‘Captain Voightlander…’
The roll-call continued; a dozen ships, then a dozen more, until she had lost count.
‘Thank you, Captains,’ she said, when the last Ultra had spoken. ‘I am grateful that you have responded to my request for help. You can, I think, provide a decisive contribution. I must warn you — though I am sure you already appreciate as much — that you will be placing your ships and crew in grave danger.’
The face of Tengiz, the first Ultra to speak, reappeared on the pane. ‘I have been tasked to speak for the other ships, Supreme Prefect Aumonier. Rest assured that we are fully aware of the risks. It is still our intention to help.’
‘I’m grateful.’
‘Tell us what you want us to do.’
‘You can be of benefit to me in two ways,’ Aumonier said. ‘Your ships have a capacity exceeding anything in the Glitter Band, even the largest in-system liners. If you can start taking aboard evacuees, that will be incalculably helpful to us.’
‘We will do what we can. How else may we help?’
‘Doubtless you’ve witnessed our efforts to contain Aurora’s expansion by destroying those habitats contaminated by her war machines. Unfortunately, we’re running out of nuclear weapons. If there was any other way—’
‘You wish us to intervene.’
‘Yes.’
‘In a military sense.’
‘I don’t doubt that you have the means, Captain. At the risk of opening an old wound, we all saw what Captain Dravidian’s ship was capable of doing. And his vessel wasn’t even armed.’
‘Tell us where and when,’ Tengiz said.
‘I’d dearly like to. Unfortunately — as you’re probably aware — I’m somewhat indisposed right now and need further surgery. I appreciate your insistence on speaking only to me, but it would simplify matters enormously if you would allow me to designate Prefect Clearmountain to speak for me.’
Tengiz looked at her with his blank telescopic eyes. She couldn’t read a single human emotion in the mongrel collision of machine and flesh that was his face.
‘Do you have confidence in Clearmountain?’
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Absolute confidence. You have my word, Captain. Allow Clearmountain to speak for me.’
Tengiz paused, then nodded. ‘So be it.’
‘I’m going to sleep again now, if that’s all right with you. Good luck, Captain. To you and all the others.’
‘We’ll do what we can. As for you…’ Tengiz halted. For the first time she sensed indecision. ‘We have long been aware of your predicament, Supreme Prefect Aumonier.’
‘I never imagined I was of the slightest interest to Ultras.’
‘You were wrong. We knew of you. We knew of you and… you’ve long had our respect. You would have made an excellent captain.’
Dreyfus and Sparver surmounted the last rise and found themselves looking out across a shallow depression in the terrain, like an old crater that had been gradually eroded and filled in by slow and mindless processes of weather and geochemistry. Yet there was something out of place at the base of the depression, even though Dreyfus nearly missed it on his first glancing survey. It was a ramp, sloping down into the ground, its walls and sides fashioned from some kind of fused construction material with the ebony lustre of burnt sugar. It had cracked and distorted in places, evidence of shifts in the underlying landscape, but it was still remarkably intact for something that had been out there for more than two hundred years. The ramp angled down into the ground and vanished into a flat-roofed tunnel, the lip of which had formed a portcullis of dagger-like ammonia-ice stalactites or icicles. Dreyfus pointed to the middle part of the opening, where a number of the spikes had been broken off at head height.
‘Someone’s been here recently,’ he said. But without knowing how long it had taken for the stalactites to form, he knew he could have been talking about a visitation that had happened days, years or even decades ago.
‘Let’s take a look-see inside,’ Sparver said. ‘There’s nothing I like better than unwelcoming tunnels leading underground.’
If a surveillance system had detected their arrival, there was no sign of it. They crunched across the last few metres of surface ice until they were standing at the top of the ramp, and then began a cautious descent towards the portcullis. The ground was slippery under their feet. Dreyfus stooped to avoid dislodging any more stalactites; Sparver only needed to nod his head slightly. Beyond the opening, the ramp continued to slope down into unseen depths. The suit’s acoustic pick-up conveyed the sounds of trickling, dripping liquids to Dreyfus’s ears. As the gloom deepened, he angled his helmet lamp down, mindful of treacherous cracks in the flooring. He supposed that this must once have been an entry point for vehicles, though it was clear that nothing large had come down here in a long time.
After fifty or sixty metres, the ramp terminated in a black wall set with a single wide door. The door consisted of a set of hinged panels that would have rolled down from a mechanism in the ceiling. It had stopped half a metre short of the floor, above an airtight slot into which the lowest part of the door must have been intended to lock.
‘Someone was careless,’ Sparver said.
‘Or in a hurry. You think we can squeeze under that?’
Sparver was already on his knees. He undid some of his equipment and weaponry and slid it through ahead of him. Then he lowered onto all fours and scraped through the gap. ‘It’s clear,’ he told Dreyfus, grunting as he stood up. ‘Send me through what you can.’
Dreyfus unclipped the bulkier pieces of his kit and passed them to his deputy. Then he lowered himself to the cracked black floor and squeezed under the door, scraping his backpack in the process. Something jammed, and for a horrible instant he thought he was trapped, pinned in place with vicelike pressure. Then whatever it was worked loose and he was through, standing up next to Sparver. His suit reported no damage, but had the door been a couple more centimetres lower, he wouldn’t have been able to get through wearing it.
Dreyfus reattached his equipment and hoped silently that he wouldn’t be sliding under any more doors. They had arrived in what was clearly a cargo airlock, designed to allow vehicles and heavy equipment to pass between Ops Nine and the outside world. A similar door to the one they’d just crawled under faced them on the opposite wall, but this one was sealed down tight.
‘We can cut through,’ Sparver said, tapping a glove against the torch on his belt. ‘Or we can try opening it. Either way, if there’s a single soul alive in this place they’ll know about it. Your call, Boss.’
‘See if you can get it to open. I’ll try to close the other one. I’d rather not flood the place with Yellowstone air if we can avoid it.’
‘Because you’re feeling charitable towards Saavedra and her friends?’ Sparver asked sceptically.
‘They committed crimes against Panoply. I’d like them alive to answer for that.’
Dreyfus brushed icy yellow caulk off a raised panel next to the door they had just crawled under. The panel contained a simple arrangement of manual controls labelled with Amerikano script. He pushed the stud with a downward-pointing arrow and heard a laboured whine of buried machinery. The door began to inch its way towards the floor, spitting chunks of yellow ice out of its tracks as it descended.
‘Looks like someone’s been paying their power bills,’ Sparver said.
Dreyfus nodded. If he’d harboured lingering doubts that Ops Nine was truly where Firebrand had gone to ground, they had just been thoroughly dispelled. The facility was powered and functional, at least on a spartan basis. Amerikano technology was robust, but not robust enough to open doors after two hundred years.
Dreyfus flinched as slats rattled open in the walls without warning. Red lights stammered on behind ceiling grilles and he heard the roar of powerful fans. The environment sensor on his suit began to record the change of gas mixture and pressure as the air in the room was swapped for breathable atmosphere. The process took
less than three minutes. The fans died down and the slats clattered shut again.
‘I think I can open the door now,’ Sparver said.
Nothing would be gained by waiting, Dreyfus knew. ‘Do it,’ he said, mentally preparing himself for whatever was on the other side. Sparver hit the control, then moved to stand next to Dreyfus, his Breitenbach rifle held doubled-handed. But as the door rose, it became clear that there was no one waiting for them on the other side. Dreyfus allowed the muzzle of his own weapon to dip slightly, but remained alert. The two prefects stepped over the threshold.
A curving corridor, triangular in cross section, walled and floored with metallic grille, stretched away to either side. An illuminated red strip ran the length of the corridor at the apex of the two angled walls. Behind the grilles snaked corroded and mould-caked piping and machinery, much of it eaten away, probably by rats. Steam jetted from ruptured lines, hot enough to scald if they hadn’t been wearing suits. But Dreyfus noticed that some of the plumbing was shiny and new. Firebrand must have done just enough to make this facility habitable again. They hadn’t been intending to make it comfortable, or homely.
‘You want me to toss a coin?’ Sparver asked.
‘Clockwise,’ Dreyfus said, leading the way.
The grilled flooring clattered heavily under their boots, the din echoing around the curve of the corridor. Dreyfus had no good idea of the dimensions of the facility, but it wasn’t difficult to imagine that noise reaching far enough to alert someone of their arrival, if that hypothetical person hadn’t already been notified by the airlock activity. Since his suit assured him that the ambient air was now breathable, Dreyfus reached up and risked removing his helmet. He attached it to his belt, just as he’d had cause to regret doing in the Nerval-Lermontov rock when Clepsydra touched her knife against his throat. But he didn’t think knives were going to be the problem now.
‘Yeah, getting kind of stuffy in here,’ Sparver said, undoing his own helmet. He took a deep breath, sucking in the same cold, metallic air Dreyfus had just tasted. ‘Feels better already.’
‘Watch out for those steam jets,’ Dreyfus said. ‘And be ready to jam your lid on again.’
They continued walking, following the slow curve of the corridor until they arrived at a junction. They paused to decide which way to go, while pink-tinged steam snorted in dragon-like exhalations from a severed pipeline. Dreyfus shone his light on a burnished metal panel stencilled with Amerikano text. ‘Central operations is this way,’ he said, raising his voice above the angry snort of the steam jet. ‘Sounds like the right place to start, doesn’t it?’
‘Or the right place to stay a long way away from.’
‘Nothing I’d like better. But we came here to do a job, Field.’
After a moment Sparver said, ‘Don’t you mean “deputy”, Boss?’
‘I mean field. Jane just promoted me to senior, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t elevate my deputy to full field status. How does it feel, Field Prefect Bancal?’
‘It feels great. Though I imagined it might happen under different circumstances.’
Dreyfus smiled to himself. ‘You mean slightly less suicidal ones?’
‘Now that you mention it…’
‘That’s exactly the same way I felt when I got my promotion, so that makes two of us.’
‘But it’s still a promotion. I mean, that’s what it’ll say in my obituary, right?’
‘It would,’ Dreyfus affirmed. ‘Only problem is, I’m the only one who knows about it. Apart from you, obviously.’
‘So it would really help if one of us survives, is what you’re saying.’
‘Yes. Me, preferably.’
‘Why you, Boss, and not me?’
‘Because if you survived, you wouldn’t be needing an obituary, would you?’
‘That makes sense,’ Sparver said, sounding only the tiniest bit puzzled.
Dreyfus tightened his grip on the Breitenbach rifle. ‘There’s something ahead,’ he said, lowering his voice.
Pale-blue light was leaking around the curve of the corridor, highlighting the hexagonal meshwork of the grilles. Dreyfus judged that they were approaching the central operations section. Conscious that there was little they could do to quieten their approach, he nonetheless slowed his walk and edged closer to the angled wall on the inside of the curve, hoping to use it for cover until the last moment. As he crept forward, he saw that the corridor terminated in a hollowed-out cavern that extended several storeys below their present level. The blue illumination originated from a grid of lights suspended from the bare rock ceiling that arched ten or twelve metres above them. The corridor brought them out onto a railinged balcony that encircled the entire cavern. Doors were set into the smooth-panelled wall at regular intervals, marked with spray-painted numbers and cryptic symbols that must have once referred to different administrative and functional departments of the facility. Dreyfus looked over the railing, down to the floor of the chamber. It was a kind of atrium, he realised. Tiled walkways encircled what might once have been flower beds or small ponds. The flower beds now contained only grey-black ash, the ponds nothing but dust. There were even a couple of benches, cut from solid rock. Rising from the ground in the middle of the atrium was a complicated-looking metal sculpture whose design he couldn’t easily fathom from this angle, but which almost resembled an iron cactus.
Dreyfus realised that he’d had preconceptions about the people who’d lived here originally. The Amerikano culture might have felt distant from his own, its values foreign, but the inhabitants of this place had still needed a place to relax and mingle, away from the pressures of their duties. In its way, this place would not have felt very different from his own place of work. He wondered what kinds of ghosts would haunt Panoply, two hundred years after he was gone.
He pulled back from the railing with a tingle of disquiet. Sparver was already a quarter of the way around the balcony, testing each door as he passed. So far they had all been locked, but as Dreyfus watched, Sparver reached a door that was ajar. He nudged it with the muzzle of his rifle, then beckoned Dreyfus forward. Glancing occasionally down at the atrium, Dreyfus approached the newly promoted field and examined what Sparver had discovered.
‘I guess you were right about Firebrand, Boss.’
The room would once have been the personal quarters of one of the Amerikano staff. Now it had been converted into makeshift accommodation for one of Saavedra’s people. A sleeping hammock had been strung between two walls. On an equipment crate, Dreyfus saw part of a Panoply uniform, a belt and whiphound clip, minus the whiphound itself. He found a coffee bulb that still had coffee in it, albeit cold. There was no dust on any of the items.
They continued their inspection of the upper level, pausing to investigate those rooms that were not locked. They found more personal effects and equipment, even a pair of compads. The compads were still operational, but when Dreyfus activated one he could not decipher the contents, even with Manticore. The Firebrand unit must have had its own security protocol.
Sparver and Dreyfus descended to the next level via a staircase, negotiating it slowly in their suits and armour. They found another ring of rooms, but most of these were larger and appeared to have served an administrative or laboratory function. There was even a medical complex, a series of glass-partitioned rooms still illuminated by pale-green secondary lighting. Old-fashioned equipment formed abstract, vaguely threatening shapes under a drapery of plastic dust sheets. The sheets had brittled and yellowed with age, but the machines under them showed little sign of decay.
‘What happened to the people who used to live here?’ Sparver asked, in little more than a whisper.
‘Didn’t they teach you anything in school?’
‘Cut me some slack. Even fifty years is ancient history from a pig’s point of view.’
‘They went insane,’ Dreyfus said. ‘They were brought here in the bellies of robots, as fertilised eggs. The robots gave birth to them, and raised t
hem to be happy, well-adjusted human beings. What they got was happy, well-adjusted psychopaths.’
‘Really?’
‘I’m simplifying. But children don’t grow up right without other normal people around, so that they can imprint on reasonable social behaviour. By the time the second generation was being raised, some nasty pathologies were bubbling to the surface. It got messy.’
‘How messy?’
‘Axes through doors messy.’
‘But they couldn’t all have been insane.’
‘They weren’t. But there weren’t nearly enough stable cases to hold the society together.’
Another staircase brought them to the lowest level of the atrium, where the pathway ambled between dried pools and ashen flower beds. Dreyfus speculated that it might once have been an agreeable place to pass time, at least in comparison with the claustrophobic confinement of the rest of the facility. But now he felt like an intruder breaking the stillness of a crypt. He told himself that the Firebrand agents had violated the sanctity of the place before Sparver and he had arrived, but the sense of being unwelcome did not abate.
Rooms, all of them larger than any they had seen on the upper levels, ringed the atrium space, cut back into the rock for many tens of metres. Corridors plunged even deeper, curving away to other parts of Ops Nine. At the far end of one, Dreyfus saw the daylit glow of what he presumed was another atrium space, perhaps at least as large as the one they were in. Several corridors ramped down into the ground, suggesting that there were further levels of habitation beneath. Dreyfus paused, unsure which route to take. He had expected to encounter someone in the central operations area, or at least find a clue as to where everyone had gone. But apart from the Panoply items they had already seen, there was no evidence of immediate human presence.
He was about to debate their next move when Sparver made an odd clicking noise, as if he’d got something lodged in his throat. Dreyfus snapped around to look at his deputy.
‘Sparv?’
‘Check out the sculpture, Boss.’
Dreyfus had paid little attention to the metal object since arriving on the lowest level. He’d appraised it just enough to see that it was indeed what it had appeared to be from above: a spiky black structure fashioned from something like wrought iron, suggestive of a cactus, anemone or angular palm tree, but equally likely to be a purely abstract form. It towered three or four metres over his head, throwing jagged shadows across the flooring. It consisted of dozens of sharp bladelike leaves radiating out from a central core, most of which were angled towards the ceiling. What he hadn’t noticed — but which had not escaped Sparver’s attention — was that there was a human skeleton at the base of the sculpture.
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