The Prefect (60 page)

‘How are we doing, evacuation-wise?' asked Dreyfus, rubbing at his eyes.

‘If I might ...' Baudry began, clutching a compad as if it was the only thing in the universe she could depend on. ‘The Toriyuma-Murchison Spindle contains ... contained ... five hundred and eleven thousand citizens. According to docking staff, we've now processed four hundred and sixty thousand, leaving a surplus of—'

‘Fifty-one thousand,' Dreyfus said, before Baudry could finish. ‘How long until we get them out?'

‘Local constables report a non-compliance level of one per cent. I'm afraid we'll just have to abandon them - we don't have time to argue with people if they really don't want saving. As for those still awaiting transport, our current estimate predicts complete evacuation within four hours, twenty minutes, assuming we can get the liners in and out without incident.'

‘There's a liner docked now?' Dreyfus asked.

‘Not a high-capacity vehicle. The biggest ship we have on-station is the medium-capacity liner
High Catherine.
She can carry six thousand at a time, but she takes a long time to load. The larger ship we've been using, the
Bellatrix,
can take ten thousand, but we're also using her to offload people from the Persistent Vegetative State.'

‘Why are we risking the lives of living citizens to save a bunch of self-induced coma-cases?' Clearmountain asked.

‘Because they're citizens as well,' Aumonier snapped. ‘No one gets priority treatment here. Not on my watch.'

‘It's a moot point in any case,' Baudry said, for Clearmountain's benefit. ‘Even if we reassigned the
Bellatrix
to deal solely with the evacuees from the Toriyuma-MurchisonSpindle, we still wouldn't get them all out in time.'

‘Correct,' Aumonier said. ‘Weevil contact is anticipated in ... fifty-five minutes, eleven seconds. With local constables tasked to assist in the evacuation at the docking hubs, the weevils will have a clear run to the polling core. If events follow the pattern we've already seen, the Toriyuma-Murchison manufactory is scheduled to start weevil production in under ten hours.'

‘Then the evacuees still have all that time,' Dreyfus said. ‘We can get them out.'

‘I'm sorry,' Aumonier said, her image looking at him as if no one else was in the room, ‘but what we're dealing with here is akin to a state of plague. So far as we know, Aurora can seize control of habitats by reaching their polling cores. What we don't know is what other capabilities she might have up her sleeve if we give her the chance to try them out. I cannot run the risk of letting her hop from habitat to habitat by another means. And that includes evacuation vehicles.'

‘But Jane—'

‘We keep moving them out until the absolute last moment,' she said. ‘But the instant weevils make groundfall on Toriyuma-Murchison, I'm pulling out the liners.' Just to be absolutely clear to all concerned, she added: ‘Even if there are still people in the docking tubes.'

‘And then what?' Dreyfus asked, even though he knew what she was going to say.

‘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.

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.