The Prefect by Alastair Reynolds Page A

irritated that he’d been disturbed. ‘Sparver, I thought I said that I wasn’t to be—’
    â€˜Had to reach you, Boss. This is urgent.’
    â€˜Then why didn’t you summon me on my bracelet?’
    â€˜Because you’d turned it off.’
    â€˜Oh.’ Dreyfus glanced down at his sleeve. ‘So I did.’
    â€˜Jane told me to pull you out of whatever you were doing, no matter how much you screamed and kicked. There’s been a development.’
    Dreyfus whispered a command to return Delphine to storage. ‘This had better be good,’ he told Sparver when the beta-level had vanished. ‘I was close to getting a set of watertight testimonies tying the Accompaniment of Shadows to the Bubble. That’s all the ammunition I need to take back to Seraphim. He’d have no choice but to hand over the ship then.’
    â€˜I don’t think you need to persuade him to hand over the ship.’
    Dreyfus frowned momentarily, still irked. ‘What?’
    â€˜It’s already on its way. It’s headed straight for us.’

CHAPTER 6
    When Sparver prodded Dreyfus awake, they’d arrived within visual range of the Accompaniment of Shadows . Dreyfus untangled himself from the hammock webbing and followed his deputy into the spacious flight deck of the deep-system cruiser. Field prefects were authorised to fly cutters, but a ship as big and powerful as the Democratic Circus needed a dedicated team. There were three operatives on the flight deck, all wearing immersion glasses and elbow-length black control gloves. The chief pilot was a man named Pell, a Panoply operative Dreyfus knew and respected. Dreyfus grunted acknowledgement, had Sparver conjure him a bulb of coffee, then asked his deputy to bring him up to date.
    â€˜Jane polled on the nukes,’ the hyperpig said. ‘We’re good to go.’
    â€˜What about the harbourmaster?’
    â€˜No further contact with Seraphim, or any other representative of the Ultras. But we do have a shipload of secondary headaches to worry about.’
    â€˜Just when I was starting to get used to the ones we already had.’
    â€˜Headquarters says there’s a storm brewing over Ruskin-Sartorious - the news is beginning to break. Not the full facts - no one else knows exactly which ship was involved - but there are a hundred million citizens out there capable of joining the dots.’
    â€˜Are people starting to work out that Ultras had to be involved?’
    â€˜Definite speculation along those lines. A handful of spectators have noticed the drifting ship and are beginning to think it must be tied to the atrocity.’
    â€˜Great.’
    â€˜In a perfect world, they’d see the ship as evidence that a crime has been committed and that the Ultras have acted with the necessary swiftness, punishing their own.’
    Dreyfus scratched at stubble. He needed a shave. ‘But if this was a perfect world, you and I’d be out of a job.’
    â€˜Jane says we have to consider the very real possibility that some parties may attempt unilateral punitive action if they conclude that Ultras were responsible.’
    â€˜In other words, we could be looking at war between the Glitter Band and the Ultras.’
    â€˜I’m hoping no one will be quite that stupid,’ Sparver said. ‘Then again, this is baseline humans we’re dealing with.’
    â€˜I’m a baseline human.’
    â€˜You’re weird.’
    Captain Pell turned away from the console towards them and flipped up his goggles. ‘Final approach now, sir. There’s a lot of debris and gas boiling off, so I suggest we hold at three thousand metres.’
    Pell had turned most of the hull transparent, so that the Accompaniment of Shadows was visible alongside. Something was very wrong with it, Dreyfus observed. The engine spars ended in ragged, splayed stumps of tangled metal and hull plating, with no sign of the