The Prefect

CHAPTER 17

The isolation chamber was clad in a honeycomb of identical interlocking grey panels, one of which functioned as a passwall. A handful of the panels were illuminated at any one time, but the pattern changed slowly and randomly, robbing the weightless prisoner of any fixed frame of reference. Clepsydra was floating, knees raised to her chest, arms linked around her shins. The patterns of lights erased all shadow, lending her the two-dimensional appearance of a cut-out. She appeared to be unconscious, but it was common knowledge that Conjoiners did not partake of anything resembling normal mammalian sleep.

Since his emergence through the passwall didn’t appear to have alerted her to his presence, Dreyfus cleared his throat gently.

“Clepsydra,” he announced, “it’s me.”

She turned her crested skull in his direction, her eyes gleaming dully in the subdued light of the bubble.

“How long has it been?”

The question took Dreyfus aback.

“Since you were transferred from Mercier’s clinic? Only a few hours.”

“I’m losing track of time again. If you had said ’months’ I might have believed you.” She pulled a face.

“I don’t like this room. It feels haunted.”

“You must feel very cut off in here.”

“I just don’t like this room. It’s so dead that I’m starting to imagine phantom presences. I keep seeing something out of the corner of my eye, then when I look it isn’t there. Even the inside of the rock wasn’t like this.”

“I apologise,” Dreyfus said.

“I committed a procedural mistake in allowing you into Panoply without considering our operational secrets.”

Clepsydra unfolded herself with catlike slowness. In the sound-absorbing space, the acoustics of her voice had acquired a metallic timbre.

“Will you get into trouble for that?”

He smiled at her concern.

“Not likely. I’ve weathered worse storms than a procedural slip-up. Especially as no damage was done.” He cocked his head.

“No damage was done, I take it?”

“I saw many things.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Many things that were of no interest to me,” she added.

“It may reassure you to know that I’ve buried those secrets far below conscious recall. I can’t simply forget them: forgetting isn’t a capacity we possess. But you may consider them as good as forgotten.”

“Thank you, Clepsydra.”

“But that won’t be the end of it, will it? You might believe me. The others won’t.”

“I’ll see to it that they do. You’re a protected witness, not a prisoner.”

“Except I’m not free to leave.”

“We’re worried someone wants to kill you.”

“That would be my problem, wouldn’t it?”

“Not when we still think you can tell us something useful.” Dreyfus had come to a halt a couple of metres from Clepsydra’s floating form, oriented the same way up. Before entering the bubble, he’d divested himself of all weapons and communications devices, including his whiphound. It occurred to him, in a way it had not before, that he was alone in a surveillance blind spot with an agile humanoid-machine hybrid that could easily kill him. Autopsies of dead Conjoiners had revealed muscle fibres derived from chimpanzee physiology, giving them five or six times normal human strength. Clepsydra might have been weakened, but he doubted that she’d have much trouble overpowering him, if she wished.

Some flicker of that unease must have showed on his face.

“I still frighten you,” she said, very quietly.

“But you came unarmed, with not even a knife for protection.”

“I’ve still got my acid wit.”

“Now tell me exactly what it is I have to fear. Something’s happened, hasn’t it? Something very, very bad.”

“It’s begun,” Dreyfus said.

“Aurora’s takeover. We’ve lost control of four habitats. Attempts to land ships on them have been met by hostile action.”

“I didn’t think it would be so soon.”

“When Sparver and I found you, she must have realised Panoply were closing in fast. She decided to go with just the four habitats that were already compromised rather than wait for the upgrade software to be installed across the entire ten thousand.” Clepsydra looked puzzled.

“What good will that do her? Even if you have lost control of those habitats now, you still have access to the resources of the rest of the Glitter Band, not to mention Panoply’s own capabilities. Aurora will not be able to hold out indefinitely.”

“I’m guessing she assumes she can.”

“All the times I sensed Aurora’s mind, I detected an intense strategic cunning; a constantly probing machinelike evaluation of shifting probabilities. This is not a mind capable of pointless gestures, or elementary lapses of judgement.” Clepsydra paused.

“Have you had any formal contact with her?”

“Not a squeak. Other than our theory about the Nerval-Lermontovs, we still don’t really know who she is.”

“You believe she was one of the Eighty?” Dreyfus nodded.

“But everything we know says that all of the Eighty failed. Aurora was one of the most famous cases. How can we have been wrong about that?”

“What if there was something different about her simulation? Some essential detail that varied from the others? I told you that we were aware of Calvin Sylveste’s procedures. We know that he fine-tuned some of the neural-mapping and simulation parameters from one volunteer to the next. Superficially, it appeared to make no difference to the outcome. But what if it did?”

“I don’t follow. She either died or she didn’t.”

“Consider this, Prefect. After her Transmigration, Aurora was truly conscious in her alpha-level embodiment. She was aware of the other seventy-nine volunteers, in close contact with many of them. They’d hoped to form a community of minds, an immortal elite above the rest of corporeal humanity. But then Aurora saw the others failing: their simulations stalling, or locking into endless recursive loops. And she began to fear for herself, even as she suspected that she might be different, immune to whatever deficiency was stalking her comrades. But she was truly fearful for another reason.”

“Which was?” Dreyfus asked.

“By the time the last of the Eighty was scanned, the true nature of what Calvin was attempting had begun to percolate through to the mass consciousness. What he had in mind was not simply a new form of immortality, to improve upon what was already available via drugs and surgery and medichines. Calvin sought the creation of an entirely new and superior stratum of existence. The Eighty wouldn’t just be invulnerable and ageless. They’d be faster, cleverer, almost limitless in their potentiality. They would make the Conjoiners seem almost Neanderthal. Can you guess what happened next, Prefect?”

“A backlash, perhaps?”

“Groups began to emerge, petitioning for tighter controls over the Eighty. They wanted Calvin’s subjects to be confined to firewall-shielded computational architectures—minds in cages, if you will. More hardline elements wanted the Eighty to be frozen, so that the implications of what they were could be studied exhaustively before they were allowed to resume simulated consciousness. Even more extreme factions wanted the Eighty to be deleted, as if their very patterns were a threat to civilised society.”

“But they didn’t get their way.”

“No, but the tide was growing. Had the Eighty not begun to fail of their own accord, there’s no telling how strong the anti-Transmigration movement might have become. Those of the Eighty who were still functioning must have seen the walls closing in.”

“Aurora amongst them.”

“It’s just a theory. But if she suspected that her kind were going to be hounded and persecuted, that her own existence was in danger even if she didn’t succumb to stasis or recursion, might she not have devised a scheme to ensure her own survival?”

“Fake her own stasis, in other words. Leave a data corpse. But in the meantime the real Aurora was somewhere else. She must have escaped into the wider architecture of the entire Glitter Band, like a rat under the floorboards.”

“I think there is a very real possibility that this is what happened.”

“Were there other survivors?”

“I don’t know. Possibly. But the only mind I ever sensed clearly was Aurora’s. Even if there are more, I think she is the strongest of them. The figurehead. The one with the dreams and plans.”

“So here comes the big question,” Dreyfus said.

“If Aurora’s really behind the loss of those four habitats—and it’s starting to look as if she is—what does she want?”

“The only thing that has ever mattered to her: her own long-term survival.” Clepsydra smiled gravely.

“Where you figure in that is another matter entirely.”

“Me personally?”

“I mean baseline humanity, Prefect.”

After a moment Dreyfus asked, “Would the Conjoiners help us if we were in trouble?”

“As you helped us on Mars two hundred and twenty years ago?”

“I thought we were over all that.”

“Some of us have long memories. Perhaps we would help you, as you might help an animal caught in a trap. Lately, though, we have our own concerns.”

“Even after everything Aurora did to you?”

“Aurora poses no threat to the greater community of the Conjoined. You might as well take revenge on the sea for drowning someone.”

“Then you’ll do nothing.” He thought that was the end of it, but after a long silence she said, “I admit I would find… consolation in seeing her hurt.” Dreyfus nodded approvingly.

“Then you do feel something. You’ve notched down those old baseline human emotions, but you haven’t expunged them completely. She did something horrific to you and your crew, and part of you needs to hit back.”

“Except there is nothing to hit.”

“But if we could identify her vulnerabilities, find a way to make life difficult for her… would you help us?”

“I wouldn’t hinder you.”

“I know you looked deep into our data architecture before I brought you into this room. You told me you’d seen nothing of interest. But now that the damage is done, I want you to sift through that information again. It’s all in your head. Look at it from different angles. If you can find something, anything, no matter how apparently inconsequential, that sheds any light on Aurora’s location or nature, or how we might strike back, I need to know about it.”

“There may be nothing.”

“But there’s no harm in looking.”

A tightness appeared in her face.

“It will take a while. Do not expect me to give you an answer immediately.”

“That’s all right,” Dreyfus said.

“I’ve got another witness I need to speak to.” Just when he thought they were done, that she had said everything she wanted to say to him, Clepsydra spoke again. “Dreyfus.”

“Yes?”

“I do not forgive your kind for what they did to us on Mars, or for the years of persecution that followed. It would be a betrayal of Galiana’s memory were I to do that.” Then she looked him in the eyes, daring him not to reciprocate.

“But you are not like those men. You have been kind to me.” Dreyfus called by the Turbine hall and sought out Trajanova, the woman he’d spoken to after the earlier accident. He was gladdened to see that two of the four machines were now spinning again, even if they were obviously not operating at normal capacity. The machine nearest the destroyed unit was still stationary, with at least a dozen technicians visible inside the transparent casing. As for the destroyed machine itself, there was now little evidence that it had ever existed. The remains of the casing had been removed, leaving circular apertures in the floor and ceiling. Technicians crowded around both sites, directing heavy servitors to assist them in the slow process of installing a new unit.

“You’ve obviously been busy,” Dreyfus told Trajanova.

“Field prefects aren’t the only ones who work hard in this organisation.”

“I know. And my remark wasn’t intended as a slight. We’ve all been under pressure and I appreciate the work that’s gone on down here. I’ll make sure the supreme prefect hears about it.”

“And which supreme prefect would that be?”

“Jane Aumonier, of course. No disrespect to Lillian Baudry, but Jane’s the only one who matters in the long run.” Trajanova looked sideways, not quite able to meet Dreyfus’ eyes.

“For what it’s worth… I don’t agree with what happened. Down here we have a lot of respect for Jane.”

“She’s earned it from all of us.” There was an awkward silence. Across the room someone hammered at something.

“What will happen now?” Trajanova asked at length.

“We work for Lillian, just as we worked for Jane. I don’t know what else you’ve heard, but we have a new crisis on our hands.” Dreyfus chose to volunteer information, hoping it might calm some of the troubled water between them.

“I need to resume interviews with my beta-level subjects: I’m hoping that they can shed some light on what’s going on and how we can stop it.” Trajanova looked at the two spinning Search Turbines.

“Those units are running at half-capacity. I can’t risk spinning them any faster. But I could prioritise your search queries, if that would help. You wouldn’t notice much difference.”

“I can still run my recoverables?”

“Yes, there’s more than enough capacity for that.”

“Good work, Trajanova.” After a moment, he said, “I know things didn’t work out between us when you were my deputy, but I’ve never had the slightest doubt concerning your professional competence down here.”

She considered his remark before answering.

“Prefect…” she began.

“What is it?”

“What you said before—the last time we spoke. About how you’d had the feeling your own query had triggered the accident?”

Dreyfus waved a dismissive hand.

“It was foolish of me. These things happen.”

“Not down here they don’t. I checked the search log and you were right. Of all the queries handled by the Turbines in the final second before the accident, yours was the last one to come in. You searched for priors on the Nerval-Lermontov family, correct?”

“Yes,” Dreyfus said cautiously.

“Just after your query was shuffled into the process stack, the Turbine began to exceed its own maximum authorised spin rate. It spun itself apart in less than one quarter of a second.”

“It must still have been a coincidence.”

“Prefect, now I’m the one trying to convince you. Something went wrong, but I don’t believe it was coincidence. The operating logic of one of these things is complex, and much of the instruction core was lost when the Turbine failed. But if I could ever piece it back together, I think I know what I’d find. Your search query was a trigger. Someone had implanted a trap in the operating logic, waiting to be primed by your question.”

Dreyfus mulled over her hypothesis. It dovetailed with his suspicions, but it was another thing entirely to hear it from Trajanova’s lips.

“You honestly think someone could have done that?”

“I could have done it, if I’d had the mind to. For anyone else, it would have been a lot more difficult. Frankly, I don’t see how they could have done it without triggering high-level security flags. But somehow they managed.”

“Thank you,” Dreyfus said softly.

“I appreciate your candour. Given what’s happened, are you satisfied that I won’t cause any more damage just by querying the system?”

“I can’t promise anything, but I’ve installed manual overspeed limits on both operating Turbs. No matter what traps may still be lurking in the logic, I don’t think the Turbs will be able to self-destruct. Go ahead and ask whatever you need to ask.”

“I will,” Dreyfus said.

“But I’ll tread ever so softly.”

Delphine Ruskin-Sartorious appraised him with her sea-green eyes, cool as ice.

“You look very tired. More so than last time, and you already looked tired back then. Is something the matter?”

Dreyfus pressed a fat finger against the side of his brow, where a vein was throbbing.

“Things have been busy.”

“Have you made progress on the case?”

“Sort of. I’ve an idea who may have been behind the murders but I’m still not seeing a motive. I was hoping you’d be able to join a few dots for me.”

Delphine pushed strands of dirty black hair under the cloth scarf she wore as a hairband.

“You’ll have to join some for me first. Who is this suspect you’re thinking of?” Dreyfus sipped from the bulb of coffee he’d conjured just before stepping into the room.

“My deputy and I followed an evidence chain, trying to find out who called your habitat to put you off making the deal with Dravidian. The lead we followed brought us to the name of another family in the Glitter Band.”

Delphine’s eyes narrowed. Genuine interest, Dreyfus thought.

“Who?” she asked. Feeling as if he was treading across a minefield, he said, “The Nerval-Lermontovs. Do you know of them?”

Beneath the workstained white smock, her slight shoulders moved in an easy shrug.

“I know of them. Who doesn’t? They were one of the big families, fifty or sixty years ago.”

“What about a specific connection with your family?”

“If there is one, I can’t think of it. We didn’t move in the same social orbits.”

“Then there’s no specific reason you can think of why the Nerval-Lermontovs would want to hurt your family?”

“None whatsoever. If you have a theory, I’d love to hear it.”

“I don’t,” Dreyfus said.

“But I was hoping you might.”

“It can’t be the answer,” she said.

“The trail you followed must have led you up a blind alley. The Nerval-Lermontovs would never have done something to my family. They’ve had their share of tragedy, but that doesn’t make them murderers.”

“You mean Aurora?”

“She was just a girl when it happened to her, Prefect. Calvin Sylveste’s machines ate her mind and spat out a clockwork zombie.”

“So I heard.”

“What are you not telling me?”

“Suppose a member of the Nerval-Lermontov family was planning something.”

“Such as?”

“Like, say, a forced takeover of part of the Glitter Band.” She nodded shrewdly.

“Hypothetically, of course. If something like that was actually happening, you’d have told me, wouldn’t you?”

Dreyfus smiled tightly.

“If it was, can you think of a reason why your family might have posed an obstacle to those plans?”

“What kind of obstacle?”

“All the evidence at my disposal says that someone connected with the Nerval-Lermontov family arranged for the torching of your habitat. Dravidian had nothing to do with it: he was set up, his ship and crew infiltrated by people who knew how to trigger a Conjoiner drive.”

“Why?”

“Wish I knew, Delphine. But here’s a guess: someone or something connected with the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble was considered a threat to those plans.”

“I can’t imagine who or what,” she said defiantly.

“We were just minding our own business. Anthony Theobald was trying to marry me into a rich industrial combine. He had his friends, people who came to visit him, but they weren’t acquaintances of mine. Vernon just wanted to be with me, even if that meant being spurned by his family. I had my art…”

The second time he had invoked her, she had mentioned visitors to Anthony Theobald. When he’d pressed her for more information, she’d become reticent. A family secret, something she’d sworn not to talk about? Perhaps. He’d gone easy on her since then, earning her trust, but he knew that the matter could not be put off indefinitely.

He would have to come at it sideways.

“Let’s talk about the art. Maybe there’s a clue there that we’re missing.”

“But we’ve already been over that: the art was just a pretext, an excuse to disguise the true reason we were murdered.”

“I wish I could convince myself of that, but there’s a connection that won’t stop surfacing. The family that did this to you had close ties with House Sylveste because of what happened to their daughter. And your breakthrough art—the pieces that started getting you attention—were inspired by Philip Lascaille’s journey into the Shroud. Lascaille was a ’guest’ of House Sylveste when he drowned in that fish pond.”

“Is there an aspect of life in this system that those bloody people haven’t dug their claws into?”

“Maybe not. But I’m still convinced there’s a link.”

She took so long to answer that for a while he thought she was ignoring the question, treating it with contempt. As if a policeman could have the slightest insight into the artistic process…

“I told you how it happened. How one day I stepped back from a work in progress and felt that something had been guiding my hand, shaping the face to look like Lascaille.”

“And?”

“Well, there was a bit more to it than that. When I made that mental connection, it was as if a bolt of lightning had hit my brain. It wasn’t just a question of tackling Lascaille because I felt it was potentially interesting. It was about having no choice in the matter. The subject was demanding that I treat it, pulling me in like a magnetic field. From that moment on I could not ignore Philip Lascaille. I had to do his death justice, or die creatively.”

“Almost as if Philip Lascaille was speaking through you, using you as a medium to communicate what he endured?”

She looked at him scornfully.

“I don’t believe in the afterlife, Prefect.”

“But figuratively, that’s how it felt to you. Right?”

“I felt a compulsion,” she said, as if this admission was the hardest thing she had ever had to do.

“A need to see this through.”

“As if you were speaking for Philip?”

“No one had done that before,” she said.

“Not properly. If you want to call it speaking for the dead, so be it.”

“I’ll call it whatever you call it. You were the artist.”

“I am the artist, Prefect. No matter what you might think of me, I still feel the same creative impulse.”

“Then if I gave you the means, a big piece of rock and a cutting torch, you’d still want to make art?”

“Isn’t that what I just said?”

“I’m sorry, Delphine. I’m not trying to pick a fight with you. It’s just that you’re the most assertive beta-level I’ve ever encountered.”

“Almost as if there’s a person behind these eyes?”

“Sometimes,” Dreyfus admitted.

“If your wife hadn’t died the way she did, you’d feel differently about me, wouldn’t you? You’d have no reason to disavow the right of a beta-level to call itself alive.”

“Valery’s death changed nothing.”

“You think that, but I’m not so sure. Look at yourself in a mirror one of these days. You’re a man with a wound. Whatever happened back then, there was more to it than what you told me.”

“Why would I keep anything from you?”

“Perhaps because there’s something you don’t want to face up to?”

“I’ve faced up to everything. I loved Valery but now she’s gone. That was eleven years ago.”

“The man who gave the order to kill those people, so that the Clockmaker would be stopped,” Delphine prompted.

“Supreme Prefect Dusollier.”

“What was so abhorrent about that decision that he felt compelled to kill himself afterwards? Didn’t he do a brave and necessary thing? Didn’t he at least give those citizens a quick and painless death, as opposed to what would have happened if the Clockmaker had reached them?” Dreyfus had lied to her before. Now he felt compelled to speak the truth, as if that was the only decent thing to do. He spoke slowly, his throat dry, as if he was the one under interrogation.

“Dusollier left a suicide note. He said: ’We made a mistake. We shouldn’t have done it. I’m sorry for what we did to those people. God help them all’.”

“I still don’t understand. What was there to be sorry about? He had no other choice.”

“That’s what I’ve been telling myself for eleven years.”

“You think something else happened.”

“There’s an anomaly. The official record says that the nukes were used almost immediately after Jane Aumonier was extracted. By then, Dusollier and his prefects knew there was no hope of rescuing the trapped citizens, and that it would only be a matter of time before the Clockmaker escaped to another habitat.”

“And the nature of this anomaly?”

“Six hours,” Dreyfus said.

“That was how long they actually waited before using the nukes. They tried to cover it up, but in an environment like the Glitter Band, wired to the teeth with monitors, you can’t hide a thing like that.”

“But shouldn’t a prefect, of all people, be able to find out what happened during those missing hours?”

“Pangolin privilege will only get you so far.”

“Have you thought to ask anyone? Like Jane Aumonier, for instance?” Dreyfus smiled at his own weakness.

“Have you ever put your hand into a box when you don’t know what’s inside it? That’s how I feel about asking that question.”

“Because you fear the answer.”

“Yes.”

“What is it that you fear? That something might have killed Valery before SIAM was destroyed?”

“Partly, I suppose. There’s another thing, though. There was a ship called the Atalanta. It had been floating in the Glitter Band for decades, mothballed. Then Panoply moved it, at the same time as the crisis, to a holding position very close to SIAM.”

“Why had the ship been mothballed?”

“It was a white elephant, financed by a consortium of Demarchist states with a view to freeing themselves from any dependence on the Conjoiners. Problem was, its drive system didn’t work as well as it was meant to. It only ever made one interstellar flight, and then they abandoned any plans to make more of them.”

“But you think it would have made an excellent lifeboat.”

“It’s crossed my mind.”

“You think Panoply tried to get those people off during those missing six hours. They brought in this abandoned ship, docked it with SIAM and evacuated the trapped citizens.”

“Or they tried to,” Dreyfus said.

“But something must have gone wrong. Or else why would Dusollier have shown such remorse?”

“All I know is that the Atalanta is part of the key. But that’s as much as I’ve been able to find out. Part of me doesn’t want to find out anything else.”

“I can see why this is so hard for you,” Delphine said.

“To lose your wife is one thing. But to have this mystery hanging over her death… I’m truly sorry for you.”

“I have another part of the key. I have this vivid picture of Valery in my head. She’s turning towards me, kneeling on soil, with flowers in her hand. She’s smiling at me. I think she recognises me. But there’s something wrong with the smile. It’s the mindless smile of a baby seeing the sun.”

“Where does that memory come from?”

“I don’t know,” Dreyfus answered honestly.

“It’s not as if Valery even liked gardening.”

“Sometimes the mind plays tricks on us. It might be the memory of another woman.”

“It’s Valery. I can see her so clearly.” After an uncomfortably long pause, Delphine said, “I believe you. But I don’t think I can help you.”

“It’s enough to talk about it.”

“You haven’t discussed these things with your colleagues?”

“They think I got over her death years ago. It would undermine their confidence in me to know otherwise. I can’t have that.” There was a longer pause before she answered, “You think it might.” Then her image seemed to twitch back a couple of seconds and she answered his question again with exactly the same words and inflection: “You think it might.”

“Is something the matter?” Dreyfus asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Delphine. Look at me. Are you all right?” Her image twitched back again. Rather than answering the question, she fixed Dreyfus with fearful eyes.

“I feel strange.”

“Something’s wrong with you.” Her voice came through too quickly, speeded up as if on helium.

“I feel strange. Something’s wrong with me.”

“I think you’re corrupted,” Dreyfus said.

“It could be related to the problems we’ve had with the Search Turbines. I’m going to freeze your invocation and run a consistency check.”

“I feel strange. I feel strange.” Her voice accelerated, the words piling up on top of each other.

“I feel strange I feel strange IfeelstrangeIfeelstrange…” Then she found a moment of lucidity, her voice and the speed of her speech returning to normal.

“Help me. I don’t think this is… normal.” Dreyfus raised his sleeve, tugging down his cuff. His lips shaped the beginning of the word ’freeze’.

“No,” Delphine said.

“Don’t freeze me. I’m frightened.”

“I’ll retrieve you as soon as I’ve run a consistency check.”

“I think I’m dying. I think something’s eating me. Help me, Prefect!”.

“Delphine, what’s happening?” Her image simplified, losing detail. Her voice came through slow, sexless and bass-heavy.

“Diagnostic traceback indicates that this beta-level is self-erasing. Progressive block overwipe is now in progress in partitions one through fifty.”

“Delphine!” he shouted. Her voice was treacle-slow, almost subsonically deep.

“Help me, Tom Dreyfus.”

“Delphine, listen to me. The only way I can help you is by bringing your murderer to justice. But for that to happen you have to answer one last question.”

“Help me, Tom.”

“You mentioned people who came to visit Anthony Theobald. Who were these people?”

“Help me, Tom.”

“Who were the people? Why did they come to visit?”

“Anthony Theobald said…”. She stalled.

“Talk to me, Delphine.”

“Anthony Theobald said… we had a guest. A guest that lived downstairs. And that I wasn’t to ask questions.” He spoke into his bracelet.

“Freeze invocation.”

“Help, Tom.” What was left of her became motionless and silent. Dreyfus called Trajanova. She was flustered, not happy to be distracted from the work at hand. She appeared to be squeezed into the shaft of one of her Turbines, suspended in a weightless sling with her back against the curved glass tube that encased the machinery.

“It’s important,” Dreyfus said.

“I just invoked one of my beta-levels. She crashed on me halfway through the interview.” Trajanova transferred a tool from one hand to the other, via her mouth.

“Did you re-invoke?”

“I tried, but nothing happened. The system said the beta-level image was irrevocably corrupted.” Trajanova grunted and eased sideways to find a more comfortable position.

“That isn’t possible. You got a stable invocation until halfway through your interview?”

“Yes.”

“Then the base image can’t have been damaged.”

“My subject appeared to be aware that something was corrupting her. She said she felt as if she was being eaten. It was as if she could feel her core personality being erased segment by segment.”

“That isn’t possible either.” Then a troubling thought made her frown.

“Unless, of course—”.

“Unless what?”

“Could someone have introduced some kind of data weapon into your beta-level?”

“Hypothetically, I suppose so. But when we pulled those recoverables out of Ruskin-Sartorious, they were subjected to all the usual tests and filters we normally run before invocation. They were badly damaged as well. I had Thalia working overtime just to stitch the pieces back together. If there’d been a data weapon—or any kind of self-destruct function—Thalia would’ve seen it.”

“And she reported nothing unusual to you?”

“She told me she’d only been able to get three clean recoveries. That was all.”

“And we can trust Thalia not to have missed anything?”

“I’d swear on it.”

“Then there’s only one answer: someone must have got to the beta-level after it entered Panoply. From a technical standpoint, it wouldn’t have been all that difficult. All they’d have needed to do was find some data weapon in the archives and embed it in the beta-level. It could have been programmed to start eating the recoverable as soon as you invoked, or maybe it was keyed to a phrase or gesture.”

“My God,” Dreyfus said.

“Then the others… I want to talk to them as well.”

“It could be too dangerous if the same code has been embedded. You’ll lose your other two witnesses.”

“What do you mean, lose? Don’t I get a back-up?”

“There is no back-up, Tom. We lost all duplicate images when the Turb blew.”

“This was all engineered.”

“Listen,” Trajanova said, with sudden intensity, “I’m going to be stuck in here for a few more hours. I have to get this Turb back up to speed before I do anything else. But as soon as I’m done I’ll look at the recoverables. I’ll see if I can salvage anything from the one that crashed, and look for a data weapon embedded in the other two. Until then, whatever you do, don’t invoke them.”

“I won’t,” Dreyfus said.

“I’ll call you when I’m done.” It was only when he had finished speaking with Trajanova that Dreyfus paused to examine his state of mind. What he found was both unexpected and shocking. Only a few days ago, he would have regarded the loss of a beta-level witness as akin to the destruction of some potentially incriminating forensic evidence. He would have been irritated, even angered, but his feelings would have arisen solely because an investigation had been hampered. He would have felt no emotional sentimentality concerning the loss of the artefact itself, because an artefact was all that it was.

That wasn’t how he felt now. He kept seeing Delphine’s face in those final moments, when she had still retained enough sentience to recognise the inevitability of her own death.

But if beta-levels were never alive, how could they ever die?

Gaffney’s first thought was that Clepsydra was dead, or at least comatose. He experienced a moment of relief, thinking that he would be spared the burden of another death, before the truth revealed itself. The Conjoiner woman was still breathing; her deathlike composure was merely her natural state of repose when no one was in attendance. Her sharp-boned face was already turning towards him, moving with the smoothness of a missile launcher locking on to a target, her eyes widening from drowsy slits.

“I was not expecting you to come back so quickly,” she said, “but perhaps the timing is fortuitous. I’ve been thinking about our previous conversation—”

“Good,” Gaffney said.

There was a measurable pause before she spoke again.

“I was expecting Dreyfus.”

“Dreyfus couldn’t make it. Otherwise detained.” Gaffney came to rest in the bubble, having judged his momentum with expert precision.

“That’s not a problem, is it?”

He felt Clepsydra’s attention pierce the skin of his face, mapping the bones under the skin. His skull itched. He had never felt so intensely looked at in all his life.

“I can guess why you are here,” she said.

“Before you kill me, though, you should be aware that I know who you are.”

The statement unnerved him. Perhaps it was bluff, perhaps not. If she had truly looked into Panoply’s archives, then she might have seen employee records. It didn’t matter. She could scream out his name and the world wouldn’t hear her.

“Who said anything about killing?” he asked mildly.

“Dreyfus came unarmed.”

“More fool him. I wouldn’t enter a room with a Conjoiner inside unless I was carrying a weapon. Or would you have me believe that you couldn’t kill me in an eyeblink?”

“I had no intention of killing you, Prefect. Until now.”

Gaffney spread his arms.

“Go ahead, then. Or rather, tell me what you were going to tell Dreyfus. Then kill me.”

“Why do I need to tell you? You know everything.”

“Well, maybe not everything.” Gaffney unclipped his whiphound and thumbed it to readiness.

“Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to let you leave this place alive and be reunited with your people. Voi knows you deserve it. Voi knows you’ve earned the right to some reward for the service you’ve provided. But it just can’t happen. Because if I let you out of here, you’d endanger the state of affairs that must now come into being. And if you did that, you’d be indirectly responsible for the terrible things your people dreamed were coming, the terrible things I’m striving to avert.” He thumbed another stud, causing the whiphound to spool out its filament and move to full attack posture. In the weightless sphere of the bubble, the filament swayed back and forth like a tendril stirred by languid sea currents.

“You have no idea what we saw in Exordium,” Clepsydra said.

“I don’t need to. That’s Aurora’s business.”

“Do you know what Aurora is, Gaffney?”

He hoped that she did not catch the subliminal hesitation in his response.

More than likely she did. Very little was subliminal to Conjoiners.

“I know everything I need to know.”

“Aurora is not a human being.”

“She looked pretty human to me when we met.”

“In person?”

“Not exactly,” he admitted.

“Aurora was a person once upon a time. But that was a long time ago. Now Aurora is something else. She is a life form that has never truly existed before, except fleetingly. Being human is something she remembers the same way you remember sucking your thumb. It’s a part of her, a necessary phase in her development, but one now so remote that she can barely comprehend that she was ever that small, that vulnerable, that ineffective. She is the closest thing to a goddess that has ever existed, and she will only get stronger.” Clepsydra flashed him a smile that did not quite belong on her face.

“And you feel comfortable entrusting the future fate of the Glitter Band to this creature?”

“Aurora’s plan is about the continued existence of the human species around Yellowstone,” Gaffney said dogmatically.

“Taking the long view, she sees that our little cultural hub is critical to the wider human diaspora. If the hub fails, the wheel will splinter itself apart. Take out Yellowstone and the Ultras lose their most lucrative stopover. Interstellar trade will wither. The other Demarchist colonies will fall like dominoes. It might take decades, centuries, even, but it will happen. That’s why we need to think about survival now.”

Clepsydra formed a convincing sneer.

“Her plan is about her survival, not yours. At the moment she is letting you tag along for the ride. When you are no longer useful—and that will come to pass—I would make sure you have a very good escape plan.”

“Thank you for the advice.” His hand tightened on the whiphound.

“I’m puzzled, Clepsydra. You know that I can kill you with this thing. I also know that you can influence it, to a degree.”

“You’re wondering why I haven’t turned it against you.”

“Crossed my mind.”

“Because I know that the gesture would be futile.” She nodded at his wrist.

“Your hand is gloved, for instance. It could be that you wish to avoid forensic contamination of the weapon, but I think there must be more to it than that. The glove extends into your sleeve. I presume it merges with some kind of lightweight armour under your uniform.”

“Good guess. It’s training armour, the kind recruits wear when they’re learning to use whiphounds. Hyperdiamond cross-weave, edged on the microscopic scale to blunt and clog the cutting mechanisms on the sharp side of the filament. Even if you could bend the tail around towards me, it wouldn’t be able to slice through my arm. Still, I’m surprised you didn’t try it anyway.”

“I was resigned to death the moment I saw that you were not Prefect Dreyfus.”

“Here’s the deal,” he said.

“I know that Conjoiners can shut off pain when they need to. But I’m willing to bet you’d still choose a quick death over a slow one. Especially here. Especially when you’re all alone, far

from your friends.”

“Death is death. And I can die precisely as quickly as I choose, not you.”

“All the same, I’ll make you a proposition. I know you looked deep into our files. Minor confession: I was prepared to let that happen because I knew I was going to have to kill you anyway. I thought you might turn something up that I could use.”

“I did.”

“I’m not talking about Aurora. I mean the Clockmaker.”

“I have no idea what you mean.”

He guessed that she was lying. Even if she’d had no knowledge of the Clockmaker prior to her arrival in Panoply—and the Exordium dreamers hadn’t been totally isolated from information concerning events in the outside world—she would surely have found out about it during her uninvited rummage through Panoply’s records.

He rolled the whiphound handle in his palm.

“I’ll let you in on a little secret. Officially, it was nuked out of existence when Panoply destroyed the Sylveste Institute for Artificial Mentation.” He lowered his voice, even though he knew there could be no eavesdroppers.

“But that’s not what really happened. SIAM was only nuked after Panoply had already gone inside to extract intelligence and hardware. They believed that they’d destroyed the Clockmaker, true enough. They found what appeared to be its remains. But they kept the relics, the clocks and musical boxes and all the nasty little booby traps. And one of those relics turned out to be… well, just as bad as the thing itself. Worse, in some respects. It was the Clockmaker.”

“No one would have been that stupid,” Clepsydra said.

“Less a question of stupidity, I think, than of overweening intellectual vanity. Which isn’t to say they haven’t been clever. Just to have pulled this off, just to have kept it hidden for eleven years… that took some doing, some guile.”

“Why are you interested in the Clockmaker? Are you so foolish as to think you can use it as well? Or is Aurora the foolish one?”

Gaffney shook his head knowingly.

“No, Aurora wouldn’t make that kind of mistake. But now the Clockmaker is a very real concern to her. Her intelligence networks have determined that it wasn’t destroyed. She knows that a cell working inside Panoply kept it under study in the same place for most of the last eleven years. Aurora fears that the Clockmaker could undo all her good work, at the eleventh hour. Therefore it must be located and destroyed, before the cell has a chance to activate it.”

“Have you already made an attempt to destroy it? Perhaps in the last few days?”

He looked at her wonderingly.

“Oh, you’re good. You’re very, very good.”

“Ruskin-Sartorious,” Clepsydra said, enunciating the syllables with particular care.

“I saw it in your files. That’s where you expected to find the Clockmaker. That’s why that habitat had to be destroyed. Except you were too late, weren’t you?”

“I can only guess that Aurora had probed around that secret a little too incautiously, and somebody had got nervous. The question is: where did they move it to?”

“Why don’t you torture someone useful and find out?”

Gaffney smiled at that.

“Don’t think I didn’t try. Trouble was the old boy turned out not to know very much after all. I kept my word to him, though: left him with enough of a brain to do some gardening. I’m not a monster, you see.”

“I cannot help you either.”

“Oh, but I think you can. Don’t be coy, Clepsydra: I know how transparent our archives must have been to you, how childishly ineffective our security measures, how laughable our attempts at obfuscation and misdirection. You only had access to those files for the brief time you were in Mercier’s clinic, and you still worked out what happened to Ruskin-Sartorious.”

“I saw nothing concerning the current location of the Clockmaker.”

“Tell me you didn’t see a hint of the cell. Feints and mirrors in the architecture. Faultlines and schisms in the flow of data. Something that would have been nigh-on impossible for a baseline human to spot, even a high-grade Panoply operative. But not necessarily beyond the discernment of a Conjoiner.”

“I saw nothing.”

“Do you want to give that a bit more thought?” He injected a tone of conciliatory reasonableness into his voice.

“We can come to an arrangement, if you like. I can leave you alive, with a modicum of neural functionality. If you help me.”

“You had better not leave me alive, Gaffney. Not if you want to sleep at night.”

“I’ll take that as a ’no’, I suppose.” He smiled nicely.

“No point asking again, is there?”

“None at all.”

“Then I guess we’re done here.”

The whiphound felt heavy and solid in his hands, like a blunt instrument. He spooled the filament back into the handle and then clipped it to his belt, for now.

“I thought—” Clepsydra began.

“I was never going to kill you with the whiphound. Too damned risky if you managed to sink your mental claws into it.” Gaffney reached into his pocket and retrieved the gun he had intended to use all along. It was an ancient thing, devoid of any components that could be influenced by Conjoiner mind-trickery. It relied on oiled steel mechanisms and simple pyrotechnic chemistry. Like a crossbow, or a bayonet, it was an outdated weapon for which there were still certain niche applications.

It only took one shot. He drilled Clepsydra through the forehead, just under the start of her cranial crest, leaving an exit wound in the back of her skull large enough to put three fingers through. Brain and bone splattered the rear wall of the interrogation bubble. He paddled closer to examine the residue. In addition to the expected smell of cordite, there was a vile stench of burnt electrical componentry. The pink and grey mess had the texture of porridge, intermingled with bits of broken earthenware and torn fabric. There was something else in there, too: tiny glinting things, silver-grey and bronze, some of them linked together by fine gold wires, some with little lights still blinking. He watched, fascinated, as the lights slowly stopped flashing, as if he was observing a neon-lit city fading into blackout. Some part of her, smeared against that wall, had still been thinking.

Clepsydra was dead now, no doubt about that. Conjoiners were superhuman but they weren’t invulnerable. She was floating quite limply, her eyes still open, elevated and turned slightly together as if—as ludicrous as it might appear—she had been tracking the path of the bullet just before it entered her forehead. The look on her face was strangely serene, with the merest hint of a coquettish smile. Gaffney wasn’t bothered by that. He’d had enough experience with corpses to know how deceptive their expressions could be. Freezeframe the onset of a scream and it could easily resemble laughter, or delight, or joyous anticipation. He was nearly done. He returned the gun to his pocket and spoke aloud, very clearly and slowly.

“Gallium, paper, basalt. Gallium, paper, basalt. Reveal. Reveal. Reveal.”

It took a moment, just long enough to stretch his nerves. But he needn’t have worried. The nonvelope flickered into existence off to his right, revealing itself as a chromed sphere reflecting back the patterning of wall tiles in convex curves. Gaffney paddled over and cracked the nonvelope open along its hemispherical divide. He removed the forensic clean-up kit he had placed in the nonvelope earlier and for a couple of minutes busied himself removing the immediate evidence of Clepsydra’s death from the walls. Had they been made of quick-matter, they would have absorbed the evidence themselves, but the interrogation bubble’s cladding was resolutely dumb. Fortunately the clean-up did not need to be a thorough job, and the fact that there would still be microscopic traces of blood and tissue located away from the splatter point—let alone dispersed through the air—was of no concern to him.

He used the clean-up kit to remove forensic traces from both the weapon and his training glove, then packed the gun and the kit back into the nonvelope. He then turned his attention to Clepsydra. The weightless environment made it no simple matter to persuade her inert form into the restrictive volume of the nonvelope, but Gaffney accomplished the task without having to resort to the cutting capabilities of the whiphound. He re-sealed the nonvelope and ordered it to return to invisibility. In the moment after it had flicked into concealment mode, he fancied that he could just discern its outline, as a pencil-thin circle looming before him. But when he glanced away and then returned his gaze to the spot where the nonvelope had been, he could not see it at all.

He slipped on his glasses, keying in sonar mode. The nonvelope did its best to absorb the sound pulses he was sending it, but it had been optimised for invisibility in vacuum, not atmosphere. The glasses picked it out easily. He reached out a hand and touched the cold, smooth curve of the sphere, which drifted to one side under his finger pressure. He pushed it towards the wall. It was a squeeze getting it through the twin passwalls, but it had made the journey once so it could make it again. Gaffney’s only concern was meeting someone coming the other way: Dreyfus, for instance. Two people could easily pass each other, but the nonvelope presented an obstruction too wide to wriggle around.

His luck—or what Gaffney preferred to think of as his calculated access window—continued to hold. He reached the much wider trunk corridor that accessed the interrogation chamber’s outer airlock without incident, where there was sufficient room for the nonvelope to hide itself, moving out of the way of passers-by when necessary. He abandoned the sphere to its own detection-avoidance programming. Gaffney was snatching off his glasses when a nameless operative came around the bend in the corridor, pulling himself along by handholds. He was hauling a bundle of shrink-wrapped uniforms from one part of Panoply to another.

“Senior Prefect,” the operative said, touching a deferential hand to the side of his head.

Gaffney nodded back, fumbling the glasses into his pocket.

“Keep up the good work, son,” he said, sounding just a touch more flustered than he would have liked.