Prefect

by Alastair Reynolds

  "But the programming is hard-coded."

  "Nothing's hard-coded to a Conjoiner. There's always a way in, always a back door. She'd have found it if she knew she was about to die and this was her only way of getting a message through. Right, Sheridan?"

  Gaffney twitched another affirmative. Some kind of whitish foam or drool was beginning to erupt around the black plug filling his mouth. The quickening tempo of his breathing was now audible to everyone in the room.

  "We still have to get it out of him," Baudry said. "Sheridan: I want you to stay very, very calm. No matter what you've done, no matter what's happened, we're going to help you." She lifted her arm and spoke into her bracelet with a voice on the trembling edge of panic. "Doctor Demikhov? Oh good, you're awake. Yes, very well, thank you. I know this is unorthodox and that you're mandated to focus only on the Aumonier case but ... something's come up. Something that requires your expertise very, very urgently."

  * * *

  Dr Demikhov conjured a quickmatter partition, closing off one end of the tactical room to allow him and the other medical technicians to work on Gaffney in privacy. The last clear view Dreyfus had of the senior prefect was of him being gently lowered onto a couch tipped at forty-five degrees to the floor, handled as if he was a bomb that might detonate at any instant. Through the partition's smoky opacity, the team became vaguely outlined pale ghosts, huddled around an indistinct black form. Then the indistinct black form started thrashing, blurred limbs flailing the air.

  "Do you think they'll get it out of him?" Baudry asked, breaking the uncanny silence.

  "I don't think Clepsydra was interested in killing him," Dreyfus said. "She could have achieved that already by embedding a different set of instructions into the whiphound. I think she wanted him to talk instead."

  "He was in no state to tell us anything reliable."

  "He told us enough," Dreyfus said. "We can get more out of him when Demikhov's finished." He eased himself into one of the seats around the table, opposite Baudry. "I'm taking something of a liberty here, but is it safe to assume that I'm no longer the prime suspect in Clepsydra's murder?"

  Baudry swallowed hard. "I was prepared to believe that you'd been framed, Tom, but I couldn't accept your accusations about Gaffney. He was one of us, for Voi's sake. I had to believe that you were wrong: that you were either striking out against him for personal reasons, or someone was framing Gaffney as well."

  "And now?"

  "Following that little spectacle, I think we can safely assume that we know who murdered Clepsydra, and that he was probably acting alone." Baudry cast a wary glance at the smoky partition, but the huddle of shapes beyond the quickmatter was now too concentrated to separate into individuals. "Which means you were right, and I was wrong, and I ignored you when I should have trusted you. I'm sorry about that."

  "Don't apologise," Dreyfus said. "You had a crisis to contain and you took the best decision you could given the evidence available to you."

  "There's more," Baudry said. She played with her fingers nervously, as if she was trying to dismantle her hands. "I see now that Gaffney wanted Jane removed from command. Not because he was concerned for her, or even for Panoply, but because he feared she'd put two and two together before very long."

  "So she had to go," Dreyfus said.

  Baudry's attention flicked to the partition. "When Demikhov's finished ... I need to talk to him about Jane. Do you think she's strong enough to resume command?"

  "Whether she is or not, we need her."

  "Like a circuit needs a fuse, even though it might blow at any time." Baudry shuddered at the thought. "Can we do this? Can we subject Jane to something that might kill her?"

  "Let Jane decide."

  "Crissel and I didn't want her removed for the same reasons as Gaffney," she said, apparently oblivious to the other people in the tactical room. "But that doesn't make what we did any more excusable."

  "Whatever Crissel did wrong, he made it right when he got on that deep-system cruiser."

  "And me?"

  "Reinstate Jane, clear me of any suspicion of wrongdoing and I think you'll have made a decent start."

  It was as if she hadn't heard him. "Perhaps I should resign. I've let down the supreme prefect, allowed myself to be hoodwinked and manipulated by another senior ... failed to trust the one man I should have placed my faith in. In most organisations, what I've done would be punished by instant dismissal."

  "Sorry, Lillian, but you don't get out of it that easily," Dreyfus said. "It takes more than a few bad judgement calls to erase a lifetime's loyal service to Panoply. You were an outstanding senior a week ago. From where I'm sitting, not much has changed."

  "That's ... generous of you," she allowed.

  "I'm only thinking of the organisation. We lost a good man in Crissel. That's why we need Jane Aumonier. That's why we need Lillian Baudry."

  "And Tom Dreyfus," she added. "And yes, you can consider yourself free of suspicion."

  "I hope that goes for Sparver as well."

  "Of course. He did nothing wrong except support a fellow prefect, and he deserves my personal apology."

  "I want him to start digging into the archives, to find everything he can on Aurora Nerval-Lermontov and the other alpha-levels."

  "I'll make sure he has all the resources, all the clearance he needs. You honestly think this is the same woman?"

  Dreyfus nodded at the partition. "We heard it from the horse's mouth. In a manner of speaking, at least. We're dealing with a ghost in the machine. Now all we need is a ghost-killer."

  * * *

  The world came back to Jane Aumonier without warning, without ceremony. She had decided, after much deliberation, that she preferred darkness and silence to the limited range of entertainments Gaffney and the others had left her with when they removed her executive authority. That left her alone with only the scarab for company, but in the eleven years since it had attached itself to her neck she had found that she could, when circumstances required it, retreat to a private corner of her own mind, a fortified place where even the scarab could not intrude. She had never been able to stay within that mental bastion for very long, but it had always been there when she needed it. In her place of sanctuary she played glacially cold, achingly melancholy piano pieces. She had often played the piano before the scarab came. Now it would not even allow the small bulk of a holoclavier in her presence, let alone a full-bodied keyboard. Yet she still remembered how to play, and when she was in full retreat her fingers moved in silent echo of the composition she was reciting in her head, ten million parsecs from the chamber in which she floated. The hidden music was the one thing the scarab had never been able to steal from her.

  She had her eyes closed when the chamber began to light up of its own volition. It was hazardous to close her eyes for too long, for that invited the spectre of sleep to take a step nearer. But there was a more profound, calmer darkness when her eyes were closed, even in the absolute blackness of the unlit chamber.

  "I didn't — " Aumonier began, squinting against the sudden intrusion of brightness, colour and movement. The music shattered into irrecoverable pieces.

  "It's all right," said a voice, coming from somewhere to her right. "You're getting back everything they took away, Jane."

  She twisted her head towards the voice. The figure was dark on dark, standing in the black aperture of the passwall. "Tom?"

  "In the flesh. Minus shoes, unfortunately."

  The feeds were popping on all around her, gradually filling the interior surface of the sphere. The configuration, the preference given to views of certain habitats over others, was recognisable as one of her usual settings. The Glitter Band, she realised, was still out there. She felt an odd flicker of resentment that her empire had continued running itself while she had been ousted from her throne.

  "Where have you been?" she asked as the dark figure fastened on a safe-distance tether and crossed the airspace towards her.

  "How muc
h did anyone tell you?" Dreyfus asked as the mounting illumination cast shifting blue highlights on his face. He looked puffy and somehow dishevelled.

  "They told me nothing."

  "You're back in command," Dreyfus said. "If you want it, of course."

  In the absence of visitors, she'd had little recent practice speaking. The words came out with mushy edges, as if she had just woken. "What about Crissel, Gaffney, Clearmountain? What about Baudry? They can't have agreed to this."

  "Let's just say the command landscape has changed. The chances are very good that Michael Crissel is dead. Gaffney — who turned out to be a traitor — is being operated on as we speak. I've just had to talk Baudry out of handing in her resignation. I think she's realised the serious mistake she made in ousting you."

  "Wait," Aumonier said. "What happened to Crissel?"

  "We lost contact with him as he was attempting to enter House Aubusson along with a squad of field prefects. We've also lost contact with that entire habitat, along with three others."

  "No one told me," she said.

  "We're talking about the same four habitats that Thalia was visiting to upgrade their polling cores. Looks as if we were set up, Jane. Thalia's installation may have closed one security hole, but it blew open a much wider one. Wide enough to let a militant faction seize control of those habitats."

  "Do you think Thalia was part of this conspiracy?"

  "No, she was set up like the rest of us. I wanted to be on the ship that Crissel took to Aubusson but Gaffney had other ideas." Dreyfus' expression was one of gloomy resignation. "Not that it would have made much difference."

  "What about Gaffney?"

  "He was working for the enemy faction, from within Panoply. Chances are it was Gaffney who manipulated Thalia's upgrade to make it work the way it did."

  Aumonier shook her head in amazement. "I never had Sheridan down as a traitor."

  "My guess is he feels he was doing the right and necessary thing, even if that meant going against his own organisation. From his point of view we're the traitors, letting down the Glitter Band by not taking our duties as seriously as he deems necessary."

  "If you're right then we're at least partially culpable."

  "How so?"

  "The organisation moulds men like Gaffney. An effective prefect is only one degree from being a monster in the first place. Most of us stay the right side of the line. But we can hardly blame one of us when he strays across it."

  "He's still got some explaining to do," Dreyfus said.

  "I'm sure you're right." Aumonier breathed in, composing herself. "Now tell me who we're up against. Do you have a name?"

  "The figure behind the takeovers is Aurora Nerval-Lermontov. She was one of the Eighty, Jane. That means she's dead; that she doesn't exist any more except as a set of disembodied patterns stored in the memory of a machine. Patterns that are supposedly frozen, as if they were written down in ink."

  Aumonier digested that, sifting her memories to verify that the Nerval-Lermontovs had indeed been one of the families sponsoring Calvin Sylveste's experiments in mind-uploading. Fifty-five years ago, she thought. But the horror of the Eighty still burnt as brightly in the public imagination as at any time in the last half-century.

  "Even if I accept this ... how do we know Aurora's behind it all?"

  "A witness told me. She was being held hostage inside a rock owned by Aurora's family. My witness reported coming into contact with an entity called Aurora."

  "This witness — "

  "Was a Conjoiner woman named Clepsydra. This is where it gets complicated."

  "Go for it."

  "Clepsydra was one of the survivors aboard an entire ship that was being held captive inside that rock, deep enough underground that there was no chance of them contacting other Conjoiners."

  "With you so far."

  Dreyfus smiled. "There was advanced technology aboard that ship — a Conjoiner device called Exordium that lets them see into the future."

  "If I was hearing this from anyone other than Tom Dreyfus, I'd get Mercier up here with a full psychiatric renormalisation kit."

  "The Conjoiners have to be in a kind of dream-state just to interpret what it shows them. It's imprecise, but a hell of an improvement on not being able to see into the future at all."

  "I'd buy one like a shot."

  "Not for sale, apparently. Which is why Aurora needed to kidnap the Conjoiners and get them to run Exordium for her. That's what they've been doing in that rock all the while: looking into the future on Aurora's behalf. Seeing things she can't see."

  "And what did they see, Tom?"

  "The end of the world. A time of plagues, Clepsydra said. Beyond that, the dreamers couldn't see anything. Aurora kept trying to persuade them to interpret the dreams differently. When they didn't show her what she wanted, she turned the screws on them."

  "I need to speak to this Clepsydra," Aumonier said. "The scarab may not like her being in this room, but she doesn't have to be physically present — I only need a voice and a face."

  "I wish you could speak to her," Dreyfus answered heavily. "Gaffney killed her, then tried to pin it on me. Given the knowledge she'd already sucked out of our records, there was a very real threat of her being able to pin down Aurora's location, maybe even isolate some weakness we could use against her. That's why she had to go. But it turns out Clepsydra had the last laugh after all."

  "Then what about Gaffney? If he's working for Aurora, we must be able to get something useful out of him?"

  "I sincerely hope so. I'm going to find out everything he knows. Then we can start formulating a response. I want those habitats back. I particularly want my deputy field back."

  "You realise Thalia may already be dead, Tom? I'm sorry, but someone has to say it. Better that you start dealing with the possibility now rather than later."

  "She's dead when we recover her body," Dreyfus said. "Until then she's behind enemy lines."

  "I fully approve of that sentiment, but don't raise your hopes, that's all I'm saying." Aumonier closed her eyes and took a deep, cleansing breath before reopening them. "Now let's talk about me, shall we? You said I am being reinstated to full status."

  "If you want it."

  "Of course I damned well want it. This is what keeps me alive."

  "It could be what kills you. Things aren't going to get any less tense around here any time soon. Are you sure you're ready for that? There isn't anyone I'd sooner see running the organisation in a time of crisis, but you've given Panoply more than enough in the last eleven years. No one would hold it against you if you decided to sit this one out."

  "I'm in command."

  "Good," called another voice from the still-open passwall. Aumonier recognised the hovering form of Baudry.

  "Hello, Lillian," Aumonier said guardedly.

  Baudry attached her own safe-distance tether and drifted out until she flanked Dreyfus, stabilising herself to the same local vertical. "There's something I need to say, Supreme Prefect. I let you down. I can't speak for Michael Crissel, but I should never have been party to what happened in this room."

  "Prefect Dreyfus tells me you've considered resignation."

  "That's correct. And I will resign, too, if you wish it."

  Aumonier let the other woman wait, until the silence had become as electrically potent as the air before a thunderstorm. "I don't approve of what you did, Lillian. Gaffney may have played a part in the decision to remove me from power, but you should still have resisted him. It's to your discredit that you failed to do so."

  "I'm sorry," Baudry mouthed.

  "You should be. Crissel as well, were he still with us."

  "We thought we were doing the right thing."

  "And the fact that I expressly requested to be allowed to stay in power — that didn't mean anything to you?"

  "Gaffney said we should ignore your pleas, that secretly you would be craving permission to step down." A little defiance returned to Baudry now. "We
were doing our best. I've told you already that I'm ashamed of what happened. But at the time I did not have the luxury of hindsight, of knowing what we now do about Sheridan."

  "Enough," Aumonier said, raising a calming hand. She thought about all the testing years that Lillian Baudry, a good, loyal senior prefect, had spent in her shadow. Never once being able to demonstrate true effectiveness, true leadership, never once having the temerity to question or undermine a single one of Aumonier's decisions. "What's done is done. At least now we both know where we stand. Don't we?"

  "I have apologised. I am ready and waiting for either a resignation order or new commands."

  "Both of you might want to take a look at that feed," Dreyfus said. "Before you make any rash decisions, that is."

  "What feed?" Baudry asked.

  "He means the long-range surveillance of House Aubusson, I think," Aumonier said. "Something's happening there, isn't it?"

  Dreyfus nodded. "It started while we were speaking."

  "We've been monitoring the thermal output from the four habitats for a number of hours," Baudry said, shifting effortlessly back into the detached tones of neutral professionalism. "Two of them, Aubusson and Szlumper Oneill, show evidence of activity in their manufactories. It's as if the assembler plants have been cranked back up to full operating strength since Aurora's takeover. So far, we've only been able to speculate as to what that means. What we do know is that Crissel's ship was hit by more weapons than we can account for based on the Aubusson blueprints filed with Panoply. One theory, therefore, is that the factories are producing new defence systems, to further consolidate Aurora's hold on the habitats."

  "How long would it take to create and install new weapons if those manufactories were running at standard capacity?" Aumonier asked.

  "Allowing for ready provision of raw materials and blueprints, no more than six to eight hours," Baudry answered. "It's entirely feasible, given the timescales we're looking at."

  "But now it looks as if they're not just making weapons," Dreyfus said.

  The image of House Aubusson was a three-quarters view captured at long-range by a surveillance cam well outside the attack volume of the habitat's anti-collision weapons. It showed the factory end of the cylinder, not the docking hub where Crissel had presumably met his demise. Vast petal-like structures, curved doors many kilometres long, were opening in the domed endcap, revealing through a star-shaped aperture the blue-gold luminance of intense, frenzied industry.