“So why are you doing this, if it’s guaranteed to fail?”
“Because there’s a chance it will succeed. Not much of one, but it’s better than any other option on the table.”
Sparver nodded at the compad.
“Does that have anything to do with all this?”
“I don’t know.” Dreyfus turned the compad around so that Sparver could see the display, with its dyslexia- encrypted read-out.
“This still makes as much sense to me as it does to you, and you don’t even have Pangolin, let alone Manticore.”
“Did Jane give you Manticore?”
Dreyfus nodded humbly.
“Not that it’s made any difference to me yet.”
But that was a lie, albeit a small one. Dreyfus had to stare hard at the scrambled text, but every now and then he’d feel a premonitory sense of something about to reveal itself, like a kind of mental hiccup that never quite arrived. The text was still illegible, but he recognised the feeling from his Pangolin exposure. The neural architecture necessary for the decoding stage was beginning to assemble. It might take another six or nine hours until it was fully functional, but the process was already beginning to affect his comprehension.
“But it’ll come, eventually?” Sparver asked.
“That’s the idea.”
“What does she want you to know, Boss?”
“How should I know if I can’t read this yet?” Dreyfus snapped.
“She must have given you an idea.”
“She did.”
“It’s about the Clockmaker, I assume.”
“Yes,” Dreyfus said tersely.
“It’s about the Clockmaker. Now would you mind leaving me alone with it so I at least have a chance of making some sense of this before we land?”
“It’s all right,” Sparver said, with more sympathy than Dreyfus felt he deserved.
“I understand, Boss. If it’s about the Clockmaker, then it’s also about Valery, isn’t it?”
“Valery died,” Dreyfus said.
“I’m over her death. Nothing in this is going to change that.”
Sparver had the good sense to leave him alone after that.
The braking phase commenced shortly, entailing several minutes at high burn. When it had subsided, Dreyfus was experiencing nearly full gravity and the cutter had already begun to ease its way into the upper atmosphere of Yellowstone. This was no fiery insertion, nothing like Paula Saavedra’s high-speed re-entry, but rather a progressive submergence into thicker and thicker air, with the cutter using its engines to avoid excessive aerodynamic friction. To a casual observer, they would look like one more passenger ship returning to Chasm City from the glitz and glamour of the orbital communities.
Dreyfus found himself dozing. It was something to do with Manticore making him sleepy while it worked on his mind. He did not feel markedly different when he woke, but when he resumed his perusal of the compad, he knew that he had taken another step closer to comprehension. Now whole phrases kept slipping in and out of clarity, like animals prowling behind tall grass. He saw:
Sylveste Institute for Artificial Mentation… Emergency measures instituted during Clockmaker crisis… Prototype ramscoop vehicle, mothballed but otherwise intact… Heavy Technical Squad boarded and assumed command… Ramliner Atalanta deemed functional… Containment effect of magnetic field… Risk of civilian casualties reduced, but not eliminated… Unavoidable losses… Assignment of emergency powers to Field Prefect Tom Dreyfus, authorised by Supreme Prefect Albert Dusollier…
And then he felt something open in his mind, like a heavy trap door, one that had been shut and forgotten for eleven years. He saw Valery’s face, lit up with childlike delight, kneeling in soil, turning to him from the bed where she had been arranging flowers.
And he knew that he had done a very bad thing to his wife.
Mercier watched the proceedings from the elevated observation room overlooking Demikhov’s dedicated operating theatre. Though the theatre had been fully equipped since its inception, it had seen few occupants in all that time. Demikhov’s team had occasionally employed it to rehearse a surgical
procedure, but they had usually done so under the assumption that the scarab would be removed by more conventional means, leaving Aumonier with only superficial injuries. It was only lately that the theatre had been staffed around the clock, with the crash team preparing for the increasingly likely eventuality that Zulu would have to be implemented.
When he wasn’t busy with his own patients, Mercier had sometimes watched the crash team working on eerily accurate medical dummies, using microsurgical techniques to reknit head and body. Sometimes the body had been intact below the neck, but they’d also worked under the assumption of varying severities of injury occasioned by the removal of the scarab. Now they were dealing with a real case that fell somewhere in the middle of their simulated outcomes. The head had been severed with superhuman precision, but the scarab had inflicted major damage to the three cervical vertebrae below the bisection point. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed—it wasn’t going to be necessary to grow the supreme prefect a new body—but there was a lot of restorative work to be done.
Little of the surgical activity was visible to Mercier. Pale-green medical servitors crowded over and around the body and head, which were currently situated on separate tables a metre apart. The hulking machines appeared clumsy until one focused on the speed with which their manipulators were knitting tissue back together. Secrets of the flesh lay obscured behind a flickering blur of antiseptic metal. Now and then one of the swan-necked servitors would whip around to swap one manipulator extremity for another, lending the whole scene the faintly comedic look of a recording on fast-forward. Demikhov’s human staff were situated several metres away from the whipping machines, gowned and masked but having no direct contact with their patient. They stood before pedestals, studying panes filled with anatomical images, not so much controlling the machines as offering advice and guidance when it was merited. They did not need to be in the same room, but they were all ready to intervene in the unlikely event of some catastrophic machine failure.
Mercier had a shrewd idea of what was happening. The machines were identifying severed nerve fibres, cross-matching them between the two detached body parts. Reverse-field trawls were being used to stimulate areas of Jane Aumonier’s brain, with particular focus on the sensorimotor cortex. When the machines identified the function of a particular nerve, they capped it with a microscopic cylinder primed with regenerative quickmatter. Myoelectric stimulation was being used to map the nerve bundles emerging from Aumonier’s body. When head and neck were rejoined, the two cylinders corresponding to a single nerve would identify each other and promote flawless tissue reconnection. Much would remain to be done—Aumonier could expect partial or complete paralysis for some time after the procedure—but Demikhov had been confident that basic life-support processes could be restored during the first phase of surgery.
Mercier watched until he was satisfied that everything was under control. Demikhov’s team were working urgently, but there was nothing about their movements that suggested anything untoward. They had prepared for this and did not appear to be encountering anything they had not anticipated.
Reluctantly Mercier turned from the spectacle. He wanted to see the moment of reunion, but he had his own matters to attend to. He’d learned about Thalia Ng’s escape from House Aubusson, accompanied by a party of local citizenry. There were no reports of serious injuries amongst that group, but they would all benefit from medical attention when the deep-system vehicle redocked at Panoply, even if the worst Mercier had to deal with was a few cuts and bruises.
He returned to his section of the infirmary. Through the windowed partition he made out the recumbent form of his only current patient, asleep on a bed. Mercier opened the partition. He stepped through and moved to the side of Gaffney’s bed, cradling a compad in the crook of his arm. He tapped a stylus and brought up a summary of Gaffney’s progress since the removal of the whiphound and his subsequent
interrogation by trawl. Mercier did not approve of the way Dreyfus had insisted upon his patient being scanned so soon after the fraught process of removing the object lodged in his throat. Gaffney had been medically fit, traumatised yet otherwise free of serious injury, but the principle of it still galled Mercier. Now, however, he was
