‘Talk about what?’
‘The weapon, Tom. Nice and easy.’
Dreyfus had no use for the rifle. Even if there had been an ammo-cell clipped into it, he was hardly going to open fire so close to the docking bay. But it still took a measure of self-control to let it drift out of his fingers.
‘What’s going on?’ Baudry asked.
Gaffney clicked his gloved fingers at the pair of field prefects still waiting to clear the armoury. ‘Get aboard the ship,’ he said.
‘She asked a civil question,’ Dreyfus said.
‘Field Prefect Tom Dreyfus,’ Gaffney said, before the stragglers had cleared the room, ‘you are under arrest. Please surrender your whiphound.’
Dreyfus didn’t move. ‘State the terms of my arrest,’ he said.
‘Your whiphound, Tom. Then we can talk.’
‘My name’s Dreyfus, you sonofabitch.’ But he still unclipped the whiphound and let it drift after the rifle.
‘I think you’d better explain,’ Crissel said.
Gaffney appeared to have trouble clearing his throat. His eyes were wide, pugnacious, brimming with an almost religious rage. ‘He’s let the prisoner escape.’
Baudry’s look sharpened. ‘You mean Clepsydra, the Conjoiner woman?’
‘Prefect Bancal visited her cell about ten minutes ago and found the cell empty. Mercier was called immediately: Bancal assumed that the doctor had moved her back to the clinic for medical reasons. Mercier hadn’t, though. She’s gone.’
‘I want her found, and fast,’ Crissel said. ‘But I don’t see why Dreyfus is automatically assumed—’
‘I checked the access logs,’ Gaffney said. ‘Dreyfus was the last one to see her before she vanished.’
‘I didn’t release her,’ Dreyfus said, directing his answer at the other two seniors, not Gaffney. ‘And how could I have got her out of that room even if I’d wanted to?’
‘We’ll figure that out in due course,’ Gaffney said. ‘What matters is that you weren’t happy about her being locked up in there, were you?’
‘She’s a witness, not a prisoner.’
‘A witness who can see through walls. That makes a difference, don’t you think?’
‘Where could she be?’ Baudry asked.
‘She has to be still inside Panoply. No ships have come or gone since Dreyfus’s return. Needless to say, I’ve initiated a level-one search. We’ll find her soon enough.’ Gaffney touched a hand to his sweat-tangled hair. ‘She may be a Conjoiner, but she sure as hell isn’t invisible.’
‘You’re wrong about this,’ Dreyfus said. ‘Clepsydra was there when I left her. I sent Sparver to check on her. Why would I do that if I’d set her free?’
‘We can worry about the how and why of it later,’ Gaffney answered. ‘The access logs leave no doubt that Dreyfus was the last one in her cell before she disappeared.’
‘I want a forensic search of that room.’
‘I insist on it,’ Gaffney said. ‘Now, are you going to make a scene, or can we do this like responsible adults?’
‘It’s you,’ Dreyfus said, with the feeling that he’d just got the punchline to a long, drawn-out joke, hours after everyone else.
‘Me?’ Gaffney asked, looking perplexed.
‘The mole. The traitor. The man Clepsydra spoke about. You’re working for Aurora, aren’t you? You sabotaged the Search Turbines. You corrupted my beta-level witness.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
‘Talk to Trajanova. See what she says.’
‘Oh dear,’ Gaffney said, biting his lower lip. ‘Haven’t you heard?’
‘Haven’t I heard what?’
‘Trajanova’s dead,’ Baudry said. ‘I’m sorry, Tom. I thought you knew.’
Dreyfus stared at her in numb disbelief. ‘What do you mean, she’s dead?’
‘It was a dreadful accident,’ Baudry said. ‘Trajanova was working inside the casing of one of the Search Turbines when it began to spin up. It appears that some safety interlock had been disabled . . . we can only imagine that Trajanova herself must have done it, because she was in a hurry to get the Turbs back up—’
‘It wasn’t an accident.’ Dreyfus was looking at Gaffney now. ‘You made this happen, didn’t you?’
‘Wait,’ Gaffney said, unfazed. ‘Isn’t this the same Trajanova you used to have issues with? The deputy you fired, the one you could barely speak to without the two of you shooting daggers at each other?’
‘We got over that.’
‘Well, isn’t that convenient.’ Gaffney looked quickly to the others. ‘Does this make any sense to anyone? Quite apart from these slanderous accusations of murder, I don’t recall Dreyfus mentioning a mole until now. Maybe if he had it would lend this outburst a bit more credibility.’ He gave Dreyfus a pitying look. ‘I can’t begin to tell you how undignified this all sounds. I expected better of you, frankly.’
‘He mentioned the mole to me.’ They turned as one to see Sparver hovering at the threshold of the chamber.
‘This is no business of yours, Deputy Field,’ said Gaffney.
‘The moment you shot off your mouth about Dreyfus it became my business. Let him go.’
‘Escort the deputy out of here,’ Gaffney instructed two of his internals. ‘Pacify him if he makes trouble.’
‘You’re making a mistake,’ Sparver said.
‘Tell you what,’ Gaffney said. ‘Why don’t you dump him in an interrogation bubble until he cools off? Got to keep a lid on that temper, son. I know it’s hard, not having a fully developed frontal cortex, but you could make an effort.’
‘There’s a line,’ Sparver said quietly. ‘You just crossed it.’
‘Not before you did.’ Gaffney’s hand hovered over his whiphound, a tacit warning. ‘Now get out of here before one of us does something he might have cause to regret.’
‘Go,’ Dreyfus mouthed to Sparver. Then, louder: ‘Find Clepsydra. Before Gaffney’s people do. She’s in danger.’
Sparver touched his hand to the side of his head, enough of a salute to let Dreyfus know he still had an ally.
‘Well,’ Gaffney said, ‘looks like you got an exemption from the rescue mission, at least. Or were you counting on that?’
Dreyfus just looked at him, not even dignifying the statement with a response.
‘I’ll take his place,’ Crissel said.
It fell to Baudry to break the silence that fell after his words. ‘No, Michael,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to do this. You’re a senior, not a field. This is where we need you.’
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. ‘Who-ever’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.
The Revelation Space Collection Page 405