“Nothing out of the ordinary about that,” Sparver said, but not without a certain skin-crawling prickle of anticipation, the way one felt sticking one’s hand into a dark sealed box. “Keep taking us in. At the very least I’d like a better idea of what’s putting out that heat signature.”
“Holding at one hundred metres per second and transmitting continuous approach requests,” Pell answered.
“Weapon ports cleared for immediate dilation,” Grolnick reported. “Warheads dialled to standard yield. RD racks showing green on all boards. Solutions locked in for a target spread. Shall I assign fire control to autonomic?”
“Hold on manual for now,” Pell said, still sounding as ice-cool as ever. “Agreed, Prefect?”
Sparver nodded his assent, seeing no reason to risk an over-reaction. “Take defensive action as required. But we don’t start shooting until Lady Jane pulls the trigger.”
“Ma’am,” Thalia said, turning from the Solid Orrery. “You ought to see this. If it’s half as bad as it’s looking …”
Lillian Baudry had been pulled back to the main table, putting out one or more fires only peripherally related to the ongoing effort. Citizen disturbances were cropping up all over the Glitter Band, sometimes beyond the ability of the constables to contain and pacify. With great reluctance, Panoply was still having to divert some of its prefects to deal with these panicked outbreaks, further hampering the Wildfire operation.
“Yes, Ng,” Baudry answered testily, barely glancing up from the scrolling reports on the table. “We know that things are difficult. Dwelling on it won’t make it any better. Your job is to optimise our response, not to …” Baudry trailed off, her brittle attention finally settling on the Solid Orrery. “No. That can’t be real.”
“I think it is, ma’am. The threshold triggers are only getting more reliable, not less, as we gain more cases.”
Baudry turned to Clearmountain, who was equally deep in concentration, leaning over a spread of compads with Claudette Saint-Croix and Ingvar Tench. “Gaston. Drop what you’re doing.”
“I’d like to, Lillian, but—” He fell silent, taking in the changing status of the Solid Orrery. Then he pushed himself up from the table, even that simple action seeming to be a triumph of supreme will over fatigue. Silently he walked over to join Thalia and Baudry by the Solid Orrery.
“Ng says they won’t be false triggers,” Baudry stated, in a low, reverent voice.
“We thought five cases per hour was bad,” Thalia said.
Across the Solid Orrery, red status call-outs were popping into life like the first new blooms of spring. Each signified a probable instance of Wildfire, either in a citizen yet to be reached or in someone already within protective custody.
“Summary, Ng. You were monitoring,” Clearmountain said.
“The curve’s been steepening for days,” Thalia said, fighting to organise her thoughts despite the light-headedness she still felt after her concussion. “But at least we had a handle on that. We knew it was going to be bad, but even our worst projections said we’d be able to save more than half of the afflicted citizens. Somewhere in the last ten minutes, though, it’s gone through the roof. I’m estimating one new instance every sixty seconds.”
“This is … impossible,” Baudry said.
“We’re tracking it, ma’am,” Thalia answered. “It’s real.”
“I know it’s real, damn it. I’m just saying this doesn’t fit with any of our existing theories. It can’t be a latency.”
“Not now,” Clearmountain agreed.
Baudry turned to one of the harried-looking analysts. “Call the Supreme Prefect. She needs to be aware of this shift.”
“She’s with Garlin,” Clearmountain said. “Running a trawl. Maybe not a coincidence.”
“You think the trawl’s allowing him to steepen the death curve?” Baudry asked.
“Theoretically … no.” Clearmountain scratched at the day-old stubble bristling against his collar. “But this is unequivocal. We’ve missed something. Given him a channel, a means to send signals to their implants.”
“Maybe it’s not what it seems,” Thalia ventured.
“I’d say there wasn’t much room for misinterpreting that,” Baudry answered, as another red flag popped into existence.
“I mean, maybe we’re looking at it from the wrong angle, ma’am.” Thalia swallowed hard. “We’ve taken all necessary measures with Garlin, haven’t we? Isolated him, and done the same thing to hundreds of the citizens. And yet something is still getting through to their Voi kernels. A signal where a signal shouldn’t be possible. So I’m thinking, maybe there isn’t a signal.”
“We’re back to the idea of a latency, then,” Clearmountain said, tolerating her outspokenness for the time being. “But this new cluster proves—”
“I don’t believe in the latency theory either, sir. But I do believe in physics. Unless Garlin’s walking around with a neutrino transmitter in his skull, there’s no way for him to be able to send any sort of signal through to those people, whether or not he has access to private abstraction channels.”
“You’re being needlessly oblique, Ng,” Baudry said.
“What I mean is, ma’am, we might have made a mistake by locking him away. I keep thinking back to Terzet Friller, the worker who died in a vacuum suit.”
“What about Friller?” Baudry asked sharply.
“The other workers told us there was an intermittent fault with the communications in Friller’s suit. That nagged at me, so Sparver helped me access the case file to make sure I wasn’t misremembering.”
“You were meant to be resting, Ng.”
“I knew I was onto something, ma’am. Friller was out of contact with the other workers when Wildfire kicked in. It didn’t happen until Friller’s suit went off-line for an extended period of time, screening out any chance of an abstraction signal getting through. That made me wonder if we’d got the cause of Wildfire the wrong way around. It’s not due to a triggering signal reaching those implants, it’s due to a safeguarding signal not getting through.”
“None of the other victims were wearing spacesuits, Ng,” Clearmountain said.
“I know, sir, and I’ve thought about that as well. It doesn’t rule out my idea. It just means that Friller might have died ahead of schedule. I think the safeguarding signals were deliberately withheld from the others, but Friller jumped the queue by accidentally isolating themself from abstraction.”
“The clinic ceased operation more than twenty years ago,” Clearmountain said. “That would mean Garlin’s been actively suppressing these Wildfire cases … all two thousand of them … until a little over four hundred days ago?”
“I know it sounds difficult to accept, sir. But it would explain why the cases are rocketing now. He can’t get those suppressing signals out.”
Lillian Baudry made to issue a flip answer, but something checked her response. She creased her lips, some desperate, weary calculation going on behind her eyes.
“You think there’s something in it?” Clearmountain asked.
“I don’t know. It doesn’t quite fit the timeline. We’ve had him in that isolation cell for hours, and yet that new spate of deaths only started showing up a few minutes ago. I also wonder why Garlin didn’t use this as a bargaining chip, if he knew we’d be cutting off the suppressing signals. But damn it all, she’s right to voice her theory. It’s an angle we hadn’t considered.” Baudry’s expression hardened. “I don’t like it, either. How can we squeeze Garlin, if we need him to keep sending out those signals?”
“We can’t,” Thalia said. “Can’t kill him, can’t risk making him unconscious, can’t risk trawling him, can’t even isolate him from abstraction.”
“It’s too soon to act on a doubtful hypothesis,” Clearmountain said.
By then another red flag hag appeared on the Solid Orrery. “Then what?” Baudry asked, with a terrible apprehension in her voice.
“I don’t know,” C
learmountain whispered, as if that admission was a confession of the utmost shamefulness.
A draught played across the back of Thalia’s neck. She turned around in time to see Jane Aumonier coming through the main doors, accompanied by Robert Tang and a couple of supernumerary analysts. Aumonier had the stricken look of someone who had just had the last of their certainties shot out from under them.
She strode to the Solid Orrery, snapped her eyes to it, nodded once. It was clear to Thalia that she had been briefed on her way from the interrogation room.
“When did this uptick start?”
“About thirteen minutes ago, ma’am,” Thalia said.
“And you didn’t think to inform me until now?”
“I wanted to be sure it wasn’t random clustering,” Thalia said, refusing to be cowed. “You wouldn’t have appreciated being dragged up here for a spurious pattern.” She ran her tongue along the back of her teeth. “Ma’am.”
Aumonier turned to Clearmountain. “Bancal should be approaching Lethe around now. Do we have a report?”
“Negative,” Clearmountain said, conjuring an enlargement of the relevant area of the Glitter Band. “But we still have a hard fix on the cruiser’s location, and no reports of anything adverse.”
“I’d call this adverse,” Aumonier muttered, taking away from Clearmountain’s conjuring, swelling Lethe and its surrounding volume to the size of a watermelon, with the cruiser as a tiny pulsing speck off to one side of the slow-tumbling object. “They’ve entered the anti-collision volume.” She nodded at one of the analysts. “Get me Bancal. Immediately.”
“Just a moment, ma’am.” The analyst held up a compad, Sparver’s face looming large, backdropped by a sweep of controls and readouts.
“Bancal,” Aumonier said. “We have a development. Confirm that you are now inside Lethe’s anti-collision volume.”
“Well into it, ma’am. We’re getting near enough to investigate a power source under one of the poles. Captain Pell says we can drop some forensic packages once we’re a little closer.”
“When did you cross into the volume?”
Thalia heard the voice of Captain Pell, well known to her from cutter and corvette instruction classes. “Fifteen minutes ago, ma’am.”
“Have you provoked any sort of reaction?”
“Nothing, ma’am,” Pell continued. “We were swept by anti-collision radar, but that’s to be expected. We’re at weapons readiness, but I’m not anticipating any sort of hostile action. Prefect Bancal will confirm, but this doesn’t look like anything out of the ordinary.”
“You mentioned a power source.”
“Probably just low-level housekeeping. We’ll take a closer look for completeness’s sake, but—”
“No, you won’t. Execute an immediate retreat, Captain Pell. I want you out of that anti-collision volume as quickly as possible. But do nothing that might be construed as threatening action.”
“I … very well, ma’am. Initiating hard reverse burn.”
Aumonier’s order countermanded any sort of instruction Sparver might have given, so there was no need for Pell to consult with the senior-most prefect on the cruiser. Thalia could imagine that smarting with Sparver, but he knew the ropes as well as any of them. Under any circumstances, at any time, the word of the Supreme Prefect was the ultimate authority.
“We’re backing off,” Sparver said. “Nice and casually. But we’ll keep our claws sharp, if no one objects.”
“Provided they’re not yet visibly deployed,” Aumonier answered. “How long until you’ve cleared the volume?”
“At this rate,” Pell answered, “ten minutes.”
“Halve that,” Aumonier said.
“Complying,” Pell said.
“Ma’am,” Sparver said. “What sort of development were you talking about?”
“A spike in the deaths, Bancal. The start of which was uncomfortably close to the point where you crossed into the volume. It might be nothing, but it’s not a chance I’m willing to take. I’m concerned that you may have tripped some monitoring system, somehow linked to the Wildfire incidence.”
“Do you think backing off will help?” Sparver asked.
“If it does or doesn’t, Bancal, we’ll know very shortly.”
If Lethe was a boulder-shaped clock hand, then according to Sparver’s reckoning, by the time it completed two whole revolutions they would be on the safe side of the anti-collision volume. They were still backing away, keeping the nose of Democratic Circus aimed at the tumbling rock, Pell determined to keep the cruiser’s scanning systems garnering as much data as possible. That pink smear of sub-surface heat had got a little sharper since they began, like a thumbprint coming into slow focus, but Sparver was still none the wiser about the exact cause of it. Something was drawing power, to be certain, but it was an excessive signature for a few housekeeping systems.
As they backed up, a proximity monitor read out a slowly increasing series of numbers. Grolnick continued to report on weapons readiness. Dias was running a sweep on any nearby space traffic, as well as feeding routine updates to Panoply. The flight deck illumination was at condition red, the rhythmic cycling of master caution tones and status chimes creating a lulling, womblike ambience.
“As soon as anyone is ready to explain what this rock might have to do with Wildfire …” Pell began.
“You heard Lady Jane,” Sparver said. “We just poked our noses into something, and now there’s a new spate of melters. She’s not one to buy into coincidences and, given the Voi connection, neither am I.”
“I thought we had Garlin?”
“We do. But Garlin can’t be the whole story. Dreyfus was supposed to be looking into the family background down in Chasm City. Whatever he turned up made him think this was worth our time—and Lady Jane obviously thought it was worth listening to his hunch. Now this has happened, I’m inclined to think Dreyfus must have been onto something.”
Pell looked disgruntled. “I hope you’re right. It’s not that I don’t trust Dreyfus—I don’t need to tell you that. But if all we were ever going to do was knock on a door and scuttle away, we didn’t really need a ship this big.”
“But I’m glad we brought it,” Sparver said. He eased out of his fold-down seat, still weightless as the cruiser backed up at a constant speed. “I’m going back to talk to the prefects. They’ve got their blood up. They were expecting a little more than this.”
“They won’t be too sorry to be told the hunt’s off,” Pell said. “We aren’t exactly equipped for an enforcement action.”
“Ten kilometres from threshold,” Dias said. “No change in Lethe or its proximity systems.”
“Good,” Sparver replied. “I’ll feel a lot easier when we’re the other side of that line.”
He went back and spoke to the four prefects, all of them armoured-up with their visors raised, making them look like a clutch of baby birds, gape-mouthed and black-feathered. He explained the new order to them, saying that it was too soon to speculate about returning to the earlier operation, but that in his opinion there was only a small likelihood of an immediate enforcement action. He watched their reactions, detecting a definite easing in the collective mood. It would have been an exaggeration to say that they were relieved at the prospect of being stood down—these were experienced field operatives, all of whom had already seen action—but equally they knew they would not normally have been sent into a high-risk investigation without additional weaponry and equipment.
“I won’t second-guess the brains in tactical,” Sparver said. “But if they decide this place really does demand a closer look, chances are they’ll want some additional operatives and firepower.”
Kober glanced down at his whiphound, the handle appearing small and ineffectual in the heavy gauntlet of his armour. “Should we stand down from tactical readiness, sir?”
“Let’s not count our chickens just yet,” Sparver said, giving Kober an encouraging pat on the shoulder.
 
; A general address chime sounded. “Pell to all stations. We’ve crossed out of the anti-collision volume. We’ll continue at our present rate of drift until we receive revised instructions from Panoply.”
Sparver went forward again. Grolnick was holding the cruiser’s weapons at their alert status, but with every kilometre that they backed off, the chance of a hostile intervention became less likely.
A minute passed, then five. Lethe was becoming just another slow-tumbling rock, beginning to fall back into the broader flow of orbital bodies.
“Incoming transmission from Panoply,” Dias said. “It’s the Supreme Prefect, sir. Shall I put her on general display?”
Pell glanced at Sparver, received a nod, then told Dias to go ahead.
“We put you safely clear of the threshold, Captain Pell. Can you confirm?”
“Safely beyond Lethe’s volume, ma’am. No change in status at our end. We’ve got a slightly better idea of that thermal excess, and it could be consistent with something more than routine housekeeping systems. Equally, someone could just be wasting power unnecessarily. Do you want us to move back in and take a closer look?”
“Negative, Captain. We’ll make no rash movements on this one until we see a trend in the Wildfire incidences. Maintain your posture until I say otherwise.”
“Understood,” Pell said.
Slowly the Democratic Circus continued its retreat.
Tang checked the restraints then lowered the trawl back into place, Garlin squirming against the straps but unable to offer any physical resistance.
“You went in once.” His speech was slightly slurred, one lip swollen where he had bitten it under the earlier trawl. “Wasn’t that enough for you?”
“I never said I was done,” Aumonier answered. “Just that you needed a little time off between sessions.” She directed a curt nod at Tang. “Begin. We can dispense with the niceties this time.”
“Show me as many faces as you like, as many pictures of that building … it isn’t going to make any difference.”
The trawl started humming. Tang quickly pushed through the lower power settings.