The Prefect (37 page)

‘I agree,' Dreyfus said. ‘This is the logical course of action. If you were still allowing Jane her rightful authority, she'd agree to it as well.'

The operative coughed awkwardly. ‘I'll get on to CTC immediately, sir.'

Crissel nodded. ‘Tell them not to hang around. I don't want to have to wait hours before finding out what we're looking at here.'

An icy silence endured for many seconds after the girl had left the room. It fell to Dreyfus to break it. ‘Let's not kid ourselves,' he said. ‘We know exactly what's going to happen to those drones.'

‘We still need confirmation,' Crissel said.

‘Agreed. But we also need to start thinking about what we do once the news comes in.'

‘Hypothesise for a moment,' Baudry said, a quaver in her voice that she could not quite conceal. ‘Could we be dealing with a breakaway movement? Four states that wish to secede from the umbrella of Panoply and the Glitter Band?'

‘If they wanted to, they'd be free to do so,' Dreyfus said. ‘The mechanism already exists, and it doesn't require shooting down approaching ships.'

‘Maybe they don't want to secede on our terms,' Baudry said, in the manner of one advancing the suggestion for debating's sake rather than out of any deep personal conviction that it was likely.

Crissel nodded patiently. ‘Maybe they don't. But once you've decided to opt out of Panoply's protection, out of the democratic apparatus, what do you gain from staying inside the Glitter Band anyway?'

‘Not much,' Dreyfus said. ‘Which is why this can't be an attempt at secession.'

‘A hostage situation?' Baudry speculated. ‘Fits the facts so far, doesn't it?'

‘For now,' Dreyfus allowed.

‘But you don't think that's what we're looking at.'

‘You don't take hostages unless there's something you want that you don't already have.'

Crissel looked pleased with himself. ‘Everyone wants to be richer.'

‘Maybe they do,' Dreyfus answered, ‘but there's no way hostage-taking is going to achieve that for you.'

‘So they're not trying to become richer,' Baudry said. ‘That still leaves a universe of possibilities. Suppose someone doesn't just want to opt out of our system of government, but dismantle it completely?'

Dreyfus shook his head. ‘Why would they want to? If someone wants to experiment with a different social model, they're welcome to do so. All they have to do is recruit enough willing collaborators to set up a new state. Provided they let their citizens have the vote, they can even stay within the apparatus. That's why we have freak shows like the Voluntary Tyrannies. Someone somewhere decided they wanted to live in that kind of place.'

‘But like you said, they have to abide by certain core principles. Maybe they find even those basic strictures too stifling. Perhaps they want to force a single political model on the entire Glitter Band. Ideological zealots, for instance: political or religious extremists who won't rest until they force everyone else to see things their way.'

‘You might have something if we weren't looking at four completely disparate communities. Thalia's habitats have almost nothing in common with each other.'

‘All right,' Baudry said, clearly wearying of debate. ‘If it isn't about forcing through a political end, what is it about?'

Once again Dreyfus thought back to the things he had learned inside the Nerval-Lermontov rock, including the possibility that not everyone in the room could necessarily be trusted. He had wanted more time to evaluate his position, more time in which to bring at least one of the other seniors around to his side and use them as leverage to put Aumonier back into the saddle. But the news concerning the latest attacks had forced his hand sooner that he would have wished. He had to say something or he would be guilty of withholding vital data from his own organisation.

‘The prisoner told me something,' he said, choosing his words with exquisite care, like a man picking his way through a minefield. ‘Obviously, I can't be certain that she was telling the truth, or that her isolation hadn't turned her insane. But all my instincts - all my old policeman's instincts, you might say - told me she was on the level.'

‘Then perhaps you'd better tell us,' Gaffney said.

‘Clepsydra believes that some group or organisation within the Glitter Band has obtained intelligence concerning a coming crisis. Something worse than what we're facing now, even given the latest news.'

‘What kind of crisis?' Baudry asked.

‘Something catastrophic. Something in the order of a collapse of the entire social matrix, if not the end of the Glitter Band itself.'

‘Preposterous,' Crissel said.

Gaffney raised a restraining hand. ‘No. Let's hear him out.'

‘Clepsydra believes that this group or organisation has devised a plan for averting whatever disaster they've seen coming, even if that means denying us our usual liberties.'

Baudry nodded in the general direction of the Solid Orrery. ‘And the blackout, the hostile actions we've just heard about?'

‘I think we could be seeing the start of a takeover bid.'

‘Voi,' Baudry answered sharply. ‘You're not serious. Surely you're not serious.'

‘Makes perfect sense to me,' Dreyfus said. ‘If we couldn't be trusted to guarantee the future security of the Glitter Band, what would you do?'

‘But only four habitats ... there are ten thousand more out there that are still ours!'

‘I think Thalia was the key,' Dreyfus said. ‘Unwittingly, of course. Her code was contaminated. It must have been tampered with to open a security loophole that didn't exist before. Thalia was
supposed
to make that upgrade Bandwide, across the entire ten thousand, in one fell swoop.'

‘But she didn't want to do that, I recall,' said Baudry.

‘No,' said Dreyfus. ‘She insisted on identifying four of the likely worst cases and running manual installations. That way she could correct errors in real-time, on the spot, and make sure no one was without their precious abstraction for more than a few minutes. Once she'd supervised those four installations, she could tweak the code to make sure the remaining ten thousand went without a hitch.'

‘But those habitats have been without abstraction for hours,' Crissel said.

‘That isn't Thalia's fault. Her diligence didn't cause this, Michael. It prevented an even worse crisis. If Thalia had done the easy, obvious thing, we wouldn't be looking at four habitats off abstraction, we'd be looking at ten thousand. The takeover would be complete. We'd have lost the Glitter Band.'

‘Now let's not get carried away,' Gaffney said, smiling at the others. ‘We have enough of a mess to deal with without indulging in apocalyptic fantasies.'

‘It isn't a fantasy,' Dreyfus said. ‘Someone wanted this to happen.'

‘Why, though?' Crissel asked. ‘What group of people could possibly organise themselves to seize control of the entire Band? It's one thing to take habitats off abstraction. But the citizens inside won't just roll over and accept that. You'd need an armed militia to actually subjugate them. Thousands of people for each habitat, at the very least. We'd be looking at an invisible army ten million strong just to have a chance of making this work. If there was a movement that powerful, that coordinated, we'd have seen it coming years ago.'

‘Maybe it's a different kind of takeover,' Dreyfus said.

‘What did the Conjoiner say about the people behind this?' asked Baudry.

‘Not much.' Dreyfus hesitated, conscious that every divulgence carried a measurable risk. ‘I got a name. A figure called Aurora. She may have some connection to the Nerval-Lermontov family.'

Baudry peered at him. ‘They lost a daughter in the Eighty. Her name was Aurora, I believe. You're not seriously suggesting—'

‘I'm not making any inferences. Maybe I can get more out of Clepsydra when she's feeling stronger, and she's certain she can trust us.'

‘You're worried about her trusting us?' Baudry said.

A knock at the door signalled the return of the operator. She entered the room with a trace less diffidence than before.

‘And?' Gaffney asked.

‘The drones have been requisitioned, sirs. First is scheduled to dock at Szlumper Oneill in eleven minutes. Within twenty-two minutes, the remaining three will have completed approaches to their respective habitats.'

‘Very good,' Gaffney allowed.

‘I've secured high-res visual feeds of all four habitats, sirs. I can pipe the observations through to the Solid Orrery, with your permission.'

Gaffney nodded. ‘Do it.'

The Solid Orrery reconfigured itself, allocating much of its quickmatter resources to providing scaled-up representations of the four silent communities. They swelled to the size of fruit, while the rest of the Glitter Band shrank down to a third of its former size. Tiny moving jewels signified the requisitioned drones, steered onto docking approaches. The prefects watched the spectacle wordlessly as the minutes oozed by.

Make me wrong,
Dreyfus thought.
Make all this turn out to be the deluded fabulation of a worn-out field prefect, resentful at the shabby treatment accorded his boss. Make Clepsydra's testimony turn out to be the burblings of a mad woman, driven insane by years of isolation. Show us that Thalia Ng really did make mistakes, despite everything I know to the contrary. Show us that the first two attacks were accidents caused by hair-trigger defence systems twitching like headless snakes when abstraction went down.

But it wasn't to be. Eleven minutes after the girl had spoken, the anti-collision systems of Szlumper Oneill opened fire on the approaching drone, destroying it utterly. If anything the fire was more concentrated, more purposeful, than on the previous two occasions. The jewel-like representation of the drone swelled to a thumb-sized smear of twinkling light, then reformed into the pulsing tetrahedral icon that symbolised an object of unknown status.

Three minutes later a second drone attempted to dock at House Aubusson, and met with precisely the same fate. Five minutes after that, a third drone was annihilated as it braked to engage with Carousel New Seattle-Tacoma. Three minutes after that, twenty-two minutes since the girl had spoken, the guns of the Chevelure-Sambuke Hourglass directed savage fire on the final drone.

The Solid Orrery reformed itself into its usual configuration. A brittle silence ensued.

‘So maybe it's war after all,' Baudry said eventually.

The isolation chamber was clad in a honeycomb of identical interlocking grey panels, one of which functioned as a passwall. A handful of the panels were illuminated at any one time, but the pattern changed slowly and randomly, robbing the weightless prisoner of any fixed frame of reference. Clepsydra was floating, knees raised to her chest, arms linked around her shins. The patterns of lights erased all shadow, lending her the two-dimensional appearance of a cut-out. She appeared to be unconscious, but it was common knowledge that Conjoiners did not partake of anything resembling normal mammalian sleep.

Since his emergence through the passwall didn't appear to have alerted her to his presence, Dreyfus cleared his throat gently. ‘Clepsydra,' he announced, ‘it's me.'

She turned her crested skull in his direction, her eyes gleaming dully in the subdued light of the bubble. ‘How long has it been?'

The question took Dreyfus aback. ‘Since you were transferred from Mercier's clinic? Only a few hours.'

‘I'm losing track of time again. If you had said months“ I might have believed you.' She pulled a face. ‘I don't like this room. It feels haunted.'

‘You must feel very cut off in here.'

‘I just don't like this room. It's so dead that I'm starting to imagine phantom presences. I keep seeing something out of the corner of my eye, then when I look it isn't there. Even the inside of the rock wasn't like this.'

‘I apologise,' Dreyfus said. ‘I committed a procedural mistake in allowing you into Panoply without considering our operational secrets.'

Clepsydra unfolded herself with catlike slowness. In the sound-absorbing space, the acoustics of her voice had acquired a metallic timbre. ‘Will you get into trouble for that?'

He smiled at her concern. ‘Not likely. I've weathered worse storms than a procedural slip-up. Especially as no damage was done.' He cocked his head. ‘No damage
was
done, I take it?'

‘I saw many things.'

‘I don't doubt it.'

‘Many things that were of no interest to me,' she added. ‘It may reassure you to know that I've buried those secrets far below conscious recall. I can't simply forget them: forgetting isn't a capacity we possess. But you may consider them as good as forgotten.'

‘Thank you, Clepsydra.'

‘But that won't be the end of it, will it? You might believe me. The others won't.'

‘I'll see to it that they do. You're a protected witness, not a prisoner.'

‘Except I'm not free to leave.'

‘We're worried someone wants to kill you.'

‘That would be my problem, wouldn't it?'

‘Not when we still think you can tell us something useful.' Dreyfus had come to a halt a couple of metres from Clepsydra's floating form, oriented the same way up. Before entering the bubble, he'd divested himself of all weapons and communications devices, including his whiphound. It occurred to him, in a way it had not before, that he was alone in a surveillance blind spot with an agile humanoid-machine hybrid that could easily kill him. Autopsies of dead Conjoiners had revealed muscle fibres derived from chimpanzee physiology, giving them five or six times normal human strength. Clepsydra might have been weakened, but he doubted that she'd have much trouble overpowering him, if she wished.