Prefect

by Alastair Reynolds

  "Aurora's plan is about the continued existence of the human species around Yellowstone," Gaffney said dogmatically. "Taking the long view, she sees that our little cultural hub is critical to the wider human diaspora. If the hub fails, the wheel will splinter itself apart. Take out Yellowstone and the Ultras lose their most lucrative stopover. Interstellar trade will wither. The other Demarchist colonies will fall like dominoes. It might take decades, centuries, even, but it will happen. That's why we need to think about survival now."

  Clepsydra formed a convincing sneer. "Her plan is about her survival, not yours. At the moment she is letting you tag along for the ride. When you are no longer useful — and that will come to pass — I would make sure you have a very good escape plan."

  "Thank you for the advice." His hand tightened on the whiphound. "I'm puzzled, Clepsydra. You know that I can kill you with this thing. I also know that you can influence it, to a degree."

  "You're wondering why I haven't turned it against you."

  "Crossed my mind."

  "Because I know that the gesture would be futile." She nodded at his wrist. "Your hand is gloved, for instance. It could be that you wish to avoid forensic contamination of the weapon, but I think there must be more to it than that. The glove extends into your sleeve. I presume it merges with some kind of lightweight armour under your uniform."

  "Good guess. It's training armour, the kind recruits wear when they're learning to use whiphounds. Hyperdiamond cross-weave, edged on the microscopic scale to blunt and clog the cutting mechanisms on the sharp side of the filament. Even if you could bend the tail around towards me, it wouldn't be able to slice through my arm. Still, I'm surprised you didn't try it anyway."

  "I was resigned to death the moment I saw that you were not Prefect Dreyfus."

  "Here's the deal," he said. "I know that Conjoiners can shut off pain when they need to. But I'm willing to bet you'd still choose a quick death over a slow one. Especially here. Especially when you're all alone, far from your friends."

  "Death is death. And I can die precisely as quickly as I choose, not you."

  "All the same, I'll make you a proposition. I know you looked deep into our files. Minor confession: I was prepared to let that happen because I knew I was going to have to kill you anyway. I thought you might turn something up that I could use."

  "I did."

  "I'm not talking about Aurora. I mean the Clockmaker."

  "I have no idea what you mean."

  He guessed that she was lying. Even if she'd had no knowledge of the Clockmaker prior to her arrival in Panoply — and the Exordium dreamers hadn't been totally isolated from information concerning events in the outside world — she would surely have found out about it during her uninvited rummage through Panoply's records.

  He rolled the whiphound handle in his palm. "I'll let you in on a little secret. Officially, it was nuked out of existence when Panoply destroyed the Sylveste Institute for Artificial Mentation." He lowered his voice, even though he knew there could be no eavesdroppers. "But that's not what really happened. SIAM was only nuked after Panoply had already gone inside to extract intelligence and hardware. They believed that they'd destroyed the Clockmaker, true enough. They found what appeared to be its remains. But they kept the relics, the clocks and musical boxes and all the nasty little booby traps. And one of those relics turned out to be ... well, just as bad as the thing itself. Worse, in some respects. It was the Clockmaker."

  "No one would have been that stupid," Clepsydra said.

  "Less a question of stupidity, I think, than of overweening intellectual vanity. Which isn't to say they haven't been clever. Just to have pulled this off, just to have kept it hidden for eleven years ... that took some doing, some guile."

  "Why are you interested in the Clockmaker? Are you so foolish as to think you can use it as well? Or is Aurora the foolish one?"

  Gaffney shook his head knowingly. "No, Aurora wouldn't make that kind of mistake. But now the Clockmaker is a very real concern to her. Her intelligence networks have determined that it wasn't destroyed. She knows that a cell working inside Panoply kept it under study in the same place for most of the last eleven years. Aurora fears that the Clockmaker could undo all her good work, at the eleventh hour. Therefore it must be located and destroyed, before the cell has a chance to activate it."

  "Have you already made an attempt to destroy it? Perhaps in the last few days?"

  He looked at her wonderingly. "Oh, you're good. You're very, very good."

  "Ruskin-Sartorious," Clepsydra said, enunciating the syllables with particular care. "I saw it in your files. That's where you expected to find the Clockmaker. That's why that habitat had to be destroyed. Except you were too late, weren't you?"

  "I can only guess that Aurora had probed around that secret a little too incautiously, and somebody had got nervous. The question is: where did they move it to?"

  "Why don't you torture someone useful and find out?"

  Gaffney smiled at that. "Don't think I didn't try. Trouble was the old boy turned out not to know very much after all. I kept my word to him, though: left him with enough of a brain to do some gardening. I'm not a monster, you see."

  "I cannot help you either."

  "Oh, but I think you can. Don't be coy, Clepsydra: I know how transparent our archives must have been to you, how childishly ineffective our security measures, how laughable our attempts at obfuscation and misdirection. You only had access to those files for the brief time you were in Mercier's clinic, and you still worked out what happened to Ruskin-Sartorious."

  "I saw nothing concerning the current location of the Clockmaker."

  "Tell me you didn't see a hint of the cell. Feints and mirrors in the architecture. Faultlines and schisms in the flow of data. Something that would have been nigh-on impossible for a baseline human to spot, even a high-grade Panoply operative. But not necessarily beyond the discernment of a Conjoiner."

  "I saw nothing."

  "Do you want to give that a bit more thought?" He injected a tone of conciliatory reasonableness into his voice. "We can come to an arrangement, if you like. I can leave you alive, with a modicum of neural functionality. If you help me."

  "You had better not leave me alive, Gaffney. Not if you want to sleep at night."

  "I'll take that as a 'no', I suppose." He smiled nicely. "No point asking again, is there?"

  "None at all."

  "Then I guess we're done here."

  The whiphound felt heavy and solid in his hands, like a blunt instrument. He spooled the filament back into the handle and then clipped it to his belt, for now.

  "I thought — " Clepsydra began.

  "I was never going to kill you with the whiphound. Too damned risky if you managed to sink your mental claws into it." Gaffney reached into his pocket and retrieved the gun he had intended to use all along. It was an ancient thing, devoid of any components that could be influenced by Conjoiner mind-trickery. It relied on oiled steel mechanisms and simple pyrotechnic chemistry. Like a crossbow, or a bayonet, it was an outdated weapon for which there were still certain niche applications.

  It only took one shot. He drilled Clepsydra through the forehead, just under the start of her cranial crest, leaving an exit wound in the back of her skull large enough to put three fingers through. Brain and bone splattered the rear wall of the interrogation bubble. He paddled closer to examine the residue. In addition to the expected smell of cordite, there was a vile stench of burnt electrical componentry. The pink and grey mess had the texture of porridge, intermingled with bits of broken earthenware and torn fabric. There was something else in there, too: tiny glinting things, silver-grey and bronze, some of them linked together by fine gold wires, some with little lights still blinking. He watched, fascinated, as the lights slowly stopped flashing, as if he was observing a neon-lit city fading into blackout. Some part of her, smeared against that wall, had still been thinking.

  Clepsydra was dead now, no doubt about that
. Conjoiners were superhuman but they weren't invulnerable. She was floating quite limply, her eyes still open, elevated and turned slightly together as if — as ludicrous as it might appear — she had been tracking the path of the bullet just before it entered her forehead. The look on her face was strangely serene, with the merest hint of a coquettish smile. Gaffney wasn't bothered by that. He'd had enough experience with corpses to know how deceptive their expressions could be. Freezeframe the onset of a scream and it could easily resemble laughter, or delight, or joyous anticipation.

  He was nearly done. He returned the gun to his pocket and spoke aloud, very clearly and slowly. "Gallium, paper, basalt. Gallium, paper, basalt. Reveal. Reveal. Reveal."

  It took a moment, just long enough to stretch his nerves. But he needn't have worried. The nonvelope flickered into existence off to his right, revealing itself as a chromed sphere reflecting back the patterning of wall tiles in convex curves. Gaffney paddled over and cracked the nonvelope open along its hemispherical divide. He removed the forensic clean-up kit he had placed in the nonvelope earlier and for a couple of minutes busied himself removing the immediate evidence of Clepsydra's death from the walls. Had they been made of quick-matter, they would have absorbed the evidence themselves, but the interrogation bubble's cladding was resolutely dumb. Fortunately the clean-up did not need to be a thorough job, and the fact that there would still be microscopic traces of blood and tissue located away from the splatter point — let alone dispersed through the air — was of no concern to him.

  He used the clean-up kit to remove forensic traces from both the weapon and his training glove, then packed the gun and the kit back into the nonvelope. He then turned his attention to Clepsydra. The weightless environment made it no simple matter to persuade her inert form into the restrictive volume of the nonvelope, but Gaffney accomplished the task without having to resort to the cutting capabilities of the whiphound. He re-sealed the nonvelope and ordered it to return to invisibility. In the moment after it had flicked into concealment mode, he fancied that he could just discern its outline, as a pencil-thin circle looming before him. But when he glanced away and then returned his gaze to the spot where the nonvelope had been, he could not see it at all.

  He slipped on his glasses, keying in sonar mode. The nonvelope did its best to absorb the sound pulses he was sending it, but it had been optimised for invisibility in vacuum, not atmosphere. The glasses picked it out easily. He reached out a hand and touched the cold, smooth curve of the sphere, which drifted to one side under his finger pressure. He pushed it towards the wall. It was a squeeze getting it through the twin passwalls, but it had made the journey once so it could make it again. Gaffney's only concern was meeting someone coming the other way: Dreyfus, for instance. Two people could easily pass each other, but the nonvelope presented an obstruction too wide to wriggle around.

  His luck — or what Gaffney preferred to think of as his calculated access window — continued to hold. He reached the much wider trunk corridor that accessed the interrogation chamber's outer airlock without incident, where there was sufficient room for the nonvelope to hide itself, moving out of the way of passers-by when necessary. He abandoned the sphere to its own detection-avoidance programming. Gaffney was snatching off his glasses when a nameless operative came around the bend in the corridor, pulling himself along by handholds. He was hauling a bundle of shrink-wrapped uniforms from one part of Panoply to another.

  "Senior Prefect," the operative said, touching a deferential hand to the side of his head.

  Gaffney nodded back, fumbling the glasses into his pocket. "Keep up the good work, son," he said, sounding just a touch more flustered than he would have liked.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 18

  * * *

  Dreyfus pinched the skin at the corners of his eyes until the gemmed lights of the Solid Orrery moved into sluggish focus. For a long while he had been fighting exhaustion, slipping into instants of treacherous microsleep where his thoughts spun off into daydreams and wish-fulfilment fantasy. Seniors, field prefects and supernumerary operatives were coming and going from the tactical room, murmuring intelligence and rumour, pausing to consult compads or run enlargements and simulations on the Solid Orrery itself. Occasionally Dreyfus was allowed to be party to what was discussed, even to add his thoughts, but the other seniors made it abundantly clear that he was there on their terms, not his. Exasperatedly, he'd listened while the next response was formulated. After much debate, the seniors had decided to send four cutters, one to each silent habitat, each of which would be carrying three Panoply operatives equipped at the same level as a lockdown party.

  "That's not enough," Dreyfus said. "All you'll have to show for it is four wrecked ships and twelve dead prefects. We can't afford to lose the ships and we damned well can't afford to lose the prefects."

  "It's the logical next step in an escalating response," Crissel pointed out.

  Dreyfus shook his head in dismay. "This isn't about logical next steps. They've already shown us that any approaching ships will be treated as hostile."

  "So what do you propose?"

  "We need four deep-system cruisers, more if we can spare them. They can carry hundreds of prefects. They'll also stand a chance of fighting all the way into the four habitats and making a forced hard dock."

  "To me," Crissel said, looking pleased with himself, "that sounds very much like putting all our eggs in one basket."

  "Whereas you'd prefer to keep throwing the eggs one a time, until we run out?"

  "That isn't it at all. I'm talking about an appropriate reaction, rather than a sledgehammer strike with all our resources — "

  Dreyfus cut him off. "If you want to recover those habitats, the time to act is now. Whoever's inside them is probably struggling to control the citizenry, enough that they may still be vulnerable to an assault by a small but coordinated squad of prefects. We have a window here, one that's closing on us fast."

  Gaffney had returned to the room — he'd been off on some errand elsewhere. Dreyfus noticed an uncharacteristic sheen of sweat on his forehead, and the fact that he was wearing the heavy black glove and sleeve of whiphound training armour.

  "At the risk of endorsing melodrama," Gaffney said, looking only at the other seniors, "Dreyfus may have a point. We can't commit four cruisers, or even two. But we do have one on launch standby. We can put fifty field prefects inside it within ten minutes, more if we move some shifts around."

  "They'll need tactical armour and extreme-contingency weapons," Crissel said.

  "The armour isn't a problem. But the weapons are still under wraps." Gaffney looked apologetic. "This crisis has caught up with us so quickly that we haven't polled for permission to use them."

  "Jane would have polled already," Dreyfus said. "I'm sure she was planning it when I left."

  "It's not too late," Baudry said. "I'll force through an emergency poll using the statutory process. We can get a return on it inside twenty minutes. That'll still give us time to equip the cruiser."

  "If they don't turn us down," Dreyfus said.

  "They won't. I'll make it abundantly clear that we need those weapons."

  "And spark off even more unrest into the bargain?" Gaffney asked, head tilted at a sceptical angle. "Be very careful how you play this one. If the citizenry get even a whiff that we're dealing with something worse than a squabble with the Ultras, we'll have our hands tied just containing the panic."

  "I'll be sure to exercise due discretion," Baudry said, speaking with fierce self-control.

  "I hope the vote goes our way," Dreyfus said. "But even if it does, one cruiser won't be anywhere near enough."

  "It's all we can spare at the moment," Gaffney said. "You'll just have to take it or leave it."

  "I'll take it," Dreyfus said. "Provided I'm allowed to lead the assault team."

  For a moment no one said anything. Dreyfus sensed the conflicted impulses of the other prefects. None of them would have wanted to be
on that ship when it got close to House Aubusson.

  "It'll be dangerous," Gaffney said.

  "I know."

  Baudry studied Dreyfus with knowing concentration. "And I presume House Aubusson will be your first port of call?"

  He didn't even blink. "It's the softest target. The one we have the best chance of taking."

  "And if Thalia Ng were elsewhere?"

  "She isn't," Dreyfus said.

  * * *

  Across the Glitter Band, a singular event was taking place, one that had not happened for eleven years, and for more than thirty before that. With the exception of the four that had already been lost, it was happening in all ten thousand habitats, irrespective of their status or social organisation. Where citizens were wired into a high degree of abstraction, whether it was inside the Bezile Solipsist State, Dreamhaven, Carousel New Jakarta or one of a hundred similar habitats, they simply found their local reality — however baroque, however impenetrably bizarre — being rudely interrupted to make way for an unscheduled announcement from the mundane depths of baseline reality. In the many mainstream Demarchist states, citizens felt the intrusion of a new presence into their minds, one that momentarily suppressed the usual nervous chatter of endless polling. In more moderate states, where abstraction was not adopted to the same degree, citizens received warning chimes from bracelets, or found windows appearing in the visual fields provided by optic implants, lenses, monocles or glasses. They paused to pay heed. In states where extreme biomodifications were in vogue, citizens were alerted by changes in their own physiology, or the physiologies of those around them. Skin patterns shifted to accommodate two-dimensional video displays. Entire bodily structures morphed to form living sculptures capable of delivering a message. In the Voluntary Tyrannies, citizens paused to look up at murals on the sides of the buildings that had suddenly flicked over to show the face of an unfamiliar woman rather than the locally designated tyrant.