“Then that’s it? No interest in the art beyond that?”
“I’m a man of simple tastes.”
“But you know what you like.” Dreyfus smiled slightly.
“I saw that sculpture you were working on—the big one with the face.”
“And what did you think of it?”
“It unsettled me.”
“It was meant to. Perhaps you’re not a man of such simple tastes as you think.” Dreyfus studied her for several moments before speaking.
“You appear to be taking the matter of your death quite lightly, Delphine.”
“I’m not dead.”
“I’m investigating your murder.”
“As well you should—a version of me has been killed. But the one that counts—the one that matters to me now—is the one talking to you. As difficult as it may be for you to accept, I feel completely alive.
Don’t get me wrong: I want justice. But I’m not going to mourn myself.”
“I admire the strength of your convictions.”
“It’s not about conviction. It’s about the way I feel. I was raised by a family that regarded beta-level simulation as a perfectly natural state of existence. My mother died in Chasm City, years before I was born from a cloned copy of her womb. I only knew her from her beta-level, but she’s been as real to me as any person I’ve ever known.”
“I don’t doubt it.”
“If someone close to you died, would you refuse to acknowledge the authenticity of their beta-level?”
“The question’s never arisen.”
She looked sceptical.
“Then no one close to you—no one with a beta-level back-up—has ever died? In your line of work?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then someone has died?”
“We’re not here to talk about abstract matters,” Dreyfus said.
“I’m not sure I can think of anything less abstract than life and death.”
“Let’s get back to Dravidian.”
“I touched a nerve, didn’t I?”
“Tell me about the Ultras.” But just as Delphine started speaking—the look on her face said she wasn’t going to answer his question directly—the black outline of a door appeared in the passwall behind her. The white surface within the outline flowed open enough to admit the stocky form of Sparver, then re-sealed behind him.
“Freeze invocation,” Dreyfus said, irritated that he’d been disturbed.
“Sparver, I thought I said that I wasn’t to be—”
“Had to reach you, Boss. This is urgent.”
“Then why didn’t you summon me on my bracelet?”
“Because you’d turned it off.”
“Oh.” Dreyfus glanced down at his sleeve.
“So I did.”
“Jane told me to pull you out of whatever you were doing, no matter how much you screamed and kicked. There’s been a development.” Dreyfus whispered a command to return Delphine to storage.
“This had better be good,” he told Sparver when the beta-level had vanished.
“I was close to getting a set of watertight testimonies tying the Accompaniment of Shadows to the Bubble. That’s all the ammunition I need to take back to Seraphim. He’d have no choice but to hand over the ship then.”
“I don’t think you need to persuade him to hand over the ship.” Dreyfus frowned momentarily, still irked.
“What?”
“It’s already on its way. It’s headed straight for us.”
CHAPTER 6
When Sparver prodded Dreyfus awake, they’d arrived within visual range of the Accompaniment of Shadows. Dreyfus untangled himself from the hammock webbing and followed his deputy into the spacious flight deck of the deep-system cruiser. Field prefects were authorised to fly cutters, but a ship as big and powerful as the Democratic Circus needed a dedicated team. There were three operatives on the flight deck, all wearing immersion glasses and elbow-length black control gloves. The chief pilot
was a man named Pell, a Panoply operative Dreyfus knew and respected. Dreyfus grunted acknowledgement, had Sparver conjure him a bulb of coffee, then asked his deputy to bring him up to date.
“Jane polled on the nukes,” the hyperpig said.
“We’re good to go.”
“What about the harbourmaster?”
“No further contact with Seraphim, or any other representative of the Ultras. But we do have a shipload of secondary headaches to worry about.”
“Just when I was starting to get used to the ones we already had.”
“Headquarters says there’s a storm brewing over Ruskin-Sartorious—the news is beginning to break. Not the full facts—no one else knows exactly which ship was involved—but there are a hundred million citizens out there capable of joining the dots.”
“Are people starting to work out that Ultras had to be involved?”
“Definite speculation along those lines. A handful of spectators have noticed the drifting ship and are beginning to think it must be tied to the atrocity.”
“Great.”
“In a perfect world, they’d see the ship as evidence that a crime has been committed and that the Ultras have acted with the necessary swiftness, punishing their own.”
Dreyfus scratched at stubble. He needed a shave.
“But if this was a perfect world, you and I’d be out of a job.”
“Jane says we have to consider the very real possibility that some parties may attempt unilateral punitive action if they conclude that Ultras were responsible.”
“In other words, we could be looking at war between the Glitter Band and the Ultras.”
“I’m hoping no one will be quite that stupid,” Sparver said.
“Then again, this is baseline humans we’re dealing with.”
“I’m a baseline human.”
“You’re weird.”
Captain Pell turned away from the console towards them and flipped up his goggles.
“Final approach now, sir. There’s a lot of debris and gas boiling off, so I suggest we hold at three thousand metres.”
Pell had turned most of the hull transparent, so that the Accompaniment of Shadows was visible alongside. Something was very wrong with it, Dreyfus observed. The engine spars ended in ragged, splayed stumps of tangled metal and hull plating, with no sign of the engines themselves. It was as if they had been ripped off; amputated. The vessel was crabbing, moving sideways instead of nose-first. The hull itself showed evidence of grave assault: great fissures and sucking wounds where armour had been plucked away to reveal hidden innards; machinery that was now glowing red-hot from some unspecified assault. Coils of blue-grey vapour bled into space, forming a widening spiral trail behind the slowly tumbling wreck.
The ship, Dreyfus realised, was burning from inside.
“I guess we’re seeing what passes for justice in Ultra circles,” Sparver said.
“They can call it what they like,” Dreyfus snapped back.
“I asked for witnesses, not a shipload of charred corpses.” He turned to Pell.
“How long until it hits the edge of the Glitter Band?”
“Four hours and twenty-eight minutes.”
“I told Jane we’d destroy it three hours before it reaches the outer habitat orbit. That gives us ninety minutes’ grace. How are the nukes coming along?”
“Dialled and ready to go. We’ve identified impact sites, but we’ll be happier if we stabilise the tumble before we blow. We’re looking at options for tug attachment now.”
“Quick as you can, please.”
The tug specialists were good at their job, and by the time Dreyfus had finished his coffee they had already anchored the three units in position at various stress-tolerant nodes along the wreck’s ruined hull.
“We’re applying corrective thrust now, sir,” one of the tug specialists informed him.
“Going to take a while, though. There’s a million tonnes of ship to stop tumbling, and we don’t want her snapping like a twig.”
“Any sign of movement or activity aboard?” Dreyfus asked.
“Fires are out,” Captain Pell said.
“All available air appears to have vented to space by now. Too much residual heat to start looking for thermal hotspots from survivors inside the thing, but we’re still sweeping her for electromagnetic signatures. Anyone human still alive in that thing has to be wearing a suit, and we may pick up some EM noise from life-support systems. It’s really not likely that we’ll find anyone, though.”