‘I don’t know what’s happened to Gaffney, but we should probably think about getting out of here,’ Dreyfus said. ‘Before he lost consciousness, Veitch told me that there’d been a containment breakdown. He was convinced that the Clockmaker would have escaped.’
‘Do you think there’d be any point in running from it?’
‘I’d rather run than sit here waiting for an audience.’
‘Well, you don’t need to worry just yet. Containment failed, but not long enough for the Clockmaker to escape. It’s still inside the tokamak. The back-up generators won’t keep it there for ever, but we’re safe for an hour or so.’
‘I’m glad. But you should still be thinking about getting out of here now.’
She cocked her head, puzzled by his response. ‘Me, Dreyfus? After all that’s happened?’
‘You came here by ship, Paula. Find Sparver, then collect your cutter. If you have fuel to reach orbit, do so. Otherwise get back to Chasm City and contact the authorities. If there’s anything left of Panoply, they can probably put you in touch.’
‘And then what?’
‘Tell them what I told you concerning the Clockmaker. Make sure someone finds out about it. If Jane Aumonier is still alive, tell Jane.’
‘How will that knowledge help matters?’
‘Maybe it’ll come in useful when they have to put the Clockmaker back in the bottle.’
‘You are not seriously injured, Dreyfus. You don’t have to die down here.’
‘Someone has to go down to the tokamak. Someone still has to talk to the thing and persuade it to do what it can to turn back Aurora.’
‘You think you can persuade the Clockmaker?’
‘I’ll give it a shot.’
‘How? You don’t even know how to communicate with it.’
‘I’ll find a way. Even if I have to open the tokamak and let it out.’
‘It would almost certainly kill you.’
‘But it might want to talk first. I’ll have to count on that. If I can make it see what a threat Aurora presents… if it hasn’t already worked that out for itself, of course.’
Saavedra unclasped her hands. She touched one index finger to her lips, studiedly conveying thoughtfulness. ‘I made a mistake in not trusting you when you arrived, didn’t I? I should have listened to you properly; learned everything I could about Aurora.’
‘You can make amends by getting through to Panoply.’
‘I’ll do what needs to be done. But first I need to know more about Aurora, not just the Clockmaker. You said she was one of the original Eighty, didn’t you?’
Dreyfus nodded wearily. It seemed unnecessary to rake over this again, given what he had already told Saavedra. ‘My colleague knows about as much as I do.’
‘But I’m asking you, not your deputy. What was her full name?’
‘Aurora Nerval-Lermontov. She was just a girl when they scanned her. I don’t think she was a monster then. Maybe it was society’s hatred and fear that drove her to become what she is, when they knew what Calvin Sylveste had brought into existence. Or maybe she always had it in her, like a seed waiting to flourish. Maybe she was a sick little girl from the moment she was born. Either way, she has to be stopped, wiped out of existence, before she takes over the entire Glitter Band. She won’t stop there, either.’
‘Where is she located?’
‘We’ve been over this, Paula. We don’t know. There’s about ten thousand habitats up there, any one of which could be hosting her unawares.’
‘Could she distribute herself, like a program executing on a massively parallel architecture? A piece of herself running on thousands of habitats, so that the loss of any one processing centre would not be catastrophic?’
‘Like I said, she won’t do that because the timelag would slow her thought processes down to a crawl.’
‘All the same. If she is to coordinate a takeover, she must make use of the network infrastructure to send commands and receive intelligence.’
‘Yes, but she’s obviously become expert at concealing herself. We just don’t have the overview to pick out the signal from the noise.’
‘Whereas you think the Clockmaker may be able to.’
‘That’s the idea.’ He was growing increasingly irritated at having to repeat the argument he’d already presented to Saavedra and Veitch. ‘Paula, why are we going over this again? We don’t have time. Either you agree or you don’t.’
‘I do agree,’ she said, so quietly that he almost didn’t catch the reply. ‘It’s your only hope of survival. Put one alpha-level mind against another. What could be more logical?’
That was when Dreyfus had the first tingling suspicion that something was very wrong.
‘Paula?’ he asked.
She turned away from him so that he was looking at her face in profile. Silhouetted against the illuminated wall, her body held the erect pose of a dancer about to begin some demanding routine. Dreyfus saw that there was something attached to the back of her head, neck and spine. It was like a thick metal caterpillar, a segmented thing with many legs. Her sleeveless black vest had been gashed open from neck to coccyx. As she turned even more, he saw that this was also true of her skin. He could see her backbone, grinning white through meat and muscle. The caterpillar had dug its needle-tipped feet through to her spinal nerve column.
Quite without warning, she dropped to the floor.
Dreyfus lay perfectly still, paralysed by the horror of what he had just witnessed. It must have found her, tortured or tricked her just enough to extract the basic details of Dreyfus’s mission. Then it had slashed her open and made her into a meat puppet.
Now it was done with the puppet. On the floor, Saavedra twitched and spasmed like a fish out of water.
‘You’re here,’ he said, finding the strength to speak. ‘You’re with me, aren’t you? In this room. You did escape after all.’
There’d been a humming sound all along, but it was only now that his ringing ears became fully attuned to it. Moving his neck by the tiniest of degrees, he looked around to face the other side of the bed, opposite where Saavedra had been standing. That side of the room was dark, but he was still aware of the form waiting there. It was larger than a man, towering towards the ceiling, stooping over to fit into the confined space. The red light gleamed off a dripping chrome ribcage, off the sickle-shaped fingers of a huge metallic hand, off the hammerhead width of a huge eyeless skull. The humming intensified. To Dreyfus, it became the most malevolent sound in the universe.
‘What do you want with me?’ he asked, expecting no answer.
But the Clockmaker spoke. Its voice was surprisingly soft, surprisingly avuncular. ‘It was very brave of you to come here, to find me. Did you expect that it would end like this?’
‘I didn’t know what to expect. I had no other choice.’
‘You expected to persuade me to help you?’
Dreyfus licked his lips. They felt as dry as clay. His heart was trying to tunnel its way out of his chest. ‘I only wanted to show you the way things are.’
‘With Aurora?’
‘Yes. She won’t stop. You’re the only thing that can touch her. Therefore she has to destroy you. And she will, sooner or later. Unless you destroy her first.’
‘Aurora will murder all of you.’
‘I know.’
‘What makes you think I’m any better?’
‘Because you didn’t kill everyone in SIAM.’