The Prefect

by Alastair Reynolds

  ‘Someone was careless,’ Sparver said.

  ‘Or in a hurry. You think we can squeeze under that?’

  Sparver was already on his knees. He undid some of his equipment and weaponry and slid it through ahead of him. Then he lowered onto all fours and scraped through the gap. ‘It’s clear,’ he told Dreyfus, grunting as he stood up. ’Send me though what you can.’

  Dreyfus unclipped the bulkier pieces of his kit and passed them to his deputy. Then he lowered himself to the cracked black floor and squeezed under the door, scraping his backpack in the process. Something jammed, and for a horrible instant he thought he was trapped, pinned in place with vicelike pressure. Then whatever it was worked loose and he was through, standing up next to Sparver. His suit reported no damage, but had the door been a couple more centimetres lower, he wouldn’t have been able to get through wearing it.

  Dreyfus reattached his equipment and hoped silently that he wouldn’t be sliding under any more doors. They had arrived in what was clearly a cargo airlock, designed to allow vehicles and heavy equipment to pass between Ops Nine and the outside world. A similar door to the one they’d just crawled under faced them on the opposite wall, but this one was sealed down tight.

  ‘We can cut through,’ Sparver said, tapping a glove against the torch on his belt. ‘Or we can try opening it. Either way, if there’s a single soul alive in this place they’ll know about it. Your call, Boss.’

  ‘See if you can get it to open. I’ll try to close the other one. I’d rather not flood the place with Yellowstone air if we can avoid it.’

  ‘Because you’re feeling charitable towards Saavedra and her friends?’ Sparver asked sceptically.

  ‘They committed crimes against Panoply. I’d like them alive to answer for that.’

  Dreyfus brushed icy yellow caulk off a raised panel next to the door they had just crawled under. The panel contained a simple arrangement of manual controls labelled with Amerikano script. He pushed the stud with a downward-pointing arrow and heard a laboured whine of buried machinery. The door began to inch its way towards the floor, spitting chunks of yellow ice out of its tracks as it descended.

  ‘Looks like someone’s been paying their power bills,’ Sparver said.

  Dreyfus nodded. If he’d harboured lingering doubts that Ops Nine was truly where Firebrand had gone to ground, they had just been thoroughly dispelled. The facility was powered and functional, at least on a spartan basis. Amerikano technology was robust, but not robust enough to open doors after two hundred years.

  Dreyfus flinched as slats rattled open in the walls without warning. Red lights stammered on behind ceiling grilles and he heard the roar of powerful fans. The environment sensor on his suit began to record the change of gas mixture and pressure as the air in the room was swapped for breathable atmosphere. The process took less than three minutes. The fans died down and the slats clattered shut again.

  ‘I think I can open the door now,’ Sparver said.

  Nothing would be gained by waiting, Dreyfus knew. ‘Do it,’ he said, mentally preparing himself for whatever was on the other side. Sparver hit the control, then moved to stand next to Dreyfus, his Breitenbach rifle held doubled-handed. But as the door rose, it became clear that there was no one waiting for them on the other side. Dreyfus allowed the muzzle of his own weapon to dip slightly, but remained alert. The two prefects stepped over the threshold.

  A curving corridor, triangular in cross section, walled and floored with metallic grille, stretched away to either side. An illuminated red strip ran the length of the corridor at the apex of the two angled walls. Behind the grilles snaked corroded and mould-caked piping and machinery, much of it eaten away, probably by rats. Steam jetted from ruptured lines, hot enough to scald if they hadn’t been wearing suits. But Dreyfus noticed that some of the plumbing was shiny and new. Firebrand must have done just enough to make this facility habitable again. They hadn’t been intending to make it comfortable, or homely.

  ‘You want me to toss a coin?’ Sparver asked.

  ‘Clockwise,’ Dreyfus said, leading the way.

  The grilled flooring clattered heavily under their boots, the din echoing around the curve of the corridor. Dreyfus had no good idea of the dimensions of the facility, but it wasn’t difficult to imagine that noise reaching far enough to alert someone of their arrival, if that hypothetical person hadn’t already been notified by the airlock activity. Since his suit assured him that the ambient air was now breathable, Dreyfus reached up and risked removing his helmet. He attached it to his belt, just as he’d had cause to regret doing in the Nerval-Lermontov rock when Clepsydra touched her knife against his throat. But he didn’t think knives were going to be the problem now.

  ‘Yeah, getting kind of stuffy in here,’ Sparver said, undoing his own helmet. He took a deep breath, sucking in the same cold, metallic air Dreyfus had just tasted. ‘Feels better already.’

  ‘Watch out for those steam jets,’ Dreyfus said. ‘And be ready to jam your lid on again.’

  They continued walking, following the slow curve of the corridor until they arrived at a junction. They paused to decide which way to go, while pink-tinged steam snorted in dragon-like exhalations from a severed pipeline. Dreyfus shone his light on a burnished metal panel stencilled with Amerikano text. ‘Central operations is this way,’ he said, raising his voice above the angry snort of the steam jet. ‘Sounds like the right place to start, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Or the right place to stay a long way away from.’

  ‘Nothing I’d like better. But we came here to do a job, Field.’

  After a moment Sparver said, ‘Don’t you mean “deputy, Boss?’

  ‘I mean field. Jane just promoted me to senior, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t elevate my deputy to full field status. How does it feel, Field Prefect Bancal?’

  ‘It feels great. Though I imagined it might happen under different circumstances.’

  Dreyfus smiled to himself. ‘You mean slightly less suicidal ones?’

  ‘Now that you mention it...’

  ‘That’s exactly the same way I felt when I got my promotion, so that makes two of us.’

  ‘But it’s still a promotion. I mean, that’s what it’ll say in my obituary, right?’

  ‘It would,’ Dreyfus affirmed. ‘Only problem is, I’m the only one who knows about it. Apart from you, obviously.’

  ‘So it would really help if one of us survives, is what you’re saying.’

  ‘Yes. Me, preferably.’

  ‘Why you, Boss, and not me?’

  ‘Because if you survived, you wouldn’t be needing an obituary, would you?’

  ‘That makes sense,’ Sparver said, sounding only the tiniest bit puzzled.

  Dreyfus tightened his grip on the Breitenbach rifle. ‘There’s something ahead,’ he said, lowering his voice.

  Pale-blue light was leaking around the curve of the corridor, highlighting the hexagonal meshwork of the grilles. Dreyfus judged that they were approaching the central operations section. Conscious that there was little they could do to quieten their approach, he nonetheless slowed his walk and edged closer to the angled wall on the inside of the curve, hoping to use it for cover until the last moment. As he crept forward, he saw that the corridor terminated in a hollowed-out cavern that extended several storeys below their present level. The blue illumination originated from a grid of lights suspended from the bare rock ceiling that arched ten or twelve metres above them. The corridor brought them out onto a railinged balcony that encircled the entire cavern. Doors were set into the smooth-panelled wall at regular intervals, marked with spray-painted numbers and cryptic symbols that must have once referred to different administrative and functional departments of the facility. Dreyfus looked over the railing, down to the floor of the chamber. It was a kind of atrium, he realised. Tiled walkways encircled what might once have been flower beds or small ponds. The flower beds now contained only grey-black ash, the ponds nothing but dust. There wer
e even a couple of benches, cut from solid rock. Rising from the ground in the middle of the atrium was a complicated-looking metal sculpture whose design he couldn’t easily fathom from this angle, but which almost resembled an iron cactus.

  Dreyfus realised that he’d had preconceptions about the people who’d lived here originally. The Amerikano culture might have felt distant from his own, its values foreign, but the inhabitants of this place had still needed a place to relax and mingle, away from the pressures of their duties. In its way, this place would not have felt very different from his own place of work. He wondered what kinds of ghosts would haunt Panoply, two hundred years after he was gone.

  He pulled back from the railing with a tingle of disquiet. Sparver was already a quarter of the way around the balcony, testing each door as he passed. So far they had all been locked, but as Dreyfus watched, Sparver reached a door that was ajar. He nudged it with the muzzle of his rifle, then beckoned Dreyfus forward. Glancing occasionally down at the atrium, Dreyfus approached the newly promoted field and examined what Sparver had discovered.

  ‘I guess you were right about Firebrand, Boss.’

  The room would once have been the personal quarters of one of the Amerikano staff. Now it had been converted into makeshift accommodation for one of Saavedra’s people. A sleeping hammock had been strung between two walls. On an equipment crate, Dreyfus saw part of a Panoply uniform, a belt and whiphound clip, minus the whiphound itself. He found a coffee bulb that still had coffee in it, albeit cold. There was no dust on any of the items.

  They continued their inspection of the upper level, pausing to investigate those rooms that were not locked. They found more personal effects and equipment, even a pair of compads. The compads were still operational, but when Dreyfus activated one he could not decipher the contents, even with Manticore. The Firebrand unit must have had its own security protocol.

  Sparver and Dreyfus descended to the next level via a staircase, negotiating it slowly in their suits and armour. They found another ring of rooms, but most of these were larger and appeared to have served an administrative or laboratory function. There was even a medical complex, a series of glass-partitioned rooms still illuminated by pale-green secondary lighting. Old-fashioned equipment formed abstract, vaguely threatening shapes under a drapery of plastic dust sheets. The sheets had brittled and yellowed with age, but the machines under them showed little sign of decay.

  ‘What happened to the people who used to live here?’ Sparver asked, in little more than a whisper.

  ‘Didn’t they teach you anything in school?’

  ‘Cut me some slack. Even fifty years is ancient history from a pig’s point of view.’

  ‘They went insane,’ Dreyfus said. ‘They were brought here in the bellies of robots, as fertilised eggs. The robots gave birth to them, and raised them to be happy, well-adjusted human beings. What they got was happy, well-adjusted psychopaths.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I’m simplifying. But children don’t grow up right without other normal people around, so that they can imprint on reasonable social behaviour. By the time the second generation was being raised, some nasty pathologies were bubbling to the surface. It got messy.’

  ‘How messy?’

  ‘Axes through doors messy.’

  ‘But they couldn’t all have been insane.’

  ‘They weren’t. But there weren’t nearly enough stable cases to hold the society together.’

  Another staircase brought them to the lowest level of the atrium, where the pathway ambled between dried pools and ashen flower beds. Dreyfus speculated that it might once have been an agreeable place to pass time, at least in comparison with the claustrophobic confinement of the rest of the facility. But now he felt like an intruder breaking the stillness of a crypt. He told himself that the Firebrand agents had violated the sanctity of the place before Sparver and he had arrived, but the sense of being unwelcome did not abate.

  Rooms, all of them larger than any they had seen on the upper levels, ringed the atrium space, cut back into the rock for many tens of metres. Corridors plunged even deeper, curving away to other parts of Ops Nine. At the far end of one, Dreyfus saw the daylit glow of what he presumed was another atrium space, perhaps at least as large as the one they were in. Several corridors ramped down into the ground, suggesting that there were further levels of habitation beneath. Dreyfus paused, unsure which route to take. He had expected to encounter someone in the central operations area, or at least find a clue as to where everyone had gone. But apart from the Panoply items they had already seen, there was no evidence of immediate human presence.

  He was about to debate their next move when Sparver made an odd clicking noise, as if he’d got something lodged in his throat. Dreyfus snapped around to look at his deputy.

  ‘Sparv?’

  ‘Check out the sculpture, Boss.’

  Dreyfus had paid little attention to the metal object since arriving on the lowest level. He’d appraised it just enough to see that it was indeed what it had appeared to be from above: a spiky black structure fashioned from something like wrought iron, suggestive of a cactus, anemone or angular palm tree, but equally likely to be a purely abstract form. It towered three or four metres over his head, throwing jagged shadows across the flooring. It consisted of dozens of sharp bladelike leaves radiating out from a central core, most of which were angled towards the ceiling. What he hadn’t noticed - but which had not escaped Sparver’s attention - was that there was a human skeleton at the base of the sculpture.

  Despite all his years as a prefect, Dreyfus still flinched at the sight. He had seen corpses, but not many of those. He had seen even fewer skeletons. But the shock subsided as he realised that the skeleton could not have belonged to someone who had died recently. Most of the flesh had been consumed, leaving only a few grey-black scraps attached here and there. The bones, those that had not crumbled, were mottled and dark. Of clothes, and whatever else the corpse had been wearing, no visible trace remained.

  The hapless victim must have been tossed from the high balcony, or perhaps dropped from some makeshift bridge stretched across the atrium, to fall on one of the larger spikes. The skeleton lay at its very base, the spike having rammed apart its ribcage. The skull lolled to one side, empty eye sockets regarding Dreyfus, the lopsided tilt of the jaw conveying incongruous amusement, as if it was taking a ghastly posthumous delight in the horror it caused.

  But the real horror, Dreyfus decided, was not that someone had been murdered here. Dreyfus hardly approved of summary justice, but at this remove there was no telling what the victim might have done to deserve this brutal end. The horror was that the agents of Firebrand had not seen fit to do something with the bones. They had gone about their business, equipping this base for rehabitation, as if the skeleton was merely an unavoidable part of the decor.

  Dreyfus knew then that he was dealing with more than one kind of monster.

  ‘Put down your weapons,’ a voice said.

  Dreyfus and Sparver spun around, but it was already too late. The muzzle of another Breitenbach rifle was aimed down at them from the intermediate-level balcony. With the weapon on maximum beam dispersal, Dreyfus knew, it could take out both of them with a single pulse.

  ‘Hello, Paula,’ Dreyfus said.

  ‘Put down the weapons,’ Saavedra repeated. ‘Do it immediately, or I will kill you.’

  Dreyfus worked the sling of the rifle over his shoulder and set the weapon down on the ground. With obvious reluctance, Sparver followed his lead.

  ‘Step away from the guns,’ Saavedra said. She began to walk around the balcony, keeping the muzzle of her rifle trained on them all the while. Reaching the staircase, she began to descend. She wore Panoply trousers, but her upper body was clothed only in a sleeveless black tunic. It made her look thinner, more doll-like, than when Dreyfus had confronted her in the refectory. Yet she cradled the rifle as if it weighed nothing. The muscles that moved under her skin looked a
s hard and sleek as tempered steel.

  ‘I haven’t come to kill you,’ Dreyfus said, as her booted feet clattered down the stairs. ‘You’ll have to answer for what you did to Chen, and Firebrand will have to explain its part in the death of the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble. But I have no difficulty believing you acted out of a sense of duty; that you thought you were doing the right thing in sheltering the Clockmaker. A tribunal will see both sides, Paula. You have nothing to fear from justice.’

  She reached the floor and started walking towards them. ‘You finished?’

  ‘I’ve said my piece. Let me walk out of here with the Clockmaker and I’ll do all I can to make things easier for you.’

  Saavedra kicked the rifles aside. ‘Why are you so interested in the Clockmaker, Dreyfus? What does it mean to you?’

  ‘I won’t know until I’ve got it.’

  ‘But you’re interested in it.’

  ‘I’m not the only one, am I?’

  ‘You mentioned Ruskin-Sartorious. Do you know why we had to move the Clockmaker?’

  ‘I presume someone was sniffing around.’

  ‘And who would that someone have been, I wonder? Who was so concerned to locate it, after all the years it had been hidden? Who is still concerned?’

  ‘Gaffney was working for Aurora. She’s the one who wanted to locate and destroy the Clockmaker, because she perceived it as a threat.’

  ‘And you think it’s safe?’

  ‘Aurora was afraid of it. That’s good enough for me.’

  ‘Thing is, Dreyfus, I don’t have any proof that you’re not lying to me.’

  ‘How about this? If I wanted to destroy the Clockmaker, I could have dropped a missile on this whole facility thirteen hours ago. Instead, my partner and I have walked in with the intention of negotiating.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Sparver said. ‘We just want access to the Clockmaker. You’ve kept it all this time because you thought it might be useful one day. Well, guess what? This is the day.’