Prefect

by Alastair Reynolds

  Keeping out of the way of the medical staff attending to hall technicians who'd been lacerated by glass and high-speed Turbine shrapnel — they'd already pulled out the most seriously wounded — Dreyfus found his way to a woman named Trajanova. She was the prefect in charge of archives, and considered supremely competent by all concerned. Dreyfus did not dissent from that view, but he did not like Trajanova and he knew that the feeling was mutual. He'd employed her once as a deputy, then dismissed her because she did not have the necessary instincts for fieldwork. She had never forgiven him for that and their rare meetings were tense, terse affairs. Dreyfus was nevertheless relieved to see that she had suffered no conspicuous injuries save for a gashed cheek. She was pressing her sleeve to it, her uniform dispensing disinfectant and coagulant agents. She had headphones lowered around her neck, glasses pushed up over her brow and a fine dusting of blue-grey debris on her clothes and skin.

  Trajanova must have seen the look on his face. "Before you ask, I have no idea what just happened."

  "I was about to ask if you were all right. Were you in here when it happened?"

  "Behind the fourth stack, the furthest one from the unit that blew. Running search-speed diagnostics."

  "And?"

  "It just went. One second it was spinning, next second it didn't exist any more. I'd have been deafened if I hadn't had the phones on."

  "You were lucky."

  She scowled, pulling her sleeve away to reveal the dried blood on her cuff. "Funny. I'd say it was fairly unlucky of me to have been in here in the first place."

  "Was anyone killed?"

  "I don't think so. Not permanently." She rubbed at dust-irritated eyes. "It was a mess, though. The glass did the worst harm. That's hyperdiamond, Dreyfus. It takes a lot to make it shatter. It was like a bomb going off in here."

  "Was it a bomb? I mean, seriously: could a bomb have caused this?"

  She shook her head. "I don't think so. The unit just spun loose, all of a sudden. There was no bang, no flash, before it happened."

  "Those things run near critical break-up speed, don't they?"

  "That's the idea. We spin them as fast as they can go. Any slower and you'd be the first to moan about retrieval lag."

  "Could the unit have overspun?"

  She answered his question with look of flat denial. "They don't do that."

  "Could the assembly have been fatigued?"

  "All the units are subjected to routine de-spin and maintenance, one at a time. You don't usually notice because we take the burden on the other three Turbs. The unit that failed got a clean bill of health during the last spin-down."

  "You're sure of that?"

  Her face said: Don't question my competence, and I won't question yours. "If it hadn't, it wouldn't be spinning, Prefect."

  "I had to ask. Something went terribly wrong here. Could a badly formed query have caused the break-up?"

  "That's a bizarre question."

  "It's just that I sent something through about a second before the accident."

  "The units would have handled millions of queries in that interval," she said.

  "Millions? There aren't millions of prefects."

  "Most of the queries coming through are machine-generated. Panoply talking to itself, consolidating its own knowledge base. The Turbs don't care whether it's a human or a machine sending the query. All are treated with equal priority."

  "It still felt related to me."

  "It can't have been your query that did this. That would be absurd."

  "Maybe so. But I'm conducting a sensitive investigation and just at the point when I think I'm getting somewhere, when I might be about to connect my case to one of our glorious families, when I might be about to hurt someone, one of my primary investigative tools is sabotaged."

  "Whatever this was, it can't have been sabotage," Trajanova said.

  "You sound very certain."

  "Maybe it's escaped your attention, but this is an ultra-secure facility inside what is already an ultra-secure organisation. No one gets inside this room without at least Pangolin clearance, and no one — not even the supreme prefect herself — gets to access the Search Turbines from outside the rock. Frankly, I can't think of a facility it would be harder to sabotage."

  "But a prefect could do it," he said. "Especially if they had Pangolin clearance."

  "I was keeping our discussion within the realms of possibility," Trajanova said. "I can think of a million reasons why our enemies might want to smash the Search Turbines. But a prefect, someone already inside the organisation? You mean a traitor?"

  "I'm just running through the possibilities. It's not so very difficult to believe, is it?"

  "I suppose not," Trajanova said slowly, staring him hard in the eye. "After all, there's a traitor's daughter in the organisation even as we speak. Have you talked to her recently?"

  "With Thalia Ng? No, she's too busy acquitting herself excellently on field duties." He smiled coldly. "I think we're done here, aren't we?"

  "Unless you want to help me clean up this mess."

  "I'll leave that to the specialists. How long before we'll have the other Turbs back up to speed?"

  She glanced over her shoulder at the intact tubes. "They'll have to be thoroughly checked for stress flaws. Thirteen hours, at the very minimum, before I'll risk spin-up. Even then we'll be running at a low retrieval rate. Sorry if that inconveniences you, Prefect."

  "It's not that it inconveniences me. What I'm worried about is that it's conveniencing someone else." Dreyfus scratched dust from the corners of his eyes, where it had begun to gather in gooey grey clumps. "Keep looking into the sabotage angle, Trajanova. If you find anything, I want to hear about it immediately."

  "Maybe it would help if you told me about this magic query of yours," she said.

  "Nerval-Lermontov."

  "What about Nerval-Lermontov?"

  "I wanted to know where the hell I'd heard that name before."

  She looked at him with icy contempt. "You didn't need the Search Turbines for that, Dreyfus. I could have told you myself. So could any prefect with a basic grasp of Yellowstone history."

  He ignored the insult. "And?"

  "The Eighty."

  It was all he needed to be told.

  * * *

  The corvette was a medium-enforcement vehicle, twice as large as a cutter, and with something in the region of eight times as much armament. Panoply's rules dictated that it was the largest craft that could be operated by a prefect, as opposed to a dedicated pilot. Dreyfus had the necessary training, but as always in such matters he preferred his deputy to handle the actual flying, when the ship wasn't taking care of itself.

  "Not much to look at," Sparver said as a magnified image leapt onto one of the panes. "Basically just a big chunk of unprocessed rock, with a beacon saying 'keep away — I'm owned by somebody'."

  "Specifically, the Nerval-Lermontov family."

  "Is that name still ringing a bell with you?"

  "Someone jogged my memory," Dreyfus said, thinking back to his less-than-cordial conversation with Trajanova. "Turns out that Nerval-Lermontov was one of the families tied up with the Eighty."

  "Really?"

  "I remember now. I was a boy at the time, but it was all over the system. The Nerval-Lermontovs were one of the families kicking up the biggest stink."

  "They lost someone?"

  "A daughter, I think. She became a kind of emblem for all the others. I can see her face, but not her name. It's on the tip of my tongue ... "

  Sparver dug between his knees and handed Dreyfus a compad. "I already did my share of homework, Boss."

  "Before the Turbines went down?"

  "I didn't need them. Remember that case we worked a couple of years ago, involving the disputed ownership of a carousel built by one of the families? I copied reams of Eighty-related stuff onto my compad back then, and it's all still there, with summaries for all the players."

  "Including the Nerval-
Lermontovs?"

  "Take a look for yourself."

  Dreyfus did as Sparver suggested, plunging deep into Chasm City history. The article was several thousand lines long, a summary that could easily have been expanded by a factor of ten or a hundred had Sparver selected different text filters. The system's major families were nothing if not well documented.

  Dreyfus hit the Eighty. One name leapt out at him across fifty-five years of history.

  "Aurora," he said, with a kind of reverence. "Aurora Nerval-Lermontov. She was just a girl — twenty-two years old when she went under Cal's machines."

  "Poor kid. No wonder they were pissed off."

  They had been, too, Dreyfus remembered. And who wouldn't be? Calvin Sylveste had promised true immortality to his seventy-nine volunteers. Their minds would be scanned at sub-neuronal resolution, with the resultant structures uploaded into invulnerable machines. Rather than just being static snapshots, Calvin's Transmigrants would continue to think, to feel, once they'd been mapped into computer space. They would be true alpha-level simulations, their mental processes indistinguishable from those of a flesh-and-blood human being. The only catch was that the scanning process had to be performed with such rapidity, such fidelity, that it was destructive. The scanned mind was ripped apart layer by layer, until nothing lucid remained.

  It wouldn't have mattered if the procedure had worked. All had been well for a while, but shortly after the last volunteer had gone under — Calvin Sylveste had been the eightieth subject in his own experiment — problems began to emerge with the earliest subjects. Their simulations froze, or became locked in pathological loops, or regressed to levels of autistic disengagement from the outside universe. Some vital detail, some animating impulse, was missing from the design.

  "Do you believe in coincidence, Sparver?"

  Sparver tapped one of the thruster controls. The rock had doubled in size, its wrinkled ash-grey surface details becoming more distinct. The potato-shaped asteroid was more than two kilometres wide at its fattest point.

  "Why d'you ask?"

  "Because I was already wondering why the Sylveste family kept coming up in this investigation. Now we've got another hit."

  "They're a big octopus. Sooner or later you're bound to trip over another tentacle."

  "So you don't think there's anything odd about this?"

  "The Sylvestes weren't a charity. Only families with influence and money were able to buy themselves a slot in Cal's experiment. And only families with influence and money can afford to hold on to rocks like this. The key here is the Nerval-Lermontovs, not the Sylvestes."

  "They tried to take down the Sylvestes, didn't they?"

  "Everyone tried. Everyone failed. This is their system. We just live in it."

  "And the Nerval-Lermontovs? They've been quiet since the Eighty, haven't they? They're hardly big players any more. If they were, I'd have recognised the name sooner. So what the hell are they doing implicating themselves in the Ruskin-Sartorious affair?"

  "Maybe they were used. Maybe when we dig into this place, we'll find it was just used to bounce signals from somewhere else."

  Dreyfus felt some of his earlier elation abate. Perhaps his cherished instincts had failed him this time. If necessary, they could go outside and read the message stack, just as they'd done with the Vanguard Six router. Sparver had sounded confident that the process was repeatable, but what if it wasn't quite so easy to backtrack the signal a second time?

  Dreyfus was musing on that theme when the rock launched its attack.

  It came fast and without warning; it was only when the assault was over that he was able to piece together the approximate sequence of events. Across the face of the rock, small regions of the crust erupted outwards as if a dozen low-yield mines had just detonated, showering rubble and debris into space. The shattered material rained into the corvette, the noise like a thousand hammer blows against the hull.

  Alarms began to shriek, damage reports cascading across the display surfaces. Dreyfus heard the whine as the corvette's own weapons began to upgrade their readiness posture. Sparver grunted something unintelligible and began to coordinate the response with manual control inputs. But the attack had not really begun in earnest. The eruptions on the rock were merely caused by the emergence of concealed weapons, tucked under ten or twenty metres of camouflaging material. Dark-muzzled kinetic slug-launchers rolled out and spat their cargoes at the corvette. Dreyfus flinched as the walls of the corvette's cabin appeared to ram inwards, before a cooler part of his mind reminded him that this was the corvette doing its best to protect the living organisms inside it. The wall flowed around his body, head to toe, forming an instant contoured cocoon. Then he felt the corvette swerve with what would have been bone-snapping acceleration under any other circumstances. With the little consciousness available to him, he hoped that the corvette had taken similar care of Sparver.

  The swerve saved them. Otherwise, the first kinetic slug would have taken them nose-on, where the corvette's armour was thinnest. As it was the slug still impacted, gouging a trench along the entire lateral line of the ship, taking out weapons and sensory modules in a roar of agonised matter that was still nerve-shreddingly loud even through the cushioning of the cocoon. The ship swerved again, and then once more, harder this time. Two more slugs rammed into it. Then the corvette began to give back something of what it had taken.

  Many of its weapons had been damaged by the slug impacts, or could not be brought to bear without presenting too much tempting cross section to the still-active slug launchers. But it was still able to respond with an awesome concentration of destructive force. Dreyfus felt rather than heard the subsonic drone of the Gatling guns. Another salvo of debris rained against the hull: that was the Gatling guns churning up the rock's surface even more, kicking more material into space. Four sequenced shoves as the corvette deployed and then traded momentum with its missiles, spitting them out like hard pips. The foam-phase-tipped warheads selected their own targets, punching hundred-metre-wide craters in the crust.

  The Gatling guns resumed firing.

  Then, with disarming suddenness, all was silent save for the occasional clang as some small piece of debris knocked into the ship.

  "I am holding at maximum readiness condition," the corvette said, its voice dismayingly calm and unhurried, as if it was delivering a weather report. "Situational analysis indicates that the offensive object has been downgraded to threat status gamma. This analysis may be flawed. If you nonetheless wish me to stand down to moderate readiness, please issue an order."

  "You can stand down," Dreyfus said.

  The cocoon released him. He felt like a single man-sized bruise, with a headache to match. Nothing appeared broken, though, and he was at least alive.

  "I think this just stopped being a peripheral investigation," Sparver said.

  Dreyfus spat blood. At some point during the attack he must have bitten his tongue. "How's the ship doing?" he enquired.

  Sparver glanced at one of the status panes. "Good news is we've still got power, air and attitude control."

  "And the bad news?"

  "Sensors are shot to hell and long-range comms don't appear to be working either. I don't think we're going to be able to call home for help."

  The absurdity of their predicament rankled Dreyfus. They were still inside the Glitter Band, in the teeming thick of human civilisation, no more than a thousand kilometres from the nearest inhabited structure. And yet they might as well have been far beyond the system, drifting in interstellar space, for all the difference it made.

  "Can we reach anyone else?" he asked. "We still have signalling lasers. If we can get a visual signal to a passing ship, we might be able to divert them."

  Sparver had already called up a navigation display showing all nearby traffic within a radius of five thousand kilometres. Dreyfus stared at it intently, but the spherical imaging surface kept malfunctioning, crowding with ghost signals caused by the damage the corvett
e had taken.

  "Not much out there," Sparver observed. "Certainly not within manual signalling range."

  Dreyfus jabbed a finger at a persistent echo in the display, an object on a slow course through the scanning volume. "That one's real, and it looks close, too. What is it?"

  "Just a robot freighter, according to the transponder flag. Probably inbound from the high-energy manufactories on Marco's Eye."

  "It'll pass within three thousand klicks of us. That's almost nothing out here."

  "But it won't respond to us even if we score a direct hit with the laser. I don't think we've got any option but to limp home, and hope no one runs into us."

  Dreyfus nodded ruefully. In the congested traffic flows of the Glitter Band, a ship with impaired sensor capability was a dangerous thing indeed. That went double for a ship that was stealthed to the point of near-invisibility.

  "How long will that take?"

  Sparver closed his eyes as he ran the numbers. "Ninety minutes, maybe a little less."

  "And then another hour before we can reasonably expect to get another ship out here; longer if it has to be reassigned from some other duty." Dreyfus shook his head. "Too long. Every instinct in my body says we don't walk away."

  "So we drop a surveillance drone. We're carrying one."

  "A drone won't help us if someone decides to run as soon as we're out of range."

  "I don't think there's anyone down there."

  "We don't know that." Dreyfus unwebbed himself enough that he could soothe his back, sore after the corvette's spine-jarring evasive swerves. "Which is why we need to take a look. Maybe we'll find a transmitter when we're down there. Then we can call in the big guns."

  * * *

  Thalia ran a finger around her collar, stiffening it back into shape. She gathered her equipment and composed herself as the airlock cycled. Spine straight, chin up, eyes sharp. She might feel tired, she might feel embittered by what she had witnessed only a couple of hours earlier, but she was still on duty. The locals would neither know nor care that they were merely the last stop on a demanding itinerary, the last obstacle before sleep and rest and some grudging expression of gratitude from the seniors. She reminded herself that she was still well ahead of her anticipated schedule, and that if all went according to plan from now on she would be back inside Panoply barely a day and a half after she had departed.