Elysium Fire

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Perhaps Mister Garlin can shed some light on that,” Sparver said.

  “Panoply say to bring him in on the arrest order. We can take over from now, if you like?”

  “No,” Sparver said, fighting to his feet, and dragging Garlin halfway to standing in the process. “Mister Garlin and I will be just fine on our own.”

  Dreyfus was getting the hurry-up-and-wait treatment. They had stopped off at the offices of the Chamber for City Security, Hestia Del Mar going off to deal with some doubtless urgent administrative business, even though it was on his time, eating into his allotted thirteen hours.

  He accepted it stoically, gazing out of a window in an empty meeting room, conscious that Panoply probably put some of its own visitors through a similar process.

  Beyond the glass, Chasm City stretched away to the limits of vision, building after building receding into a twinkling, pearly haze. It was the densest urban concentration in human history, vastly larger and more populous than any of the habitats under his responsibility. The size of the place made the back of his neck tingle with a sort of anti-claustrophobia, his innate understanding of the right and proper scale of things constantly mocked and undermined in every direction that he stared. Habitats were contained, manageable. Their cities never had room to sprawl too far before meeting their own edges again. Even if the worst possible thing went wrong in a habitat, it was still just one among ten thousand. But this place was madness. It was a huge, humming, human machine spun up to berserk speed, just waiting to go wrong.

  He thought of Devon Garlin being born here, the son of one of the oldest, most influential and respected families, given the metaphorical keys to this city, all its promise and power at his fingertips.

  And still that wasn’t enough for you, you bastard?

  His bracelet chimed.

  “Dreyfus,” he said.

  “It’s Jane,” he heard. “I gather you’ve arrived. Are you making progress?”

  “They’re falling over themselves to help,” Dreyfus said.

  “Good.”

  “Good? I was being sarcastic.”

  “Fine, yes.” He picked up on the distracted edge in her voice. “I should have … look, something’s happened, and I feel you should know about it.”

  “To do with Garlin?”

  “Ng and Bancal got caught up in trouble in Fuxin-Nymburk. Garlin was in danger of being trampled and Ng took him into protective custody, but she got hurt in the process.”

  “Hurt?”

  “She made a human shield of herself. When Bancal made it back to her she was unconscious.”

  Dreyfus sifted through his emotions. Pride that Ng had acquitted herself selflessly. Resentment that he had not been allowed to be there in her place, with all his additional years of experience. Anger that Sparver had not done a better job of looking over her shoulder.

  “Why the hell wasn’t he with her to begin with?”

  “Don’t blame him. If anyone’s at fault it’s me, for not sending in a larger team.”

  Dreyfus made an effort to lower his voice. “Where is Thalia now?”

  “Under observation, being transported back to Panoply. They tell me she’s stable, but I daren’t count my blessings yet. We’ll throw the entire resources of the medical section at her when she comes in, but until then we can only hope for the best. It was a mess, Tom—worse than I anticipated. Garlin’s mob gained access to the polling core.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “It happened. And you’ve been the one telling me all along that Garlin wasn’t operating within the usual rules.”

  “I was hoping to be proved wrong, not right.”

  “Too late for that, I’m afraid. We have Garlin, at least. Barring a few bruises he got off lightly.”

  “At least you have reasonable grounds to detain and question him now.”

  “More than that. Something came in after you left—a definite link between Garlin and the clinic.”

  “It was definite enough as far as I was concerned.”

  “The rest of us needed a little more persuasion. Now we know Garlin was posing as Doctor Julius Mazarin, one of the clinic’s staff.”

  “He confessed to it, did he?”

  “No, he’s still putting up a façade of ignorance about the whole thing. What we have is a video fragment …”

  “Send it through to my goggles when you have a chance. But I’m not pinning all our hopes on fragments. No citizen quorum will sign off on an enforcement action on the basis of a video, no matter how incriminating.”

  “We’ll squeeze Garlin—he may crack any moment. In the meantime, continue your investigation of the Shell House.”

  Dreyfus glanced over his shoulder. “Just as soon as Hestia Del Mar finishes off her year-end tax returns, or whatever else is keeping her.”

  “I’m sure she’s a busy woman. Oh, and Tom?”

  “Yes?”

  “Another Wildfire case just came in. Make that our sixty-third victim.”

  “Sixty-sixth,” Dreyfus corrected her. “I just learned about three earlier cases.”

  “That doesn’t match … oh, wait. I see. Obvious in hindsight, I suppose, that Wildfire would show up on her watch, as well as mine.”

  “I believe you had a request for intelligence-sharing? Something about tracking down fugitives?”

  “Yes, I put Jirmal onto it. I couldn’t give her authorisation to use all available resources, though—especially not now. I just trusted that …”

  “The problem would go away, if we ignored it long enough?”

  “That’s a little unfair. Jirmal understood the request had to be treated with a realistic level of priority. Not ignored … not at all. But relegated, until we’re out of this mess.”

  “We’re not the only ones who could use a helping hand occasionally, Jane. We should have been more cooperative from the outset. I’m trying to rebuild some bridges now, although judging by Hestia’s warm and welcoming nature it might be a bit too late. Anyway, I’ve told her what we know about Wildfire, as little as it is.”

  “She doesn’t have Pangolin clearance.”

  “I’m aware of that. But just for once, I felt a little trust might not go amiss.”

  “All right,” she said, with grudging agreement. “It’s risky and I’ll probably regret it. But share with her as you see fit. And use your damned discretion, too—she doesn’t have to know everything. In the meantime I’ll attempt to make amends about her requests. You’ll have that feed on your goggles as soon as Tang sends it through.”

  “Thank you, Jane. Keep me informed about Thalia, will you?”

  “I will.”

  There was a cough from behind him as he signed off. He turned around to see Hestia Del Mar placing some items on the room’s bare table.

  “I was starting to worry you’d forgotten about me,” Dreyfus said.

  “It took a little longer than I anticipated to compile these summaries,” Del Mar answered, squaring up the little pile of dossiers she had created. “These are evidential packages relating to our three Wildfire cases. There are issues of witness confidentiality, so I had to make sure we weren’t in violation of our own rules, which meant omitting some of the testimonies. I also had to go up the chain of rank to get agreement, and not all my superiors were happy with the idea of sharing this knowledge in the light of Panoply’s recent intransigence.”

  “I … all right.” Dreyfus was momentarily flummoxed. “Thank you.”

  “Just as long as you didn’t think I was wasting your very precious time, Prefect.” She gave him a knowing look. “You may take these dossiers and examine them as you see fit. In the meantime the contents will be uplinked to Panoply for the eyes of Jane Aumonier and her tactical staff only.”

  “I did you a disservice,” Dreyfus said, reaching for the dossiers “I assumed—”

  “Later,” Del Mar said, flicking aside his apology with the disdain it merited.

  She had parked the volantor on
the roof. They returned to it, climbed in, then swooped off and dived hard. Del Mar had given the volantor a verbal instruction before, but now she was flying it on manual override, making effortless but precise inputs via its multi-mode joystick.

  Layer after layer of Chasm City rose up and stacked into a thickening, gridlike pattern overhead. The gold-stained daylight, which had seemed bright from the train, now turned brassy, then sepia, then a dim, effectless brown. Still the buildings’ roots plunged deeper. Concourses, shopping plazas, parks, woods, gardens, civic lakes, rose up and were swept into the dense complication overhead.

  “So, about your call from Panoply.”

  Dreyfus affected no surprise that he had been eavesdropped on. “What about it?”

  “Firstly, the obligatory sympathies concerning your injured colleague. I trust she makes a good recovery.”

  “So do I.”

  After a silence Del Mar said: “How could Garlin’s people get into the polling core so easily? Didn’t you have the place under some sort of lockdown?”

  “It failed. We don’t know why.”

  “Yet your boss made mention of Garlin operating beyond the usual rules.”

  Dreyfus sighed, debating with himself how candid he ought to be. It was one thing to share scraps of intelligence, another to voice unverified theories of his own.

  “I’ve been keeping an eye on him since he crawled out of the slime. There are things he can do, things he’s able to find out, that can’t be easily explained. Call them superhuman powers of omniscience and foresight.” He caught her sidelong expression, doubt shading into incredulity. “Nothing magical. I just think he’s able to use abstraction in a way that shouldn’t be possible. He can pick up on information patterns—detecting my presence in a crowd, for instance. But it goes beyond that. I think he just willed that lockdown to collapse. I’m not even sure he knows how he does it.”

  “And you have an explanation for these … capabilities?”

  “He’s a Voi. I think Devon Garlin must have been let in on a few family secrets.”

  “But to be so brazen about it … he must expect to be found out?”

  “He’s careful. There’s always an alternative explanation. If he spreads rumours about Wildfire, it’s only because he picked up on the gossip himself. If I bump into him, it’s just coincidence. But over time, the pattern becomes clear.”

  Gradually the last traces of daylight vanished and the only lighting sources were the artificial colours of neon signs, the busy, strident flickering of holographic adverts and slogans, the bright patterning of other vehicles and traffic lanes. Even though he was only along for the ride, Dreyfus felt a definite shift in the volantor’s flight characteristics as the air became heavier and more sluggish, humid with updraughts of steam.

  “And Wildfire—that’s his doing as well?”

  “The victims were tied to the clinic I mentioned. Now the Senior Prefect has found another connection.”

  “The video fragment she mentioned.”

  “I take it you’ve already had a good look?”

  “No—although I can, with your permission.”

  Dreyfus fished out his goggles. “I need these to view the recording.”

  “Ah, right—no implants. I’d almost forgotten how backward you people like to keep yourselves. But there’s no need for those clumsy things. We’ll watch it together.”

  A Panoply evidential docket summary appeared on the volantor’s console, followed by a lofty view of the inside of Elysium Heights, as it must have looked during its years of operation. They watched all thirty-five seconds of the recording in silence, Del Mar only occasionally flicking her attention back to the outside view, then played it back a couple of times.

  “It’s him,” Dreyfus said, after a moment or two of contemplation. “Twenty, thirty years ago, but definitely the same man. He could have shifted his appearance, used a completely different name, but he’s barely bothered with an alias, let alone a physical disguise.”

  “As if he’s playing a game with you,” Del Mar said. “Taunting you.”

  “Even though he wasn’t expecting us to find this fragment.”

  “Perhaps,” she said, making an equivocal sound. “All right, take it at face value. He used family money to set up this clinic, posed as one of its senior staff, and now the people who were treated there are starting to die in extremely unpleasant ways. That’s bad enough, but since you believe the Wildfire deaths to be deliberately engineered, I think there’s a question you’re not asking yourself.”

  “Which is?”

  “You might wonder what those people did to him in the first place.”

  Jane Aumonier requested the lock be cleared of all other staff when the corvette came in. It was somewhat against protocol, but then a great many things had been against protocol recently. She doubted one more infraction would matter.

  Sparver Bancal came out of the lock first, with Devon Garlin just behind him, his hands bound but with no other restraints applied. One side of Garlin’s face was cut and bruised, with dirt already ground into the wounds. A fat medical cuff had been clamped around his wrist. He had already been examined by medical specialists, but she would submit him to an extra round of analysis just to be absolutely safe. Regardless of her feelings about him, she was determined nothing bad should happen to Devon Garlin while he was her guest.

  “About Thalia—” Sparver began.

  “She’ll be taken straight to medical. I’ll have Demikhov attend to her personally, no matter how busy he is.”

  “I’m afraid we left you a bit of a mess to clean up.”

  “It was the best of a bad job, Bancal. You shouldn’t blame yourselves for what happened in there.” Garlin was floating just behind Sparver, drinking in this conversation, but Aumonier saw no call for anything but the most forthright honesty. “Now, I’ll take our guest off your hands, if I may.”

  “What will happen to him now?”

  “He’ll be interviewed.”

  “You’ve interviewed me once already,” Garlin said.

  “That was a friendly chat,” Aumonier said, delivering the coldest smile she could muster. “I told you not to make yourself my business again. What part of that wasn’t clear to you?”

  “I did nothing wrong.”

  “You can leave us now, Bancal. I’ll make sure Demikhov keeps you up to date.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “No need, Field Prefect.” She lingered over the rank, making it plain that his demotion had been rescinded; that he was now back to his former status of Field One. “I think we can consider that small lesson learned, can’t we? I suspect it was instructive for both of you.”

  “It was, ma’am … and thank you, again.”

  “Good. Drop some observations into a report, when you have time. I’ll value them.”

  “I shall, ma’am.”

  Sparver left the reception area, leaving her alone with Garlin. They floated a few metres apart, Garlin bound only at the hands and Aumonier weaponless. For a long while neither said anything. Garlin was bursting to come out with some indignation, Aumonier decided, some mendacious claim that his most fundamental rights had been violated. And yet, there was restraint as well. A certain calculation and shrewdness, despite the battering he had taken.

  “For the record,” Aumonier said, volunteering to break the silence, “Ng was sent in to give you protective custody. I was concerned that you’d stirred up emotions beyond your control. The constables couldn’t hold the line, and I was worried one of your many enemies might get close enough to do you harm. It appears I was entirely justified in those fears.”

  “She arrested me.”

  “Had you submitted to her offer of protective custody, there would have been no arrest—at least while Ng was acting under her original instructions. But you delayed matters, playing to your rabble. Ng knew she couldn’t stand by while you were inciting the crowd to attempt a takeover of the core. Despite that, she exercis
ed commendable restraint. But when those doors opened …”

  “That wasn’t my doing.”

  “I’m speaking. You were encouraging that mob to make a stampede for the core even while Chief Constable Malkmus’s lockdown was in force. You must have known that no such attempt could ever succeed if the lockdown held. But you persisted, demonstrating to me that you had prior knowledge that those doors would eventually open. Are you going to deny it?”

  “Is this an interrogation?”

  “No, that will follow. You’ll be cross-examined by my senior operatives. We’ll move to trawl you if I deem it necessary. But you can spare both of us a great deal of unpleasantness if you cooperate immediately. From the outset Dreyfus—”

  “Dreyfus,” Garlin said, with a disgusted sneer. “Didn’t you learn to disregard his stupid fantasies?”

  “I should have listened to him sooner. Dreyfus was convinced all along that you were operating with advantageous knowledge and capabilities: information and insights that shouldn’t have been yours to have. You know about our crisis, and you’ve been stoking fears, knowing how well it will play into your breakaway movement.”

  “That’s paranoid conspiracy-mongering.”

  “Dreyfus isn’t prone to that sort of thing. Besides, our investigations have turned up a direct and damning connection between you and our emergency.”

  He studied her with new interest, surprise and suspicion mingling on his face. “Whatever you think you’ve found, Aumonier …”

  “We have a legal link between your family and a clinic tied to the Wildfire cases. That’s proven, and damning enough on its own terms. But we also know about your other identity: Doctor Julius Mazarin, evidently high up in the running of the clinic.”

  “I don’t even …”

  “Don’t even what?”

  He swallowed. “You’re spouting nonsense. There’s no clinic, and that name means nothing to me.”

  “We have the evidence, Mister Garlin. Very shortly I expect to have even more.”

  Something of her certainty must have penetrated his own sense of imperviousness.