But when she handed him the compad, all he wrote on it this time was: ‘Help me.’
‘I think it might be best to save further questioning for later,’ Dreyfus said.
‘Why is it doing this to him?’ Baudry asked. ‘I’ve heard about the difficulties with the Model Cs, but nothing like
‘He must have switched on the whiphound in Clepsydra’s presence, ’ Dreyfus said. ‘Very silly thing to do around a Conjoiner, but I guess he couldn’t resist tormenting her. She couldn’t stop him killing her — he used a gun for that — but she was still able to tamper with the whiphound.’
‘She wouldn’t have had time.’
‘I doubt it took her more than a second. For a Conjoiner, it would have been about as difficult as blinking.’
‘But the programming is hard-coded.’
‘Nothing’s hard-coded to a Conjoiner. There’s always a way in, always a back door. She’d have found it if she knew she was about to die and this was her only way of getting a message through. Right, Sheridan?’
Gaffney twitched another affirmative. Some kind of whitish foam or drool was beginning to erupt around the black plug filling his mouth. The quickening tempo of his breathing was now audible to everyone in the room.
‘We still have to get it out of him,’ Baudry said. ‘Sheridan: I want you to stay very, very calm. No matter what you’ve done, no matter what’s happened, we’re going to help you.’ She lifted her arm and spoke into her bracelet with a voice on the trembling edge of panic. ‘Doctor Demikhov? Oh good, you’re awake. Yes, very well, thank you. I know this is unorthodox and that you’re mandated to focus only on the Aumonier case but… something’s come up. Something that requires your expertise very, very urgently.’
Dr Demikhov conjured a quickmatter partition, closing off one end of the tactical room to allow him and the other medical technicians to work on Gaffney in privacy. The last clear view Dreyfus had of the senior prefect was of him being gently lowered onto a couch tipped at forty-five degrees to the floor, handled as if he was a bomb that might detonate at any instant. Through the partition’s smoky opacity, the team became vaguely outlined pale ghosts, huddled around an indistinct black form. Then the indistinct black form started thrashing, blurred limbs flailing the air.
‘Do you think they’ll get it out of him?’ Baudry asked, breaking the uncanny silence.
‘I don’t think Clepsydra was interested in killing him,’ Dreyfus said. ‘She could have achieved that already by embedding a different set of instructions into the whiphound. I think she wanted him to talk instead.’
‘He was in no state to tell us anything reliable.’
‘He told us enough,’ Dreyfus said. ‘We can get more out of him when Demikhov’s finished.’ He eased himself into one of the seats around the table, opposite Baudry. ‘I’m taking something of a liberty here, but is it safe to assume that I’m no longer the prime suspect in Clepsydra’s murder?’
Baudry swallowed hard. ‘I was prepared to believe that you’d been framed, Tom, but I couldn’t accept your accusations about Gaffney. He was one of us, for Voi’s sake. I had to believe that you were wrong: that you were either striking out against him for personal reasons, or someone was framing Gaffney as well.’
‘And now?’
‘Following that little spectacle, I think we can safely assume that we know who murdered Clepsydra, and that he was probably acting alone.’ Baudry cast a wary glance at the smoky partition, but the huddle of shapes beyond the quickmatter was now too concentrated to separate into individuals. ‘Which means you were right, and I was wrong, and I ignored you when I should have trusted you. I’m sorry about that.’
‘Don’t apologise,’ Dreyfus said. ‘You had a crisis to contain and you took the best decision you could given the evidence available to you.’
‘There’s more,’ Baudry said. She played with her fingers nervously, as if she was trying to dismantle her hands. ‘I see now that Gaffney wanted Jane removed from command. Not because he was concerned for her, or even for Panoply, but because he feared she’d put two and two together before very long.’
‘So she had to go,’ Dreyfus said.
Baudry’s attention flicked to the partition. ‘When Demikhov’s finished… I need to talk to him about Jane. Do you think she’s strong enough to resume command?’
‘Whether she is or not, we need her.’
‘Like a circuit needs a fuse, even though it might blow at any time.’ Baudry shuddered at the thought. ‘Can we do this? Can we subject Jane to something that might kill her?’
‘Let Jane decide.’
‘Crissel and I didn’t want her removed for the same reasons as Gaffney,’ she said, apparently oblivious to the other people in the tactical room. ‘But that doesn’t make what we did any more excusable.’
‘Whatever Crissel did wrong, he made it right when he got on that deep-system cruiser.’
‘And me?’
‘Reinstate Jane, clear me of any suspicion of wrongdoing and I think you’ll have made a decent start.’
It was as if she hadn’t heard him. ‘Perhaps I should resign. I’ve let down the supreme prefect, allowed myself to be hoodwinked and manipulated by another senior… failed to trust the one man I should have placed my faith in. In most organisations, what I’ve done would be punished by instant dismissal.’
‘Sorry, Lillian, but you don’t get out of it that easily,’ Dreyfus said. ‘It takes more than a few bad judgement calls to erase a lifetime’s loyal service to Panoply. You were an outstanding senior a week ago. From where I’m sitting, not much has changed.’
‘That’s… generous of you,’ she allowed.
‘I’m only thinking of the organisation. We lost a good man in Crissel. That’s why we need Jane Aumonier. That’s why we need Lillian Baudry.’
‘And Tom Dreyfus,’ she added. ‘And yes, you can consider yourself free of suspicion.’
‘I hope that goes for Sparver as well.’
‘Of course. He did nothing wrong except support a fellow prefect, and he deserves my personal apology.’
‘I want him to start digging into the archives, to find everything he can on Aurora Nerval-Lermontov and the other alpha-levels.’
‘I’ll make sure he has all the resources, all the clearance he needs. You honestly think this is the same woman?’
Dreyfus nodded at the partition. ‘We heard it from the horse’s mouth. In a manner of speaking, at least. We’re dealing with a ghost in the machine. Now all we need is a ghost-killer.’
The world came back to Jane Aumonier without warning, without ceremony. She had decided, after much deliberation, that she preferred darkness and silence to the limited range of entertainments Gaffney and the others had left her with when they removed her executive authority. That left her alone with only the scarab for company, but in the eleven years since it had attached itself to her neck she had found that she could, when circumstances required it, retreat to a private corner of her own mind, a fortified place where even the scarab could not intrude. She had never been able to stay within that mental bastion for very long, but it had always been there when she needed it. In her place of sanctuary she played glacially cold, achingly melancholy piano pieces. She had often played the piano before the scarab came. Now it would not even allow the small bulk of a holoclavier in her presence, let alone a full-bodied keyboard. Yet she still remembered how to play, and when she was in full retreat her fingers moved in silent echo of the composition she was reciting in her head, ten million parsecs from the chamber in which she floated. The hidden music was the one thing the scarab had never been able to steal from her.
She had her eyes closed when the chamber began to light up of its own volition. It was hazardous to close her eyes for too long, for that invited the spectre of sleep to take a step nearer. But there was a more profound, calmer darkness when her eyes were closed, even in the absolute blackness of the unlit chamber.
‘I didn’t—’ Aumonier began, squinting against the sudden intrusion of brightness, colour and movement. The music shattered into irrecoverable pieces.
‘It’s all right,’ said a voice, coming from somewhere to her right. ‘You’re getting back everything they took away, Jane.’
She twisted her head towards the voice. The figure was dark on dark, standing in the black aperture of the
