‘This is good work, Tom,’ Aumonier said. ‘But the point still holds. Neither Panoply nor the local enforcement agencies have the resources to comb the whole planet looking for a secret hideaway, especially not now.’
‘We don’t have to comb. I think I know exactly where they are.’ Dreyfus indicated the night-time face of Yellowstone in the Solid Orrery. It was almost entirely black, except for a cold blue flicker of frozen lightning at the southern pole. ‘Saavedra’s ship was stealthed, but nothing’s truly invisible, not even a nonvelope. To avoid being pinned down, Saavedra had to move quickly and exploit gaps in CTC’s tracking, just like any prefect on sensitive business.’
‘How does that help us?’
‘It means her options were limited when she hit atmosphere. I’m sure she’d have preferred to come in slowly, but that would have meant spending too much time in near-Yellowstone space. So she came in hard and fast, using the atmosphere itself as a brake.’
‘And we got a hit,’ Aumonier said.
Dreyfus smiled. Jane was one step ahead of him, but he liked it that way. He felt as if the two of them were a double act, feeding each other lines so that they both looked better before the other prefects. The others must have thought that the whole performance had been rehearsed.
‘The cams detected this flash,’ Dreyfus said, letting the Orrery scroll forward to the point he had tagged. A tiny pink spot of light waxed and waned near Yellowstone’s equator. ‘It matches the expected entry signature for a cutter-sized vehicle moving at about the same speed Saavedra had just before she dropped out of range. It’s her, Seniors.’
‘Ships are coming and going from Yellowstone all the time,’ Clearmountain said.
‘But not that fast. Most ships come in slow, settling down into the atmosphere on controlled thrust. And there’s hardly been any routine traffic since the supreme prefect polled for the use of emergency powers. People are keeping their heads down, hoping this will all blow over.’
‘But an entry point is just an entry point,’ Baudry said.
‘Agreed. I can’t rule out the possibility that Saavedra travelled a lot further within the atmosphere. But if she did, planetary traffic control didn’t pick her up. I think she came in hard and fast close to her destination.’
‘But there’s nothing there,’ Baudry said. She craned her head slightly. ‘I can see the weather pattern over Chasm City, on the sunward face. Unless my knowledge of Stoner geography’s seriously flawed, Saavedra came in thousands of kilometres from any other settlements.’
Dreyfus sent another command to the Orrery. ‘You’re right, Lillian. The nearest surface community would have been Loreanville, eight thousand kilometres to the west. But Firebrand wouldn’t have been interested in Loreanville, or any of the domed settlements: there’d have been too much local security for them to continue their activities.’
‘So where was she headed?’
‘Clear to surface,’ Dreyfus told the Orrery. The quickmatter envelope of the planet’s atmosphere dissipated in a puff, revealing the wrinkled terrain of Yellowstone’s crust. It was an icy landscape riven with fissures and ridges, spotted here and there with simmering cold lakes, lifeless save for the hardiest of organisms capable of enduring the toxic chemistry of the methane-ammonia atmosphere.
‘There’s still nothing there,’ Baudry said.
‘Not now. But there used to be.’ Dreyfus gave another command and the surface became dotted with a dozen or so vermilion symbols, each accompanied by a small textual annotation.
‘What are we looking at, Tom?’ Aumonier asked.
‘The sites of former Amerikano colonies or bases, predating the Demarchist era. Most of these structures and digs go back three hundred years. They’ve been ruins for more than two hundred.’ There was no need for him to labour the point: Saavedra’s entry trajectory had positioned her directly above one of the abandoned colonies. ‘Now, this could be coincidence, but I’m inclined to think otherwise.’
‘What is that place?’ Aumonier asked.
‘The Amerikanos called it Surface Operations Facility Nine, or Ops Nine. If they had another name for it, we have no record of it.’ Dreyfus shrugged. ‘It’s been a long time.’
‘But not so long that there isn’t still something there.’
‘Firebrand wouldn’t have needed a fully operational base, just somewhere to hide the Clockmaker and keep an eye on it. An abandoned facility would have served them adequately.’
‘But is there anything there at all, after all this time?’
‘Not much on the surface according to the terrain maps, but the old records say Ops Nine went down several levels. This is quite a stable area, geologically speaking. The subsurface areas may still be relatively intact: even to the extent that they’ll still be airtight.’
Clearmountain blew out slowly. ‘Then we’d better get a task force down there immediately. There may be nothing in this, but we can’t take that risk. Our top priority is to secure the Clockmaker.’
‘All due respect, Senior,’ Dreyfus said, ‘but I wouldn’t recommend any kind of visible response to this intelligence. Since nothing’s happened so far, we can be reasonably sure that Aurora hasn’t made the same deductions we have. But if we start retasking assets - sending deep-system vehicles into the atmosphere - Aurora’s going to see that and wonder what’s got us so interested in an abandoned Amerikano base.’
‘And I wouldn’t expect her to take long to put two and two together,’ Aumonier said. ‘No: Tom’s correct. We need to respond, but it has to be a covert approach. We need to secure and protect the Clockmaker before Aurora even has a hint as to what we’re up to. That rules out any mass concentration of assets or personnel.’ She paused heavily. ‘But someone will still have to go in. I’d volunteer to do it - I’ve already survived direct contact with the Clockmaker - but for obvious reasons my participation isn’t an option.’
‘We wouldn’t risk you anyway,’ Dreyfus said. ‘You were a field when you encountered the Clockmaker back then. It’s still a field’s job to go in now.’
‘But it doesn’t have to be you.’
‘This has been my case from the moment I spoke to that Ultra captain. I propose talking with it.’
‘It doesn’t talk. It kills.’
‘Then I’ll just have to find some common ground. A negotiating position.’
Clearmountain looked appalled. ‘Even if that means giving it something in return?’
‘Even if.’
‘I won’t permit it.’
‘Then I suggest you start looking into alternative career options. I don’t think Aurora’s going to have a lot of use for senior prefects when she takes over.’
Someone knocked at the door. Dreyfus recognised the girl - she was the operative who’d informed the tactical room of the hostile action taken by the first four habitats claimed by Aurora.
‘Bad news for us again?’ he asked.
‘Sirs, I’m not sure,’ she said, looking nervously at the strained faces of the seniors. ‘I was asked to bring this to your immediate attention. There’s been a development in the House Aubusson situation.’
‘What kind of development? Dreyfus asked, secretly dreading her answer.
‘Sirs, I have imagery obtained by the deep-system cruiser we have on monitoring standby near Aubusson.’ With shaking hands, she placed a compad on the table. ‘There’s been a pressure breach, a major one. Air’s blasting out through a hundred-metre-wide hole in one of the window bands.’
Dreyfus snatched the compad across the table, flipping it around to face him. He made out the sausage-shaped habitat, a jet of cold, grey air geysering out from its side.
‘The cause of this breach?’
She was facing Dreyfus now, answering him to the exclusion of everyone else present, even the supreme prefect herself. ‘Sir, it appears something crashed through the window band. The cruiser’s tracking a metal object, a sphere, moving on a slow free-fall trajectory away from the habit
at.’
Dreyfus’s throat was very dry. ‘The nature of this object?’
‘Unknown, sir, but it doesn’t resemble any orthodox space vehicle or weapons system. The cruiser’s asking permission, sir.’
‘Permission for what?’
She blinked. ‘To fire, sir. To destroy the unknown object.’
‘Over my dead fucking body,’ Dreyfus said.
‘We can’t be too careful,’ Clearmountain replied. ‘This could be another part of Aurora’s takeover strategy.’
‘It’s Thalia.’
‘How can you be so sure? We don’t know what Aurora might have planned.’
‘She’s been using weevils to spread her influence from habitat to habitat,’ Dreyfus answered. ‘Why would she change, put all her eggs in one basket, when her existing strategy’s working just fine?’
‘We can’t guess what she has in mind.’
‘I can. She’s going to keep using force of numbers, the way she already has. Whatever this is, it isn’t part of her plan.’
‘Which doesn’t automatically mean it’s anything to do with Thalia Ng,’ Baudry said. ‘I’m sorry to remind you of this, but we have no evidence that she survived the initial takeover phase.’
‘If we think they’re all dead, why haven’t we nuked Aubusson already?’
‘Because there’s a chance, however small, that the citizenry may still be alive. But that doesn’t necessarily imply that Thalia is amongst the survivors.’ Baudry offered Dreyfus a sympathetic look. ‘I know this is tough on you, but we need to take the rational view. How likely is it that Thalia Ng is behind this development, whatever it represents? We don’t even know what the object is, let alone how it came to smash through the habitat. Thalia was just a single deputy field, Tom. She knew a lot about polling cores, and I don’t doubt that she’d have done her best to protect the citizens, but we have to be realistic about the chances of her succeeding. She had next to no experience in high-risk field situations. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it true that she’d only participated in a single lockdown before all this happened?’
‘I know Thalia,’ Dreyfus said. ‘She’d have done whatever it took.’
‘Tom, I know you mean well, but we can’t afford to let this foreign object—’
‘Put me through to the deep-system cruiser,’ Aumonier said, cutting over Baudry.
The operative touched settings on her bracelet. ‘Connection should be open, Supreme Prefect.’
‘This is Jane Aumonier,’ said the projected figure. ‘To whom am I speaking?’
A woman’s voice crackled across the room. ‘Captain Sarasota, Supreme Prefect. How may I be of assistance?’
‘I believe you’re tracking something, Captain, something that emerged from House Aubusson?’
‘We have a weapons lock on it, Supreme Prefect. We can fire at your command.’
‘I’d rather you didn’t do that, Captain. Maintain your maximum defensive posture, but approach the unidentified object close enough to sweep for infrared hotspots. I want to know if there are survivors aboard that thing.’
‘And if there are?’
‘Bring them in. As fast as you can.’
CHAPTER 28
Dreyfus fastened the safe-distance tether with an unshakeable conviction that this would be the last time he performed the action. Either he would not be coming back from Yellowstone, or Jane Aumonier would not be waiting for him here, in this weightless room, upon his return. The significance of either outcome caused his hands to shake as he locked the catch into place.
‘How long before you leave?’ Aumonier said as Dreyfus came to a halt.
‘Thyssen says there’ll be a ship fuelled and prepped within thirty minutes.’
‘A deep-system cruiser, I take it?’
‘No, I opted for a cutter. The amount of armament’s immaterial. All that matters is that we sneak in unobserved.’
‘We, Tom?’
‘Pell will fly me to the drop-off point. I’ll walk the rest of the way.’
‘Walk?’ she asked, frowning. ‘No one said anything about walking.’
‘There’s no other way. Firebrand will have Ops Nine guarded against the approach of any unauthorised vehicle. But if Pell drops me over their sensor horizon, I should be able to walk in without triggering the perimeter defences.’
‘How will you know where their sensor horizon ends?’
‘They want to stay hidden, so their coverage will be necessarily limited. They won’t be floating drones up in the air to spy on someone approaching overland.’
‘You hope.’
‘I’ll take my chances. If you could clear the paperwork for a Breitenbach rifle, that would help.’
‘Take whatever you want from the armoury,’ Aumonier said dismissively. ‘If I could spare a nuke, I’d give you one of those as well.’
‘Not on my kit list, but would you really give me one if I asked?’
‘Probably, but with misgivings. The problem is we don’t have an inexhaustible supply, and we need to make sure we curtail all weevil production when we take out a habitat.’
‘How many nukes do you have left?’
Aumonier glanced away: he could tell that she’d rather he hadn’t asked that particular question. ‘We’re down to our last fifty warheads. For some of the larger habitats on the evacuation front we’ll have to use three or four to guarantee total destruction of all manufactory centres. It’s bad enough that we’re driven to this, Tom. But no one ever imagined Panoply would need more than a few dozen nukes, even in the worst crisis scenarios we ever imagined.’
Dreyfus smiled thinly. ‘Can we make more nukes?’
‘Not on a useful timescale. We’ve put in so many safeguards to stop people making these horrors that it’s going to take days of frantic red-tape cutting before we can even begin to utilise civilian manufactories. They won’t come through in time to help us, I’m afraid.’
‘If we had another weapon to use against the evacuated habitats, would we consider it?’
‘You mean something with the destructive potential of nukes?’ Aumonier shook her head sadly. ‘There just isn’t anything in our arsenal, I’m afraid. If we deployed every foam-phase warhead we have, we might be able to destroy a single habitat. But it would take hours, and we’d always run the risk of missing a chunk of functioning manufactory, something with the capacity to keep churning out weevils.’
‘I wasn’t thinking about our armoury,’ Dreyfus said. ‘I was thinking about the people we blamed for starting this whole thing in the first place.’
‘I’m not following you, Tom.’
‘The Ultras,’ Dreyfus said. ‘We’ve already had a comprehensive demonstration that one of their ships can destroy one of our habitats, no problem. Granted, Ruskin-Sartorious was one of the smaller states, but I think the principle still applies. They can help us, Jane.’
‘Will they go for it?’
‘We won’t know unless we ask,’ Dreyfus said.
She looked down, surveying her weightless form, the tips of her dangling feet. Dreyfus wondered if she had noticed the thin, red scratch of the laser that was now cutting across her body just below her neckline. If she had cause to raise a hand, she would notice it shining across her wrist. Demikhov’s guillotine was in place, the laser’s sub-millimetre accuracy good enough for surgical purposes, so Dreyfus had been informed. If the laser happened to transect her throat above the upper extremity of the scarab, and if all other physiological parameters were satisfactory, Demikhov would initiate the decapitation process. Demikhov had even argued against Dreyfus visiting Aumonier in person, for he would not trigger the blades while another prefect was in the same room. Dreyfus understood that, and that his presence was therefore not in Aumonier’s best interests. But he’d had an overwhelming need to see her before he left.
‘I don’t want to keep you, Tom,’ she said hesitantly. ‘But before you go—’
He cut her off, more out of nerves than in
tention. ‘There’s been no news from Captain Sarasota?’ he asked.
‘I’m still waiting. Her last report said that there appeared to be thermal signatures consistent with survivors, but they won’t know until they’ve docked with it and cut a boarding aperture. I’ve no idea what the hell that thing is, but I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.’
‘It’s not done anything hostile, has it?’
‘No. On that score your intuitions were correct.’
There was a silence. Dreyfus was conscious of the ship waiting for him down in the bay, almost ready for departure. As little desire as he had to be aboard it, he knew that he could not delay. It might take many hours to reach Ops Nine, but every minute was critical.
‘You were about to say something,’ he said. ‘Then I interrupted you.’
Aumonier could not meet his eyes. ‘This is difficult for me.’
‘Then save it for later. I’m not planning on staying down there.’
‘It can’t wait until later, unfortunately. This whole business with the Clockmaker has precipitated something I had hoped to avoid for a very long while. Perhaps for ever. I’ve had to make a very difficult decision, Tom. Even now, I don’t know if what I’m about to do, what I’m about to say to you, is the right thing.’
‘Perhaps you should just say it and see how things go.’
‘Before you board the ship, I’m going to make a document available you. I’ll have it transferred onto your compad.’
‘You want me to read a document?’
‘It isn’t that simple. You have Pangolin clearance now, but this is a matter above Pangolin. You’ll need Manticore.’
‘I don’t have Manticore.’
‘But I can grant it to you. The choice will be yours as to whether you use it or not.’