‘Thank you,’ Dreyfus said, glad that he’d taken the initiative to have Sparver shadow Chen and Saavedra. ‘I’ll be there immediately.’
Sparver had detained them in the docking bay that formed the nose of Panoply’s pumpkin-face, the bay that handled cutters and corvettes as opposed to civilian vehicles or deep-system cruisers. As field prefects, the Firebrand operatives were regular users of both light- and medium-enforcement vehicles and would have been familiar faces to the technical staff manning the bay. Although they did not have clearance to take a ship, they had managed to talk their way aboard a cutter that had just come in for refuelling and re-armament and had been well advanced in pre-flight checks when Sparver blocked their escape by closing the main bay doors. Dreyfus would have to reprimand the staff who had allowed the prefects aboard the ship without the right clearance, but for now his only concern was extracting information from the two unsuccessful fugitives. They were still aboard the cutter, the ship still poised on its launching rack, with the doors blocking its egress.
‘I had a hard time tailing them,’ Sparver said, floating next to the cutter’s suitwall, inside the air-filled connecting tube. Two internal prefects flanked him, whiphounds drawn. ‘For run-of-the-mill fields, these two knew a few tricks.’
‘They’re not exactly field prefects,’ Dreyfus said. ‘That’s just an operational cover for what they really do. They’re specialists, assigned to a superblack cell called Firebrand. Jane pulled the plug on the cell, but the cell had other ideas. They’ve been carrying on without her authority for nine years.’
‘Now that’s just naughty.’
‘Naughtier than you think. Firebrand has to take some of the responsibility for what happened to Ruskin-Sartorious.’ Dreyfus unclipped his whiphound and motioned for Sparver to do likewise. ‘Let’s get them off the vehicle. We can’t keep these bay doors closed for ever.’
They set the passwall to yield and entered, Dreyfus leading with Sparver just to his rear. Dreyfus sealed the passwall behind them, with the internals keeping guard on the other side so that there was no possibility of the Firebrand agents escaping back into Panoply.
Like all cutters, it was a small vehicle with a limited number of hiding places. It was powered, but the cabin illumination was dimmed almost to darkness. Dreyfus fumbled in his pocket for his glasses, but he’d left them in his room before he went to the refectory.
He called into the cutter’s depths. ‘This is Tom Dreyfus. You both know me by reputation. You’re not going anywhere, so let’s talk civilly.’
There was no answer.
Dreyfus tried again. ‘You don’t have anything to fear from me. I know about Firebrand. I know about your operational mandate. I understand that you did what you did because you thought you were doing the right thing by Panoply.’
Again there was no reply. Dreyfus glanced back at Sparver, then pushed further into the ship, in the direction of the flight deck. He made out the watery blue glow of instrumentation seeping around the corner of the bulkhead that separated the flight deck from the adjoining compartment.
‘I haven’t come to punish you for the consequences of any actions you may have taken that you believed to be in the best interests of the Band.’ Dreyfus paused heavily. ‘But I do need to know the facts. I know that Firebrand was using Ruskin-Sartorious until just before the Bubble was destroyed. At some point, you’re all going to have to answer for the mistake of hiding your activities inside that habitat. It was a mistake, a bad one, but no one’s accusing you of premeditated murder. All I’m interested in is why that habitat had to die. Panoply needs whatever Aurora was scared of, and it needs it now.’
At last a voice emerged from the direction of that blueish glow. ‘You have no idea, Dreyfus. No idea at all.’ It was a woman’s voice - so Saavedra, not Chen.
‘Then it’s up to you to put me right. Go ahead. I’m ready and waiting.’
‘We weren’t just working with relics,’ Paula Saavedra said. ‘We were working with the Clockmaker itself.’
Dreyfus recalled everything that Jane Aumonier had told him. ‘The Clockmaker doesn’t exist any more.’
‘Everyone believes that the Clockmaker was destroyed,’ Saavedra said. ‘But it left relics of itself. Souvenirs, like the clocks in the Sleep Lab and the thing clamped to Jane. And other things, too. We got to study them. We thought they were toys, puzzles, vicious little trinkets. Mostly, they were. But not the one we opened nine years ago.’
‘What was it?’
‘The Clockmaker had encapsulated itself, squeezed its essence down into one of the relics. It knew Panoply was closing in on it eleven years ago, so it survived by tricking us. It compressed itself into a seed and waited for us to find it.’ Before Dreyfus could frame an objection, she continued: ‘It had to discard much of itself, accept a weakening of both its intellectual and physical capabilities. It did so willingly because it knew it had no other option. And also because it knew it could rebuild all that it lost at some point in the future.’
Dreyfus pushed himself closer to the flight deck. ‘And you - we - helped it?’
‘It was a mistake. But when we reactivated the Clockmaker, it was still weak, still ineffectual compared to its former embodiment. Even so, it still nearly won.’
‘How much of this did Jane know?’ Dreyfus asked, beginning to wonder why Lansing Chen wasn’t contributing to the conversation.
‘She was informed that one of the relics had run amok. She was never told that it was the Clockmaker itself that had come back from the grave. It was felt that the news would have been too upsetting.’
‘But she still closed you down.’
‘Perhaps she was right. Needless to say, we didn’t agree. Although Firebrand had taken grave losses, we felt that we had come closer than ever before to learning something of the Clockmaker’s true nature. We who survived were convinced that the future security of the Glitter Band depended on the discovery of that nature. We had to know what it was, where it had come from, so that we could ensure nothing like it ever emerged again. That was our moral imperative, Prefect Dreyfus. So we decided to remain operational. We were already superblack; it took very little effort to submerge ourselves to an even deeper level of secrecy, beyond even Jane’s oversight.’
‘And what did you learn, Paula?’
‘Don’t come any closer, Prefect Dreyfus.’
But Dreyfus was already within view of the flight deck by the time she finished her sentence. The connecting door was open. Blood droplets formed a cloud of little scarlet balloons, pulled into perfect spheres by surface tension. Lansing Chen was dead. He was buckled into the right-hand command seat, his head lolling at an unnatural angle, swaying slowly from side to side as the air shifted. His neck had been gashed open with the whiphound Paula Saavedra was still holding. She was buckled into the left-hand chair, rotated around to face Dreyfus and Sparver. She had one leg hooked higher than the other. She held the whiphound in her right hand, while her left hovered above one of the luminous blue controls on the console.
‘You didn’t have to kill Chen,’ Dreyfus said, tightening his grip on his own whiphound.
Behind, he heard Sparver speak into his bracelet. ‘Get me Mercier. We need a crash team at the nose. This is a medical emergency.’
‘I didn’t want to kill him,’ Saavedra said, with real menace. ‘Chen was a good man, Prefect. He served Firebrand well, until the end. It’s not his fault that he’s been having doubts.’
‘What kind of doubts?’
‘None of us liked what happened to Ruskin-Sartorious, but most of us saw it as an unfortunate but unavoidable occurrence. A casualty of war, Prefect. Not Chen, though. He felt we’d gone too far; that nine hundred and sixty lives were too high a price to pay for security. He felt it was time to blow our cover.’
‘He’d have been right.’
The tip of her whiphound gleamed dark red. ‘No, he wouldn’t. Nothing matters more now than keeping the Clockmaker’s new location
hidden.’
‘I agree wholeheartedly. Aurora mustn’t learn of the Clockmaker’s whereabouts. But Panoply needs that information more than ever.’
‘Ordinarily, I might have agreed you. But Panoply is compromised. Someone’s been sniffing around Firebrand for days. Probably the same someone who helped arrange the attack on Ruskin-Sartorious.’
‘That was Senior Prefect Gaffney. He’s out of the picture now. I took care of that myself, so you can start trusting me.’
‘Can I, really? You’ve done very well to track us down, Prefect. How do I know you aren’t just following up on Gaffney’s unfinished business?’
‘I am, in a way - I had to find you. Why’d you have to kill Chen, Paula?’
‘I told you - he got cold feet at the last moment. Decided he’d rather stay here and face the music. I couldn’t let that happen, Prefect. Just as I can’t let you keep me here now.’
‘Nothing bad will happen to you,’ Dreyfus said. But if he’d meant it earlier, it was an empty promise now. Nothing could excuse the murder of a fellow prefect.
‘Even if killed myself, you’d trawl my corpse to get the location of the Clockmaker. Therefore I must leave. Can you see my left hand, Prefect?’
Dreyfus nodded. ‘I guess you’re holding it there for a reason.’
‘When I boarded this ship, I brought four whiphounds with me. They’re set to grenade mode, maximum yield, keyed to this console. Don’t go looking for them - they’re well hidden.’
‘Whiphounds won’t detonate inside Panoply. There’s a positional safeguard.’
‘Which I overrode, without difficulty.’ She shook her head disappointedly. ’I’m Firebrand, Prefect. Can you imagine the lengths we’ve had to go to to maintain our effectiveness and secrecy over the last nine years? There isn’t a trick in the book we don’t know.’
‘Don’t do it, Paula. We need this bay in one piece.’
‘I won’t do it unless you prevent me from leaving. But if you try to prevent me, I won’t hesitate. The blast won’t do significant damage to Panoply - it might put this bay out of action, true - but it definitely won’t leave enough of me for you to trawl.’
‘I need to know where the Clockmaker is,’ Dreyfus insisted.
‘I can’t take the risk of telling you. As far as I’m concerned, Panoply is already compromised. Firebrand is the only remaining part of the organisation capable of handling things from now on.’
‘If you think I can’t be trusted, why did you tell me that the Clockmaker’s still alive?’
‘I told you nothing Aurora won’t already know. Now leave the cutter, Prefects.’
‘We’ll track you. Wherever you go. You’re just prolonging the inevitable.’
‘There isn’t a ship in Panoply that can be prepped and launched in time to follow me.’ She allowed a glint of self-satisfaction to shine through. ‘I know: I checked. And you won’t be able to track me. This cutter is CTC-dark. Maybe if there wasn’t a Bandwide crisis going down, stretching all our resources, you might have a chance. But you don’t, so you may as well not even bother. I’m dropping off the map. You won’t hear from me again.’
‘You might hear from me,’ Dreyfus said.
‘Get off this ship. Then make sure those bay doors are opened. You’ve got two minutes.’
‘Give us Chen’s body.’
‘So you can run a post-mortem trawl to find out what he knew about the Clockmaker? Nice try.’
No, Dreyfus thought: not for that reason at all. He’d never counted on extracting anything useful from the dead. But he was sure Demikhov’s crash team would welcome some practice at stabilising a severed head before they had to do it for real.
‘Have it your way, Paula.’ Dreyfus looked back at Sparver. ‘We’re leaving. She may be bluffing about those whiphounds, but we can’t take the chance.’
‘Boss,’ Sparver said quietly, ‘I already have her marked. I can put my own whiphound on her in under a second.’
‘Try it,’ Saavedra said. ‘If you’re feeling lucky. You have about ninety seconds now, by the way.’
‘You’re making a terrible mistake, Paula,’ Dreyfus said.
‘So are you. Get off the ship.’
Dreyfus nodded at Sparver and the two of them retreated back into the docking connector. The airlock closed, isolating the ship. Dreyfus cuffed his bracelet and called through to Thyssen, the officer in charge of bay operations. ‘This is Dreyfus. Open the doors. Let her go.’
‘Prefect, we can’t afford to lose that cutter,’ Thyssen said.
‘We lose the bay if we don’t lose the cutter. Open the doors.’
Thyssen didn’t need to be told twice. A moment later the vast jaws of the armoured doors began to ease wide, interlocking teeth pulling away from each other to reveal a sea of false stars and the darkside curve of Yellowstone, cusped by a line of indigo. The launching rack pushed out on pistons, shoving Saavedra’s cutter into open space. Engines kicked in, spiking out needle-thin thrust lines. The cutter surged away at maximum burn.
‘Can we get another ship out there?’ Dreyfus asked.
‘Not fast enough to intercept,’ Thyssen said. ‘We’ll track her as best we can, but I can’t promise anything.’
Through the window of the docking connector, Dreyfus watched Saavedra’s ship fall into the sea of stars, following it by eye until he could no longer distinguish it from the lights of distant habitats.
’It’s very, very bad,’ Jane Aumonier’s hovering face told Dreyfus and the assembled seniors, while the Solid Orrery displayed six red lights amidst a sea of twinkling emerald. ‘Weevils penetrated and occupied Carousel New Brazilia nine hours, thirty minutes ago. We detected manufactory warm-up two hours ago. Eighteen minutes ago, the doors opened and newly minted weevils began to emerge. Squadron density and flow throughput is consistent with what we’ve already seen in Aubusson and Szlumper Oneill.’ She paused, allowing that to sink in before delivering the grim remainder of her summary. ‘We lost Flammarion not long after Brazilia. The manufactories are on-line there as well. Based on what we’ve observed in the other habitats, we can expect weevil output to commence in ten to fifteen minutes. We’ve failed to contain the outflow from Aubusson and Szlumper Oneill, but we were at least able to reduce the number of weevils, which must have had some measurable effect on Aurora’s rate of spread. Now we’ll have no chance, short of nuclear intervention at the production sites. Of course, that won’t stop any weevils that have already departed.’
‘Which habitats are the new weevils targeting?’ asked Clearmountain.
‘If there’s one crumb of comfort to extract from any of this,’ Aumonier said, ’it’s that Lillian’s simulation appears to accurately predict Aurora’s intentions. That may change in the future if Aurora realises that we’re guessing her movements, but for the moment it does at least allow us to concentrate our evacuation efforts where they’re most useful. The weevil flow from Brazilia is aimed at the Toriyuma-Murchison Spindle, one of the ten habitats we’ve already prioritised.’
‘How are we doing, evacuation-wise?’ asked Dreyfus, rubbing at his eyes.
‘If I might ...’ Baudry began, clutching a compad as if it was the only thing in the universe she could depend on. ‘The Toriyuma-Murchison Spindle contains ... contained ... five hundred and eleven thousand citizens. According to docking staff, we’ve now processed four hundred and sixty thousand, leaving a surplus of—’
‘Fifty-one thousand,’ Dreyfus said, before Baudry could finish. ‘How long until we get them out?’
‘Local constables report a non-compliance level of one per cent. I’m afraid we’ll just have to abandon them - we don’t have time to argue with people if they really don’t want saving. As for those still awaiting transport, our current estimate predicts complete evacuation within four hours, twenty minutes, assuming we can get the liners in and out without incident.’
‘There’s a liner docked now?’ Dreyfus asked.
‘Not a hig
h-capacity vehicle. The biggest ship we have on-station is the medium-capacity liner High Catherine. She can carry six thousand at a time, but she takes a long time to load. The larger ship we’ve been using, the Bellatrix, can take ten thousand, but we’re also using her to offload people from the Persistent Vegetative State.’
‘Why are we risking the lives of living citizens to save a bunch of self-induced coma-cases?’ Clearmountain asked.
‘Because they’re citizens as well,’ Aumonier snapped. ‘No one gets priority treatment here. Not on my watch.’
‘It’s a moot point in any case,’ Baudry said, for Clearmountain’s benefit. ‘Even if we reassigned the Bellatrix to deal solely with the evacuees from the Toriyuma-MurchisonSpindle, we still wouldn’t get them all out in time.’
‘Correct,’ Aumonier said. ‘Weevil contact is anticipated in ... fifty-five minutes, eleven seconds. With local constables tasked to assist in the evacuation at the docking hubs, the weevils will have a clear run to the polling core. If events follow the pattern we’ve already seen, the Toriyuma-Murchison manufactory is scheduled to start weevil production in under ten hours.’
‘Then the evacuees still have all that time,’ Dreyfus said. ‘We can get them out.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Aumonier said, her image looking at him as if no one else was in the room, ‘but what we’re dealing with here is akin to a state of plague. So far as we know, Aurora can seize control of habitats by reaching their polling cores. What we don’t know is what other capabilities she might have up her sleeve if we give her the chance to try them out. I cannot run the risk of letting her hop from habitat to habitat by another means. And that includes evacuation vehicles.’
‘But Jane—’
‘We keep moving them out until the absolute last moment,’ she said. ‘But the instant weevils make groundfall on Toriyuma-Murchison, I’m pulling out the liners.’ Just to be absolutely clear to all concerned, she added: ‘Even if there are still people in the docking tubes.’
‘And then what?’ Dreyfus asked, even though he knew what she was going to say.