The Prefect

CHAPTER 22

Dreyfus had asked to be alerted the instant Sheridan Gaffney regained consciousness. Mercier—who was now handling the patient following the fraught operation that had been mainly supervised by Demikhov—was predictably reluctant to let Dreyfus anywhere near the recuperating senior prefect.

“If you had any idea of the severity of the procedure he’s just gone through, the extent of the internal damage caused by the whiphound,” Mercier said, waving his hands graphically, his treasured fountain pen clutched like a dagger as he guarded the entrance to the medical centre.

Dreyfus looked at the doctor obligingly. He’d always had a good relationship with Mercier and was reluctant to jeopardise it now.

“I understand your concerns. They’re admirable. All I need to know is, can he talk?”

“He’s suffered severe laceration of the trachea. He has a damaged larynx. About all he can manage right now is a croak, and even that causes him great pain. Please, Tom. No matter what this man did, but he’s still a patient.”

“If we could wait, we would,” Dreyfus said, “but right now we’re in a situation where even an hour is too long. Gaffney has information vital to the security of the Glitter Band. I need to speak to him immediately.”

Mercier wilted, clearly aware that this was not a battle he could hope to win.

“You can force this through, can’t you?”

“I have Jane’s authority. Baudry’s, too, as if Jane’s isn’t enough. Please, Doctor. Minutes are ticking by while you and I debate the health of a man who was quite happy to murder another of your patients.”

Mercier looked disappointed.

“You think I didn’t put two and two together, Tom? I’m not that stupid. I guessed exactly what Gaffney did. But he’s still a sick man, no matter what he did to Clepsydra.”

Dreyfus placed a hand on Mercier’s green-sleeved forearm.

“I need to do this. Please don’t make it any harder.”

Mercier stepped aside.

“Do whatever you have to do. Then get out of my clinic, Tom. The next time you come here, you’d better be the one seeking medical help.”

Dreyfus stepped through into the recovery room. It was a spartan cube lit only by thin blue strips set into the upper walls. Gaffney was in a bed at one end of the cube, attended by a single medical servitor with a swooping white swan’s neck. The transparent passwall sealed itself behind Dreyfus, subtly changing the acoustics of the room. He walked to the bedside, then conjured his usual chair out of the floor. Gaffney’s face was an impassive mask, almost deathlike, but his eyes betrayed alertness. They tracked Dreyfus with reptilian intensity.

“No flowers?” Gaffney said, scratching the words out.

“That’s a surprise.”

“You’re more talkative than Mercier led me to expect.”

“What’s the use in not being talkative? You’re going to make me speak one way or another.” The words emerged dry as charcoal, each one forced out separately. Something horrible rattled down in his lungs.

Dreyfus tucked his hands together in his lap.

“We have a situation, Sheridan. I thought you might be able to shed some more light on it.”

“I told you everything I know.”

“We have a handle on Aurora now, but there’s still a lot more we’d like to know.” He checked his bracelet.

“Thirty minutes ago, House Aubusson and Szlumper Oneill began releasing clouds of manufactured entities into Glitter Band space. We’re still not sure what those entities are yet, but at least now we have some idea of where they’re headed. They’re not expanding in all directions. They’re moving in two directed flows, like wasps following a scent trail. In less than two hours, those flows will come into contact with two other habitats with combined populations exceeding six hundred and fifty thousand citizens. Do you want to speculate about what might happen when those flows touch the habitats?”

Gaffney’s expression hadn’t changed since Dreyfus had entered the room. His mask of a face was still fixated on the ceiling.

“If you’re so worried, why don’t you move the habitats?”

“You know we can’t change the orbit of a fifty-million-tonne structure just by clicking our fingers. We can’t stop the arrival of the flow of entities either: the individual elements might be vulnerable, but there are just too many of them. The best we can do is alert those habitats, get them to prepare their defences and initiate whatever kind of evacuation programme they have in place. We’ve already done that, of course, but given the time available, we’ll be lucky to offload more than ten thousand citizens by the time the flows hit.” Dreyfus leaned closer to the bedside.

“That’s why I’d really like to know what’s going to happen, Sheridan.”

“Then you’re shit out of luck, Tommy-boy.”

“I’m disappointed, Sheridan. You know better than any of us that there’s no sense in withholding information. We’ll get it out of you eventually, by hook or by crook. I have the authorisation to run a deep-cortex trawl, for one. Or I could go with one of those Model Cs so dear to your heart. See how you like a dose of enhanced subject compliance.”

“In my condition, how long do you think I’d last?”

“That’s a fair point,” Dreyfus conceded.

“So perhaps the trawl would be a safer bet. What would you go for, just out of interest?”

“I’m old-fashioned. Never could get on with trawls.”

Dreyfus nodded.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? I run a whiphound on you, you die before you spill your guts, end of story.”

“I could think of worse outcomes.”

Dreyfus unlaced his hands and tapped a finger against the side of his brow.

“Here’s what I don’t get, Sheridan. You’re a solid Panoply man, as good a prefect as any of us. What exactly did Aurora have on you that made you turn traitor?”

At last the mask fashioned a grimace-like smile.

“You’re the traitor, Tom, not me. You and all the other cowards who turn a blind eye to what’s really going on in the Glitter Band. It’s been clear to me since we walked away from Hell-Five. The people voted us the power to protect them. Problem is we abdicated that responsibility years ago. We let the people down.”

“That’s not quite the way it looks from where I’m sitting,” Dreyfus said.

“If only you saw the bigger picture, you’d understand.”

“Enlighten me, Sheridan. Tell me what I’m not seeing. Would Aurora’s glimpse into the future have anything to do with it?”

After a while Gaffney said, “You know about Exordium, then.”

“Enough to know where to start trawling if you don’t tell me about it now.”

“Aurora saw the end of everything we hold precious, Tom. We’ve created something wonderful around Yellowstone, something glorious, something unheralded in all the human history that’s come before us. Something fit to last a thousand years, or ten thousand. And yet it ends. Less than a hundred years from now, all this is over. Humanity opened a window into paradise, and in eighty or ninety years it closes. The Garden of Eden isn’t some ancient Biblical story about the fall of paradise thousands of years ago. It’s a premonition.”

“How does it end?”

“Everything goes, in a matter of hours and days. Aurora walked amongst their dreams. She saw habitats burning, she saw people screaming in agony, she saw Chasm City turning against its own inhabitants, becoming something monstrous.”

“A time of plague,” Dreyfus said.

“No one sees it coming. There’s no time to prepare. It hits us when we feel at our least vulnerable, in our highest, brightest hour.” Gaffney halted and caught his breath, the air rasping in and out of his lungs.

“Aurora couldn’t let that happen, Tom. She believes the Glitter Band deserves better than to crash and burn.”

“But we’re still talking about something eighty or ninety years in the future. Why is she taking action now?”

“Prudence,” Gaffney said.

“Aurora believes the content of the Exordium prognostications, but not necessarily the detail. She’s worried that the Conjoiners were wrong about the timeline, that perhaps it might happen sooner than they predicted. There’s no time to wait for warning signals. If action is to be taken to ensure the future survival of the Glitter Band, we must move now, not in twenty years, or fifty years. Only then can she be certain of success.”

“And this action?” Dreyfus ventured, wondering how much Gaffney was going to give up without coercion.

But Gaffney looked disappointed.

“Isn’t it obvious? A benign takeover. The installation of a new authority that will ensure the Glitter Band’s security for time immemorial.”

“She could have just come to us, if she had reasonable concerns.”

“And how do you think Panoply would have reacted?” Gaffney asked.

“Not by taking the necessary measures, that’s for certain. We’ve already let the people take our guns away. Do you think that kind of ready submission implies an organisation with the necessary spine to take difficult, unpopular action, just because it happens to be in the public good?”

“I think you answered that question for yourself.”

“I love this organisation,” Gaffney said.

“I’ve given it my life. But little by little I’ve watched it allow the citizenry to erode its power. We were complicit in that, no question about it. We rolled over and handed the people back the very tools they’d given us to do our work. We’ve reached the point now where we have to beg for the right to arm our agents. And what happens when we finally issue that request? The people spit it back in our faces. They love the idea of a police force, Tom. Just not one with the teeth to actually do anything.”

“Maybe taking guns off us wasn’t such a bad idea.”

“It’s not just the guns. When we perform a lockdown, we spend the next year defending our actions. They’ll take lockdown authority from us next. Before you know it, we won’t even be allowed near our own polling cores. Aurora saw this coming. She knew that Panoply’s usefulness was always going to be limited, and that if the people were really to be protected, someone else was going to have to do it for them.”

“This someone else being Aurora, and whoever’s with her,” Dreyfus said quietly.

“She’s no tyrant, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

“A takeover sounds more than a little tyrannical, frankly.”

“It won’t be like that. Aurora merely envisages a state of affairs in which the people are protected from the consequences of their own worst actions. Under Aurora’s regime, life in the habitats will continue exactly as it does now. The citizenry will still have access to the same technologies they’ve grown to depend upon. No one will be denied longevity treatments, or any other medicines they need. The people will continue to enjoy the same luxuries as they do now, and on a day-to-day level their societies will look much the same. The artists will still work.”

Dreyfus cocked his head.

“Then I’m missing something. What will have changed?”

“Only those things strictly essential for our future security. Needless to say, the Glitter Band will have to be isolated from the rest of human society. That’ll mean an end to commerce with the Ultras, and Chasm City. We can’t run the risk that some outside agent introduced to the Glitter Band causes its ultimate downfall.”

“You think it will be something internal, something we do to ourselves?”

“We can’t know that for certain, so we have to take reasonable precautions against other possibilities. That’s only right and proper, isn’t it?”

“I suppose so.”

“Likewise, travel between habitats will have to be curtailed. If the destabilising factor arises within the Glitter Band, we can at least stop it spreading.”

“So no one ever gets to leave home.”

Gaffney appeared genuinely perplexed by Dreyfus’ point.

“But why would they ever want to, Tom? They’ll have everything handed to them on a plate: every amenity, every luxury.”

“Except personal freedom.”

“It’s overrated. How often do people exercise it, anyway? It’s only ever the minority that test the real limits of a society. Reasonable men don’t make history, Dreyfus. Most people are content with their lot,

content to do today what they did yesterday. They’ll still have almost every old freedom within a given habitat.”

“But they won’t be able to leave. They won’t be able to visit loved ones or friends in other habitats.”

“It won’t come to that. Once Aurora has control of the ten thousand, she’ll allow a grace period before the strictures come into force. People will be permitted to move around as they wish until they’ve settled on their permanent place of residence. Only then will the gates be closed.”

“There’ll always be some people who regret the choice they made,” Dreyfus said.

“But I suppose you’re about to tell me they can always use abstraction to simulate physical travel.”

Gaffney looked almost apologetic.

“Well, actually… abstraction will need to be policed as well.”

“By which you mean…”

“A downgrading of the current provisions. For the sake of security, of course. It could be that the destabilising agent gains a foothold as a consequence of the data networks, you see. Aurora can’t take that risk. The habitats will need to be isolated from each other.”

“The cure’s beginning to sound worse than the disease,” Dreyfus said.

“Oh, don’t make it sound worse than it really is. The habitats will still be running internal abstraction services. For many citizens, that’s already enough. And the data infrastructure will remain in place, so that Aurora can continue to supervise and assist the ten thousand.”

“So let’s get this straight,” Dreyfus said.

“We’re talking about a state of curfew, in which no one can move, no one can communicate and in which no one has a democratic say in their own destiny?”

Gaffney winced: Dreyfus couldn’t tell if it was because of his injuries, or because of what Dreyfus had just said.

“But they’ll be safe, Tom. Not just today, not just tomorrow, but for the next ninety years and beyond. Under Aurora’s regime, the destabilising event will not be allowed to happen. The Glitter Band will persist.”

“In chains.”

“We’re talking about an interim security measure, not something that will have to remain in place in perpetuity. As the years roll on, Aurora will strive to identify the likely focus of the agent. Once the risk is quantified, the people can be handed back their own destiny.” Gaffney peered intently into the depths of the ceiling, as if searching for inspiration.

“Look at it this way, Tom,” he said reasonably, as if the two of them were only a hair’s breadth from agreement.

“A man is carrying a sharp instrument in a crowded space. He’s about to suffer an epileptic seizure. He could hurt himself, or those around him, if he is not unburdened of that instrument and perhaps restrained. What do you do? Do you sit back and respect his rights? Or do you take the action that will guarantee not only his safety, but that of everyone nearby?”

“I ask him nicely to drop the sharp instrument.”

“And you scare him in the process. He grips the instrument more tightly than ever. Now what?”

“I disarm him.”

“It’s too late. He cuts you anyway. Then the seizure kicks in and he starts hacking away at everyone else. Democracy is that sharp instrument, Tom. It’s the final weapon of the people, and sometimes they just can’t be trusted with it.”

“And you can.”

“Not me, not you. But Aurora?” Gaffney shook his head: not in denial, but in an awed inability to express whatever was running through his mind.

“She’s bigger than us. Faster and cleverer. I’d have my doubts, too, if I hadn’t been in her presence. But from the moment I first encountered Aurora, I’ve never had the slightest doubt that she’s the one to lead us forward, the one to guide us into the light.”

Dreyfus stood up and conjured the chair back into the floor.

“Thanks, Sheridan.”

“We’re done?”

“I think I’ve learned everything that you’re willing to tell me without coercion. You genuinely think this can’t be stopped, don’t you? That’s why you’re so content to tell me what Aurora has in mind.”

“It was touch and go for a while back there,” Gaffney said, confidingly.

“And I’ll admit that matters were pre-empted by your discovery of Clepsydra. Aurora had been hoping not to have to move until she had complete control of the entire Glitter Band.”

“You mean when Thalia made the upgrade to the entire ten thousand?”

“That was the idea. One second the ten thousand would have been in the hands of the citizenry, the next they would have been Aurora’s. It would have been the ultimate bloodless revolution, Tom. No one would have been hurt or inconvenienced. Human distress would have been kept to an absolute minimum.”

“Then I’m sorry I threw a wrench into her plans by doing my job.”

“It wasn’t much of a wrench, all told. Aurora had always been mindful that it might be necessary to begin the takeover in a piecemeal fashion, habitat by habitat. It really won’t make much difference in the long run, though. Those clouds of manufactured entities you mentioned earlier? You’re still in the dark about them, aren’t you?”

Dreyfus remained impassive, but something in his expression must have given the game away.

“The machines are mass-produced weevil-class war robots,” Gaffney said.

“Very simple, very rugged, with just enough autonomy to cross space between habitats. By itself, a single weevil can’t do much damage. But the manufactories are spewing them out by the hundreds of thousands. That’s a lot of weevils, Tom. Weight of numbers’ll get you in the end. Always does.”

“What will the weevils do when they reach the other habitats? Cut their way inside and kill everyone?”

“Given that the objective here is to preserve human life, that would be rather counterproductive, don’t you think?”

“So what, then?”

“The weevils are carrying copies of the same upgrade Thalia already installed in the first four habitats. Once they reach the target habitats, they’ll work their way inside and infect their cores with the same security hole. Aurora will then have complete control of six habitats, not four.”

“Your weevils will have to reach the polling cores first. The local citizenry are already standing by to protect them.”

“They’ll slow the weevils, but not stop them. There’ll always be more weevils. The manufactories won’t stop making them. And once Aurora gains control of another manufactory-equipped habitat, she’ll start producing weevils there as well.”

“So we shut down the polling cores. Destroy them, even. Same with the manufactories.”

Again Gaffney looked apologetic, like someone who kept winning against a weaker opponent and was beginning to feel sorry for them.

“Won’t work, either. Weevils are more than warriors. They’re general-purpose construction servitors. Can’t replicate, but there isn’t much else they can’t do. Build and integrate a new polling core? Matter of hours. I gave them the necessary blueprints. Repair a scuttled manufactory? Six hours. Maybe twelve. Ditto on the blueprints. Aurora’s covered all the bases, Tom. Why do you think I’d be telling you all this otherwise?”

“I guess you may have a point there,” Dreyfus said. Then he lifted up the cuff of his sleeve to reveal his bracelet.

“Jane?” he asked.

“Aumonier,” she replied, her voice reduced to a doll-like buzz.

“The machines are weevil-class war robots. Someone needs to see what we have on them in the archive. Instruct the Democratic Circus to proceed with maximum caution. If they can bring one in intact, they should do so, but I don’t want to lose another deep-system cruiser without good reason.”

“Copy, Tom,” Jane Aumonier said.

He cuffed down his sleeve and surveyed the man on the bed.

“Of course, if I find you were lying about any of that—”

“I wasn’t lying. And that was spoken like a true leader, by the way. You should have heard yourself. Anyone would have thought you were the supreme prefect the way you dished out instructions to Jane.”

“We have a good understanding. It’s called mutual respect.”

“Sounded more like the natural assumption of authority to me. Perhaps you covet her job the same way Baudry and Crissel did?”

“We weren’t talking about Jane.” Dreyfus reached behind his back and unclipped the whiphound he had been keeping there, out of Gaffney’s line of sight. He brought it around in front of him and let the other man see what he was holding.

“Oh, now that’s low. Did Doctor Mercier see you come in with that thing?”

Dreyfus whipped out the filament, letting it hiss against the floor. It sliced the quickmatter like a rapier through water, the floor material healing behind it almost instantly.

“Don’t worry. It isn’t a Model C. Doesn’t have any of those fancy new features you were so keen to see installed.”

“Are you going to kill me now?”

“No. I’ll leave killing prisoners to the experts. I want you alive, Sheridan, so I can run a deep-cortex trawl while you still have some brain cells.”

“Trawl me now. See how far it gets you.”

“Sword mode,” Dreyfus said, almost under his breath. The filament flicked to immediate rigidity. He swept it over Gaffney’s recumbent form, hard and fast enough to raise a whoosh of parted air.

“I’ll spare you the sales pitch. You know what one of these can do in the wrong hands.”

“I’ve told you everything.”

“No, you haven’t. There’s an elephant in this room that you’re trying very hard to ignore, Sheridan. It’s called Ruskin-Sartorious. You set up the execution of that habitat, didn’t you?”

“You know the Ultras were behind that.”

“No,” Dreyfus said patiently.

“That’s what you wanted us to think. It had to look like an act of spite so we wouldn’t go nosing around trying to find the real reason. Dravidian and his crew were used, weren’t they? You got someone aboard their ship who knew how to manipulate the engines.”

“Ridiculous.”

“They would have needed expert insider knowledge of Conjoiner systems, but given that you already had a shipload of Conjoiners to torture, that wouldn’t have been insurmountable. The question is, why? What was it about Ruskin-Sartorious that mattered to you so much? Why did it have to burn?” Dreyfus lowered the blade of the whiphound until it was almost touching the bruised skin of Gaffney’s throat.

“Talk to me, Sheridan. Tell me why that had to happen.”

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 polling 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 backup plan in place. Put the sword away for now. I’m going to test the water with Redon.”