Elysium Fire

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Is this your robot?” Del Mar called out. “Answer me.”

  “You’re in no position to be demanding answers from anyone,” the figure called back, voice creaking with age.

  Dreyfus continued staring. The man was hooded and gowned in black, no part of his face yet visible. He walked with a stoop, but there was also a boldness in the way he placed the stick, as if he had been using it for so long that it had become fully part of him. The robot tracked him with its blue eye, but clearly it had decided to tolerate the man’s presence.

  “I am Detective-Marshal Del Mar of the Chamber for City Security. We are being detained here against our will. This is a serious crime.”

  “And your accomplice?”

  Dreyfus answered for himself. “I’m an operative of Panoply, here as a guest of Detective-Marshal Del Mar. I’m investigating a series of deaths that have a link to this estate.”

  “Your authority begins and ends in orbit, Prefect. Here you’re nothing. You didn’t even tell me your name.”

  “You didn’t tell me yours.”

  The figure worked its way around the debris piles, glancing up at the ceiling as if it might crash down at any moment. Dreyfus caught a glimpse of a sharp, pale face, with eyes like thumb-holes. “My name needn’t concern you.”

  “I think it does,” Dreyfus said. He made to push himself up from the ground and the robot lurched forward threateningly.

  The man waved the stick at the machine. “He may stand, Lurcher. As may the woman. But don’t allow them to leave.”

  “Who are you?” Dreyfus asked, feeling it couldn’t hurt to ask again.

  “I know who you are,” Del Mar said in a low, confiding tone. “The doctor. The family physician. It’s you, isn’t it? Doctor … something. Strelnikov. Stresov.”

  “Stasov,” the man answered. “Doctor Balthasar Stasov. How well you remember me, Detective-Marshal, for all my troubles. How well I lodged in your memory.”

  “You know this man?” Dreyfus asked.

  “The former employee I mentioned? This is him. Dismissed from service due to some form of gross professional misconduct. After Aliya died he was interviewed as part of the routine investigation surrounding her death.”

  “Tell the man I was innocent of any wrongdoing in that matter, Detective-Marshal.”

  She sighed. “He’d left the service before she died, so there was no suggestion he was involved in her murder. Naturally, he was interviewed in the aftermath of her death. The files say that he was tight-lipped, but otherwise cooperative. Vouched for the family, gave credence to Marlon’s account of the accident—said she’d often gone away on business, and was prone to cutting corners when she was in a hurry to get back home. The case was closed soon after.”

  “But you reviewed it.”

  “He came back to us, years later. Wanted to change his story. That’s when he crossed my path; why I looked into the older files. He wasn’t credible, though. His new story didn’t make any sense.”

  “Don’t feel you have to spare my feelings, Detective-Marshal. Tell him what you really thought of me.”

  “You were a broken man, Doctor Stasov. Ruined. Your reputation had been fragile to begin with—it was hardly a glittering career. The family took you on out of charity, hoping to give you a second chance. Then they had to dismiss you. You’ve been nursing your resentment ever since, desperate to get back at the Vois.”

  “Is it true that you were dismissed?” Dreyfus asked.

  The hood slid from Doctor Stasov’s head. He was bald; his skin waxlike; his eyes two dark, unblinking voids; his lips colourless; his mouth a black gash. His face contained a great many vertical wrinkles, his cheeks like drawn curtains.

  “I made an error,” Doctor Stasov said. “I attempted to learn the location of the Shell House.”

  “You were in the service of the Voi family,” Dreyfus said, confused. “How could you not know where you were?”

  “Things were never as they appeared, Prefect,” Stasov answered. “Not to begin with, and even less so as time went on.”

  15

  Sparver was called into the tactical room. He took his seat next to the one normally occupied by Thalia, and swept his eyes around the assembled gathering, trying to judge the mood. The atmosphere was expectant, a nervous energy present despite the obvious tiredness of the prefects and analysts. The Seniors were leaning over to the analysts, whispering exchanges, tapping fingers at scrolling lists, mouthing agreement or framing careful queries. Gaston Clearmountain and Jane Aumonier were studying the same compad, trading clipped observations. Lillian Baudry was talking to someone via a microphone and earpiece, nodding in quiet, frowning concentration. Over in the room’s left-hand corner, the Solid Orrery was in an unusually complex configuration, bristling with numerous enlarged habitats and dense thickets of annotation, the whole thing knotted in a mad tangle of orbits and trajectories. Mildred Dosso and Robert Tang were standing next to it with their backs to the table, engaged in a deft display of dual-conjuring.

  “Ah, Bancal,” Aumonier said, finally noticing his presence. “Someone close the doors, please.”

  “Has Garlin cracked?” Sparver asked, trying to uncover the reason for the heightened atmosphere.

  “No, not yet. I’m putting him through a series of soft interviews, trying to root out inconsistencies. Claudette and Miles are with him at the moment. We’ll go harder soon, but I want to know where his weak points are first. Oh, this is yours, I think.” She reached down for something beneath the table, rolling his whiphound across to him. “You misplaced it, I gather. Normally that would be a disciplinary matter, but …” Aumonier gave him the tiniest nod, the slightest forgiving smile. “You won’t make a habit of it, will you?”

  Sparver took the whiphound and clipped it to his belt.

  “I got it out of my system, ma’am.”

  “Good. I believe you may have helped get it out of one or two other systems as well.”

  Assuming this was an end to the matter, and the reason for his summoning, Sparver made to leave.

  “Wait,” Aumonier said, raising her hand. “You’re still needed. We’re all still needed. We have the opening we’ve been hoping for, Bancal. A breakthrough from the team at Elysium Heights.” She glanced down, some urgent new report or analysis showing on the table. “Would you brief him, Ingvar?”

  Ingvar Tench cleared her throat. “Does Bancal know about the link to Julius Mazarin?”

  “Julius who?” Sparver asked.

  “An apparent alias of Julius Devon Garlin Voi, when he was involved in the operation of the clinic. We have a video fragment, a sort of sales document. All the implications are that Garlin was a senior figure in the clinic, more than likely the head of operations if not the owner of the clinic itself. Of course he denies the connection.”

  Sparver frowned. “Wouldn’t we know if he was running around operating a clinic?”

  “The recording could be thirty or more years old,” Tench answered. “Garlin wasn’t a public figure then, and under the terms of provision of the Common Articles his movements aren’t on record. Other than financing the clinic, and monitoring its operation, his day-to-day involvement needn’t have been close, anyway.”

  “Then why risk blowing his secrecy by appearing in a sales document?” Sparver asked.

  “He was trading under the alias, and his clients wouldn’t have had any a priori reason to suspect a link to the Voi family,” Tench said. “In any case, whoever mothballed the clinic must have thought they’d covered all their tracks pretty thoroughly. As they did, apart from this fragment and the patient list …”

  “Which is corrupted to the point of uselessness,” Sparver said.

  “Was,” Tench replied. “It seems the technicals overlooked an intact record during their initial search. It came to light a little over an hour ago, giving us just enough time to begin adjusting our response strategy.”

  “They overlooked something? That’s not like them.” />
  “Something about a search algorithm hitting some memory threshold, and then it cleared.”

  Sparver nodded, accepting this at face value, even though it struck him as highly uncharacteristic of the Heavy Technical Squad to have allowed such an oversight, no matter the technical reasons.

  “I have a question. How many names are there?”

  “One thousand, nine hundred and thirty-one,” Tench said. “But some have died by other means, and some have either left the system or vanished to the margins. That leaves one thousand, seven hundred and fifteen citizens who are still alive, still within the vicinity of Yellowstone and the Glitter Band, still walking around. Eighty-five are believed to be within Chasm City or one of the outlying settlements. That leaves sixteen hundred and thirty citizens on our immediate watch, sprinkled more or less randomly around the ten thousand.”

  Sparver understood the reason for the Solid Orrery’s unusual configuration. It was undoubtedly showing the present locations of those citizens, and the habitats they were in.

  He thought of them going about their daily lives at this very moment, sleeping or awake, busy or idle, each utterly unaware that they had become the subject of Panoply’s immediate and pressing interest.

  “Can we get to them?” he asked.

  “That’s what we’re evaluating,” Tench answered. “Supreme Prefect—you’ve seen the most recent coordination plans.”

  “Yes, Ingvar,” Aumonier said, looking up from her readouts. “Our aim is to secure each of those citizens as quickly as possible. We’re liaising with local constables as I speak—where possible they’ll approach and isolate the citizens, without causing undue distress. Meanwhile, medical functionaries are being placed on immediate standing alert, and tasked into areas close to the citizens. Our threshold triggers will maintain their vigilance. The medicals will be ready to intervene if any of the citizens show signs of imminent Wildfire.” The lines around her mouth tightened. “Of course, beyond cutting their heads off there isn’t a lot they can do …”

  “But we have other options,” said Gaston Clearmountain. “Priority number one, after the citizens are located, will be to screen their implants for outside influence. Abstraction services will be reduced to emergency levels in the relevant habitats, turned off completely in some instances, and that may help a little. But we can’t rely on that as a solution.”

  “Why not?” Sparver asked.

  “You saw it yourself, Bancal,” Aumonier said. “The lockdown failed in Fuxin-Nymburk. That means we can’t depend on absolute control of abstraction or polling services. Even if we thought we had a block in place, a hidden signal might still be able to slip through. What’s required is some form of physical barrier.”

  “Some of the habitats already have the means to establish isolation cages,” Clearmountain said. “Where they are lacking—or can’t be manufactured in a useful time—the citizens will be moved to other habitats or conveyed to our own facilities. Estimates suggest we can move to isolate around six to seven hundred citizens within the next thirteen hours, with the rest following over another twenty-six. That buys us a little time—maybe as much as we need. But it’s only a temporary measure until we can get in and disable those implants. Again, medical functionaries are being tasked to lay the necessary groundwork. Our powers also allow us to requisition civilian surgical facilities, and to delay any non-essential procedures while we clear the backlog.”

  “And all of this without causing a panic?” Sparver asked, raising a sceptical brow.

  “It’s all but unavoidable now,” Aumonier said. “But I have one advantage I lacked before: now I know the exact scope of our problem. If we act firmly, and efficiently, we can declare the crisis contained and neutralised almost as soon as the panic breaks. The people will see it, too. I have a duty to protect them from undue distress, but ultimately I believe in their reasonableness.”

  “I do like an optimist,” Sparver said.

  Thalia had the sense he had been watching her for a while before she became fully aware of his presence. She waited for her eyes to find focus, and when that failed to happen she made to touch her forehead, wondering why her skull felt as if it had swollen to the size of a balloon, monstrous and throbbing and huge, the rest of her no more than a limp, useless appendage.

  “Easy, Prefect Ng.”

  She made to speak and nothing came out except a senseless guttural croak. Sparver’s still-blurred form reached out to a steely, skeletal thing that might possibly have been a trolley or bedside table, and then he was pressing a stiff white surface to her lips, a gesture which struck her as both surreal and unwarranted until she realised it was a cup and she was expected to drink from it.

  “You can nod for the time being,” Sparver said. “Demikhov says he’s spoken to you a couple of times, but you were groggy on both occasions and he’s not sure how much sunk in.”

  She had to work hard to puzzle his words into a form she could understand. It was as if he spoke a twisty, difficult language that she had once studied and then allowed to grow rusty.

  “Mm …”

  “Just nod, Thalia.” Sparver watched her reaction. “You were as close to being dead as most of us get before the big day. But you got us Garlin. He came in with hardly a scratch on him.”

  With a substantial effort of will she placed these jumbled facts onto the murky, fog-shrouded terrain which she knew to represent the larger picture. Garlin, the breakaway movement, the clinic, the polling cores. She remembered crowds and shouting. She remembered whiphounds and glass doors. She remembered walking around with someone’s head in a box.

  “What …” she started again.

  “Garlin’s here. Aumonier’s putting the slow squeeze on him. He can’t weasel out now, not after what happened in Fuxin-Nymburk. Not sure I’d have believed it myself, if I hadn’t been there, but I saw that lockdown fail with my own eyes and things like that just don’t happen.”

  “Sparver.” She forced his name out, a minor miracle, and took more of the water, cradling the cup with her own fingers. “I feel a mess.”

  “Concussion. I think a skull fracture, too. But beyond that you got off lightly. I mean, not that I’d call those bruises nothing, but …”

  “And you?”

  “I’m all right. Got knocked out, too, but only for a minute or two. I wanted to see you now because I’m going back out again.”

  “Didn’t we both do enough?”

  “It’s not as unjust as it sounds. I’ve had some rest, got one or two things off my chest, and now I’m ready to finish this off. Did Demikhov mention the names?”

  “I don’t even remember Demikhov speaking to me.”

  “We have the remaining Wildfire cases—all the citizens who are ever going to pop. Now it’s just a question of rounding them up and defusing them. It’s all hands on deck. They’re giving me a cutter and a list of targets, and I expect it’ll keep me busy for at least another thirteen hours. I just wanted to drop by now, while they’re turning the ship around.”

  “Is it safe work?”

  “Compared to our last couple of assignments? A walk in the park. The constables and medics are rushing around trying to pin down the citizens. All I need to do is ship them back here as quickly as I can.”

  “I’d come with you if I could.”

  “You’ve earned an exemption on this one, Ng.”

  Something floated up from the base of her memory. “Are you still … what I mean to say, are you working for me, or am I working for you?”

  “I got my rank reinstated.”

  “I’m glad. It should never have happened the way it did.”

  “Well, don’t cut yourself about it too much. A sudden reversal of roles, like that … it was bound to be difficult.”

  “I meant your demotion. That’s what I mean should never have happened.”

  “Of course.” Sparver shifted. “I’m glad you’re going to be all right. I don’t have too many friends in this place—need to
take care of the ones I do have.”

  She studied his face, lingering over the strangeness in it, but also the humanity, reminding herself of the times when he had shown her loyalty and support, even when he had borne some cost to that support. A true colleague, in other words, but more than that. A friend she had turned to more than once and knew she would have cause to rely on in the future.

  “I … feel the same way.”

  “I’m glad. That would have been a hell of an awkward speech if it turned out you couldn’t stand the sight of me.”

  She managed a laugh.

  “Thank you for dropping by. You didn’t have to, and I appreciate it. Have you heard from Dreyfus?”

  “No, he’s still down in Chasm City trying to find some more dirt to shovel onto Garlin’s reputation. Not that we need it now. We’ve got the patient list, and we’ve got a younger Garlin showing up under an alias in the clinic itself.” Sparver tightened his belt, making a quick patting inventory of his equipment. “He’ll crack sooner or later. Then it’s just a question of making him stop the deaths.”

  “Do you think he’ll give in so easily?”

  “He’s got some fight in him still. But maybe not as much as he did before that mob trampled his smirking face into the dirt.”

  Thalia nodded, her thoughts still foggy, but something nagging at her with the odd and troubling insistence that often came with waking to a half-glimpsed connection, some clue or link furnished by her unconscious link.

  “Sparver, will you do me a favour?”

  “Only if it’s the sort that doesn’t get me into trouble again.”

  “I don’t think they’ll let me have a compad in here, not when I’m supposed to be resting. But I’ve still got Pangolin clearance and I want to see the files on the Terzet Friller death again.”

  “It was open and shut—or as open and shut as any of the Wildfire deaths. Wasn’t it?”

  She gave him her best pleading look.