“They’ll find out what you did,” he said.
“They’re better than you, Gaffney. You won’t be able to hide from Panoply for ever.”
Then he felt the filament whip around him. It wrapped itself around him twice, constricting him with its blunt edge. His arms were pinned to his sides, his knees jammed hard against his ribcage. The handle remained pointed at his face, its laser eye washing the world into scarlet.
“The whiphound’s going to insert the tip of its tail into your mouth,” Gaffney said, “but we can go with any orifice you like. Your call, Tom.”
Dreyfus closed his mouth, biting down so hard that he tasted salty wetness gush from his tongue. The filament tapped against the portcullis of his teeth, as if asking permission to enter. Dreyfus produced a senseless groan of defiance. The whiphound tapped again. He felt the filament tighten its coils.
“Open wide,” Gaffney said, cheerily encouraging.
“Easy does it.”
The whiphound tapped twice more against his teeth, then withdrew the tip of the filament. Dreyfus wondered if it was going to try to force its way in through a different orifice now that he had barred it from slithering in through his mouth.
He felt the coils loosen. Breathing was no longer difficult. The handle held its gaze on him for a second, and then rotated slowly around until it was directing the horizontal glare of its scanning laser eye onto Gaffney’s face rather than Dreyfus’. The coil released Dreyfus completely. He took a grateful breath and slumped against the wall, feeling a stripe of cold sweat ooze down the valley of his spine. The whiphound moved stealthily off the bunk, never releasing its visual lock on Gaffney.
“Stand down,” Gaffney said, keeping the panic from his voice for the moment.
“Stand down. Revert to defence posture one.”
The whiphound showed no sign of having heard or recognised his order and kept on slithering. The filament pushed the handle higher, so that it was level with the standing man’s face. Gaffney took a hesitant step backwards, then another, until his back bumped into the wall.
“Stand down,” he repeated, louder this time.
“This is Senior Prefect Gaffney ordering you to stand down and switch to standby mode. You have developed a fault. Repeat, you have developed a fault.”
“It doesn’t appear to be listening,” Dreyfus said.
Gaffney raised a shaky hand.
“Stand down!”
“I wouldn’t touch it if I were you. It’ll have your fingers off.”
The whiphound pressed Gaffney hard against the wall, the filament spooled out to its maximum extension. The handle made an emphatic nodding motion.
“I think it wants you to kneel,” Dreyfus said.
CHAPTER 21
The assembled seniors, internals and supernumerary analysts looked away from the Solid Orrery as the heavy doors of the tactical room swung open. For a second their expressions were as one, conveying a shared sense of indignation that their secret session had been interrupted, and without even the courtesy of a knock. Then they saw that the man stepping through the door was Senior Prefect Sheridan Gaffney and their collective mood changed from one of annoyance to mild puzzlement. Gaffney was perfectly entitled to enter the tactical room, his presence at least as welcome as that of anyone else there. But even Gaffney would normally have had the good manners to announce his arrival before barging in. The head of Internal Security was nothing if not a stickler for observation of the niceties.
“Is there a problem, Senior?” Baudry asked, speaking for the assembled party.
But it was not Gaffney who answered the query. Gaffney himself appeared strangely dumbstruck, incapable of formulating a response. Ten centimetres of black cylinder jutted from his mouth, as if he had been trying to swallow a thick candle. His eyes bulged as if he was seeking to squeeze all meaning through them.
The honour of replying fell instead to Dreyfus, who was following only a couple of paces behind the other man. There was an understandable measure of consternation at this development. Everyone in the room was aware that Dreyfus was under detention, unavoidably implicated in the murder of the Conjoiner woman. A smaller number of those present knew that Gaffney had been tasked to interview Dreyfus, and an even smaller number knew which methods that interview was likely to employ. The thought must have occurred to at least some of the party that Dreyfus had overpowered Gaffney and must now be holding him at knife- or gunpoint. Further inspection, however, revealed the presence of no recognisable weapon about the person of the field prefect. He was not even wearing shoes.
“Actually,” Dreyfus said, “there is a bit of a problem.”
“Why are you not in your cell?” Baudry asked, her attention flicking from Dreyfus to Gaffney and back again.
“What’s happened? What’s wrong with Sheridan? What’s that thing in his mouth?”
Gaffney’s posture was almost rigidly upright, as if he was hanging from an invisible coat rack. When he had walked into the room, he had moved with tiny shuffling footsteps, like a man with his laces tied together. He kept his arms glued to his sides. The thing lodged in his mouth forced him to keep his head at an unusual angle—it was as if he had developed a crick in his neck while looking up at the ceiling. There was a bulge in the skin of his throat, distending the collar of his tunic, that was more than Adam’s apple. He appeared unwilling to make the slightest unnecessary bodily movement.
“The thing in his mouth is a whiphound,” Dreyfus said.
“He came to interrogate me with a Model C. We were getting on famously when it just turned on him.”
“That’s not possible. A whiphound isn’t meant to do that.” Baudry looked at Dreyfus with an appalled expression.
“You didn’t do this, did you, Tom? You didn’t push that thing into him?”
“If I’d have touched it, I wouldn’t have any fingers left. No, it did it all by itself. Actually, Gaffney helped a bit with the final insertion.”
“I don’t understand. Why on Earth would he help?”
“He didn’t have a lot of choice. It all happened very slowly, very precisely. Have you ever seen a snake swallowing an egg? It pushed the filament into his mouth, then reached down into his stomach. You know how the interrogation mode works on those things: it locates major organs then threatens to slice them in two from inside.”
“What do you mean: interrogation mode? There’s no such thing.”
“There is now. It’s one of the new features Gaffney had built into the Model Cs. Of course, it has some innocuous-sounding name: enhanced compliance facilitation, or something similar.”
“He could have called for help.”
Dreyfus shook his head.
“Not a hope. It would have sliced him into six or seven pieces before he could say his name into his bracelet.”
“But why did he help it finish what it was doing to him?”
“It was hurting him, letting him know that if he didn’t help by pushing the handle into his mouth, it was going to do something really unpleasant.”
Baudry stared at Gaffney with renewed comprehension. The handle of a model A or B whiphound would have been too thick to enter the human throat. But a Model C was thinner, sleeker, altogether nastier. A whiphound handle jammed partway down Gaffney’s gullet would certainly explain his stiff-necked posture, his unwillingness to compromise what must have already been a very congested windpipe.
“We have to get it out of him,” she said.
“I don’t think it wants you to do that,” Dreyfus said.
“It doesn’t want anything. It’s malfunctioning, obviously.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Dreyfus said, looking around the party, at the documents and compads on the table.
“But perhaps Gaffney has an opinion on the matter. He can’t speak right now, obviously, but he can still use his hands. Can’t you?” Gaffney shuffled around. His eyes were two bulging eggs, ready to pop out of their sockets. His cheeks were the colour o
f beetroot. He didn’t so much nod as make a microscopic twitching suggestion of one.
“I think he needs something to write with,” Dreyfus said.
“Can anyone spare a compad and a stylus?”
“Take mine,” Baudry said, skidding the item across the table. One of the analysts took the compad, unclipped the stylus and passed them both to Gaffney. His arms unlocked from the sides of his body, articulating with painful slowness as if the bones themselves had fused. His hands were shaking. He took the compad in his left hand and fumbled for the stylus with his right. It fell to the floor. The analyst knelt down and gently placed it in his palm.
“I don’t see—” Baudry began.
“Tell them what happened to Clepsydra,” Dreyfus said. Gaffney scratched the stylus across the writing surface of the compad. His movements were pained and childlike, as if he had seldom held a stylus before, let alone written with one. But laboriously he formed recognisable letters, scratching them out in agonised strokes.
He shuffled forward to the edge of the table and dropped the compad. Baudry picked it up. She studied the scrawl upon it.
“‘I killed her’,” she mouthed.
“That’s what it says: ‘I killed her’.” She looked up at Gaffney.
“Is this true, Sheridan? Did you really kill the prisoner?”
Again that twitch of a nod, a movement so subtle that the assembled seniors would never have seen it had they not been watching for it. She handed him back the compad.
“Why?” He scratched out another answer.
“‘Knew too much’,” Baudry read.
“Knew too much about what, Sheridan? What secret did she have to die to protect?”
Gaffney scribbled again. His trembling was growing worse, and it took longer to spell out one word than it had taken him to spell out three the last time.
“‘Aurora’,” Baudry read.
“That name again. Is it true, Sheridan? Is she really one of the Eighty?”
But when she handed him the compad, all he wrote on it this time was: “Help me.”
“I think it might be best to save further questioning for later,” Dreyfus said.
“Why is it doing this to him?” Baudry asked.
“I’ve heard about the difficulties with the Model Cs, but nothing like this has ever happened.”
“He must have switched on the whiphound in Clepsydra’s presence,” Dreyfus said.
“Very silly thing to do around a Conjoiner, but I guess he couldn’t resist tormenting her. She couldn’t stop him killing her—he used a gun for that—but she was still able to tamper with the whiphound.”
“She wouldn’t have had time.”
“I doubt it took her more than a second. For a Conjoiner, it would have been about as difficult as blinking.”
“But the programming is hard-coded.”
“Nothing’s hard-coded to a Conjoiner. There’s always a way in, always a back door. She’d have found it if she knew she was about to die and this was her only way of getting a message through. Right, Sheridan?”
Gaffney twitched another affirmative. Some kind of whitish foam or drool was beginning to erupt around the black plug filling his mouth. The quickening tempo of his breathing was now audible to everyone in the room.
“We still have to get it out of him,” Baudry said.
“Sheridan: I want you to stay very, very calm. No matter what you’ve done, no matter what’s happened, we’re going to help you.” She lifted her arm and spoke into her bracelet with a voice on the trembling edge of panic.
“Doctor Demikhov? Oh good, you’re awake. Yes, very well, thank you. I know this is unorthodox and that you’re mandated to focus only on the Aumonier case but… something’s come up. Something that requires your expertise very, very urgently.”
Dr Demikhov conjured a quickmatter partition, closing off one end of the tactical room to allow him and the other medical technicians to work on Gaffney in privacy. The last clear view Dreyfus had of the senior prefect was of him being gently lowered onto a couch tipped at forty-five degrees to the floor, handled as if he was a bomb that might detonate at any instant. Through the partition’s smoky opacity, the team became vaguely outlined pale ghosts, huddled around an indistinct black form. Then the indistinct black form started thrashing, blurred limbs flailing the air.
“Do you think they’ll get it out of him?” Baudry asked, breaking the uncanny silence.
“I don’t think Clepsydra was interested in killing him,” Dreyfus said.
“She could have achieved that already by embedding a different set of instructions into the whiphound. I think she wanted him to talk instead.”
“He was in no state to tell us anything reliable.”
“He told us enough,” Dreyfus said.
“We can get more out of him when Demikhov’s finished.” He eased himself into one of the seats around the table, opposite Baudry.
“I’m taking something of a liberty here, but is it safe to assume that I’m no longer the prime suspect in Clepsydra’s murder?”
Baudry swallowed hard.
“I was prepared to believe that you’d been framed, Tom, but I couldn’t accept your accusations about Gaffney. He was one of us, for Voi’s sake. I had to believe that you were wrong: that you were either striking out against him for personal reasons, or someone was framing Gaffney as well.”
“And now?”
“Following that little spectacle, I think we can safely assume that we know who murdered Clepsydra, and that he was probably acting alone.” Baudry cast a wary glance at the smoky partition, but the huddle of shapes beyond the quickmatter was now too concentrated to separate into individuals.
“Which means you were right, and I was wrong, and I ignored you when I should have trusted you. I’m sorry about that.”
“Don’t apologise,” Dreyfus said.
“You had a crisis to contain and you took the best decision you could given the evidence available to you.”
“There’s more,” Baudry said. She played with her fingers nervously, as if she was trying to dismantle her hands.
“I see now that Gaffney wanted Jane removed from command. Not because he was concerned for her, or even for Panoply, but because he feared she’d put two and two together before very long.”
“So she had to go,” Dreyfus said.
Baudry’s attention flicked to the partition.
“When Demikhov’s finished… I need to talk to him about Jane. Do you think she’s strong enough to resume command?”
“Whether she is or not, we need her.”
“Like a circuit needs a fuse, even though it might blow at any time.” Baudry shuddered at the thought.
“Can we do this? Can we subject Jane to something that might kill her?”
“Let Jane decide.”
“Crissel and I didn’t want her removed for the same reasons as Gaffney,” she said, apparently oblivious to the other people in the tactical room.
“But that doesn’t make what we did any more excusable.”
“Whatever Crissel did wrong, he made it right when he got on that deep-system cruiser.”
“And me?”
“Reinstate Jane, clear me of any suspicion of wrongdoing and I think you’ll have made a decent start.”
It was as if she hadn’t heard him.
“Perhaps I should resign. I’ve let down the supreme prefect, allowed myself to be hoodwinked and manipulated by another senior… failed to trust the one man I should have placed my faith in. In most organisations, what I’ve done would be punished by instant dismissal.”
“Sorry, Lillian, but you don’t get out of it that easily,” Dreyfus said.
“It takes more than a few bad judgement calls to erase a lifetime’s loyal service to Panoply. You were an outstanding senior a week ago. From where I’m sitting, not much has changed.”
“That’s… generous of you,” she allowed.
“I’m only thinking of the organisation. We
lost a good man in Crissel. That’s why we need Jane Aumonier. That’s why we need Lillian Baudry.”
“And Tom Dreyfus,” she added.
“And yes, you can consider yourself free of suspicion.”
“I hope that goes for Sparver as well.”
“Of course. He did nothing wrong except support a fellow prefect, and he deserves my personal apology.”
“I want him to start digging into the archives, to find everything he can on Aurora Nerval-Lermontov and the other alpha-levels.”
“I’ll make sure he has all the resources, all the clearance he needs. You honestly think this is the same woman?” Dreyfus nodded at the partition.
“We heard it from the horse’s mouth. In a manner of speaking, at least. We’re dealing with a ghost in the machine. Now all we need is a ghost-killer.” The world came back to Jane Aumonier without warning, without ceremony. She had decided, after much deliberation, that she preferred darkness and silence to the limited range of entertainments Gaffney and the others had left her with when they removed her executive authority. That left her alone with only the scarab for company, but in the eleven years since it had attached itself to her neck she had found that she could, when circumstances required it, retreat to a private corner of her own mind, a fortified place where even the scarab could not intrude. She had never been able to stay within that mental bastion for very long, but it had always been there when she needed it. In her place of sanctuary she played glacially cold, achingly melancholy piano pieces. She had often played the piano before the scarab came. Now it would not even allow the small bulk of a holoclavier in her presence, let alone a full-bodied keyboard. Yet she still remembered how to play, and when she was in full retreat her fingers moved in silent echo of the composition she was reciting in her head, ten million parsecs from the chamber in which she floated. The hidden music was the one thing the scarab had never been able to steal from her. She had her eyes closed when the chamber began to light up of its own volition. It was hazardous to close her eyes for too long, for that invited the spectre of sleep to take a step nearer. But there was a more profound, calmer darkness when her eyes were closed, even in the absolute blackness of the unlit chamber.
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