The Prefect

CHAPTER 2

Dreyfus had closed half the distance to the middle of the supreme prefect’s office when the safe-distance tether jerked him to a halt. For a moment Jane Aumonier appeared unaware of his presence, absorbed in one of her wall displays. He coughed quietly before speaking.

“If you want my resignation, it’s yours.” Aumonier turned her head to face him, without moving the rest of her body.

“On what grounds, Tom?”

“You name it. If I committed an error of procedure, or was guilty of improper judgement, you only have to say the word.”

“If you committed an error, it was in not going far enough to defend yourself and your deputies. What was the final body count?”

“Six,” Dreyfus said.

“We’ve done worse. Perigal was always going to be a tough nut. A single-figure body count strikes me as entirely acceptable, given all that we could have expected.”

“I was hoping things wouldn’t get quite so messy.”

“That was Perigal’s call, not yours.”

“I still don’t think we’re finished with her. What she said to me…” Dreyfus paused, certain that Aumonier had enough to worry about without being burdened with his doubts.

“I feel as if a debt has been settled. That isn’t a good way for a prefect to feel.”

“It’s human.”

“She got away with it in the past because we weren’t clever or fast enough to audit her before the evidence turned stale. But even if we’d been able to pin anything on her, her crimes wouldn’t have merited a full century of lockdown.”

“And we don’t know that it will come to that this time, either.”

“You think she’ll slip through again?”

“That’ll depend on the evidence. Time to make use of that bright new expert on your team.”

“I have every confidence in Thalia.”

“Then you’ve nothing to fear. If Perigal’s guilty, the state of lockdown will continue. If the evidence doesn’t turn anything up, House Perigal will be allowed re-entry into the Glitter Band.”

“Minus six people.”

“Citizens panic when they lose abstraction. That isn’t our problem.” Dreyfus tried to read Aumonier’s expression, wondering what he was missing. It wasn’t like her to need to ask him how many people had died during an operation: normally she’d have committed the figures to memory before he was back inside Panoply. But Aumonier’s emotionless mask was as impossible to read as ever. He could remember how she looked when she smiled, or laughed, or showed anger, how she’d been before her brush with the Clockmaker, but it took an increasing effort of will.

“Pardon me,” he said, “but if this isn’t a reprimand… what exactly do you want me for?”

“The conversation? The banter? The warmth of human companionship?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Something’s come up. The news broke while you were outside. It’s as delicate as the Perigal affair, if not more so. Urgent, too. We need immediate action.” Dreyfus had not heard of anything brewing.

“Another lockdown?”

“No. There wouldn’t be much point, unfortunately.”

“I’m sorry?” Aumonier extended a hand to the wall, enlarging one of the display facets. It filled with an image of a spherical habitat, a grey ball blurred with microscopic detail, banded by tropical sun-panels, with an array of vast mirrors stationed at the poles and around the equator. The scale was difficult to judge, though Dreyfus doubted that the habitat was less than a kilometre wide.

“You won’t recognise it. This is a recent image of the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble, a fifth-magnitude shell habitat in the high outer orbits. It’s never fallen under Panoply scrutiny before.”

“What have they done wrong now?”

“Here’s a more recent image, taken three hours ago.” The Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble had been cut open, sliced along its mid-section like an eyeball gouged by a razor. The cut had almost split the habitat into two hemispheres. On either side of the cut, the habitat’s fabric had been scorched to a crisp midnight black. Structures inside were still glowing cherry-red.

“Casualties?” Dreyfus asked, holding his horror at bay.

“Last census put the population at nine hundred and sixty. We think they all died, but we need to get a team in and make an immediate physical inspection. Survivors can’t be ruled out. At the very least, there may be beta-level recoverables.”

“Why isn’t this all over the Band?”

“Because we’re keeping a lid on it. This doesn’t look like an accident.”

“Someone will have noticed Ruskin-Sartorious dropping off the networks.”

“They only participated in abstraction at a shallow level, enough that we can continue to simulate the existence of the fully functional habitat for the time being, using our network privileges.”

“And the time being… would be how long?”

“Best guess? Less than twenty-six hours. Thirteen might be nearer the mark.”

“And when the story breaks?”

“We’ll have a major crisis on our hands. I think I know who did this, but I’ll need to be absolutely certain before I move on it. That’s why I want you to get out to Ruskin-Sartorious immediately. Take whoever you need. Secure evidence and recoverables and get back to Panoply. Then we’ll hold our breath.” Dreyfus looked again at the image of the wounded habitat.

“There’s only one thing that could have done that, isn’t there? And it isn’t even a weapon.”

“We see things similarly,” Aumonier said. The walls of the tactical room were finely grained teak, varnished to a forbidding gleam. There were no windows or pictures, no humanising touches. The heavy, dark furniture was all inert matter: grown, cut and constructed by nature and carpentry. The double doors were cased in hammered bronze, studded with huge brass bolts, each door inlaid with a stylised version of the raised gauntlet that was Panoply’s symbol. The gauntlet was supposed to signify protection, but it could just as easily be interpreted as a threatening fist, clenched to smash down on its enemies or those who failed it.

“Begin please, Ng,” said the man sitting opposite Thalia, Senior Prefect Michael Crissel. She placed the recovered diskettes on the table’s edge, almost dropping them in her nervousness.

“Thank you, Senior Prefect. These are the triplicate physical summary packages from the Perigal polling core.” She nodded at the clockwork-gear shape of the Perigal habitat, imaged as a tiny representation in the tactical room’s Solid Orrery, enlarged and elevated above its real orbital plane.

“The data has now been copied into our archives, all one thousand days’ worth of it. I’ve verified that the three triplicate summaries are consistent, with no indication of tampering.”

“And your findings?”

“I’ve only had a few hours to look into things, which really isn’t enough time to do more than skim—”. Senior Prefect Gaston Clearmountain growled his impatience.

“Cut the blather, Ng. Just tell us what you have.”

“Sir,” Thalia said, almost stammering.

“Preliminary analysis confirms everything in the lockdown report. House Perigal were indeed guilty of tampering with the democratic process. On at least eight occasions they were able to bias voting patterns in marginal polls, either to their advantage, or to the advantage of their allies. There may be more instances. We’ll have a clearer picture when we’ve run a full audit on the packages.”

“I was hoping for a clearer picture now,” Clearmountain said. Senior Prefect Sheridan Gaffney leaned forward in his huge black chair with a creak of leather.

“Easy on her, Gaston,” he growled.

“She’s been under a lot of pressure to pull this together at short notice.”

Gaffney had a reputation for having a short fuse and a marked intolerance for fools. But as head of both Internal Security and whiphound training, the gruff-voiced Gaffney had always treated Thalia with impeccable fairness, even encouragement. She now perceived him as her only unambiguous ally in the room. It would have been different if Dreyfus or Jane Aumonier had been present, but Dreyfus was absent (his Pangolin clearance would have allowed him to sit in on the meeting even though he wasn’t a senior) and the position where the supreme prefect normally manifested—beamed into the room as a projection—was conspicuously empty. On her way to the room, Thalia had picked up rumours that some other crisis was brewing, something unrelated to the lockdown they’d recently performed.

The other seniors were neither on her side nor against her. Michael Crissel was a gentle-looking man with scholarly features and a diffident manner. By all accounts he’d been an excellent field prefect once, but he’d spent most of the last twenty years inside Panoply, becoming detached from the hard reality of duty outside. Lillian Baudry’s field career had come to an end when she was blown apart by a malfunctioning whiphound. They’d put her back together again, but her nervous system had never been the same. She could have surrendered herself to the medical expertise available elsewhere in the Glitter Band, but the security implications of receiving outside treatment would have meant her leaving Panoply for good. So she’d chosen duty over well-being, even though that meant sitting in meetings like a stiffly posed china doll.

It was a measure of the importance attached to Thalia’s report that only four seniors were present. Normally at least six or seven of the ten permanent seniors would have been in attendance, but today there were more than the usual number of empty places around the table. Yes, they wanted this affair tied up as quickly as possible—but that didn’t mean they saw it as anything other than a blip in Panoply’s schedule of business.

“Let’s cut to the chase,” Clearmountain said.

“We’ve got the packages. They confirm our existing suspicions, which is that Perigal had her hands in the pie. The lockdown can hold. Now all we need to do is seal the leak before someone else exploits it the same way.”

“I agree, sir,” Thalia said.

“Exactly how much damage did these polling violations cause?” asked Baudry.

“In the scheme of things, nothing major,” Thalia answered.

“They were all polls on relatively minor issues. Caitlin Perigal might have wanted to tip the balance in more significant polls, but discovery would have been even more likely if she’d tried. Frankly, with the amount of oversight and scrutiny we already have in place whenever something big comes up, I can’t imagine anyone managing to bias the votes to a statistically useful degree.”

“It’s your job to imagine it,” Michael Crissel said.

“She knows that,” Gaffney said in a whisper.

Thalia acknowledged Crissel.

“I’m sorry, sir. I just mean—given everything we know—it’s unlikely. The system can’t ever be proven to be inviolable; Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem—”

“I don’t need to be lectured on Godel, Ng,” Crissel said tersely.

“What I mean, sir, is that the system tests itself through being used. House Perigal has actually done us a favour. Now we’re aware of a logical flaw we hadn’t seen before: one that permits a tiny bias in the polls. We’ll fix that and move on. Somewhere down the line, someone else will get creative and find another loophole. We’ll fix that as well. That’s the process.”

“So you’re confident we can plug this hole?” Baudry asked.

“Absolutely, Senior. It’s trivial.”

“If it’s ’trivial’, how did we miss it until now?”

“Because we introduced it,” Thalia said, trying not to sound too full of herself.

“We plugged one hole—thinking we were being clever—and inadvertently opened another. The fault was deep in our error-handling routine. It was designed to stop valid votes being lost, but it accidentally allowed additional votes to be registered fraudulently.”

“Probably not the first time in history that’s happened,” Crissel said dryly.

Thalia laced her hands together on the table, trying to strike the right note between defensiveness and professional detachment.

“It was regrettable. But to date only a handful of habitats have exploited the loophole.”

“Regrettable?” Clearmountain said.

“I call it reprehensible.”

“Sir, the existing error-handling routine already ran to twenty-two million lines of code, including some subroutines written more than two hundred and twenty years ago, in the First System. Those programmers weren’t even speaking modern Canasian. Reading their documentation is like… well, deciphering Sanskrit or something.”

“Ng’s right,” Gaffney said.

“They did the best they could. And the secondary loophole was subtle enough that only five habitats in ten thousand ever attempted to exploit it. I think we can put this one down to experience and move on.”

“Provided, of course, we have a reliable fix,” Baudry said. She nodded stiffly at Thalia.

“You did say it would be a simple matter?”

“For once, yes. The correction isn’t anything like as complicated as the alteration that introduced the fault in the first place. Just a few thousand lines that need changing. Having said that, I’d still like to run the first few installations manually, just to iron out any unanticipated issues due to different core architectures. Once I’m satisfied, we can go live across the entire ten thousand.”

Gaffney looked sharply at Thalia.

“It’s clear that we need to get this whole mess tidied up as quickly as possible. By the time the Perigal lockdown becomes binding—as I have no doubt it will—I want us ready to begin implementing the upgrade. The special evidential board has access to the summary packages?”

“Since this morning, sir.”

Gaffney took out a handkerchief and dabbed at the perspiration glistening on his forehead.

“On past form we can expect their decision within ten days. Can you match that?”

“We could go live in two, sir, if you demanded it. I’m confident that the tests won’t throw up any anomalies.”

“We were confident last time,” Gaffney reminded her.

“Let’s not make the same mistake twice.”

But there’s a difference between then and now, Thalia thought to herself. She hadn’t been on the team when the last upgrade was made. She couldn’t speak for her predecessors, but she would never have allowed that error to slip through.

“We won’t,” she said. Dreyfus took in the scene of the crime from the vantage point of a Panoply cutter. It would have been quick, he reflected, but perhaps not fast enough to be either painless or merciful. The habitat was a corpse now, gutted of pressure. When whatever gouged that wound had touched the atmosphere inside the shell, it would have caused it to expand in a scalding ball of superheated air and steam. There’d have been no time to reach shuttles, escape pods or even armoured security vaults. But there’d have been time to realise what was happening. Most people in the Glitter Band didn’t expect to die, let alone in fear and agony.

“This isn’t looking good,” Sparver said.

“Still want to go in, before forensics catch up with us?”

“We may still be able to get something from hardened data cores,” Dreyfus answered, with gloomy resignation. He wasn’t even confident about the cores.

“What kind of weapon did this?”

“I don’t think it was a weapon.”

“That doesn’t look like any kind of impact damage to me. There’s scorching, suggesting some kind of directed energy source. Could the Conjoiners have dug out something that nasty? Everyone says they have a few big guns tucked away somewhere.” Dreyfus shook his head.

“If the Spiders wanted to pick a fight with an isolated habitat, they’d have made a cleaner job of it.”

“All the same—”.

“Jane has a shrewd idea of what did this. She just isn’t happy about the implications.” Dreyfus and Sparver passed through the cutter’s suitwall into vacuum, and then through a chain of old-fashioned but still functional airlocks. The locks fed them into a series of successively larger reception chambers, all of which were now dark and de-pressurised. The chambers were full of slowly wheeling debris clouds, little of which Dreyfus was able to identify. The internal map on his face-patch was based on the data Ruskin-Sartorious had volunteered during the last census. The polling core—which was likely to be where any beta-levels had been sequestered—was supposedly on the sphere’s inside surface near the equator. They would just have to hope that the beam had missed it. The main interior spaces—the two-kilometre-wide Bubble had been partitioned into chambered habitat zones—were charred black caverns, littered only with heat-warped or pressure-mangled ruins. Near the cut, traceries of structural metal were still glowing where the killing beam had sliced through them. It appeared that the Bubble had been a free-fall culture, with only limited provision for artificial gravity. There were many places like that in the Band, and their citizens grew elegant and willowy and tended not to travel all that much. Sparver and Dreyfus floated through the heart of the sphere, using their suit jets to steer around the larger chunks of free-fall debris. The suits had already begun to warn of heightened radiation levels, which did nothing to assuage Dreyfus’ suspicions that Aumonier was right about who had done this. But they’d need more than just suit readings to make a case.

“I’ve found something,” Sparver said suddenly, when they had drifted several tens of metres apart.

“What?”

“There’s something big floating over here. Could be a piece of ship or something.”

Dreyfus was sceptical.

“Inside the habitat?”

“See for yourself, Boss.”

Dreyfus steered his suit closer to Sparver and cast his lights over the floating object. Sparver had been right in that at first glance the thing resembled a chunk of ship, or some other nondescript piece of large machinery. But on closer inspection it was clear that this was nothing of the sort. The blackened object was a piece of artwork, apparently only half-finished.

Someone had begun with a chunk of metal-rich rock, a potato-shaped boulder about ten or twelve metres across. It had a dark-blue lustre, shading to olive green when the light caught it in a certain fashion. One face of the boulder was still rough and unworked, but the other had been cut back to reveal an intricate sculptural form. Regions of the sculpted side of the boulder were still at a crude stage of development, but other areas gave the impression of having been finished to a very high degree, worked down to a scale of centimetres. The way the rock had flowed and congealed around the worked-in areas suggested that the artist had been sculpting with fusion torches rather than just cutting drills or hammers. The liquid forms of the molten rock had become an integral part of the piece, incorporated into the composition at a level that could not be accidental.

Which didn’t mean that Dreyfus had any idea as to what it represented. There was a face emerging from a rock, that of a man, but oriented upside down from Dreyfus’ present point of view. He spun the suit around and for a moment, fleetingly, he had the impression that he recognised the face, that it belonged to a celebrity or historical figure rather than someone he knew personally. But the moment passed and the face lost whatever sheen of familiarity it might have possessed. Perhaps it was better that way, too. The man’s expression was difficult to read, but it was either one of ecstasy or soul-consuming dread.

“What do you make of it?” Sparver asked.

“I don’t know,” Dreyfus said.

“Maybe the beta-levels will tell us something, if any of them turn out to be recoverable.” He pushed his suit closer and fired an adhesive marker onto the floating rock so that forensics would know to haul it in.

They moved on to the entry wound, until they were hovering just clear of the edge of the cut. Before them, airtight cladding had turned black and flaked away, exposing the fused and reshaped rock that had formed the Bubble’s skin. The beam had made the rock boil, melt and resolidify in organic formations that were unsettlingly similar to those in the sculpture, gleaming a glassy black under their helmet lights. Stars were visible through the ten-metre-wide opening. Somewhere else out there, Dreyfus reflected, was all that remained of the habitat’s interior biome, billowing away into empty space.

He steered his suit into the cleft. He floated down to half the depth of the punctured skin, then settled near a glinting object embedded in the resolidified rock. It was a flake of metal, probably a piece of cladding that had come loose and then been trapped when the rock solidified. Dreyfus unhooked a cutter from his belt and snipped a palm-sized section of the flake away. Nearby he spotted another glint, and then a third. Within a minute he had gathered three different samples, stowing them in the suit’s abdominal pouch.

“Got something?” Sparver asked.

“Probably. If it was a drive beam that did it, this metal will have mopped up a lot of subatomic particles. There’ll be spallation tracks, heavy isotopes and fragmentation products. Forensics can tell us if the signatures match a Conjoiner drive.”

Now he’d said it, it was out in the open.

“Okay, but no matter what forensics say, why would Ultras do this?” Sparver asked.

“They couldn’t hope to get away with it.”

“Maybe that’s exactly what they were hoping to do—cut and run. They might not be back in this system for decades, centuries even. Do you think anyone will still care about what happened to Ruskin-Sartorious by then?” After a thoughtful moment, Sparver said, “You would.”

“I won’t be around. Neither will you.”

“You’re in an unusually cheerful frame of mind.”

“Nine hundred and sixty people died here, Sparver. It’s not exactly the kind of thing that puts a spring in my step.” Dreyfus looked around, but saw no other easily accessible forensic samples. The analysis squad would arrive shortly, but the really heavy work would have to wait until the story had broken and Panoply were not obliged to work under cover of secrecy. By then, though, all hell would have broken loose anyway.

“Let’s get to the polling core,” he said, moving his suit out of the cut.

“The sooner we leave here the better. I can already feel the ghosts getting impatient.”