"But she still closed you down."
"Perhaps she was right. Needless to say, we didn't agree. Although Firebrand had taken grave losses, we felt that we had come closer than ever before to learning something of the Clockmaker's true nature. We who survived were convinced that the future security of the Glitter Band depended on the discovery of that nature. We had to know what it was, where it had come from, so that we could ensure nothing like it ever emerged again. That was our moral imperative, Prefect Dreyfus. So we decided to remain operational. We were already superblack; it took very little effort to submerge ourselves to an even deeper level of secrecy, beyond even Jane's oversight."
"And what did you learn, Paula?"
"Don't come any closer, Prefect Dreyfus."
But Dreyfus was already within view of the flight deck by the time she finished her sentence. The connecting door was open. Blood droplets formed a cloud of little scarlet balloons, pulled into perfect spheres by surface tension. Lansing Chen was dead. He was buckled into the right-hand command seat, his head lolling at an unnatural angle, swaying slowly from side to side as the air shifted. His neck had been gashed open with the whiphound Paula Saavedra was still holding. She was buckled into the left-hand chair, rotated around to face Dreyfus and Sparver. She had one leg hooked higher than the other. She held the whiphound in her right hand, while her left hovered above one of the luminous blue controls on the console.
"You didn't have to kill Chen," Dreyfus said, tightening his grip on his own whiphound.
Behind, he heard Sparver speak into his bracelet. "Get me Mercier. We need a crash team at the nose. This is a medical emergency."
"I didn't want to kill him," Saavedra said, with real menace. "Chen was a good man, Prefect. He served Firebrand well, until the end. It's not his fault that he's been having doubts."
"What kind of doubts?"
"None of us liked what happened to Ruskin-Sartorious, but most of us saw it as an unfortunate but unavoidable occurrence. A casualty of war, Prefect. Not Chen, though. He felt we'd gone too far; that nine hundred and sixty lives were too high a price to pay for security. He felt it was time to blow our cover."
"He'd have been right."
The tip of her whiphound gleamed dark red. "No, he wouldn't. Nothing matters more now than keeping the Clockmaker's new location hidden."
"I agree wholeheartedly. Aurora mustn't learn of the Clockmaker's whereabouts. But Panoply needs that information more than ever."
"Ordinarily, I might have agreed you. But Panoply is compromised. Someone's been sniffing around Firebrand for days. Probably the same someone who helped arrange the attack on Ruskin-Sartorious."
"That was Senior Prefect Gaffney. He's out of the picture now. I took care of that myself, so you can start trusting me."
"Can I, really? You've done very well to track us down, Prefect. How do I know you aren't just following up on Gaffney's unfinished business?"
"I am, in a way — I had to find you. Why'd you have to kill Chen, Paula?"
"I told you — he got cold feet at the last moment. Decided he'd rather stay here and face the music. I couldn't let that happen, Prefect. Just as I can't let you keep me here now."
"Nothing bad will happen to you," Dreyfus said. But if he'd meant it earlier, it was an empty promise now. Nothing could excuse the murder of a fellow prefect.
"Even if killed myself, you'd trawl my corpse to get the location of the Clockmaker. Therefore I must leave. Can you see my left hand, Prefect?"
Dreyfus nodded. "I guess you're holding it there for a reason."
"When I boarded this ship, I brought four whiphounds with me. They're set to grenade mode, maximum yield, keyed to this console. Don't go looking for them — they're well hidden."
"Whiphounds won't detonate inside Panoply. There's a positional safeguard."
"Which I overrode, without difficulty." She shook her head disappointedly. "I'm Firebrand, Prefect. Can you imagine the lengths we've had to go to to maintain our effectiveness and secrecy over the last nine years? There isn't a trick in the book we don't know."
"Don't do it, Paula. We need this bay in one piece."
"I won't do it unless you prevent me from leaving. But if you try to prevent me, I won't hesitate. The blast won't do significant damage to Panoply — it might put this bay out of action, true — but it definitely won't leave enough of me for you to trawl."
"I need to know where the Clockmaker is," Dreyfus insisted.
"I can't take the risk of telling you. As far as I'm concerned, Panoply is already compromised. Firebrand is the only remaining part of the organisation capable of handling things from now on."
"If you think I can't be trusted, why did you tell me that the Clockmaker's still alive?"
"I told you nothing Aurora won't already know. Now leave the cutter, Prefects."
"We'll track you. Wherever you go. You're just prolonging the inevitable."
"There isn't a ship in Panoply that can be prepped and launched in time to follow me." She allowed a glint of self-satisfaction to shine through. "I know: I checked. And you won't be able to track me. This cutter is CTC-dark. Maybe if there wasn't a Bandwide crisis going down, stretching all our resources, you might have a chance. But you don't, so you may as well not even bother. I'm dropping off the map. You won't hear from me again."
"You might hear from me," Dreyfus said.
"Get off this ship. Then make sure those bay doors are opened. You've got two minutes."
"Give us Chen's body."
"So you can run a post-mortem trawl to find out what he knew about the Clockmaker? Nice try."
No, Dreyfus thought: not for that reason at all. He'd never counted on extracting anything useful from the dead. But he was sure Demikhov's crash team would welcome some practice at stabilising a severed head before they had to do it for real.
"Have it your way, Paula." Dreyfus looked back at Sparver. "We're leaving. She may be bluffing about those whiphounds, but we can't take the chance."
"Boss," Sparver said quietly, "I already have her marked. I can put my own whiphound on her in under a second."
"Try it," Saavedra said. "If you're feeling lucky. You have about ninety seconds now, by the way."
"You're making a terrible mistake, Paula," Dreyfus said.
"So are you. Get off the ship."
Dreyfus nodded at Sparver and the two of them retreated back into the docking connector. The airlock closed, isolating the ship. Dreyfus cuffed his bracelet and called through to Thyssen, the officer in charge of bay operations. "This is Dreyfus. Open the doors. Let her go."
"Prefect, we can't afford to lose that cutter," Thyssen said.
"We lose the bay if we don't lose the cutter. Open the doors."
Thyssen didn't need to be told twice. A moment later the vast jaws of the armoured doors began to ease wide, interlocking teeth pulling away from each other to reveal a sea of false stars and the darkside curve of Yellowstone, cusped by a line of indigo. The launching rack pushed out on pistons, shoving Saavedra's cutter into open space. Engines kicked in, spiking out needle-thin thrust lines. The cutter surged away at maximum burn.
"Can we get another ship out there?" Dreyfus asked.
"Not fast enough to intercept," Thyssen said. "We'll track her as best we can, but I can't promise anything."
Through the window of the docking connector, Dreyfus watched Saavedra's ship fall into the sea of stars, following it by eye until he could no longer distinguish it from the lights of distant habitats.
* * *
"It's very, very bad," Jane Aumonier's hovering face told Dreyfus and the assembled seniors, while the Solid Orrery displayed six red lights amidst a sea of twinkling emerald. "Weevils penetrated and occupied Carousel New Brazilia nine hours, thirty minutes ago. We detected manufactory warm-up two hours ago. Eighteen minutes ago, the doors opened and newly minted weevils began to emerge. Squadron density and flow throughput is consistent with what we've already seen in Aubusson and
Szlumper Oneill." She paused, allowing that to sink in before delivering the grim remainder of her summary. "We lost Flammarion not long after Brazilia. The manufactories are on-line there as well. Based on what we've observed in the other habitats, we can expect weevil output to commence in ten to fifteen minutes. We've failed to contain the outflow from Aubusson and Szlumper Oneill, but we were at least able to reduce the number of weevils, which must have had some measurable effect on Aurora's rate of spread. Now we'll have no chance, short of nuclear intervention at the production sites. Of course, that won't stop any weevils that have already departed."
"Which habitats are the new weevils targeting?" asked Clearmountain.
"If there's one crumb of comfort to extract from any of this," Aumonier said, "it's that Lillian's simulation appears to accurately predict Aurora's intentions. That may change in the future if Aurora realises that we're guessing her movements, but for the moment it does at least allow us to concentrate our evacuation efforts where they're most useful. The weevil flow from Brazilia is aimed at the Toriyuma-Murchison Spindle, one of the ten habitats we've already prioritised."
"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-Murchison Spindle, 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.
* * *
CHAPTER 26
* * *
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.
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