think I ought to come back to Panoply—”
“Of course I don’t, now that you’re out there. But I’m still cross. You should have cleared this with me first.” Thalia cocked her head.
“Would you have let me go alone?”
“Probably not. I don’t throw assets into risky environments without making damned sure they’re protected.”
“Then now you know why I went out without calling you.” She saw something in his expression give way, as if he recognised this was a fight he could not hope to win. He had chosen Thalia for her cleverness, her independence of mind. He could hardly be surprised that she was beginning to chafe at the leash.
“Promise me this,” he said.
“The instant something happens that you’re not happy about… you call in, understood?”
“Baudry said they won’t be able to spare a taskforce, sir, if I run into trouble.”
“Never mind Baudry. I’d find a way to move Panoply itself if I knew one of my squad was in trouble.”
“I’ll call in, sir.” After a moment, Dreyfus said, “In case you were wondering, I didn’t call you to tick you off. I need some technical input.”
“I’m listening, sir.”
“Where House Perigal was concerned, you were able to recover all the communications handled by the core in the last thousand days, correct?”
“Yes,” Thalia said.
“Suppose we needed something similar for the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble?”
“If the beta-levels didn’t come through intact, I don’t hold out much hope for transmission logs.”
“That’s what I thought. But a message still has to originate from somewhere. That means someone else must have the relevant outgoing transmission somewhere in their logs. And if it travelled more than a few hundred kilometres through the Band, it probably passed through a router or hub, maybe several.
Routers and hubs keep records of all data traffic passing through them.”
“Not deep content, though.”
“I’ll settle for a point of origin. Can you help?”
Thalia thought about it.
“It’s doable, sir, but I’ll need access to a full version of the Solid Orrery.”
“Can your ship run a copy?”
“Not a light-enforcement vehicle. I’m afraid it’ll have to wait until I return.”
“I’d rather it didn’t.”
Thalia thought even harder.
“Then… you’ll need to turn the Orrery back to around the time of this transmission, if you know it.”
“I think I can narrow it down,” Dreyfus said.
“You’ll need to pinpoint it to within a few minutes. That’s the kind of timescale on which the router network optimises itself. If you can do that, then you can send me a snapshot of the Orrery. Pull out Ruskin-Sartorious and all routers or hubs within ten thousand kilometres. I’ll see what I can do.”
Dreyfus looked uncharacteristically pleased.
“Thank you, Thalia.”
“No promises, sir. This might not work.”
“It’s a lead. Since I’ve nothing else to go on, I’ll take what I’m given.”
Sparver collected his food from the counter and moved to an empty table near the corner of the refectory. The lights were bright and the low-ceilinged, gently curving space was as busy as it ever got. A group of fields had just returned from duty aboard one of the deep-system vehicles. A hundred or so grey-uniformed cadets were squeezing around three tables near the middle, most of them carrying the dummy whiphounds they’d just been introduced to in basic training. The cadets’ eager, over-earnest faces meant nothing to him. Dreyfus occasionally taught classes, and Sparver sometimes filled in for him, but that happened so infrequently that he never had a chance to commit any of the cadets to memory.
The one thing he didn’t doubt was that they all knew his name. He could feel their sidelong glances when he looked around the room, taking in the other diners. As the only hyperpig to have made it past Deputy II in twenty years, Sparver was known throughout Panoply. There’d been another promising candidate in the organisation a few years earlier, but he’d died during a bad lock-down. Sparver couldn’t see any hyperpigs amongst the cadets, and it didn’t surprise him. Dreyfus had accepted him unquestioningly, had even pulled strings to get Sparver assigned to his team rather than someone else’s, but for the most part there was still distrust and suspicion against his kind. Baseline humans had made hyperpigs, created them for sinister purposes, and now they had to live with the legacy of that crime. They were resentful of his very existence because it spoke of the dark appetites of their ancestors.
He began to eat his meal, using the specially shaped cutlery that best fit his hands.
He felt eyes on the back of his neck.
He laid his compad before him and called up the results on the search term he had fed into the Turbines just before entering the refectory. Lascaille’s Shroud, Dreyfus had said. But what did Sparver—or Dreyfus, for that matter—know of the Shrouds? No more or less than the average citizen of the Glitter Band.
The compad jogged his memory.
The Shrouds were things out in interstellar space, light-years from Yellowstone. They’d been found in all directions: lightless black spheres of unknown composition, wider than stars. Alien constructs, most likely: that was why their hypothetical builders were called the Shrouders. But no one had ever made contact with a Shrouder, or had the least idea what the aliens might be like, if they were not already extinct.
The difficulty with the Shrouds was that nothing sent towards them ever came back intact. Probes and ships returned to the study stations mangled beyond recognition, if they came back at all. No useful data was ever obtained. The only indisputable fact was that the crewed vehicles returned less mangled, and with more frequency, than the robots. Something about the Shrouds was, if not exactly tolerant of living things, at least slightly less inclined to destroy them utterly. Even so, most of the time the people came back dead, their minds too pulverised even for a post-mortem trawl.
But occasionally there was an exception.
Lascaille’s Shroud, the compad informed Sparver, was named for the first man to return alive from its boundary. Philip Lascaille had gone in solo, without the permission of the study station where he’d been based. Against all the odds, he’d returned from the Shroud with his body and mind superficially intact. But that wasn’t to say that Lascaille had not still paid a terrible price. He’d come back mute, either unwilling or incapable of talking about his experiences. His emotional connection with other human beings had become autistically impoverished. A kind of holy fool, he spent his time making intricate chalk drawings on concrete slabs. Shipped back to the Sylveste Institute for Shrouder Studies, Lascaille became a curiosity of gradually dwindling interest.
That was one mystery solved, but it begged more questions than it answered. Why had Delphine alighted on this subject matter, so many decades after Lascaille’s return? And why had her decision to portray Lascaille resulted in a work of such striking emotional resonance, when her creations had been so affectless before?
On this, the compad had nothing to say.
Sparver continued with his meal, wondering how far ahead of him Dreyfus’ enquiries had reached.
He could still feel the eyes on his neck.
“Back from whatever busy errand called you away last time, Prefect Dreyfus?” asked the beta-level invocation of Delphine Ruskin-Sartorious.
“I’m sorry about that,” Dreyfus said.
“Something came up.”
“Connected with the Bubble?”
“I suppose so.” His instincts told him that Delphine didn’t need to know all the details concerning Captain Dravidian.
“But the case isn’t closed just yet. I’d like to talk to you in some detail concerning the way the deal collapsed.”
Delphine reached up and pushed a stray strand of hair back under the rag-like band she wore around her head. She was dressed in the same clothes she’d been wearing during the last invocation: white smock and
