Dreyfus nodded at the partition. ‘We heard it from the horse’s mouth. In a manner of speaking, at least. We’re dealing with a ghost in the machine. Now all we need is a ghost-killer.’
The world came back to Jane Aumonier without warning, without ceremony. She had decided, after much deliberation, that she preferred darkness and silence to the limited range of entertainments Gaffney and the others had left her with when they removed her executive authority. That left her alone with only the scarab for company, but in the eleven years since it had attached itself to her neck she had found that she could, when circumstances required it, retreat to a private corner of her own mind, a fortified place where even the scarab could not intrude. She had never been able to stay within that mental bastion for very long, but it had always been there when she needed it. In her place of sanctuary she played glacially cold, achingly melancholy piano pieces. She had often played the piano before the scarab came. Now it would not even allow the small bulk of a holoclavier in her presence, let alone a full-bodied keyboard. Yet she still remembered how to play, and when she was in full retreat her fingers moved in silent echo of the composition she was reciting in her head, ten million parsecs from the chamber in which she floated. The hidden music was the one thing the scarab had never been able to steal from her.
She had her eyes closed when the chamber began to light up of its own volition. It was hazardous to close her eyes for too long, for that invited the spectre of sleep to take a step nearer. But there was a more profound, calmer darkness when her eyes were closed, even in the absolute blackness of the unlit chamber.
‘I didn’t—’ Aumonier began, squinting against the sudden intrusion of brightness, colour and movement. The music shattered into irrecoverable pieces.
‘It’s all right,’ said a voice, coming from somewhere to her right. ‘You’re getting back everything they took away, Jane.’
She twisted her head towards the voice. The figure was dark on dark, standing in the black aperture of the passwall. ‘Tom?’
‘In the flesh. Minus shoes, unfortunately.’
The feeds were popping on all around her, gradually filling the interior surface of the sphere. The configuration, the preference given to views of certain habitats over others, was recognisable as one of her usual settings. The Glitter Band, she realised, was still out there. She felt an odd flicker of resentment that her empire had continued running itself while she had been ousted from her throne.
‘Where have you been?’ she asked as the dark figure fastened on a safe-distance tether and crossed the airspace towards her.
‘How much did anyone tell you?’ Dreyfus asked as the mounting illumination cast shifting blue highlights on his face. He looked puffy and somehow dishevelled.
‘They told me nothing.’
‘You’re back in command,’ Dreyfus said. ‘If you want it, of course.’
In the absence of visitors, she’d had little recent practice speaking. The words came out with mushy edges, as if she had just woken. ‘What about Crissel, Gaffney, Clearmountain? What about Baudry? They can’t have agreed to this.’
‘Let’s just say the command landscape has changed. The chances are very good that Michael Crissel is dead. Gaffney — who turned out to be a traitor — is being operated on as we speak. I’ve just had to talk Baudry out of handing in her resignation. I think she’s realised the serious mistake she made in ousting you.’
‘Wait,’ Aumonier said. ‘What happened to Crissel?’
‘We lost contact with him as he was attempting to enter House Aubusson along with a squad of field prefects. We’ve also lost contact with that entire habitat, along with three others.’
‘No one told me,’ she said.
‘We’re talking about the same four habitats that Thalia was visiting to upgrade their polling cores. Looks as if we were set up, Jane. Thalia’s installation may have closed one security hole, but it blew open a much wider one. Wide enough to let a militant faction seize control of those habitats.’
‘Do you think Thalia was part of this conspiracy?’
‘No, she was set up like the rest of us. I wanted to be on the ship that Crissel took to Aubusson but Gaffney had other ideas.’ Dreyfus’s expression was one of gloomy resignation. ‘Not that it would have made much difference.’
‘What about Gaffney?’
‘He was working for the enemy faction, from within Panoply. Chances are it was Gaffney who manipulated Thalia’s upgrade to make it work the way it did.’
Aumonier shook her head in amazement. ‘I never had Sheridan down as a traitor.’
‘My guess is he feels he was doing the right and necessary thing, even if that meant going against his own organisation. From his point of view we’re the traitors, letting down the Glitter Band by not taking our duties as seriously as he deems necessary.’
‘If you’re right then we’re at least partially culpable.’
‘How so?’
‘The organisation moulds men like Gaffney. An effective prefect is only one degree from being a monster in the first place. Most of us stay the right side of the line. But we can hardly blame one of us when he strays across it.’
‘He’s still got some explaining to do,’ Dreyfus said.
‘I’m sure you’re right.’ Aumonier breathed in, composing herself. ‘Now tell me who we’re up against. Do you have a name?’
‘The figure behind the takeovers is Aurora Nerval-Lermontov. She was one of the Eighty, Jane. That means she’s dead; that she doesn’t exist any more except as a set of disembodied patterns stored in the memory of a machine. Patterns that are supposedly frozen, as if they were written down in ink.’
Aumonier digested that, sifting her memories to verify that the Nerval-Lermontovs had indeed been one of the families sponsoring Calvin Sylveste’s experiments in mind-uploading. Fifty-five years ago, she thought. But the horror of the Eighty still burnt as brightly in the public imagination as at any time in the last half-century.
‘Even if I accept this… how do we know Aurora’s behind it all?’
‘A witness told me. She was being held hostage inside a rock owned by Aurora’s family. My witness reported coming into contact with an entity called Aurora.’
‘This witness—’
‘Was a Conjoiner woman named Clepsydra. This is where it gets complicated.’
‘Go for it.’
‘Clepsydra was one of the survivors aboard an entire ship that was being held captive inside that rock, deep enough underground that there was no chance of them contacting other Conjoiners.’
‘With you so far.’
Dreyfus smiled. ‘There was advanced technology aboard that ship — a Conjoiner device called Exordium that lets them see into the future.’
‘If I was hearing this from anyone other than Tom Dreyfus, I’d get Mercier up here with a full psychiatric renormalisation kit.’
‘The Conjoiners have to be in a kind of dream-state just to interpret what it shows them. It’s imprecise, but a hell of an improvement on not being able to see into the future at all.’
‘I’d buy one like a shot.’
‘Not for sale, apparently. Which is why Aurora needed to kidnap the Conjoiners and get them to run Exordium for her. That’s what they’ve been doing in that rock all the while: looking into the future on Aurora’s behalf. Seeing things she can’t see.’
‘And what did they see, Tom?’
‘The end of the world. A time of plagues, Clepsydra said. Beyond that, the dreamers couldn’t see anything. Aurora kept trying to persuade them to interpret the dreams differently. When they didn’t show her what she wanted, she turned the screws on them.’