“We’re going to lose Brazilia and Flammarion,” she said, by way of acknowledging his presence.
“Weevils are deep inside both habitats and the local citizenry can’t hold them back. They’ve already taken appalling losses, and all they’ve done is slow their approach to the polling cores.”
Dreyfus said nothing, sensing that Aumonier was not finished. Eventually she asked: “Did they get
anything out of Gaffney?”
“Not much. I’ve just read the initial summary from the trawl squad.”
“And?”
“They’ve cleared up at least one mystery. We know how he moved Clepsydra from the bubble to my quarters. He used a nonvelope.”
“I’m not familiar with the term,” Aumonier said.
“It’s an invisibility device. A shell of quickmatter with a degree of autonomy and the ability to conceal itself from superficial observation. You put something in it you don’t want people to find.”
“Sounds like exactly the sort of thing that should be banned by any right-thinking society. How did he get hold of it?”
“From Anthony Theobald Ruskin-Sartorious, apparently. Anthony Theobald must have procured it through his black-market arms contacts. He used the nonvelope to escape from his habitat just before it was torched by Dravidian’s ship.” Aumonier frowned slightly.
“But Anthony Theobald didn’t escape. All you had to interview was his beta-level copy.”
“Gaffney knew differently, apparently. He intercepted the nonvelope before it fell into the hands of Anthony Theobald’s allies.”
“And then what?”
“He cracked it open. Then he ran a trawl on Anthony Theobald to see if he could find out where the thing Ruskin-Sartorious was sheltering had got to.”
“Voi. Gaffney trawled him?” Reading her expression, Dreyfus could imagine what was going through her mind. It was one thing to be trawled inside Panoply, where strict rules were in force. It was another to receive the same treatment elsewhere, inflicted by a man acting outside the bounds of the law who cared nothing for the consequences of his actions.
“He didn’t get as much information as he was hoping for, unfortunately.”
“I presume he kept digging until he’d burnt away Anthony Theobald’s brain?”
“That’s the odd thing,” Dreyfus said.
“He appears to have held back at the last. He got something out of the man, enough for him to stop before he burnt him out completely.”
“Why didn’t he go all the way if he thought there was something more to gain?”
“Because Gaffney doesn’t see himself as a monster. He’s a prefect, still doing his job, still sticking to his principles while the rest of us betray the cause. He killed Clepsydra because he had no other option. He killed the people in Ruskin-Sartorious for the same reason. But he’s not an indiscriminate murderer. He’s still thinking about the tens of millions he’s going to save.”
“What else did he get?”
“That was where the trawl team hit resistance. Gaffney really didn’t want to give up whatever he had learned from Anthony Theobald. But they got a word.”
“Tell me.”
“Firebrand.”
Aumonier nodded very slowly. She said the word herself, as if testing how it sounded coming from her own lips.
“Did the summary team have anything to say about this word?”
“To them it was meaningless noise. Firebrand could be a weapon, a ship, an agent, anything. Or it could be the name of the puppy he owned when he was five.”
“Do you have any theories?”
“I’m inclined to think it’s just noise: either noise that came out of Anthony Theobald, which Gaffney assumed was significant, or noise that came out of Gaffney. I ran a search on the word. Lots of priors, but nothing that raised any flags.”
“There wouldn’t have been any,” Aumonier said.
Dreyfus heard something in her tone of voice that he hadn’t been expecting.
“Because it’s meaningless?”
“No. It’s anything but. Firebrand has a very specific meaning, especially in a Panoply context.”
Dreyfus shook his head emphatically.
“Nothing came up, Jane.”
“That’s because we’re talking about an operational secret so highly classified that even Gaffney wouldn’t have known about it. It’s superblack, screened from all possible scrutiny even within the organisation.”
“Are you going to enlighten me?”
“Firebrand was a cell within Panoply,” Aumonier said.
“It was created eleven years ago to study and exploit any remaining artefacts connected with the Clockmaker affair.”
“You mean the clocks, the musical boxes?”
She answered with superhuman calm, taking no pleasure in contradicting him.
“More than that. The Clockmaker created other things during its spree. The public record holds that none of these artefacts survived, but in reality a handful of them were recovered. They were small things, of unknown purpose, but because they had been made by the Clockmaker, they were considered too unique to destroy. At least not until we’d studied them, worked out what they were and how we could apply that data to the future security of the Glitter Band.” Before he could get a word in, she said: “Don’t hate us for doing that, Tom. We had a duty to learn everything we could. We didn’t know where the Clockmaker had come from. Because we didn’t understand it, we couldn’t rule out the possibility of another one arising. If that ever happened, we owed it to the citizenry to be prepared.”
“And?” he asked.
“Are we?”
“I instigated Firebrand. The cell was answerable only to me, and for a couple of years I permitted it to operate in absolute secrecy within Panoply.”
“How come Gaffney didn’t know about it?”
“Gaffney’s predecessor knew—we couldn’t have set it up without some cooperation from Security—but when he handed over the reins there was no need to inform Gaffney. By then the cell was self-sufficient, operating within Panoply but completely isolated from the usual mechanisms of oversight and surveillance. And that was how things continued for a couple of years.”
“What happened then?”
“There was an accident: one of the seemingly dead artefacts reactivated itself. It killed half the cell before the rest brought it under control. When the news reached me, I took the decision to shut down Firebrand. I realised then that no benefits could outweigh the risks of allowing those artefacts to remain in existence. I ordered all the remains to be destroyed, all the records to be deleted and the cell itself to be disbanded. Those involved were dispersed back to normal duties, resuming the jobs they’d never officially left.”
“And?” Dreyfus asked.
“Shortly after, I received confirmation that my orders had been implemented. The cell was no more. The artefacts had been destroyed.”
“But that was nine years ago. Why would Firebrand come up again now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Someone’s stirring up old ghosts, Jane. If Firebrand is really connected with Panoply, how did Anthony Theobald know about it?”
“We don’t know for sure that he did. That could be a rogue inference from the trawl.”
“Or it could explain why Gaffney was so interested in the Ruskin-Sartorious family,” Dreyfus said.
“You shut down that cell, Jane. But what if the cell had other ideas?” Her eyes flashed nervously.
“I’m not with you.”
“Try this on for size. The people running that cell decided their work was too important to be closed down, no matter what you thought. They told you it was all over for Firebrand. But what if they just relocated their efforts?”
“I’d have known.”
“You already told me this cell was damn near untraceable,” Dreyfus said.
“Can you really be sure they couldn’t have kept it running without your knowledge?”
“They’d never have done such a thing.”
“But what if they believed they were acting in the right? You clearly thought there was a justification for Firebrand when you started it. What if the people inside thought those reasons were still valid, even after you tried to kill it?”
“They were loyal to me,” Aumonier said.
“I don’t doubt it. But you’d already set a bad example, Jane. You’d shown them that deception was acceptable, in the interests of the common good. What if they decided that they had to deceive you, to keep the cell operational?” For a long moment Aumonier said nothing, as if Dreyfus’ words had not just stunned her, but undermined her every certainty.
“I told them to put a stop to it,” she said, so quietly that Dreyfus would not have caught the words had he not already attuned himself to her voice.
“I ordered them to end Firebrand.”
“It appears they thought differently.”
“But why would all this surface now, Tom? What does any of this have to do with Anthony Theobald, or Gaffney, or Aurora?”
“There was something in the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble that had to be destroyed,” Dreyfus said.
“Something that even we didn’t realise was there, but which Aurora considered an impediment to her plans, something that had to be removed before she could begin the takeover.”
“You think Firebrand relocated to the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble nine years ago.”
“If you’d pulled the plug on the cell, it would have been too difficult for them to remain operational inside Panoply, especially if something went wrong again. Too risky to relocate elsewhere in the system, either, since that would have involved travel they couldn’t easily explain away as routine Panoply business. So why not another habitat? Somewhere close enough to be easily reachable, but still discreet enough to contain something so secret even we didn’t know about it?”
“What would Anthony Theobald’s involvement have been?”
“I don’t know,” Dreyfus said, still getting things straight in his head.
“Did he have any prior connection with Firebrand?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Then he was probably just told to keep his mouth shut in return for certain favours. Whatever those favours were, it looks as if he was prepared to screw his own family to safeguard them. He was the only one who bailed out, just before the Bubble was destroyed. I’m assuming your cell had ready access to funds, without going through the usual channels?”
“Like I said, it was superblack. If they needed something—resources, equipment, expertise—they got it, no questions asked.”
“Then I imagine they could have made someone like Anthony Theobald very comfortable indeed.”
“He must have had advance warning that the Bubble was going to be hit,” Aumonier said.
“Or he was good at putting two and two together. According to Gaffney’s trawl, Firebrand moved out of the Bubble at the last minute. They must have received intelligence that someone was closing in on them, trying to hunt down the Clockmaker artefacts.”
“Aurora,” Aumonier said.
“Almost certainly. Whatever it was was enough to scare them out of hiding. Maybe they tipped off Anthony Theobald: get your family out of here now, while you can, that kind of thing. Then change your identities and lie low for a couple of centuries, until the trail goes cold. But Anthony Theobald obviously decided to prioritise the saving of his own neck instead.”
“Except Gaffney was cleverer.”
“We need to find out who’s still running Firebrand, Jane. Something they were holding in that Bubble scared Aurora really badly. For obvious reasons I’m interested in finding out what it was.”
“If it still exists.”
“They didn’t destroy it nine years ago. Chances are they didn’t destroy it this time, either. They moved it somewhere. Find someone with ties to Firebrand and we’ll have a shot at getting hold of the artefacts.”
“That might not be easy.”
“It’s all we have. I need names, Jane. Everyone who was part of the original Firebrand cell, when you closed it down. You remember, don’t you?”
“Of course,” she said, apparently dismayed that he even had to ask.
“I committed them to memory. What are you going to do with them?”
“Ask hard questions,” Dreyfus said.
Thalia and Parnasse were alone beneath the lowest public level of the polling core sphere. They’d been down to these corridors and rooms once before, scouting for barricade material, but the expedition had been largely fruitless. Thalia had not expected to be making a return trip into the unwelcoming space, and certainly not with the destructive intention that was now occupying her thoughts. She was grateful that Parnasse knew his way around. Although it was now full daylight outside, very little of that light reached these gloomily lit sub-levels.
“Now we go deeper,” he said, pausing to lever up a floor hatch that Thalia would never have noticed.
“Gonna be a bit dusty and dark down here, but you’ll cope. Just try not to make too much noise. The elevator, polling core conduit and stairwell rise right through this part of the sphere, and there’s only a few centimetres of material between us and them. I don’t think the machines have got this high yet, but we don’t want to take chances, do we, girl?”
“If they get this high,” Thalia said, “what’s to stop them breaking through the walls and bypassing our barricade completely?”
“Nothing, if they get the idea into their thick metal heads. That’s why it might be an idea for us not to make too much noise.” He lowered himself into the underfloor space, then extended a hand to help Thalia down.
“How did Meriel Redon take it, by the way?” she asked as she pushed her legs into the darkness.
“She thought I was taking the piss.”
Thalia’s feet touched metal flooring.
“And afterwards, when you explained it was my idea?”
“She changed her mind. She thought you were taking the piss. But I think I brought her round in the end. Like you say, it’s not as if we really want to take our chances with those servitors.”
“No,” Thalia said, grimly resigned.
“That we don’t. Did you see any sign that anyone else has noticed the military-grade machines?”
He kept his voice low.
“I don’t think so. Cuthbertson started nosing around the windows, but I managed to steer him away before he saw anything.”
“That’s good. The citizens are spooked enough as it is, without having to deal with the thought of war robots. I don’t expect I have to tell you what those machines would be capable of doing to unarmed civilians.”
“No, got enough of an imagination on me for that,” Parnasse said, taking a kind of grim pleasure in the remark.
“What do you think they’re going to do—try coming up the inside, like the others?”
“No need. These machines are designed for assault and infiltration. They wouldn’t need to climb the stairs to reach the polling core. They can come up the outside, even if they have to form a siege tower with their own bodies.”
“They don’t seem to have started climbing yet.”
“Must be evaluating the situation, working out how to take us down as quickly as possible. But we can’t count on them dithering for ever. You’d better show me where to cut.”
“This way,” Parnasse whispered, pushing Thalia’s head down so that she did not knock it against a ceiling strut.
“You might want to put those glasses of yours on,” he added.
“What about you?”
“I know my way. You just take care of yourself.”
Thalia slipped the glasses on. The image amplifier threw grainy shapes against her eyes. She clicked in the infrared overlay and locked on to Parnasse’s blob-like form, following his every move as if they were passing through a minefield. As silently as they could, they negotiated a forest of crisscrossing struts and util
ity ducts, descending slowly until they reached the trunk-like intrusion of the three service shafts Parnasse had already described. Thalia had a clear sense that they’d reached the base of the sphere, for she could see where the curve of the outer skin met the top of the stalk. Surrounding the cluster of service shafts was a series of heavy-looking buttresses, arcing back over Thalia’s head into the depths of the chamber. Wordlessly, Parnasse touched a finger against one of the spoke-like buttresses. It was as thick as her thigh.
“That’s what I have to cut?” she asked.
“Not just this one,” he whispered back.
“There are eighteen of these, and you’re going to have to take care of at least nine if we’re to have a hope of toppling.”
“Nine!” she hissed back.
He raised a shushing finger to his lips.
“I didn’t say you had to cut through ’em all. You cut through four or five, say two on either side of this fellow, and you cut partway through another two on either side, and that should be enough. We want to make damned sure the sphere topples in the right direction.”
“I know,” Thalia said, resenting the fact that he felt she needed reminding.
“You want that magic sword of yours?”
“No time like the present.”
Parnasse passed her the thick bundle he’d made of the whiphound. Between them, they unwrapped the insulating layers, then re-wrapped the cool outer part around the scorching-hot shaft of the handle. Her hands trembling as they had done before, Thalia took the damaged weapon and prayed that the filament would extend for her one more time.
Then she started cutting.
Not for the first time, Jane Aumonier found herself both awed and frightened by the submarine processes of her own mind. She had scarcely given the names of the Firebrand operatives more than a second’s thought in nine years, but the process of recall was as automatic and swift as some well-engineered dispensing machine. She dictated the names to Dreyfus while he scratched them into a compad, floating at the end of the safe-distance tether. He always looked awkward when writing, as if it was a skill his hands had not quite evolved for.
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