The Prefect

CHAPTER 31

Saavedra led them deeper into Ops Nine, down one of the sloping ramps that Dreyfus had already noticed leading away from the atrium. Her whiphound slinked along behind the party, constantly triangulating the distance between Saavedra and her guests, waiting for one of them to transgress the parameters she had laid down. Dreyfus was relieved not to have a gun aimed at him, but the whiphound was only a marginal improvement. If he had been concerned about dying because of a twitch from Saavedra’s finger, now he had to worry about the inflexible thought processes of a machine that really wasn’t much brighter than a guard dog. Not that he had any intention of deliberately violating the rules, but what if he tripped, or accidentally crossed the five-metre line?

“I will show it to you,” she said, “but you can forget any idea of negotiating with it. It is not a rational intellect.”

“It doesn’t have to be rational to understand that Aurora wants it dead,” Dreyfus replied.

“You think that will give you leverage?”

“It’s all I’ve got. Better make the most of it.”

“How did you manage to install a containment facility down here at such short notice?” Sparver asked.

“We didn’t. There was only just time to clear out of Ruskin-Sartorious before it was destroyed. Fortunately, there was a kind of cage already here. It needed some alterations, but nothing beyond our resources.”

“You’re talking about the tokamak,” Dreyfus said, wonderingly.

“The what?” Sparver asked.

“He means the fusion reactor that would have powered this facility during the Amerikano era,” Saavedra said loftily.

“And he’s right. That’s exactly what we used. It’s one large magnetic containment bottle. Hideously inefficient compared to the portable generators we brought with us, but it has its uses. It needed to be checked, and the field geometry adjusted, but none of that was particularly taxing. It was much easier than installing our own containment equipment: we’d have needed to hollow out another cavern for that.”

“I hope you trust Amerikano engineering,” Dreyfus said.

“Keeping a psychopathic machine prisoner wasn’t exactly in the design specs.”

“I trust it not to fail. Do you think I’d have come here if I didn’t?”

“Where’s everyone else?” Dreyfus asked.

“The rest of Firebrand? Apart from Simon Veitch, I’m the only one down here.”

Dreyfus remembered that name from the list of Firebrand members Jane had given him. It had impressed itself on his memory for a reason.

“Where are the others?”

“Wherever their duties require them to be. Since Jane pulled the plug on us, we’ve all had to live dual lives. How do you imagine we managed to maintain Firebrand while we also had our regular duties to attend to?”

“I did wonder.”

“The same therapeutic regime designed to keep Aumonier awake proved equally useful to the agents of Firebrand. Most of us have been getting by on only a few hours of sleep a week.” Saavedra lifted her arm and spoke into the bracelet clamped around the pale stick of her wrist.

“Simon? I’ve found the intruders.” She paused, listening to Veitch’s reply.

“Yes, just the two. I’m bringing them down to the reactor.” She paused again.

“Yes, I have them under control. Why else would I have allowed them to live?”

The tunnel levelled out. They passed along a corridor lined with equipment storage rooms, then emerged onto a balcony overlooking a chamber only slightly smaller than the atrium they’d left behind. There was enough room for all three of them on the balcony without triggering the whiphound into action. The reactor filled most of the chamber, squatting on shockproof supports like an enormous magic cauldron. It was painted a pale green, with faint lines of rust along panel joints. A handful of panels and parts shone like chrome. Other than that it appeared superficially intact. Dreyfus guessed that little repair had been

necessary before its magnetic generators were coaxed back to strength. A catwalk girdled the reactor at its fattest point. A figure, dressed in black, was attending a monitor panel next to a dark observation window. The figure looked around and up, a grimace on his face. Veitch was as thin and cadaverous-looking as Saavedra, but conveyed the same impression of wiry strength.

“You should have killed them,” he said, raising his voice above the low hum of the reactor.

“They have information about the Clockmaker,” she said.

“Dreyfus says he knows where it came from.

I’d like to hear what he has to tell us.”

Veitch looked irritated.

“We know where it came from. They made it in SIAM. That’s where it ran amok.”

“But it didn’t begin there,” Dreyfus said.

“It came of age in SIAM, reached its true potential there, but it originated somewhere else entirely.”

“Descend the stairs,” Saavedra snapped.

“You can call the whiphound off now,” Dreyfus said.

“I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Just descend the stairs. I’ll worry about the whiphound.” Dreyfus and Sparver edged past Saavedra, taking care not to come closer to her than five metres. They clattered down the stairs and crossed the chamber’s equipment-cluttered floor until the reactor was looming over them.

“Climb to the observation deck,” Saavedra said, “and tell Veitch why you want the Clockmaker.” Looking up at Veitch, Dreyfus reiterated the argument he had already presented to Saavedra—that the Clockmaker was now the only effective weapon against Aurora.

“So what are you proposing? That we just let it loose and hope it crawls back to us when it’s done?”

Dreyfus placed a hand on the railing and began to climb the stairs to the observation deck, Sparver immediately behind him.

“I’m hoping we won’t have to let it loose at all. It’s a matter of self-preservation. If I can impress upon it how much Aurora wants to destroy it, I can make it see the sense in defeating her. It will help us by helping itself.”

“From inside the cage?”

“It’s a form of machine intelligence,” Dreyfus said.

“So is Aurora, no matter what she started out as.”

“How does that help us?”

“Aurora isn’t a disembodied intelligence. She’s a collection of software routines emulating the structure of an individual human brain. But she’s nothing unless she has a physical architecture to run on.”

Above him, Veitch nodded impatiently.

“And your point is?”

“Somewhere out there, a machine has to be simulating her. More than likely she’s controlling her takeover from within a single habitat. It probably isn’t one of those she’s already taken over, since she wouldn’t want to risk being wiped out by one of our nukes. Unfortunately, that leaves almost ten thousand other candidates to consider. If we had all the time in the world, we could comb through network traffic records and pin her down. But we don’t have all the time in the world. We have a few days.”

“You think she has free roam of the networks?”

“Almost certainly. She’s stayed under our radar for fifty-five years, which means she can move herself from point to point without difficulty. But she can’t duplicate herself. That’s a limitation embedded in the deep structure of alpha-level simulations by Cal Sylveste himself. They cannot be copied, or even backed-up.”

“Perhaps she’s got around that one by now.”

“I don’t think so. If she could copy herself, she wouldn’t be so concerned about safeguarding her own survival. She’s scared precisely because there’s only one of her.”

“But the notion of ’machine’ is nebulous, Prefect. Aurora might not be able to copy herself, but there’s surely nothing to prevent her from spreading herself thinly, using thousands of habitats instead of one.”

“There is,” Dreyfus said, puffing as he reached the observation deck.

“It’s called execution speed. The more distributed she is, the more she has to contend with light-speed timelag between processor centres. If part of her was running on one side of the Glitter Band, and another part on the far side of the Band, she could be afflicted by unacceptable latencies, whole fractions of a second. She’d still be just as clever as she is now, but the clock rate of her consciousness would have slowed by an intolerable factor. And that’s her problem. Being clever isn’t good enough on its own, especially when she’s trying to win a war on ten thousand fronts. She has to be fast as well.”

“There’s a lot of supposition there,” Veitch said as Dreyfus approached him cautiously, Sparver, Saavedra and her whiphound close behind.

“I agree, but I think it’s watertight. Aurora can’t afford to be spread out, therefore she has to be running on a single machine, inside a single habitat. And that means she’s vulnerable to a counterstrike if that habitat can be identified.”

“And you’re hoping the Clockmaker can pin her down?”

“Something along those lines.”

Veitch looked puzzled, as if he knew he was missing something obvious.

“It would need access to the networks.”

“I know.”

“You’re insane. What if it escapes, loses itself in the networks the same way Aurora did?”

“There’d be a risk of that, but it’s one I’m prepared to take given the alternative. I’d rather have a monster on the loose if it’s a choice between that or dying under Aurora.”

“Do you have any idea what the Clockmaker did to its victims?”

Dreyfus thought of everything he had learned since gaining Manticore. Examining those new, fresh memories was like opening a wound that had just begun to scab over.

“I know it did bad things. But it wasn’t indiscriminate. It spared more than it killed. Aurora won’t spare a soul.”

“Show him what it is,” Saavedra said.

“He may as well know what he’s talking about letting loose.”

“You’ve searched him for weapons?”

“He’s clean. Show him the window.”

Veitch stood back from the monitor panel.

“Take a look for yourself, Prefect.”

“It’s on the other side of this glass?”

“Nearly. We usually keep it away from the window. I’ll rotate the magnets to bring it into view for a few moments.”

Dreyfus glanced back at Saavedra, waiting for her permission to move. She nodded. He joined Veitch and stepped onto the small pedestal beneath the viewing window. Two upright handrails provided support on either side of the armoured porthole. Dreyfus touched the pale-green skin of the reactor and felt it tremble under his hands. The tremor was irregular, with powerful surges.

“How did you get it in here?”

“There’s a door on the other side, for swapping out the magnets. We kept the Clockmaker in a portable confinement rig while we moved it from Ruskin-Sartorious. We had to move fast, since the rig’s only good for about six hours. The Clockmaker was testing it all the time, flexing its muscles, trying to break out, even though we did our best to stun it before the relocation.”

“Stun it how?” Dreyfus asked.

“With a heavy electromagnetic pulse. It doesn’t put it under completely, but it does subdue it. But by the time we arrived here, it was back up to full strength. We got it inside and locked down with the big magnets just in time. You know how a tokamak works?”

“More or less.”

“Normally the magnets trap a ring-shaped plasma, steering it away from the walls. You heat and squeeze the plasma to a few hundred million degrees, until you get fusion. There’s no fusion going on inside there now. Just hard vacuum, and the Clockmaker. We had to adjust the magnets to create a localised bottle, but it wasn’t too difficult.”

“It’s still trying to get out, isn’t it?” He touched a hand to the reactor’s throbbing skin again. He was feeling the Clockmaker’s exertions as it tested the resilience of those magnetic shackles.

“It never stops trying.”

Dreyfus looked through the window. At first he saw nothing save a deep-blue darkness. Then he became aware of a faint pink glow encroaching on the darkness from his right. The glow flickered and intensified. To his left, Veitch made delicate adjustments to the configuration of the trapping magnets. The pink became a halo of flickering silver. The silver brightened to incandescent white.

“Why does it glow?”

“The field’s stripping ions off its outer layer, a kind of plasma cocoon. When we collapse the field, the Clockmaker appears to suck the plasma back into itself. It doesn’t suffer any net mass loss as far as we can tell.”

“I can see it now,” Dreyfus said, very quietly.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

Dreyfus said nothing. He wasn’t exactly sure how he felt. He had thought of the Clockmaker many times since losing Valery, but the appearance of the thing had never been something he dwelled upon. He had been concerned only with its effects, not its nature. He knew from the victims’ testimonies that the Clockmaker was amorphous, capable of shifting its shape with fluid ease, or at least of conveying that impression. He knew also that some of the survivors had spoken of a humanoid form underpinning its quicksilver transformations, like a stable attractor at the heart of a chaotic process. But those accounts had barely registered. It was only now that he truly appreciated that this was no ordinary machine, but something more like an angel, rendered in glowing white metal.

It hung in the tokamak, pinned in place by magnetic fields fierce enough to boil the electrons off hydrogen. Any normal machine, anything forged from orthodox matter—be it inert or quick—would have been simultaneously shredded and vaporised by those wrenching stresses. And yet the Clockmaker endured, with only that silver-pink halo conveying the extreme physical conditions in which it floated. It had the vague shape of a man: a torso, arms and legs, the suggestion of a head—but the humanoid form was elongated and spectral. The details shimmered and blurred, layers phasing in and out of clarity. For a moment the Clockmaker was a thing of jointed armour, recognisable mechanisms. Then it became a smooth-surfaced, mercurial form.

“He’s seen enough,” Saavedra said.

“Move it away from the window before it breaks confinement.”

Veitch worked the controls. Dreyfus watched the Clockmaker recede from view. He was glad when it had gone. Though its face was featureless, he’d had the overwhelming impression that it was looking straight at him, marking him as a subject for future attention.

“That’s my side of the arrangement,” Saavedra said.

“Now tell me what you know about it.”

“If I do, will you let me talk to it?”

“Just tell us what you know. We’ll worry about the other stuff later.”

“I only came down here for one reason. The longer we delay, the harder it’s going to be to stop Aurora. People are dying up there while we hesitate.”

“Tell us where it came from, like you promised. Then we’ll talk.”

“It didn’t come from SIAM,” Dreyfus said.

“It was created somewhere else, more than ten years earlier.”

“Could you try to be less cryptic?” Veitch said.

“Does the name Philip Lascaille mean anything to you?” Dreyfus asked rhetorically.

“Of course it does. You’re educated prefects. You know your history.”

“What does Lascaille have to do with anything?” Saavedra asked.

“Everything. He became the Clockmaker.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Veitch said, looking away with a dismissive smile on his lips.

“Lascaille went mad after he got back from the Shroud. He died years ago.”

Dreyfus nodded patiently.

“As you’ll doubtless recall, he was found drowned in the Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies. It was always assumed that he’d committed suicide, that the madness he came back with had finally caught up with him. But that wasn’t the only explanation for his death. He’d been silent for years, but just before his death he’d opened up to Dan, the scion of the family. He’d imparted clues that allowed Dan to go off on his own expedition to the Shrouders, confident of success where others had

failed. People concluded that Lascaille, having relieved himself of this enormous burden of knowledge, had viewed his life’s work as being complete. Either way, it was still suicide.”

“You don’t think it was,” Saavedra said, curiosity vying with suspicion in her voice.

“Like I said, a man was murdered. I think that’s where this all began.”

“But why?” she said.

“He was already mad. If people were worried about what he might say to Dan, the time to kill him would have been before they spoke, not after.”

“That’s not the reason he died,” Dreyfus said.

“He wasn’t killed because certain people were worried about the knowledge inside his head. He was killed because certain people wanted to get at that knowledge more than anything else in the universe. And killing him was the only way they knew to reach it.”

“You’re not making much sense,” Veitch said.

“He’s talking about alpha-level scanning,” Saavedra said, with dawning comprehension.

“Lascaille had to die because the process was fatal. Right, Dreyfus?”

“They wanted the patterns in his head, the structures left behind when he returned from the Shroud. They thought that if they could understand those structures, they’d have another shot at understanding the Shrouders. But to scan at the necessary resolution meant cooking his mind alive.”

“But things have improved since the Eighty,” Veitch said.

“Not by the time Lascaille died. All this took place thirty years after the Eighty, but for most of that time there’d been a moratorium concerning that kind of technology. They took him and did it anyway. They burnt his brains out, but they got their alpha-level scan. Then they took his body and dumped it in the fish pond. He was known to be insane, so no questions were asked when it looked as if he’d drowned himself.”

“Who would have done this?”

Dreyfus shrugged at Saavedra’s question. He hadn’t got that far yet, and his mind was freewheeling with the possibilities.

“I don’t know. It would have needed to be someone high up in the Sylveste organisation. I doubt that it was Dan himself—it would have been against his own interests since he already had an insight into how to contact the Shrouders. But who’s to say he didn’t have a rival, a spy in the clan, interested in beating him to the prize?”

“But you’ll go looking, won’t you?” she said.

“I can’t let a murder go uninvestigated. Of course, there are a couple of matters we need to deal with first. Surviving the next fifty-two hours would be a good start.” Dreyfus turned his attention to Veitch.

“Which is why we need the Clockmaker. I’ve stated my case as best I can. Now I want you to show me how to communicate with it.”

“It’s an interesting theory you have, concerning its origin,” Veitch said.

“It may even be true. But that doesn’t mean it makes any sense to let it loose now.”

“I’m not talking about letting it loose,” Dreyfus replied patiently.

“I’m talking about—”

“You think it makes a scrap of difference to the Clockmaker whether you open that cage or give it a hotline to the networks?”

Dreyfus felt a powerful wave of exhaustion crash over him. He had done his best. He had explained things to Saavedra and Veitch as clearly as he could, trusting that they would see his sincerity and understand that the Clockmaker really was the only effective weapon against Aurora, as unpalatable a prospect as that undoubtedly was. And it hadn’t worked. Perhaps Saavedra had begun to come around, or at least believe that he had not come to destroy it. With time she could have been turned. But Veitch was showing no inclination to see things Dreyfus’ way.

“I came here to negotiate,” he said, offering his hands in surrender.

“I could have had you killed, you and the Clockmaker. A single nuke would have done it. Do you think I’d have come here if I felt there was another option?”

“Prefect, listen to me,” Veitch said.

“No matter how bad things are up there, no matter how desperate they look, nothing can possibly be bad enough to justify giving the Clockmaker an angstrom of freedom. This is pure fucking evil incarnate, understand? It’s the devil in chrome.”

“I know.”

“You can’t know. No one really knows unless they’ve had direct experience with it, day after day, year after year, the way we have.”

“I was there,” Dreyfus said calmly.

“What do you mean, you were there?”

“When we went into SIAM. I was one of the prefects who went inside, before it was nuked out of existence.”

Veitch shot a nervous glance at Saavedra. Dreyfus recognised the look. They thought he was losing it. He looked at Sparver and saw the same expression on the face of his former deputy, though only Dreyfus would have recognised it.

“Prefect, we have clearance that exceeds Pangolin, clearance that exceeds even Manticore,” Veitch answered, in tones of slow reasonableness.

“We know everything that happened that day, to the last minute. We know who was involved, where they were, what they were doing.”

“Except the facts were changed,” Dreyfus said.

“My involvement was expunged from the record, from all documents except those intended for the eyes of Jane Aumonier alone. But I was there. I just didn’t remember much about it until now.”

“He’s losing it,” Veitch said.

“Dusollier committed suicide shortly after the Clockmaker crisis,” Dreyfus continued, “but it wasn’t because of decisions he took for himself. He killed himself rather than deal with the consequences of the actions I initiated, acting with Dusollier’s blessing.”

“What do you mean, actions you initiated?”

“There was no prefect of higher rank in the vicinity of the crisis. The Clockmaker had already reached Jane. She was out of the equation. Dusollier authorised me to go in and use whatever measures were necessary to save the people still inside SIAM.”

“Then you failed,” Veitch said.

“No, I succeeded. I saved most of them.” Dreyfus paused. He found the words difficult to say out loud.

It had been one thing to read the account of what he had done that day. But it was only now that he was speaking of his deeds that he felt he was really internalising what had happened.

“They survived. They’re still alive.”

“No one survived,” Saavedra said.

“We nuked SIAM.”

“Yes, but not until six hours after Jane was pulled out, with the scarab on her neck. What happened in that gap? Why was it expunged from the public record? I’ve always wondered.” Dreyfus smiled weakly.

“Now I know.”

“Just come back to you, has it?” Saavedra asked snidely.

“Jane felt it might be tactically useful for me to recover the memories of my previous encounter with the Clockmaker. She knew it would be painful for me, given everything else that came with that baggage. But she was right to do it.”

“I agree with Veitch—you’re losing it,” Saavedra replied.

“There was a ship orbiting nearby,” Dreyfus said quietly, “a type of starship built by the Demarchists in an effort to lessen their dependence on the Conjoiners. It was a prototype, built around Fand. It used a different drive system, one that owed nothing to Conjoiner science. It had made one flight to our system and then been mothballed because it was too expensive, too slow, too clumsy. It was being stored against the day when even a ship like that became economical.”

“What was the name of this ship?” Saavedra asked.

“Atalanta,” Dreyfus replied.

“There was a ship with that name,” Veitch said, frowning.

“I remember that they wanted to rip it apart for scrap.”

“They did. It doesn’t exist any more.”

“Tell us what happened,” Saavedra said.

“Yeah, you do that,” Sparver said. Dreyfus was about to speak when two bracelets began to chime in unison. Saavedra and Veitch stared down in what was at first irritation and then alarm.

“Are the surface guns online?” Saavedra asked Veitch. He nodded.

“They’ve acquired, but they won’t open fire until it’s closer.”

“Until what’s closer?” Dreyfus asked. Saavedra’s eyes snapped to him.

“There’s a ship coming in from space. It’s making a direct insertion from orbit, at high-burn. It’s not even attempting to conceal itself. Do you know anything about this, Dreyfus?”

“I went out of my way not to draw attention to your location. I didn’t want Aurora following me to you.”

“But only Panoply knows we’re here.”

“Then something must have happened,” Dreyfus said.

“It’s a fair bet that whoever’s flying that ship wants to put the Clockmaker out of action.”

“Let’s get to operations,” Saavedra said. She fixed Dreyfus with a warning look.

“I’m calling off the whiphound now, but you know how quick these things are. I can put it back on you before you can blink.” She turned to Veitch.

“Is the containment stable?”

“Steady as a rock.” He flipped an armoured cover across the viewing window, secured it with a heavy latch, then followed the other three along the catwalk and down to the reactor floor. Saavedra’s whiphound was now clipped to her belt again, but Dreyfus was under no illusions that he had gained her unequivocal trust. She was accepting his story provisionally, until he slipped up or circumstances changed.

“It could be Gaffney,” he said as they ascended the sloping tunnel back to the main habitation and operations level.

“The last time I saw him he was lying on his back recovering from surgery. But he wasn’t dead. Maybe that was my big mistake.”

“Presumably he was under guard, though?” Saavedra said, looking back over her shoulder as they jogged up the slope.

“He was, but perhaps that wasn’t enough. Gaffney was already able to sabotage the Search Turbines and murder both Clepsydra and Trajanova. He was clever, and he had the entire security apparatus at his fingertips, but he’s not superhuman. I think Aurora may have been helping him, even inside Panoply.”

“And now she’s helped him escape?”

“Possibly, but regardless, this feels like Gaffney. Did I hear you mention guns?”

“Portable self-burrowing anti-ship emplacements,” Veitch said.

“We installed them in case anyone came snooping without an invitation. You’d have found out if you hadn’t come overland.”

“I’m glad we did. The walk did me good.”

Firebrand’s operations centre had been set up in what must once have been a conference room when the facility was under Amerikano control. The walls were covered in monochrome photographs of scenic panoramas with only shallow three-dimensionality. One wall showed a deep canyon, possibly taken on Mars. Another showed a horseshoe-shaped waterfall. A third showed a rock face carved with enormous stone likenesses: eight vast heads, the fifth and seventh of which were women.

A cluster of display panes rested on the table, arranged hexagonally so that they formed a makeshift holographic tank. Veitch sent a gestural command to the apparatus, causing it to fill with luminous green wireframe graphics. Dreyfus recognised the contoured landscape of Ops Nine and its surrounding terrain. Markers signified the placement of weapons and tracking devices. An arrowhead symbol high above the landscape indicated the incoming craft.

“Signature matches a light-enforcement vehicle,” Veitch said, peering at the numbers accompanying the symbol.

“Would Gaffney be able to fly one of those?”

“He’d have the necessary experience,” Dreyfus said.

“It’s not good news. It may be a cutter, but it could easily be carrying nukes.”

“Only if Jane had any left,” Dreyfus said.

“And if she did, they were probably already outside Panoply aboard deep-system cruisers, ready to be deployed as and when they were required. I don’t think Gaffney would have been able to get his hands on one. More than likely it was all he could do to escape from Panoply.”

“I hope you’re right,” Veitch said.

“I hope your guns are good. When will they open fire?”

“Not until he’s below about thirty klicks,” Saavedra replied.

“The guns know the kinds of evasive routines and countermeasures a cutter has up its sleeve. Unless the cutter shoots first, they won’t waste a shot until they have a chance of making a difference.”

Dreyfus saw that the cutter was still more than one hundred and twenty kilometres above them, but falling fast enough that it would pass below the weapon ceiling in only a couple of minutes.

“Gaffney wouldn’t come unless he thought he could do damage,” he said.

“He’ll be expecting to meet anti-ship fire.”

“I could take our cutter,” Saavedra said doubtfully.

“It still has enough fuel to get me airborne.”

“You wouldn’t last five seconds against Gaffney,” Dreyfus said.

“Even if you could get up in time.”

She stared at the display, mesmerised by the falling arrow.

“He can damage the complex if he has foam-phase weapons, but he won’t be able to touch the Clockmaker, inside the tokamak. He must know that.” A thought drained colour from her face.

“Voi, maybe he does have a nuke after all.”

“If he does, it’ll be clean and fast for all of us,” Dreyfus told her.

“But I don’t think he’s intending to take out the Clockmaker in one hit. He must be planning to flush it out, then pick it off on the surface. It can’t fly, can it?”

“If you gave it enough time,” Veitch said, “I don’t think there’s much it couldn’t do.” Then he studied the tank again.

“At present rate of descent, weapons will engage in… forty-five seconds.” He looked anxiously at the others.

“There isn’t much more we can do here. Maybe we should get below again?”

“Missile inbound,” Saavedra said, with dreamlike calm.

The display showed the missile streaking down from the cutter, leaping though the intervening atmosphere with ferocious acceleration. Any faster and friction would have incinerated the warhead before it reached its target.

“Guns retargeting,” Saavedra reported.

“Engaging.”

The room tremored. Dreyfus heard a low, rolling report, like distant thunder. He shuddered to think of the energy that had just been dissipated only a few hundred metres over his head. The weapons would have blasted their way out of concealed bunkers, just like the guns buried in the Nerval-Lermontov rock. But that had taken place in vacuum, not under a smothering methane-ammonia atmosphere. On the planet’s surface, it would have looked like a series of choreographed volcanic eruptions, as if fists of molten fire had punched through the very crust of the world.

“Missile intercepted,” Saavedra said, though they could all see the result for themselves.

“Second incoming. Third incoming. Guns responding.”

The room tremored again, the earthquake-like rumble longer than before. There was a moment of silence as the guns retargeted to intercept the third missile, then the noise recommenced.

“Second missile destroyed. Partial intercept on third,” Saavedra announced. The room shook again, but Dreyfus knew that the guns would struggle to shoot down the third missile on the second attempt. It had been damaged, but it was still arcing down towards the facility.

“Brace,” Veitch said.

The missile’s impact came a fraction of a second later. Dreyfus felt the shock-wave slam through his bones. There was a roar louder than the guns, loud enough that it felt as if he was out there, standing under Yellowstone’s poison sky with his eardrums naked to the air. He felt a violent shove, as if the room and all its contents had just lurched several centimetres to one side.

“One emplacement out,” Saavedra said as the appropriate icon pulsed red and faded to black.

“Fourth missile inbound. Guns acquiring.”

The roar of the anti-ship weapons sounded more distant now: Dreyfus guessed that the disabled emplacement had been the nearest one, taken out in a direct hit by the damaged missile.

“Tell me you have an intercept,” Dreyfus said.

“Partial,” Saavedra said.

“Attempting re-contact.”

The guns droned. The room shook. The sense of helplessness Dreyfus felt was suffocating. Machines were running his life now: machines and software. The system running the anti-ship emplacements was locking antlers with the system controlling the cutter’s onboard weapons. Like familiar adversaries, the systems had a thorough understanding of their mutual capabilities. In all likelihood, his survival could already be ascribed a fixed mathematical probability. One participant knew it would eventually lose, but was still going through the motions for the sake of formality.

The fourth missile had lost much of its effectiveness when it struck home, but still retained enough potency to do real damage. The noise was a continuous deafening avalanche of sound. The room shuddered, chunks of ceiling material crashing down. A deep crack jagged its way down one wall, dividing the eight carved heads. The room’s illumination failed, leaving only the pale-green glow from the holographic display, which was itself faltering.

“Generator complex is down,” Veitch said, with grim resignation.

“We should have buried it deeper. I said we should have buried it deeper.” He began to tap instructions into his bracelet.

“Back-up generator should have kicked in automatically. Why isn’t it working?”

“Fifth missile inbound,” Saavedra said as the holographic display flickered.

“Guns attempting to acquire. Two emplacements down. What about that backup generator, Veitch?”

“I’m doing the best I can,” he said through gritted teeth.

The roar of anti-ship guns was like a distant avalanche.

“Intercept?” Veitch queried.

“Partial,” Saavedra said.

Dreyfus was about to ask something when the fifth missile came slamming in. There was no sound this time; it was too loud to register as noise. It felt like a cosh to the skull. Deafened, but with scarcely a moment to register the fact, Dreyfus observed events compress themselves into a single frantic instant. The room darkened, filling with choking black dust, scouring eyes and skin, burning throat and lungs. His last glimpse gave the impression of the ceiling bowing down, riven with cracks. He saw a similar crack rip through the already damaged wall. And then there was neither light, nor sound, nor consciousness.