change.”
“I thought Demikhov said they understood everything inside it.”
“He’s never claimed that, just that they know enough to be able to get it off me, one day.” Dreyfus studied the thing attached to the back of Aumonier’s neck. It was a fist-sized machine shaped like a red chromed beetle, clamped into place by its legs, a dozen sterile prongs that dug into her skin.
“Why now?” he asked.
“These last few days have been stressful for all of us. I can’t get much out of Demikhov, but I can guess what he’s thinking. We already know the scarab has a tap into my spine, so that it can read my blood chemistry. We also suspect that it has a field trawl, so that it can tell if I start falling asleep. I’ve no doubt about that—occasionally I feel the itch as it runs its fingers through my brain. I think it has enough to go on, Tom. It’s responding to my stress levels. Something in me has crossed a threshold, and the scarab has responded accordingly.”
“But apart from the change, the movement of components, it’s done nothing?”
“It may be preparing for something, waiting for my stress levels to notch higher. But no one in the Sleep Lab will tell me anything. I think they’re concerned about what might happen were I to become even more stressed.”
“I’ll talk to Demikhov,” Dreyfus said.
“Get the straight story.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
“It’s the least I can do.”
“The thing is, I can’t let this distract me from the present crisis. But I thought you deserved to know.” She swallowed hard.
“In case something happens to me.”
CHAPTER 5
The passwall sealed itself into non-existence behind Senior Prefect Gaffney. He had just returned from Hospice Idlewild, and his sinuses were still blocked after exposure to the furnace-dry air aboard the corvette. He picked at a nostril, then smeared the offending nasal matter against the wall, where it melted away into the absorbing matrix of quickmatter. The room—the heart of Internal Security—was as cold and still and empty as the deepest, clammiest part of a cave system. But as Gaffney moved further into it, the systems responded to his presence and conjured furniture and amenities into being, shaped to his usual ergonomic preferences. Gaffney settled himself before a wraparound console from which rose several membrane-thin display panes. Symbols appeared on the console, outlined in neon blue. Gaffney’s fingers skated over them, entering complex chains of richly syntactic security commands, stringing them together like beads on a wire. Text and graphics churned over the display facets, flickering past at high speed. Within Panoply, Gaffney prided himself on having one of the highest speed-reading faculties of any operative. Far away, in the weightless heart of Panoply, the Search Turbines threshed their way through unthinkable quantities of archived knowledge. It was illusory, but Gaffney swore he could feel the subterranean rumble of those questing machines; could almost feel the fire-hose pressure of the data rocketing through them. He slowed the flow as he neared the focus of his search.
“Warning,” the system advised him.
“You are entering a high-security data trove. Pangolin clearance is now mandatory. If you do not have Pangolin clearance, desist from further queries.” Gaffney pressed on. He not only had Pangolin clearance, he got to decide who else had it.
“Category: weapon systems, archival, interdicted,” said the system. Gaffney refined his query parameters one final time.
“Specific retrieval item,” the system said.
“War robot. Weevil class.”
“Show me,” Gaffney breathed as his hands echoed the verbal command. Line diagrams and cutaway illustrations crammed the display panes. Gaffney narrowed his eyes and peered closer. In some of the views, the weevils were accompanied by human figures to lend scale. The robots were smaller than he’d been expecting, until he remembered that one of their prime uses had been infiltration. By all accounts they were fast, with a high degree of tactical autonomy. Not that anyone alive had clear memories of weevils. The datestamps on the annotations were all at least a century old. Gaffney’s hands moved again. Now the panes filled with scrolling lines of text and symbols in MAL, the human-readable Manufactory Assembler Language. The instructions became a whizzing blur. The blur began to dance and squirm in subtle rhythms, betraying large-scale structure in the sequencing code. Here were the commands that, if fed into a sufficiently equipped manufactory, would result in the production of a fully operational weevil.
Or more than one.
Having verified that the MAL script was complete and error-free, Gaffney encysted the code in a private partition of his own security management area. In the unlikely event of anyone stumbling on it, all they would see would be routine entry/exit schedules for pressure-tight passwalls inside Panoply.
He backed-up the top level of the query stack. His hands dithered over the keys. He switched to voice- only.
“Retrieve priors on search-term Firebrand.”
“Repeat search term, please.”
“Firebrand,” Gaffney said, with exaggerated slowness.
He’d been expecting some hits, but nothing like the multitude of priors that filled the panes. He applied filters and whittled down the stack. Yet when he was finished it was still hopelessly large, and he wasn’t seeing anything remotely connected with Panoply, or the thing that so interested Aurora.
Firebrand.
What the hell did it mean? Anthony Theobald had given him the word, and he’d allowed himself to believe it was something useful, enough to stop trawling the man before he became an unwilling recruit for the Persistent Vegetative State. But now that he had let the man go, now that he was alone with the Search Turbines, Gaffney wondered whether he should not have gone deeper.
“You sold me a dud, Tony,” Gaffney said aloud.
“You naughty, naughty boy.”
But even as he spoke, he remembered something else Anthony Theobald had told him. The men who’d let slip that codeword had once told him that their operations were superblack. Untraceable, unaccountable and officially deniable at all levels of Panoply command and control, right up to the Queen of the Scarab herself.
In other words, it was hardly surprising that he hadn’t found anything significant in a two-minute search. Firebrand might still mean something. But it was going to take more than sitting at a console to get any closer to the truth.
Gaffney spent the next five minutes covering his tracks, erasing any trace of his rummaging from the query logs of the Search Turbines. Then another five minutes covering traces of that By the time he was done, Gaffney was confident that even he wouldn’t have been able to follow his own trail.
He stood from the console and conjured it back into the room, together with the seat he had been using. Then he wiped the sleeve of his tunic across his brow, ran fingers through his wiry red hair and headed for the passwall.
He knew that what he had just done was ’wrong’, just as it had been ’wrong’ to intercept, trawl and discard the hapless Anthony Theobald. But everything, as Aurora liked to remind him, depended on viewpoint. There was nothing wrong with protecting the citizenry, even if what they most needed protection from was their own worst natures.
And Aurora was always right. The beta-level regarded Dreyfus with cold indifference. Dreyfus stared at him obligingly, as if waiting for the punch line to a joke. It was an old interview technique that usually obtained a result. The imaged figure was male, taller than Dreyfus, thin of face, his body hidden under the voluminous folds of a purple robe or gown. His right shoulder and arm were clothed in quilted black leather, his visible hand gloved and ringed. His cropped greying hair, the aquiline curve of his nose, the solemnity of his expression, his general stance,
