Prefect

by Alastair Reynolds

  They reached the next level down and arrived at the trap door in the floor, still open as they had left it. Parnasse rolled up his sleeves, moving to lower himself into the gap ahead of Thalia.

  "It's all right," she said. "I memorised the way pretty well the last time we came down here. You showed me where to place the whiphound. I'm sure I can find my way without you."

  "All the same, girl, I'm coming with you."

  "I'd rather you were back up with the others, Cyrus, making sure they do what they're told."

  "Redon's got them under control. I think you convinced them there was no other choice."

  Thalia had been striving to maintain a façade of certainty, but all of a sudden doubts magnified inside her. "There isn't, is there?"

  "Of course there isn't."

  "But what if I'm wrong?"

  "Nothing could be worse than waiting for those bastards to break through. Even if this doesn't work, it'll be a hell of an improvement on being ripped apart by killer robots. At least we'll go out with style."

  "Even though there'll be no one to applaud our efforts?"

  "We'll know, girl. That's all that matters." He gave her an encouraging pinch on the arm. "Now let's get that whiphound in place."

  They clambered through the tangle of intervening supports until they reached the area where the struts had already been weakened or cut through entirely.

  "Thank our lucky stars this isn't quickmatter," Parnasse said, "or those cuts would have healed over by now. But the rules say you can't have quickmatter anywhere near a polling core."

  "I like rules," Thalia said. "Rules are good."

  "Let's unwrap the baby."

  Thalia removed the whiphound from its protective bundle. It was trembling, with parts of the casing beginning to melt from the heat. The smell of burning components hit her nose. "Okay," she said, twisting the first of the dials. "Setting yield to maximum. Looks as if it's accepted the input. So far so good." She paused to let her fingers cool down.

  "Now the timer," Parnasse said.

  She nodded. She twisted the first of the two dials necessary to input the setting. It was stiff, but eventually the dial moved under her fingers until it reached the limit of its rotation. The double-dial fail-safe existed to stop the whiphound being set to grenade mode accidentally. "Five minutes," she said.

  "It'll start counting as soon as you twist the other dial?"

  Thalia nodded. "It should give us enough time to get back upstairs and lashed down. If you want to go ahead now, to make sure — "

  "I'm not going anywhere without you. Set the timer."

  Thalia took hold of the end of the whiphound and began to twist the other dial. It moved easily compared to the other one, clicking around through its settings. Then it stopped, long before it had reached the correct limit. Thalia tried again, but the dial would not pass beyond the point where it had jammed.

  "Something's the matter," she said. "I can't get the second setting locked in. Both dials have to be reading three hundred seconds or it won't start the countdown."

  "Can I try?"

  She passed him the whiphound. "Maybe you can force that dial past the blockage."

  He tried. He couldn't.

  "It's jammed pretty good, girl." Parnasse squinted at the tiny white digits marked next to the dial. "Looks like we're stuck at one hundred seconds, or less."

  "It isn't enough," Thalia said. "We'd never get back up and lashed down in one hundred seconds."

  "There's no other way of setting that counter?"

  "None."

  Then something came over her, a kind of awesome calm, like the placidity of the sea after a great storm. She had never felt more serene, more purposeful, in her life. This was it, she knew. It was the point she had waited for, with guarded expectation, knowing it would arrive at some time in her career, but that she might not notice it unless she was both alert and open-minded. This was her opportunity to redeem whatever it was her father had done wrong.

  "Girl?" Parnasse asked, for Thalia had fallen into a momentary trance.

  "It's okay," she said. "We can still do this. I want you to leave now, Cyrus. Get back to the others and strap yourself down. Make sure you close all airtight doors on the way."

  "And you?"

  "I'm going to wait a whole three hundred seconds. Then I'm going to complete what I came here to do."

  "Which is?"

  Her voice trembled. "Uphold the public good."

  "Is that right?" Parnasse said.

  "Yes," she answered.

  "I don't think so, girl."

  She started to protest, started to raise her arm in defence, but Parnasse was faster and stronger. Whatever it was he did to her, she never saw it coming.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 27

  * * *

  Thyssen's face was slit-eyed and puffy when it appeared on Dreyfus' compad.

  "I know you're meant to be sleeping now, and I apologise for disturbing your rest. But something's been nagging at me and I need to talk to you about it." He neglected to tell Thyssen that the thing that had been bothering him had only revealed itself fully when he woke from his snooze.

  "Is this urgent, Prefect?"

  "Very."

  "Then I'll see you in the bay in five minutes."

  Thyssen looked surprisingly alert when Dreyfus arrived, feeling less than clearheaded himself. Thyssen was talking with his shift replacement Tezuka, the two of them peering through a window at the ongoing ship operations. Technicians were performing vacuum welds on the damaged hull of a cutter. Both men were sipping something from drinking bulbs.

  "Prefect Dreyfus," Thyssen said, breaking away from his conversation. "You look like you could use some of this." He offered Dreyfus the drinking bulb. Dreyfus declined.

  "The ship Saavedra took," Dreyfus said.

  "You mean Saavedra and Chen."

  Dreyfus nodded: he'd forgotten that Thyssen hadn't been informed of Chen's murder. "I'm just wondering why they took that one, out of all the choices they had. Am I correct in thinking that cutter was a Type B?"

  "Correct," Thyssen said. "Most of the new vehicles are Type C or D. They don't have the — "

  "Transatmospheric capability," Dreyfus finished for him. "That's what I reckoned."

  "Since the segregation of security responsibilities between Chasm City and the Glitter Band — "

  "Prefects hardly ever need to take a ship into Yellowstone's atmosphere. And all that aerodynamic bodywork makes for fuel-draining mass that we don't need in normal duties. I know. But we still keep a small number of transat vehicles on readiness, in case we do need them."

  Something clicked behind Thyssen's eyes. "You think they've gone to Yellowstone."

  "It's a possibility. I need you to look into your logs. I'm going to give you the names of some prefects and I want you to correlate those names against the vehicles they've signed out for routine duties. Can you do that for me?"

  "Yes. Immediately."

  "Here are the names." Dreyfus handed Thyssen his compad, allowing him access to the area where he had input the identities of the eight Firebrand operatives. Thyssen retired to an office space, Dreyfus shadowing him, and transferred the names into his own compad with a finger stroke.

  Thyssen chucked his bulb into the wall and conjured a console. "I'm checking the logs right now. How far back do you want me to go?"

  Dreyfus thought of the likely activity that would have preceded the destruction of the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble. Moving the Clockmaker and its associated relics — including any equipment required to study them — would have certainly required more than one trip.

  "Two months should do it."

  "Conjure yourself a coffee, Prefect. This is going to take a couple of minutes."

  * * *

  Thalia woke with the worst headache she could remember, one that felt as if someone had driven an iron piton into the side of her skull. She was just beginning to speculate on the precise origin of that pain
when she became aware of less intense discomfort afflicting almost her entire body. It was difficult to breathe, and her arms were tugged so far behind her back that she felt as if her shoulders had been dislocated. Something squeezed her chest. Something hard dug into her spine. She opened her eyes and looked around, wondering where she was and what had happened to her.

  "Easy," said Meriel Redon, who appeared to be bound in a similar position next to Thalia: sitting on the ground with her back against the railings that encircled the polling core, her arms crossed and bound behind one of the uprights. "You're okay now, Prefect Ng. You took a bad bump on the head, but there's no bleeding. We'll get you checked as soon as we're out of this."

  Through a curtain of pain, Thalia said, "I don't remember. What happened?"

  "You were down in the basement, getting ready to set the timer on your whiphound."

  "I was," Thalia said foggily. She had a groggy recollection that there had been some kind of problem with the whiphound, but the details refused to sharpen.

  "You banged your head on one of the struts, knocking yourself out."

  "I banged my head?"

  "You were out cold. Citizen Parnasse carried you back up here on his own."

  The events began to come back to her. She remembered the second timing dial jamming, how she had come to the decision that she would have to detonate the whiphound manually. She remembered that awesome calm she had experienced, as if every trifling detail in her life had just been swept aside, leaving a breathtaking clarity of mind, as empty and full of possibility as the clear dawn sky. And then she remembered nothing at all, except waking up here.

  "Where is Parnasse?"

  "He went back down to set the timer," Redon said. "He said you'd shown him what to do."

  "No — " Thalia began.

  "We're expecting him back any minute. He said he'd be able to tie himself down when he arrived."

  "He isn't coming back. There was a problem with the whiphound, with setting the five-minute fuse. I didn't bang my head. Parnasse must have knocked me out."

  Redon looked puzzled. "Why would he have done that?"

  "Because I was going to set it off myself, while I was still down there. It was the only way. But he wouldn't let me. He's decided to do it himself."

  Comprehension came to Redon in horrified degrees. "You mean he's going to die down there?"

  "He isn't coming back up. I showed him how to set the whiphound. He knows exactly what to do."

  "Someone has to go down there, tell him not to do it," Redon said. "He can't kill himself to save us. He's just a citizen, just one of us."

  "When did he go?"

  "Quite a long time ago."

  "He can't set the fuse for longer than a hundred seconds. There's no reason why he needs to wait that long, if he's in place."

  "You mean we could go any second?"

  "If the whiphound works. If the machines haven't already broken through and stopped him." She knew she ought to feel gratitude, but instead she felt betrayed. "Damn him! He shouldn't have brought me back up here. It wasted too much time!"

  "Maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea if one of us — "

  Redon never got to finish her sentence. Judging by the force of the blast, felt through Thalia's spine as it transmitted itself through the fabric of the polling core sphere, the whiphound must have detonated at nearly its maximum theoretical yield. It had been a new unit, she remembered belatedly: she'd checked it out of the armoury only a couple of weeks ago. There would still have been a lot of energy left inside it, anxiously seeking release.

  The sphere rocked appreciably: Thalia saw the landscape tilt and then settle again at its former angle. The blast had been very brief: a spike of intense sound followed by a few seconds of echoing repercussions. Now all was silent again. The sphere was still. The landscape outside was still.

  "It didn't work," she said. "We're not moving. It didn't fucking work."

  "Wait," Caillebot said quietly.

  "It didn't work, Citizen. We're not going anywhere. The blast wasn't sufficient. I've failed you, used up our one chance."

  "Wait," he said.

  "Something's happening," Cuthbertson said. "I can hear it. It sounds like metal straining. Can't you?"

  "We're tilting," Redon said. "Look."

  Thalia craned her neck in time to see the white ball of the model polling core sphere roll across the floor, towards the window facing them.

  From somewhere below there came a kind of twanging sound, as if the energy stored in a stretched spar had just been catastrophically released. The twanging sound was followed in quick succession by another, then a third, and then a volley of them too close together to count.

  The tilt of the floor increased. Thalia felt her weight beginning to tug on the upright to which she was bound. The sphere must have been at ten or fifteen degrees to the horizontal already. She heard another series of metallic sounds: shearing and buckling noises, less like the failure of structural components than the cries of animals in distress.

  The angle of the tilt reached twenty degrees and continued increasing.

  "We're going over," she said. "It's happening."

  Loose clothes and debris skittered across the floor, coming to rest along the curve of the outer wall. The architectural model slid noisily, then shattered itself to pieces. Thirty degrees, easy. Thalia felt an unpleasant tingling in her stomach. The landscape was tilting alarmingly. Through the windows, she could see aspects of the surrounding campus that had been obscured before. Suddenly it looked much further down than she had been imagining. Five hundred metres was a long way to fall. She remembered Caillebot's reaction when she'd outlined the plan: That doesn't look survivable.

  Maybe he'd been right all along.

  Now the tilt was increasing faster. Forty degrees, then forty-five. Thalia's arms felt as if they were being wrenched out of their sockets, but it was only the effect of her bodyweight so far. When the sphere started rolling, it was going to get much worse. Fifty degrees. The lower extremity of the stalk was beginning to come into view through the windows. In one brief glimpse she knew she'd been right about the war machines. They covered it like a black mould, reaching as high up the shaft as it was possible to see. They must have been very close to the sphere itself.

  Something gave way. Thalia felt the sphere drop several metres, as if the upper part of the stalk had crumbled or subsided under the changing load. And then suddenly they were rolling, pitching down the side of the stalk, the angle of tilt exceeding ninety degrees and then continuing to climb. The sphere shook and roared. There was no time to analyse the situation, or even judge how far down the stalk they had rolled. There was only room in Thalia's head for a single, simple thought: Its working ... so far.

  She felt a momentary increase in the forces tugging at her body and judged that the sphere had reached the base of the stalk and changed its direction of roll from the vertical to the horizontal. She tried to time the duration of each roll, hoping to judge the distance they had travelled and detect some evidence that the sphere was slowing. But it was hopeless trying to concentrate on such matters.

  "I think," she heard Caillebot call out, between grunts of discomfort, "that we've cleared the perimeter."

  "Really?" Thalia called back, raising her voice above the juggernaut rumble of their progress.

  "We're still rolling pretty fast. I hope we don't just bounce right over the window band."

  It was a possibility neither Thalia nor Parnasse had considered. They'd guessed that the sphere would have enough momentum to reach the edge of the band, but they had never thought about it moving so fast that it would skim right across, moving too quickly to stress the window enough to break. Now Thalia realised that they were open to the awful possibility that the sphere might traverse the entire window band and come to a rolling halt on the next stretch of solid ground.

  "Can you see the band yet?" she asked.

  "Yes," called out Meriel Redon. "I think I can. But s
omething's wrong."

  "We're coming in too fast?"

  "Not that. Shouldn't we be rolling in a straight line?"

  "Yes," Thalia said. "Aren't we?"

  "We seem to be curving. I can see the window band, but we're approaching it obliquely."

  Thalia was confused and worried. They'd always assumed that the sphere would follow a straight course once it reached the base of the stalk, with only minor deviations caused by obstacles and friction. But now that she concentrated on the tumbling landscape and tried to make out the grey line that marked the edge of the window band, she knew that Redon was right. They were clearly off-course, at far too sharp an angle to be explained by the sphere crashing through the remains of the campus grounds.

  "I don't understand," she said. "We went over this. It should be a straight roll all the way to the window band."

  "We're still going to hit the window band," Cuthbertson said, his voice reduced to a strangled approximation of itself. "You've just forgotten about Coriolis force."

  "We should be moving in a straight line," Thalia said.

  "We are. But the habitat's rotating, and it's trying to get us to follow a helical trajectory instead. It's all about reference frames, Prefect."

  "Coriolis force," Thalia said. "Shit. After everything they taught me in Panoply, I forgot about Coriolis force. We're not on a planet. We're inside a fucking spinning tube."

  She'd become aware that the rate of roll was diminishing, the landscape cartwheeling around at half the speed from when they had begun the journey. She could begin to pick out details, landmarks that the Aubusson citizens had already noted.

  "We'll be okay," Cuthbertson said. "We're just going to hit a different part of the window band than we were expecting."

  "Will that make any difference?" she asked.

  "Don't think so. We should break through as easily there as anywhere else."

  "Any second now," Meriel Redon said. "We're coming up on the band. Get ready, everyone. There's going to be a jolt when we hit the edge of the land strip."

  Thalia braced herself, in so far as bracing was possible when she was already bound like a sacrificial offering. She felt a moment of giddy vertigo as the sphere rolled over the edge of the landscape strip and crashed down onto the vast glassy plain of the window band. The ride became eerily smooth as they trundled over the geometrically perfect surface. With little friction save air resistance, the rate of roll was holding more or less steady.