At last a voice emerged from the direction of that blueish glow. ‘You have no idea, Dreyfus. No idea at all.’ It was a woman’s voice — so Saavedra, not Chen.
‘Then it’s up to you to put me right. Go ahead. I’m ready and waiting.’
‘We weren’t just working with relics,’ Paula Saavedra said. ‘We were working with the Clockmaker itself.’
Dreyfus recalled everything that Jane Aumonier had told him. ‘The Clockmaker doesn’t exist any more.’
‘Everyone believes that the Clockmaker was destroyed,’ Saavedra said. ‘But it left relics of itself. Souvenirs, like the clocks in the Sleep Lab and the thing clamped to Jane. And other things, too. We got to study them. We thought they were toys, puzzles, vicious little trinkets. Mostly, they were. But not the one we opened nine years ago.’
‘What was it?’
‘The Clockmaker had encapsulated itself, squeezed its essence down into one of the relics. It knew Panoply was closing in on it eleven years ago, so it survived by tricking us. It compressed itself into a seed and waited for us to find it.’ Before Dreyfus could frame an objection, she continued: ‘It had to discard much of itself, accept a weakening of both its intellectual and physical capabilities. It did so willingly because it knew it had no other option. And also because it knew it could rebuild all that it lost at some point in the future.’
Dreyfus pushed himself closer to the flight deck. ‘And you — we — helped it?’
‘It was a mistake. But when we reactivated the Clockmaker, it was still weak, still ineffectual compared to its former embodiment. Even so, it still nearly won.’
‘How much of this did Jane know?’ Dreyfus asked, beginning to wonder why Lansing Chen wasn’t contributing to the conversation.
‘She was informed that one of the relics had run amok. She was never told that it was the Clockmaker itself that had come back from the grave. It was felt that the news would have been too upsetting.’
‘But she still closed you down.’
‘Perhaps she was right. Needless to say, we didn’t agree. Although Firebrand had taken grave losses, we felt that we had come closer than ever before to learning something of the Clockmaker’s true nature. We who survived were convinced that the future security of the Glitter Band depended on the discovery of that nature. We had to know what it was, where it had come from, so that we could ensure nothing like it ever emerged again. That was our moral imperative, Prefect Dreyfus. So we decided to remain operational. We were already superblack; it took very little effort to submerge ourselves to an even deeper level of secrecy, beyond even Jane’s oversight.’
‘And what did you learn, Paula?’
‘Don’t come any closer, Prefect Dreyfus.’
But Dreyfus was already within view of the flight deck by the time she finished her sentence. The connecting door was open. Blood droplets formed a cloud of little scarlet balloons, pulled into perfect spheres by surface tension. Lansing Chen was dead. He was buckled into the right-hand command seat, his head lolling at an unnatural angle, swaying slowly from side to side as the air shifted. His neck had been gashed open with the whiphound Paula Saavedra was still holding. She was buckled into the left-hand chair, rotated around to face Dreyfus and Sparver. She had one leg hooked higher than the other. She held the whiphound in her right hand, while her left hovered above one of the luminous blue controls on the console.
‘You didn’t have to kill Chen,’ Dreyfus said, tightening his grip on his own whiphound.
Behind, he heard Sparver speak into his bracelet. ‘Get me Mercier. We need a crash team at the nose. This is a medical emergency.’
‘I didn’t want to kill him,’ Saavedra said, with real menace. ‘Chen was a good man, Prefect. He served Firebrand well, until the end. It’s not his fault that he’s been having doubts.’
‘What kind of doubts?’
‘None of us liked what happened to Ruskin-Sartorious, but most of us saw it as an unfortunate but unavoidable occurrence. A casualty of war, Prefect. Not Chen, though. He felt we’d gone too far; that nine hundred and sixty lives were too high a price to pay for security. He felt it was time to blow our cover.’
‘He’d have been right.’
The tip of her whiphound gleamed dark red. ‘No, he wouldn’t. Nothing matters more now than keeping the Clockmaker’s new location hidden.’
‘I agree wholeheartedly. Aurora mustn’t learn of the Clockmaker’s whereabouts. But Panoply needs that information more than ever.’
‘Ordinarily, I might have agreed you. But Panoply is compromised. Someone’s been sniffing around Firebrand for days. Probably the same someone who helped arrange the attack on Ruskin-Sartorious.’
‘That was Senior Prefect Gaffney. He’s out of the picture now. I took care of that myself, so you can start trusting me.’
‘Can I, really? You’ve done very well to track us down, Prefect. How do I know you aren’t just following up on Gaffney’s unfinished business?’
‘I am, in a way — I had to find you. Why’d you have to kill Chen, Paula?’
‘I told you — he got cold feet at the last moment. Decided he’d rather stay here and face the music. I couldn’t let that happen, Prefect. Just as I can’t let you keep me here now.’
‘Nothing bad will happen to you,’ Dreyfus said. But if he’d meant it earlier, it was an empty promise now. Nothing could excuse the murder of a fellow prefect.
‘Even if killed myself, you’d trawl my corpse to get the location of the Clockmaker. Therefore I must leave. Can you see my left hand, Prefect?’
Dreyfus nodded. ‘I guess you’re holding it there for a reason.’
‘When I boarded this ship, I brought four whiphounds with me. They’re set to grenade mode, maximum yield, keyed to this console. Don’t go looking for them — they’re well hidden.’
‘Whiphounds won’t detonate inside Panoply. There’s a positional safeguard.’
‘Which I overrode, without difficulty.’ She shook her head disappointedly. ‘I’m Firebrand, Prefect. Can you imagine the lengths we’ve had to go to to maintain our effectiveness and secrecy over the last nine years? There isn’t a trick in the book we don’t know.’
‘Don’t do it, Paula. We need this bay in one piece.’
‘I won’t do it unless you prevent me from leaving. But if you try to prevent me, I won’t hesitate. The blast won’t do significant damage to Panoply — it might put this bay out of action, true — but it definitely won’t leave enough of me for you to trawl.’
‘I need to know where the Clockmaker is,’ Dreyfus insisted.
‘I can’t take the risk of telling you. As far as I’m concerned, Panoply is already compromised. Firebrand is the only remaining part of the organisation capable of handling things from now on.’
‘If you think I can’t be trusted, why did you tell me that the Clockmaker’s still alive?’
‘I told you nothing Aurora won’t already know. Now leave the cutter, Prefects.’
‘We’ll track you. Wherever you go. You’re just prolonging the inevitable.’
‘There isn’t a ship in Panoply that can be prepped and launched in time to follow me.’ She allowed a glint of self-satisfaction to shine through. ‘I know: I checked. And you won’t be able to track me. This cutter is CTC-dark. Maybe if there wasn’t a Bandwide crisis going down, stretching all our resources, you might have a chance. But you don’t, so you may as well not even bother. I’m dropping off the map. You won’t hear from me again.’