The Prefect (43 page)

Crissel plucked the rifle from the air where it had come to rest. His hands closed around it with probing unfamiliarity, as if he wasn't quite sure which end was which. ‘I'll get suited-up and have the rest of the weapons issued,' he said, with a confidence that sounded ice-thin. ‘We can launch inside five minutes.'

‘You're not ready for this,' Baudry said.

‘Dreyfus was prepared to put his neck on the line. Regardless of what's just happened, we can't simply abandon those kids aboard the
Universal Suffrage.'

‘When was the last time you left Panoply on field duty, as opposed to pleasure?' Dreyfus asked.

‘Only a few months ago,' Crissel said quickly. ‘Six at the most. Definitely within the last year.'

‘Did you carry a whiphound?'

Crissel blinked as he retrieved the memories of the trip. Dreyfus wondered how far back he was digging. ‘We didn't need them. The risk assessment was low.'

‘So hardly comparable to what we're facing now.'

‘No one's ever faced anything like this, Tom. It's new to all of us.'

‘I'll give you that,' Dreyfus said. ‘And I'll give you the fact that you were once an outstanding field. But that was a long time ago, Michael. You've been staring into the Solid Orrery too long.'

‘I'm still field-certified.'

‘I can still go,' Dreyfus said. ‘Overrule Gaffney. You have my word that I'll submit to his arrest order as soon as I return from House Aubusson.'

‘That would suit you just fine, wouldn't it?' Gaffney said. ‘Dying in the line of duty. Going out in a blaze of glory, never having to face an internal tribunal. Not gonna happen, I'm afraid.'

‘He's right,' Baudry said. ‘Until this is resolved, you can't leave Panoply. That's the way we do things. I'm sorry, Tom.'

‘Take him down,' Gaffney said.

It was the middle of the night in House Aubusson. Thalia already felt as if she had spent half a lifetime in the place, when in fact it was still less than fifteen hours since she had docked her cutter at the hub. But she had not rested in all that time, and now she was pacing back and forth determinedly, fiercely intent on staying both awake and alert, knowing that it would be fatal to sit down with the other citizens and succumb to her tiredness.

‘No sign of that rescue of yours, I take it,' Paula Thory said, for about the twentieth time.

‘We've only been cut off for half a day,' Thalia replied, pausing to lean against the transparent casing covering the architectural model of the Museum of Cybernetics. ‘I didn't promise they'd arrive bang on schedule.'

‘You said we might be isolated for a few hours. It's been considerably longer than that.'

‘Yes,' Thalia said. ‘But thanks to the good citizens of the Glitter Band, a civil emergency was in force when I left. My organisation was doing everything it could to prevent all-out war between the habitats and the Ultras.'

‘You think they're still dealing with that, is that it?' asked Caillebot, reasonably enough.

She nodded at the landscape gardener, glad that he had given up some of his earlier outrage. ‘That's my best guess. I'm long overdue by now, and they'll be able to see that my ship's still docked with Aubusson. If they could spare the resources to get here, they would.' She swallowed hard, striving to find some of that confidence Parnasse had told her she needed to assert. ‘But you can bet we're getting near the top of their list. They'll be here before sunrise.'

‘Sunrise is still a long way off,' Thory observed. ‘And those machines aren't slowing down.'

‘But they're not touching the main stalk,' Thalia replied. ‘Whoever's operating them needs to send instructions through this structure, which means they can't risk damaging it just to get rid of us.'

By now it was clear that the construction servitors were engaged in nothing less than the systematic dismantling of the habitat's human buildings and infrastructure. Throughout the night, Thalia had watched - sometimes alone, sometimes with Parnasse, Redon or one of the other citizens - as the robots bulldozed and ripped their way through the outlying structures of the Museum of Cybernetics. They had already torn down the ring of secondary stalks, shovelling the pulverised remains onto the backs of massive debris-carriers. Kilometres away, in illuminated clusters of huddled activity, other groups of machines were engaged in similar demolition work. The machines tackling the museum must already have gathered tens of thousands of tonnes of rubble. Across the entire interior of House Aubusson, they must have gathered dozens or hundreds of times as much. And all that raw material - millions of tonnes of it, in Thalia's estimation - was being conveyed in one direction, toward the great manufactory complex at the habitat's far end. It was feedstock, so that those mighty mills could turn again.

In fact, they were already turning. Though no sound reached Thalia and her cadre of citizens through the airtight windows of the polling core, they had all felt the tremor of distant industrial processes starting up. Near the endcap that rumble must have been thunderous. The manufactories were making something. Whatever it was, they were being cranked up to full capacity.

‘Thalia,' called Parnasse, poking his head above the top of the spiral staircase that led to the lower level. ‘I need your help with something, when you've got a moment.'

Thalia tensed. That was Parnasse's way of telling her they had a problem without alarming the others unduly. She crossed to the staircase and followed him down to the administrative level, with its unlit offices and storage rooms. Three of the citizens were still working on the barricade detail, collecting equipment and junk from wherever they could find it and then toppling it down the stairs and lift shaft.

‘What is it, Cyrus?' she asked quietly, the two of them standing far enough away from the work gang that their conversation would not be overhead.

‘They're getting tired, and they've only been on this shift for forty-five minutes. They may be able to last until the end of it, but I'm not sure if they're going to be much use to us by the time they're up for duty again. We're getting worn out down here.'

‘Maybe it's time Thory weighed in.'

‘She'd be more hindrance than help, with all her moaning. The team getting tired isn't the main problem, though. We're going to start running out of barricade material pretty soon. If not before the end of this shift, then definitely before the end of the next one. Things ain't looking too good. Just thought you should know.'

‘Maybe the existing barricade will hold.'

‘Maybe.'

‘You don't think so.'

‘When it's quiet up here, I can hear activity below. The machines are working at the far end of it, clearing it as fast as we can pour new stuff down from our end. That's why the barricade keeps settling down. They're removing the debris at the base.'

‘And if we don't keep topping it up—'

‘They'll be breaking through before you know it.'

‘We need options,' Thalia said. ‘I've told the other citizens that we're working on a contingency plan. It's about time we had one, before someone calls me on it.'

‘I wish I had an idea.'

‘Let's focus on the barricade, since that's all we have right now. If we're running out of material, we'll need to find another supply.'

‘We've already cleaned out all the rooms along this corridor. Anything that we can move, and that isn't too large to fit down the holes, we've already thrown.'

‘But we've still got the building itself,' Thalia said. ‘The walls, the partitions between the rooms... it's all ours, if we want it.'

‘Unfortunately, none of us thought to bring demolition tools to the civic reception,' Parnasse said.

Thalia unclipped the buzzing handle of her whiphound. ‘Then it's a good job I did. This thing might be damaged, but it can still just about function in sword mode. If I can start cutting away material—'

Parnasse looked at the whiphound dubiously. ‘What will that thing cut through?'

It was almost too hot to hold now. ‘Just about any material that isn't actively reinforced, like hyperdiamond.'

‘There's nothing like that in this building. I know, I saw the blueprints before she went up. But you'd better not cut the first thing you see. There are structural spars running right through this thing.'

‘Then we'll start with something that clearly isn't structural,' Thalia said, remembering the item she had been resting against before Parnasse summoned her below.

‘Like what?'

‘Right above me, on the next level. That architectural model.'

‘We'll need more than that for barricade material, girl. That model's about as substantial as a soap bubble.'

‘I was thinking of the plinth - it looked like granite to me. If we could cut that into manageable chunks... there's got to be three or four tonnes of rock there. That would make a difference, surely?'

‘Maybe not enough to save us,' he said, scratching his chin, ‘but beggars can't be choosers, can they? Let's see if that little toy of yours will hold up for us.'

Thalia clipped the whiphound back to her belt, then rubbed her sore palm against her trousers. Leaving the work gang to their duty, she ascended the staircase to the main level, Parnasse following immediately behind her.

‘People,' she called, ‘I need some help here. It'll only take a couple of minutes, then you can go back and rest.'

‘What do you want?' asked the young man in the electric-blue suit, rubbing a stiff forearm.

Thalia strode to the side of the architectural model and patted the transparent casing. ‘We need to remove this thing so I can get at the plinth. I could use my whiphound to cut it up, but I'd rather save it for stuff we can't break apart with our hands.'

The transparent casing was a boxlike shell resting in place by virtue of its weight alone. Thalia squeezed her fingers under one end of it, wincing as she caught a broken nail. The young man worked his fingers under the far end, and between them they heaved the casing into the air, exposing the delicate model underneath. They shuffled sideways until they'd reached a clear spot of floor and were able to lower the casing. They would work out what to do with it later.

‘Now this part,' Thalia said, getting a grip under the heavy, flat sheet on which the model had been constructed. This time it took three of them before the model even budged, with Caillebot taking one of the corners. The delicately formed representation of the museum might have been insubstantial, but that could not be said for its foundations. ‘Harder,' Thalia grunted, as Parnasse added to the effort.

The sheet budged again, tilting upwards from the underlying plinth. ‘Steady,' Thalia said, gritting her teeth with the effort. ‘Let's put it down over there, on top of the casing.'

She had already participated in the destruction of several tonnes of museum property, including items that might well have been priceless relics from the history of computing. But there was something about the model that made her unwilling to see it damaged. Perhaps it was because of her suspicion that it had been made by hand, laboriously, over many hundreds of hours. ‘Easy,' she said as they reached the casing.

They'd almost made it when the young man yelped and let go as some nerve or muscle in his already strained forearm gave way. The remaining three of them might have been able to take the weight, but they were in the wrong positions. The model crashed to one side, one corner smashing its way through the casing. The impact was enough to dislodge the sphere of the polling core, sending it toppling from the tip of the stalk. The silver-white ball bounced off the tilted landscape and went trundling across the room, until it was lost in the darkness.

Thalia fell to the floor, landing hard on her knees.

‘Sorry,' the young man said.

She bit back tears of pain. ‘It's just a model. The plinth is what matters.'

‘Let's see how that granite holds up,' Parnasse said, helping Thalia to her feet.

Hobbling back towards the plinth, Thalia touched her whiphound and almost flinched from the contact. It felt white-hot now, as if it had just been spat out of a furnace.

‘If anyone has one,' she said, ‘I could use a glove.'

Sparver knew he had been lucky not to find himself in a detention cell, but that did not mean he was going to avoid confrontation with Gaffney just to stay out of trouble. The last thing Dreyfus had told him to do was to find Clepsydra, and like Dreyfus he believed that she must still be somewhere inside Panoply. He reasoned that the place to begin his search was the interrogation bubble where Dreyfus had last spoken to the Conjoiner. No matter how cunning or stealthy she might have been, he did not think it likely that she could have travelled a very great distance from the bubble; certainly not as far as one of the centrifuge rings. It might have been in Clepsydra's gift to blind and confuse surveillance systems, but classes were in session now and Sparver doubted that she would find it easy to pass through a bottleneck of prefects and cadets waiting to transition between the weightless and standard-gee sections. In his mind's eye he could see several possible places she might have hidden; his intention was to search them before Internal Security and attempt to reassure Clepsydra so that he could protect her from any rogue elements within the organisation.

But when he reached the passwall into the now empty interrogation bubble, his way was blocked by a couple of Gaffney's goons. Sparver tried to reason with them, without effect. He was certain that the Internal Security operatives were acting sincerely, in the genuine belief that Gaffney was to be trusted, but that did not make them any easier to persuade. He was still trying when Gaffney himself showed up.