Dreyfus thought back to his last conversation with Aumonier. ‘She didn’t appear to be in pain.’
‘Then she was doing a good job of hiding it from you. It’s not agony — yet. But the scarab’s been changing faster and faster lately. It’s sending us a warning, Tom. We don’t have much time.’
‘But it’s only been a few days since the last time we talked. You didn’t have a strategy then; nothing that would get it off her in under four-tenths of a second. Are you telling me you’ve come up with something new since then?’
Demikhov could not quite meet his eyes. ‘I’ve not been entirely truthful with you, Tom. There’s always been a strategy, one that we’re confident can remove the scarab before it has time to retaliate. It’s just that we wanted to make sure all other options were exhausted first.’
Dreyfus shook his head. ‘Tango was your best option. Yet it still wasn’t down to four-tenths or less.’
‘There’s always been something faster than Tango. We’ve held it in reserve, barely discussed it since the groundwork was put in place. We always hoped we’d come up with something better in the meantime. But we haven’t. And now there isn’t any more time. Which leaves us three choices, Tom.’
‘Which are?’
‘Option one is we do nothing and hope that the scarab never triggers. Option two is we go with Tango. All the sims — incorporating the work we’ve put in during the last week — say that Tango will achieve scarab extraction in point four nine six seconds. The sims also estimate that that isn’t quite enough time for the scarab to do anything.’
‘But there’s not much of a margin of error.’ They’d agreed long ago that no action would be taken until the extraction could be achieved in under point four seconds. Warily, Dreyfus asked, ‘What’s the third option?’
‘We call it Zulu. It’s the last resort.’
‘Which is?’
‘Decapitation,’ Demikhov said.
‘You’re not serious.’
‘It’s been analysed into the ground. We have a plan, and we think it will work.’
‘You think?’
‘Nothing’s guaranteed here, Tom. We’re talking about operating on a patient we haven’t been able to get within seven and half metres of for eleven years.’
Dreyfus realised that he was taking out his exasperation on the hapless Demikhov, a man who had selflessly dedicated the last eleven years of his life to finding a way to help Jane Aumonier. ‘All right. Tell me what’s involved. How does cutting her head off score over just shooting the scarab right now? And how are you going to get a surgical team in there to decapitate her, anyway?’
Demikhov steered Dreyfus towards one of the partitions that divided the central area of the Sleep Lab, bright with diagrams and images of both the patient and the thing clamped to her neck. ‘Let’s deal with one thing at a time. We’ve considered forced removal of the scarab — shooting it off, if you like — since day one. But we’ve always been concerned that there might be something in it that can still hurt Jane even if it isn’t physically connected to her.’
They’d been over this before, but Dreyfus still needed his memory jogging. ‘Like what?’
‘An explosive device, for instance. We’re confident the Clockmaker couldn’t have got antimatter inside it, but there might be conventional explosives or spring-loaded cutting mechanisms concealed in the structures we haven’t been able to map.’
‘Enough to hurt Jane?’
‘Easily. You’ve seen what it managed to build into some of those clocks. If we can get the scarab on the other side of some kind of blast screen, no harm will befall the patient. That’s how we’ll kill two birds, Tom.’
‘Two birds? I’m not sure what you mean.’
Demikhov tapped a finger against one of the diagrams. Dreyfus had the vague impression that he’d seen this picture a hundred times without ever paying it due attention. It was a cross section of the chamber in which Jane floated.
‘You’ll have noted this ring-shaped duct running around the bubble,’ Demikhov said.
‘I assumed…’ But Dreyfus trailed off. He hadn’t assumed anything, beyond the fact that the ring-shaped structure was nothing to do with the bubble itself.
‘We installed that duct, Tom. We opened up that space because one day we feared we might need to proceed with Zulu.’
‘What’s in it now?’
‘Nothing: it’s just an empty ring encircling the bubble. But everything we need to install in it is stored elsewhere in Panoply, ready to go.’
‘Show me.’
Demikhov tapped a finger and the diagram tilted around so that they were looking down on the bubble and the ring instead of seeing them in cross section. A series of modular structures were shown being inserted into the ring through a single opening, then pushed around until they joined up to form a kind of thick, barbed necklace.
‘What is it?’
‘A guillotine,’ Demikhov said, matter-of-factly. ‘When the structures are in place, they’ll project those bladed segments through the wall of the sphere. We’ve weakened the outer wall where they need to cut through, so there’s no need to do anything on the inside of the bubble. It’ll happen very quickly. The segments will close in and bisect the chamber in two-tenths of a second: well inside our margin of error.’
The diagram flipped back around to cross-sectional form. A figure appeared, floating in the middle of the chamber. A red line bisected the figure’s neck. The blades sprang through the wall, severing the figure’s head from its body. The head floated up into one half of the bisected space. The decapitated body floated down into the other half.
‘We cut high enough to remove the scarab,’ Demikhov said. ‘We bisect between the submaxillary triangle and the hyoid bone. If we’re lucky, we get a clean separation of the third and fourth cervical vertebra. The scarab goes into the lower half. Even if it blows up, the blades will have interlocked to form a blastproof shield.’
‘What about Jane’s body?’ Dreyfus said.
‘We don’t care about the body. We’ll grow her a new one, or fix any damage the old one sustains. Then we reattach the head. But the head’s the most important thing. Provided we get a clean decapitation, she’ll live.’
Dreyfus knew he was missing something. ‘But you still need to get a surgical team in there somehow. She needs to be prepped for the procedure.’
‘No, she doesn’t.’
‘I’m not following.’
‘We don’t prep Jane, Tom, because we can’t. We can’t anaesthetize her because that’s exactly what the scarab’s waiting for. And if she knows what’s coming her stress levels are going to shoot through the roof. The only way this will work is if we go in fast, without warning.’ Demikhov nodded at Dreyfus’s reaction. ‘You see it now, I think. You understand why this has only ever been an option of last resort.’
‘This is a nightmare. This can’t be happening.’
‘Listen to me,’ Demikhov said urgently. ‘Jane’s had eleven years of living hell inside that chamber. Nothing we can do to her to get rid of the scarab even begins to stack up against that. She’ll have no warning, and therefore she’ll have no time to get scared. When the blades close, the upper half of the chamber is ours. Then we send in a crash surgical team, ready to stabilise Jane and put her under.’
‘How long?’
‘Before the team goes in? Seconds. That’s all. We’ll just need confirmation that the hemisphere’s really clear, that the scarab hasn’t left any surprises, and in we go.’
‘Jane will still be conscious at that point, won’t she?’
The question troubled Demikhov visibly. ‘There’s anecdotal evidence… but I really wouldn’t put too much store by it. The shock of blood loss is just as likely to plunge her into deep unconsciousness within five to seven seconds. Clinical death, if you like.’