‘And?’ Dreyfus asked.
‘Shortly after, I received confirmation that my orders had been implemented. The cell was no more. The artefacts had been destroyed.’
‘But that was nine years ago. Why would Firebrand come up again now?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Someone’s stirring up old ghosts, Jane. If Firebrand is really connected with Panoply, how did Anthony Theobald know about it?’
‘We don’t know for sure that he did. That could be a rogue inference from the trawl.’
‘Or it could explain why Gaffney was so interested in the Ruskin-Sartorious family,’ Dreyfus said. ‘You shut down that cell, Jane. But what if the cell had other ideas?’
Her eyes flashed nervously. ‘I’m not with you.’
‘Try this on for size. The people running that cell decided their work was too important to be closed down, no matter what you thought. They told you it was all over for Firebrand. But what if they just relocated their efforts?’
‘I’d have known.’
‘You already told me this cell was damn near untraceable,’ Dreyfus said. ‘Can you really be sure they couldn’t have kept it running without your knowledge?’
‘They’d never have done such a thing.’
‘But what if they believed they were acting in the right? You clearly thought there was a justification for Firebrand when you started it. What if the people inside thought those reasons were still valid, even after you tried to kill it?’
‘They were loyal to me,’ Aumonier said.
‘I don’t doubt it. But you’d already set a bad example, Jane. You’d shown them that deception was acceptable, in the interests of the common good. What if they decided that they had to deceive you, to keep the cell operational?’
For a long moment Aumonier said nothing, as if Dreyfus’s words had not just stunned her, but undermined her every certainty. ‘I told them to put a stop to it,’ she said, so quietly that Dreyfus would not have caught the words had he not already attuned himself to her voice. ‘I ordered them to end Firebrand.’
‘It appears they thought differently.’
‘But why would all this surface now, Tom? What does any of this have to do with Anthony Theobald, or Gaffney, or Aurora?’
‘There was something in the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble that had to be destroyed,’ Dreyfus said. ‘Something that even we didn’t realise was there, but which Aurora considered an impediment to her plans, something that had to be removed before she could begin the takeover.’
‘You think Firebrand relocated to the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble nine years ago.’
‘If you’d pulled the plug on the cell, it would have been too difficult for them to remain operational inside Panoply, especially if something went wrong again. Too risky to relocate elsewhere in the system, either, since that would have involved travel they couldn’t easily explain away as routine Panoply business. So why not another habitat? Somewhere close enough to be easily reachable, but still discreet enough to contain something so secret even we didn’t know about it?’
‘What would Anthony Theobald’s involvement have been?’
‘I don’t know,’ Dreyfus said, still getting things straight in his head. ‘Did he have any prior connection with Firebrand?’
‘Not to my knowledge.’
‘Then he was probably just told to keep his mouth shut in return for certain favours. Whatever those favours were, it looks as if he was prepared to screw his own family to safeguard them. He was the only one who bailed out, just before the Bubble was destroyed. I’m assuming your cell had ready access to funds, without going through the usual channels?’
‘Like I said, it was superblack. If they needed something — resources, equipment, expertise — they got it, no questions asked.’
‘Then I imagine they could have made someone like Anthony Theobald very comfortable indeed.’
‘He must have had advance warning that the Bubble was going to be hit,’ Aumonier said.
‘Or he was good at putting two and two together. According to Gaffney’s trawl, Firebrand moved out of the Bubble at the last minute. They must have received intelligence that someone was closing in on them, trying to hunt down the Clockmaker artefacts.’
‘Aurora,’ Aumonier said.
‘Almost certainly. Whatever it was was enough to scare them out of hiding. Maybe they tipped off Anthony Theobald: get your family out of here now, while you can, that kind of thing. Then change your identities and lie low for a couple of centuries, until the trail goes cold. But Anthony Theobald obviously decided to prioritise the saving of his own neck instead.’
‘Except Gaffney was cleverer.’
‘We need to find out who’s still running Firebrand, Jane. Something they were holding in that Bubble scared Aurora really badly. For obvious reasons I’m interested in finding out what it was.’
‘If it still exists.’
‘They didn’t destroy it nine years ago. Chances are they didn’t destroy it this time, either. They moved it somewhere. Find someone with ties to Firebrand and we’ll have a shot at getting hold of the artefacts.’
‘That might not be easy.’
‘It’s all we have. I need names, Jane. Everyone who was part of the original Firebrand cell, when you closed it down. You remember, don’t you?’
‘Of course,’ she said, apparently dismayed that he even had to ask. ‘I committed them to memory. What are you going to do with them?’
‘Ask hard questions,’ Dreyfus said.
Thalia and Parnasse were alone beneath the lowest public level of the polling core sphere. They’d been down to these corridors and rooms once before, scouting for barricade material, but the expedition had been largely fruitless. Thalia had not expected to be making a return trip into the unwelcoming space, and certainly not with the destructive intention that was now occupying her thoughts. She was grateful that Parnasse knew his way around. Although it was now full daylight outside, very little of that light reached these gloomily lit sub-levels.
‘Now we go deeper,’ he said, pausing to lever up a floor hatch that Thalia would never have noticed. ‘Gonna be a bit dusty and dark down here, but you’ll cope. Just try not to make too much noise. The elevator, polling core conduit and stairwell rise right through this part of the sphere, and there’s only a few centimetres of material between us and them. I don’t think the machines have got this high yet, but we don’t want to take chances, do we, girl?’
‘If they get this high,’ Thalia said, ‘what’s to stop them breaking through the walls and bypassing our barricade completely?’
‘Nothing, if they get the idea into their thick metal heads. That’s why it might be an idea for us not to make too much noise.’ He lowered himself into the underfloor space, then extended a hand to help Thalia down.
‘How did Meriel Redon take it, by the way?’ she asked as she pushed her legs into the darkness.
‘She thought I was taking the piss.’
Thalia’s feet touched metal flooring. ‘And afterwards, when you explained it was my idea?’
‘She changed her mind. She thought you were taking the piss. But I think I brought her round in the end. Like you say, it’s not as if we really want to take our chances with those servitors.’
‘No,’ Thalia said, grimly resigned. ‘That we don’t. Did you see any sign that anyone else has noticed the military-grade machines?’
He kept his voice low. ‘I don’t think so. Cuthbertson started nosing around the windows, but I managed to steer him away before he saw anything.’
‘That’s good. The citizens are spooked enough as it is, without having to deal with the thought of war robots. I don’t expect I have to tell you what those machines would be capable of doing to unarmed civilians.’
‘No, got enough of an imagination on me for that,’ Parnasse said, taking a kind of grim pleasure in the remark. ‘What do you think they’re going to do — try coming up the inside, like the others?’
‘No need. These machines are designed for assault and infiltration. They wouldn’t need to climb the stairs to reach the polling core. They can come up the outside, even if they have to form a siege tower with their own bodies.’
‘They don’t seem to have started climbing yet.’
‘Must be evaluating the situation, working out how to take us down as quickly as possible. But we can’t count on them dithering for ever. You’d better show me where to cut.’
‘This way,’ Parnasse whispered, pushing Thalia’s head down so that she did not knock it against a ceiling strut. ‘You might want to put those glasses of yours on,’ he added.
‘What about you?’
‘I know my way. You just take care of yourself.’
Thalia slipped the glasses on. The image amplifier threw grainy shapes against her eyes. She clicked in the infrared overlay and locked on to Parnasse’s blob-like form, following his every move as if they were passing through a minefield. As silently as they could, they negotiated a forest of crisscrossing struts and utility ducts, descending slowly until they reached the trunk-like intrusion of the three service shafts Parnasse had already described. Thalia had a clear sense that they’d reached the base of the sphere, for she could see where the curve of the outer skin met the top of the stalk. Surrounding the cluster of service shafts was a series of heavy-looking buttresses, arcing back over Thalia’s head into the depths of the chamber. Wordlessly, Parnasse touched a finger against one of the spoke-like buttresses. It was as thick as her thigh.
‘That’s what I have to cut?’ she asked.
‘Not just this one,’ he whispered back. ‘There are eighteen of these, and you’re going to have to take care of at least nine if we’re to have a hope of toppling.’
‘Nine!’ she hissed back.
He raised a shushing finger to his lips. ‘I didn’t say you had to cut through ’em all. You cut through four or five, say two on either side of this fellow, and you cut partway through another two on either side, and that should be enough. We want to make damned sure the sphere topples in the right direction.’
‘I know,’ Thalia said, resenting the fact that he felt she needed reminding.
‘You want that magic sword of yours?’
‘No time like the present.’
Parnasse passed her the thick bundle he’d made of the whiphound. Between them, they unwrapped the insulating layers, then re-wrapped the cool outer part around the scorching-hot shaft of the handle. Her hands trembling as they had done before, Thalia took the damaged weapon and prayed that the filament would extend for her one more time.
Then she started cutting.
Not for the first time, Jane Aumonier found herself both awed and frightened by the submarine processes of her own mind. She had scarcely given the names of the Firebrand operatives more than a second’s thought in nine years, but the process of recall was as automatic and swift as some well-engineered dispensing machine. She dictated the names to Dreyfus while he scratched them into a compad, floating at the end of the safe-distance tether. He always looked awkward when writing, as if it was a skill his hands had not quite evolved for.
When he was done he left her alone, the past amok in her head, while the weevil-class war robots rampaged through the gilded plazas of Carousel New Brazilia.
Many public data feeds had been severed, but the habitat would not be completely isolated until the weevils reached the polling core. The cams would maintain their dispassionate vigilance until that final moment of transmission, even as the streets turned slippery with citizens’ blood, congealing too thickly to be absorbed by the municipal quickmatter. The war robots moved very fast once they were inside the airtight environment of the wheel-shaped structure. They tumbled out of doorways and ramps in a slurry of dark armour, their traction legs a furious grey-black blur. They whisked through plazas and atria in a rampaging column of thrashing metal, as if lumpy black tar was being poured along the alleys and boulevards of the habitat’s great public spaces, a tar that ate and dissolved people as it swept over them. It looked disorganised, almost random, until Aumonier slowed down the time rate and studied the invasion in the accelerated frame of machine perception. Then she saw how fiercely systematic the invaders were, how efficient and regimented. They cut down the citizens with brutal precision, but only when they were directly opposed. Bystanders, or those running in panic, were left quite alone provided they offered no immediate obstruction to the weevils. Local constables, recognisable by their armbands and activated from amongst the citizenry under the usual emergency measures, were taking the brunt of the casualties. The constables’ non-lethal weapons were hopelessly ineffective against the war machines, but still they tried to slow down the invading force, spraying the weevils with immobilising foam or sticky netting. Using their special constabulory authority, they tried to conjure barricades out of the ambient quickmatter, but their efforts were panicked and ineffective. The weevils barged through the obstacles as if they were no more substantial than cobwebs. Most of the constables ran for cover as soon as they’d used their weapons or conjured obstacles, but a few stood their ground and paid a predictable price. Death, when it came, was always mercifully quick — Aumonier remembered what Baudry had told them about the weevils carrying anatomical knowledge — but while there appeared to be no specific cruelty in the machines’ actions, that did not make the process of invasion any less horrific.
The polling core in Carousel New Brazilia lay at the heart of a dizzying multi-tiered atrium crisscrossed by railingless pedestrian bridges. Here the constables had converged from all over the wheel, ready for a courageous last stand. They’d taken up defensive positions around the core, covering the endpoints of all the bridges. In addition to their usual non-lethal weapons, some of them now carried heavier armaments dispensed under the emergency provisions. Aumonier watched as a trio of constables tried to assemble some kind of tripod-mounted cannon, two of them arguing over the right way to attach the angled blast screen. By the time they had the cannon operational, the weevils were already crossing the bridges from the surrounding galleries. The constables opened fire, their gun chugging silently as it spewed out low-velocity munitions, trailing banners of pink smoke. It made no practical difference. Weevils were constructed for the rigours of vacuum warfare, hardened to withstand direct hits from high-energy pulses or penetrating slugs. The constables managed to dislodge a couple of the robots, sending them plummeting from the bridges, but it was as nothing compared to the numbers still crossing. Belatedly, some of the constables realised that they had the authority to conjure gaps in the bridges, and a couple of them ran bravely out into the middle to issue the necessary close-proximity commands. The bridges puckered apart, like strands of toffee being pulled too hard.
But by then it was much too late. The weevils bridged the openings with their own bodies, locking together while other machines flowed over them. They flung the retreating constables aside, into the open space of the atrium. The constables fell with silent screams.
Then the weevils were at the polling core. Aumonier watched until the last bitter instant, until the cam feeds greyed out, filling with static and cascading error messages.
Panoply had just lost Carousel New Brazilia. Aurora now held five habitats.
Aumonier switched her attention to House Flammarion, where the weevils were only just beginning to reach the interior. Something compelled her to watch, as if the futile but dignified resistance of the constables demanded a witness, even though she could do nothing to affect the outcome.
Before very long Aurora held her sixth prize.
CHAPTER 24
It was the first time Dreyfus had returned to his quarters since his release from detention. He knew that the forensics team had worked the place over with their customary thoroughness, removing every atom of Clepsydra that had not already been digested by the quickmatter. And yet he could not shake the sense that this temporarily allocated space — it was now functioning as his
living room — remained unclean, materially despoiled by the act of her murder. Death had visited in his absence, stroked his furniture, made himself at home and left a sour mortuary smell that mostly lingered just below conscious detection.
Dreyfus conjured thick, hot coffee and enveloped himself in a cloud of bitter aroma. He sat back in his usual chair and brought the compad to life. He had not looked at the names until this moment since Jane had dictated them to him, and even now he angled the compad steeply to his chest, as if someone might be looking over his shoulder. It was a pointless gesture — it made no more sense than the smell — but he was equally incapable of suppressing it. Even though he was engaged on Panoply business, even though the names had been divulged by the supreme prefect herself, he felt a furtive sense of wrongness.
He sipped the coffee. It rushed down his throat, acrid and black, and for a moment he forgot Clepsydra.
There were eight names. He had no doubt that these were the eight original members of Firebrand, assuming that Aumonier herself was not to be counted amongst them. He recognised all of the names, too, and could even put faces to some of them. Panoply’s compartmentalised structure, with each field prefect being assigned a tightly knit team of deputies, ensured that there was only limited communication between field units. Units with very different field assignments might go years before their members met.
And yet he knew these eight names and could put faces — blurred, admittedly — to five of them.
He read them again, just to make sure he wasn’t missing something obvious:
Lansing Chen (FPIII)
Xavier Valloton (DFPIII)
Eloise Dassault (DFPIII)
Riyoko Chadwick (FPI)
Murray Vos (FPII)
Simon Veitch (FPII)
Paula Saavedra (FPIII)
Gilbert Knerr (DFPII)
But there’d been no mistake, and the more he thought about the names the more he convinced himself he could put at least sketchy faces to all of them, not just the five he’d thought of first. Veitch in particular — that name loomed larger in his memory than the others for some reason. But he couldn’t think of a case or training exercise where he’d worked with any of them. The faces, such as they were, hung in contextless limbo, like portraits where the background had only been roughed-in.
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