The Prefect

by Alastair Reynolds

  Dreyfus saw that the cutter was still more than one hundred and twenty kilometres above them, but falling fast enough that it would pass below the weapon ceiling in only a couple of minutes. ‘Gaffney wouldn’t come unless he thought he could do damage,’ he said. ‘He’ll be expecting to meet anti-ship fire.’

  ‘I could take our cutter,’ Saavedra said doubtfully. ‘It still has enough fuel to get me airborne.’

  ‘You wouldn’t last five seconds against Gaffney,’ Dreyfus said. ‘Even if you could get up in time.’

  She stared at the display, mesmerised by the falling arrow. ‘He can damage the complex if he has foam-phase weapons, but he won’t be able to touch the Clockmaker, inside the tokamak. He must know that.’ A thought drained colour from her face. ‘Voi, maybe he does have a nuke after all.’

  ‘If he does, it’ll be clean and fast for all of us,’ Dreyfus told her. ‘But I don’t think he’s intending to take out the Clockmaker in one hit. He must be planning to flush it out, then pick it off on the surface. It can’t fly, can it?’

  ‘If you gave it enough time,’ Veitch said, ‘I don’t think there’s much it couldn’t do.’ Then he studied the tank again. ‘At present rate of descent, weapons will engage in ... forty-five seconds.’ He looked anxiously at the others. ‘There isn’t much more we can do here. Maybe we should get below again?’

  ‘Missile inbound,’ Saavedra said, with dreamlike calm.

  The display showed the missile streaking down from the cutter, leaping though the intervening atmosphere with ferocious acceleration. Any faster and friction would have incinerated the warhead before it reached its target.

  ‘Guns retargeting,’ Saavedra reported. ‘Engaging.’

  The room tremored. Dreyfus heard a low, rolling report, like distant thunder. He shuddered to think of the energy that had just been dissipated only a few hundred metres over his head. The weapons would have blasted their way out of concealed bunkers, just like the guns buried in the Nerval-Lermontov rock. But that had taken place in vacuum, not under a smothering methane-ammonia atmosphere. On the planet’s surface, it would have looked like a series of choreographed volcanic eruptions, as if fists of molten fire had punched through the very crust of the world.

  ‘Missile intercepted,’ Saavedra said, though they could all see the result for themselves. ‘Second incoming. Third incoming. Guns responding.’

  The room tremored again, the earthquake-like rumble longer than before. There was a moment of silence as the guns retargeted to intercept the third missile, then the noise recommenced. ‘Second missile destroyed. Partial intercept on third,’ Saavedra announced. The room shook again, but Dreyfus knew that the guns would struggle to shoot down the third missile on the second attempt. It had been damaged, but it was still arcing down towards the facility.

  ‘Brace,’ Veitch said.

  The missile’s impact came a fraction of a second later. Dreyfus felt the shockwave slam through his bones. There was a roar louder than the guns, loud enough that it felt as if he was out there, standing under Yellowstone’s poison sky with his eardrums naked to the air. He felt a violent shove, as if the room and all its contents had just lurched several centimetres to one side.

  ‘One emplacement out,’ Saavedra said as the appropriate icon pulsed red and faded to black. ‘Fourth missile inbound. Guns acquiring.’

  The roar of the anti-ship weapons sounded more distant now: Dreyfus guessed that the disabled emplacement had been the nearest one, taken out in a direct hit by the damaged missile.

  ‘Tell me you have an intercept,’ Dreyfus said.

  ‘Partial,’ Saavedra said. ‘Attempting recontact.’

  The guns droned. The room shook. The sense of helplessness Dreyfus felt was suffocating. Machines were running his life now: machines and software. The system running the anti-ship emplacements was locking antlers with the system controlling the cutter’s onboard weapons. Like familiar adversaries, the systems had a thorough understanding of their mutual capabilities. In all likelihood, his survival could already be ascribed a fixed mathematical probability. One participant knew it would eventually lose, but was still going through the motions for the sake of formality.

  The fourth missile had lost much of its effectiveness when it struck home, but still retained enough potency to do real damage. The noise was a continuous deafening avalanche of sound. The room shuddered, chunks of ceiling material crashing down. A deep crack jagged its way down one wall, dividing the eight carved heads. The room’s illumination failed, leaving only the pale-green glow from the holographic display, which was itself faltering.

  ‘Generator complex is down,’ Veitch said, with grim resignation. ‘We should have buried it deeper. I said we should have buried it deeper.’ He began to tap instructions into his bracelet. ‘Back-up generator should have kicked in automatically. Why isn’t it working?’

  ‘Fifth missile inbound,’ Saavedra said as the holographic display flickered. ’Guns attempting to acquire. Two emplacements down. What about that back-up generator, Veitch?’

  ‘I’m doing the best I can,’ he said through gritted teeth.

  The roar of anti-ship guns was like a distant avalanche.

  ‘Intercept?’ Veitch queried.

  ‘Partial,’ Saavedra said.

  Dreyfus was about to ask something when the fifth missile came slamming in. There was no sound this time; it was too loud to register as noise. It felt like a cosh to the skull. Deafened, but with scarcely a moment to register the fact, Dreyfus observed events compress themselves into a single frantic instant. The room darkened, filling with choking black dust, scouring eyes and skin, burning throat and lungs. His last glimpse gave the impression of the ceiling bowing down, riven with cracks. He saw a similar crack rip through the already damaged wall. And then there was neither light, nor sound, nor consciousness.

  CHAPTER 32

  Dreyfus came round to a world coloured in degrees of pain. He was cognisant of the pain map of his body, traced in his mind’s eye by a flickering green mesh. There was a knot somewhere around his lower right leg, the contours bunching together until they formed an angry little eye. There was another knot in his chest, to the left of his sternum. A third on his upper right arm. The rest of him was merely aflame with discomfort. His throat felt as if it had been etched with acid. When he breathed, it was as if the lining of his lungs had been replaced by powdered glass.

  And yet he was breathing. That was more than he’d expected to be doing.

  He remembered the attack, but had no sense of how much time had passed since the arrival of the final missile. Everything was very still now. Not exactly silent, for his ears were ringing, but when he moved slightly he could hear his own groans of discomfort, so he had not been entirely deafened. He must have screamed at the end, he thought. He lay still, breathing heavily, ignoring the stab of pain that accompanied each breath, until he had regained some clarity of thought.

  He forced his eyes open. At first he could see nothing, but then he became conscious of a faint glow. One of the holographic panes was still flickering, casting insipid green light around the wreckage-strewn room. Most of the dust and debris appeared to have settled, suggesting that more than a few minutes had passed since the assault. His eyes were stinging, watering, but slowly Dreyfus became accustomed to the gloom and began to pick out details of his surroundings. He was lying on his back on the floor, with his legs and hips pinned under the table, which had collapsed when the ceiling thrust down upon it. As the table gave way, the cluster of display panes had toppled to the floor to Dreyfus’s right, including the one unit that was still aglow. He was trapped, and he could only speculate as to the true extent of his injuries, but he knew that he was very lucky to be alive at all. Had the table not shielded him, he would have been killed by the rubble that had crashed in through the ceiling. He tried moving his right arm again. The knot of pain had died down slightly, and as the arm moved he drew some comfort from the fact that it was probably not
broken. He flexed his fingers, watching them move like pale wormlike things, seemingly disconnected from his own body. His left arm felt intact, but he could not reach the edge of the table from where he was pinned. Groaning again, pain flaring in his chest, he tried to move his right arm enough to begin to lever the table, hoping to lift it away from his trapped lower half. But as soon as he applied pressure, he knew it was hopeless. The pain in his arm intensified, and the table did not move at all. Dreyfus realised that he would not be able to escape unassisted.

  He looked to his side, trying to distinguish between rubble and bodies. He began to fear that the others had been killed in the attack. But slowly he realised that the only other body in the room belonged to Simon Veitch. Of Sparver and Saavedra there was no sign.

  ‘Veitch?’ Dreyfus called, barely hearing his own voice over the ringing in his head.

  Veitch answered almost immediately. ‘Prefect,’ he said, sounding as if there was a thick layer of insulating glass between the two men. ‘You’re alive, then.’

  Dreyfus paused to recover strength before speaking again. Each word cost him more energy than he felt he could spare. ‘I’m trapped under this table. I think I’ve broken a rib, maybe a leg. What about you?’

  ‘Worse than that. Can’t you see?’

  Dreyfus could see, now that his eyes were finally adjusting to the minimal light. A silvery pipe, probably one of those installed by Firebrand when they were reactivating the facility, had buckled down from the ceiling to plunge through Veitch’s thigh.

  ‘Are you losing blood?’

  ‘I hope so.’

  Dreyfus coughed and tasted his own blood. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means I think I have a chance of dying before it finds us.’

  ‘Then it’s loose?’

  ‘The back-up generator should have activated immediately to ensure a smooth handover. It didn’t. Containment failed.’

  ‘But we don’t know for sure that it’s loose. Not until someone goes down there ...’

  Veitch laughed. It was the vilest, most inhuman sound Dreyfus had ever heard coming from another person. ‘It’s out, Prefect. Don’t worry about that. It’s just a question of how long it takes to find us. Because you can bet your life it’s looking.’

  ‘Or maybe it’s already run away, trying to hide itself.’

  ‘You don’t know the Clockmaker. I do.’

  ‘And you hope you’re going to die before it gets here.’

  Veitch touched a hand to his thigh. In the green glow his fingers came up tipped with something wet and dark, like melted chocolate. ‘I think I’ve got a shot. How about you? You could always try holding your breath, see how far that gets you.’

  ‘Tell me something, Veitch,’ Dreyfus said, in the tone of a man changing the subject of a conversation that had begun to weary him.

  ‘What?’

  ‘When Jane gave me the list of Firebrand operatives, your name was familiar to me for some reason.’

  ‘I get around.’

  ‘It was more than that. It struck an old chord. It just took me a little while to remember the rest.’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  ‘You were involved in the case against Jason Ng, weren’t you?’

  The silence that followed was enough of an answer for Dreyfus. ‘Simon?’ he asked.

  ‘Still here.’

  ‘You’re going to die soon. More than likely so am I. But let’s clear this one up, shall we? Thalia’s father was innocent. His only mistake was to get too close to your operation. He was investigating Firebrand, long after Firebrand had supposedly been shut down, and you had to do something about it.’

  ‘Looks like you’ve already made your case.’

  ‘I’m just putting pieces together. You concocted a case against Jason Ng to protect the operational integrity of Firebrand, didn’t you? You fabricated evidence and watched a good man go down. And then you had him murdered, making it look like suicide, because you couldn’t risk his testimony coming out in a Panoply tribunal. Which makes you no better than the people who murdered Philip Lascaille, does it? In fact, I’d put you on about the same moral pedestal.’

  ‘Fuck you, Dreyfus. Fuck you and fuck Panoply.’

  ‘I’ll take your views into consideration. Before you die on me, answer one last question. Where are the others?’

  Veitch’s answer came more slowly this time, his words slurred. He sounded like a man on the edge of unconsciousness. ‘I woke up once and your pig was still here. Saavedra was already gone. When I came around the second time, the pig was gone as well. Before I passed out the first time, he said something about taking care of Gaffney.’

  Dreyfus absorbed that. As gladdened as he was to hear that Sparver was alive, he was troubled by the other prefect’s intentions. ‘Where did Saavedra go?’

  ‘I don’t know. Why don’t you go and ask her?’

  ‘Veitch?’ Dreyfus asked, a little later.

  But this time there was no answer.

  ‘Good for you,’ Dreyfus said, under his breath.

  It was dark when Sparver finally found his way to the surface again, his suit donned hastily, sacrificing the armour he would have needed assistance to lock into place. Much of Ops Nine had collapsed during the attack, but the sloping tunnel by which he and Dreyfus had entered was still intact, and with care he had been able to ascend through the facility and squeeze past the obstructions on his way, using his suit’s power to force open the surface doors. For once being a hyperpig had been to his advantage; he doubted very much that a fully armoured and suited baseline human would have been able to navigate some of the crawlspaces he’d had to pass through, especially not while dragging a Breitenbach rifle.

  When he’d first regained consciousness, Saavedra had been about to leave the collapsed room, intending to find a way to restore the Clockmaker’s containment. Sparver knew then that he had to get out of that room, even if it meant abandoning Dreyfus for the time being. He’d talked Saavedra into handing over the ammo cells she had confiscated earlier and clipped to her belt, telling her that he would attempt to take down Gaffney - or whoever it was - on his own. Saavedra obviously hadn’t liked the idea of giving him access to weapons, but she presumably liked the idea of the attacker going unpunished even less. Eventually she’d relented and Sparver had taken the cells, watched Saavedra go and then lain very still while the room suddenly resettled, filling with pale dust and pinning him temporarily again before he worked loose and made his exit. He’d found the suit and weapon near the sculpture on the atrium level, right where he and Dreyfus had been ambushed what felt like a lifetime ago.

  He emerged from the sloping ramp, crouching low as he passed through the toothlike formation of icicles. Overhead, the sky surged with the unbridled energy of a storm, clouds billowing and flickering with electrical discharges and strange, seething shifts in local atmospheric chemistry. Yet above the roar of the wind and thunder, his suit was conveying another sound to his ears. It was high-pitched and steady: the shrill whine of engines. Still using the upper slope of the ramp for cover, he knelt with the rifle between his knees and scanned the howling dark sky. It was not very long before he made out the hovering form of the cutter, poised nose-down like a stabbing dagger, with its hull-mounted weapons deployed and ready. Sparver guessed that Gaffney was loitering over the remains of Ops Nine with the intention of catching the Clockmaker making its escape. Whatever firepower had yet to be discharged would be directed in a single berserk frenzy of concentrated destruction. Perhaps Gaffney had no real expectation of killing the Clockmaker, but he would certainly be hoping to maim it.

  Sparver flipped open the Breitenbach’s weather cover, exposing the muzzle with its delicate battery of plasma emitters and laser-confinement optics. He powered-up the weapon, mindful that the cutter might be sniffing the local electromagnetic environment. The weapon ran through its start-up cycle, then signalled readiness. Sparver settled the long barrel of the rifle onto his shoulder, b
azooka-style. A portion of his faceplate filled with a sighting reticle, superimposed over a view of the rifle’s current target. Sparver eased back on his haunches until the hovering cutter bobbed into the middle of the reticle. He squeezed a stud on the side of the primary grip, telling the weapon to lock on to this target. A red bracket pulsed around the cutter, signifying target acquisition. Instantly Sparver felt the suit stiffen and adjust his posture for him. The rifle had assumed command of the power-assisted suit; it was using it as an aiming platform, with Sparver just going along for the ride.

  The cutter’s engine note shifted. Sparver watched the ship rotate and then start to drift in his direction. Its weapons slewed slowly towards him, like a nest of snakes moving in unison. The cutter must have detected him. Gaffney was scouting closer, not wanting to discharge his weapons against a false target. The rifle, tracking the moving ship, made Sparver’s suit adjust his position. A stutter of light erupted from the side of the hull. A rain of slugs tore into the upper lip of the ramp entrance, dislodging the icicles just before the lip crumbled away entirely. Sparver took a hit above one knee, a glancing shot that must have ricocheted off the ground. The impact nearly floored him, but his suit wasn’t holed.

  He fired the rifle, squeezing off three closely spaced pulses before regaining control of his suit and falling back into cover. Confirmed hit, the weapon informed him.

  He peered back over the rim. The cutter was still airborne, but it wasn’t doing any more shooting. The engine note had become erratic. The weapons were jerking around haphazardly, locking on to dozens of false targets. Sparver resettled the rifle on his shoulder and fired another three shots, this time relying on his own aiming ability. Crimson light poured from the hole he’d blown in the side of Gaffney’s ship. The engine note quietened to silence.

  The cutter dropped.

  A second or so later, Sparver felt the impact slam through the ground. He braced, but there was no explosion. He waited a decent interval, then hauled himself from the cover of the shattered ramp and made his way across the pulverised ground, keeping the rifle aimed nervously ahead of him. The cutter had come down a kilometre away, close to the main entrance point to Ops Nine, where Saavedra would have docked and hidden her own ship. When Sparver reached it he found that the cutter had buried the front three metres of its nose in the frost, urine-coloured rivulets of melted methane-ammonia snow dribbling away from the impact point. The airlock was open, the outer door blasted off and lying to one side some metres away. The inner door was also open, revealing the faintly glowing interior of the crashed vehicle. Sparver’s suit started warning him that radiation levels were above tolerable norms. He ignored its protestations and used a handy boulder to climb into the shell. He pointed the rifle into the interior, using its sighting facility to see around the corner. But it only took a glance to confirm that the cutter was empty.