Elysium Fire

by Alastair Reynolds

  “Mister Dias,” Pell said. “Signal Panoply that we’re sending back the forensic imagery, as requested. We’ll make one close approach to that pole, run a deep-terrain scan, then reverse back out again. Mister Grolnick: hold at our current threat posture, and be ready to interdict any anti-collision measures.”

  Lady Jane had been in no hurry to explain the reasons for sending the cruiser back in again, but Sparver took it as read that there had been a shift in intelligence at Panoply’s end, necessitating a closer look at Lethe. He had explained the new orders to the prefects, and they had accepted the revised plan without question, taking it as read that no such order would have been issued without good reason.

  More than likely they would complete their deep scan, find there was nothing worth investigating, and be pulled back into the rescue operation—however well or badly that was going.

  Sparver returned to the flight deck, some small, distant voice in his head insisting that something, somewhere, was not entirely as it should have been, but Sparver reasoned that since very little had seemed right for several days, this disquiet was merely the new normal, and he had better start getting used to it.

  “I’m a little clearer about that access duct, sir,” Grolnick said. “It has to be an elevator shaft, something like that, so that you can dock as close to the centre of grav as possible.”

  “And that chamber?” Sparver asked. “What sort of gravity would they be feeling in there?”

  “Close enough to a gee as to make no difference, sir. Can’t be accidental. The whole geometry and spin of this rock is just right to provide a habitable volume under that pole.”

  Democratic Circus was holding station now, allowing Lethe to rotate under it. It only took three minutes for the rock to complete its spin, and after a few such cycles Pell said that the deep-terrain sensors had gathered as much information as was possible, given the layers of intervening rock.

  The interior chamber was roughly hemispherical, with a domed ceiling about a kilometre high, and a gently curving base about three kilometres in diameter. Surrounding this volume were layers of insulation and life-support management. The connecting thread came in at an offset angle, joining the chamber at its rim, rather than piercing the dome. At its other end, seven kilometres away, was a right-angled connection to a surface lock and docking emplacement.

  “We can just about resolve some interior features,” Pell said. “Enough to say that the chamber looks mostly empty, except for a structure near the middle of the floor. Could be almost anything: a ship, a building, a machine. It’s warm in there, though, and our best guess is that there’s some kind of atmosphere. Do you think they’d like us to dock and take a closer look?”

  Sparver opened a channel to Panoply and the Supreme Prefect. “Bancal here, ma’am. We think we’ve identified a way into Lethe, if you’d like us to conduct a meet-and-greet.”

  Her reply came back almost immediately. “Yes, we see your imagery, Bancal. Proceed with caution, but dock and investigate.”

  “Just a reminder that we don’t have tactical armament, ma’am—just armour and whiphounds.”

  “I’m sure you’ll use whatever is available to the best of your abilities, Bancal. If you run into difficulty, I shall be prompt in tasking assistance.”

  Sparver nodded to himself as he closed the connection, his qualms in no way dispelled by this latest communication with Jane Aumonier. He wished he knew her better: at least as well as he knew Dreyfus. Then he would have known if that paradoxical sense of interested detachment was in some way typical.

  “Well,” he said under his breath. “Orders are orders.”

  It was time to go back to the prefects and swallow his pride.

  Dreyfus, Thalia, Aumomier and the others watched from the tactical room as the cruiser dropped its forensic packages, then swung in close for what could only be a deep-terrain scan. Several more minutes passed, the cruiser maintaining communications silence, neither issuing transmissions nor responding to requests for a clarification of its actions.

  Then it swung away from its holding position, making a slow but unmistakable vector for one of the surface docks.

  “I could use that cutter,” Dreyfus said.

  “This isn’t the work of someone misconstruing an order or responding to changed conditions,” Aumonier said. “Pell’s acting as if he’s following a script, one order after another.” Then a dark intuition clouded her features. “Is it possible, Tom? Given what we know about Garlin and his brother—or don’t know—could either of them be using their Voi privileges to intercept our own signals and feed Pell false orders?”

  Dreyfus phrased his answer carefully, thinking how easily Aurora had already tricked and manipulated him, firstly by mimicking Aumonier and then by feeding him lies. “Pell can only be following false orders. I have to get out there and instruct him to stand down.”

  “It might be a little late for that,” Lillian Baudry said, casting a despairing glance at the Solid Orrery. “The new wave of cases isn’t easing off. If anything I believe we might be seeing a further steepening. We’ve had six threshold triggers in the last four minutes …”

  “Look on the bright side,” Clearmountain said. “At this rate the entire emergency will be over in less than a month.”

  “Because they’ll all be dead,” Aumonier answered. “That’s not my idea of a consolation, Gaston.” She coughed, straightened her spine, forced some final spark of authority and confidence back into her voice as she once again addressed the room. “We’ve still got a job to do here. I want a revised update on those clinical throughput estimates. It’s no good taking people into our custody if we can’t get their implants out for days to come. If you see a corner, cut it. We’re not striving for perfection.”

  “I’ll … see what we can do with the surgical throughput,” Clearmountain said.

  “Democratic Circus is on final docking approach,” Thalia said. “No weapons interdiction so far.”

  “We take our blessings where we can find them,” Baudry said.

  Dreyfus turned to Aumonier. “If the deaths are still spiking, that at least shows we were right to be interested in Lethe. Caleb’s in there, I’m sure. He’s aware of our presence and he’s sending a message.”

  “Not a very bright one, if he wants to avoid being found out,” Aumonier said.

  “He knows we know,” Dreyfus said. “Now he wants to make it very plain that we can’t use force against him—not while he has direct control of Wildfire.”

  “Ng had a theory, Tom,” Aumonier told him, nodding to Thalia. “It was about Julius, to begin with, but if she’s right it could just as easily apply to Caleb.”

  Thalia seemed reticent. “It’s just a theory, ma’am.”

  Dreyfus gave her an encouraging look.

  Thalia swallowed. “I wondered if whoever was behind this wasn’t causing Wildfire, but in some way actively suppressing it, with some sort of safeguarding signal. I know it’s difficult to imagine anyone doing that, but if half of what we know about Julius or Caleb is true … you see what it would mean, don’t you?”

  “Our isolation measures won’t make any difference,” Dreyfus said, the full and terrible implications of her idea opening up in his mind like some vast mansion. “Not just that, but we could easily be making things worse. And we can’t neutralise Caleb, even if we were sure he was the only one alive in Lethe.”

  “That’s my fear, sir.”

  Hestia Del Mar had risen from the table to join the gathering by the Solid Orrery. “This is the endgame Caleb’s always known would come. That’s why he’s so unconcerned about you discovering his location. He knows you can’t touch him—can’t even risk closing off his communications.”

  “You almost make it seem as if he’s guided us to this confrontation,” Aumonier said, with morbid amusement in her voice.

  “I think he has, all along. Dreyfus told me about the sequence of events in Addison-Lovelace, when the partition was flooded. I th
ought there was something odd about that whole drama even then and I’m even more certain of it now. You were being steered to the truth about the clinic, prodded into making the apparent connection to Devon Garlin. That was Caleb trying to goad you into a reckless over-reaction. But you did the one thing he wasn’t counting on. You showed restraint, good judgement, wisdom.”

  Aumonier almost blushed at this unexpected praise. “Unfortunately my supply of good judgement is running a little low.”

  “I don’t blame you. But the facts still apply. If Ng’s correct, and he stops sending the suppression signal, all the citizens on your list could be dead within the day.”

  “Then tell me how to get that cruiser to retreat.”

  Something chimed. Thalia lifted up her bracelet, spoke quietly to someone on the other end.

  “Thyssen, sir. By the time you get to the dock they’ll have that cutter ready for immediate departure. With an expedited burn you can be at Lethe in just under thirty minutes.”

  “There’s still not much chance of you reaching Pell in time to make any difference,” Aumonier said. “But if you think it worthwhile …”

  “I’d like to make an additional request,” Dreyfus said. “No one’s going to like it very much.”

  The prefects were visors-down and ready for immediate vacuum operations. As the cruiser completed its final approach, Sparver clambered up and down the aisle, offering such encouragement as he felt able to give.

  “We’ve mapped a route in, a shaft that will take us from the dock to what looks like a habitable volume. If there isn’t an elevator, it’ll be a clean drop. You’ll have a tactical overlay compiled from the deep-terrain scans.”

  “Will you be accompanying us, sir?” asked Kober.

  “I’ll be right behind you. I came without tactical armour, and the ship can’t fabricate me a set at short order. But it can give me an m-suit.”

  “You won’t be very well protected, sir,” said Gurney.

  “No, but if we do run into trouble I’ll have you to hide behind, won’t I?” Sparver had meant it as a joke, but the nervous silence that followed made him wonder if they took him at his word. “Now, let’s go over those whiphound settings one more time.”

  The ship jerked without warning. Sparver, weightless until that moment, slammed against the nearest wall. The surface softened itself just in time to make the impact painful, rather than bone-breaking. The prefects’ couches had swelled up to provide cushioning cocoons. The ship jerked again, and a series of clangs rained along the hull. An instant later Sparver felt a low, tooth-grinding vibration, which he knew to be the the cruiser’s rapid-deployment Gatling guns, giving back some part of whatever had just been dished out to the Democratic Circus.

  The return salvo lasted three seconds at the most. Then the ship was silent and still again.

  Sparver said: “Captain Pell. Anything I should know?”

  Pell’s voice sounded from the flight deck. “The closest ring of anti-collision guns took a disliking to us getting so close, Prefect Bancal. But we took them out before they managed to do much damage. Grolnick says we’re out of the sight-lines of any remaining hazards. Do you want to back off and deliver an asymmetric response?”

  “Tempted, Captain—sorely tempted. But Lady Jane gave us a job to do. Force us in if you have to, but complete the docking.”

  “Stand by,” Pell said.

  It was a jolting touchdown, by the standards he was used to, but Pell was taking no chances and if Sparver had asked him to ram their way into Lethe, he felt sure the captain would have obliged.

  With the attack neutralised, the prefects were released from their impact cocoons and able to continue checking their whiphounds and armour.

  Sparver went forward.

  “Docked and secure,” Pell said. “Standard airlock interface, green on all capture seals. You can stroll right in. We’ll hold at immediate departure readiness.”

  “Appreciate the show of solidarity, Captain, but I’d sooner you undocked and pulled out to a safe monitoring distance. Use your discretion regarding those remaining anti-collision defences. If you feel like neutralising them ahead of time, you won’t hear any complaints from me.”

  “I didn’t see you bringing tactical armour aboard,” Pell remarked.

  Sparver touched his forehead absent-mindedly. “Knew I was forgetting something. But you can stretch to an m-suit, can’t you?”

  “You know where the suitwall is. Go easy in there, all right? None of this is sitting right with me, not since we got those revised orders.”

  “We’re all a little on edge,” Sparver said. “Comes with the times.”

  While Pell double-checked the docking arrangements, Sparver stepped through the quickmatter membrane of the suitwall and allowed an m-suit to mould itself around him, forming to his contours and fashioning life-support, communications and navigation systems within itself like quick-growing organs. Parts grew transparent, parts grew opaque, parts hardened or formed flexible joints and detachable seams. A spray of status symbols fed across his faceplate.

  Sparver fixed two whiphounds onto the adhesive attachment points on the outside of the suit. He would have felt happier with something he could point and aim. But like the m-suit itself, the whiphounds would have to suffice.

  He met the four prefects in the staging area on this side of the lock, the m-suit automatically establishing a common communications protocol with the other suits.

  “Reading vacuum on the other side, sir,” said Perec, her stencilled name glowing gently against the dull black of her inert-matter armour.

  “I’m set,” Sparver said. “Proceed at your discretion, and be ready for surprises.”

  Kober had already opened the cruiser’s airlock, clamped tight against Lethe’s counterpart, with only a quickmatter membrane holding back the cruiser’s air. Sparver had been through several thousand similar locks and nothing here looked out of place or in any way remarkable. It was an old, sturdy and reliable design, exactly the sort of thing one would expect on a piece of mothballed real estate which might yet still have some capital value.

  Kober reached through the membrane and worked the other lock’s manual controls. After a second’s hesitation it opened, grinding back into a recessed slot.

  All was dark beyond it. Then sets of red striplights flickered on, revealing a cylindrical chamber more than large enough for the five of them, with a secondary door at the other end of it.

  “Whiphound,” Perec said.

  Singh unclipped her whiphound, keeping the tail retracted, and stretched her forearm through the membrane until she was able to give the whiphound a gentle lob into the space beyond. It sailed on like a rod-shaped miniature spacecraft, red eye blinking as it went into active scan and threat detection mode, a summary of its results appearing on Sparver’s visor.

  The whiphound bounced off the rear door, then came slowly to rest.

  “Clear,” Singh said.

  “Proceed,” Perec answered.

  When Dreyfus entered the interrogation room Devon Garlin and Balthasar Stasov were still facing each other across the lone table, Garlin shaking his head in response to some unheard query from the doctor. Stasov turned to meet Dreyfus, mirroring the other man’s gesture.

  “It’s no good. He just won’t admit remembering me.” Stasov’s eyes wandered back to the trawl, wheeled back into a corner of the room but still maintaining a threatening presence. “Do you propose to put him back under that thing?”

  “Do you think it would teach us very much, beyond his tolerance for pain?”

  “I rather doubt it.”

  Dreyfus moved around to Garlin and released his restraints. “That’s why I’m trying a different approach.”

  “What now?” Garlin asked. “Going back to the tried and true methods? A locked room and some time alone with me? I’ll spare you the trouble. You could break every bone in my body and I wouldn’t be able to give you the answers you want. About your stupid clinic, th
ese deaths, this man …”

  Dreyfus grabbed Garlin by the collar and with a grunt of effort hauled him to his feet. “I agree. You aren’t responsible. But Caleb is, and I need you to get me close to him.”

  “This brother of mine who doesn’t actually exist?”

  “We’ll find out soon enough.” Dreyfus shoved Garlin in the direction of the door, Garlin stumbling on unsteady legs before gaining his balance. He braced a hand against the mirrored partition, turned back with his head lowered and his eyes half shrouded.

  “Where are we going?”

  “Lethe. There’s a party of prefects already there, but I figure Caleb’s much more likely to negotiate with us if we bring along a human shield—especially if it’s his brother.”

  Garlin touched his swollen lip. “This isn’t going to end well for you, Dreyfus.”

  “I’d like to join you,” Doctor Stasov ventured, piping up in his high, quavering voice. “You’ll accept that I have a somewhat personal stake in the matter. His family ruined me and built a lie on my reputation. I’d very much like to see my story vindicated.”

  “If it’s true, you will,” Dreyfus said. “But I only have room for one passenger in the cutter. Besides, I’d be taking a civilian witness into a questionable situation.”

  “And I don’t count?” Garlin asked.

  “You’re a grey area,” Dreyfus said.

  The four prefects went through into the chamber. Singh recovered her whiphound. Kober examined the controls on the chamber’s far end. “Vacuum beyond here as well, sir,” he told Sparver. “But I think it’s safe for you to follow us through.”

  Sparver pushed through the membrane, much as he had done when going through the suitwall in the first place, except that its grab on him was slighter and the membrane was intelligent enough to know to leave his suit in place. His push carried him through on a slow, bending arc, until he landed and assumed a standing position next to the others.