The cam greyed out.
Another feed showed the Bellatrix turning, giving a view along its white flanks. The outrush from the open airlock had ceased. Interior doors must have closed.
‘She’s on drive,’ Dreyfus said. The liner’s quadruple engines cranked wide, spitting tongues of pink fire. The enormous vessel hardly appeared to move at first. Gradually, though, the slow but sure acceleration became apparent. The Bellatrix began to put distance between itself and the habitat. Departing from the Spindle’s forward docking hub, the liner would have the entire bulk of the habitat between it and the fusion explosion when the missiles hit home.
Aumonier lifted her bracelet again. ‘Connect me to the Democratic Circus,’ she said, barely breathing before speaking again. ‘Captain Pelclass="underline" allow the Bellatrix to achieve ten kilometres. Then you may open fire on the habitat’s aft assembly.’
Since the Bellatrix was maintaining a steady half-gee of thrust, it took only sixty seconds for the liner to reach the designated safe distance. By then, all surrounding habitats — those that hadn’t already been taken by Aurora — were on a state of high defensive alertness, anticipating not just the electromagnetic pulse of each nuclear strike, but also the likely risk of impact debris. For Dreyfus the seconds slowed and then appeared to stall altogether. He knew that Aumonier would have preferred to give the liner more space, but she was mindful of the weevils escaping and doing more harm if they waited. The evacuees aboard the Bellatrix would just have to hope that the shielding between them and the engines would serve to protect them from the worst effects of the blast.
A voice, rendered small and reedy in transmission, spoke through her bracelet. ‘Pell, Supreme Prefect. Bellatrix has cleared safe-distance margin.’
‘You already have my authorisation to fire, Captain.’
‘I just wanted to be certain that nothing’d changed, Ma’am.’
‘Nothing’s changed. Do your job, Captain Pell.’
‘Missiles launched and running, Ma’am.’
The cam feed switched to a long-range view of the Toriyuma-Murchison Spindle. With distance foreshortened by the cam angle, the Bellatrix almost appeared to be still docked.
The missiles surged in, etching two bright streaks of exhaust fire, as if they’d gashed open space to reveal something luminous and clean behind it.
They detonated.
The nuclear explosion — the double bursts occurred too close in time to separate — whited out the cam view. There’d been no sense of the fireball expanding; it was just there, consuming everything in a single annihilating flash.
It happened in deathly silence.
All the displays in Jane’s room flickered momentarily as the electromagnetic pulse raced across the Glitter Band.
Then the whited-out view dulled through darkening reds until the background blackness was again visible, and something mangled and molten was drifting there, something that had once been a habitat, but which now resembled more the blackened, tattered remains of a spent firework. The nukes had destroyed the manufactory, but in doing so they’d blasted away at least a third of the habitat’s length, leaving the rest of the structure cracked open along structural fault lines. The air inside wouldn’t have had time to escape through those cracks before it became searingly hot. No one would have had time to suffocate, either. But they’d have had time to see the fire surging towards them, even as that fire burnt the eyes out of their sockets.
If only for an instant, they’d have known what had been done to them.
‘Status, Captain Pell,’ Aumonier said.
‘Initial indications suggest complete destruction of the manufactory. Bellatrix reporting minor damage, but no additional casualties. Likelihood of further survivors is… low.’
‘That’s what I expected,’ Aumonier said, with almost infinite resignation. ‘Destroy the rest of the habitat, Captain. I don’t want those weevils using it as a bridgehead even if they can’t make new copies of themselves.’
Dreyfus felt the weight of what they had just done squeeze in on him like a vice. In the time since he had last blinked, thirty-five thousand people had ceased to exist. He couldn’t focus on that kind of number, any more than he could focus on the nine hundred and sixty who had died in Ruskin-Sartorious. But he had seen the faces of the people in the Spindle’s docking tube; he’d seen their inexpressible terror when they knew that the air was going to suck them out into space and they were going to die, unpleasantly, with their lungs freezing into hard, cold husks before their hearts stopped beating. The face of one middle-aged woman came back to him now, even though she’d just been one of many people squeezed into the boarding tube. She’d been looking directly into the cam, looking — so it seemed to him now — directly at him, her expression one of quiet, dignified pleading, placing her utmost faith in him to do something about her predicament. He knew nothing of that woman, not even her name, but now she came to stand in his imagination for all the good and honest citizens who had just been erased from existence. He didn’t need to imagine her death multiplied by thirty-five thousand. The loss of one decent citizen was shame enough. That it had happened by Panoply’s hand made it all the more repellent.
But that didn’t mean Jane had been wrong to do it.
‘I never thought I’d have to do this,’ she said. ‘Now I’m wondering if I’ve just committed the worst crime in our history.’
‘You haven’t. You did the right thing.’
‘I killed those people.’
‘You did what you were meant to do: think of the majority.’
‘I haven’t saved them, Tom. I’ve just given them time.’
‘Then we’d better make it count, hadn’t we? If nothing else, we owe it to the citizens of the Spindle.’
‘I keep thinking: what if I’m wrong? What if they really will be better off under Aurora’s government?’
‘The people gave us the authority to protect them, Jane. That’s what we just did.’
Jane Aumonier said nothing. Together they watched as Captain Pell finished off the rest of the habitat. Now that there was no possibility of sparing survivors, the yields were dialled as high as they could go. The blasts snipped the remains of the Spindle out of existence.
Perhaps it was Dreyfus’s imagination, but he detected an easing in Aumonier’s mood when the evidence of her actions had finally been erased.
‘You know the hard part?’ she asked.
Dreyfus shook his head. ‘No.’
‘The hard part is we have to do exactly the same thing to the Persistent Vegetative State. By the end of the day I’ll be lucky if I have less than a hundred thousand dead on my hands.’
‘They’re not on your hands,’ Dreyfus said. ‘They’re on Aurora’s. Don’t ever forget that.’
She came to them shortly afterwards. Her transmission rode a secure Panoply-restricted data channel, one that remained active when the public networks were silenced and the citizens roused from the great dream of abstraction. The incoming data signal was subjected to ruthless scrutiny, but it was free of any hint of concealed subliminal influence or embedded weaponry. After consultation with the supreme prefect, it was concluded that nothing would be lost by displaying the image to the seniors gathered in the tactical room.
They found themselves looking at a girclass="underline" a child-woman on a throne wearing elaborate brocaded clothes. Her parted hair was reddish-brown, her expression watchful but not hostile.
‘It’s high time we spoke,’ Aurora said, in a strong, clear voice with excellent elocution.