Elysium Fire

by Alastair Reynolds

  “It was an accident?” Dreyfus asked, while Caleb drooled and groaned, thrashing along the length of his body. He placed a hand on him, trying to find a way to offer comfort.

  “No—not an accident at all. He reached into my head, just as I’m reaching into his now. He altered my visual field. Made me see a cat, instead of our mother. Made me take aim, as if were still playing one of his hunting games. Made me drop the cat. I was pleased, for a second or two. I was always trying to impress him. Then we went over to see the body, and I saw what I had done. I killed her. But it was his idea, his intention.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dreyfus said, looking up from the writhing form. “But this won’t make it any better. Let him go.”

  “Stop it,” Singh said, pleadingly. “Whatever he did, it doesn’t excuse …”

  A rumble ran through the ground.

  Julius, distracted for an instant, turned back to the Shell House. Something between surprise and admiration played across his features. “Did you feel that, Dreyfus? It was the escape capsule, departing Lethe.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Dreyfus said.

  “Your man … your pig. I presented him with a choice—a simple one. I’m more than a little surprised he took the path he did, though. If I’m being honest with myself, I was convinced he’d hold on to his principles to the end. Even if it meant dying, and surrendering any means of contacting your organisation. That vibration we just felt was the escape shaft blowing out, allowing the capsule to fall away from Lethe. It could only have happened if your colleague was prepared to commit murder to save his own skin.”

  “Sparver wouldn’t have done that,” Dreyfus said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because he’s not a piece of self-interested dirt. Because he’s my friend. Because he’s a prefect.”

  “Oh, don’t be too sure. People will do all sorts of things in extremis. And I really did stress to him that it was only a small murder, in the great scheme of things.”

  Behind Julius, a figure emerged into daylight from the Shell House. It was Sparver, his hands lathered in blood all the way to the elbows. Dreyfus watched, glad that his colleague was alive, but that gladness tempered by thoughts of exactly what had transpired below.

  Casually, Sparver allowed some small glinting thing to drop from his hand.

  “You got me wrong,” he said, calling to the brother who had his back to the house. “You needn’t have troubled yourself, Julius. You see, it wasn’t a question of whether or not to murder your father. That was secondary. To me, it was all about evidential preservation.”

  Julius bent round, distracted by this unexpected development, shaking his head as if he meant to teach Sparver a lesson in manners.

  “What?”

  “I killed him, just like you wanted me to. But only so I could stuff his body into that capsule. It’s out there now, and it’s my guess it won’t be more than a few minutes before someone from Panoply reaches it, cracks it open and realises what’s inside.”

  “You put Marlon in that thing?” Dreyfus asked.

  “Yes,” Sparver answered. “He’d been kept alive in the basement. I had to kill him to get him out of here, but I did so in the reasonable expectation of emergency intervention.”

  Dreyfus nodded. “Good work.”

  “One other thing,” Sparver said. “There’s a fusion reactor set to blow. We don’t have too long.”

  “Did you get word to Panoply?”

  Sparver glanced down at his hands again, as if only just noticing the degree to which they were bloodied. “I did my best, boss. Scratched out a message. Trouble is, I only had one thing to scratch it on.”

  “No!” Julius raged.

  Then an odd, grimacing look took hold on his face. He twisted back to address Dreyfus and Singh, his mouth twitching but no sounds emerging.

  Now it was his turn to buckle at the knees, sinking to the ground, his eyes bulging obscenely large and white in their sockets.

  Caleb had stopped writhing. He had seen his opportunity and snatched it. Now he pressed himself up by an elbow, and with the other hand reached out in a beseeching gesture that reminded Dreyfus of the outstretched hand of Adam, in a painting he had once seen. Julius toppled back, squirming under the mounting neural assault from his brother. Caleb, regaining confidence and authority, propped himself up on his knees and then rose shakily to his feet.

  “Don’t kill him,” Dreyfus urged. “We need him to keep those people alive.”

  Caleb adopted a wide stance, loosening his shoulders and neck like a man preparing for a brawl. He was still reaching out, still inflicting some dreadful punishment on Julius. Then, with his other hand—carelessly, as if it cost him no effort at all—he gestured at the upper levels of the Shell House. Instantly the quickmatter lost coherence, sluicing away in white cataracts. Caleb steered his hand, the play of his fingers like a virtuoso, conjuring more and more of the upper layers to collapse away. The house was melting. No, Dreyfus corrected himself: that wasn’t it, exactly. It was more as if the house were a form made from liquid, caught in a snapshot, and now time had been allowed to advance. But selectively, only where Caleb gestured.

  Perhaps the show of skill was a little too cocksure, for all of a sudden Julius seemed to shake loose of Caleb’s attack. He stumbled to his feet, one hand at his throat, the other shaping a conjuring gesture in the direction of Caleb. Caleb staggered back, his aim awry and causing him to conjure a black smear in the sky.

  Julius regained some of his composure. He opened his fists, and some of the white detritus of the Shell House veered from its cataracting course and flowed into his hands. He gathered and balled it like dough. The quickmatter shaped itself into jagged, lightning-like forms, and Julius hurled them at his brother. Caleb rolled aside in time to avoid the first of the strikes, but not the second. It caught him in the thigh, and he let out a scream composed as much of anguish as it was pain. Glancing away from Julius, he shaped a conjuring gesture and turned the impaling form to black smoke. It curdled away from his leg, but left a coin-sized wound behind.

  Enraged, Caleb swept a hand across a swathe of the jungle, where it pressed nearest to the Shell House. The organic forms withered under the force of the gesture, turning black and then shrinking and shrivelling. With these dramatic conjurations of quickmatter came an electric tingle in the air, as well as a warm, unsettled wind, as air molecules were caught up in the crash and flow of matter. Dreyfus glanced at Sparver, questions piling up in his head.

  “How long do we have?”

  “Less than thirty minutes.” Sparver reconsidered. “A lot less. Twelve, fifteen if we’re lucky.”

  Beneath their feet, the ground was shaking. Some process of self-sustaining collapse had now taken hold within the architecture of the Shell House, for the building was continuing to dismantle itself regardless of Caleb’s direct instructions. Something similar was at play in the jungle, too. It was dying back—reverting to the condition of primal, unshaped quickmatter. Dreyfus watched, mesmerised, as a patch of jungle opened up long enough to permit him a view of two black cats, melting like candles.

  “It’s no good,” Dreyfus said. “The elevator went dead after we arrived.”

  “I might be able to get back up the shaft on power assist, sir,” Singh said.

  “I’m sorry, Deepa. There just isn’t time.”

  The disappointment he read in her expression cut him to the marrow.

  “That’s not what you said before, sir, about never giving up. You said we never get to decide when it’s too late. But those were just words, weren’t they, to get me moving? You didn’t really mean them.”

  “I meant them,” Dreyfus said softly. “But I also know when we’ve lost.”

  “No,” said a voice, speaking for the first time since the brothers had commenced their struggle. “It’s not over yet, Dreyfus. I can hold him.”

  It was Caleb, standing again now, glancing down at the wound in his thigh then dismissing
it as if it were no more consequential than a graze, walking with a limping gait towards Julius, who was also standing but had something like fear showing in his eyes as he took a step backwards, closer to the last, diminishing traces of the Shell House.

  “You can’t beat me,” Julius shouted, a strangled quality to his voice. “Once, maybe. But not since then. I learned too well from you, brother.”

  Overhead, where it had been wounded, the sky rained curtains of black mist. Slowly that black rot was eating away the blue, turning the brightness of day to an oppressive dusk.

  “I know what you are,” Caleb said, reaching out again with both hands, a gesture that might almost have been one of embrace, except that the brothers were still six or seven metres apart. “It wasn’t enough for you, was it? You lived and breathed quickmatter. You could do wonders with it, judging by this place. But you couldn’t resist the final step. It’s in you. I can sense it.”

  “No,” Julius said.

  But something unsettling was happening to Julius. He was blurring at the edges, a fine smoke coming off him, breezing away on the shifting winds. The ground shook under Dreyfus, nearly throwing him off his feet, and every instinct in his body screamed for him to run, to find some illusion of shelter, no matter how pointless it might prove.

  “Boss,” Sparver said, pointing at something beyond Dreyfus’s line of sight.

  The brothers stumbled near each other. It was as if each were walking into a gale, being pushed apart, yet both determined to overpower that opposing force, seeking some final connection. Julius was growing more tenuous: he was losing body mass, a much thinner and frailer human core beginning to show through as successive layers of quickmatter peeled off him, forming a buzzy, indeterminate cloud above the siblings. The battle was not yet done. Caleb was continuing his dismantling attack on Julius, yet some of the liberated quickmatter was being drawn to Caleb now, clotting itself onto his body, and he twisted and pawed at it, convincing Dreyfus that Julius was not yet done.

  “Prefect Dreyfus!” said Singh, and at last he snapped his gaze from the confrontation, realising what Sparver had been trying to tell him, and what Singh had now noticed for herself. The ground was shaking for a reason, and if some part of that was due to the battle between the brothers, it was not the sole explanation.

  Machines were breaking through into the chamber.

  There were three points of emergence that Dreyfus could see, scattered around the border of the Shell House. Sharp, scissoring mandibles were pushing through the last layers of rock and soil which formed the bedrock of the chamber, accompanied by the hum and flash of energy tools, until at last the machines were able to shrug their low, sleek, multi-limbed bodies out of the ground, flopping onto the sides of the newly excavated holes. More machines followed the first trio, at least a dozen of the quick, beetle-like forms for each point of entry. Dreyfus tried to feel relieved at this sudden intervention, but he couldn’t suppress the prickle of disquiet he felt at the emergence of the machines. Unless he was mistaken, he recognised them.

  They were weevils. Military-grade assault robots, equipped with the means to cut through the fabric of a habitat, gaining entry to the soft, vulnerable core within. There, weevils could work all sorts of havoc. And they had, not too long ago. Dreyfus knew far too much about weevils, and he had not counted on seeing them again.

  Yet here they were. Not running wild, though, but turning inert once the chamber had been breached. And there was something else worth noting, too. On the side of each weevil, glowing in silver, was the raised gauntlet of Panoply.

  “What are they?” Singh asked.

  “Someone’s bad idea,” Dreyfus answered, drawing no judgements for the moment.

  Then something else came out of the nearest excavated shaft. It flung itself into the air, landed deftly and settled on its traction coil, the red eye of its head sweeping the chamber.

  Then another.

  Then another.

  Whiphounds were bursting out of the ground like the fruit of some strange new harvest. They were obviously under a variety of orders. Some held station, some formed into cordons, some went scouting off at high speed. Still more came.

  Then a head popped out of the nearest hole. It wore the black tactical armour of a Panoply enforcement squad. The figure scrambled onto the level ground, then reached down to assist a second member of the squad. Then a third. A similar process was happening at the other entry points, prefects emerging in growing numbers, some of them carrying whiphounds, some with heavier armaments.

  The ground was still shaking, but not as badly as before. The sky had stopped curtaining, and the jungle had withered back to a final, unchanging core of dormant quickmatter. The air was quieter. Distracted as he had been by the arrival of the weevils, Dreyfus realised he had taken his eyes off the brothers.

  But now there was only one. A figure lay on the ground, surrounded by a lingering haze of dark particles, a nimbus of still-active quickmatter.

  The first prefect who had emerged strode up to Dreyfus, raising the visor of their tactical armour as they walked. Dreyfus lifted his hand, intending to issue a warning that he could not guarantee the safety of the environment. Then he realised how much weight that would have carried, given that he was standing there in only his normal uniform.

  Besides, the prefect was Thalia.

  “We had no choice, sir,” she was saying, as if he had already fired a volley of questions at her. “When Pell resumed contact, we knew we had no confidence in the situation here. The Supreme Prefect took the decision to escalate to an immediate enforcement action.” She looked around, squinting into the dying light of the chamber. “Did you manage to apprehend …”

  “I don’t know,” Dreyfus said, returning his gaze to the lone figure. Was it Caleb, or was it Julius? He had no immediate way of telling. And as he watched, so that busy, buzzing nimbus seemed to plunge itself from the solitary form, the body arcing off the ground, then slowly relaxing. “I don’t know,” he repeated, unsure quite what he had just witnessed, except that it was an ending of sorts.

  Then a sort of focus found its way back into his eyes. “Thalia, we have a problem. Sparver says this whole place could go up at any minute.”

  “I know, sir. We got his … message just as we were closing in.”

  “He did what needed to be done. Tell the enforcement squad to make an immediate retreat back the way they’ve come. You’ve got ships docked at the other ends of these shafts, haven’t you?”

  “Yes, sir. Corvettes and a couple of cruisers, fixed on with grapples, and the Democratic Circus isn’t too far away, if we need to pick anyone up. We capped the shafts with portable airlocks, just in case you weren’t wearing suits when we broke through. Sir, exactly why is this place going to go up?”

  “The fusion generator. There isn’t time to explain, I’m afraid. Everyone has to leave now.”

  “What about the others, sir?”

  “They’re all dead, Thalia. Kober, Perec, Gurney. And I’m not even sure about Devon Garlin. Do you see that person on the ground? I want him taken into protective custody. But you’re to instruct the squad to treat the body as a possible quickmatter hazard.” Dreyfus looked around. “This whole place is dangerous, Thalia. It seems dormant for now, but it’s not good to be here a second longer than necessary.”

  “I’ll arrange an immediate evacuation, sir.”

  “Good. See that Sparver leaves with the first wave, will you? He’s been through the mill.”

  “He looks like it, sir. I’ll make sure he doesn’t put up a struggle.”

  Despite everything Dreyfus found the energy to smile. “You will, I don’t doubt it.”

  “You should leave as well, sir.”

  “I will—just as soon you’ve taken care of the witness.”

  Thalia passed on his orders and the arrangements were soon in place. Dreyfus paced nervously, every second feeling like an hour, but it could not have been five minutes before the enforcement squ
ad had an inert-matter evidence cocoon around the unmoving form, and in short order they were lowering the cocoon back down the shaft, Thalia barking instructions with precision and confidence, leaving nothing to chance. After that, the enforcement squad, their whiphounds and weevils began to manage a staged withdrawal, falling back in waves.

  “There’s a lot to talk about,” Sparver confided.

  “You can save it for later,” Dreyfus said, unable to stop himself from adding: “If there is a later.”

  The squad had rigged up an emergency suitwall, like an upright glass sheet fixed in a portable frame. Dreyfus and Sparver stepped through it, gaining fresh m-suits. It was a necessary precaution, in case something went wrong with the airlock seals between here and the grappled ships.

  Thalia came back over. “Heavy technical have a thermal reading on the fusion generator, sir. Someone’s rigged something, and it’s definitely getting hot, but they don’t think it’s quite ready to go critical.”

  “That’s hardly a reassurance,” Dreyfus said.

  “There’s evidence here, isn’t there, sir? To do with Wildfire, and I’m guessing the clinic as well?”

  Dreyfus could not deny it. “Enough to put a very different slant on those victims, if half of what we’ve been told is true. Never mind rewriting the history of one of our most trusted families.”

  “It can’t be lost, sir,” Thalia said. “That’s paramount, isn’t it? A few of the heavy technicals think they can get in and stabilise that core, before it runs away. We’ve got the equipment, we’ve mapped an access route, and there’s still just enough time.”

  “What do you mean, we?”

  “I’m volunteering sir. Insisting, in fact. Evidential safeguarding, sir. You drummed that into us from day one. There isn’t time to argue, anyway. We’re going in. There should be a shaft under the remains of that house, if the weevils can clear it for us quickly enough.”