The knife was still pressing against his throat.
“Who are you?” he asked, speaking quietly, fearful of moving his throat.
“Who are you?” the woman asked back.
There was no reason for subterfuge. “Field Prefect Tom Dreyfus, of Panoply.”
“Don’t try anything rash, Prefect. This knife cuts very well. If you doubt me, take a look around you.”
“At what?”
“The sleepers. See what I’ve done to them.”
He followed her instruction. He saw what she meant.
Not all of the sleepers were whole.
The confusion of restraints, surgical lines and helmets had hidden the truth at first. But once Dreyfus had become accustomed to the fact of the sleepers, and the mechanisms that sustained them, he realised that many of them were incomplete. Some were missing hands and arms, others lower legs or the whole limb. Perhaps a third of the sleepers had suffered a loss of some kind. Dreyfus started thinking back to the wars the Conjoiners had been involved in—perhaps this ship had been carrying the injured from one of those engagements, waylaid on their passage to the Conjoiner equivalent of a hospital.
But that couldn’t be the answer. This ship had probably been here for decades, and yet the injuries looked fresh. Some form of turquoise salve had been spread over the wounds, but beneath the salve the stumps were still raw. The sleepers hadn’t even received basic field care, let alone the emergency regenerative medicine that the Conjoiners should have been able to utilize.
“I don’t understand—” he began.
“I did it,” the woman said. “I cut them. I cut them all.”
“Why?” Dreyfus asked.
“To eat them,” she said, sounding amazed at his question. “What other reason would there have been?”
CHAPTER 13
Thalia found herself once again confronting a waiting polling core. She was somewhere in the sphere: most likely on a floor about halfway up its hundred-metre diameter, judging by the spacious dimensions of the room housing the machinery. Large porthole-shaped windows ringed the enormous space. The beige walls were covered in mazelike white patterns derived from the designs of early integrated circuits. A number of chairs and tables had been provided for the comfort of the visitors. The furniture was all safely inert; no quickmatter was permitted near a polling core, save that essential for the functioning of the core itself. The core was a pearl-coloured cylinder rising from the middle of the floor and piercing the ceiling, surrounded by a low metal railing. Resting on a heavy-looking plinth just outside the railinged area was a glass-cased architectural model of the Museum of Cybernetics, rendered with sterile precision.
Thalia had already explained what she would have to do; that if everything went to plan she would be on her way within less than twenty minutes; that at most her guests could expect a subliminal interruption in their access to abstraction. She had already examined the core and satisfied herself that there would be no surprises once she had opened the access window. “Really,” she said, in her best self-deprecating tone, “it’s not all that interesting. If it was serious, they wouldn’t entrust it to just one field prefect.”
“I’m sure you’re understating your abilities,” said Caillebot, lounging in a blocky blue chair, one leg hooked over the other.
“All I’m saying is, if you don’t want to hang around and see me mutter a few boring incantations, I won’t be offended. I know my way down now. If you want to wait by those goldfish ponds, I can find you when I’m done.”
“If it doesn’t inconvenience you, I think we’d all like to stay,” Paula Thory said, looking to the others for support. “It’s not often we see the beating heart of the voting apparatus laid open for examination.”
Thalia scratched at her damp collar. “If you want to stick around, I have no problem with that. I’m about ready to begin.”
“Do what you must, Prefect,” Thory said.
She opened the cylinder, conscious of the eyes on her, and retrieved the last of the four one-time pads. “I’m going to read out three magic words here. They’ll give me access to the core for six hundred seconds. There’s no going back once I’ve initiated that window, so it’d be best if I’m not interrupted unless absolutely necessary. Of course, I’ll keep you informed about what’s happening.”
“We appreciate the gesture. Please, continue your work and don’t pay any heed to us,” Caillebot said.
Thalia stepped through a gap in the surrounding railing, placed her cylinder on the ground and faced the flickering pillar of the core. She cleared her throat. “This is Deputy Field Prefect Thalia Ng. Acknowledge security access override Hickory Crepuscule Ivory.”
“Override confirmed,” answered the core. “You now have six hundred seconds of clearance, Deputy Field Prefect Ng.”
Thalia removed the final upgrade diskette from her cylinder. “I’m going to insert this into the core,” she said. “It contains new software instructions to cover a minor security loophole identified by Panoply.”
She had the core present a data-entry slot for her use. She pushed the thick diskette into the pillar, then stood back while the machine digested its contents. Thalia was anxious, but not nervous. She had run into difficulties in Carousel New Seattle-Tacoma, but all her instincts assured her that nothing like that would happen here.
“The diskette contains a data fragment,” the core said. “What do you wish me to do with this data fragment?”
Thalia started to answer, but at that moment her bracelet began chiming. She lifted her cuff and glared at it in irritation. What was Prefect Muang trying to reach her about, now of all times? Muang was not one of the bastards who gave her grief about her father, but he wasn’t Dreyfus or Sparver, or one of the senior prefects she was doing her best to impress. Whatever he was calling about, it could not possibly be that urgent. Certainly not urgent enough to interrupt a sensitive field upgrade, especially now that she’d actually opened the six-hundred-second access window.
She would call him back when she was done. The world wasn’t going to end because she kept Muang waiting for a few minutes.
“I’m sorry,” Thalia said, squeezing the suppress button.
The core repeated its enquiry. “The diskette contains a data fragment. What do you wish me to do with this data fragment?”
Thalia pulled down her cuff. “Use it to overwrite the contents of executable data segment alpha alpha five one six, please.”
“Just a moment.” Lights flashed while the pillar cogitated. “I am ready to execute the overwrite order. I anticipate that the operation will entail a brief loss of abstraction, not exceeding three microseconds. Please confirm that the overwrite order is to be executed.”
“Confirm,” Thalia said.
“The executable data segment has now been overwritten. Abstraction was down for two point six eight microseconds. All affected transactions were buffered and have now been successfully reinstated. A level-one audit indicates no software conflicts have arisen as a result of this installation. Do you have further instructions for me?”
“No,” Thalia said. “That will be all.”
“There are four hundred and eleven seconds remaining on your access window. Do you wish the window to remain open until its scheduled termination, or shall I invoke immediate closure?”
“You can close. We’re done here.”
“Access is now terminated. Thank you for your visit, Deputy Field Prefect Thalia Ng.”
“It’s been a pleasure.” After retrieving the upgrade diskette from the pillar, Thalia snapped it back into the cylinder and then sealed the cylinder itself. She tried to keep her composure, but now that she was done, she could not help but feel a giddy elation. It was a little like being drunk on an empty stomach. I did it! she thought. She had completed all four installations. All on her own, without Dreyfus looking over her shoulder, without even the benefit of another field agent to help her with the technical workload. If anyone had ever doubted h
er abilities, or wondered how well she would function outside a team context, this would silence them. I, Thalia Ng, not only designed the security plug, I field-installed it myself, by hand, with just a cutter for company.
Four habitats completed. The plan had been executed. And now that she had satisfied herself that the upgrade was robust by installing it in four worst-case examples, there was nothing to stop her going live across the entire Glitter Band, all ten thousand habitats.
Bring them on, Thalia thought, and then worked very hard to wipe the look of self-satisfaction from her face as she turned to her audience again, because it would be neither seemly nor dignified in a prefect.
“Is there a problem?” Jules Caillebot asked, still sitting in the blue armchair but no longer in the relaxed pose of a few minutes earlier.
“Not from my end,” Thalia said. “It all went like a dream. Thanks for your cooperation.” Maybe Muang had been calling her to inform her of a temporary comms blackout, she thought. It happened sometimes. Nothing to worry about. “You know what? Now that we’re done, maybe I will take a walk in some of the gardens after all.”
“Abstraction is down,” Caillebot said quietly.
Thalia felt the first itch of wrongness. “I’m sorry?”
“We have no abstraction. You said it would be off-line for a few microseconds, too short to notice. But it’s still down.” His voice became firmer and louder. “Abstraction is down, Prefect. Abstraction is down.”
Thalia shook her head. “You’re mistaken. It can’t be down.”
“There is no abstraction,” Paula Thory said, standing up from her own chair. “We’re out of contact, Prefect. Something appears to have gone wrong.”
“The system ran an audit on itself. It confirmed that abstraction had only been interrupted for an instant. The system doesn’t make mistakes.”
“Then why were you here in the first place, if it wasn’t to correct a failing in the apparatus?” asked Caillebot.
“Maybe it’s just us,” said Broderick Cuthbertson. His mechanical owl twitched its head in all directions, as if following the flight of an invisible wasp.
“Your bird’s confused,” Cyrus Parnasse said. “I’m guessing it depends on abstraction to orient itself.”
Cuthbertson comforted his creation with a finger-stroke. “Easy, boy.”
“Then it’s at least everyone—everything—in this building,” Thory said, colour draining from her cheeks. “What if it’s not just the building? What if we’re looking at a major outage across the whole campus?”
“Let’s look out of the windows,” said Meriel Redon. “We can see half of Aubusson from here.”
They were paying no attention to Thalia. She was just a detail in the room. For now. She walked behind them as they stood from their chairs and sofas and stools—those who weren’t already standing—and dashed to the row of portholes, two or three of them crowding behind each circular pane.
“I can see people down in the park,” said a clean-shaven young man whose name Thalia didn’t remember. He wore an electric-blue suit with frilled black cuffs. “They’re behaving oddly. Clumping together all of a sudden, as if they want to talk. Some of them are starting to run for the exits. They’re looking up, at us.”
“They know there’s a problem,” Thory said. “It’s no wonder they’re looking up at the polling core. They’re wondering what the hell’s happening.”
“There’s a train stopped on the line,” said a woman in a flame-red dress, standing at another porthole. “It’s the other side of the nearest window band. Whatever this is, it isn’t local. It isn’t just happening to us, or to the museum.”
“There’s a volantor,” someone else said. “It’s making an emergency landing on the roof of the Bailter Ziggurat. That’s two whole bands towards the leading cap. Nearly ten kilometres!”
“It’s the whole habitat,” Thory said, as if she’d just seen a fearful omen. “The whole of House Aubusson, all sixty kilometres of it. Eight hundred thousand people have just lost abstraction for the first time in their lives.”
“This can’t be happening,” Thalia whispered.
The knife was still hard against Dreyfus’s throat. He cursed himself for not donning the helmet when he’d had the chance. He tried to reason that the woman would have killed him by now if that was her intention, but he could think of a multitude of reasons why she might want to keep him talking now and kill him later.
“What year is it?” she asked, as if the question had just popped into her head.
“What year?”
The pressure of the knife increased. “Is there a problem with my diction?”
“No,” Dreyfus said hastily. “Not at all. The year is two thousand, four hundred and twenty-seven. Why do you ask?”
“Because I’ve been inside this place a very long time.”
“Long enough to lose track of the year?”
“Long enough to lose track of everything. I had my suspicions, though.” He caught a note of proud defiance in her voice. “I wasn’t so very far off the mark.”
He’d still not seen her face, or any part of her save the gauntleted hand holding the knife. “Are you a member of the Nerval-Lermontov family?” he asked.
“Is that who you are looking for?”
“I’m not looking for anyone in particular. I’m a policeman. I’m investigating a crime. My inquiries brought me to this asteroid.”
“Alone?”
“I came in a ship, with my deputy. We were attacked during our approach and the ship was damaged. We could have limped back to Panoply, but we decided to see if we could use the rock to get a message to them quicker. That’s what my deputy’s doing now. I also wanted to see what was worth attacking us to protect.”
The knife scratched against his skin. It felt cold. He wondered if it had drawn blood yet.
“You’ve seen it now,” the woman said, obviously meaning the ship in which they were floating. “Tell me what you make of it.”
“It’s a Conjoiner spacecraft. That’s as much as I was able to tell from outside. I came aboard and I’ve seen this.” He meant the room full of dismembered sleepers, the ones that the woman said she had been eating. “That’s all. Now are you going to tell me what this means?”
“Try moving,” she said. “Move an arm or a leg. I won’t stop you.”
Dreyfus tried, but although he could move his limbs, they encountered stiff resistance against the interior of his suit. He was effectively paralysed.
“I can’t.”
“I’ve reached into your suit and disabled its motor and communication functions. I can turn them on and off as easily as I can blink. With the suit immobilised like that, you won’t be able to move or remove it. You’ll starve here and die. It would take a long time and it would not be pleasant.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“So that you understand, Prefect. So that you grasp that I have complete control over you.” The pressure from the knife eased. “So that you understand that I don’t need this to kill you.”
Her hand pulled away.
“You must be a Conjoiner,” he said. “No one else could perform a trick like that.” When she offered neither confirmation nor denial, he said, “You must be from this ship. Am I right?”
“So you are not completely incapable of deductive reasoning. For one of the retarded, you must be quite bright.”
“I’m just a prefect trying to do my job. Are you being held captive here?”
“What do you think?” she asked, with acid sarcasm.
“Let’s establish some ground rules. I’m not your enemy. If someone is keeping you here against your will, I want to find out who they are and why they’re doing it. We’re on the same side. We should be able to trust each other.”
“Shall I tell you why I have difficulty trusting you, Prefect? A man like you came here already. He saw what was being done to us and did nothing.”
“What do you mean, a man like me?�
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“He wore the same kind of suit.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“I mean exactly the same kind. If a prefect is what you are, then this man was a prefect as well.”
“That’s not possible,” Dreyfus said. But even as he spoke he recalled the link that Sparver had found connecting this rock to Panoply. Could someone else have come here, making independent inquiries? Perhaps. But if so, how could Jane Aumonier not have known about it?
“I saw him myself. There was no mistake. I could not see into his head, and I can’t see into yours. Your kind never carry neural implants, do they?”
His own voice sounded distant and strangulated. “This man… does he come on his own, or are there others?”
“Only the man comes in person. But there are other visitors.”
“You’re confusing me.”
“That is because they confuse me. I know when the man comes because I sense the electromagnetic noise from the opening and closing of airlocks. I sense his suit, although I can never get close enough to paralyse him. But the others don’t arrive like that. Suddenly they are simply here, like a change in the wind. One in particular makes her presence very clear to me. She likes to walk in our heads, as if she is taking a stroll through an ornamental garden. She toys with us. She takes pleasure in our confinement, in our distress.”
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