already been weakened or cut through entirely.
‘Thank our lucky stars this isn’t quickmatter,’ Parnasse said, ‘or those cuts would have healed over by now. But the rules say you can’t have quickmatter anywhere near a polling core.’
‘I like rules,’ Thalia said. ‘Rules are good.’
‘Let’s unwrap the baby.’
Thalia removed the whiphound from its protective bundle. It was trembling, with parts of the casing beginning to melt from the heat. The smell of burning components hit her nose. ‘Okay,’ she said, twisting the first of the dials. ‘Setting yield to maximum. Looks as if it’s accepted the input. So far so good.’ She paused to let her fingers cool down.
‘Now the timer,’ Parnasse said.
She nodded. She twisted the first of the two dials necessary to input the setting. It was stiff, but eventually the dial moved under her fingers until it reached the limit of its rotation. The double-dial fail-safe existed to stop the whiphound being set to grenade mode accidentally. ‘Five minutes,’ she said.
‘It’ll start counting as soon as you twist the other dial?’
Thalia nodded. ‘It should give us enough time to get back upstairs and lashed down. If you want to go ahead now, to make sure—’
‘I’m not going anywhere without you. Set the timer.’
Thalia took hold of the end of the whiphound and began to twist the other dial. It moved easily compared to the other one, clicking around through its settings. Then it stopped, long before it had reached the correct limit. Thalia tried again, but the dial would not pass beyond the point where it had jammed.
‘Something’s the matter,’ she said. ‘I can’t get the second setting locked in. Both dials have to be reading three hundred seconds or it won’t start the countdown.’
‘Can I try?’
She passed him the whiphound. ‘Maybe you can force that dial past the blockage.’
He tried. He couldn’t.
‘It’s jammed pretty good, girl.’ Parnasse squinted at the tiny white digits marked next to the dial. ‘Looks like we’re stuck at one hundred seconds, or less.’
‘It isn’t enough,’ Thalia said. ‘We’d never get back up and lashed down in one hundred seconds.’
‘There’s no other way of setting that counter?’
‘None.’
Then something came over her, a kind of awesome calm, like the placidity of the sea after a great storm. She had never felt more serene, more purposeful, in her life. This was it, she knew. It was the point she had waited for, with guarded expectation, knowing it would arrive at some time in her career, but that she might not notice it unless she was both alert and open-minded. This was her opportunity to redeem whatever it was her father had done wrong.
‘Girl?’ Parnasse asked, for Thalia had fallen into a momentary trance.
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘We can still do this. I want you to leave now, Cyrus. Get back to the others and strap yourself down. Make sure you close all airtight doors on the way.’
‘And you?’
‘I’m going to wait a whole three hundred seconds. Then I’m going to complete what I came here to do.’
‘Which is?’
Her voice trembled. ‘Uphold the public good.’
‘Is that right?’ Parnasse said.
‘Yes,’ she answered.
‘I don’t think so, girl.’
She started to protest, started to raise her arm in defence, but Parnasse was faster and stronger. Whatever it was he did to her, she never saw it coming.
CHAPTER 27
Thyssen’s face was slit-eyed and puffy when it appeared on Dreyfus’s compad.
‘I know you’re meant to be sleeping now, and I apologise for disturbing your rest. But something’s been nagging at me and I need to talk to you about it.’ He neglected to tell Thyssen that the thing that had been bothering him had only revealed itself fully when he woke from his snooze.
‘Is this urgent, Prefect?’
‘Very.’
‘Then I’ll see you in the bay in five minutes.’
Thyssen looked surprisingly alert when Dreyfus arrived, feeling less than clearheaded himself. Thyssen was talking with his shift replacement Tezuka, the two of them peering through a window at the ongoing ship operations. Technicians were performing vacuum welds on the damaged hull of a cutter. Both men were sipping something from drinking bulbs.
‘Prefect Dreyfus,’ Thyssen said, breaking away from his conversation. ‘You look like you could use some of this.’ He offered Dreyfus the drinking bulb. Dreyfus declined.
‘The ship Saavedra took,’ Dreyfus said.
‘You mean Saavedra and Chen.’
Dreyfus nodded: he’d forgotten that Thyssen hadn’t been informed of Chen’s murder. ‘I’m just wondering why they took that one, out of all the choices they had. Am I correct in thinking that cutter was a Type B?’
‘Correct,’ Thyssen said. ‘Most of the new vehicles are Type C or D. They don’t have the—’
‘Transatmospheric capability,’ Dreyfus finished for him. ‘That’s what I reckoned.’
‘Since the segregation of security responsibilities between Chasm City and the Glitter Band—’
‘Prefects hardly ever need to take a ship into Yellowstone’s atmosphere. And all that aerodynamic bodywork makes for fuel-draining mass that we don’t need in normal duties. I know. But we still keep a small number of transat vehicles on readiness, in case we do need them.’
Something clicked behind Thyssen’s eyes. ‘You think they’ve gone to Yellowstone.’
‘It’s a possibility. I need you to look into your logs. I’m going to give you the names of some prefects and I want you to correlate those names against the vehicles they’ve signed out for routine duties. Can you do that for me?’
‘Yes. Immediately.’
‘Here are the names.’ Dreyfus handed Thyssen his compad, allowing him access to the area where he had input the identities of the eight Firebrand operatives. Thyssen retired to an office space, Dreyfus shadowing him, and transferred the names into his own compad with a finger stroke.
Thyssen chucked his bulb into the wall and conjured a console. ‘I’m checking the logs right now. How far back do you want me to go?’
Dreyfus thought of the likely activity that would have preceded the destruction of the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble. Moving the Clockmaker and its associated relics — including any equipment required to study them — would have certainly required more than one trip.
‘Two months should do it.’
‘Conjure yourself a coffee, Prefect. This is going to take a couple of minutes.’
Thalia woke with the worst headache she could remember, one that felt as if someone had driven an iron piton into the side of her skull. She was just beginning to speculate on the precise origin of that pain when she became aware of less intense discomfort afflicting almost her entire body. It was difficult to breathe, and her arms were tugged so far behind her back that she felt as if her shoulders had been dislocated. Something squeezed her chest. Something hard dug into her spine. She opened her eyes and looked around, wondering where she was and what had happened to her.
‘Easy,’ said Meriel Redon, who appeared to be bound in a similar position next to Thalia: sitting on the ground with her back against the railings that encircled the polling core, her arms crossed and bound behind one of
