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    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.
    â€˜Got something?’ Sparver asked.
    â€˜Probably. If it was a drive beam that did it, this metal will have mopped up a lot of subatomic particles. There’ll be spallation tracks, heavy isotopes and fragmentation products. Forensics can tell us if the signatures match a Conjoiner drive.’
    Now he’d said it, it was out in the open.
    â€˜Okay, but no matter what forensics say, why would Ultras do this?’ Sparver asked. ‘They couldn’t hope to get away with it.’
    â€˜Maybe that’s exactly what they were hoping to do - cut and run. They might not be back in this system for decades, centuries even. Do you think anyone will still care about what happened to Ruskin-Sartorious by then?’
    After a thoughtful moment, Sparver said, ‘You would.’
    â€˜I won’t be around. Neither will you.’
    â€˜You’re in an unusually cheerful frame of mind.’
    â€˜Nine hundred and sixty people died here, Sparver. It’s not exactly the kind of thing that puts a spring in my step.’ Dreyfus looked around, but saw no other easily accessible forensic samples. The analysis squad would arrive shortly, but the really heavy work would have to wait until the story had broken and Panoply were not obliged to work under cover of secrecy.
    By then, though, all hell would have broken loose anyway.
    â€˜Let’s get to the polling core,’ he said, moving his suit out of the cut. ‘The sooner we leave here the better. I can already feel the ghosts getting impatient.’

CHAPTER 3
    Whether by accident or design - Dreyfus had never been sufficiently curious to find out - the four main bays on the trailing face of Panoply conspired to suggest the grinning, ghoulish countenance of a Hallowe’en pumpkin. No attempt had been made to smooth or contour the rock’s outer crust, or to lop it into some kind of symmetry. There were a thousand similar asteroids wheeling around Yellowstone: rough-cut stones shepherded into parking orbits where they awaited demolition and reforging into sparkling new habitats. This was the only one that held prefects, though: barely a thousand in total, from the senior prefect herself right down to the greenest field just out of the cadet rankings.
    The cutter docked itself in the nose, where it was racked into place alongside a phalanx of similar light-enforcement vehicles. Dreyfus and Sparver handed the evidential packages to a waiting member of the forensics squad and signed off on the paperwork. Conveyor bands pulled them deeper into the asteroid, until they were in one of the rotating sections.
    â€˜I’ll see you in thirteen hours,’ Dreyfus told Sparver at the junction between the field-training section and the cadets’ dormitory ring. ‘Get some rest - I’m expecting a busy day.’
    â€˜And you?’
    â€˜Some loose ends to tie up first.’
    â€˜Fine,’ Sparver said, shaking his head. ‘It’s your metabolism. You do what you want with it.’
    Dreyfus was tired, but with Caitlin Perigal and the implications of the murdered habitat dogging his thoughts, he knew it would be futile trying to sleep. Instead he returned to his quarters for just long enough to step through a washwall and conjure a change of clothing. By the time he emerged to make his way back through the rock, the lights had dimmed for the graveyard shift in Panoply’s twenty-six-hour