‘I really don’t know much about Aurora,’ Saavedra answered. ‘Yes, I’m aware of the crisis in orbit, the loss of the habitats, the evacuation effort. But I still don’t have a clear picture of who’s behind it. Can you enlighten me?’
‘Is anything we say going to make you point that gun elsewhere?’ Dreyfus asked.
‘Let’s see how you get on.’
Dreyfus took a deep breath, as much to calm his nerves as to prepare to speak. ’We think we know what Aurora is. She’s a rogue alpha-level; one of the original Eighty. Unlike the others, she didn’t fade or loop. She just made it look that way. In reality, she’d moved on, become stronger and faster.’
Saavedra’s lip twitched derisively. ‘So where’s she been for the last fifty years, or however long it’s been?’
‘Fifty-five. And we don’t know where she’s been all that time, except that she’s been planning something for much of it. The takeover is just the start. She wants complete control of the Glitter Band. Humans won’t be allowed to live in it any more. It’ll just be one vast support infrastructure for an immortal mind.’
‘Why the sudden megalomaniacal intentions if she’s lived happily enough under our noses all this time?’
‘Because she thinks we’re going to do something bad to the Glitter Band, something that will make it impossible for even an evolved alpha-level intelligence to remain safe.’
Again that lip-twitch. ‘Something bad?’
‘The point is, she’s convinced herself that we can’t be trusted with the safekeeping of the infrastructure she needs to stay alive, so we have to be removed from the equation. It isn’t a takeover, since there isn’t going to be anyone left alive under her regime - unless you count the handful of human slaves she’ll need to fix the servitors when they break down. It’s mass genocide, Paula.’
‘And why does she fear the Clockmaker?’
‘I think it’s because the Clockmaker’s the only thing in the system with an intelligence even approaching her own. It may even be cleverer. That means it’s a threat to her sovereignty. That means she has to remove it.’
‘That’s what she was trying to do when she took out Ruskin-Sartorious,’ Sparver put in. ‘Gaffney set that up, but it was Aurora pulling the strings all the time. Only problem was, she was too late. You’d sensed her interest and moved the Clockmaker here.’
‘Which is a pity, given that nine hundred and sixty people died because of false data,’ Dreyfus said.
‘Those people - the inhabitants of the Ruskin-Sartorious Bubble - were not meant to die,’ Saavedra said.
‘Then you regret their deaths?’ Dreyfus asked.
‘Of course.’ She snarled her answer back at him. ‘Don’t you think we’d rather it hadn’t happened? We assumed that whoever had shown interest had backed away. The relocation was a precaution. We didn’t think there’d be consequences.’
‘I’m prepared to believe that,’ Dreyfus said.
‘Believe what you like.’
‘I also believe that a portion of the blame must be placed on Anthony Theobald’s doorstep. He must have known he was endangering the lives of his family, even if he didn’t know exactly what he was giving houseroom to.’
‘He didn’t need to know. None of them needed to know. None of them did know, right until the end.’
‘One of them came close, though.’
She looked at him with sharp eyes. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Delphine Ruskin-Sartorious. The daughter. The artist of the family. Or didn’t you realise?’
‘Realise what?’
‘She was in contact with the Clockmaker. It was something of a one-way dialogue, but it was contact all the same.’
She looked at him for a moment, then shook her head in flat dismissal. ‘No, that wouldn’t have been possible. Delphine was never allowed anywhere near it. Nor were any of the family members, including Anthony Theobald. It was kept inside an armoured cell, locked away unless we wanted to communicate with it. Not only could it not escape from the cell, it couldn’t send a signal beyond it, either.’
‘It still found a way to reach her.’
‘Impossible.’
‘Like it or not, it happened. My guess is that the cell wasn’t as data-secure as you thought it was. Or maybe the Clockmaker slipped a signal through when you were talking to it, or whatever it was you did during your visits.’
‘A signal needs a receiver,’ Saavedra pointed out.
‘Delphine had one. It was in her head. Like any good Demarchist citizen, she had a skull full of implants. She used them to direct the machines that helped her with her art. The Clockmaker found out how to manipulate one or more of those implants to place imagery in Delphine’s mind and shape her artwork.’
Now Saavedra tilted her head sceptically. Dreyfus knew that he had some way to go before she was convinced, but he had certainly succeeded in intriguing her. ‘Imagery?’
‘The Clockmaker used her as medium, expressing itself through her work. She thought she’d tapped a seam of miraculous self-inspiration, but in truth she’d just become a conduit for the Clockmaker.’
‘Ridiculous,’ she said, but not with quite enough conviction.
‘Maybe that’s what attracted Aurora in the first place,’ Dreyfus said, the idea occurring to him more or less at that moment. ‘Of course, for the threat of the Clockmaker to have impinged on her consciousness, she must have a good idea of what the Clockmaker actually is.’
‘And what is it? Seeing as you appear to have all the answers.’
Dreyfus couldn’t help smiling. ‘You mean you really don’t know? After all this time?’
‘And you, presumably, do?’
‘I’ve got an inkling.’
‘Nice try, Dreyfus, but if you think you’re going to bluff your way out of this one—’
‘A crime was committed,’ he said. ‘It all goes back to a single, simple deed: the murder of an innocent man. The Clockmaker is a direct consequence of that.’
‘Who was murdered?’
‘Point that gun elsewhere and I might tell you. Better yet, why don’t you show me the Clockmaker?’
‘Remove your suits,’ she said. ‘I want to check that you’re not carrying any other weapons. If I even think you’re about to trick me, I’ll kill you.’
Dreyfus glanced at Sparver. ‘Better do as she says.’
They removed their armour and suits, laying them out in neat piles before them. Under the suits, they both wore standard-issue Panoply uniforms.
‘Turn around,’ Saavedra instructed.
They turned their backs to her.
‘Now turn to face me. Remove your whiphounds. Do not activate them.’
Dreyfus and Sparver unclipped their whiphounds and tossed the handles to the ground.
‘Kick them to me.’
They did as they were told. Still training the rifle on them, Saavedra knelt down and clipped the whiphounds to her own belt. Then she single-handedly unclipped her own unit, a Model C, and deployed the filament. It hissed against the floor, its sharp edge a coiling scratch of bright silver. Deftly flipping the haft in her hand to turn the laser eye towards Dreyfus and Sparver, she marked them both then released the handle.
‘Confirm target acquisition,’ she said; the whiphound nodded its handle in reply. ‘Maintain target surveillance. If targets approach within five metres of me, or move more than ten metres from me, intercept and detain both subjects with maximum lethal force. Indicate compliance.’
The whiphound nodded.
‘I think we’re clear on the ground rules,’ Dreyfus said.
Saavedra moved to the rifles she had told them to discard, put down her own weapon and removed the ammo cells from the other two guns. She clipped the cells to her belt, next to the two captured whiphounds. Then she collected her own rifle and shrugged it back over her shoulder, the muzzle aimed at the ceiling.
‘This is called a gesture of trust. Don’t abuse it.’
�
�We’re cool with not abusing it,’ Sparver said.
‘Follow me, and remember what I just told the whiphound. I’ll show you the Clockmaker, if you really want to see it.’
CHAPTER 31
Saavedra led them deeper into Ops Nine, down one of the sloping ramps that Dreyfus had already noticed leading away from the atrium. Her whiphound slinked along behind the party, constantly triangulating the distance between Saavedra and her guests, waiting for one of them to transgress the parameters she had laid down. Dreyfus was relieved not to have a gun aimed at him, but the whiphound was only a marginal improvement. If he had been concerned about dying because of a twitch from Saavedra’s finger, now he had to worry about the inflexible thought processes of a machine that really wasn’t much brighter than a guard dog. Not that he had any intention of deliberately violating the rules, but what if he tripped, or accidentally crossed the five-metre line?
‘I will show it to you,’ she said, ‘but you can forget any idea of negotiating with it. It is not a rational intellect.’
‘It doesn’t have to be rational to understand that Aurora wants it dead,’ Dreyfus replied.
‘You think that will give you leverage?’
‘It’s all I’ve got. Better make the most of it.’
‘How did you manage to install a containment facility down here at such short notice?’ Sparver asked.
‘We didn’t. There was only just time to clear out of Ruskin-Sartorious before it was destroyed. Fortunately, there was a kind of cage already here. It needed some alterations, but nothing beyond our resources.’
‘You’re talking about the tokamak,’ Dreyfus said, wonderingly.
‘The what?’ Sparver asked.
‘He means the fusion reactor that would have powered this facility during the Amerikano era,’ Saavedra said loftily. ‘And he’s right. That’s exactly what we used. It’s one large magnetic containment bottle. Hideously inefficient compared to the portable generators we brought with us, but it has its uses. It needed to be checked, and the field geometry adjusted, but none of that was particularly taxing. It was much easier than installing our own containment equipment: we’d have needed to hollow out another cavern for that.’
‘I hope you trust Amerikano engineering,’ Dreyfus said. ‘Keeping a psychopathic machine prisoner wasn’t exactly in the design specs.’
‘I trust it not to fail. Do you think I’d have come here if I didn’t?’
‘Where’s everyone else?’ Dreyfus asked.
‘The rest of Firebrand? Apart from Simon Veitch, I’m the only one down here.’
Dreyfus remembered that name from the list of Firebrand members Jane had given him. It had impressed itself on his memory for a reason.
‘Where are the others?’
‘Wherever their duties require them to be. Since Jane pulled the plug on us, we’ve all had to live dual lives. How do you imagine we managed to maintain Firebrand while we also had our regular duties to attend to?’
‘I did wonder.’
‘The same therapeutic regime designed to keep Aumonier awake proved equally useful to the agents of Firebrand. Most of us have been getting by on only a few hours of sleep a week.’ Saavedra lifted her arm and spoke into the bracelet clamped around the pale stick of her wrist. ‘Simon? I’ve found the intruders.’ She paused, listening to Veitch’s reply. ‘Yes, just the two. I’m bringing them down to the reactor.’ She paused again. ‘Yes, I have them under control. Why else would I have allowed them to live?’
The tunnel levelled out. They passed along a corridor lined with equipment storage rooms, then emerged onto a balcony overlooking a chamber only slightly smaller than the atrium they’d left behind. There was enough room for all three of them on the balcony without triggering the whiphound into action. The reactor filled most of the chamber, squatting on shockproof supports like an enormous magic cauldron. It was painted a pale green, with faint lines of rust along panel joints. A handful of panels and parts shone like chrome. Other than that it appeared superficially intact. Dreyfus guessed that little repair had been necessary before its magnetic generators were coaxed back to strength.
A catwalk girdled the reactor at its fattest point. A figure, dressed in black, was attending a monitor panel next to a dark observation window. The figure looked around and up, a grimace on his face. Veitch was as thin and cadaverous-looking as Saavedra, but conveyed the same impression of wiry strength.
‘You should have killed them,’ he said, raising his voice above the low hum of the reactor.
‘They have information about the Clockmaker,’ she said. ‘Dreyfus says he knows where it came from. I’d like to hear what he has to tell us.’
Veitch looked irritated. ‘We know where it came from. They made it in SIAM. That’s where it ran amok.’
‘But it didn’t begin there,’ Dreyfus said. ‘It came of age in SIAM, reached its true potential there, but it originated somewhere else entirely.’
‘Descend the stairs,’ Saavedra snapped.
‘You can call the whiphound off now,’ Dreyfus said. ‘I’m not going to hurt you.’
‘Just descend the stairs. I’ll worry about the whiphound.’
Dreyfus and Sparver edged past Saavedra, taking care not to come closer to her than five metres. They clattered down the stairs and crossed the chamber’s equipment-cluttered floor until the reactor was looming over them.
‘Climb to the observation deck,’ Saavedra said, ‘and tell Veitch why you want the Clockmaker.’
Looking up at Veitch, Dreyfus reiterated the argument he had already presented to Saavedra - that the Clockmaker was now the only effective weapon against Aurora.
‘So what are you proposing? That we just let it loose and hope it crawls back to us when it’s done?’
Dreyfus placed a hand on the railing and began to climb the stairs to the observation deck, Sparver immediately behind him.
‘I’m hoping we won’t have to let it loose at all. It’s a matter of self-preservation. If I can impress upon it how much Aurora wants to destroy it, I can make it see the sense in defeating her. It will help us by helping itself.’
‘From inside the cage?’
‘It’s a form of machine intelligence,’ Dreyfus said. ‘So is Aurora, no matter what she started out as.’
‘How does that help us?’
‘Aurora isn’t a disembodied intelligence. She’s a collection of software routines emulating the structure of an individual human brain. But she’s nothing unless she has a physical architecture to run on.’
Above him, Veitch nodded impatiently. ‘And your point is?’
‘Somewhere out there, a machine has to be simulating her. More than likely she’s controlling her takeover from within a single habitat. It probably isn’t one of those she’s already taken over, since she wouldn’t want to risk being wiped out by one of our nukes. Unfortunately, that leaves almost ten thousand other candidates to consider. If we had all the time in the world, we could comb through network traffic records and pin her down. But we don’t have all the time in the world. We have a few days.’
‘You think she has free roam of the networks?’
‘Almost certainly. She’s stayed under our radar for fifty-five years, which means she can move herself from point to point without difficulty. But she can’t duplicate herself. That’s a limitation embedded in the deep structure of alpha-level simulations by Cal Sylveste himself. They cannot be copied, or even backed-up.’
‘Perhaps she’s got around that one by now.’
‘I don’t think so. If she could copy herself, she wouldn’t be so concerned about safeguarding her own survival. She’s scared precisely because there’s only one of her.’
‘But the notion of “machine is nebulous, Prefect. Aurora might not be able to copy herself, but there’s surely nothing to prevent her from spreading herself thinly, using thousands of habitats instead of one.’
‘There is,’ Dreyfus said, puffing as he reached the observation
deck. ‘It’s called execution speed. The more distributed she is, the more she has to contend with light-speed timelag between processor centres. If part of her was running on one side of the Glitter Band, and another part on the far side of the Band, she could be afflicted by unacceptable latencies, whole fractions of a second. She’d still be just as clever as she is now, but the clock rate of her consciousness would have slowed by an intolerable factor. And that’s her problem. Being clever isn’t good enough on its own, especially when she’s trying to win a war on ten thousand fronts. She has to be fast as well.’
‘There’s a lot of supposition there,’ Veitch said as Dreyfus approached him cautiously, Sparver, Saavedra and her whiphound close behind.
‘I agree, but I think it’s watertight. Aurora can’t afford to be spread out, therefore she has to be running on a single machine, inside a single habitat. And that means she’s vulnerable to a counterstrike if that habitat can be identified.’
‘And you’re hoping the Clockmaker can pin her down?’
‘Something along those lines.’
Veitch looked puzzled, as if he knew he was missing something obvious. ‘It would need access to the networks.’
‘I know.’
‘You’re insane. What if it escapes, loses itself in the networks the same way Aurora did?’
‘There’d be a risk of that, but it’s one I’m prepared to take given the alternative. I’d rather have a monster on the loose if it’s a choice between that or dying under Aurora.’
‘Do you have any idea what the Clockmaker did to its victims?’
Dreyfus thought of everything he had learned since gaining Manticore. Examining those new, fresh memories was like opening a wound that had just begun to scab over. ‘I know it did bad things. But it wasn’t indiscriminate. It spared more than it killed. Aurora won’t spare a soul.’
‘Show him what it is,’ Saavedra said. ‘He may as well know what he’s talking about letting loose.’
‘You’ve searched him for weapons?’
‘He’s clean. Show him the window.’
Veitch stood back from the monitor panel. ‘Take a look for yourself, Prefect.’
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