Thalia stepped closer, warily. The woman looked dead, but it was the device attached to her arm that most concerned her. The watch face was a battery of glass vials, arranged in a radial fashion. Little alloy plungers had already pushed out the contents of a couple of them.
“You seen anything like that before, Sparver?” Thalia asked, wondering if it might be a bomb or an anti-tamper device.
Sparver seemed oddly reticent.
“The evidence archive, once or twice.”
“You going to enlighten me?”
“It’s a Painflower, an interrogation machine. There’s a little clockwork timer in the base, and it delivers escalating doses in sequence.”
“What the hell is such a nasty thing doing here?”
“I almost hate to speculate. It’s black market technology, imported from Sky’s Edge: home-made torture tech from the murkier fringes of the war. When the Ultras have a score to settle, this is one of their preferred methods.”
There was a little click, and a mechanical buzzing. The third plunger in sequence had begun to depress into its vial. Thalia and Sparver watched, both of them taken aback that the device was still operating.
Ghiselin Bronner jolted awake, her head snapping back as if it had been yanked by a cord. Her arms flexed and tensed and her back arched against the chair. Her eyes bulged. A sound came from her mouth, muffled by the gag. Her head twisted, eyes fixing on Thalia—some wild, terrified acknowledgement flashing between them.
“It’s all right,” Thalia said. “We’ll get it off you.” Putting aside any concerns that there might still be a booby-trap, she moved to Bronner’s side and loosened the gag. Bronner drew breath, her eyes still meeting Thalia’s, and then she gave out a terrible rising moan. Thalia squeezed her hand. “Sparver. Can we get the Painflower off without making things worse?”
“Depends,” Sparver said. He looked at Thalia, then at the woman, as if unsure how candid he could be. “Sometimes there’s an anti-tamper trigger. A terminal dose.”
Ghiselin Bronner stopped moaning. She breathed in and out, each breath heavier than the last. Then, her jaw clenched tight, she said: “Get it off me. I don’t care.”
Sparver put out a hand and summoned his whiphound. It jumped into his grip, retracting its filament with a clean snap.
“Sword mode,” Sparver said. “Five-centimetre blade, anaesthetic edge.”
His whiphound pushed out a bright stiff line. He leaned over Bronner. “I’m going to cut it off. I’ll be as careful as I can, but it would still be best if you didn’t flinch.”
“Do it,” she said, before biting down on the pain.
Something clattered in the adjoining room. Thalia twisted around. The neutrois citizen in the yellow gown was still exactly where Thalia had stepped over them. She looked back at Sparver, then Bronner.
“He’s still here,” Bronner said.
Thalia summoned her whiphound, retracting the filament but holding it in her hand rather than clipping it to her belt. “Stay with her,” she told Sparver.
“Thal—” Sparver began.
She was already turning, already on her way out of the room, in the direction of the noise. They had already swept this part of the property, she told herself. If there had been someone present besides the constables and Ghiselin Bronner, the whiphounds would have picked up on it.
But something was leaving the room. She saw the ornament they had stumbled against, a larger version of the white candelabra, now lying on the floor. It was skeletal, with a narrow trunk and bony arms supporting spherical candle-holders. The fleeing figure was a human form, but sketched out of mismatched edges and shadows, very nearly invisible except when it moved.
“Stop,” Thalia called out. “You are under Panoply observance. I have authorisation to use lethal force.”
The figure hesitated, looking back at her—a man-shaped collage of mirrors and prisms. “Not your problem, Prefect.”
She deployed the whiphound’s filament, allowed it to form a traction spool, and then let go. “Mark and acquire,” she ordered. But the whiphound kept sweeping its head in a scan pattern, trying and failing to lock onto the subject.
Chameleoflage, Thalia realised.
The man must have realised that this was his chance. He moved more quickly now, striding over a low table, ducking under an archway and bounding towards the front door.
“Here,” she said angrily, snatching the whiphound, retracting its filament and snapping it to her belt. Perhaps it would have a better chance at subject acquisition in daylight.
The front door creaked open. Thalia sprinted back through the rooms after the man, skipping over the first fallen constable. By the time she reached the reception area the door was wide open. She bounded out onto the balcony, momentarily dazzled by the brightness of day.
She looked left and right, certain the fleeing man would not have had time to reach either end of the balcony.
But there was something, she realised—a sort of clotted smokiness against the air above the parapet to her left, where there ought only to have been a view of distant rising terrain. She squinted, forcing her eyes to make some sense of the confusing impression. The fleeing man was on the parapet, crouching as he tried to lower himself over the wall, down to the level below.
He was only twenty paces away.
“Stop!” she called again. “No further warnings! I will use lethal force!”
“Use it, Prefect,” the man called back, lowering further so only his head and upper torso were visible over the parapet.
Thalia jogged after him, re-deploying the whiphound once again. “Mark and acquire,” she said, but this time holding the handle to concentrate its scan. She felt it twist in her grip, signalling acquisition. But the man was stretching lower, barely any part of him now visible. She hurled the whiphound, shouting “detain!” as she did, and prayed she had not made matters worse.
The man slipped out of view. The whiphound landed next to the parapet, flicking out its traction spool at the last moment to cushion and orientate itself, and in another instant it was slithering over the wall. Thalia bounded after it.
The man was below, sprawled on the ground, the whiphound wrapping its filament around his legs, taking care to keep the sharpened edge away from any physical contact with its subject. The man was struggling, trying to claw himself along, but his efforts were futile. His chameleoflage outfit was starting to malfunction, blocky areas of it showing the wrong colour and background, so that it looked like a restlessly changing harlequin pattern. He had been wearing a full-length gown, with a narrow-slitted hood drawn tight over a pair of goggles.
“Don’t fight it,” she advised. “I’m coming down to you.”
“Take your time,” a hoarse voice said, a hand touching her wrist gently. “You can have him later—I understand that he’s your concern, not mine. But we do have some unfinished business.”
It was the female constable, the one Thalia had assumed was out cold. Thalia appraised the red-haired woman, looking at her eyes for signs of concussion or a brain bleed and seeing only stubborn focus and an eagerness to be getting on with her duties.
“Do you remember what happened?”
“A man came to the house, forced his way in. After that, nothing.”
“He got to Ghiselin Bronner. She’s alive, but in a pretty bad way. I’ve asked Panoply to alert your people and let them know medical help is needed, but if there’s anything you can do to speed things up …?”
The woman’s hand tightened on the haft of her stun-truncheon. “What did the bastard do to her?”
“Fixed some interrogation device to her. My deputy’s in there trying to get it off.” Thalia nodded over the wall, to the level below. “But he’s our concern now.”
“How is Dane?”
Thalia realised she must mean the other constable. “Out cold, like you were. But I think he’ll be all right.”
The woman gave Thalia a look that was just as long and appraising a
s the one she had received from Thalia. She nodded slowly. “All right, Prefect—since you asked nicely. The fucker’s yours. I’ll make sure the medics are alerted.”
“Thank you … what’s your name, by the way?”
“Trelon. Take this, Prefect.” Trelon offered Thalia the stun-truncheon, armed now—its blunt end giving off a dancing blue spark and a sharp ozone tang.
Thalia nodded her thanks, took the stun-truncheon, went to the end of the balcony, down the connecting stairs to the lower level, and then backtracked until she reached the man. The whiphound was still holding him.
A handful of citizens had begun to drift out of their homes, gathering along the balcony to see what was happening. They were all keeping a sensible distance from the detained man, and all of them edged briskly aside as Thalia passed, the truncheon crackling in her hand.
“Nothing to see here, citizens,” she said, knowing how little good it would do.
She knelt next to the man, extended her free hand and tugged his cloak looser so she could see more of what was under it. He wore a tight black outfit sewn with many pockets and loops. He was very skinny, young-looking, hairless, and the goggles were jammed so tightly over his eyes they seemed to be part of him.
“Who are you?” she asked, softly at first.
“None of your concern, Prefect.”
“Ultras sent you. What was your interest in Ghiselin Bronner?”
The man bared his teeth, grinning at her. “What’s your interest?”
Thalia considered the stun-truncheon. It felt heavy and dependable in her hand, and she had no doubt it would be an unpleasant thing, to be touched by that dancing, crackling spark.
She set the truncheon aside, then spoke into her collar. “Ng. I have detained a subject near the Bronner residence. Medical assistance has been requested from local authorities. I’ll remain with the subject until Prefect Bancal is available to assist me with moving the subject to our vehicle.” She paused, swallowed, and added: “Unless there are further instructions, I will continue with my agreed duties when we leave the Shiga-Mintz Spindle.”
She closed the link. The subject wriggled under the whiphound’s embrace and the whiphound tightened its hold, its single red eye fixed on him with malevolent intensity.
“You could hurt me, Prefect. Why don’t you?”
“Because you want it,” Thalia said.
Aumonier closed the doors to the tactical room and turned to face the gathered prefects and analysts. Almost without thinking she studied their faces and postures for signs of fatigue, looking for anyone who might be pushing themselves past the point of effectiveness. They had all been working harder than usual these recent weeks, as the crisis bit deeper. Red eyes, poor complexions, slack muscle tone and flashes of irritability were almost a given now. What concerned her was the traces of more extreme tiredness, such as forgetfulness, bursts of micro-sleep (however artfully concealed) and a general fading of operational focus, leading to the risk of sub-optimal or even dangerously incorrect decision processes. The older hands, such as Clearmountain and Baudry, were rarely the subject of her interest. They knew their own limits by now, and they also knew it was worse than futile to attempt to match Jane Aumonier’s own working patterns. They were not like her. They would never be like her, because they were fortunate enough not to have been through the experience she had.
But it was sometimes necessary to remind others, especially the newer entrants. Some of the truly foolish even tried to put in more hours than Aumonier, always trying to be first in the tactical room when she arrived, and still there when she left. They volunteered for extra duties, put in double shifts, covered for others with a too-eager enthusiasm. They meant well, but it was a short-cut to burn-out and operational ineffectiveness.
Sometimes it only took a quiet word to put them right. “You’re not me,” she would explain to them. “Be grateful for that, and enjoy your dependence on sleep. It’s your brain’s chance to break out of linear thought patterns. Even asleep, you’re doing useful work for Panoply.”
When that failed to do the trick, when the bags remained under the eyes, she had one other option open to her. She would take them to the “office,” the room she only rarely visited these days, the spherical chamber in an area of Panoply where there was no artificial gravity, and where she had spent every second of those eleven years. She would point to the spot in the middle of the room where she had been obliged to float in weightlessness, safely distant from the walls or any visitors. When people had come to her in the office, they had been required to tie safe-distance tethers to themselves, to prevent them drifting too close.
“I’m the way I am because of what happened in this room,” she would tell them. “Not because I’m strong, or better than you, or more dedicated to Panoply. Not because I care about the Glitter Band more than you. It’s because I’m damaged. Because the thing that happened to me in this room broke my mind, and all the king’s horses couldn’t put me back together again.”
If they got to that point, then some of them were foolish to think the lesson was over.
It was not.
“I’m going to leave you in here now,” Aumonier would say. “For twenty-six hours. The room will be dark. You can’t touch anything or speak to anyone. No one will visit you. You’ll just float here in the middle, alone. I have a feed from your biometric bracelet, though. It will tell me if you are awake or unconscious. If you fall asleep at any point in these twenty-six hours, even for an instant—a bout of micro-sleep, just the barest closing of your eyes—you will be dismissed. There will be no appeal, no disciplinary review. You will leave Panoply.”
If there was a lie in that promise, it was a small one. She never let any of them spend more than thirteen hours in the room. That was enough; more than sufficient to make her point. When she pulled them out, they would always swear that the time had been much longer than a day.
“It wasn’t. It was thirteen hours, and you didn’t manage to get through that without several episodes of micro-sleep. You’re forgiven, though, because you’re only human and now you have some idea of what I went through. Only a small idea, though. You endured thirteen hours and if the scarab had been on you you’d have died. I was in there for eight thousand times as long.”
She rarely had trouble with them after that.
“How are we feeling?” she asked the room. “I want total honesty. Everyone wants to play their part, and that’s to be respected. But I’d sooner one of you took a day away from Wildfire now and returned fresh, than end up in a state of nervous collapse where you’re no use to me for weeks. Believe me, I respect hard work. But nothing impresses me more than admitting to our own limits, and not being ashamed of them.” She was standing, arms folded across her chest, facing her own empty chair across the table, Dreyfus to the right of it. “Well, a deafening silence. And yet you all look like death warmed over, except for Tom, who looks like death warmed over twice. In which case I have some news for you all, just in case anyone was starting to think things couldn’t get any more complicated. Have you all been briefed on what Ng and Bancal found in Shiga-Mintz?”
The analyst next to Dreyfus glanced up. “Feeding through on all Pangolin surfaces now, ma’am.”
“I’ll spare you the bother of reading.” Aumonier walked around to the left of the table, skirting past the Solid Orrery. “Ng and Bancal have the Bronner widow, and she’s out of immediate danger. But that’s only because luck threw us a bone. Ghiselin Bronner was in the middle of being interrogated by an Ultra spy, using a chemical torture device. If Ng and Bancal had got there twenty minutes later, she’d have been dead.”
“A Painflower?” Dreyfus asked, pinching absently at the corner of an eye.
“The interrogation instrument of choice. And it’s not supposition that there’s Ultra involvement. We have detained the agent.”
“Could we be dealing with a false-flag operative?” asked Senior Prefect Miles Jaffna, squinting through narrow, rectangu
lar glasses at the summary feed appearing before him on the table.
“To stir things up with the Ultras?” Aumonier shook her head crisply as she took her place at the table. “I’d almost welcome such a transparent gambit, Miles. At least it would fit our previous case history of zero involvement with Ultra elements. But it’s no false flag. We’ve a known profile on the assailant. Theobald Grobno. A small-time dogsbody for the Ultras, a button boy sent in to settle scores and eliminate unwanted competition. Grobno’s the real deal and we can backtrack his movements all the way to the Parking Swarm.”
Aumonier thought about the swarm, that ever-shifting cloud of Ultra starships, laying over in the Yellowstone system for trade, repairs or merely the settling of ancient scores. Ultras were human, technically, but their motives were often deeply alien and she never relished any overlap between her business and theirs. Life was complicated enough.
“How the hell did an Ultra assassin get inside Shiga-Mintz?” Dreyfus asked.
“The usual chain of follies. Weak security screening at the hub, a plausible fake biography, some moderately clever implant tampering to help him slip past routine scrutiny. We don’t think the equipment came in with him. More than likely a previous operative had stashed the Painflower, the assassin goggles and the chameleoflage cloak at a safe location inside Shiga-Mintz Spindle.”
“Then by association,” said Senior Prefect Mildred Dosso, pushing a loose lock of hair back under a clasp as she spoke, “we can figure the Ultras for the death of Antal Bronner as well? And by implication the remaining Wildfire cases?”
“Wouldn’t that be lovely?” Aumonier said. “Then all we’d have to concern ourselves with is an implicit declaration of war against one hundred million citizens.”