Perec turned the sharp beak of her visor to him. “Ready, sir?”
“Go through,” Sparver said.
Kober operated the door. Sparver steeled himself for an inrush of air, but the vacuum reading had been accurate. Beyond the airlock, stretching away to infinity, was an extension of the same red-lit chamber. Sections of it were lighting up in sequence, receding further and further into the distance.
It looked impossibly long, but Sparver knew Lethe was only seven kilometres across at this point, and he doubted the shaft extended much more than half that distance.
“Forward scout mode,” Perec said, flicking out the tail on her own primary whiphound. “Ascertain the length of this shaft, then hold station at the far end. Gurney: instruct your number one to define a hundred-metre moving secure zone.”
Picking up on Perec’s command through the suit channel, the whiphound lunged forward, flicking itself faster and faster with rhythmic pulses of its tail, finding traction even in the near-weightless conditions. Gurney’s unit sped away just as quickly initially, but only as far as one hundred metres, before swivelling around and locking its eye onto them.
The prefects advanced, moving along the tunnel in loping, dreamlike strides. Perec and Kober led the squad, Singh and Gurney following behind, Sparver bringing up the rear. Perec’s whiphound was still racing ahead, already half a kilometre down the shaft, finding only the same clean-walled corridor with its converging lines of red striplights. A minute passed, then another. Three minutes, then five. Trained to communicate only when necessary, the squad moved in silence. He had to admire their discipline, but Sparver would have appreciated a little mindless small talk to settle his jangling nerves.
Perec’s whiphound slowed as it neared the limit of the shaft. It came to a halt, scanning rapidly, feeding pictures through to their visors. The shaft had widened out into a small holding area next to an internal airlock or bulkhead door.
“That’s got to be the top of the connecting shaft that leads down to the habitable volume,” Sparver said.
Perec’s whiphound held its ground at the head of the shaft, maintaining watch for any hitherto undetected threats. Gurney’s whiphound caught up with it ten minutes later, and the prefects were only just behind it. Kober wasted no time in determining that the door was the upper access point to an elevator shaft.
Some of the power indications were active, but Kober could neither call nor confirm the position of the elevator. He spent a couple of minutes trying to coax a response from the control panel, then turned to Perec with a shake of his helmet.
“Get the door open one way or another,” she said. “We can drop down the shaft if necessary. One of us can carry Prefect Bancal.”
Kober set his primary whiphound to sword mode and cut open the control panel casing. Inside was a gooey, glowing confusion of tangled connections and modules.
“Attempt interface,” he told the whiphound, holding it by the handle while its filament formed a questing tentacle, using the quickmatter mechanisms on the second edge to override or hotwire the panel systems. “Panel confirms vacuum in shaft,” Kober said, after a few seconds. “Elevator seems to be at the far end. I think we can open the door, but I can’t rule out booby-traps or a false pressure reading.”
“Tell your whiphound to open it in twenty seconds,” Perec said. “Squad: fall back thirty metres and assume defensive posture.”
Kober issued the command, leaving his whiphound still interfaced with the panel, and scuttled back to join the others. The prefects crouched low against the wall, tucked their heads down and formed cross-shaped defences with their arms. Sparver hunkered down and closed his eyes, not caring to dwell on how little protection his m-suit would give against flying debris or a sudden pressure blast.
He need not have worried. The door opened without incident, not even a breath of air escaping from the shaft.
The squad advanced back to the holding area. Perec approached the dark void beyond the now-open door, steadying herself by one hand against the doorframe as she peered in and down.
“See anything?” Sparver asked.
“Just a vertical shaft, Prefect Bancal.” Perec opened her fist. “Here, boy.”
Her whiphound sprung into her grip, snapping its filament into itself.
“Drop to the limit of this shaft. If you survive the impact, hold station at maximum threat readiness. We will descend on suit thrusters.”
Perec flung the whiphound into the void, giving it an initial burst of momentum to assist it on its way.
“Good luck,” Sparver heard her whisper.
The whiphound dropped, freely at first and then skidding against the wall. The further it went the more speed it picked up, the walls of the shaft racing by ever faster, a moving plug of darkness hovering just out of range of the whiphound’s battery of sensors.
“One kilometre,” Perec announced. “Still in vacuum.” Then, after what seemed to Sparver to be only a few more seconds: “Two kilometres. No alteration in the shaft.” Then: “Three. Must be close to halfway down, still no sign of … shit.”
Sparver had seen it too, a sudden bottom to the shaft, rising up unexpectedly soon. The whiphound’s feed had gone dark. He frowned to himself, wondering why the whiphound had failed to detect that abrupt end to the shaft, when it should have been scanning well ahead of itself, preparing to use its traction coil to slow down as it neared the bottom. He only had to think about it a fraction longer to realise that there could have been no fault with the whiphound, and what had appeared to be the bottom of the shaft was nothing of the sort.
It was the elevator, coming back up.
“Back off,” he said.
“I … yes,” Perec said. “Immediate fallback.”
“You want me to try shutting the door?” Kober asked.
“No time,” Perec said.
Kober retrieved his whiphound. The prefects scuttled back to the same thirty-metre position where they had waited before, then crouched down and assumed defensive postures. Sparver took shelter behind them, mind racing as he tried to calculate how much time they had. The shaft was still in vacuum, still silent, not even a hint of vibration to give a clue as to the elevator’s approach—if indeed it was still racing towards them.
It was almost an anticlimax when the elevator came. They saw it rising through the door: fast but not too fast, obviously decelerating rapidly as it neared the upper end of the shaft. A blur of motion like a ramming piston, a soft thud as the elevator’s momentum was absorbed, and then silence and stillness. All they could see of the elevator was its own door, lined up with the open door in the shaft but presently sealed.
“Hold,” Perec warned, as Kober made a move to break formation. “We still don’t know what’s behind that door.”
It was sensible advice because when the elevator door did open, it was as if a bright, soundless bomb had gone off. The shaft shook, flakes of debris shaken loose, a cloud of shock-frozen air blasting past the party with almost enough force to tear them off the wall. It had not been a bomb, though, but merely the sudden decompression of the elevator, which must have been filled with air all the time it had been on the way up. Some safety circuit should never have allowed that door to open into vacuum, but Sparver guessed that time—or the damage already done to the outer door—had confused the system.
“Better hope there wasn’t anyone in that thing,” Gurney said.
Still no one moved. They were waiting for the cloud to disperse, to get a clear view of the open elevator. Sparver watched intently. As gaps began to open up in the white confusion, so his eyes insisted that there was a form coming into focus, an upright shape like a tall, waiting figure.
He was hoping it was his imagination. The gases would thin out and there would just be the empty elevator, summoned by some automatic protocol once it detected activity at this end of the shaft.
But Perec said: “Someone’s there.”
The grey shape gained form and solidity. It was sta
nding in the elevator, seemingly unmoved by the explosion.
Perec unclipped her second whiphound. “Forward scout mode,” she said, in little more than a whisper.
Still wreathed in the dispersing traces of air, the figure stepped out of the elevator, placing one very precise and careful footfall after the other, managing a slow and deliberate walk despite the near-weightlessness.
The last few gasps of air pulled away from the form. Sparver stared at it, trying to make sense of the conflicting information reaching his eyes. The figure seemed more animal than human, and yet there was something very wrong with its basic proportions. It was taller than any of the prefects, yet there was nothing above the shoulders.
The headless form lifted an arm. It was carrying something, a dark object with the purposeful lines of a weapon. Slowly it brought the arm to the level.
Perec’s whiphound flung itself at the arm and the weapon. It made a noose of its coil and slipped the noose around the arm, swiftly and accurately as a carnival trick. The coil tightened and the arm and the weapon fell away, severed along a clean smoking line.
The figure toppled slowly forward, bouncing softly before coming to a halt.
Singh and Gurney dispatched whiphounds to safeguard the fallen form until it could be inspected at close range. Perec used hand gestures to signal the party to advance. They crept nearer to the body, wary of sudden movements. The severed arm had been holding a rifle-shaped thing. Sparver knelt down and extracted it from the pawlike grip of the hand, prizing furry fingers open to release the weapon.
He recognised it for what it was. A crossbow.
Then he turned his attention to the headless body. Beneath its layering of brown fur was the suggestion of powerful mechanical musculature. Where the head had been—if indeed there had ever been a head—was a ragged collar, and a busy mechanism of bearings and pipes, cut clean at the level of the neck.
Perec turned to him. “This might sound impertinent, Prefect Bancal. But do you have the faintest fucking idea what this thing is?”
Sparver met her eyes. His expression was all the answer she really needed.
“I think we’d better take the lift,” he said.
Dreyfus cleared Panoply and notched up the acceleration. The cutter was on an expedited burn, eating into the fuel reserves that it would need to make its own way back home. This emergency crossing would get them to Lethe in just under twenty-seven minutes, a trade-off that Dreyfus considered more than satisfactory.
“Captain Pell has undocked and pulled back to just outside the exclusion volume,” Aumonier told him over the link. “There was an attack from the anti-collision systems, but we don’t think it damaged the cruiser too badly. ”
“He still isn’t answering?”
“Nothing, despite repeated requests. We’re agreed that this isn’t like Pell?”
“Pell’s been duped. My guess is that he’s standing by to re-dock if he gets the call from Sparver.”
“Do we think that Caleb’s able to hijack our communications that way?”
Dreyfus picked his words carefully, not caring to utter a direct lie to Aumonier if he could help it. “If the brother’s responsible for Wildfire, then I wouldn’t put this past him.”
“Damn it all. Didn’t we patch all the holes last time?”
“There are always more holes. If there weren’t, we’d be out of a job.”
“Sometimes I wouldn’t mind being out of a job,” Aumonier said.
Dreyfus heard the quiet strain in her voice and knew exactly how she felt. They were all on the limit, all on the point of breaking. “Maybe the brother will give us some answers,” he offered forlornly, before signing off.
“There is no brother,” Garlin said, strapped into the position to the right of Dreyfus, exactly where Grobno had been before Dreyfus handed him back to the Ultras. “Stasov’s admitted he has a grudge against the family. Why would you believe a word he says?”
The cutter made a sharp course change, a lumbering multi-hulled cargo hauler looming close to starboard, then swerving past in a blur of navigation lights. Traffic control had done their best to clear the lanes for this rapid crossing, but there were obviously some loose ends. Dreyfus tightened his restraint belt against his paunch, just in case.
“Stasov was treated badly by the Vois, but that doesn’t mean we should dismiss his story.”
“I was in that room, Dreyfus. I heard the conversation. It was going on in front of my nose. No one’s been frozen that long. The moment Spider-fingers mentioned—”
Dreyfus regarded him. “What did you call Stasov?”
“Read as much into that as you like.”
“Do you remember something, Julius? The first time you and I met. Properly, I mean. In Stonehollow.”
Garlin shrugged. “Clearly it left a mark on you.”
“I think it left a mark on both of us. Let me jog your memory a bit, though. You were delivering a lecture—one of your public rallies. I was the man in the crowd, wearing a hood, trying to pass unnoticed. You picked me out with uncanny accuracy, even though you had no reason to suspect that I was present.”
“Oh, yes. I remember now. I think the meeting ended with you face down in the mud, floundering like a beached whale.”
“Good. Then you’ll also remember the Amerikano woman.”
“The what?”
“Her statue. The pioneer, the settler. She had her fist digging into the ground, trying to scrape some life from this new world. All very tragic.”
“It was a statue. I needed somewhere to stand, to address my gathering.”
“And you just happened to choose her, of all people. There were other statues in that habitat, Julius. But I think she called to you. You felt an affinity with her—even if you couldn’t articulate it.”
“Didn’t you hear what Stasov said? That whole mess happened three hundred years ago.”
“There’s a connection,” Dreyfus said. “I’m sure of it now, and deep down so are you. But I don’t blame you for not remembering. Stasov said you’d already had at least one round of induced amnesia before he ever started working for the family. I think that was to suppress the memory of whatever it was that linked you to the Amerikano tragedy. But you got another dose, after your mother died. Pushed everything back even further. It’s still in there, though, and my money says that Caleb’s treatment wasn’t anywhere near as effective. It’s closer to the surface with him.”
“I’ll say one thing, Dreyfus. You may not be making any sense, but at least you’ve stopped blaming me for Wildfire.”
The cutter took a nosedive through the middle of a ring-shaped habitat, violating several dozen traffic regulations in one swoop. Dreyfus studied his guest, ruminating on his own feelings towards Garlin and the bruised dignity he still remembered from the encounter in Hospice Idlewild.
“You chose to make yourself a person of interest,” Dreyfus said. “And I had a job to do.”
20
The elevator door closed, sealing the five of them into a little moving cube of vacuum. The inertial tracker in Sparver’s helmet recorded their progress, marking the kilometres as they descended.
“I think I might know what that thing was,” Kober said, almost hesitantly, as if he were wary of making a fool of himself.
“If you have an idea, share it,” Perec snapped.
“I don’t know why it didn’t have a head. Maybe it did, once. But the rest of it reminded me of something I saw in the history lessons. When they sent people here, those early colonists … the ones raised by robots. The psychologists weren’t sure whether or not to make the robots look like robots, or people, or something else. I think they tried all the different approaches, in all the colonies they tried to start. But none of them helped much.”
“Kober’s right,” Sparver said, memories of his own sharpening into focus. “They knew the children needed mentors. Guiding figures, to help them with the first phase of development, until the colony had passed through a
generation or two and become self-sufficient and stable. That was the plan, anyway. Some of the robots were done up to look like people, and that didn’t work too well. Close but not quite right—and even a child can pick up on all the ways that it’s wrong. The Ursas were another approach. Forget trying to pass them off as people, go the other way instead. Big, furry teddy bears. Mentors and friends. But they didn’t work out any better than the humans, in the end.”
“You think that was an Ursa?” Perec asked.
“After three hundred years, maybe not an Ursa exactly. But something that was meant to remind us of one,” Sparver said.
Perec turned her visor to face him. “What do you think we’re dealing with here, Prefect Bancal?”
“Ghosts,” Sparver said. “Bad memories. Some seriously bad history. That’d be my wild stab in the dark.”
They had already passed the three-kilometre mark, and soon it was four, then five. They felt glued to the floor now, but that was only in comparison with the near-weightlessness they had experienced before. After the sixth kilometre the elevator began to slow down, preparing for a smooth arrival at the base of the shaft. Their weight peaked, then settled back down to close to a gee.
Perec still had one whiphound. She fiddled with the setting dials, a nervous but understandable act of triple-checking.
“Be ready,” she said.
Sparver felt a barely perceptible halting of the elevator. He eyed the door warily, deciding it was wiser not to place his trust in any of the functions or readouts of the lock mechanism. There could be anything beyond that door, from vacuum to a thousand crushing atmospheres of acid. He wondered which of them would be better off in either scenario: the prefects in their tactical armour, or him in his tissue-thin m-suit. At least it would be quick for Sparver, if his worst fears were justified.
“Air exchange,” Singh said. “I’m reading a rising partial pressure.”