Alastair Reynolds: The Prefect

Veitch's answer came more slowly this time, his words slurred. He sounded like a man on the edge of unconsciousness.

"I woke up once and your pig was still here. Saavedra was already gone. When I came around the second time, the pig was gone as well. Before I passed out the first time, he said something about taking care of Gaffney."

Dreyfus absorbed that. As gladdened as he was to hear that Sparver was alive, he was troubled by the other prefect's intentions.

"Where did Saavedra go?"

"I don't know. Why don't you go and ask her?"

"Veitch?" Dreyfus asked, a little later.

But this time there was no answer.

"Good for you," Dreyfus said, under his breath.

It was dark when Sparver finally found his way to the surface again, his suit donned hastily, sacrificing the armour he would have needed assistance to lock into place. Much of Ops Nine had collapsed during the attack, but the sloping tunnel by which he and Dreyfus had entered was still intact, and with care he had been able to ascend through the facility and squeeze past the obstructions on his way, using his suit's power to force open the surface doors. For once being a hyperpig had been to his advantage; he doubted very much that a fully armoured and suited baseline human would have been able to navigate some of the crawlspaces he'd had to pass through, especially not while dragging a Breitenbach rifle.

When he'd first regained consciousness, Saavedra had been about to leave the collapsed room, intending to find a way to restore the Clockmaker's containment. Sparver knew then that he had to get out of that room, even if it meant abandoning Dreyfus for the time being. He'd talked Saavedra into handing over the ammo cells she had confiscated earlier and clipped to her belt, telling her that he would attempt to take down Gaffney – or whoever it was – on his own. Saavedra obviously hadn't liked the idea of giving him access to weapons, but she presumably liked the idea of the attacker going unpunished even less. Eventually she'd relented and Sparver had taken the cells, watched Saavedra go and then lain very still while the room suddenly resettled, filling with pale dust and pinning him temporarily again before he worked loose and made his exit. He'd found the suit and weapon near the sculpture on the atrium level, right where he and Dreyfus had been ambushed what felt like a lifetime ago.

He emerged from the sloping ramp, crouching low as he passed through the toothlike formation of icicles. Overhead, the sky surged with the unbridled energy of a storm, clouds billowing and flickering with electrical discharges and strange, seething shifts in local atmospheric chemistry. Yet above the roar of the wind and thunder, his suit was conveying another sound to his ears. It was high-pitched and steady: the shrill whine of engines. Still using the upper slope of the ramp for cover, he knelt with the rifle between his knees and scanned the howling dark sky. It was not very long before he made out the hovering form of the cutter, poised nose-down like a stabbing dagger, with its hull-mounted weapons deployed and ready. Sparver guessed that Gaffney was loitering over the remains of Ops Nine with the intention of catching the Clockmaker making its escape. Whatever firepower had yet to be discharged would be directed in a single berserk frenzy of concentrated destruction. Perhaps Gaffney had no real expectation of killing the Clockmaker, but he would certainly be hoping to maim it.

Sparver flipped open the Breitenbach's weather cover, exposing the muzzle with its delicate battery of plasma emitters and laser-confinement optics. He powered-up the weapon, mindful that the cutter might be sniffing the local electromagnetic environment. The weapon ran through its start-up cycle, then signalled readiness. Sparver settled the long barrel of the rifle onto his shoulder, bazooka-style. A portion of his faceplate filled with a sighting reticle, superimposed over a view of the rifle's current target. Sparver eased back on his haunches until the hovering cutter bobbed into the middle of the reticle. He squeezed a stud on the side of the primary grip, telling the weapon to lock on to this target. A red bracket pulsed around the cutter, signifying target acquisition. Instantly Sparver felt the suit stiffen and adjust his posture for him. The rifle had assumed command of the power-assisted suit; it was using it as an aiming platform, with Sparver just going along for the ride.

The cutter's engine note shifted. Sparver watched the ship rotate and then start to drift in his direction. Its weapons slewed slowly towards him, like a nest of snakes moving in unison. The cutter must have detected him. Gaffney was scouting closer, not wanting to discharge his weapons against a false target. The rifle, tracking the moving ship, made Sparver's suit adjust his position. A stutter of light erupted from the side of the hull. A rain of slugs tore into the upper lip of the ramp entrance, dislodging the icicles just before the lip crumbled away entirely. Sparver took a hit above one knee, a glancing shot that must have ricocheted off the ground. The impact nearly floored him, but his suit wasn't holed.

He fired the rifle, squeezing off three closely spaced pulses before regaining control of his suit and falling back into cover. Confirmed hit, the weapon informed him.

He peered back over the rim. The cutter was still airborne, but it wasn't doing any more shooting. The engine note had become erratic. The weapons were jerking around haphazardly, locking on to dozens of false targets. Sparver resettled the rifle on his shoulder and fired another three shots, this time relying on his own aiming ability. Crimson light poured from the hole he'd blown in the side of Gaffney's ship. The engine note quietened to silence.

The cutter dropped.

A second or so later, Sparver felt the impact slam through the ground. He braced, but there was no explosion. He waited a decent interval, then hauled himself from the cover of the shattered ramp and made his way across the pulverised ground, keeping the rifle aimed nervously ahead of him. The cutter had come down a kilometre away, close to the main entrance point to Ops Nine, where Saavedra would have docked and hidden her own ship. When Sparver reached it he found that the cutter had buried the front three metres of its nose in the frost, urine-coloured rivulets of melted methane-ammonia snow dribbling away from the impact point. The airlock was open, the outer door blasted off and lying to one side some metres away. The inner door was also open, revealing the faintly glowing interior of the crashed vehicle. Sparver's suit started warning him that radiation levels were above tolerable norms. He ignored its protestations and used a handy boulder to climb into the shell. He pointed the rifle into the interior, using its sighting facility to see around the corner. But it only took a glance to confirm that the cutter was empty.

Gaffney was missing.

"Even for a cockroach, you take a lot of killing," Sparver said.

Dreyfus snapped to consciousness again. He had no recollection of sliding back under, although he did remember that he had been about to make another attempt to free himself of the table. Perhaps the pain, or simply the exertion, had been enough to loosen his hold on the waking world. Either way, once more he had no clear idea of how much time had elapsed; whether it was seconds or minutes or hours.

"Stay still," a woman's voice told him.

"You're safe now.". He realised that he wasn't pinned under the table any more, and that the overall blanket of pain had dampened to a vague numbness. His ears were still ringing, his eyes still watering, but he did not feel any worse off than when he had been speaking with Veitch.

"Paula?" he asked, recognising the voice as Saavedra's, and that she was standing to one side of the bed or couch upon which he was resting.