Prefect

by Alastair Reynolds

  "Fuck you, Dreyfus. Fuck you and fuck Panoply."

  "I'll take your views into consideration. Before you die on me, answer one last question. Where are the others?"

  Veitch's answer came more slowly this time, his words slurred. He sounded like a man on the edge of unconsciousness. "I woke up once and your pig was still here. Saavedra was already gone. When I came around the second time, the pig was gone as well. Before I passed out the first time, he said something about taking care of Gaffney."

  Dreyfus absorbed that. As gladdened as he was to hear that Sparver was alive, he was troubled by the other prefect's intentions. "Where did Saavedra go?"

  "I don't know. Why don't you go and ask her?"

  "Veitch?" Dreyfus asked, a little later.

  But this time there was no answer.

  "Good for you," Dreyfus said, under his breath.

  * * *

  It was dark when Sparver finally found his way to the surface again, his suit donned hastily, sacrificing the armour he would have needed assistance to lock into place. Much of Ops Nine had collapsed during the attack, but the sloping tunnel by which he and Dreyfus had entered was still intact, and with care he had been able to ascend through the facility and squeeze past the obstructions on his way, using his suit's power to force open the surface doors. For once being a hyperpig had been to his advantage; he doubted very much that a fully armoured and suited baseline human would have been able to navigate some of the crawlspaces he'd had to pass through, especially not while dragging a Breitenbach rifle.

  When he'd first regained consciousness, Saavedra had been about to leave the collapsed room, intending to find a way to restore the Clockmaker's containment. Sparver knew then that he had to get out of that room, even if it meant abandoning Dreyfus for the time being. He'd talked Saavedra into handing over the ammo cells she had confiscated earlier and clipped to her belt, telling her that he would attempt to take down Gaffney — or whoever it was — on his own. Saavedra obviously hadn't liked the idea of giving him access to weapons, but she presumably liked the idea of the attacker going unpunished even less. Eventually she'd relented and Sparver had taken the cells, watched Saavedra go and then lain very still while the room suddenly resettled, filling with pale dust and pinning him temporarily again before he worked loose and made his exit. He'd found the suit and weapon near the sculpture on the atrium level, right where he and Dreyfus had been ambushed what felt like a lifetime ago.

  He emerged from the sloping ramp, crouching low as he passed through the toothlike formation of icicles. Overhead, the sky surged with the unbridled energy of a storm, clouds billowing and flickering with electrical discharges and strange, seething shifts in local atmospheric chemistry. Yet above the roar of the wind and thunder, his suit was conveying another sound to his ears. It was high-pitched and steady: the shrill whine of engines. Still using the upper slope of the ramp for cover, he knelt with the rifle between his knees and scanned the howling dark sky. It was not very long before he made out the hovering form of the cutter, poised nose-down like a stabbing dagger, with its hull-mounted weapons deployed and ready. Sparver guessed that Gaffney was loitering over the remains of Ops Nine with the intention of catching the Clockmaker making its escape. Whatever firepower had yet to be discharged would be directed in a single berserk frenzy of concentrated destruction. Perhaps Gaffney had no real expectation of killing the Clockmaker, but he would certainly be hoping to maim it.

  Sparver flipped open the Breitenbach's weather cover, exposing the muzzle with its delicate battery of plasma emitters and laser-confinement optics. He powered-up the weapon, mindful that the cutter might be sniffing the local electromagnetic environment. The weapon ran through its start-up cycle, then signalled readiness. Sparver settled the long barrel of the rifle onto his shoulder, bazooka-style. A portion of his faceplate filled with a sighting reticle, superimposed over a view of the rifle's current target. Sparver eased back on his haunches until the hovering cutter bobbed into the middle of the reticle. He squeezed a stud on the side of the primary grip, telling the weapon to lock on to this target. A red bracket pulsed around the cutter, signifying target acquisition. Instantly Sparver felt the suit stiffen and adjust his posture for him. The rifle had assumed command of the power-assisted suit; it was using it as an aiming platform, with Sparver just going along for the ride.

  The cutter's engine note shifted. Sparver watched the ship rotate and then start to drift in his direction. Its weapons slewed slowly towards him, like a nest of snakes moving in unison. The cutter must have detected him. Gaffney was scouting closer, not wanting to discharge his weapons against a false target. The rifle, tracking the moving ship, made Sparver's suit adjust his position. A stutter of light erupted from the side of the hull. A rain of slugs tore into the upper lip of the ramp entrance, dislodging the icicles just before the lip crumbled away entirely. Sparver took a hit above one knee, a glancing shot that must have ricocheted off the ground. The impact nearly floored him, but his suit wasn't holed.

  He fired the rifle, squeezing off three closely spaced pulses before regaining control of his suit and falling back into cover. Confirmed hit, the weapon informed him.

  He peered back over the rim. The cutter was still airborne, but it wasn't doing any more shooting. The engine note had become erratic. The weapons were jerking around haphazardly, locking on to dozens of false targets. Sparver resettled the rifle on his shoulder and fired another three shots, this time relying on his own aiming ability. Crimson light poured from the hole he'd blown in the side of Gaffney's ship. The engine note quietened to silence.

  The cutter dropped.

  A second or so later, Sparver felt the impact slam through the ground. He braced, but there was no explosion. He waited a decent interval, then hauled himself from the cover of the shattered ramp and made his way across the pulverised ground, keeping the rifle aimed nervously ahead of him. The cutter had come down a kilometre away, close to the main entrance point to Ops Nine, where Saavedra would have docked and hidden her own ship. When Sparver reached it he found that the cutter had buried the front three metres of its nose in the frost, urine-coloured rivulets of melted methane-ammonia snow dribbling away from the impact point. The airlock was open, the outer door blasted off and lying to one side some metres away. The inner door was also open, revealing the faintly glowing interior of the crashed vehicle. Sparver's suit started warning him that radiation levels were above tolerable norms. He ignored its protestations and used a handy boulder to climb into the shell. He pointed the rifle into the interior, using its sighting facility to see around the corner. But it only took a glance to confirm that the cutter was empty.

  Gaffney was missing.

  "Even for a cockroach, you take a lot of killing," Sparver said.

  * * *

  Dreyfus snapped to consciousness again. He had no recollection of sliding back under, although he did remember that he had been about to make another attempt to free himself of the table. Perhaps the pain, or simply the exertion, had been enough to loosen his hold on the waking world. Either way, once more he had no clear idea of how much time had elapsed; whether it was seconds or minutes or hours.

  "Stay still," a woman's voice told him. "You're safe now."

  He realised that he wasn't pinned under the table any more, and that the overall blanket of pain had dampened to a vague numbness. His ears were still ringing, his eyes still watering, but he did not feel any worse off than when he had been speaking with Veitch.

  "Paula?" he asked, recognising the voice as Saavedra's, and that she was standing to one side of the bed or couch upon which he was resting. "What happened? Where am I?"

  "I rescued you from the collapsed room. You're in a different part of the facility, deep enough that it escaped the damage."

  Saavedra was almost lost in the shadows, with only dull red highlights tracing her form. She stood demurely, her hands linked before her, against the ruddy glow from a wall panel.

  "Did you check
Veitch?"

  She nodded stiffly. "He was already dead when I got back."

  Dreyfus moved his head enough to survey his body. It was difficult, since there was hardly any light in the room. The lower part of his right leg was covered with dried blood, but there was no sign of any bones sticking through the fabric. The pain had eased now: his uniform would have begun secreting topical antiseptic and painkillers as soon as it detected his injury, and by now they'd had time to take effect. His right arm was still sore — the uniform was allowing him to feel just enough pain to remind him not to hurt himself further — but again the injury could have been much worse.

  "I don't know what's happened to Gaffney, but we should probably think about getting out of here," Dreyfus said. "Before he lost consciousness, Veitch told me that there'd been a containment breakdown. He was convinced that the Clockmaker would have escaped."

  "Do you think there'd be any point in running from it?"

  "I'd rather run than sit here waiting for an audience."

  "Well, you don't need to worry just yet. Containment failed, but not long enough for the Clockmaker to escape. It's still inside the tokamak. The back-up generators won't keep it there for ever, but we're safe for an hour or so."

  "I'm glad. But you should still be thinking about getting out of here now."

  She cocked her head, puzzled by his response. "Me, Dreyfus? After all that's happened?"

  "You came here by ship, Paula. Find Sparver, then collect your cutter. If you have fuel to reach orbit, do so. Otherwise get back to Chasm City and contact the authorities. If there's anything left of Panoply, they can probably put you in touch."

  "And then what?"

  "Tell them what I told you concerning the Clockmaker. Make sure someone finds out about it. If Jane Aumonier is still alive, tell Jane."

  "How will that knowledge help matters?"

  "Maybe it'll come in useful when they have to put the Clockmaker back in the bottle."

  "You are not seriously injured, Dreyfus. You don't have to die down here."

  "Someone has to go down to the tokamak. Someone still has to talk to the thing and persuade it to do what it can to turn back Aurora."

  "You think you can persuade the Clockmaker?"

  "I'll give it a shot."

  "How? You don't even know how to communicate with it."

  "I'll find a way. Even if I have to open the tokamak and let it out."

  "It would almost certainly kill you."

  "But it might want to talk first. I'll have to count on that. If I can make it see what a threat Aurora presents ... if it hasn't already worked that out for itself, of course."

  Saavedra unclasped her hands. She touched one index finger to her lips, studiedly conveying thoughtfulness. "I made a mistake in not trusting you when you arrived, didn't I? I should have listened to you properly; learned everything I could about Aurora."

  "You can make amends by getting through to Panoply."

  "I'll do what needs to be done. But first I need to know more about Aurora, not just the Clockmaker. You said she was one of the original Eighty, didn't you?"

  Dreyfus nodded wearily. It seemed unnecessary to rake over this again, given what he had already told Saavedra. "My colleague knows about as much as I do."

  "But I'm asking you, not your deputy. What was her full name?"

  "Aurora Nerval-Lermontov. She was just a girl when they scanned her. I don't think she was a monster then. Maybe it was society's hatred and fear that drove her to become what she is, when they knew what Calvin Sylveste had brought into existence. Or maybe she always had it in her, like a seed waiting to flourish. Maybe she was a sick little girl from the moment she was born. Either way, she has to be stopped, wiped out of existence, before she takes over the entire Glitter Band. She won't stop there, either."

  "Where is she located?"

  "We've been over this, Paula. We don't know. There's about ten thousand habitats up there, any one of which could be hosting her unawares."

  "Could she distribute herself, like a program executing on a massively parallel architecture? A piece of herself running on thousands of habitats, so that the loss of any one processing centre would not be catastrophic?"

  "Like I said, she won't do that because the timelag would slow her thought processes down to a crawl."

  "All the same. If she is to coordinate a takeover, she must make use of the network infrastructure to send commands and receive intelligence."

  "Yes, but she's obviously become expert at concealing herself. We just don't have the overview to pick out the signal from the noise."

  "Whereas you think the Clockmaker may be able to."

  "That's the idea." He was growing increasingly irritated at having to repeat the argument he'd already presented to Saavedra and Veitch. "Paula, why are we going over this again? We don't have time. Either you agree or you don't."

  "I do agree," she said, so quietly that he almost didn't catch the reply. "It's your only hope of survival. Put one alpha-level mind against another. What could be more logical?"

  That was when Dreyfus had the first tingling suspicion that something was very wrong.

  "Paula?" he asked.

  She turned away from him so that he was looking at her face in profile. Silhouetted against the illuminated wall, her body held the erect pose of a dancer about to begin some demanding routine. Dreyfus saw that there was something attached to the back of her head, neck and spine. It was like a thick metal caterpillar, a segmented thing with many legs. Her sleeveless black vest had been gashed open from neck to coccyx. As she turned even more, he saw that this was also true of her skin. He could see her backbone, grinning white through meat and muscle. The caterpillar had dug its needle-tipped feet through to her spinal nerve column.

  Quite without warning, she dropped to the floor.

  Dreyfus lay perfectly still, paralysed by the horror of what he had just witnessed. It must have found her, tortured or tricked her just enough to extract the basic details of Dreyfus' mission. Then it had slashed her open and made her into a meat puppet.

  Now it was done with the puppet. On the floor, Saavedra twitched and spasmed like a fish out of water.

  "You're here," he said, finding the strength to speak. "You're with me, aren't you? In this room. You did escape after all."

  There'd been a humming sound all along, but it was only now that his ringing ears became fully attuned to it. Moving his neck by the tiniest of degrees, he looked around to face the other side of the bed, opposite where Saavedra had been standing. That side of the room was dark, but he was still aware of the form waiting there. It was larger than a man, towering towards the ceiling, stooping over to fit into the confined space. The red light gleamed off a dripping chrome ribcage, off the sickle-shaped fingers of a huge metallic hand, off the hammerhead width of a huge eyeless skull. The humming intensified. To Dreyfus, it became the most malevolent sound in the universe.

  "What do you want with me?" he asked, expecting no answer.

  But the Clockmaker spoke. Its voice was surprisingly soft, surprisingly avuncular. "It was very brave of you to come here, to find me. Did you expect that it would end like this?"

  "I didn't know what to expect. I had no other choice."

  "You expected to persuade me to help you?"

  Dreyfus licked his lips. They felt as dry as clay. His heart was trying to tunnel its way out of his chest. "I only wanted to show you the way things are."

  "With Aurora?"

  "Yes. She won't stop. You're the only thing that can touch her. Therefore she has to destroy you. And she will, sooner or later. Unless you destroy her first."

  "Aurora will murder all of you."

  "I know."

  "What makes you think I'm any better?"

  "Because you didn't kill everyone in SIAM."

  The Clockmaker sounded amused. "And that gives you hope? That makes you think I'm the lesser of two evils?"

  "I don't think you're evil. Not really. I think
you're furious and driven, like an avenging angel. You've been hurt and you want to give back some of that hurt. I think that makes you bad. But I don't think it makes you evil."

  The Clockmaker contorted itself even more, bending at the middle to lower its upper chest and head to only a metre above Dreyfus. Still he could see only highlights, where the red light caught a sleek metal edge. The head, which had appeared hammer-like only a moment ago, now had the form of an anvil.

  "You presume to know what I am?"

  "I know who you are," Dreyfus said, each word feeling as if it might be his last. "I know what they did to you, Philip."

  The Clockmaker did not answer. But something sliced through the air, one of its arms moving so quickly that the motion became a scything blur of darkness and shadow. The whipping arm touched Dreyfus' forehead. His skin felt suddenly cold. Something trickled into his eye, warm and stinging.

  "I know what they did to you," he repeated. "They took you and burnt out your mind, trying to extract an alpha-level simulation. Then they dumped your body in a fish pond and made it look like suicide. They only wanted those alpha-level patterns for one thing, Philip. Not to give you immortality, but to help them program a machine that could travel into the Shroud without being ripped apart. You'd survived, where others hadn't. They made a robot and loaded your alpha-level simulation into it, in the hope that something in those brain patterns would make a difference."

  The Clockmaker was listening. It hadn't killed him yet. Perhaps it was planning something worse than death, some ingenious new cruelty that would make even Jane Aumonier's eleven years of sleeplessness seem like a kindness.

  "They must have sent you into a Shroud," Dreyfus continued. "One within a few light-years of Yellowstone, so that you had time to go there and back before you showed up in SIAM. That's what happened, isn't it? You were sent into the Shroud as a machine running Philip Lascaille's alpha-level simulation, and you came back ... changed, just the way Philip had all those years before. Something inside the Shroud had remade you. You were still a machine, but now you were a machine with alien components. And you were angry. You were worse than angry. You were a machine that knew its soul had been stolen from an innocent man, a man who'd already been driven half-mad by the things he'd seen inside the Shroud."