The Prefect

CHAPTER 3

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’ 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. A figure in an anonymous black spacesuit entered the bay. The figure crouched next to the nonvelope and observed it open. The sphere cracked wide, one half folding back to reveal its occupant. A glassy cocoon of support systems oozed away from his foetal form. The man was breathing, but only just on the edge of consciousness. The man in the suit removed his helmet.

“Welcome back to the world, Anthony Theobald Ruskin-Sartorious.” The man in the nonvelope groaned and stirred. His eyes were gummed with protective gel. He pawed them clean, then squinted while they found their focus.

“I’ve arrived?”

“You’re aboard the ship. Just like you planned.” His relief was palpable.

“I thought it was never going to end. Four hours in that thing… it felt like a million years.”

“I wouldn’t mind betting that’s the first physical discomfort you’ve ever known in your life.” The man in the black spacesuit was standing now, his legs slightly apart, braced in the half-gravity produced by the ship’s acceleration. Anthony Theobald narrowed his eyes at the figure.

“Do I know you?”

“You do now.”

“I was expecting to be met by Raichle.”

“Raichle couldn’t make it. I came instead. You’re okay with that, I assume?”

“Of course I’m…” But Anthony Theobald’s usual self-control was betraying him. The man in the suit felt waves of fear rippling off him. Waves of fear and suspicion and an arrogant unwillingness to grasp that his escape plans hadn’t been as foolproof as they’d looked when he climbed into the nonvelope.

“Did it really happen? Is Ruskin-Sartorious gone?”

“It’s gone. The Ultras did a good job. You got out just in time.”

“And the others? The rest of us?”

“I’d be surprised if there’s a single intact strand of human DNA left anywhere in the Bubble.”

“Delphine…” There was a heartbreaking crack in his voice.

“My poor daughter?”

“You knew the deal, Anthony Theobald. You were the only one with a get-out clause.”

“I demand to know who you are. If Raichle didn’t send you, how did you know where to find the nonvelope?”

“Because he told me, that’s why. During interrogation.”

“Who are you?”

“That isn’t the issue, Anthony Theobald. The issue at hand is what you were doing sheltering that evil thing in your nice little family-run habitat.”

“I wasn’t sheltering anything. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The man in the suit reached behind the small of his back and unclipped a small, handle-shaped object. He hefted it in his palm as if it might be a cosh or truncheon.

“I think it’s about time you met a close, personal friend of mine.”

“You’ve got it wrong. The thing underground was just—”. The man made an odd flicking motion with the handle and something whipped out, extending all the way to the floor. It was almost invisibly fine, catching the light only intermittently. It appeared to swish against the flooring of its own volition, as if searching for something. The man let go of the handle. The handle remained where it was, its coiled filament stiffening to support it. The handle tracked around until the black cylinder of its head was aimed directly at Anthony Theobald. He raised a hand against the laser as it scratched a bright, oscillating line across his eyes.

It had a mark on him now, confirmed by a minute nod from the man in black.

“Keep that thing away from me.”

“This is a Model C whiphound,” the man in the suit said.

“It’s got a few additional features compared to the last version. One of them’s called ’interrogation mode’. Shall we give it a spin?” The whiphound began to slink closer to Anthony Theobald.

Dreyfus was alone in his quarters. He had prepared some tea, losing himself in the task. When he was finished, he knelt at a low, black table and allowed the hot ginger-coloured brew to cool before drinking it. The room filled itself with the tinkling sound of distant wind chimes, a ghost-thin melody implicit in the apparent randomness. Normally it suited his mood, but today Dreyfus waved the music quieter, until he had near-silence. He sipped at the tea but it was still too hot.

He faced a blank rice-paper wall. He raised a hand and shaped a basic conjuring gesture, one that he had practised thousands of times. The wall brightened with blocky patches of vivid colour. The colours resolved into a mosaic of faces, several dozen of them, arranged in a compositional scheme with the larger images clustered near the middle. The faces were all the same woman, but taken at different stages in her life, so that they almost looked like images of different people. Sometimes the woman was looking into the camera; sometimes she was looking askance, or had been snapped candidly. She had high cheekbones, a slight overbite and eyes of a startling bronze, flecked with chips of fiery gold. She had black hair that she usually wore in tight curls. She was smiling in many of the images, even the ones where she hadn’t been aware that she was being photographed. She’d smiled a lot.

Dreyfus stared at the pictures as if they were a puzzle he had to solve.

Something was missing. In his mind’s eye he could see the woman in the pictures turning to him with flowers in her hand, kneeling in newly tilled soil. The image was vivid, but when he tried to focus on any particular part of it the details squirmed from his attention. He knew that memory had to come from somewhere, but he couldn’t relate it to any of the images already on the wall.

He’d been trying to place it for nearly eleven years.

The tea was cool enough to drink at last. He sipped it slowly, concentrating on the mosaic of faces. Suddenly the composition struck him as jarringly unbalanced in the top-right corner, even though he’d been satisfied with it for many months. He raised a hand and adjusted the placement of the images, the wall obeying his gestures with flawless obedience. It looked better now, but he knew it would come to displease him in time. Until he found that missing piece, the mosaic would always be disharmonious.

He thought back to what had happened, flinching from the memory even as he embraced it.

Six missing hours.

“You were okay,” he told the woman on the wall.

“You were safe. It didn’t get to you before we did.”

He made himself believe it, as if nothing else in the universe mattered quite as much.

Dreyfus made the images disappear, leaving the rice-paper wall as blank as when he’d entered the room. He finished the tea in a gulp, barely tasting it as it sluiced down his throat. On the same portion of the wall he called up an operational summary of the day’s business, wondering if the forensics squad had managed to get anything on the sculpture Sparver and he had seen in Ruskin-Sartorious. But when the summary sprang onto the wall, neither the images nor the words were legible. He could make out shapes in the images, individual letters in the words, but somewhere between the wall and his brain there was a scrambling filter in place.

Belatedly, Dreyfus realised that he’d neglected to take his scheduled Pangolin shot. Security dyslexia was kicking in as his last clearance boost faded.

He stood from the table and moved to the part of the wall where the booster was dispensed. As he reached towards the pearly-grey surface, the booster appeared in an alcove. It was a pale-grey tube marked with the Panoply gauntlet and a security barcode matching the one on his uniform. Text on the side of the booster read: Pangolin clearance. To be self-administered by Field Prefect Tom Dreyfus only. Unauthorised use may result in permanent irreversible death.

Dreyfus rolled up his sleeve and pressed the tube against the skin of his forearm. He felt a cold tingle as the booster rammed its contents into his body, but there was no discomfort. He retired to his bedroom. He slept fitfully, but without dreams. When he woke three or four hours later, the summary on the wall was crystal clear. He studied it for a while, then decided he’d given the Ultras long enough.