-alertness.
“Get this stuff off me.”
“Did you not hear my colleague placing you under arrest?” Sparver asked reasonably. “And then placing her own life on the line to protect you, when the tempers you’d stirred up turned against you?”
One of the newly arrived prefects knelt down next to them.
“Prefect Bancal. Good to see you, sir.”
“We understand Garlin’s been served a detention order?”
“Thalia Ng did it just before the mob closed in,” Sparver said. “Have you got word back to Panoply?”
“Just now, sir. Partial restoration of core. The constables sealed the doors from the outside and pumped sleeping gas into the building. It took down a few of their own, but they’ll make a good recovery and it allowed the rest of them to go in and consolidate the core. Our technicians are down there arranging a full restart. No one’s quite sure why the lockdown failed, though.”