The Prefect (2 page)

‘You're insane.'

‘Kindly issue a priority interrupt to all your citizens and guests. Tell them that a lockdown is in force, and that they're about to lose contact with the external universe. Remind them that this state of affairs could last for anything up to one century. Tell them that if they have thoughts or messages to convey to loved ones beyond House Perigal, they have six hundred seconds in which to do so.'

He turned to Thalia and Sparver and lowered his voice, but not so low that Perigal wouldn't have been able to hear him. ‘You know what to do, Deputies. If anyone obstructs you, or refuses to cooperate, you have clearance to euthanise.'

The rim transit moved quickly, its motion counteracting the centrifugal gravity of the slow-turning wheel. Thalia sat next to Sparver, brooding.

‘It isn't fair,' she said.

‘What isn't?'

‘All those people stuck here by accident, the people who just happened to be visiting.'

‘Sometimes the only workable solution isn't a fair one.'

‘But cut off from the Glitter Band, from Yellowstone, from friends and family, from abstraction, from their medical programmes ... some of them could actually die in here before the lockdown's over.'

‘Then they should have thought about that before. If you don't like the idea of being caught in a lockdown, do the homework on your habitat.'

‘That's a very callous outlook.'

‘They screwed with democracy. I'm not going to lose much sleep when democracy screws them back.'

Thalia felt her weight returning as they neared their destination and the transit slowed. The two prefects disembarked into another cavern, smaller and brighter than the first. This time the floor was an expanse of interlocking black and white tiles, polished to a luxurious gleam. A cylindrical structure rose from a hole in the centre of the floor, wide as a tree trunk, its spired tip almost touching the ceiling. The cylinder's black surface flickered with schematic representations of data flows: rapidly changing red and blue traceries. A railingless spiral staircase wrapped around the pillar, offering access to the stump-like branches of interface ports.

A man in beige uniform - some kind of technician or functionary, Thalia decided - stood by the base of the trunk, his face a study in suspicion.

‘Don't come any closer,' he said.

Sparver answered him. ‘Didn't Perigal make it clear we were on our way, and that we weren't to be hindered?'

‘It's a trick. You're agents of House Cantarini.'

Sparver looked at him sceptically. ‘Do I look like an agent of House Cantarini?'

‘An agent could look like anyone.'

‘I'm a pig. How likely is it that they'd send an ugly specimen like me when there was an alternative?'

‘I can't take the risk. You touch this core, I lose my job, my standing, everything.'

‘Step aside, sir,' Thalia said.

‘I'm sorry. I can't let you any nearer.' The man opened his hand to reveal a matt-silver device cuffed to his palm, inset with a red firing stud. ‘There are weapons already trained on you. Please don't make me use them.'

‘You kill us, Panoply will just send more prefects,' Sparver said.

Thalia's skin prickled. She could feel the scrutiny of those hidden weapons, ready to wipe her out of existence at the twitch of the man's thumb.

‘I won't kill you if you turn and leave.'

‘We'll leave when we have the evidence.' Sparver's hand moved to his belt. He unclipped the handle of his whiphound and flicked it to deploy the filament. It cracked as it spun out to its maximum extension, lashing the floor.

‘He's right,' Thalia said, fighting to keep the tremor from her voice. ‘We're Panoply.'

‘Please.' The man's thumb caressed the firing stud. ‘I'll do what needs to be done to protect the core.'

Sparver released the whiphound. The handle remained at waist height, supported by the coiled extremity of its stiffened filament. It swayed from side to side with the questing motion of a snake. Then it curled around and aimed itself at the man.

A bright red dot appeared on his Adam's apple.

‘I need you to answer a question for me,' Sparver said. ‘How attached are you to your fingers?'

The man inhaled and held his breath.

‘The whiphound has a mark on you now,' Sparver continued. ‘If it detects hostile intent - and it's very, very good at detecting hostile intent - it'll be on you faster than a nerve impulse can travel down your arm. When it reaches you, it'll do something quite nasty with the sharp edge of that filament.'

The man opened his mouth to say something, but all that came out was a dry croak. He spread both his hands, opening his fingers and thumbs as wide as they would go.

‘Sensible,' Sparver said. ‘Now hold that pose, but step away from the core.' He nodded at Thalia, giving her the go-ahead to start securing the evidence. The whiphound stayed by his side, its blunt head tracking the man as he inched away from the central column.

Thalia walked to the core. It was a standard design, installed within the last twenty years, so she knew exactly where to start.

‘This is Deputy Field Prefect Thalia Ng,' she said aloud. ‘Confirm recognition.'

‘Welcome, Deputy Field Prefect Ng,' it replied, in the neutrally sexless voice common to all cores. ‘How may I assist you?'

Thalia brought to mind the one-time code with which she had been briefed after the cutter's departure from Panoply. ‘Acknowledge security access override Narcissus Eight Palisander.'

‘Override confirmed. You now have six hundred seconds of clearance, Deputy Field Prefect Ng.'

‘Disable two-way access to the exterior abstraction.'

‘Access is now blocked.'

The red lines vanished. Now the pillar showed only blue traffic. No signals were reaching or leaving the habitat. Almost immediately the blue traffic intensified as the citizenry began to panic, sending emergency queries to the core.

Thalia glanced at the man Sparver's whiphound was still detaining. For the first time in his life, his implants would no longer be in constant communication with the informational matrix beyond House Perigal. It must have felt like the drop of a guillotine.

She returned her attention to the core. ‘Prepare me triplicate physical summary packages for all data traffic in and out of this habit in the last thousand days.'

‘I am preparing the packages. Please wait a moment.'

Thalia reached up and touched her throat microphone. ‘Thalia, sir. We're securing the evidence now. We should be back with you within ten minutes.'

There was no response. She waited a few moments, giving Dreyfus time to activate his own microphone, but still nothing came.

She shot a look at Sparver. ‘I'm not getting anything.'

‘The boss man could be preoccupied,' Sparver said.

‘He should have answered by now. I'm worried. Maybe we ought to get back there, see—'

‘We need those summary packages, Thalia. In five minutes you'll be locked out of the core again.'

Sparver was right. The one-time code - good for ten minutes of unrestricted activity - would not buy her access to the core a second time.

‘Hurry up,' she said, through clenched teeth.

She tried Dreyfus again, but still there was no reply. After what felt like an eternity, the core ejected the summary packages from a slot near its base. Thalia clipped together the thick diskettes and then secured them to her belt. Absurd as it was, she swore she could feel the weight of the information inside them. It would have taken days to squeeze that amount of data across a beam.

‘You done?' Sparver asked.

‘This is all we need. We can leave the local abstraction running.'

‘And if they try to get around the block you just put in?'

‘They'll have a dead core on their hands. They'll be lucky if life support still works after that, let alone abstraction.' Thalia turned back to the core and authorised it to rescind the Panoply access privilege it had just granted her. ‘That's it, then,' she said, feeling an unexpected sense of anticlimax.

‘There. Wasn't so hard, was it?'

‘I'm worried about the boss.'

‘It's just the rock this thing's made of, blocking our signals.' Sparver smiled at the technician again. ‘We're done. Can I trust you not to do anything silly if I pull the whiphound off you?'

The man swallowed painfully and twitched his head in a nod.

‘I'll take that as a “yes”,' Sparver said. He reached out his hand and beckoned the whiphound. With a flick of its tail, the weapon sprang its handle into Sparver's grip, the tail whisking back into the housing with a lashing sound.

Sparver patted the handle and reattached it to his belt. ‘Let's go check on the boss man.'

But when they rode the rim transit back to Dreyfus, they found him standing alone and still, amidst a scene of almost unspeakable carnage. He held his glasses in one hand and the whiphound in the other.

Thalia snatched off her own glasses so that she could see things as they really were. People were screaming, scrambling and splashing to get away from the prefect and the objects of his attention. Caitlin Perigal's two male guests were both slumped in the pool, in water that was now bloodstained pink. The man with the grey hair had lost his forearm: it was lying on the marble poolside, the hand pointing accusingly at Dreyfus. Behind the wrist, the skin bulged as if a bone-grafted weapon had been trying to push its way through to the surface. The other man, trembling as if in the throes of a seizure, had blood running from both his nostrils. His eyes were wide open, fixated on the ceiling. Three or four nearby guests were nursing wounds of varying severity. With all the blood in the water - draining from pool to pool via the waterfalls and sluices - it was difficult to be certain how many people had been hurt. Medical servitors had already arrived and were attending to the most seriously injured, but even the machines appeared confused.

Perigal was still alive, albeit breathing heavily. A vivid gash cut her across the right cheek, running from the corner of her mouth to her ear. She breathed heavily, her eyes wide and white with fury and fear.

‘You're wrong about this,' she breathed. ‘You're wrong about this and you're going to pay.'

Dreyfus turned slowly at the approach of Thalia and Sparver. ‘Got the packages?'

Thalia's mouth was dry. ‘Yes,' she said, forcing the word out, striving to maintain professional composure.

‘Then let's go. We're done here.'

Dreyfus had closed half the distance to the middle of the supreme prefect's office when the safe-distance tether jerked him to a halt. For a moment Jane Aumonier appeared unaware of his presence, absorbed in one of her wall displays. He coughed quietly before speaking.

‘If you want my resignation, it's yours.'

Aumonier turned her head to face him, without moving the rest of her body. ‘On what grounds, Tom?'

‘You name it. If I committed an error of procedure, or was guilty of improper judgement, you only have to say the word.'

‘If you committed an error, it was in not going far enough to defend yourself and your deputies. What was the final body count?'

‘Six,' Dreyfus said.

‘We've done worse. Perigal was always going to be a tough nut. A single-figure body count strikes me as entirely acceptable, given all that we could have expected.'

‘I was hoping things wouldn't get quite so messy.'

‘That was Perigal's call, not yours.'

‘I still don't think we're finished with her. What she said to me ...' Dreyfus paused, certain that Aumonier had enough to worry about without being burdened with his doubts. ‘I feel as if a debt has been settled. That isn't a good way for a prefect to feel.'

‘It's human.'

‘She got away with it in the past because we weren't clever or fast enough to audit her before the evidence turned stale. But even if we'd been able to pin anything on her, her crimes wouldn't have merited a full century of lockdown.'

‘And we don't know that it will come to that this time, either.'

‘You think she'll slip through again?'

‘That'll depend on the evidence. Time to make use of that bright new expert on your team.'

‘I have every confidence in Thalia.'

‘Then you've nothing to fear. If Perigal's guilty, the state of lockdown will continue. If the evidence doesn't turn anything up, House Perigal will be allowed re-entry into the Glitter Band.'

‘Minus six people.'

‘Citizens panic when they lose abstraction. That isn't our problem.'

Dreyfus tried to read Aumonier's expression, wondering what he was missing. It wasn't like her to need to ask him how many people had died during an operation: normally she'd have committed the figures to memory before he was back inside Panoply. But Aumonier's emotionless mask was as impossible to read as ever. He could remember how she looked when she smiled, or laughed, or showed anger, how she'd been before her brush with the Clockmaker, but it took an increasing effort of will.

‘Pardon me,' he said, ‘but if this isn't a reprimand ... what exactly do you want me for?'

‘The conversation? The banter? The warmth of human companionship?'

‘I don't think so.'

‘Something's come up. The news broke while you were outside. It's as delicate as the Perigal affair, if not more so. Urgent, too. We need immediate action.'