unobserved.’
‘We, Tom?’
‘Pell will fly me to the drop-off point. I’ll walk the rest of the way.’
‘Walk?’ she asked, frowning. ‘No one said anything about walking. ’
‘There’s no other way. Firebrand will have Ops Nine guarded against the approach of any unauthorised vehicle. But if Pell drops me over their sensor horizon, I should be able to walk in without triggering the perimeter defences.’
‘How will you know where their sensor horizon ends?’
‘They want to stay hidden, so their coverage will be necessarily limited. They won’t be floating drones up in the air to spy on someone approaching overland.’
‘You hope.’
‘I’ll take my chances. If you could clear the paperwork for a Breitenbach rifle, that would help.’
‘Take whatever you want from the armoury,’ Aumonier said dismissively. ‘If I could spare a nuke, I’d give you one of those as well.’
‘Not on my kit list, but would you really give me one if I asked?’
‘Probably, but with misgivings. The problem is we don’t have an inexhaustible supply, and we need to make sure we curtail all weevil production when we take out a habitat.’
‘How many nukes do you have left?’
Aumonier glanced away: he could tell that she’d rather he hadn’t asked that particular question. ‘We’re down to our last fifty warheads. For some of the larger habitats on the evacuation front we’ll have to use three or four to guarantee total destruction of all manufactory centres. It’s bad enough that we’re driven to this, Tom. But no one ever imagined Panoply would need more than a few dozen nukes, even in the worst crisis scenarios we ever imagined.’
Dreyfus smiled thinly. ‘Can we make more nukes?’
‘Not on a useful timescale. We’ve put in so many safeguards to stop people making these horrors that it’s going to take days of frantic red-tape cutting before we can even begin to utilise civilian manufactories. They won’t come through in time to help us, I’m afraid.’
‘If we had another weapon to use against the evacuated habitats, would we consider it?’
‘You mean something with the destructive potential of nukes?’ Aumonier shook her head sadly. ‘There just isn’t anything in our arsenal, I’m afraid. If we deployed every foam-phase warhead we have, we might be able to destroy a single habitat. But it would take hours, and we’d always run the risk of missing a chunk of functioning manufactory, something with the capacity to keep churning out weevils.’
‘I wasn’t thinking about our armoury,’ Dreyfus said. ‘I was thinking about the people we blamed for starting this whole thing in the first place.’
‘I’m not following you, Tom.’
‘The Ultras,’ Dreyfus said. ‘We’ve already had a comprehensive demonstration that one of their ships can destroy one of our habitats, no problem. Granted, Ruskin-Sartorious was one of the smaller states, but I think the principle still applies. They can help us, Jane.’
‘Will they go for it?’
‘We won’t know unless we ask,’ Dreyfus said.
She looked down, surveying her weightless form, the tips of her dangling feet. Dreyfus wondered if she had noticed the thin, red scratch of the laser that was now cutting across her body just below her neckline. If she had cause to raise a hand, she would notice it shining across her wrist. Demikhov’s guillotine was in place, the laser’s sub-millimetre accuracy good enough for surgical purposes, so Dreyfus had been informed. If the laser happened to transect her throat above the upper extremity of the scarab, and if all other physiological parameters were satisfactory, Demikhov would initiate the decapitation process. Demikhov had even argued against Dreyfus visiting Aumonier in person, for he would not trigger the blades while another prefect was in the same room. Dreyfus understood that, and that his presence was therefore not in Aumonier’s best interests. But he’d had an overwhelming need to see her before he left.
‘I don’t want to keep you, Tom,’ she said hesitantly. ‘But before you go—’
He cut her off, more out of nerves than intention. ‘There’s been no news from Captain Sarasota?’ he asked.
‘I’m still waiting. Her last report said that there appeared to be thermal signatures consistent with survivors, but they won’t know until they’ve docked with it and cut a boarding aperture. I’ve no idea what the hell that thing is, but I suppose we’ll find out soon enough.’
‘It’s not done anything hostile, has it?’
‘No. On that score your intuitions were correct.’
There was a silence. Dreyfus was conscious of the ship waiting for him down in the bay, almost ready for departure. As little desire as he had to be aboard it, he knew that he could not delay. It might take many hours to reach Ops Nine, but every minute was critical.
‘You were about to say something,’ he said. ‘Then I interrupted you.’
Aumonier could not meet his eyes. ‘This is difficult for me.’
‘Then save it for later. I’m not planning on staying down there.’
‘It can’t wait until later, unfortunately. This whole business with the Clockmaker has precipitated something I had hoped to avoid for a very long while. Perhaps for ever. I’ve had to make a very difficult decision, Tom. Even now, I don’t know if what I’m about to do, what I’m about to say to you, is the right thing.’
‘Perhaps you should just say it and see how things go.’
‘Before you board the ship, I’m going to make a document available to you. I’ll have it transferred onto your compad.’
‘You want me to read a document?’
‘It isn’t that simple. You have Pangolin clearance now, but this is a matter above Pangolin. You’ll need Manticore.’
‘I don’t have Manticore.’
‘But I can grant it to you. The choice will be yours as to whether you use it or not.’
‘Why should I hesitate?’
‘Because of what’s in that document, Tom. It probably won’t come as a great surprise if I tell you that it concerns the last Clockmaker crisis, and what happened to the Sylveste Institute for Artificial Mentation. By implication, it concerns Valery.’
‘I understand.’
She answered very gently. ‘No, you don’t. Not yet. Not until you’ve read the contents. Something happened back then, Tom, that was personally very difficult for you.’
‘I lost my wife. It doesn’t get any more difficult than that.’
Aumonier closed her eyes. He could sense the distress this was causing her. ‘What happened in SIAM was… not what was entered in the public record. There were good reasons for this. But you chose not to live with the facts as they were.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You were more closely involved in the Clockmaker affair than you have led yourself to believe these last eleven years. After the crisis, you were… troubled. You could no longer function as an effective prefect. You recognised this yourself and requested the appropriate remedial action.’
Though he was floating weightless, Dreyfus had the impression that he was falling down a deep, dark shaft, into invisible depths.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Selective amnesia was applied, Tom, at your request. Your memories of the Clockmaker crisis were forcibly suppressed.’
‘But the records say I was nowhere near SIAM,’ Dreyfus protested.
‘The records were incorrect. Since so much of what happened that day was destined to remain secret anyway, it was an easy matter to place you elsewhere. It was done with my full authorisation.’
Dreyfus knew she wasn’t lying. She had no reason to, not now. The stress of speaking the truth was almost ripping her in two.
