"Those doors ... are they part of the habitat's original design?" Aumonier asked.
Baudry nodded. "Back when the habitat had the capacity and the client base to grow entire ships, they needed those doors to launch them into space. But our records say they haven't opened in over a century."
"Then why are they opening now?"
"That's why," Dreyfus said.
Something was spilling through the gaps between the fingerlike doors, billowing out in a gauzy black mass, like an eruption of wasps. It was a cloud composed of thousands of individual elements.
Simultaneously, Dreyfus and Baudry's bracelets started chiming.
"Someone else has noticed," Baudry said.
"What are we looking at?" asked Aumonier, a queasy feeling in her stomach. Up to this point, her crisis parameters had consisted of a hostage scenario in which Panoply might lose control of four habitats. Four was inexcusable, the worst disaster in eleven years, but it was still negligible compared to the mind-numbing immensity of the ten thousand. Containable, she thought. And yet that emerging black cloud said otherwise. She did not yet know what it was, but she knew with piercing certainty that it was not good news, and that the crisis she had imagined Panoply to be facing was as nothing compared to the one that was now blossoming.
"We need to know what that ... froth is," she said, fighting to keep her voice from faltering. "We need numbers and tech assessments. We need to know what it's for and where it's headed."
"Doors are opening in Szlumper Oneill," Baudry said, reading a text summary on her bracelet. As she spoke, a window enlarged itself, squeezing others aside as it filled with a long-range view of the other habitat. A black cloud was boiling out of elongated slots near one of the polar docking complexes, smothering detail as it expanded.
"I think it's the same stuff," Aumonier said.
"Has to be," Dreyfus said. "Question is, what about the other two habitats?"
"No excess thermal activity in either Carousel New Seattle-Tacoma or the Chevelure-Sambuke Hourglass," Baudry said. "But according to our data, neither of those habitats has any kind of manufacturing capacity."
Dreyfus scratched at the back of his collar. "Thalia's upgrade may have been contaminated, but I'm pretty sure she chose those four habitats herself, based on her own selection criteria."
"Meaning what?" Aumonier asked.
"Meaning Aurora may not have had any influence over which habitats she got control of. Given four, the chances were good that at least one of them was going to have some kind of manufacturing capability. But it wasn't guaranteed. Looks like two of the four were duds, in any case. She's captured them, but right now she can't make them work for her."
"I'm not taking my eye off any of these habitats."
"I agree. But it shows us that Aurora isn't pulling all the strings here. She had to work with the hand Thalia dealt her." Dreyfus flashed a bleak smile. "I won't say it gladdens my heart, but — "
"Problem is we may already have done the work she needs."
"I'm hoping that isn't the case." But Dreyfus still nodded, letting Aumonier know that he shared her fears. "You're right, though. We need a closer look at whatever those factories are spewing out. How fast would you say that stuff is emerging?"
"I don't know. Judging by the scale ... hundreds of metres a second, maybe faster."
"I concur," Baudry said.
"That's what I was thinking," Dreyfus said. "Pretty damned fast, anyway. I'll need to look at the Solid Orrery, but given the mean spacing between habitats, it isn't going to take very long before the swarm reaches another one. Let's assume the closest neighbour to Aubusson is sixty or seventy kilometres away, in the same orbit. Even if that stuff is only moving at ten metres a second, we're not looking at much more than two hours. Of course, I hope I'm wrong."
"You're hardly ever wrong," Aumonier said. "That's what worries me."
Dreyfus glanced at Baudry. "We need to task ships for a close fly-by of one of those clouds. Automated, if possible, but manned if that's all we can manage in the time available."
"I'll get on it. We have a deep-system cruiser — the Democratic Circus — inbound from the Parking Swarm. I've already asked Captain Pell to swing by Aubusson, to see if he can image the remains of the Universal Suffrage, sweep for survivors and get a better look at those weapons emplacements."
"Tell them to take care," Dreyfus said.
Baudry said, "I already did. Now I'll tell them to take even more."
"The scope of this crisis is now greater than the four lost habitats," Dreyfus said, directing his words back at Aumonier. "I'll run the Orrery immediately, but in the meantime I think we should consider an appropriate statement. We've buffered the citizenry so far, but now it may be time to start alerting the wider Glitter Band to the real nature of the crisis."
Aumonier swallowed hard. "I don't want mass panic. What should we tell them?"
Dreyfus looked pragmatic. "Frankly, mass panic may be the least of our worries."
"Even so ... we still don't know what we're dealing with, what Aurora wants, what she's doing with those habitats when she gains control of them."
"Tell them something's trying to take over," Dreyfus said. "Tell them that it has nothing to do with the Ultras, and that we'll phase in mass euthanisation if we even suspect that someone's trying to settle an old score with the Swarm. Tell them that Panoply is declaring a Bandwide state of emergency, and that this time we really need a vote in favour of utilizing heavy weapons."
"We don't have it already?" Aumonier asked.
"I dropped the ball," Baudry said. "I went to the polls, stressed that we had a crisis on our hands, but didn't spell out the true severity of the situation. I didn't lie, but I let them think I was just talking about the crisis with the Ultras."
"Because you didn't want panic?"
"Exactly so," she said.
"Then you probably did exactly what I'd have done." Aumonier held Lillian Baudry's gaze for a long moment, signalling to her that, whatever the other woman had done, her professional conduct in Aumonier's absence was not in doubt. She needed allies around her now, people who knew they had her confidence and trust. "But Tom's right," she added. "We need that vote. As a matter of fact, I'll table a request for every emergency privilege in the book. Up to and including mass lockdowns and the curtailing of Bandwide abstraction and polling services."
"We haven't had to do that in — " Baudry began.
Aumonier nodded. "I know. Eleven years. And doesn't it feel like yesterday?"
* * *
CHAPTER 22
* * *
Dreyfus had asked to be alerted the instant Sheridan Gaffney regained consciousness. Mercier — who was now handling the patient following the fraught operation that had been mainly supervised by Demikhov — was predictably reluctant to let Dreyfus anywhere near the recuperating senior prefect.
"If you had any idea of the severity of the procedure he's just gone through, the extent of the internal damage caused by the whiphound," Mercier said, waving his hands graphically, his treasured fountain pen clutched like a dagger as he guarded the entrance to the medical centre.
Dreyfus looked at the doctor obligingly. He'd always had a good relationship with Mercier and was reluctant to jeopardise it now. "I understand your concerns. They're admirable. All I need to know is, can he talk?"
"He's suffered severe laceration of the trachea. He has a damaged larynx. About all he can manage right now is a croak, and even that causes him great pain. Please, Tom. No matter what this man did, but he's still a patient."
"If we could wait, we would," Dreyfus said, "but right now we're in a situation where even an hour is too long. Gaffney has information vital to the security of the Glitter Band. I need to speak to him immediately."
Mercier wilted, clearly aware that this was not a battle he could hope to win. "You can force this through, can't you?"
"I have Jane's authority. Baudry's, too, as if Jane's isn't enough. Please, D
octor. Minutes are ticking by while you and I debate the health of a man who was quite happy to murder another of your patients."
Mercier looked disappointed. "You think I didn't put two and two together, Tom? I'm not that stupid. I guessed exactly what Gaffney did. But he's still a sick man, no matter what he did to Clepsydra."
Dreyfus placed a hand on Mercier's green-sleeved forearm. "I need to do this. Please don't make it any harder."
Mercier stepped aside. "Do whatever you have to do. Then get out of my clinic, Tom. The next time you come here, you'd better be the one seeking medical help."
Dreyfus stepped through into the recovery room. It was a spartan cube lit only by thin blue strips set into the upper walls. Gaffney was in a bed at one end of the cube, attended by a single medical servitor with a swooping white swan's neck. The transparent passwall sealed itself behind Dreyfus, subtly changing the acoustics of the room. He walked to the bedside, then conjured his usual chair out of the floor. Gaffney's face was an impassive mask, almost deathlike, but his eyes betrayed alertness. They tracked Dreyfus with reptilian intensity.
"No flowers?" Gaffney said, scratching the words out. "That's a surprise."
"You're more talkative than Mercier led me to expect."
"What's the use in not being talkative? You're going to make me speak one way or another." The words emerged dry as charcoal, each one forced out separately. Something horrible rattled down in his lungs.
Dreyfus tucked his hands together in his lap. "We have a situation, Sheridan. I thought you might be able to shed some more light on it."
"I told you everything I know."
"We have a handle on Aurora now, but there's still a lot more we'd like to know." He checked his bracelet. "Thirty minutes ago, House Aubusson and Szlumper Oneill began releasing clouds of manufactured entities into Glitter Band space. We're still not sure what those entities are yet, but at least now we have some idea of where they're headed. They're not expanding in all directions. They're moving in two directed flows, like wasps following a scent trail. In less than two hours, those flows will come into contact with two other habitats with combined populations exceeding six hundred and fifty thousand citizens. Do you want to speculate about what might happen when those flows touch the habitats?"
Gaffney's expression hadn't changed since Dreyfus had entered the room. His mask of a face was still fixated on the ceiling. "If you're so worried, why don't you move the habitats?"
"You know we can't change the orbit of a fifty-million-tonne structure just by clicking our fingers. We can't stop the arrival of the flow of entities either: the individual elements might be vulnerable, but there are just too many of them. The best we can do is alert those habitats, get them to prepare their defences and initiate whatever kind of evacuation programme they have in place. We've already done that, of course, but given the time available, we'll be lucky to offload more than ten thousand citizens by the time the flows hit." Dreyfus leaned closer to the bedside. "That's why I'd really like to know what's going to happen, Sheridan."
"Then you're shit out of luck, Tommy-boy."
"I'm disappointed, Sheridan. You know better than any of us that there's no sense in withholding information. We'll get it out of you eventually, by hook or by crook. I have the authorisation to run a deep-cortex trawl, for one. Or I could go with one of those Model Cs so dear to your heart. See how you like a dose of enhanced subject compliance."
"In my condition, how long do you think I'd last?"
"That's a fair point," Dreyfus conceded. "So perhaps the trawl would be a safer bet. What would you go for, just out of interest?"
"I'm old-fashioned. Never could get on with trawls."
Dreyfus nodded. "You'd like that, wouldn't you? I run a whiphound on you, you die before you spill your guts, end of story."
"I could think of worse outcomes."
Dreyfus unlaced his hands and tapped a finger against the side of his brow. "Here's what I don't get, Sheridan. You're a solid Panoply man, as good a prefect as any of us. What exactly did Aurora have on you that made you turn traitor?"
At last the mask fashioned a grimace-like smile. "You're the traitor, Tom, not me. You and all the other cowards who turn a blind eye to what's really going on in the Glitter Band. It's been clear to me since we walked away from Hell-Five. The people voted us the power to protect them. Problem is we abdicated that responsibility years ago. We let the people down."
"That's not quite the way it looks from where I'm sitting," Dreyfus said.
"If only you saw the bigger picture, you'd understand."
"Enlighten me, Sheridan. Tell me what I'm not seeing. Would Aurora's glimpse into the future have anything to do with it?"
After a while Gaffney said, "You know about Exordium, then."
"Enough to know where to start trawling if you don't tell me about it now."
"Aurora saw the end of everything we hold precious, Tom. We've created something wonderful around Yellowstone, something glorious, something unheralded in all the human history that's come before us. Something fit to last a thousand years, or ten thousand. And yet it ends. Less than a hundred years from now, all this is over. Humanity opened a window into paradise, and in eighty or ninety years it closes. The Garden of Eden isn't some ancient Biblical story about the fall of paradise thousands of years ago. It's a premonition."
"How does it end?"
"Everything goes, in a matter of hours and days. Aurora walked amongst their dreams. She saw habitats burning, she saw people screaming in agony, she saw Chasm City turning against its own inhabitants, becoming something monstrous."
"A time of plague," Dreyfus said.
"No one sees it coming. There's no time to prepare. It hits us when we feel at our least vulnerable, in our highest, brightest hour." Gaffney halted and caught his breath, the air rasping in and out of his lungs. "Aurora couldn't let that happen, Tom. She believes the Glitter Band deserves better than to crash and burn."
"But we're still talking about something eighty or ninety years in the future. Why is she taking action now?"
"Prudence," Gaffney said. "Aurora believes the content of the Exordium prognostications, but not necessarily the detail. She's worried that the Conjoiners were wrong about the timeline, that perhaps it might happen sooner than they predicted. There's no time to wait for warning signals. If action is to be taken to ensure the future survival of the Glitter Band, we must move now, not in twenty years, or fifty years. Only then can she be certain of success."
"And this action?" Dreyfus ventured, wondering how much Gaffney was going to give up without coercion.
But Gaffney looked disappointed. "Isn't it obvious? A benign takeover. The installation of a new authority that will ensure the Glitter Band's security for time immemorial."
"She could have just come to us, if she had reasonable concerns."
"And how do you think Panoply would have reacted?" Gaffney asked. "Not by taking the necessary measures, that's for certain. We've already let the people take our guns away. Do you think that kind of ready submission implies an organisation with the necessary spine to take difficult, unpopular action, just because it happens to be in the public good?"
"I think you answered that question for yourself."
"I love this organisation," Gaffney said. "I've given it my life. But little by little I've watched it allow the citizenry to erode its power. We were complicit in that, no question about it. We rolled over and handed the people back the very tools they'd given us to do our work. We've reached the point now where we have to beg for the right to arm our agents. And what happens when we finally issue that request? The people spit it back in our faces. They love the idea of a police force, Tom. Just not one with the teeth to actually do anything."
"Maybe taking guns off us wasn't such a bad idea."
"It's not just the guns. When we perform a lockdown, we spend the next year defending our actions. They'll take lockdown authority from us next. Before you know it, we won't e
ven be allowed near our own polling cores. Aurora saw this coming. She knew that Panoply's usefulness was always going to be limited, and that if the people were really to be protected, someone else was going to have to do it for them."
"This someone else being Aurora, and whoever's with her," Dreyfus said quietly.
"She's no tyrant, if that's what you're thinking."
"A takeover sounds more than a little tyrannical, frankly."
"It won't be like that. Aurora merely envisages a state of affairs in which the people are protected from the consequences of their own worst actions. Under Aurora's regime, life in the habitats will continue exactly as it does now. The citizenry will still have access to the same technologies they've grown to depend upon. No one will be denied longevity treatments, or any other medicines they need. The people will continue to enjoy the same luxuries as they do now, and on a day-to-day level their societies will look much the same. The artists will still work."
Dreyfus cocked his head. "Then I'm missing something. What will have changed?"
"Only those things strictly essential for our future security. Needless to say, the Glitter Band will have to be isolated from the rest of human society. That'll mean an end to commerce with the Ultras, and Chasm City. We can't run the risk that some outside agent introduced to the Glitter Band causes its ultimate downfall."
"You think it will be something internal, something we do to ourselves?"
"We can't know that for certain, so we have to take reasonable precautions against other possibilities. That's only right and proper, isn't it?"
"I suppose so."
"Likewise, travel between habitats will have to be curtailed. If the destabilising factor arises within the Glitter Band, we can at least stop it spreading."
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