Prefect

by Alastair Reynolds

  "Sparver?" Dreyfus asked. "Are you reading me?"

  "Loud and clear. You must be closer than before."

  "I'm on my way back up to the surface lock. I have a witness with me, so don't be too surprised."

  "I'm in the storage area just under the lock. I was coming back down to you with a plasma torch."

  "No need now. You can meet us aboard the ship. Did you manage to get that message through to Thalia?"

  "I got a message through to Muang, but Thalia wasn't answering."

  Dreyfus felt his spirits dip. "Did you tell him to keep trying?"

  "It's worse than that." Sparver sounded genuinely sorry that he had to be the bearer of bad news. "Muang's lost contact with her completely. He isn't even receiving a signal from her bracelet."

  "Did he have time to get any kind of message through to her?"

  "Nothing, Boss. But at least help's on its way to us."

  "Can you cope with a vacuum crossing?" Dreyfus asked Clepsydra, preparing to fix his own helmet back into place. "Our ship isn't mated with the exterior airlock. You'll have to pass through a suitwall as well."

  "I'd survive vacuum even if I didn't have a suit. Worry about yourself before you worry about me."

  "Just asking," Dreyfus said.

  They were back aboard the corvette in less than five minutes. Sparver was waiting for them on the other side of the suitwall, his arms crossed in anticipation. Clepsydra's suit stayed intact during its passage through the wall, but once she was inside the corvette she made a point of removing her helmet rather than simply folding it back into her suit, and pressed it against an adhesive area on the wall with a natural fluency that suggested she'd been on similar ships a thousand times before. Dreyfus could not help but interpret the gesture as indicative of Clepsydra's provisional trust in her new hosts.

  "This is my partner, Deputy Field Prefect Bancal," Dreyfus told Clepsydra, introducing Sparver. "I don't know what you've heard about hyperpigs, but there's nothing you need fear from him."

  "Nor does he have anything to fear from me," Clepsydra answered, her voice low and level.

  "Is she a guest or a prisoner?" Sparver asked.

  "She's a protected witness. She's been through hell and now we have to safeguard both Clepsydra and her colleagues."

  "How many more of them are there down there?"

  "A lot. But we can't do anything for them right now, not until help arrives. I hope you impressed the seriousness of our situation on Muang."

  "He got the message."

  "There are nearly a hundred Conjoiners aboard that ship. When help arrives I'll call Jane and get her to task some more assets. We're going to need a Heavy Medical Squad as well. ETA, roughly?"

  Sparver glanced through the flight deck passwall just as the console chimed. "Proximity alert," he said. "Guess that's the help arriving. That was quick."

  "Too bloody quick," Dreyfus said, a bad feeling brewing low in his gut.

  Without seeking permission from either of her hosts, Clepsydra hauled herself across the cabin and through into the vacant flight deck. "This is the other vehicle from Panoply?" she asked.

  "Hopefully," Sparver said.

  "Then why is it coming in on such a fast approach?"

  "Guess they're in a bit of a hurry to get to us," Sparver said.

  "They're in more than a hurry. Not even a Conjoiner vehicle could slow down from that kind of speed without pulping everyone aboard."

  "Then maybe they're planning to overshoot the rock and come back around on a second pass," Sparver answered.

  "They're not overshooting," Clepsydra said. "If your tracking system is correct, the incoming ship is on a collision vector."

  Quickly Dreyfus pulled himself into the flight deck and checked the proximity display. He saw the icon of the approaching vehicle and recognised its identifier tag.

  "It's not the deep-system vehicle we were hoping for," he said. "It's the freighter from Marco's Eye that we saw earlier."

  "Aurora must have tapped into its navigation system, deviating it from its usual flight-path," Clepsydra said. "She is going to use it to ram you out of existence, and destroy the evidence of this rock."

  "She's that powerful?" Dreyfus asked.

  "It would not take great power, merely great cunning and stealth."

  Sparver joined them. "How long have we got?"

  "Eighty-five seconds," Clepsydra said.

  "Then we're in trouble," Sparver replied. "We can't get this thing moving inside of a minute, and even then we wouldn't get far enough away from the surface to make a difference."

  "Seventy-five seconds."

  "We can suit up, return to the rock. If we can get far enough underground — "

  "The rock will be destroyed," Clepsydra said, with stony detachment.

  "There isn't time in any case," Dreyfus said. "It'd take too long to cycle through the airlock."

  "We have less than a minute," said Clepsydra.

  "The countdown isn't helping," Sparver replied. "Maybe we should start thinking about the pods. We've got enough for all three of us. We don't have much time, but — "

  "Will they eject us away from the rock, or towards it?" Clepsydra asked.

  "They're dorsal pods. We're belly-down now, so — "

  "They'll eject us into space," Dreyfus finished.

  "We have thirty-eight seconds," Clepsydra said. "I suggest we adjourn to the pods."

  They were designed to be used in dire emergency, when every second counted, so there was little in the way of preliminaries to attend to. Even so, Dreyfus sensed that they were down to the last ten seconds before all three of them were safely ensconced in their own single-person pods.

  "The pods have transponders," he told Clepsydra, just before they sealed the door on her. "The deep-system vehicle will pick all of them up, but it may take some time."

  Five seconds later he was webbed into his own unit. He reached up over his forehead and tugged down the heavy red handle that triggered the pod's escape system. Quickmatter erupted into the empty spaces to cocoon him against the coming acceleration. When it arrived, it still felt as if the bones of his spine were being compressed to the thickness of parchment.

  Then he lost consciousness.

  * * *

  Thalia snapped on her glasses and peered into the gloom of the windowless chamber, while Cyrus Parnasse stood back with his veined, muscular hands planted on his hips, for all the world like a farmer surveying his crops. They were alone in a section of the polling core sphere located well below the viewing gallery where the other citizens were holed up. Boxy grey structures loomed out of the darkness, stretching away into the distance.

  She tapped a finger against the side of the glasses, keying in additional amplification. "What am I looking at here, Citizen Parnasse? It just looks like a load of boxes and junk."

  "Exactly what it is, girl. This is a storage room for the Museum of Cybernetics, full of stuff they haven't got room for in the main exhibit areas. There're hundreds of rooms like this, right across the campus. But this is the only one we can reach without going back down to the lobby."

  "Oh."

  "I reckoned we could use some of this stuff to barricade those stairs. What d'ya think?"

  "I didn't think any of those machines would be able to get up the stairs."

  "They won't: too big, most of 'em, or with the wrong kind of design. But there are plenty of machines out there that'll fit the bill. Now that they know we're up here, how long do you think it'll be before they arrive and start climbing?"

  "Not long," she said. "You're right. I should have thought of that sooner."

  "Don't be too hard on yerself. Had a lot to think out in the last few hours, I dare say."

  True, Thalia thought. True but still entirely inexcusable. "You don't think we're too late, do you?"

  "Not if we get a shift on. There's enough junk here to block the stairs, provided we get a chain movin' it. We'll need to take care of the elevator shaft as w
ell."

  "I hadn't forgotten that, just didn't think there was much we could do about it."

  The elevator was still at the bottom of the shaft, waiting in the lobby where they had abandoned it.

  "If that whip-thing of yours still works, we can cut a hole into the shaft and drop as much of this stuff down it as we can manage. That's five hundred metres straight down. It won't stop the machines for ever, if they're really determined to get the elevator moving, but it'll definitely put a dent in their plans."

  "From where I'm standing, that sounds a lot better than nothing." But when she touched her whiphound, it responded by buzzing against her belt, giving off an acrid smell. They'd had to use it to cut through the locked door into the storage room and now it was protesting again. Thalia wondered how long it would last before giving out on her completely; it was already of limited utility as a weapon, unless employed as a one-off grenade.

  "We shouldn't hang around," Parnasse said. "I'll start moving boxes if you go and round up some help."

  "I hope they're in a mood to take orders."

  "They will be if they think you know exactly what you're doing."

  "I don't, Citizen Parnasse. That's the problem." Thalia pulled off her glasses and slipped them into her pocket. "I've been putting a brave face on it, but I'm seriously out of my depth here. You saw what we had to deal with outside."

  "I saw you coping, girl. You might not feel like it, but you look as if you're doing a decent enough job." Thalia's expression must have been sceptical, because he added: "You got us all back here alive, didn't you?"

  "Right back where we started, Citizen Parnasse. My escape attempt didn't actually achieve much, did it?"

  "It was the right thing to try. And we didn't know about the servitors when we started off, did we?"

  "I suppose not."

  "Think of it as a scouting expedition. We went out and gathered intelligence on our situation. We learned things we wouldn't have learned if we'd just stayed up here, waitin' for help to come."

  "Put it like that, it almost sounds as if I knew what I was doing."

  "You did know. You've convinced me already, girl. Now all you have to do is convince the others. And you know where that starts, don't you?"

  There was a heavy feeling in her stomach, but she forced herself to smile. "With me. I've got to start acting as if I know exactly what to do, or else the others aren't going to listen."

  "That's the spirit."

  She looked into the darkness of the storage room. "Maybe we can block the stairs and the shaft. But what do we do afterwards? Sooner or later those machines are going to find a way to get to us, just like they've got to the other citizens outside. Everything we've seen says they're being directed by an external intelligence, something with problem-solving capability." She thought of the way the citizens had been rounded up and pacified, cowed into submission by warnings of an attack against the habitat. "Something smart enough to lie."

  "One step at a time," Parnasse said. "We deal with the barricades first. Then we worry about a dazzling encore."

  He made it sound so effortless, as if all they were talking about was the right way to cook an egg.

  "All right."

  "You're a prefect, girl. A lot might've changed since you dropped by today, but you're still wearing the uniform. Make it count. The citizens are depending on you."

  * * *

  CHAPTER 16

  * * *

  Dreyfus was still drowsing as the deep-system cruiser completed its docking, nudging home into its skeletal berthing rack. He'd slept all the way back to Panoply, from almost the moment when his escape pod was brought aboard the ship and he was reunited with Sparver and Clepsydra. He dreamed of reeking halls of raw human meat hanging from bloodstained hooks, and a woman gorging herself on muscle and sinew, her mouth a red-stained obscenity. When he woke and sifted through his memories of recent events, his experiences in the Nerval-Lermontov rock felt like something that had happened yesterday, rather than a handful of hours earlier. The rock itself no longer existed. The impact of the fully laden and fuelled freighter had pulverised it, so that nothing now remained of its secrets except a cloud of expanding rubble; a gritty sleet that would rain against the sticky collision shields of the Glitter Band habitats for many orbits. Even if Panoply had the resources, there'd have been little point in combing that debris cloud for forensic clues. Clepsydra was now Dreyfus' only witness to the unspeakable crime that had been visited upon her crewmates.

  But it wasn't Clepsydra who was foremost in his thoughts.

  As soon as he pushed through the cruiser's suitwall, Dreyfus badgered Thyssen, the tired-looking dock attendant. "Thalia Ng, my deputy. When did she get in?"

  The man glanced at his compad. He had red rings around his eyes, vivid as brands. "She's still out there, Tom."

  "On her way back?"

  "Not according to this." The man tapped his stylus against a line of text. "CTC haven't logged her undocking from House Aubusson. Looks as if she's still inside."

  "How long since she docked there?"

  "According to this ... eight hours."

  Dreyfus knew that Thalia had only had a six-hundred-second access window. No matter what obstacles she'd encountered, she should have been out of there by now.

  "Has anyone managed to get through to her since Deputy Sparver's attempt?"

  The man looked helpless. "I don't have a record of that."

  "She has one of your ships," Dreyfus snapped. "I'd say it was your duty to keep adequate tabs on her, wouldn't you?"

  "I'm sorry, Prefect."

  "Don't apologise," Dreyfus growled. "Just do your job." He grabbed a handhold and pulled himself towards the exit.

  "If you think you're having a shitty day," Sparver told Thyssen, "you should try ours on for size."

  The two prefects and their Conjoiner guest cleared the dock and transitioned through to one of the standard-gravity wheels. They detoured to the medical section and left Clepsydra in the care of one of the doctors, an impish man named Mercier whom Dreyfus trusted not to ask awkward questions. Mercier affected the appearance and manners of a bookish scholar of the natural sciences from some remote candlelit century. He dressed impeccably, with a white shirt and cravat, his eyes forever hidden behind green-tinted half-moon spectacles, and chose to surround himself with facsimiles of varnished wooden furniture, conjured museum-piece medical tools and gruesome illustrative devices. He had a perplexing attachment to paperwork, to the extent that he made many of his reports in inked handwriting, using a curious black stylus that he referred to as a 'fountain pen'. Yet for all his eccentricities, he was no less competent than Dr Demikhov, his counterpart in the adjoining Sleep Lab.

  "This is my witness," Dreyfus explained. "She's to be examined humanely, treated for malnutrition and dehydration and then left well alone. I'll return in a few hours."

  Clepsydra cocked her crested bald egg of a head and narrowed her eyes. "Am I now to consider myself a prisoner again?"

  "No. Just a guest, under my protection. When the crisis is over, I'll do all in my power to get you back to your people."

  "I could call my people myself if you give me access to a medium-strength transmitter."

  "Part of me would like nothing better. But someone was prepared to kill to keep you a secret. They succeeded in killing your compatriots. That means they'll be more than prepared to kill again if they know you're here."

  "Then I should leave. Immediately."

  "You'll be safe here."

  "I think I can trust you," Clepsydra said, her attention on Dreyfus, as if no one else was in the room. "But understand one thing: it is a significant thing for a Conjoiner to trust a baseline human being. People like you did terrible things to people like me, once. Many of them would do the same things again if the chance arose. Please do not give me cause to regret this."

  "I won't," Dreyfus said.

  * * *

  Dusk was falling in the long shaft of House Au
busson. The mirror-directed sunlight pouring through the window bands was being slowly dimmed as the bands lost their transparency. Soon the habitat would be dark even when its orbit brought it around to Yellowstone's dayside.

  From the curved viewing gallery of the polling core, more than five hundred metres above the ground, Thalia watched the shadows encroach like an army of stalking cats. She could still make out the pale-grey trajectory of the pathway they had tried to follow out of the formal gardens, towards the objective of the endcap wall. But the grey was darkening, losing definition as darkness won. Soon even the concentric black hoops of the window bands would be indistinguishable from the surrounding terrain. She would be able to make out neither the path nor the endcap. The attempted crossing, which had seemed achievable only hours earlier, now struck her as hopelessly misguided. It would have been ill-conceived if all they had to contend with was enraged and panicked citizenry looking for someone to mob. But now Thalia knew that the darkening landscape was in all likelihood crawling with dangerous machines, serving an agenda that definitely did not involve the preservation of human life.

  But, she thought, seeking composure before she turned around, the citizens in her care must not see how frightened she was. She had come into their world bearing the authority of Panoply and that was the role she was obliged to continue playing. She had failed them once; twice if she included the mistake with the polling core that had created this mess in the first place. She could not let them down again.

  "So what's the next step in your plan?" Caillebot asked, with a sarcastic lilt that Thalia couldn't help but detect.

  "The next step is we stay put," she said.

  "Up here?"

  "We're safe here," she said, mentally deleting the 'for now' that she had been about to add. "This is as good a place to wait as anywhere we could have picked in the habitat."

  "Wait for what, exactly?" Caillebot asked.

  She'd been expecting the gardener to start needling her as soon as they were inside the core. "For Panoply, Citizen. They're on their way. There'll be a deep-system cruiser docked with us before you can blink."