“Veitch?” Dreyfus called, barely hearing his own voice over the ringing in his head.
Veitch answered almost immediately.
“Prefect,” he said, sounding as if there was a thick layer of insulating glass between the two men.
“You’re alive, then.”
Dreyfus paused to recover strength before speaking again. Each word cost him more energy than he felt he could spare.
“I’m trapped under this table. I think I’ve broken a rib, maybe a leg. What about you?”
“Worse than that. Can’t you see?”
Dreyfus could see, now that his eyes were finally adjusting to the minimal light. A silvery pipe, probably one of those installed by Firebrand when they were reactivating the facility, had buckled down from the ceiling to plunge through Veitch’s thigh.
“Are you losing blood?”
“I hope so.” Dreyfus coughed and tasted his own blood.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I think I have a chance of dying before it finds us.”
“Then it’s loose?”
“The back-up generator should have activated immediately to ensure a smooth handover. It didn’t.
Containment failed.”
“But we don’t know for sure that it’s loose. Not until someone goes down there…”. Veitch laughed. It was the vilest, most inhuman sound Dreyfus had ever heard coming from another person.
“It’s out, Prefect. Don’t worry about that. It’s just a question of how long it takes to find us. Because you can bet your life it’s looking.”
“Or maybe it’s already run away, trying to hide itself.”
“You don’t know the Clockmaker. I do.”
“And you hope you’re going to die before it gets here.” Veitch touched a hand to his thigh. In the green glow his fingers came up tipped with something wet and dark, like melted chocolate.
“I think I’ve got a shot. How about you? You could always try holding your breath, see how far that gets you.”
“Tell me something, Veitch,” Dreyfus said, in the tone of a man changing the subject of a conversation that had begun to weary him.
“What?”
“When Jane gave me the list of Firebrand operatives, your name was familiar to me for some reason.”
“I get around.”
“It was more than that. It struck an old chord. It just took me a little while to remember the rest.”
“Meaning what?”
“You were involved in the case against Jason Ng, weren’t you?” The silence that followed was enough of an answer for Dreyfus.
“Simon?” he asked.
“Still here.”
“You’re going to die soon. More than likely so am I. But let’s clear this one up, shall we? Thalia’s father was innocent. His only mistake was to get too close to your operation. He was investigating Firebrand, long after Firebrand had supposedly been shut down, and you had to do something about it.”
“Looks like you’ve already made your case.”
“I’m just putting pieces together. You concocted a case against Jason Ng to protect the operational integrity of Firebrand, didn’t you? You fabricated evidence and watched a good man go down. And then you had him murdered, making it look like suicide, because you couldn’t risk his testimony coming out in a Panoply tribunal. Which makes you no better than the people who murdered Philip Lascaille, does it?
In fact, I’d put you on about the same moral pedestal.”
“Fuck you, Dreyfus. Fuck you and fuck Panoply.”
“I’ll take your views into consideration. Before you die on me, answer one last question. Where are the others?”
Veitch’s answer came more slowly this time, his words slurred. He sounded like a man on the edge of unconsciousness.
“I woke up once and your pig was still here. Saavedra was already gone. When I came around the second time, the pig was gone as well. Before I passed out the first time, he said something about taking care of Gaffney.”
Dreyfus absorbed that. As gladdened as he was to hear that Sparver was alive, he was troubled by the other prefect’s intentions.
“Where did Saavedra go?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you go and ask her?”
“Veitch?” Dreyfus asked, a little later.
But this time there was no answer.
“Good for you,” Dreyfus said, under his breath.
It was dark when Sparver finally found his way to the surface again, his suit donned hastily, sacrificing the armour he would have needed assistance to lock into place. Much of Ops Nine had collapsed during the attack, but the sloping tunnel by which he and Dreyfus had entered was still intact, and with care he had been able to ascend through the facility and squeeze past the obstructions on his way, using his suit’s power to force open the surface doors. For once being a hyperpig had been to his advantage; he doubted very much that a fully armoured and suited baseline human would have been able to navigate some of the crawlspaces he’d had to pass through, especially not while dragging a Breitenbach rifle.
When he’d first regained consciousness, Saavedra had been about to leave the collapsed room, intending to find a way to restore the Clockmaker’s containment. Sparver knew then that he had to get out of that room, even if it meant abandoning Dreyfus for the time being. He’d talked Saavedra into handing over the ammo cells she had confiscated earlier and clipped to her belt, telling her that he would attempt to take down Gaffney—or whoever it was—on his own. Saavedra obviously hadn’t liked the idea of giving him access to weapons, but she presumably liked the idea of the attacker going unpunished even less. Eventually she’d relented and Sparver had taken the cells, watched Saavedra go and then lain very still while the room suddenly resettled, filling with pale dust and pinning him temporarily again before he worked loose and made his exit. He’d found the suit and weapon near the sculpture on the atrium level, right where he and Dreyfus had been ambushed what felt like a lifetime ago.
He emerged from the sloping ramp, crouching low as he passed through the toothlike formation of icicles. Overhead, the sky surged with the unbridled energy of a storm, clouds billowing and flickering with electrical discharges and strange, seething shifts in local atmospheric chemistry. Yet above the roar of the wind and thunder, his suit was conveying another sound to his ears. It was high-pitched and steady: the shrill whine of engines. Still using the upper slope of the ramp for cover, he knelt with the rifle between his knees and scanned the howling dark sky. It was not very long before he made out the hovering form of the cutter, poised nose-down like a stabbing dagger, with its hull-mounted weapons deployed and ready. Sparver guessed that Gaffney was loitering over the remains of Ops Nine with the intention of catching the Clockmaker making its escape. Whatever firepower had yet to be discharged would be directed in a single berserk frenzy of concentrated destruction. Perhaps Gaffney had no real expectation of killing the Clockmaker, but he would certainly be hoping to maim it.
Sparver flipped open the Breitenbach’s weather cover, exposing the muzzle with its delicate battery of plasma emitters and laser-confinement optics. He powered-up the weapon, mindful that the cutter might be sniffing the local electromagnetic environment. The weapon ran through its start-up cycle, then signalled readiness. Sparver settled the long barrel of the rifle onto his shoulder, bazooka-style. A portion of his faceplate filled with a sighting reticle, superimposed over a view of the rifle’s current target. Sparver eased back on his haunches until the hovering cutter bobbed into the middle of the reticle. He squeezed a stud on the side of the primary grip, telling the weapon to lock on to this target. A red bracket pulsed around the cutter, signifying target acquisition. Instantly Sparver felt the suit stiffen and adjust his posture for him. The rifle had assumed command of the power-assisted suit; it was using it as an aiming platform, with Sparver just going along for the ride.
The cutter’s engine note shifted. Sparver watched the ship rotate and then start to drift in his direction. Its
