Alastair Reynolds: The Prefect

"You did say it would be a simple matter?"

"For once, yes. The correction isn't anything like as complicated as the alteration that introduced the fault in the first place. Just a few thousand lines that need changing. Having said that, I'd still like to run the first few installations manually, just to iron out any unanticipated issues due to different core architectures. Once I'm satisfied, we can go live across the entire ten thousand."

Gaffney looked sharply at Thalia.

"It's clear that we need to get this whole mess tidied up as quickly as possible. By the time the Perigal lockdown becomes binding – as I have no doubt it will – I want us ready to begin implementing the upgrade. The special evidential board has access to the summary packages?"

"Since this morning, sir."

Gaffney took out a handkerchief and dabbed at the perspiration glistening on his forehead.

"On past form we can expect their decision within ten days. Can you match that?"

"We could go live in two, sir, if you demanded it. I'm confident that the tests won't throw up any anomalies."

"We were confident last time," Gaffney reminded her.

"Let's not make the same mistake twice."

But there's a difference between then and now, Thalia thought to herself. She hadn't been on the team when the last upgrade was made. She couldn't speak for her predecessors, but she would never have allowed that error to slip through.

"We won't," she said. Dreyfus took in the scene of the crime from the vantage point of a Panoply cutter. It would have been quick, he reflected, but perhaps not fast enough to be either painless or merciful. The habitat was a corpse now, gutted of pressure. When whatever gouged that wound had touched the atmosphere inside the shell, it would have caused it to expand in a scalding ball of superheated air and steam. There'd have been no time to reach shuttles, escape pods or even armoured security vaults. But there'd have been time to realise what was happening. Most people in the Glitter Band didn't expect to die, let alone in fear and agony.

"This isn't looking good," Sparver said.

"Still want to go in, before forensics catch up with us?".

"We may still be able to get something from hardened data cores," Dreyfus answered, with gloomy resignation. He wasn't even confident about the cores.

"What kind of weapon did this?".

"I don't think it was a weapon.".

"That doesn't look like any kind of impact damage to me. There's scorching, suggesting some kind of directed energy source. Could the Conjoiners have dug out something that nasty? Everyone says they have a few big guns tucked away somewhere.". Dreyfus shook his head.

"If the Spiders wanted to pick a fight with an isolated habitat, they'd have made a cleaner job of it.".

"All the same – ".

"Jane has a shrewd idea of what did this. She just isn't happy about the implications.". Dreyfus and Sparver passed through the cutter's suitwall into vacuum, and then through a chain of old-fashioned but still functional airlocks. The locks fed them into a series of successively larger reception chambers, all of which were now dark and de-pressurised. The chambers were full of slowly wheeling debris clouds, little of which Dreyfus was able to identify. The internal map on his face-patch was based on the data Ruskin-Sartorious had volunteered during the last census. The polling core – which was likely to be where any beta-levels had been sequestered – was supposedly on the sphere's inside surface near the equator. They would just have to hope that the beam had missed it. The main interior spaces – the two-kilometre-wide Bubble had been partitioned into chambered habitat zones – were charred black caverns, littered only with heat-warped or pressure-mangled ruins. Near the cut, traceries of structural metal were still glowing where the killing beam had sliced through them. It appeared that the Bubble had been a free-fall culture, with only limited provision for artificial gravity. There were many places like that in the Band, and their citizens grew elegant and willowy and tended not to travel all that much. Sparver and Dreyfus floated through the heart of the sphere, using their suit jets to steer around the larger chunks of free-fall debris. The suits had already begun to warn of heightened radiation levels, which did nothing to assuage Dreyfus' suspicions that Aumonier was right about who had done this. But they'd need more than just suit readings to make a case.

"I've found something," Sparver said suddenly, when they had drifted several tens of metres apart.

"What? "

"There's something big floating over here. Could be a piece of ship or something."

Dreyfus was sceptical.

"Inside the habitat?"

"See for yourself, Boss."

Dreyfus steered his suit closer to Sparver and cast his lights over the floating object. Sparver had been right in that at first glance the thing resembled a chunk of ship, or some other nondescript piece of large machinery. But on closer inspection it was clear that this was nothing of the sort. The blackened object was a piece of artwork, apparently only half-finished.

Someone had begun with a chunk of metal-rich rock, a potato-shaped boulder about ten or twelve metres across. It had a dark-blue lustre, shading to olive green when the light caught it in a certain fashion. One face of the boulder was still rough and unworked, but the other had been cut back to reveal an intricate sculptural form. Regions of the sculpted side of the boulder were still at a crude stage of development, but other areas gave the impression of having been finished to a very high degree, worked down to a scale of centimetres. The way the rock had flowed and congealed around the worked-in areas suggested that the artist had been sculpting with fusion torches rather than just cutting drills or hammers. The liquid forms of the molten rock had become an integral part of the piece, incorporated into the composition at a level that could not be accidental.

Which didn't mean that Dreyfus had any idea as to what it represented. There was a face emerging from a rock, that of a man, but oriented upside down from Dreyfus' present point of view. He spun the suit around and for a moment, fleetingly, he had the impression that he recognised the face, that it belonged to a celebrity or historical figure rather than someone he knew personally. But the moment passed and the face lost whatever sheen of familiarity it might have possessed. Perhaps it was better that way, too. The man's expression was difficult to read, but it was either one of ecstasy or soul-consuming dread.

"What do you make of it?" Sparver asked.

"I don't know," Dreyfus said.

"Maybe the beta-levels will tell us something, if any of them turn out to be recoverable." He pushed his suit closer and fired an adhesive marker onto the floating rock so that forensics would know to haul it in.

They moved on to the entry wound, until they were hovering just clear of the edge of the cut. Before them, airtight cladding had turned black and flaked away, exposing the fused and reshaped rock that had formed the Bubble's skin. The beam had made the rock boil, melt and resolidify in organic formations that were unsettlingly similar to those in the sculpture, gleaming a glassy black under their helmet lights. Stars were visible through the ten-metre-wide opening. Somewhere else out there, Dreyfus reflected, was all that remained of the habitat's interior biome, billowing away into empty space.

He steered his suit into the cleft. He floated down to half the depth of the punctured skin, then settled near a glinting object embedded in the resolidified rock. It was a flake of metal, probably a piece of cladding that had come loose and then been trapped when the rock solidified. Dreyfus unhooked a cutter from his belt and snipped a palm-sized section of the flake away. Nearby he spotted another glint, and then a third. Within a minute he had gathered three different samples, stowing them in the suit's abdominal pouch.