CHAPTER 2
Dreyfus had closed half the distance to the middle of the supreme prefect’s office when the safe-distance tether jerked him to a halt. For a moment Jane Aumonier appeared unaware of his presence, absorbed in one of her wall displays. He coughed quietly before speaking.
‘If you want my resignation, it’s yours.’
Aumonier turned her head to face him, without moving the rest of her body. ‘On what grounds, Tom?’
‘You name it. If I committed an error of procedure, or was guilty of improper judgement, you only have to say the word.’
‘If you committed an error, it was in not going far enough to defend yourself and your deputies. What was the final body count?’
‘Six,’ Dreyfus said.
‘We’ve done worse. Perigal was always going to be a tough nut. A single-figure body count strikes me as entirely acceptable, given all that we could have expected.’
‘I was hoping things wouldn’t get quite so messy.’
‘That was Perigal’s call, not yours.’
‘I still don’t think we’re finished with her. What she said to me…’ Dreyfus paused, certain that Aumonier had enough to worry about without being burdened with his doubts. ‘I feel as if a debt has been settled. That isn’t a good way for a prefect to feel.’
‘It’s human.’
‘She got away with it in the past because we weren’t clever or fast enough to audit her before the evidence turned stale. But even if we’d been able to pin anything on her, her crimes wouldn’t have merited a full century of lockdown.’
‘And we don’t know that it will come to that this time, either.’
‘You think she’ll slip through again?’
‘That’ll depend on the evidence. Time to make use of that bright new expert on your team.’ ‘I have every confidence in Thalia.’
‘Then you’ve nothing to fear. If Perigal’s guilty, the state of lockdown will continue. If the evidence doesn’t turn anything up, House Perigal will be allowed re-entry into the Glitter Band.’
‘Minus six people.’
‘Citizens panic when they lose abstraction. That isn’t our problem.’
Dreyfus tried to read Aumonier’s expression, wondering what he was missing. It wasn’t like her to need to ask him how many people had died during an operation: normally she’d have committed the figures to memory before he was back inside Panoply. But Aumonier’s emotionless mask was as impossible to read as ever. He could remember how she looked when she smiled, or laughed, or showed anger, how she’d been before her brush with the Clockmaker, but it took an increasing effort of will.
‘Pardon me,’ he said, ‘but if this isn’t a reprimand… what exactly do you want me for?’
‘The conversation? The banter? The warmth of human companionship?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Something’s come up. The news broke while you were outside. It’s as delicate as the Perigal affair, if not more so. Urgent, too. We need immediate action.’
Dreyfus had not heard of anything brewing. ‘Another lockdown? ’
‘No. There wouldn’t be much point, unfortunately.’
‘I’m sorry?’
Aumonier extended a hand to the wall, enlarging one of the display facets. It filled with an image of a spherical habitat, a grey ball blurred with microscopic detail, banded by tropical sun-panels, with an array of vast mirrors stationed at the poles and around the equator. The scale was difficult to judge, though Dreyfus doubted that the habitat was less than a kilometre wide.
‘You won’t recognise it. This is a recent image of the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble, a fifth-magnitude shell habitat in the high outer orbits. It’s never fallen under Panoply scrutiny before.’
‘What have they done wrong now?’
‘Here’s a more recent image, taken three hours ago.’
The Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble had been cut open, sliced along its midsection like an eyeball gouged by a razor. The cut had almost split the habitat into two hemispheres. On either side of the cut, the habitat’s fabric had been scorched to a crisp midnight black. Structures inside were still glowing cherry-red.
‘Casualties?’ Dreyfus asked, holding his horror at bay.
‘Last census put the population at nine hundred and sixty. We think they all died, but we need to get a team in and make an immediate physical inspection. Survivors can’t be ruled out. At the very least, there may be beta- level recoverables.’
‘Why isn’t this all over the Band?’
‘Because we’re keeping a lid on it. This doesn’t look like an accident.’
‘Someone will have noticed Ruskin-Sartorious dropping off the networks.’
‘They only participated in abstraction at a shallow level, enough that we can continue to simulate the existence of the fully functional habitat for the time being, using our network privileges.’
‘And the time being… would be how long?’
‘Best guess? Less than twenty-six hours. Thirteen might be nearer the mark.’
‘And when the story breaks?’
‘We’ll have a major crisis on our hands. I think I know who did this, but I’ll need to be absolutely certain before I move on it. That’s why I want you to get out to Ruskin-Sartorious immediately. Take whoever you need. Secure evidence and recoverables and get back to Panoply. Then we’ll hold our breath.’
Dreyfus looked again at the image of the wounded habitat. ‘There’s only one thing that could have done that, isn’t there? And it isn’t even a weapon.’
‘We see things similarly,’ Aumonier said.
The walls of the tactical room were finely grained teak, varnished to a forbidding gleam. There were no windows or pictures, no humanising touches. The heavy, dark furniture was all inert matter: grown, cut and constructed by nature and carpentry. The double doors were cased in hammered bronze, studded with huge brass bolts, each door inlaid with a stylised version of the raised gauntlet that was Panoply’s symbol. The gauntlet was supposed to signify protection, but it could just as easily be interpreted as a threatening fist, clenched to smash down on its enemies or those who failed it.
‘Begin please, Ng,’ said the man sitting opposite Thalia, Senior Prefect Michael Crissel.
She placed the recovered diskettes on the table’s edge, almost dropping them in her nervousness. ‘Thank you, Senior Prefect. These are the triplicate physical summary packages from the Perigal polling core.’ She nodded at the clockwork-gear shape of the Perigal habitat, imaged as a tiny representation in the tactical room’s Solid Orrery, enlarged and elevated above its real orbital plane. ‘The data has now been copied into our archives, all one thousand days’ worth of it. I’ve verified that the three triplicate summaries are consistent, with no indication of tampering.’
‘And your findings?’
‘I’ve only had a few hours to look into things, which really isn’t enough time to do more than skim—’
Senior Prefect Gaston Clearmountain growled his impatience. ‘Cut the blather, Ng. Just tell us what you have.’
‘Sir,’ Thalia said, almost stammering. ‘Preliminary analysis confirms everything in the lockdown report. House Perigal were indeed guilty of tampering with the democratic process. On at least eight occasions they were able to bias voting patterns in marginal polls, either to their advantage, or to the advantage of their allies. There may be more instances. We’ll have a clearer picture when we’ve run a full audit on the packages.’
‘I was hoping for a clearer picture now,’ Clearmountain said.
Senior Prefect Sheridan Gaffney leaned forward in his huge black chair with a creak of leather. ‘Easy on her, Gaston,’ he growled. ‘She’s been under a lot of pressure to pull this together at short notice.’
Gaffney had a reputation for having a short fuse and a marked intolerance for fools. But as head of both
