very little effort to submerge ourselves to an even deeper level of secrecy, beyond even Jane’s oversight.”
“And what did you learn, Paula?”
“Don’t come any closer, Prefect Dreyfus.”
But Dreyfus was already within view of the flight deck by the time she finished her sentence. The connecting door was open. Blood droplets formed a cloud of little scarlet balloons, pulled into perfect spheres by surface tension. Lansing Chen was dead. He was buckled into the right-hand command seat, his head lolling at an unnatural angle, swaying slowly from side to side as the air shifted. His neck had been gashed open with the whiphound Paula Saavedra was still holding. She was buckled into the left-hand chair, rotated around to face Dreyfus and Sparver. She had one leg hooked higher than the other. She held the whiphound in her right hand, while her left hovered above one of the luminous blue controls on the console.
“You didn’t have to kill Chen,” Dreyfus said, tightening his grip on his own whiphound.
Behind, he heard Sparver speak into his bracelet.
“Get me Mercier. We need a crash team at the nose. This is a medical emergency.”
“I didn’t want to kill him,” Saavedra said, with real menace.
“Chen was a good man, Prefect. He served Firebrand well, until the end. It’s not his fault that he’s been having doubts.”
“What kind of doubts?”
“None of us liked what happened to Ruskin-Sartorious, but most of us saw it as an unfortunate but unavoidable occurrence. A casualty of war, Prefect. Not Chen, though. He felt we’d gone too far; that nine hundred and sixty lives were too high a price to pay for security. He felt it was time to blow our cover.”
“He’d have been right.”
The tip of her whiphound gleamed dark red.
“No, he wouldn’t. Nothing matters more now than keeping the Clockmaker’s new location hidden.”
“I agree wholeheartedly. Aurora mustn’t learn of the Clockmaker’s whereabouts. But Panoply needs that information more than ever.”
“Ordinarily, I might have agreed you. But Panoply is compromised. Someone’s been sniffing around Firebrand for days. Probably the same someone who helped arrange the attack on Ruskin-Sartorious.”
“That was Senior Prefect Gaffney. He’s out of the picture now. I took care of that myself, so you can start trusting me.”
“Can I, really? You’ve done very well to track us down, Prefect. How do I know you aren’t just following up on Gaffney’s unfinished business?”
“I am, in a way—I had to find you. Why’d you have to kill Chen, Paula?”
“I told you—he got cold feet at the last moment. Decided he’d rather stay here and face the music. I
couldn’t let that happen, Prefect. Just as I can’t let you keep me here now.”
“Nothing bad will happen to you,” Dreyfus said. But if he’d meant it earlier, it was an empty promise now. Nothing could excuse the murder of a fellow prefect.
“Even if killed myself, you’d trawl my corpse to get the location of the Clockmaker. Therefore I must leave. Can you see my left hand, Prefect?” Dreyfus nodded.
“I guess you’re holding it there for a reason.”
“When I boarded this ship, I brought four whiphounds with me. They’re set to grenade mode, maximum yield, keyed to this console. Don’t go looking for them—they’re well hidden.”
“Whiphounds won’t detonate inside Panoply. There’s a positional safeguard.”
“Which I overrode, without difficulty.” She shook her head disappointedly.
“I’m Firebrand, Prefect. Can you imagine the lengths we’ve had to go to to maintain our effectiveness and secrecy over the last nine years? There isn’t a trick in the book we don’t know.”
“Don’t do it, Paula. We need this bay in one piece.”
“I won’t do it unless you prevent me from leaving. But if you try to prevent me, I won’t hesitate. The blast won’t do significant damage to Panoply—it might put this bay out of action, true—but it definitely won’t leave enough of me for you to trawl.”
“I need to know where the Clockmaker is,” Dreyfus insisted.
“I can’t take the risk of telling you. As far as I’m concerned, Panoply is already compromised. Firebrand is the only remaining part of the organisation capable of handling things from now on.”
“If you think I can’t be trusted, why did you tell me that the Clockmaker’s still alive?”
“I told you nothing Aurora won’t already know. Now leave the cutter, Prefects.”
“We’ll track you. Wherever you go. You’re just prolonging the inevitable.”
“There isn’t a ship in Panoply that can be prepped and launched in time to follow me.” She allowed a glint of self-satisfaction to shine through.
“I know: I checked. And you won’t be able to track me. This cutter is CTC-dark. Maybe if there wasn’t a Bandwide crisis going down, stretching all our resources, you might have a chance. But you don’t, so you may as well not even bother. I’m dropping off the map. You won’t hear from me again.”
“You might hear from me,” Dreyfus said.
“Get off this ship. Then make sure those bay doors are opened. You’ve got two minutes.”
“Give us Chen’s body.”
“So you can run a post-mortem trawl to find out what he knew about the Clockmaker? Nice try.” No, Dreyfus thought: not for that reason at all. He’d never counted on extracting anything useful from the dead. But he was sure Demikhov’s crash team would welcome some practice at stabilising a severed head before they had to do it for real.
“Have it your way, Paula.” Dreyfus looked back at Sparver.
“We’re leaving. She may be bluffing about those whiphounds, but we can’t take the chance.”
“Boss,” Sparver said quietly, “I already have her marked. I can put my own whiphound on her in under a second.”
“Try it,” Saavedra said.
“If you’re feeling lucky. You have about ninety seconds now, by the way.”
“You’re making a terrible mistake, Paula,” Dreyfus said.
“So are you. Get off the ship.” Dreyfus nodded at Sparver and the two of them retreated back into the docking connector. The airlock closed, isolating the ship. Dreyfus cuffed his bracelet and called through to Thyssen, the officer in charge of bay operations.
“This is Dreyfus. Open the doors. Let her go.”
“Prefect, we can’t afford to lose that cutter,” Thyssen said.
“We lose the bay if we don’t lose the cutter. Open the doors.” Thyssen didn’t need to be told twice. A moment later the vast jaws of the armoured doors began to ease wide, interlocking teeth pulling away from each other to reveal a sea of false stars and the darkside curve of Yellowstone, cusped by a line of indigo. The launching rack pushed out on pistons, shoving Saavedra’s cutter into open space. Engines kicked in, spiking out needle-thin thrust lines. The cutter surged away at maximum burn.
“Can we get another ship out there?” Dreyfus asked.
“Not fast enough to intercept,” Thyssen said.
“We’ll track her as best we can, but I can’t promise anything.” Through the window of the docking connector, Dreyfus watched Saavedra’s ship fall into the sea of stars, following it by eye until he could no longer distinguish it from the lights of distant habitats.
“It’s very, very bad,” Jane Aumonier’s hovering face told Dreyfus and the assembled seniors, while the Solid Orrery displayed six red lights amidst a sea of twinkling emerald.
“Weevils penetrated and occupied Carousel New Brazilia nine hours, thirty minutes ago. We detected manufactory warm-up two hours ago. Eighteen minutes ago, the doors opened and newly minted weevils began to emerge. Squadron density and flow throughput is consistent with what we’ve already seen in Aubusson and Szlumper Oneill.” She paused, allowing that to sink in before delivering the grim remainder of her summary.
“We lost Flammarion not long after Brazilia. The manufactories are on-line there as well. Based on what we’ve observed in the other habitats, we can expect weevil output to commence in ten to fifteen minutes. We’ve failed to contain the outflow from Aubusson and Szlumper Oneill, but we were at least able to reduce the number of weevils, which must have had some measurable effect on Aurora’s rate of spread. Now we’ll have no chance, short
