“From where I’m standing, that sounds a lot better than nothing.” But when she touched her whiphound, it responded by buzzing against her belt, giving off an acrid smell. They’d had to use it to cut through the locked door into the storage room and now it was protesting again. Thalia wondered how long it would last before giving out on her completely; it was already of limited utility as a weapon, unless employed as a one-off grenade.
“We shouldn’t hang around,” Parnasse said.
“I’ll start moving boxes if you go and round up some help.”
“I hope they’re in a mood to take orders.”
“They will be if they think you know exactly what you’re doing.”
“I don’t, Citizen Parnasse. That’s the problem.” Thalia pulled off her glasses and slipped them into her pocket.
“I’ve been putting a brave face on it, but I’m seriously out of my depth here. You saw what we had to deal with outside.”
“I saw you coping, girl. You might not feel like it, but you look as if you’re doing a decent enough job.” Thalia’s expression must have been sceptical, because he added: “You got us all back here alive, didn’t you?”
“Right back where we started, Citizen Parnasse. My escape attempt didn’t actually achieve much, did it?”
“It was the right thing to try. And we didn’t know about the servitors when we started off, did we?”
“I suppose not.”
“Think of it as a scouting expedition. We went out and gathered intelligence on our situation. We learned things we wouldn’t have learned if we’d just stayed up here, waitin’ for help to come.”
“Put it like that, it almost sounds as if I knew what I was doing.”
“You did know. You’ve convinced me already, girl. Now all you have to do is convince the others. And you know where that starts, don’t you?”
There was a heavy feeling in her stomach, but she forced herself to smile.
“With me. I’ve got to start acting as if I know exactly what to do, or else the others aren’t going to listen.”
“That’s the spirit.” She looked into the darkness of the storage room.
“Maybe we can block the stairs and the shaft. But what do we do afterwards? Sooner or later those machines are going to find a way to get to us, just like they’ve got to the other citizens outside. Everything we’ve seen says they’re being directed by an external intelligence, something with problem-solving capability.” She thought of the way the citizens had been rounded up and pacified, cowed into submission by warnings of an attack against the habitat.
“Something smart enough to lie.”
“One step at a time,” Parnasse said.
“We deal with the barricades first. Then we worry about a dazzling encore.” He made it sound so effortless, as if all they were talking about was the right way to cook an egg.
“All right.”
“You’re a prefect, girl. A lot might’ve changed since you dropped by today, but you’re still wearing the uniform. Make it count. The citizens are depending on you.”
CHAPTER 16
Dreyfus was still drowsing as the deep-system cruiser completed its docking, nudging home into its skeletal berthing rack. He’d slept all the way back to Panoply, from almost the moment when his escape pod was brought aboard the ship and he was reunited with Sparver and Clepsydra. He dreamed of reeking halls of raw human meat hanging from bloodstained hooks, and a woman gorging herself on muscle and sinew, her mouth a red-stained obscenity. When he woke and sifted through his memories of recent events, his experiences in the Nerval- Lermontov rock felt like something that had happened yesterday, rather than a handful of hours earlier. The rock itself no longer existed. The impact of the fully laden and fuelled freighter had pulverised it, so that nothing now remained of its secrets except a cloud of expanding rubble; a gritty sleet that would rain against the sticky collision shields of the Glitter Band habitats for many orbits. Even if Panoply had the resources, there’d have been little point in combing that debris cloud for forensic clues. Clepsydra was now Dreyfus’ only witness to the unspeakable crime that had been visited upon her crewmates. But it wasn’t Clepsydra who was foremost in his thoughts. As soon as he pushed through the cruiser’s suitwall, Dreyfus badgered Thyssen, the tired-looking dock attendant.
“Thalia Ng, my deputy. When did she get in?” The man glanced at his compad. He had red rings around his eyes, vivid as brands.
“She’s still out there, Tom.”
“On her way back?”
“Not according to this.” The man tapped his stylus against a line of text.
“CTC haven’t logged her undocking from House Aubusson. Looks as if she’s still inside.”
“How long since she docked there?”
“According to this… eight hours.” Dreyfus knew that Thalia had only had a six-hundred-second access window. No matter what obstacles she’d encountered, she should have been out of there by now.
“Has anyone managed to get through to her since Deputy Sparver’s attempt?” The man looked helpless.
“I don’t have a record of that.”
“She has one of your ships,” Dreyfus snapped.
“I’d say it was your duty to keep adequate tabs on her,
wouldn’t you?”
“I’m sorry, Prefect.”
“Don’t apologise,” Dreyfus growled.
“Just do your job.” He grabbed a handhold and pulled himself towards the exit.
“If you think you’re having a shitty day,” Sparver told Thyssen, “you should try ours on for size.”
The two prefects and their Conjoiner guest cleared the dock and transitioned through to one of the standard-gravity wheels. They detoured to the medical section and left Clepsydra in the care of one of the doctors, an impish man named Mercier whom Dreyfus trusted not to ask awkward questions. Mercier affected the appearance and manners of a bookish scholar of the natural sciences from some remote candlelit century. He dressed impeccably, with a white shirt and cravat, his eyes forever hidden behind green-tinted half-moon spectacles, and chose to surround himself with facsimiles of varnished wooden furniture, conjured museum-piece medical tools and gruesome illustrative devices. He had a perplexing attachment to paperwork, to the extent that he made many of his reports in inked handwriting, using a curious black stylus that he referred to as a ’fountain pen’. Yet for all his eccentricities, he was no less competent than Dr Demikhov, his counterpart in the adjoining Sleep Lab.
“This is my witness,” Dreyfus explained.
“She’s to be examined humanely, treated for malnutrition and dehydration and then left well alone. I’ll return in a few hours.”
Clepsydra cocked her crested bald egg of a head and narrowed her eyes.
“Am I now to consider myself a prisoner again?”
“No. Just a guest, under my protection. When the crisis is over, I’ll do all in my power to get you back to your people.”
“I could call my people myself if you give me access to a medium-strength transmitter.”
“Part of me would like nothing better. But someone was prepared to kill to keep you a secret. They succeeded in killing your compatriots. That means they’ll be more than prepared to kill again if they know you’re here.”
“Then I should leave. Immediately.”
“You’ll be safe here.”
“I think I can trust you,” Clepsydra said, her attention on Dreyfus, as if no one else was in the room.
“But understand one thing: it is a significant thing for a Conjoiner to trust a baseline human being. People like
