this was no Ultra starship.
Dreyfus smiled to himself. He’d felt the scope of the investigation widening the moment a connection to the Eighty entered the frame. But nothing had prepared him for this shift in perspective.
“Keep talking to me, Boss. I’m still on the line.”
“There’s a Conjoiner ship here. It’s just sitting in the middle of the rock.”
Sparver paused before answering. Dreyfus could imagine him working through the ramifications of the discovery.
“Remind me: what have Conjoiners got to do with our case?”
“That’s what I’m very eager to find out.”
“How did the ship get where it is?”
“No idea. Can’t see any sign of a door in the chamber, and there definitely wasn’t one on the outside. Almost looks as if it’s been walled-up in here, encased in rock.”
“You think the Conjoiners hid it here for a reason?”
Dreyfus brushed his hand over the control panel again.
“I don’t think so. Apart from the ship itself, nothing in the rock looks Conjoiner. It’s more as if the ship’s being held here by someone else.”
“Someone managed to capture and contain a Conjoiner ship? That’s a pretty good trick in anyone’s book.”
“I agree,” Dreyfus said.
“Next question: why would anyone do that? What would they hope to gain?”
Dreyfus looked at the one facet in the chamber that was burnished silver and realised that it was a sealed door rather than an opaque panel in the bank of windows. The chamber’s illumination traced the ribbed tube of a docking connector, stretching across space from the door panel to meet the light-sucking hull of the ship.
“That’s what I’m going to have to go aboard to find out.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, Boss.”
Dreyfus turned to the panel again. Every cell in his body was screaming at him to leave. But the policeman in him had to know what was inside that ship; what secret was worth murdering to protect.
His hand alighted on another toggle control, this one marked {X}—the universal symbol for an airlock actuator. The silver panel whisked aside silently and smoothly. Sensing his intentions, lights came on in sequence along the connector. The golden band arced down until it vanished into a docking port on the side of the lighthugger.
Nothing now prevented him from boarding.
“I’m going inside. Call me back as soon as you get through to Panoply.”
While Thalia had been talking with her House Aubusson companions, they had crossed another window band spanning a brief ocean of space and stars (most of which were in fact other habitats), and now the train was slowing as it neared its destination. They crossed a series of manicured lawns, skimming high above them on a filigreed wisp of a bridge, then descended back down to ground level. On either side, Thalia saw the tapering stalks of the Museum of Cybernetics, each structure rising at least a hundred metres into the air, each surmounted by a smooth blue-grey sphere, each sphere marked with a symbol from the hallowed history of information processing. There was the ampersand, which had once symbolised a primitive form of abstraction. There was an ever-tumbling hourglass, still the universal symbol for an active computational process. There was the apple with a chunk missing, which (so Thalia had been led to believe) commemorated the suicidal poisoning of the info-theorist Turing himself.
The train plunged into a tunnel, then slowed to a smooth halt in a plaza under the central stalk of the polling core. People came and went from trains parked at adjoining platforms, but Thalia’s party had an entire section of the station to themselves, screened off by servitors and glass barriers. They rode escalators into hazy daylight, surrounded by the ornamental gardens and rock pools clustering around the base of the main stalk. Nearby, a bright blue servitor was diligently trimming a hedge into the shape of a peacock, its cutting arms moving with lightning speed as it executed the three-dimensional template in its memory.
Thalia craned her head back to take in the entirety of the stalk. It rose from a gradually steepening skirt, climbing five or six hundred metres above the ground before tapering to a neck that appeared only just capable of supporting the main sphere. The sphere was much larger than those balanced on the smaller stalks, banded with tiny round windows where they were blank. Geometric shapes were in constant play on its surface, indicating—so Thalia guessed—the changing parameters of abstraction flow and voting patterns.
Thalia’s party walked into the shaded lobby of the stalk. The structure appeared to be hollow, its inward- leaning interior walls given over to towering murals, each of which depicted a great visionary of the PreCalvinist cybernetic era. A thick column rose up through the middle of the dizzying space, buttressed to the walls by filigreed arches. That had to be the main data conduit, Thalia judged, carrying abstraction services and voting packets to the polling core high above her head. The citizens here might not be as thoroughly integrated into abstraction as those in New Seattle-Tacoma, but their enthusiasm for the voting process would nonetheless ensure hefty data traffic. Thalia imagined the flow of information in the pipe, like high-pressure water searching for a loose rivet or leaky valve. Rising next to the column, but separated from it by a few metres of clear space, was the thinner tube of an elevator shaft, with a spiral walkway wrapped around it in ever-receding vertigo-inducing loops. The data conduit, elevator shaft and spiral staircase plunged through the ceiling at the top of the stalk, into the sphere that sat above it.
Thalia knew she was rubbernecking, that even this tower would have been considered unimpressive by Chasm City standards, but the locals looked happy that she was impressed.
“It’s an ugly big bastard all right,” Parnasse said, which was presumably his way of showing a fragment of civic pride.
“We go up?” Thalia asked.
Paula Thory nodded.
“We go up. The elevator should already be waiting for us.”
“Good,” Thalia said.
“Then let’s get this done so we can all go home.”
Not for the first time in his life, Sparver found himself cursing the inadequacy of his hands. It was not because there was anything wrong with them from a hyperpig’s point of view, but because he had to live in a world made for dextrous baseline humans, with long fingers and thumbs and an absurd volume of sensorimotor cortex dedicated to using them. The stubby, gauntleted fingers of his trotter-like hands kept pushing two keys at once, forcing him to backtrack and initiate the command sequence all over again. At last he succeeded, and heard a chirp in his helmet signifying that he was in contact with Panoply, albeit on a channel not normally used for field communications.
“Internal Prefect Muang,” a voice announced.
“You have reached Panoply. How may I be of assistance?”
Sparver knew and liked Muang. A small, stocky man himself, with looks that were at best unconventional, he had no conspicuous problem with hyperpigs.
“This is Sparver. Can you hear me?”
“Loud and clear. Is something wrong?”
“You could say that. Prefect Dreyfus and I were investigating a free-floating rock owned by Nerval-Lermontov, as part of a case we’re working. As we were making our final approach the rock opened fire on our corvette and took out our long-range communications.”
“The rock attacked you?”
“There were heavy anti-ship weapons concealed under its surface. They popped out and started shooting at us.”
“My God.”
“I know. Don’t you just hate it when that happens? Thing is, we could use some assistance out here.”
“Where are you now?”
“I’m patching in via a transmitter inside the rock itself, but I don’t know how long this link is going to hold up.”
“Copy, Sparver. With luck we can rustle up a deep-system vehicle. Do you need a medical team? Are either of you injured?”
