“The rain’s easing, friend. You can drop the hood.” The friendly tone of the words only brought out the steel beneath them. “Go on. There’s no need to be coy about your identity. I knew who you were from the moment you arrived.”
Dreyfus left his hood up. He had hoped not to speak, because to do so would draw exactly the scrutiny he had meant to avoid. But Garlin had rendered his efforts futile.
“I just came to hear you speak, like everyone else.”
“Are you going to introduce yourself, friend?” There was a beat, no more than that, before Garlin continued. “I’ll do it for you. Good people, good citizens! This is Tom Dreyfus. Or should I say Prefect Dreyfus? He walks among us—Senior Prefect Tom Dreyfus of Panoply. One of the very men who brought us to the brink of disaster two years ago. I wonder why he’s so keen to preserve his anonymity?” Garlin let out a snigger. “You couldn’t have expected to pass unnoticed, Tom?”
“I’m here as a civilian,” Dreyfus said, doing his best not to raise his voice, not to sound in any way perturbed. “I wanted to hear what you had to say.”
“And what did you make of it, before some other business called you away?”
“You make a very persuasive case.”
There was a murmur of conversation from the onlookers, but only Garlin and Dreyfus were speaking at a normal volume. Dreyfus prickled under the attention, feeling cast in a role he had never asked for.
“You see how it works now,” Garlin said, nodding out at his audience. “We’ve got them rattled. Rattled enough that they send out people like Dreyfus to mingle with us and attempt to undermine our efforts. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it, Tom?”
“I told you why I was here. You call yourself the voice of the people, the spokesperson for the common citizen. Why shouldn’t I be interested?”
“Is that all it is, just innocent interest?”
Dreyfus looked around at his unwelcome audience. “Don’t allow yourselves to be taken in by him,” he said, addressing no one in particular but making eye contact with as many as possible. “He’s not the common man he makes out. His birth name was Julius Devon Garlin Voi—the wealthy son of Marlon and Aliya Voi. Ask him about the Shell House. He was raised in a private estate in Chasm City, not in the Glitter Band. He’s been pampered from the moment he was born. And now he wants to tear apart the very society that welcomed him with open arms, like a spoilt brat breaking his playthings.”
Someone flicked down his hood and the last traces of the rain drizzled down against his scalp. Dreyfus turned again, showing no haste or anger, not even seeking eye contact with the person who had dropped his hood.
“Let him leave,” Garlin said, pushing a false magnanimity into his words. “He’s within his rights. We won’t stop him doing as he chooses. We’re not the ones who fall back on force and intimidation in the face of our enemies. Nor are we the ones who say that a man must be defined by his origins.”
Dreyfus began to walk away from the gathering. He had been near the back of the audience but there were still a few stragglers to push past. They moved out of his way, grudgingly. But he had only taken a few steps when something tripped him. It was sudden, and he hit the ground hard enough to knock the wind from his lungs. For a moment—probably no more than a second, although it felt longer—wet grass pushed into his face, prickling into his nose and eyes. He forced himself up. The ground here was scuffed and muddy, and his hands came away smeared with grass and soil. He had probably been tripped deliberately, but there was an outside chance it was just an accident.
Dreyfus was pushing himself to his feet when Garlin bounded over, kneeling slightly to bring their faces level.
“Let me help you up, Tom.”
“There’s no need.”
“You should watch your step. No one wants to see a prefect face-down in the grass like that.” Garlin braced a hand under Dreyfus’s elbow and made a theatrical show of grunting as he helped him up. “My, you’re heavy. I didn’t know they let prefects carry around so much weight.”
Dreyfus wiped his hands on his knees, the fabric absorbing the stain into itself.
“You and I aren’t done.”
Cold blue eyes regarded Dreyfus carefully. Finally Garlin gave a nod. “I doubt very much that we are.”
2
Near the outer orbit of the Glitter Band, deep inside a small, pumpkin-shaped asteroid, lay a room reached through a pair of heavy bronze doors. Hung on massive hinges, each door was engraved with the symbol of a clenched, gauntleted fist. Beyond the deliberate anachronism of the doors was a windowless chamber, its curved walls clad in many spotless layers of varnished wood. The room’s lighting was subdued, with most of the illumination coming from the ever-changing tactical readouts on its long, oval-shaped table, as well as the soft glow of the Solid Orrery, ticking away to itself in a corner. The Orrery was an evolving, real-time, three-dimensional representation of the entire flow of worlds in the Glitter Band, as well as the planet they orbited.
The doors hinged shut behind Thalia. She breathed in, forcing calm upon herself. The air in the room—based on the few occasions she had been inside it—always seemed to lie heavy on her lungs, as if it carried some of the varnish with it.
“Take a seat, Ng. This needn’t take long.”
There were twenty seats around the table, of which a dozen were presently occupied. There was Jane Aumonier, of course, and flanking her were a mixture of Senior Prefects, Internal Prefects, Field Prefects, and a few supernumerary analysts with tactical security ratings. Thalia took the high-backed chair facing the Supreme Prefect. Aumonier’s face was under-lit by the readouts on the area of table before her and they cast colours and patterns across her chin and cheekbones.
After a silence, Thalia ventured to speak.
“I haven’t had time to submit a field report, ma’am.”
“There’ll be no need in this instance, Ng. Your conduct was entirely satisfactory. It was an unusual development and you reacted well.”
Thalia nodded once, her hands settled before her in her lap. She wondered if the words “unusual development” had ever been delivered with more dry understatement.
“I’m sorry about the medical orderly. He was just trying to do his work.”
“Don’t worry about him,” said Senior Prefect Gaston Clearmountain, sitting to the right of Aumonier. “He was lucky to get away with just a broken ankle.”
“Perhaps he’ll take it as a lesson,” said Senior Prefect Lillian Baudry, who was sitting in her customary position to the left of Aumonier.
“I hope we don’t have to teach too many of them,” Field Prefect Sparver Bancal said. “Or it could get messy.”
“It’s messy enough already,” Aumonier said, nodding in sympathy with Sparver, who had taken his usual position between Baudry and one of the supernumerary analysts. His seat was slightly elevated compared to the others, bringing his eye level close to the other operatives’.
“The Heavy Medicals attended him. Do we have an update on his condition?”
“No lasting complications,” said Internal Prefect Ingvar Tench, who was sitting on the extreme right of the oval table.
There was a silence.
“And the other man?” Thalia asked.
Aumonier looked puzzled by the question.
“Which other man?”
“The man whose head you had me bring back,” Thalia answered.
Aumonier’s voice remained level, her posture poised and still, hardly any part of her face moving except her lips. “The man’s condition was far beyond anything the local medics were equipped to treat.”
“We didn’t even let them try.”
Sparver Bancal smiled, or rather produced the nearest thing to a smile that a hyperpig could. “It wasn’t about killing or saving him. It was about evidential preservation.”
“It was just a seizure,” she said, looking from face to face for a clue. “Something went wrong in his brain and he started having some sort of episode. Why is th
at any concern of ours?”
“You did well,” Aumonier said, as if they had just spooled back to the start of the conversation. “You may continue your work with the polling cores, according to the agreed schedule.”
“Begging your pardon, ma’am,” Thalia said. “But you were expecting it, weren’t you? That’s why that container was in my ship, just waiting to be used. You were expecting to have to cut someone’s head off.”
She watched the faces of the others, measuring their reactions. None of them looked comfortable, but they were doing their best to make this seem like routine business.
“Let me blunt with you, Ng,” Aumonier said. “Today you brushed against the periphery of something beyond your security clearance. I won’t insult your intelligence by suggesting otherwise. You are correct in your assumption that certain operational provisions had already been made.”
“Well, ma’am—” Thalia began.
“Speaking,” Aumonier said, softening the remark with the mildest hint of a smile. “You are trusted, Ng, and expected to execute your duties with due regard to matters of security and secrecy. I am confident you will do so. But just so there is no ambiguity, there will be no mention of this matter from the moment you leave this room. You will discuss it with no one, regardless of rank; you will not allude to it in the vaguest of terms; you will conduct no queries pertaining to this business in any regard whatsoever. You are entitled to your curiosity. I would think less of you if you were not curious. For now, though, you will proceed as if nothing unusual had happened today. In time you be privy to more information—but not now, and not for the foreseeable future.”
It’s something big, then, Thalia thought. Something they haven’t cleared up yet. Something they don’t know when they’ll clear up. Another emergency, on the order of the last one …
“If I could help, ma’am …”
“You can’t, Ng,” Aumonier said. “Or rather, you can, by putting this entire matter out of your mind. Is that clear?”
Thalia felt the pressure of the other faces staring at her own. “It is, ma’am,” she answered, forcing herself to meet their eyes, to show confidence rather than cowedness.
“Then that will be all, Ng,” Aumonier said.
In the area of Panoply they still called the Sleep Lab, Doctor Demikhov’s face loomed behind a distorting surface of tinted glassware. He was adjusting some valve or temperature regulator on the side of a cryogenic vessel. Inside the vessel, looking oddly shrunken, was the severed head.
Behind Sparver Bancal, their own reflections ghosting above his own, stood Senior Prefect Gaston Clearmountain and Supreme Prefect Jane Aumonier.
“Well?” Aumonier asked, after the silence had grown interminable. “What’s the verdict, Doctor? You’re the expert on heads, or so I’m told.”
Some flicker of amusement crossed Demikhov’s lantern-jawed face as he straightened up from the vessel and the bench’s worth of medical systems surrounding it. “I generally prefer working with heads that have at least a fighting chance of revival.”
The head was upright, fixed into some sort of life-support collar, caged by columns of rising bubbles. It looked waxy and inert, more like a casting than something that had only recently belonged to a living individual.
“How does it compare?” Sparver asked.
“The usual mush, Prefect Bancal. Just a little less cooked than the others.”
“You have such a delicate way with words,” Clearmountain muttered.
“Nothing recoverable?” Aumonier asked.
“I haven’t cracked it open yet. But the scans tell me all I need to know. Neural patterns are scrambled beyond recognition and the implants are reduced to a few micrograms of metallic slag.”
“This is our best chance to date,” Aumonier said. “If there’s anything in this head, the tiniest clue, we need it.”
“I’ll go through the motions,” Demikhov said resignedly.
“One question,” Sparver said. “Do we know anything about the melter?”
He heard Clearmountain’s sniff of displeasure. Something tightened in Aumonier’s already taut features before she spoke. “The citizen was Antal Bronner. Eighty-two years old. Born and died in the Shiga-Mintz Spindle, spent less than a decade living in other habitats.”
“Priors?” Sparver asked.
“He looks clean,” Aumonier said. “A private trader in out-system goods, specialising in exo-art. No scandals, no major insolvencies—just the ups and downs of any small-time broker.”
“Living associates?” asked Sparver.
“One wife—Ghiselin Bronner. She’s been told that her husband died in a sudden medical event. She’ll have questions, undoubtedly, but we won’t be able to offer her all the answers.”
“We could sequester her as a warm witness,” Clearmountain said.
Aunonier gave a sharp shake of her head. “No, tact is key for now. I’ll arrange a soft interview, on her territory. Just enough to see if she’s hiding anything.”
“You could always send Ng,” Sparver offered.
“After I made it clear she isn’t to speak a word of this to anyone?” Aumonier asked.
“You had to for security’s sake. But that’s only because she hasn’t been brought on board. If she understood the situation, she’d be just as keen as the rest of us to keep this under wraps. If she was given a Pangolin shot she could be up to speed by tomorrow, another pair of eyes and ears we badly need …”
“And another risk of a leak,” Clearmountain said.
“She’s no more likely to leak than you or I, Gaston,” Sparver said. “Unless you still believe Jason Ng wasn’t totally absolved of wrongdoing?”
“I never mentioned her father,” Clearmountain said.
“You didn’t need to—you’ve made it as plain as can be that you’ll never let Thalia step out of his shadow.”
“Gentlemen,” Aumonier said softly. “Let’s not bicker. The fact of the matter, though, is that Gaston is correct: we’ve kept this watertight until now by confining it to the highest security rankings, including our good colleague Doctor Demikhov. Thalia may well be trustworthy—I don’t doubt that she is—but every additional operative brings the risk of an accidental slip. Need I remind you that our enemies—opportunists like Devon Garlin—are circling like sharks, waiting for just such an opportunity?”
“I still say she could be an asset,” Sparver said.
“And in time she may well be,” Aumonier allowed. “But for now, you must set aside your personal feelings of protectiveness towards Ng. It could have been any operational Field who had to bring back that head. Would you be so keen to bring one of the others into the investigation, if you hadn’t worked closely with them under Dreyfus?”
Sparver knew better than to lie. “Perhaps you’re right.”
“She was required to execute a task in the line of duty,” Clearmountain replied. “That’s where it ends for her. She’s a competent operative, but at the end of the day she’s just another Field. That won’t cause any difficulties will it, Prefect Bancal?”
“None at all,” Sparver said.
“You acted without my authority,” Aumonier said, without even a token attempt at pleasantries.
Dreyfus faced her across the table. He had come directly from the docking bay, not even taking the time to step through a washwall.
“Your authority wasn’t required,” he answered. “When I go to the hospice to see Valery, I do so as a free citizen. This was no different.”
“Don’t split legalistic hairs with me. Devon Garlin isn’t our concern. Don’t force us into a position where he becomes so.”
“I think we’ve already passed that point.”
Aumonier studied him with a faint air of exasperation, of lofty expectations in grave danger of being undermined.
“Garlin’s breakaway movement will lose steam. It’ll only take a small crisis, a minor economic downturn, to have those rogue habitats scuttling back into the fold.”
/>
“You wouldn’t have said that two years ago.”
“Things change.”
Dreyfus leaned forward. “Garlin isn’t just another flash-in-the-pan blowhard. Those eight habitats aren’t rushing to rejoin us. And there are at least twenty more on the verge of breaking away.”
“These are small numbers.”
Dreyfus offered open palms, traces of yellowish dirt still lodged under his fingernails. “I wanted to see him for real, not just on compads and screens. To get a measure of the man.”
Aumonier sighed slowly, clearly aware she was being drawn into a conversation against her will.
“And what gems of insight did you bring back?”
“Mainly that I don’t like self-professed men of the people who keep quiet about being born into one of the richest families in Chasm City.”
“It wasn’t all roses. He was only sixteen when Aliya died. Tough for an only child, especially the way Marlon was fading, losing his grip on things. Yet Julius picked himself up, made his own way beyond the estate and Chasm City, and found a role for himself in life.”
“To wrack and ruin.”
Half a smile bent her lips. “I don’t have to like the man, or believe in his objectives, to see that he’s made something of himself beyond the umbrella of the Voi name.”
“There’s something else going on here. I’d done nothing to draw attention to myself, nothing to call out my presence. And yet he knew I was there.”
“I know. I saw it on the public feeds. ‘Panoply sends spy to eavesdrop on public gathering.’”
“He’d been aware of me all along. And yet I’d barely shown my face. I went to Stonehollow by civilian shuttle. No one gave me a second glance at any point in my journey.”
“What are you saying?”
“He still picked up on my presence. He sensed there was someone at the gathering who didn’t belong.”
“For all you know, he wasn’t aware of you until the moment you turned your back on him. Then he ran an identity query on you and realised you weren’t carrying implants. From there it’s only a small step to guessing you were a Panoply operative.”