The Prefect

CHAPTER 29

Doctor Demikhov watched events unfold with a curious sense of retardation, as if he was replaying one of his simulations at half normal speed. The blades pushed through the weakened part of the wall and raced together, their cutting edges forming a tightening circle with the supreme prefect at the precise centre. Aumonier floated motionlessly, her expression unchanging: she did not have time to react to the blades’ intrusion into her private space. They closed on her, reaching her throat and passing cleanly through, interlocking with micron precision as they met. Demikhov was now forced to take in two distinct views, captured from cams in the two isolated halves of the former sphere. In the upper hemisphere, the supreme prefect’s severed head began to drift away from the blades with almost imperceptible slowness. In the lower hemisphere, her body and the scarab drifted in the opposite direction. In the same decelerated time-frame, Demikhov saw the scarab react to the violent intrusion of a large foreign object into its volume of denial. The lower part of Aumonier’s neck, below the cut, puffed apart in a cloud of pink and grey. Blood continued to spurt from the neck in inky profusion. The heart was still pumping. The drifting remains of both the decapitated body and its damaged parasite were quickly obscured. Demikhov’s attention flicked to the upper sphere. Time accelerated. The head’s slow drift became an ungainly tumble. The head was also leaking blood, albeit with much less ferocity than the body. Servitors rushed into both chambers, moving too quickly for the eye to follow. The machines reached the scarab, detached it from the neck and encased it in a cocoon of blast-smothering quickmatter. In the upper chamber, machines reached the head and arrested its motion away from the shining floor formed by the blades.

“Scarab is neutralised,” reported one of Demikhov’s analysts.

“Repeat, scarab is neutralised. Upper chamber is now secure for crash team.”

“Go,” Demikhov said, with all the urgency he could muster. And then he too was moving as if his own life depended upon it. He was only slightly behind the crash team when he arrived at the head. The servitors had braced it, pinning it gently in place between telescopic manipulators. There’d been a temptation to simply immerse the head in a vat of curative quickmatter, but Demikhov had resisted. The quickmatter would undoubtedly stabilise the head, flooding the brain to preserve neural structure, and would make a start on the necessary tissue-repair. The drawback was that the quickmatter would most likely wipe short-term memories and delay the return to full consciousness by many days. Demikhov had considered every angle and knew that this was a time when hard-won clinical judgement, the cumulated knowledge of his own eyes and experience, outweighed the easy option. He meant only to look at the neck, to judge the accuracy of the cut and assess the damage to the major structures. He saw instantly that the blades had transected the cervical vertebrae between C3 and C4, as he had always hoped. The cut had been so accurate that only the cartilaginous disc between the bones had been destroyed. The carotid artery, internal and external jugular veins and vagus nerve had all been severed within a millimetre of his optimum cut points. Had he been looking at a simulation, Demikhov would have rejected it as unrealistically optimistic. But this was reality. Zulu—this stage, at least—had worked as well as he could have dreamed. Then he looked at the face. He didn’t mean to. It was clinically irrelevant, and he’d told himself to pay no heed to any signs of apparent consciousness he saw behind Jane Aumonier’s eyes. But he couldn’t help it. And there was something there: a sharpness in her gaze, a sense that she was focusing on no one in the room but him, that she was utterly, shockingly aware of her condition. Less than ten seconds had passed since the blades had gone in.

“Begin stabilisation,” Demikhov said.

“Plan three-delta. We have a job to do here, people.” He risked another look at the eyes. This time there was a fogged absence where a mind had been. It took three hours to fall towards Yellowstone. The cutter could have made the journey in a third of the time, but then it would have appeared to be moving anomalously fast, running the risk of attracting Aurora’s attention. Dreyfus could not be certain of the extent of her surveillance, but it was likely that she would be alert to any traffic that appeared to be out of the ordinary, be it civilian or law-enforcement. As much as it pained him to watch the clock ticking, he knew that the slow and unobtrusive approach was necessary.

“Captain says to buckle up,” Sparver said, prompting Dreyfus to put aside the compad he’d been studying.

“We’ll be slowing for atmosphere in about five minutes.” Dreyfus nodded curtly.

“You can tell him you passed on the message.” Sparver had braced himself with an arm and a foot.

“You still sore at me for sneaking aboard?”

“What do you think?”

“I had Jane’s blessing. Who else do you think put that stuff under your seat?”

“I expressly requested that I go in alone,” Dreyfus said.

Sparver shrugged, as if none of this was his fault, merely the outcome of a series of circumstances beyond his control.

“Look, it’s done. I’m aboard. So make the most of me.”

“I will. You can keep Pell company when he flies this cutter back to Panoply.”

“Actually, I intend to keep you company during that little stroll you’ve got planned.”

“Then it’s a pity we didn’t load two surface suits, isn’t it? I only requested one, I’m afraid. And it wouldn’t fit you anyway.”

“Which is why I had a word with Thyssen and asked him to stow a spare,” Sparver said.

“The extra weapons were my idea as well. You didn’t think you were going to carry them all on your own, did you?”

Dreyfus sighed. He knew Sparver meant well, and that there was no other prefect he’d sooner have at his side than his own deputy. But he had resigned himself to going in alone. Now that he had crossed that mental Rubicon, he could not easily accept the idea of placing another’s life at risk.

“Sparv, I appreciate the gesture. But like I said to you before, you’re one of the few people who have been following this investigation since the outset. I cannot in conscience accept that you should be placed at risk. Especially not—”

“Save it for later, Boss,” Sparver said.

“There’s no secret now. Jane and the other senior prefects know everything we do. We’ve just become expendable again. And isn’t that a wonderful, liberating feeling?”

“You’re right,” Dreyfus answered forcefully.

“We are expendable. And you know what? We probably won’t come back from this mission. If the Clockmaker doesn’t get us, Firebrand or Aurora will.”

Sparver lowered his voice. For once he was serious.

“So why are you doing this, if it’s guaranteed to fail?”

“Because there’s a chance it will succeed. Not much of one, but it’s better than any other option on the table.”

Sparver nodded at the compad.

“Does that have anything to do with all this?”

“I don’t know.” Dreyfus turned the compad around so that Sparver could see the display, with its dyslexia-encrypted read-out.

“This still makes as much sense to me as it does to you, and you don’t even have Pangolin, let alone Manticore.”

“Did Jane give you Manticore?”

Dreyfus nodded humbly.

“Not that it’s made any difference to me yet.”

But that was a lie, albeit a small one. Dreyfus had to stare hard at the scrambled text, but every now and then he’d feel a premonitory sense of something about to reveal itself, like a kind of mental hiccup that never quite arrived. The text was still illegible, but he recognised the feeling from his Pangolin exposure. The neural architecture necessary for the decoding stage was beginning to assemble. It might take another six or nine hours until it was fully functional, but the process was already beginning to affect his comprehension.

“But it’ll come, eventually?” Sparver asked.

“That’s the idea.”

“What does she want you to know, Boss?”

“How should I know if I can’t read this yet?” Dreyfus snapped.

“She must have given you an idea.”

“She did.”

“It’s about the Clockmaker, I assume.”

“Yes,” Dreyfus said tersely.

“It’s about the Clockmaker. Now would you mind leaving me alone with it so I at least have a chance of making some sense of this before we land?”

“It’s all right,” Sparver said, with more sympathy than Dreyfus felt he deserved.

“I understand, Boss. If it’s about the Clockmaker, then it’s also about Valery, isn’t it?”

“Valery died,” Dreyfus said.

“I’m over her death. Nothing in this is going to change that.”

Sparver had the good sense to leave him alone after that.

The braking phase commenced shortly, entailing several minutes at high burn. When it had subsided, Dreyfus was experiencing nearly full gravity and the cutter had already begun to ease its way into the upper atmosphere of Yellowstone. This was no fiery insertion, nothing like Paula Saavedra’s high-speed re-entry, but rather a progressive submergence into thicker and thicker air, with the cutter using its engines to avoid excessive aerodynamic friction. To a casual observer, they would look like one more passenger ship returning to Chasm City from the glitz and glamour of the orbital communities.

Dreyfus found himself dozing. It was something to do with Manticore making him sleepy while it worked on his mind. He did not feel markedly different when he woke, but when he resumed his perusal of the compad, he knew that he had taken another step closer to comprehension. Now whole phrases kept slipping in and out of clarity, like animals prowling behind tall grass. He saw:

Sylveste Institute for Artificial Mentation… Emergency measures instituted during Clockmaker crisis… Prototype ramscoop vehicle, mothballed but otherwise intact… Heavy Technical Squad boarded and assumed command… Ramliner Atalanta deemed functional… Containment effect of magnetic field… Risk of civilian casualties reduced, but not eliminated… Unavoidable losses… Assignment of emergency powers to Field Prefect Tom Dreyfus, authorised by Supreme Prefect Albert Dusollier…

And then he felt something open in his mind, like a heavy trap door, one that had been shut and forgotten for eleven years. He saw Valery’s face, lit up with childlike delight, kneeling in soil, turning to him from the bed where she had been arranging flowers.

And he knew that he had done a very bad thing to his wife.

Mercier watched the proceedings from the elevated observation room overlooking Demikhov’s dedicated operating theatre. Though the theatre had been fully equipped since its inception, it had seen few occupants in all that time. Demikhov’s team had occasionally employed it to rehearse a surgical

procedure, but they had usually done so under the assumption that the scarab would be removed by more conventional means, leaving Aumonier with only superficial injuries. It was only lately that the theatre had been staffed around the clock, with the crash team preparing for the increasingly likely eventuality that Zulu would have to be implemented.

When he wasn’t busy with his own patients, Mercier had sometimes watched the crash team working on eerily accurate medical dummies, using microsurgical techniques to reknit head and body. Sometimes the body had been intact below the neck, but they’d also worked under the assumption of varying severities of injury occasioned by the removal of the scarab. Now they were dealing with a real case that fell somewhere in the middle of their simulated outcomes. The head had been severed with superhuman precision, but the scarab had inflicted major damage to the three cervical vertebrae below the bisection point. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed—it wasn’t going to be necessary to grow the supreme prefect a new body—but there was a lot of restorative work to be done.

Little of the surgical activity was visible to Mercier. Pale-green medical servitors crowded over and around the body and head, which were currently situated on separate tables a metre apart. The hulking machines appeared clumsy until one focused on the speed with which their manipulators were knitting tissue back together. Secrets of the flesh lay obscured behind a flickering blur of antiseptic metal. Now and then one of the swan-necked servitors would whip around to swap one manipulator extremity for another, lending the whole scene the faintly comedic look of a recording on fast-forward. Demikhov’s human staff were situated several metres away from the whipping machines, gowned and masked but having no direct contact with their patient. They stood before pedestals, studying panes filled with anatomical images, not so much controlling the machines as offering advice and guidance when it was merited. They did not need to be in the same room, but they were all ready to intervene in the unlikely event of some catastrophic machine failure.

Mercier had a shrewd idea of what was happening. The machines were identifying severed nerve fibres, cross-matching them between the two detached body parts. Reverse-field trawls were being used to stimulate areas of Jane Aumonier’s brain, with particular focus on the sensorimotor cortex. When the machines identified the function of a particular nerve, they capped it with a microscopic cylinder primed with regenerative quickmatter. Myoelectric stimulation was being used to map the nerve bundles emerging from Aumonier’s body. When head and neck were rejoined, the two cylinders corresponding to a single nerve would identify each other and promote flawless tissue reconnection. Much would remain to be done—Aumonier could expect partial or complete paralysis for some time after the procedure—but Demikhov had been confident that basic life-support processes could be restored during the first phase of surgery.

Mercier watched until he was satisfied that everything was under control. Demikhov’s team were working urgently, but there was nothing about their movements that suggested anything untoward. They had prepared for this and did not appear to be encountering anything they had not anticipated.

Reluctantly Mercier turned from the spectacle. He wanted to see the moment of reunion, but he had his own matters to attend to. He’d learned about Thalia Ng’s escape from House Aubusson, accompanied by a party of local citizenry. There were no reports of serious injuries amongst that group, but they would all benefit from medical attention when the deep-system vehicle redocked at Panoply, even if the worst Mercier had to deal with was a few cuts and bruises.

He returned to his section of the infirmary. Through the windowed partition he made out the recumbent form of his only current patient, asleep on a bed. Mercier opened the partition. He stepped through and moved to the side of Gaffney’s bed, cradling a compad in the crook of his arm. He tapped a stylus and brought up a summary of Gaffney’s progress since the removal of the whiphound and his subsequent

interrogation by trawl. Mercier did not approve of the way Dreyfus had insisted upon his patient being scanned so soon after the fraught process of removing the object lodged in his throat. Gaffney had been medically fit, traumatised yet otherwise free of serious injury, but the principle of it still galled Mercier. Now, however, he was forced to admit that Gaffney had no need of further medical supervision. He could be transferred to a normal holding facility somewhere else in Panoply, freeing up space that could be used when Thalia’s party arrived.

“Sheridan,” he said softly.

“Can you hear me? It’s time to wake up now.” At first Gaffney didn’t stir. Mercier repeated his instruction. Gaffney mumbled something and opened his eyes with resentful slowness.

“I was sound asleep, Doctor Mercier,” he said, his voice still a painful croak.

“I apologise. You still need rest.” Mercier tapped the stylus again, bringing up a different set of diagnostic summaries.

“Unfortunately, I’ve got a ship coming in with an unspecified number of injured citizens aboard. I can’t afford to tie up this bed for much longer.”

“Are you discharging me?” Gaffney croaked.

“Not exactly. I’m still ordered to keep you under lock and key, but there’s no reason why you can’t be transferred to a normal detention cell.”

“I’m surprised Dreyfus isn’t here to give you a helping hand.”

“Dreyfus is outside,” Mercier said.

“That’s a shame. Can’t say I really miss his bedside manner, though. You didn’t hear where he was headed, by any chance?”

“No,” Mercier said, after a trace of hesitation.

“Well, let’s hope he doesn’t come to grief, wherever it is. I think we still need to clear the air between us.

Are you sure he didn’t put you up to this, Doctor?”

“This has nothing to do with Dreyfus. I don’t approve of what you did, Sheridan, but that doesn’t mean I approve of the way you were treated, either.”

“Aumonier, then? Did she issue the order?”

“Jane’s in no fit state to issue any kind of order,” Mercier said, and then regretted it instantly, for Gaffney had no need to know of the operation in progress.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I mean… I’ve said enough.”

“Where is she?” Gaffney cocked his head.

“Has something happened, Doctor? Are they doing something to her? Come to think of it, this place has been a little quiet lately.”

“Never mind Jane. I assure you that you won’t be any less comfortable in a holding cell than you are here, and you’ll be under constant machine observation. If you do experience any complications, someone can attend to you almost immediately.”

“You put it like that,” Gaffney said sarcastically, “how can I possibly refuse?”

“I wish there was another way, Sheridan.”

“Yeah. So do I, son.” Gaffney set his face in a look of resigned determination.

“But needs must when the devil calls. Can you help me out of this bed? I seem to have become a little stiff in my spine.” Mercier put down the compad and stylus and leaned over to assist Gaffney to his feet. In a flash Gaffney was standing by his side, twisting Mercier’s right arm behind his back, pushing the stylus hard against the side of his throat. The stylus was blunt, but Gaffney was applying so much pressure that the pain was unpleasantly sharp.

“Got to admit, I was feeling a bit stronger than I looked,” Gaffney said.

“Sorry about that, Doctor, but there’s no way you’re moving me to a holding cell.” The pressure on his throat made it difficult for Mercier to answer.

“You can’t get out of here.”

“Let’s take a stroll to your office.” With Gaffney still pressing the stylus into his neck, Mercier shuffle-walked sideways, his heart hammering and his breathing beginning to rocket.

“My arm,” Mercier protested.

“Fuck your arm. Open the door.” Mercier admitted the two of them into his administrative annexe. He held out a forlorn hope that there’d be someone in there who could pacify Gaffney or raise the alarm. But with all the other medical staff either participating in Demikhov’s operation or up in the bay awaiting the arrival of the deep-system cruiser, the medical centre was deserted.

“Don’t even think about calling out,” Gaffney warned.

“Now move to your desk. Pull out the chair and sit down.” Mercier’s office was all inert matter. The furniture was studiedly old-fashioned, the way he liked it. But even if he’d had the means to conjure one, he wouldn’t have had the necessary control or presence of mind to fashion a weapon or restraining device.

“What do you want with me?” he asked as he sat down in the chair, with Gaffney still jamming the stylus into his neck.

“You’re going to dislocate my arm!”.

“That’s what happens to arms. Now open the desk drawer on your right.”

“My drawer?” Gaffney intensified the pressure on both the stylus and the arm.

“I’m not really in the mood to say things twice, son.”

With his left arm, Mercier opened the drawer.

“There’s nothing in here except papers,” he said, tugging it open enough to demonstrate that this was the case.

“You do like your paperwork,” Gaffney commented.

“Now reach all the way to the back of the drawer.”

“There’s nothing at the back.”

“Do it.” Mercier started as his fingers brushed against something unfamiliar, lodged at the back of the drawer where it would not interfere with his beloved paperwork.

“Pull it out,” Gaffney said.

Mercier tugged and the item snapped loose. It felt heavy in his hand, like a bar of cold iron. Something about its shape was familiar, though he had never handled anything remotely like it.

“This isn’t possible,”. he said.

“There shouldn’t be—”

“How many times have you had this office swept by Internal Security?” Gaffney asked.

Mercier’s hand emerged from the drawer. He was clutching the black shaft of a whiphound.

“How did—”

“I put it there. I put them in a lot of places, wherever I felt I might need one. The possibility of my being exposed and arrested was not something I could ignore. Matter of fact, there’s one in that holding cell you were probably intending to take me to. Impossible, you say. Security would never have allowed it! Getting the picture now?” Gaffney croaked out a guttural laugh.

“Put the whiphound down on the table.”

Mercier dropped the whiphound. It clunked heavily on the table, denting the polished wood surface beneath his writing lamp. In a single fluid movement, Gaffney released Mercier’s arm, alleviated the pressure from the stylus and snatched up the whiphound.

He spooled out the filament.

“You know what one of these can do in the wrong hands,” he said.

“So let’s not dick around, shall we?”

Pell brought the cutter to a halt on a ledge just under the rim of the canyon they had been following for the last twenty kilometres. He powered down the in-atmosphere engines, allowing the weight of the vehicle to settle onto its tripedal landing gear.

“This is as close as I can get you.”

Dreyfus felt an unsettling crunching movement as the gear forced its way though the ice crusting the shelf.

“Are you sure?”

Pell flipped up his goggles and nodded.

“I’d caution against flying any closer, unless you have a burning desire to find out what kind of perimeter defences Firebrand have managed to get their hands on.”

“Fair enough.” Dreyfus knew better than to debate the point with Pell, who he knew would have done the best possible job.

“How long a stroll are we looking at?”

Pell indicated a contour map conjured onto his flight-deck console.

“You’re here,” he said, stabbing his finger at the head of the canyon.

“Ops Nine is here.” He moved his finger a few centimetres to the right.

“Ten or eleven kilometres as the crow flies. Good news is that the terrain’s pretty level between here and there, with only one crevasse you’ll want to avoid, so your route should be less than fifteen kilometres. Those surface suits have amplification, don’t they? I hope so, given the size of those rifles. With power-assist, I’m guessing you can keep to three or four klicks per hour. Say, four or five hours to the nearest entry point.”

“If that’s the good news,” Sparver said, “what’s the bad?”

“You’ll have limited cover, which is the reason we can’t fly any closer. You’ll have to stay low and avoid

exposed ground. If something paints you, hunker down and don’t move for at least thirty minutes. The perimeter system may just assume it picked up a scavenger drone, wandering the surface looking for Amerikano trinkets.”

“What about our way in?” Dreyfus asked.

“Imagery points to several possible entry points. I don’t recommend going in through the front door.” Pell moved his finger slightly.

“If you approach the way I’m suggesting, you should hit some kind of secondary access ramp about here. It’s all locked into your suits, so don’t worry about that.”

“We won’t,” Dreyfus said.

“That’s about all I have to say. You can get off the ledge easily enough: there’s a dried-up river bed that climbs up onto the plateau. Keep low once you’re up there, and exploit whatever natural features you can find for cover. You’ve got a good shot at getting to Ops Nine by sundown. I suggest you aim to achieve that objective.”

“If we don’t?” Sparver asked.

“It cools down pretty fast here. In infrared, those suits of yours are going to light up the landscape like a pair of beacons.”

“Then we should move out right now,” Dreyfus said, readying his suit for exposure to Yellowstone’s atmosphere. He picked up the heavy bulk of the Breitenbach rifle and slung it over his shoulder.

“Thank you for the ride, Captain. I appreciate the risk you took in bringing us this close.”

“I’m not the one taking the risk here.” Pell touched a control on this console then studied a read-out for a moment.

“We’re stable. You’re free to cycle through.”

Dreyfus nodded at Sparver and the two of them moved towards the cutter’s suitwall.

“One thing I forgot to mention,” Pell said.

“When you were suiting up, word came through from Panoply.”

“They weren’t supposed to contact us.”

“They didn’t, not specifically. It was a general broadcast, to all assets. It sounded like a code. It meant nothing to me, but I thought you might know better.”

“Tell me,” Dreyfus said, swallowing hard against the tightness in his throat.

“The message was, ’Zulu has occurred. Repeat, Zulu has occurred’.” Pell shrugged.

“That was all.” Dreyfus moved to snap down his faceplate.

“You’re right. It does mean something.”

“Good or bad?”

“Too soon to tell,” he answered.