“We can cut through,” Sparver said, tapping a glove against the torch on his belt.
“Or we can try opening it. Either way, if there’s a single soul alive in this place they’ll know about it. Your call, Boss.”
“See if you can get it to open. I’ll try to close the other one. I’d rather not flood the place with Yellowstone air if we can avoid it.”
“Because you’re feeling charitable towards Saavedra and her friends?” Sparver asked sceptically.
“They committed crimes against Panoply. I’d like them alive to answer for that.”
Dreyfus brushed icy yellow caulk off a raised panel next to the door they had just crawled under. The panel contained a simple arrangement of manual controls labelled with Amerikano script. He pushed the stud with a downward-pointing arrow and heard a laboured whine of buried machinery. The door began to inch its way towards the floor, spitting chunks of yellow ice out of its tracks as it descended.
“Looks like someone’s been paying their power bills,” Sparver said.
Dreyfus nodded. If he’d harboured lingering doubts that Ops Nine was truly where Firebrand had gone to ground, they had just been thoroughly dispelled. The facility was powered and functional, at least on a spartan basis. Amerikano technology was robust, but not robust enough to open doors after two hundred years.
Dreyfus flinched as slats rattled open in the walls without warning. Red lights stammered on behind ceiling grilles and he heard the roar of powerful fans. The environment sensor on his suit began to record the change of gas mixture and pressure as the air in the room was swapped for breathable atmosphere. The process took less than three minutes. The fans died down and the slats clattered shut again.
“I think I can open the door now,” Sparver said.
Nothing would be gained by waiting, Dreyfus knew.
“Do it,” he said, mentally preparing himself for whatever was on the other side. Sparver hit the control, then moved to stand next to Dreyfus, his Breitenbach rifle held doubled-handed. But as the door rose, it became clear that there was no one waiting for them on the other side. Dreyfus allowed the muzzle of his own weapon to dip slightly, but remained alert. The two prefects stepped over the threshold.
A curving corridor, triangular in cross section, walled and floored with metallic grille, stretched away to either side. An illuminated red strip ran the length of the corridor at the apex of the two angled walls. Behind the grilles snaked corroded and mould-caked piping and machinery, much of it eaten away, probably by rats. Steam jetted from ruptured lines, hot enough to scald if they hadn’t been wearing suits. But Dreyfus noticed that some of the plumbing was shiny and new. Firebrand must have done just enough to make this facility habitable again. They hadn’t been intending to make it comfortable, or homely.
“You want me to toss a coin?” Sparver asked.
“Clockwise,” Dreyfus said, leading the way.
The grilled flooring clattered heavily under their boots, the din echoing around the curve of the corridor. Dreyfus had no good idea of the dimensions of the facility, but it wasn’t difficult to imagine that noise reaching far enough to alert someone of their arrival, if that hypothetical person hadn’t already been notified by the airlock activity. Since his suit assured him that the ambient air was now breathable, Dreyfus reached up and risked removing his helmet. He attached it to his belt, just as he’d had cause to regret doing in the Nerval-Lermontov rock when Clepsydra touched her knife against his throat. But he didn’t think knives were going to be the problem now.
“Yeah, getting kind of stuffy in here,” Sparver said, undoing his own helmet. He took a deep breath, sucking in the same cold, metallic air Dreyfus had just tasted.
“Feels better already.”
“Watch out for those steam jets,” Dreyfus said.
“And be ready to jam your lid on again.”
They continued walking, following the slow curve of the corridor until they arrived at a junction. They paused to decide which way to go, while pink-tinged steam snorted in dragon-like exhalations from a severed pipeline. Dreyfus shone his light on a burnished metal panel stencilled with Amerikano text.
“Central operations is this way,” he said, raising his voice above the angry snort of the steam jet.
“Sounds like the right place to start, doesn’t it?”
“Or the right place to stay a long way away from.”
“Nothing I’d like better. But we came here to do a job, Field.”
After a moment Sparver said, “Don’t you mean ’deputy’, Boss?”
“I mean field. Jane just promoted me to senior, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t elevate my deputy to full field status. How does it feel, Field Prefect Bancal?”
“It feels great. Though I imagined it might happen under different circumstances.”
Dreyfus smiled to himself.
“You mean slightly less suicidal ones?”
“Now that you mention it…”
“That’s exactly the same way I felt when I got my promotion, so that makes two of us.”
“But it’s still a promotion. I mean, that’s what it’ll say in my obituary, right?”
“It would,” Dreyfus affirmed.
“Only problem is, I’m the only one who knows about it. Apart from you, obviously.”
“So it would really help if one of us survives, is what you’re saying.”
“Yes. Me, preferably.”
“Why you, Boss, and not me?”
“Because if you survived, you wouldn’t be needing an obituary, would you?”
“That makes sense,” Sparver said, sounding only the tiniest bit puzzled.
Dreyfus tightened his grip on the Breitenbach rifle.
“There’s something ahead,” he said, lowering his voice.
Pale-blue light was leaking around the curve of the corridor, highlighting the hexagonal meshwork of the grilles. Dreyfus judged that they were approaching the central operations section. Conscious that there was little they could do to quieten their approach, he nonetheless slowed his walk and edged closer to the angled wall on the inside of the curve, hoping to use it for cover until the last moment. As he crept forward, he saw that the corridor terminated in a hollowed-out cavern that extended several storeys below their present level. The blue illumination originated from a grid of lights suspended from the bare rock ceiling that arched ten or twelve metres above them. The corridor brought them out onto a railinged balcony that encircled the entire cavern. Doors were set into the smooth-panelled wall at regular intervals, marked with spray-painted numbers and cryptic symbols that must have once referred to different administrative and functional departments of the facility. Dreyfus looked over the railing, down to the floor of the chamber. It was a kind of atrium, he realised. Tiled walkways encircled what might once have been flower beds or small ponds. The flower beds now contained only grey-black ash, the ponds nothing but dust. There were even a couple of benches, cut from solid rock. Rising from the ground in the middle of the atrium was a complicated-looking metal sculpture whose design he couldn’t easily fathom from this angle, but which almost resembled an iron cactus.
Dreyfus realised that he’d had preconceptions about the people who’d lived here originally. The Amerikano culture might have felt distant from his own, its values foreign, but the inhabitants of this place had still needed a place to relax and mingle, away from the pressures of their duties. In its way, this place would not have felt very different from his own place of work. He wondered what kinds of ghosts would haunt Panoply, two hundred years after he was gone.
He pulled back from the railing with a tingle of disquiet. Sparver was already a quarter of the way around the balcony, testing each door as he passed. So far they had all been locked, but as Dreyfus watched, Sparver reached a door that was ajar. He nudged it with the muzzle of his rifle, then beckoned Dreyfus forward. Glancing occasionally down at the atrium, Dreyfus approached the newly promoted field and examined what Sparver had discovered.
“I guess you were right about Firebrand, Boss.”
The room would once have been the personal quarters of one of the Amerikano staff. Now it had been converted into makeshift accommodation for one of Saavedra’s people. A sleeping hammock had been strung between two walls. On an equipment crate, Dreyfus saw part of a Panoply uniform, a belt and whip-hound clip, minus the whiphound itself. He found a coffee bulb that still had coffee in it, albeit cold. There was no dust on any
