“It’s your call, Prefect. I’ll try to pick a spot where you’ll have an easy approach.”
“I know you’ll do your best, Captain, but I’m not expecting miracles.” Dreyfus glanced through the nearest window at the waiting form of the cutter, a flint-like wedge of black poised on the end of its launch rack.
“Are we good to go?”
Pell nodded.
“We can move out as soon as we’re aboard and lashed down.”
“There’s a surface suit aboard?”
“Everything you asked for on the checklist, and as many weapons as Thyssen’s people could cram into the remaining space.”
“I’m hoping it won’t come to a gunfight,” Dreyfus said, “but I’ll take what I can get.” He was about to board the ship when an internal prefect came rushing into the observation area, braking himself to a halt against a restraining strap.
“Prefect Dreyfus!” the man called.
“I’m glad I caught you, sir. We were told you’re shipping out and that you’ll be out of comms range. But you need to hear this before you go.”
“Is it about Thalia?” The man smiled.
“She’s alive, sir. She’s alive and well and she’s managed to get a whole party of Aubusson citizens out of that place.”
“Thank God.” Despite his nerves, Dreyfus couldn’t help smiling as well.
“I want to speak to her. Is she back yet?”
“Sorry, sir. We need that deep-system cruiser out there for the time being.”
“But she’s okay?”
“We have reports of minor injuries, sir, nothing worse than that. But Thalia had some bad news for us. It looks like there are no other survivors from Aubusson.”
“None?”
“It wasn’t the decompression, sir. According to Thalia the servitors inside the habitat have been rounding people up and killing them for hours. She doesn’t think anyone else made it through the night.”
“Thank you,” Dreyfus said.
“You’ll make sure the supreme prefect is informed, won’t you? If Aubusson is depopulated, she needs to know. It could make all the difference.”
“She already has the intelligence, sir. Is there anything else?”
“Just this: I want you to pass on a message to Thalia Ng when she gets back to Panoply. Tell her I was very pleased to hear that she made it out in one piece. Tell her that I’m very proud of her actions. Tell her that she’s a credit to the organisation, and that I look forward to telling her that in person.”
“I’ll see the message gets through, sir.” Dreyfus nodded.
“You do that for me.”
Pell boarded the cutter first, sealing the flight-deck passwall while Dreyfus attended to the organisation of his suit, weapons and equipment, satisfying himself that everything he had requested was present. It was a more complicated ensemble than could be created by a standard suitwall. There had been no oversights, he was glad to see. If anything, the technicians had stocked more armour and weapons than he could ever have hoped to carry. It was all lashed down or fixed into place via conjured restraints. He resisted the urge to suit-up now; there would be time enough for that during the long subsonic flight to the drop-off point, once they were safely inside Yellowstone’s atmosphere.
Dreyfus felt a tightness in his stomach. It was fear, moving back in like an old lodger. He felt the cutter move on the rack. He buckled in for launch, wishing he had remembered to shave. His neck hairs rasped against his collar and he could smell his own sweat seeping out of his pores.
His bracelet chimed. It was Jane Aumonier, as he had anticipated.
“They say we should remain out of contact once you’ve cleared Panoply,” she said, “just in case Aurora can eavesdrop on our long-range comms.”
“It’s a sensible precaution.”
“Concerning the matter we discussed, Tom—the document is now available on your compad. There’s also a package under your seat. I had it loaded aboard before you arrived. You’ll know exactly what it is when you open it.”
“I’ve made my decision,” Dreyfus said. He was on the verge of adding something, feeling that he ought to wish Aumonier well, but he did not want to risk her guessing Demikhov’s intentions.
“I’ll see you back in Panoply,” he said.
The cutter surged forward. He waited until the vehicle had ramped up to full thrust and then carefully loosened his webbing. He reached under the seat and found the package Aumonier had mentioned. It came loose with a gentle tug. He settled the black box onto his lap, allowing the cutter’s thrust to hold it in place. The box was unfamiliar, but his fingers located a catch and the lid sprang open easily.
Dreyfus examined the contents.
The box contained six boosters of the same basic type that maintained his Pangolin clearance. He took one of them out. The label on the side read: Manticore clearance. To be self-administered by Senior Prefect Tom Dreyfus only. Unauthorised use may result in neurological injury or permanent irreversible death.
He felt as if he was holding a bomb in his hands, and the bomb had just stopped ticking.
“Senior Prefect Dreyfus,” he said, mouthing the words as if there must have been some mistake. But he knew there hadn’t been.
The thrust sequence ended. The cutter was now in free fall and would remain so until it commenced its braking phase prior to atmospheric insertion. Through the window he’d sketched in the wall upon his arrival, Dreyfus saw that they had already cleared the main orbits of the Glitter Band. Habitats of all shapes and sizes crowded upon each other, sliding silently through space as if they were the ornamented, treasure-bedecked barques and argosies of some marvellous flotilla. The clear space between them, which he knew was at least fifty or sixty kilometres, looked too narrow to allow the passage of a single cutter. He could see now, with a forcefulness that had never really struck him when staring into the Solid Orrery, that it would be the simplest matter in the world for Aurora to spread her infection from state to state. Her weevils had almost no distance to cross. The habitats were stepping stones towards total dominion.
And yet nowhere in his line of sight was there the slightest evidence of the crisis itself. Even if it now encompassed thirty or fifty habitats, including those on the fringe of the evacuation effort, that was still much less than a hundredth of the total number of states under Panoply’s protection. The serene panorama before him looked startlingly normal, like a snapshot of the Glitter Band during the most routine of days. And yet he recalled the swiftness with which Lillian Baudry’s simulation had demonstrated the takeover could spread. No comfort could be extracted from this apparent normality. Satisfied that the cutter would not be making any high-acceleration swerves for now, Dreyfus replaced the Manticore box beneath his seat and propelled himself through the cabin. He knocked quietly on the passwall before letting himself through into the flight deck.
“Thanks for getting us away in good time, Captain Pell,” he said, before his eyes took in the fact that Pell was not alone on the flight deck. Sitting behind and to his left, in one of the other flight positions, was Sparver.
“Hi, Boss.”
Dreyfus was too stunned to feel anger, or even annoyance that his orders had been disobeyed.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
Sparver looked at Pell.
“Now, I ask you—is that any way to talk to your deputy?”
Aumonier floated alone, striving to keep her thoughts on the matter at hand rather than Dreyfus’ mission to Yellowstone. She had cleared all but four display facets in her sphere, and had enlarged those until they filled almost the entire facing hemisphere. They showed the four habitats where Thalia Ng had performed the initial upgrade to the polling core software: Carousel New Seattle-Tacoma, the Chevelure-Sambuke Hourglass, Szlumper Oneill and House Aubusson. No contact had been made with any of these states since the installation of the core patch, more than twenty-six hours earlier. All along, Aumonier had assumed that the citizenry were
alive and well, albeit under some new and possibly repressive system of government. She had always assumed that if Aurora wished to kill those people, she would achieve it the easy way, by depressurising the habitat or tampering with the life-support in some equally decisive fashion. It was only now that Aumonier realised the fatal flaw in her thinking. Aurora had indeed wanted those people dead: not because she hated them, not because they were capable of derailing her plans, but because they were of no conceivable use to her. And yet, as Thalia’s debriefing testimony made clear, Aurora had been at pains to conceal her murder of the citizenry from the outside world. It had to be done the old-fashioned way, the historical way: not with a single catastrophic release of air or heat, something that would have been detectable from afar, but with the apparatus of state: armed force, applied via her new army of servitors. The citizens had been rounded up, pacified with lies and then executed by machine. And then their remains had been shovelled into bigger machines and conveyed to the matter-consuming furnaces of the manufactories, where they were smelted down and made into parts for other machines.
Aumonier cursed the way Aurora had manipulated her unwillingness to strike against habitats that she still believed contained living citizens. But without Thalia’s escape with her tiny party of survivors, she would still not have known. There was probably no one left alive in any of those four habitats. Even if some survivors had managed to hide or hold out against the machines, Panoply could do nothing for them now.
Well, there was one thing, Aumonier reflected. It could end their torment now, before the machines reached them. It was not much of a kindness, but it was the only one she had left to give.
“Captains Sarasota, Yokosuka, Ribeauville and Gilden. This is Jane Aumonier. You have my permission to open fire on your designated targets.”
This time there was no questioning of her order, no doubt that she meant what she had said.
“Nukes deployed and running,” Gilden said.
“Deployed and running,” Yokosuka reported.
“Deployed and running,” Sarasota and Ribeauville said, in near-unison. Aumonier closed her eyes before the first flash reached her. Even though she was only seeing a monitor feed, the brilliance of the nuclear explosions—twelve in all, three per habitat—still pushed through her eyelids. She counted twelve pink flashes. When she opened her eyes, nothing remained of the targets except four slowly expanding nebulae: the atomised, ionised remains of what had once been homes to more than two million of her citizens. There’d been beauty and misery in those habitats, wonder and sadness, every facet of human experience, history reaching back two hundred years. Between one breath and the next all that had been wiped out of existence, like a delirious dream that never happened.
“Forgive us,” she said to herself. A little later, she received confirmation that the weevil flows from Aubusson and Szlumper Oneill had both been curtailed. The weevils that had been manufactured just before the attack were still crossing space, but their predicted destinations were already subjects of the evacuation effort. Aumonier knew that they would not clear all the citizens out in time, that they would be doing well to remove seventy per cent of them before the weevil contamination infected another habitat. Nothing more could be done, given the limiting bottlenecks of airlocks and ships and round-trip travel times. Her best people had been on the problem around the clock, and she had no doubt that they had already squeezed the last fraction of a percentile out of that figure. Attempts were now under way to mobilise enough ships to change the orbits of habitats lying beyond Aurora’s current expansion front, but the technical challenge of moving a billion-tonne city state was awesome, and Aumonier knew that this was not a solution she could count on in the long term. At best, it would just take the weevils a little longer to reach their targets. Her bracelet chimed. She glanced down and saw that it was the call she had been hoping for.
“This is Baudry, Supreme Prefect.”
“Go ahead, Lillian.”
“We’re receiving reports from CTC.” Aumonier heard a catch in Baudry’s voice.
“They’re tracking massive ship movements from the Parking Swarm. Dozens of Ultra vessels, Supreme Prefect. Lighthuggers leaving their assigned orbits in the Swarm.”
“Are they leaving the system, Lillian?”
“No.” Baudry sounded flustered.
“Some of them, yes. Most of them… no. Most of them appear to be on vectors that will bring them into the Glitter Band.”
“How long until they arrive?”
“Six to seven hours, Supreme Prefect, before the lead vehicles enter Glitter Band airspace. If we are to consider a tactical response, we need to start making arrangements now. Deep-system vehicles will need to be retasked, fuelled and weaponed in readiness—”.
“You consider this a hostile gesture?”
“What else could it be? They’ve had designs on control of the Glitter Band for decades. Now that we’re facing a crisis, they’ve seen their moment. They’re going to use the Aurora emergency to stage a takeover of their own.”
“I don’t believe so, Lillian. I actually requested assistance from the Ultras. I sent my plea to Harbourmaster Seraphim. I’d heard nothing from him since Dreyfus’ departure, so I assumed… but I
assumed wrongly, I think.” Aumonier paused, conscious that it had been a mistake not to inform the other seniors of her contact with Seraphim.
“Have any attempts been made to speak to the incoming ships?”
“Standard approach queries were transmitted, Supreme Prefect. No valid response has been received.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. We’re dealing with Ultras here. They have their own way of doing things.”
“But Supreme Prefect… we have to assume the worst.”
“I’ll assume the worst when I have evidence of hostile intent. Until then, no one so much as fires a ranging laser on one of those ships. Is that clear?”
“Clear,” Baudry said sullenly.
“Lillian, we have less than forty nuclear devices left in our arsenal. Do you honestly think we’d get very far if it came to open war against the Ultras?”
“I’m just saying… we can’t trust them. We’ve never been able to trust them. That’s always been a cornerstone of our operational policy.”
“Then maybe it’s time we got a new cornerstone. They’re people, Lillian. They might be people who make us uncomfortable, people with very different values from ours, but when we’re facing local extinction at the hands of a genocidal machine intelligence, I don’t think the differences between us look massively significant, do you?”
“I’ll keep you informed,” Baudry said.
“You do that. I’m not having the best of days here, Lillian, and the one thing I’m sure of is that we really, really don’t want to add any new enemies to our list.”
She closed the connection with Baudry and allowed her hand to drift down from her mouth. As it did so, she saw the red scratch of the laser cut across her cuff. She had been aware of that thin line for some hours now, without allowing herself to be distracted by pondering its purpose. Now, however, there was a window in her schedule. The Ultra ships would not arrive for six or seven hours. Dreyfus would take even longer to reach Ops Nine.
She had time to ponder.
She raised the bracelet again and spoke softly.
“Put me through to Doctor Demikhov.”
He answered almost immediately, almost as if he’d been watching her place the call.
“Supreme Prefect. This is a surprise.” Aumonier smiled: for all his talents, Demikhov was a poor liar.
“I wasn’t expecting to hear from you.”
“Doctor,” she said, “perhaps I’m mistaken, but I can’t help feeling that you have something planned for me.” She waited a handful of seconds, listening to his breathing.
“I’m right, aren’t I? This laser, which wasn’t here yesterday. The noises Dreyfus did his best to explain away. What’s going to happen, Doctor?”
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After a silence that made her wonder whether the link had been broken, Demikhov said, “It’s best if you don’t know.”
“You’re probably right. It’s not as if I’ve ever had cause to doubt your clinical wisdom, after all. But I just wanted to say something.”
“Go ahead,” Demikhov answered.
“I’ve done all I can for the next few hours. If you’re intending to remove the scarab, now might be the best time to try it.”
“There’ll be risks.”
“Just as there are risks in allowing it to remain clamped on my neck. I know the score, Doctor.”
“After the procedure we have in mind,” Demikhov said hesitantly, “there’s a possibility that you may be incapacitated.”
“In which case Senior Prefect Clearmountain will assume temporary authority. But only until I’m fit to resume command. Don’t keep me out of it for too long, Doctor. All I need is a pair of eyes and a mouth to give orders. Understood?”
“Understood,” he answered.
“Then I urge you to execute whatever plan you’ve been putting in place. You are good to go, aren’t you?”
“We’re good to go.”
“Then do your best, Doctor. I’m submitting myself to your care.”
“If I fail—” he began.
“You’ll still have my undying gratitude. Now get this fucking thing off my neck.”
“You’re in position,” Demikhov said.
“Please don’t move a muscle, Supreme Prefect. Not even to answer me.” Jane Aumonier held her breath. She heard something go click.
CHAPTER 29
Doctor Demikhov watched events unfold with a curious sense of retardation, as if he was replaying one of his simulations at half normal speed. The blades pushed through the weakened part of the wall and raced together, their cutting edges forming a tightening circle with the supreme prefect at the precise centre. Aumonier floated motionlessly, her expression unchanging: she did not have time to react to the blades’ intrusion into her private space. They closed on her, reaching her throat and passing cleanly through, interlocking with micron precision as they met. Demikhov was now forced to take in two distinct views, captured from cams in the two isolated halves of the former sphere. In the upper hemisphere, the supreme prefect’s severed head began to drift away from the blades with almost imperceptible slowness. In the lower hemisphere, her body and the scarab drifted in the opposite direction. In the same decelerated time-frame, Demikhov saw the scarab react to the violent intrusion of a large foreign object into its volume of denial. The lower part of Aumonier’s neck, below the cut, puffed apart in a cloud of pink and grey. Blood continued to spurt from the neck in inky profusion. The heart was still pumping. The drifting remains of both the decapitated body and its damaged parasite were quickly obscured. Demikhov’s attention flicked to the upper sphere. Time accelerated. The head’s slow drift became an ungainly tumble. The head was also leaking blood, albeit with much less ferocity than the body. Servitors rushed into both chambers, moving too quickly for the eye to follow. The machines reached the scarab, detached it from the neck and encased it in a cocoon of blast-smothering quickmatter. In the upper chamber, machines reached the head and arrested its motion away from the shining floor formed by the blades.
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