“You want me to drop you right on the doorstep of that place?”
Dreyfus shook his head.
“I’m not expecting a warm welcome when I get there. You’ll have to assess the terrain and put me down as close as you can without risking detection by anti-ship systems. If that means I have to walk twenty or thirty klicks overland, so be it.”
“It’s your call, Prefect. I’ll try to pick a spot where you’ll have an easy approach.”
“I know you’ll do your best, Captain, but I’m not expecting miracles.” Dreyfus glanced through the nearest window at the waiting form of the cutter, a flint-like wedge of black poised on the end of its launch rack.
“Are we good to go?”
Pell nodded.
“We can move out as soon as we’re aboard and lashed down.”
“There’s a surface suit aboard?”
“Everything you asked for on the checklist, and as many weapons as Thyssen’s people could cram into the remaining space.”
“I’m hoping it won’t come to a gunfight,” Dreyfus said, “but I’ll take what I can get.” He was about to board the ship when an internal prefect came rushing into the observation area, braking himself to a halt against a restraining strap.
“Prefect Dreyfus!” the man called.
“I’m glad I caught you, sir. We were told you’re shipping out and that you’ll be out of comms range. But you need to hear this before you go.”
“Is it about Thalia?” The man smiled.
“She’s alive, sir. She’s alive and well and she’s managed to get a whole party of Aubusson citizens out of that place.”
“Thank God.” Despite his nerves, Dreyfus couldn’t help smiling as well.
“I want to speak to her. Is she back yet?”
“Sorry, sir. We need that deep-system cruiser out there for the time being.”
“But she’s okay?”
“We have reports of minor injuries, sir, nothing worse than that. But Thalia had some bad news for us. It looks like there are no other survivors from Aubusson.”
“None?”
“It wasn’t the decompression, sir. According to Thalia the servitors inside the habitat have been rounding people up and killing them for hours. She doesn’t think anyone else made it through the night.”
“Thank you,” Dreyfus said.
“You’ll make sure the supreme prefect is informed, won’t you? If Aubusson is depopulated, she needs to know. It could make all the difference.”
“She already has the intelligence, sir. Is there anything else?”
“Just this: I want you to pass on a message to Thalia Ng when she gets back to Panoply. Tell her I was very pleased to hear that she made it out in one piece. Tell her that I’m very proud of her actions. Tell her that she’s a credit to the organisation, and that I look forward to telling her that in person.”
“I’ll see the message gets through, sir.” Dreyfus nodded.
“You do that for me.”
Pell boarded the cutter first, sealing the flight-deck passwall while Dreyfus attended to the organisation of his suit, weapons and equipment, satisfying himself that everything he had requested was present. It was a more complicated ensemble than could be created by a standard suitwall. There had been no oversights, he was glad to see. If anything, the technicians had stocked more armour and weapons than he could ever have hoped to carry. It was all lashed down or fixed into place via conjured restraints. He resisted the urge to suit-up now; there would be time enough for that during the long subsonic flight to the drop-off point, once they were safely inside Yellowstone’s atmosphere.
Dreyfus felt a tightness in his stomach. It was fear, moving back in like an old lodger. He felt the cutter move on the rack. He buckled in for launch, wishing he had remembered to shave. His neck hairs rasped against his collar and he could smell his own sweat seeping out of his pores.
His bracelet chimed. It was Jane Aumonier, as he had anticipated.
“They say we should remain out of contact once you’ve cleared Panoply,” she said, “just in case Aurora can eavesdrop on our long-range comms.”
“It’s a sensible precaution.”
“Concerning the matter we discussed, Tom—the document is now available on your compad. There’s also a package under your seat. I had it loaded aboard before you arrived. You’ll know exactly what it is when you open it.”
“I’ve made my decision,” Dreyfus said. He was on the verge of adding something, feeling that he ought to wish Aumonier well, but he did not want to risk her guessing Demikhov’s intentions.
“I’ll see you back in Panoply,” he said.
The cutter surged forward. He waited until the vehicle had ramped up to full thrust and then carefully loosened his webbing. He reached under the seat and found the package Aumonier had mentioned. It came loose with a gentle tug. He settled the black box onto his lap, allowing the cutter’s thrust to hold it in place. The box was unfamiliar, but his fingers located a catch and the lid sprang open easily.
Dreyfus examined the contents.
The box contained six boosters of the same basic type that maintained his Pangolin clearance. He took one of them out. The label on the side read: Manticore clearance. To be self-administered by Senior Prefect Tom Dreyfus only. Unauthorised use may result in neurological injury or permanent irreversible death.
He felt as if he was holding a bomb in his hands, and the bomb had just stopped ticking.
“Senior Prefect Dreyfus,” he said, mouthing the words as if there must have been some mistake. But he knew there hadn’t been.
The thrust sequence ended. The cutter was now in free fall and would remain so until it commenced its braking phase prior to atmospheric insertion. Through the window he’d sketched in the wall upon his arrival, Dreyfus saw that they had already cleared the main orbits of the Glitter Band. Habitats of all shapes and sizes crowded upon each other, sliding silently through space as if they were the ornamented, treasure-bedecked barques and argosies of some marvellous flotilla. The clear space between them, which he knew was at least fifty or sixty kilometres, looked too narrow to allow the passage of a single cutter. He could see now, with a forcefulness that had never really struck him when staring into the Solid Orrery, that it would be the simplest matter in the world for Aurora to spread her infection from state to state. Her weevils had almost no distance to cross. The habitats were stepping stones towards total dominion.
And yet nowhere in his line of sight was there the slightest evidence of the crisis itself. Even if it now encompassed thirty or fifty habitats, including those on the fringe of the evacuation effort, that was still much less than a hundredth of the total number of states under Panoply’s protection. The serene panorama before him looked startlingly normal, like a snapshot of the Glitter Band during the most routine of days. And yet he recalled the swiftness with which Lillian Baudry’s simulation had demonstrated the takeover could spread. No comfort could be extracted from this apparent normality. Satisfied that the cutter would not be making any high-acceleration swerves for now, Dreyfus replaced the Manticore box beneath his seat and propelled himself through the cabin. He knocked quietly on the passwall before letting himself through into the flight deck.
“Thanks for getting us away in good time, Captain Pell,” he said, before his eyes took in the fact that Pell was not alone on the flight deck. Sitting behind and to his left, in one of the other flight positions, was Sparver.
“Hi, Boss.”
Dreyfus was too stunned to feel anger, or even annoyance that his orders had been disobeyed.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
Sparver looked at Pell.
“Now, I ask you—is that any way to talk to your deputy?”
Aumonier floated alone, striving to keep her thoughts on the matter at hand rather than Dreyfus’ mission to Yellowstone. She had cleared all but four display facets in her sphere, and had enlarged those until they filled almost the entire facing hemisphere. They showed the four habitats where Thalia Ng had performed the initial upgrade to the polling core software: Carousel New Seattle-Tacoma, the Chevelure-Sambuke Hourglass, Szlumper Oneill and House Aubusson. No contact had been made with any of these states since the installation of the core patch, more than twenty-six hours earlier. All along, Aumonier had assumed that the citizenry were alive and well, albeit under some new and possibly repressive system of government. She had always assumed that if Aurora wished to kill those people, she would achieve it the easy way, by depressurising the habitat or tampering with the life-support in some equally decisive fashion. It was only now that Aumonier realised the fatal flaw in her thinking. Aurora had indeed wanted those people dead: not because she hated them, not because they were capable of derailing her plans, but because they were of no conceivable use to her. And yet, as Thalia’s debriefing testimony made clear, Aurora had been at pains to conceal her murder of the citizenry from the outside world. It had to be done the old-fashioned way, the historical way: not with a single catastrophic release of air or heat, something that would have been detectable from afar, but with the apparatus of state: armed force, applied via her new army of servitors. The citizens had been rounded up, pacified with lies and then executed by machine. And then their remains had been shovelled into bigger machines and conveyed to the matter-consuming furnaces of the manufactories, where they were smelted down and made into parts for other machines.