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And yet nowhere in his line of sight was there the slightest evidence of the crisis itself. Even if it now encompassed thirty or fifty habitats, including those on the fringe of the evacuation effort, that was still much less than a hundredth of the total number of states under Panoply’s protection. The serene panorama before him looked startlingly normal, like a snapshot of the Glitter Band during the most routine of days. And yet he recalled the swiftness with which Lillian Baudry’s simulation had demonstrated the takeover could spread. No comfort could be extracted from this apparent normality.

Satisfied that the cutter would not be making any high-acceleration swerves for now, Dreyfus replaced the Manticore box beneath his seat and propelled himself through the cabin. He knocked quietly on the passwall before letting himself through into the flight deck.

‘Thanks for getting us away in good time, Captain Pell,’ he said, before his eyes took in the fact that Pell was not alone on the flight deck. Sitting behind and to his left, in one of the other flight positions, was Sparver.

‘Hi, Boss.’

Dreyfus was too stunned to feel anger, or even annoyance that his orders had been disobeyed. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.

Sparver looked at Pell. ‘Now, I ask you — is that any way to talk to your deputy?’

Aumonier floated alone, striving to keep her thoughts on the matter at hand rather than Dreyfus’s mission to Yellowstone. She had cleared all but four display facets in her sphere, and had enlarged those until they filled almost the entire facing hemisphere. They showed the four habitats where Thalia Ng had performed the initial upgrade to the polling core software: Carousel New Seattle-Tacoma, the Chevelure-Sambuke Hourglass, Szlumper Oneill and House Aubusson. No contact had been made with any of these states since the installation of the core patch, more than twenty-six hours earlier. All along, Aumonier had assumed that the citizenry were alive and well, albeit under some new and possibly repressive system of government. She had always assumed that if Aurora wished to kill those people, she would achieve it the easy way, by depressurising the habitat or tampering with the life-support in some equally decisive fashion. It was only now that Aumonier realised the fatal flaw in her thinking. Aurora had indeed wanted those people dead: not because she hated them, not because they were capable of derailing her plans, but because they were of no conceivable use to her. And yet, as Thalia’s debriefing testimony made clear, Aurora had been at pains to conceal her murder of the citizenry from the outside world. It had to be done the old-fashioned way, the historical way: not with a single catastrophic release of air or heat, something that would have been detectable from afar, but with the apparatus of state: armed force, applied via her new army of servitors. The citizens had been rounded up, pacified with lies and then executed by machine. And then their remains had been shovelled into bigger machines and conveyed to the matter-consuming furnaces of the manufactories, where they were smelted down and made into parts for other machines.

Aumonier cursed the way Aurora had manipulated her unwillingness to strike against habitats that she still believed contained living citizens. But without Thalia’s escape with her tiny party of survivors, she would still not have known. There was probably no one left alive in any of those four habitats. Even if some survivors had managed to hide or hold out against the machines, Panoply could do nothing for them now.

Well, there was one thing, Aumonier reflected. It could end their torment now, before the machines reached them. It was not much of a kindness, but it was the only one she had left to give.

‘Captains Sarasota, Yokosuka, Ribeauville and Gilden. This is Jane Aumonier. You have my permission to open fire on your designated targets.’

This time there was no questioning of her order, no doubt that she meant what she had said.

‘Nukes deployed and running,’ Gilden said.

‘Deployed and running,’ Yokosuka reported.

‘Deployed and running,’ Sarasota and Ribeauville said, in near-unison.

Aumonier closed her eyes before the first flash reached her. Even though she was only seeing a monitor feed, the brilliance of the nuclear explosions — twelve in all, three per habitat — still pushed through her eyelids. She counted twelve pink flashes.

When she opened her eyes, nothing remained of the targets except four slowly expanding nebulae: the atomised, ionised remains of what had once been homes to more than two million of her citizens. There’d been beauty and misery in those habitats, wonder and sadness, every facet of human experience, history reaching back two hundred years. Between one breath and the next all that had been wiped out of existence, like a delirious dream that never happened.

‘Forgive us,’ she said to herself.

* * *

A little later, she received confirmation that the weevil flows from Aubusson and Szlumper Oneill had both been curtailed. The weevils that had been manufactured just before the attack were still crossing space, but their predicted destinations were already subjects of the evacuation effort. Aumonier knew that they would not clear all the citizens out in time, that they would be doing well to remove seventy per cent of them before the weevil contamination infected another habitat. Nothing more could be done, given the limiting bottlenecks of airlocks and ships and round-trip travel times. Her best people had been on the problem around the clock, and she had no doubt that they had already squeezed the last fraction of a percentile out of that figure. Attempts were now under way to mobilise enough ships to change the orbits of habitats lying beyond Aurora’s current expansion front, but the technical challenge of moving a billion-tonne city state was awesome, and Aumonier knew that this was not a solution she could count on in the long term. At best, it would just take the weevils a little longer to reach their targets.

Her bracelet chimed. She glanced down and saw that it was the call she had been hoping for.

‘This is Baudry, Supreme Prefect.’

‘Go ahead, Lillian.’

‘We’re receiving reports from CTC.’ Aumonier heard a catch in Baudry’s voice. ‘They’re tracking massive ship movements from the Parking Swarm. Dozens of Ultra vessels, Supreme Prefect. Lighthuggers leaving their assigned orbits in the Swarm.’

‘Are they leaving the system, Lillian?’

‘No.’ Baudry sounded flustered. ‘Some of them, yes. Most of them… no. Most of them appear to be on vectors that will bring them into the Glitter Band.’

‘How long until they arrive?’

‘Six to seven hours, Supreme Prefect, before the lead vehicles enter Glitter Band airspace. If we are to consider a tactical response, we need to start making arrangements now. Deep-system vehicles will need to be retasked, fuelled and weaponed in readiness—’

‘You consider this a hostile gesture?’