“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.”