The Prefect (68 page)

Her bracelet chimed. She glanced down and saw that it was the call she had been hoping for.

‘This is Baudry, Supreme Prefect.'

‘Go ahead, Lillian.'

‘We're receiving reports from CTC.' Aumonier heard a catch in Baudry's voice. 'They're tracking massive ship movements from the Parking Swarm. Dozens of Ultra vessels, Supreme Prefect. Lighthuggers leaving their assigned orbits in the Swarm.'

‘Are they leaving the system, Lillian?'

‘No.' Baudry sounded flustered. ‘Some of them, yes. Most of them... no. Most of them appear to be on vectors that will bring them into the Glitter Band.'

‘How long until they arrive?'

‘Six to seven hours, Supreme Prefect, before the lead vehicles enter Glitter Band airspace. If we are to consider a tactical response, we need to start making arrangements now. Deep-system vehicles will need to be retasked, fuelled and weaponed in readiness—'

‘You consider this a hostile gesture?'

‘What else could it be? They've had designs on control of the Glitter Band for decades. Now that we're facing a crisis, they've seen their moment. They're going to use the Aurora emergency to stage a takeover of their own.'

‘I don't believe so, Lillian. I actually requested assistance from the Ultras. I sent my plea to Harbourmaster Seraphim. I'd heard nothing from him since Dreyfus's departure, so I assumed... but I assumed wrongly, I think.' Aumonier paused, conscious that it had been a mistake not to inform the other seniors of her contact with Seraphim. ‘Have any attempts been made to speak to the incoming ships?'

‘Standard approach queries were transmitted, Supreme Prefect. No valid response has been received.'

‘That doesn't mean anything. We're dealing with Ultras here. They have their own way of doing things.'

‘But Supreme Prefect... we have to assume the worst.'

‘I'll assume the worst when I have evidence of hostile intent. Until then, no one so much as fires a ranging laser on one of those ships. Is that clear?'

‘Clear,' Baudry said sullenly.

‘Lillian, we have less than forty nuclear devices left in our arsenal. Do you honestly think we'd get very far if it came to open war against the Ultras?'

‘I'm just saying... we can't trust them. We've never been able to trust them. That's always been a cornerstone of our operational policy.'

‘Then maybe it's time we got a new cornerstone. They're people, Lillian. They might be people who make us uncomfortable, people with very different values from ours, but when we're facing local extinction at the hands of a genocidal machine intelligence, I don't think the differences between us look massively significant, do you?'

‘I'll keep you informed,' Baudry said.

‘You do that. I'm not having the best of days here, Lillian, and the one thing I'm sure of is that we really, really don't want to add any new enemies to our list.'

She closed the connection with Baudry and allowed her hand to drift down from her mouth. As it did so, she saw the red scratch of the laser cut across her cuff. She had been aware of that thin line for some hours now, without allowing herself to be distracted by pondering its purpose. Now, however, there was a window in her schedule. The Ultra ships would not arrive for six or seven hours. Dreyfus would take even longer to reach Ops Nine.

She had time to ponder.

She raised the bracelet again and spoke softly. ‘Put me through to Doctor Demikhov.'

He answered almost immediately, almost as if he'd been watching her place the call. ‘Supreme Prefect. This is a surprise.' Aumonier smiled: for all his talents, Demikhov was a poor liar. ‘I wasn't expecting to hear from you.'

‘Doctor,' she said, ‘perhaps I'm mistaken, but I can't help feeling that you have something planned for me.' She waited a handful of seconds, listening to his breathing. ‘I'm right, aren't I? This laser, which wasn't here yesterday. The noises Dreyfus did his best to explain away. What's going to happen, Doctor?'

After a silence that made her wonder whether the link had been broken, Demikhov said, ‘It's best if you don't know.'

‘You're probably right. It's not as if I've ever had cause to doubt your clinical wisdom, after all. But I just wanted to say something.'

‘Go ahead,' Demikhov answered.

‘I've done all I can for the next few hours. If you're intending to remove the scarab, now might be the best time to try it.'

‘There'll be risks.'

‘Just as there are risks in allowing it to remain clamped on my neck. I know the score, Doctor.'

‘After the procedure we have in mind,' Demikhov said hesitantly, ‘there's a possibility that you may be incapacitated.'

‘In which case Senior Prefect Clearmountain will assume temporary authority. But only until I'm fit to resume command. Don't keep me out of it for too long, Doctor. All I need is a pair of eyes and a mouth to give orders. Understood?'

‘Understood,' he answered.

‘Then I urge you to execute whatever plan you've been putting in place. You are good to go, aren't you?'

‘We're good to go.'

‘Then do your best, Doctor. I'm submitting myself to your care.'

‘If I fail—' he began.

‘You'll still have my undying gratitude. Now get this fucking thing off my neck.'

‘You're in position,' Demikhov said. ‘Please don't move a muscle, Supreme Prefect. Not even to answer me.'

Jane Aumonier held her breath. She heard something go click.

Doctor Demikhov watched events unfold with a curious sense of retardation, as if he was replaying one of his simulations at half normal speed. The blades pushed through the weakened part of the wall and raced together, their cutting edges forming a tightening circle with the supreme prefect at the precise centre. Aumonier floated motionlessly, her expression unchanging: she did not have time to react to the blades' intrusion into her private space. They closed on her, reaching her throat and passing cleanly through, interlocking with micron precision as they met. Demikhov was now forced to take in two distinct views, captured from cams in the two isolated halves of the former sphere. In the upper hemisphere, the supreme prefect's severed head began to drift away from the blades with almost imperceptible slowness. In the lower hemisphere, her body and the scarab drifted in the opposite direction. In the same decelerated time-frame, Demikhov saw the scarab react to the violent intrusion of a large foreign object into its volume of denial. The lower part of Aumonier's neck, below the cut, puffed apart in a cloud of pink and grey. Blood continued to spurt from the neck in inky profusion. The heart was still pumping. The drifting remains of both the decapitated body and its damaged parasite were quickly obscured.

Demikhov's attention flicked to the upper sphere. Time accelerated. The head's slow drift became an ungainly tumble. The head was also leaking blood, albeit with much less ferocity than the body.

Servitors rushed into both chambers, moving too quickly for the eye to follow. The machines reached the scarab, detached it from the neck and encased it in a cocoon of blast-smothering quickmatter. In the upper chamber, machines reached the head and arrested its motion away from the shining floor formed by the blades.

‘Scarab is neutralised,' reported one of Demikhov's analysts. ‘Repeat, scarab is neutralised. Upper chamber is now secure for crash team.'

‘Go,' Demikhov said, with all the urgency he could muster.

And then he too was moving as if his own life depended upon it.

He was only slightly behind the crash team when he arrived at the head. The servitors had braced it, pinning it gently in place between telescopic manipulators. There'd been a temptation to simply immerse the head in a vat of curative quickmatter, but Demikhov had resisted. The quickmatter would undoubtedly stabilise the head, flooding the brain to preserve neural structure, and would make a start on the necessary tissue-repair. The drawback was that the quickmatter would most likely wipe short-term memories and delay the return to full consciousness by many days. Demikhov had considered every angle and knew that this was a time when hard-won clinical judgement, the cumulated knowledge of his own eyes and experience, outweighed the easy option.

He meant only to look at the neck, to judge the accuracy of the cut and assess the damage to the major structures. He saw instantly that the blades had transected the cervical vertebrae between C3 and C4, as he had always hoped. The cut had been so accurate that only the cartilaginous disc between the bones had been destroyed. The carotid artery, internal and external jugular veins and vagus nerve had all been severed within a millimetre of his optimum cut points. Had he been looking at a simulation, Demikhov would have rejected it as unrealistically optimistic. But this was reality. Zulu - this stage, at least - had worked as well as he could have dreamed.

Then he looked at the face. He didn't mean to. It was clinically irrelevant, and he'd told himself to pay no heed to any signs of apparent consciousness he saw behind Jane Aumonier's eyes. But he couldn't help it. And there was something there: a sharpness in her gaze, a sense that she was focusing on no one in the room but him, that she was utterly, shockingly aware of her condition.

Less than ten seconds had passed since the blades had gone in.

‘Begin stabilisation,' Demikhov said. ‘Plan three-delta. We have a job to do here, people.'

He risked another look at the eyes. This time there was a fogged absence where a mind had been.

It took three hours to fall towards Yellowstone. The cutter could have made the journey in a third of the time, but then it would have appeared to be moving anomalously fast, running the risk of attracting Aurora's attention. Dreyfus could not be certain of the extent of her surveillance, but it was likely that she would be alert to any traffic that appeared to be out of the ordinary, be it civilian or law-enforcement. As much as it pained him to watch the clock ticking, he knew that the slow and unobtrusive approach was necessary.

‘Captain says to buckle up,' Sparver said, prompting Dreyfus to put aside the compad he'd been studying. ‘We'll be slowing for atmosphere in about five minutes.'

Dreyfus nodded curtly. ‘You can tell him you passed on the message.'

Sparver had braced himself with an arm and a foot. ‘You still sore at me for sneaking aboard?'

‘What do you think?'

‘I had Jane's blessing. Who else do you think put that stuff under your seat?'

‘I expressly requested that I go in alone,' Dreyfus said.

Sparver shrugged, as if none of this was his fault, merely the outcome of a series of circumstances beyond his control. ‘Look, it's done. I'm aboard. So make the most of me.'

‘I will. You can keep Pell company when he flies this cutter back to Panoply.'

‘Actually, I intend to keep you company during that little stroll you've got planned.'

‘Then it's a pity we didn't load two surface suits, isn't it? I only requested one, I'm afraid. And it wouldn't fit you anyway.'

‘Which is why I had a word with Thyssen and asked him to stow a spare,' Sparver said. ‘The extra weapons were my idea as well. You didn't think you were going to carry them all on your own, did you?'

Dreyfus sighed. He knew Sparver meant well, and that there was no other prefect he'd sooner have at his side than his own deputy. But he had resigned himself to going in alone. Now that he had crossed that mental Rubicon, he could not easily accept the idea of placing another's life at risk.

‘Sparv, I appreciate the gesture. But like I said to you before, you're one of the few people who have been following this investigation since the outset. I cannot in conscience accept that you should be placed at risk. Especially not—'

‘Save it for later, Boss,' Sparver said. ‘There's no secret now. Jane and the other senior prefects know everything we do. We've just become expendable again. And isn't that a wonderful, liberating feeling?'

‘You're right,' Dreyfus answered forcefully. ‘We are expendable. And you know what? We probably won't come back from this mission. If the Clockmaker doesn't get us, Firebrand or Aurora will.'

Sparver lowered his voice. For once he was serious. ‘So why are you doing this, if it's guaranteed to fail?'

‘Because there's a chance it will succeed. Not much of one, but it's better than any other option on the table.'

Sparver nodded at the compad. ‘Does that have anything to do with all this?'

‘I don't know.' Dreyfus turned the compad around so that Sparver could see the display, with its dyslexia-encrypted read-out. ‘This still makes as much sense to me as it does to you, and you don't even have Pangolin, let alone Manticore.'

‘Did Jane give you Manticore?'

Dreyfus nodded humbly. ‘Not that it's made any difference to me yet.'

But that was a lie, albeit a small one. Dreyfus had to stare hard at the scrambled text, but every now and then he'd feel a premonitory sense of something about to reveal itself, like a kind of mental hiccup that never quite arrived. The text was still illegible, but he recognised the feeling from his Pangolin exposure. The neural architecture necessary for the decoding stage was beginning to assemble. It might take another six or nine hours until it was fully functional, but the process was already beginning to affect his comprehension.

‘But it'll come, eventually?' Sparver asked.