skin.
Trajanova must have seen the look on his face.
“Before you ask, I have no idea what just happened.”
“I was about to ask if you were all right. Were you in here when it happened?”
“Behind the fourth stack, the furthest one from the unit that blew. Running search-speed diagnostics.”
“And?”
“It just went. One second it was spinning, next second it didn’t exist any more. I’d have been deafened if I hadn’t had the phones on.”
“You were lucky.”
She scowled, pulling her sleeve away to reveal the dried blood on her cuff.
“Funny. I’d say it was fairly unlucky of me to have been in here in the first place.”
“Was anyone killed?”
“I don’t think so. Not permanently.” She rubbed at dust-irritated eyes.
“It was a mess, though. The glass did the worst harm. That’s hyperdiamond, Dreyfus. It takes a lot to make it shatter. It was like a bomb going off in here.”
“Was it a bomb? I mean, seriously: could a bomb have caused this?”
She shook her head.
“I don’t think so. The unit just spun loose, all of a sudden. There was no bang, no flash, before it happened.”
“Those things run near critical break-up speed, don’t they?”
“That’s the idea. We spin them as fast as they can go. Any slower and you’d be the first to moan about retrieval lag.”
“Could the unit have overspun?” She answered his question with look of flat denial.
“They don’t do that.”
“Could the assembly have been fatigued?”
“All the units are subjected to routine de-spin and maintenance, one at a time. You don’t usually notice because we take the burden on the other three Turbs. The unit that failed got a clean bill of health during the last spin-down.”
“You’re sure of that?” Her face said: Don’t question my competence, and I won’t question yours.
“If it hadn’t, it wouldn’t be spinning, Prefect.”
“I had to ask. Something went terribly wrong here. Could a badly formed query have caused the break- up?”
“That’s a bizarre question.”
“It’s just that I sent something through about a second before the accident.”
“The units would have handled millions of queries in that interval,” she said.
“Millions? There aren’t millions of prefects.”
“Most of the queries coming through are machine-generated. Panoply talking to itself, consolidating its own knowledge base. The Turbs don’t care whether it’s a human or a machine sending the query. All are treated with equal priority.”
“It still felt related to me.”
“It can’t have been your query that did this. That would be absurd.”
“Maybe so. But I’m conducting a sensitive investigation and just at the point when I think I’m getting somewhere, when I might be about to connect my case to one of our glorious families, when I might be about to hurt someone, one of my primary investigative tools is sabotaged.”
“Whatever this was, it can’t have been sabotage,” Trajanova said.
“You sound very certain.”
“Maybe it’s escaped your attention, but this is an ultra-secure facility inside what is already an ultra-secure organisation. No one gets inside this room without at least Pangolin clearance, and no one—not even the supreme prefect herself—gets to access the Search Turbines from outside the rock. Frankly, I can’t think of a facility it would be harder to sabotage.”
“But a prefect could do it,” he said.
“Especially if they had Pangolin clearance.”
“I was keeping our discussion within the realms of possibility,” Trajanova said.
“I can think of a million reasons why our enemies might want to smash the Search Turbines. But a prefect, someone already inside the organisation? You mean a traitor?”
“I’m just running through the possibilities. It’s not so very difficult to believe, is it?”
“I suppose not,” Trajanova said slowly, staring him hard in the eye.
“After all, there’s a traitor’s daughter in the organisation even as we speak. Have you talked to her recently?”
“With Thalia Ng? No, she’s too busy acquitting herself excellently on field duties.” He smiled coldly.
“I think we’re done here, aren’t we?”
“Unless you want to help me clean up this mess.”
“I’ll leave that to the specialists. How long before we’ll have the other Turbs back up to speed?” She glanced over her shoulder at the intact tubes.
“They’ll have to be thoroughly checked for stress flaws. Thirteen hours, at the very minimum, before I’ll risk spin-up. Even then we’ll be running at a low retrieval rate. Sorry if that inconveniences you, Prefect.”
“It’s not that it inconveniences me. What I’m worried about is that it’s conveniencing someone else.” Dreyfus scratched dust from the corners of his eyes, where it had begun to gather in gooey grey clumps.
“Keep looking into the sabotage angle, Trajanova. If you find anything, I want to hear about it immediately.”
“Maybe it would help if you told me about this magic query of yours,” she said.
“Nerval-Lermontov.”
“What about Nerval-Lermontov?”
“I wanted to know where the hell I’d heard that name before.” She looked at him with icy contempt.
“You didn’t need the Search Turbines for that, Dreyfus. I could have told you myself. So could any prefect with a basic grasp of Yellowstone history.” He ignored the insult.
“And?”
“The Eighty.” It was all he needed to be told.
The corvette was a medium-enforcement vehicle, twice as large as a cutter, and with something in the region of eight times as much armament. Panoply’s rules dictated that it was the largest craft that could be operated by a prefect, as opposed to a dedicated pilot. Dreyfus had the necessary training, but as always in such matters he preferred his deputy to handle the actual flying, when the ship wasn’t taking care of itself.
“Not much to look at,” Sparver said as a magnified image leapt onto one of the panes.
“Basically just a big chunk of unprocessed rock, with a beacon saying ’keep away—I’m owned by somebody’.”
“Specifically, the Nerval-Lermontov family.”
“Is that name still ringing a bell with you?”
“Someone jogged my memory,” Dreyfus said, thinking back to his less-than-cordial conversation with Trajanova.
“Turns out that Nerval-Lermontov was one of the families tied up with the Eighty.”
“Really?”
“I remember now. I was a boy at the time, but it was all over the system. The Nerval-Lermontovs were one of the families kicking up the biggest stink.”
“They lost someone?”
“A daughter, I think. She became a kind of emblem for all the others. I can see her face, but not her name. It’s on the tip of my tongue…”
Sparver dug between his knees and handed Dreyfus a compad.
“I already did my share of homework, Boss.”
“Before the Turbines went down?”
