‘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.’
‘It’s on the other side of this glass?’
‘Nearly. We usually keep it away from the window. I’ll rotate the magnets to bring it into view for a few moments.’
Dreyfus glanced back at Saavedra, waiting for her permission to move. She nodded. He joined Veitch and stepped onto the small pedestal beneath the viewing window. Two upright handrails provided support on either side of the armoured porthole. Dreyfus touched the pale-green skin of the reactor and felt it tremble under his hands. The tremor was irregular, with powerful surges.