time to try it.”
“There’ll be risks.”
“Just as there are risks in allowing it to remain clamped on my neck. I know the score, Doctor.”
“After the procedure we have in mind,” Demikhov said hesitantly, “there’s a possibility that you may be incapacitated.”
“In which case Senior Prefect Clearmountain will assume temporary authority. But only until I’m fit to resume command. Don’t keep me out of it for too long, Doctor. All I need is a pair of eyes and a mouth to give orders. Understood?”
“Understood,” he answered.
“Then I urge you to execute whatever plan you’ve been putting in place. You are good to go, aren’t you?”
“We’re good to go.”
“Then do your best, Doctor. I’m submitting myself to your care.”
“If I fail—” he began.
“You’ll still have my undying gratitude. Now get this fucking thing off my neck.”
“You’re in position,” Demikhov said.
“Please don’t move a muscle, Supreme Prefect. Not even to answer me.” Jane Aumonier held her breath. She heard something go click.
CHAPTER 29
Doctor Demikhov watched events unfold with a curious sense of retardation, as if he was replaying one of his simulations at half normal speed. The blades pushed through the weakened part of the wall and raced together, their cutting edges forming a tightening circle with the supreme prefect at the precise centre. Aumonier floated motionlessly, her expression unchanging: she did not have time to react to the blades’ intrusion into her private space. They closed on her, reaching her throat and passing cleanly through, interlocking with micron precision as they met. Demikhov was now forced to take in two distinct views, captured from cams in the two isolated halves of the former sphere. In the upper hemisphere, the supreme prefect’s severed head began to drift away from the blades with almost imperceptible slowness. In the lower hemisphere, her body and the scarab drifted in the opposite direction. In the same decelerated time-frame, Demikhov saw the scarab react to the violent intrusion of a large foreign object into its volume of denial. The lower part of Aumonier’s neck, below the cut, puffed apart in a cloud of pink and grey. Blood continued to spurt from the neck in inky profusion. The heart was still pumping. The drifting remains of both the decapitated body and its damaged parasite were quickly obscured. Demikhov’s attention flicked to the upper sphere. Time accelerated. The head’s slow drift became an ungainly tumble. The head was also leaking blood, albeit with much less ferocity than the body. Servitors rushed into both chambers, moving too quickly for the eye to follow. The machines reached the scarab, detached it from the neck and encased it in a cocoon of blast-smothering quickmatter. In the upper chamber, machines reached the head and arrested its motion away from the shining floor formed by the blades.
“Scarab is neutralised,” reported one of Demikhov’s analysts.
“Repeat, scarab is neutralised. Upper chamber is now secure for crash team.”
“Go,” Demikhov said, with all the urgency he could muster. And then he too was moving as if his own life depended upon it. He was only slightly behind the crash team when he arrived at the head. The servitors had braced it, pinning it gently in place between telescopic manipulators. There’d been a temptation to simply immerse the head in a vat of curative quickmatter, but Demikhov had resisted. The quickmatter would undoubtedly stabilise the head, flooding the brain to preserve neural structure, and would make a start on the necessary tissue-repair. The drawback was that the quickmatter would most likely wipe short-term memories and delay the return to full consciousness by many days. Demikhov had considered every angle and knew that this was a time when hard-won clinical judgement, the cumulated knowledge of his own eyes and experience, outweighed the easy option. He meant only to look at the neck, to judge the accuracy of the cut and assess the damage to the major structures. He saw instantly that the blades had transected the cervical vertebrae between C3 and C4, as he had always hoped. The cut had been so accurate that only the cartilaginous disc between the bones had been destroyed. The carotid artery, internal and external jugular veins and vagus nerve had all been severed within a millimetre of his optimum cut points. Had he been looking at a simulation, Demikhov would have rejected it as unrealistically optimistic. But this was reality. Zulu—this stage, at least—had worked as well as he could have dreamed. Then he looked at the face. He didn’t mean to. It was clinically irrelevant, and he’d told himself to pay no heed to any signs of apparent consciousness he saw behind Jane Aumonier’s eyes. But he couldn’t help it. And there was something there: a sharpness in her gaze, a sense that she was focusing on no one in the room but him, that she was utterly, shockingly aware of her condition. Less than ten seconds had passed since the blades had gone in.
“Begin stabilisation,” Demikhov said.
“Plan three-delta. We have a job to do here, people.” He risked another look at the eyes. This time there was a fogged absence where a mind had been. It took three hours to fall towards Yellowstone. The cutter could have made the journey in a third of the time, but then it would have appeared to be moving anomalously fast, running the risk of attracting Aurora’s attention. Dreyfus could not be certain of the extent of her surveillance, but it was likely that she would be alert to any traffic that appeared to be out of the ordinary, be it civilian or law-enforcement. As much as it pained him to watch the clock ticking, he knew that the slow and unobtrusive approach was necessary.
“Captain says to buckle up,” Sparver said, prompting Dreyfus to put aside the compad he’d been studying.
“We’ll be slowing for atmosphere in about five minutes.” Dreyfus nodded curtly.
“You can tell him you passed on the message.” Sparver had braced himself with an arm and a foot.
“You still sore at me for sneaking aboard?”
“What do you think?”
“I had Jane’s blessing. Who else do you think put that stuff under your seat?”
“I expressly requested that I go in alone,” Dreyfus said.
Sparver shrugged, as if none of this was his fault, merely the outcome of a series of circumstances beyond his control.
“Look, it’s done. I’m aboard. So make the most of me.”
“I will. You can keep Pell company when he flies this cutter back to Panoply.”
“Actually, I intend to keep you company during that little stroll you’ve got planned.”
“Then it’s a pity we didn’t load two surface suits, isn’t it? I only requested one, I’m afraid. And it wouldn’t fit you anyway.”
“Which is why I had a word with Thyssen and asked him to stow a spare,” Sparver said.
“The extra weapons were my idea as well. You didn’t think you were going to carry them all on your own, did you?”
Dreyfus sighed. He knew Sparver meant well, and that there was no other prefect he’d sooner have at his side than his own deputy. But he had resigned himself to going in alone. Now that he had crossed that mental Rubicon, he could not easily accept the idea of placing another’s life at risk.
“Sparv, I appreciate the gesture. But like I said to you before, you’re one of the few people who have been following this investigation since the outset. I cannot in conscience accept that you should be placed at risk. Especially not—”
“Save it for later, Boss,” Sparver said.
“There’s no secret now. Jane and the other senior prefects know everything we do. We’ve just become expendable again. And isn’t that a wonderful, liberating feeling?”
“You’re right,” Dreyfus answered forcefully.
“We are expendable. And you know what? We probably won’t come back from this mission. If the Clockmaker doesn’t get us, Firebrand or Aurora will.”
Sparver lowered his voice. For once he was serious.
