‘Proximity and usefulness, with allowance for varying distances due to differential orbital velocities. I reasoned that Aurora would concentrate her efforts on the nearest habitats with manufacturing capability.’
‘Sounds reasonable to me,’ Aumonier said. ‘The question is, can we get the people out of those habitats before the weevils arrive from those that are now under assault?’
‘You mean evacuate and then nuke?’ Dreyfus asked.
‘If we can do it, we’ll be clearing a line in a forest. Aurora’s weevils may well be able to cross that line and leapfrog to even further habitats, but at least it’ll have bought us time, with no expenditure of human lives.’
‘If we get them out in time,’ Clearmountain said.
‘We can’t be certain which habitats she’ll go for,’ Baudry said, pointing at the Solid Orrery. ‘I selected likely candidates, but I couldn’t be precise.’
‘Then we’ll have to cover more bases.’ Aumonier said. ‘I’m going to initiate an emergency evacuation order for ten probable targets.’
Dreyfus said, ‘I suggest we concentrate any enforcement activities on one habitat, just to show we mean business. The others will hopefully assume we’re capable of dishing out the same treatment to them.’
‘I agree,’ Aumonier replied. ‘The one thing the people mustn’t suspect is that we’re overstretched. As for assistance in the evacuation effort, I’ll go through CTC. They can requisition and re-route all spaceborne traffic without the need for a poll. We’ll be limited by ship capacity and docking hub throughput, but we’ll just have to do the best we can.’ She looked directly at Baudry. ‘I want the names of ten habitats, Lillian. Immediately.’
‘I’d like to re-run the simulation, varying the parameters a little,’ Baudry said.
‘There isn’t time. Just give me those names.’
Baudry’s mouth fell open, as if she was about to say something but the words had suddenly escaped her. She reached for her stylus and compad and started compiling the list, her hand shaking with the momentous enormity of what she was doing.
‘How long are you going to give them?’ Dreyfus asked. ‘Before you go in with the nukes, I mean.’
‘We can’t wait a day,’ Aumonier said. ‘That would be too long, too risky. I think thirteen hours is a reasonable compromise, don’t you?’
She knew that it could not be done, Dreyfus thought. Save for the tiniest family-run microstates, there was no habitat in the Glitter Band that could be emptied of people that quickly. Even if evacuation vehicles were docked and ready, even if the citizens were briefed and prepared, ready to leave their world in an orderly and calm fashion, a world that many of them would have spent their entire lives in.
It just couldn’t be done. But at least those people would have a chance of getting out, rather than none at all. That was all Jane was counting on.
‘I have those names,’ Baudry said.
Aumonier floated rock-still, anchored in space at the epicentre of her own sensory universe. Most of her feeds were blanked out, leaving a bright equatorial strip focusing only on those twenty-five or thirty habitats at immediate or peripheral risk from Aurora’s takeover. The views kept shuffling, playing havoc with Dreyfus’s sense of his own orientation.
‘We’re going to lose Brazilia and Flammarion,’ she said, by way of acknowledging his presence. ‘Weevils are deep inside both habitats and the local citizenry can’t hold them back. They’ve already taken appalling losses, and all they’ve done is slow their approach to the polling cores.’
Dreyfus said nothing, sensing that Aumonier was not finished. Eventually she asked: ‘Did they get anything out of Gaffney?’
‘Not much. I’ve just read the initial summary from the trawl squad.’
‘And?’
‘They’ve cleared up at least one mystery. We know how he moved Clepsydra from the bubble to my quarters. He used a nonvelope.’
‘I’m not familiar with the term,’ Aumonier said.
‘It’s an invisibility device. A shell of quickmatter with a degree of autonomy and the ability to conceal itself from superficial observation. You put something in it you don’t want people to find.’
‘Sounds like exactly the sort of thing that should be banned by any right-thinking society. How did he get hold of it?’
‘From Anthony Theobald Ruskin-Sartorious, apparently. Anthony Theobald must have procured it through his black-market arms contacts. He used the nonvelope to escape from his habitat just before it was torched by Dravidian’s ship.’
Aumonier frowned slightly. ‘But Anthony Theobald didn’t escape. All you had to interview was his beta-level copy.’
‘Gaffney knew differently, apparently. He intercepted the nonvelope before it fell into the hands of Anthony Theobald’s allies.’
‘And then what?’
‘He cracked it open. Then he ran a trawl on Anthony Theobald to see if he could find out where the thing Ruskin-Sartorious was sheltering had got to.’
‘Voi. Gaffney trawled him?’ Reading her expression, Dreyfus could imagine what was going through her mind. It was one thing to be trawled inside Panoply, where strict rules were in force. It was another to receive the same treatment elsewhere, inflicted by a man acting outside the bounds of the law who cared nothing for the consequences of his actions.
‘He didn’t get as much information as he was hoping for, unfortunately. ’
‘I presume he kept digging until he’d burnt away Anthony Theobald’s brain?’
‘That’s the odd thing,’ Dreyfus said. ‘He appears to have held back at the last. He got something out of the man, enough for him to stop before he burnt him out completely.’
‘Why didn’t he go all the way if he thought there was something more to gain?’
‘Because Gaffney doesn’t see himself as a monster. He’s a prefect, still doing his job, still sticking to his principles while the rest of us betray the cause. He killed Clepsydra because he had no other option. He killed the people in Ruskin-Sartorious for the same reason. But he’s not an indiscriminate murderer. He’s still thinking about the tens of millions he’s going to save.’
‘What else did he get?’
‘That was where the trawl team hit resistance. Gaffney really didn’t want to give up whatever he had learned from Anthony Theobald. But they got a word.’
‘Tell me.’
‘Firebrand.’
Aumonier nodded very slowly. She said the word herself, as if testing how it sounded coming from her own lips. ‘Did the summary team have anything to say about this word?’
‘To them it was meaningless noise. Firebrand could be a weapon, a ship, an agent, anything. Or it could be the name of the puppy he owned when he was five.’
‘Do you have any theories?’
‘I’m inclined to think it’s just noise: either noise that came out of Anthony Theobald, which Gaffney assumed was significant, or noise that came out of Gaffney. I ran a search on the word. Lots of priors, but nothing that raised any flags.’
‘There wouldn’t have been any,’ Aumonier said.
Dreyfus heard something in her tone of voice that he hadn’t been expecting. ‘Because it’s meaningless?’
‘No. It’s anything but. Firebrand has a very specific meaning, especially in a Panoply context.’
Dreyfus shook his head emphatically. ‘Nothing came up, Jane.’
‘That’s because we’re talking about an operational secret so highly classified that even Gaffney wouldn’t have known about it. It’s superblack, screened from all possible scrutiny even within the organisation.’
‘Are you going to enlighten me?’
‘Firebrand was a cell within Panoply,’ Aumonier said. ‘It was created eleven years ago to study and exploit any remaining artefacts connected with the Clockmaker affair.’