Despite all his years as a prefect, Dreyfus still flinched at the sight. He had seen corpses, but not many of those. He had seen even fewer skeletons. But the shock subsided as he realised that the skeleton could not have belonged to someone who had died recently. Most of the flesh had been consumed, leaving only a few grey-black scraps attached here and there. The bones, those that had not crumbled, were mottled and dark. Of clothes, and whatever else the corpse had been wearing, no visible trace remained.
The hapless victim must have been tossed from the high balcony, or perhaps dropped from some makeshift bridge stretched across the atrium, to fall on one of the larger spikes. The skeleton lay at its very base, the spike having rammed apart its ribcage. The skull lolled to one side, empty eye sockets regarding Dreyfus, the lopsided tilt of the jaw conveying incongruous amusement, as if it was taking a ghastly posthumous delight in the horror it caused.
But the real horror, Dreyfus decided, was not that someone had been murdered here. Dreyfus hardly approved of summary justice, but at this remove there was no telling what the victim might have done to deserve this brutal end. The horror was that the agents of Firebrand had not seen fit to do something with the bones. They had gone about their business, equipping this base for rehabitation, as if the skeleton was merely an unavoidable part of the decor.
Dreyfus knew then that he was dealing with more than one kind of monster.
‘Put down your weapons,’ a voice said.
Dreyfus and Sparver spun around, but it was already too late. The muzzle of another Breitenbach rifle was aimed down at them from the intermediate-level balcony. With the weapon on maximum beam dispersal, Dreyfus knew, it could take out both of them with a single pulse.
‘Hello, Paula,’ Dreyfus said.
‘Put down the weapons,’ Saavedra repeated. ‘Do it immediately, or I will kill you.’
Dreyfus worked the sling of the rifle over his shoulder and set the weapon down on the ground. With obvious reluctance, Sparver followed his lead.
‘Step away from the guns,’ Saavedra said. She began to walk around the balcony, keeping the muzzle of her rifle trained on them all the while. Reaching the staircase, she began to descend. She wore Panoply trousers, but her upper body was clothed only in a sleeveless black tunic. It made her look thinner, more doll-like, than when Dreyfus had confronted her in the refectory. Yet she cradled the rifle as if it weighed nothing. The muscles that moved under her skin looked as hard and sleek as tempered steel.
‘I haven’t come to kill you,’ Dreyfus said, as her booted feet clattered down the stairs. ‘You’ll have to answer for what you did to Chen, and Firebrand will have to explain its part in the death of the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble. But I have no difficulty believing you acted out of a sense of duty; that you thought you were doing the right thing in sheltering the Clockmaker. A tribunal will see both sides, Paula. You have nothing to fear from justice.’
She reached the floor and started walking towards them. ‘You finished?’
‘I’ve said my piece. Let me walk out of here with the Clockmaker and I’ll do all I can to make things easier for you.’
Saavedra kicked the rifles aside. ‘Why are you so interested in the Clockmaker, Dreyfus? What does it mean to you?’
‘I won’t know until I’ve got it.’
‘But you’re interested in it.’
‘I’m not the only one, am I?’
‘You mentioned Ruskin-Sartorious. Do you know why we had to move the Clockmaker?’
‘I presume someone was sniffing around.’
‘And who would that someone have been, I wonder? Who was so concerned to locate it, after all the years it had been hidden? Who is still concerned?’
‘Gaffney was working for Aurora. She’s the one who wanted to locate and destroy the Clockmaker, because she perceived it as a threat.’
‘And you think it’s safe?’
‘Aurora was afraid of it. That’s good enough for me.’
‘Thing is, Dreyfus, I don’t have any proof that you’re not lying to me.’
‘How about this? If I wanted to destroy the Clockmaker, I could have dropped a missile on this whole facility thirteen hours ago. Instead, my partner and I have walked in with the intention of negotiating.’
‘It’s true,’ Sparver said. ‘We just want access to the Clockmaker. You’ve kept it all this time because you thought it might be useful one day. Well, guess what? This is the day.’
‘I really don’t know much about Aurora,’ Saavedra answered. ‘Yes, I’m aware of the crisis in orbit, the loss of the habitats, the evacuation effort. But I still don’t have a clear picture of who’s behind it. Can you enlighten me?’
‘Is anything we say going to make you point that gun elsewhere?’ Dreyfus asked.
‘Let’s see how you get on.’
Dreyfus took a deep breath, as much to calm his nerves as to prepare to speak. ‘We think we know what Aurora is. She’s a rogue alpha-level; one of the original Eighty. Unlike the others, she didn’t fade or loop. She just made it look that way. In reality, she’d moved on, become stronger and faster.’
Saavedra’s lip twitched derisively. ‘So where’s she been for the last fifty years, or however long it’s been?’
‘Fifty-five. And we don’t know where she’s been all that time, except that she’s been planning something for much of it. The takeover is just the start. She wants complete control of the Glitter Band. Humans won’t be allowed to live in it any more. It’ll just be one vast support infrastructure for an immortal mind.’
‘Why the sudden megalomaniacal intentions if she’s lived happily enough under our noses all this time?’
‘Because she thinks we’re going to do something bad to the Glitter Band, something that will make it impossible for even an evolved alpha-level intelligence to remain safe.’
Again that lip-twitch. ‘Something bad?’
‘The point is, she’s convinced herself that we can’t be trusted with the safekeeping of the infrastructure she needs to stay alive, so we have to be removed from the equation. It isn’t a takeover, since there isn’t going to be anyone left alive under her regime — unless you count the handful of human slaves she’ll need to fix the servitors when they break down. It’s mass genocide, Paula.’
‘And why does she fear the Clockmaker?’
‘I think it’s because the Clockmaker’s the only thing in the system with an intelligence even approaching her own. It may even be cleverer. That means it’s a threat to her sovereignty. That means she has to remove it.’
‘That’s what she was trying to do when she took out Ruskin-Sartorious, ’ Sparver put in. ‘Gaffney set that up, but it was Aurora pulling the strings all the time. Only problem was, she was too late. You’d sensed her interest and moved the Clockmaker here.’
‘Which is a pity, given that nine hundred and sixty people died because of false data,’ Dreyfus said.
‘Those people — the inhabitants of the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble — were not meant to die,’ Saavedra said.
‘Then you regret their deaths?’ Dreyfus asked.
‘Of course.’ She snarled her answer back at him. ‘Don’t you think we’d rather it hadn’t happened? We assumed that whoever had shown interest had backed away. The relocation was a precaution. We didn’t think there’d be consequences.’
‘I’m prepared to believe that,’ Dreyfus said.
‘Believe what you like.’
‘I also believe that a portion of the blame must be placed on Anthony Theobald’s doorstep. He must have known he was endangering the lives of his family, even if he didn’t know exactly what he was giving houseroom to.’