microphone.
“Thalia, sir. We’re securing the evidence now. We should be back with you within ten minutes.”
There was no response. She waited a few moments, giving Dreyfus time to activate his own microphone, but still nothing came. She shot a look at Sparver.
“I’m not getting anything.”
“The boss man could be preoccupied,” Sparver said.
“He should have answered by now. I’m worried. Maybe we ought to get back there, see—”
“We need those summary packages, Thalia. In five minutes you’ll be locked out of the core again.”
Sparver was right. The one-time code—good for ten minutes of unrestricted activity—would not buy her access to the core a second time.
“Hurry up,” she said, through clenched teeth.
She tried Dreyfus again, but still there was no reply. After what felt like an eternity, the core ejected the summary packages from a slot near its base. Thalia clipped together the thick diskettes and then secured them to her belt. Absurd as it was, she swore she could feel the weight of the information inside them. It would have taken days to squeeze that amount of data across a beam.
“You done?” Sparver asked.
“This is all we need. We can leave the local abstraction running.”
“And if they try to get around the block you just put in?”
“They’ll have a dead core on their hands. They’ll be lucky if life support still works after that, let alone abstraction.” Thalia turned back to the core and authorised it to rescind the Panoply access privilege it had just granted her.
“That’s it, then,” she said, feeling an unexpected sense of anticlimax.
“There. Wasn’t so hard, was it?”
“I’m worried about the boss.”
“It’s just the rock this thing’s made of, blocking our signals.” Sparver smiled at the technician again.
“We’re done. Can I trust you not to do anything silly if I pull the whiphound off you?”
The man swallowed painfully and twitched his head in a nod.
“I’ll take that as a ’yes’,” Sparver said. He reached out his hand and beckoned the whiphound. With a flick of its tail, the weapon sprang its handle into Sparver’s grip, the tail whisking back into the housing with a lashing sound.
Sparver patted the handle and re-attached it to his belt.
“Let’s go check on the boss man.”
But when they rode the rim transit back to Dreyfus, they found him standing alone and still, amidst a scene of almost unspeakable carnage. He held his glasses in one hand and the whiphound in the other.
Thalia snatched off her own glasses so that she could see things as they really were. People were screaming, scrambling and splashing to get away from the prefect and the objects of his attention. Caitlin Perigal’s two male guests were both slumped in the pool, in water that was now bloodstained pink. The man with the grey hair had lost his forearm: it was lying on the marble pool-side, the hand pointing accusingly at Dreyfus. Behind the wrist, the skin bulged as if a bone-grafted weapon had been trying to push its way through to the surface. The other man, trembling as if in the throes of a seizure, had blood running from both his nostrils. His eyes were wide open, fixated on the ceiling. Three or four nearby guests were nursing wounds of varying severity. With all the blood in the water—draining from pool to pool via the waterfalls and sluices—it was difficult to be certain how many people had been hurt. Medical servitors had already arrived and were attending to the most seriously injured, but even the machines appeared confused. Perigal was still alive, albeit breathing heavily. A vivid gash cut her across the right cheek, running from the corner of her mouth to her ear. She breathed heavily, her eyes wide and white with fury and fear.
“You’re wrong about this,” she breathed.
“You’re wrong about this and you’re going to pay.” Dreyfus turned slowly at the approach of Thalia and Sparver.
“Got the packages?” Thalia’s mouth was dry.
“Yes,” she said, forcing the word out, striving to maintain professional composure.
“Then let’s go. We’re done here.”
CHAPTER 2
Dreyfus had closed half the distance to the middle of the supreme prefect’s office when the safe-distance tether jerked him to a halt. For a moment Jane Aumonier appeared unaware of his presence, absorbed in one of her wall displays. He coughed quietly before speaking.
“If you want my resignation, it’s yours.” Aumonier turned her head to face him, without moving the rest of her body.
“On what grounds, Tom?”
“You name it. If I committed an error of procedure, or was guilty of improper judgement, you only have to say the word.”
“If you committed an error, it was in not going far enough to defend yourself and your deputies. What was the final body count?”
“Six,” Dreyfus said.
“We’ve done worse. Perigal was always going to be a tough nut. A single-figure body count strikes me as entirely acceptable, given all that we could have expected.”
“I was hoping things wouldn’t get quite so messy.”
“That was Perigal’s call, not yours.”
“I still don’t think we’re finished with her. What she said to me…” Dreyfus paused, certain that Aumonier had enough to worry about without being burdened with his doubts.
“I feel as if a debt has been settled. That isn’t a good way for a prefect to feel.”
“It’s human.”
“She got away with it in the past because we weren’t clever or fast enough to audit her before the evidence turned stale. But even if we’d been able to pin anything on her, her crimes wouldn’t have merited a full century of lockdown.”
“And we don’t know that it will come to that this time, either.”
“You think she’ll slip through again?”
“That’ll depend on the evidence. Time to make use of that bright new expert on your team.”
“I have every confidence in Thalia.”
“Then you’ve nothing to fear. If Perigal’s guilty, the state of lockdown will continue. If the evidence doesn’t turn anything up, House Perigal will be allowed re-entry into the Glitter Band.”
“Minus six people.”
“Citizens panic when they lose abstraction. That isn’t our problem.” Dreyfus tried to read Aumonier’s expression, wondering what he was missing. It wasn’t like her to need to ask him how many people had died during an operation: normally she’d have committed the figures to memory before he was back inside Panoply. But Aumonier’s emotionless mask was as impossible to read as ever. He could remember how she looked when she smiled, or laughed, or showed anger, how she’d been before her brush with the Clockmaker, but it took an increasing effort of will.
“Pardon me,” he said, “but if this isn’t a reprimand… what exactly do you want me for?”
“The conversation? The banter? The warmth of human companionship?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Something’s come up. The news broke while you were outside. It’s as delicate as the Perigal affair, if not more so. Urgent, too. We need immediate action.” Dreyfus had not heard of anything brewing.
“Another lockdown?”
“No. There wouldn’t be much point, unfortunately.”
