‘I can’t take the risk. You touch this core, I lose my job, my standing, everything.’
‘Step aside, sir,’ Thalia said.
‘I’m sorry. I can’t let you any nearer.’ The man opened his hand to reveal a matt-silver device cuffed to his palm, inset with a red firing stud. ‘There are weapons already trained on you. Please don’t make me use them.’
‘You kill us, Panoply will just send more prefects,’ Sparver said.
Thalia’s skin prickled. She could feel the scrutiny of those hidden weapons, ready to wipe her out of existence at the twitch of the man’s thumb.
‘I won’t kill you if you turn and leave.’
‘We’ll leave when we have the evidence.’ Sparver’s hand moved to his belt. He unclipped the handle of his whiphound and flicked it to deploy the filament. It cracked as it spun out to its maximum extension, lashing the floor.
‘He’s right,’ Thalia said, fighting to keep the tremor from her voice. ‘We’re Panoply.’
‘Please.’ The man’s thumb caressed the firing stud. ‘I’ll do what needs to be done to protect the core.’
Sparver released the whiphound. The handle remained at waist height, supported by the coiled extremity of its stiffened filament. It swayed from side to side with the questing motion of a snake. Then it curled around and aimed itself at the man.
A bright red dot appeared on his Adam’s apple.
‘I need you to answer a question for me,’ Sparver said. ‘How attached are you to your fingers?’
The man inhaled and held his breath.
‘The whiphound has a mark on you now,’ Sparver continued. ‘If it detects hostile intent — and it’s very, very good at detecting hostile intent — it’ll be on you faster than a nerve impulse can travel down your arm. When it reaches you, it’ll do something quite nasty with the sharp edge of that filament.’
The man opened his mouth to say something, but all that came out was a dry croak. He spread both his hands, opening his fingers and thumbs as wide as they would go.
‘Sensible,’ Sparver said. ‘Now hold that pose, but step away from the core.’ He nodded at Thalia, giving her the go-ahead to start securing the evidence. The whiphound stayed by his side, its blunt head tracking the man as he inched away from the central column.
Thalia walked to the core. It was a standard design, installed within the last twenty years, so she knew exactly where to start.
‘This is Deputy Field Prefect Thalia Ng,’ she said aloud. ‘Confirm recognition.’
‘Welcome, Deputy Field Prefect Ng,’ it replied, in the neutrally sexless voice common to all cores. ‘How may I assist you?’
Thalia brought to mind the one-time code with which she had been briefed after the cutter’s departure from Panoply. ‘Acknowledge security access override Narcissus Eight Palisander.’
‘Override confirmed. You now have six hundred seconds of clearance, Deputy Field Prefect Ng.’
‘Disable two-way access to the exterior abstraction.’
‘Access is now blocked.’
The red lines vanished. Now the pillar showed only blue traffic. No signals were reaching or leaving the habitat. Almost immediately the blue traffic intensified as the citizenry began to panic, sending emergency queries to the core.
Thalia glanced at the man Sparver’s whiphound was still detaining. For the first time in his life, his implants would no longer be in constant communication with the informational matrix beyond House Perigal. It must have felt like the drop of a guillotine.
She returned her attention to the core. ‘Prepare me triplicate physical summary packages for all data traffic in and out of this habit in the last thousand days.’
‘I am preparing the packages. Please wait a moment.’
Thalia reached up and touched her throat microphone. ‘Thalia, sir. We’re securing the evidence now. We should be back with you within ten minutes.’
There was no response. She waited a few moments, giving Dreyfus time to activate his own microphone, but still nothing came.
She shot a look at Sparver. ‘I’m not getting anything.’
‘The boss man could be preoccupied,’ Sparver said.
‘He should have answered by now. I’m worried. Maybe we ought to get back there, see—’
‘We need those summary packages, Thalia. In five minutes you’ll be locked out of the core again.’
Sparver was right. The one-time code — good for ten minutes of unrestricted activity — would not buy her access to the core a second time.
‘Hurry up,’ she said, through clenched teeth.
She tried Dreyfus again, but still there was no reply. After what felt like an eternity, the core ejected the summary packages from a slot near its base. Thalia clipped together the thick diskettes and then secured them to her belt. Absurd as it was, she swore she could feel the weight of the information inside them. It would have taken days to squeeze that amount of data across a beam.
‘You done?’ Sparver asked.
‘This is all we need. We can leave the local abstraction running.’
‘And if they try to get around the block you just put in?’
‘They’ll have a dead core on their hands. They’ll be lucky if life support still works after that, let alone abstraction.’ Thalia turned back to the core and authorised it to rescind the Panoply access privilege it had just granted her. ‘That’s it, then,’ she said, feeling an unexpected sense of anticlimax.
‘There. Wasn’t so hard, was it?’
‘I’m worried about the boss.’
‘It’s just the rock this thing’s made of, blocking our signals.’ Sparver smiled at the technician again. ‘We’re done. Can I trust you not to do anything silly if I pull the whiphound off you?’
The man swallowed painfully and twitched his head in a nod.
‘I’ll take that as a “yes”,’ Sparver said. He reached out his hand and beckoned the whiphound. With a flick of its tail, the weapon sprang its handle into Sparver’s grip, the tail whisking back into the housing with a lashing sound.
Sparver patted the handle and reattached it to his belt. ‘Let’s go check on the boss man.’
But when they rode the rim transit back to Dreyfus, they found him standing alone and still, amidst a scene of almost unspeakable carnage. He held his glasses in one hand and the whiphound in the other.
Thalia snatched off her own glasses so that she could see things as they really were. People were screaming, scrambling and splashing to get away from the prefect and the objects of his attention. Caitlin Perigal’s two male guests were both slumped in the pool, in water that was now bloodstained pink. The man with the grey hair had lost his forearm: it was lying on the marble poolside, the hand pointing accusingly at Dreyfus. Behind the wrist, the skin bulged as if a bone-grafted weapon had been trying to push its way through to the surface. The other man, trembling as if in the throes of a seizure, had blood running from both his nostrils. His eyes were wide open, fixated on the ceiling. Three or four nearby guests were nursing wounds of varying severity. With all the blood in the water — draining from pool to pool via the waterfalls and sluices — it was difficult to be certain how many people had been hurt. Medical servitors had already arrived and were attending to the most seriously injured, but even the machines appeared confused.
Perigal was still alive, albeit breathing heavily. A vivid gash cut her across the right cheek, running from the corner of her mouth to her ear. She breathed heavily, her eyes wide and white with fury and fear.
‘You’re wrong about this,’ she breathed. ‘You’re wrong about this and you’re going to pay.’
Dreyfus turned slowly at the approach of Thalia and Sparver. ‘Got the packages?’
Thalia’s mouth was dry. ‘Yes,’ she said, forcing the word out, striving to maintain professional composure.
‘Then let’s go. We’re done here.’
