The Prefect Read Online Free PDF Page A

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’s suspicions that Aumonier was right about who had done this. But they’d need more than just suit readings to make a case.
    â€˜I’ve found something,’ Sparver said suddenly, when they had drifted several tens of metres apart.
    â€˜What?’
    â€˜There’s something big floating over here. Could be a piece of ship or something.’
    Dreyfus was sceptical. ‘Inside the habitat?’
    â€˜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’s 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.
    â€˜What do you make of it?’ Sparver asked.
    â€˜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