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  * * *

  Captain Pell let the missiles streak away, sprinting across the gap to the Accompaniment of Shadows. At twenty gees they reached the wreck in slightly more than a minute and a half. In the last instant before impact, the missiles fanned out and then vectored in again from different angles, so that their bright fusion exhausts formed the talons of a gripping three-clawed hand, closing around Dravidian's ship with swift predatory eagerness.

  The three nuclear explosions blurred together into a single inseparable flash. When the radiation and debris had dissipated, nothing remained of the killing ship, nor of its captain.

  Dreyfus turned from the hull window with a cold, hard feeling that he still had work to do.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 7

  * * *

  In the cloistered cool of his private security annexe, Senior Prefect Sheridan Gaffney found himself looking at the face of Aurora. She was coming through on an untraceable channel, their mutual communication disguised as an exchange of routine housekeeping data. He'd been expecting her; he'd composed his thoughts and marshalled a set of likely questions and responses, and yet still she made him feel flustered and ill-prepared, simply by the withering force of her regard. This, he thought, and not for the first time, was how it must feel to be interrogated by a goddess.

  "It's been a while, Sheridan," she said.

  "I'm sorry," he replied, wiping a sleeve across his brow. "Things have been complicated around here. But everything's under control."

  "Everything, Sheridan? Then you're confident that there'll be no untoward ramifications concerning the Ruskin-Sartorious incident?"

  "I don't think so."

  He was looking at a child-woman, a girl of indeterminate age, sitting on a simple wooden throne. She wore a gold-trimmed brocaded gown of dark green over a brocaded dress of fiery red, patterned again in gold. Her fingers curled around the edges of the armrests, toying with them in a manner that suggested mild restlessness more than actual boredom or impatience. Her auburn hair was parted in the middle and fell to her shoulders in perfect symmetry, framing a face of startling, ravishing serenity. Behind her head, suggesting a halo, was a shining gold motif worked into bas-relief panelling. Her eyes were liquid blue, brimming with puzzled intelligence. He knew he would do anything for those eyes, that face.

  "You don't think so?" she asked.

  "Dreyfus is on the case, unfortunately. I could do without him nosing around in the whole business, but there was no way I could get him off the investigation without drawing attention to myself."

  "You're head of security, Sheridan. Couldn't you have been more creative?"

  "I've had my hands full preparing the ground for Thalia Ng. That's required more than enough creativity, I assure you."

  "Nonetheless, this man — this Dreyfus — is a rogue element. He must be brought under control."

  "Not that easy," Gaffney said, feeling as if they'd had this discussion a thousand times already. "He's Jane Aumonier's pet field prefect. She's even given him Pangolin clearance, despite my protestations. If I interfere too much, I'll have Jane on my back, metaphorically speaking." He tested Aurora with a smile. "Right now that would not be a good idea."

  "Jane is a problem," Aurora said, signally failing to acknowledge his smile. "We can't put off dealing with her for ever, either. Once the Thalia situation is stable, I'd like you to direct some energy into removing Aumonier."

  Gaffney dredged up some outrage. "I hope you're not asking me to kill her."

  "We're not murderers," Aurora said, looking suitably shocked at the suggestion.

  "We just took out nine hundred and sixty people. If that's not murder, it's a hell of a way to make friends."

  "They were the unavoidable victims of a war that has already begun, Sheridan. I grieve for those people. If I could have spared one of them, I would have. But we must think of the millions we shall save, not the hundreds we must sacrifice."

  "Not that you'd blink an eyelid at killing Jane, if she got in our way."

  "She doesn't have to die, Sheridan. She's a brave woman and a good prefect. But she has principles. They're admirable, in their own way, but they'd compel her to obstruct our arrangements. She would commit the error of placing loyalty to Panoply above the greater good of the people."

  Gaffney ruminated over the possibilities. "Aumonier's been under a lot of pressure lately, that's for sure."

  "Enough to concern Doctor Demikhov?"

  "So I gather."

  "Well, things are certainly not going to get any less stressful for the supreme prefect any time soon. Perhaps you could arrange her removal from power on compassionate grounds?"

  "The other seniors won't go for it if they think I'm after her job."

  "We don't need you in the hot seat, Sheridan, we just need Jane out of it. The other key players — Crissel, Baudry, Clearmountain ... which one would be her natural successor?"

  "Baudry has automatic seniority."

  "How will she perform?"

  "Baudry's competent, but she's detail-focused, not someone with Jane's strategic overview. There are going to be a lot of balls in the air when we go live. I think Baudry could end up dropping a few."

  "In other words, she'd suit our requirements very well." Aurora looked pleased with him, or with herself: he wasn't usually able to tell. "Start making arrangements, Sheridan."

  "I'm still concerned about Dreyfus. You can bet he'll fight Jane's corner. Baudry and the other seniors have a lot of respect for him, so it'll be difficult to squeeze Jane out while he's around."

  "Then I see only one possibility, Sheridan. You'd better remove Dreyfus from the picture. He's a field prefect, correct?"

  "Long in the tooth, but still one of the best."

  "It can be dangerous work, being a field prefect." For a moment she seemed absent, as if the face had pulled away from the mask. Gaffney drummed his fingers against the pedestal of his chair until she returned, feeling like a little schoolboy left alone in a big office. "Perhaps I can help," she continued. "I'll need to know his movements when he's outside Panoply. I presume you can feed them to me?"

  "It'll be risky, but — "

  "You'll do your best. See to it, Sheridan," she urged. "And don't worry. I know that you are a good man and that deception does not come easily to you. Your natural instincts are to duty and loyalty, to the service of the people. I've known that since Hell-Five. You stared into the moral abyss of that horror, saw what freedom can lead to when freedom is unchecked, and you said no more. You knew that something must be done, even if it meant good men doing unpleasant things."

  "I know. It's just that occasionally I have doubts."

  "Purge them. Purge them utterly. Have I not vouchsafed unto you the consequences of our inaction, Sheridan? Have I not shown you glimpses of the world to come, if we do not act now?"

  She had, too, and he knew that everything boiled down to a choice between two contending futures. One was a Glitter Band under the kindly rule of a benevolent tyrant, where the lives of the hundred million citizens continued essentially as they did now, albeit with some minor restrictions on civil liberty. The other was a Glitter Band in ruins, its population decimated, its fallen glories stalked by ghosts, revenants and monsters, some of which had once been people.

  "I have the weevil data," he said, when the silence had become unendurable.

  "I must see it immediately."

  "I'm encapsulating it into the comms feed."

  Aurora closed her eyes. Her lips opened slightly, as if she was in transports of indescribable ecstasy. He imagined the data streaming out of Panoply, into the labyrinthine tangle of the Glitter Band data network, Aurora — whatever she was, human or machine — drinking it in somewhere at the end of a complex chain of routers and hubs.

  Her mouth closed again as her eyes opened. "Well done, Gaffney. All appears to be in order. You've done very well indeed."

  "Then you have all that you need? To make the weevils?"

&n
bsp; "I won't know for sure until I have access to a functioning manufactory. The proof of the pudding, as they say. But I've no reason to doubt that things will work exactly as intended."

  "I read the tech notes," Gaffney said. "Those things are nightmares."

  "And that's why they'll only be used as an absolute last resort. But we must have the means, Sheridan, if we are to prevent the unnecessary loss of life. We would be negligent otherwise."

  "People are going to die when we do this."

  "People will die if we don't. Oh, Sheridan — you've come so far, done so much good work for the cause. Please don't quail now, at the final hurdle."

  "I won't 'quail'," he said, resenting her tone.

  "You trust me, don't you? Absolutely, unquestioningly?"

  "Yes."

  "Then you know that we are doing the right thing, the decent thing, the only human thing. When the time of transition is complete, the citizenry will thank us from the bottom of their hearts. And the time will be soon, Sheridan. Now that all but these last few trifling obstacles have been removed ... "

  Gaffney had learned that brazen honesty was the only sensible approach when dealing with Aurora. She pierced lies, penetrated evasion like a gamma-ray laser burning through rice paper.

  "There is still one larger problem we haven't dealt with," Gaffney began.

  "I confess I don't understand."

  "The Clockmaker is still out there."

  "We destroyed it. How can it possibly be a problem?"

  Gaffney shifted on his seat. "The intelligence was flawed. They'd moved the Clockmaker before we destroyed Ruskin-Sartorious."

  He'd been expecting fury. The mild reaction he got was worse, since it implied fury being bottled away, stored up for later dispensing. "How can you be sure?"

  "Forensics swept the ruin. They'd have flagged anything anomalous, even if they didn't recognise what they were dealing with."

  "We know it was there recently. What happened?"

  "Someone must have decided to move it somewhere else."

  "Why would they do that?"

  "Probably because they got word that someone was nosing around their secret."

  "And that someone would be ... " Aurora asked.

  "You ordered me to ferret out the location of the Clockmaker. I did the best I could, but it meant digging into data outside my control, where I couldn't always hide my enquiries. I made that abundantly clear before you asked me to find it."

  "So why did you wait until now to tell me you thought it had been moved?"

  "Because I have another lead, one I'm still following. I thought it best to wait and see where it leads before taking up any of your valuable time."

  If his sarcasm grated on her, she didn't show it. Aurora merely looked unimpressed. "And this lead?"

  "Anthony Theobald survived the destruction of the habitat. The weasel must have suspected something was going down. But he didn't get far. I intercepted him and ran some extraction procedures."

  "He'd hardly have been likely to know where they were taking the Clockmaker."

  "He knew something."

  Now she looked vaguely interested again. "Names, faces?"

  "Names and faces wouldn't mean anything — the operatives who visited the Clockmaker wouldn't have been using their official identities. But it appears they were occasionally indiscreet. One of them dropped a word into the conversation once, something Anthony Theobald obviously wasn't meant to hear."

  "A word."

  "Firebrand," Gaffney said.

  "That's all? One word, which could mean almost anything?"

  "I hoped you might be able to shed some light on it. I've run a database search, but it didn't reveal any significant priors."

  "Then it means nothing."

  "Or it refers to something so dark that it doesn't even show up in maximum-security files. I can't dig any deeper without the risk of stumbling into the same kinds of tripwire that may already have alerted them to our interest in the Clockmaker. But I thought you — "

  She cut him off brusquely. "I am not omniscient, Sheridan. There are places you can go that I can't, and vice versa. If I knew everything, saw everything, why would I need you?"

  "That's a very good point."

  "Maybe there is something called Firebrand." It sounded like a conciliatory line, but he could feel the stinger coming. "Perhaps that is the name of the group or cell who have been studying the Clockmaker. But if so it tells us nothing we didn't already know."

  "It's a handle. It's leverage."

  "Or random noise, plucked out of a dying man's head by the grabbing fingers of a trawl. What do you think?"

  "I think we're dealing with Panoply," Gaffney said.

  "You believe your own organisation chose to keep it alive, after all it did to them?"

  "Look, it makes a kind of sense. When the Clockmaker got loose, it was Panoply that put it back in the bottle. But we still didn't know what it was or where it had come from. Who'd have been better placed to smuggle that bottle away for further study? Who, frankly, would have been negligent not to do something like that?"

  After a while she said, "There may be some merit in your reasoning, Sheridan."

  "That's why I think Firebrand might be the codename for a unit inside Panoply. Now I need to find out who's inside Firebrand. They'll know where the thing is now. If I can get to one of them, isolate and trawl ... " As he spoke, his hand stroked the black haft of his Model C whiphound.

  "Apart from Jane Aumonier, you wouldn't know where to start."

  "I can run a systematic search: look at who was involved eleven years ago, however peripherally, who's still in the organisation." He risked another smile. "I've got one thing on my side, Aurora. They're beginning to panic, which means they're likely to screw up."

  He'd hoped his words would console her, but they had exactly the opposite effect. "We don't want them to err, Sheridan. If these people make mistakes, they may allow the Clockmaker to slip free. Such an outcome wouldn't just be catastrophic for our plans. It would be catastrophic for the Glitter Band, as it very nearly was eleven years ago."

  "I'll exercise due discretion. Believe me, that thing isn't going to escape a second time. And even if it does, we know what we have to do to catch it again."

  "Yes," Aurora said. "And while we were doing it we'd hope and pray that the same thing worked twice, wouldn't we? Answer me this, just out of interest: could you have given that order?"

  "Which order would that be?"

  "You know exactly which one I mean. The thing they don't like to talk about. The thing they did before they nuked the Sylveste Institute for Artificial Mentation."

  "I wouldn't have blinked," he said.

  * * *

  Thalia felt a chill on her neck as the heavy double doors swung open behind her. As they entered, the other prefects were engaged in low, whispered conversations that had obviously been going on for some time. Thalia had been too absorbed in her duties to pay much attention to the crisis that had been unfolding during the last twenty-six hours, but it was clear that this meeting was considered a necessary but disagreeable diversion.

  "Let's keep this brief, Thalia," said Senior Prefect Gaffney. "We all have work to be getting back to. Can we conclude that you've closed the leak in the polling apparatus?"

  "Sir," Thalia said, almost stammering, "I've completed work on the update. As I said before, it only amounted to a couple of thousand lines of changes."

  "And you're confident this will plug the security hole Caitlin Perigal was able to abuse?"

  "As confident as we can ever be, sir. I've subjected the new code to the formal testing process, and the validation system found no errors after simulating fifty years' worth of polling transactions. That's a better error rate than we accepted before the last upgrade, sir. I can see no reason not to go live."

  Gaffney looked at her distractedly, as if his mind had already strolled out of the room, into another more urgent meeting. "Across the entire ten tho
usand?"

  "No, sir," Thalia said patiently. She'd already explained her plans the last time she'd been sitting in that room, but obviously she'd have to go through it one more time. "The changes to the code are relatively simple, but the upgrade will involve high-level access to all ten thousand polling cores. It'll go smoothly with most of the newer cores, but there are some issues with older installations that I'd like to resolve in the field. By that I mean physical visits, sir."

  "On-site installation?" asked Michael Crissel.

  Thalia nodded keenly. "But only for the following habitats." She raised a hand to the Solid Orrery, a gesture she had primed it to wait for. On command, the invisibly fine ceiling threads retracted five orbiting bodies from the frozen swirl of the Glitter Band. Quickmatter oozed down the threads and swelled the representations a hundredfold. One of the five bodies was Panoply itself, instantly recognisable to all present in the room. Thalia pointed instead to the other four, naming each in turn. "Carousel New Seattle-Tacoma. The Chevelure-Sambuke Hourglass. Szlumper Oneill. House Aubusson." Scattered red laser-light flicked between the four habitats and Panoply, revealing Thalia's intended route. "In all cases, I think we can be in and out well inside thirteen hours per habitat. Abstraction downtime will be in the order of milliseconds: not long enough for anyone to actually notice."

  "We can't spare four ships in the current emergency," Gaffney said.

  "I'm not expecting you to, sir. I'd like to be on-site for all the installations myself, which means doing them sequentially. But even allowing for sleep and travel time between the four habs, I can have all four upgrades complete inside sixty hours."

  "And then you'll go live across the whole Band?"

  "Provided no issues come to light during the four test installations, I don't see any reason to delay."

  "I think we should hold off until the Ruskin-Sartorious mess has blown over," said Senior Prefect Baudry, holding her usual electrified posture. "Any non-essential activity at this time is a stretch on our resources we can do without. I don't doubt that Thalia's counting on a full support team. Frankly, we can't afford to reallocate key personnel at such a sensitive time, with the citizenry straining at the leash to punish the Ultras."