CHAPTER 32
Dreyfus came round to a world coloured in degrees of pain. He was cognisant of the pain map of his body, traced in his mind’s eye by a flickering green mesh. There was a knot somewhere around his lower right leg, the contours bunching together until they formed an angry little eye. There was another knot in his chest, to the left of his sternum. A third on his upper right arm. The rest of him was merely aflame with discomfort. His throat felt as if it had been etched with acid. When he breathed, it was as if the lining of his lungs had been replaced by powdered glass.
And yet he was breathing. That was more than he’d expected to be doing.
He remembered the attack, but had no sense of how much time had passed since the arrival of the final missile. Everything was very still now. Not exactly silent, for his ears were ringing, but when he moved slightly he could hear his own groans of discomfort, so he had not been entirely deafened. He must have screamed at the end, he thought. He lay still, breathing heavily, ignoring the stab of pain that accompanied each breath, until he had regained some clarity of thought.
He forced his eyes open. At first he could see nothing, but then he became conscious of a faint glow. One of the holographic panes was still flickering, casting insipid green light around the wreckage-strewn room. Most of the dust and debris appeared to have settled, suggesting that more than a few minutes had passed since the assault. His eyes were stinging, watering, but slowly Dreyfus became accustomed to the gloom and began to pick out details of his surroundings. He was lying on his back on the floor, with his legs and hips pinned under the table, which had collapsed when the ceiling thrust down upon it. As the table gave way, the cluster of display panes had toppled to the floor to Dreyfus’s right, including the one unit that was still aglow. He was trapped, and he could only speculate as to the true extent of his injuries, but he knew that he was very lucky to be alive at all. Had the table not shielded him, he would have been killed by the rubble that had crashed in through the ceiling. He tried moving his right arm again. The knot of pain had died down slightly, and as the arm moved he drew some comfort from the fact that it was probably not broken. He flexed his fingers, watching them move like pale wormlike things, seemingly disconnected from his own body. His left arm felt intact, but he could not reach the edge of the table from where he was pinned. Groaning again, pain flaring in his chest, he tried to move his right arm enough to begin to lever the table, hoping to lift it away from his trapped lower half. But as soon as he applied pressure, he knew it was hopeless. The pain in his arm intensified, and the table did not move at all. Dreyfus realised that he would not be able to escape unassisted.
He looked to his side, trying to distinguish between rubble and bodies. He began to fear that the others had been killed in the attack. But slowly he realised that the only other body in the room belonged to Simon Veitch. Of Sparver and Saavedra there was no sign.
‘Veitch?’ Dreyfus called, barely hearing his own voice over the ringing in his head.
Veitch answered almost immediately. ‘Prefect,’ he said, sounding as if there was a thick layer of insulating glass between the two men. ‘You’re alive, then.’
Dreyfus paused to recover strength before speaking again. Each word cost him more energy than he felt he could spare. ‘I’m trapped under this table. I think I’ve broken a rib, maybe a leg. What about you?’
‘Worse than that. Can’t you see?’
Dreyfus could see, now that his eyes were finally adjusting to the minimal light. A silvery pipe, probably one of those installed by Firebrand when they were reactivating the facility, had buckled down from the ceiling to plunge through Veitch’s thigh.
‘Are you losing blood?’
‘I hope so.’
Dreyfus coughed and tasted his own blood. ‘What does that mean?’
‘It means I think I have a chance of dying before it finds us.’
‘Then it’s loose?’
‘The back-up generator should have activated immediately to ensure a smooth handover. It didn’t. Containment failed.’
‘But we don’t know for sure that it’s loose. Not until someone goes down there…’
Veitch laughed. It was the vilest, most inhuman sound Dreyfus had ever heard coming from another person. ‘It’s out, Prefect. Don’t worry about that. It’s just a question of how long it takes to find us. Because you can bet your life it’s looking.’
‘Or maybe it’s already run away, trying to hide itself.’
‘You don’t know the Clockmaker. I do.’
‘And you hope you’re going to die before it gets here.’
Veitch touched a hand to his thigh. In the green glow his fingers came up tipped with something wet and dark, like melted chocolate. ‘I think I’ve got a shot. How about you? You could always try holding your breath, see how far that gets you.’
‘Tell me something, Veitch,’ Dreyfus said, in the tone of a man changing the subject of a conversation that had begun to weary him.
‘What?’
‘When Jane gave me the list of Firebrand operatives, your name was familiar to me for some reason.’
‘I get around.’
‘It was more than that. It struck an old chord. It just took me a little while to remember the rest.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘You were involved in the case against Jason Ng, weren’t you?’
The silence that followed was enough of an answer for Dreyfus. ‘Simon?’ he asked.
‘Still here.’
‘You’re going to die soon. More than likely so am I. But let’s clear this one up, shall we? Thalia’s father was innocent. His only mistake was to get too close to your operation. He was investigating Firebrand, long after Firebrand had supposedly been shut down, and you had to do something about it.’
‘Looks like you’ve already made your case.’
‘I’m just putting pieces together. You concocted a case against Jason Ng to protect the operational integrity of Firebrand, didn’t you? You fabricated evidence and watched a good man go down. And then you had him murdered, making it look like suicide, because you couldn’t risk his testimony coming out in a Panoply tribunal. Which makes you no better than the people who murdered Philip Lascaille, does it? In fact, I’d put you on about the same moral pedestal.’
‘Fuck you, Dreyfus. Fuck you and fuck Panoply.’
‘I’ll take your views into consideration. Before you die on me, answer one last question. Where are the others?’
Veitch’s answer came more slowly this time, his words slurred. He sounded like a man on the edge of unconsciousness. ‘I woke up once and your pig was still here. Saavedra was already gone. When I came around the second time, the pig was gone as well. Before I passed out the first time, he said something about taking care of Gaffney.’
Dreyfus absorbed that. As gladdened as he was to hear that Sparver was alive, he was troubled by the other prefect’s intentions. ‘Where did Saavedra go?’
‘I don’t know. Why don’t you go and ask her?’
‘Veitch?’ Dreyfus asked, a little later.
But this time there was no answer.