‘Open wide,’ Gaffney said, cheerily encouraging. ‘Easy does it.’
The whiphound tapped twice more against his teeth, then withdrew the tip of the filament. Dreyfus wondered if it was going to try to force its way in through a different orifice now that he had barred it from slithering in through his mouth.
He felt the coils loosen. Breathing was no longer difficult. The handle held its gaze on him for a second, and then rotated slowly around until it was directing the horizontal glare of its scanning laser eye onto Gaffney’s face rather than Dreyfus’s. The coil released Dreyfus completely. He took a grateful breath and slumped against the wall, feeling a stripe of cold sweat ooze down the valley of his spine. The whiphound moved stealthily off the bunk, never releasing its visual lock on Gaffney.
‘Stand down,’ Gaffney said, keeping the panic from his voice for the moment. ‘Stand down. Revert to defence posture one.’
The whiphound showed no sign of having heard or recognised his order and kept on slithering. The filament pushed the handle higher, so that it was level with the standing man’s face. Gaffney took a hesitant step backwards, then another, until his back bumped into the wall.
‘Stand down,’ he repeated, louder this time. ‘This is Senior Prefect Gaffney ordering you to stand down and switch to standby mode. You have developed a fault. Repeat, you have developed a fault.’
‘It doesn’t appear to be listening,’ Dreyfus said.
Gaffney raised a shaky hand. ‘Stand down!’
‘I wouldn’t touch it if I were you. It’ll have your fingers off.’
The whiphound pressed Gaffney hard against the wall, the filament spooled out to its maximum extension. The handle made an emphatic nodding motion.
‘I think it wants you to kneel,’ Dreyfus said.
CHAPTER 21
The assembled seniors, internals and supernumerary analysts looked away from the Solid Orrery as the heavy doors of the tactical room swung open. For a second their expressions were as one, conveying a shared sense of indignation that their secret session had been interrupted, and without even the courtesy of a knock. Then they saw that the man stepping through the door was Senior Prefect Sheridan Gaffney and their collective mood changed from one of annoyance to mild puzzlement. Gaffney was perfectly entitled to enter the tactical room, his presence at least as welcome as that of anyone else there. But even Gaffney would normally have had the good manners to announce his arrival before barging in. The head of Internal Security was nothing if not a stickler for observation of the niceties.
‘Is there a problem, Senior?’ Baudry asked, speaking for the assembled party.
But it was not Gaffney who answered the query. Gaffney himself appeared strangely dumbstruck, incapable of formulating a response. Ten centimetres of black cylinder jutted from his mouth, as if he had been trying to swallow a thick candle. His eyes bulged as if he was seeking to squeeze all meaning through them.
The honour of replying fell instead to Dreyfus, who was following only a couple of paces behind the other man. There was an understandable measure of consternation at this development. Everyone in the room was aware that Dreyfus was under detention, unavoidably implicated in the murder of the Conjoiner woman. A smaller number of those present knew that Gaffney had been tasked to interview Dreyfus, and an even smaller number knew which methods that interview was likely to employ. The thought must have occurred to at least some of the party that Dreyfus had overpowered Gaffney and must now be holding him at knife- or gunpoint. Further inspection, however, revealed the presence of no recognisable weapon about the person of the field prefect. He was not even wearing shoes.
‘Actually,’ Dreyfus said, ‘there is a bit of a problem.’
‘Why are you not in your cell?’ Baudry asked, her attention flicking from Dreyfus to Gaffney and back again. ‘What’s happened? What’s wrong with Sheridan? What’s that thing in his mouth?’
Gaffney’s posture was almost rigidly upright, as if he was hanging from an invisible coat rack. When he had walked into the room, he had moved with tiny shuffling footsteps, like a man with his laces tied together. He kept his arms glued to his sides. The thing lodged in his mouth forced him to keep his head at an unusual angle — it was as if he had developed a crick in his neck while looking up at the ceiling. There was a bulge in the skin of his throat, distending the collar of his tunic, that was more than Adam’s apple. He appeared unwilling to make the slightest unnecessary bodily movement.
‘The thing in his mouth is a whiphound,’ Dreyfus said. ‘He came to interrogate me with a Model C. We were getting on famously when it just turned on him.’
‘That’s not possible. A whiphound isn’t meant to do that.’ Baudry looked at Dreyfus with an appalled expression. ‘You didn’t do this, did you, Tom? You didn’t push that thing into him?’
‘If I’d have touched it, I wouldn’t have any fingers left. No, it did it all by itself. Actually, Gaffney helped a bit with the final insertion.’
‘I don’t understand. Why on Earth would he help?’
‘He didn’t have a lot of choice. It all happened very slowly, very precisely. Have you ever seen a snake swallowing an egg? It pushed the filament into his mouth, then reached down into his stomach. You know how the interrogation mode works on those things: it locates major organs then threatens to slice them in two from inside.’
‘What do you mean: interrogation mode? There’s no such thing.’
‘There is now. It’s one of the new features Gaffney had built into the Model Cs. Of course, it has some innocuous-sounding name: enhanced compliance facilitation, or something similar.’
‘He could have called for help.’
Dreyfus shook his head. ‘Not a hope. It would have sliced him into six or seven pieces before he could say his name into his bracelet.’
‘But why did he help it finish what it was doing to him?’
‘It was hurting him, letting him know that if he didn’t help by pushing the handle into his mouth, it was going to do something really unpleasant.’
Baudry stared at Gaffney with renewed comprehension. The handle of a model A or B whiphound would have been too thick to enter the human throat. But a Model C was thinner, sleeker, altogether nastier. A whiphound handle jammed partway down Gaffney’s gullet would certainly explain his stiff-necked posture, his unwillingness to compromise what must have already been a very congested windpipe.
‘We have to get it out of him,’ she said.
‘I don’t think it wants you to do that,’ Dreyfus said.
‘It doesn’t want anything. It’s malfunctioning, obviously.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure of that,’ Dreyfus said, looking around the party, at the documents and compads on the table. ‘But perhaps Gaffney has an opinion on the matter. He can’t speak right now, obviously, but he can still use his hands. Can’t you?’
Gaffney shuffled around. His eyes were two bulging eggs, ready to pop out of their sockets. His cheeks were the colour of beetroot. He didn’t so much nod as make a microscopic twitching suggestion of one.
‘I think he needs something to write with,’ Dreyfus said. ‘Can anyone spare a compad and a stylus?’
‘Take mine,’ Baudry said, skidding the item across the table. One of the analysts took the compad, unclipped the stylus and passed them both to Gaffney. His arms unlocked from the sides of his body, articulating with painful slowness as if the bones themselves had fused. His hands were shaking. He took the compad in his left hand and fumbled for the stylus with his right. It fell to the floor. The analyst knelt down and gently placed it in his palm.