The Revelation Space Collection (519 page)

‘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 thousand?’

‘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 nonessential 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.’

‘Maybe you’re right,’ Gaffney said. ‘I know Jane wants closure on the polling anomaly as quickly as possible, but she’ll also understand that we have to contain the aggressors until something else comes along to occupy their time.’

‘Begging your pardon, sir,’ Thalia said, ‘but I’m not counting on anything other than myself and a cutter to get me between habitats. I can handle the upgrades single-handedly.’

Gaffney looked unconvinced. ‘Quite a responsibility, Ng.’

‘It makes sense, sir. I’m intimately familiarly with the software changes and the procedure for installing them. It’s been my speciality since I joined the organisation. It’s what I live and breathe. I don’t think there’s anyone else in Panoply who understands the polling mechanism as thoroughly as I do.’

‘All the same, it’s still a heavy burden for one person.’

‘I can do it, sir. In sixty hours, less if things go smoothly, this whole business could be behind us.’

Crissel and Gaffney exchanged glances. ‘It would be good to get it off the table,’ Crissel said quietly. ‘And if Ng thinks she can handle this on her own . . . it won’t impact on our existing activities.’

‘I still say she should wait,’ Baudry put in.

‘We have no idea how long the crisis with the Ultras is going to last,’ Crissel said. ‘We could still be putting out fires a month from now. We can’t leave the security hole unplugged until then - there are critical polls coming up and we need the apparatus in a fit state to handle them.’

‘If she runs into trouble,’ Baudry said, ‘we won’t be able to spare a Heavy Technical Squad to help her out.’

‘I won’t run into trouble,’ Thalia replied.

Baudry looked unimpressed. ‘You sound spectacularly sure of yourself. No update to a polling core is
routine
, Ng. You take the local abstraction down and then can’t get it back up, you’ll have a rioting mob on your hands. One whiphound isn’t going to make much difference in that situation.’

‘I promise there’ll be no technical difficulties. Aside from a few habitat seniors, no one else need even know that I’m on the premises.’

‘She talks a good talk,’ Gaffney said, with the tone of a man who had no great stomach for argument. ‘Part of me says hold off this until we can give it our full attention. Another part says, hell, if she thinks she can do it unassisted—’

‘I can, sir,’ Thalia said.

‘Maybe we should bounce this one off Jane,’ Crissel said.

‘The supreme prefect expressly requested not to be troubled with matters of minor procedure,’ said Baudry. ‘As she’s made abundantly clear, she can only be expected to concentrate on so many matters at once.’

Gaffney pulled a face, racked by indecision. ‘Sixty hours, you say?’

‘Starting from now, sir. I can leave immediately for New Seattle-Tacoma. ’ Thalia nodded towards the red laser-line trajectory. ‘The conjunction’s favourable. Assign me a cutter and I can be on-site inside Sea-Tac within two hours.’

‘All right,’ Gaffney said. ‘We’ll spare you a cutter. No weps or heavy armour, though.’

‘I won’t let you down,’ Thalia said.