The nuclear explosion - the double bursts occurred too close in time to separate - whited out the cam view. There’d been no sense of the fireball expanding; it was just there, consuming everything in a single annihilating flash.
It happened in deathly silence.
All the displays in Jane’s room flickered momentarily as the electromagnetic pulse raced across the Glitter Band.
Then the whited-out view dulled through darkening reds until the background blackness was again visible, and something mangled and molten was drifting there, something that had once been a habitat, but which now resembled more the blackened, tattered remains of a spent firework. The nukes had destroyed the manufactory, but in doing so they’d blasted away at least a third of the habitat’s length, leaving the rest of the structure cracked open along structural fault lines. The air inside wouldn’t have had time to escape through those cracks before it became searingly hot. No one would have had time to suffocate, either. But they’d have had time to see the fire surging towards them, even as that fire burnt the eyes out of their sockets.
If only for an instant, they’d have known what had been done to them.
‘Status, Captain Pell,’ Aumonier said.
‘Initial indications suggest complete destruction of the manufactory. Bellatrix reporting minor damage, but no additional casualties. Likelihood of further survivors is ... low.’
‘That’s what I expected,’ Aumonier said, with almost infinite resignation. ’Destroy the rest of the habitat, Captain. I don’t want those weevils using it as a bridgehead even if they can’t make new copies of themselves.’
Dreyfus felt the weight of what they had just done squeeze in on him like a vice. In the time since he had last blinked, thirty-five thousand people had ceased to exist. He couldn’t focus on that kind of number, any more than he could focus on the nine hundred and sixty who had died in Ruskin-Sartorious. But he had seen the faces of the people in the Spindle’s docking tube; he’d seen their inexpressible terror when they knew that the air was going to suck them out into space and they were going to die, unpleasantly, with their lungs freezing into hard, cold husks before their hearts stopped beating. The face of one middle-aged woman came back to him now, even though she’d just been one of many people squeezed into the boarding tube. She’d been looking directly into the cam, looking - so it seemed to him now - directly at him, her expression one of quiet, dignified pleading, placing her utmost faith in him to do something about her predicament. He knew nothing of that woman, not even her name, but now she came to stand in his imagination for all the good and honest citizens who had just been erased from existence. He didn’t need to imagine her death multiplied by thirty-five thousand. The loss of one decent citizen was shame enough. That it had happened by Panoply’s hand made it all the more repellent.
But that didn’t mean Jane had been wrong to do it.
‘I never thought I’d have to do this,’ she said. ‘Now I’m wondering if I’ve just committed the worst crime in our history.’
‘You haven’t. You did the right thing.’
‘I killed those people.’
‘You did what you were meant to do: think of the majority.’
‘I haven’t saved them, Tom. I’ve just given them time.’
‘Then we’d better make it count, hadn’t we? If nothing else, we owe it to the citizens of the Spindle.’
‘I keep thinking: what if I’m wrong? What if they really will be better off under Aurora’s government?’
‘The people gave us the authority to protect them, Jane. That’s what we just did.’
Jane Aumonier said nothing. Together they watched as Captain Pell finished off the rest of the habitat. Now that there was no possibility of sparing survivors, the yields were dialled as high as they could go. The blasts snipped the remains of the Spindle out of existence.
Perhaps it was Dreyfus’s imagination, but he detected an easing in Aumonier’s mood when the evidence of her actions had finally been erased.
‘You know the hard part?’ she asked.
Dreyfus shook his head. ‘No.’
‘The hard part is we have to do exactly the same thing to the Persistent Vegetative State. By the end of the day I’ll be lucky if I have less than a hundred thousand dead on my hands.’
‘They’re not on your hands,’ Dreyfus said. ‘They’re on Aurora’s. Don’t ever forget that.’
She came to them shortly afterwards. Her transmission rode a secure Panoply-restricted data channel, one that remained active when the public networks were silenced and the citizens roused from the great dream of abstraction. The incoming data signal was subjected to ruthless scrutiny, but it was free of any hint of concealed subliminal influence or embedded weaponry. After consultation with the supreme prefect, it was concluded that nothing would be lost by displaying the image to the seniors gathered in the tactical room.
They found themselves looking at a girl: a child-woman on a throne wearing elaborate brocaded clothes. Her parted hair was reddish-brown, her expression watchful but not hostile.
‘It’s high time we spoke,’ Aurora said, in a strong, clear voice with excellent elocution.
‘State your demands,’ Jane Aumonier said, her projection addressing the image from her usual position at the table. ‘What do you want?’
‘I don’t want anything, Supreme Prefect, except your absolute capitulation.’
‘Keep her talking,’ Dreyfus mouthed. Panoply’s best network hounds were trying to backtrack the transmission all the way to Aurora herself, wherever she was hiding.
‘You must have demands,’ Aumonier persisted.
‘None,’ the child-woman said firmly, as if it was the answer to a parlour game. ‘Demands would imply that I need something from you. That is not the case.’
‘Then why have you contacted us?’ asked Lillian Baudry.
‘To make recommendations,’ Aurora replied. ‘To suggest a way in which this whole matter can be settled with the minimum of inconvenience to all parties, as swiftly and painlessly as possible. But make no mistake: I will succeed, with or without your cooperation. I am merely concerned that the citizenry should be subject to the least amount of disruption.’
‘You sound very confident of success,’ said Aumonier.
‘It is a strategic certainty. You have seen how easily I can take your habitats. Each is a stepping stone to another. You cannot stop the weevils, and you will not fire on your own citizens except as an absolute last resort. Ergo, my success is logically assured.’
‘Don’t be so sure of yourself,’ Aumonier replied. ‘You are still in a position of weakness, and I have no proof that you haven’t murdered all your hostages. Why shouldn’t I assume they’re all dead, and just destroy the habitats you now control?’
‘Be my guest, Supreme Prefect. Go ahead. Fire on those habitats.’
‘Give me proof that the citizens are still alive.’
‘What would be the point? You would rightly distrust anything I showed you. Conversely, even if I showed you a smoking ruin, the corpses of a million dead, you would suspect an ulterior motive, that I was encouraging you to attack for nefarious reasons of my own. You would still not fire.’
‘You’re wrong,’ Dreyfus said. ‘You can convince us that the people are alive in one very easy way. Let us speak to Thalia Ng. We’ll trust her testimony, even if we don’t trust yours.’
Something crossed her face - a moue of irritation, quickly suppressed.
‘You can’t,’ Aumonier said, ‘because you’ve either killed her, or she’s out of your control.’
One of the network analysts pushed a compad in Dreyfus’s direction. He glanced at the summary. They had narrowed down Aurora’s location to a locus of thirteen hundred possible habitats.
‘My concern is for the absolute welfare of the citizens,’ the child-woman said. ’Under my care, no harm will come to any of them. Their future security will be guaranteed, for centuries to come. The transition to this ne
w state of affairs can be as bloodless you wish. By the same token, all casualties incurred during the transition will be upon your conscience, not mine.’
‘Why do you care about people at all?’ Dreyfus enquired. ‘You’re a machine. An alpha-level intelligence.’
Her fingers tightened on the edges of her armrests. ‘I used to be alive. Do you think I’ve forgotten what it feels like?’
‘But you’ve been a disembodied intelligence for a lot longer than you were a little girl. Call me judgemental, but my instincts tell me your sympathies are far more likely to lie with machines than with flesh-and-blood mortals.’
‘Would you stop caring for the citizens if they were slower and weaker, stupider and frailer than yourself?’
‘We’d all still be people,’ Dreyfus countered. ‘Tell me something else, Aurora, now that you’ve confirmed your origin. Are there more of you? Were you the only one of the Eighty who survived?’
‘I have allies,’ she said cryptically. ‘You would be as unwise to underestimate their power as you would mine.’
‘But for all that power, there’s still something that scares you, isn’t there?’
‘Nothing frightens me, Prefect Dreyfus.’ She said his name with particular emphasis, making it clear that she knew of him.
‘I don’t believe you. We know about the Clockmaker, Aurora. We know how it keeps you from sleeping at night. It’s a machine intelligence stronger and quicker than you, even with your allies to back you up. If it got out, it would rip you to shreds, wouldn’t it?’
‘You overestimate its significance to me.’
‘It can’t be that insignificant. If you hadn’t destroyed Ruskin-Sartorious, none of us would have been any the wiser that you were planning this takeover. You’d have achieved your goal in one fell swoop, taking the entire ten thousand at a stroke. But you were prepared to risk everything to remove the Clockmaker. That doesn’t sound insignificant to me.’
The analyst drew his attention to the compad again. The locus of habitats had now shrunk to eight hundred candidates.
‘If you had control of the Clockmaker, you would have turned it against me already.’ She leaned forward slightly, her voice hardening. ‘In truth, you neither control nor understand it. Even if it was in your possession, you would fear to use it.’
‘That would depend on how much you provoked us,’ Aumonier said.
‘There has been no provocation. I have merely begun the process of relieving you of the burden of care of one hundred million citizens. I care about them more than you do.’
‘You murdered nearly a thousand people in Ruskin-Sartorious,’ Dreyfus answered. ‘You killed the prefects sent in to regain control of House Aubusson. That doesn’t sound like a very caring attitude to me.’
‘Their deaths were necessary, to safeguard the rest.’
‘And if it takes a million, or ten million? Would they be necessary deaths as well?’
‘All that matters is that no one else need suffer. We have already discussed the inevitability of my success. If you resist me, people will die. People will die anyway, because people panic and do irrational things and I cannot be held accountable for that. But there is a way to bring this to an immediate conclusion, with the absolute minimum of fatalities. You have my takeover code: it’s the instruction set your agent so helpfully installed in the first four habitats. Make it universal. Broadcast it to the rest of the ten thousand. I will have them all eventually; this way it will be with the least pain and bloodshed.’
‘You’re out of your mind,’ Aumonier said.
‘Then I shall give you an incentive. I am convinced that many millions of lives will be saved by speedy transition to my rule. So convinced, in fact, that I am prepared to sacrifice a certain number of citizens to underline my point. You have six hours, Supreme Prefect. Then I shall begin humane euthanisation of one in ten of the citizens already under my care.’ The child-woman eased back into her throne. ‘You may stop the deaths at any time by broadcasting the code to the ten thousand. If you choose not to, the deaths will continue. But my weevils will still give me the ten thousand, whatever you do.’
‘One hundred and thirty habitats,’ the analyst whispered in Dreyfus’s ear. ’We’re zeroing in.’
‘Before I sign off,’ Aurora said, ‘let me assist you in one matter. Doubtless you are trying to localise the origin of this transmission. If you are employing your usual search methods, you will have narrowed the field down to between one hundred and one hundred and fifty habitats by the time I utter these words. Were I to stay on the line, you would locate my point of origin inside two minutes. I’ll spare you the trouble, shall I? You will localise me to Panoply. I’m sure it’s one of your candidates.’
Dreyfus looked at the analyst. The analyst nodded briefly, his face losing colour.
‘I’m not really in Panoply. It’s a mirror bounce; very difficult to crack in the time I’m giving you.’ Aurora smiled slightly. ‘Just in case you were thinking of turning those missiles on yourselves.’
It had never exactly been day in House Aubusson - the dust-smeared window panels hadn’t let in enough light for that - but now even that half-daylight was sliding back into twilight, and another machine-stalked night would soon be upon them. Thalia supposed they had done well to last this long, but she could extract no comfort from the realisation. They had pushed their luck, that was all. They would not see another dawn unless they left Aubusson, and there was only one way that was going to happen.
She refrained from more detailed elaboration until Jules Caillebot had returned with the barricade squad. Paula Thory was almost incandescent with rage and incomprehension, and her mood was beginning to rub off on some of the others. But Thalia held her ground, standing with her arms folded in front of her. Nothing would be gained by showing even the slightest trace of doubt now. She had to appear in absolute command, utterly certain of success.
‘We’re leaving,’ she said as soon as Parnasse and Redon managed to quieten the party. ‘Cyrus and I have already made the preparations. We either do this or wait for the servitors to arrive. No one’s going to rescue us in the meantime.’
‘We can’t leave,’ Thory said. ‘We’re in a building, Prefect. Buildings don’t move.’
Without answering her, Thalia walked to the architectural model. It was now resting on the flat, damaged surface of the transparent casing that had once covered it. Between them, Meriel Redon and Thalia had removed most of the structures surrounding the stalk, corresponding to the actual demolition work that had taken place overnight.
Thalia reached into her pocket and removed the white ball that represented the sphere of the polling core, dusted it against her thigh and placed it gently atop the stalk. ‘For the benefit of anyone who hasn’t been paying attention, this is us. Machines are trying to get at us through the stalk, and more than likely they’re climbing up the outside as well. So we have to leave. Here’s how it’s going to happen.’
She touched a finger against the side of the ball and toppled it from the stalk. It dropped to the side and rolled away across the denuded grounds of the Museum of Cybernetics until it ran off the edge of the model and fell to the floor.
‘Oh. My. God,’ Thory said. ‘You’re insane. This isn’t going to happen.’
‘That... doesn’t look survivable,’ said Jules Caillebot.
‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ Thalia said. ‘For a start, we’re not going to just drop half a kilometre. We’re going to topple and roll. The sphere will travel down the side of the stalk, but it won’t ever hit the ground. The stalk widens near the base and then flares out until it’s almost horizontal. We’ll be moving fast, but there’s nothing to stop us rolling around the bend and continuing along a horizontal trajectory. It’s going to be bumpy, sure, but with the momentum we’ll have gained during the drop we should roll a long way, particularly as there isn’t much left out there to slow us down. We can thank the robots for that. If they’d left the surrounding sta
lks in place, we wouldn’t have a hope.’
‘Girl’s right,’ Parnasse said, standing next to Thalia with his arms folded and a look on his face that dared anyone to contradict him. ‘Structurally, the sphere’ll hold. We can expect to roll two, three kilometres before we run out of momentum.’
‘But surely we won’t be able to just roll off the stalk like that,’ said the young man in the electric-blue suit. ‘What do you want us to do? Run back and forth until we topple over?’
‘We’ve taken care of the rolling part,’ Thalia said. ‘Cyrus and I have weakened the connections between the stalk and the sphere. It’ll hold for another hundred years as it is, but I’m going to give it a little nudge in the right direction with my whiphound. I’ll set it to grenade mode, on maximum yield. It’ll give us a pretty big bang. It should sever the remaining connections and push us in the right direction. We’ll topple.’
‘We’ll be smashed around like eggs in a box,’ Caillebot said.
‘Not if we secure ourselves first.’ Thalia indicated the metal railings encircling the polling core. ‘You’re going to strap yourselves to these guards, as tight as you can. Meriel’s going to make sure everyone has enough clothing to do a good job. You’ll need to be secure during the roll. I don’t want anyone breaking loose when we end up upside down.’
‘Maybe I’m missing something,’ Caillebot said. ‘You talk of us rolling two or three kilometres.’
‘Correct,’ Parnasse said.
‘That isn’t going to help us much, is it? By the time we’ve unlashed ourselves, the robots will have caught up with us again.’
Parnasse glanced at Thalia. ‘I think you’d better tell them the rest, girl.’
‘The robots won’t be catching up with us,’ she said.
Caillebot frowned. ‘Why not?’
‘Because we’re not stopping. We said we could roll two or three kilometres. That should be enough to take us across the nearest window band.’
‘Oh no,’ Thory said, shaking her head. ‘Don’t even think—’
Thalia grimaced. She walked over to the woman and faced her down. ‘Here’s the deal, Citizen. I don’t have a fully functional whiphound any more. If I did, I’d run you through some of the more interesting things I can do with it. But I do have a pair of hands. If you make one more remark, if you open your mouth to speak, even if you so much as give me a funny look, I’m going to wrap those hands around that fat neck of yours and keep squeezing until your eyeballs pop into your lap.’