with something between amusement and pity. He froze the invocation and stood staring at the empty space where she had been standing. Not a she, he told himself. An it.
“Hello?” Thalia called into an echoing, dank darkness.
“This is Deputy Field Prefect Ng. Is anyone there?”
There was no answer. Thalia stopped and put down the heavy cylinder she’d been carrying in her left hand. She touched her right hand to the haft of her whiphound, and then chided herself for her unease. Letting go of the weapon, she extracted her glasses, slipped them on and keyed image-amplification. The darkness of the chamber abated, revealing a doorway in one wall. Thalia touched the glasses again, but the entoptic overlay changed nothing. If a habitat citizen had been standing in Thalia’s place with a skullful of sense-modifying implants, they’d still have seen only the same drab walls.
“Moving deeper into the hab,” Thalia said, reporting back to her cutter.
“So far I’m not exactly overwhelmed by the welcoming committee.”
She picked up the equipment cylinder in her left hand. Caution prevailed, and this time she chose to release the whiphound.
“Proceed ahead of me at defence posture one,” she instructed, before letting go. Red eye bright, the whiphound nodded its haft once to indicate that it had understood her order and was now in compliance. Then it turned the haft away from her and slunk forward, gliding across the ground on the coiled tip of its filament, like a sketch of a cobra.
The doorway led to a damp tunnel with cracked flooring. Ahead, the tunnel began to curve around. The whiphound slinked forward, the red light of its scanning eye reflecting back from moist surfaces. Thalia followed it into the tunnel, around a gentle curve, until the tunnel widened out into a gloomily lit plaza. The curvature of the habitat was evident in the continuous gentle upsweep of the floor, rising ahead of her until it was hidden by the similarly curving ceiling. The only illumination came from sunlight creeping through immense slatted windows on either side, their glass panes tinting the light sepia-brown through a thick caking of dust and mould. Rising high above Thalia, interrupted only by the windows, were multi-levelled tiers of what had once been shops, boutiques and restaurants. Bridges and ramps spanned the space between the two walls, some of them sagging or broken. Glass frontages lay shattered, or were covered with various forms of mould or foliage-like infestation. In some of the shops there was even evidence of unsold merchandise, cobwebbed into obscurity.
Thalia didn’t like the place at all. She was glad when she found another tunnel leading out of the plaza. The whiphound slinked ahead of her, its coil making a rhythmic hissing sound against the flooring.
Without warning, it vanished.
An instant later Thalia heard a sound like two pieces of scrap metal being smashed against each other. Cautiously she rounded the curve and saw the whiphound wrapped around the immobilised form of a robot, which had toppled over onto its side, its rubber-tyred wheels spinning uselessly. Thalia stepped closer, putting down the cylinder. She appraised the fallen machine for weapons, but there was no sign that it was anything other than a general-purpose servitor of antique design.
“Release it,” she said.
The whiphound uncoiled itself and pulled back from the robot, while still keeping its eye locked on the machine. Laboriously, the robot extended telescopic limbs to right itself. A slender pillar rose from the wheeled base, with limbs and sensors sprouting at odd, asymmetric angles from the pillar.
“I am Deputy Field Prefect Thalia Ng, of Panoply,” she said.
“Identify your origin.”
The robot’s voice was disconcertingly deep and emphatic.
“Welcome to Carousel New Seattle-Tacoma, Deputy Field Prefect Ng. I trust your journey was pleasant. I apologise for my lateness. I have been tasked to escort you to the participatory core.”
“I was hoping to talk to Citizen Orson Newkirk.”
“Orson Newkirk is in the participatory core. Shall I assist you with your luggage?”
“I can manage,” Thalia said, shaking her head.
“Very well, Deputy Field Prefect Ng. Please follow me.”
“Where is everyone? I was expecting a population of one point three million people.”
“The current population is one million, two hundred and seventy-four thousand, six hundred and eighteen people. All are accounted for in the participatory core.”
“You keep saying that—what’s a ’participatory core’?”
“Please follow me.” The robot spun around, tyres hissing against the wet flooring, and began to amble down the corridor, trailing an electrical burning smell in its wake. From seven and a half metres away Jane Aumonier smiled tightly.
“You’re like a dog with a bone, Tom. Not everything in life is a conspiracy. People do sometimes get mad and do stupid and irrational things.”
“Dravidian sounded neither mad nor irrational to me.”
“One of his crew, then.”
“Acting according to plan. Following a script to make the whole attack look like a heat-of-the-moment thing, when in fact it was set up long before Dravidian ever met Delphine.”
“You really think so?” Dreyfus had just run the Solid Orrery in his room. He’d backtracked the configuration of the Glitter Band to the time when Delphine Ruskin-Sartorious said the call had come in. The data was now sitting in Thalia’s cutter, waiting for her to get to it when she completed her current upgrade.
“You’ve always trusted my instincts in the past,” Dreyfus said.
“Now they’re telling me that there’s something going on here that we’re supposed to overlook.”
“You’ve spoken to the betas?”
“They can’t think of anyone who’d do this to the family.”
“So you’ve no hint as to what the motive might have been?”
“No, not yet. But I’ll tell you this. If you just wanted to hurt a family, there are any number of assassination weapons capable of doing the job without leaving a forensic trail.”
“Agreed…” Aumonier said, her tone non-committal, letting him know that she was going along with him for the sake of argument alone.
“But whoever did this wanted to take out more than just the family. They killed all the people in that habitat and then they killed the habitat itself.”
“Maybe they didn’t have access to assassination weapons.”
Dreyfus pulled a sceptical expression.
“Yet they did have the means to infiltrate an Ultra ship and manipulate its Conjoiner drive?”
“I’m not sure where you’re going with this, Tom.”
“I’m saying that it would have been harder for them to use Dravidian than to get their hands on any number of assassination tools. Which means they really needed that ship. They used it for a reason. Killing the family wasn’t enough. They had to incinerate them, wipe every trace of them out of existence. Short of a foam-phase bomb or a nuke, how else do you do that, except with a Conjoiner drive?”
“It still doesn’t add up to much,” Aumonier said.
“At least the ship gave them a chance to pin it on the Ultras, rather than making it look like the work of another habitat. But I think Dravidian and his crew were innocent.” Aumonier looked wearily at the wall of displays jostling for her attention. Even at a glance, Dreyfus could see that almost all of them referred to her efforts to contain the escalating crisis between the Glitter Band and the Ultras. The screens wrapped the room from pole to pole, the combined pressure of them pushing in from all directions like the impaling spikes of an iron maiden.
“If I did have proof,” she said, “if I could demonstrate that the Ultras were innocent, that would certainly ease matters.”
“I’ve got Thalia Ng helping me to trace the caller who set up Dravidian.” She looked at Dreyfus questioningly.
“I thought Ng was outside on field duty. The update to the polling cores, wasn’t it? Vantrollier asked me to sign off on the pad release.”
“Thalia’s outside,” Dreyfus confirmed.
“And she’s helping me as well, between upgrades.” Aumonier nodded approvingly.
“A good deputy.”
