consisted of a smaller version of the panel he had already used. It had been glued to the side of the hull, fixed into place by crusty dabs of bright green adhesive. There were only two toggles. Dreyfus reached for the one marked with the airlock symbol and gave it a hefty twist. After a moment, a luminous blue outline appeared in the black, defining the rectangular shape of a door. The outline thickened, and then the entire rectangular part pushed outwards and sideways, unassisted by any visible mechanisms or hinges. Dreyfus pushed himself into the interior of the Conjoiner vehicle. He looked back, holding his breath until he was satisfied that the rectangular door was not going to seal him in. He followed a winding, throat-like corridor until he reached a junction. Five corridors converged on this point, arriving from different angles. Light—of a peculiar blue-green sickliness—was leaking down one of the routes. The others were singularly dark and uninviting, and appeared to feed back towards the rear of the ship. He followed the light. When he estimated that he had moved twenty or thirty metres towards the bow, he found himself emerging into a very large room. The light, which had appeared bright from a distance, now revealed itself to be meagre, obscuring detail and scale. Dreyfus unfixed his helmet from its bonded connection with his belt and used the crown lamp to investigate his surroundings. His illumination glanced off steely surfaces, glass partitions and intricate tangles of plumbing. That was when he felt something cold and sharp press against his naked throat.
“There are lights, for emergency use,” a woman’s voice said, speaking very calmly into his ear.
“I shall bring them on now.” Dreyfus kept very still. In his lower peripheral vision he could see the gauntleted knuckle of a hand. The hand was holding a blade. The blade was tight against his Adam’s apple. The lights came on at full strength, yellow shading to pale green, and after a few moments of blinking in the sudden brightness Dreyfus saw a room full of sleepers, wired into complicated apparatus. There were dozens of them, eighty or ninety easily, maybe more. They’d been arranged in four long rows spaced equidistantly around an openwork catwalk. The sleepers did not lie in closed caskets, but rather on couches, to which they were bound by black restraining straps and webs of silver meshwork. Transparent lines ran in and out of their bodies, pulsing not just with what Dreyfus presumed to be blood and saline but with vividly coloured chemicals of obscure function. The sleepers were all naked and they were all breathing, yet so slowly that Dreyfus had to study the rise and fall of a single chest intently before he convinced himself that he was looking at anything other than a corpse. It was sleep dialled down almost all the way to death. He could make out nothing of their heads, for each sleeper wore a perfectly spherical black helmet sealed tight around the neck, which in turn sprouted a thick ribbed black cable from its crown, connected into a socket recessed into the adjoining wall. The impression of a room full of faceless human components, smaller parts plugged into a larger machine, was total.
The knife was still pressing against his throat.
“Who are you?” he asked, speaking quietly, fearful of moving his throat.
“Who are you?” the woman asked back.
There was no reason for subterfuge.
“Field Prefect Tom Dreyfus, of Panoply.”
“Don’t try anything rash, Prefect. This knife cuts very well. If you doubt me, take a look around you.”
“At what?”
“The sleepers. See what I’ve done to them.”
He followed her instruction. He saw what she meant.
Not all of the sleepers were whole.
The confusion of restraints, surgical lines and helmets had hidden the truth at first. But once Dreyfus had become accustomed to the fact of the sleepers, and the mechanisms that sustained them, he realised that many of them were incomplete. Some were missing hands and arms, others lower legs or the whole limb. Perhaps a third of the sleepers had suffered a loss of some kind. Dreyfus started thinking back to the wars the Conjoiners had been involved in—perhaps this ship had been carrying the injured from one of those engagements, waylaid on their passage to the Conjoiner equivalent of a hospital.
But that couldn’t be the answer. This ship had probably been here for decades, and yet the injuries looked fresh. Some form of turquoise salve had been spread over the wounds, but beneath the salve the stumps were still raw. The sleepers hadn’t even received basic field care, let alone the emergency regenerative medicine that the Conjoiners should have been able to utilize.
“I don’t understand—” he began.
“I did it,” the woman said.
“I cut them. I cut them all.”
“Why?” Dreyfus asked.
“To eat them,” she said, sounding amazed at his question.
“What other reason would there have been?”
CHAPTER 13
Thalia found herself once again confronting a waiting polling core. She was somewhere in the sphere: most likely on a floor about halfway up its hundred-metre diameter, judging by the spacious dimensions of the room housing the machinery. Large porthole-shaped windows ringed the enormous space. The beige walls were covered in mazelike white patterns derived from the designs of early integrated circuits. A number of chairs and tables had been provided for the comfort of the visitors. The furniture was all safely inert; no quickmatter was permitted near a polling core, save that essential for the functioning of the core itself. The core was a pearl-coloured cylinder rising from the middle of the floor and piercing the ceiling, surrounded by a low metal railing. Resting on a heavy-looking plinth just outside the railinged area was a glass-cased architectural model of the Museum of Cybernetics, rendered with sterile precision.
Thalia had already explained what she would have to do; that if everything went to plan she would be on her way within less than twenty minutes; that at most her guests could expect a subliminal interruption in
their access to abstraction. She had already examined the core and satisfied herself that there would be no surprises once she had opened the access window.
“Really,” she said, in her best self-deprecating tone, “it’s not all that interesting. If it was serious, they wouldn’t entrust it to just one field prefect.”
“I’m sure you’re understating your abilities,” said Caillebot, lounging in a blocky blue chair, one leg hooked over the other.
“All I’m saying is, if you don’t want to hang around and see me mutter a few boring incantations, I won’t be offended. I know my way down now. If you want to wait by those goldfish ponds, I can find you when I’m done.”
“If it doesn’t inconvenience you, I think we’d all like to stay,” Paula Thory said, looking to the others for support.
“It’s not often we see the beating heart of the voting apparatus laid open for examination.”
Thalia scratched at her damp collar.
“If you want to stick around, I have no problem with that. I’m about ready to begin.”
“Do what you must, Prefect,” Thory said.
She opened the cylinder, conscious of the eyes on her, and retrieved the last of the four one-time pads.
“I’m going to read out three magic words here. They’ll give me access to the core for six hundred seconds. There’s no going back once I’ve initiated that window, so it’d be best if I’m not interrupted unless absolutely necessary. Of course, I’ll keep you informed about what’s happening.”
“We appreciate the gesture. Please, continue your work and don’t pay any heed to us,” Caillebot said.
Thalia stepped through a gap in the surrounding railing, placed her cylinder on the ground and faced the flickering pillar of the core. She cleared her throat.
“This is Deputy Field Prefect Thalia Ng. Acknowledge security access override Hickory Crepuscule Ivory.”
“Override confirmed,” answered the core.
“You now have six hundred seconds of clearance, Deputy Field Prefect Ng.”
Thalia removed the final upgrade diskette from her cylinder.
