The Prefect rs-5

by Alastair Reynolds

  Thalia and Parnasse climbed back through the forest of structural supports until they reached the ceiling door that led into the lowest inhabitable section of the sphere. A minute later they reached the floor of the polling core, where most of the party were now awake and nervous, aware that something was afoot but as yet ignorant of Thalia’s plan.

  They had questions for her, but before she spoke to them, Thalia moved to the nearest window and looked down towards the very base of the stalk. She noted, with a knife-twist of apprehension in her stomach, that the concentration of military-grade servitors was now much less than it had been before. It could only mean that most of the machines were now ascending the stalk, working with methodical inevitability towards the level of the polling core.

  “Call off the work squad,” she told Caillebot.

  “Tell them to drop what they’re doing and get back up here.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “What about the barricade? Someone needs to keep watch on it.”

  “Not now they don’t. It’s served us well but we won’t be needing it any more.”

  “But the machines are getting close.”

  “I know. That’s why it’s time we got out of here. Get the squad, Jules. We don’t have time to debate this.”

  He stared at her, frozen as if on the verge of framing an objection, then turned and descended the short staircase down to the next level, where the current barricade team was still doing what they could to reinforce the obstruction.

  “What’s going to happen?” asked Paula Thory, standing up from the sprawl of clothes that she had made into a makeshift bed.

  “We’re getting out of here,” Thalia said.

  “How? You’re not expecting us to climb down those stairs, are you? We can’t very well fight our way past those machines.”

  “We won’t be fighting our way past anything. If all goes well, we won’t have to deal with a single servitor. Before you know it, we’ll be outside House Aubusson, in clear space, waiting to be rescued.”

  “What do you mean, in space? None of us have suits! We don’t have a ship. We don’t even have an escape pod!”

  “We don’t need an escape pod,” Thalia said carefully.

  “We’re in one.”

  Dreyfus noticed that Aumonier was clenching and unclenching her hands, her chest rising and falling with deep breaths.

  “I thought you’d appreciate some company,” he said.

  “In person, I mean.”

  “Thank you, Tom. And yes, you’re right. I do appreciate it.” She paused.

  “I just issued that statement, by

  the way—including your remarks.”

  “They needed reassurance.”

  “They did. You were right.”

  “Have we gone dark yet?”

  “No—I’m holding off on removing network services until we’ve finished with the Spindle. I want the citizens to know that we’re dealing with something bad, but that we’re doing all in our power to keep as many of them safe as we can.”

  “Won’t seeing the Spindle nuked to kingdom come scare them half to death?”

  “More than likely. But if it means they start listening to local constabulary, it’s a price worth paying.”

  Dreyfus looked at the largest screen.

  “How long now?”

  “Three minutes.”

  Three minutes until the weevil flow hit the Toriyuma-Murchison Spindle, he thought. Panoply ships had done what they could to thin or deflect the flow, but their efforts had proved almost entirely ineffectual. They were only holding station now in case there were survivors after the Democratic Circus had done her work.

  The deep-system cruiser hovered aft of the Spindle, two missiles locked on target and armed, dialled to a yield high enough to take out the as-yet-dormant machinery of the habitat’s manufactory. Panoply had always had a contingency procedure in place for the act of destroying a habitat, and the crew would have run through such a scenario many times during training. The sequence, from the issuing of the command to the firing of the weapons, was supposedly immune to error. It required not just the authorisation of the supreme prefect, but also a majority of seniors. Mechanisms even existed to deal with the possibility of sudden changes in rank due to death or injury, so that the order could still be given even if there’d been a direct attack on Panoply.

  And yet, Dreyfus thought, the crew wouldn’t have been human if they didn’t at least consider the possibility that the order was erroneous, or had originated through malicious action. They were being asked to do the one thing that cut against everything Panoply stood for. Like a surgeon putting out his hand to receive a scalpel, and being handed a gun instead.

  But they’d do it, he thought. They’d allow themselves that one flicker of doubt, and then they’d get over it. The protocol was watertight. No mistake was possible: if the order had come in, then it was logically guaranteed that it had been issued by the supreme prefect herself, with the approval of her seniors.

  The crew had no choice but to act upon it.

  “One minute thirty,” Aumonier said. Then her tone shifted.

  “Tom: I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”

  “Go on.”

  “It may be a difficult question. You may be uncomfortable about answering it truthfully.”

  “Go on anyway.”

  “Is something happening? Something I don’t know about?”

  “What kind of something?”

  “I’ve been hearing sounds. I’ve been in this room for eleven years, Tom, so I’ve become quite astonishingly attuned to my surroundings. I’ve almost never heard any noises from elsewhere in Panoply, except for today.”

  “What kinds of noises?”

  “The kinds of noises people make when they’re trying very hard to do something without making any sound. Something that involves heavy machinery and tools.” She faced him directly.

  “Is something going on?” He’d never lied to her, in all the years they’d known each other. Never lied, or bent the truth, even when that would have been the kinder thing to do.

  Today he chose to lie.

  “It’s the mouth bay,” he said.

  “The launching rack was damaged when one of the cruisers came in too hard. They’ve been working around the clock to get it back into shape.”

  “The mouth bay is hundreds of metres away, Tom.”

  “They’re using heavy equipment.”

  “Look at me and say that.” He met her gaze steadily.

  “It’s the bay. Why? What else do you think it might be?”

  “You know exactly what I think.” She glanced away. He couldn’t tell whether he’d passed or failed the test of her scrutiny.

  “I’ve been trying to get Demikhov to talk to me. He’s using every excuse in the book not to return my calls.”

  “Demikhov’s been busy. That business with Gaffney—”.

  “All right, so he’s been busy. But if you knew something was happening… if you knew they were planning something… you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”

  “Absolutely,” Dreyfus said.

  Except now.

  “It’s time,” she said, returning her attention to the display.

  “Weevil contact in three… two… one. Impact is confirmed. They’ve made groundfall.” She raised her arm and spoke into her bracelet.

  “This is Aumonier. Detach the Bellatrix and instruct her to proceed at full-burn. Repeat, detach the Bellatrix.”

  They still had cam feeds from the docking hub of the Toriyuma-Murchison Spindle. Hundreds of people were still crammed into the boarding tubes, being ushered aboard the waiting liner. Dozens of constables, marked by their armbands, were assisting in the boarding process. Dreyfus already knew that many constables had elected to remain inside the Spindle rather than leave on earlier evacuation flights. A few hours earlier they’d just been ordinary citizens, going about their daily lives.

  “Bellatrix is secured for space
,” Aumonier said, reading a text summary on her bracelet.

  “She’s moving, Tom. She’s undocking.”

  The feed had locked on to a single boarding corridor. The viewpoint was from inside a transparent-walled tube filled with civilians, constables and servitors, floating in an unruly multicoloured jumble. The vast, white, porthole-sprinkled side of the Bellatrix loomed beyond the glass, huge and steep as a cliff. And the cliff was starting to move: pushing away from the tube with a dreamlike slowness. At the far end of the tube, hundreds of metres from the cam, Dreyfus made out a sudden puff of silvery white vapour escaping to vacuum. He presumed that the airlock doors had closed, but a small amount of air had been sacrificed into space.

  The Bellatrix kept receding. He focused on the golden glow of her airlock. Formless debris spilled out. Something was wrong there, he realised. The liner’s outer doors should have closed by now.

  “Jane…” he began.

  “They can’t close the doors,” she said numbly.

  “The locks on the Bellatrix are jammed. Too many people are trying to squeeze through.”

  “It’s not just the liner,” Dreyfus said.

  Air was still rocketing into space from the end of the docking tube. But now it was carrying people with it, sucked out by the force of decompression. It started at the far end and then raced up the tube, towards the cam. Dreyfus watched in horror as the people nearest the cam realised what was coming. He saw them scream and reach for something to hold on to. Then it hit them and they were just gone, as if they’d been rammed down a syringe by an invisible plunger.

  He watched them spill into space by the hundreds: civilians, constables, machines, clothes, possessions and toys. He watched the people-shaped things thrash and die.

  The cam greyed out.

  Another feed showed the Bellatrix turning, giving a view along its white flanks. The outrush from the open airlock had ceased. Interior doors must have closed.

  “She’s on drive,” Dreyfus said. The liner’s quadruple engines cranked wide, spitting tongues of pink fire. The enormous vessel hardly appeared to move at first. Gradually, though, the slow but sure acceleration became apparent. The Bellatrix began to put distance between itself and the habitat. Departing from the Spindle’s forward docking hub, the liner would have the entire bulk of the habitat between it and the fusion explosion when the missiles hit home.

  Aumonier lifted her bracelet again.

  “Connect me to the Democratic Circus,” she said, barely breathing before speaking again.

  “Captain Pell: allow the Bellatrix to achieve ten kilometres. Then you may open fire on the habitat’s aft assembly.”

  Since the Bellatrix was maintaining a steady half-gee of thrust, it took only sixty seconds for the liner to reach the designated safe distance. By then, all surrounding habitats—those that hadn’t already been taken by Aurora—were on a state of high defensive alertness, anticipating not just the electromagnetic pulse of each nuclear strike, but also the likely risk of impact debris. For Dreyfus the seconds slowed and then appeared to stall altogether. He knew that Aumonier would have preferred to give the liner more space, but she was mindful of the weevils escaping and doing more harm if they waited. The evacuees aboard the Bellatrix would just have to hope that the shielding between them and the engines would serve to protect them from the worst effects of the blast.

  A voice, rendered small and reedy in transmission, spoke through her bracelet.

  “Pell, Supreme Prefect. Bellatrix has cleared safe-distance margin.”

  “You already have my authorisation to fire, Captain.”

  “I just wanted to be certain that nothing’d changed, Ma’am.”

  “Nothing’s changed. Do your job, Captain Pell.”

  “Missiles launched and running, Ma’am.”

  The cam feed switched to a long-range view of the Toriyuma-Murchison Spindle. With distance foreshortened by the cam angle, the Bellatrix almost appeared to be still docked.

  The missiles surged in, etching two bright streaks of exhaust fire, as if they’d gashed open space to reveal something luminous and clean behind it.

  They detonated.

  The nuclear explosion—the double bursts occurred too close in time to separate—whited out the cam view. There’d been no sense of the fireball expanding; it was just there, consuming everything in a single annihilating flash.

  It happened in deathly silence.

  All the displays in Jane’s room flickered momentarily as the electromagnetic pulse raced across the Glitter Band.

  Then the whited-out view dulled through darkening reds until the background blackness was again visible, and something mangled and molten was drifting there, something that had once been a habitat, but which now resembled more the blackened, tattered remains of a spent firework. The nukes had destroyed the manufactory, but in doing so they’d blasted away at least a third of the habitat’s length, leaving the rest of the structure cracked open along structural fault lines. The air inside wouldn’t have had time to escape through those cracks before it became searingly hot. No one would have had time to suffocate, either. But they’d have had time to see the fire surging towards them, even as that fire burnt the eyes out of their sockets.

  If only for an instant, they’d have known what had been done to them.

  “Status, Captain Pell,” Aumonier said.

  “Initial indications suggest complete destruction of the manufactory. Bellatrix reporting minor damage, but no additional casualties. Likelihood of further survivors is… low.”

  “That’s what I expected,” Aumonier said, with almost infinite resignation.

  “Destroy the rest of the habitat, Captain. I don’t want those weevils using it as a bridgehead even if they can’t make new copies of themselves.”

  Dreyfus felt the weight of what they had just done squeeze in on him like a vice. In the time since he had last blinked, thirty-five thousand people had ceased to exist. He couldn’t focus on that kind of number, any more than he could focus on the nine hundred and sixty who had died in Ruskin-Sartorious. But he had seen the faces of the people in the Spindle’s docking tube; he’d seen their inexpressible terror when they knew that the air was going to suck them out into space and they were going to die, unpleasantly, with their lungs freezing into hard, cold husks before their hearts stopped beating. The face of one middle-aged woman came back to him now, even though she’d just been one of many people squeezed into the boarding tube. She’d been looking directly into the cam, looking—so it seemed to him now—directly at him, her expression one of quiet, dignified pleading, placing her utmost faith in him to do something about her predicament. He knew nothing of that woman, not even her name, but now she came to stand in his imagination for all the good and honest citizens who had just been erased from existence. He didn’t need to imagine her death multiplied by thirty-five thousand. The loss of one decent citizen was shame enough. That it had happened by Panoply’s hand made it all the more repellent.

  But that didn’t mean Jane had been wrong to do it.

  “I never thought I’d have to do this,” she said.

  “Now I’m wondering if I’ve just committed the worst crime in our history.”

  “You haven’t. You did the right thing.”

  “I killed those people.”

  “You did what you were meant to do: think of the majority.”

  “I haven’t saved them, Tom. I’ve just given them time.”

  “Then we’d better make it count, hadn’t we? If nothing else, we owe it to the citizens of the Spindle.”

  “I keep thinking: what if I’m wrong? What if they really will be better off under Aurora’s government?”

  “The people gave us the authority to protect them, Jane. That’s what we just did.” Jane Aumonier said nothing. Together they watched as Captain Pell finished off the rest of the habitat.

  Now that there was no possibility of sparing survivors, the yields were dialled as high as they could go.


  The blasts snipped the remains of the Spindle out of existence. Perhaps it was Dreyfus’ imagination, but he detected an easing in Aumonier’s mood when the evidence of her actions had finally been erased.

  “You know the hard part?” she asked. Dreyfus shook his head.

  “No.”

  “The hard part is we have to do exactly the same thing to the Persistent Vegetative State. By the end of the day I’ll be lucky if I have less than a hundred thousand dead on my hands.”

  “They’re not on your hands,” Dreyfus said.

  “They’re on Aurora’s. Don’t ever forget that.”

  She came to them shortly afterwards. Her transmission rode a secure Panoply-restricted data channel, one that remained active when the public networks were silenced and the citizens roused from the great dream of abstraction. The incoming data signal was subjected to ruthless scrutiny, but it was free of any hint of concealed subliminal influence or embedded weaponry. After consultation with the supreme prefect, it was concluded that nothing would be lost by displaying the image to the seniors gathered in the tactical room.

  They found themselves looking at a girl: a child-woman on a throne wearing elaborate brocaded clothes. Her parted hair was reddish-brown, her expression watchful but not hostile.

  “It’s high time we spoke,” Aurora said, in a strong, clear voice with excellent elocution.

  “State your demands,” Jane Aumonier said, her projection addressing the image from her usual position at the table.

  “What do you want?”

  “I don’t want anything, Supreme Prefect, except your absolute capitulation.”

  “Keep her talking,” Dreyfus mouthed. Panoply’s best network hounds were trying to backtrack the transmission all the way to Aurora herself, wherever she was hiding.

  “You must have demands,” Aumonier persisted.

  “None,” the child-woman said firmly, as if it was the answer to a parlour game.

  “Demands would imply that I need something from you. That is not the case.”

  “Then why have you contacted us?” asked Lillian Baudry.

  “To make recommendations,” Aurora replied.