“She can read our goddamn machines, Tom.” Baudry looked to the others for support.
“She’s a walking surveillance system. Every operational secret in our core is hers for the taking, and you let her stroll into Panoply without even putting a Faraday cage around her skull.” Dreyfus leaned closer.
“Isn’t it written down somewhere that we look after victims and go after criminals?”
Crissel looked exasperated.
“We’re not the law-enforcement agency you seem to think we are, Tom. We’re here to ensure that the democratic apparatus functions smoothly. We’re here to punish fraudulent voting. That’s it.”
“My personal remit extends further than that, but you’re welcome to yours.”
“Let’s focus on the matter at hand—the Conjoiner woman,” Baudry said insistently.
“She may already have done incalculable harm in the short time she’s been inside Panoply. That can’t be helped now. What we can do is make sure that she doesn’t do any more damage.”
“Do you want me to throw her into space, or will you do it?”
“Let’s be adult about this, shall we?” Crissel said.
“If the Spi- if the Conjoiner woman is a witness, then naturally she must be protected. But not at the expense of our operational secrets. She must be moved to a maximum-security holding facility.”
“You mean an interrogation bubble.”
Crissel looked pained.
“Call it what you like. She’ll be safer there. More importantly, so will we.”
“She’ll be moved when Mercier says she’s well enough,” Dreyfus said.
“Is she breathing?” When Dreyfus said nothing, Crissel looked satisfied.
“Then she’s well enough to be moved. She isn’t going to die on us, Tom. She’s a survival machine. The human equivalent of a scorpion.”
“Or a spider,” Dreyfus said.
There was a gentle tap on the main doors. Crissel’s eyes flashed angrily to the widening gap. A low-ranking operative—a girl barely out of her teens, with a pageboy haircut—entered the room timidly.
“Pardon, Seniors, but I was asked to bring this to your attention.”
“It’d better be good,” Crissel said.
“CTC contacted us, sirs. They say they’re picking up reports about House Aubusson and the Chevelure- Sambuke Hourglass.”
“They’re off the network. Yes. We know.”
“It’s more than that, sir.” The girl placed the compad on the table, next to Gaffney. He picked it up by one corner, inhaling slowly as he digested its message. Without a word he slid it to Crissel. He glanced at it, glanced again, then passed the compad to Baudry. She read it, her lips moving slowly as she did so, as if she needed the sound of her own voice to lend the report a degree of reality.
Then she slid the compad over to Dreyfus.
“He doesn’t have authority,” Crissel said.
“His deputy’s inside Aubusson. He needs to see this.”
Dreyfus took the compad and read it for himself. His Pangolin boost was fading and it took more than the usual effort to read the words. At first he was convinced that he had made a mistake, despite the fears he was already nursing.
But there had been no error.
Two separate but similar incidents had occurred, within a few minutes of each other. One ship had been on final approach for docking at the Chevelure-Sambuke Hourglass when it was fired on by the habitat with what appeared to be normal anti-collision defences. The ship had sustained a near-fatal hull breach, too large to be patched by the intervention of quickmatter repair systems. The ship had abandoned its docking approach and put out an emergency distress signal, to which CTC had responded by redirecting two nearby vessels. The crew of the damaged ship had all survived, albeit with decompression injuries.
The second ship, on an approach to House Aubusson, had been less fortunate. The anti-collision defences had gored it open in an instant, spilling air and life into space. Its crew had died with merciful speed, but the ship itself had retained enough sentience to put out its own distress signal. CTC had again directed passing traffic to offer assistance, but this time there was nothing that could be done to save the victims.
All this had happened within the last eighteen minutes.
“I think we can safely rule out coincidence,” Dreyfus said, placing the compad back on the table.
“What are we dealing with?” Baudry asked with rigid composure.
“A systemic defence-system malfunction triggered by the loss of abstraction? Could that be the answer?”
“Everything I know about defence systems says that they can’t malfunction in this way,” Crissel said.
“Yet it rather looks as if someone doesn’t want anyone coming or going from those habitats,” Gaffney observed, reading the CTC report again.
“And the other two?” Baudry asked.
“What about those?”
“They’re isolationist,” Dreyfus said.
“New Seattle-Tacoma is a haven for people who want their brains plugged into abstraction and don’t care what happens to their physical bodies. Szlumper Oneill is a Voluntary Tyranny gone sour. Either way, neither’s going to see much in- or outgoing traffic on a given day.”
“He’s right,” Crissel said, favouring Dreyfus with a conciliatory nod. He turned to the still-waiting operative.
“You’re still in contact with CTC?” Without waiting for an answer or conferring with the other seniors, he continued, “Have them identify four unmanned cargo drones currently passing near the four habitats. Then put them on normal docking trajectories, just as if they were on scheduled approaches. If these were malfunctions, then someone inside may have had time to disable the anti-collision systems by now. If they weren’t, we’ll have confirmation that we’re not dealing with one-off incidents.”
“There’ll be hell to pay,” Gaffney said, shaking his head.
“Whatever those cargo drones are hauling, someone owns it.”
“Then I hope they have good insurance,” Crissel replied tersely.
“CTC has the right to requisition any civilian traffic moving inside the Glitter Band, manned or otherwise. Just because that clause hasn’t been invoked in a century or so doesn’t mean it isn’t still valid.”
“I agree,” Dreyfus said.
“This is the logical course of action. If you were still allowing Jane her rightful authority, she’d agree to it as well.”
The operative coughed awkwardly.
“I’ll get on to CTC immediately, sir.”
Crissel nodded.
“Tell them not to hang around. I don’t want to have to wait hours before finding out what we’re looking at here.”
An icy silence endured for many seconds after the girl had left the room. It fell to Dreyfus to break it.
“Let’s not kid ourselves,” he said.
“We know exactly what’s going to happen to those drones.”
“We still need confirmation,” Crissel said.
“Agreed. But we also need to start thinking about what we do once the news comes in.”
“Hypothesise for a moment,” Baudry said, a quaver in her voice that she could not quite conceal.
“Could we be dealing with a breakaway movement? Four states that wish to secede from the umbrella of Panoply and the Glitter Band?”
“If they wanted to, they’d be free to do so,” Dreyfus said.
“The mechanism already exists, and it doesn’t
require shooting down approaching ships.”
“Maybe they don’t want to secede on our terms,” Baudry said, in the manner of one advancing the suggestion for debating’s sake rather than out of any deep personal conviction that it was likely.
Crissel nodded patiently.
