The Prefect (4 page)

Sparver and Dreyfus floated through the heart of the sphere, using their suit jets to steer around the larger chunks of free-fall debris. The suits had already begun to warn of heightened radiation levels, which did nothing to assuage Dreyfus's suspicions that Aumonier was right about who had done this. But they'd need more than just suit readings to make a case.

‘I've found something,' Sparver said suddenly, when they had drifted several tens of metres apart.

‘What?'

‘There's something big floating over here. Could be a piece of ship or something.'

Dreyfus was sceptical. ‘Inside the habitat?'

‘See for yourself, Boss.'

Dreyfus steered his suit closer to Sparver and cast his lights over the floating object. Sparver had been right in that at first glance the thing resembled a chunk of ship, or some other nondescript piece of large machinery. But on closer inspection it was clear that this was nothing of the sort. The blackened object was a piece of artwork, apparently only half-finished.

Someone had begun with a chunk of metal-rich rock, a potato-shaped boulder about ten or twelve metres across. It had a dark-blue lustre, shading to olive green when the light caught it in a certain fashion. One face of the boulder was still rough and unworked, but the other had been cut back to reveal an intricate sculptural form. Regions of the sculpted side of the boulder were still at a crude stage of development, but other areas gave the impression of having been finished to a very high degree, worked down to a scale of centimetres. The way the rock had flowed and congealed around the worked-in areas suggested that the artist had been sculpting with fusion torches rather than just cutting drills or hammers. The liquid forms of the molten rock had become an integral part of the piece, incorporated into the composition at a level that could not be accidental.

Which didn't mean that Dreyfus had any idea as to what it represented. There was a face emerging from a rock, that of a man, but oriented upside down from Dreyfus's present point of view. He spun the suit around and for a moment, fleetingly, he had the impression that he recognised the face, that it belonged to a celebrity or historical figure rather than someone he knew personally. But the moment passed and the face lost whatever sheen of familiarity it might have possessed. Perhaps it was better that way, too. The man's expression was difficult to read, but it was either one of ecstasy or soul-consuming dread.

‘What do you make of it?' Sparver asked.

‘I don't know,' Dreyfus said. ‘Maybe the beta-levels will tell us something, if any of them turn out to be recoverable.' He pushed his suit closer and fired an adhesive marker onto the floating rock so that forensics would know to haul it in.

They moved on to the entry wound, until they were hovering just clear of the edge of the cut. Before them, airtight cladding had turned black and flaked away, exposing the fused and reshaped rock that had formed the Bubble's skin. The beam had made the rock boil, melt and resolidify in organic formations that were unsettlingly similar to those in the sculpture, gleaming a glassy black under their helmet lights. Stars were visible through the ten-metre-wide opening. Somewhere else out there, Dreyfus reflected, was all that remained of the habitat's interior biome, billowing away into empty space.

He steered his suit into the cleft. He floated down to half the depth of the punctured skin, then settled near a glinting object embedded in the resolidified rock. It was a flake of metal, probably a piece of cladding that had come loose and then been trapped when the rock solidified. Dreyfus unhooked a cutter from his belt and snipped a palm-sized section of the flake away. Nearby he spotted another glint, and then a third. Within a minute he had gathered three different samples, stowing them in the suit's abdominal pouch.

‘Got something?' Sparver asked.

‘Probably. If it was a drive beam that did it, this metal will have mopped up a lot of subatomic particles. There'll be spallation tracks, heavy isotopes and fragmentation products. Forensics can tell us if the signatures match a Conjoiner drive.'

Now he'd said it, it was out in the open.

‘Okay, but no matter what forensics say, why would Ultras do this?' Sparver asked. ‘They couldn't hope to get away with it.'

‘Maybe that's exactly what they were hoping to do - cut and run. They might not be back in this system for decades, centuries even. Do you think anyone will still care about what happened to Ruskin-Sartorious by then?'

After a thoughtful moment, Sparver said, ‘You would.'

‘I won't be around. Neither will you.'

‘You're in an unusually cheerful frame of mind.'

‘Nine hundred and sixty people died here, Sparver. It's not exactly the kind of thing that puts a spring in my step.' Dreyfus looked around, but saw no other easily accessible forensic samples. The analysis squad would arrive shortly, but the really heavy work would have to wait until the story had broken and Panoply were not obliged to work under cover of secrecy.

By then, though, all hell would have broken loose anyway.

‘Let's get to the polling core,' he said, moving his suit out of the cut. ‘The sooner we leave here the better. I can already feel the ghosts getting impatient.'

Whether by accident or design - Dreyfus had never been sufficiently curious to find out - the four main bays on the trailing face of Panoply conspired to suggest the grinning, ghoulish countenance of a Hallowe'en pumpkin. No attempt had been made to smooth or contour the rock's outer crust, or to lop it into some kind of symmetry. There were a thousand similar asteroids wheeling around Yellowstone: rough-cut stones shepherded into parking orbits where they awaited demolition and reforging into sparkling new habitats. This was the only one that held prefects, though: barely a thousand in total, from the senior prefect herself right down to the greenest field just out of the cadet rankings.

The cutter docked itself in the nose, where it was racked into place alongside a phalanx of similar light-enforcement vehicles. Dreyfus and Sparver handed the evidential packages to a waiting member of the forensics squad and signed off on the paperwork. Conveyor bands pulled them deeper into the asteroid, until they were in one of the rotating sections.

‘I'll see you in thirteen hours,' Dreyfus told Sparver at the junction between the field-training section and the cadets' dormitory ring. ‘Get some rest - I'm expecting a busy day.'

‘And you?'

‘Some loose ends to tie up first.'

‘Fine,' Sparver said, shaking his head. ‘It's your metabolism. You do what you want with it.'

Dreyfus was tired, but with Caitlin Perigal and the implications of the murdered habitat dogging his thoughts, he knew it would be futile trying to sleep. Instead he returned to his quarters for just long enough to step through a washwall and conjure a change of clothing. By the time he emerged to make his way back through the rock, the lights had dimmed for the graveyard shift in Panoply's twenty-six-hour operational cycle. The cadets were all asleep; the refectory, training rooms and classrooms empty.

Thalia, however, was still in her office. The passwall was transparent, so he entered silently. He stood behind her like a father admiring his daughter doing homework. She was still dealing with the implications of the Perigal case, seated before a wall filled with scrolling code. Dreyfus stared numbly at the lines of interlocking symbols, none of which meant anything to him.

‘Sorry to interrupt your flow,' he said gently when Thalia didn't look up.

‘Sir,' she said, starting. ‘I thought you were still outside.'

‘Word obviously gets around.'

Thalia froze the scroll. ‘I heard there was some kind of crisis brewing.'

‘Isn't there always?' Dreyfus plopped a heavy black bag down on her desk. ‘I know you're already busy, Thalia, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to add to your burden.'

‘That's okay, sir.'

‘Inside that bag are twelve beta-level recoverables. We had to pull them out of a damaged core, so in all likelihood they're riddled with errors. I'd like you to fix what you can.'

‘Where did they come from?'

‘A place called Ruskin-Sartorious. It doesn't exist any more. Of the nine hundred and sixty people who used to live there, the only survivors are the patterns in these beta-levels.'

‘Just twelve, out of all those people?'

‘That's all we got. Even then, I doubt you'll get twelve stable invocations. But do what you can. Call me as soon as you recover something I can talk to.'

Thalia looked back at the code wall. ‘After I'm done with this, right?'

‘Actually, I'd like those invocations as quickly as possible. I don't want you to neglect Perigal, but this is looking more serious by the hour.'

‘What happened?' she breathed. ‘How did those people die?'

‘Badly,' Dreyfus said.

The safe-distance tether jerked him to a halt in Jane Aumonier's presence.

‘Forensics are on the case,' he said. ‘We should have an answer on those samples within the hour.'

‘Not that there's much room for doubt,' Aumonier said. ‘I have every confidence - if that's the word - that they'll tie the damage to the output beam of a Conjoiner drive.' She directed Dreyfus's attention to a portion of the wall she had enlarged before his arrival. Frozen there was a sleek silver-grey thing like a child's paper dart. ‘Gaffney's been talking to Centralised Traffic Control. They were able to backtrack the movements of this ship. Her name is
Accompaniment of Shadows.'

‘They can place her at the Bubble?'

‘Close enough for our purposes. No other lighthugger was anywhere near.'

‘Where's she now?'

‘Hidden in the Parking Swarm.'

Aumonier enlarged another portion of the wall. Dreyfus saw a ball of fireflies, packed too tightly in the middle to separate into individual motes of light. A single ship would have no difficulty losing itself in the tight-packed core.

‘Have any left since the attack?' he asked.

‘None. We've had the Swarm under tight surveillance.'

‘And in the event that one should break cover?'

‘I'd rather not think about it.'

‘But you have.'

She nodded minutely. ‘Theoretically, one of our deep-system cruisers could shadow a lighthugger all the way out to the Oort cloud. But what good would it do us? If they don't want to stop, or let us board ... nothing we have is going to persuade them. Frankly, direct confrontation with Ultras is the one situation I've been dreading ever since they gave me this job.'

‘Do we have any priors on this ship?'

‘Nothing, Tom. Why?'

‘I was wondering about a motive.'

‘Me, too. Maybe one of the recoverables can shed some light on that.'

‘If we're lucky,' Dreyfus said. ‘We only got twelve, and most of those are likely to be damaged.'

‘What about back-ups? Ruskin-Sartorious wouldn't have kept all their eggs in that one basket.'

‘Agreed. But it's unlikely that the squirts happened more frequently than once a day, if that. Once a week is a lot more likely.'

‘Stale memories may be better than nothing, if that's all we have.' Her tone shifted, becoming more personal. ‘Tom, I have to ask another favour of you. I'm afraid it's going to be even more difficult and delicate than Perigal.'

‘You'd like me to talk to the Ultras.'

‘I want you to ride out to the Swarm. You don't have to enter it yet, but I want them to know that we have our eye on them. I want them to know that if they attempt to hide that ship - or aid its evasion of justice in any way - we won't take it lightly.'

Dreyfus skimmed mental options, trying to work out what kind of ship would send the most effective signal to the Ultras. Nothing in his previous experience with the starship crews had given him much guidance.

‘I'll leave immediately,' he said, preparing to haul himself back to the wall.

‘I'd rather you didn't,' Aumonier replied. ‘Get some rest first. We're up against the clock on this one, but I still want the Ultras to stew a little, wonder what our response is going to be. We're not totally clawless. We can hit them in the trade networks, where it really hurts. Time to make them feel uncomfortable for once.'

Elsewhere, an object fell through the Glitter Band.

It was a two-metre-wide sphere, following a carefully calculated free-fall trajectory that would slip it through the transient gaps in civilian, CTC and Panoply tracking systems with the precision of a dancer weaving between scarves. The nonvelope's path was simply an additional precaution that had cost nothing except a tiny expenditure of computing time and an equally small delay to its departure time. It was already nearly invisible, by the standards of all but the most probing close-range surveillance methods.

Presently it detected the intrusion of light of a very particular frequency, one that it was programmed not to deflect. Machinery deep in the nonvelope processed the temporal structure of the light and extracted an encoded message in an expected format. The same machinery composed a response and spat it out in the opposite direction, back to whatever had transmitted the original pulse.

A confirmatory pulse arrived milliseconds later.

The nonvelope had allowed itself to be detected. This was part of the plan.

Three hours later, a ship positioned itself over the nonvelope, using gravitational sensing to refine its final approach. The nonvelope was soon safely concealed inside the reception bay of the ship. Clamps locked it into position. Detecting its safe arrival, the nonvelope relaxed the structure of its quickmatter envelope in preparation for disgorging its cargo. As lights came on and air flooded into the bay, the nonvelope's surface flicked to the appearance of a large chromed marble. Weight returned as the ship powered away from the rendezvous point.