Elysium Fire

by Alastair Reynolds

  They were nowhere near that loading today. There simply weren’t enough prefects to go around, and since the Democratic Circus had been functioning largely as a high-capacity taxi, there had been no need for more than a skeleton staff.

  Captain Pell welcomed Sparver aboard, offering him a firm handshake and an immediate offer of coffee. The whiskered Pell was a veteran of several crises, with a reputation for steadiness under pressure. Sparver and Dreyfus had worked with Pell during the Aurora emergency, and there was a mutual respect between the captain and the hyperpig.

  “The ship’s at your disposal, Field Bancal. We’re pretty much in the dark about this reassignment, though.”

  “If it’s any consolation they haven’t told me much either,” Sparver said, glugging down the bulb of coffee in one hit. “I’d like you to lock in a high-speed crossing to an object called Lethe. We’ll make a normal approach and stand-off just beyond the anti-collision volume.”

  “Are we likely to expect trouble, sir?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine, Captain Pell.” Sparver gave the man an encouraging pat on the shoulders. “But I’d stand ready to pop out those guns.”

  Pell took Sparver forward to the command deck, where the two other supernumerary operatives sat visored and gloved in acceleration couches. “This is Prefect Bancal. Prefect, these are operatives Grolnick and Dias,” Pell said, introducing the young woman and man wearing the visors. “We’re going to be taking a quick look-see at an object called Lethe.” Pell eased into his own seat and began conjuring navigation facets and tactile input surfaces, his hands and fingers moving with the effortless speed and precision of a master musician. “Minimum crossing time, military power, and an attack-readiness posture on final approach. Mister Dias: would you go back and instruct the prefects to secure for imminent gee loads?”

  “A question,” Sparver said. “How many are we carrying?”

  “Four fields, plus tactical armour and dual whiphounds. No sidearms, though. We don’t have dispensation, and even if it came in now we’d have to run back to Panoply to re-equip.”

  “Then let’s hope we don’t run into anything problematic,” Sparver said.

  The field trawl was an upright contraption mounted onto a horseshoe-shaped base, equipped with a swooping neck and a dome-shaped scanning helmet. Aumonier stepped aside as the technicians wheeled the cumbersome object along the bridge that led to the isolation cube.

  “And you can guarantee me he won’t be able to use this thing as a means to reach beyond Panoply?” Aumonier asked Tang.

  “I can’t make any such assurances, ma’am,” Tang replied, with the understandable annoyance of someone who had been asked a similar question at least half a dozen times in the last half-hour. “If the trawl can read Garlin, then there’s at least a chance that Garlin can push back. We’ve done what we can, though. If you were prepared to lower Garlin into a subconscious or semi-conscious state during the trawl …”

  “I need him awake and receptive,” Aumonier said. She gestured with the folder clamped between her fingers. “Wheel it through. The sooner we’re done with this the better.”

  Tang and the technicians propelled the trawl into the observation area of the triple-lined cube. Aumonier signalled for the bridge to be retracted. The trawl team began to power up their machine, studying a stream of data and graphics on a built-in screen with a privacy hood.

  Aumonier opened the partition door and went into Garlin’s interrogation area. He was still sitting with his arms resting on the table, staring up at her with a blunt, unyielding defiance.

  “This has gone beyond an infringement of my basic rights. You’ll be facing an interrogation of your own before long, Supreme Prefect.”

  “I’ve addressed the citizen quorum,” Aumonier said, placing the folder on the table and slipping into one of the two chairs facing Garlin. “They had grounds for concern over the conditions of your detention, and my refusal to allow them physical access.”

  “Then you admit you’ve crossed a line.”

  “I admit I’ve been forced into unusual measures. I was still able to persuade them that my position had merit. More than that, I was able to obtain permission to trawl you.”

  “Trawl as much as you like. You’ll find you’ve been persecuting an innocent man. Of course, I don’t doubt that you’ll bury that evidence, and then concoct something that incriminates me …”

  “I’m not in the business of concocting, Mister Garlin.” She turned around, nodded to the mirrored window.

  The trawl team wheeled the apparatus into the room. The humming machine gave off a faint tang of ozone.

  “Wait,” Garlin said, his façade beginning to crack. “It doesn’t work like this. You don’t just put someone’s head in that thing. They have to be prepared … their implants taken out, drugs administered …”

  “That’s normally the way,” Aumonier agreed, as the technicians eased the trawl into position, the two prongs of its base fitting either side of his chair. “And for good reason. Inductive heating can do a lot of damage. But then you’d know all about that sort of thing, wouldn’t you?”

  “You can’t do this to me.”

  “You’ve put me in this invidious position, Mister Garlin. I’m not digging for deep memories here, so we don’t have to go in at high-resolution. But I do need you to be fully conscious.” She lifted her head to the analysts. “Strap him down.”

  Garlin resisted, but she had expected as much and couldn’t swear that she would have been any more submissive in the same circumstances. Restraints were applied at his cuffs and elbows, and then the dome-shaped scanner was lowered down until it reached the level of his eyes.

  “Ready when you are,” Tang said.

  “Commence initial read.”

  The trawl’s hum intensified. Garlin tensed, his hands stiffening on the armrests.

  “Sub-cranial,” Tang reported, his eyes to the hooded screen. “Resolving bulk cortical structure.”

  “Stop now,” Garlin said.

  “Vocalisation will only confuse the read,” Aumonier said gently. “Better for you, and better for us, if you refrain from any utterances. We’ll be done much faster that way.” Carefully she opened the folder and slid out one of its chemically printed images, face down.

  “You showed me the people already,” Garlin said.

  “It’s not the faces I’m most interested in now. I don’t know how much contact you ever had with those victims. Perhaps you were always at one remove from them, even when you were operating the clinic.”

  “The what?”

  “Bloodflow normal. Synaptic firing strength normal. Resolving functional neural modules.”

  Aumonier flipped the image and presented it to Garlin, giving him no chance to avert his vision. It was a picture of Elysium Heights, captured by the Heavy Technical Squad only a couple of days earlier. She held the image for a few more seconds, studying his reactions, then placed it face down on the table and selected another from the folder. It was another recent view of the clinic, taken from a fresh angle and under different lighting conditions.

  “Is this supposed to mean something?” Garlin asked, still tense but fully able to speak.

  “I’m establishing your visual familiarity with this structure, Mister Garlin.”

  “I’ve never seen it before.”

  Aumonier offered a third view, this one a still frame from the thirty-five-second video fragment, showing the elevated view of the main lobby. “It doesn’t matter how you answer me. You may even think you don’t recognise this place. That’s entirely possible. Memories can be suppressed, deliberately or otherwise. Some of the targeted amnesia therapies are extremely effective, so I’ve heard. But the trawl sees beyond conscious recall. There’ll be traces lodged in your long-term memory.”

  “I think I’d know.”

  Aumonier presented the fourth and fifth images. They were further stills from the video, showing deeper areas of the clinic: waiting rooms, fri
endly staff, gleaming equipment.

  “Don’t glance away, Mister Garlin. If you resist the recognition test, I’ll just end up clamping open your eyelids.”

  She carried on with more images. By the eighth, she risked a glance at Tang, hoping for the clear signal he was meant to send if the trawl was picking up unambiguous evidence of deep-learned recognition. But Tang’s face was pensive, his frown deepening.

  Aumonier had been warned they might not pick anything up at the low settings. To be sure of a result—even a null result—they would have to push deeper into the brain structure, at a more fine-grained resolution setting. That would mean a higher risk of induced damage.

  She looked to her colleague.

  “Crank it up a little, Mister Tang.”

  Tang did as he was instructed. The humming grew more intense. Garlin clenched his hands on the seat rest, his jaw straining, the tendons in his neck beginning to stand out.

  “Stop,” he said, but with difficulty this time.

  “Work with me, Mister Garlin,” Aumonier answered, selecting another tranche of images, more pictures of the Wildfire victims. Perhaps he had never met any of them in person, but she would be a fool to pass up this chance to test him. She turned over the images one at a time, presenting the faces to the man under the trawl.

  By now Tang was giving her a tiny twitch of his head, signalling “no” for each instance.

  Aumonier had dropped three control images into the list of faces. One was Sister Catherine of the Ice Mendicants, but presented in civilian garb. The second was Constable Malkmus, again in full civilian clothing, and the third a randomly selected citizen known to have been present and visible during one of Garlin’s recent rallies.

  Aumonier interspersed these controls with more images of the Wildfire cases, including some of the citizens who had not yet succumbed. Tang found no clear traces of recognition, except when the controls were tested. Then he nodded at Aumonier, seemingly pleased that at last a result had been obtained. But she had deliberately not mentioned the control images to Tang.

  “Go deeper,” she told him.

  “He’ll feel it,” Tang replied quietly.

  “Go deeper.”

  Tang nodded peremptorily. “Increasing resolution. Inductance effects now exceeding safe threshold.”

  The trawl increased its humming. Garlin jolted in his restraints, his spine flexing. He let out a grunt of discomfort or shock, his nostrils flaring, his eyes still wide and alert as they met Aumonier’s. Something twitched in his cheek. A sweat bead ran down the side of his face. His breathing hastened to sharp, sawlike inhalations.

  Aumonier turned over a fresh image of Elysium Heights, presented it to the subject.

  “Maybe you can fool the machine, Garlin, but not me. You’ve got a breaking point. It’s just a question of finding it.”

  He straightened his jaw, made a strained guttural sound that only bore a distant, debased relationship to language. Aumonier had to struggle to assemble the noises into words.

  “Never … liked you. But thought … you were better … than this.”

  Still Tang was reporting an absence of recognition. She worked through some more pictures of the clinic, Garlin juddering now, a seizure-like tremor in his muscle tone. Tang was right to warn her that they had crossed the safe threshold. But there were margins of error. The trawl could be continued at this level for some while without risk of irreversible damage.

  But not indefinitely.

  She turned over another image. According to the label it was an interior shot, the inside of one of the elevators in the main lobby, with the clinic’s stylised motif of a lone white tree.

  Tang glanced at her.

  Recognition—a flicker of it at least.

  Sensing she was making progress, Aumonier moved to her trump card. It was a still frame of Doctor Julius Mazarin.

  “This man, Garlin. Do you see anything in his face that might ring a bell?”

  “I … don’t know who that … man is.”

  “Take a closer look,” Aumonier said.

  “You think it’s me. It isn’t me.” Garlin made a choking sound, forced out the rest of his words. “Not me. Someone else. Look at—”

  “Go deeper,” Aumonier said.

  17

  Sparver would have welcomed time to gather his thoughts ahead of their arrival at Lethe, but the Democratic Circus had only needed thirty minutes to complete its rapid dash through the Glitter Band, all civilian and non-emergency traffic re-routed to allow the heavy ship unrestricted passage. Sparver had spent most of the time back with the four prefects, giving them as much of a briefing as he felt able to.

  He leaned on a bulkhead, bracing himself as the cruiser commenced its bruising deceleration burn.

  “All I can tell you is that this came down from Lady Jane, and she’s acting on credible intelligence supplied by Tom Dreyfus. There’s a piece of rock that might relate to the Wildfire emergency. You’ve all got Pangolin clearance so I can tell you that this object belongs to the Voi family, and that fact alone ties it to Devon Garlin, presently a guest of ours. You can see what a powder keg this could be if it isn’t handled properly.”

  “Is this going to turn into an enforcement action, Prefect Bancal?” asked the most senior of the four, a Field Prefect named Dalia Perec. Like the others she was wearing full tactical vacuum armour, buckled into deceleration webbing, only her visor yet to be snapped down. Her name was stencilled onto the black skin of her suit, but Sparver knew her well enough from routine work in Panoply. She had fine angular eyebrows and very pale green eyes, surprisingly expressive for a baseline human.

  “Depends if we find anyone who needs enforcing, Dalia. Most likely there’ll be nothing there but dirt and stale air.”

  “But if we did run into trouble …” She made an open gesture with her palms. “We weren’t expecting to need sidearms on this operation, Prefect Bancal.”

  “And we might not have got them even if we’d asked, Dalia. But we’ve got the weapons on this ship, if anyone feels like proving a point.”

  “If there’s something we can stick to the Vois, I’m happy going in there naked,” said the prefect jammed in next to Dalia Perec. “Just give me a whiphound.”

  “We might not be going in at all,” Sparver told the eager young Field One, a recent promotion from Deputy Three by the name of Kober. “If the rock checks out, we’ll be back on rescue duty without ever touching vacuum.”

  “Is it true, sir, about Prefect Dreyfus?”

  Sparver turned to the questioner. It was the prefect sitting opposite Perec, on the other side of the cruiser’s aisle. “What did you hear, Prefect Singh?” he asked, reading the name stencil.

  “Only that it’s personal between Garlin and Dreyfus … I mean Prefect Dreyfus, sir.”

  Sparver tightened his grip on the bulkhead as the cruiser made a sharp course adjustment. He guessed they must be on the final approach, nosing up to the rock’s legally designated anti-collision volume. “Garlin made it personal. But all Dreyfus has ever done is execute his duty according to the rulebook. He didn’t go looking for this connection to the Voi family—it dropped into his hands.” Sparver studied the expressions—Perec, Kober, Singh and the fourth of them, Gurney—deciding that their reactions all fitted somewhere on the spectrum between doubtful and sceptical. “All right, I’m going forward to talk to Captain Pell. Maintain readiness.”

  The ship had become weightless by the time he pushed back into the command deck. Pell, Dias and Grolnick were whispering observations to each other, so quietly that it almost seemed there might be a risk of their words carrying across vacuum.

  A large area of the forward part of the flight deck had turned transparent, affording an excellent view of the nearby Lethe. It was an unremarkable-looking lump of cratered rock, muddy ochre in colour, fifteen kilometres across at its widest point, and about seven at its narrowest. It tumbled slowly, the elongated poles cartwheeling around once every three minute
s. Beyond it oozed a moving river of more distant rocks and habitats, and beyond that the half-shadowed face of Yellowstone.

  Sparver studied the rock wordlessly.

  “We’re standing off at seventy-five point five kilometres,” Pell said. “Just outside the nominal anti-collision threshold. So far we haven’t been scanned or signalled.”

  “Do you have any readings on the rock?”

  “Orbit’s regular, the spin stable.” Pell enlarged a schematic for Sparver’s benefit. “The surface is plastic-sheathed rock, for the most part. A scattering of docking points, airlocks and routine communications equipment: ownership beacons, transponders, and so on. Nothing you won’t find on a few hundred similar boulders.”

  “Then it’s just a dead lump of rock with some flags stuck into it?”

  “A bit more than flags,” Grolnick commented. “There’s a thermal excess, more than you’d expect if there was nothing going on inside it. Housekeeping systems of some kind, buried under the visible crust.”

  “Something must feed power to those transponders,” Dias said. “And correct the drift if the orbit starts deviating. But it’s not a large signature.”

  “Can you localise it?” Sparver asked.

  “Closer to one of those poles than the other,” Pell said, pointing to a pink smudge on one of the readouts. “Beyond that, we’re a little too far out for a detailed sub-surface scan.”

  Sparver rubbed his chin, debating whether or not to report back to Panoply before taking further action. On balance, he decided that Jane Aumonier probably had enough on her plate for the time being.

  “Take us in, Captain—not too fast, not too slow. And go to maximum weapons readiness.”

  Pell applied thrust again. The cruiser edged forward and an automated voice warned them that they were about to cross the anti-collision threshold.

  “We’ve been painted,” Pell said, noting that a proximity radar had picked up the cruiser.