The Prefect (55 page)

‘Pressure containment?'

‘Still holding. It looks as if the machines are at least programmed to break inside without compromising biosphere integrity.'

It would go the same way with Flammarion, Dreyfus knew. The concentration of weevils might not be exactly the same, the anti-collision systems might prove more or less successful at intercepting the arriving forces, but it would make no practical difference in the long run. It would only take a handful of those war robots to storm their way through the citizenry, scything a bloody path to the polling core. And then they would open a door and Aurora, or some facet of Aurora, could pass through.

‘How many did we get off Brazilia?'

‘Eleven thousand on the commercial shuttles that were already docked. Three from Flammarion.'

‘Aurora's reliant on data networks to hop into those habitats,' Dreyfus said. 'Before we start nuking our own citizens, can we block her progress by taking down part of the network?'

Baudry grimaced. ‘It's all or nothing, Tom.'

‘Then we take the whole damned thing down.'

‘We don't know for sure that that would stop Aurora, but it would definitely hurt us. We need the apparatus to track Aurora's spread, to coordinate evacuation operations and the deployment of our own assets.'

‘Nonetheless,' Aumonier said, ‘Tom is right. Taking down Bandwide abstraction is something we have to consider. In fact, I've been considering it ever since I became aware of the crisis. We shouldn't underestimate the risks, though. We may slow Aurora, but we'll more than likely blind ourselves in the process.'

‘Use the nukes and we end this now,' Baudry said. ‘Aurora may not be intending to kill people, but she definitely intends to take their freedom from them.'

Dreyfus clutched his stylus so tightly that the nib pushed into his palm and drew blood. ‘There's another option, while we still have the apparatus. A given habitat may not be able to fight off the weevils, but at the moment we still have the resources of the entire Glitter Band to call upon.'

‘I'm not with you, Tom,' Baudry said.

‘I say we table an emergency poll with the people. We request permission to draft and mobilise a temporary militia from across the entire Glitter Band.'

‘Define militia“.'

‘I mean millions of citizens, armed and equipped with whatever weapons their manufactories can produce in the next thirteen hours. They already have the ships, so moving them around won't be a problem. If we can supply them with weapons blueprints, then place enough of them into the compromised habitats, and into the habitats we think Aurora will go for next, together with military-grade servitors under our control, we may be able to break her back without using nukes.'

Baudry looked regretful. ‘You're talking about citizens, Tom, not soldiers.'

‘You were the one calling them combatants, not me.'

‘They have no training, no equipment—'

‘The manufactories'll give them equipment. Eidetics will give them training. Prefects can lead small units of drafted citizens.'

‘There are a hundred million citizens out there, Tom, ninety-eight per cent of whom face no immediate threat from Aurora. Do you honestly think many of them are going to race to throw themselves against those weevils?'

‘I think we should at least give them the choice. We won't be proposing to draft the entire citizenry. Ten million would give us an overwhelming advantage, especially if they're backed up by servitors. That's only one citizen in ten, Lillian. The majority can agree to our draft safe in the knowledge that they're not likely to be called up.'

‘Do you want to put some numbers on casualty estimates?' Baudry asked. 'One in ten, two in ten? Worse than that?'

Dreyfus tapped his stylus against the table. ‘I don't know.'

‘Lose two million and you'll have killed more people than if we go in now with nukes.'

‘But it would be two million people who chose to put themselves on the line, for the greater good of the Glitter Band, rather than two million we press the button on just because some simulation says so.'

‘Maybe we can come to some kind of compromise,' Aumonier said, her crystal-clear voice cutting through the tension between Dreyfus and Baudry. ‘We all find the idea of nuking habitats abhorrent, even if we differ on the necessity of doing so.'

‘Agreed,' Baudry said cautiously.

‘Which criteria did you use to identify Aurora's next targets?' Aumonier asked.

‘Proximity and usefulness, with allowance for varying distances due to differential orbital velocities. I reasoned that Aurora would concentrate her efforts on the nearest habitats with manufacturing capability.'

‘Sounds reasonable to me,' Aumonier said. ‘The question is, can we get the people out of those habitats before the weevils arrive from those that are now under assault?'

‘You mean evacuate and then nuke?' Dreyfus asked.

‘If we can do it, we'll be clearing a line in a forest. Aurora's weevils may well be able to cross that line and leapfrog to even further habitats, but at least it'll have bought us time, with no expenditure of human lives.'

‘If we get them out in time,' Clearmountain said.

‘We can't be certain which habitats she'll go for,' Baudry said, pointing at the Solid Orrery. ‘I selected likely candidates, but I couldn't be precise.'

‘Then we'll have to cover more bases.' Aumonier said. ‘I'm going to initiate an emergency evacuation order for ten probable targets.'

Dreyfus said, ‘I suggest we concentrate any enforcement activities on one habitat, just to show we mean business. The others will hopefully assume we're capable of dishing out the same treatment to them.'

‘I agree,' Aumonier replied. ‘The one thing the people mustn't suspect is that we're overstretched. As for assistance in the evacuation effort, I'll go through CTC. They can requisition and re-route all spaceborne traffic without the need for a poll. We'll be limited by ship capacity and docking hub throughput, but we'll just have to do the best we can.' She looked directly at Baudry. ‘I want the names of ten habitats, Lillian. Immediately.'

‘I'd like to re-run the simulation, varying the parameters a little,' Baudry said.

‘There isn't time. Just give me those names.'

Baudry's mouth fell open, as if she was about to say something but the words had suddenly escaped her. She reached for her stylus and compad and started compiling the list, her hand shaking with the momentous enormity of what she was doing.

‘How long are you going to give them?' Dreyfus asked. ‘Before you go in with the nukes, I mean.'

‘We can't wait a day,' Aumonier said. ‘That would be too long, too risky. I think thirteen hours is a reasonable compromise, don't you?'

She knew that it could not be done, Dreyfus thought. Save for the tiniest family-run microstates, there was no habitat in the Glitter Band that could be emptied of people that quickly. Even if evacuation vehicles were docked and ready, even if the citizens were briefed and prepared, ready to leave their world in an orderly and calm fashion, a world that many of them would have spent their entire lives in.

It just couldn't be done. But at least those people would have a chance of getting out, rather than none at all. That was all Jane was counting on.

‘I have those names,' Baudry said.

Aumonier floated rock-still, anchored in space at the epicentre of her own sensory universe. Most of her feeds were blanked out, leaving a bright equatorial strip focusing only on those twenty-five or thirty habitats at immediate or peripheral risk from Aurora's takeover. The views kept shuffling, playing havoc with Dreyfus's sense of his own orientation.

‘We're going to lose Brazilia and Flammarion,' she said, by way of acknowledging his presence. ‘Weevils are deep inside both habitats and the local citizenry can't hold them back. They've already taken appalling losses, and all they've done is slow their approach to the polling cores.'

Dreyfus said nothing, sensing that Aumonier was not finished. Eventually she asked: ‘Did they get anything out of Gaffney?'

‘Not much. I've just read the initial summary from the trawl squad.'

‘And?'

‘They've cleared up at least one mystery. We know how he moved Clepsydra from the bubble to my quarters. He used a nonvelope.'

‘I'm not familiar with the term,' Aumonier said.

‘It's an invisibility device. A shell of quickmatter with a degree of autonomy and the ability to conceal itself from superficial observation. You put something in it you don't want people to find.'

‘Sounds like exactly the sort of thing that should be banned by any right-thinking society. How did he get hold of it?'

‘From Anthony Theobald Ruskin-Sartorious, apparently. Anthony Theobald must have procured it through his black-market arms contacts. He used the nonvelope to escape from his habitat just before it was torched by Dravidian's ship.'

Aumonier frowned slightly. ‘But Anthony Theobald didn't escape. All you had to interview was his beta-level copy.'

‘Gaffney knew differently, apparently. He intercepted the nonvelope before it fell into the hands of Anthony Theobald's allies.'

‘And then what?'

‘He cracked it open. Then he ran a trawl on Anthony Theobald to see if he could find out where the thing Ruskin-Sartorious was sheltering had got to.'

‘Voi. Gaffney
trawled
him?' Reading her expression, Dreyfus could imagine what was going through her mind. It was one thing to be trawled inside Panoply, where strict rules were in force. It was another to receive the same treatment elsewhere, inflicted by a man acting outside the bounds of the law who cared nothing for the consequences of his actions.

‘He didn't get as much information as he was hoping for, unfortunately.'

‘I presume he kept digging until he'd burnt away Anthony Theobald's brain?'

‘That's the odd thing,' Dreyfus said. ‘He appears to have held back at the last. He got something out of the man, enough for him to stop before he burnt him out completely.'

‘Why didn't he go all the way if he thought there was something more to gain?'

‘Because Gaffney doesn't see himself as a monster. He's a prefect, still doing his job, still sticking to his principles while the rest of us betray the cause. He killed Clepsydra because he had no other option. He killed the people in Ruskin-Sartorious for the same reason. But he's not an indiscriminate murderer. He's still thinking about the tens of millions he's going to save.'

‘What else did he get?'

‘That was where the trawl team hit resistance. Gaffney really didn't want to give up whatever he had learned from Anthony Theobald. But they got a word.'

‘Tell me.'

‘Firebrand.'

Aumonier nodded very slowly. She said the word herself, as if testing how it sounded coming from her own lips. ‘Did the summary team have anything to say about this word?'

‘To them it was meaningless noise. Firebrand could be a weapon, a ship, an agent, anything. Or it could be the name of the puppy he owned when he was five.'

‘Do you have any theories?'

‘I'm inclined to think it's just noise: either noise that came out of Anthony Theobald, which Gaffney assumed was significant, or noise that came out of Gaffney. I ran a search on the word. Lots of priors, but nothing that raised any flags.'

‘There wouldn't have been any,' Aumonier said.

Dreyfus heard something in her tone of voice that he hadn't been expecting. 'Because it's meaningless?'

‘No. It's anything but. Firebrand has a very specific meaning, especially in a Panoply context.'

Dreyfus shook his head emphatically. ‘Nothing came up, Jane.'

‘That's because we're talking about an operational secret so highly classified that even Gaffney wouldn't have known about it. It's superblack, screened from all possible scrutiny even within the organisation.'

‘Are you going to enlighten me?'

‘Firebrand was a cell within Panoply,' Aumonier said. ‘It was created eleven years ago to study and exploit any remaining artefacts connected with the Clockmaker affair.'

‘You mean the clocks, the musical boxes?'

She answered with superhuman calm, taking no pleasure in contradicting him. ‘More than that. The Clockmaker created other things during its spree. The public record holds that none of these artefacts survived, but in reality a handful of them were recovered. They were small things, of unknown purpose, but because they had been made by the Clockmaker, they were considered too unique to destroy. At least not until we'd studied them, worked out what they were and how we could apply that data to the future security of the Glitter Band.' Before he could get a word in, she said: ‘Don't hate us for doing that, Tom. We had a duty to learn everything we could. We didn't know where the Clockmaker had come from. Because we didn't understand it, we couldn't rule out the possibility of another one arising. If that ever happened, we owed it to the citizenry to be prepared.'

‘And?' he asked. ‘Are we?'

‘I instigated Firebrand. The cell was answerable only to me, and for a couple of years I permitted it to operate in absolute secrecy within Panoply.'

‘How come Gaffney didn't know about it?'

‘Gaffney's predecessor knew - we couldn't have set it up without
some
cooperation from Security - but when he handed over the reins there was no need to inform Gaffney. By then the cell was self-sufficient, operating within Panoply but completely isolated from the usual mechanisms of oversight and surveillance. And that was how things continued for a couple of years.'