‘State your demands,’ Jane Aumonier said, her projection addressing the image from her usual position at the table. ‘What do you want?’
‘I don’t want anything, Supreme Prefect, except your absolute capitulation.’
‘Keep her talking,’ Dreyfus mouthed. Panoply’s best network hounds were trying to backtrack the transmission all the way to Aurora herself, wherever she was hiding.
‘You must have demands,’ Aumonier persisted.
‘None,’ the child-woman said firmly, as if it was the answer to a parlour game. ‘Demands would imply that I need something from you. That is not the case.’
‘Then why have you contacted us?’ asked Lillian Baudry.
‘To make recommendations,’ Aurora replied. ‘To suggest a way in which this whole matter can be settled with the minimum of inconvenience to all parties, as swiftly and painlessly as possible. But make no mistake: I will succeed, with or without your cooperation. I am merely concerned that the citizenry should be subject to the least amount of disruption.’
‘You sound very confident of success,’ said Aumonier.
‘It is a strategic certainty. You have seen how easily I can take your habitats. Each is a stepping stone to another. You cannot stop the weevils, and you will not fire on your own citizens except as an absolute last resort. Ergo, my success is logically assured.’
‘Don’t be so sure of yourself,’ Aumonier replied. ‘You are still in a position of weakness, and I have no proof that you haven’t murdered all your hostages. Why shouldn’t I assume they’re all dead, and just destroy the habitats you now control?’
‘Be my guest, Supreme Prefect. Go ahead. Fire on those habitats.’
‘Give me proof that the citizens are still alive.’
‘What would be the point? You would rightly distrust anything I showed you. Conversely, even if I showed you a smoking ruin, the corpses of a million dead, you would suspect an ulterior motive, that I was encouraging you to attack for nefarious reasons of my own. You would still not fire.’
‘You’re wrong,’ Dreyfus said. ‘You can convince us that the people are alive in one very easy way. Let us speak to Thalia Ng. We’ll trust her testimony, even if we don’t trust yours.’
Something crossed her face — a moue of irritation, quickly suppressed.
‘You can’t,’ Aumonier said, ‘because you’ve either killed her, or she’s out of your control.’
One of the network analysts pushed a compad in Dreyfus’s direction. He glanced at the summary. They had narrowed down Aurora’s location to a locus of thirteen hundred possible habitats.
‘My concern is for the absolute welfare of the citizens,’ the child-woman said. ‘Under my care, no harm will come to any of them. Their future security will be guaranteed, for centuries to come. The transition to this new state of affairs can be as bloodless you wish. By the same token, all casualties incurred during the transition will be upon your conscience, not mine.’
‘Why do you care about people at all?’ Dreyfus enquired. ‘You’re a machine. An alpha-level intelligence.’
Her fingers tightened on the edges of her armrests. ‘I used to be alive. Do you think I’ve forgotten what it feels like?’
‘But you’ve been a disembodied intelligence for a lot longer than you were a little girl. Call me judgemental, but my instincts tell me your sympathies are far more likely to lie with machines than with flesh-and-blood mortals.’
‘Would you stop caring for the citizens if they were slower and weaker, stupider and frailer than yourself?’
‘We’d all still be people,’ Dreyfus countered. ‘Tell me something else, Aurora, now that you’ve confirmed your origin. Are there more of you? Were you the only one of the Eighty who survived?’
‘I have allies,’ she said cryptically. ‘You would be as unwise to underestimate their power as you would mine.’
‘But for all that power, there’s still something that scares you, isn’t there?’
‘Nothing frightens me, Prefect Dreyfus.’ She said his name with particular emphasis, making it clear that she knew of him.
‘I don’t believe you. We know about the Clockmaker, Aurora. We know how it keeps you from sleeping at night. It’s a machine intelligence stronger and quicker than you, even with your allies to back you up. If it got out, it would rip you to shreds, wouldn’t it?’
‘You overestimate its significance to me.’
‘It can’t be that insignificant. If you hadn’t destroyed Ruskin-Sartorious, none of us would have been any the wiser that you were planning this takeover. You’d have achieved your goal in one fell swoop, taking the entire ten thousand at a stroke. But you were prepared to risk everything to remove the Clockmaker. That doesn’t sound insignificant to me.’
The analyst drew his attention to the compad again. The locus of habitats had now shrunk to eight hundred candidates.
‘If you had control of the Clockmaker, you would have turned it against me already.’ She leaned forward slightly, her voice hardening. ‘In truth, you neither control nor understand it. Even if it was in your possession, you would fear to use it.’
‘That would depend on how much you provoked us,’ Aumonier said.
‘There has been no provocation. I have merely begun the process of relieving you of the burden of care of one hundred million citizens. I care about them more than you do.’
‘You murdered nearly a thousand people in Ruskin-Sartorious,’ Dreyfus answered. ‘You killed the prefects sent in to regain control of House Aubusson. That doesn’t sound like a very caring attitude to me.’
‘Their deaths were necessary, to safeguard the rest.’
‘And if it takes a million, or ten million? Would they be necessary deaths as well?’
‘All that matters is that no one else need suffer. We have already discussed the inevitability of my success. If you resist me, people will die. People will die anyway, because people panic and do irrational things and I cannot be held accountable for that. But there is a way to bring this to an immediate conclusion, with the absolute minimum of fatalities. You have my takeover code: it’s the instruction set your agent so helpfully installed in the first four habitats. Make it universal. Broadcast it to the rest of the ten thousand. I will have them all eventually; this way it will be with the least pain and bloodshed.’
‘You’re out of your mind,’ Aumonier said.
‘Then I shall give you an incentive. I am convinced that many millions of lives will be saved by speedy transition to my rule. So convinced, in fact, that I am prepared to sacrifice a certain number of citizens to underline my point. You have six hours, Supreme Prefect. Then I shall begin humane euthanisation of one in ten of the citizens already under my care.’ The child-woman eased back into her throne. ‘You may stop the deaths at any time by broadcasting the code to the ten thousand. If you choose not to, the deaths will continue. But my weevils will still give me the ten thousand, whatever you do.’
‘One hundred and thirty habitats,’ the analyst whispered in Dreyfus’s ear. ‘We’re zeroing in.’
‘Before I sign off,’ Aurora said, ‘let me assist you in one matter. Doubtless you are trying to localise the origin of this transmission. If you are employing your usual search methods, you will have narrowed the field down to between one hundred and one hundred and fifty habitats by the time I utter these words. Were I to stay on the line, you would locate my point of origin inside two minutes. I’ll spare you the trouble, shall I? You will localise me to Panoply. I’m sure it’s one of your candidates.’
Dreyfus looked at the analyst. The analyst nodded briefly, his face losing colour.
‘I’m not really in Panoply. It’s a mirror bounce; very difficult to crack in the time I’m giving you.’ Aurora smiled slightly. ‘Just in case you were thinking of turning those missiles on yourselves.’