The Prefect

  ‘It was meant to. Perhaps you’re not a man of such simple tastes as you think.’

  Dreyfus studied her for several moments before speaking. ‘You appear to be taking the matter of your death quite lightly, Delphine.’

  ‘I’m not dead.’

  ‘I’m investigating your murder.’

  ‘As well you should - a version of me has been killed. But the one that counts - the one that matters to me now - is the one talking to you. As difficult as it may be for you to accept, I feel completely alive. Don’t get me wrong: I want justice. But I’m not going to mourn myself.’

  ‘I admire the strength of your convictions.’

  ‘It’s not about conviction. It’s about the way I feel. I was raised by a family that regarded beta-level simulation as a perfectly natural state of existence. My mother died in Chasm City, years before I was born from a cloned copy of her womb. I only knew her from her beta-level, but she’s been as real to me as any person I’ve ever known.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’

  ‘If someone close to you died, would you refuse to acknowledge the authenticity of their beta-level?’

  ‘The question’s never arisen.’

  She looked sceptical. ‘Then no one close to you - no one with a beta-level back-up - has ever died? In your line of work?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘Then someone has died?’

  ‘We’re not here to talk about abstract matters,’ Dreyfus said.

  ‘I’m not sure I can think of anything less abstract than life and death.’

  ‘Let’s get back to Dravidian.’

  ‘I touched a nerve, didn’t I?’

  ‘Tell me about the Ultras.’

  But just as Delphine started speaking - the look on her face said she wasn’t going to answer his question directly - the black outline of a door appeared in the passwall behind her. The white surface within the outline flowed open enough to admit the stocky form of Sparver, then resealed behind him.

  ‘Freeze invocation,’ Dreyfus said, irritated that he’d been disturbed. ‘Sparver, I thought I said that I wasn’t to be—’

  ‘Had to reach you, Boss. This is urgent.’

  ‘Then why didn’t you summon me on my bracelet?’

  ‘Because you’d turned it off.’

  ‘Oh.’ Dreyfus glanced down at his sleeve. ‘So I did.’

  ‘Jane told me to pull you out of whatever you were doing, no matter how much you screamed and kicked. There’s been a development.’

  Dreyfus whispered a command to return Delphine to storage. ‘This had better be good,’ he told Sparver when the beta-level had vanished. ‘I was close to getting a set of watertight testimonies tying the Accompaniment of Shadows to the Bubble. That’s all the ammunition I need to take back to Seraphim. He’d have no choice but to hand over the ship then.’

  ‘I don’t think you need to persuade him to hand over the ship.’

  Dreyfus frowned momentarily, still irked. ‘What?’

  ‘It’s already on its way. It’s headed straight for us.’

  CHAPTER 6

  When Sparver prodded Dreyfus awake, they’d arrived within visual range of the Accompaniment of Shadows. Dreyfus untangled himself from the hammock webbing and followed his deputy into the spacious flight deck of the deep-system cruiser. Field prefects were authorised to fly cutters, but a ship as big and powerful as the Democratic Circus needed a dedicated team. There were three operatives on the flight deck, all wearing immersion glasses and elbow-length black control gloves. The chief pilot was a man named Pell, a Panoply operative Dreyfus knew and respected. Dreyfus grunted acknowledgement, had Sparver conjure him a bulb of coffee, then asked his deputy to bring him up to date.

  ‘Jane polled on the nukes,’ the hyperpig said. ‘We’re good to go.’

  ‘What about the harbourmaster?’

  ‘No further contact with Seraphim, or any other representative of the Ultras. But we do have a shipload of secondary headaches to worry about.’

  ‘Just when I was starting to get used to the ones we already had.’

  ‘Headquarters says there’s a storm brewing over Ruskin-Sartorious - the news is beginning to break. Not the full facts - no one else knows exactly which ship was involved - but there are a hundred million citizens out there capable of joining the dots.’

  ‘Are people starting to work out that Ultras had to be involved?’

  ‘Definite speculation along those lines. A handful of spectators have noticed the drifting ship and are beginning to think it must be tied to the atrocity.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘In a perfect world, they’d see the ship as evidence that a crime has been committed and that the Ultras have acted with the necessary swiftness, punishing their own.’

  Dreyfus scratched at stubble. He needed a shave. ‘But if this was a perfect world, you and I’d be out of a job.’

  ‘Jane says we have to consider the very real possibility that some parties may attempt unilateral punitive action if they conclude that Ultras were responsible.’

  ‘In other words, we could be looking at war between the Glitter Band and the Ultras.’

  ‘I’m hoping no one will be quite that stupid,’ Sparver said. ‘Then again, this is baseline humans we’re dealing with.’

  ‘I’m a baseline human.’

  ‘You’re weird.’

  Captain Pell turned away from the console towards them and flipped up his goggles. ‘Final approach now, sir. There’s a lot of debris and gas boiling off, so I suggest we hold at three thousand metres.’

  Pell had turned most of the hull transparent, so that the Accompaniment of Shadows was visible alongside. Something was very wrong with it, Dreyfus observed. The engine spars ended in ragged, splayed stumps of tangled metal and hull plating, with no sign of the engines themselves. It was as if they had been ripped off; amputated. The vessel was crabbing, moving sideways instead of nose-first. The hull itself showed evidence of grave assault: great fissures and sucking wounds where armour had been plucked away to reveal hidden innards; machinery that was now glowing red-hot from some unspecified assault. Coils of blue-grey vapour bled into space, forming a widening spiral trail behind the slowly tumbling wreck.

  The ship, Dreyfus realised, was burning from inside.

  ‘I guess we’re seeing what passes for justice in Ultra circles,’ Sparver said.

  ‘They can call it what they like,’ Dreyfus snapped back. ‘I asked for witnesses, not a shipload of charred corpses.’ He turned to Pell. ‘How long until it hits the edge of the Glitter Band?’

  ‘Four hours and twenty-eight minutes.’

  ‘I told Jane we’d destroy it three hours before it reaches the outer habitat orbit. That gives us ninety minutes’ grace. How are the nukes coming along?’

  ‘Dialled and ready to go. We’ve identified impact sites, but we’ll be happier if we stabilise the tumble before we blow. We’re looking at options for tug attachment now.’

  ‘Quick as you can, please.’

  The tug specialists were good at their job, and by the time Dreyfus had finished his coffee they had already anchored the three units in position at various stress-tolerant nodes along the wreck’s ruined hull.

  ‘We’re applying corrective thrust now, sir,’ one of the tug specialists informed him. ‘Going to take a while, though. There’s a million tonnes of ship to stop tumbling, and we don’t want her snapping like a twig.’

  ‘Any sign of movement or activity aboard?’ Dreyfus asked.

  ‘Fires are out,’ Captain Pell said. ‘All available air appears to have vented to space by now. Too much residual heat to start looking for thermal hotspots from survivors inside the thing, but we’re still sweeping her for electromagnetic signatures. Anyone human still alive in that thing has to be wearing a suit, and we may pick up some EM noise from life-support systems. It’s really not likely that we’ll find anyone, though.’

  ‘I didn’t ask for a likelihood estimat
e,’ Dreyfus said, nerves beginning to get the better of him.

  It took another thirty minutes to bring the tumbling ship under control. The specialists rotated the hull so that its long axis was pointed at the Glitter Band, minimising its collision cross section should something go amiss with the nukes. There was no possibility of using the tugs to shove the lighthugger onto a safe trajectory; at best, all that could be done would be to aim her at one of the less densely populated orbits and hope that she slipped through the empty space between habitats. From this far out, the Glitter Band appeared to be a smooth, flat ring of tarnished silver: the individual glints from ten thousand habitats blurring into a solid bow of light.

  Dreyfus kept reminding himself that it was still mostly empty space, but his eyes couldn’t accept it.

  ‘How long?’ he asked.

  ‘You have just under an hour, sir,’ Pell informed him.

  ‘Give me an airlock as close to the front kilometre of the ship as you can manage. If anyone’s survived, that’s where they’ll be.’

  Pell seemed reticent. ‘Sir, I think you need to look at this first, before you go aboard that thing. We just picked up a burst of radio, stronger than anything we’ve heard since we began our approach.’

  ‘What kind of burst?’

  ‘Voice-only comms. It was faint, but we still managed to localise it pretty well. As it happens, it matched one of the hotspots we’re already monitoring.’

  ‘I thought you said you couldn’t see any hotspots because of all the thermal noise.’

  ‘I was talking about hotspots inside the ship, sir. This one’s coming from outside.’

  ‘Someone’s escaped?’

  ‘Not exactly, sir. It’s as if they’re on the outside of the hull. We should have an image for you once we’re a bit closer.’

  Pell started bringing the deep-system cruiser closer to the Accompaniment of Shadows. It was a fraught operation. Even though the lighthugger had been stabilised and was most likely completely drained of air, it was still giving off vapour at a prodigious rate as the ship’s water reserves boiled away into space. With the outgassing vapour came a steady eruption of debris, ranging from thumb-sized twinkling shards to chunks of warped metal the size of houses. The cruiser’s hull pinged and clanged with each nerve-jarring impact. Occasionally Dreyfus felt the subsonic burp as one of the Democratic Circus’s automatic guns intercepted one of the larger pieces of junk.

  Forty-five minutes now remained.

  ‘I’ve isolated the sound burst, sir,’ Pell told Dreyfus. ‘Do you want me to replay it?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ Dreyfus said, frowning.

  But when the fragment burst over the cruiser’s intercom, he understood Pell’s unwillingness to transmit it without warning. It was just a momentary thing, like a squall of random sound picked up when scanning across radio frequencies. But in that squall was something unspeakable, an implicit horror that pierced Dreyfus to the marrow. It was a voice calling out in pain or terror or both; a voice that encapsulated some primal state of human distress. There was a universe of misery in that fragment of sound; enough to open a door into a part of the mind that was usually kept locked and bolted.

  It was not a sound Dreyfus ever wanted to hear again.

  ‘Do you have that image ready for me?’

  ‘Zeroing in now, sir. I’ll put it on the wall.’

  Part of the transparent hull revealed an enlargement of the prow of the lighthugger. It zoomed in dizzyingly. For a moment Dreyfus was overwhelmed by the intricate, gothic detail of the ship’s spire-like hull. Then he made out the one thing that didn’t belong.

  There was a figure on the hull. The spacesuited form was spread out, limbs splayed as if it had been nailed in place. Dreyfus knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he was looking at Captain Dravidian.

  And that Captain Dravidian was still alive.

  The Ultras had done a thorough job with their victim. They’d nailed his extremities to the hull, with his head nearest to the prow. Some form of piton had been rammed or shot into his forearms and lower legs, puncturing suit armour and penetrating the hull’s fabric. Dreyfus judged that it was the same kind of piton that ships used to guy themselves to asteroids or comets: hyperdiamond-tipped, viciously barbed against accidental retraction. The entry wounds had been sealed over with rapid-setting caulk, preventing pressure loss. Thus immobilised, Dravidian had been welded to the hull along the edges of his limbs and the midpoint of his torso. A thick silvery line of fillet-weld connected him to the plating of the ship, creating a seamless bond between the armour of his suit and the material of the hull. Dreyfus - standing weightless next to Dravidian, anchored to the hull by the soles of his boots - stared at the spectacle and realised that no expertise with cutters would suffice to free his witness in the time remaining.

  He was going to ride his ship all the way to its doom, whether that meant a collision in the Glitter Band or an instant of nuclear annihilation. Through Dravidian’s faceplate, eyes tracked Dreyfus and Sparver. They were wide and alert, but utterly without hope.

  Dravidian knew exactly how good his chances were.

  Dreyfus used his left hand to unreel the froptic line from his right wrist. The design of Dravidian’s suit was unfamiliar to him: it was probably a jerry-built lash-up of home-made parts and ancient pieces, some of them dating back to the era of chemical rocketry. But almost all suits were engineered for a degree of intercompatibility. Air- and power-line jacks conformed to a handful of standard interfaces, and had done for centuries. It was the same for comms inputs.

  Dreyfus found the corresponding jack in Dravidian’s sleeve and slid the froptic in. He felt the minute click as the contacts docked, followed an instant later by a hiss of foreign air-circulator noise in his helmet. He was hearing Dravidian’s life-support system.

  ‘Captain Dravidian? I hope you can hear me. I’m Field Prefect Tom Dreyfus, of Panoply.’

  There was a pause longer than Dreyfus had been expecting. He was almost ready to give up on the attempt to talk when he heard Dravidian take in a laboured breath.

  ‘I can hear you, Prefect Dreyfus. And yes, I’m Dravidian. It was very astute of you to guess.’

  ‘I wish we could have reached you sooner. I heard your transmission. You sounded in pain.’

  There came something like a chuckle. ‘I was.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘That at least has passed. Tell me: what have they done? I felt great pain in my extremities ... but I couldn’t see. They were holding me down. Did they cut me into pieces?’

  Dreyfus surveyed the welded form, as if he needed to reassure himself that all of Dravidian was there. ‘No,’ he said. ‘They didn’t cut you into pieces.’

  ‘That’s good. It means I go with some dignity.’

  ‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’

  ‘There is a scale of punishment amongst Ultras, when a crime is said to have been committed. As it is, my guilt has been deemed highly probable. But not certain. If they thought all possibility of innocence had been eliminated, then they would have cut me into pieces.’

  ‘They’ve nailed you to the ship,’ Dreyfus said. ‘Nailed you and then welded you.’

  ‘Yes, I saw the light.’

  ‘I can’t get you out of that suit, or cut the suit away from the hull. I can’t cut away a section of the hull, either. Not in thirty minutes.’

  ‘Thirty minutes?’

  ‘I’m afraid I have orders to destroy this ship. I am sorry that you have been made to suffer, Captain. I can promise you that my justice will be swift and clean, when it comes.’

  ‘Nukes?’

  ‘It’ll be fast. You have my word on that.’

  ‘That is kind of you, Prefect. And no, I didn’t seriously think there was any possibility of rescue. When Ultras do something ...’ He left the remark hanging, unfinished.

  Dreyfus nodded, for there was no need to complete the sentence.

  ‘But you talk of justice,’ Dravidian c
ontinued, when he had recovered either breath or clarity of mind. ‘I assume that means you have a fixed opinion as to my guilt?’

  ‘A terrible crime took place, Captain. The evidence in my possession leaves little room for doubt that your ship was involved.’

  ‘I ran,’ Dravidian said. ‘I ran for the shelter of the Parking Swarm, thinking I would be safe there, that my argument would fall on sympathetic ears. I should never have run. I should have trusted your justice over that of my people.’

  ‘I’d have listened to whatever you had to say,’ replied Dreyfus.

  ‘What happened ... was not what it appeared.’

  ‘Your drive did destroy that habitat.’

  ‘Yes, I concede that much.’

  ‘You left it in a state of anger, having been cheated out of a lucrative deal.’

  ‘I was sorry that the family did not choose to close negotiations. But that doesn’t mean I planned to kill them all.’

  ‘It wasn’t an accident, Dravidian. No one’s going to buy that.’

  ‘I never said it was. It was a deliberate act of murder against an innocent habitat. But I had no hand in it.’ With sudden intensity, he added: ‘Nor did my crew.’

  ‘Either it happened or it didn’t.’

  ‘Someone made it happen, Prefect. Someone infiltrated the Accompaniment of Shadows and used her against the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble. We were a weapon, not the murderer.’

  ‘You mean someone got aboard the ship and worked out how to turn the engines on and off at just the right moment to kill the Bubble?’

  ‘Yes,’ Dravidian said resignedly, as if all his hopes of being believed had just evaporated. ‘Exactly that.’

  ‘I wish I could take you at your word.’

  ‘Prefect, ask yourself this: what could I possibly stand to gain from lying now? My crew has been slaughtered, burnt alive aboard their own ship. They let me hear their screams, their pleas for mercy. My vessel has been ripped apart like a rabid animal tossed to the wolves. I have been tortured and welded to the hull. Very shortly I am going to die.’

  ‘I still—’ Dreyfus began.

  ‘I don’t know why anyone wanted this to happen, Prefect. It’s not my job to answer that question, it’s yours. But I swear no crime was committed by my crew.’