The Prefect

CHAPTER 28

Dreyfus fastened the safe-distance tether with an unshakeable conviction that this would be the last time he performed the action. Either he would not be coming back from Yellowstone, or Jane Aumonier would not be waiting for him here, in this weightless room, upon his return. The significance of either outcome caused his hands to shake as he locked the catch into place. “How long before you leave?” Aumonier said as Dreyfus came to a halt.

“Thyssen says there’ll be a ship fuelled and prepped within thirty minutes.”

“A deep-system cruiser, I take it?”

“No, I opted for a cutter. The amount of armament’s immaterial. All that matters is that we sneak in unobserved.”

“We, Tom?”

“Pell will fly me to the drop-off point. I’ll walk the rest of the way.”

“Walk?” she asked, frowning.

“No one said anything about walking.”

“There’s no other way. Firebrand will have Ops Nine guarded against the approach of any unauthorised vehicle. But if Pell drops me over their sensor horizon, I should be able to walk in without triggering the perimeter defences.”

“How will you know where their sensor horizon ends?”

“They want to stay hidden, so their coverage will be necessarily limited. They won’t be floating drones up in the air to spy on someone approaching overland.”

“You hope.”

“I’ll take my chances. If you could clear the paperwork for a Breitenbach rifle, that would help.”

“Take whatever you want from the armoury,” Aumonier said dismissively.

“If I could spare a nuke, I’d give you one of those as well.”

“Not on my kit list, but would you really give me one if I asked?”

“Probably, but with misgivings. The problem is we don’t have an inexhaustible supply, and we need to make sure we curtail all weevil production when we take out a habitat.”

“How many nukes do you have left?” Aumonier glanced away: he could tell that she’d rather he hadn’t asked that particular question.

“We’re down to our last fifty warheads. For some of the larger habitats on the evacuation front we’ll have to use three or four to guarantee total destruction of all manufactory centres. It’s bad enough that we’re driven to this, Tom. But no one ever imagined Panoply would need more than a few dozen nukes, even in the worst crisis scenarios we ever imagined.”

Dreyfus smiled thinly.

“Can we make more nukes?”

“Not on a useful timescale. We’ve put in so many safeguards to stop people making these horrors that it’s going to take days of frantic red-tape cutting before we can even begin to utilise civilian manufactories. They won’t come through in time to help us, I’m afraid.”

“If we had another weapon to use against the evacuated habitats, would we consider it?”

“You mean something with the destructive potential of nukes?” Aumonier shook her head sadly.

“There just isn’t anything in our arsenal, I’m afraid. If we deployed every foam-phase warhead we have, we might be able to destroy a single habitat. But it would take hours, and we’d always run the risk of missing a chunk of functioning manufactory, something with the capacity to keep churning out weevils.”

“I wasn’t thinking about our armoury,” Dreyfus said.

“I was thinking about the people we blamed for starting this whole thing in the first place.”

“I’m not following you, Tom.”

“The Ultras,” Dreyfus said.

“We’ve already had a comprehensive demonstration that one of their ships can destroy one of our habitats, no problem. Granted, Ruskin-Sartorious was one of the smaller states, but I think the principle still applies. They can help us, Jane.”

“Will they go for it?”

“We won’t know unless we ask,” Dreyfus said.

She looked down, surveying her weightless form, the tips of her dangling feet. Dreyfus wondered if she had noticed the thin, red scratch of the laser that was now cutting across her body just below her neckline. If she had cause to raise a hand, she would notice it shining across her wrist. Demikhov’s guillotine was in place, the laser’s sub-millimetre accuracy good enough for surgical purposes, so Dreyfus had been informed. If the laser happened to transect her throat above the upper extremity of the scarab, and if all other physiological parameters were satisfactory, Demikhov would initiate the decapitation process. Demikhov had even argued against Dreyfus visiting Aumonier in person, for he would not trigger the blades while another prefect was in the same room. Dreyfus understood that, and that his presence was therefore not in Aumonier’s best interests. But he’d had an overwhelming need to see her before he left.

“I don’t want to keep you, Tom,” she said hesitantly.

“But before you go—”

He cut her off, more out of nerves than intention.

“There’s been no news from Captain Sarasota?” he asked.

“I’m still waiting. Her last report said that there appeared to be thermal signatures consistent with survivors, but they won’t know until they’ve docked with it and cut a boarding aperture. I’ve no idea what the hell that thing is, but I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.”

“It’s not done anything hostile, has it?”

“No. On that score your intuitions were correct.”

There was a silence. Dreyfus was conscious of the ship waiting for him down in the bay, almost ready for departure. As little desire as he had to be aboard it, he knew that he could not delay. It might take many hours to reach Ops Nine, but every minute was critical.

“You were about to say something,” he said.

“Then I interrupted you.”

Aumonier could not meet his eyes.

“This is difficult for me.”

“Then save it for later. I’m not planning on staying down there.”

“It can’t wait until later, unfortunately. This whole business with the Clockmaker has precipitated something I had hoped to avoid for a very long while. Perhaps for ever. I’ve had to make a very difficult decision, Tom. Even now, I don’t know if what I’m about to do, what I’m about to say to you, is the right thing.”

“Perhaps you should just say it and see how things go.”

“Before you board the ship, I’m going to make a document available you. I’ll have it transferred onto your compad.”

“You want me to read a document?”

“It isn’t that simple. You have Pangolin clearance now, but this is a matter above Pangolin. You’ll need Manticore.”

“I don’t have Manticore.”

“But I can grant it to you. The choice will be yours as to whether you use it or not.”

“Why should I hesitate?”

“Because of what’s in that document, Tom. It probably won’t come as a great surprise if I tell you that it concerns the last Clockmaker crisis, and what happened to the Sylveste Institute for Artificial Mentation. By implication, it concerns Valery.”

“I understand.” She answered very gently.

“No, you don’t. Not yet. Not until you’ve read the contents. Something happened back then, Tom, that was personally very difficult for you.”

“I lost my wife. It doesn’t get any more difficult than that.” Aumonier closed her eyes. He could sense the distress this was causing her.

“What happened in SIAM was… not what was entered in the public record. There were good reasons for this. But you chose not to live with the facts as they were.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You were more closely involved in the Clockmaker affair than you have led yourself to believe these last eleven years. After the crisis, you were… troubled. You could no longer function as an effective prefect.

You recognised this yourself and requested the appropriate remedial action.” Though he was floating weightless, Dreyfus had the impression that he was falling down a deep, dark shaft, into invisible depths.

“What do you mean?”

“Selective amnesia was applied, Tom, at your request. Your memories of the Clockmaker crisis were forcibly suppressed.”

“But the records say I was nowhere near SIAM,” Dreyfus protested.

“The records were incorrect. Since so much of what happened that day was destined to remain secret anyway, it was an easy matter to place you elsewhere. It was done with my full authorisation.”

Dreyfus knew she wasn’t lying. She had no reason to, not now. The stress of speaking the truth was almost ripping her in two.

“And the missing six hours? What happened with the Atalanta?” “It’s all in the document. Take Manticore and you’ll understand why we had to lie. But understand that it was the truth that nearly broke you. I’ve spent eleven years protecting you from the memories you wanted suppressed. In return, I’ve got back the best field prefect I could ever have asked for. But now I have to give you the key, so you can unlock them again.”

“Will digging up the past really help?” Dreyfus asked, his own voice sounding small and childlike.

“I don’t know. But I can’t let you go down there without knowing everything there is to know about the Clockmaker. Ultimately, though, the choice has to be yours.”

“I understand.”

“I’m sorry I have to do this to you, Tom. If there was any other way in the world…”

He looked at the thin red line etched across her throat like a premonitory scar.

“You don’t have anything to apologise for.”

Captain Pell was talking to Thyssen when Dreyfus arrived in the pressurised observation platform overlooking the nose bay. Pell had already been briefed on the general nature of the mission, though not its precise objective.

“We’ll make our approach into the atmosphere just like any other ship on its way to Chasm City,”. Dreyfus said.

“But once we’re under cover of the clouds, you fly me to the other hemisphere. Can you do that without Aurora picking up our movement?”

“Nothing’s guaranteed,” Pell said.

“If we go supersonic, and she happens to have sensors pointed down at the right part of the sky, she may see the disturbance in the atmosphere caused by our Mach cone.”

Dreyfus didn’t welcome the news, but he’d been expecting it.

“Then we’ll have to hold subsonic. How long will that take?”

“Eight, nine hours, depending on the trajectory. Too long for you?”

“It’s still faster than using surface transportation, even if I could get closer than Loreanville.”

Pell tapped a stylus at the compad he held in the crook of his arm.

“There are some deep canyon systems we can use for cover. I may be able to take us supersonic for brief periods, using the canyon walls to soak up most of our Shockwave.”

“Just give me the fastest approach you can consistent with our staying hidden from orbital surveillance.”

“You want me to drop you right on the doorstep of that place?”

Dreyfus shook his head.

“I’m not expecting a warm welcome when I get there. You’ll have to assess the terrain and put me down as close as you can without risking detection by anti-ship systems. If that means I have to walk twenty or thirty klicks overland, so be it.”

“It’s your call, Prefect. I’ll try to pick a spot where you’ll have an easy approach.”

“I know you’ll do your best, Captain, but I’m not expecting miracles.” Dreyfus glanced through the nearest window at the waiting form of the cutter, a flint-like wedge of black poised on the end of its launch rack.

“Are we good to go?”

Pell nodded.

“We can move out as soon as we’re aboard and lashed down.”

“There’s a surface suit aboard?”

“Everything you asked for on the checklist, and as many weapons as Thyssen’s people could cram into the remaining space.”

“I’m hoping it won’t come to a gunfight,” Dreyfus said, “but I’ll take what I can get.” He was about to board the ship when an internal prefect came rushing into the observation area, braking himself to a halt against a restraining strap.

“Prefect Dreyfus!” the man called.

“I’m glad I caught you, sir. We were told you’re shipping out and that you’ll be out of comms range. But you need to hear this before you go.”

“Is it about Thalia?” The man smiled.

“She’s alive, sir. She’s alive and well and she’s managed to get a whole party of Aubusson citizens out of that place.”

“Thank God.” Despite his nerves, Dreyfus couldn’t help smiling as well.

“I want to speak to her. Is she back yet?”

“Sorry, sir. We need that deep-system cruiser out there for the time being.”

“But she’s okay?”

“We have reports of minor injuries, sir, nothing worse than that. But Thalia had some bad news for us. It looks like there are no other survivors from Aubusson.”

“None?”

“It wasn’t the decompression, sir. According to Thalia the servitors inside the habitat have been rounding people up and killing them for hours. She doesn’t think anyone else made it through the night.”

“Thank you,” Dreyfus said.

“You’ll make sure the supreme prefect is informed, won’t you? If Aubusson is depopulated, she needs to know. It could make all the difference.”

“She already has the intelligence, sir. Is there anything else?”

“Just this: I want you to pass on a message to Thalia Ng when she gets back to Panoply. Tell her I was very pleased to hear that she made it out in one piece. Tell her that I’m very proud of her actions. Tell her that she’s a credit to the organisation, and that I look forward to telling her that in person.”

“I’ll see the message gets through, sir.” Dreyfus nodded.

“You do that for me.”

Pell boarded the cutter first, sealing the flight-deck passwall while Dreyfus attended to the organisation of his suit, weapons and equipment, satisfying himself that everything he had requested was present. It was a more complicated ensemble than could be created by a standard suitwall. There had been no oversights, he was glad to see. If anything, the technicians had stocked more armour and weapons than he could ever have hoped to carry. It was all lashed down or fixed into place via conjured restraints. He resisted the urge to suit-up now; there would be time enough for that during the long subsonic flight to the drop-off point, once they were safely inside Yellowstone’s atmosphere.

Dreyfus felt a tightness in his stomach. It was fear, moving back in like an old lodger. He felt the cutter move on the rack. He buckled in for launch, wishing he had remembered to shave. His neck hairs rasped against his collar and he could smell his own sweat seeping out of his pores.

His bracelet chimed. It was Jane Aumonier, as he had anticipated.

“They say we should remain out of contact once you’ve cleared Panoply,” she said, “just in case Aurora can eavesdrop on our long-range comms.”

“It’s a sensible precaution.”

“Concerning the matter we discussed, Tom—the document is now available on your compad. There’s also a package under your seat. I had it loaded aboard before you arrived. You’ll know exactly what it is when you open it.”

“I’ve made my decision,” Dreyfus said. He was on the verge of adding something, feeling that he ought to wish Aumonier well, but he did not want to risk her guessing Demikhov’s intentions.

“I’ll see you back in Panoply,” he said.

The cutter surged forward. He waited until the vehicle had ramped up to full thrust and then carefully loosened his webbing. He reached under the seat and found the package Aumonier had mentioned. It came loose with a gentle tug. He settled the black box onto his lap, allowing the cutter’s thrust to hold it in place. The box was unfamiliar, but his fingers located a catch and the lid sprang open easily.

Dreyfus examined the contents.

The box contained six boosters of the same basic type that maintained his Pangolin clearance. He took one of them out. The label on the side read: Manticore clearance. To be self-administered by Senior Prefect Tom Dreyfus only. Unauthorised use may result in neurological injury or permanent irreversible death.

He felt as if he was holding a bomb in his hands, and the bomb had just stopped ticking.

“Senior Prefect Dreyfus,” he said, mouthing the words as if there must have been some mistake. But he knew there hadn’t been.

The thrust sequence ended. The cutter was now in free fall and would remain so until it commenced its braking phase prior to atmospheric insertion. Through the window he’d sketched in the wall upon his arrival, Dreyfus saw that they had already cleared the main orbits of the Glitter Band. Habitats of all shapes and sizes crowded upon each other, sliding silently through space as if they were the ornamented, treasure-bedecked barques and argosies of some marvellous flotilla. The clear space between them, which he knew was at least fifty or sixty kilometres, looked too narrow to allow the passage of a single cutter. He could see now, with a forcefulness that had never really struck him when staring into the Solid Orrery, that it would be the simplest matter in the world for Aurora to spread her infection from state to state. Her weevils had almost no distance to cross. The habitats were stepping stones towards total dominion.

And yet nowhere in his line of sight was there the slightest evidence of the crisis itself. Even if it now encompassed thirty or fifty habitats, including those on the fringe of the evacuation effort, that was still much less than a hundredth of the total number of states under Panoply’s protection. The serene panorama before him looked startlingly normal, like a snapshot of the Glitter Band during the most routine of days. And yet he recalled the swiftness with which Lillian Baudry’s simulation had demonstrated the takeover could spread. No comfort could be extracted from this apparent normality. Satisfied that the cutter would not be making any high-acceleration swerves for now, Dreyfus replaced the Manticore box beneath his seat and propelled himself through the cabin. He knocked quietly on the passwall before letting himself through into the flight deck.

“Thanks for getting us away in good time, Captain Pell,” he said, before his eyes took in the fact that Pell was not alone on the flight deck. Sitting behind and to his left, in one of the other flight positions, was Sparver.

“Hi, Boss.”

Dreyfus was too stunned to feel anger, or even annoyance that his orders had been disobeyed.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

Sparver looked at Pell.

“Now, I ask you—is that any way to talk to your deputy?”

Aumonier floated alone, striving to keep her thoughts on the matter at hand rather than Dreyfus’ mission to Yellowstone. She had cleared all but four display facets in her sphere, and had enlarged those until they filled almost the entire facing hemisphere. They showed the four habitats where Thalia Ng had performed the initial upgrade to the polling core software: Carousel New Seattle-Tacoma, the Chevelure-Sambuke Hourglass, Szlumper Oneill and House Aubusson. No contact had been made with any of these states since the installation of the core patch, more than twenty-six hours earlier. All along, Aumonier had assumed that the citizenry were alive and well, albeit under some new and possibly repressive system of government. She had always assumed that if Aurora wished to kill those people, she would achieve it the easy way, by depressurising the habitat or tampering with the life-support in some equally decisive fashion. It was only now that Aumonier realised the fatal flaw in her thinking. Aurora had indeed wanted those people dead: not because she hated them, not because they were capable of derailing her plans, but because they were of no conceivable use to her. And yet, as Thalia’s debriefing testimony made clear, Aurora had been at pains to conceal her murder of the citizenry from the outside world. It had to be done the old-fashioned way, the historical way: not with a single catastrophic release of air or heat, something that would have been detectable from afar, but with the apparatus of state: armed force, applied via her new army of servitors. The citizens had been rounded up, pacified with lies and then executed by machine. And then their remains had been shovelled into bigger machines and conveyed to the matter-consuming furnaces of the manufactories, where they were smelted down and made into parts for other machines.

Aumonier cursed the way Aurora had manipulated her unwillingness to strike against habitats that she still believed contained living citizens. But without Thalia’s escape with her tiny party of survivors, she would still not have known. There was probably no one left alive in any of those four habitats. Even if some survivors had managed to hide or hold out against the machines, Panoply could do nothing for them now.

Well, there was one thing, Aumonier reflected. It could end their torment now, before the machines reached them. It was not much of a kindness, but it was the only one she had left to give.

“Captains Sarasota, Yokosuka, Ribeauville and Gilden. This is Jane Aumonier. You have my permission to open fire on your designated targets.”

This time there was no questioning of her order, no doubt that she meant what she had said.

“Nukes deployed and running,” Gilden said.

“Deployed and running,” Yokosuka reported.

“Deployed and running,” Sarasota and Ribeauville said, in near-unison. Aumonier closed her eyes before the first flash reached her. Even though she was only seeing a monitor feed, the brilliance of the nuclear explosions—twelve in all, three per habitat—still pushed through her eyelids. She counted twelve pink flashes. When she opened her eyes, nothing remained of the targets except four slowly expanding nebulae: the atomised, ionised remains of what had once been homes to more than two million of her citizens. There’d been beauty and misery in those habitats, wonder and sadness, every facet of human experience, history reaching back two hundred years. Between one breath and the next all that had been wiped out of existence, like a delirious dream that never happened.

“Forgive us,” she said to herself. A little later, she received confirmation that the weevil flows from Aubusson and Szlumper Oneill had both been curtailed. The weevils that had been manufactured just before the attack were still crossing space, but their predicted destinations were already subjects of the evacuation effort. Aumonier knew that they would not clear all the citizens out in time, that they would be doing well to remove seventy per cent of them before the weevil contamination infected another habitat. Nothing more could be done, given the limiting bottlenecks of airlocks and ships and round-trip travel times. Her best people had been on the problem around the clock, and she had no doubt that they had already squeezed the last fraction of a percentile out of that figure. Attempts were now under way to mobilise enough ships to change the orbits of habitats lying beyond Aurora’s current expansion front, but the technical challenge of moving a billion-tonne city state was awesome, and Aumonier knew that this was not a solution she could count on in the long term. At best, it would just take the weevils a little longer to reach their targets. Her bracelet chimed. She glanced down and saw that it was the call she had been hoping for.

“This is Baudry, Supreme Prefect.”

“Go ahead, Lillian.”

“We’re receiving reports from CTC.” Aumonier heard a catch in Baudry’s voice.

“They’re tracking massive ship movements from the Parking Swarm. Dozens of Ultra vessels, Supreme Prefect. Lighthuggers leaving their assigned orbits in the Swarm.”

“Are they leaving the system, Lillian?”

“No.” Baudry sounded flustered.

“Some of them, yes. Most of them… no. Most of them appear to be on vectors that will bring them into the Glitter Band.”

“How long until they arrive?”

“Six to seven hours, Supreme Prefect, before the lead vehicles enter Glitter Band airspace. If we are to consider a tactical response, we need to start making arrangements now. Deep-system vehicles will need to be retasked, fuelled and weaponed in readiness—”.

“You consider this a hostile gesture?”

“What else could it be? They’ve had designs on control of the Glitter Band for decades. Now that we’re facing a crisis, they’ve seen their moment. They’re going to use the Aurora emergency to stage a takeover of their own.”

“I don’t believe so, Lillian. I actually requested assistance from the Ultras. I sent my plea to Harbourmaster Seraphim. I’d heard nothing from him since Dreyfus’ departure, so I assumed… but I

assumed wrongly, I think.” Aumonier paused, conscious that it had been a mistake not to inform the other seniors of her contact with Seraphim.

“Have any attempts been made to speak to the incoming ships?”

“Standard approach queries were transmitted, Supreme Prefect. No valid response has been received.”

“That doesn’t mean anything. We’re dealing with Ultras here. They have their own way of doing things.”

“But Supreme Prefect… we have to assume the worst.”

“I’ll assume the worst when I have evidence of hostile intent. Until then, no one so much as fires a ranging laser on one of those ships. Is that clear?”

“Clear,” Baudry said sullenly.

“Lillian, we have less than forty nuclear devices left in our arsenal. Do you honestly think we’d get very far if it came to open war against the Ultras?”

“I’m just saying… we can’t trust them. We’ve never been able to trust them. That’s always been a cornerstone of our operational policy.”

“Then maybe it’s time we got a new cornerstone. They’re people, Lillian. They might be people who make us uncomfortable, people with very different values from ours, but when we’re facing local extinction at the hands of a genocidal machine intelligence, I don’t think the differences between us look massively significant, do you?”

“I’ll keep you informed,” Baudry said.

“You do that. I’m not having the best of days here, Lillian, and the one thing I’m sure of is that we really, really don’t want to add any new enemies to our list.”

She closed the connection with Baudry and allowed her hand to drift down from her mouth. As it did so, she saw the red scratch of the laser cut across her cuff. She had been aware of that thin line for some hours now, without allowing herself to be distracted by pondering its purpose. Now, however, there was a window in her schedule. The Ultra ships would not arrive for six or seven hours. Dreyfus would take even longer to reach Ops Nine.

She had time to ponder.

She raised the bracelet again and spoke softly.

“Put me through to Doctor Demikhov.”

He answered almost immediately, almost as if he’d been watching her place the call.

“Supreme Prefect. This is a surprise.” Aumonier smiled: for all his talents, Demikhov was a poor liar.

“I wasn’t expecting to hear from you.”

“Doctor,” she said, “perhaps I’m mistaken, but I can’t help feeling that you have something planned for me.” She waited a handful of seconds, listening to his breathing.

“I’m right, aren’t I? This laser, which wasn’t here yesterday. The noises Dreyfus did his best to explain away. What’s going to happen, Doctor?”

After a silence that made her wonder whether the link had been broken, Demikhov said, “It’s best if you don’t know.”

“You’re probably right. It’s not as if I’ve ever had cause to doubt your clinical wisdom, after all. But I just wanted to say something.”

“Go ahead,” Demikhov answered.

“I’ve done all I can for the next few hours. If you’re intending to remove the scarab, now might be the best time to try it.”

“There’ll be risks.”

“Just as there are risks in allowing it to remain clamped on my neck. I know the score, Doctor.”

“After the procedure we have in mind,” Demikhov said hesitantly, “there’s a possibility that you may be incapacitated.”

“In which case Senior Prefect Clearmountain will assume temporary authority. But only until I’m fit to resume command. Don’t keep me out of it for too long, Doctor. All I need is a pair of eyes and a mouth to give orders. Understood?”

“Understood,” he answered.

“Then I urge you to execute whatever plan you’ve been putting in place. You are good to go, aren’t you?”

“We’re good to go.”

“Then do your best, Doctor. I’m submitting myself to your care.”

“If I fail—” he began.

“You’ll still have my undying gratitude. Now get this fucking thing off my neck.”

“You’re in position,” Demikhov said.

“Please don’t move a muscle, Supreme Prefect. Not even to answer me.” Jane Aumonier held her breath. She heard something go click.