directly at Baudry.
“I want the names of ten habitats, Lillian. Immediately.”
“I’d like to re-run the simulation, varying the parameters a little,” Baudry said.
“There isn’t time. Just give me those names.”
Baudry’s mouth fell open, as if she was about to say something but the words had suddenly escaped her. She reached for her stylus and compad and started compiling the list, her hand shaking with the momentous enormity of what she was doing.
“How long are you going to give them?” Dreyfus asked.
“Before you go in with the nukes, I mean.”
“We can’t wait a day,” Aumonier said.
“That would be too long, too risky. I think thirteen hours is a reasonable compromise, don’t you?”
She knew that it could not be done, Dreyfus thought. Save for the tiniest family-run microstates, there was no habitat in the Glitter Band that could be emptied of people that quickly. Even if evacuation vehicles were docked and ready, even if the citizens were briefed and prepared, ready to leave their world in an orderly and calm fashion, a world that many of them would have spent their entire lives in.
It just couldn’t be done. But at least those people would have a chance of getting out, rather than none at all. That was all Jane was counting on.
“I have those names,” Baudry said.
Aumonier floated rock-still, anchored in space at the epicentre of her own sensory universe. Most of her feeds were blanked out, leaving a bright equatorial strip focusing only on those twenty-five or thirty habitats at immediate or peripheral risk from Aurora’s takeover. The views kept shuffling, playing havoc with Dreyfus’ sense of his own orientation.
“We’re going to lose Brazilia and Flammarion,” she said, by way of acknowledging his presence.
“Weevils are deep inside both habitats and the local citizenry can’t hold them back. They’ve already taken appalling losses, and all they’ve done is slow their approach to the polling cores.”
Dreyfus said nothing, sensing that Aumonier was not finished. Eventually she asked: “Did they get
anything out of Gaffney?”
“Not much. I’ve just read the initial summary from the trawl squad.”
“And?”
“They’ve cleared up at least one mystery. We know how he moved Clepsydra from the bubble to my quarters. He used a nonvelope.”
“I’m not familiar with the term,” Aumonier said.
“It’s an invisibility device. A shell of quickmatter with a degree of autonomy and the ability to conceal itself from superficial observation. You put something in it you don’t want people to find.”
“Sounds like exactly the sort of thing that should be banned by any right-thinking society. How did he get hold of it?”
“From Anthony Theobald Ruskin-Sartorious, apparently. Anthony Theobald must have procured it through his black-market arms contacts. He used the nonvelope to escape from his habitat just before it was torched by Dravidian’s ship.” Aumonier frowned slightly.
“But Anthony Theobald didn’t escape. All you had to interview was his beta-level copy.”
“Gaffney knew differently, apparently. He intercepted the nonvelope before it fell into the hands of Anthony Theobald’s allies.”
“And then what?”
“He cracked it open. Then he ran a trawl on Anthony Theobald to see if he could find out where the thing Ruskin-Sartorious was sheltering had got to.”
“Voi. Gaffney trawled him?” Reading her expression, Dreyfus could imagine what was going through her mind. It was one thing to be trawled inside Panoply, where strict rules were in force. It was another to receive the same treatment elsewhere, inflicted by a man acting outside the bounds of the law who cared nothing for the consequences of his actions.
“He didn’t get as much information as he was hoping for, unfortunately.”
“I presume he kept digging until he’d burnt away Anthony Theobald’s brain?”
“That’s the odd thing,” Dreyfus said.
“He appears to have held back at the last. He got something out of the man, enough for him to stop before he burnt him out completely.”
“Why didn’t he go all the way if he thought there was something more to gain?”
“Because Gaffney doesn’t see himself as a monster. He’s a prefect, still doing his job, still sticking to his principles while the rest of us betray the cause. He killed Clepsydra because he had no other option. He killed the people in Ruskin-Sartorious for the same reason. But he’s not an indiscriminate murderer. He’s still thinking about the tens of millions he’s going to save.”
“What else did he get?”
“That was where the trawl team hit resistance. Gaffney really didn’t want to give up whatever he had learned from Anthony Theobald. But they got a word.”
“Tell me.”
“Firebrand.”
Aumonier nodded very slowly. She said the word herself, as if testing how it sounded coming from her own lips.
“Did the summary team have anything to say about this word?”
“To them it was meaningless noise. Firebrand could be a weapon, a ship, an agent, anything. Or it could be the name of the puppy he owned when he was five.”
“Do you have any theories?”
“I’m inclined to think it’s just noise: either noise that came out of Anthony Theobald, which Gaffney assumed was significant, or noise that came out of Gaffney. I ran a search on the word. Lots of priors, but nothing that raised any flags.”
“There wouldn’t have been any,” Aumonier said.
Dreyfus heard something in her tone of voice that he hadn’t been expecting.
“Because it’s meaningless?”
“No. It’s anything but. Firebrand has a very specific meaning, especially in a Panoply context.”
Dreyfus shook his head emphatically.
“Nothing came up, Jane.”
“That’s because we’re talking about an operational secret so highly classified that even Gaffney wouldn’t have known about it. It’s superblack, screened from all possible scrutiny even within the organisation.”
“Are you going to enlighten me?”
“Firebrand was a cell within Panoply,” Aumonier said.
“It was created eleven years ago to study and exploit any remaining artefacts connected with the Clockmaker affair.”
“You mean the clocks, the musical boxes?”
She answered with superhuman calm, taking no pleasure in contradicting him.
“More than that. The Clockmaker created other things during its spree. The public record holds that none of these artefacts survived, but in reality a handful of them were recovered. They were small things, of unknown purpose, but because they had been made by the Clockmaker, they were considered too unique to destroy. At least not until we’d studied them, worked out what they were and how we could apply that data to the future security of the Glitter Band.” Before he could get a word in, she said: “Don’t hate us for doing that, Tom. We had a duty to learn everything we could. We didn’t know where the Clockmaker had come from. Because we didn’t understand it, we couldn’t rule out the possibility of another one arising. If that ever happened, we owed it to the citizenry to be prepared.”
“And?” he asked.
“Are we?”
“I instigated Firebrand. The cell was answerable only to me, and for a couple of years I permitted it to operate in absolute secrecy within Panoply.”
