‘Taking out that one habitat won’t necessarily stop her.’
‘It’ll inconvenience her. I’ll settle for that for now.’
‘This is bigger than Panoply,’ Dreyfus said desperately. ‘We need to call in assistance. Anyone who has a ship and can help.’
‘I’ve issued requests for help through the usual channels. Maybe something will arrive, but I’m not counting on it.’ She hesitated, her attention still fixed only on him. Dreyfus had the feeling that he was participating in a private conversation, to the exclusion of everyone else in the room. ‘Tom, there’s something else.’
‘What?’ he asked.
‘I’m going to have to take down polling and abstraction services, Bandwide. There’s just too much danger of Aurora utilising the network for her own purposes.’
‘She spreads by weevil.’
‘The weevils are her main agents, but we don’t know for sure that she isn’t using other channels to assist in her spread. I’ve already received a mandate to use all emergency powers at our disposal. That means authorisation to commit mass euthanisation if it means saving other lives. It also means I can take down the networks.’
‘We’ll need those networks to coordinate our own efforts.’
‘And we’ll retain skeletal data links for just that purpose. But everything else has to go. It’s the only way to be sure.’
Dreyfus examined his thoughts. It startled him to realise that he was less shocked by Aumonier’s planned use of nuclear weapons than he was by the idea of blacking out the entire Glitter Band. But the fact of the matter was that for most of the ten thousand habitats, life was continuing more or less as normally. Some of the citizens would be aware of the crisis, but many would be completely insulated from it, snug in the hermetic cocoons of their private fantasy universes. That wouldn’t necessarily change when Panoply started nuking. But no one — save the citizens of the Bezile Solipsist State, or the Persistent Vegetative State, or the harsher Voluntary Tyrannies — could fail to notice the withdrawal of Bandwide data services. Reality was about to give them a cold, hard slap in the face, whether they liked it or not.
The lights were about to go out across the Glitter Band. There was no choice: it had to be done.
‘Just do one thing for me,’ Dreyfus said, ‘before you pull the plug. Tell them Panoply isn’t giving up on them. Tell them that we’re going to be outside, fighting, and that we won’t let them down. Tell them not to forget that.’
‘I will,’ she said.
CHAPTER 26
Thalia’s trembling hands nearly dropped the whiphound as she finished weakening the final support spar in the sphere of the polling core. It had been agonisingly slow, and not just because the whiphound had grown too hot to hold for more than a minute at a time, even with a scarf wrapped around her palm. The weapon’s sword function had begun to falter, the filament occasionally losing its piezoelectrically maintained stiffness, the molecular cutting mechanisms losing some of their efficacy. The whiphound had ghosted through granite as if she was cutting air with a laser, but now towards the end she had to strain every muscle to persuade the filament to keep working its way through the structural members. The ninth had been the worst; it had taken nearly half an hour just to cut partially through, so that the strut would give way when she detonated the whiphound in grenade mode.
‘Is that enough?’ she whispered, even though the sound of the buzzing, crackling whiphound seemed loud enough to render whispering pointless.
‘It’d better be,’ Parnasse said. ‘I don’t think that thing of yours is good for much more cutting.’
Thalia retracted the filament. ‘No, I don’t think it is.’
‘I guess we’d best just thank Sandra Voi that that thing held out as long as it did. Only has to do one more thing for us now.’
‘Two things,’ Thalia said, remembering that she still intended to sabotage the polling core. ‘Show me where we have to place it, anyway.’
‘Anywhere around here should do the trick. A centimetre’s not going to make the difference between life and death.’
Thalia placed the bundled whiphound under one of the weakened spars. ‘Like here?’
‘That’ll do, girl.’
‘Good. I should be able to find this spot when I come down again.’
‘How does grenade mode work on that thing?’
Thalia eased aside the wrapping surrounding the shaft until she had revealed the whiphound’s twist-controls. ‘You twist that dial to set the yield. I’ll turn it to maximum, obviously. It’ll give us about point one to point two kilotonnes, depending on how much dust’s left in the power bubble.’
‘And time delay?’
‘Those two dials there, in combination.’
‘How long a delay will it give you?’
‘Long enough,’ Thalia said.
Parnasse nodded wordlessly. They had done what they could down there, and while it might have been possible to weaken one or two more struts, Thalia doubted that they had the time. The barricade teams were already reporting that the noise of the servitors was louder than it had ever been, suggesting that the machines were only metres from breaking through. Thalia had heard them while she had been cutting. They had begun to climb past the top of the stalk, into the sphere itself. We’ve probably get less than an hour, she thought. Even thirty minutes might be pushing it now. And that was without considering the war machines that she believed were planning to ascend the outside of the stalk, or even the inside of the elevator shaft.
Thalia and Parnasse climbed back through the forest of structural supports until they reached the ceiling door that led into the lowest inhabitable section of the sphere. A minute later they reached the floor of the polling core, where most of the party were now awake and nervous, aware that something was afoot but as yet ignorant of Thalia’s plan.
They had questions for her, but before she spoke to them, Thalia moved to the nearest window and looked down towards the very base of the stalk. She noted, with a knife-twist of apprehension in her stomach, that the concentration of military-grade servitors was now much less than it had been before. It could only mean that most of the machines were now ascending the stalk, working with methodical inevitability towards the level of the polling core.
‘Call off the work squad,’ she told Caillebot. ‘Tell them to drop what they’re doing and get back up here.’
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘What about the barricade? Someone needs to keep watch on it.’
‘Not now they don’t. It’s served us well but we won’t be needing it any more.’
‘But the machines are getting close.’
‘I know. That’s why it’s time we got out of here. Get the squad, Jules. We don’t have time to debate this.’
He stared at her, frozen as if on the verge of framing an objection, then turned and descended the short staircase down to the next level, where the current barricade team was still doing what they could to reinforce the obstruction.
‘What’s going to happen?’ asked Paula Thory, standing up from the sprawl of clothes that she had made into a makeshift bed.
‘We’re getting out of here,’ Thalia said.
‘How? You’re not expecting us to climb down those stairs, are you? We can’t very well fight our way past those machines.’
‘We won’t be fighting our way past anything. If all goes well, we won’t have to deal with a single servitor. Before you know it, we’ll be outside House Aubusson, in clear space, waiting to be rescued.’