and alert, knowing that it would be fatal to sit down with the other citizens and succumb to her tiredness.
‘No sign of that rescue of yours, I take it,’ Paula Thory said, for about the twentieth time.
‘We’ve only been cut off for half a day,’ Thalia replied, pausing to lean against the transparent casing covering the architectural model of the Museum of Cybernetics. ‘I didn’t promise they’d arrive bang on schedule.’
‘You said we might be isolated for a few hours. It’s been considerably longer than that.’
‘Yes,’ Thalia said. ‘But thanks to the good citizens of the Glitter Band, a civil emergency was in force when I left. My organisation was doing everything it could to prevent all-out war between the habitats and the Ultras.’
‘You think they’re still dealing with that, is that it?’ asked Caillebot, reasonably enough.
She nodded at the landscape gardener, glad that he had given up some of his earlier outrage. ‘That’s my best guess. I’m long overdue by now, and they’ll be able to see that my ship’s still docked with Aubusson. If they could spare the resources to get here, they would.’ She swallowed hard, striving to find some of that confidence Parnasse had told her she needed to assert. ‘But you can bet we’re getting near the top of their list. They’ll be here before sunrise.’
‘Sunrise is still a long way off,’ Thory observed. ‘And those machines aren’t slowing down.’
‘But they’re not touching the main stalk,’ Thalia replied. ‘Who-ever’s operating them needs to send instructions through this structure, which means they can’t risk damaging it just to get rid of us.’
By now it was clear that the construction servitors were engaged in nothing less than the systematic dismantling of the habitat’s human buildings and infrastructure. Throughout the night, Thalia had watched — sometimes alone, sometimes with Parnasse, Redon or one of the other citizens — as the robots bulldozed and ripped their way through the outlying structures of the Museum of Cybernetics. They had already torn down the ring of secondary stalks, shovelling the pulverised remains onto the backs of massive debris-carriers. Kilometres away, in illuminated clusters of huddled activity, other groups of machines were engaged in similar demolition work. The machines tackling the museum must already have gathered tens of thousands of tonnes of rubble. Across the entire interior of House Aubusson, they must have gathered dozens or hundreds of times as much. And all that raw material — millions of tonnes of it, in Thalia’s estimation — was being conveyed in one direction, toward the great manufactory complex at the habitat’s far end. It was feedstock, so that those mighty mills could turn again.
In fact, they were already turning. Though no sound reached Thalia and her cadre of citizens through the airtight windows of the polling core, they had all felt the tremor of distant industrial processes starting up. Near the endcap that rumble must have been thunderous. The manufactories were making something. Whatever it was, they were being cranked up to full capacity.
‘Thalia,’ called Parnasse, poking his head above the top of the spiral staircase that led to the lower level. ‘I need your help with something, when you’ve got a moment.’
Thalia tensed. That was Parnasse’s way of telling her they had a problem without alarming the others unduly. She crossed to the staircase and followed him down to the administrative level, with its unlit offices and storage rooms. Three of the citizens were still working on the barricade detail, collecting equipment and junk from wherever they could find it and then toppling it down the stairs and lift shaft.
‘What is it, Cyrus?’ she asked quietly, the two of them standing far enough away from the work gang that their conversation would not be overhead.
‘They’re getting tired, and they’ve only been on this shift for forty-five minutes. They may be able to last until the end of it, but I’m not sure if they’re going to be much use to us by the time they’re up for duty again. We’re getting worn out down here.’
‘Maybe it’s time Thory weighed in.’
‘She’d be more hindrance than help, with all her moaning. The team getting tired isn’t the main problem, though. We’re going to start running out of barricade material pretty soon. If not before the end of this shift, then definitely before the end of the next one. Things ain’t looking too good. Just thought you should know.’
‘Maybe the existing barricade will hold.’
‘Maybe.’
‘You don’t think so.’
‘When it’s quiet up here, I can hear activity below. The machines are working at the far end of it, clearing it as fast as we can pour new stuff down from our end. That’s why the barricade keeps settling down. They’re removing the debris at the base.’
‘And if we don’t keep topping it up—’
‘They’ll be breaking through before you know it.’
‘We need options,’ Thalia said. ‘I’ve told the other citizens that we’re working on a contingency plan. It’s about time we had one, before someone calls me on it.’
‘I wish I had an idea.’
‘Let’s focus on the barricade, since that’s all we have right now. If we’re running out of material, we’ll need to find another supply.’
‘We’ve already cleaned out all the rooms along this corridor. Anything that we can move, and that isn’t too large to fit down the holes, we’ve already thrown.’
‘But we’ve still got the building itself,’ Thalia said. ‘The walls, the partitions between the rooms… it’s all ours, if we want it.’
‘Unfortunately, none of us thought to bring demolition tools to the civic reception,’ Parnasse said.
Thalia unclipped the buzzing handle of her whiphound. ‘Then it’s a good job I did. This thing might be damaged, but it can still just about function in sword mode. If I can start cutting away material—’
Parnasse looked at the whiphound dubiously. ‘What will that thing cut through?’
It was almost too hot to hold now. ‘Just about any material that isn’t actively reinforced, like hyperdiamond.’
‘There’s nothing like that in this building. I know, I saw the blueprints before she went up. But you’d better not cut the first thing you see. There are structural spars running right through this thing.’
‘Then we’ll start with something that clearly isn’t structural,’ Thalia said, remembering the item she had been resting against before Parnasse summoned her below.
‘Like what?’
‘Right above me, on the next level. That architectural model.’
‘We’ll need more than that for barricade material, girl. That model’s about as substantial as a soap bubble.’
‘I was thinking of the plinth — it looked like granite to me. If we could cut
‘Maybe not enough to save us,’ he said, scratching his chin, ‘but beggars can’t be choosers, can they? Let’s see if that little toy of yours will hold up for us.’
Thalia clipped the whiphound back to her belt, then rubbed her sore palm against her trousers. Leaving the work gang to their duty, she ascended the staircase to the main level, Parnasse following immediately behind her.
‘People,’ she called, ‘I need some help here. It’ll only take a couple of minutes, then you can go back and rest.’
‘What do you want?’ asked the young man in the electric-blue suit, rubbing a stiff forearm.
Thalia strode to the side of the architectural model and patted the transparent casing. ‘We need to remove this thing so I can get at the plinth. I could use my whiphound to cut it up, but I’d rather save it for stuff we can’t break apart with our hands.’
The transparent casing was a boxlike shell resting in place by virtue of its weight alone. Thalia squeezed her fingers under one end of it, wincing as she caught a broken nail. The young man worked his fingers under the far end, and between them they heaved the casing into the air, exposing the delicate model underneath. They shuffled sideways until they’d reached a clear spot of floor and were able to lower the casing. They would work out what to do with it later.
‘Now this part,’ Thalia said, getting a grip under the heavy, flat sheet on which the model had been constructed. This time it took three of them before the model even budged, with Caillebot taking one of the corners. The delicately formed representation of the museum might have been insubstantial, but that could not be said for
