Then he looked at the face. He didn’t mean to. It was clinically irrelevant, and he’d told himself to pay no heed to any signs of apparent consciousness he saw behind Jane Aumonier’s eyes. But he couldn’t help it. And there was something there: a sharpness in her gaze, a sense that she was focusing on no one in the room but him, that she was utterly, shockingly aware of her condition.
Less than ten seconds had passed since the blades had gone in.
‘Begin stabilisation,’ Demikhov said. ‘Plan three-delta. We have a job to do here, people.’
He risked another look at the eyes. This time there was a fogged absence where a mind had been.
It took three hours to fall towards Yellowstone. The cutter could have made the journey in a third of the time, but then it would have appeared to be moving anomalously fast, running the risk of attracting Aurora’s attention. Dreyfus could not be certain of the extent of her surveillance, but it was likely that she would be alert to any traffic that appeared to be out of the ordinary, be it civilian or law-enforcement. As much as it pained him to watch the clock ticking, he knew that the slow and unobtrusive approach was necessary.
‘Captain says to buckle up,’ Sparver said, prompting Dreyfus to put aside the compad he’d been studying. ‘We’ll be slowing for atmosphere in about five minutes.’
Dreyfus nodded curtly. ‘You can tell him you passed on the message.’
Sparver had braced himself with an arm and a foot. ‘You still sore at me for sneaking aboard?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I had Jane’s blessing. Who else do you think put that stuff under your seat?’
‘I expressly requested that I go in alone,’ Dreyfus said.
Sparver shrugged, as if none of this was his fault, merely the outcome of a series of circumstances beyond his control. ‘Look, it’s done. I’m aboard. So make the most of me.’
‘I will. You can keep Pell company when he flies this cutter back to Panoply.’
‘Actually, I intend to keep you company during that little stroll you’ve got planned.’
‘Then it’s a pity we didn’t load two surface suits, isn’t it? I only requested one, I’m afraid. And it wouldn’t fit you anyway.’
‘Which is why I had a word with Thyssen and asked him to stow a spare,’ Sparver said. ‘The extra weapons were my idea as well. You didn’t think you were going to carry them all on your own, did you?’
Dreyfus sighed. He knew Sparver meant well, and that there was no other prefect he’d sooner have at his side than his own deputy. But he had resigned himself to going in alone. Now that he had crossed that mental Rubicon, he could not easily accept the idea of placing another’s life at risk.
‘Sparv, I appreciate the gesture. But like I said to you before, you’re one of the few people who have been following this investigation since the outset. I cannot in conscience accept that you should be placed at risk. Especially not—’
‘Save it for later, Boss,’ Sparver said. ‘There’s no secret now. Jane and the other senior prefects know everything we do. We’ve just become expendable again. And isn’t that a wonderful, liberating feeling?’
‘You’re right,’ Dreyfus answered forcefully. ‘We are expendable. And you know what? We probably won’t come back from this mission. If the Clockmaker doesn’t get us, Firebrand or Aurora will.’
Sparver lowered his voice. For once he was serious. ‘So why are you doing this, if it’s guaranteed to fail?’
‘Because there’s a chance it will succeed. Not much of one, but it’s better than any other option on the table.’
Sparver nodded at the compad. ‘Does that have anything to do with all this?’
‘I don’t know.’ Dreyfus turned the compad around so that Sparver could see the display, with its dyslexia-encrypted read-out. ‘This still makes as much sense to me as it does to you, and you don’t even have Pangolin, let alone Manticore.’
‘Did Jane give you Manticore?’
Dreyfus nodded humbly. ‘Not that it’s made any difference to me yet.’
But that was a lie, albeit a small one. Dreyfus had to stare hard at the scrambled text, but every now and then he’d feel a premonitory sense of something about to reveal itself, like a kind of mental hiccup that never quite arrived. The text was still illegible, but he recognised the feeling from his Pangolin exposure. The neural architecture necessary for the decoding stage was beginning to assemble. It might take another six or nine hours until it was fully functional, but the process was already beginning to affect his comprehension.
‘But it’ll come, eventually?’ Sparver asked.
‘That’s the idea.’
‘What does she want you to know, Boss?’
‘How should I know if I can’t read this yet?’ Dreyfus snapped.
‘She must have given you an idea.’
‘She did.’
‘It’s about the Clockmaker, I assume.’
‘Yes,’ Dreyfus said tersely. ‘It’s about the Clockmaker. Now would you mind leaving me alone with it so I at least have a chance of making some sense of this before we land?’
‘It’s all right,’ Sparver said, with more sympathy than Dreyfus felt he deserved. ‘I understand, Boss. If it’s about the Clockmaker, then it’s also about Valery, isn’t it?’
‘Valery died,’ Dreyfus said. ‘I’m over her death. Nothing in this is going to change that.’
Sparver had the good sense to leave him alone after that.
The braking phase commenced shortly, entailing several minutes at high burn. When it had subsided, Dreyfus was experiencing nearly full gravity and the cutter had already begun to ease its way into the upper atmosphere of Yellowstone. This was no fiery insertion, nothing like Paula Saavedra’s high-speed re-entry, but rather a progressive submergence into thicker and thicker air, with the cutter using its engines to avoid excessive aerodynamic friction. To a casual observer, they would look like one more passenger ship returning to Chasm City from the glitz and glamour of the orbital communities.
Dreyfus found himself dozing. It was something to do with Manticore making him sleepy while it worked on his mind. He did not feel markedly different when he woke, but when he resumed his perusal of the compad, he knew that he had taken another step closer to comprehension. Now whole phrases kept slipping in and out of clarity, like animals prowling behind tall grass. He saw:
Sylveste Institute for Artificial Mentation
…
Emergency measures instituted during Clockmaker crisis…
Prototype ramscoop vehicle, mothballed but otherwise intact…
Heavy Technical Squad boarded and assumed command…
Ramliner
Atalanta
deemed functional…
Containment effect of magnetic field…
Risk of civilian casualties reduced, but not eliminated…
Unavoidable losses…
Assignment of emergency powers to Field Prefect Tom Dreyfus,
authorised by Supreme Prefect Albert Dusollier…
And then he felt something open in his mind, like a heavy trap door, one that had been shut and forgotten for eleven years. He saw Valery’s face, lit up with childlike delight, kneeling in soil, turning to him from the bed where she had been arranging flowers.