‘We’re leaving,’ she said as soon as Parnasse and Redon managed to quieten the party. ‘Cyrus and I have already made the preparations. We either do this or wait for the servitors to arrive. No one’s going to rescue us in the meantime.’
‘We can’t leave,’ Thory said. ‘We’re in a building, Prefect. Buildings don’t move.’
Without answering her, Thalia walked to the architectural model. It was now resting on the flat, damaged surface of the transparent casing that had once covered it. Between them, Meriel Redon and Thalia had removed most of the structures surrounding the stalk, corresponding to the actual demolition work that had taken place overnight.
Thalia reached into her pocket and removed the white ball that represented the sphere of the polling core, dusted it against her thigh and placed it gently atop the stalk. ‘For the benefit of anyone who hasn’t been paying attention, this is us. Machines are trying to get at us through the stalk, and more than likely they’re climbing up the outside as well. So we have to leave. Here’s how it’s going to happen.’
She touched a finger against the side of the ball and toppled it from the stalk. It dropped to the side and rolled away across the denuded grounds of the Museum of Cybernetics until it ran off the edge of the model and fell to the floor.
‘Oh. My. God,’ Thory said. ‘You’re insane. This isn’t going to happen.’
‘That… doesn’t look survivable,’ said Jules Caillebot.
‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ Thalia said. ‘For a start, we’re not going to just drop half a kilometre. We’re going to topple and roll. The sphere will travel down the side of the stalk, but it won’t ever hit the ground. The stalk widens near the base and then flares out until it’s almost horizontal. We’ll be moving fast, but there’s nothing to stop us rolling around the bend and continuing along a horizontal trajectory. It’s going to be bumpy, sure, but with the momentum we’ll have gained during the drop we should roll a long way, particularly as there isn’t much left out there to slow us down. We can thank the robots for that. If they’d left the surrounding stalks in place, we wouldn’t have a hope.’
‘Girl’s right,’ Parnasse said, standing next to Thalia with his arms folded and a look on his face that dared anyone to contradict him. ‘Structurally, the sphere’ll hold. We can expect to roll two, three kilometres before we run out of momentum.’
‘But surely we won’t be able to just roll off the stalk like that,’ said the young man in the electric-blue suit. ‘What do you want us to do? Run back and forth until we topple over?’
‘We’ve taken care of the rolling part,’ Thalia said. ‘Cyrus and I have weakened the connections between the stalk and the sphere. It’ll hold for another hundred years as it is, but I’m going to give it a little nudge in the right direction with my whiphound. I’ll set it to grenade mode, on maximum yield. It’ll give us a pretty big bang. It should sever the remaining connections and push us in the right direction. We’ll topple.’
‘We’ll be smashed around like eggs in a box,’ Caillebot said.
‘Not if we secure ourselves first.’ Thalia indicated the metal railings encircling the polling core. ‘You’re going to strap yourselves to these guards, as tight as you can. Meriel’s going to make sure everyone has enough clothing to do a good job. You’ll need to be secure during the roll. I don’t want anyone breaking loose when we end up upside down.’
‘Maybe I’m missing something,’ Caillebot said. ‘You talk of us rolling two or three kilometres.’
‘Correct,’ Parnasse said.
‘That isn’t going to help us much, is it? By the time we’ve unlashed ourselves, the robots will have caught up with us again.’
Parnasse glanced at Thalia. ‘I think you’d better tell them the rest, girl.’
‘The robots won’t be catching up with us,’ she said.
Caillebot frowned. ‘Why not?’
‘Because we’re not stopping. We said we could roll two or three kilometres. That should be enough to take us across the nearest window band.’
‘Oh no,’ Thory said, shaking her head. ‘Don’t even think—’
Thalia grimaced. She walked over to the woman and faced her down. ‘Here’s the deal, Citizen. I don’t have a fully functional whiphound any more. If I did, I’d run you through some of the more interesting things I can do with it. But I do have a pair of hands. If you make one more remark, if you open your mouth to speak, even if you so much as give me a funny look, I’m going to wrap those hands around that fat neck of yours and keep squeezing until your eyeballs pop into your lap.’
‘I think you’d better listen to the girl,’ Parnasse said.
Thalia stepped back and resumed her earlier position. ‘Thank you, Cyrus. Yes, we’re going to roll across the window band. The band’s pretty tough, I admit — it’s already holding back air at atmospheric pressure, and it’s designed to tolerate occasional stresses above and beyond its normal loading. It could withstand collision by a small ship, a volantor or a train coming off one of the bridges. But it isn’t designed to cope with something as substantial as the sphere. Parnasse and I both agree that the band will collapse under our weight, allowing us to drop into open space.’
‘Where we’ll suffocate and die,’ Caillebot said. ‘Followed quickly by everyone else still inside House Aubusson as the air rushes out through the hundred-metre-wide hole we’ll have just dropped through.’
‘There’s no one else to worry about,’ Thalia said. ‘We’ve kept it from you until now, but all the evidence at our disposal says that the machines have embarked on the systematic murder of all the other citizens. They’ve been rounded up, euthanised and shipped off to the manufactory to be stripped down and scavenged for useful elements.’
‘You can’t be certain that there are no other survivors,’ said the woman in the red dress, her face pale.
Thalia nodded. ‘No, we can’t. Some other groups may have held out for a while. But we’re the only party able to protect ourselves by virtue of being near the polling core. No one else will have had that security. There’ll have been nothing to stop the machines storming everyone else en masse.’
‘But what about us?’ asked Cuthbertson, his mechanical owl still perched on his shoulder. ‘We’ll still need air, even if everyone else is already dead!’
‘We’ve got it,’ Thalia said. ‘There’s enough air inside here to keep us alive until we’re rescued. It won’t be going anywhere because the sphere’s already airtight. Provided the portholes hold, we’ll be fine. Internal doors will stop the air leaking out of the bottom of the sphere, where it used to meet the stalk. If there’s a slow leak, we can live with it. Rescue should be on us within a few minutes of break-out, if my guess is right.’
‘You’re confident of that?’ Caillebot asked.
‘I’m even more confident that we won’t have a chance against those machines when they break through.’ Thalia planted a hand on her hip. ‘That good enough for you, or do you want it in writing?’
Meriel Redon coughed. ‘I know it sounds like madness, at first. That’s what I thought initially when they told me about this plan. But now that I’ve had time to think things through, I see that this is the only way we’re going to survive. It’s roll or die, people.’
‘How soon?’ Cuthbertson asked.
‘Very,’ Thalia said.
‘We need to think about it. We need time to talk it over, see if we can’t come up with another plan.’
‘You’ve got five seconds,’ Thalia said, looking at him belligerently. ‘Thought of anything? No, didn’t think so. Sorry, but this is the plan, and there’s no opt-out clause. I want you all to start securing yourselves. Anything you can’t do, I’ll help you with. But we haven’t got time for a debate on the matter.’
‘It’s going to work,’ Redon said, raising her arms to silence the party. ‘But we have to do it fast, or those machines are going to be through to us before we know it. Thalia’s given us a way out when we had
nothing. Don’t think for one second that I’m thrilled about what we’re going to attempt, but I see that we have no choice.’
‘What about the polling core?’ Caillebot asked. ‘Have you forgotten about sabotaging it?’
Thalia produced the whiphound, gripping it in a glove-wrapped hand. ‘I’m going to take it down now. Then I’ll head downstairs to see if I can hear any activity behind the barricade. If I don’t, and there’s no sign of the machines trying to break in elsewhere, then I may reconsider our escape plan. But if I decide to go ahead, I won’t have time to come back up and tell you until we’re almost ready to roll. You’d better assume that’s what’s going to happen.’
She stepped through the gap in the railinged enclosure, extending and stiffening the whiphound’s filament. Without ceremony, she swung it into the polling core’s pillar at chest height, straining to push it deeper until the resistance was too much. The core flickered in protest at the damage she was inflicting, fingers of sharp-edged black radiating away from the wound. She withdrew the filament and came in again, slicing at a different angle. The whiphound buzzed fiercely, the handle throbbing in her hand. Thalia sweated. If she failed to disable the core and somehow incapacitated the whiphound’s grenade mode, it would all have been for nothing.
She removed the whiphound. Now most of the pillar was consumed by geometric black shapes. At some level it was still functioning — her glasses confirmed that there was still some low-level abstraction traffic — but she had certainly impaired it, perhaps to a degree where it would not be able to send coherent packets to the servitors. That would have to suffice. The marrow of quickmatter at the heart of the core would prove resilient against the whiphound, healing as the filament passed through it, and she could not risk overtaxing the weapon.
Thalia let the filament go limp and spool back into the handle. She had done all that she could.
‘Let’s see if we did any damage,’ she said to Parnasse.
She left the polling core level, glancing back to make sure the citizens were all engaged in securing themselves to the railings. She was pleased to see that they were, despite the ramshackle nature of some of their bindings. There was some grumbling going on, some indignation, but Meriel Redon was doing her best to make them understand that there was no other way.
Maybe it wouldn’t be necessary, she thought. Maybe taking down the polling core would be the end of it.
But when Thalia and Parnasse reached the top of the barricade, she knew that the machines were still alive. If anything they sounded louder and closer than ever. Thalia had the palpable impression that they were about to break through the obstruction at any second. The machines sounded enraged, their dim mechanical fury only doubled by what she had just attempted.
‘Roll it is,’ Parnasse said.
‘Looks like it.’
They started jogging away from the barricade, towards the next set of stairs.
‘Any idea why those things are still moving if we just took down the core?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine, Cyrus. Could be they were uploaded with enough autonomy to keep functioning even without direct supervision. Could be I didn’t damage the core enough. Could be they made another one, somewhere else. It isn’t that difficult if you know the protocols.’
They reached the next level down and arrived at the trap door in the floor, still open as they had left it. Parnasse rolled up his sleeves, moving to lower himself into the gap ahead of Thalia.
‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘I memorised the way pretty well the last time we came down here. You showed me where to place the whiphound. I’m sure I can find my way without you.’
‘All the same, girl, I’m coming with you.’
‘I’d rather you were back up with the others, Cyrus, making sure they do what they’re told.’
‘Redon’s got them under control. I think you convinced them there was no other choice.’
Thalia had been striving to maintain a façade of certainty, but all of a sudden doubts magnified inside her. ‘There isn’t, is there?’
‘Of course there isn’t.’
‘But what if I’m wrong?’
‘Nothing could be worse than waiting for those bastards to break through. Even if this doesn’t work, it’ll be a hell of an improvement on being ripped apart by killer robots. At least we’ll go out with style.’
‘Even though there’ll be no one to applaud our efforts?’
‘We’ll know, girl. That’s all that matters.’ He gave her an encouraging pinch on the arm. ‘Now let’s get that whiphound in place.’
They clambered through the tangle of intervening supports until they reached the area where the struts had already been weakened or cut through entirely.
‘Thank our lucky stars this isn’t quickmatter,’ Parnasse said, ‘or those cuts would have healed over by now. But the rules say you can’t have quickmatter anywhere near a polling core.’
‘I like rules,’ Thalia said. ‘Rules are good.’
‘Let’s unwrap the baby.’
Thalia removed the whiphound from its protective bundle. It was trembling, with parts of the casing beginning to melt from the heat. The smell of burning components hit her nose. ‘Okay,’ she said, twisting the first of the dials. ‘Setting yield to maximum. Looks as if it’s accepted the input. So far so good.’ She paused to let her fingers cool down.
‘Now the timer,’ Parnasse said.
She nodded. She twisted the first of the two dials necessary to input the setting. It was stiff, but eventually the dial moved under her fingers until it reached the limit of its rotation. The double-dial fail-safe existed to stop the whiphound being set to grenade mode accidentally. ‘Five minutes,’ she said.
‘It’ll start counting as soon as you twist the other dial?’
Thalia nodded. ‘It should give us enough time to get back upstairs and lashed down. If you want to go ahead now, to make sure—’
‘I’m not going anywhere without you. Set the timer.’
Thalia took hold of the end of the whiphound and began to twist the other dial. It moved easily compared to the other one, clicking around through its settings. Then it stopped, long before it had reached the correct limit. Thalia tried again, but the dial would not pass beyond the point where it had jammed.
‘Something’s the matter,’ she said. ‘I can’t get the second setting locked in. Both dials have to be reading three hundred seconds or it won’t start the countdown.’
‘Can I try?’
She passed him the whiphound. ‘Maybe you can force that dial past the blockage.’
He tried. He couldn’t.
‘It’s jammed pretty good, girl.’ Parnasse squinted at the tiny white digits marked next to the dial. ‘Looks like we’re stuck at one hundred seconds, or less.’
‘It isn’t enough,’ Thalia said. ‘We’d never get back up and lashed down in one hundred seconds.’
‘There’s no other way of setting that counter?’
‘None.’
Then something came over her, a kind of awesome calm, like the placidity of the sea after a great storm. She had never felt more serene, more purposeful, in her life. This was it, she knew. It was the point she had waited for, with guarded expectation, knowing it would arrive at some time in her career, but that she might not notice it unless she was both alert and open-minded. This was her opportunity to redeem whatever it was her father had done wrong.
‘Girl?’ Parnasse asked, for Thalia had fallen into a momentary trance.
‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘We can still do this. I want you to leave now, Cyrus. Get back to the others and strap yourself down. Make sure you close all airtight doors on the way.’
‘And you?’
‘I’m going to wait a whole three hundred seconds. Then I’m going to complete what I came here to do.’
‘Which is?’
Her voice trembled. ‘Uphold the public good.’
‘Is that right?’ Parnasse said.
‘Yes,’ she answered.
‘I don’t think so, girl.’
She started to protest, started to raise her arm in defence, but Parnasse was faster and stronger. Whatever it was he did to her, she never saw it coming.
CHAPTER 27
Thyssen’s face was slit-eyed and puffy when it appeared on Dreyfus’s compad.
‘I know you’re meant to be sleeping now, and I apologise for disturbing your rest. But something’s been nagging at me and I need to talk to you about it.’ He neglected to tell Thyssen that the thing that had been bothering him had only revealed itself fully when he woke from his snooze.
‘Is this urgent, Prefect?’
‘Very.’
‘Then I’ll see you in the bay in five minutes.’
Thyssen looked surprisingly alert when Dreyfus arrived, feeling less than clearheaded himself. Thyssen was talking with his shift replacement Tezuka, the two of them peering through a window at the ongoing ship operations. Technicians were performing vacuum welds on the damaged hull of a cutter. Both men were sipping something from drinking bulbs.
‘Prefect Dreyfus,’ Thyssen said, breaking away from his conversation. ‘You look like you could use some of this.’ He offered Dreyfus the drinking bulb. Dreyfus declined.
‘The ship Saavedra took,’ Dreyfus said.
‘You mean Saavedra and Chen.’
Dreyfus nodded: he’d forgotten that Thyssen hadn’t been informed of Chen’s murder. ‘I’m just wondering why they took that one, out of all the choices they had. Am I correct in thinking that cutter was a Type B?’
‘Correct,’ Thyssen said. ‘Most of the new vehicles are Type C or D. They don’t have the—’
‘Transatmospheric capability,’ Dreyfus finished for him. ‘That’s what I reckoned.’
‘Since the segregation of security responsibilities between Chasm City and the Glitter Band—’
The Revelation Space Collection (revelation space) Page 419
