Machine Vendetta (The Prefect Dreyfus Emergencies), page 1
part #3 of Prefect Dreyfus Emergency Series
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2024 by Alastair Reynolds
Excerpt from Eversion copyright © 2022 by Alastair Reynolds
Excerpt from Translation State copyright © 2023 by Ann Leckie
Cover design by Alexia E. Pereira
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Cover copyright © 2024 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
Author photograph by Barbara Bella
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First Edition: January 2024
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2023944054
ISBNs: 9780316462846 (trade paperback), 9780316462853 (ebook)
E3-20231111-JV-NF-ORI
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Discover More
Extras Meet the Author
A Preview of Eversion
A Preview of Translation State
Also by Alastair Reynolds
Praise for Alastair Reynolds
For Bill Schafer
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CHAPTER ONE
Something terrible had happened in Mercy Sphere.
Thalia Ng was the first on-scene. She touched a hand to her throat, stifling nausea. With her other hand she slipped on a pair of goggles, feeding her observations back to the Supreme Prefect.
“I’m inside, ma’am,” she said. “You should have a clear view of the scene.”
“Pan around for me,” the voice in her ear instructed.“Slower. Slower still. Why isn’t it in focus?”
“It is, ma’am.” Thalia coughed. “There’s a lot of smoke in the air. The circulators are struggling to clear it.”
“Do you need a breather?”
“No, ma’am. It’s pretty bad, but if these people are managing without breathers, I think I can as well.”
Mendicants—the order who operated Mercy Sphere—were busy fixing damage, clearing bodies and tending to the few souls who had survived the conflagration. Humans and hyperpigs alike made up their number, dressed in green and white clerical outfits.
As Thalia tracked around, her goggles placed reference tags on the fallen and sick.
“It’s vile, ma’am. That someone should do this deliberately . . .” She trailed off, the horror too unwieldy to be carved into words.
“Detachment, Ng,” Jane Aumonier said. “Record and assist where you can. Medical and forensic squads are inbound.”
Thalia coughed again. Some part of that smoke haze came from the burned fabric of Mercy Sphere, but the rest was a sooty suspension of barbecued flesh. The flavour of it was new and ancient at the same time, as if her brain had always been primed to recognise it.
“Ma’am,” she said, swallowing hard.
“Why haven’t they sent a hyperpig?”
The question came not from Jane Aumonier, but from the Mendicant who had arrived alongside Thalia. A middle-aged human woman with ash-smeared skin and eyes slitted and inflamed by the smoke.
Her goggles brought up her name from Panoply’s register of citizens.
“I was the nearest when the alarm came in, Sister Drusilla. It could have been any one of us, a human or hyperpig prefect. We make no distinction.”
“Words for my benefit, or is your superior listening in? Let me address Jane Aumonier personally.” Staring directly at Thalia, Sister Drusilla pushed steel into her voice. “This attack against us was a foregone event. We’ve been warning of such a thing for six months, begging for greater protection. Why did you not listen?”
“Tell her that we did listen, but that our resources are not infinite,” Aumonier interjected.
“There are just a thousand of us,” Thalia offered. “That’s a thousand of us to cover every possible threat in the Glitter Band, anything that can’t be managed by the constables. With the best will in the world, we can’t be everywhere at once. And since the Cranach crisis blew up . . .” She winced at her own ill-judged choice of words. “We’re tallying multiple threats and multiple possible targets, and with each escalation the problem gets worse.”
Sister Drusilla surveyed the carnage surrounding them: the burned, twisted, charred and smoking bodies, the melted architecture, the damage caused by secondary fires and explosions as the chain of destruction played out.
She touched a hand to the snowflake stitched across her chest.
“So, your policy is to stand back and observe . . . until such threats are acted on?”
“I wish I could offer more, Sister.”
“That’s the best you have, a wish?”
“Do not apologise for a system forced on us by the democratic will of the citizenry,” Aumonier interjected.
Thalia salted some authority into her reply. “Be grateful that we’re here at all, Sister. My colleagues will shortly be arriving in force. Rest assured our investigation will be extremely thorough. I must ask: did you have much warning before the capsule docked?”
“What difference does it make, now that the harm’s done?”
“With respect, Sister, that’s for me to decide. Was there anything unusual?”
A sigh. “We had a few minutes’ warning—the usual pattern. When escapees flee to us, they rarely have time to put elaborate plans in place. Of course, our suspicions have been heightened with the threats made against us—that’s why we’ve been pleading for more protection—but everything about this capsule seemed genuine.” Despair broke through her mask. “If there’s something we missed, something we should have seen . . .”
“There won’t have been,” Thalia said firmly. “The ones who did this to you would have made sure of that.”
“How long will it take you to identify them?”
“We’re already working on that problem. We think they used a nonvelope to conceal the capsule’s movements until it was very close to you.”
“I have no idea what that is.”
“A sort of invisibility screen, made from a quickmatter shell. It’s contraband technology, but easily within the grasp of hundreds of families and concerns in the Glitter Band.”
“But you will find them.”
Thalia groped for an answer that was neither a lie nor promised too much. “This attack was part of a pattern of escalating grudges, drawing in many actors. We’ll seek to identify all culpable elements. Our greatest concern, though, is to stop the violence on all fronts.”
“You’ve dodged my question.”
“We will bring our resources to bear,” Thalia affirmed. “And none of us will rest until you have an answer.”
“Well handled, Ng,” came the voice in her ear.
Thalia unholstered her whiphound, displaying it to Sister Drusilla. “I’m going to send this device off to gather evidential traces. You needn’t be alarmed by it.”
Sister Drusilla scoffed. “I’ve just seen my best friends burn alive, Prefect Ng. They’re in my nostrils. Do you imagine much is capable of alarming me now?”
Thalia didn’t answer. She flicked out the whiphound’s traction filament and sent it scurrying away, a busy blur of flickering silver.
Jane Aumonier floated weightless, taking in the audiovisual stream from Thalia Ng.
The large, spherical room in which she hovered had a single continuous inner surface, wrapping it from pole to pole. A mosaic of feeds quilted the surface: images and status summaries of the ten thousand orbital habitats under her responsibility. She even allowed room for the dozen or so that had seceded during the breakaway crisis. Panoply had no formal jurisdiction over those wayward states, but she still considered them her children.
Behind the quilt, algorithms churned ceaselessly. They evaluated metrics from each feed and assigned an attentional weighting to each habitat. As events played out, certain feeds swelled and magnified, while others shrank into the background, diminishing to tiny chips of colour. If a development demanded that a feed be brought to her immediate notice, then the entire quilt would move, creating a dizzy sense of the entire universe spinning around the floating woman at its focus.
That was exactly what had happened with Mercy Sphere.
The structure was an outstation of Hospice Idlewild, operated by the same order of Ice Mendicants. It was a beacon of kindness, a shrine to a way of living in which hyperpigs and baseline humans were considered equals, and given every opportunity to coexist, thrive and prosper. Tolerance, openness and forgiveness were the norms. It was a model of a better Glitter Band, one Aumonier hoped to live long enough to see.
Naturally, it had become a target.
Six months earlier, one of their own—a hyperpig prefect named Mizler Cranach—had launched a murderous and unprovoked suicide attack on a habitat. As the spill-out from the incident intensified, Aumonier had naturally moved to upgrade her surveillance on potential targets like Mercy Sphere. The problem was that there were just too many plausible candidates for any one of them to merit special attention. Too many candidates, too few prefects, even fewer ships to move them around in.
Hindsight was a wonderful thing.
“Completing sweep of segment one, ma’am,” came Ng on her earpiece. “The worst of the fatalities were here, but segment two also took a lot of damage. There are reports of fatalities right through to segment three. I’m moving through now.”
“Thank you, Ng. You won’t be on your own in there much longer. Heavy Technical and Medical squads should be clamps-on inside . . .” Aumonier stopped. “I’ll call you back, Ng.”
“Ma’am?”
“A situation, Ng. Continue as you were.”
Between one second and the next, an entirely different feed had swelled up to dominate the room.
It was impossible. The algorithms had made one of their rare glitches… surely?
Because what could possibly overshadow the events at Mercy Sphere, not even an hour into the atrocity?
Something had, though.
“Stadler-Kremeniev,” Aumonier said, reading aloud as the feed helpfully annotated itself. “I know you,” she mouthed, some faint connection pricking her memory. “Now what is it . . .”
But she did not need to speculate. Next to a real-time image of the grey, wheel-shaped habitat, the annotation was already answering her next question.
A prefect—Ingvar Tench—was on her way to Stadler-Kremeniev.
And Jane Aumonier’s blood ran cold.
She tapped her earpiece.
“Aumonier to Ingvar Tench. Respond immediately, please.”
Silence.
“Ingvar. Answer me. If you can’t answer me, change course.”
She eyed the status summary, willing some alteration.
Nothing changed.
“Dock Attendant.”
A thin male voice answered her immediately. “Thyssen, ma’am. How may I help you?”
“Very quickly, I hope. Ingvar Tench appears to be on her way to a watchlisted habitat, Stadler-Kremeniev. Were you on duty when she signed out?”
“Yes, ma’am, eight hours ago. I was keeping an eye on the schedules, making sure we had a docking slot available for her.”
“Did she go out alone?”
“Yes. Tench was her usual talkative self. And she didn’t make any mention of visiting anyone or anything on a watchlist.”
“Thyssen, I need you to take control of Tench’s vehicle. Do it immediately. Get that ship steered onto any heading except Stadler-Kremeniev.”
“One moment, ma’am.”
She heard Thyssen delegating to subordinates in the docking bay. Voices batted back and forth. They were normal at first, but after a few exchanges she detected a gradually rising concern.
Something wasn’t right.
“Thyssen?” she pressed.
“We can’t stop that cutter,” he said. “She’s going to dock.”
Dreyfus was knee-deep in a mob of angry babies.
Technically they were not babies at all, but rather adult-age humans who had undergone forced developmental regression to an infant body-template, surrendering most of their higher mental faculties along the way. They lived in a world of basic needs and responses: hunger, joy, rage, with just a thin smear of language and comprehension on top, just enough to satisfy the basic requirements of democratic participation, and to earn reciprocal status as full and valued citizens of the Glitter Band, with all the rights that came with that association.
Dreyfus knew all that. As far as he was concerned, though, and especially now that he was in the thick of them, they were still angry babies.
He had planned a straightforward in-and-out, no complications. The thoroughfares of the Grevenboich Spindle had been almost empty when he came through on his way to the polling core. He had gone about his business without molestation. The checks had come back clear, and he had begun the journey back to the docking hub.
Which is when it had all gone wrong.
Without warning, thousands of infant-sized citizens had spilled into the civic core of the habitat. At first, Dreyfus had assumed that he was the object of their concern. But as more and more of them arrived—coming in on moving walkways, escalators and miniature public transit systems —he realised that their interest in him was transitory, a mere detail to be absorbed on the way to something else.
