Redemption Ark

The wall displayed a Mercator projection of Resurgam. The map had kept up with the terraforming program, showing small blotches of blue or green in addition to the unrelenting shades of grey, tan and white that would have been the case a century earlier. Cuvier was still the largest settlement, but there were now a dozen or so outposts that were large enough to be considered small cities in their own right. Slev lines connected most of them; others were linked by canals, roads or freight pipelines. There were a handful of landing strips, but there were not enough aircraft to permit routine journeys for anyone other than key government officials. Smaller settlements — weather stations and the few remaining archaeological digs — could be reached by airship or all-terrain crawler, but not usually in less than weeks of travel time.

Now a red light was winking up in the northeastern corner of the map, hundreds of kilometres away from anywhere most people had heard of. A field agent was calling in. Operatives were identified by their code numbers, winking next to the spot of light that denoted their position.

Operative Four.

The Inquisitor felt the short dark hairs on the back of her neck prickle. It had been a long, long time since she had heard from Operative Four.

She tapped a query into the desk, hunting and pecking for the stiff black keys. She asked the desk to verify that Operative Four was currently reachable. The desk’s readout confirmed that the red light had only come on in the last two hours. The operative was still on the air, awaiting the Inquisitor’s response.

The Inquisitor picked up the telephone handset from her desk, squeezing its sluglike black bulk against the side of her head.

‘Communications,’ she said.

‘Comms.’

‘Put me through to Field Operative Four. Repeat, Field Operative Four. Audio only. Protocol three.’

‘Hold the line, please. Establishing. Connected.’

‘Go secure.’

She heard the pitch of the line modulate slightly as the comms officer dropped out of the loop. She listened, hearing nothing but hiss.

‘Four…?’ she breathed.

There was an agonising delay before the reply came back. ‘Speaking.’ The voice was faint, skirling in and out of static.

‘It’s been a long time, Four.’

‘I know.’ It was a woman’s voice, one the Inquisitor knew very well. ‘How are you keeping, Inquisitor Vuilleumier?’

‘Work has its ups and downs.’

‘I know the feeling. We need to meet, urgently and in person. Does your Office still have its little privileges?’

‘Within limits.’

‘Then I suggest you abuse them to the fullest extent. You know my current location. There is a small settlement seventy-five klicks to the southwest of me by the name of Solnhofen. I can be there within one day, at the following…’ and then she gave the Inquisitor the details of a hostelry that she had already located.

The Inquisitor did her usual mental arithmetic. Via slev and road it would take in the region of two to three days to reach Solnhofen. Slev and airship would be quicker but more conspicuous: Solnhofen was not on any of the normal dirigible routes. An aircraft would be faster, of course, easily capable of reaching the meeting point within a day and a half, even if she had to take the long way around to avoid weather fronts. Normally, given an urgent request from a field agent, she would not have hesitated to fly. But this was Operative Four. She could not afford to draw undue attention to the meeting. But, she reflected, not flying would do precisely that.

It was not easy.

‘Is it really so urgent?’ the Inquisitor asked, knowing what the answer would be.

‘Of course.’ The woman made an odd henlike clucking sound. ‘I wouldn’t have called otherwise, would I?’

‘And it concerns her… the Triumvir?’ Perhaps she imagined it, but she thought she could hear a smile in the field agent’s reply.

‘Who else?’

CHAPTER 5

The comet had no name. It might once have been classified and catalogued, but not in living memory, and certainly no information relating to it was to be found in any public database. No transponder had ever been anchored to its surface; no Skyjacks had ever grappled themselves in and extracted a core sample. To all intents and purposes it was completely unremarkable, simply one member of a much larger swarm of cold drifters. There were billions of them, each following a slow and stately orbit around Epsilon Eridani. For the most part they had been undisturbed since the system’s formation. Very occasionally, a resonant perturbation of the system’s larger worlds might unshackle a few members of the swarm and send them falling in on sun-grazing orbits, but for the vast majority of comets the future would consist only of more orbits around Eridani, until the sun itself swelled up. Until then they would remain dormant, insufferably cold and still.