“And from there he guessed my name?”
“Like it or not, the Aurora affair made you something of a public figure.” Aumonier angled her head to one side, conveying at least a measure of sympathy. “Don’t make more of this than you need to. Let Garlin be my headache, not yours.”
“As if you didn’t have enough to be getting on with.”
“I take it you heard about Ng’s little mission?”
Dreyfus nodded, glad the matter of Garlin had been set aside for the time being. “I saw Sparver in the docking bay. He told me what happened. Do you think it’s the break we’ve been hoping for?”
Aumonier looked equivocal. “Demikhov doesn’t seem very optimistic—even for Demikhov.”
“There has to be a pattern, a causal factor. We just haven’t seen it yet.”
“In other words: more deaths would be helpful?”
Dreyfus leaned back, evaluating a risky idea before he put it into words. “Might I say something?”
“You’re going to anyway.”
“Assign the polling core upgrades to a DFP One, and put Thalia Ng onto a full-time investigation of the deaths. Give her a Pangolin boost, and assign a squad, if need be.”
“I can’t risk it. I’ve already been over this with Clearmountain and Bancal. It’s not that I don’t trust Ng, but if so much as a word of this gets out, I’ll have a mass panic on my hands.”
“You already have witnesses.”
“Civilians who aren’t sure what happened, and who aren’t aware of any larger pattern of incidents. That’s how it’ll stay, provided we maintain the present security arrangements.”
Dreyfus knew better than to argue. “I suppose there’s always a chance the dead will give us something.”
“You do have a way with them,” Aumonier said. “Vanessa Laur just notified me, by the way. Our sequestration order came through. We have Antal Bronner’s beta-level. See if you can get something useful from the poor man, will you?”
Dreyfus made to rise. “Have you ever had to tell someone that they’re dead?”
“No,” Aumonier said. “I prefer to leave that sort of thing to the experts.”
Sparver was eating alone at one of the corner tables. He seemed hunched over his tray, as if pressed down by the low, curving ceiling. Thalia set her own tray down without begging an invitation. For a moment she let her friend get on with his meal, using the special cutlery that had been provided for hyperpigs. He ate fastidiously, taking small mouthfuls and chewing carefully. He had even tucked a napkin into his collar. His reading spectacles were set on the table before him, next to a compad.
“I hear you’re doing well with the polling cores,” he said. “Not exactly thrilling work, it’s got to be said. But they wouldn’t trust it to anyone but a safe pair of hands.”
“How long was that thing in my cutter?”
Sparver’s cutlery clinked. “Dreyfus will keep you on it for a little while longer. But that’s only because he knows you’ll do a thorough job.” He carried on eating, nodding between mouthfuls. “This is actually not too terrible. You should try it. Or maybe it wouldn’t suit a baseline palate, with your restricted range of taste receptors.” He looked at her with vague sympathetic interest. “How do you live like that?”
“It was pure luck that I was near that man, wasn’t it?” She pressed closer, lowering her voice. “I’ve been thinking about that, and what Aumonier said.”
“I should cook for you again one of these days, show you what food’s meant to taste like. Pork’s off the menu, obviously, but other than that—”
“So they must have hundreds of those boxes stashed aboard our ships, just waiting for one of us to be in the right position.”
Sparver dabbed at his mouth with the napkin. “Did you hear the news about the boss man? Took it upon himself to pay a visit to Devon Garlin.” He tapped his spectacles against the compad. “Lady Jane’s spitting nails.”
Thalia’s hands were now fists to either side of her tray. “You have seniority over me, I understand. There are things you can talk about, and things you can’t. Ordinarily I’d respect that. But not after you talked me through cutting a man’s head off while he was still alive.”
Sparver took another mouthful, chewing and swallowing before giving his answer.
“He wasn’t still alive.”
“He was moving.” She leaned in closer still, her voice a hoarse whisper. “He was still alive. You made me kill a man who was still alive.”
“Did you listen to a word Lady Jane said, about not saying anything more about this?”
“She was talking about security leaks. You don’t count. Now tell me about that man.”
Sparver set down his cutlery, dabbed at his chin, then looked at Thalia with his small, sad, all-too-human eyes. “By the time you got to him the entire medical resources of the Glitter Band and Chasm City couldn’t have made a difference. What mattered was getting some fragment of evidence back to Panoply.”
She was silent for a few moments. She leaned back, getting out of his face. The food on her tray was still untouched.
“Are you just going to leave it at that?”
“I’m sure you’ll get a proper briefing at some point. But I won’t be the one giving it. It’s not that I don’t trust you—”
“Someone doesn’t,” she said sharply. “I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised. They can say they’ve exonerated someone, but whether they really mean it, deep down …”
“You think this is about your father?” He glanced down at his meal, what remained of it, then reached for his spectacles and stood to leave. “It’s about seniority, that’s all. You were given a difficult duty to perform and you did it. Be content with that.”
They regarded each other for an uncomfortable moment. Deep down she knew she was being unreasonable, pressuring him into a disclosure he had no right to give. But he was not the one who had gone through that nightmare in the Shiga-Mintz Spindle.
She had done her duty, all right. Not disgraced herself. But Sparver wasn’t the one who had vomited up his guts as soon as he was back on the ship, nor woken himself screaming as soon as he managed to sleep after his shift.
“He wasn’t the first, was he?” she said, knowing there would be neither confirmation nor denial from her friend. “Not by a long stretch. Not the first and I’m guessing he won’t be the last. Aumonier admitted I’d brushed against something outside my clearance, something big. What is it, Sparver? What are we dealing with?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Just give me a word. A case codename. Something.”
Sparver said nothing.
Dreyfus’s shoes crunched on gravel. The sound was sufficient to break the reverie of a lone man sitting on a park bench, staring into the grey distance. Irritation and confusion clouded his features, as if he had just realised that he had no recollection of arriving at the bench.
“I—” the man started.
Dreyfus raised a calming hand, softening his expression in a way that he hoped conveyed empathy and understanding.
“It’s all right, Antal. You’re among friends and nothing bad will happen to you.” Stopping before the man, he lowered down onto his haunches, bringing his eye line level with the seated figure.
“Who are you?”
“My name’s Dreyfus. I’m a prefect. Something happened and now you’re in the care of Panoply.”
“How …” the man began, frowning. “What do you mean, something happened?”
Dreyfus put on a solemn look. “You died.” He paused, letting that sink in for a second or two. “It was violent and irrevocable, with no prospect of neural consolidation. But you had a beta-level instantiation shadowing you for many years. That beta-level has now been legally sequestered and brought to a responsive state within a simulated environment, executing inside Panoply.”
Dreyfus could have scripted the exchange that would follow.
“No, you’ve made an error. I’m definitel
y not dead. I’d know if I were dead.”
“Do you remember walking to this bench? Do you even have an idea where we are now?”
“A habitat. Somewhere.”
“You don’t remember because there was no transitional experience. Under the terms of the sequestration order you were placed in immediate executive quarantine. You are the only copy of Antal Bronner presently executing. You were re-initiated a few seconds before I arrived.”
“No,” the beta-level said flatly. “There’s been a mistake.”
“I wish there had been, Antal. But look at it this way. The whole point of you was to shine now. To speak for Antal Bronner when Antal could not.”
Maybe some part of that got through. Though denial was a virtually universal reaction, the beta-levels varied starkly in the way they moved from denial to acceptance. The ease or otherwise of that shift was unavoidably correlated with their base-personality.
“I don’t feel dead,” the beta-level said, more flatly than before. He stared down at his own sleeve, as if some desolate truth lay evident in the fabric’s weave.
“You didn’t feel dead when you were alive, so you won’t feel it now. The crucial thing is that you may be able to help us.”
“How can I possibly help?”
“We need to talk about how you died.”
“You said it was violent. Was I murdered?”
“It was a medical event, and an extreme one.” Dreyfus paused, his knees beginning to ache. He was squatting for real in the grey box of the immersion room, with plugs jammed into his ears and goggles chafing at his skin. “Whether it was deliberate or not, we can’t yet say.”
Antal Bronner looked around, taking in the tall hedges and the distant arc of patterned landscape rising overhead, towns and hamlets laid across it like arrangements of tiny gaming pieces.
“Will I be able to leave?”
Dreyfus smiled tightly. “In good time.”
“I want to speak to my wife. Ghiselin does know, doesn’t she?”
“Your wife’s been informed of your death, and she has constables and counsellors to turn to. But I can’t allow any possibility of evidential contamination at this stage of the investigation.”
“What evidence are we talking about?”
“You,” Dreyfus said bluntly. At last the effort of squatting had become too much. He beckoned to the seat and waited for a nod from Bronner, inviting him to sit down. Dreyfus settled his weight onto what he trusted would be a functionally equivalent surface, conjured out of quickmatter in the interview room. “For reasons presently unknown, something went wrong with your neural machinery. Your implants sent out debilitating signals, putting you into a grand mal seizure. Then they underwent a catastrophic thermal overload.”
“What does that mean?”
“A heat pulse, which boiled the surrounding brain tissue.”
They were facing the same way now, staring out across the lawn, a silvery fog creeping its way down the distant curve of the habitat’s inner surface.
“We got to you as quickly as we could,” said Dreyfus. “Had we been there a little sooner, we might have been able to slow down the thermal event. I’m waiting for our medical examiner to see if you can teach us anything we didn’t already know. In the meantime, though, I’m counting on there being something, some detail or circumstance, that might help.”
Bronner gave a hollow laugh. “There’s nothing. I’d remember if there was.”
“Has anything ever gone wrong with your implants?”
“Nothing.”
“And you’ve had them all your life?”
“I don’t know exactly when they were put in. Allowed to grow, I should say. I was just a boy.”
“But since then—no complications?”
“None. What happened to me, Prefect?”
Dreyfus kept his tone studiedly neutral. “Witnesses and public records place you walking through the park when you collapsed. There was no visible cause and no one else was affected. But something made it happen, and I’d like to know what. If there’s anything in your past that you think might have any bearing …”
Bronner turned to face him. “Like what, exactly?”
“Some borderline procedure? Black market medicine. Illicit neural modification. Contact with Ultras, or Conjoiners—you name it. Be as frank as you like, Antal. The last thing I’m going to do is prosecute you.”
“I’ve never gone in for anything like that. I’m not one for taking chances. I live in the Shiga-Mintz Spindle, for pity’s sake.”
“I have to ask.”
“Why do you? I died. It’s a tragedy for me, that’s for sure. But it’s not the sort of thing I’d expect Panoply to expend much energy on. Aren’t you supposed to be making sure none of us commit voting fraud?”
“There’s that,” Dreyfus said, nodding slightly. “But it’s not the limit of our remit.” With a grunt of effort he pushed himself up from the bench, or rather its counterpart in the interview room. “If I’ve judged you right, Antal, you’ve told me the truth about yourself, to the limit of your knowledge.”
“I can see I’ve been a disappointment.”
“Not at all—we’re just getting started. This place, by the way—this simulation—we call it Necropolis.”
“And that’s supposed to help me?”
Dreyfus gestured across the lawn, where the gravelled path cut through a slot in the manicured hedge. “Follow the path. Look for an ornamental garden, a big lake, some terraces and pavilions. Sooner or later you’ll bump into some other people. They all know each other by now, and they all know why they’re here.”
Some dark realisation shadowed Bronner’s eyes.
“The same thing happened to them, didn’t it?”
The briefing was short, because Doctor Demikhov had already told them almost everything of significance. Sparver sat through it, toying with his spectacles as the neural scans and slices played across the tactical room’s walls, projected over dark varnished wood.
Bronner’s implants, what had been salvaged of them, resembled the mangled, blackened remains of space vehicles after a bad re-entry.
Dreyfus had not been present during the first conversation with the medical chief, but nothing Demikhov said seemed to surprise him. He just sat there, nodding sometimes, rarely bothering with a direct question. Gaston Clearmountain and Lillian Baudry listened stoically, offering the occasional clipped interjection.
Jane Aumonier said less than anyone, waiting until Demikhov was finished, out of the room and back to some other pressing business.
“If I’m going to draw a crumb of encouragement out of this whole unpleasantness, it’s that the protocol worked. The whiphound performed flawlessly, as did the cryogenic vessel.”
“The only weak link,” Gaston Clearmountain said, “was the prefect. Why did Ng take so damned long to reach him? She was already in the habitat.”
“She had to go back for the equipment,” Dreyfus said, mumbling out the words like a man on the edge of sleep.
“And whose bright idea was that?” Clearmountain asked.
“Yours,” said the brittle, stiff-backed Lillian Baudry, with a surprising lack of rancour. “You didn’t want routine activities hampered by prefects carrying around surplus equipment.”
Clearmountain gruffed out his disgruntlement. “She should still have been faster.”
“Grown wings, you mean?” Dreyfus speculated.
“I was with her on the link the whole time,” Sparver put in, before his boss inflamed an already tense discussion. “Ng was the best prefect we could have hoped to have on hand.”
“Whatever we learn from this episode,” Aumonier said, “we’re still left with essentially the same set of questions we had a couple of days ago. Tom: you’ve talked to the beta. Do you see any scope for progress?”
“Same story as the rest,” Dreyfus said after a moment’s reflection. “Surprised to be dead. Nothing in his declared background to explain the neural anoma
lies. I’ve already allowed him free interaction with the other betas.”
“Wise, Dreyfus?” asked Clearmountain.
“They’re dead,” Dreyfus said. “The least we can do is give them someone to talk to. Besides, we haven’t time to do things by the usual routine.”
Their collective gaze had shifted to the Solid Orrery. The ten thousand habitats were ten thousand tiny points of coloured light, glinting in shades of ruby, gold, emerald or topaz, each accorded a brightness in relation to the size of structure or population load it represented.
Eight of the habitats had been enlarged and elevated above the true orbital plane of the Glitter Band, so that their true shapes were apparent. These were the eight breakaway states—technically no longer within Panoply’s purview, but still a matter for consideration as far as Aumonier was concerned.
Then there were the others.
Fifty-four additional habitats, raised even further from the plane than the breakaway states. This had nothing to do with their physical locations in the Glitter Band, but everything to do with their recent significance to Panoply. There was, as yet, no overlap between the two sets of habitats. Of these, however, the fifty-fourth bore the characteristic shape of the Shiga-Mintz Spindle.
“Tom’s right,” Aumonier said, her level tone drawing a line under any criticism of Dreyfus’s methods. “The betas have a vested interest in helping us explain their deaths. The more they interact, the greater the chance that some common factor will come to light. It’s a slim hope, but the best we have.”
“Until the next death,” Dreyfus said. “Case fifty-five.”
Aumonier gave a slow nod. “Fortunately—or not, depending on your point of view—I doubt we’ll have long to wait.”
They were walking side by side, following the trail that skirted the biggest lake in this part of Necropolis. The woman next to Dreyfus was small and wiry with an acrobat’s muscle tone. Her hair was trimmed to a functional crop, emphasising the elfin structure of her facial bones. She wore a grey outfit of trousers and tunic, stitched with an interlocking design of white trees.
“It’s not that I don’t like your company,” she was saying. “But I’m starting to feel as if we’ve already been over this a hundred times.”
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