‘And maybe they’ve acquired enough autonomy now that they can keep coming without receiving instructions. Face it: we don’t really know what their capabilities are.’
‘Can you take down the core?’
‘I think I can damage it,’ she said, nodding at her whiphound, which was waiting on a nearby chair. ‘But that may not be enough to stop all abstraction packets getting through. There’s a lot of self-repairing quickmatter in a core. It isn’t like cutting dumb matter.’
‘And to be sure?’
‘I’d have to blow it up. Problem is we only have one shot at that.’
His expression conveyed a mixture of exasperation and admiration. ‘And you want to keep the grenade mode for later, don’t you?’
‘Ignore the likelihood of our survival for the moment,’ she answered. ‘Just give me the facts concerning the technical side of the problem. Can we weaken the structural members sufficiently if all we have is the whiphound?’
‘You said it’ll cut just about anything, short of hyperdiamond?’
Thalia nodded. ‘Of course, it isn’t working as well as it should. But provided the filament stays rigid, it ought to be okay. It coped with granite, after all.’
‘Then you can probably do it, provided you follow through with a big bang, in exactly the right place.’
‘I don’t think the big bang’s going to be a problem.’
Parnasse scratched under his collar, looking conflicted. ‘Then if we get down into the base of the sphere we can reach what we need to cut. If we weaken the right members, and position the whiphound in exactly the right place, we can probably force the sphere to topple in the right direction. Emphasis on “probably”, girl.’
‘I’ll take what I’m given. And then? Will she hold, from a structural standpoint?’
‘Your guess is as good as mine.’
‘Everyone in here will need to be braced, lashed down. We need to plan for that now or there are going to be a lot of broken bones.’
‘Girl, I think broken bones will be the least of our worries.’
‘We need to start bringing some of the others in on the plan,’ Thalia said. When Parnasse said nothing, she added, ‘So that they can start making preparations.’
‘Girl, we haven’t agreed to this. We haven’t discussed it, or put it to the vote.’
‘We’re not putting it to the vote. We’re just doing it.’
‘Whatever happened to democracy?’
‘Democracy took a hike.’ She stared at him with fierce intent, brooking no dissent. ‘You know we have to do this, Cyrus. You know there’s no other choice.’
‘I know it, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.’
‘Even so.’
He closed his eyes, reaching some troubled conclusion. ‘Redon. She’s pretty reasonable. If we can bring her in, she can smooth it with the others, get them to see sense. Then maybe she can start explaining it to me.’
‘Talk to her,’ Thalia said, nodding at the sleeping, exhausted-looking woman. Meriel Redon was resting after having worked on the barricade shift and would probably not welcome being woken prematurely.
‘How much do you want me to tell her?’
‘The lot. But tell her to keep it to herself until we’ve made the preparations.’
‘Let’s hope she’s in an optimistic frame of mind.’
‘Just a second,’ Thalia said distractedly.
Parnasse narrowed his eyes. ‘What are you looking at?’
For the first time since the coming of day, movement in the landscape had caught her eye. She squinted for a moment, wondering if she’d imagined it, but just when she was ready to conclude that her mind was playing tricks on her she caught it again. She’d seen something dark move along what had once been the perimeter of the Museum of the Cybernetics, the motion furtive and scurrying. She thought of Crissel and his boarding party, of the black tactical armour of field prefects, and for a cruel instant she let herself imagine they were being rescued. Then she snapped the glasses to her face and zoomed in on the movement, and saw that it had nothing to do with prefects. She was looking at an advancing column of low, beetle-like machines, many dozens of them. They moved faster than any civilian servitor she had ever seen, tearing through or gliding over obstacles like a line of black ink running down a page.
‘What is it?’
‘Something bad,’ Thalia answered.
They were not civilian servitors, she realised. They were some kind of war machine, and they were working their way inexorably towards the polling core.
Terror nestled tighter in her stomach, as if it was making itself even more at home.
‘Tell me, girl.’
‘Military-grade servitors,’ she said. ‘I’m pretty sure, anyway.’
‘Must be some mistake. There was nothing like that here before.’
‘I know. It would have been a lockdown offence even to own the construction files.’
‘So where have they come from?’
‘I think we already know,’ she said. ‘They’ve been made overnight. There are probably bits of people in them.’
‘The manufactories?’
‘I think so. I can’t believe these are the only thing they’re spewing out — there’d have been enough material to make millions of them, which is obviously absurd. But at least we know what part of the production flow was meant for.’
‘And the rest?’
‘I’m too scared to think about it.’
Thalia turned back to the polling core. Perhaps Parnasse was right, that the time had now come to destroy it. The option had been at the back of her mind all along, after all. She believed that the core was playing a vital part in coordinating the activities of the machines via the low-level signals she had already detected. That was why the servitors had not already demolished the stalk, something that she knew would have been well within their capabilities. But she would not risk putting that theory to the test until she took the core out of action. If the machines were somehow able to keep running afterwards, it would all have been for nothing. She had not been prepared to take that risk until now, but the spectacle of the advancing war machines had changed everything.
She walked to the nearest chair and picked up her whiphound. It had become too hot to wear clipped to her belt and she could only tolerate holding it if she had a scarf wrapped around her palm. She let the filament extend and stiffen itself in sword mode, ignoring the buzzing protestation from the handle.
‘Are you going to do it?’ Parnasse asked.
‘I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s time.’
He steadied her trembling hand. ‘And maybe it isn’t. Like you said, girl — if chopping at this thing doesn’t do the job, we’d better have a pretty good back-up plan in place. Put the sword away for now. I’m going to test the water with Redon.’
CHAPTER 23
A portion of the Solid Orrery had been reassigned to emulate the three-dimensional form of a weevil-class war robot. The one-tenth-scale representation rotated slowly, the light of the room appearing to gleam off its angled black surfaces. In its space-travel/ atmospheric-entry configuration, the machine’s multiple legs and manipulators were tucked hard against its shell, as if it had died and shrivelled up. Its binocular sensor packages were contained in two grilled domes that bore an uncanny resemblance to the compound eyes of an insect.
‘They’re as nasty as they look,’ Baudry commented to the assembled prefects. ‘Banned under seven or eight conventions of war, last seen in action more than a hundred and twenty years ago. Most war robots are designed to kill other war robots. Weevils were engineered to do that and kill humans. They carry detailed files on human anatomy. They know our weak points, what makes us hurt, what makes us break.’ As she spoke, reams of dense technical data scrolled down the walls. ‘In and of themselves, weevils are containable. We have techniques and weapons that would be effective against them in both vacuum stand-off situations and in close-quarters combat in and around habitats. The problem is the number, not the machines themselves. According to the Democratic Circus, House Aubusson has already manufactured and launched two hundred and sixty thousand units, and the flow isn’t showing any signs of stopping. A weevil only weighs five hundred kilograms, and most of the materials required to make one would be commonplace inside a habitat like Aubusson. If the servitors inside the habitat work efficiently, they can easily supply all the feed materials necessary to build more just by dismantling and recycling existing structures inside the cylinder. We could be looking at an output of millions of weevils before the manufactories need to start eating into the structural fabric of the habitat. Then the numbers become unthinkable.’