The Prefect Read online

  Thalia glanced at the man Sparver’s whiphound was still detaining. For the first time in his life, his implants would no longer be in constant communication with the informational matrix beyond House Perigal. It must have felt like the drop of a guillotine.

  She returned her attention to the core. ‘Prepare me triplicate physical summary packages for all data traffic in and out of this habit in the last thousand days.’

  ‘I am preparing the packages. Please wait a moment.’

  Thalia reached up and touched her throat microphone. ‘Thalia, sir. We’re securing the evidence now. We should be back with you within ten minutes.’

  There was no response. She waited a few moments, giving Dreyfus time to activate his own microphone, but still nothing came.

  She shot a look at Sparver. ‘I’m not getting anything.’

  ‘The boss man could be preoccupied,’ Sparver said.

  ‘He should have answered by now. I’m worried. Maybe we ought to get back there, see—’

  ‘We need those summary packages, Thalia. In five minutes you’ll be locked out of the core again.’

  Sparver was right. The one-time code - good for ten minutes of unrestricted activity - would not buy her access to the core a second time.

  ‘Hurry up,’ she said, through clenched teeth.

  She tried Dreyfus again, but still there was no reply. After what felt like an eternity, the core ejected the summary packages from a slot near its base. Thalia clipped together the thick diskettes and then secured them to her belt. Absurd as it was, she swore she could feel the weight of the information inside them. It would have taken days to squeeze that amount of data across a beam.

  ‘You done?’ Sparver asked.

  ‘This is all we need. We can leave the local abstraction running.’

  ‘And if they try to get around the block you just put in?’

  ‘They’ll have a dead core on their hands. They’ll be lucky if life support still works after that, let alone abstraction.’ Thalia turned back to the core and authorised it to rescind the Panoply access privilege it had just granted her. ‘That’s it, then,’ she said, feeling an unexpected sense of anticlimax.

  ‘There. Wasn’t so hard, was it?’

  ‘I’m worried about the boss.’

  ‘It’s just the rock this thing’s made of, blocking our signals.’ Sparver smiled at the technician again. ‘We’re done. Can I trust you not to do anything silly if I pull the whiphound off you?’

  The man swallowed painfully and twitched his head in a nod.

  ‘I’ll take that as a “yes”,’ Sparver said. He reached out his hand and beckoned the whiphound. With a flick of its tail, the weapon sprang its handle into Sparver’s grip, the tail whisking back into the housing with a lashing sound.

  Sparver patted the handle and reattached it to his belt. ‘Let’s go check on the boss man.’

  But when they rode the rim transit back to Dreyfus, they found him standing alone and still, amidst a scene of almost unspeakable carnage. He held his glasses in one hand and the whiphound in the other.

  Thalia snatched off her own glasses so that she could see things as they really were. People were screaming, scrambling and splashing to get away from the prefect and the objects of his attention. Caitlin Perigal’s two male guests were both slumped in the pool, in water that was now bloodstained pink. The man with the grey hair had lost his forearm: it was lying on the marble poolside, the hand pointing accusingly at Dreyfus. Behind the wrist, the skin bulged as if a bone-grafted weapon had been trying to push its way through to the surface. The other man, trembling as if in the throes of a seizure, had blood running from both his nostrils. His eyes were wide open, fixated on the ceiling. Three or four nearby guests were nursing wounds of varying severity. With all the blood in the water - draining from pool to pool via the waterfalls and sluices - it was difficult to be certain how many people had been hurt. Medical servitors had already arrived and were attending to the most seriously injured, but even the machines appeared confused.

  Perigal was still alive, albeit breathing heavily. A vivid gash cut her across the right cheek, running from the corner of her mouth to her ear. She breathed heavily, her eyes wide and white with fury and fear.

  ‘You’re wrong about this,’ she breathed. ‘You’re wrong about this and you’re going to pay.’

  Dreyfus turned slowly at the approach of Thalia and Sparver. ‘Got the packages?’

  Thalia’s mouth was dry. ‘Yes,’ she said, forcing the word out, striving to maintain professional composure.

  ‘Then let’s go. We’re done here.’

  CHAPTER 2

  Dreyfus had closed half the distance to the middle of the supreme prefect’s office when the safe-distance tether jerked him to a halt. For a moment Jane Aumonier appeared unaware of his presence, absorbed in one of her wall displays. He coughed quietly before speaking.

  ‘If you want my resignation, it’s yours.’

  Aumonier turned her head to face him, without moving the rest of her body. ‘On what grounds, Tom?’

  ‘You name it. If I committed an error of procedure, or was guilty of improper judgement, you only have to say the word.’

  ‘If you committed an error, it was in not going far enough to defend yourself and your deputies. What was the final body count?’

  ‘Six,’ Dreyfus said.

  ‘We’ve done worse. Perigal was always going to be a tough nut. A single-figure body count strikes me as entirely acceptable, given all that we could have expected.’

  ‘I was hoping things wouldn’t get quite so messy.’

  ‘That was Perigal’s call, not yours.’

  ‘I still don’t think we’re finished with her. What she said to me ...’ Dreyfus paused, certain that Aumonier had enough to worry about without being burdened with his doubts. ‘I feel as if a debt has been settled. That isn’t a good way for a prefect to feel.’

  ‘It’s human.’

  ‘She got away with it in the past because we weren’t clever or fast enough to audit her before the evidence turned stale. But even if we’d been able to pin anything on her, her crimes wouldn’t have merited a full century of lockdown.’

  ‘And we don’t know that it will come to that this time, either.’

  ‘You think she’ll slip through again?’

  ‘That’ll depend on the evidence. Time to make use of that bright new expert on your team.’

  ‘I have every confidence in Thalia.’

  ‘Then you’ve nothing to fear. If Perigal’s guilty, the state of lockdown will continue. If the evidence doesn’t turn anything up, House Perigal will be allowed re-entry into the Glitter Band.’

  ‘Minus six people.’

  ‘Citizens panic when they lose abstraction. That isn’t our problem.’

  Dreyfus tried to read Aumonier’s expression, wondering what he was missing. It wasn’t like her to need to ask him how many people had died during an operation: normally she’d have committed the figures to memory before he was back inside Panoply. But Aumonier’s emotionless mask was as impossible to read as ever. He could remember how she looked when she smiled, or laughed, or showed anger, how she’d been before her brush with the Clockmaker, but it took an increasing effort of will.

  ‘Pardon me,’ he said, ‘but if this isn’t a reprimand ... what exactly do you want me for?’

  ‘The conversation? The banter? The warmth of human companionship?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Something’s come up. The news broke while you were outside. It’s as delicate as the Perigal affair, if not more so. Urgent, too. We need immediate action.’

  Dreyfus had not heard of anything brewing. ‘Another lockdown?’

  ‘No. There wouldn’t be much point, unfortunately.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  Aumonier extended a hand to the wall, enlarging one of the display facets. It filled with an image of a spherical habitat, a grey ball blurred with microscopic detail
, banded by tropical sun-panels, with an array of vast mirrors stationed at the poles and around the equator. The scale was difficult to judge, though Dreyfus doubted that the habitat was less than a kilometre wide.

  ‘You won’t recognise it. This is a recent image of the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble, a fifth-magnitude shell habitat in the high outer orbits. It’s never fallen under Panoply scrutiny before.’

  ‘What have they done wrong now?’

  ‘Here’s a more recent image, taken three hours ago.’

  The Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble had been cut open, sliced along its midsection like an eyeball gouged by a razor. The cut had almost split the habitat into two hemispheres. On either side of the cut, the habitat’s fabric had been scorched to a crisp midnight black. Structures inside were still glowing cherry-red.

  ‘Casualties?’ Dreyfus asked, holding his horror at bay.

  ‘Last census put the population at nine hundred and sixty. We think they all died, but we need to get a team in and make an immediate physical inspection. Survivors can’t be ruled out. At the very least, there may be beta-level recoverables.’

  ‘Why isn’t this all over the Band?’

  ‘Because we’re keeping a lid on it. This doesn’t look like an accident.’

  ‘Someone will have noticed Ruskin-Sartorious dropping off the networks.’

  ‘They only participated in abstraction at a shallow level, enough that we can continue to simulate the existence of the fully functional habitat for the time being, using our network privileges.’

  ‘And the time being ... would be how long?’

  ‘Best guess? Less than twenty-six hours. Thirteen might be nearer the mark.’

  ‘And when the story breaks?’

  ‘We’ll have a major crisis on our hands. I think I know who did this, but I’ll need to be absolutely certain before I move on it. That’s why I want you to get out to Ruskin-Sartorious immediately. Take whoever you need. Secure evidence and recoverables and get back to Panoply. Then we’ll hold our breath.’

  Dreyfus looked again at the image of the wounded habitat. ‘There’s only one thing that could have done that, isn’t there? And it isn’t even a weapon.’

  ‘We see things similarly,’ Aumonier said.

  The walls of the tactical room were finely grained teak, varnished to a forbidding gleam. There were no windows or pictures, no humanising touches. The heavy, dark furniture was all inert matter: grown, cut and constructed by nature and carpentry. The double doors were cased in hammered bronze, studded with huge brass bolts, each door inlaid with a stylised version of the raised gauntlet that was Panoply’s symbol. The gauntlet was supposed to signify protection, but it could just as easily be interpreted as a threatening fist, clenched to smash down on its enemies or those who failed it.

  ‘Begin please, Ng,’ said the man sitting opposite Thalia, Senior Prefect Michael Crissel.

  She placed the recovered diskettes on the table’s edge, almost dropping them in her nervousness. ‘Thank you, Senior Prefect. These are the triplicate physical summary packages from the Perigal polling core.’ She nodded at the clockwork-gear shape of the Perigal habitat, imaged as a tiny representation in the tactical room’s Solid Orrery, enlarged and elevated above its real orbital plane. ‘The data has now been copied into our archives, all one thousand days’ worth of it. I’ve verified that the three triplicate summaries are consistent, with no indication of tampering.’

  ‘And your findings?’

  ‘I’ve only had a few hours to look into things, which really isn’t enough time to do more than skim—’

  Senior Prefect Gaston Clearmountain growled his impatience. ‘Cut the blather, Ng. Just tell us what you have.’

  ‘Sir,’ Thalia said, almost stammering. ‘Preliminary analysis confirms everything in the lockdown report. House Perigal were indeed guilty of tampering with the democratic process. On at least eight occasions they were able to bias voting patterns in marginal polls, either to their advantage, or to the advantage of their allies. There may be more instances. We’ll have a clearer picture when we’ve run a full audit on the packages.’

  ‘I was hoping for a clearer picture now,’ Clearmountain said.

  Senior Prefect Sheridan Gaffney leaned forward in his huge black chair with a creak of leather. ‘Easy on her, Gaston,’ he growled. ‘She’s been under a lot of pressure to pull this together at short notice.’

  Gaffney had a reputation for having a short fuse and a marked intolerance for fools. But as head of both Internal Security and whiphound training, the gruff-voiced Gaffney had always treated Thalia with impeccable fairness, even encouragement. She now perceived him as her only unambiguous ally in the room. It would have been different if Dreyfus or Jane Aumonier had been present, but Dreyfus was absent (his Pangolin clearance would have allowed him to sit in on the meeting even though he wasn’t a senior) and the position where the supreme prefect normally manifested - beamed into the room as a projection - was conspicuously empty. On her way to the room, Thalia had picked up rumours that some other crisis was brewing, something unrelated to the lockdown they’d recently performed.

  The other seniors were neither on her side nor against her. Michael Crissel was a gentle-looking man with scholarly features and a diffident manner. By all accounts he’d been an excellent field prefect once, but he’d spent most of the last twenty years inside Panoply, becoming detached from the hard reality of duty outside. Lillian Baudry’s field career had come to an end when she was blown apart by a malfunctioning whiphound. They’d put her back together again, but her nervous system had never been the same. She could have surrendered herself to the medical expertise available elsewhere in the Glitter Band, but the security implications of receiving outside treatment would have meant her leaving Panoply for good. So she’d chosen duty over well-being, even though that meant sitting in meetings like a stiffly posed china doll.

  It was a measure of the importance attached to Thalia’s report that only four seniors were present. Normally at least six or seven of the ten permanent seniors would have been in attendance, but today there were more than the usual number of empty places around the table. Yes, they wanted this affair tied up as quickly as possible - but that didn’t mean they saw it as anything other than a blip in Panoply’s schedule of business.

  ‘Let’s cut to the chase,’ Clearmountain said. ‘We’ve got the packages. They confirm our existing suspicions, which is that Perigal had her hands in the pie. The lockdown can hold. Now all we need to do is seal the leak before someone else exploits it the same way.’

  ‘I agree, sir,’ Thalia said.

  ‘Exactly how much damage did these polling violations cause?’ asked Baudry.

  ‘In the scheme of things, nothing major,’ Thalia answered. ‘They were all polls on relatively minor issues. Caitlin Perigal might have wanted to tip the balance in more significant polls, but discovery would have been even more likely if she’d tried. Frankly, with the amount of oversight and scrutiny we already have in place whenever something big comes up, I can’t imagine anyone managing to bias the votes to a statistically useful degree.’

  ‘It’s your job to imagine it,’ Michael Crissel said.

  ‘She knows that,’ Gaffney said in a whisper.

  Thalia acknowledged Crissel. ‘I’m sorry, sir. I just mean - given everything we know - it’s unlikely. The system can’t ever be proven to be inviolable; Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem—’

  ‘I don’t need to be lectured on Gödel, Ng,’ Crissel said tersely.

  ‘What I mean, sir, is that the system tests itself through being used. House Perigal has actually done us a favour. Now we’re aware of a logical flaw we hadn’t seen before: one that permits a tiny bias in the polls. We’ll fix that and move on. Somewhere down the line, someone else will get creative and find another loophole. We’ll fix that as well. That’s the process.’

  ‘So you’re confident we can plug this hole?’ Baudry asked.

  ‘Absolutel
y, Senior. It’s trivial.’

  ‘If it’s “trivial, how did we miss it until now?’

  ‘Because we introduced it,’ Thalia said, trying not to sound too full of herself. ‘We plugged one hole - thinking we were being clever - and inadvertently opened another. The fault was deep in our error-handling routine. It was designed to stop valid votes being lost, but it accidentally allowed additional votes to be registered fraudulently.’

  ‘Probably not the first time in history that’s happened,’ Crissel said dryly.

  Thalia laced her hands together on the table, trying to strike the right note between defensiveness and professional detachment. ‘It was regrettable. But to date only a handful of habitats have exploited the loophole.’

  ‘Regrettable?’ Clearmountain said. ‘I call it reprehensible.’

  ‘Sir, the existing error-handling routine already ran to twenty-two million lines of code, including some subroutines written more than two hundred and twenty years ago, in the First System. Those programmers weren’t even speaking modern Canasian. Reading their documentation is like ... well, deciphering Sanskrit or something.’

  ‘Ng’s right,’ Gaffney said. ‘They did the best they could. And the secondary loophole was subtle enough that only five habitats in ten thousand ever attempted to exploit it. I think we can put this one down to experience and move on.’

  ‘Provided, of course, we have a reliable fix,’ Baudry said. She nodded stiffly at Thalia. ‘You did say it would be a simple matter?’

  ‘For once, yes. The correction isn’t anything like as complicated as the alteration that introduced the fault in the first place. Just a few thousand lines that need changing. Having said that, I’d still like to run the first few installations manually, just to iron out any unanticipated issues due to different core architectures. Once I’m satisfied, we can go live across the entire ten thousand.’

  Gaffney looked sharply at Thalia. ‘It’s clear that we need to get this whole mess tidied up as quickly as possible. By the time the Perigal lockdown becomes binding - as I have no doubt it will - I want us ready to begin implementing the upgrade. The special evidential board has access to the summary packages?’