Alastair Reynolds: The Prefect

"And then what?". Dreyfus grimaced as a spike of pain shot up his leg.

"Then I'll go after the Clockmaker, of course. Just because it was wronged doesn't mean it gets an exemption."

"Presupposing, of course, that this minor business with Aurora blows over. Or had that slipped your mind?".

"I'm not too worried about Aurora any more."

"Maybe you should be. The last time I checked, we were getting a whipping up there."

"The Clockmaker interrogated me," Dreyfus said.

"It grilled me on her capabilities, her nature. It wanted to know exactly what she was. Then it escaped. Doesn't that tell you something?".

"It's going after her.".

"It's at least as smart as she is, Sparv. Maybe smarter. And it has a very good reason to take her out of the picture."

"At which point we'll be left with the Clockmaker to deal with, instead of Aurora. Is that really an improvement?".

"It wants vengeance, not genocide. I'm not saying any of us are going to sleep easy with that thing out there, but at least we'll be sleeping. That wouldn't have been an option under Aurora.". Dreyfus and Sparver completed the last stage of their ascent. They passed through the collapsed remains of a subterranean landing area where Saavedra's cutter was still parked and waiting. A ceiling spar from the sliding weather cover that concealed the landing deck had pinned the ship to the ground. Sparver went aboard and tried to communicate with Panoply, but the cutter was dead.

"Don't worry," Dreyfus said.

"They'll come for us.". By the time they arrived on the surface, the storm had abated. The starless sky was a moving vault of poisonous black, but according to Sparver it had nothing of the howling ferocity of earlier. Unafraid now to stand on high ground, Dreyfus activated his helmet lamp and surveyed the fractured dark landscape, picking out suggestive details that made him flinch until he saw that they were merely conjunctions of ice and rock, light and shade, rather than the furtive presence of the Clockmaker. He sensed that it had left this place, putting as much distance as it could between itself and the magnetic prison of the tokamak.

"It must still be out there somewhere," Sparver commented.

"I don't know about that.".

"It can't have left the planet. It's a machine, not a ship.".

"It can take whatever form it wants to," Dreyfus replied.

"What's to say it can't change itself into anything it needs to be? I watched it manipulate its form right in front of me. Now that it's free of the cage, I wonder if there's anything it can't do.".

"It's still a thing. It can be tracked, located, recaptured.".

"Maybe."

"What are you thinking?" Sparver asked.

"Maybe it will have taken a leaf out of Aurora's book. An alpha-level intelligence is easy to contain if it confines itself to a single machine, a single platform. But it doesn't have to be like that. Aurora worked out how to move herself around, to embody herself wherever it suited her needs. What's to say the Clockmaker won't do likewise?"

"To meet her on her own terms, you mean?".

"If I was it, and I thought she wanted to kill me, that's what I'd do."

"That would also make it more difficult for us to kill it, wouldn't it?"

"There'd be that as well," Dreyfus admitted.

They stood in silence, waiting for something to come out of the sky and rescue them. Occasionally a strobing flash pushed through the darkness: evidence of lightning or – perhaps – something taking orbit around Yellowstone, something that had nothing to do with weather.

After a long while, Dreyfus started speaking again.

"I had a simple choice, Sparv. The nukes were available and ready to go. They'd have destroyed SIAM and taken out the Clockmaker. We'd already got Jane out, so we knew what it was capable of. We knew the things it could do to people even if it didn't kill them. And we knew there were still survivors inside that structure, people it hadn't got to yet. Including Valery."

"You don't have to talk about this now, Boss. It can wait."

"It's waited eleven years," Dreyfus said.

"I think that's long enough, don't you?"

"I'm just saying … I pushed you earlier. But I had no idea what I was doing."

"There was something else, of course. We still needed to know what we'd been dealing with. If we nuked SIAM without gaining any further intelligence on the Clockmaker, we'd never know what to do to stop something like it happening again. That was vital, Sparv. As a prefect, I couldn't ignore my responsibility to the future security of the Glitter Band."

"So what happened?"

"From the technical data we'd already recovered, and Jane's testimony, we knew that the Clockmaker was susceptible to intense magnetic fields. Nothing else – no physical barrier or conventional weapon

– seemed able to stop or slow it. I realised that if we could pin the Clockmaker down, if we could freeze it, we could get the surviving citizens out alive. That's when I knew we had to power up the Atalanta.".

"The Atalanta," Sparver echoed.

"It was a ship designed to undercut the Conjoiners in the starship-building business. Thing is, although it worked, it never worked well enough to make it economical. So they mothballed it, left it in orbit around Yellowstone while they worked out what to do with it. It'd been there for decades but was still perfectly intact, exactly the way it had been when it was last powered down."

"What was so special about this ship?"

"It was a ramscoop," Dreyfus said.

"A starship built around a single massive engine designed to suck in interstellar hydrogen and use it for reaction mass. Because it didn't have to carry its own fuel around, it could go almost as fast as it liked, right up to the edge of light-speed. That was the idea, anyway. But the drive system was cumbersome, and the intake field generated so much friction that the ship was never as fast as its designers had hoped. But that didn't matter to me. I didn't want the ship to move. I just wanted its intake. The scoop generator was fifteen kilometres across, Sparv: a swallowing mouth wide enough to encompass SIAM in its entirety."

"A magnetic field," Sparver said.

"I sent a Heavy Technical Squad aboard the Atalanta. We attached high-burn tugs to shift its orbit, to bring it close to SIAM. We couldn't get its reactors back on line fast enough, so we jump-started the

ramscoop using the engines on our corvettes. In an hour the field was building strength. In two we had it positioned around SIAM." Dreyfus paused, the words suddenly drying up in his mouth.

"We knew there was a risk. The human survivors in SIAM were going to be exposed to that same magnetic field. There was no telling what it would do to their nervous systems, let alone the implants most of them were carrying. The best we could do was to try to focus the field on the area where we'd last pinpointed the Clockmaker, and try to hold the field strength as low as possible elsewhere."

"It was better than just nuking. At least you gave them a chance."

"Yes," Dreyfus said.

"You said they survived. When you told me about it earlier."

"They did. But the effects of the field had been … worse than we feared. We froze the Clockmaker, recovered its relics, studied it as best we could and then retreated with the survivors. That took the rest of the six hours. Then we nuked. We thought we'd destroyed the Clockmaker, of course. In truth, it'd had packed itself down into one of the relics, waiting to be reopened like a jack-in-the-box."

"And the survivors?" Sparver asked eventually.

It took Dreyfus an equally long time to answer.

"They were all taken care of. Including Valery."

"They're still alive?"

"All of them. In Hospice Idlewild. The Mendicants were asked to look after a consignment of brain-damaged sleepers. They were never told where those people really came from."