In the Mouth of the Whale (34 page)

‘They are not weapons. They are the tools of my trade,’ I said.

‘Security says they are weapons. Hand them over.’

‘I can’t do that. They are particular to my clan. And I may need to use them.’

The captain repeated his demand. The pair of troopers held me fast and a security bot hovered behind him, the muzzle of a glaser aimed at me as it pulsed my security every thirty milliseconds, trying to find a way inside.

Prem stepped up and said that she needed my skills. ‘Your prefect will need them too.’

‘Everything is under control,’ the captain said.

‘You don’t know that. I don’t know that. Only this man can know for sure.’

Prem looked slim and vulnerable amongst the armoured troopers, but she showed no fear and carried herself with forthright authority.

I sensed traffic as the captain consulted someone. He said, ‘On your responsibility, Majistra.’

‘All of it is my responsibility.’

The troopers picked me up again and carried me down a passage to a platform that overlooked a long, red-lit chamber, where I was unceremoniously dumped on the floor in front of a heavyset man in scarlet and yellow: Dyal Cardinale, the prefect of Avalon, according to my security. He looked at me, then at Prem, affecting nonchalance.

‘I appreciate your offer of help,’ he said. ‘But as you can see, everything is under control.’

‘Where is my cousin?’ Prem said.

‘He came here and did his work, and left.’

‘Where did he go?’

‘I regret that I did not enquire,’ the prefect said.

‘I’ll want traffic records,’ Prem said.

‘I’ll show you everything,’ the prefect said.

Prem turned to me and said, ‘What do you see, Isak?’

I got to my feet, moving slowly, aware of the troopers and the drones watching me. Below the platform, troopers stood over a small crew of Quick workers who lay face down on the floor, hands clasped on the backs of their necks. Beyond were ranks of cradles, each brimful of water, each containing the small sleek form of a newborn Quick adapted for aquatic life. The newborns chirped and trilled and splashed, agitated no doubt by the sudden change in their routines. Everywhere else was still and quiet, and I told Prem so.

‘This isn’t the locus of the infection,’ the prefect said. ‘We have dealt with that. No, this is the locus of an insurrection. And as you can see, we have dealt with that, too.’

‘My cousin came here to look for something,’ Prem said.

‘And he found it, and dealt with it,’ the prefect said.

‘A hell,’ Prem said.

‘What else?’

‘It is in the mind of one of the heat pumps installed by the Quick construction machines,’ I said, and recited the coordinates that I’d pulled from the brain of the undead leader of the Billion Blossoms.

Prem gave me a sharp look, then told the prefect that we needed to go there at once.

‘There is no need.’

‘With respect, you don’t know what you are dealing with.’

‘With respect, I believe that we do,’ the prefect said, with wintry politeness. ‘After the pump’s mind had been purged by your cousin and his assistant, I discovered that several workers had died. It seems as if they had fought each other to the death, using fists and teeth and nails. Very messy. I also discovered a clandestine comm line to the heat pump. It was obvious that they were wreckers, and that they had been controlled by demons in the hell hidden in the pump’s mind. So I took appropriate precautions.’

Prem said, ‘My cousin had an assistant? He came here with someone?’

The prefect said, ‘He had specialist help. Just like you.’

‘Did she claim to be working for the Library of the Homesun?’

‘Was her name Bree Sixsmith?’

Prem and I had spoken at the same time.

The prefect looked at me, then at Prem.

Prem said, ‘No doubt you have confirmed my authority.’

‘Yes, Majistra.’

‘Then you will help me understand what they did here.’

The prefect threw a packet of information at me, and told Prem, ‘I have just given your servant a copy of their report. Their authority was confirmed at the highest level of security. I had no reason to doubt that they were acting in anything other than an official capacity.’

He wore rings on every finger. Some were the kind that augments memory and other mental facilities; others were the kind that command machines. He was twisting one, a plain black band on his right forefinger, back and forth. I was certain that it was some kind of weapon.

‘She turned him,’ Prem said to me. ‘She caught up with Yakob and she turned him.’

‘I think so too,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘Do you have any idea what they found?’

‘According to their report, they harrowed and erased a hell,’ I said.

‘After they used the gateway inside it,’ Prem said.

‘The hell they claim to have erased was nothing like the one in the ship,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t a copy of part of the Library, but appears to have been a genuine hell, inhabited by a clutch of minor demons. But even on a first reading, it seems very thin. Generic. As if patched together from records of other hells.’

The prefect said, ‘It was a real hell, with real demons. They infected my workers.’

‘I would like to inspect the heat pump,’ I said. ‘No doubt every trace of the hell has been erased, but I think it likely that something was left behind. A trap.’

Prem understood. ‘Those workers were cultists.’

‘I think so. They used the gateway to access data stored in the Library. After your cousin and Bree Sixsmith left, they wanted to find out what had been done to their archive. They looked inside the heat pump’s mind. And they found a demon.’

‘And it made them kill each other,’ Prem said. ‘How elegant.’

‘They worked here,’ the prefect said. ‘The Quick infected by the demon. They worked in this place. These prisoners also worked here, and may have useful information about the conspiracy. You are welcome to question them in any way you see fit. I have held them in isolation. I have put the entire sector in isolation. Nothing in or out until you arrived. The situation is completely contained.’

‘There is no situation,’ Prem said. ‘Not any more. The Quick who died weren’t wreckers. They were . . . guardians. They kept safe something which has been stolen from under your nose.’

‘And that was?’ the prefect said.

‘There’s no way of knowing now,’ Prem said, with perfectly calibrated bitterness.

I knew she was lying, but the prefect did not. He gestured at the Quick prisoners sprawled below us. ‘They might know.’

‘They are alive. Therefore they are innocent,’ I said. ‘Everyone who had anything to do with this conspiracy, so-called, was caught in the trap, and infected by the demon.’

‘Let them go,’ Prem told the prefect.

The prefect shook his head. ‘I will deal with them as I see fit.’

His smile was colder than ever. I felt sick. I knew that he knew that he possessed the authority to kill the Quick, and he was determined to exert it. To redeem his status. To prove to Prem that her authority was not absolute.

‘If you won’t let them go, then release them into my custody,’ Prem said ‘I will take them with me for further investigation.’

‘They are quarantined,’ the prefect said.

‘There is no need for the quarantine.’

‘I believe there is. You can question them here, of course. And then I will deal with them.’

‘I give you my word that they are innocent. Harmless.’

‘They worked with wreckers. They are tainted, whether or not they know it. I cannot take the risk that the taint will spread.’

‘The workers who died were not wreckers,’ Prem said.

‘If you have evidence to back up that assertion, I will of course examine it,’ the prefect said.

‘Do we have proof, Isak? Can you show this man that Yakob’s report is faked?’

‘Bree Sixsmith may have patched up the characteristics of the hell she and your cousin supposedly harrowed from reports of other harrowings. But I would have to check the records of the Library to determine that.’

‘What about the heat pump’s mind?’ Prem said.

‘I don’t think I can allow you to examine it,’ the prefect said.

‘I don’t think you can stop us,’ Prem said.

‘Your servant claims that it may contain some kind of trap,’ the prefect said. ‘If that’s true, it must remain in quarantine until it can be destroyed in place.’

Prem held the prefect’s gaze. Her face was still and calm, but she was poised as if to spring at his throat. He raised his right hand and aimed the plain black band on his forefinger at her; I prepared to hurl a nightmare, aware that the troopers around us had shifted their stances in readiness for action.

At last, without looking away from the prefect, Prem said, ‘Let’s go, Isak.’

‘I should like to look inside the mind of that heat pump,’ I said.

‘I don’t think you can.’

‘Before you leave, I want you to witness the last part of the containment strategy,’ the prefect said, and flicked a packet at his troopers.

Those down on the floor of the hatchery stepped back as drones swung in over the prone prisoners and in a rapid tattoo fired infrared lasers that cooked their brains to boiling soup. The prisoners shuddered as their skulls popped and cracked. Troopers moved past them to the ranks of cradles, scooping out newborns and dropping them on to the floor to drown in air.

Prem caught my arm. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing left for us here.’

Her face was still set with glacial calm, but red light swam and glittered in her eyes and sparkled in the tears that slid one after the other down her cheeks.

3

Ori and the rest of the crew of
The Eye of the Righteous
, awake for more than forty-eight hours, running on kaf and meth, were still trying to come to terms with the enormity of their situation. All the pilots were dead and all the predators were lost; more than half of the elite crew which had maintained the predators and served the pilots had committed suicide. Most of the drones were gone. The planetary net was down, every link broken. Radio yielded only the crackle of a distant storm and the slow, deep heartbeat of the planet’s magnetic field. There was no way of contacting anyone else. They were entirely alone, cast adrift in the vast and empty sky.

One good thing: the fall of the net meant that Ori didn’t have to send any more reports to Commissar Doctor Pentangel. And despite the warnings of his philosopher-soldiers, the device they’d implanted hadn’t punished her when she’d missed the last deadline. Perhaps those warnings had been empty threats, or perhaps the device was intelligent enough to know that it wasn’t her fault she couldn’t send reports: Ori didn’t care. She wondered how Inas was, what she was doing, whether the Whale had been attacked, but otherwise had no time for regrets, no time for the past. She was living from moment to moment, experiencing everything with a pure and lucid intensity.

‘We’re in a tight spot, but we’re not helpless,’ Commander Tenkiller told her crew. ‘We will make more drones and turn them into flying bombs. We will convert the launch cannon into kinetic weapons, and we will search the library of maker templates for useful weaponry, or for tools that can be turned into weapons. We have suffered a grave setback, but we are not out of the fight. When we confront the enemy, we will have a few surprises in store. We will give back more than we get. This I promise.’

Some of the crew were given the task of prepping the small number of spare drones and assembling various kinds of explosive loads from components spun by the ship’s makers. The rest, including Ori, set to work converting the launch cannon. Buttoned up inside their chairs, they each woke a maintenance bot and walked them out of the hutches and across the upper deck of the ship in bright clear early morning light. The sky empty except for a feathering of cumulonimbus clouds, the great span of the ring-arch, and the baleful spark of one of the orbital forts burning low in the west.

The launch cannon were guide rails ringed with a series of superconducting hoops that ran the full length of the upper surface of the ship. Drones attached to sleds that ran along the rail were accelerated by magnetic fields generated by the hoops, each kicking it faster and faster until the sled crashed into the retaining buffer at the far end of the gun and the drone shot off; once it had cleared the ship, the initial acceleration imparted by the cannon was boosted by solid-fuel rockets to a velocity that would sustain air-breathing flight. Simple machines, the launch cannon, dumb as a bag of spanners and with no moving parts except for the sled and the load grab, but the circuits that coordinated the priming and discharge of the hoops were delicate and frangible, there were safety devices that had to be stripped out or circumvented, and the hoops themselves were constructed from an intricate knit of superconducting plastics. It took Ori and the rest of the crew all day to break down one cannon and use the modular components to make four smaller units, and then plug in reprogrammed control circuits and check everything for integrity.