“It wasn’t Veitch.” Dreyfus paused, sucking in his pain while Sparver helped him off the couch.
“I came around in here, and I was talking to Paula Saavedra. But it wasn’t her. It was the Clockmaker, Sparv. I was in the same room as it. It was talking to me, speaking through her body.”
“You sure you weren’t hallucinating?”
“Later I saw it for what it was. It revealed itself to me when I guessed what was going on. I thought it was going to kill me. But it didn’t. I woke up and I’m looking at you instead.” As the pain ebbed, Dreyfus was struck by an unpleasant possibility.
“It had time to do something to me, Sparv. Is there anything on me? Anything missing?” Sparver inspected him.
“You look the same way you did when I left you, Boss. The only difference is that thing on your leg.” Dreyfus looked down with apprehension.
“What thing?”
“It’s just a splint, Boss. Nothing to be alarmed by.” There was a thin metal cage wrapped around his lower right leg made up of a series of thin chrome shafts, bracing his leg at several contact points. The metal shafts had a still-molten quality about them, as if they were formed from elongated beads of mercury that might quiver back to liquid form at any instant. The longer Dreyfus studied it, the more clearly it looked like the work of the Clockmaker, rather than any human artificer.
“I thought it was going to kill me, or do something worse,” he said, in a kind of awed shock.
“Instead it did this.”
“That doesn’t mean we misjudged it,” Sparver said, “just that it has nice days.”
“I don’t think that’s why it did this. It just wants me kept alive so I can serve a purpose.”
Sparver helped him to begin hobbling towards the door.
“Which purpose would that be?”
“The usual one,” Dreyfus said. Then another troubling thought crystallised in his head.
“Gaffney,” he said.
“Veitch said—”
“I took care of Gaffney. He isn’t a problem any more.”
“You killed him?”
“I shot down his ship. He survived the crash and escaped into Ops Nine before I had a chance to finish him off. But he isn’t an issue any more.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I passed him on the way down to fetch you,” Sparver said, taking the bulk of Dreyfus’ weight as they started ascending stairs.
“Most of him, anyway.” With Dreyfus suited, an outcome that was somehow achieved despite the cumbersome bulk of his splint, they made their way to the surface, taking a different route than the one Sparver had used earlier. Although there were some tight squeezes along the way, neither of them was wearing tactical armour and Sparver discarded the rifle after a while on the assumption that it would prove inadequate against the only foe they stood a chance of encountering.
“It’s gone,” Dreyfus said, attempting to reassure his deputy.
“You won’t be seeing it again.”
“I didn’t see it the first time.”
“Figure of speech.”
“Anyway, what do you mean I won’t be seeing it?”
“Wherever it’s gone, wherever it ends up, I think it’ll be keeping its eye on me,” Dreyfus said.
“That’s why it left me alive. It wants me to see that justice is served.”
“Justice for what?”
“The murder of Philip Lascaille. It was a long time ago, but some of the people involved may still be in the system, maybe even still working for House Sylveste.”
“You’re talking about avenging the Clockmaker?”
“It still has a right to justice. I don’t deny that it’s a perversion of whatever Philip Lascaille once was. They took the mind of a man who’d been driven insane by the Shrouders and then fed the mind of that man—terrified even more because he knew he was going to die—into a machine for making contact. What they got back was an angel of vengeance, forged in a strange and alien place. I’m not saying the thing has my sympathies. But the earlier crime still stands.”
“And you’d be the man to look into it?”
“I don’t care who wants justice, Sparv. It’s a thing unto itself, irrespective of the moral worth of the wronged party. The Clockmaker may have committed atrocities, but it was still wronged. I’ll do what I can to put that right.”
“And then what?” Dreyfus grimaced as a spike of pain shot up his leg.
“Then I’ll go after the Clockmaker, of course. Just because it was wronged doesn’t mean it gets an exemption.”
“Presupposing, of course, that this minor business with Aurora blows over. Or had that slipped your mind?”
“I’m not too worried about Aurora any more.”
“Maybe you should be. The last time I checked, we were getting a whipping up there.”
“The Clockmaker interrogated me,” Dreyfus said.
“It grilled me on her capabilities, her nature. It wanted to know exactly what she was. Then it escaped. Doesn’t that tell you something?”
“It’s going after her.”
“It’s at least as smart as she is, Sparv. Maybe smarter. And it has a very good reason to take her out of the picture.”
“At which point we’ll be left with the Clockmaker to deal with, instead of Aurora. Is that really an improvement?”
“It wants vengeance, not genocide. I’m not saying any of us are going to sleep easy with that thing out there, but at least we’ll be sleeping. That wouldn’t have been an option under Aurora.” Dreyfus and Sparver completed the last stage of their ascent. They passed through the collapsed remains of a subterranean landing area where Saavedra’s cutter was still parked and waiting. A ceiling spar from the sliding weather cover that concealed the landing deck had pinned the ship to the ground. Sparver went aboard and tried to communicate with Panoply, but the cutter was dead.
“Don’t worry,” Dreyfus said.
“They’ll come for us.” By the time they arrived on the surface, the storm had abated. The starless sky was a moving vault of poisonous black, but according to Sparver it had nothing of the howling ferocity of earlier. Unafraid now to stand on high ground, Dreyfus activated his helmet lamp and surveyed the fractured dark landscape, picking out suggestive details that made him flinch until he saw that they were merely conjunctions of ice and rock, light and shade, rather than the furtive presence of the Clockmaker. He sensed that it had left this place, putting as much distance as it could between itself and the magnetic prison of the tokamak.
“It must still be out there somewhere,” Sparver commented.
“I don’t know about that.”
“It can’t have left the planet. It’s a machine, not a ship.”
“It can take whatever form it wants to,” Dreyfus replied.
“What’s to say it can’t change itself into anything it needs to be? I watched it manipulate its form right in front of me. Now that it’s free of the cage, I wonder if there’s anything it can’t do.”
“It’s still a thing. It can be tracked, located, recaptured.”
“Maybe.”
“What are you thinking?” Sparver asked.
“Maybe it will have taken a leaf out of Aurora’s book. An alpha-level intelligence is easy to contain if it confines itself to a single machine, a single platform. But it doesn’t have to be like that. Aurora worked out how to move herself around, to embody herself wherever it suited her needs. What’s to say the Clockmaker won’t do likewise?”
