Prefect

by Alastair Reynolds

  Dreyfus examined the contents.

  The box contained six boosters of the same basic type that maintained his Pangolin clearance. He took one of them out. The label on the side read: Manticore clearance. To be self-administered by Senior Prefect Tom Dreyfus only. Unauthorised use may result in neurological injury or permanent irreversible death.

  He felt as if he was holding a bomb in his hands, and the bomb had just stopped ticking.

  "Senior Prefect Dreyfus," he said, mouthing the words as if there must have been some mistake. But he knew there hadn't been.

  The thrust sequence ended. The cutter was now in free fall and would remain so until it commenced its braking phase prior to atmospheric insertion. Through the window he'd sketched in the wall upon his arrival, Dreyfus saw that they had already cleared the main orbits of the Glitter Band. Habitats of all shapes and sizes crowded upon each other, sliding silently through space as if they were the ornamented, treasure-bedecked barques and argosies of some marvellous flotilla. The clear space between them, which he knew was at least fifty or sixty kilometres, looked too narrow to allow the passage of a single cutter. He could see now, with a forcefulness that had never really struck him when staring into the Solid Orrery, that it would be the simplest matter in the world for Aurora to spread her infection from state to state. Her weevils had almost no distance to cross. The habitats were stepping stones towards total dominion.

  And yet nowhere in his line of sight was there the slightest evidence of the crisis itself. Even if it now encompassed thirty or fifty habitats, including those on the fringe of the evacuation effort, that was still much less than a hundredth of the total number of states under Panoply's protection. The serene panorama before him looked startlingly normal, like a snapshot of the Glitter Band during the most routine of days. And yet he recalled the swiftness with which Lillian Baudry's simulation had demonstrated the takeover could spread. No comfort could be extracted from this apparent normality.

  Satisfied that the cutter would not be making any high-acceleration swerves for now, Dreyfus replaced the Manticore box beneath his seat and propelled himself through the cabin. He knocked quietly on the passwall before letting himself through into the flight deck.

  "Thanks for getting us away in good time, Captain Pell," he said, before his eyes took in the fact that Pell was not alone on the flight deck. Sitting behind and to his left, in one of the other flight positions, was Sparver.

  "Hi, Boss."

  Dreyfus was too stunned to feel anger, or even annoyance that his orders had been disobeyed. "What are you doing here?" he asked.

  Sparver looked at Pell. "Now, I ask you — is that any way to talk to your deputy?"

  * * *

  Aumonier floated alone, striving to keep her thoughts on the matter at hand rather than Dreyfus' mission to Yellowstone. She had cleared all but four display facets in her sphere, and had enlarged those until they filled almost the entire facing hemisphere. They showed the four habitats where Thalia Ng had performed the initial upgrade to the polling core software: Carousel New Seattle-Tacoma, the Chevelure-Sambuke Hourglass, Szlumper Oneill and House Aubusson. No contact had been made with any of these states since the installation of the core patch, more than twenty-six hours earlier. All along, Aumonier had assumed that the citizenry were alive and well, albeit under some new and possibly repressive system of government. She had always assumed that if Aurora wished to kill those people, she would achieve it the easy way, by depressurising the habitat or tampering with the life-support in some equally decisive fashion. It was only now that Aumonier realised the fatal flaw in her thinking. Aurora had indeed wanted those people dead: not because she hated them, not because they were capable of derailing her plans, but because they were of no conceivable use to her. And yet, as Thalia's debriefing testimony made clear, Aurora had been at pains to conceal her murder of the citizenry from the outside world. It had to be done the old-fashioned way, the historical way: not with a single catastrophic release of air or heat, something that would have been detectable from afar, but with the apparatus of state: armed force, applied via her new army of servitors. The citizens had been rounded up, pacified with lies and then executed by machine. And then their remains had been shovelled into bigger machines and conveyed to the matter-consuming furnaces of the manufactories, where they were smelted down and made into parts for other machines.

  Aumonier cursed the way Aurora had manipulated her unwillingness to strike against habitats that she still believed contained living citizens. But without Thalia's escape with her tiny party of survivors, she would still not have known. There was probably no one left alive in any of those four habitats. Even if some survivors had managed to hide or hold out against the machines, Panoply could do nothing for them now.

  Well, there was one thing, Aumonier reflected. It could end their torment now, before the machines reached them. It was not much of a kindness, but it was the only one she had left to give.

  "Captains Sarasota, Yokosuka, Ribeauville and Gilden. This is Jane Aumonier. You have my permission to open fire on your designated targets."

  This time there was no questioning of her order, no doubt that she meant what she had said.

  "Nukes deployed and running," Gilden said.

  "Deployed and running," Yokosuka reported.

  "Deployed and running," Sarasota and Ribeauville said, in near-unison.

  Aumonier closed her eyes before the first flash reached her. Even though she was only seeing a monitor feed, the brilliance of the nuclear explosions — twelve in all, three per habitat — still pushed through her eyelids. She counted twelve pink flashes.

  When she opened her eyes, nothing remained of the targets except four slowly expanding nebulae: the atomised, ionised remains of what had once been homes to more than two million of her citizens. There'd been beauty and misery in those habitats, wonder and sadness, every facet of human experience, history reaching back two hundred years. Between one breath and the next all that had been wiped out of existence, like a delirious dream that never happened.

  "Forgive us," she said to herself.

  * * *

  A little later, she received confirmation that the weevil flows from Aubusson and Szlumper Oneill had both been curtailed. The weevils that had been manufactured just before the attack were still crossing space, but their predicted destinations were already subjects of the evacuation effort. Aumonier knew that they would not clear all the citizens out in time, that they would be doing well to remove seventy per cent of them before the weevil contamination infected another habitat. Nothing more could be done, given the limiting bottlenecks of airlocks and ships and round-trip travel times. Her best people had been on the problem around the clock, and she had no doubt that they had already squeezed the last fraction of a percentile out of that figure. Attempts were now under way to mobilise enough ships to change the orbits of habitats lying beyond Aurora's current expansion front, but the technical challenge of moving a billion-tonne city state was awesome, and Aumonier knew that this was not a solution she could count on in the long term. At best, it would just take the weevils a little longer to reach their targets.

  Her bracelet chimed. She glanced down and saw that it was the call she had been hoping for.

  "This is Baudry, Supreme Prefect."

  "Go ahead, Lillian."

  "We're receiving reports from CTC." Aumonier heard a catch in Baudry's voice. "They're tracking massive ship movements from the Parking Swarm. Dozens of Ultra vessels, Supreme Prefect. Lighthuggers leaving their assigned orbits in the Swarm."

  "Are they leaving the system, Lillian?"

  "No." Baudry sounded flustered. "Some of them, yes. Most of them ... no. Most of them appear to be on vectors that will bring them into the Glitter Band."

  "How long until they arrive?"

  "Six to seven hours, Supreme Prefect, before the lead vehicles enter Glitter Band airspace. If we are to consider a tactical response, we need to start making arrangements n
ow. Deep-system vehicles will need to be retasked, fuelled and weaponed in readiness — "

  "You consider this a hostile gesture?"

  "What else could it be? They've had designs on control of the Glitter Band for decades. Now that we're facing a crisis, they've seen their moment. They're going to use the Aurora emergency to stage a takeover of their own."

  "I don't believe so, Lillian. I actually requested assistance from the Ultras. I sent my plea to Harbourmaster Seraphim. I'd heard nothing from him since Dreyfus' departure, so I assumed ... but I assumed wrongly, I think." Aumonier paused, conscious that it had been a mistake not to inform the other seniors of her contact with Seraphim. "Have any attempts been made to speak to the incoming ships?"

  "Standard approach queries were transmitted, Supreme Prefect. No valid response has been received."

  "That doesn't mean anything. We're dealing with Ultras here. They have their own way of doing things."

  "But Supreme Prefect ... we have to assume the worst."

  "I'll assume the worst when I have evidence of hostile intent. Until then, no one so much as fires a ranging laser on one of those ships. Is that clear?"

  "Clear," Baudry said sullenly.

  "Lillian, we have less than forty nuclear devices left in our arsenal. Do you honestly think we'd get very far if it came to open war against the Ultras?"

  "I'm just saying ... we can't trust them. We've never been able to trust them. That's always been a cornerstone of our operational policy."

  "Then maybe it's time we got a new cornerstone. They're people, Lillian. They might be people who make us uncomfortable, people with very different values from ours, but when we're facing local extinction at the hands of a genocidal machine intelligence, I don't think the differences between us look massively significant, do you?"

  "I'll keep you informed," Baudry said.

  "You do that. I'm not having the best of days here, Lillian, and the one thing I'm sure of is that we really, really don't want to add any new enemies to our list."

  She closed the connection with Baudry and allowed her hand to drift down from her mouth. As it did so, she saw the red scratch of the laser cut across her cuff. She had been aware of that thin line for some hours now, without allowing herself to be distracted by pondering its purpose. Now, however, there was a window in her schedule. The Ultra ships would not arrive for six or seven hours. Dreyfus would take even longer to reach Ops Nine.

  She had time to ponder.

  She raised the bracelet again and spoke softly. "Put me through to Doctor Demikhov."

  He answered almost immediately, almost as if he'd been watching her place the call. "Supreme Prefect. This is a surprise." Aumonier smiled: for all his talents, Demikhov was a poor liar. "I wasn't expecting to hear from you."

  "Doctor," she said, "perhaps I'm mistaken, but I can't help feeling that you have something planned for me." She waited a handful of seconds, listening to his breathing. "I'm right, aren't I? This laser, which wasn't here yesterday. The noises Dreyfus did his best to explain away. What's going to happen, Doctor?"

  After a silence that made her wonder whether the link had been broken, Demikhov said, "It's best if you don't know."

  "You're probably right. It's not as if I've ever had cause to doubt your clinical wisdom, after all. But I just wanted to say something."

  "Go ahead," Demikhov answered.

  "I've done all I can for the next few hours. If you're intending to remove the scarab, now might be the best time to try it."

  "There'll be risks."

  "Just as there are risks in allowing it to remain clamped on my neck. I know the score, Doctor."

  "After the procedure we have in mind," Demikhov said hesitantly, "there's a possibility that you may be incapacitated."

  "In which case Senior Prefect Clearmountain will assume temporary authority. But only until I'm fit to resume command. Don't keep me out of it for too long, Doctor. All I need is a pair of eyes and a mouth to give orders. Understood?"

  "Understood," he answered.

  "Then I urge you to execute whatever plan you've been putting in place. You are good to go, aren't you?"

  "We're good to go."

  "Then do your best, Doctor. I'm submitting myself to your care."

  "If I fail — " he began.

  "You'll still have my undying gratitude. Now get this fucking thing off my neck."

  "You're in position," Demikhov said. "Please don't move a muscle, Supreme Prefect. Not even to answer me."

  Jane Aumonier held her breath. She heard something go click.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 29

  * * *

  Doctor Demikhov watched events unfold with a curious sense of retardation, as if he was replaying one of his simulations at half normal speed. The blades pushed through the weakened part of the wall and raced together, their cutting edges forming a tightening circle with the supreme prefect at the precise centre. Aumonier floated motionlessly, her expression unchanging: she did not have time to react to the blades' intrusion into her private space. They closed on her, reaching her throat and passing cleanly through, interlocking with micron precision as they met. Demikhov was now forced to take in two distinct views, captured from cams in the two isolated halves of the former sphere. In the upper hemisphere, the supreme prefect's severed head began to drift away from the blades with almost imperceptible slowness. In the lower hemisphere, her body and the scarab drifted in the opposite direction. In the same decelerated time-frame, Demikhov saw the scarab react to the violent intrusion of a large foreign object into its volume of denial. The lower part of Aumonier's neck, below the cut, puffed apart in a cloud of pink and grey. Blood continued to spurt from the neck in inky profusion. The heart was still pumping. The drifting remains of both the decapitated body and its damaged parasite were quickly obscured.

  Demikhov's attention flicked to the upper sphere. Time accelerated. The head's slow drift became an ungainly tumble. The head was also leaking blood, albeit with much less ferocity than the body.

  Servitors rushed into both chambers, moving too quickly for the eye to follow. The machines reached the scarab, detached it from the neck and encased it in a cocoon of blast-smothering quickmatter. In the upper chamber, machines reached the head and arrested its motion away from the shining floor formed by the blades.

  "Scarab is neutralised," reported one of Demikhov's analysts. "Repeat, scarab is neutralised. Upper chamber is now secure for crash team."

  "Go," Demikhov said, with all the urgency he could muster.

  And then he too was moving as if his own life depended upon it.

  He was only slightly behind the crash team when he arrived at the head. The servitors had braced it, pinning it gently in place between telescopic manipulators. There'd been a temptation to simply immerse the head in a vat of curative quickmatter, but Demikhov had resisted. The quickmatter would undoubtedly stabilise the head, flooding the brain to preserve neural structure, and would make a start on the necessary tissue-repair. The drawback was that the quickmatter would most likely wipe short-term memories and delay the return to full consciousness by many days. Demikhov had considered every angle and knew that this was a time when hard-won clinical judgement, the cumulated knowledge of his own eyes and experience, outweighed the easy option.

  He meant only to look at the neck, to judge the accuracy of the cut and assess the damage to the major structures. He saw instantly that the blades had transected the cervical vertebrae between C3 and C4, as he had always hoped. The cut had been so accurate that only the cartilaginous disc between the bones had been destroyed. The carotid artery, internal and external jugular veins and vagus nerve had all been severed within a millimetre of his optimum cut points. Had he been looking at a simulation, Demikhov would have rejected it as unrealistically optimistic. But this was reality. Zulu — this stage, at least — had worked as well as he could have dreamed.

  Then he looked at the face. He didn't mean to. It was clinically ir
relevant, and he'd told himself to pay no heed to any signs of apparent consciousness he saw behind Jane Aumonier's eyes. But he couldn't help it. And there was something there: a sharpness in her gaze, a sense that she was focusing on no one in the room but him, that she was utterly, shockingly aware of her condition.

  Less than ten seconds had passed since the blades had gone in.

  "Begin stabilisation," Demikhov said. "Plan three-delta. We have a job to do here, people."

  He risked another look at the eyes. This time there was a fogged absence where a mind had been.

  * * *

  It took three hours to fall towards Yellowstone. The cutter could have made the journey in a third of the time, but then it would have appeared to be moving anomalously fast, running the risk of attracting Aurora's attention. Dreyfus could not be certain of the extent of her surveillance, but it was likely that she would be alert to any traffic that appeared to be out of the ordinary, be it civilian or law-enforcement. As much as it pained him to watch the clock ticking, he knew that the slow and unobtrusive approach was necessary.

  "Captain says to buckle up," Sparver said, prompting Dreyfus to put aside the compad he'd been studying. "We'll be slowing for atmosphere in about five minutes."

  Dreyfus nodded curtly. "You can tell him you passed on the message."

  Sparver had braced himself with an arm and a foot. "You still sore at me for sneaking aboard?"

  "What do you think?"

  "I had Jane's blessing. Who else do you think put that stuff under your seat?"

  "I expressly requested that I go in alone," Dreyfus said.

  Sparver shrugged, as if none of this was his fault, merely the outcome of a series of circumstances beyond his control. "Look, it's done. I'm aboard. So make the most of me."