‘You do now.’
‘I was expecting to be met by Raichle.’
‘Raichle couldn’t make it. I came instead. You’re okay with that, I assume?’
‘Of course I’m…’ But Anthony Theobald’s usual self-control was betraying him. The man in the suit felt waves of fear rippling off him. Waves of fear and suspicion and an arrogant unwillingness to grasp that his escape plans hadn’t been as foolproof as they’d looked when he climbed into the nonvelope. ‘Did it really happen? Is Ruskin-Sartorious gone?’
‘It’s gone. The Ultras did a good job. You got out just in time.’
‘And the others? The rest of us?’
‘I’d be surprised if there’s a single intact strand of human DNA left anywhere in the Bubble.’
‘Delphine…’ There was a heartbreaking crack in his voice. ‘My poor daughter?’
‘You knew the deal, Anthony Theobald. You were the only one with a get-out clause.’
‘I demand to know who you are. If Raichle didn’t send you, how did you know where to find the nonvelope?’
‘Because he told me, that’s why. During interrogation.’
‘Who are you?’
‘That isn’t the issue, Anthony Theobald. The issue at hand is what you were doing sheltering that evil thing in your nice little family-run habitat.’
‘I wasn’t sheltering anything. I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
The man in the suit reached behind the small of his back and unclipped a small, handle-shaped object. He hefted it in his palm as if it might be a cosh or truncheon.
‘I think it’s about time you met a close, personal friend of mine.’
‘You’ve got it wrong. The thing underground was just—’
The man made an odd flicking motion with the handle and something whipped out, extending all the way to the floor. It was almost invisibly fine, catching the light only intermittently. It appeared to swish against the flooring of its own volition, as if searching for something.
The man let go of the handle. The handle remained where it was, its coiled filament stiffening to support it. The handle tracked around until the black cylinder of its head was aimed directly at Anthony Theobald. He raised a hand against the laser as it scratched a bright, oscillating line across his eyes.
It had a mark on him now, confirmed by a minute nod from the man in black.
‘Keep that thing away from me.’
‘This is a Model C whiphound,’ the man in the suit said. ‘It’s got a few additional features compared to the last version. One of them’s called “interrogation mode”. Shall we give it a spin?’
The whiphound began to slink closer to Anthony Theobald.
Dreyfus was alone in his quarters. He had prepared some tea, losing himself in the task. When he was finished, he knelt at a low, black table and allowed the hot ginger-coloured brew to cool before drinking it. The room filled itself with the tinkling sound of distant wind chimes, a ghost-thin melody implicit in the apparent randomness. Normally it suited his mood, but today Dreyfus waved the music quieter, until he had near-silence. He sipped at the tea but it was still too hot.
He faced a blank rice-paper wall. He raised a hand and shaped a basic conjuring gesture, one that he had practised thousands of times. The wall brightened with blocky patches of vivid colour. The colours resolved into a mosaic of faces, several dozen of them, arranged in a compositional scheme with the larger images clustered near the middle. The faces were all the same woman, but taken at different stages in her life, so that they almost looked like images of different people. Sometimes the woman was looking into the camera; sometimes she was looking askance, or had been snapped candidly. She had high cheekbones, a slight overbite and eyes of a startling bronze, flecked with chips of fiery gold. She had black hair that she usually wore in tight curls. She was smiling in many of the images, even the ones where she hadn’t been aware that she was being photographed. She’d smiled a lot.
Dreyfus stared at the pictures as if they were a puzzle he had to solve.
Something was missing. In his mind’s eye he could see the woman in the pictures turning to him with flowers in her hand, kneeling in newly tilled soil. The image was vivid, but when he tried to focus on any particular part of it the details squirmed from his attention. He knew that memory had to come from somewhere, but he couldn’t relate it to any of the images already on the wall.
He’d been trying to place it for nearly eleven years.
The tea was cool enough to drink at last. He sipped it slowly, concentrating on the mosaic of faces. Suddenly the composition struck him as jarringly unbalanced in the top-right corner, even though he’d been satisfied with it for many months. He raised a hand and adjusted the placement of the images, the wall obeying his gestures with flawless obedience. It looked better now, but he knew it would come to displease him in time. Until he found that missing piece, the mosaic would always be disharmonious.
He thought back to what had happened, flinching from the memory even as he embraced it.
Six missing hours.
‘You were okay,’ he told the woman on the wall. ‘You were safe. It didn’t get to you before we did.’
He made himself believe it, as if nothing else in the universe mattered quite as much.
Dreyfus made the images disappear, leaving the rice-paper wall as blank as when he’d entered the room. He finished the tea in a gulp, barely tasting it as it sluiced down his throat. On the same portion of the wall he called up an operational summary of the day’s business, wondering if the forensics squad had managed to get anything on the sculpture Sparver and he had seen in Ruskin-Sartorious. But when the summary sprang onto the wall, neither the images nor the words were legible. He could make out shapes in the images, individual letters in the words, but somewhere between the wall and his brain there was a scrambling filter in place.
Belatedly, Dreyfus realised that he’d neglected to take his scheduled Pangolin shot. Security dyslexia was kicking in as his last clearance boost faded.
He stood from the table and moved to the part of the wall where the booster was dispensed. As he reached towards the pearly-grey surface, the booster appeared in an alcove. It was a pale-grey tube marked with the Panoply gauntlet and a security barcode matching the one on his uniform. Text on the side of the booster read:
Dreyfus rolled up his sleeve and pressed the tube against the skin of his forearm. He felt a cold tingle as the booster rammed its contents into his body, but there was no discomfort.
He retired to his bedroom. He slept fitfully, but without dreams. When he woke three or four hours later, the summary on the wall was crystal clear.
He studied it for a while, then decided he’d given the Ultras long enough.
CHAPTER 4
An alert chimed on the cutter’s console. Dreyfus pushed the coffee bulb back into the wall and studied the read-out. Something was approaching from the Parking Swarm, too small to be a lighthugger. Guardedly, he notched up the cutter’s defensive posture. Weapons unpacked and armed, but refrained from revealing themselves through the hull. Dreyfus concluded that the approaching object was moving too slowly to make an effective missile. A few moments later, the cutter’s cams locked on and resolved the foreshortened form of a small ship-to- ship shuttle. The vehicle had the shape of an eyeless equine skull. Black armour was offset with a scarlet dragonfly, traced in glowing filaments.
He received an invitation to open audio-only communications.
‘Welcome, Prefect,’ said an accentless male voice in modern Russish. ‘How may I be of assistance?’
With some effort, Dreyfus changed verbal gears. ‘You can be of assistance by staying right where you are. I haven’t entered the Swarm.’
‘But you’re very close to the outer perimeter. That would suggest an intention to enter.’
‘To whom am I speaking?’
