The Prefect

  ‘We need to start thinking about getting off this thing,’ Sparver said quietly.

  Dreyfus held up a silencing hand. To Dravidian he said: ‘But surely someone in your crew had to have been responsible.’

  ‘No one that I trusted. No one that I really considered crew. But someone else ... maybe.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘We took on new recruits after we arrived around Yellowstone. Some crew left to join other ships; others came aboard. It’s possible that one of those recruits ...’

  ‘Captain?’

  Dravidian’s tone changed, as if something new had just occurred to him. ’Something odd happened. Our shuttle developed a fault. That was why we had to move the entire ship close to Ruskin-Sartorious, rather than just shuttle over to it from the Swarm. There wasn’t time to worry about the cause of the fault, not when we had a deal to close. But now that I look back on it ... now that I don’t have any other distractions ... the more I’m convinced that the shuttle’s malfunction could only have been sabotage.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Someone put the shuttle out of action, Prefect. Someone wanted an excuse to bring the Accompaniment of Shadows within kill-range of the Bubble. Until now I’ve been thinking that whatever happened, whatever was done in our name, was done in anger, because of the way that deal collapsed. That maybe someone on the ship thought Ruskin-Sartorious needed to be punished for that. Now I’m not so sure.’ He fell silent, the face behind the glass completely still. Just when Dreyfus was starting to think that the captain had died or lost consciousness, his lips moved again: ‘Now I’m wondering if it wasn’t premeditated.’

  ‘Not just murder, but murder in cold blood?’

  ‘I can only tell you what happened.’

  ‘These recruits ... can you tell me anything about them?’

  ‘Six or seven of them. The usual mix. Hardcore types who’ve already crewed on other ships. Green-behind-the-ears newcomers who don’t know one end of a hull from the other. I didn’t meet any of them in person, just delivered the usual blood-and-thunder speech when they came aboard.’

  ‘No names, nothing?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Prefect. If I had more to give you, you’d be hearing it.’

  Dreyfus nodded. There was no earthly reason for Dravidian to withhold evidence now, if he truly believed in his own innocence. ‘What I don’t understand is why anyone would want to destroy the Bubble, if it wasn’t revenge for a deal that went sour?’

  ‘You’re the investigator, Prefect. You tell me.’

  ‘You’re going to die,’ Dreyfus said softly. ‘Nothing I say or do can change that now.’

  ‘But you believe I may be telling the truth.’

  ‘I believe that the investigation has yet to run its course. If the facts confirm your innocence, I’ll make sure that they’re heard.’

  ‘I hope you’re good at your job.’

  ‘That’s not for me to say.’

  ‘Whoever did this was prepared to kill nearly a thousand people. More now that my crew have paid with their lives. They won’t take kindly to a prefect snooping around trying to undermine their good work.’

  ‘They don’t pay us to be popular.’

  ‘You strike me as a decent man, Prefect Dreyfus. I can hear it in your voice. We Ultras aren’t such bad judges of character. My crew were decent people, too. Even if you can’t exonerate me, I beg of you this much: do what you can to lift this shame from their heads. They didn’t deserve to die like this. The Accompaniment was a good ship, right to the end. She didn’t deserve to die like this either.’ He hesitated, then added: ‘How are those nukes coming along?’

  Dreyfus glanced at Sparver. Sparver tapped his sleeve, as if there was a wrist-watch there.

  ‘Twenty minutes, Boss.’

  Dreyfus looked along the prow, in the direction of the dead ship’s flight. He was also looking straight at Yellowstone and the Glitter Band. The planet was still lit up on its dayside. It was not his imagination that the arc of the Band appeared wider than when he had last seen it. He felt as if he could make out the twinkling granularity of individual habitats. With time and patience, and his ingrained knowledge of their orbits, he was sure he could even have begun to pick out the largest structures by eye. There, for instance: wasn’t that silvery glint near the planet’s westward limb Carousel New Venice, moving in the congested real estate of the central orbits? And a little to the right: wasn’t that string of ruby-red sparks the signature of the eight habitats of the Remortal Concatenation? If so, then that blue-tinged glint to the east had to be House Sammartini, or perhaps the Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies.

  ‘I think I’m about done here, Captain.’

  ‘Just one thing, Prefect. Maybe it’s nothing, or maybe it’ll help you. You’ll have to decide for yourself.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Our negotiations with Ruskin-Sartorious were conducted with the usual degree of secrecy. It’s how we do things. Yet someone from outside the Bubble was still able to contact Delphine and promise her a better offer than the one already on the table. That means someone knew what was going on.’

  ‘Could have been a lucky break. They saw your ship parked near the Bubble; they knew Delphine’s art was on the market, put two and two together.’

  ‘And outbid us by a calculatedly effective margin? I don’t think so, Prefect. Someone had already gone to great lengths to position the Accompaniment as a murder weapon. All they needed then was to make it look as if we struck back in anger. For that they needed a plausible motive.’

  ‘So what you’re saying is ... the whole thing about the deal collapsing was just a ruse, to provide a justification for you hitting back?’

  ‘Exactly so.’

  In his head Dreyfus felt the ominous sliding of mental chess pieces moving into a new and threatening configuration. ‘Then there must have been another reason why someone wanted to destroy the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble.’

  ‘Now all you have to do is find out why,’ Dravidian answered.

  Captain Pell let the missiles streak away, sprinting across the gap to the Accompaniment of Shadows. At twenty gees they reached the wreck in slightly more than a minute and a half. In the last instant before impact, the missiles fanned out and then vectored in again from different angles, so that their bright fusion exhausts formed the talons of a gripping three-clawed hand, closing around Dravidian’s ship with swift predatory eagerness.

  The three nuclear explosions blurred together into a single inseparable flash. When the radiation and debris had dissipated, nothing remained of the killing ship, nor of its captain.

  Dreyfus turned from the hull window with a cold, hard feeling that he still had work to do.

  CHAPTER 7

  In the cloistered cool of his private security annexe, Senior Prefect Sheridan Gaffney found himself looking at the face of Aurora. She was coming through on an untraceable channel, their mutual communication disguised as an exchange of routine housekeeping data. He’d been expecting her; he’d composed his thoughts and marshalled a set of likely questions and responses, and yet still she made him feel flustered and ill-prepared, simply by the withering force of her regard. This, he thought, and not for the first time, was how it must feel to be interrogated by a goddess.

  ‘It’s been a while, Sheridan,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he replied, wiping a sleeve across his brow. ‘Things have been complicated around here. But everything’s under control.’

  ‘Everything, Sheridan? Then you’re confident that there’ll be no untoward ramifications concerning the Ruskin-Sartorious incident?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  He was looking at a child-woman, a girl of indeterminate age, sitting on a simple wooden throne. She wore a gold-trimmed brocaded gown of dark green over a brocaded dress of fiery red, patterned again in gold. Her fingers curled around the edges of the armrests, toying with them in a manner that suggested mild restlessness more than actu
al boredom or impatience. Her auburn hair was parted in the middle and fell to her shoulders in perfect symmetry, framing a face of startling, ravishing serenity. Behind her head, suggesting a halo, was a shining gold motif worked into bas-relief panelling. Her eyes were liquid blue, brimming with puzzled intelligence. He knew he would do anything for those eyes, that face.

  ‘You don’t think so?’ she asked.

  ‘Dreyfus is on the case, unfortunately. I could do without him nosing around in the whole business, but there was no way I could get him off the investigation without drawing attention to myself.’

  ‘You’re head of security, Sheridan. Couldn’t you have been more creative?’

  ‘I’ve had my hands full preparing the ground for Thalia Ng. That’s required more than enough creativity, I assure you.’

  ‘Nonetheless, this man - this Dreyfus - is a rogue element. He must be brought under control.’

  ‘Not that easy,’ Gaffney said, feeling as if they’d had this discussion a thousand times already. ‘He’s Jane Aumonier’s pet field prefect. She’s even given him Pangolin clearance, despite my protestations. If I interfere too much, I’ll have Jane on my back, metaphorically speaking.’ He tested Aurora with a smile. ‘Right now that would not be a good idea.’

  ‘Jane is a problem,’ Aurora said, signally failing to acknowledge his smile. ‘We can’t put off dealing with her for ever, either. Once the Thalia situation is stable, I’d like you to direct some energy into removing Aumonier.’

  Gaffney dredged up some outrage. ‘I hope you’re not asking me to kill her.’

  ‘We’re not murderers,’ Aurora said, looking suitably shocked at the suggestion.

  ‘We just took out nine hundred and sixty people. If that’s not murder, it’s a hell of a way to make friends.’

  ‘They were the unavoidable victims of a war that has already begun, Sheridan. I grieve for those people. If I could have spared one of them, I would have. But we must think of the millions we shall save, not the hundreds we must sacrifice.’

  ‘Not that you’d blink an eyelid at killing Jane, if she got in our way.’

  ‘She doesn’t have to die, Sheridan. She’s a brave woman and a good prefect. But she has principles. They’re admirable, in their own way, but they’d compel her to obstruct our arrangements. She would commit the error of placing loyalty to Panoply above the greater good of the people.’

  Gaffney ruminated over the possibilities. ‘Aumonier’s been under a lot of pressure lately, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Enough to concern Doctor Demikhov?’

  ‘So I gather.’

  ‘Well, things are certainly not going to get any less stressful for the supreme prefect any time soon. Perhaps you could arrange her removal from power on compassionate grounds?’

  ‘The other seniors won’t go for it if they think I’m after her job.’

  ‘We don’t need you in the hot seat, Sheridan, we just need Jane out of it. The other key players - Crissel, Baudry, Clearmountain ... which one would be her natural successor?’

  ‘Baudry has automatic seniority.’

  ‘How will she perform?’

  ‘Baudry’s competent, but she’s detail-focused, not someone with Jane’s strategic overview. There are going to be a lot of balls in the air when we go live. I think Baudry could end up dropping a few.’

  ‘In other words, she’d suit our requirements very well.’ Aurora looked pleased with him, or with herself: he wasn’t usually able to tell. ‘Start making arrangements, Sheridan.’

  ‘I’m still concerned about Dreyfus. You can bet he’ll fight Jane’s corner. Baudry and the other seniors have a lot of respect for him, so it’ll be difficult to squeeze Jane out while he’s around.’

  ‘Then I see only one possibility, Sheridan. You’d better remove Dreyfus from the picture. He’s a field prefect, correct?’

  ‘Long in the tooth, but still one of the best.’

  ‘It can be dangerous work, being a field prefect.’ For a moment she seemed absent, as if the face had pulled away from the mask. Gaffney drummed his fingers against the pedestal of his chair until she returned, feeling like a little schoolboy left alone in a big office. ‘Perhaps I can help,’ she continued. ‘I’ll need to know his movements when he’s outside Panoply. I presume you can feed them to me?’

  ‘It’ll be risky, but—’

  ‘You’ll do your best. See to it, Sheridan,’ she urged. ‘And don’t worry. I know that you are a good man and that deception does not come easily to you. Your natural instincts are to duty and loyalty, to the service of the people. I’ve known that since Hell-Five. You stared into the moral abyss of that horror, saw what freedom can lead to when freedom is unchecked, and you said no more. You knew that something must be done, even if it meant good men doing unpleasant things.’

  ‘I know. It’s just that occasionally I have doubts.’

  ‘Purge them. Purge them utterly. Have I not vouchsafed unto you the consequences of our inaction, Sheridan? Have I not shown you glimpses of the world to come, if we do not act now?’

  She had, too, and he knew that everything boiled down to a choice between two contending futures. One was a Glitter Band under the kindly rule of a benevolent tyrant, where the lives of the hundred million citizens continued essentially as they did now, albeit with some minor restrictions on civil liberty. The other was a Glitter Band in ruins, its population decimated, its fallen glories stalked by ghosts, revenants and monsters, some of which had once been people.

  ‘I have the weevil data,’ he said, when the silence had become unendurable.

  ‘I must see it immediately.’

  ‘I’m encapsulating it into the comms feed.’

  Aurora closed her eyes. Her lips opened slightly, as if she was in transports of indescribable ecstasy. He imagined the data streaming out of Panoply, into the labyrinthine tangle of the Glitter Band data network, Aurora - whatever she was, human or machine - drinking it in somewhere at the end of a complex chain of routers and hubs.

  Her mouth closed again as her eyes opened. ‘Well done, Gaffney. All appears to be in order. You’ve done very well indeed.’

  ‘Then you have all that you need? To make the weevils?’

  ‘I won’t know for sure until I have access to a functioning manufactory. The proof of the pudding, as they say. But I’ve no reason to doubt that things will work exactly as intended.’

  ‘I read the tech notes,’ Gaffney said. ‘Those things are nightmares.’

  ‘And that’s why they’ll only be used as an absolute last resort. But we must have the means, Sheridan, if we are to prevent the unnecessary loss of life. We would be negligent otherwise.’

  ‘People are going to die when we do this.’

  ‘People will die if we don’t. Oh, Sheridan - you’ve come so far, done so much good work for the cause. Please don’t quail now, at the final hurdle.’

  ‘I won’t “quail,’ he said, resenting her tone.

  ‘You trust me, don’t you? Absolutely, unquestioningly?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you know that we are doing the right thing, the decent thing, the only human thing. When the time of transition is complete, the citizenry will thank us from the bottom of their hearts. And the time will be soon, Sheridan. Now that all but these last few trifling obstacles have been removed ...’

  Gaffney had learned that brazen honesty was the only sensible approach when dealing with Aurora. She pierced lies, penetrated evasion like a gamma-ray laser burning through rice paper.

  ‘There is still one larger problem we haven’t dealt with,’ Gaffney began.

  ‘I confess I don’t understand.’

  ‘The Clockmaker is still out there.’

  ‘We destroyed it. How can it possibly be a problem?’

  Gaffney shifted on his seat. ‘The intelligence was flawed. They’d moved the Clockmaker before we destroyed Ruskin-Sartorious.’

  He’d been expecting fury. The mild reaction he got
was worse, since it implied fury being bottled away, stored up for later dispensing. ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘Forensics swept the ruin. They’d have flagged anything anomalous, even if they didn’t recognise what they were dealing with.’

  ‘We know it was there recently. What happened?’

  ‘Someone must have decided to move it somewhere else.’

  ‘Why would they do that?’

  ‘Probably because they got word that someone was nosing around their secret.’

  ‘And that someone would be ...’ Aurora asked.

  ‘You ordered me to ferret out the location of the Clockmaker. I did the best I could, but it meant digging into data outside my control, where I couldn’t always hide my enquiries. I made that abundantly clear before you asked me to find it.’

  ‘So why did you wait until now to tell me you thought it had been moved?’

  ‘Because I have another lead, one I’m still following. I thought it best to wait and see where it leads before taking up any of your valuable time.’

  If his sarcasm grated on her, she didn’t show it. Aurora merely looked unimpressed. ’And this lead?’

  ‘Anthony Theobald survived the destruction of the habitat. The weasel must have suspected something was going down. But he didn’t get far. I intercepted him and ran some extraction procedures.’

  ‘He’d hardly have been likely to know where they were taking the Clockmaker.’

  ‘He knew something.’

  Now she looked vaguely interested again. ‘Names, faces?’

  ‘Names and faces wouldn’t mean anything - the operatives who visited the Clockmaker wouldn’t have been using their official identities. But it appears they were occasionally indiscreet. One of them dropped a word into the conversation once, something Anthony Theobald obviously wasn’t meant to hear.’

  ‘A word.’

  ‘Firebrand,’ Gaffney said.

  ‘That’s all? One word, which could mean almost anything?’

  ‘I hoped you might be able to shed some light on it. I’ve run a database search, but it didn’t reveal any significant priors.’