Dreyfus remained impassive, but something in his expression must have given the game away.
‘The machines are mass-produced weevil-class war robots,’ Gaffney said. ‘Very simple, very rugged, with just enough autonomy to cross space between habitats. By itself, a single weevil can’t do much damage. But the manufactories are spewing them out by the hundreds of thousands. That’s a lot of weevils, Tom. Weight of numbers’ll get you in the end. Always does.’
‘What will the weevils do when they reach the other habitats? Cut their way inside and kill everyone?’
‘Given that the objective here is to preserve human life, that would be rather counterproductive, don’t you think?’
‘So what, then?’
‘The weevils are carrying copies of the same upgrade Thalia already installed in the first four habitats. Once they reach the target habitats, they’ll work their way inside and infect their cores with the same security hole. Aurora will then have complete control of six habitats, not four.’
‘Your weevils will have to reach the polling cores first. The local citizenry are already standing by to protect them.’
‘They’ll slow the weevils, but not stop them. There’ll always be more weevils. The manufactories won’t stop making them. And once Aurora gains control of another manufactory-equipped habitat, she’ll start producing weevils there as well.’
‘So we shut down the polling cores. Destroy them, even. Same with the manufactories.’
Again Gaffney looked apologetic, like someone who kept winning against a weaker opponent and was beginning to feel sorry for them. ‘Won’t work, either. Weevils are more than warriors. They’re general-purpose construction servitors. Can’t replicate, but there isn’t much else they can’t do. Build and integrate a new polling core? Matter of hours. I gave them the necessary blueprints. Repair a scuttled manufactory? Six hours. Maybe twelve. Ditto on the blueprints. Aurora’s covered all the bases, Tom. Why do you think I’d be telling you all this otherwise?’
‘I guess you may have a point there,’ Dreyfus said. Then he lifted up the cuff of his sleeve to reveal his bracelet. ‘Jane?’ he asked.
‘Aumonier,’ she replied, her voice reduced to a doll-like buzz.
‘The machines are weevil-class war robots. Someone needs to see what we have on them in the archive. Instruct the Democratic Circus to proceed with maximum caution. If they can bring one in intact, they should do so, but I don’t want to lose another deep-system cruiser without good reason.’
‘Copy, Tom,’ Jane Aumonier said.
He cuffed down his sleeve and surveyed the man on the bed. ‘Of course, if I find you were lying about any of that—’
‘I wasn’t lying. And that was spoken like a true leader, by the way. You should have heard yourself. Anyone would have thought you were the supreme prefect the way you dished out instructions to Jane.’
‘We have a good understanding. It’s called mutual respect.’
‘Sounded more like the natural assumption of authority to me. Perhaps you covet her job the same way Baudry and Crissel did?’
‘We weren’t talking about Jane.’ Dreyfus reached behind his back and unclipped the whiphound he had been keeping there, out of Gaffney’s line of sight. He brought it around in front of him and let the other man see what he was holding.
‘Oh, now that’s low. Did Doctor Mercier see you come in with that thing?’
Dreyfus whipped out the filament, letting it hiss against the floor. It sliced the quickmatter like a rapier through water, the floor material healing behind it almost instantly. ‘Don’t worry. It isn’t a Model C. Doesn’t have any of those fancy new features you were so keen to see installed.’
‘Are you going to kill me now?’
‘No. I’ll leave killing prisoners to the experts. I want you alive, Sheridan, so I can run a deep-cortex trawl while you still have some brain cells.’
‘Trawl me now. See how far it gets you.’
‘Sword mode,’ Dreyfus said, almost under his breath. The filament flicked to immediate rigidity. He swept it over Gaffney’s recumbent form, hard and fast enough to raise a whoosh of parted air. ‘I’ll spare you the sales pitch. You know what one of these can do in the wrong hands.’
‘I’ve told you everything.’
‘No, you haven’t. There’s an elephant in this room that you’re trying very hard to ignore, Sheridan. It’s called Ruskin-Sartorious. You set up the execution of that habitat, didn’t you?’
‘You know the Ultras were behind that.’
‘No,’ Dreyfus said patiently. ‘That’s what you wanted us to think. It had to look like an act of spite so we wouldn’t go nosing around trying to find the real reason. Dravidian and his crew were used, weren’t they? You got someone aboard their ship who knew how to manipulate the engines.’
‘Ridiculous.’
‘They would have needed expert insider knowledge of Conjoiner systems, but given that you already had a shipload of Conjoiners to torture, that wouldn’t have been insurmountable. The question is, why? What was it about Ruskin-Sartorious that mattered to you so much? Why did it have to burn?’ Dreyfus lowered the blade of the whiphound until it was almost touching the bruised skin of Gaffney’s throat. ‘Talk to me, Sheridan. Tell me why that had to happen.’
Gaffney said nothing. Dreyfus let the whiphound touch his skin until it drew a beetle-sized drop of blood.
‘Feel that, Sheridan?’ he asked. ‘It would only take a twitch of my hand to sever your windpipe.’
‘Fuck you, Dreyfus.’ But as he spoke, he appeared to submerge himself even further into the embrace of the bed, trying to lower his throat as far as possible from the whiphound’s blade.
‘You had those people executed for a reason. Here’s my shot at why. There was something about Ruskin-Sartorious, something about that family, or even about that habitat, that was threatening to Aurora. Something that she considered worth mass murder to get rid of. It must have been a major threat or she wouldn’t have risked drawing attention to herself when her plans were nearly in place.’ He let the whiphound bite deeper, drawing multiple droplets of blood. ‘How am I doing? Hot, cold, in the middle?’
‘Bring the fucking trawl,’ Gaffney said, his voice strangulated as he squeezed his neck even further into the bed. ‘See how far it gets you.’
Dreyfus let the filament skim back into the handle, cleansing itself of tiny droplets of blood as it did so. ‘You know what?’ he said as the fine pink fog settled back towards Gaffney. ‘That’s an excellent idea. I never did have the stomach for torture.’
Silver-grey daylight penetrated the dust-covered window bands of House Aubusson. Standing at one of the viewing portholes, Thalia contemplated an ashen landscape, utterly ravaged by machines. In contrast to the activity that had been evident through much of the night, all was still now. It had been many hours since she had last seen any kind of robot or construction servitor. The machines must have completed their work, picking the habitat clean of anything that might conceivably be useful for the churning manufactories in the endcap. Structures, vehicles, people: nothing of any utility had been left untouched, save for the polling core itself. Perhaps the servitors were even dismantling themselves now that the hardest work was over.
She picked grit out of the corner of her eye. How long did they have left now? She might not have seen any machines outside, but that didn’t mean they’d gone away. The barricade was still holding, but the servitors in the stalk were slowly dismantling it from the other side, working methodically and with a calmness that was somehow more frightening than if they’d come ripping through it at speed. No one could be certain how much of the barricade now remained, but Parnasse thought it unlikely that there was more than ten metres of obstruction left, and perhaps a lot less than that. They’ll be through in a matter of hours, Thalia thought. She was beginning to think it had been tempting fate to hope they could make it until the end of another day.
‘Well?’ she asked, as Parnasse joined her. �
��Have you looked into what we discussed?’
He pulled a disagreeable face. ‘I looked into it, like I said I would. And the more I looked, the less I liked it. I said I’d consider anything, even if it was near-suicidal. But this isn’t near-suicidal, girl. It’s the real deal.’
She spoke through clenched teeth, hardly moving her lips. She didn’t want anyone else to guess what they were talking about, even if they saw her expression reflected in the glass. ‘The machines are going to kill us, Cyrus. That’s guaranteed. At least this way we’d have a fighting chance.’
‘We haven’t even taken down the polling core,’ he said. ‘Shouldn’t we attempt that first, and see what happens? Maybe the machines will stop being a problem.’
‘And maybe they’ve acquired enough autonomy now that they can keep coming without receiving instructions. Face it: we don’t really know what their capabilities are.’
‘Can you take down the core?’
‘I think I can damage it,’ she said, nodding at her whiphound, which was waiting on a nearby chair. ‘But that may not be enough to stop all abstraction packets getting through. There’s a lot of self-repairing quickmatter in a core. It isn’t like cutting dumb matter.’
‘And to be sure?’
‘I’d have to blow it up. Problem is we only have one shot at that.’
His expression conveyed a mixture of exasperation and admiration. ‘And you want to keep the grenade mode for later, don’t you?’
‘Ignore the likelihood of our survival for the moment,’ she answered. ‘Just give me the facts concerning the technical side of the problem. Can we weaken the structural members sufficiently if all we have is the whiphound?’
‘You said it’ll cut just about anything, short of hyperdiamond?’
Thalia nodded. ‘Of course, it isn’t working as well as it should. But provided the filament stays rigid, it ought to be okay. It coped with granite, after all.’
‘Then you can probably do it, provided you follow through with a big bang, in exactly the right place.’
‘I don’t think the big bang’s going to be a problem.’
Parnasse scratched under his collar, looking conflicted. ‘Then if we get down into the base of the sphere we can reach what we need to cut. If we weaken the right members, and position the whiphound in exactly the right place, we can probably force the sphere to topple in the right direction. Emphasis on “probably”, girl.’
‘I’ll take what I’m given. And then? Will she hold, from a structural standpoint?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine.’
‘Everyone in here will need to be braced, lashed down. We need to plan for that now or there are going to be a lot of broken bones.’
‘Girl, I think broken bones will be the least of our worries.’
‘We need to start bringing some of the others in on the plan,’ Thalia said. When Parnasse said nothing, she added, ‘So that they can start making preparations.’
‘Girl, we haven’t agreed to this. We haven’t discussed it, or put it to the vote.’
‘We’re not putting it to the vote. We’re just doing it.’
‘Whatever happened to democracy?’
‘Democracy took a hike.’ She stared at him with fierce intent, brooking no dissent. ‘You know we have to do this, Cyrus. You know there’s no other choice.’
‘I know it, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.’
‘Even so.’
He closed his eyes, reaching some troubled conclusion. ‘Redon. She’s pretty reasonable. If we can bring her in, she can smooth it with the others, get them to see sense. Then maybe she can start explaining it to me.’
‘Talk to her,’ Thalia said, nodding at the sleeping, exhausted-looking woman. Meriel Redon was resting after having worked on the barricade shift and would probably not welcome being woken prematurely.
‘How much do you want me to tell her?’
‘The lot. But tell her to keep it to herself until we’ve made the preparations.’
‘Let’s hope she’s in an optimistic frame of mind.’
‘Just a second,’ Thalia said distractedly.
Parnasse narrowed his eyes. ‘What are you looking at?’
For the first time since the coming of day, movement in the landscape had caught her eye. She squinted for a moment, wondering if she’d imagined it, but just when she was ready to conclude that her mind was playing tricks on her she caught it again. She’d seen something dark move along what had once been the perimeter of the Museum of the Cybernetics, the motion furtive and scurrying. She thought of Crissel and his boarding party, of the black tactical armour of field prefects, and for a cruel instant she let herself imagine they were being rescued. Then she snapped the glasses to her face and zoomed in on the movement, and saw that it had nothing to do with prefects. She was looking at an advancing column of low, beetle-like machines, many dozens of them. They moved faster than any civilian servitor she had ever seen, tearing through or gliding over obstacles like a line of black ink running down a page.
‘What is it?’
‘Something bad,’ Thalia answered.
They were not civilian servitors, she realised. They were some kind of war machine, and they were working their way inexorably towards the polling core.
Terror nestled tighter in her stomach, as if it was making itself even more at home.
‘Tell me, girl.’
‘Military-grade servitors,’ she said. ‘I’m pretty sure, anyway.’
‘Must be some mistake. There was nothing like that here before.’
‘I know. It would have been a lockdown offence even to own the construction files.’
‘So where have they come from?’
‘I think we already know,’ she said. ‘They’ve been made overnight. There are probably bits of people in them.’
‘The manufactories?’
‘I think so. I can’t believe these are the only thing they’re spewing out - there’d have been enough material to make millions of them, which is obviously absurd. But at least we know what part of the production flow was meant for.’
‘And the rest?’
‘I’m too scared to think about it.’
Thalia turned back to the polling core. Perhaps Parnasse was right, that the time had now come to destroy it. The option had been at the back of her mind all along, after all. She believed that the core was playing a vital part in coordinating the activities of the machines via the low-level signals she had already detected. That was why the servitors had not already demolished the stalk, something that she knew would have been well within their capabilities. But she would not risk putting that theory to the test until she took the core out of action. If the machines were somehow able to keep running afterwards, it would all have been for nothing. She had not been prepared to take that risk until now, but the spectacle of the advancing war machines had changed everything.
She walked to the nearest chair and picked up her whiphound. It had become too hot to wear clipped to her belt and she could only tolerate holding it if she had a scarf wrapped around her palm. She let the filament extend and stiffen itself in sword mode, ignoring the buzzing protestation from the handle.
‘Are you going to do it?’ Parnasse asked.
‘I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s time.’
He steadied her trembling hand. ‘And maybe it isn’t. Like you said, girl - if chopping at this thing doesn’t do the job, we’d better have a pretty good back-up plan in place. Put the sword away for now. I’m going to test the water with Redon.’
CHAPTER 23
A portion of the Solid Orrery had been reassigned to emulate the three-dimensional form of a weevil-class war robot. The one-tenth-scale representation rotated slowly, the light of the room appearing to gleam off its angled black surfaces. In its space-travel/ atmospheric-entry configuration, the machine’s multiple legs and manipulators were tucked hard against its shell, as if it had died and shrivelled up. Its bino
cular sensor packages were contained in two grilled domes that bore an uncanny resemblance to the compound eyes of an insect.
‘They’re as nasty as they look,’ Baudry commented to the assembled prefects. ‘Banned under seven or eight conventions of war, last seen in action more than a hundred and twenty years ago. Most war robots are designed to kill other war robots. Weevils were engineered to do that and kill humans. They carry detailed files on human anatomy. They know our weak points, what makes us hurt, what makes us break.’ As she spoke, reams of dense technical data scrolled down the walls. ‘In and of themselves, weevils are containable. We have techniques and weapons that would be effective against them in both vacuum stand-off situations and in close-quarters combat in and around habitats. The problem is the number, not the machines themselves. According to the Democratic Circus, House Aubusson has already manufactured and launched two hundred and sixty thousand units, and the flow isn’t showing any signs of stopping. A weevil only weighs five hundred kilograms, and most of the materials required to make one would be commonplace inside a habitat like Aubusson. If the servitors inside the habitat work efficiently, they can easily supply all the feed materials necessary to build more just by dismantling and recycling existing structures inside the cylinder. We could be looking at an output of millions of weevils before the manufactories need to start eating into the structural fabric of the habitat. Then the numbers become unthinkable.’
‘Do we know for a fact that we’re dealing with weevils?’ Dreyfus asked.
Baudry nodded. ‘The Circus hasn’t secured a sample yet, but the scans are all on the nose. These are weevils, just as Gaffney told us. There’s no reason to doubt that they’re carrying the Thalia code.’
‘What about the rest of what Gaffney revealed?’ asked the projected head of Jane Aumonier, imaged on a curving pane of glass supported above an empty chair. ‘Do we believe that weevils are capable of hijacking a second habitat?’
Baudry faced her superior. ‘If Aurora has embarked on this strategy, chances are she has a high expectation of success. She already has intimate knowledge of security holes in the polling apparatus. There’s every reason to think she has the ability to seize another habitat if she can get weevils into it.’ All of a sudden Baudry looked shattered, as if the crisis had notched past some personal threshold of endurance. ‘I think we must assume the worst.’
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