The Prefect

  ‘We nuke. We remove one of Aurora’s stepping stones.’

  ‘There’ll still be tens of thousands of people inside the Spindle.’

  ‘About thirty-five thousand, if the Bellatrix can get in and out one more time. But there’s no other way, Tom. We’ll target the manufactory first, of course, but we’ll have to hit it so hard to take it out completely that we might as well be attacking the entire habitat. We’ll have ships standing by in case, but I’m not expecting survivors.’

  ‘There must be another way.’

  ‘There is. We could nuke the six habitats Aurora already holds, and the two she’s about to take. That would stop her. But then we’d be talking about killing several million people, not just tens of thousands.’

  ‘Taking out that one habitat won’t necessarily stop her.’

  ‘It’ll inconvenience her. I’ll settle for that for now.’

  ‘This is bigger than Panoply,’ Dreyfus said desperately. ‘We need to call in assistance. Anyone who has a ship and can help.’

  ‘I’ve issued requests for help through the usual channels. Maybe something will arrive, but I’m not counting on it.’ She hesitated, her attention still fixed only on him. Dreyfus had the feeling that he was participating in a private conversation, to the exclusion of everyone else in the room. ‘Tom, there’s something else.’

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m going to have to take down polling and abstraction services, Bandwide. There’s just too much danger of Aurora utilising the network for her own purposes.’

  ‘She spreads by weevil.’

  ‘The weevils are her main agents, but we don’t know for sure that she isn’t using other channels to assist in her spread. I’ve already received a mandate to use all emergency powers at our disposal. That means authorisation to commit mass euthanisation if it means saving other lives. It also means I can take down the networks.’

  ‘We’ll need those networks to coordinate our own efforts.’

  ‘And we’ll retain skeletal data links for just that purpose. But everything else has to go. It’s the only way to be sure.’

  Dreyfus examined his thoughts. It startled him to realise that he was less shocked by Aumonier’s planned use of nuclear weapons than he was by the idea of blacking out the entire Glitter Band. But the fact of the matter was that for most of the ten thousand habitats, life was continuing more or less as normally. Some of the citizens would be aware of the crisis, but many would be completely insulated from it, snug in the hermetic cocoons of their private fantasy universes. That wouldn’t necessarily change when Panoply started nuking. But no one - save the citizens of the Bezile Solipsist State, or the Persistent Vegetative State, or the harsher Voluntary Tyrannies - could fail to notice the withdrawal of Bandwide data services. Reality was about to give them a cold, hard slap in the face, whether they liked it or not.

  The lights were about to go out across the Glitter Band. There was no choice: it had to be done.

  ‘Just do one thing for me,’ Dreyfus said, ‘before you pull the plug. Tell them Panoply isn’t giving up on them. Tell them that we’re going to be outside, fighting, and that we won’t let them down. Tell them not to forget that.’

  ‘I will,’ she said.

  CHAPTER 26

  Thalia’s trembling hands nearly dropped the whiphound as she finished weakening the final support spar in the sphere of the polling core. It had been agonisingly slow, and not just because the whiphound had grown too hot to hold for more than a minute at a time, even with a scarf wrapped around her palm. The weapon’s sword function had begun to falter, the filament occasionally losing its piezoelectrically maintained stiffness, the molecular cutting mechanisms losing some of their efficacy. The whiphound had ghosted through granite as if she was cutting air with a laser, but now towards the end she had to strain every muscle to persuade the filament to keep working its way through the structural members. The ninth had been the worst; it had taken nearly half an hour just to cut partially through, so that the strut would give way when she detonated the whiphound in grenade mode.

  ‘Is that enough?’ she whispered, even though the sound of the buzzing, crackling whiphound seemed loud enough to render whispering pointless.

  ‘It’d better be,’ Parnasse said. ‘I don’t think that thing of yours is good for much more cutting.’

  Thalia retracted the filament. ‘No, I don’t think it is.’

  ‘I guess we’d best just thank Sandra Voi that that thing held out as long as it did. Only has to do one more thing for us now.’

  ‘Two things,’ Thalia said, remembering that she still intended to sabotage the polling core. ‘Show me where we have to place it, anyway.’

  ‘Anywhere around here should do the trick. A centimetre’s not going to make the difference between life and death.’

  Thalia placed the bundled whiphound under one of the weakened spars. ‘Like here?’

  ‘That’ll do, girl.’

  ‘Good. I should be able to find this spot when I come down again.’

  ‘How does grenade mode work on that thing?’

  Thalia eased aside the wrapping surrounding the shaft until she had revealed the whiphound’s twist-controls. ‘You twist that dial to set the yield. I’ll turn it to maximum, obviously. It’ll give us about point one to point two kilotonnes, depending on how much dust’s left in the power bubble.’

  ‘And time delay?’

  ‘Those two dials there, in combination.’

  ‘How long a delay will it give you?’

  ‘Long enough,’ Thalia said.

  Parnasse nodded wordlessly. They had done what they could down there, and while it might have been possible to weaken one or two more struts, Thalia doubted that they had the time. The barricade teams were already reporting that the noise of the servitors was louder than it had ever been, suggesting that the machines were only metres from breaking through. Thalia had heard them while she had been cutting. They had begun to climb past the top of the stalk, into the sphere itself. We’ve probably get less than an hour, she thought. Even thirty minutes might be pushing it now. And that was without considering the war machines that she believed were planning to ascend the outside of the stalk, or even the inside of the elevator shaft.

  Thalia and Parnasse climbed back through the forest of structural supports until they reached the ceiling door that led into the lowest inhabitable section of the sphere. A minute later they reached the floor of the polling core, where most of the party were now awake and nervous, aware that something was afoot but as yet ignorant of Thalia’s plan.

  They had questions for her, but before she spoke to them, Thalia moved to the nearest window and looked down towards the very base of the stalk. She noted, with a knife-twist of apprehension in her stomach, that the concentration of military-grade servitors was now much less than it had been before. It could only mean that most of the machines were now ascending the stalk, working with methodical inevitability towards the level of the polling core.

  ‘Call off the work squad,’ she told Caillebot. ‘Tell them to drop what they’re doing and get back up here.’

  ‘Why?’ he asked. ‘What about the barricade? Someone needs to keep watch on it.’

  ‘Not now they don’t. It’s served us well but we won’t be needing it any more.’

  ‘But the machines are getting close.’

  ‘I know. That’s why it’s time we got out of here. Get the squad, Jules. We don’t have time to debate this.’

  He stared at her, frozen as if on the verge of framing an objection, then turned and descended the short staircase down to the next level, where the current barricade team was still doing what they could to reinforce the obstruction.

  ‘What’s going to happen?’ asked Paula Thory, standing up from the sprawl of clothes that she had made into a makeshift bed.

  ‘We’re getting out of here,’ Thalia said.

  ‘How? You’re not expecting us to climb down those stairs, are
you? We can’t very well fight our way past those machines.’

  ‘We won’t be fighting our way past anything. If all goes well, we won’t have to deal with a single servitor. Before you know it, we’ll be outside House Aubusson, in clear space, waiting to be rescued.’

  ‘What do you mean, in space? None of us have suits! We don’t have a ship. We don’t even have an escape pod!’

  ‘We don’t need an escape pod,’ Thalia said carefully. ‘We’re in one.’

  Dreyfus noticed that Aumonier was clenching and unclenching her hands, her chest rising and falling with deep breaths. ‘I thought you’d appreciate some company,’ he said. ‘In person, I mean.’

  ‘Thank you, Tom. And yes, you’re right. I do appreciate it.’ She paused. ‘I just issued that statement, by the way - including your remarks.’

  ‘They needed reassurance.’

  ‘They did. You were right.’

  ‘Have we gone dark yet?’

  ‘No - I’m holding off on removing network services until we’ve finished with the Spindle. I want the citizens to know that we’re dealing with something bad, but that we’re doing all in our power to keep as many of them safe as we can.’

  ‘Won’t seeing the Spindle nuked to kingdom come scare them half to death?’

  ‘More than likely. But if it means they start listening to local constabulary, it’s a price worth paying.’

  Dreyfus looked at the largest screen. ‘How long now?’

  ‘Three minutes.’

  Three minutes until the weevil flow hit the Toriyuma-Murchison Spindle, he thought. Panoply ships had done what they could to thin or deflect the flow, but their efforts had proved almost entirely ineffectual. They were only holding station now in case there were survivors after the Democratic Circus had done her work.

  The deep-system cruiser hovered aft of the Spindle, two missiles locked on target and armed, dialled to a yield high enough to take out the as-yet-dormant machinery of the habitat’s manufactory. Panoply had always had a contingency procedure in place for the act of destroying a habitat, and the crew would have run through such a scenario many times during training. The sequence, from the issuing of the command to the firing of the weapons, was supposedly immune to error. It required not just the authorisation of the supreme prefect, but also a majority of seniors. Mechanisms even existed to deal with the possibility of sudden changes in rank due to death or injury, so that the order could still be given even if there’d been a direct attack on Panoply.

  And yet, Dreyfus thought, the crew wouldn’t have been human if they didn’t at least consider the possibility that the order was erroneous, or had originated through malicious action. They were being asked to do the one thing that cut against everything Panoply stood for. Like a surgeon putting out his hand to receive a scalpel, and being handed a gun instead.

  But they’d do it, he thought. They’d allow themselves that one flicker of doubt, and then they’d get over it. The protocol was watertight. No mistake was possible: if the order had come in, then it was logically guaranteed that it had been issued by the supreme prefect herself, with the approval of her seniors.

  The crew had no choice but to act upon it.

  ‘One minute thirty,’ Aumonier said. Then her tone shifted. ‘Tom: I’ve been meaning to ask you something.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘It may be a difficult question. You may be uncomfortable about answering it truthfully.’

  ‘Go on anyway.’

  ‘Is something happening? Something I don’t know about?’

  ‘What kind of something?’

  ‘I’ve been hearing sounds. I’ve been in this room for eleven years, Tom, so I’ve become quite astonishingly attuned to my surroundings. I’ve almost never heard any noises from elsewhere in Panoply, except for today.’

  ‘What kinds of noises?’

  ‘The kinds of noises people make when they’re trying very hard to do something without making any sound. Something that involves heavy machinery and tools.’ She faced him directly. ‘Is something going on?’

  He’d never lied to her, in all the years they’d known each other. Never lied, or bent the truth, even when that would have been the kinder thing to do.

  Today he chose to lie.

  ‘It’s the mouth bay,’ he said. ‘The launching rack was damaged when one of the cruisers came in too hard. They’ve been working around the clock to get it back into shape.’

  ‘The mouth bay is hundreds of metres away, Tom.’

  ‘They’re using heavy equipment.’

  ‘Look at me and say that.’

  He met her gaze steadily. ‘It’s the bay. Why? What else do you think it might be?’

  ‘You know exactly what I think.’ She glanced away. He couldn’t tell whether he’d passed or failed the test of her scrutiny. ‘I’ve been trying to get Demikhov to talk to me. He’s using every excuse in the book not to return my calls.’

  ‘Demikhov’s been busy. That business with Gaffney—’

  ‘All right, so he’s been busy. But if you knew something was happening ... if you knew they were planning something ... you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Dreyfus said.

  Except now.

  ‘It’s time,’ she said, returning her attention to the display. ‘Weevil contact in three ... two ... one. Impact is confirmed. They’ve made groundfall.’ She raised her arm and spoke into her bracelet. ‘This is Aumonier. Detach the Bellatrix and instruct her to proceed at full-burn. Repeat, detach the Bellatrix.’

  They still had cam feeds from the docking hub of the Toriyuma-Murchison Spindle. Hundreds of people were still crammed into the boarding tubes, being ushered aboard the waiting liner. Dozens of constables, marked by their armbands,were assisting in the boarding process. Dreyfus already knew that many constables had elected to remain inside the Spindle rather than leave on earlier evacuation flights. A few hours earlier they’d just been ordinary citizens, going about their daily lives.

  ’Bellatrix is secured for space,’ Aumonier said, reading a text summary on her bracelet. ‘She’s moving, Tom. She’s undocking.’

  The feed had locked on to a single boarding corridor. The viewpoint was from inside a transparent-walled tube filled with civilians, constables and servitors, floating in an unruly multicoloured jumble. The vast, white, porthole-sprinkled side of the Bellatrix loomed beyond the glass, huge and steep as a cliff. And the cliff was starting to move: pushing away from the tube with a dreamlike slowness. At the far end of the tube, hundreds of metres from the cam, Dreyfus made out a sudden puff of silvery white vapour escaping to vacuum. He presumed that the airlock doors had closed, but a small amount of air had been sacrificed into space.

  The Bellatrix kept receding. He focused on the golden glow of her airlock. Formless debris spilled out. Something was wrong there, he realised. The liner’s outer doors should have closed by now.

  ‘Jane ...’ he began.

  ‘They can’t close the doors,’ she said numbly. ‘The locks on the Bellatrix are jammed. Too many people are trying to squeeze through.’

  ‘It’s not just the liner,’ Dreyfus said.

  Air was still rocketing into space from the end of the docking tube. But now it was carrying people with it, sucked out by the force of decompression. It started at the far end and then raced up the tube, towards the cam. Dreyfus watched in horror as the people nearest the cam realised what was coming. He saw them scream and reach for something to hold on to. Then it hit them and they were just gone, as if they’d been rammed down a syringe by an invisible plunger.

  He watched them spill into space by the hundreds: civilians, constables, machines, clothes, possessions and toys. He watched the people-shaped things thrash and die.

  The cam greyed out.

  Another feed showed the Bellatrix turning, giving a view along its white flanks. The outrush from the open airlock had ceased. Interior doors must have closed.

  ‘She’s on drive,’
Dreyfus said. The liner’s quadruple engines cranked wide, spitting tongues of pink fire. The enormous vessel hardly appeared to move at first. Gradually, though, the slow but sure acceleration became apparent. The Bellatrix began to put distance between itself and the habitat. Departing from the Spindle’s forward docking hub, the liner would have the entire bulk of the habitat between it and the fusion explosion when the missiles hit home.

  Aumonier lifted her bracelet again. ‘Connect me to the Democratic Circus,’ she said, barely breathing before speaking again. ‘Captain Pell: allow the Bellatrix to achieve ten kilometres. Then you may open fire on the habitat’s aft assembly.’

  Since the Bellatrix was maintaining a steady half-gee of thrust, it took only sixty seconds for the liner to reach the designated safe distance. By then, all surrounding habitats - those that hadn’t already been taken by Aurora - were on a state of high defensive alertness, anticipating not just the electromagnetic pulse of each nuclear strike, but also the likely risk of impact debris. For Dreyfus the seconds slowed and then appeared to stall altogether. He knew that Aumonier would have preferred to give the liner more space, but she was mindful of the weevils escaping and doing more harm if they waited. The evacuees aboard the Bellatrix would just have to hope that the shielding between them and the engines would serve to protect them from the worst effects of the blast.

  A voice, rendered small and reedy in transmission, spoke through her bracelet. ’Pell, Supreme Prefect. Bellatrix has cleared safe-distance margin.’

  ‘You already have my authorisation to fire, Captain.’

  ‘I just wanted to be certain that nothing’d changed, Ma’am.’

  ‘Nothing’s changed. Do your job, Captain Pell.’

  ‘Missiles launched and running, Ma’am.’

  The cam feed switched to a long-range view of the Toriyuma-Murchison Spindle. With distance foreshortened by the cam angle, the Bellatrix almost appeared to be still docked.

  The missiles surged in, etching two bright streaks of exhaust fire, as if they’d gashed open space to reveal something luminous and clean behind it.

  They detonated.