The Prefect Read online

  ‘Can you check that?’

  ‘Already did. You ready for this?’ Sparver sent a command to the wall. Now there was only one transmission entry left. ‘You’ll need to look over the eleven I rejected, but I’m pretty confident we can rule them out. This one, on the other hand, sticks out like the proverbial.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘The point of origin isn’t anywhere I recognise, which immediately sets off my alarm bells. It’s just a rock, a free-floating chunk of unprocessed asteroid drifting in one of the middle orbits.’

  ‘Someone’s got to own it.’

  ‘The claim on the rock goes back to a family or combine called Nerval-Lermontov. Whether that means anything or not, I don’t know.’

  ‘Nerval-Lermontov,’ Dreyfus said, repeating the name slowly. ‘I know that family name from somewhere.’

  ‘But then you know a lot of families.’

  ‘They could be innocent. Is there any reason to think this rock isn’t just another router?’

  ‘Maybe it is. But here’s the odd thing. Whoever made the call, whoever sent that signal from the Nerval-Lermontov rock - whether it originated there, or was just routed through it - that was the only time they ever contacted Ruskin-Sartorious through that particular node.’

  ‘You’re right,’ Dreyfus said approvingly. ‘Alarm bells. Lots of them.’

  Sparver put down his tea, the china clinking delicately against Dreyfus’s table. ’Never say we pigs don’t have our uses.’

  A flying horse had been waiting for Thalia when she arrived in the Chevelure-Sambuke Hourglass. The animal’s wings beat the air with dreamlike slowness, slender legs treading air as if galloping on the spot. Its skin was transparent, affording an anatomically precise view of its tightly packed internal organs, its highly modified skeleton and musculature. The insectile wings were blade-slender, intricately veined, with no visible skeletal underpinnings.

  Thalia’s pegasus wasn’t the only flying thing in the air. There were other flying horses, visible as slowly flapping translucent forms in the far distance. Some of them had riders; others must have been on their way to pick up passengers or were engaged in some errand of their own. There were also much more colourful things, suggestive of giant patterned moths, striped fish or elaborately tailed Chinese dragon kites. The pegasuses appeared to be confined to the habitat’s low-gravity regions (with those prismatic wings it wasn’t surprising) but the other flying forms had free roam of the entire interior. Amongst them, almost too small to make out, were the star-shaped forms of flying people, with wings or aerodynamic surfaces of their own. Thalia tried her glasses, but the overlay revealed no significant points of difference compared to naked reality. This confirmed everything that she had read about the Hourglass during her flight: the people here preferred to shape matter, not information.

  Gradually, she became aware of gravity pushing her deeper into the saddle. The horse was aiming itself at a tongue-like landing deck, buttressed out from a spired white mansion near the top of a city constructed on the slopes of the Hourglass’s midpoint constriction. As she neared the touchdown point, Thalia observed a civic welcoming party gathered around the perimeter of the deck.

  A pair of functionaries rushed to the side of the pegasus to help Thalia disembark as soon as the horse’s hooves clinked against glass flooring. The pull of gravity could still not have been more than a tenth of a gee, but the horse’s wings were beating constantly, fanning the air with an audible whoosh on each twisting downbeat. The functionaries - who were more or less baseline human in appearance - moved out of the way once Thalia was on her feet.

  A giant panda-like man, all black and white fur, ambled across to meet her. He moved with remarkable grace despite his obvious mass. His huge head was as wide as a vacuum helmet, his true eyes barely visible in the black ovals of his eyepatches. He stopped munching on a thin greenish stick and passed it to a functionary.

  ‘Welcome, Deputy Field Prefect Ng,’ he said in an unctuous tone. ‘I am Mayor Graskop. It is a pleasure to welcome you to our modest little world. We trust your stay will be both pleasant and productive.’

  He offered her his paw in greeting. Thalia’s own small hand disappeared into a padding of warm, damp fur. She noticed that Mayor Graskop had five fingers and a thumb, all digits tipped with a shiny black nail.

  ‘Thank you for sending the horse.’

  ‘Did you like it? We’d have cultured something unique if we’d had more notice of your visit.’

  ‘It was a very nice horse, thank you. You didn’t need to go to any more trouble.’

  The mayor released his grip. ‘Our understanding is that you wish to access our polling core.’

  ‘That’s correct. What I have to do won’t take too long. It’s quite straightforward.’

  ‘And afterwards? You’ll stay to enjoy some of our hospitality, won’t you? It’s not often we get a visitor from Panoply.’

  ‘I’d love to, Mayor, but now isn’t a good time.’

  He tilted his huge monochrome head. ‘Trouble outside, is there? We’d heard reports, although I confess we don’t pay as much attention to such matters as we ought.’

  ‘No,’ Thalia said diplomatically. ‘No trouble. Just a schedule I have to stick to.’

  ‘But you will stay, just for a short while.’ When the mayor spoke, she glimpsed fierce ranks of sharp white teeth and caught the sugary whiff of animal digestive products.

  ‘I can’t. Not really.’

  ‘But you simply must, Prefect.’ He looked at the other members of the welcoming party, daring Thalia to disappoint them. Their faces, for the most part, were still recognisably human, albeit furred, scaled or otherwise distorted according to some zoological model. Their eyes were disturbingly beautiful, liquid and intense and childlike. ‘We won’t detain you without good reason,’ the mayor insisted. ‘We receive so very few outsiders, let alone figures of authority. On such rare occasions that we do, it’s our custom to host an impromptu contest, or tournament, and to invite our honoured guest to participate in the judging. We were hoping you’d help with the adjudication in an air-joust ‘

  ‘I’d love to, but—’

  He grinned triumphantly. ‘Then it’s settled. You will stay.’ He clasped his paws together in anticipation. ‘Oh, how wonderful. A prefect as judge!’

  ‘I’m not—’

  ‘Let’s deal with the trifling business of the polling core, shall we? Then we can move on to the main event. It will be a wonderful air-joust! Are you happy to follow me? If you don’t like our low gravity, we can arrange a palanquin.’

  ‘I’m doing just fine,’ Thalia said tersely.

  CHAPTER 11

  Dreyfus was settled before his console, composing a query for the Search Turbines. He sought priors on the Nerval-Lermontov family, certain that the name meant something but incapable of dredging the relevant information from the event-congested registers of his own ageing memory. Yet he had no sooner launched the request, and was dwelling on the idle possibility of trawling his own mind, when he felt a sudden brief shudder run through the room. It was as if Panoply had suffered an earthquake.

  He lifted his cuff, ready to call his deputy, fearing the worst. But he had not even uttered Sparver’s name before his console informed him that there had been a major incident in the Turbine hall.

  Dreyfus stepped through his clotheswall and made his way from his room through the warrens of the rock to the non-centrifuge section where the Search Turbines were located. Even before he arrived, he realised that the incident had been grave. Prefects, technicians and machines were rushing past him. By the time he reached the entrance to the free-fall hall, medical crews were bringing out the wounded. Their injuries were shocking.

  A conveyor band drew him into the vastness of the hall. He stared in stupefied amazement at the spectacle. There were no longer four Search Turbines, but three. The endmost cylinder was gone, save for the sleeve-like anchor points where it emerged from the chamber�
�s inner surface. The transparent shrouding had shattered into countless dagger-like shards, many of which were now embedded in the walling. Dreyfus couldn’t imagine the outward force that would have been necessary to rupture the armoured sheathing, which was the same kind of glass-like substance they used to form spacecraft hulls. As for the machinery that would have been whirling inside the glass just before it broke loose, nothing remained except a dusty residue, lathered several centimetres thick over every surface and hanging in the air in a choking blue-grey smog. The Turbine - its layered data stacks and whisking retrieval blades - had pulverised itself efficiently, leaving no components larger than a speck of grit. It was designed to do that, Dreyfus reminded himself, so that no information could be recovered by hostile parties in the event of a takeover of Panoply. But it was not meant to self-destruct during the course of normal operations.

  He studied the other Turbines. The sheathing on the nearest of the three, the one that had been closest to the destroyed unit, was riven by several prominent cracks. The apparatus inside was spinning down, decelerating visibly. The other two units were undergoing the same failsafe shutdown, even though their casings appeared intact.

  Keeping out of the way of the medical staff attending to hall technicians who’d been lacerated by glass and high-speed Turbine shrapnel - they’d already pulled out the most seriously wounded - Dreyfus found his way to a woman named Trajanova. She was the prefect in charge of archives, and considered supremely competent by all concerned. Dreyfus did not dissent from that view, but he did not like Trajanova and he knew that the feeling was mutual. He’d employed her once as a deputy, then dismissed her because she did not have the necessary instincts for fieldwork. She had never forgiven him for that and their rare meetings were tense, terse affairs. Dreyfus was nevertheless relieved to see that she had suffered no conspicuous injuries save for a gashed cheek. She was pressing her sleeve to it, her uniform dispensing disinfectant and coagulant agents. She had headphones lowered around her neck, glasses pushed up over her brow and a fine dusting of blue-grey debris on her clothes and skin.

  Trajanova must have seen the look on his face. ‘Before you ask, I have no idea what just happened.’

  ‘I was about to ask if you were all right. Were you in here when it happened?’

  ‘Behind the fourth stack, the furthest one from the unit that blew. Running search-speed diagnostics.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘It just went. One second it was spinning, next second it didn’t exist any more. I’d have been deafened if I hadn’t had the phones on.’

  ‘You were lucky.’

  She scowled, pulling her sleeve away to reveal the dried blood on her cuff. ’Funny. I’d say it was fairly unlucky of me to have been in here in the first place.’

  ‘Was anyone killed?’

  ‘I don’t think so. Not permanently.’ She rubbed at dust-irritated eyes. ‘It was a mess, though. The glass did the worst harm. That’s hyperdiamond, Dreyfus. It takes a lot to make it shatter. It was like a bomb going off in here.’

  ‘Was it a bomb? I mean, seriously: could a bomb have caused this?’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t think so. The unit just spun loose, all of a sudden. There was no bang, no flash, before it happened.’

  ‘Those things run near critical break-up speed, don’t they?’

  ‘That’s the idea. We spin them as fast as they can go. Any slower and you’d be the first to moan about retrieval lag.’

  ‘Could the unit have overspun?’

  She answered his question with look of flat denial. ‘They don’t do that.’

  ‘Could the assembly have been fatigued?’

  ‘All the units are subjected to routine de-spin and maintenance, one at a time. You don’t usually notice because we take the burden on the other three Turbs. The unit that failed got a clean bill of health during the last spin-down.’

  ‘You’re sure of that?’

  Her face said: Don’t question my competence, and I won’t question yours. ‘If it hadn’t, it wouldn’t be spinning, Prefect.’

  ‘I had to ask. Something went terribly wrong here. Could a badly formed query have caused the break-up?’

  ‘That’s a bizarre question.’

  ‘It’s just that I sent something through about a second before the accident.’

  ‘The units would have handled millions of queries in that interval,’ she said.

  ‘Millions? There aren’t millions of prefects.’

  ‘Most of the queries coming through are machine-generated. Panoply talking to itself, consolidating its own knowledge base. The Turbs don’t care whether it’s a human or a machine sending the query. All are treated with equal priority.’

  ‘It still felt related to me.’

  ‘It can’t have been your query that did this. That would be absurd.’

  ‘Maybe so. But I’m conducting a sensitive investigation and just at the point when I think I’m getting somewhere, when I might be about to connect my case to one of our glorious families, when I might be about to hurt someone, one of my primary investigative tools is sabotaged.’

  ‘Whatever this was, it can’t have been sabotage,’ Trajanova said.

  ‘You sound very certain.’

  ‘Maybe it’s escaped your attention, but this is an ultra-secure facility inside what is already an ultra-secure organisation. No one gets inside this room without at least Pangolin clearance, and no one - not even the supreme prefect herself - gets to access the Search Turbines from outside the rock. Frankly, I can’t think of a facility it would be harder to sabotage.’

  ‘But a prefect could do it,’ he said. ‘Especially if they had Pangolin clearance.’

  ‘I was keeping our discussion within the realms of possibility,’ Trajanova said. ’I can think of a million reasons why our enemies might want to smash the Search Turbines. But a prefect, someone already inside the organisation? You mean a traitor?’

  ‘I’m just running through the possibilities. It’s not so very difficult to believe, is it?’

  ‘I suppose not,’ Trajanova said slowly, staring him hard in the eye. ‘After all, there’s a traitor’s daughter in the organisation even as we speak. Have you talked to her recently?’

  ‘With Thalia Ng? No, she’s too busy acquitting herself excellently on field duties.’ He smiled coldly. ‘I think we’re done here, aren’t we?’

  ‘Unless you want to help me clean up this mess.’

  ‘I’ll leave that to the specialists. How long before we’ll have the other Turbs back up to speed?’

  She glanced over her shoulder at the intact tubes. ‘They’ll have to be thoroughly checked for stress flaws. Thirteen hours, at the very minimum, before I’ll risk spin-up. Even then we’ll be running at a low retrieval rate. Sorry if that inconveniences you, Prefect.’

  ‘It’s not that it inconveniences me. What I’m worried about is that it’s conveniencing someone else.’ Dreyfus scratched dust from the corners of his eyes, where it had begun to gather in gooey grey clumps. ‘Keep looking into the sabotage angle, Trajanova. If you find anything, I want to hear about it immediately.’

  ‘Maybe it would help if you told me about this magic query of yours,’ she said.

  ‘Nerval-Lermontov.’

  ‘What about Nerval-Lermontov?’

  ‘I wanted to know where the hell I’d heard that name before.’

  She looked at him with icy contempt. ‘You didn’t need the Search Turbines for that, Dreyfus. I could have told you myself. So could any prefect with a basic grasp of Yellowstone history.’

  He ignored the insult. ‘And?’

  ‘The Eighty.’

  It was all he needed to be told.

  The corvette was a medium-enforcement vehicle, twice as large as a cutter, and with something in the region of eight times as much armament. Panoply’s rules dictated that it was the largest craft that could be operated by a prefect, as opposed to a dedicated pilot. Dreyfus had the necessary training,
but as always in such matters he preferred his deputy to handle the actual flying, when the ship wasn’t taking care of itself.

  ‘Not much to look at,’ Sparver said as a magnified image leapt onto one of the panes. ‘Basically just a big chunk of unprocessed rock, with a beacon saying keep away - I’m owned by somebody“.’

  ‘Specifically, the Nerval-Lermontov family.’

  ‘Is that name still ringing a bell with you?’

  ‘Someone jogged my memory,’ Dreyfus said, thinking back to his less-than-cordial conversation with Trajanova. ‘Turns out that Nerval-Lermontov was one of the families tied up with the Eighty.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I remember now. I was a boy at the time, but it was all over the system. The Nerval-Lermontovs were one of the families kicking up the biggest stink.’

  ‘They lost someone?’

  ‘A daughter, I think. She became a kind of emblem for all the others. I can see her face, but not her name. It’s on the tip of my tongue ...’

  Sparver dug between his knees and handed Dreyfus a compad. ‘I already did my share of homework, Boss.’

  ‘Before the Turbines went down?’

  ‘I didn’t need them. Remember that case we worked a couple of years ago, involving the disputed ownership of a carousel built by one of the families? I copied reams of Eighty-related stuff onto my compad back then, and it’s all still there, with summaries for all the players.’

  ‘Including the Nerval-Lermontovs?’

  ‘Take a look for yourself.’

  Dreyfus did as Sparver suggested, plunging deep into Chasm City history. The article was several thousand lines long, a summary that could easily have been expanded by a factor of ten or a hundred had Sparver selected different text filters. The system’s major families were nothing if not well documented.

  Dreyfus hit the Eighty. One name leapt out at him across fifty-five years of history.