The Prefect (32 page)

The battle between whiphound and servitor had become a blur of furious metal. Thumb-sized pieces of severed machine parts sprayed in all directions. The whiphound must have impaired the servitor's guidance system, for it was moving erratically now, swerving from side to side. A larger length of severed tentacle came spinning out of the maelstrom. The sound of the battle was like a hundred lashes being administered in unison against rusted steel. The servitor slowed, one of its legs severed. Blue-grey smoke belched from under the gold carapace.

Perhaps it was going to work, Thalia dared to think.

Then something dark came winging out of the chaos, flung aside by the tentacles. It was the handle of the whiphound, trailing a line of limp filament. It thudded at Thalia's heels, a buzzing sound coming from the handle, the tail twitching spasmodically.

The servitor was still approaching.

Thalia slowed as a cold, clear thought shaped itself. The whiphound was damaged, useless as a weapon now except in one very terminal sense. Thalia stopped, spun on her heels and grabbed at the handle. There was a gash in the casing, exposing obscene layers of internal componentry, things she had never been meant to see. The handle was warm, and every time it buzzed she felt it tremor in her hands. The tail drooped in a plumb line.

Thalia twisted the knurled dials at the end of the handle, bringing two tiny red dots into alignment. The dots lit up and started pulsing.

The tail sped back into the housing. The black handle was still buzzing in her hand, but the training slammed home with the icy clarity of something that had been burnt into muscle memory by agonising repetition.

She flung the whiphound. It left her hand, following a smooth arc towards the still-approaching servitor. She had aimed it to land just ahead of the machine, directly in its path. Too close and the manipulators would have time to pick it up and fling it aside. Too early, and it wouldn't do enough damage. She'd have liked the luxury of requesting maximum yield, but while that would have taken care of the advancing machine, it wouldn't have done wonders for Thalia or her party.

One second.

‘Get down!' she shouted, preparing to fling herself against the ground.

Two seconds.

Suddenly the servitor wasn't moving. The smoke was billowing out in greater intensity. It was fatally damaged, Thalia thought. The whiphound had done its job, and now she was going to waste it by having it blow up unnecessarily, when the servitor was already immobilised.

Three seconds.

‘Rescind!' Thalia shouted. ‘Rescind!'

Four seconds. Then five. The whiphound lay still on the ground. Six seconds oozed into seven. The grenade order had been cancelled, but she could still not shake the sense that she had created a bomb, one that was now compelled to detonate, much as a sword must draw blood before it could be returned to its scabbard.

She crept back towards the whiphound, knees wobbling underneath her. The damaged servitor was still twitching its manipulator tentacles, brushing the gravel only a few centimetres from where the handle had fallen. The citizens were looking back, no doubt wondering what she was doing. Thalia knelt and reached out, fingers advancing gingerly towards the damaged whiphound. The servitor's tentacles stirred and made one last-ditch effort to trap her, but Thalia was faster. Her hand closed around the warm handle of the whiphound and snatched it back. She almost fell on her haunches, before pushing herself to her feet. She quickly turned the arming dials back to their neutral settings.

‘What now?' Caillebot asked, his hands on his hips. The party had stopped; they were all looking at her, not so much expecting guidance as demanding it.

Thalia clipped the damaged handle to her belt. It continued to buzz and tremble. ‘We can't go on. It'll be too risky with the whiphound the way it is.'

‘I say we just surrender ourselves to Thesiger's constables,' Caillebot said. 'What do we care if they're machines or people? They'll look after us.'

‘Tell them,' Parnasse said, nodding in Thalia's direction.

Her mouth was dry. She wanted to be anywhere other than here, in this situation, with nothing to protect her or her party but one damaged whiphound.

‘Tell us what?' Meriel Redon asked, fear staining her voice.

Thalia wiped gravel dust from her hands onto the hem of her tunic. It left grey finger smears. ‘We're in trouble,' she said. ‘Worse trouble than I wanted you to know. But Citizen Parnasse is right - I can't keep it from you any longer.'

‘Keep what?' Redon asked.

‘I don't think Thesiger is in control. I think that's just a ruse to get the citizens to accept the machines. My guess is Thesiger is either dead, already rounded up or fighting for his life. I don't think there are any human constables active inside Aubusson.'

‘Meaning what?' the woman persisted.

‘The machines are running things now. The servitors are the new authority. And they've started killing.'

‘You can't know that.'

‘I can,' Thalia said. She pushed sweat-damp hair back from her forehead. ‘I've seen where they bury the bodies. I saw a man ... he was dead. He'd been killed by one of those things. Butchered by a machine. And he was being hidden somewhere we wouldn't see him.'

Cuthbertson took a deep breath. ‘Then what we were doing ... trying to get out of here ... that was the right thing to try. Wasn't it?

‘It was,' Thalia said. ‘But now I see I was wrong. We'd never have made it with just one whiphound to protect us. It was a mistake. My mistake, and I'm sorry. We shouldn't have left the stalk.'

They all looked back at the slender tower, with the windowed sphere of the polling core still gleaming against the blue-hazed pseudo-sky of the habitat's opposite wall.

‘So what do we do now?' Caillebot asked.

‘We get back up there,' Thalia said, ‘as fast as we can, before more machines arrive. Then we secure it.'

If luck had been against them in their attempt to leave the museum campus, it held until they were back inside the cool, shadowed silence of the stalk's lobby. No machines had arrived to block their way, or shepherd them to be detained with the prisoners on the lawn. On one level, it felt as if many hours had passed since the loss of abstraction and the first hints that this was more than just a technical failure. But when Thalia checked the time she was dismayed to see that less than forty minutes had passed since she had completed her upgrade. As far as Panoply was concerned, she wouldn't even be overdue yet, let alone a matter for concern. Help might arrive eventually, but for now - and quite possibly for hours to come - Thalia was on her own.

As if to emphasize how little time had passed, the elevator car was still waiting in the lobby. Thalia beckoned the others inside, the doors snicking closed behind them. Her voice sounded ragged, on the slurred edge of exhaustion and burnout.

‘This is Deputy Field Prefect Thalia Ng. Recognise my voiceprint.'

After an agonising wait - which could only have been a fraction of a second - the door answered her.

‘Voiceprint recognised, Deputy Field Prefect Ng.'

‘Take us up.'

Nothing happened. Thalia held her breath and waited for movement, that welcome surge as the floor pushed against her feet. Still nothing happened.

‘Is there a problem?' Caillebot asked.

Thalia whirled on him with vicious speed, all her tiredness wiped away in an instant. ‘What does it look like? We're not moving.'

‘Try again,' Parnasse said calmly. ‘Could be it didn't understand you the first time.'

‘This is Thalia Ng. Please ascend.' But still the elevator refused to move. ‘This is Deputy Field Prefect Thalia Ng,' she said again. ‘Recognise my voiceprint!'

This time the elevator stayed mute.

‘Something's broken,' Parnasse said, still keeping his voice low and disengaged, as if he was commenting on the action rather than participating in it. ‘I suggest we consider using the stairs instead.'

‘Good idea,' Meriel Redon said. ‘I'm starting to feel locked in here—'

‘Try the doors,' Parnasse said.

Thalia pressed her hand against the manual-control panel. Her palm was cut and bruised from her battle with the servitors, tiny chips of stone still embedded in her skin.

‘No dice. They aren't opening.'

‘Try again.'

Thalia already had. ‘Nothing doing. I don't suppose asking nicely's going to help either.'

‘You could try.'

With a sense of futility, she said, ‘This is Thalia Ng. Open the doors.' She hammered the panel again. ‘Open the doors.
Open the fucking doors!'

‘Machines,' Cuthbertson said.

They all followed his gaze, through the trelliswork doors, across the shadowed emptiness of the lobby to the daylight beyond, where a squad of servitors glinted and shone as they made a slow but deliberate approach towards the stalk. There were eight or nine of them, all of different designs, wheeling, perambulating or sliding, with manipulators and cutting tools raised high.

‘They've trapped us,' Caillebot said, marvelling. ‘They let us get back here because they knew we'd take the elevator. That was another of your ideas, Prefect.'

‘Do you want to shut up now, or after I've rammed this down your throat?' Thalia asked, unclipping the buzzing warm handle of her whiphound.

The leading machines had reached the shadow of the overhang sheltering the wide doorway leading into the lobby. Three marbled steps led up to the level of the main floor, where the lift was situated. The walking machines began ascending the steps with slow but deliberate intent.

Thalia felt the whiphound tremble in her grip, as if its heart was racing.

‘You already said it was damaged,' Caillebot said. ‘How much use is it going to be against all those if it could barely hold back two?'

Thalia thumbed the heavy control that invoked sword mode and hoped that there was still enough functionality left in the whiphound to spool out and stiffen its filament. The handle buzzed like a trapped wasp; nothing happened. She thumbed the control again, willing the whiphound to respond.

The filament inched out, the buzzing intensifying. Ten centimetres, then fifteen. Twenty before it reached its limit. But it appeared to be rigid and straight.

Thalia sliced into the black metal trelliswork of the elevator doors. She felt more resistance than when she had cut through the hedge, but that was only to be expected. Keeping her cool, knowing that nothing would be gained from panicking, she worked her way methodically across and then down. She directed the whiphound blade back up to the point where she had started, the last few cuts taking almost as long as the dozen or so that had preceded them. Then the rectangle of trelliswork clattered outwards onto the marble floor. The servitors had already reached the top of the stairs and were beginning to cross the expanse of the lobby. Two of the ambulatory machines were even assisting one of the wheeled variants over the obstacle of the steps.

‘The stairs,' Thalia said. ‘Run like hell, and don't stop running until you get to the top.'

Thalia moved with the party, but kept herself between them and the machines. She walked backwards, facing the servitors, holding the damaged whiphound in front of her. She had turned the arming dials into alignment again, ready to throw the broken weapon as a grenade. But as her heels touched the stairs, something made her change her mind. Nothing would be gained from attacking these machines now; more would always follow.

Thalia clipped the whiphound back onto her belt and started climbing the stairs behind the others.

Gaffney experienced a moment's hesitation as he clipped the safe-distance line to his belt. How easy it would be to fail to secure the latch, so that the line snapped off just when he reached its maximum extension. Then he would sail on through the boundary of the exclusion volume, into the sphere of space around Jane Aumonier into which the scarab forbade the intrusion of all but the smallest of objects. Aumonier would have a second or two to register both the failure of the line and the Euclidean inevitability of Gaffney's onward progress. No force in the universe could stop him from colliding with her.

How fast would it be? he wondered. How clean, how merciful? He'd pondered the literature concerning sudden, non-medical decapitation. It was confusing and contradictory. Very few subjects had survived to testify to their experiences. There'd be blood, certainly. Litres of it, at arterial pressure.

Blood did interesting, artistic things in weightlessness.

‘Prefects,' Aumonier said as she became aware of the delegation's presence. ‘I wasn't expecting a visit. Is something the matter?'

‘You know what this is about, Jane,' Gaffney said, beginning his drift into the chamber. Next to him, Crissel and Baudry fastened their own safe-distance tethers and kicked off from the wall. ‘Please don't make it any more difficult than it already is.'

‘I'm not sure I understand.'

‘We've come to announce our decision,' Crissel said, in a regretful tone of voice. ‘You must stand down for the duration, Jane. Until the present crisis is averted, and the nature of the change in the scarab has become clear to us.'

‘I can still do my job.'

Baudry spoke next. ‘No one's doubting that,' she said. ‘Whatever else this is about, it has absolutely nothing to do with your professional competence, now or at any time in the past.'