sausage-shaped habitat, a jet of cold, grey air geysering out from its side.
“The cause of this breach?”
She was facing Dreyfus now, answering him to the exclusion of everyone else present, even the supreme prefect herself.
“Sir, it appears something crashed through the window band. The cruiser’s tracking a metal object, a sphere, moving on a slow free-fall trajectory away from the habitat.” Dreyfus’ throat was very dry.
“The nature of this object?”
“Unknown, sir, but it doesn’t resemble any orthodox space vehicle or weapons system. The cruiser’s asking permission, sir.”
“Permission for what?” She blinked.
“To fire, sir. To destroy the unknown object.”
“Over my dead fucking body,” Dreyfus said.
“We can’t be too careful,” Clearmountain replied.
“This could be another part of Aurora’s takeover strategy.”
“It’s Thalia.”
“How can you be so sure? We don’t know what Aurora might have planned.” “She’s been using weevils to spread her influence from habitat to habitat,” Dreyfus answered.
“Why would she change, put all her eggs in one basket, when her existing strategy’s working just fine?”
“We can’t guess what she has in mind.”
“I can. She’s going to keep using force of numbers, the way she already has. Whatever this is, it isn’t part of her plan.”
“Which doesn’t automatically mean it’s anything to do with Thalia Ng,” Baudry said.
“I’m sorry to remind you of this, but we have no evidence that she survived the initial takeover phase.”
“If we think they’re all dead, why haven’t we nuked Aubusson already?”
“Because there’s a chance, however small, that the citizenry may still be alive. But that doesn’t necessarily imply that Thalia is amongst the survivors.” Baudry offered Dreyfus a sympathetic look.
“I know this is tough on you, but we need to take the rational view. How likely is it that Thalia Ng is behind this development, whatever it represents? We don’t even know what the object is, let alone how it came to smash through the habitat. Thalia was just a single deputy field, Tom. She knew a lot about polling cores, and I don’t doubt that she’d have done her best to protect the citizens, but we have to be realistic about the chances of her succeeding. She had next to no experience in high-risk field situations. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t it true that she’d only participated in a single lockdown before all this happened?”
“I know Thalia,” Dreyfus said.
“She’d have done whatever it took.”
“Tom, I know you mean well, but we can’t afford to let this foreign object—”.
“Put me through to the deep-system cruiser,” Aumonier said, cutting over Baudry. The operative touched settings on her bracelet.
“Connection should be open, Supreme Prefect.”
“This is Jane Aumonier,” said the projected figure.
“To whom am I speaking?” A woman’s voice crackled across the room.
“Captain Sarasota, Supreme Prefect. How may I be of assistance?”
“I believe you’re tracking something, Captain, something that emerged from House Aubusson?”
“We have a weapons lock on it, Supreme Prefect. We can fire at your command.”
“I’d rather you didn’t do that, Captain. Maintain your maximum defensive posture, but approach the unidentified object close enough to sweep for infrared hotspots. I want to know if there are survivors aboard that thing.”
“And if there are?”
“Bring them in. As fast as you can.”
CHAPTER 28
Dreyfus fastened the safe-distance tether with an unshakeable conviction that this would be the last time he performed the action. Either he would not be coming back from Yellowstone, or Jane Aumonier would not be waiting for him here, in this weightless room, upon his return. The significance of either outcome caused his hands to shake as he locked the catch into place. “How long before you leave?” Aumonier said as Dreyfus came to a halt.
“Thyssen says there’ll be a ship fuelled and prepped within thirty minutes.”
“A deep-system cruiser, I take it?”
“No, I opted for a cutter. The amount of armament’s immaterial. All that matters is that we sneak in 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.
