pulping everyone aboard.’
‘Then maybe they’re planning to overshoot the rock and come back around on a second pass,’ Sparver answered.
‘They’re not overshooting,’ Clepsydra said. ‘If your tracking system is correct, the incoming ship is on a collision vector.’
Quickly Dreyfus pulled himself into the flight deck and checked the proximity display. He saw the icon of the approaching vehicle and recognised its identifier tag.
‘It’s not the deep-system vehicle we were hoping for,’ he said. ‘It’s the freighter from Marco’s Eye that we saw earlier.’
‘Aurora must have tapped into its navigation system, deviating it from its usual flight-path,’ Clepsydra said. ‘She is going to use it to ram you out of existence, and destroy the evidence of this rock.’
‘She’s that powerful?’ Dreyfus asked.
‘It would not take great power, merely great cunning and stealth.’
Sparver joined them. ‘How long have we got?’
‘Eighty-five seconds,’ Clepsydra said.
‘Then we’re in trouble,’ Sparver replied. ‘We can’t get this thing moving inside of a minute, and even then we wouldn’t get far enough away from the surface to make a difference.’
‘Seventy-five seconds.’
‘We can suit up, return to the rock. If we can get far enough underground—’
‘The rock will be destroyed,’ Clepsydra said, with stony detachment.
‘There isn’t time in any case,’ Dreyfus said. ‘It’d take too long to cycle through the airlock.’
‘We have less than a minute,’ said Clepsydra.
‘The countdown isn’t helping,’ Sparver replied. ‘Maybe we should start thinking about the pods. We’ve got enough for all three of us. We don’t have much time, but—’
‘Will they eject us away from the rock, or towards it?’ Clepsydra asked.
‘They’re dorsal pods. We’re belly-down now, so—’
‘They’ll eject us into space,’ Dreyfus finished.
‘We have thirty-eight seconds,’ Clepsydra said. ‘I suggest we adjourn to the pods.’
They were designed to be used in dire emergency, when every second counted, so there was little in the way of preliminaries to attend to. Even so, Dreyfus sensed that they were down to the last ten seconds before all three of them were safely ensconced in their own single-person pods.
‘The pods have transponders,’ he told Clepsydra, just before they sealed the door on her. ‘The deep-system vehicle will pick all of them up, but it may take some time.’
Five seconds later he was webbed into his own unit. He reached up over his forehead and tugged down the heavy red handle that triggered the pod’s escape system. Quickmatter erupted into the empty spaces to cocoon him against the coming acceleration. When it arrived, it still felt as if the bones of his spine were being compressed to the thickness of parchment.
Then he lost consciousness.
Thalia snapped on her glasses and peered into the gloom of the windowless chamber, while Cyrus Parnasse stood back with his veined, muscular hands planted on his hips, for all the world like a farmer surveying his crops. They were alone in a section of the polling core sphere located well below the viewing gallery where the other citizens were holed up. Boxy grey structures loomed out of the darkness, stretching away into the distance.
She tapped a finger against the side of the glasses, keying in additional amplification. ‘What am I looking at here, Citizen Parnasse? It just looks like a load of boxes and junk.’
‘Exactly what it is, girl. This is a storage room for the Museum of Cybernetics, full of stuff they haven’t got room for in the main exhibit areas. There’re hundreds of rooms like this, right across the campus. But this is the only one we can reach without going back down to the lobby.’
‘Oh.’
‘I reckoned we could use some of this stuff to barricade those stairs. What d’ya think?’
‘I didn’t think any of those machines would be able to get up the stairs.’
‘They won’t: too big, most of ’em, or with the wrong kind of design. But there are plenty of machines out there that’ll fit the bill. Now that they know we’re up here, how long do you think it’ll be before they arrive and start climbing?’
‘Not long,’ she said. ‘You’re right. I should have thought of that sooner.’
‘Don’t be too hard on yerself. Had a lot to think out in the last few hours, I dare say.’
‘Not if we get a shift on. There’s enough junk here to block the stairs, provided we get a chain movin’ it. We’ll need to take care of the elevator shaft as well.’
‘I hadn’t forgotten that, just didn’t think there was much we could do about it.’
The elevator was still at the bottom of the shaft, waiting in the lobby where they had abandoned it.
‘If that whip-thing of yours still works, we can cut a hole into the shaft and drop as much of this stuff down it as we can manage. That’s five hundred metres straight down. It won’t stop the machines for ever, if they’re really determined to get the elevator moving, but it’ll definitely put a dent in their plans.’
‘From where I’m standing, that sounds a lot better than nothing.’ But when she touched her whiphound, it responded by buzzing against her belt, giving off an acrid smell. They’d had to use it to cut through the locked door into the storage room and now it was protesting again. Thalia wondered how long it would last before giving out on her completely; it was already of limited utility as a weapon, unless employed as a one-off grenade.
‘We shouldn’t hang around,’ Parnasse said. ‘I’ll start moving boxes if you go and round up some help.’
‘I hope they’re in a mood to take orders.’
‘They will be if they think you know exactly what you’re doing.’
‘I don’t, Citizen Parnasse. That’s the problem.’ Thalia pulled off her glasses and slipped them into her pocket. ‘I’ve been putting a brave face on it, but I’m seriously out of my depth here. You saw what we had to deal with outside.’
‘I saw you coping, girl. You might not feel like it, but you look as if you’re doing a decent enough job.’ Thalia’s expression must have been sceptical, because he added: ‘You got us all back here alive, didn’t you?’
‘Right back where we started, Citizen Parnasse. My escape attempt didn’t actually achieve much, did it?’
‘It was the right thing to try. And we didn’t know about the servitors when we started off, did we?’
‘I suppose not.’
‘Think of it as a scouting expedition. We went out and gathered intelligence on our situation. We learned things we wouldn’t have learned if we’d just stayed up here, waitin’ for help to come.’
‘Put it like that, it almost sounds as if I knew what I was doing.’
‘You did know. You’ve convinced me already, girl. Now all you have to do is convince the others. And you know where that starts, don’t you?’
There was a heavy feeling in her stomach, but she forced herself to smile. ‘With me. I’ve got to start acting as if I know exactly what to do, or else the others aren’t going to listen.’
‘That’s the spirit.’
She looked into the darkness of the storage room. ‘Maybe we can block the stairs and the shaft. But what do we do afterwards? Sooner or later those machines are going to find a way to get to us, just like they’ve got to the other citizens outside. Everything we’ve seen says they’re being directed by an external intelligence, something with problem-solving capability.’ She thought of the way the citizens had been rounded up and pacified, cowed into submission by warnings of an attack against the habitat. ‘Something smart enough to lie.’
‘One step at a time,’ Parnasse said. ‘We deal with the barricades first. Then we worry about a dazzling encore.’
He made it sound so effortless, as if all they were talking about was the right way to cook an egg.
‘All right.’
‘You’re a prefect, girl. A lot might’ve changed since you dropped by today, but you’re still wearing the
