The Prefect

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘You mean we could go any second?’

  ‘If the whiphound works. If the machines haven’t already broken through and stopped him.’ She knew she ought to feel gratitude, but instead she felt betrayed. ‘Damn him! He shouldn’t have brought me back up here. It wasted too much time!’

  ‘Maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea if one of us—’

  Redon never got to finish her sentence. Judging by the force of the blast, felt through Thalia’s spine as it transmitted itself through the fabric of the polling core sphere, the whiphound must have detonated at nearly its maximum theoretical yield. It had been a new unit, she remembered belatedly: she’d checked it out of the armoury only a couple of weeks ago. There would still have been a lot of energy left inside it, anxiously seeking release.

  The sphere rocked appreciably: Thalia saw the landscape tilt and then settle again at its former angle. The blast had been very brief: a spike of intense sound followed by a few seconds of echoing repercussions. Now all was silent again. The sphere was still. The landscape outside was still.

  ‘It didn’t work,’ she said. ‘We’re not moving. It didn’t fucking work.’

  ‘Wait,’ Caillebot said quietly.

  ‘It didn’t work, Citizen. We’re not going anywhere. The blast wasn’t sufficient. I’ve failed you, used up our one chance.’

  ‘Wait,’ he said.

  ‘Something’s happening,’ Cuthbertson said. ‘I can hear it. It sounds like metal straining. Can’t you?’

  ‘We’re tilting,’ Redon said. ‘Look.’

  Thalia craned her neck in time to see the white ball of the model polling core sphere roll across the floor, towards the window facing them.

  From somewhere below there came a kind of twanging sound, as if the energy stored in a stretched spar had just been catastrophically released. The twanging sound was followed in quick succession by another, then a third, and then a volley of them too close together to count.

  The tilt of the floor increased. Thalia felt her weight beginning to tug on the upright to which she was bound. The sphere must have been at ten or fifteen degrees to the horizontal already. She heard another series of metallic sounds: shearing and buckling noises, less like the failure of structural components than the cries of animals in distress.

  The angle of the tilt reached twenty degrees and continued increasing.

  ‘We’re going over,’ she said. ‘It’s happening.’

  Loose clothes and debris skittered across the floor, coming to rest along the curve of the outer wall. The architectural model slid noisily, then shattered itself to pieces. Thirty degrees, easy. Thalia felt an unpleasant tingling in her stomach. The landscape was tilting alarmingly. Through the windows, she could see aspects of the surrounding campus that had been obscured before. Suddenly it looked much further down than she had been imagining. Five hundred metres was a long way to fall. She remembered Caillebot’s reaction when she’d outlined the plan: That doesn’t look survivable.

  Maybe he’d been right all along.

  Now the tilt was increasing faster. Forty degrees, then forty-five. Thalia’s arms felt as if they were being wrenched out of their sockets, but it was only the effect of her bodyweight so far. When the sphere started rolling, it was going to get much worse. Fifty degrees. The lower extremity of the stalk was beginning to come into view through the windows. In one brief glimpse she knew she’d been right about the war machines. They covered it like a black mould, reaching as high up the shaft as it was possible to see. They must have been very close to the sphere itself.

  Something gave way. Thalia felt the sphere drop several metres, as if the upper part of the stalk had crumbled or subsided under the changing load. And then suddenly they were rolling, pitching down the side of the stalk, the angle of tilt exceeding ninety degrees and then continuing to climb. The sphere shook and roared. There was no time to analyse the situation, or even judge how far down the stalk they had rolled. There was only room in Thalia’s head for a single, simple thought: It’s working... so far.

  She felt a momentary increase in the forces tugging at her body and judged that the sphere had reached the base of the stalk and changed its direction of roll from the vertical to the horizontal. She tried to time the duration of each roll, hoping to judge the distance they had travelled and detect some evidence that the sphere was slowing. But it was hopeless trying to concentrate on such matters.

  ‘I think,’ she heard Caillebot call out, between grunts of discomfort, ‘that we’ve cleared the perimeter.’

  ‘Really?’ Thalia called back, raising her voice above the juggernaut rumble of their progress.

  ‘We’re still rolling pretty fast. I hope we don’t just bounce right over the window band.’

  It was a possibility neither Thalia nor Parnasse had considered. They’d guessed that the sphere would have enough momentum to reach the edge of the band, but they had never thought about it moving so fast that it would skim right across, moving too quickly to stress the window enough to break. Now Thalia realised that they were open to the awful possibility that the sphere might traverse the entire window band and come to a rolling halt on the next stretch of solid ground.

  ‘Can you see the band yet?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ called out Meriel Redon. ‘I think I can. But something’s wrong.’

  ‘We’re coming in too fast?’

  ‘Not that. Shouldn’t we be rolling in a straight line?’

  ‘Yes,’ Thalia said. ‘Aren’t we?’

  ‘We seem to be curving. I can see the window band, but we’re approaching it obliquely.’

  Thalia was confused and worried. They’d always assumed that the sphere would follow a straight course once it reached the base of the stalk, with only minor deviations caused by obstacles and friction. But now that she concentrated on the tumbling landscape and tried to make out the grey line that marked the edge of the window band, she knew that Redon was right. They were clearly off-course, at far too sharp an angle to be explained by the sphere crashing through the remains of the campus grounds.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘We went over this. It should be a straight roll all the way to the window band.’

  ‘We’re still going to hit the window band,’ Cuthbertson said, his voice reduced to a strangled approximation of itself. ‘You’ve just forgotten about Coriolis force.’

  ‘We should be moving in a straight line,’ Thalia said.

  ‘We are. But the habitat’s rotating, and it’s trying to get us to follow a helical trajectory instead. It’s all about reference frames, Prefect.’

  ‘Coriolis force,’ Thalia said. ‘Shit. After everything they taught me in Panoply, I forgot about Coriolis force. We’re not on a planet. We’re inside a fucking spinning tube.’

  She’d become aware that the rate of roll was diminishing, the landscape cartwheeling around at half the speed from when they had begun the journey. She could begin to pick out details, landmarks that the Aubusson citizens had already noted.

  ‘We’ll be okay,’ Cuthbertson said. ‘We’re just going to hit a different part of the window band than we were expecting.’

  ‘Will that make any difference?’ she asked.

  ‘Don’t think so. We should break through as easily there as anywhere else.’

  ‘Any second now,’ Meriel Redon said. ‘We’re coming up on the band. Get ready, everyone. There’s going to be a jolt when we hit the edge of the land strip.’

  Thalia braced herself, in so far as bracing was possible when she was already bound like a sacrificial offering. She felt a moment of giddy vertigo as the sphere rolled over the edge of the landscape strip and crashed down onto the vast glassy plain of the window band. The ride became eerily smooth as they trundled over the geometrically perfect surface. With little friction save air resistance, the rate of roll was holding more or less steady.

  ‘Break,’ Thalia whispered. ‘Please break. And please let us be airtight when it happens.’

&n
bsp; Dreyfus knocked on the door to the tactical room before stepping through. A certain deference was advisable. Dreyfus knew that his Pangolin clearance put him on a level footing with the seniors in some respects, but he saw no point in rubbing salt into that particular wound.

  ‘Dreyfus,’ Baudry said, breaking off from whatever discussion she’d been having with the other seniors. ‘I’m afraid you’re too late. You’ve just missed the demise of the Persistent Vegetative State.’

  Without sitting down, Dreyfus moved to a position close to the Solid Orrery. The number of red lights hadn’t changed since last time he’d seen it, but he could draw no consolation from that, knowing what it had cost just to slow Aurora’s advance. ‘How many’d we get out?’

  ‘One hundred and seventeen thousand, out of a total population of one hundred and thirty. Not bad, all things considered, especially as we were basically dealing with corpses.’

  ‘We’ve now concentrated our evacuation efforts on the targets we think Aurora will go for next,’ Clearmountain said. ‘Our monitors show that the weevil flows are already changing direction, now they know the Spindle and the PVS are out of the picture.’

  ‘You mean nuked“,’ Dreyfus said.

  ‘Whatever. So far, though, we can’t say where the flows are most likely to hit next. There are a number of possible candidates. Unfortunately, none of them are habitats where we’ve already started evacuating. We’re starting from scratch.’

  ‘Where are the evacuees going?’

  He could tell from their reactions that his question wasn’t a popular one. ‘In an ideal world, we’d ship them far across the Glitter Band, well beyond Aurora’s expansion front,’ Clearmountain said. ‘But even with the high-burn liners, that would involve an unacceptable round-trip delay. Our only practical strategy has been to move the citizens to relatively close habitats, so that the turnaround time can be minimised.’

  ‘Go on.’

  Clearmountain cast a glance at the other seniors. ‘Unfortunately, Aurora’s projected front is now beginning to impinge on some of the habs where we’ve been moving people.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Which means that when we start evacuating those habs, we’re also going to have to shift the recent refugees. With our current resources the situation is borderline containable, but as the front expands, and the number of endangered habitats grows geometrically, the refugee burden will soon become the predominant limiting factor.’ Clearmountain offered his palms in a gesture of well-intentioned surrender. ‘Some tough calls may have to be made when that happens, Prefect Dreyfus.’

  ‘Today we nuked two occupied habitats. We’ve already made tough calls.’

  ‘What I mean,’ Clearmountain said, with a strained smile, ‘is that we may have to focus our activities where they can do the most good.’

  ‘Isn’t that exactly what we’re already doing?’

  ‘Not to the degree that may shortly become necessary. In the interests of maximising the number of citizens we can evacuate away from Aurora’s takeover front, we may have to prioritise assistance to those citizens least likely to hinder our efforts.’

  ‘I see where you’re going. You think we should leave the coma cases to die.’

  ‘It’s not as if they’ll know what hit them.’

  ‘All those citizens went into voluntary coma on the understanding that the PVS would be looking after them, and that Panoply would be standing by if the PVS failed in its care. That was a promise we made to those people.’

  Clearmountain looked exasperated. ‘You’re worried about breaking a promise to a citizen with the brain functions of a cabbage?’

  ‘I’m just wondering where this ends. So the coma cases are inconvenient to us. Fine, we lose them. Who’s next? Citizens who can’t move as fast as the rest? Citizens we just don’t like the look of? Citizens who maybe didn’t vote the right way the last time there was a poll on Panoply’s right to arms?’

  ‘I think you’re being needlessly melodramatic,’ Clearmountain said. ‘There was a reason for this visit, wasn’t there, other than to cast doubts on an already complicated evacuation programme?’

  ‘Clearmountain’s right,’ Jane Aumonier said, her image speaking from her usual position at the table. ‘The coma cases are a blessed nuisance, and we’d have a much easier time of it if we just pulled life-support on the lot of them. They’re going to retard our evacuation programme and therefore increase the danger to the rest of the citizenry. But Tom’s even more right. If we cross this line just once - if we say these citizens matter less than those citizens - we may as well hand Aurora the keys to the kingdom. But we’re not going to do that. This is Panoply. Everything we stand for says we’re better than that.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Dreyfus said, his voice a hushed whisper.

  ‘But we can’t let the coma cases impose too heavy a drag on the evacuation programme,’ Aumonier continued. ‘That’s why I want them dealt with now, so we won’t have to worry about them in the future. I want them leapfrogged well ahead of the front - out of the Glitter Band, even, if we can identify a suitable holding point.’

  ‘That’ll tie up ships and manpower,’ Baudry said.

  ‘I know. But it has to be done. Do you have any suggestions, Lillian?’

  ‘We might consider an approach to Hospice Idlewild. They’re used to dealing with sudden influxes of incapacitated sleepers, so they should be able to handle the coma cases.’

  ‘Excellent proposal. Can you sort that out?’

  ‘I’ll get right on it.’ After a lengthy pause she said, ‘Supreme Prefect Aumonier...’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s been nearly six hours now. Since Aurora’s transmission.’

  ‘I’m well aware of that, thank you very much.’

  ‘I’m just saying... given what we now know of her capabilities ... and the difficulties we’re having with the evacuation effort, and the finite number of nuclear devices in our arsenal—’

  ‘Yes, Lillian?’

  ‘I think it would be prudent at least to consider Aurora’s proposal.’ Her words came out awkwardly, the strain written in her face. ‘If her success is guaranteed, then we have an onus to do everything we can to protect the citizenry during the transition phase. Aurora has threatened to start euthanising citizens in the habitats she already holds. I believe she will follow through on that threat unless we broadcast the takeover code to the rest of the ten thousand. If we wish to save as many lives as possible, we may have no choice but to comply with her demand.’

  ‘I don’t think we’re quite ready to hand her the keys to the castle,’ Dreyfus said, before anyone else had time to respond to Baudry’s words.

  ‘With all due respect, Field Prefect Dreyfus—’ she began exasperatedly.

  ‘With all due respect, Senior Prefect Baudry, shut up.’ Dreyfus looked pointedly away from Baudry, to Clearmountain. ‘I dropped by for a reason, and it wasn’t to rubber-stamp our surrender. You have any objections if I commandeer the Orrery for a moment?’

  ‘If you need to run the Orrery, you have authorisation to conjure a duplicate in your quarters,’ Clearmountain said.

  ‘Let him run it,’ Aumonier said warningly. ‘What have you got for us, Tom?’

  ‘It may be nothing. On the other hand, it may be a clue to the present location of the Clockmaker.’

  Aumonier lifted an eyebrow. He hadn’t briefed her in advance, so she was as much in the dark as everyone else in the room. ‘Then I think you should continue, with all haste.’

  ‘I’ll need to wind back a few hours. Everyone happy with that?’

  ‘Do what you need to do,’ Aumonier said.

  Dreyfus began to spin back the Solid Orrery to the point when he had begun tracking Saavedra’s cutter. ‘Let’s remind ourselves what we’re looking at here,’ he said, as the timetag digits reversed themselves. ‘The Orrery’s more than just a real-time record of the disposition of the Glitter Band and its habitats. It also shows Yellowstone. That
isn’t just some static representation of what the planet looks like from space. It’s a constantly changing three-dimensional image, pieced together from countless orbital viewpoints.’

  ‘We’re well aware of this,’ Clearmountain said.

  ‘Hear him out,’ purred Aumonier.

  ‘Everything that happens on Yellowstone, the Orrery keeps a record of it. Changes in the weather, the cloud colouration ... it all goes into the memory. Even those rare occasions when the clouds clear to reveal the surface. But there’s more to it than that.’ The digits froze: the Orrery had wound back to the time of Saavedra’s flight. Dreyfus dabbed a finger into the jewelled disc of the Band. ’Here’s Panoply.’ He moved his finger a few centimetres to the right. ‘Here’s the last known position of Saavedra’s vehicle before she dropped beyond our sensor horizon. In clear space we’d have been able to track her at a range of several light-seconds, even with her hull stealthing. But it’s hopeless in the thick of the Band, even more so with the present crisis, and Saavedra knew it.’

  ‘You said we lost her,’ Aumonier said. ‘Has something changed?’

  ‘Saavedra told me I had no hope of chasing her since there were no other ships ready to go. She was bluffing - maybe there were no other ships fast enough to catch her, but there were certainly other vehicles that had more fuel and heavier weapons loads.’ Dreyfus looked up from the Orrery. ‘So I did some nosing around. Turns out the Firebrand operatives - I presume you’ve all been briefed concerning Firebrand? - have been using a lot of transat vehicles lately, even signing them out for duties that wouldn’t require that capability. Now, why would they do that?’

  ‘You think they’ve moved the Clockmaker to Yellowstone,’ Aumonier said.

  Dreyfus nodded. ‘That’s the way it’s looking. Of course, that’s not particularly useful data in and of itself. It’s a big planet with a lot of hiding places.’

  ‘So why didn’t they take the Clockmaker there first, instead of using the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble?’ Baudry asked.