“Why are you answering me now, you bastard? I can see you’ve left me to die.”
“I’m curious, that’s all.” He held his breath, half-expecting that she would not reply.
“About what?”
“About what made you ask for our help. Aren’t you terrified of what we’ll do to you?”
“Why should I be terrified?”
She sounded nonchalant but Clavain wasn’t fooled. “It’s generally our policy to assimilate captured prisoners, Bax. We’d bring you aboard and feed our machines into your brain. Doesn’t that concern you?”
“Yes, but I’ll tell you what concerns me a fuck of a lot more right now, and that’s hitting this fucking planet.”
Clavain smiled. “That’s a very pragmatic attitude, Bax. I admire it.”
“Good. Now will you fuck off and let me die in peace?”
“Antoinette, listen to me carefully. There’s something I need you to do for me, with some urgency.”
She must have detected the change of tone in his voice, although she still sounded suspicious. “What?”
“Have your ship transmit a blueprint of itself to me. I want a complete map of your hull’s structural integrity profile. Hard-points, that kind of thing. If you can persuade your hull to colour itself to reveal maximum stress contours, all the better. I want to know where I can safely put a load without having your ship fold under the strain.”
“There’s no way you can save me. You’re too far away. Even if you turned around now, it’d be too late.”
“There’s a way, trust me. Now, that data, please, or I’ll have to trust my instincts, and that may not be for the best.”
She did not answer for a moment. He waited, scratching his beard, and only breathed again when he felt Nightshade’s acknowledgement that the data had been uploaded. He filtered the transmission for neuropathic viruses and then allowed it into his skull. Everything he needed to know about the freighter bloomed in his head, crammed into short-term memory.
“Thank you very much, Antoinette. That will do nicely.”
Clavain sent an order to one of the returning tractor rockets. The tractor peeled away from its brethren at whiplash acceleration, executing a hairpin reversal that would have reduced an organic passenger to paste. Clavain authorised the tractor to ignore all its internal safety limits, removing the need for it to conserve enough fuel for a safe return to Nightshade.
“What are you going to do?” Bax asked.
“I’m sending a drone back. It will latch on to your hull and drag you to clear space, out of the Jovian’s gravity well. I’ll have the tractor give you a modest nudge in the direction of Yellowstone, but I’m afraid you’ll be on your own from then. I hope you can fix your tokamak, or else you’ll be in for a very long fall home.”
It seemed to take an eternity for his words to sink in. “You’re not going to take me prisoner?”
“Not today, Antoinette. But if you ever cross my path again, I promise one thing: I’ll kill you.”
He had not enjoyed delivering the threat, but hoped it might knock some sense into her. Clavain closed the link before she could answer.
FOUR
In a building in Cuvier, on the planet Resurgam, a woman stood at a window, facing away from the door with her hands clasped tightly behind her back.
“Next,” she said.
While she waited for the suspect to be dragged in, the woman remained at the window, admiring the tremendous and sobering view that it presented. The raked windows reached from floor to ceiling, leaning outwards at the top. Structures of utilitarian aspect marched away in all directions, cubes and rectangles piled atop one another. The ruthlessly rectilinear buildings inspired a sense of crushing conformity and subjugation; mental waveguides designed to exclude the slightest joyful or uplifting thought.
Her office, which was merely one slot in the much larger Inquisition House itself, was situated in the rebuilt portion of Cuvier. Historical records—the Inquisitor had not been there herself during the events—established that the building lay more or less directly above the ground-zero point where the True Path Inundationists had detonated the first of their terrorist devices. With a yield in the two-kilotonne range, the pinhead-sized antimatter bombs had not been the most impressive destructive devices in her experience. But, she supposed, it was not how big your weapon was that mattered, but what you did with it.
The terrorists could not have picked a softer target, and the results had been appropriately calamitous.
“Next . . .” the Inquisitor repeated, a little louder this time.
The door creaked open a hand’s width. She heard the voice of the guard who stood outside. “That’s it for today, ma’am.”
Of course—Ibert’s file had been the last in the pile.
“Thank you,” the Inquisitor replied. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard any news on the Thorn inquiry?”
The guard answered with a trace of unease, as well he might given that he was passing information between two rival government departments. “They’ve released a man after questioning, I gather. He had a watertight alibi, though it took a little persuasion to get it out of him. Something about being with a woman other than his wife.” He shrugged. “The usual story . . .”
“And the usual persuasion, I imagine—a few unfortunate trips down the stairs. So they’ve no additional leads on Thorn?”
“They’re no closer to catching him than you are to catching the Triumvir. Sorry. You know what I mean, ma’am.”
“Yes . . .” She prolonged the word tortuously.
“Will that be all, ma’am?”
“For now.”
The door creaked shut.
The woman whose official title was Inquisitor Vuilleumier returned her attention to the city. Delta Pavonis was low in the sky, beginning to shade the sides of the buildings in various faint permutations of rust and orange. She looked at the view until dusk fell, comparing it in her mind’s eye with her memories of Chasm City and, before that, Sky’s Edge. It was always at dusk that she decided whether she liked a place or not. She remembered once, not long after her arrival in Chasm City, asking a man named Mirabel whether there had ever come a point when he had decided he liked the city. Mirabel had, like her, been a native of Sky’s Edge. He had told her that he had found ways of getting used to it. She had doubted him, but in the end he had been proven right. But it was only when she was wrenched away from Chasm City that she had begun to look back on it with anything resembling fondness.
She had never reached that state on Resurgam.
The lights of government-issue electric cars stirred silver rivers between the buildings. She turned from the window and walked across the room to her private chamber. She closed the door behind her.
Security considerations dictated that the chamber was windowless. She eased herself into a padded seat behind a vast horseshoe-shaped desk. It was an old escritoire whose dead cybernetic innards had been reamed out and replaced by much cruder systems. A pot of stale, tepid coffee sat on a heated coil at one end of the desk. A buzzing electric fan gave off the tang of ozone.
Three walls, including most of the wall she had stepped through, were lined with shelves containing bound reports detailing fifteen years’ worth of effort. It would have been an absurdity for an entire department of government to be dedicated to the capture of a single individual: a woman who could not with certainty be said to be still alive, much less on Resurgam. Therefore the remit of the Inquisitor’s office extended to the gathering of intelligence on a range of external threats to the colony. But it was a fact that the Triumvir had become the most celebrated of the still-open cases, in the same way that the apprehension of Thorn, and the dismantling of the movement he fronted, dominated the work of the neighbouring department, Internal Threats. Though it was more than sixty years since she committed her crimes, high-ranking officials continued to bray for the Triumvir’s arrest and trial, using her as a focus for public sentiments that might otherwise have been directed at the government. It was one of the oldest tricks of mob-management: give them a hate figure. The Inquisitor had a great many other things she would rather be doing than pursuing the war criminal. But if her department failed to show the necessary enthusiasm for the task, another would surely take its place, and that could not be tolerated. There was the faintest of possibilities that a new department might succeed.
So the Inquisitor maintained the pretence. The Triumvir case remained legitimately open because the Triumvir was an Ultra, and could therefore be assumed to be still alive despite the time that had passed since her criminal activities. On her case alone there were lists of tens of thousands of potential suspects, transcriptions of thousands of interviews. There were hundreds of biographies and case summaries. Some individuals, around a dozen, each merited a good portion of a shelf. And this was just a fraction of the office’s archive; just the paperwork that had to be immediately on hand. Down in the basement, and at other sites around the city, were many more miles of documentation. A marvellous and largely secret network of pneumatic tubes enabled files to be whisked from office to office in seconds.
On her desk were a few opened files. Various names had been ringed, underscored or connected by spidery lines. Photographs were stapled to summary cards, blurry long-lens acquisitions of faces moving through crowds. She leafed through them, aware that she had to give a convincing impression of actually following up these apparent leads. She had to listen to her field agents and digest the snippets of information passed on by informers. She had to give every indication that she was actually interested in finding the Triumvir.
Something caught her eye. Something on the fourth wall.
The wall displayed a Mercator projection of Resurgam. The map had kept up with the terraforming program, showing small blotches of blue or green in addition to the unrelenting shades of grey, tan and white that would have been the case a century earlier. Cuvier was still the largest settlement, but there were now a dozen or so outposts that were large enough to be considered small cities in their own right. Slev lines connected most of them; others were linked by canals, roads or freight pipelines. There were a handful of landing strips, but there were not enough aircraft to permit routine journeys for anyone other than key government officials. Smaller settlements—weather stations and the few remaining archaeological digs—could be reached by airship or all-terrain crawler, but not usually in less than weeks of travel time.
Now a red light was winking up in the northeastern corner of the map, hundreds of kilometres away from anywhere most people had heard of. A field agent was calling in. Operatives were identified by their code numbers, winking next to the spot of light that denoted their position.