“Of course it doesn’t. You see that, just as you feel it in your heart. Authoritarian control can also be a form of kindness, like a mother hugging an infant to her breast to stop it thrashing and wailing. But no amount of rational persuasion will convince the populace. They must simply be shown.”
“Then it’ll never happen. Even if Panoply had the will, it’d never have the power to seize the Glitter Band. The citizenry won’t even let us carry guns!”
“There are other ways of asserting control, Sheridan. It doesn’t have to involve prefects storming every habitat in the ten thousand and declaring a new regime.”
“How, then?”
“It can happen between one moment and the next, if the right preparations are made.”
“I don’t follow.”
“For a long time I’ve been thinking along similar lines to yourself. After much deliberation, I’ve concluded that the transition to central authority must happen instantly, before there is a possibility of panic and counter- reaction.”
“The means don’t exist,” he told her.
“But what if we arranged things such that they do?”
“They’d notice our preparations.”
“Not if we are better than them. That’s no problem. Between the two of us, Sheridan, I think we can be very good indeed.”
Years after that first conversation with Aurora, Gaffney found himself thinking of all the preparations they had made, all the perils and impediments they had overcome. The thing that struck him, given all that he now knew, was how Aurora had never once uttered an actual untruth. She had not needed to tell him about her own visions of the future, but she had done so nonetheless. And as their relationship deepened, as the bonds of conspiracy grew thicker and more tangled, so she had allowed him to learn the true nature of that lens of which she had first spoken: the machine called Exordium, and the unwilling sleepers who on her behalf peered into its misty depths and reported what they saw. He had even walked amongst them, privy to a secret that would have ripped the system wide open had it become known. He felt sorry for those dreaming prisoners. But what they were doing was a beautiful, necessary thing.
History would thank them.
Hell-Five had shown Gaffney that the very nature of the Glitter Band embodied the seed of its own destruction. But Aurora had sucked information out of the future and seen the end itself: not as some vague, ill- determined catastrophe, but a specific event that could almost be tied down to a specific date.
A time of plague. A time of corruption and foulness.
It was coming and there was nowhere to hide.
But between them they had done something: perhaps not enough to avert the crisis, but at least to deflect some of its impact when it arrived. In a very short while, the Glitter Band would be relieved of the burden of self- determination.
This, Gaffney knew, was the time of the most acute risk. He had taken care of almost everything. But the one thing that might create difficulties for Aurora had still not been neutralised. Now he was also confronted with the thorny issues of the beta-levels. Gaffney had hoped that none would survive the attack, and that any backed-up copies retrieved from other habitats would be too out-of-sync to point Dreyfus towards the truth.
But Dreyfus was on to something. Gaffney had accessed the logs concerning the other prefect’s usage of the Search Turbines. The man was showing an unhealthy interest in the details of Delphine’s art, as if he instinctively knew that there was more to the habitat’s demise than met the eye. Dreyfus might not be aware of the Clockmaker connection, but given the man’s demonstrated resourcefulness, it might only be a matter of time before he found a link. So he had to be impeded. Gaffney’s hands moved to initiate the command he had already composed. From elsewhere in the data troves laid open for his inspection, he retrieved a slow-acting, high-stealth cybervirus. The software weapon was ancient and wouldn’t stand a chance against a properly shielded installation. But the beta- levels were a different matter. He threaded copies of the virus into their architectures at a level that would withstand superficial scrutiny. For now it did nothing. It was dormant, waiting until it was called into action. Waiting until the witnesses were resurrected from the dead again. Sparver was blowing his upturned, flat-ended nose into his sleeve while Dreyfus poured tea. His hyperpig respiratory system liked the air on cutters even less than Dreyfus’ did.
“You were quicker than I was expecting,” Dreyfus observed.
“Any hitches?” Sparver stared at his sleeve until it cleaned itself.
“Not at all. I got in and out without a snag.”
“What did you find?”
“Nothing to write home about. A piece of free-floating junk about the same size as the cutter. I grappled in and spacewalked. Took me about two minutes to find the right module and patch in a froptic. After that it was plain sailing.” His gently slanted eyes were pink-rimmed, as if he’d been up all night drinking vodka.
“Heard from Thalia since I left, Boss?” Dreyfus shook his head.
“I reckoned she’d work faster without me breathing down her neck every five minutes.”
“She’ll get the job done, don’t worry about that.”
“I sincerely hope so.”
“You have doubts?”
“I can’t help worrying. She’s a good deputy, but she’s barely out of school. I know she wants to prove to us all how good she is, but sometimes I think she’s overcompensating for what happened to her father.”
“What was your take on that?”
“I didn’t know Jason Ng all that well. But from what I did know, I never had cause to doubt his abilities or his dedication to Panoply.”
“So you were surprised?”
“We all were.”
“You ever talk to Thalia about it?”
“The subject’s never come up.”
Sparver smiled.
“She’d hardly be the one to raise it, would she?”
“Whatever I might think of her father, it has no bearing on my opinion of Thalia. I wouldn’t have selected her for my squad if I’d had doubts.” Dreyfus took his cup and sipped at it gently, blowing on the tea to cool it.
“Isn’t that all the reassurance she needs?”
“There are still prefects who won’t look her in the eye when she goes to the refectory,” Sparver said.
“I know how that feels.”
“They also resent her because she was promoted to Deputy Field One ahead of most of her classmates.”
“I just sometimes wonder if we truly understand what it’s like for her, working for the same organisation that tarred and feathered her father.”
Dreyfus shrugged. He had no real opinion on the matter. Jason Ng had been outwardly competent and trustworthy, but it was a matter of record that he had obstructed an investigation into a mid-rank habitat suspected of voting fraud. He had been found dead, having committed suicide in a cargo airlock. Postmortem audits revealed how Ng had been receiving bribes from parties connected to the habitat. He had killed himself because his culpability was about to be made public, and he wished to spare Thalia the shame of watching her father go through a humiliating tribunal.
Dreyfus didn’t care. He did not believe in an inherited disposition for accepting bribes or perverting investigations. If anything, he believed that Thalia would make a better prefect than many of her peers. She wanted both to redeem her father’s sins and show that she was not a slave to her genes.
“She’s a good deputy,” he said again.
“That’s all that matters to me. And I have every confidence that she’ll pull this off without our assistance.”
“You didn’t sound confident just now.”
“I’m entitled to entertain reasonable qualms. But that’s all they are. And face it, Sparv: Thalia chose to bite this one off on her own. She’d hardly welcome the arrival of a back-up squad, even if we could spare the
