The Prefect (21 page)

‘Do you believe in coincidence, Sparver?'

Sparver tapped one of the thruster controls. The rock had doubled in size, its wrinkled ash-grey surface details becoming more distinct. The potato-shaped asteroid was more than two kilometres wide at its fattest point.

‘Why d'you ask?'

‘Because I was already wondering why the Sylveste family kept coming up in this investigation. Now we've got another hit.'

‘They're a big octopus. Sooner or later you're bound to trip over another tentacle.'

‘So you don't think there's anything odd about this?'

‘The Sylvestes weren't a charity. Only families with influence and money were able to buy themselves a slot in Cal's experiment. And only families with influence and money can afford to hold on to rocks like this. The key here is the Nerval-Lermontovs, not the Sylvestes.'

‘They tried to take down the Sylvestes, didn't they?'

‘Everyone tried. Everyone failed. This is their system. We just live in it.'

‘And the Nerval-Lermontovs? They've been quiet since the Eighty, haven't they? They're hardly big players any more. If they were, I'd have recognised the name sooner. So what the hell are they doing implicating themselves in the Ruskin-Sartorious affair?'

‘Maybe they were used. Maybe when we dig into this place, we'll find it was just used to bounce signals from somewhere else.'

Dreyfus felt some of his earlier elation abate. Perhaps his cherished instincts had failed him this time. If necessary, they could go outside and read the message stack, just as they'd done with the Vanguard Six router. Sparver had sounded confident that the process was repeatable, but what if it wasn't quite so easy to backtrack the signal a second time?

Dreyfus was musing on that theme when the rock launched its attack.

It came fast and without warning; it was only when the assault was over that he was able to piece together the approximate sequence of events. Across the face of the rock, small regions of the crust erupted outwards as if a dozen low-yield mines had just detonated, showering rubble and debris into space. The shattered material rained into the corvette, the noise like a thousand hammer blows against the hull.

Alarms began to shriek, damage reports cascading across the display surfaces. Dreyfus heard the whine as the corvette's own weapons began to upgrade their readiness posture. Sparver grunted something unintelligible and began to coordinate the response with manual control inputs. But the attack had not really begun in earnest. The eruptions on the rock were merely caused by the emergence of concealed weapons, tucked under ten or twenty metres of camouflaging material. Dark-muzzled kinetic slug-launchers rolled out and spat their cargoes at the corvette. Dreyfus flinched as the walls of the corvette's cabin appeared to ram inwards, before a cooler part of his mind reminded him that this was the corvette doing its best to protect the living organisms inside it. The wall flowed around his body, head to toe, forming an instant contoured cocoon. Then he felt the corvette swerve with what would have been bone-snapping acceleration under any other circumstances. With the little consciousness available to him, he hoped that the corvette had taken similar care of Sparver.

The swerve saved them. Otherwise, the first kinetic slug would have taken them nose-on, where the corvette's armour was thinnest. As it was the slug still impacted, gouging a trench along the entire lateral line of the ship, taking out weapons and sensory modules in a roar of agonised matter that was still nerveshreddingly loud even through the cushioning of the cocoon. The ship swerved again, and then once more, harder this time. Two more slugs rammed into it. Then the corvette began to give back something of what it had taken.

Many of its weapons had been damaged by the slug impacts, or could not be brought to bear without presenting too much tempting cross section to the still-active slug launchers. But it was still able to respond with an awesome concentration of destructive force. Dreyfus felt rather than heard the subsonic drone of the Gatling guns. Another salvo of debris rained against the hull: that was the Gatling guns churning up the rock's surface even more, kicking more material into space. Four sequenced shoves as the corvette deployed and then traded momentum with its missiles, spitting them out like hard pips. The foam-phase-tipped warheads selected their own targets, punching hundred-metre-wide craters in the crust.

The Gatling guns resumed firing.

Then, with disarming suddenness, all was silent save for the occasional clang as some small piece of debris knocked into the ship.

‘I am holding at maximum readiness condition,' the corvette said, its voice dismayingly calm and unhurried, as if it was delivering a weather report. ‘Situational analysis indicates that the offensive object has been downgraded to threat status gamma. This analysis may be flawed. If you nonetheless wish me to stand down to moderate readiness, please issue an order.'

‘You can stand down,' Dreyfus said.

The cocoon released him. He felt like a single man-sized bruise, with a headache to match. Nothing appeared broken, though, and he was at least alive.

‘I think this just stopped being a peripheral investigation,' Sparver said.

Dreyfus spat blood. At some point during the attack he must have bitten his tongue. ‘How's the ship doing?' he enquired.

Sparver glanced at one of the status panes. ‘Good news is we've still got power, air and attitude control.'

‘And the bad news?'

‘Sensors are shot to hell and long-range comms don't appear to be working either. I don't think we're going to be able to call home for help.'

The absurdity of their predicament rankled Dreyfus. They were still inside the Glitter Band, in the teeming thick of human civilisation, no more than a thousand kilometres from the nearest inhabited structure. And yet they might as well have been far beyond the system, drifting in interstellar space, for all the difference it made.

‘Can we reach anyone else?' he asked. ‘We still have signalling lasers. If we can get a visual signal to a passing ship, we might be able to divert them.'

Sparver had already called up a navigation display showing all nearby traffic within a radius of five thousand kilometres. Dreyfus stared at it intently, but the spherical imaging surface kept malfunctioning, crowding with ghost signals caused by the damage the corvette had taken.

‘Not much out there,' Sparver observed. ‘Certainly not within manual signalling range.'

Dreyfus jabbed a finger at a persistent echo in the display, an object on a slow course through the scanning volume. ‘That one's real, and it looks close, too. What is it?'

‘Just a robot freighter, according to the transponder flag. Probably inbound from the high-energy manufactories on Marco's Eye.'

‘It'll pass within three thousand klicks of us. That's almost nothing out here.'

‘But it won't respond to us even if we score a direct hit with the laser. I don't think we've got any option but to limp home, and hope no one runs into us.'

Dreyfus nodded ruefully. In the congested traffic flows of the Glitter Band, a ship with impaired sensor capability was a dangerous thing indeed. That went double for a ship that was stealthed to the point of near-invisibility.

‘How long will that take?'

Sparver closed his eyes as he ran the numbers. ‘Ninety minutes, maybe a little less.'

‘And then another hour before we can reasonably expect to get another ship out here; longer if it has to be reassigned from some other duty.' Dreyfus shook his head. ‘Too long. Every instinct in my body says we don't walk away.'

‘So we drop a surveillance drone. We're carrying one.'

‘A drone won't help us if someone decides to run as soon as we're out of range.'

‘I don't think there's anyone down there.'

‘We don't know that.' Dreyfus unwebbed himself enough that he could soothe his back, sore after the corvette's spine-jarring evasive swerves. ‘Which is why we need to take a look. Maybe we'll find a transmitter when we're down there. Then we can call in the big guns.'

Thalia ran a finger around her collar, stiffening it back into shape. She gathered her equipment and composed herself as the airlock cycled. Spine straight, chin up, eyes sharp. She might feel tired, she might feel embittered by what she had witnessed only a couple of hours earlier, but she was still on duty. The locals would neither know nor care that they were merely the last stop on a demanding itinerary, the last obstacle before sleep and rest and some grudging expression of gratitude from the seniors. She reminded herself that she was still well ahead of her anticipated schedule, and that if all went according to plan from now on she would be back inside Panoply barely a day and a half after she had departed.

The Chevelure-Sambuke Hourglass upgrade had gone flawlessly, but then she'd been detained while the locals had her sit in as a guest adjudicator in their impromptu tournament. It had turned out to be both unpleasant and draining, a combination of beauty pageant and gladiatorial combat, with the entrants all radically biomodified, none of them lacking in teeth and claws. She'd been assured that the most bloodied, humiliated or deceased participants would all be stitched back together again, but the entire experience had left her feeling soiled and manipulated.

Szlumper Oneill had been even worse, but for different reasons. Szlumper Oneill was a Voluntary Tyranny that had turned nasty, and nothing could be done about it.

Citizens in the Voluntary Tyrannies had no rights at all: no freedoms, no means of expression beyond what they could achieve through the usual voting channels. Their entire lives were under the authoritarian control of whatever regime held sway in their particular habitat. Typically, they'd be guaranteed the basic needs: food, water, heating, minimal medical care, somewhere to sleep, even access to sex and rudimentary forms of entertainment. In return they might have to perform some daily activity, however drudge-like and purposeless the work itself might be. They'd be stripped of identity, forced to dress alike, even - in the most extreme cases - compelled to undergo surgery to eradicate distinguishing features.

For some people - a small but not entirely insignificant fraction of the Glitter Band citizenry - life in a Voluntary Tyranny was perversely liberating because it allowed them to shut off an entire part of their minds that dealt with the usual anxieties of hierarchy and influence. They were looked after and told what to do. It was like becoming a child again, a regression to a state of dependence on the adult machinery of the state.

But sometimes the VTs went wrong.

No one was exactly sure what triggered the shift from benevolent-yet-rigid state to dystopian nightmare, but it had happened enough times that it had begun to look as inevitable as the radioactive decay of an unstable isotope. Something unspeakable would ooze from the social woodwork, a form of corrupting sap. Citizens who tried to resist or leave were rounded up and punished. Panoply could do nothing, since it had no remit to interfere in the government of a state unless the state's citizens were being denied abstraction access and voting rights, or unless there was a majority mandate from the wider citizenry of the ten thousand.

Szlumper Oneill was an object lesson in how bad things could get. Representatives of the Interior Administration had escorted Thalia to the polling core, and they'd done their best to shield her from the populace. But she'd still seen enough to get the picture. While Thalia had been setting up her equipment at the core, an old man had broken through a cordon and rushed to plead with her. He'd fallen to his knees, clutching her trouser hems with knotted, arthritic fingers.

‘Prefect,' he said, through toothless gums. ‘You can do something for us. Please do something, before it's too late.'

‘I'm sorry,' she said, barely able to speak. ‘I wish I could, but—'

‘Help us. Please.'

The police had arrived. They'd fired electrified barbs into the man and dragged him away, his body still palsied by the stun currents. He couldn't speak, but he'd managed to keep his face directed at Thalia as he receded, his lips still forming a plea. As the cordon closed around him again, Thalia made out a blur of fists and sticks raining down on frail bones.

She'd completed the upgrade. She did not want to think about what had happened to the old man. She prayed that this next and final upgrade would go smoother, so that she could return to Panoply and wipe the mild taste of complicity from her mouth. She was glad now that she had left House Aubusson till last. It promised to be the simplest of the upgrades; the one that would place the least demands on her concentration.

The habitat had the form of a hollow cylinder with rounded ends, rotating slowly around its long axis to provide gravity. From a distance, just before she dozed off during transit, Thalia had seen a pale-green sausage banded by many sets of windows, their facets spangling as the habitat's dreamily slow spin caused sunlight to flare off them. At the nearer end ticked the intricate clockwork of de-spun docking assemblies, where huge ships were reduced to microscopic details against the mind-numbing scale of the structure. The sausage was an entire world, sixty kilometres from end to end, more than eight kilometres across.

Weightlessness prevailed even after Thalia had disembarked from the cutter and passed through a series of rotating transfer locks. Instead of the teeming concourse she had been expecting, she found herself in a diplomatic receiving area. It was a zero-gravity sphere walled in pale-pink marble, inlaid with monochrome friezes depicting the early history of space colonisation: men in bulbous spacesuits covered in what looked like canvas; surface-to-orbit transports that resembled white fireworks lashed together; space stations so ramshackle in appearance that they looked as if they'd fall apart at the first breath of solar wind. Laughable, yes, Thalia thought: undoubtedly so. But without those canvas suits and firework rockets, without those treehouse space stations, Deputy Field Prefect Thalia Ng would not be floating in the marbled reception bay of a sixty-kilometre-long habitat, one of ten thousand other structures that carried a human freight of one hundred million souls, orbiting an inhabited world that happened to host the most dazzling, bejewelled city in human experience, a world that circled the sun of another solar system entirely, a system that formed the mercantile and cultural nexus of a human civilisation encompassing many such worlds, many stars, bound together by wonderful sleek ships that crossed the interstellar night in mere
years
of starflight.