“Lascaille had to die because the process was fatal. Right, Dreyfus?”
“They wanted the patterns in his head, the structures left behind when he returned from the Shroud. They thought that if they could understand those structures, they’d have another shot at understanding the Shrouders. But to scan at the necessary resolution meant cooking his mind alive.”
“But things have improved since the Eighty,” Veitch said.
“Not by the time Lascaille died. All this took place thirty years after the Eighty, but for most of that time there’d been a moratorium concerning that kind of technology. They took him and did it anyway. They burnt his brains out, but they got their alpha-level scan. Then they took his body and dumped it in the fish pond. He was known to be insane, so no questions were asked when it looked as if he’d drowned himself.”
“Who would have done this?”
Dreyfus shrugged at Saavedra’s question. He hadn’t got that far yet, and his mind was freewheeling with the possibilities.
“I don’t know. It would have needed to be someone high up in the Sylveste organisation. I doubt that it was Dan himself—it would have been against his own interests since he already had an insight into how to contact the Shrouders. But who’s to say he didn’t have a rival, a spy in the clan, interested in beating him to the prize?”
“But you’ll go looking, won’t you?” she said.
“I can’t let a murder go uninvestigated. Of course, there are a couple of matters we need to deal with first. Surviving the next fifty-two hours would be a good start.” Dreyfus turned his attention to Veitch.
“Which is why we need the Clockmaker. I’ve stated my case as best I can. Now I want you to show me how to communicate with it.”
“It’s an interesting theory you have, concerning its origin,” Veitch said.
“It may even be true. But that doesn’t mean it makes any sense to let it loose now.”
“I’m not talking about letting it loose,” Dreyfus replied patiently.
“I’m talking about—”
“You think it makes a scrap of difference to the Clockmaker whether you open that cage or give it a hotline to the networks?”
Dreyfus felt a powerful wave of exhaustion crash over him. He had done his best. He had explained things to Saavedra and Veitch as clearly as he could, trusting that they would see his sincerity and understand that the Clockmaker really was the only effective weapon against Aurora, as unpalatable a prospect as that undoubtedly was. And it hadn’t worked. Perhaps Saavedra had begun to come around, or at least believe that he had not come to destroy it. With time she could have been turned. But Veitch was showing no inclination to see things Dreyfus’ way.
“I came here to negotiate,” he said, offering his hands in surrender.
“I could have had you killed, you and the Clockmaker. A single nuke would have done it. Do you think I’d have come here if I felt there was another option?”
“Prefect, listen to me,” Veitch said.
“No matter how bad things are up there, no matter how desperate they look, nothing can possibly be bad enough to justify giving the Clockmaker an angstrom of freedom. This is pure fucking evil incarnate, understand? It’s the devil in chrome.”
“I know.”
“You can’t know. No one really knows unless they’ve had direct experience with it, day after day, year after year, the way we have.”
“I was there,” Dreyfus said calmly.
“What do you mean, you were there?”
“When we went into SIAM. I was one of the prefects who went inside, before it was nuked out of existence.”
Veitch shot a nervous glance at Saavedra. Dreyfus recognised the look. They thought he was losing it. He looked at Sparver and saw the same expression on the face of his former deputy, though only Dreyfus would have recognised it.
“Prefect, we have clearance that exceeds Pangolin, clearance that exceeds even Manticore,” Veitch answered, in tones of slow reasonableness.
“We know everything that happened that day, to the last minute. We know who was involved, where they were, what they were doing.”
“Except the facts were changed,” Dreyfus said.
“My involvement was expunged from the record, from all documents except those intended for the eyes of Jane Aumonier alone. But I was there. I just didn’t remember much about it until now.”
“He’s losing it,” Veitch said.
“Dusollier committed suicide shortly after the Clockmaker crisis,” Dreyfus continued, “but it wasn’t because of decisions he took for himself. He killed himself rather than deal with the consequences of the actions I initiated, acting with Dusollier’s blessing.”
“What do you mean, actions you initiated?”
“There was no prefect of higher rank in the vicinity of the crisis. The Clockmaker had already reached Jane. She was out of the equation. Dusollier authorised me to go in and use whatever measures were necessary to save the people still inside SIAM.”
“Then you failed,” Veitch said.
“No, I succeeded. I saved most of them.” Dreyfus paused. He found the words difficult to say out loud.
It had been one thing to read the account of what he had done that day. But it was only now that he was speaking of his deeds that he felt he was really internalising what had happened.
“They survived. They’re still alive.”
“No one survived,” Saavedra said.
“We nuked SIAM.”
“Yes, but not until six hours after Jane was pulled out, with the scarab on her neck. What happened in that gap? Why was it expunged from the public record? I’ve always wondered.” Dreyfus smiled weakly.
“Now I know.”
“Just come back to you, has it?” Saavedra asked snidely.
“Jane felt it might be tactically useful for me to recover the memories of my previous encounter with the Clockmaker. She knew it would be painful for me, given everything else that came with that baggage. But she was right to do it.”
“I agree with Veitch—you’re losing it,” Saavedra replied.
“There was a ship orbiting nearby,” Dreyfus said quietly, “a type of starship built by the Demarchists in an effort to lessen their dependence on the Conjoiners. It was a prototype, built around Fand. It used a different drive system, one that owed nothing to Conjoiner science. It had made one flight to our system and then been mothballed because it was too expensive, too slow, too clumsy. It was being stored against the day when even a ship like that became economical.”
“What was the name of this ship?” Saavedra asked.
“Atalanta,” Dreyfus replied.
“There was a ship with that name,” Veitch said, frowning.
“I remember that they wanted to rip it apart for scrap.”
“They did. It doesn’t exist any more.”
“Tell us what happened,” Saavedra said.
“Yeah, you do that,” Sparver said. Dreyfus was about to speak when two bracelets began to chime in unison. Saavedra and Veitch stared down in what was at first irritation and then alarm.
“Are the surface guns online?” Saavedra asked Veitch. He nodded.
“They’ve acquired, but they won’t open fire until it’s closer.”
“Until what’s closer?” Dreyfus asked. Saavedra’s eyes snapped to him.
“There’s a ship coming in from space. It’s making a direct insertion from orbit, at high-burn. It’s not even attempting to conceal itself. Do you know anything about this, Dreyfus?”
“I went out of my way not to draw attention to your location. I didn’t want Aurora following me to you.”
“But only Panoply knows we’re here.”
“Then something must have happened,” Dreyfus said.
“It’s a fair bet that whoever’s flying that ship wants to put the Clockmaker out of action.”
“Let’s get to operations,” Saavedra said. She fixed Dreyfus with a warning look.
“I’m calling off the whiphound now, but you know how quick these things are. I can put it back on you before you can blink.” She turned to Veitch.
“Is the containment stable?”