Prefect

by Alastair Reynolds

  "What was so special about this ship?"

  "It was a ramscoop," Dreyfus said. "A starship built around a single massive engine designed to suck in interstellar hydrogen and use it for reaction mass. Because it didn't have to carry its own fuel around, it could go almost as fast as it liked, right up to the edge of light-speed. That was the idea, anyway. But the drive system was cumbersome, and the intake field generated so much friction that the ship was never as fast as its designers had hoped. But that didn't matter to me. I didn't want the ship to move. I just wanted its intake. The scoop generator was fifteen kilometres across, Sparv: a swallowing mouth wide enough to encompass SIAM in its entirety."

  "A magnetic field," Sparver said.

  "I sent a Heavy Technical Squad aboard the Atalanta. We attached high-burn tugs to shift its orbit, to bring it close to SIAM. We couldn't get its reactors back on line fast enough, so we jump-started the ramscoop using the engines on our corvettes. In an hour the field was building strength. In two we had it positioned around SIAM." Dreyfus paused, the words suddenly drying up in his mouth. "We knew there was a risk. The human survivors in SIAM were going to be exposed to that same magnetic field. There was no telling what it would do to their nervous systems, let alone the implants most of them were carrying. The best we could do was to try to focus the field on the area where we'd last pinpointed the Clockmaker, and try to hold the field strength as low as possible elsewhere."

  "It was better than just nuking. At least you gave them a chance."

  "Yes," Dreyfus said.

  "You said they survived. When you told me about it earlier."

  "They did. But the effects of the field had been ... worse than we feared. We froze the Clockmaker, recovered its relics, studied it as best we could and then retreated with the survivors. That took the rest of the six hours. Then we nuked. We thought we'd destroyed the Clockmaker, of course. In truth, it'd had packed itself down into one of the relics, waiting to be reopened like a jack-in-the-box."

  "And the survivors?" Sparver asked eventually.

  It took Dreyfus an equally long time to answer. "They were all taken care of. Including Valery."

  "They're still alive?"

  "All of them. In Hospice Idlewild. The Mendicants were asked to look after a consignment of brain-damaged sleepers. They were never told where those people really came from."

  "Valery's with them, isn't she?"

  Dreyfus' eyes were beginning to sting. "I visited her once, Sparv. Just after the crisis, when it had all blown over. I thought I could live with what she'd become. But when I saw her, when I saw how little of my wife was left, I knew I couldn't. She was tending the gardens, kneeling in soil. She had flowers in her hand. When she looked at me, she smiled. But she didn't really know who I was."

  "I'm sorry."

  "That was when I went back to Jane. I told her I couldn't live with what I'd done to them. So she authorised the memory block."

  "And Valery?"

  "I never went back to see her. Not in eleven years."

  * * *

  Presently Dreyfus became aware of a rising sound, louder than the wind. He looked up in time to see a large ship come slamming through the clouds, its hull still glowing from a high-speed re-entry. He recognised it immediately as a deep-system cruiser, although he could not identify the ship itself. It circled overhead, landing gear clawing down from its reptile-smooth belly, weapons erupting through the hull as if they were the retractile spines of some poisonous fish. The pilot selected a patch of level ground large enough to accommodate the ninety-metre-long vehicle and descended slowly, using brief coughs of steering thrust to manage the descent.

  Dreyfus and Sparver raised their hands in salute and started walking towards the parked ship, Dreyfus' stiff right leg dragging in the ice. A ramp lowered from the belly. Almost immediately, a suited figure began walking down it, picking its way cautiously down the cleated surface. The figure's small stature, the way she walked, told Dreyfus exactly who she was.

  "Thalia," he called out, delighted. "It is you, isn't it?"

  She answered on the suit-to-suit channel. "Are you okay, sir?"

  "I'll mend, thanks to Sparver. What are you doing here?"

  "As soon as Prefect Gaffney got to you, we knew there was no point in concealing this location from Aurora. We would have come sooner, but we've been tied up with evacuees."

  "I understand completely. You came quickly enough as it is."

  Thalia walked across the rough ground until they were only a few metres from each other. "I'm sorry about what happened, sir."

  "Sorry about what?"

  "I screwed up, sir. The upgrades ... I was unprepared."

  "It wasn't your fault."

  "But maybe if I hadn't gone in alone, if I'd had a back-up squad with me ... things might have been different."

  "I very much doubt it. Aurora had already considered every possible eventuality. She'd have found a way through no matter what precautions you took. It might have taken longer, but it would still have happened. Don't cut yourself up about it, Deputy." Dreyfus extended a hand, inviting her closer. She crossed the remaining ground and let her suit touch his. Dreyfus held one of her arms, Sparver the other. "I'm glad I got you back in one piece," he said.

  "I wish I could have done something for all the other people."

  "You saved some. And you got word back to us that Aurora had no intention of keeping anyone alive once she was in control. You did good, Thalia. I'm not displeased."

  "That's praise," Sparver said. "I'd take it if I were you."

  "What about Gaffney, sir?"

  "Gaffney's gone," Dreyfus answered.

  "And the rest of Firebrand? The Clockmaker?"

  "You've been well briefed, I see. I thought you'd have wanted to rest."

  "Well, sir?"

  "Veitch and Saavedra are dead. The Clockmaker escaped."

  Behind her faceplate, Thalia nodded. "We did wonder, sir."

  "Why?"

  "Something's happening. We could only assume it had some connection with the Clockmaker, that you'd managed to persuade it to act against Aurora."

  "I wouldn't exactly say I persuaded it." But Dreyfus was encouraged by this information. "What's been happening, Thalia?"

  "We're not really sure. The good news is that the Ultras have been contributing to the evacuation effort and helping with the destruction of contaminated habitats. Overnight we've cleared and evacuated another six along Aurora's expansion front."

  "Total evacuations?" Dreyfus probed.

  "No, sir," she said, hesitantly. "Some people were still left aboard at the end. But a lot less than before."

  "I guess we can't expect miracles."

  "Sir, there's something else. A couple of hours ago, weevil flows reached two habitats before we were in place with nukes or lighthuggers. We'd got most of the citizenry out, but local constables were still assisting with the evacuation when the weevils broke through."

  "Go on," he pushed.

  "The constables started encountering the expected weevil resistance. They were doing their best to slow the weevils as they worked their way to the polling core, but they were taking heavy casualties. Then the weevils started behaving strangely. They became uncoordinated, erratic. They stopped their advance. The surviving constables managed to deploy heavy guns and started inflicting losses on the weevils."

  "But there'd still have been millions more in the flow, even if there was a local malfunction at the head of the assault."

  Thalia shook her head urgently. "It wasn't a local malfunction, sir. It's started happening everywhere, wherever there are weevils. They have a degree of autonomous programming, like any servitor, but whatever controlling influence was guiding them appears to be absent, or at least distracted."

  "As if Aurora's mind's on other things."

  "That's what it looks like. Which is why we assumed you must have had some success with the Clockmaker."

  "It's already engaged her," Dreyfus sai
d marvellingly, as if he'd just witnessed some staggering phenomenon of nature. "It knew it couldn't afford to wait very long. Even though Gaffney hadn't succeeded, Aurora would have found another way to destroy this facility. It had to leave."

  "We should probably be leaving as well," Thalia said. "Unless you still want to admire the scenery, that is."

  "I've had enough scenery," Dreyfus replied. "I'm not really a planet person."

  "Me neither, sir."

  "Thalia," he said gently. "There's something else you need to know. It's about your father."

  "Sir?" she asked, cautiously.

  "It's good news," Dreyfus said.

  * * *

  When Dreyfus returned to Panoply, even before Mercier had attended to his injuries, his first port of call was the tactical room. There he found Clearmountain and Baudry engrossed in study of the Solid Orrery, running it back and forth through time under different assumptions. As the outcomes of their simulations varied, so did the number and distribution of the red points of light in the emerald swirl of the Glitter Band. Sometimes there were dozens of red glints, but never the hundreds or thousands that had figured in the earlier forecasts, when Aurora's expansion had appeared unstoppable.

  "Dreyfus," Clearmountain purred. "Welcome back to Panoply. I understand you now have senior status?"

  "That's what it said on the Manticore booster. You'll have to talk to Jane to see whether it's a permanent status change."

  "You received the message, I take it?" Baudry asked him sharply. "Demikhov went ahead with Zulu."

  "I heard."

  "There were ... complications, but when I last spoke to him, Demikhov was optimistic that Jane will make a complete recovery." She shot an awkward glance at Clearmountain. "There'll be no reason for her not to resume her duties."

  "After she's had a long rest," Dreyfus said forcefully. "She deserves that, no matter what she says."

  "Yes. No one would begrudge her that," Baudry replied.

  "I lost the Clockmaker."

  Clearmountain nodded at Dreyfus. "From what we heard, it was tactically unavoidable. We could have nuked Ops Nine, but then we'd still be fighting Aurora on our own. You did well, Senior Dreyfus."

  "Thank you." Dreyfus rubbed at the sore spot on his arm. "Concerning Aurora ... I heard from Thalia that there've been some changes. Is this correct?"

  Baudry answered him. "The picture still isn't completely clear. All we know is that weevil activity has now become much less organised, much less systematic. We're still not able to seriously affect the flows before they reach target habitats, even with the assistance of the Ultras. But constables and field prefects are making real strides in preventing the weevils from reaching the cores once they achieve habitat penetration."

  "Enough to mean you don't need to nuke any more?"

  "That's a possibility. For now, it should at least give us time to complete the evacuations before we sterilise. In the longer term, once the current flows are exhausted, we should see a total cessation of all weevil activity. We'll have halted Aurora."

  "She may just have stalled, not gone away for good."

  "We're mindful of that," Baudry said. "We'll continue evacuating well beyond her current expansion front, even if it means emptying fifty or a hundred habitats. We'll have nukes and lighthuggers in place to incinerate those habitats if we see renewed weevil activity." She laced her fingers together. "It should be enough, Senior. The emergency could be over in two to three days."

  "How many habitats will we have sacrificed by then?"

  "Forty-five, most likely," Baudry answered automatically. "Twenty-five in the best-case scenario, more than a hundred and twenty in the worst."

  "Civilian losses?"

  "Assuming that we can move to complete evacuation for the remaining occupied habitats within twenty-six hours, we'd be looking at total casualties in the range of two to three million citizens."

  "Just over a thirtieth of the entire citizenry," Clearmountain said. "It's a catastrophe, no doubt about it. But we have to thank our stars we're talking about millions, not tens of millions. And if we get out of this and we've lost forty-five habitats ... it's nothing against the ten thousand, Dreyfus."

  "I wouldn't say it's nothing, but I take your point."

  "The citizenry will get over it," Baudry said. "They'll move on with their lives, choosing to forget how close we came to disaster. For some of them, the forgetting will be quite literal. At the moment we're in the middle of an emergency. In a few days, if all goes well, it'll have been reduced to the status of a crisis. This time next year, we'll look back on it as an incident. Ten years from now, it'll be something no one outside of Panoply remembers, something our new recruits learn about with bored indifference."

  "Not if I get my way," said Dreyfus. "What about Aurora's prognostication? The time of plagues?"

  "We'll keep a weather eye open," Clearmountain said.

  Baudry looked at Dreyfus with interest. "Do you have plans, Senior?"

  "We haven't won," he told her. "We've just postponed the day of reckoning. If it isn't Aurora, we'll be facing the Clockmaker."

  "There is such a thing as the lesser of two evils," Clearmountain observed.

  "I'll remind you of that when it crawls out of the woodwork again."

  "Where do you think they are?" asked Baudry.

  "Dispersed," Dreyfus said. "Spread out over the network, two alpha-level intelligences smeared as thin as they can go before they stop being conscious entities at all."

  "How can you be so certain?"

  "Because it's the only way for them to survive. If Aurora concentrates herself in one habitat, the Clockmaker will find a way to engage and destroy her in a single attack. The same applies to the Clockmaker. But distributed, spread out across the entire Glitter Band, they're almost invulnerable."

  "Why didn't Aurora adopt such a strategy already?"

  "Because there's a cost. The speed of her thought processes depends on the distance between processing nodes. The Clockmaker's forced her to spread out just to survive. The downside for her is that she can't think quickly enough to defeat us."

  "But we can't kill her either," Clearmountain said.

  "No. Finding her would be almost impossible now. Maybe if we listen to network traffic long enough, we'll see the tiny slow-down caused by Aurora's presence. But that still wouldn't help us destroy her. We'd have to take out thousands of nodes, thousands of habitats, before we began to hurt her."

  "And by then we'd have hurt ourselves even more," Baudry said, nodding as she understood what Dreyfus was driving at. "So what you're saying, if I get you rightly, is that there's nothing we can do. We just have to sit back while these two monsters slug it out in slow motion, parasiting our network infrastructure."

  "That's right," Dreyfus said. "But I wouldn't worry unduly. If they've been slowed down as much as I think they have, it's going to be a long time before one of them emerges as victor. You're talking about a chess match between two opponents of almost limitless intelligence and guile. The only problem is they only get to make one move a year."

  "I hope you're right," Clearmountain said.

  Dreyfus smiled. "So do I. In the meantime, we still have jobs to do. We can't dwell on the gods fighting over our heads."

  "Gods will be gods," Baudry said.

  "But that doesn't mean I'm finished with this case," Dreyfus continued. "With the permission of the acting supreme prefect, I'd like authorisation to dig into the murder of Philip Lascaille. If there's still a body, I want it exhumed for analysis. I want to see if there's any evidence that his brain was subjected to alpha-level scanning."

  "You have my permission, of course," Clearmountain said. "I don't doubt that Jane would give it to you. But you should realise what you're getting yourself into, digging into ancient history like that. You'll be going up against the legal apparatus of House Sylveste. That's an organisation that protects its secrets even more zealously than we do. It isn't to be trifled with." />
  "With respect," Dreyfus said, standing up, "neither is Panoply."

  * * *

  A little while later he called upon Demikhov. The man resembled a spectral shadow of his former self, spent beyond exhaustion.

  "I heard that there were complications," Dreyfus said.

  "Nothing medical, you'll be glad to hear. The cut was as clean as a guillotine. Nerve reconnection could not have been less problematic. The only difficulty was occasioned by the intervention of your former colleague." Demikhov shrugged philosophically, bony shoulders moving under the green fabric of his surgical gown. "It was undignified, what he did to her. But at least she was unconscious throughout the whole sorry escapade."

  Dreyfus had no idea what he was talking about. He assumed he would learn all about it later. "And now?"

  "I completed partial re-attachment, then brought her round to talk to the Ultras. She was lucid and comfortable. I then put her under again to complete the procedure."

  "How did it go?"

  "She's whole again. It would take a better doctor than me to tell that Zulu ever happened."

  "Then she'll be fine?"

  "Yes, but it's not going to happen overnight. At the moment she can breathe for herself and make some limited body movements, but it'll be a while before she can walk. Having the wiring back in place doesn't mean her brain's ready to use it again."

  "I'd like to see her," Dreyfus said.

  "She's sleeping. I'd like to keep her that way until there's another emergency."

  "I'd still like to see her."

  "Then you'd better follow me," Demikhov answered with a heavy sigh, standing up to lead the way.

  He brought Dreyfus to the quiet green room where the supreme prefect was recuperating. Jane Aumonier lay under bedsheets, sleeping normally. Aside from her thinness, the baldness of her skull and the grey pallor of her skin, there was nothing to hint at what she had endured, either in the last day or the last eleven years. She looked peaceful, serenely restful. Dreyfus moved to her bedside. "I won't wake her," he whispered.