Prefect

by Alastair Reynolds

  There were about a dozen different addresses Sparver didn't recognise off the top of his head. But there were another dozen entries that were shockingly familiar.

  They consisted of two different addresses, interspersed randomly. Apart from the last three digits, one was identical to the format he'd just used to contact Muang.

  Someone had been using the Nerval-Lermontov rock to call Panoply.

  But if anything it was the second of the two addresses that unnerved Sparver the most. He recognised it instantly, for it was still fresh in his mind from his most recent investigation. But it had no business being any part of this one.

  It was the address of House Perigal.

  "This doesn't make sense," he said, mouthing the words in something more than a whisper. "There's no connection. The cases don't belong together."

  But there was no mistake. The numbers weren't going away.

  "You still there, Boss?"

  "I'm nearly at the airlock. What's up?"

  "I don't know. I've just discovered something that doesn't make any sense."

  "Tell me."

  "Someone used this rock to contact House Perigal."

  "You mean Ruskin-Sartorious," Dreyfus said testily.

  "No, I mean exactly what I just said. There've only been a handful of outgoing messages, but they include transmissions to both Panoply and House Perigal, in addition to Ruskin-Sartorious. That means there's a connection between the two cases, and a Panoply connection."

  "There can't be," Dreyfus said.

  "The evidence is staring right back at me. There's a link."

  "But Perigal was an open-and-shut case of polling fraud. It has no bearing on the murder of Ruskin-Sartorious."

  "Boss, we may not be able to understand the link, but I'm telling you it exists. We already know this case is bigger than a simple incident of revenge or assassination — we'd figured that much out before you went and found a Conjoiner ship buried inside this rock." Sparver paused: he could feel something behind his eyes trying to come into clarity, but not quite succeeding. "We went after Perigal because of voting fraud," he said. "We nailed her, too, and all along it felt too easy."

  "Too much like a debt being settled," Dreyfus said, echoing Sparver's tone.

  "Maybe what we should be focusing on is the consequence of that case. Not the fact that Perigal's under lockdown, but the security hole it drew our attention to."

  He heard a silence on the end of the line. Then: "We're closing that hole, Sparv. That's what Thalia's doing."

  "That's what we think she's doing. But what if we've been led up the garden path?"

  "We can trust Thalia," Dreyfus said.

  "Boss, we don't have time to think through all the implications. All we know is that something's wrong, and that, knowingly or otherwise, Thalia may be a part of it."

  "You're right," Dreyfus said eventually. "I don't like it, but ... something doesn't fit."

  "Thalia's still out there, isn't she?"

  "As far as I know."

  "We have to get a message to her. She has to stop those upgrades until we figure out what's going on."

  "Can you contact Panoply again?"

  "No reason why not," Sparver said. "But it'll mean me dropping out of contact with you again until I'm done."

  "Do it immediately. Call me back when you've got word to Thalia. Do it now, Sparv."

  He closed the connection with Dreyfus and re-established the jury-rigged link with Panoply.

  "I wasn't expecting to hear from you again so soon," Muang said, before Sparver could get a word in. "Good news is Jane expedited immediate retasking of a deep-system vehicle. It's on high-burn as we speak. Should be on your position inside forty-five minutes."

  "Good," Sparver said, barely hearing what Muang had to say. "Now listen to me. Has Deputy Field Ng returned from her mission?"

  There was no need to elaborate. Everyone in Panoply knew of Jason Ng's daughter.

  "I don't know. I can check with Thyssen, but — "

  "Never mind, there isn't time. Can you patch me through to Thalia? I need to talk to her urgently."

  "Wait a moment. I'll see what I can do."

  Sparver did not breathe. It could only have been tens of seconds before Muang spoke again, but it felt like hours. "She isn't aboard her cutter, which is currently docked at House Aubusson. I'm trying to contact her through her bracelet, but if she's out of range of the cutter, the transmission will have to be routed through the habitat's own abstraction services. This may take a moment — "

  "No one's going anywhere," Sparver said.

  After another eternity, Muang said, "I'm picking up her bracelet, Deputy. It's ringing. If she's wearing it, she'll hear you."

  * * *

  Dreyfus slowed his passage along the tube, gripped by an almost overwhelming urge to turn back. But he focused his resolve and continued until he reached the black wall of the entry lock. There was no suggestion of a door. He touched the armour of the Conjoiner ship and felt it ease inwards under the pressure of his fingers. It was neither metal nor ordinary quickmatter.

  The only visible controls consisted of a smaller version of the panel he had already used. It had been glued to the side of the hull, fixed into place by crusty dabs of bright green adhesive. There were only two toggles. Dreyfus reached for the one marked with the airlock symbol and gave it a hefty twist. After a moment, a luminous blue outline appeared in the black, defining the rectangular shape of a door. The outline thickened, and then the entire rectangular part pushed outwards and sideways, unassisted by any visible mechanisms or hinges.

  Dreyfus pushed himself into the interior of the Conjoiner vehicle. He looked back, holding his breath until he was satisfied that the rectangular door was not going to seal him in. He followed a winding, throat-like corridor until he reached a junction. Five corridors converged on this point, arriving from different angles. Light — of a peculiar blue-green sickliness — was leaking down one of the routes. The others were singularly dark and uninviting, and appeared to feed back towards the rear of the ship.

  He followed the light. When he estimated that he had moved twenty or thirty metres towards the bow, he found himself emerging into a very large room. The light, which had appeared bright from a distance, now revealed itself to be meagre, obscuring detail and scale. Dreyfus unfixed his helmet from its bonded connection with his belt and used the crown lamp to investigate his surroundings. His illumination glanced off steely surfaces, glass partitions and intricate tangles of plumbing.

  That was when he felt something cold and sharp press against his naked throat.

  "There are lights, for emergency use," a woman's voice said, speaking very calmly into his ear. "I shall bring them on now."

  Dreyfus kept very still. In his lower peripheral vision he could see the gauntleted knuckle of a hand. The hand was holding a blade. The blade was tight against his Adam's apple.

  The lights came on at full strength, yellow shading to pale green, and after a few moments of blinking in the sudden brightness Dreyfus saw a room full of sleepers, wired into complicated apparatus. There were dozens of them, eighty or ninety easily, maybe more. They'd been arranged in four long rows spaced equidistantly around an openwork catwalk. The sleepers did not lie in closed caskets, but rather on couches, to which they were bound by black restraining straps and webs of silver meshwork. Transparent lines ran in and out of their bodies, pulsing not just with what Dreyfus presumed to be blood and saline but with vividly coloured chemicals of obscure function. The sleepers were all naked and they were all breathing, yet so slowly that Dreyfus had to study the rise and fall of a single chest intently before he convinced himself that he was looking at anything other than a corpse. It was sleep dialled down almost all the way to death. He could make out nothing of their heads, for each sleeper wore a perfectly spherical black helmet sealed tight around the neck, which in turn sprouted a thick ribbed black cable from its crown, connected into a socket recessed into the adjoining wal
l. The impression of a room full of faceless human components, smaller parts plugged into a larger machine, was total.

  The knife was still pressing against his throat.

  "Who are you?" he asked, speaking quietly, fearful of moving his throat.

  "Who are you?" the woman asked back.

  There was no reason for subterfuge. "Field Prefect Tom Dreyfus, of Panoply."

  "Don't try anything rash, Prefect. This knife cuts very well. If you doubt me, take a look around you."

  "At what?"

  "The sleepers. See what I've done to them."

  He followed her instruction. He saw what she meant.

  Not all of the sleepers were whole.

  The confusion of restraints, surgical lines and helmets had hidden the truth at first. But once Dreyfus had become accustomed to the fact of the sleepers, and the mechanisms that sustained them, he realised that many of them were incomplete. Some were missing hands and arms, others lower legs or the whole limb. Perhaps a third of the sleepers had suffered a loss of some kind. Dreyfus started thinking back to the wars the Conjoiners had been involved in — perhaps this ship had been carrying the injured from one of those engagements, waylaid on their passage to the Conjoiner equivalent of a hospital.

  But that couldn't be the answer. This ship had probably been here for decades, and yet the injuries looked fresh. Some form of turquoise salve had been spread over the wounds, but beneath the salve the stumps were still raw. The sleepers hadn't even received basic field care, let alone the emergency regenerative medicine that the Conjoiners should have been able to utilize.

  "I don't understand — " he began.

  "I did it," the woman said. "I cut them. I cut them all."

  "Why?" Dreyfus asked.

  "To eat them," she said, sounding amazed at his question. "What other reason would there have been?"

  * * *

  CHAPTER 13

  * * *

  Thalia found herself once again confronting a waiting polling core. She was somewhere in the sphere: most likely on a floor about halfway up its hundred-metre diameter, judging by the spacious dimensions of the room housing the machinery. Large porthole-shaped windows ringed the enormous space. The beige walls were covered in mazelike white patterns derived from the designs of early integrated circuits. A number of chairs and tables had been provided for the comfort of the visitors. The furniture was all safely inert; no quickmatter was permitted near a polling core, save that essential for the functioning of the core itself. The core was a pearl-coloured cylinder rising from the middle of the floor and piercing the ceiling, surrounded by a low metal railing. Resting on a heavy-looking plinth just outside the railinged area was a glass-cased architectural model of the Museum of Cybernetics, rendered with sterile precision.

  Thalia had already explained what she would have to do; that if everything went to plan she would be on her way within less than twenty minutes; that at most her guests could expect a subliminal interruption in their access to abstraction. She had already examined the core and satisfied herself that there would be no surprises once she had opened the access window. "Really," she said, in her best self-deprecating tone, "it's not all that interesting. If it was serious, they wouldn't entrust it to just one field prefect."

  "I'm sure you're understating your abilities," said Caillebot, lounging in a blocky blue chair, one leg hooked over the other.

  "All I'm saying is, if you don't want to hang around and see me mutter a few boring incantations, I won't be offended. I know my way down now. If you want to wait by those goldfish ponds, I can find you when I'm done."

  "If it doesn't inconvenience you, I think we'd all like to stay," Paula Thory said, looking to the others for support. "It's not often we see the beating heart of the voting apparatus laid open for examination."

  Thalia scratched at her damp collar. "If you want to stick around, I have no problem with that. I'm about ready to begin."

  "Do what you must, Prefect," Thory said.

  She opened the cylinder, conscious of the eyes on her, and retrieved the last of the four one-time pads. "I'm going to read out three magic words here. They'll give me access to the core for six hundred seconds. There's no going back once I've initiated that window, so it'd be best if I'm not interrupted unless absolutely necessary. Of course, I'll keep you informed about what's happening."

  "We appreciate the gesture. Please, continue your work and don't pay any heed to us," Caillebot said.

  Thalia stepped through a gap in the surrounding railing, placed her cylinder on the ground and faced the flickering pillar of the core. She cleared her throat. "This is Deputy Field Prefect Thalia Ng. Acknowledge security access override Hickory Crepuscule Ivory."

  "Override confirmed," answered the core. "You now have six hundred seconds of clearance, Deputy Field Prefect Ng."

  Thalia removed the final upgrade diskette from her cylinder. "I'm going to insert this into the core," she said. "It contains new software instructions to cover a minor security loophole identified by Panoply."

  She had the core present a data-entry slot for her use. She pushed the thick diskette into the pillar, then stood back while the machine digested its contents. Thalia was anxious, but not nervous. She had run into difficulties in Carousel New Seattle-Tacoma, but all her instincts assured her that nothing like that would happen here.

  "The diskette contains a data fragment," the core said. "What do you wish me to do with this data fragment?"

  Thalia started to answer, but at that moment her bracelet began chiming. She lifted her cuff and glared at it in irritation. What was Prefect Muang trying to reach her about, now of all times? Muang was not one of the bastards who gave her grief about her father, but he wasn't Dreyfus or Sparver, or one of the senior prefects she was doing her best to impress. Whatever he was calling about, it could not possibly be that urgent. Certainly not urgent enough to interrupt a sensitive field upgrade, especially now that she'd actually opened the six-hundred-second access window.

  She would call him back when she was done. The world wasn't going to end because she kept Muang waiting for a few minutes.

  "I'm sorry," Thalia said, squeezing the suppress button.

  The core repeated its enquiry. "The diskette contains a data fragment. What do you wish me to do with this data fragment?"

  Thalia pulled down her cuff. "Use it to overwrite the contents of executable data segment alpha alpha five one six, please."

  "Just a moment." Lights flashed while the pillar cogitated. "I am ready to execute the overwrite order. I anticipate that the operation will entail a brief loss of abstraction, not exceeding three microseconds. Please confirm that the overwrite order is to be executed."

  "Confirm," Thalia said.

  "The executable data segment has now been overwritten. Abstraction was down for two point six eight microseconds. All affected transactions were buffered and have now been successfully reinstated. A level-one audit indicates no software conflicts have arisen as a result of this installation. Do you have further instructions for me?"

  "No," Thalia said. "That will be all."

  "There are four hundred and eleven seconds remaining on your access window. Do you wish the window to remain open until its scheduled termination, or shall I invoke immediate closure?"

  "You can close. We're done here."

  "Access is now terminated. Thank you for your visit, Deputy Field Prefect Thalia Ng."

  "It's been a pleasure." After retrieving the upgrade diskette from the pillar, Thalia snapped it back into the cylinder and then sealed the cylinder itself. She tried to keep her composure, but now that she was done, she could not help but feel a giddy elation. It was a little like being drunk on an empty stomach. I did it! she thought. She had completed all four installations. All on her own, without Dreyfus looking over her shoulder, without even the benefit of another field agent to help her with the technical workload. If anyone had ever doubted her abilities, or wondered how well she would function outside
a team context, this would silence them. I, Thalia Ng, not only designed the security plug, I field-installed it myself, by hand, with just a cutter for company.

  Four habitats completed. The plan had been executed. And now that she had satisfied herself that the upgrade was robust by installing it in four worst-case examples, there was nothing to stop her going live across the entire Glitter Band, all ten thousand habitats.

  Bring them on, Thalia thought, and then worked very hard to wipe the look of self-satisfaction from her face as she turned to her audience again, because it would be neither seemly nor dignified in a prefect.

  "Is there a problem?" Jules Caillebot asked, still sitting in the blue armchair but no longer in the relaxed pose of a few minutes earlier.

  "Not from my end," Thalia said. "It all went like a dream. Thanks for your cooperation." Maybe Muang had been calling her to inform her of a temporary comms blackout, she thought. It happened sometimes. Nothing to worry about. "You know what? Now that we're done, maybe I will take a walk in some of the gardens after all."

  "Abstraction is down," Caillebot said quietly.

  Thalia felt the first itch of wrongness. "I'm sorry?"

  "We have no abstraction. You said it would be off-line for a few microseconds, too short to notice. But it's still down." His voice became firmer and louder. "Abstraction is down, Prefect. Abstraction is down."

  Thalia shook her head. "You're mistaken. It can't be down."

  "There is no abstraction," Paula Thory said, standing up from her own chair. "We're out of contact, Prefect. Something appears to have gone wrong."

  "The system ran an audit on itself. It confirmed that abstraction had only been interrupted for an instant. The system doesn't make mistakes."

  "Then why were you here in the first place, if it wasn't to correct a failing in the apparatus?" asked Caillebot.

  "Maybe it's just us," said Broderick Cuthbertson. His mechanical owl twitched its head in all directions, as if following the flight of an invisible wasp.