The Prefect (56 page)

‘What happened then?'

‘There was an accident: one of the seemingly dead artefacts reactivated itself. It killed half the cell before the rest brought it under control. When the news reached me, I took the decision to shut down Firebrand. I realised then that no benefits could outweigh the risks of allowing those artefacts to remain in existence. I ordered all the remains to be destroyed, all the records to be deleted and the cell itself to be disbanded. Those involved were dispersed back to normal duties, resuming the jobs they'd never officially left.'

‘And?' Dreyfus asked.

‘Shortly after, I received confirmation that my orders had been implemented. The cell was no more. The artefacts had been destroyed.'

‘But that was nine years ago. Why would Firebrand come up again now?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Someone's stirring up old ghosts, Jane. If Firebrand is really connected with Panoply, how did Anthony Theobald know about it?'

‘We don't know for sure that he did. That could be a rogue inference from the trawl.'

‘Or it could explain why Gaffney was so interested in the Ruskin-Sartorious family,' Dreyfus said. ‘You shut down that cell, Jane. But what if the cell had other ideas?'

Her eyes flashed nervously. ‘I'm not with you.'

‘Try this on for size. The people running that cell decided their work was too important to be closed down, no matter what you thought. They told you it was all over for Firebrand. But what if they just relocated their efforts?'

‘I'd have known.'

‘You already told me this cell was damn near untraceable,' Dreyfus said. ‘Can you really be sure they couldn't have kept it running without your knowledge?'

‘They'd never have done such a thing.'

‘But what if they believed they were acting in the right? You clearly thought there was a justification for Firebrand when you started it. What if the people inside thought those reasons were still valid, even after you tried to kill it?'

‘They were loyal to me,' Aumonier said.

‘I don't doubt it. But you'd already set a bad example, Jane. You'd shown them that deception was acceptable, in the interests of the common good. What if they decided that they had to deceive
you,
to keep the cell operational?'

For a long moment Aumonier said nothing, as if Dreyfus's words had not just stunned her, but undermined her every certainty. ‘I told them to put a stop to it,' she said, so quietly that Dreyfus would not have caught the words had he not already attuned himself to her voice. ‘I ordered them to end Firebrand.'

‘It appears they thought differently.'

‘But why would all this surface now, Tom? What does any of this have to do with Anthony Theobald, or Gaffney, or Aurora?'

‘There was something in the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble that had to be destroyed,' Dreyfus said. ‘Something that even we didn't realise was there, but which Aurora considered an impediment to her plans, something that had to be removed before she could begin the takeover.'

‘You think Firebrand relocated to the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble nine years ago.'

‘If you'd pulled the plug on the cell, it would have been too difficult for them to remain operational inside Panoply, especially if something went wrong again. Too risky to relocate elsewhere in the system, either, since that would have involved travel they couldn't easily explain away as routine Panoply business. So why not another habitat? Somewhere close enough to be easily reachable, but still discreet enough to contain something so secret even we didn't know about it?'

‘What would Anthony Theobald's involvement have been?'

‘I don't know,' Dreyfus said, still getting things straight in his head. ‘Did he have any prior connection with Firebrand?'

‘Not to my knowledge.'

‘Then he was probably just told to keep his mouth shut in return for certain favours. Whatever those favours were, it looks as if he was prepared to screw his own family to safeguard them. He was the only one who bailed out, just before the Bubble was destroyed. I'm assuming your cell had ready access to funds, without going through the usual channels?'

‘Like I said, it was superblack. If they needed something - resources, equipment, expertise - they got it, no questions asked.'

‘Then I imagine they could have made someone like Anthony Theobald very comfortable indeed.'

‘He must have had advance warning that the Bubble was going to be hit,' Aumonier said.

‘Or he was good at putting two and two together. According to Gaffney's trawl, Firebrand moved out of the Bubble at the last minute. They must have received intelligence that someone was closing in on them, trying to hunt down the Clockmaker artefacts.'

‘Aurora,' Aumonier said.

‘Almost certainly. Whatever it was was enough to scare them out of hiding. Maybe they tipped off Anthony Theobald: get your family out of here now, while you can, that kind of thing. Then change your identities and lie low for a couple of centuries, until the trail goes cold. But Anthony Theobald obviously decided to prioritise the saving of his own neck instead.'

‘Except Gaffney was cleverer.'

‘We need to find out who's still running Firebrand, Jane. Something they were holding in that Bubble scared Aurora really badly. For obvious reasons I'm interested in finding out what it was.'

‘If it still exists.'

‘They didn't destroy it nine years ago. Chances are they didn't destroy it this time, either. They moved it somewhere. Find someone with ties to Firebrand and we'll have a shot at getting hold of the artefacts.'

‘That might not be easy.'

‘It's all we have. I need names, Jane. Everyone who was part of the original Firebrand cell, when you closed it down. You remember, don't you?'

‘Of course,' she said, apparently dismayed that he even had to ask. ‘I committed them to memory. What are you going to do with them?'

‘Ask hard questions,' Dreyfus said.

Thalia and Parnasse were alone beneath the lowest public level of the polling core sphere. They'd been down to these corridors and rooms once before, scouting for barricade material, but the expedition had been largely fruitless. Thalia had not expected to be making a return trip into the unwelcoming space, and certainly not with the destructive intention that was now occupying her thoughts. She was grateful that Parnasse knew his way around. Although it was now full daylight outside, very little of that light reached these gloomily lit sub-levels.

‘Now we go deeper,' he said, pausing to lever up a floor hatch that Thalia would never have noticed. ‘Gonna be a bit dusty and dark down here, but you'll cope. Just try not to make too much noise. The elevator, polling core conduit and stairwell rise right through this part of the sphere, and there's only a few centimetres of material between us and them. I don't think the machines have got this high yet, but we don't want to take chances, do we, girl?'

‘If they get this high,' Thalia said, ‘what's to stop them breaking through the walls and bypassing our barricade completely?'

‘Nothing, if they get the idea into their thick metal heads. That's why it might be an idea for us not to make too much noise.' He lowered himself into the underfloor space, then extended a hand to help Thalia down.

‘How did Meriel Redon take it, by the way?' she asked as she pushed her legs into the darkness.

‘She thought I was taking the piss.'

Thalia's feet touched metal flooring. ‘And afterwards, when you explained it was my idea?'

‘She changed her mind. She thought you were taking the piss. But I think I brought her round in the end. Like you say, it's not as if we really want to take our chances with those servitors.'

‘No,' Thalia said, grimly resigned. ‘That we don't. Did you see any sign that anyone else has noticed the military-grade machines?'

He kept his voice low. ‘I don't think so. Cuthbertson started nosing around the windows, but I managed to steer him away before he saw anything.'

‘That's good. The citizens are spooked enough as it is, without having to deal with the thought of war robots. I don't expect I have to tell you what those machines would be capable of doing to unarmed civilians.'

‘No, got enough of an imagination on me for that,' Parnasse said, taking a kind of grim pleasure in the remark. ‘What do you think they're going to do - try coming up the inside, like the others?'

‘No need. These machines are designed for assault and infiltration. They wouldn't need to climb the stairs to reach the polling core. They can come up the outside, even if they have to form a siege tower with their own bodies.'

‘They don't seem to have started climbing yet.'

‘Must be evaluating the situation, working out how to take us down as quickly as possible. But we can't count on them dithering for ever. You'd better show me where to cut.'

‘This way,' Parnasse whispered, pushing Thalia's head down so that she did not knock it against a ceiling strut. ‘You might want to put those glasses of yours on,' he added.

‘What about you?'

‘I know my way. You just take care of yourself.'

Thalia slipped the glasses on. The image amplifier threw grainy shapes against her eyes. She clicked in the infrared overlay and locked on to Parnasse's blob-like form, following his every move as if they were passing through a minefield. As silently as they could, they negotiated a forest of crisscrossing struts and utility ducts, descending slowly until they reached the trunk-like intrusion of the three service shafts Parnasse had already described. Thalia had a clear sense that they'd reached the base of the sphere, for she could see where the curve of the outer skin met the top of the stalk. Surrounding the cluster of service shafts was a series of heavy-looking buttresses, arcing back over Thalia's head into the depths of the chamber. Wordlessly, Parnasse touched a finger against one of the spoke-like buttresses. It was as thick as her thigh.

‘That's what I have to cut?' she asked.

‘Not just this one,' he whispered back. ‘There are eighteen of these, and you're going to have to take care of at least nine if we're to have a hope of toppling.'

‘Nine!' she hissed back.

He raised a shushing finger to his lips. ‘I didn't say you had to cut through 'em all. You cut through four or five, say two on either side of this fellow, and you cut partway through another two on either side, and that should be enough. We want to make damned sure the sphere topples in the right direction.'

‘I know,' Thalia said, resenting the fact that he felt she needed reminding.

‘You want that magic sword of yours?'

‘No time like the present.'

Parnasse passed her the thick bundle he'd made of the whiphound. Between them, they unwrapped the insulating layers, then re-wrapped the cool outer part around the scorching-hot shaft of the handle. Her hands trembling as they had done before, Thalia took the damaged weapon and prayed that the filament would extend for her one more time.

Then she started cutting.

Not for the first time, Jane Aumonier found herself both awed and frightened by the submarine processes of her own mind. She had scarcely given the names of the Firebrand operatives more than a second's thought in nine years, but the process of recall was as automatic and swift as some well-engineered dispensing machine. She dictated the names to Dreyfus while he scratched them into a compad, floating at the end of the safe-distance tether. He always looked awkward when writing, as if it was a skill his hands had not quite evolved for.

When he was done he left her alone, the past amok in her head, while the weevil-class war robots rampaged through the gilded plazas of Carousel New Brazilia.

Many public data feeds had been severed, but the habitat would not be completely isolated until the weevils reached the polling core. The cams would maintain their dispassionate vigilance until that final moment of transmission, even as the streets turned slippery with citizens' blood, congealing too thickly to be absorbed by the municipal quickmatter. The war robots moved very fast once they were inside the airtight environment of the wheel-shaped structure. They tumbled out of doorways and ramps in a slurry of dark armour, their traction legs a furious grey-black blur. They whisked through plazas and atria in a rampaging column of thrashing metal, as if lumpy black tar was being poured along the alleys and boulevards of the habitat's great public spaces, a tar that ate and dissolved people as it swept over them. It looked disorganised, almost random, until Aumonier slowed down the time rate and studied the invasion in the accelerated frame of machine perception. Then she saw how fiercely systematic the invaders were, how efficient and regimented. They cut down the citizens with brutal precision, but only when they were directly opposed. Bystanders, or those running in panic, were left quite alone provided they offered no immediate obstruction to the weevils. Local constables, recognisable by their armbands and activated from amongst the citizenry under the usual emergency measures, were taking the brunt of the casualties. The constables' non-lethal weapons were hopelessly ineffective against the war machines, but still they tried to slow down the invading force, spraying the weevils with immobilising foam or sticky netting. Using their special constabulory authority, they tried to conjure barricades out of the ambient quickmatter, but their efforts were panicked and ineffective. The weevils barged through the obstacles as if they were no more substantial than cobwebs. Most of the constables ran for cover as soon as they'd used their weapons or conjured obstacles, but a few stood their ground and paid a predictable price. Death, when it came, was always mercifully quick - Aumonier remembered what Baudry had told them about the weevils carrying anatomical knowledge - but while there appeared to be no specific cruelty in the machines' actions, that did not make the process of invasion any less horrific.