The Prefect

CHAPTER 12

Dreyfus held his breath, still anticipating an attack despite the evidence from the scans. The corvette’s sensors had probed the rock’s embattled surface and revealed no further evidence of active weaponry, although he considered it likely that there were still guns buried in the other hemisphere. The same scans had pinpointed a likely entry point, what appeared to be an airlock leading to some kind of subsurface excavation. The scans could only hint at the depth and extent of the tunnel system. The corvette now lay with its dorsal lock positioned over the surface entry point, separated by only a couple of metres of clear space.

“I can do this alone,” Dreyfus said, ready to push himself through the suitwall.

“We don’t both need to go inside.”

“And I’m not babysitting the corvette while you have all the fun,” Sparver replied.

“All right,” Dreyfus said.

“But understand this: if something happens to one of us down there—whether it’s you or me—the other one gets out of there as fast as he can and concentrates on warning Panoply. Whatever we’re dealing with here, it’s bigger than the life of a single prefect.”

“Message received,” Sparver said.

“See you on the other side.”

Dreyfus pushed himself through the grey surface of the suitwall. As always, he felt ticklish resistance as the suit formed around him, conjured into being from the very fabric of the suitwall. He turned around in time to observe Sparver’s emergence: seeing the edges of the suit blend into the exterior surface of the suitwall and then pucker free. For a moment, the details of Sparver’s suit were blurred and ill-defined, then snapped into sharpness.

The two prefects completed their checks, verifying that their suits were able to talk to each other, and then turned to face the waiting airlock that would allow entry into the rock. Nothing about it surprised Dreyfus, save the fact that it existed in the first place. It was a standard lock, built according to a rugged, inert-matter design. The lock had been hidden before the engagement, tucked away near the base of one of the slug cannons. A concealed shaft must have led down from the surface before the cannons deployed.

There was no need to invoke the manual operating procedure since the lock was still powered and functional. The outer door opened without hesitation, admitting Dreyfus and Sparver to the lock’s air-exchange chamber.

“There’s pressure on the other side,” Sparver said, indicating the standard-format read-out set into the opposite door.

“There’s probably no one inside this thing, but there might be, so we can’t just blow it wide open.”

It was a complication Dreyfus could have done without, but he concurred with his deputy. They would need to seal the door behind them before they advanced further.

“Close the outer door,” Dreyfus said.

The lock finished pressurising. Dreyfus’ suit tasted the air and reported that it was cold but breathable, should the need arise.

He hoped it wouldn’t.

“Stay sharp,” he told Sparver.

“We’re going deeper.”

Dreyfus waited for the inner door to seal itself before moving off. Common lock protocol dictated both inner and outer doors be closed against vacuum unless someone was transitioning through.

“I can’t see a damn thing,” he said, knowing that Sparver’s vision was at least as poor as his own.

“I’m switching on my helmet lamp. We’ll see if that’s a good idea in about two seconds.”

“I’m holding my breath.”

The helmet revealed that they had arrived in a storage area, a repository for tools and replacement machine parts. Dreyfus made out tunnelling gear, some spare airlock components, a couple of racked spacesuits of PreCalvinist design.

“Want to take a guess at how long this junk’s been here?” Sparver said, activating his own lamp.

“Could be ten years, could be two hundred,” Dreyfus said.

“Hard to call.”

“You don’t pressurise a place if you’re planning to mothball it. Waste of air and power.”

“I agree. See anything here that looks like a transmitter, or that might send a signal?”

“No joy.” Sparver nodded his helmet lamp towards the far wall.

“But if I’m not mistaken, that’s a doorway. Think we should take a look-see?”

“We’re not exactly overwhelmed with choices, are we?”

Dreyfus kicked off from the wall and aimed himself at the far doorway, Sparver following just behind. Doubtless the rock’s gravity would eventually have tugged him there, but Dreyfus didn’t have time to wait for that. He reached the doorway and sailed on through into a narrow shaft furnished only with rails and flexible hand-grabs. When the air began to impede his forward drift, he grabbed the nearest handhold and started yanking himself forward. The shaft stretched on far ahead of him, pushing deeper into the heart of the rock. Maybe the shaft had been there for ever, he thought: sunk deep into the rock by prospecting Skyjacks, and someone had just come along and used it serendipitously. But the tunnelling equipment he’d already seen didn’t have the ramshackle, improvised look of Skyjack tools.

He was just pondering that when he caught sight of the end of the shaft.

“I’m slowing down. Watch out behind me.”

Dreyfus reached the bottom and spun through one hundred and eighty degrees to bring his soles into contact with the surface at the base of the shaft. Up and down still had little meaning in the rock’s minimal gravity, but his instincts forced him to orient himself as if his feet were being tugged toward the middle.

He assessed his surroundings as Sparver arrived next to him. They’d come to an intersection with a second shaft that appeared to run horizontally in either direction, curving gently away until it was hidden beyond the limit of the illumination provided by their helmet lamps. The rust-brown tunnel wall was clad with segmented panels, thick braids of pipework and plumbing stapled to the sides. Every now and then the cladding was interrupted by a piece of machinery as rust-brown and ancient-looking as the rest of the tunnel.

“We didn’t see deep enough to map this,” Dreyfus said.

“What do you make of it?”

“Not much, to be frank.”

“Judging by the curvature, we could be looking at a ring that goes right around the middle of the rock. We need to find out why it’s here.”

“And if we get lost?”

Dreyfus used his suit to daub a luminous cross onto the wall next to their exit point.

“We won’t. If the shaft’s circular, we’ll know when we come back to this point, even if something messes around with our inertial compasses.”

“That’s me fully reassured, then.”

“Good. Keep an eye out for anything we can use to squeeze a signal back to Panoply.” Dreyfus started moving, the brown walls of the shaft drifting past him. His own shadow stalked courageously ahead of him, projected by the light from Sparver’s lamp. He glanced down at the suit’s inertial map, displayed just below his main face-patch overlay.

“So do you have a theory as to what the Nerval-Lermontov family needs with this place?” Sparver asked.

“Because this is beginning to look like a lot more than a simple case of inter-habitat rivalry, at least from where I’m standing.”

“It’s bigger, definitely. And now I’m wondering if the Sylveste family might have a part in this after all.”

“We could always pay them a visit when we’re done here.”

“We wouldn’t get very far. The family’s being run by beta-level caretakers. Calvin Sylveste’s dead, and his son’s out of the system. The last I heard, he’s not due back for at least another ten or fifteen years.”

“But you still think there’s a Sylveste angle.”

“I’m all for coincidence, Sparv, and I agree that the family has a lot of tentacles. But as soon as the Eighty popped up in our investigation, I got the feeling there was more to it than chance.” After a pause, Sparver said, “Do you think the Nerval-Lermontovs are still around?”

“Someone’s been here recently. A place feels different when it’s deserted, when no one’s visited it for a very long time. I’m not getting that feeling here.”

“I was hoping it was just me,” Sparver said. Dreyfus set his jaw determinedly.

“All the more reason to investigate, then.” But in truth he felt no compulsion to continue further along the corridor. He also felt Sparver’s unease.

There was nothing he would rather have done than return to the corvette and await back-up, however long it took to arrive. They hadn’t gone more than a couple of hundred metres along the gently curving shaft when Sparver brought them to a halt next to a piece of equipment jutting from the wall. To Dreyfus it looked almost indistinguishable from the countless rust-coloured items of machinery they had already passed, but Sparver was paying it particular attention.

“Something we can use?” Dreyfus asked. Sparver flipped aside a panel, revealing a matrix of tactile input controls and sockets.

“It’s a tap-in point,” he said.

“No promises, but if this is hooked up to any kind of local network, I should be able to find my way to the transmitter and maybe open a two-way channel to Panoply.”

“How long will it take?” Sparver’s suit had been conjured with a standard toolkit. He dug into it and retrieved a strand of luminous cabling with a writhing, slug-shaped quickmatter universal adaptor at the end.

“I should know within a few minutes,” he said.

“If it doesn’t work, we’ll move on.”

“See what you can get out of it. I’ll be back here in five or ten minutes.” Sparver’s eyes were wide behind his face-patch.

“We should stay together.”

“I’m just taking a look a little further along this shaft. We’ll remain in contact the whole time.” Dreyfus left his deputy attending to the equipment, fiddling with adaptors and spools of differently coloured froptic and electrical cabling. He had no doubt that if there was a way to get a message to Panoply, Sparver would find it. But he could not afford to wait around for that to happen. Elsewhere in the rock, someone might be erasing evidence or preparing to make their escape via a hidden ship or lifepod.

Eventually Dreyfus looked back and saw that Sparver had vanished around the curve of the shaft.

“How are you doing?” he asked via the suit-to-suit comms channel.

“Making slow progress, but I think it’s doable. The protocols are pretty archaic, but nothing I haven’t seen before.”

“Good. Keep in touch. I’m pressing on.” Dreyfus passed through a constriction in the cladding of the tunnel, tucking his elbows in to avoid banging them against the narrow flange where the walls pinched tighter. Looking back now, he could not even see the faint glow caused by the light spilling from Sparver’s helmet lamp. Psychologically, it felt as if they were kilometres apart rather than the hundreds of metres that was really the case.

Suddenly there came a bell-like clang, hard and metallic. Dreyfus’ gut tightened. He knew exactly what had happened, even before his conscious mind had processed the information. Where the constriction had been was now a solid wall of metal. A bulkhead door—part of an interior airlock system—had just slammed down between him and Sparver.

He returned to the door and checked the rim for manual controls, but found nothing. An automatic system had sealed the door, and the same automatic system would have to open it again.

“Sparver?” His deputy’s voice came through chopped and metallic.

“Still reading you, but faintly. What just happened?”

“I tripped a door,” Dreyfus said, feeling sheepish.

“It doesn’t want to open again.”

“Stay where you are. I’ll see if I can work it from my side.”

“Leave it for now. We made a plan and we’ll stick to it, even if I have to stay here until help arrives. If necessary I should be able to cut through with my whiphound, provided the door doesn’t incorporate any active quickmatter. In the meantime I’ll try circumnavigating and see if I can meet you from the other side.”

“Try not to trip any more doors on the way.”

“I will.”

“You should think about conserving air,” Sparver said, in a gently reminding tone.

“These m-suits don’t recirculate, Boss. You’re only good for twenty-six hours.”

“That’s about twenty-four hours longer than I expect to be here.”

“Just saying we need to allow for all eventualities. I can make it back to the corvette; you may not be able to.”

“Point taken,” Dreyfus said.

The suit was indeed still assuring him that the air surrounding him was breathable. He clearly had little to lose by trusting it. He reached up and unlatched the helmet; the suit had been conjured in one piece, but it obliged by splitting into familiar components.

He sucked in his first lungful of cold, new air. After the initial shock of it hitting his system, he judged that it was tolerable, with little of the mustiness he’d been anticipating.

“I’m breathing ambient air, Sparv. No ill effects so far.”

“Good. All I’ve got to do now is kid this system that I’m a valid user, and then we should get ourselves a hotline to Panoply. I’ll be out of touch when I’m calling home—I’ll have to reassign the suit-to-suit channel to make this work.”

“Whatever you have to do.”

Dreyfus pressed the helmet against his belt until it formed a cusp-like bond. He’d made perhaps another hundred metres of progress when he encountered a junction in the shaft. The main tunnel, the one he’d been following, continued unobstructed ahead, but now it was joined by another route, set at right angles and leading towards the centre of the rock.

“Sparver,” he said, “slight change of plan. While I’m not using suit air, I’m going to explore a sub-shaft I’ve just run into. It appears to head deeper. My guess is it leads to whatever this place is concealing.”

“You be careful.”

“As ever.”

The new shaft turned out to be much shorter than the one they’d descended from the surface, and within thirty metres he detected a widening at the far end. Dreyfus continued his approach, caution vying with curiosity, and emerged into a hemispherical chamber set with heavy glass facets. His helmet lamp played across the bolted and welded partitions between the window elements. Beyond the glass loomed a profound darkness, more absolute than space itself, as if the very heart of the rock had been cored out.

“It’s hollow, an empty shell,” he said to himself, as much in wonder as perplexity.

The hemispherical chamber was not just some kind of viewing gallery. One of the facets was covered with a sheet of burnished silver rather than glass, and next to that was a simple control panel set with tactile controls of old-fashioned design. Dreyfus propelled himself to the panel and appraised its contents. The chunky controls were designed to be used by someone wearing a spacesuit with thick gloves, and most of them were labelled in antiquated Canasian script. Most of the abbreviations meant nothing to Dreyfus, but he saw that one of the controls was marked with a stylised representation of a sunburst.

His hand moved to the control. At first it was so stiff that he feared it had seized into place. Then it budged with a resounding clunk, and vast banks of lights began to blaze on beyond the armoured glass.

He’d been wrong, he realised. The hollowed-out interior of the Nerval-Lermontov rock was not empty.

It contained a ship.

“I’ve found something interesting,” he told Sparver.

“What I don’t understand,” Thalia said as the train whisked the entourage across the first window band of House Aubusson, “is how this place pays for itself. No offence, but I’ve spoken to most of you by now and I’m puzzled. I assume you’re a representative slice of the citizenry, or you wouldn’t have been selected for the welcoming party. Yet none of you seem to be doing any work that’s marketable outside Aubusson. One of you breeds butterflies. Another designs gardens. Another one of you makes mechanical animals, for fun.”

“There’s no law against hobbies,” said Paula Thory, the plump butterfly-keeper.

“I totally agree. But hobbies won’t pay for the upkeep of a sixty-kilometre-long habitat.”

“We have a full-scale manufactory complex in the trailing endcap,” Caillebot said.

“We used to make ships. Lovely things, too: single-molecule hulls in ruby and emerald. It hasn’t run at anything like full capacity for decades, but smaller habitats occasionally contract us to build components and machines. The big enterprises on Marco’s Eye will always out-compete us when it comes to efficiency and economies of scale, but we don’t have to lift anything out of a gravity well, or pay Glitter Band import duties. That takes care of some of our finances.”

“Not all of it, though,” Thalia said.

“Right?”

“We vote,” Thory said.

“So does everyone,” Thalia replied.

“Except for Panoply.”

“Not everyone votes the way we do. That’s the big difference. There are eight hundred thousand people in this habitat, and each and every one of us takes our voting rights very seriously indeed.”

“Still won’t put food on your plates.”

“It will if you vote often enough, and intelligently enough.” Thory was looking at Thalia quite intently now, as the train whisked through a campus of low-lying buildings, all of which had the softened outlines and pastel coloration of candied marshmallows.

“You’re Panoply. I presume you’re adequately familiar with the concept of vote weighting?”

“I recall that the mechanism allows it, under certain circumstances.” Thory looked surprised.

“You ’recall’. Aren’t you supposed to be the expert here, Prefect?”

“Ask me about security, or about polling core software, and I’ll keep you enthralled for hours. Vote processing is a different area. That’s not my remit.” Thalia had her hands laced in her lap, with the cylinder between her knees.

“So tell me how it works for Aubusson.”

“It’s common knowledge that the apparatus logs every vote ever entered, across the entire Glitter Band,”. Thory said.

“That’s at least a million transactions every second, going back two hundred years. What people don’t generally realise is that the system occasionally peers back into its own records and looks at voting patterns that shaped a particular outcome. Suppose, for instance, that a critical vote was put to the population of the entire Band, all hundred million of us. A hypothetical threat had been identified, one that could be met with a variety of responses ranging from a pre-emptive attack to the simple decision to do nothing at all. Suppose furthermore that the majority voted for one particular response out of the options available. Suppose also that action was taken based on that vote, and that with hindsight that action turned out to have been the wrong thing to do. The apparatus is intelligent enough to recognise

democratic mistakes like that. It’s also intelligent enough to look back into the records and see who voted otherwise. Who, in other words, could be said to have been right, while the majority were wrong.”

Thalia nodded, recalling details she had once learned and then buried under more immediately relevant knowledge.

“And then, having identified those voters as being of shrewd judgement, it attaches a weighting bias to any future votes they might cast.”

“In essence, that’s how it works. In practice, it’s infinitely more subtle. The system keeps monitoring those individuals, constantly tuning the appropriate weighting factor. If they keep on voting shrewdly, then their weighting remains, or even increases. If they show a sustained streak of bad judgement, the system weights them back down to the default value.”

“Why not just remove their voting rights entirely, if they’re that bad?”

“Because then we wouldn’t be a democracy,” Thory replied.

“Everyone deserves a chance to mend their ways.”

“And how does this work for Aubusson?”

“It’s how we make our living. The citizenry here possesses a very high number of weighted votes, well above the Glitter Band mean. We’ve all worked hard for that, of course: it isn’t just a statistical fluctuation. I have a weighting index of one point nine, which means that every vote I cast has nearly double its normal efficacy. I’m almost equivalent to two people voting in lockstep on any issue. One point nine is high, but there are fifty-four people out there who have indices nudging three. These are people whom the system has identified as possessing an almost superhuman acumen. Most of us see the landscape of future events as a bewilderingly jumbled terrain, cloaked in a mist of ever-shifting possibilities. The Triples see a shining road, its junctions marked in blazing neon.” Thory’s voice became reverential.

“Somewhere out there, Prefect, is a being we call the Quadruple. We know he walks amongst us because the system says he is a citizen of House Aubusson. But the Quad has never revealed himself to any other citizen. Perhaps he fears a public stoning. His own wisdom must be a wonderful and terrifying gift, like the curse of Cassandra. Yet he still only carries four votes, in a population of a hundred million. Pebbles on an infinite beach.”

“Tell me how you stay ahead of the curve,” Thalia said.

“With blood, sweat and toil. All of us take our issues seriously. That’s what citizenship in Aubusson entails. You don’t get to live here unless you can hold a weighted voting average above one point two five. That means we’re all required to think very seriously about the issues we vote on. Not just from a personal perspective, not just from the perspective of House Aubusson, but from the standpoint of the greater good of the entire Glitter Band. And it pays off for us, of course. It’s how we make our living—by trading on our prior shrewdness. Because our votes are disproportionately effective, we are very attractive to lobbyists from other communities. On marginal issues, they pay us to listen to what they have to say, knowing that a block vote from Aubusson may swing the result by a critical factor. That’s where the money comes from.”

“Political bribes?”

“Hardly. They buy our attention, our willingness to listen. That doesn’t guarantee that we will vote according to their wishes. If all we did was follow the money, our collective indices would ramp down to one before you could blink. Then we’d be no use to anyone.”

“It’s a balancing act,” put in Caillebot.

“To remain useful to the lobbyists, we must maintain a degree of independence from them. This is the central paradox of our existence. But it is the paradox that allows

me to spend my time designing gardens, and Paula to breed her butterflies.”

Thory leaned forward.

“Since we’ve been on this train, I’ve already participated in two polling transactions. There’s a third coming up in two minutes. Minor issues, in the scheme of things—the kinds of things most citizens let their predictive routines take care of.”

“I didn’t notice.”

“You wouldn’t have. Most of us are so used to the process now that it’s almost autonomic, like blinking. But we take each and every vote as seriously as the last.” Thory must have seen something amiss in Thalia’s expression, for she leaned forward concernedly.

“Everything I’ve just described is completely legal, Prefect. Panoply wouldn’t allow it to happen otherwise.”

“I know it’s legal. I just didn’t think it had become systematized, made the basis for a whole community.”

“Does that distress you?”

“No,” Thalia answered truthfully.

“If the system allows it, it’s fine by me. But it just reminds me how many surprises the Glitter Band still has in store.”

“This is the most complex, variegated society in human history,” Thory said.

“It’s a machine for surprising people.”

Dreyfus studied the spectacle of the ship floating before him, pinned in the vivid blue lights at the core of the Nerval-Lermontov rock. It was a midnight-black form in a pitch-black cavern. He did not so much see the ship as detect the subtle gradation in darkness between its hull and the background surface of the rock’s hollowed-out heart. It was like an exercise in optical trickery, a perceptual mirage that kept slipping out of his cognitive grasp.

But he knew exactly what he was looking at. Though it was smaller than most, the vehicle was clearly a starship. It had the sleek, tapering hull of a lighthugger, and the two swept-back spars that held the complicated nacelles of its twin drives. He remembered the burning wreck of the Accompaniment of Shadows, its own engines snipped off to become prizes for other Ultras. But as soon as its shape stabilised in his imagination, he knew that this was no Ultra starship.

Dreyfus smiled to himself. He’d felt the scope of the investigation widening the moment a connection to the Eighty entered the frame. But nothing had prepared him for this shift in perspective.

“Keep talking to me, Boss. I’m still on the line.”

“There’s a Conjoiner ship here. It’s just sitting in the middle of the rock.”

Sparver paused before answering. Dreyfus could imagine him working through the ramifications of the discovery.

“Remind me: what have Conjoiners got to do with our case?”

“That’s what I’m very eager to find out.”

“How did the ship get where it is?”

“No idea. Can’t see any sign of a door in the chamber, and there definitely wasn’t one on the outside. Almost looks as if it’s been walled-up in here, encased in rock.”

“You think the Conjoiners hid it here for a reason?”

Dreyfus brushed his hand over the control panel again.

“I don’t think so. Apart from the ship itself, nothing in the rock looks Conjoiner. It’s more as if the ship’s being held here by someone else.”

“Someone managed to capture and contain a Conjoiner ship? That’s a pretty good trick in anyone’s book.”

“I agree,” Dreyfus said.

“Next question: why would anyone do that? What would they hope to gain?”

Dreyfus looked at the one facet in the chamber that was burnished silver and realised that it was a sealed door rather than an opaque panel in the bank of windows. The chamber’s illumination traced the ribbed tube of a docking connector, stretching across space from the door panel to meet the light-sucking hull of the ship.

“That’s what I’m going to have to go aboard to find out.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Boss.”

Dreyfus turned to the panel again. Every cell in his body was screaming at him to leave. But the policeman in him had to know what was inside that ship; what secret was worth murdering to protect.

His hand alighted on another toggle control, this one marked {X}—the universal symbol for an airlock actuator. The silver panel whisked aside silently and smoothly. Sensing his intentions, lights came on in sequence along the connector. The golden band arced down until it vanished into a docking port on the side of the lighthugger.

Nothing now prevented him from boarding.

“I’m going inside. Call me back as soon as you get through to Panoply.”

While Thalia had been talking with her House Aubusson companions, they had crossed another window band spanning a brief ocean of space and stars (most of which were in fact other habitats), and now the train was slowing as it neared its destination. They crossed a series of manicured lawns, skimming high above them on a filigreed wisp of a bridge, then descended back down to ground level. On either side, Thalia saw the tapering stalks of the Museum of Cybernetics, each structure rising at least a hundred metres into the air, each surmounted by a smooth blue-grey sphere, each sphere marked with a symbol from the hallowed history of information processing. There was the ampersand, which had once symbolised a primitive form of abstraction. There was an ever-tumbling hourglass, still the universal symbol for an active computational process. There was the apple with a chunk missing, which (so Thalia had been led to believe) commemorated the suicidal poisoning of the info-theorist Turing himself.

The train plunged into a tunnel, then slowed to a smooth halt in a plaza under the central stalk of the polling core. People came and went from trains parked at adjoining platforms, but Thalia’s party had an entire section of the station to themselves, screened off by servitors and glass barriers. They rode escalators into hazy daylight, surrounded by the ornamental gardens and rock pools clustering around the base of the main stalk. Nearby, a bright blue servitor was diligently trimming a hedge into the shape of a peacock, its cutting arms moving with lightning speed as it executed the three-dimensional template in its memory.

Thalia craned her head back to take in the entirety of the stalk. It rose from a gradually steepening skirt, climbing five or six hundred metres above the ground before tapering to a neck that appeared only just capable of supporting the main sphere. The sphere was much larger than those balanced on the smaller stalks, banded with tiny round windows where they were blank. Geometric shapes were in constant play on its surface, indicating—so Thalia guessed—the changing parameters of abstraction flow and voting patterns.

Thalia’s party walked into the shaded lobby of the stalk. The structure appeared to be hollow, its inward-leaning interior walls given over to towering murals, each of which depicted a great visionary of the PreCalvinist cybernetic era. A thick column rose up through the middle of the dizzying space, buttressed to the walls by filigreed arches. That had to be the main data conduit, Thalia judged, carrying abstraction services and voting packets to the polling core high above her head. The citizens here might not be as thoroughly integrated into abstraction as those in New Seattle-Tacoma, but their enthusiasm for the voting process would nonetheless ensure hefty data traffic. Thalia imagined the flow of information in the pipe, like high-pressure water searching for a loose rivet or leaky valve. Rising next to the column, but separated from it by a few metres of clear space, was the thinner tube of an elevator shaft, with a spiral walkway wrapped around it in ever-receding vertigo-inducing loops. The data conduit, elevator shaft and spiral staircase plunged through the ceiling at the top of the stalk, into the sphere that sat above it.

Thalia knew she was rubbernecking, that even this tower would have been considered unimpressive by Chasm City standards, but the locals looked happy that she was impressed.

“It’s an ugly big bastard all right,” Parnasse said, which was presumably his way of showing a fragment of civic pride.

“We go up?” Thalia asked.

Paula Thory nodded.

“We go up. The elevator should already be waiting for us.”

“Good,” Thalia said.

“Then let’s get this done so we can all go home.”

Not for the first time in his life, Sparver found himself cursing the inadequacy of his hands. It was not because there was anything wrong with them from a hyperpig’s point of view, but because he had to live in a world made for dextrous baseline humans, with long fingers and thumbs and an absurd volume of sensorimotor cortex dedicated to using them. The stubby, gauntleted fingers of his trotter-like hands kept pushing two keys at once, forcing him to backtrack and initiate the command sequence all over again. At last he succeeded, and heard a chirp in his helmet signifying that he was in contact with Panoply, albeit on a channel not normally used for field communications.

“Internal Prefect Muang,” a voice announced.

“You have reached Panoply. How may I be of assistance?”

Sparver knew and liked Muang. A small, stocky man himself, with looks that were at best unconventional, he had no conspicuous problem with hyperpigs.

“This is Sparver. Can you hear me?”

“Loud and clear. Is something wrong?”

“You could say that. Prefect Dreyfus and I were investigating a free-floating rock owned by Nerval-Lermontov, as part of a case we’re working. As we were making our final approach the rock opened fire on our corvette and took out our long-range communications.”

“The rock attacked you?”

“There were heavy anti-ship weapons concealed under its surface. They popped out and started shooting at us.”

“My God.”

“I know. Don’t you just hate it when that happens? Thing is, we could use some assistance out here.”

“Where are you now?”

“I’m patching in via a transmitter inside the rock itself, but I don’t know how long this link is going to hold up.”

“Copy, Sparver. With luck we can rustle up a deep-system vehicle. Do you need a medical team? Are either of you injured?”

“We’re separated from each other, but otherwise both okay. If I could put Dreyfus through, I would, but it’s all I can do to rig this connection from my own suit.”

“Is your ship flightworthy?”

“We could limp home if we had to, but it would be better if Panoply sent out a couple of heavy ships to pick over this place.”

“Do you have orbital data for this rock?”

“Aboard the ship. But all you have to do is check the assets of the Nerval-Lermontov family. We’re sitting on a two-kilometre-wide lump of unprocessed rock in the middle orbits. You should be able to image our corvette, even if you can’t pick out the debris cloud from the attack.”

“Should narrow it down. Sit tight and I’ll get the wheels moving.”

“Tell those ships to come in cautiously. And make sure they know Dreyfus and I are sitting inside this thing, in case anyone gets trigger-happy.”

“I’ll get the message through immediately. You shouldn’t have to wait more than an hour.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” Sparver said. He closed the link and re-established contact with Dreyfus, glad when he heard his laboured breathing coming through nice and regularly, as if Dreyfus was pulling himself along a docking connector.

“I got through, Boss. Cavalry’s coming.”

“Good.”

“So now might be the time to rethink that plan of yours to board the ship.”

“I’m nearly there. Might as well go all the way, after coming this far.” Dreyfus took deep breaths between sentences.

“There’s no telling what mechanisms might kick in to destroy evidence if the rock senses our intrusion.”

“Or which might kick in to destroy us. That’s also a possibility.”

“I’m still going in. I suggest you return to the corvette and await the back-up.” That sounded like an excellent idea to Sparver as well, but he had no intention of abandoning Dreyfus inside the rock. Besides, what his boss had just said was equally applicable to the data stored in the rock’s router log. It did not take very long, now that he knew his way around the architecture. But when the list of outgoing message addresses spilled across his face-patch, he assumed there must be some mistake. He’d been expecting hundreds, even thousands, of entries in the last hundred days. But there were only a few dozen. Whoever was controlling the Nerval-Lermontov rock had been very sparing with their usage.

Looking down the list, he recognised the address of the Ruskin-Sartorious sphere, with a timetag corresponding to just before the attack by the Accompaniment of Shadows. That was the message that had prompted Delphine to break off negotiations with Dravidian. Yet as pleasing as it was to see that in the log—confirmation that they’d been following the right leads—it was dismaying to see some of the other entries.

There were about a dozen different addresses Sparver didn’t recognise off the top of his head. But there were another dozen entries that were shockingly familiar. They consisted of two different addresses, interspersed randomly. Apart from the last three digits, one was identical to the format he’d just used to contact Muang.

Someone had been using the Nerval-Lermontov rock to call Panoply. But if anything it was the second of the two addresses that unnerved Sparver the most. He recognised it instantly, for it was still fresh in his mind from his most recent investigation. But it had no business being any part of this one. It was the address of House Perigal.

“This doesn’t make sense,” he said, mouthing the words in something more than a whisper.

“There’s no connection. The cases don’t belong together.” But there was no mistake. The numbers weren’t going away.

“You still there, Boss?”

“I’m nearly at the airlock. What’s up?”

“I don’t know. I’ve just discovered something that doesn’t make any sense.”

“Tell me.”

“Someone used this rock to contact House Perigal.”

“You mean Ruskin-Sartorious,” Dreyfus said testily.

“No, I mean exactly what I just said. There’ve only been a handful of outgoing messages, but they include transmissions to both Panoply and House Perigal, in addition to Ruskin-Sartorious. That means there’s a connection between the two cases, and a Panoply connection.”

“There can’t be,” Dreyfus said.

“The evidence is staring right back at me. There’s a link.”

“But Perigal was an open-and-shut case of polling fraud. It has no bearing on the murder of Ruskin-Sartorious.”

“Boss, we may not be able to understand the link, but I’m telling you it exists. We already know this case is bigger than a simple incident of revenge or assassination—we’d figured that much out before you went and found a Conjoiner ship buried inside this rock.” Sparver paused: he could feel something behind his eyes trying to come into clarity, but not quite succeeding.

“We went after Perigal because of voting fraud,” he said.

“We nailed her, too, and all along it felt too easy.”

“Too much like a debt being settled,” Dreyfus said, echoing Sparver’s tone.

“Maybe what we should be focusing on is the consequence of that case. Not the fact that Perigal’s under lockdown, but the security hole it drew our attention to.” He heard a silence on the end of the line. Then: “We’re closing that hole, Sparv. That’s what Thalia’s doing.”

“That’s what we think she’s doing. But what if we’ve been led up the garden path?”

“We can trust Thalia,” Dreyfus said.

“Boss, we don’t have time to think through all the implications. All we know is that something’s wrong, and that, knowingly or otherwise, Thalia may be a part of it.”

“You’re right,” Dreyfus said eventually.

“I don’t like it, but… something doesn’t fit.”

“Thalia’s still out there, isn’t she?”

“As far as I know.”

“We have to get a message to her. She has to stop those upgrades until we figure out what’s going on.”

“Can you contact Panoply again?”

“No reason why not,” Sparver said.

“But it’ll mean me dropping out of contact with you again until I’m done.”

“Do it immediately. Call me back when you’ve got word to Thalia. Do it now, Sparv.” He closed the connection with Dreyfus and re-established the jury-rigged link with Panoply.

“I wasn’t expecting to hear from you again so soon,” Muang said, before Sparver could get a word in.

“Good news is Jane expedited immediate retasking of a deep-system vehicle. It’s on high-burn as we speak. Should be on your position inside forty-five minutes.”

“Good,” Sparver said, barely hearing what Muang had to say.

“Now listen to me. Has Deputy Field Ng returned from her mission?”

There was no need to elaborate. Everyone in Panoply knew of Jason Ng’s daughter.

“I don’t know. I can check with Thyssen, but—”.

“Never mind, there isn’t time. Can you patch me through to Thalia? I need to talk to her urgently.”

“Wait a moment. I’ll see what I can do.” Sparver did not breathe. It could only have been tens of seconds before Muang spoke again, but it felt like hours.

“She isn’t aboard her cutter, which is currently docked at House Aubusson. I’m trying to contact her through her bracelet, but if she’s out of range of the cutter, the transmission will have to be routed through the habitat’s own abstraction services. This may take a moment—”.

“No one’s going anywhere,” Sparver said. After another eternity, Muang said, “I’m picking up her bracelet, Deputy. It’s ringing. If she’s wearing it, she’ll hear you.” Dreyfus slowed his passage along the tube, gripped by an almost overwhelming urge to turn back. But he focused his resolve and continued until he reached the black wall of the entry lock. There was no suggestion of a door. He touched the armour of the Conjoiner ship and felt it ease inwards under the pressure of his fingers. It was neither metal nor ordinary quickmatter. The only visible controls consisted of a smaller version of the panel he had already used. It had been glued to the side of the hull, fixed into place by crusty dabs of bright green adhesive. There were only two toggles. Dreyfus reached for the one marked with the airlock symbol and gave it a hefty twist. After a moment, a luminous blue outline appeared in the black, defining the rectangular shape of a door. The outline thickened, and then the entire rectangular part pushed outwards and sideways, unassisted by any visible mechanisms or hinges. Dreyfus pushed himself into the interior of the Conjoiner vehicle. He looked back, holding his breath until he was satisfied that the rectangular door was not going to seal him in. He followed a winding, throat-like corridor until he reached a junction. Five corridors converged on this point, arriving from different angles. Light—of a peculiar blue-green sickliness—was leaking down one of the routes. The others were singularly dark and uninviting, and appeared to feed back towards the rear of the ship. He followed the light. When he estimated that he had moved twenty or thirty metres towards the bow, he found himself emerging into a very large room. The light, which had appeared bright from a distance, now revealed itself to be meagre, obscuring detail and scale. Dreyfus unfixed his helmet from its bonded connection with his belt and used the crown lamp to investigate his surroundings. His illumination glanced off steely surfaces, glass partitions and intricate tangles of plumbing. That was when he felt something cold and sharp press against his naked throat.

“There are lights, for emergency use,” a woman’s voice said, speaking very calmly into his ear.

“I shall bring them on now.” Dreyfus kept very still. In his lower peripheral vision he could see the gauntleted knuckle of a hand. The hand was holding a blade. The blade was tight against his Adam’s apple. The lights came on at full strength, yellow shading to pale green, and after a few moments of blinking in the sudden brightness Dreyfus saw a room full of sleepers, wired into complicated apparatus. There were dozens of them, eighty or ninety easily, maybe more. They’d been arranged in four long rows spaced equidistantly around an openwork catwalk. The sleepers did not lie in closed caskets, but rather on couches, to which they were bound by black restraining straps and webs of silver meshwork. Transparent lines ran in and out of their bodies, pulsing not just with what Dreyfus presumed to be blood and saline but with vividly coloured chemicals of obscure function. The sleepers were all naked and they were all breathing, yet so slowly that Dreyfus had to study the rise and fall of a single chest intently before he convinced himself that he was looking at anything other than a corpse. It was sleep dialled down almost all the way to death. He could make out nothing of their heads, for each sleeper wore a perfectly spherical black helmet sealed tight around the neck, which in turn sprouted a thick ribbed black cable from its crown, connected into a socket recessed into the adjoining wall. The impression of a room full of faceless human components, smaller parts plugged into a larger machine, was total.

The knife was still pressing against his throat.

“Who are you?” he asked, speaking quietly, fearful of moving his throat.

“Who are you?” the woman asked back.

There was no reason for subterfuge.

“Field Prefect Tom Dreyfus, of Panoply.”

“Don’t try anything rash, Prefect. This knife cuts very well. If you doubt me, take a look around you.”

“At what?”

“The sleepers. See what I’ve done to them.”

He followed her instruction. He saw what she meant.

Not all of the sleepers were whole.

The confusion of restraints, surgical lines and helmets had hidden the truth at first. But once Dreyfus had become accustomed to the fact of the sleepers, and the mechanisms that sustained them, he realised that many of them were incomplete. Some were missing hands and arms, others lower legs or the whole limb. Perhaps a third of the sleepers had suffered a loss of some kind. Dreyfus started thinking back to the wars the Conjoiners had been involved in—perhaps this ship had been carrying the injured from one of those engagements, waylaid on their passage to the Conjoiner equivalent of a hospital.

But that couldn’t be the answer. This ship had probably been here for decades, and yet the injuries looked fresh. Some form of turquoise salve had been spread over the wounds, but beneath the salve the stumps were still raw. The sleepers hadn’t even received basic field care, let alone the emergency regenerative medicine that the Conjoiners should have been able to utilize.

“I don’t understand—” he began.

“I did it,” the woman said.

“I cut them. I cut them all.”

“Why?” Dreyfus asked.

“To eat them,” she said, sounding amazed at his question.

“What other reason would there have been?”