‘But you can’t guarantee that. You can’t promise me that she won’t have awareness after those blades have closed.’
‘No,’ Demikhov said. ‘I can’t.’
‘She has to be told, Doctor.’
‘She’s always made it clear that we don’t need her consent to attempt an extraction.’
‘But this isn’t the same as sending in a servitor to disarm the scarab,’ Dreyfus protested. ‘This is a completely different form of intervention, one that’ll probably involve pain and distress above and beyond anything Jane’s ever expected to endure.’
‘I agree wholeheartedly. I also think that’s exactly why we can’t breathe a word of this to her.’
Dreyfus looked at the diagram again. He recalled the red line cutting through Jane’s neck, just above the point where the scarab was attached. ‘The position of those blades is fixed, right? You can’t steer them if she’s not floating at the right height?’
‘That’s correct.’
‘So how will you be able to cut in the right place?’
‘We mount a laser on the door. It’s small enough that she won’t notice it. The laser draws a line across Jane, indicating where the blades will pass.’
‘Cut. That’s the word you’re looking for.’
‘Thank you, but I’m fully aware of what we’re contemplating here. I’m not taking any of this lightly.’
‘And what happens if the line doesn’t hit her in the right spot?’
‘We wait,’ Demikhov said. ‘She bobs up and down. Sometimes she does it herself, paddling the air. Sometimes it’s just currents in the chamber, pushing her around. But sooner or later that line’s going to touch the right spot.’ He looked hard at Dreyfus. ‘My hand will be on a trigger. It’ll be my call as to when the blades go in, not some machine’s. I have to feel it’s the right moment.’
‘What about the crash team?’
‘I’ve arranged for three shifts. There’ll always be one team on stand-by.’
Dreyfus felt numb. He could see the logic. He didn’t have to like it.
‘Have you spoken to the other seniors?’
‘They’ve been informed. I have their consent to proceed.’
‘Then you don’t need mine.’
‘I don’t need it, but I want it. You’re closer to Jane than anyone else in the organisation, Tom. Even me. From the word go it’s always been clear to me that I’d need your permission before I go ahead with this. She trusts you like an only son. How many other field prefects have Pangolin?’
‘To my knowledge, none,’ Dreyfus said candidly.
‘You’re the one she’d want to have the final say-so, Tom.’ Demikhov shrugged resignedly, as if he’d done all he could. ‘I’ve stated the medical case. If you give me the nod, we can install the blades in thirteen hours. She could be out of that room and stable in thirteen hours, ten minutes.’
‘And if I say no?’
‘We’ll run with Tango. I can’t risk doing nothing. That would be true negligence.’
‘I need time to deal with this,’ Dreyfus said. ‘You should have told me about this years ago, so I’d have had time to think it over.’
‘Do you think it would have helped? You’d have listened to me, agreed how unpleasant it was and then shoved the whole matter to the back of your mind because you didn’t need to deal with it there and then.’
Dreyfus wanted to argue but he knew that Demikhov was right. There were some horrors it was pointless spying on the horizon. You had to deal with them at close range.
‘I still need time. Give me an hour. Then you can start installing the equipment.’
‘I lied to you,’ Demikhov said softly. ‘We’ve already started. But you still have your hour, Tom.’ He turned away and picked up one of the dismantled plastic scarab models, distracted by some waxy grey internal component, a snail-shaped thing he’d apparently only just noticed. ‘You know where to find me. I’ll be awake, just like Jane.’
CHAPTER 25
Dreyfus was leaving the Sleep Lab when his bracelet chimed. It was Sparver.
‘Think you need to drop by the nose, Boss. Caught a couple of fish trying to swim away.’
‘Thank you,’ Dreyfus said, glad that he’d taken the initiative to have Sparver shadow Chen and Saavedra. ‘I’ll be there immediately. ’
Sparver had detained them in the docking bay that formed the nose of Panoply’s pumpkin-face, the bay that handled cutters and corvettes as opposed to civilian vehicles or deep-system cruisers. As field prefects, the Firebrand operatives were regular users of both light- and medium-enforcement vehicles and would have been familiar faces to the technical staff manning the bay. Although they did not have clearance to take a ship, they had managed to talk their way aboard a cutter that had just come in for refuelling and re-armament and had been well advanced in pre-flight checks when Sparver blocked their escape by closing the main bay doors. Dreyfus would have to reprimand the staff who had allowed the prefects aboard the ship without the right clearance, but for now his only concern was extracting information from the two unsuccessful fugitives. They were still aboard the cutter, the ship still poised on its launching rack, with the doors blocking its egress.
‘I had a hard time tailing them,’ Sparver said, floating next to the cutter’s suitwall, inside the air-filled connecting tube. Two internal prefects flanked him, whiphounds drawn. ‘For run-of-the-mill fields, these two knew a few tricks.’
‘They’re not exactly field prefects,’ Dreyfus said. ‘That’s just an operational cover for what they really do. They’re specialists, assigned to a superblack cell called Firebrand. Jane pulled the plug on the cell, but the cell had other ideas. They’ve been carrying on without her authority for nine years.’
‘Now that’s just naughty.’
‘Naughtier than you think. Firebrand has to take some of the responsibility for what happened to Ruskin-Sartorious.’ Dreyfus unclipped his whiphound and motioned for Sparver to do likewise. ‘Let’s get them off the vehicle. We can’t keep these bay doors closed for ever.’
They set the passwall to yield and entered, Dreyfus leading with Sparver just to his rear. Dreyfus sealed the passwall behind them, with the internals keeping guard on the other side so that there was no possibility of the Firebrand agents escaping back into Panoply.
Like all cutters, it was a small vehicle with a limited number of hiding places. It was powered, but the cabin illumination was dimmed almost to darkness. Dreyfus fumbled in his pocket for his glasses, but he’d left them in his room before he went to the refectory.
He called into the cutter’s depths. ‘This is Tom Dreyfus. You both know me by reputation. You’re not going anywhere, so let’s talk civilly.’
There was no answer.
Dreyfus tried again. ‘You don’t have anything to fear from me. I know about Firebrand. I know about your operational mandate. I understand that you did what you did because you thought you were doing the right thing by Panoply.’
Again there was no reply. Dreyfus glanced back at Sparver, then pushed further into the ship, in the direction of the flight deck. He made out the watery blue glow of instrumentation seeping around the corner of the bulkhead that separated the flight deck from the adjoining compartment.
‘I haven’t come to punish you for the consequences of any actions you may have taken that you believed to be in the best interests of the Band.’ Dreyfus paused heavily. ‘But I do need to know the facts. I know that Firebrand was using Ruskin-Sartorious until just before the Bubble was destroyed. At some point, you’re all going to have to answer for the mistake of hiding your activities inside that habitat. It was a mistake, a bad one, but no one’s accusing you of premeditated murder. All I’m interested in is why that habitat had to die. Panoply needs whatever Aurora was scared of, and it needs it now.’