The Prefect

CHAPTER 27

Thyssen’s face was slit-eyed and puffy when it appeared on Dreyfus’ compad.

“I know you’re meant to be sleeping now, and I apologise for disturbing your rest. But something’s been nagging at me and I need to talk to you about it.” He neglected to tell Thyssen that the thing that had been bothering him had only revealed itself fully when he woke from his snooze.

“Is this urgent, Prefect?”

“Very.”

“Then I’ll see you in the bay in five minutes.” Thyssen looked surprisingly alert when Dreyfus arrived, feeling less than clearheaded himself. Thyssen was talking with his shift replacement Tezuka, the two of them peering through a window at the ongoing ship operations. Technicians were performing vacuum welds on the damaged hull of a cutter. Both men were sipping something from drinking bulbs.

“Prefect Dreyfus,” Thyssen said, breaking away from his conversation.

“You look like you could use some of this.” He offered Dreyfus the drinking bulb. Dreyfus declined.

“The ship Saavedra took,” Dreyfus said.

“You mean Saavedra and Chen.” Dreyfus nodded: he’d forgotten that Thyssen hadn’t been informed of Chen’s murder.

“I’m just wondering why they took that one, out of all the choices they had. Am I correct in thinking that cutter was a Type B?”

“Correct,” Thyssen said.

“Most of the new vehicles are Type C or D. They don’t have the—”.

“Transatmospheric capability,” Dreyfus finished for him.

“That’s what I reckoned.”

“Since the segregation of security responsibilities between Chasm City and the Glitter Band—”.

“Prefects hardly ever need to take a ship into Yellowstone’s atmosphere. And all that aerodynamic bodywork makes for fuel-draining mass that we don’t need in normal duties. I know. But we still keep a small number of transat vehicles on readiness, in case we do need them.”

Something clicked behind Thyssen’s eyes.

“You think they’ve gone to Yellowstone.”

“It’s a possibility. I need you to look into your logs. I’m going to give you the names of some prefects and I want you to correlate those names against the vehicles they’ve signed out for routine duties. Can you do that for me?”

“Yes. Immediately.”

“Here are the names.” Dreyfus handed Thyssen his compad, allowing him access to the area where he had input the identities of the eight Firebrand operatives. Thyssen retired to an office space, Dreyfus shadowing him, and transferred the names into his own compad with a finger stroke. Thyssen chucked his bulb into the wall and conjured a console.

“I’m checking the logs right now. How far back do you want me to go?” Dreyfus thought of the likely activity that would have preceded the destruction of the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble. Moving the Clockmaker and its associated relics—including any equipment required to study them—would have certainly required more than one trip.

“Two months should do it.”

“Conjure yourself a coffee, Prefect. This is going to take a couple of minutes.” Thalia woke with the worst headache she could remember, one that felt as if someone had driven an iron piton into the side of her skull. She was just beginning to speculate on the precise origin of that pain when she became aware of less intense discomfort afflicting almost her entire body. It was difficult to breathe, and her arms were tugged so far behind her back that she felt as if her shoulders had been dislocated. Something squeezed her chest. Something hard dug into her spine. She opened her eyes and looked around, wondering where she was and what had happened to her.

“Easy,” said Meriel Redon, who appeared to be bound in a similar position next to Thalia: sitting on the ground with her back against the railings that encircled the polling core, her arms crossed and bound behind one of the uprights.

“You’re okay now, Prefect Ng. You took a bad bump on the head, but there’s no bleeding. We’ll get you checked as soon as we’re out of this.” Through a curtain of pain, Thalia said, “I don’t remember. What happened?”

“You were down in the basement, getting ready to set the timer on your whiphound.”

“I was,” Thalia said foggily. She had a groggy recollection that there had been some kind of problem with the whiphound, but the details refused to sharpen.

“You banged your head on one of the struts, knocking yourself out.”

“I banged my head?”

“You were out cold. Citizen Parnasse carried you back up here on his own.” The events began to come back to her. She remembered the second timing dial jamming, how she had come to the decision that she would have to detonate the whiphound manually. She remembered that awesome calm she had experienced, as if every trifling detail in her life had just been swept aside, leaving a breathtaking clarity of mind, as empty and full of possibility as the clear dawn sky. And then she remembered nothing at all, except waking up here.

“Where is Parnasse?”

“He went back down to set the timer,” Redon said.

“He said you’d shown him what to do.”

“No—” Thalia began.

“We’re expecting him back any minute. He said he’d be able to tie himself down when he arrived.”

“He isn’t coming back. There was a problem with the whiphound, with setting the five-minute fuse. I didn’t bang my head. Parnasse must have knocked me out.” Redon looked puzzled.

“Why would he have done that?”

“Because I was going to set it off myself, while I was still down there. It was the only way. But he wouldn’t let me. He’s decided to do it himself.” Comprehension came to Redon in horrified degrees.

“You mean he’s going to die down there?”

“He isn’t coming back up. I showed him how to set the whiphound. He knows exactly what to do.”

“Someone has to go down there, tell him not to do it,” Redon said.

“He can’t kill himself to save us. He’s just a citizen, just one of us.”

“When did he go?”

“Quite a long time ago.”

“He can’t set the fuse for longer than a hundred seconds. There’s no reason why he needs to wait that long, if he’s in place.”

“You mean we could go any second?”

“If the whiphound works. If the machines haven’t already broken through and stopped him.” She knew she ought to feel gratitude, but instead she felt betrayed.

“Damn him! He shouldn’t have brought me back up here. It wasted too much time!”

“Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea if one of us—”. Redon never got to finish her sentence. Judging by the force of the blast, felt through Thalia’s spine as it transmitted itself through the fabric of the polling core sphere, the whiphound must have detonated at nearly its maximum theoretical yield. It had been a new unit, she remembered belatedly: she’d checked it out of the armoury only a couple of weeks ago. There would still have been a lot of energy left inside it, anxiously seeking release.

The sphere rocked appreciably: Thalia saw the landscape tilt and then settle again at its former angle. The blast had been very brief: a spike of intense sound followed by a few seconds of echoing repercussions. Now all was silent again. The sphere was still. The landscape outside was still.

“It didn’t work,” she said.

“We’re not moving. It didn’t fucking work.”

“Wait,” Caillebot said quietly.

“It didn’t work, Citizen. We’re not going anywhere. The blast wasn’t sufficient. I’ve failed you, used up our one chance.”

“Wait,” he said.

“Something’s happening,” Cuthbertson said.

“I can hear it. It sounds like metal straining. Can’t you?”

“We’re tilting,” Redon said.

“Look.” Thalia craned her neck in time to see the white ball of the model polling core sphere roll across the floor, towards the window facing them. From somewhere below there came a kind of twanging sound, as if the energy stored in a stretched spar had just been catastrophically released. The twanging sound was followed in quick succession by another, then a third, and then a volley of them too close together to count. The tilt of the floor increased. Thalia felt her weight beginning to tug on the upright to which she was bound. The sphere must have been at ten or fifteen degrees to the horizontal already. She heard another series of metallic sounds: shearing and buckling noises, less like the failure of structural components than the cries of animals in distress. The angle of the tilt reached twenty degrees and continued increasing.

“We’re going over,” she said.

“It’s happening.”

Loose clothes and debris skittered across the floor, coming to rest along the curve of the outer wall. The architectural model slid noisily, then shattered itself to pieces. Thirty degrees, easy. Thalia felt an unpleasant tingling in her stomach. The landscape was tilting alarmingly. Through the windows, she could see aspects of the surrounding campus that had been obscured before. Suddenly it looked much further down than she had been imagining. Five hundred metres was a long way to fall. She remembered Caillebot’s reaction when she’d outlined the plan: That doesn’t look survivable.

Maybe he’d been right all along.

Now the tilt was increasing faster. Forty degrees, then forty-five. Thalia’s arms felt as if they were being wrenched out of their sockets, but it was only the effect of her bodyweight so far. When the sphere started rolling, it was going to get much worse. Fifty degrees. The lower extremity of the stalk was beginning to come into view through the windows. In one brief glimpse she knew she’d been right about the war machines. They covered it like a black mould, reaching as high up the shaft as it was possible to see. They must have been very close to the sphere itself.

Something gave way. Thalia felt the sphere drop several metres, as if the upper part of the stalk had crumbled or subsided under the changing load. And then suddenly they were rolling, pitching down the side of the stalk, the angle of tilt exceeding ninety degrees and then continuing to climb. The sphere shook and roared. There was no time to analyse the situation, or even judge how far down the stalk they had rolled. There was only room in Thalia’s head for a single, simple thought: Its working… so far.

She felt a momentary increase in the forces tugging at her body and judged that the sphere had reached the base of the stalk and changed its direction of roll from the vertical to the horizontal. She tried to time the duration of each roll, hoping to judge the distance they had travelled and detect some evidence that the sphere was slowing. But it was hopeless trying to concentrate on such matters.

“I think,” she heard Caillebot call out, between grunts of discomfort, “that we’ve cleared the perimeter.”

“Really?” Thalia called back, raising her voice above the juggernaut rumble of their progress.

“We’re still rolling pretty fast. I hope we don’t just bounce right over the window band.”

It was a possibility neither Thalia nor Parnasse had considered. They’d guessed that the sphere would have enough momentum to reach the edge of the band, but they had never thought about it moving so fast that it would skim right across, moving too quickly to stress the window enough to break. Now Thalia realised that they were open to the awful possibility that the sphere might traverse the entire window band and come to a rolling halt on the next stretch of solid ground.

“Can you see the band yet?” she asked.

“Yes,” called out Meriel Redon.

“I think I can. But something’s wrong.”

“We’re coming in too fast?”

“Not that. Shouldn’t we be rolling in a straight line?”

“Yes,” Thalia said.

“Aren’t we?”

“We seem to be curving. I can see the window band, but we’re approaching it obliquely.”

Thalia was confused and worried. They’d always assumed that the sphere would follow a straight course once it reached the base of the stalk, with only minor deviations caused by obstacles and friction. But now that she concentrated on the tumbling landscape and tried to make out the grey line that marked the edge of the window band, she knew that Redon was right. They were clearly off-course, at far too sharp an angle to be explained by the sphere crashing through the remains of the campus grounds.

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“We went over this. It should be a straight roll all the way to the window band.”

“We’re still going to hit the window band,” Cuthbertson said, his voice reduced to a strangled approximation of itself.

“You’ve just forgotten about Coriolis force.”

“We should be moving in a straight line,” Thalia said.

“We are. But the habitat’s rotating, and it’s trying to get us to follow a helical trajectory instead. It’s all about reference frames, Prefect.”

“Coriolis force,” Thalia said.

“Shit. After everything they taught me in Panoply, I forgot about Coriolis force. We’re not on a planet. We’re inside a fucking spinning tube.”

She’d become aware that the rate of roll was diminishing, the landscape cartwheeling around at half the speed from when they had begun the journey. She could begin to pick out details, landmarks that the Aubusson citizens had already noted.

“We’ll be okay,” Cuthbertson said.

“We’re just going to hit a different part of the window band than we were expecting.”

“Will that make any difference?” she asked.

“Don’t think so. We should break through as easily there as anywhere else.”

“Any second now,” Meriel Redon said.

“We’re coming up on the band. Get ready, everyone. There’s going to be a jolt when we hit the edge of the land strip.”

Thalia braced herself, in so far as bracing was possible when she was already bound like a sacrificial offering. She felt a moment of giddy vertigo as the sphere rolled over the edge of the landscape strip and crashed down onto the vast glassy plain of the window band. The ride became eerily smooth as they trundled over the geometrically perfect surface. With little friction save air resistance, the rate of roll was holding more or less steady.

“Break,” Thalia whispered.

“Please break. And please let us be airtight when it happens.”

Dreyfus knocked on the door to the tactical room before stepping through. A certain deference was advisable. Dreyfus knew that his Pangolin clearance put him on a level footing with the seniors in some respects, but he saw no point in rubbing salt into that particular wound.

“Dreyfus,” Baudry said, breaking off from whatever discussion she’d been having with the other seniors.

“I’m afraid you’re too late. You’ve just missed the demise of the Persistent Vegetative State.”

Without sitting down, Dreyfus moved to a position close to the Solid Orrery. The number of red lights hadn’t changed since last time he’d seen it, but he could draw no consolation from that, knowing what it had cost just to slow Aurora’s advance.

“How many’d we get out?”

“One hundred and seventeen thousand, out of a total population of one hundred and thirty. Not bad, all

things considered, especially as we were basically dealing with corpses.”

“We’ve now concentrated our evacuation efforts on the targets we think Aurora will go for next,”. Clearmountain said.

“Our monitors show that the weevil flows are already changing direction, now they know the Spindle and the PVS are out of the picture.”

“You mean ’nuked’,” Dreyfus said.

“Whatever. So far, though, we can’t say where the flows are most likely to hit next. There are a number of possible candidates. Unfortunately, none of them are habitats where we’ve already started evacuating. We’re starting from scratch.”

“Where are the evacuees going?”

He could tell from their reactions that his question wasn’t a popular one.

“In an ideal world, we’d ship them far across the Glitter Band, well beyond Aurora’s expansion front,” Clearmountain said.

“But even with the high-burn liners, that would involve an unacceptable round-trip delay. Our only practical strategy has been to move the citizens to relatively close habitats, so that the turnaround time can be minimised.”

“Go on.”

Clearmountain cast a glance at the other seniors.

“Unfortunately, Aurora’s projected front is now beginning to impinge on some of the habs where we’ve been moving people.”

“I see.”

“Which means that when we start evacuating those habs, we’re also going to have to shift the recent refugees. With our current resources the situation is borderline containable, but as the front expands, and the number of endangered habitats grows geometrically, the refugee burden will soon become the predominant limiting factor.” Clearmountain offered his palms in a gesture of well-intentioned surrender.

“Some tough calls may have to be made when that happens, Prefect Dreyfus.”

“Today we nuked two occupied habitats. We’ve already made tough calls.”

“What I mean,” Clearmountain said, with a strained smile, “is that we may have to focus our activities where they can do the most good.”

“Isn’t that exactly what we’re already doing?”

“Not to the degree that may shortly become necessary. In the interests of maximising the number of citizens we can evacuate away from Aurora’s takeover front, we may have to prioritise assistance to those citizens least likely to hinder our efforts.”

“I see where you’re going. You think we should leave the coma cases to die.”

“It’s not as if they’ll know what hit them.”

“All those citizens went into voluntary coma on the understanding that the PVS would be looking after them, and that Panoply would be standing by if the PVS failed in its care. That was a promise we made to those people.”

Clearmountain looked exasperated.

“You’re worried about breaking a promise to a citizen with the brain functions of a cabbage?”

“I’m just wondering where this ends. So the coma cases are inconvenient to us. Fine, we lose them. Who’s next? Citizens who can’t move as fast as the rest? Citizens we just don’t like the look of? Citizens who maybe didn’t vote the right way the last time there was a poll on Panoply’s right to arms?”

“I think you’re being needlessly melodramatic,” Clearmountain said.

“There was a reason for this visit, wasn’t there, other than to cast doubts on an already complicated evacuation programme?”

“Clearmountain’s right,” Jane Aumonier said, her image speaking from her usual position at the table.

“The coma cases are a blessed nuisance, and we’d have a much easier time of it if we just pulled life-support on the lot of them. They’re going to retard our evacuation programme and therefore increase the danger to the rest of the citizenry. But Tom’s even more right. If we cross this line just once—if we say these citizens matter less than those citizens—we may as well hand Aurora the keys to the kingdom. But we’re not going to do that. This is Panoply. Everything we stand for says we’re better than that.”

“Thank you,” Dreyfus said, his voice a hushed whisper.

“But we can’t let the coma cases impose too heavy a drag on the evacuation programme,” Aumonier continued.

“That’s why I want them dealt with now, so we won’t have to worry about them in the future. I want them leapfrogged well ahead of the front—out of the Glitter Band, even, if we can identify a suitable holding point.”

“That’ll tie up ships and manpower,” Baudry said.

“I know. But it has to be done. Do you have any suggestions, Lillian?”

“We might consider an approach to Hospice Idlewild. They’re used to dealing with sudden influxes of incapacitated sleepers, so they should be able to handle the coma cases.”

“Excellent proposal. Can you sort that out?”

“I’ll get right on it.” After a lengthy pause she said, “Supreme Prefect Aumonier…”

“Yes?”

“It’s been nearly six hours now. Since Aurora’s transmission.”

“I’m well aware of that, thank you very much.”

“I’m just saying… given what we now know of her capabilities… and the difficulties we’re having with the evacuation effort, and the finite number of nuclear devices in our arsenal—”

“Yes, Lillian?”

“I think it would be prudent at least to consider Aurora’s proposal.” Her words came out awkwardly, the strain written in her face.

“If her success is guaranteed, then we have an onus to do everything we can to protect the citizenry during the transition phase. Aurora has threatened to start euthanising citizens in the habitats she already holds. I believe she will follow through on that threat unless we broadcast the takeover code to the rest of the ten thousand. If we wish to save as many lives as possible, we may have no choice but to comply with her demand.”

“I don’t think we’re quite ready to hand her the keys to the castle,” Dreyfus said, before anyone else had time to respond to Baudry’s words.

“With all due respect, Field Prefect Dreyfus—” she began exasperatedly.

“With all due respect, Senior Prefect Baudry, shut up.” Dreyfus looked pointedly away from Baudry, to Clearmountain.

“I dropped by for a reason, and it wasn’t to rubber-stamp our surrender. You have any objections if I commandeer the Orrery for a moment?”

“If you need to run the Orrery, you have authorisation to conjure a duplicate in your quarters,”. Clearmountain said.

“Let him run it,” Aumonier said warningly.

“What have you got for us, Tom?”

“It may be nothing. On the other hand, it may be a clue to the present location of the Clockmaker.”

Aumonier lifted an eyebrow. He hadn’t briefed her in advance, so she was as much in the dark as everyone else in the room.

“Then I think you should continue, with all haste.”

“I’ll need to wind back a few hours. Everyone happy with that?”

“Do what you need to do,” Aumonier said.

Dreyfus began to spin back the Solid Orrery to the point when he had begun tracking Saavedra’s cutter.

“Let’s remind ourselves what we’re looking at here,” he said, as the timetag digits reversed themselves.

“The Orrery’s more than just a real-time record of the disposition of the Glitter Band and its habitats. It also shows Yellowstone. That isn’t just some static representation of what the planet looks like from space. It’s a constantly changing three-dimensional image, pieced together from countless orbital viewpoints.”

“We’re well aware of this,” Clearmountain said.

“Hear him out,” purred Aumonier.

“Everything that happens on Yellowstone, the Orrery keeps a record of it. Changes in the weather, the cloud colouration… it all goes into the memory. Even those rare occasions when the clouds clear to reveal the surface. But there’s more to it than that.” The digits froze: the Orrery had wound back to the time of Saavedra’s flight. Dreyfus dabbed a finger into the jewelled disc of the Band.

“Here’s Panoply.” He moved his finger a few centimetres to the right.

“Here’s the last known position of Saavedra’s vehicle before she dropped beyond our sensor horizon. In clear space we’d have been able to track her at a range of several light-seconds, even with her hull stealthing. But it’s hopeless in the thick of the Band, even more so with the present crisis, and Saavedra knew it.”

“You said we lost her,” Aumonier said.

“Has something changed?”

“Saavedra told me I had no hope of chasing her since there were no other ships ready to go. She was bluffing—maybe there were no other ships fast enough to catch her, but there were certainly other vehicles that had more fuel and heavier weapons loads.” Dreyfus looked up from the Orrery.

“So I did some nosing around. Turns out the Firebrand operatives—I presume you’ve all been briefed concerning Firebrand?—have been using a lot of transat vehicles lately, even signing them out for duties that wouldn’t require that capability. Now, why would they do that?”

“You think they’ve moved the Clockmaker to Yellowstone,” Aumonier said.

Dreyfus nodded.

“That’s the way it’s looking. Of course, that’s not particularly useful data in and of itself. It’s a big planet with a lot of hiding places.”

“So why didn’t they take the Clockmaker there first, instead of using the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble?” Baudry asked. “Because it would have been much more risky,” Dreyfus said.

“Visiting the Clockmaker in the Bubble was so easy that they kept it up for nine years without any of us suspecting. But it’s a lot more difficult to conceal flights in and out of Yellowstone. They must have looked on it as a temporary holding point until they could prepare somewhere else in the Band. But then Aurora made her move.”

“This is good work, Tom,” Aumonier said.

“But the point still holds. Neither Panoply nor the local enforcement agencies have the resources to comb the whole planet looking for a secret hideaway, especially not now.”

“We don’t have to comb. I think I know exactly where they are.” Dreyfus indicated the night-time face of Yellowstone in the Solid Orrery. It was almost entirely black, except for a cold blue flicker of frozen lightning at the southern pole.

“Saavedra’s ship was stealthed, but nothing’s truly invisible, not even a nonvelope. To avoid being pinned down, Saavedra had to move quickly and exploit gaps in CTC’s tracking, just like any prefect on sensitive business.”

“How does that help us?”

“It means her options were limited when she hit atmosphere. I’m sure she’d have preferred to come in slowly, but that would have meant spending too much time in near-Yellowstone space. So she came in hard and fast, using the atmosphere itself as a brake.”

“And we got a hit,” Aumonier said.

Dreyfus smiled. Jane was one step ahead of him, but he liked it that way. He felt as if the two of them were a double act, feeding each other lines so that they both looked better before the other prefects. The others must have thought that the whole performance had been rehearsed.

“The cams detected this flash,” Dreyfus said, letting the Orrery scroll forward to the point he had tagged. A tiny pink spot of light waxed and waned near Yellowstone’s equator.

“It matches the expected entry signature for a cutter-sized vehicle moving at about the same speed Saavedra had just before she dropped out of range. It’s her, Seniors.”

“Ships are coming and going from Yellowstone all the time,” Clearmountain said.

“But not that fast. Most ships come in slow, settling down into the atmosphere on controlled thrust. And there’s hardly been any routine traffic since the supreme prefect polled for the use of emergency powers. People are keeping their heads down, hoping this will all blow over.”

“But an entry point is just an entry point,” Baudry said.

“Agreed. I can’t rule out the possibility that Saavedra travelled a lot further within the atmosphere. But if she did, planetary traffic control didn’t pick her up. I think she came in hard and fast close to her destination.”

“But there’s nothing there,” Baudry said. She craned her head slightly.

“I can see the weather pattern over Chasm City, on the sunward face. Unless my knowledge of Stoner geography’s seriously flawed, Saavedra came in thousands of kilometres from any other settlements.”

Dreyfus sent another command to the Orrery.

“You’re right, Lillian. The nearest surface community would have been Loreanville, eight thousand kilometres to the west. But Firebrand wouldn’t have been interested in Loreanville, or any of the domed settlements: there’d have been too much local security for them to continue their activities.”

“So where was she headed?”

“Clear to surface,” Dreyfus told the Orrery. The quickmatter envelope of the planet’s atmosphere dissipated in a puff, revealing the wrinkled terrain of Yellowstone’s crust. It was an icy landscape riven with fissures and ridges, spotted here and there with simmering cold lakes, lifeless save for the hardiest of organisms capable of enduring the toxic chemistry of the methane-ammonia atmosphere.

“There’s still nothing there,” Baudry said.

“Not now. But there used to be.” Dreyfus gave another command and the surface became dotted with a dozen or so vermilion symbols, each accompanied by a small textual annotation.

“What are we looking at, Tom?” Aumonier asked.

“The sites of former Amerikano colonies or bases, predating the Demarchist era. Most of these structures and digs go back three hundred years. They’ve been ruins for more than two hundred.” There was no need for him to labour the point: Saavedra’s entry trajectory had positioned her directly above one of the abandoned colonies.

“Now, this could be coincidence, but I’m inclined to think otherwise.”

“What is that place?” Aumonier asked.

“The Amerikanos called it Surface Operations Facility Nine, or Ops Nine. If they had another name for it, we have no record of it.” Dreyfus shrugged.

“It’s been a long time.”

“But not so long that there isn’t still something there.”

“Firebrand wouldn’t have needed a fully operational base, just somewhere to hide the Clockmaker and keep an eye on it. An abandoned facility would have served them adequately.”

“But is there anything there at all, after all this time?”

“Not much on the surface according to the terrain maps, but the old records say Ops Nine went down several levels. This is quite a stable area, geologically speaking. The subsurface areas may still be relatively intact: even to the extent that they’ll still be airtight.”

Clearmountain blew out slowly.

“Then we’d better get a task force down there immediately. There may be nothing in this, but we can’t take that risk. Our top priority is to secure the Clockmaker.”

“All due respect, Senior,” Dreyfus said, “but I wouldn’t recommend any kind of visible response to this intelligence. Since nothing’s happened so far, we can be reasonably sure that Aurora hasn’t made the same deductions we have. But if we start retasking assets—sending deep-system vehicles into the atmosphere—Aurora’s going to see that and wonder what’s got us so interested in an abandoned Amerikano base.”

“And I wouldn’t expect her to take long to put two and two together,” Aumonier said.

“No: Tom’s correct. We need to respond, but it has to be a covert approach. We need to secure and protect the Clockmaker before Aurora even has a hint as to what we’re up to. That rules out any mass concentration of assets or personnel.” She paused heavily.

“But someone will still have to go in. I’d volunteer to do it—I’ve already survived direct contact with the Clockmaker—but for obvious reasons my participation isn’t an option.”

“We wouldn’t risk you anyway,” Dreyfus said.

“You were a field when you encountered the Clockmaker back then. It’s still a field’s job to go in now.”

“But it doesn’t have to be you.”

“This has been my case from the moment I spoke to that Ultra captain. I propose talking with it.”

“It doesn’t talk. It kills.”

“Then I’ll just have to find some common ground. A negotiating position.” Clearmountain looked appalled.

“Even if that means giving it something in return?”

“Even if.”

“I won’t permit it.”

“Then I suggest you start looking into alternative career options. I don’t think Aurora’s going to have a lot of use for senior prefects when she takes over.”

Someone knocked at the door. Dreyfus recognised the girl—she was the operative who’d informed the tactical room of the hostile action taken by the first four habitats claimed by Aurora.

“Bad news for us again?” he asked.

“Sirs, I’m not sure,” she said, looking nervously at the strained faces of the seniors.

“I was asked to bring this to your immediate attention. There’s been a development in the House Aubusson situation.”

“What kind of development?” Dreyfus asked, secretly dreading her answer.

“Sirs, I have imagery obtained by the deep-system cruiser we have on monitoring standby near Aubusson.” With shaking hands, she placed a compad on the table.

“There’s been a pressure breach, a major one. Air’s blasting out through a hundred-metre-wide hole in one of the window bands.” Dreyfus snatched the compad across the table, flipping it around to face him. He made out the sausage-shaped habitat, a jet of cold, grey air geysering out from its side.

“The cause of this breach?”

She was facing Dreyfus now, answering him to the exclusion of everyone else present, even the supreme prefect herself.

“Sir, it appears something crashed through the window band. The cruiser’s tracking a metal object, a sphere, moving on a slow free-fall trajectory away from the habitat.” Dreyfus’ throat was very dry.

“The nature of this object?”

“Unknown, sir, but it doesn’t resemble any orthodox space vehicle or weapons system. The cruiser’s asking permission, sir.”

“Permission for what?” She blinked.

“To fire, sir. To destroy the unknown object.”

“Over my dead fucking body,” Dreyfus said.

“We can’t be too careful,” Clearmountain replied.

“This could be another part of Aurora’s takeover strategy.”

“It’s Thalia.”

“How can you be so sure? We don’t know what Aurora might have planned.” “She’s been using weevils to spread her influence from habitat to habitat,” Dreyfus answered.

“Why would she change, put all her eggs in one basket, when her existing strategy’s working just fine?”

“We can’t guess what she has in mind.”

“I can. She’s going to keep using force of numbers, the way she already has. Whatever this is, it isn’t part of her plan.”

“Which doesn’t automatically mean it’s anything to do with Thalia Ng,” Baudry said.

“I’m sorry to remind you of this, but we have no evidence that she survived the initial takeover phase.”

“If we think they’re all dead, why haven’t we nuked Aubusson already?”

“Because there’s a chance, however small, that the citizenry may still be alive. But that doesn’t necessarily imply that Thalia is amongst the survivors.” Baudry offered Dreyfus a sympathetic look.

“I know this is tough on you, but we need to take the rational view. How likely is it that Thalia Ng is behind this development, whatever it represents? We don’t even know what the object is, let alone how it came to smash through the habitat. Thalia was just a single deputy field, Tom. She knew a lot about polling cores, and I don’t doubt that she’d have done her best to protect the citizens, but we have to be realistic about the chances of her succeeding. She had next to no experience in high-risk field situations. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it true that she’d only participated in a single lockdown before all this happened?”

“I know Thalia,” Dreyfus said.

“She’d have done whatever it took.”

“Tom, I know you mean well, but we can’t afford to let this foreign object—”.

“Put me through to the deep-system cruiser,” Aumonier said, cutting over Baudry. The operative touched settings on her bracelet.

“Connection should be open, Supreme Prefect.”

“This is Jane Aumonier,” said the projected figure.

“To whom am I speaking?” A woman’s voice crackled across the room.

“Captain Sarasota, Supreme Prefect. How may I be of assistance?”

“I believe you’re tracking something, Captain, something that emerged from House Aubusson?”

“We have a weapons lock on it, Supreme Prefect. We can fire at your command.”

“I’d rather you didn’t do that, Captain. Maintain your maximum defensive posture, but approach the unidentified object close enough to sweep for infrared hotspots. I want to know if there are survivors aboard that thing.”

“And if there are?”

“Bring them in. As fast as you can.”