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 pol
ling 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 binocular 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.’
The wall displays froze abruptly. Bracelets chorused in unison. The Solid Orrery consumed the weevil and sprang up an enlarged representation of one of the two threatened habitats, a hubless wheel. ‘That’s Carousel New Brazilia,’ Baudry said. ‘Anti-collision systems have begun to engage the incoming flow of weevils. We can expect House Flammarion to begin similar engagements within the next fifteen minutes.’
‘How are our assets coping?’ Aumonier asked.
‘We only had time to place three corvette-class vehicles close enough to Brazilia to make a difference,’ Baudry said. ‘Frankly, their pinpoint weapons are next to useless against the scale of the flow. Even if we dropped a nuke into the middle of it, it would only take out a few thousand units. It’s like trying to stop a tsunami with a spoon.’
Aumonier answered calmly: ‘Then we need an alternative strategy.’
‘Our corvettes are standing by to concentrate their fire on the weevils once they make groundfall on the habitat. The war robots will need time to cut through or force their way in via docking apertures.’
‘Let’s assume we don’t stop them all. What happens if we lose Brazilia and Flammarion?’
‘Both habitats have manufacturies of their own,’ Dreyfus said, looking up from his compad. ‘If Aurora takes them, she’ll have two new sites of weevil production. From there she can start leapfrogging to new habitats.’
‘I’ve prepared a simulation on the Orrery,’ Baudry said. ‘There’s a lot of guesswork fed into it, obviously, but I can show you how things might progress under some reasonable assumptions.’
‘Go ahead,’ Aumonier said.
Baudry shrank the image of Carousel New Brazilia back down to its former size, so that it became simply one gemlike point moving in the stately swirl of the Glitter Band. With another gesture she turned all the points of light to the same emerald green, save for four scattered points of ruby.
‘These are the habitats Aurora now controls,’ Baudry said, before two more red points lit up, each located close to one of the other four points. ‘These are Brazilia and Flammarion, under the assumption that Aurora attains control. I now assume that both these new habitats become weevil-production centres with an output flow similar to what we’ve already seen. I assume also that each habitat concentrates its weevil output on one other habitat not yet in Aurora’s control, in accordance with what we’ve seen so far. I further assume that in twenty-six hours, a habitat can be attacked by weevils, brought under Aurora’s control and direct its own weevil flow against a designated target, crossing space until they make contact.’
‘Continue,’ Aumonier said.
‘In one day, we’ll have already gone from two compromised habitats to four. Those four habitats will each infect another neighbouring state, giving us eight infection sites by the end of the second day.’ As she spoke, the number of red lights increased in geometric fas
hion. ‘At the end of the third day, sixteen habitats. Thirty-two by the end of the fourth day. Sixty-four by the fifth. One hundred and twenty-eight by the end of the sixth: that’s more than one per cent of the entire Glitter Band.’
There were now too many red lights to count. They were still overwhelmed by the green lights, but the inevitability of the process was now painfully apparent.
‘How long…?’ Aumonier asked, voicing the question none of them wanted answering.
‘Fewer than half the states in the Glitter Band retain any kind of manufacturing capacity,’ Baudry said, ‘but that’s still over four thousand habitats. Aurora will have taken them all a few hours into the twelfth day. Even if we still hold the remainder by then, we’ll lose them very quickly. Aurora will have over four thousand weevil-production sites to turn against us. I doubt that we’d retain a single habitat by the end of the thirteenth day.’ She swallowed heavily. ‘That includes Panoply.’
‘And that assumption of twenty-six hours—’ Dreyfus began.
‘It’s guesswork, a number I pulled out of the air. Perhaps it’ll take longer than that. But even if it takes four days to leapfrog from one habitat to the next, she’ll still have beaten us within two months. It’s anyone’s guess how long Chasm City will be able to hold out, but I wouldn’t put odds on it lasting much longer than the Glitter Band.’
‘We can do something, though, surely,’ Aumonier said.
Baudry’s expression was that of someone burdened with terrible news. She reminded Dreyfus of a doctor about to deliver the most devastating of verdicts. ‘We can do something, yes. Now, while Aurora is still gaining a foothold, and before her efforts touch us. Let’s rewind the simulation back to day zero, today.’
Now there were just four habitats highlighted in red. ‘The weevil flows have reached Brazilia, and will make contact with Flammarion any minute now.’ Baudry glanced uneasily at her bracelet. ‘But for the next few hours — maybe even as long as a day — we’re only looking at four points of potential spread, if we assume the new habitats can be geared up to weevil production.’ Baudry tightened her fingers against each other. ‘Aurora is at her most vulnerable now. She has revealed herself, and therefore already played the element of surprise. But she has not yet consolidated enough territory to truly overwhelm us.’
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