It was not a sound Dreyfus ever wanted to hear again.
‘Do you have that image ready for me?’
‘Zeroing in now, sir. I’ll put it on the wall.’
Part of the transparent hull revealed an enlargement of the prow of the lighthugger. It zoomed in dizzyingly. For a moment Dreyfus was overwhelmed by the intricate, gothic detail of the ship’s spire-like hull. Then he made out the one thing that didn’t belong.
There was a figure on the hull. The spacesuited form was spread out, limbs splayed as if it had been nailed in place. Dreyfus knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he was looking at Captain Dravidian.
And that Captain Dravidian was still alive.
The Ultras had done a thorough job with their victim. They’d nailed his extremities to the hull, with his head nearest to the prow. Some form of piton had been rammed or shot into his forearms and lower legs, puncturing suit armour and penetrating the hull’s fabric. Dreyfus judged that it was the same kind of piton that ships used to guy themselves to asteroids or comets: hyperdiamond-tipped, viciously barbed against accidental retraction. The entry wounds had been sealed over with rapid-setting caulk, preventing pressure loss. Thus immobilised, Dravidian had been welded to the hull along the edges of his limbs and the midpoint of his torso. A thick silvery line of fillet-weld connected him to the plating of the ship, creating a seamless bond between the armour of his suit and the material of the hull. Dreyfus - standing weightless next to Dravidian, anchored to the hull by the soles of his boots - stared at the spectacle and realised that no expertise with cutters would suffice to free his witness in the time remaining.
He was going to ride his ship all the way to its doom, whether that meant a collision in the Glitter Band or an instant of nuclear annihilation. Through Dravidian’s faceplate, eyes tracked Dreyfus and Sparver. They were wide and alert, but utterly without hope.
Dravidian knew exactly how good his chances were.
Dreyfus used his left hand to unreel the froptic line from his right wrist. The design of Dravidian’s suit was unfamiliar to him: it was probably a jerry-built lash-up of home-made parts and ancient pieces, some of them dating back to the era of chemical rocketry. But almost all suits were engineered for a degree of inter-compatibility. Air- and power-line jacks conformed to a handful of standard interfaces, and had done for centuries. It was the same for comms inputs.
Dreyfus found the corresponding jack in Dravidian’s sleeve and slid the froptic in. He felt the minute click as the contacts docked, followed an instant later by a hiss of foreign air-circulator noise in his helmet. He was hearing Dravidian’s life-support system.
‘Captain Dravidian? I hope you can hear me. I’m Field Prefect Tom Dreyfus, of Panoply.’
There was a pause longer than Dreyfus had been expecting. He was almost ready to give up on the attempt to talk when he heard Dravidian take in a laboured breath.
‘I can hear you, Prefect Dreyfus. And yes, I’m Dravidian. It was very astute of you to guess.’
‘I wish we could have reached you sooner. I heard your transmission. You sounded in pain.’
There came something like a chuckle. ‘I was.’
‘And now?’
‘That at least has passed. Tell me: what have they done? I felt great pain in my extremities . . . but I couldn’t see. They were holding me down. Did they cut me into pieces?’
Dreyfus surveyed the welded form, as if he needed to reassure himself that all of Dravidian was there. ‘No,’ he said. ‘They didn’t cut you into pieces.’
‘That’s good. It means I go with some dignity.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t understand.’
‘There is a scale of punishment amongst Ultras, when a crime is said to have been committed. As it is, my guilt has been deemed highly probable. But not certain. If they thought all possibility of innocence had been eliminated, then they would have cut me into pieces.’
‘They’ve nailed you to the ship,’ Dreyfus said. ‘Nailed you and then welded you.’
‘Yes, I saw the light.’
‘I can’t get you out of that suit, or cut the suit away from the hull. I can’t cut away a section of the hull, either. Not in thirty minutes.’
‘Thirty minutes?’
‘I’m afraid I have orders to destroy this ship. I am sorry that you have been made to suffer, Captain. I can promise you that my justice will be swift and clean, when it comes.’
‘Nukes?’
‘It’ll be fast. You have my word on that.’
‘That is kind of you, Prefect. And no, I didn’t seriously think there was any possibility of rescue. When Ultras do something . . .’ He left the remark hanging, unfinished.
Dreyfus nodded, for there was no need to complete the sentence.
‘But you talk of justice,’ Dravidian continued, when he had recovered either breath or clarity of mind. ‘I assume that means you have a fixed opinion as to my guilt?’
‘A terrible crime took place, Captain. The evidence in my possession leaves little room for doubt that your ship was involved.’
‘I ran,’ Dravidian said. ‘I ran for the shelter of the Parking Swarm, thinking I would be safe there, that my argument would fall on sympathetic ears. I should never have run. I should have trusted your justice over that of my people.’
‘I’d have listened to whatever you had to say,’ replied Dreyfus.
‘What happened . . . was not what it appeared.’
‘Your drive did destroy that habitat.’
‘Yes, I concede that much.’
‘You left it in a state of anger, having been cheated out of a lucrative deal.’
‘I was sorry that the family did not choose to close negotiations. But that doesn’t mean I planned to kill them all.’
‘It wasn’t an accident, Dravidian. No one’s going to buy that.’
‘I never said it was. It was a deliberate act of murder against an innocent habitat. But I had no hand in it.’ With sudden intensity, he added: ‘Nor did my crew.’
‘Either it happened or it didn’t.’
‘Someone made it happen, Prefect. Someone infiltrated the Accompaniment of Shadows and used her against the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble. We were a weapon, not the murderer.’
‘You mean someone got aboard the ship and worked out how to turn the engines on and off at just the right moment to kill the Bubble?’
‘Yes,’ Dravidian said resignedly, as if all his hopes of being believed had just evaporated. ‘Exactly that.’
‘I wish I could take you at your word.’
‘Prefect, ask yourself this: what could I possibly stand to gain from lying now? My crew has been slaughtered, burnt alive aboard their own ship. They let me hear their screams, their pleas for mercy. My vessel has been ripped apart like a rabid animal tossed to the wolves. I have been tortured and welded to the hull. Very shortly I am going to die.’
‘I still—’ Dreyfus began.
‘I don’t know why anyone wanted this to happen, Prefect. It’s not my job to answer that question, it’s yours. But I swear no crime was committed by my crew.’
‘We need to start thinking about getting off this thing,’ Sparver said quietly.
Dreyfus held up a silencing hand. To Dravidian he said: ‘But surely someone in your crew had to have been responsible.’
‘No one that I trusted. No one that I really considered crew. But someone else . . . maybe.’
‘Who?’
‘We took on new recruits after we arrived around Yellowstone. Some crew left to join other ships; others came aboard. It’s possible that one of those recruits . . .’
‘Captain?’
Dravidian’s tone changed, as if something new had just occurred to him. ‘Something odd happened. Our shuttle developed a fault. That was why we had to move the entire ship close to Ruskin-Sartorious, rather than just shuttle over to it from the Swarm. There wasn’t time to worry about the cause of the fault, not when we had a deal to close. But now that I loo
k back on it . . . now that I don’t have any other distractions . . . the more I’m convinced that the shuttle’s malfunction could only have been sabotage.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Someone put the shuttle out of action, Prefect. Someone wanted an excuse to bring the Accompaniment of Shadows within kill-range of the Bubble. Until now I’ve been thinking that whatever happened, whatever was done in our name, was done in anger, because of the way that deal collapsed. That maybe someone on the ship thought Ruskin-Sartorious needed to be punished for that. Now I’m not so sure.’ He fell silent, the face behind the glass completely still. Just when Dreyfus was starting to think that the captain had died or lost consciousness, his lips moved again: ‘Now I’m wondering if it wasn’t premeditated.’
‘Not just murder, but murder in cold blood?’
‘I can only tell you what happened.’
‘These recruits . . . can you tell me anything about them?’
‘Six or seven of them. The usual mix. Hardcore types who’ve already crewed on other ships. Green-behind-the-ears newcomers who don’t know one end of a hull from the other. I didn’t meet any of them in person, just delivered the usual blood-and-thunder speech when they came aboard.’
‘No names, nothing?’
‘I’m sorry, Prefect. If I had more to give you, you’d be hearing it.’
Dreyfus nodded. There was no earthly reason for Dravidian to withhold evidence now, if he truly believed in his own innocence. ‘What I don’t understand is why anyone would want to destroy the Bubble, if it wasn’t revenge for a deal that went sour?’
‘You’re the investigator, Prefect. You tell me.’
‘You’re going to die,’ Dreyfus said softly. ‘Nothing I say or do can change that now.’
‘But you believe I may be telling the truth.’
‘I believe that the investigation has yet to run its course. If the facts confirm your innocence, I’ll make sure that they’re heard.’
‘I hope you’re good at your job.’
‘That’s not for me to say.’
‘Whoever did this was prepared to kill nearly a thousand people. More now that my crew have paid with their lives. They won’t take kindly to a prefect snooping around trying to undermine their good work.’
‘They don’t pay us to be popular.’
‘You strike me as a decent man, Prefect Dreyfus. I can hear it in your voice. We Ultras aren’t such bad judges of character. My crew were decent people, too. Even if you can’t exonerate me, I beg of you this much: do what you can to lift this shame from their heads. They didn’t deserve to die like this. The Accompaniment was a good ship, right to the end. She didn’t deserve to die like this either.’ He hesitated, then added: ‘How are those nukes coming along?’
Dreyfus glanced at Sparver. Sparver tapped his sleeve, as if there was a wristwatch there.
‘Twenty minutes, Boss.’
Dreyfus looked along the prow, in the direction of the dead ship’s flight. He was also looking straight at Yellowstone and the Glitter Band. The planet was still lit up on its dayside. It was not his imagination that the arc of the Band appeared wider than when he had last seen it. He felt as if he could make out the twinkling granularity of individual habitats. With time and patience, and his ingrained knowledge of their orbits, he was sure he could even have begun to pick out the largest structures by eye. There, for instance: wasn’t that silvery glint near the planet’s westward limb Carousel New Venice, moving in the congested real estate of the central orbits? And a little to the right: wasn’t that string of ruby-red sparks the signature of the eight habitats of the Remortal Concatenation? If so, then that blue-tinged glint to the east had to be House Sammartini, or perhaps the Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies.
‘I think I’m about done here, Captain.’
‘Just one thing, Prefect. Maybe it’s nothing, or maybe it’ll help you. You’ll have to decide for yourself.’
‘Go on.’
‘Our negotiations with Ruskin-Sartorious were conducted with the usual degree of secrecy. It’s how we do things. Yet someone from outside the Bubble was still able to contact Delphine and promise her a better offer than the one already on the table. That means someone knew what was going on.’
‘Could have been a lucky break. They saw your ship parked near the Bubble; they knew Delphine’s art was on the market, put two and two together.’
‘And outbid us by a calculatedly effective margin? I don’t think so, Prefect. Someone had already gone to great lengths to position the Accompaniment as a murder weapon. All they needed then was to make it look as if we struck back in anger. For that they needed a plausible motive.’
‘So what you’re saying is . . . the whole thing about the deal collapsing was just a ruse, to provide a justification for you hitting back?’
‘Exactly so.’
In his head Dreyfus felt the ominous sliding of mental chess pieces moving into a new and threatening configuration. ‘Then there must have been another reason why someone wanted to destroy the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble.’
‘Now all you have to do is find out why,’ Dravidian answered.
Captain Pell let the missiles streak away, sprinting across the gap to the Accompaniment of Shadows. At twenty gees they reached the wreck in slightly more than a minute and a half. In the last instant before impact, the missiles fanned out and then vectored in again from different angles, so that their bright fusion exhausts formed the talons of a gripping three-clawed hand, closing around Dravidian’s ship with swift predatory eagerness.
The three nuclear explosions blurred together into a single inseparable flash. When the radiation and debris had dissipated, nothing remained of the killing ship, nor of its captain.
Dreyfus turned from the hull window with a cold, hard feeling that he still had work to do.
CHAPTER 7
In the cloistered cool of his private security annexe, Senior Prefect Sheridan Gaffney found himself looking at the face of Aurora. She was coming through on an untraceable channel, their mutual communication disguised as an exchange of routine housekeeping data. He’d been expecting her; he’d composed his thoughts and marshalled a set of likely questions and responses, and yet still she made him feel flustered and ill-prepared, simply by the withering force of her regard. This, he thought, and not for the first time, was how it must feel to be interrogated by a goddess.
‘It’s been a while, Sheridan,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry,’ he replied, wiping a sleeve across his brow. ‘Things have been complicated around here. But everything’s under control.’
‘Everything, Sheridan? Then you’re confident that there’ll be no untoward ramifications concerning the Ruskin-Sartorious incident?’
‘I don’t think so.’
He was looking at a child-woman, a girl of indeterminate age, sitting on a simple wooden throne. She wore a gold-trimmed brocaded gown of dark green over a brocaded dress of fiery red, patterned again in gold. Her fingers curled around the edges of the armrests, toying with them in a manner that suggested mild restlessness more than actual boredom or impatience. Her auburn hair was parted in the middle and fell to her shoulders in perfect symmetry, framing a face of startling, ravishing serenity. Behind her head, suggesting a halo, was a shining gold motif worked into bas-relief panelling. Her eyes were liquid blue, brimming with puzzled intelligence. He knew he would do anything for those eyes, that face.
‘You don’t think so?’ she asked.
‘Dreyfus is on the case, unfortunately. I could do without him nosing around in the whole business, but there was no way I could get him off the investigation without drawing attention to myself.’
‘You’re head of security, Sheridan. Couldn’t you have been more creative?’
‘I’ve had my hands full preparing the ground for Thalia Ng. That’s required more than enough creativity, I assure you.’
‘Nonetheless, this man - this Dreyfus - is a rogue element. He must
be brought under control.’
‘Not that easy,’ Gaffney said, feeling as if they’d had this discussion a thousand times already. ‘He’s Jane Aumonier’s pet field prefect. She’s even given him Pangolin clearance, despite my protestations. If I interfere too much, I’ll have Jane on my back, metaphorically speaking.’ He tested Aurora with a smile. ‘Right now that would not be a good idea.’
‘Jane is a problem,’ Aurora said, signally failing to acknowledge his smile. ‘We can’t put off dealing with her for ever, either. Once the Thalia situation is stable, I’d like you to direct some energy into removing Aumonier.’
Gaffney dredged up some outrage. ‘I hope you’re not asking me to kill her.’
‘We’re not murderers,’ Aurora said, looking suitably shocked at the suggestion.
‘We just took out nine hundred and sixty people. If that’s not murder, it’s a hell of a way to make friends.’
‘They were the unavoidable victims of a war that has already begun, Sheridan. I grieve for those people. If I could have spared one of them, I would have. But we must think of the millions we shall save, not the hundreds we must sacrifice.’
‘Not that you’d blink an eyelid at killing Jane, if she got in our way.’
‘She doesn’t have to die, Sheridan. She’s a brave woman and a good prefect. But she has principles. They’re admirable, in their own way, but they’d compel her to obstruct our arrangements. She would commit the error of placing loyalty to Panoply above the greater good of the people.’
Gaffney ruminated over the possibilities. ‘Aumonier’s been under a lot of pressure lately, that’s for sure.’
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