“I have the weevil data,” he said, when the silence had become unendurable.
“I must see it immediately.”
“I’m encapsulating it into the comms feed.”
Aurora closed her eyes. Her lips opened slightly, as if she was in transports of indescribable ecstasy. He imagined the data streaming out of Panoply, into the labyrinthine tangle of the Glitter Band data network, Aurora—whatever she was, human or machine—drinking it in somewhere at the end of a complex chain of routers and hubs.
Her mouth closed again as her eyes opened.
“Well done, Gaffney. All appears to be in order. You’ve done very well indeed.”
“Then you have all that you need? To make the weevils?”
“I won’t know for sure until I have access to a functioning manufactory. The proof of the pudding, as they say. But I’ve no reason to doubt that things will work exactly as intended.”
“I read the tech notes,” Gaffney said.
“Those things are nightmares.”
“And that’s why they’ll only be used as an absolute last resort. But we must have the means, Sheridan, if we are to prevent the unnecessary loss of life. We would be negligent otherwise.”
“People are going to die when we do this.”
“People will die if we don’t. Oh, Sheridan—you’ve come so far, done so much good work for the cause. Please don’t quail now, at the final hurdle.”
“I won’t ’quail’,” he said, resenting her tone.
“You trust me, don’t you? Absolutely, unquestioningly?”
“Yes.”
“Then you know that we are doing the right thing, the decent thing, the only human thing. When the time of transition is complete, the citizenry will thank us from the bottom of their hearts. And the time will be soon, Sheridan. Now that all but these last few trifling obstacles have been removed…”. Gaffney had learned that brazen honesty was the only sensible approach when dealing with Aurora. She pierced lies, penetrated evasion like a gamma-ray laser burning through rice paper.
“There is still one larger problem we haven’t dealt with,” Gaffney began.
“I confess I don’t understand.”
“The Clockmaker is still out there.”
“We destroyed it. How can it possibly be a problem?”
Gaffney shifted on his seat.
“The intelligence was flawed. They’d moved the Clockmaker before we destroyed Ruskin-Sartorious.”
He’d been expecting fury. The mild reaction he got was worse, since it implied fury being bottled away, stored up for later dispensing.
“How can you be sure?”
“Forensics swept the ruin. They’d have flagged anything anomalous, even if they didn’t recognise what they were dealing with.”
“We know it was there recently. What happened?”
“Someone must have decided to move it somewhere else.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Probably because they got word that someone was nosing around their secret.”
“And that someone would be…” Aurora asked.
“You ordered me to ferret out the location of the Clockmaker. I did the best I could, but it meant digging into data outside my control, where I couldn’t always hide my enquiries. I made that abundantly clear before you asked me to find it.”
“So why did you wait until now to tell me you thought it had been moved?”
“Because I have another lead, one I’m still following. I thought it best to wait and see where it leads before taking up any of your valuable time.”
If his sarcasm grated on her, she didn’t show it. Aurora merely looked unimpressed.
“And this lead?”
“Anthony Theobald survived the destruction of the habitat. The weasel must have suspected something was going down. But he didn’t get far. I intercepted him and ran some extraction procedures.”
“He’d hardly have been likely to know where they were taking the Clockmaker.”
“He knew something.” Now she looked vaguely interested again.
“Names, faces?”
“Names and faces wouldn’t mean anything—the operatives who visited the Clockmaker wouldn’t have been using their official identities. But it appears they were occasionally indiscreet. One of them dropped a word into the conversation once, something Anthony Theobald obviously wasn’t meant to hear.”
“A word.”
“Firebrand,” Gaffney said.
“That’s all? One word, which could mean almost anything?”
“I hoped you might be able to shed some light on it. I’ve run a database search, but it didn’t reveal any significant priors.”
“Then it means nothing.”
“Or it refers to something so dark that it doesn’t even show up in maximum-security files. I can’t dig any deeper without the risk of stumbling into the same kinds of tripwire that may already have alerted them to our interest in the Clockmaker. But I thought you—”. She cut him off brusquely.
“I am not omniscient, Sheridan. There are places you can go that I can’t, and vice versa. If I knew everything, saw everything, why would I need you?”
“That’s a very good point.”
“Maybe there is something called Firebrand.” It sounded like a conciliatory line, but he could feel the stinger coming.
“Perhaps that is the name of the group or cell who have been studying the Clockmaker. But if so it tells us nothing we didn’t already know.”
“It’s a handle. It’s leverage.”
“Or random noise, plucked out of a dying man’s head by the grabbing fingers of a trawl. What do you think?”
“I think we’re dealing with Panoply,” Gaffney said.
“You believe your own organisation chose to keep it alive, after all it did to them?”
“Look, it makes a kind of sense. When the Clockmaker got loose, it was Panoply that put it back in the bottle. But we still didn’t know what it was or where it had come from. Who’d have been better placed to smuggle that bottle away for further study? Who, frankly, would have been negligent not to do something like that?”
After a while she said, “There may be some merit in your reasoning, Sheridan.”
“That’s why I think Firebrand might be the codename for a unit inside Panoply. Now I need to find out who’s inside Firebrand. They’ll know where the thing is now. If I can get to one of them, isolate and trawl…” As he spoke, his hand stroked the black haft of his Model C whiphound.
“Apart from Jane Aumonier, you wouldn’t know where to start.”
“I can run a systematic search: look at who was involved eleven years ago, however peripherally, who’s still in the organisation.” He risked another smile.
“I’ve got one thing on my side, Aurora. They’re beginning to panic, which means they’re likely to screw up.”
He’d hoped his words would console her, but they had exactly the opposite effect.
“We don’t want them to err, Sheridan. If these people make mistakes, they may allow the Clockmaker to slip free. Such an outcome wouldn’t just be catastrophic for our plans. It would be catastrophic for the Glitter Band, as it very nearly was eleven years ago.”
“I’ll exercise due discretion. Believe me, that thing isn’t going to escape a second time. And even if it does, we know what we have to do to catch it again.”
“Yes,” Aurora said.
“And while we were doing it we’d hope and pray that the same thing worked twice, wouldn’t we? Answer me this, just out of interest: could you have given that order?”
“Which order would that be?”
“You know exactly which one I mean. The thing they don’t like to talk about. The thing they did before they nuked the Sylveste Institute for Artificial Mentation.”
“I wouldn’t have blinked,” he said.
Thalia felt a chill on her neck as the heavy double doors swung open behind her. As they entered, the other prefects were engaged in low, whispered conversations that had obviously been going on for some time. Thalia had been too absorbed in her duties to pay much attention to the crisis that had been unfolding during the last twenty-six hours, but it was clear that this meeting was considered a necessary but disagreeable diversion.