The Prefect

CHAPTER 8

The gallery of clocks covered two long walls, with each timepiece resting in a glass-sealed alcove next to a small black plaque denoting the date and precise location of the object’s construction, together with any other salient observations. As usual, Dreyfus had no intention of stopping on his way to the inner sanctum of Dr Demikhov’s Sleep Lab. But something always caused him to halt, select one of the clocks and use his Pangolin privilege to open the alcove, remove the evil thing and hold it in his hands. This time he chose a clock he did not believe he had examined before, one that was dark and unornamented enough to have escaped his curiosity on previous occasions.

He could hear it ticking behind the glass. It would have been wound by one of Demikhov’s technicians.

He read the plaque:

Clock #115 Found: LCS, SIAM, 13:54, 17:03:15 YST. Finder: Valery Chapelon. Duration of construction: unknown. Primary base materials: common ferrous alloys. Origin of base materials: unknown. Movement: double-roller anchor escapement. Remarks: electron microscopy reveals atomic-scale fractal patterning in top-right spandrel. Nature of fractal patterning obscure, but may echo visible detail on pendulum hinge of clock #341. Status: functional. Known booby traps: none. Associated fatalities: none. Estimated hazard level: low.

Dreyfus opened the glass panel. The clock’s ticking became louder. He reached in and placed his hands on either side of the black metal case and lifted the clock from its base, holding it at eye level. Like all the clocks it was surprisingly heavy, dense with mechanisms, but in this case there was no delicate tracery of gold-leaf ornamentation or razor-sharp edges to watch for. The clock had a crudely fashioned look, at odds with the complexity and accuracy of the mechanism inside it. No glass protected the dial. The hands were withered wisps of beaten metal, the hour marks irregularly soldered stubs.

Dreyfus hated to hold any of the clocks. But whenever he made the pilgrimage to the Sleep Lab, he found himself unable to resist. The models of the scarab in Demikhov’s lab were accurate, but only Jane Aumonier could touch the scarab on her neck. The clocks—all four hundred and nineteen of them—were the only tangible link back to the entity itself.

Dreyfus had long wondered whether there was a message in the clocks. During the long period of its incarceration in SIAM, the clocks it made had grown in sophistication and ingenuity. It had been presumed by those studying it that the entity was learning with each clock, inventing and innovating as it progressed.

This view was now considered incorrect. Analysis of microscopic details engraved onto the main gear of clock thirty-five turned out to anticipate refinements—an elegant grasshopper escapement and gridiron pendulum—incorporated as far along the series as clock three hundred and eighty-eight. Since the entity had been denied access to its artefacts as soon as they were discovered, only one conclusion was possible: the Clockmaker had always known what it was doing.

Which meant that it could easily have been planning its killing spree while the researchers thought they were dealing with something as innocent and guileless as a child, which desired nothing more than to be allowed to make clocks.

Which meant in turn that, in any given clock, there might be a message that had yet to be deciphered: one that spoke of the Clockmaker’s intentions for the woman who had spent the most time with it, the one who thought she knew it best of all. Had it hated her more than any of the others?

Dreyfus didn’t know, but he hoped that one day a clock might reveal something to him.

Not today, though.

He replaced clock one hundred and fifteen carefully, then sealed the window. Around him the ticking of the other instruments grew more insistent, the ticks moving in and out of phase with subtle rhythms until the hectoring noise forced him further into the Sleep Lab.

For eleven years, Demikhov’s department had had no other business than the matter of removing the scarab. Every square centimetre of the Sleep Lab beyond the gallery of clocks (which itself offered an insight into the mentality of the Clockmaker) was testament to that effort: walls and partitions aglow with sectional schematics of both the scarab and its host, scribbled over with eleven years’ worth of handwritten notes and commentary. Jane Aumonier’s skull and neck had been imaged from every conceivable angle, using scanning devices powerful enough to function from more than seven metres away and yet still resolve nerve and circulatory structure. The metallic probes that the scarab had pushed into her spinal cord were visible in multiple cross sections, at different degrees of structural penetration. The scarab’s main body, clamped to her neck, had been subjected to the same variety of analysis modes. Interior details showed in ghostly pastel overlays.

Dreyfus touched certain panels, causing animations to spring into life. These were simulations of planned rescue attempts, all of which had been deemed unsatisfactory. Dreyfus had heard reliable estimates that the scarab’s mechanism would require just under six-tenths of a second to kill Aumonier, meaning that if they could get a machine in there and disarm the scarab in less than half a second they might have a hope of saving her. But he did not envy the person who would have to make the decision as to when to go in. It wouldn’t be Aumonier: that was one responsibility she had abdicated long ago.

Dreyfus paused by one of the benches and picked up a model of the scarab moulded in smoky translucent plastic. There were dozens like it, littering the benches in various dismantled states. They differed in their internal details, depending on the way the scans had been interpreted. Entire rescue strategies hinged on infinitely subtle nuances of analysis. At any one time, Demikhov’s squad consisted of several different teams pursuing radically opposed plans. More than once, they’d almost come to blows over the right course of action. Dreyfus thought of monks, arguing over different interpretations of scripture. Only Demikhov’s quiet presence kept the whole operation from collapsing into acrimony. He’d been doing that for eleven years, with no visible reward.

He was at work, leaning over a bench in low, whispered debate with three of his team members. Tools and scarab parts covered the work surface. An anatomical model of a skull—made up of detachable glass parts—sat with the structure of its neck and spine exposed. Luminous markers highlighted vulnerable areas.

Demikhov must have heard Dreyfus approaching. He pulled goggles from his eyes and used his fingers to comb lank strands of hair away from his brow. The subdued red lighting of the Sleep Lab did nothing to ameliorate Demikhov’s sagging lantern-jawed features. Dreyfus had seldom met anyone who looked quite as old.

“Tom,” he said, with a weary smile.

“Nice of you to drop by.”

Dreyfus smiled back.

“Anything new for me?”

“No new strategies, although we’ve shaved another two-hundredths of a second off Plan Tango.”

“Good work.”

“But not good enough for us to go in.”

“You’re getting closer.”

“Slowly. Ever so slowly.”

“Jane’s patient. She knows how much effort you put in down here.” Demikhov stared deep into Dreyfus’ eyes, as if looking for a clue.

“You’ve spoken to her recently. How is she? How’s she holding up?”

“As well as can be expected.”

“Did she…”.

“Yes,” Dreyfus said.

“She told me the news.” Demikhov picked up a scarab model and unclipped its waxy grey casing. The internal parts glowed blue and violet, highlighting control circuits, power lines and processors. He poked a white stylus into the innards, tapping it against a complicated nexus of violet lines.

“This changed. A week ago, there were only three lines running into this node. Now there are five.” He moved the stylus to the right.

“And this mechanical assembly has shifted by two centimetres. The movement was quite sudden. We don’t know what to make of either change.”

Dreyfus glanced at the other lab technicians. He presumed they were fully aware of the situation, or Demikhov wouldn’t be talking so openly.

“It’s getting ready for something,” he said.

“That’s my fear.”

“After eleven years: why now?”

“It’s probably reading stress levels.”

“That’s what she told me,” Dreyfus said, “but this isn’t the first crisis we’ve had in the last eleven years.”

“Maybe it’s the first time things have been this bad. It’s self-reinforcing, unfortunately. We can only hope that her elevated hormone level won’t trigger another change.”

“And if it does?”

“We may have to rethink that safety margin of which we’ve always been so protective.”

“You’d make that call?”

“If I felt that thing was about to kill her.”

“And in the meantime?”

“The usual. We’ve altered her therapeutic regime. More drugs. She doesn’t like it, says it dulls her consciousness. She still self-administers. We’re treading a very fine line: we have to take the edge off her nerves, but we mustn’t put her to sleep.”

“I don’t envy you.”

“No one envies us, Tom. We’ve grown used to that by now.”

“There’s something you need to know. Things aren’t going to get any easier for Jane right now. I’m working a case that might stir up some trouble. Jane’s given me the green light to follow my investigation wherever it leads.”

“You’ve a duty to do so.”

“I’m still worried how Jane’ll take things if the crisis worsens.”

“She won’t step down, if that’s what you’re wondering,” Demikhov said.

“We’ve been over that a million times.”

“I wouldn’t expect her to resign. Right now the only thing keeping her sane is her job.” Dreyfus sat before his low black table, sipping reheated tea. The wall opposite him, where he normally displayed his mosaic of faces, now showed only a single image. It was a picture of the rock sculpture, the one that Sparver and he had found in the incinerated ruin of Ruskin-Sartorious. Forensics had dragged it back to Panoply and scanned it at micron-level resolution. A neon-red contour mesh emphasized the three-dimensional structure that would otherwise have been difficult to make out.

“I’m missing something here,” Sparver said, sitting next to him at the table.

“We’ve got the killers, no matter what Dravidian might have wanted us to think. We’ve got the motive and the means. Why are we fixating on the art?”

“Something about it’s been bothering me ever since we first saw it,” Dreyfus said.

“Don’t you feel the same way?”

“I wouldn’t hang it on my wall. Beyond that, it’s just a face.”

“It’s the face of someone in torment. It’s the face of someone looking into hell and knowing that’s where they’re going. More than that, it’s a face I feel I know.”

“I’m still just seeing a face. Granted, it’s not the happiest face I’ve ever seen, but—”.

“What bothers me,” Dreyfus said, as if Sparver hadn’t spoken, “is that we’re clearly looking at the work of a powerful artist, someone in complete control of their craft. But why haven’t I ever heard of Delphine Ruskin-Sartorious before?”

“Maybe you just haven’t been paying attention.”

“That’s what I wondered. But when I searched for priors on Delphine, I only got sparse returns. She’s been contributing pieces to exhibitions for more than twenty years, but with no measurable success for most of that time.”

“And lately?”

“Things have begun to take off for her.”

“Because people caught on to what she was doing, or because she got better at it?”

“Good question,” Dreyfus said.

“I’ve looked at some of her older stuff. There are similarities with the unfinished sculpture, but there’s also something missing. She’s always been accomplished from a technical standpoint, but I didn’t get an emotional connection with the older works. I’d have marked her down as another rich postmortal with too much time on her hands, convinced that the world owes her fame in addition to everything else it’s already given her.”

“You said you thought you knew the face.”

“I did. But forensics didn’t make any connection, and when I ran the sculpture through the Search Turbines, nothing came up. Hardly surprising, I suppose, given the stylised manner in which she’s rendered the face.”

“So you’ve drawn a blank.” Dreyfus smiled.

“Not quite. There’s something Vernon told me.”

“Vernon?” Sparver said.

“Delphine’s suitor, Vernon Tregent, one of the three stable recoverables. He told me the work had been part of her ’Lascaille’ series. The name meant something to me, but I couldn’t quite place it.”

“So run it through the Turbines.”

“I don’t need to. Just sitting here talking to you, I know where I’ve heard that name before.” And it was true. Whenever he voiced the word in his mind, he saw a darkness beyond comprehension, a wall of starless black more profound than space itself. He saw darkness, and something falling into that darkness, like a white petal floating down into an ocean of pure black ink.

“Are you going to put me out of my misery?” Sparver asked.

“Lascaille’s Shroud,” Dreyfus answered, as if that was all that needed to be said. Thalia was reviewing the summary file on Carousel New Seattle-Tacoma when the call came in. She lifted her eyes from her compad and conjured her master’s face into existence before her. Slow-moving habitats, vast and imperious as icebergs, were visible through the slight opacity of the display pane.

“I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” Dreyfus asked. Thalia tried not to sound flustered.

“Not at all, sir.”

“No one told me you were outside.”

“It all came together quite quickly, sir. I have the patch for the polling bug, the one that allowed Caitlin Perigal to bias the results. I’m going to dry-run it before going live across the whole ten thousand.”

“Good. It’ll be one less headache to deal with. Who’s with you?”

“No one, sir. I’m handling the initial upgrades on my own.” Something twitched in the corner of his right eye, the lazy one.

“How many are you doing?”

“Four, sir, ending with House Aubusson. I told the seniors that I can have the upgrades complete inside sixty hours, but I was being deliberately cautious. If all goes well I should be done a lot quicker than that.”

“I don’t like the idea of you handling this alone, Thalia.”

“I’m quite capable of doing this, sir. Another pair of hands would only slow me down.”

“That isn’t the issue. The issue is one of my deputies going out there without back-up.”

“I’m not going out there to initiate a lockdown, sir. No one’s going to put up a fight.”

“We don’t start being popular just because we aren’t enforcing lockdowns. The citizenry moves from hating and fearing us to guarded tolerance. That’s as good as it gets.”

“I’ve been doing this for five years, sir.”

“But never alone.”

“I was alone in Bezile Solipsist for eight months.”

“But no one noticed you. That’s why they call it Bezile Solipsist.”

“I need to prove that I can handle a difficult assignment on my own, sir. This is my chance. But if you really think I ought to come back to Panoply—”

“Of course I don’t, now that you’re out there. But I’m still cross. You should have cleared this with me first.” Thalia cocked her head.

“Would you have let me go alone?”

“Probably not. I don’t throw assets into risky environments without making damned sure they’re protected.”

“Then now you know why I went out without calling you.” She saw something in his expression give way, as if he recognised this was a fight he could not hope to win. He had chosen Thalia for her cleverness, her independence of mind. He could hardly be surprised that she was beginning to chafe at the leash.

“Promise me this,” he said.

“The instant something happens that you’re not happy about… you call in, understood?”

“Baudry said they won’t be able to spare a taskforce, sir, if I run into trouble.”

“Never mind Baudry. I’d find a way to move Panoply itself if I knew one of my squad was in trouble.”

“I’ll call in, sir.” After a moment, Dreyfus said, “In case you were wondering, I didn’t call you to tick you off. I need some technical input.”

“I’m listening, sir.”

“Where House Perigal was concerned, you were able to recover all the communications handled by the core in the last thousand days, correct?”

“Yes,” Thalia said.

“Suppose we needed something similar for the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble?”

“If the beta-levels didn’t come through intact, I don’t hold out much hope for transmission logs.”

“That’s what I thought. But a message still has to originate from somewhere. That means someone else must have the relevant outgoing transmission somewhere in their logs. And if it travelled more than a few hundred kilometres through the Band, it probably passed through a router or hub, maybe several.

Routers and hubs keep records of all data traffic passing through them.”

“Not deep content, though.”

“I’ll settle for a point of origin. Can you help?”

Thalia thought about it.

“It’s doable, sir, but I’ll need access to a full version of the Solid Orrery.”

“Can your ship run a copy?”

“Not a light-enforcement vehicle. I’m afraid it’ll have to wait until I return.”

“I’d rather it didn’t.”

Thalia thought even harder.

“Then… you’ll need to turn the Orrery back to around the time of this transmission, if you know it.”

“I think I can narrow it down,” Dreyfus said.

“You’ll need to pinpoint it to within a few minutes. That’s the kind of timescale on which the router network optimises itself. If you can do that, then you can send me a snapshot of the Orrery. Pull out Ruskin-Sartorious and all routers or hubs within ten thousand kilometres. I’ll see what I can do.”

Dreyfus looked uncharacteristically pleased.

“Thank you, Thalia.”

“No promises, sir. This might not work.”

“It’s a lead. Since I’ve nothing else to go on, I’ll take what I’m given.”

Sparver collected his food from the counter and moved to an empty table near the corner of the refectory. The lights were bright and the low-ceilinged, gently curving space was as busy as it ever got. A group of fields had just returned from duty aboard one of the deep-system vehicles. A hundred or so grey-uniformed cadets were squeezing around three tables near the middle, most of them carrying the dummy whiphounds they’d just been introduced to in basic training. The cadets’ eager, over-earnest faces meant nothing to him. Dreyfus occasionally taught classes, and Sparver sometimes filled in for him, but that happened so infrequently that he never had a chance to commit any of the cadets to memory.

The one thing he didn’t doubt was that they all knew his name. He could feel their sidelong glances when he looked around the room, taking in the other diners. As the only hyperpig to have made it past Deputy II in twenty years, Sparver was known throughout Panoply. There’d been another promising candidate in the organisation a few years earlier, but he’d died during a bad lock-down. Sparver couldn’t see any hyperpigs amongst the cadets, and it didn’t surprise him. Dreyfus had accepted him unquestioningly, had even pulled strings to get Sparver assigned to his team rather than someone else’s, but for the most part there was still distrust and suspicion against his kind. Baseline humans had made hyperpigs, created them for sinister purposes, and now they had to live with the legacy of that crime. They were resentful of his very existence because it spoke of the dark appetites of their ancestors.

He began to eat his meal, using the specially shaped cutlery that best fit his hands.

He felt eyes on the back of his neck.

He laid his compad before him and called up the results on the search term he had fed into the Turbines just before entering the refectory. Lascaille’s Shroud, Dreyfus had said. But what did Sparver—or Dreyfus, for that matter—know of the Shrouds? No more or less than the average citizen of the Glitter Band.

The compad jogged his memory.

The Shrouds were things out in interstellar space, light-years from Yellowstone. They’d been found in all directions: lightless black spheres of unknown composition, wider than stars. Alien constructs, most likely: that was why their hypothetical builders were called the Shrouders. But no one had ever made contact with a Shrouder, or had the least idea what the aliens might be like, if they were not already extinct.

The difficulty with the Shrouds was that nothing sent towards them ever came back intact. Probes and ships returned to the study stations mangled beyond recognition, if they came back at all. No useful data was ever obtained. The only indisputable fact was that the crewed vehicles returned less mangled, and with more frequency, than the robots. Something about the Shrouds was, if not exactly tolerant of living things, at least slightly less inclined to destroy them utterly. Even so, most of the time the people came back dead, their minds too pulverised even for a post-mortem trawl.

But occasionally there was an exception.

Lascaille’s Shroud, the compad informed Sparver, was named for the first man to return alive from its boundary. Philip Lascaille had gone in solo, without the permission of the study station where he’d been based. Against all the odds, he’d returned from the Shroud with his body and mind superficially intact. But that wasn’t to say that Lascaille had not still paid a terrible price. He’d come back mute, either unwilling or incapable of talking about his experiences. His emotional connection with other human beings had become autistically impoverished. A kind of holy fool, he spent his time making intricate chalk drawings on concrete slabs. Shipped back to the Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies, Lascaille became a curiosity of gradually dwindling interest.

That was one mystery solved, but it begged more questions than it answered. Why had Delphine alighted on this subject matter, so many decades after Lascaille’s return? And why had her decision to portray Lascaille resulted in a work of such striking emotional resonance, when her creations had been so affectless before?

On this, the compad had nothing to say.

Sparver continued with his meal, wondering how far ahead of him Dreyfus’ enquiries had reached.

He could still feel the eyes on his neck.

“Back from whatever busy errand called you away last time, Prefect Dreyfus?” asked the beta-level invocation of Delphine Ruskin-Sartorious.

“I’m sorry about that,” Dreyfus said.

“Something came up.”

“Connected with the Bubble?”

“I suppose so.” His instincts told him that Delphine didn’t need to know all the details concerning Captain Dravidian.

“But the case isn’t closed just yet. I’d like to talk to you in some detail concerning the way the deal collapsed.”

Delphine reached up and pushed a stray strand of hair back under the rag-like band she wore around her head. She was dressed in the same clothes she’d been wearing during the last invocation: white smock and trousers, sleeves rolled to the elbow, trousers tucked up to the knee. Once again Dreyfus was struck by the paleness of her eyes and the doll-like simplicity of her features.

“How much did Vernon tell you?” she asked.

“Enough to know that someone called through and that was enough to remove Dravidian’s offer from consideration. I’d really like to know who that mystery caller was.”

“A representative of some other group of Ultras, intent on undermining Dravidian. Does it really matter now?”

“Play along with me,” Dreyfus said.

“Assume for a minute that Dravidian was set up to make it look as if he intentionally fired on you. What reason might there have been for someone to want to hurt your family?” Her face became suspicious.

“But it was revenge, Prefect. What else could it have been?”

“I’m simply keeping an open mind. Did you or your family have enemies?”

“You’d have to ask someone else.”

“I’m asking you. What about Anthony Theobald? Had he crossed swords with anyone?”

“Anthony Theobald had friends and rivals, like anyone. But actual enemies? I wasn’t aware of any.”

“Did he leave the habitat often?”

“Now and then, to visit another state or go down to Chasm City. But there was never anything sinister about his movements.”

“What about visitors—get many of those?”

“We kept ourselves to ourselves, by and large.”

“So no visitors.”

“I didn’t say that. Yes, of course people came by. We weren’t hermits. Anthony Theobald had his usual guests; I had the occasional fellow artist or critic.”

“None of whom would have had any pressing reason to see you dead?”

“Speaking for myself, no.”

“And Anthony Theobald—what were his guests like?” He caught it then: the tiniest flicker of hesitation in her answer.

“Nothing out of the ordinary, Prefect.” Dreyfus nodded, allowing her to think he was content to let the matter stand. He knew he’d touched on something, however peripheral it might prove, but his years of experience had taught him that it would be counterproductive to dig away at it now. Delphine would be conflicted between her blood loyalty to Anthony Theobald and her desire to see justice served, and too much probing from him now might cause her to clam up irrevocably.

He would have to earn her trust.

“The point is,” she went on, “I really wasn’t interested in family or Glitter Band politics. I had—have—my art. That was all that interested me.”

“Let’s talk about your art, then. Could someone have been jealous of your success?” She looked stunned.

“Enough to kill nine hundred and sixty people?”

“Crimes aren’t always proportionate to motive.”

“I can’t think of anyone. If I’d been the talk of Stoner society, we wouldn’t have been dealing with a second-rate trader like Dravidian.”

Dreyfus bit his tongue, keeping his policeman’s poker face fixed firmly in place.

“All the same, someone wanted you all dead, and I’ll sleep easier when I know the reason.”

“I wish I could help.”

“You still can. I want you to tell me when that call came through.”

“While Dravidian was visiting us.”

“If you could narrow it down, that would help.”

The beta-level closed her eyes momentarily.

“The call came in at fourteen hours, twenty-three minutes, fifty-one seconds, Yellowstone Standard Time.”

“Thank you,” Dreyfus said.

“Freeze—” he began.

“Are we done?” Delphine asked, cutting him off before he had finished issuing the command.

“For now. If there’s anything else I need from you, you’ll be the first to hear about it.”

“And now you’re going to put me back in the box?”

“That’s the idea.”

“I thought you wanted to talk about art.”

“We did.”

“No, we discussed the possibility of my art being a motivating factor in the crime. We didn’t discuss the art itself.” Dreyfus shrugged easily.

“We can, if you think it’s relevant.”

“You don’t?”

“The art appears to be a peripheral detail, unless you think otherwise. You yourself expressed doubt that jealousy could have been a motivating factor.” Dreyfus paused and reconsidered.

“That said, your reputation was building, wasn’t it?” Delphine looked at him sourly.

“You make it sound as if my life story’s already written, down to the last footnote.”

“From where I’m standing…” But then Dreyfus remembered what Vernon had told him concerning Delphine’s belief in the validity of beta-level simulation.

“What?” Delphine said.

“Things will be different. Won’t they?”

“Different. Not necessarily worse. You still don’t believe in me, do you?”

“I’m trying my best,” Dreyfus replied.

“The last time we spoke, I asked you a question.”

“Did you?”

“I asked you if you’d ever lost a loved one.”

“I answered you.”

“Evasively.” She fixed him with a long, searching stare.

“You have lost someone, haven’t you? Not just a colleague or friend. Someone closer than that.”

“We’ve all lost people.”

“Who was it, Prefect Dreyfus? Who did you lose?”

“Tell me why you chose to work on the Lascaille series. Why did you care about what happened to a man you never knew?”

“Those are personal questions for an artist.”

“I’m wondering if you made any enemies when you picked that theme.”

“And I’m wondering why you find it so difficult to acknowledge my conscious existence. This person who died—did something happen that made you turn against beta-levels?” Her eyes flashed an insistent sea-green, daring him to look away.

“Who was it, Prefect? Quid pro quo. Answer my question and I’ll answer yours.”

“I’ve got a job to do, Delphine. Empathising with software isn’t part of it.”

“I’m sorry you feel that way.”

“No,” Dreyfus said, something inside him snapping, “you aren’t ’sorry’. ’Sorry’ would imply the presence of a thinking mind, a sentient will capable of experiencing the emotion called ’regret’. You’re saying that you are sorry because that’s what the living Delphine would have said under similar circumstances. But it doesn’t mean you feel it.”

“You really don’t think I’m alive, in any sense of the word?”

“I’m afraid not.”

Delphine nodded coolly.

“In which case: why are you arguing with me?”

Dreyfus reached for an automatic answer, but nothing came. The moment dragged, Delphine regarding him with something between amusement and pity. He froze the invocation and stood staring at the empty space where she had been standing. Not a she, he told himself. An it.

“Hello?” Thalia called into an echoing, dank darkness.

“This is Deputy Field Prefect Ng. Is anyone there?”

There was no answer. Thalia stopped and put down the heavy cylinder she’d been carrying in her left hand. She touched her right hand to the haft of her whiphound, and then chided herself for her unease. Letting go of the weapon, she extracted her glasses, slipped them on and keyed image-amplification. The darkness of the chamber abated, revealing a doorway in one wall. Thalia touched the glasses again, but the entoptic overlay changed nothing. If a habitat citizen had been standing in Thalia’s place with a skullful of sense-modifying implants, they’d still have seen only the same drab walls.

“Moving deeper into the hab,” Thalia said, reporting back to her cutter.

“So far I’m not exactly overwhelmed by the welcoming committee.”

She picked up the equipment cylinder in her left hand. Caution prevailed, and this time she chose to release the whiphound.

“Proceed ahead of me at defence posture one,” she instructed, before letting go. Red eye bright, the whiphound nodded its haft once to indicate that it had understood her order and was now in compliance. Then it turned the haft away from her and slunk forward, gliding across the ground on the coiled tip of its filament, like a sketch of a cobra.

The doorway led to a damp tunnel with cracked flooring. Ahead, the tunnel began to curve around. The whiphound slinked forward, the red light of its scanning eye reflecting back from moist surfaces. Thalia followed it into the tunnel, around a gentle curve, until the tunnel widened out into a gloomily lit plaza. The curvature of the habitat was evident in the continuous gentle upsweep of the floor, rising ahead of her until it was hidden by the similarly curving ceiling. The only illumination came from sunlight creeping through immense slatted windows on either side, their glass panes tinting the light sepia-brown through a thick caking of dust and mould. Rising high above Thalia, interrupted only by the windows, were multi-levelled tiers of what had once been shops, boutiques and restaurants. Bridges and ramps spanned the space between the two walls, some of them sagging or broken. Glass frontages lay shattered, or were covered with various forms of mould or foliage-like infestation. In some of the shops there was even evidence of unsold merchandise, cobwebbed into obscurity.

Thalia didn’t like the place at all. She was glad when she found another tunnel leading out of the plaza. The whiphound slinked ahead of her, its coil making a rhythmic hissing sound against the flooring.

Without warning, it vanished.

An instant later Thalia heard a sound like two pieces of scrap metal being smashed against each other. Cautiously she rounded the curve and saw the whiphound wrapped around the immobilised form of a robot, which had toppled over onto its side, its rubber-tyred wheels spinning uselessly. Thalia stepped closer, putting down the cylinder. She appraised the fallen machine for weapons, but there was no sign that it was anything other than a general-purpose servitor of antique design.

“Release it,” she said.

The whiphound uncoiled itself and pulled back from the robot, while still keeping its eye locked on the machine. Laboriously, the robot extended telescopic limbs to right itself. A slender pillar rose from the wheeled base, with limbs and sensors sprouting at odd, asymmetric angles from the pillar.

“I am Deputy Field Prefect Thalia Ng, of Panoply,” she said.

“Identify your origin.”

The robot’s voice was disconcertingly deep and emphatic.

“Welcome to Carousel New Seattle-Tacoma, Deputy Field Prefect Ng. I trust your journey was pleasant. I apologise for my lateness. I have been tasked to escort you to the participatory core.”

“I was hoping to talk to Citizen Orson Newkirk.”

“Orson Newkirk is in the participatory core. Shall I assist you with your luggage?”

“I can manage,” Thalia said, shaking her head.

“Very well, Deputy Field Prefect Ng. Please follow me.”

“Where is everyone? I was expecting a population of one point three million people.”

“The current population is one million, two hundred and seventy-four thousand, six hundred and eighteen people. All are accounted for in the participatory core.”

“You keep saying that—what’s a ’participatory core’?”

“Please follow me.” The robot spun around, tyres hissing against the wet flooring, and began to amble down the corridor, trailing an electrical burning smell in its wake. From seven and a half metres away Jane Aumonier smiled tightly.

“You’re like a dog with a bone, Tom. Not everything in life is a conspiracy. People do sometimes get mad and do stupid and irrational things.”

“Dravidian sounded neither mad nor irrational to me.”

“One of his crew, then.”

“Acting according to plan. Following a script to make the whole attack look like a heat-of-the-moment thing, when in fact it was set up long before Dravidian ever met Delphine.”

“You really think so?” Dreyfus had just run the Solid Orrery in his room. He’d backtracked the configuration of the Glitter Band to the time when Delphine Ruskin-Sartorious said the call had come in. The data was now sitting in Thalia’s cutter, waiting for her to get to it when she completed her current upgrade.

“You’ve always trusted my instincts in the past,” Dreyfus said.

“Now they’re telling me that there’s something going on here that we’re supposed to overlook.”

“You’ve spoken to the betas?”

“They can’t think of anyone who’d do this to the family.”

“So you’ve no hint as to what the motive might have been?”

“No, not yet. But I’ll tell you this. If you just wanted to hurt a family, there are any number of assassination weapons capable of doing the job without leaving a forensic trail.”

“Agreed…” Aumonier said, her tone non-committal, letting him know that she was going along with him for the sake of argument alone.

“But whoever did this wanted to take out more than just the family. They killed all the people in that habitat and then they killed the habitat itself.”

“Maybe they didn’t have access to assassination weapons.”

Dreyfus pulled a sceptical expression.

“Yet they did have the means to infiltrate an Ultra ship and manipulate its Conjoiner drive?”

“I’m not sure where you’re going with this, Tom.”

“I’m saying that it would have been harder for them to use Dravidian than to get their hands on any number of assassination tools. Which means they really needed that ship. They used it for a reason. Killing the family wasn’t enough. They had to incinerate them, wipe every trace of them out of existence. Short of a foam-phase bomb or a nuke, how else do you do that, except with a Conjoiner drive?”

“It still doesn’t add up to much,” Aumonier said.

“At least the ship gave them a chance to pin it on the Ultras, rather than making it look like the work of another habitat. But I think Dravidian and his crew were innocent.” Aumonier looked wearily at the wall of displays jostling for her attention. Even at a glance, Dreyfus could see that almost all of them referred to her efforts to contain the escalating crisis between the Glitter Band and the Ultras. The screens wrapped the room from pole to pole, the combined pressure of them pushing in from all directions like the impaling spikes of an iron maiden.

“If I did have proof,” she said, “if I could demonstrate that the Ultras were innocent, that would certainly ease matters.”

“I’ve got Thalia Ng helping me to trace the caller who set up Dravidian.” She looked at Dreyfus questioningly.

“I thought Ng was outside on field duty. The update to the polling cores, wasn’t it? Vantrollier asked me to sign off on the pad release.”

“Thalia’s outside,” Dreyfus confirmed.

“And she’s helping me as well, between upgrades.” Aumonier nodded approvingly.

“A good deputy.”

“I don’t employ any other kind.”

“And I don’t employ any other kind of field prefect. I want you to understand that you are appreciated, no matter how… frustrating you must occasionally find your position.”

“I’m perfectly happy with my role in the organisation.”

“I’m glad you feel that way.” There was a lull.

“Tell me something, Jane. Now that we’re having this conversation.”

“Go ahead, Tom.”

“I want you to answer truthfully. I’m going to be poking around under some stones. There may be things under them that bite back. I need to be certain that I have your complete confidence when I go out there to do my job.”

“You have it. Unconditionally.”

“Then there’s no reason for me to think that I might have disappointed you, or underperformed, in my line of work?”

“Why would you feel that way?”

“I sense that I have your confidence. You’ve given me Pangolin clearance, which I appreciate. I’m entitled to sit in with the senior prefects. But I’m still a field, after all these years.”

“There’s no shame in that.”

“I know.”

“If it wasn’t for this… thing on my neck, maybe I’d still be out there as well.”

“Not very likely, Jane. You’d have been promoted out of fieldwork whether you liked it or not. They’d have kept you inside Panoply anyway, where you can be of most benefit to the organisation.”

“And if I’d said no?”

“They’d have thanked you for your opinion and ignored you anyway. People get promoted out of field while they’re still at the top of their game. That’s the way it works.”

“And if I told you I thought the best way for you to serve Panoply was to remain a field prefect?”

“I’m getting old and tired, Jane. I’ve started making mistakes.”

“None that have reached my attention.” She addressed him with sudden urgency, as if she’d been indulging him until then but now it was time to lay down the law.

“Tom, listen to me. I don’t want to hear any more of this. You’re the best we have. I wouldn’t say that if I didn’t mean it.”

“Then I have your confidence?”

“I’ve said it once already. Go and look under as many stones as you want. I’ll be right behind you.”