uniform. Make it count. The citizens are depending on you.’
CHAPTER 16
Dreyfus was still drowsing as the deep-system cruiser completed its docking, nudging home into its skeletal berthing rack. He’d slept all the way back to Panoply, from almost the moment when his escape pod was brought aboard the ship and he was reunited with Sparver and Clepsydra. He dreamed of reeking halls of raw human meat hanging from bloodstained hooks, and a woman gorging herself on muscle and sinew, her mouth a red-stained obscenity. When he woke and sifted through his memories of recent events, his experiences in the Nerval- Lermontov rock felt like something that had happened yesterday, rather than a handful of hours earlier. The rock itself no longer existed. The impact of the fully laden and fuelled freighter had pulverised it, so that nothing now remained of its secrets except a cloud of expanding rubble; a gritty sleet that would rain against the sticky collision shields of the Glitter Band habitats for many orbits. Even if Panoply had the resources, there’d have been little point in combing that debris cloud for forensic clues. Clepsydra was now Dreyfus’s only witness to the unspeakable crime that had been visited upon her crewmates.
But it wasn’t Clepsydra who was foremost in his thoughts.
As soon as he pushed through the cruiser’s suitwall, Dreyfus badgered Thyssen, the tired-looking dock attendant. ‘Thalia Ng, my deputy. When did she get in?’
The man glanced at his compad. He had red rings around his eyes, vivid as brands. ‘She’s still out there, Tom.’
‘On her way back?’
‘Not according to this.’ The man tapped his stylus against a line of text. ‘CTC haven’t logged her undocking from House Aubusson. Looks as if she’s still inside.’
‘How long since she docked there?’
‘According to this… eight hours.’
Dreyfus knew that Thalia had only had a six-hundred-second access window. No matter what obstacles she’d encountered, she should have been out of there by now.
‘Has anyone managed to get through to her since Deputy Sparver’s attempt?’
The man looked helpless. ‘I don’t have a record of that.’
‘She has one of your ships,’ Dreyfus snapped. ‘I’d say it was your duty to keep adequate tabs on her, wouldn’t you?’
‘I’m sorry, Prefect.’
‘Don’t apologise,’ Dreyfus growled. ‘Just do your job.’ He grabbed a handhold and pulled himself towards the exit.
‘If you think you’re having a shitty day,’ Sparver told Thyssen, ‘you should try ours on for size.’
The two prefects and their Conjoiner guest cleared the dock and transitioned through to one of the standard-gravity wheels. They detoured to the medical section and left Clepsydra in the care of one of the doctors, an impish man named Mercier whom Dreyfus trusted not to ask awkward questions. Mercier affected the appearance and manners of a bookish scholar of the natural sciences from some remote candlelit century. He dressed impeccably, with a white shirt and cravat, his eyes forever hidden behind green-tinted half-moon spectacles, and chose to surround himself with facsimiles of varnished wooden furniture, conjured museum-piece medical tools and gruesome illustrative devices. He had a perplexing attachment to paperwork, to the extent that he made many of his reports in inked handwriting, using a curious black stylus that he referred to as a ‘fountain pen’. Yet for all his eccentricities, he was no less competent than Dr Demikhov, his counterpart in the adjoining Sleep Lab.
‘This is my witness,’ Dreyfus explained. ‘She’s to be examined humanely, treated for malnutrition and dehydration and then left well alone. I’ll return in a few hours.’
Clepsydra cocked her crested bald egg of a head and narrowed her eyes. ‘Am I now to consider myself a prisoner again?’
‘No. Just a guest, under my protection. When the crisis is over, I’ll do all in my power to get you back to your people.’
‘I could call my people myself if you give me access to a medium-strength transmitter.’
‘Part of me would like nothing better. But someone was prepared to kill to keep you a secret. They succeeded in killing your compatriots. That means they’ll be more than prepared to kill again if they know you’re here.’
‘Then I should leave. Immediately.’
‘You’ll be safe here.’
‘I think I can trust you,’ Clepsydra said, her attention on Dreyfus, as if no one else was in the room. ‘But understand one thing: it is a significant thing for a Conjoiner to trust a baseline human being. People like you did terrible things to people like me, once. Many of them would do the same things again if the chance arose. Please do not give me cause to regret this.’
‘I won’t,’ Dreyfus said.
Dusk was falling in the long shaft of House Aubusson. The mirror-directed sunlight pouring through the window bands was being slowly dimmed as the bands lost their transparency. Soon the habitat would be dark even when its orbit brought it around to Yellowstone’s dayside.
From the curved viewing gallery of the polling core, more than five hundred metres above the ground, Thalia watched the shadows encroach like an army of stalking cats. She could still make out the pale-grey trajectory of the pathway they had tried to follow out of the formal gardens, towards the objective of the endcap wall. But the grey was darkening, losing definition as darkness won. Soon even the concentric black hoops of the window bands would be indistinguishable from the surrounding terrain. She would be able to make out neither the path nor the endcap. The attempted crossing, which had seemed achievable only hours earlier, now struck her as hopelessly misguided. It would have been ill-conceived if all they had to contend with was enraged and panicked citizenry looking for someone to mob. But now Thalia knew that the darkening landscape was in all likelihood crawling with dangerous machines, serving an agenda that definitely did not involve the preservation of human life.
But, she thought, seeking composure before she turned around, the citizens in her care must not see how frightened she was. She had come into their world bearing the authority of Panoply and that was the role she was obliged to continue playing. She had failed them once; twice if she included the mistake with the polling core that had created this mess in the first place. She could not let them down again.
‘So what’s the next step in your plan?’ Caillebot asked, with a sarcastic lilt that Thalia couldn’t help but detect.
‘The next step is we stay put,’ she said.
‘Up here?’
‘We’re safe here,’ she said, mentally deleting the ‘for now’ that she had been about to add. ‘This is as good a place to wait as anywhere we could have picked in the habitat.’
‘Wait for what, exactly?’ Caillebot asked.
She’d been expecting the gardener to start needling her as soon as they were inside the core. ‘For Panoply, Citizen. They’re on their way. There’ll be a deep-system cruiser docked with us before you can blink.’
‘It’ll take more than a few prefects to deal with those machines.’
Thalia touched the buzzing remains of her whiphound. It was uncomfortably hot against her thigh, like a metal bar cooling down from a furnace. ‘They’ll have the tools for the job, don’t you worry about that. All we have to do is hold out until they get here. That’s our part of the equation.’
‘“Hold out”,’ repeated Paula Thory mockingly. The plump woman was sitting on one of the inert-matter benches encircling the pearl-grey pillar of the polling core. ‘You make it sound so easy, like waiting for a train.’
Thalia walked over to the woman and knelt down to bring them face to face. ‘I’m not asking you to run a mile. We’re perfectly safe up here.’
‘Those barricades won’t hold for ever.’
