The Revelation Space Collection

passwall, Crissel found himself looking out through a gaping wound where the front of the Universal Suffrage had been. He could see space, the too-bright stars of other habitats, the waxy yellow curve of Yellowstone’s nearest horizon. The hull ended in strips of ragged laminate, still twitching from aborted repair processes, oozing with the tarlike slime of quickmatter. Jutting into the space formerly occupied by the flight deck was a metre-thick spar that presumably belonged to the docking hub. All but one of the flight crews’ positions had been ripped clean away. The pilot was still there, but impaled on a forking appendage of the docking spar.

The Universal Suffrage hadn’t achieved the hard docking he had hoped for. But it had come in tantalisingly close. The habitat’s own airlock was visible only a few metres beyond the ragged end of the hull. They could reach it easily enough by clambering along the spar. Blanking the predicament of the impaled pilot, confident that it would return to haunt him in due course, Crissel scrambled back into the assembly bay.

‘We’ve lost the flight crew,’ he said. ‘It’s messy ahead, but there’s a way into the habitat. We still have a mission to complete, people. Follow me and be prepared to meet resistance as soon as we clear the lock.’

The prefects followed him like a massed black tide, moving with the ease of those well practised in weightless conditions. They divided into two quickly moving formations, traversing the spar like two lines of black ants until they reached the lock ahead of them.

While they worked to open the lock, Crissel at last found the mental breathing space to review what had just happened. The blueprints in Panoply’s possession should have included every change made to the habitat since its construction. It was possible that House Aubusson had installed the rim-mounted slug launchers secretively, in covert violation of the legal limit on defensive systems for a habitat of that size. Yet of all the places Crissel could think of, Aubusson was one of the least likely to indulge in that kind of furtive upgrading.

Which left a much less palatable explanation. If the manufactories were truly up and running, and if the fabricators had access to sufficient blueprints and raw matter, then the habitat had the means to create almost anything it needed. Forging and installing additional anti-collision systems would not have taxed even a modest facility — it would only require dealing with a few hundred tonnes of new matter. Installing the guns would have been the difficult part, but even that wouldn’t have been insurmountable if one could hijack at least part of the general servitor workforce. The manufactories had been running hot since the cruiser departed Panoply, but they could have been operating for some time before it became necessary to dump that waste heat so visibly. In fact, if all the manufactories had to do was create the new guns, they’d hardly have broken a sweat.

So something else was being made in there.

It did not take long for the prefects to persuade the door to open. It slid into its heavy buttressed frame to reveal the wide mouth of a high-capacity docking connection. It was illuminated, belching pressure into space. A passenger liner could disembark a hundred people down that tube inside a minute, without anyone grazing elbows.

The prefects poured into the empty docking tunnel. Conveyor bands ran the length of the tunnel, moving in both directions. The prefects touched the adhesive bands with one hand and allowed themselves to be hauled toward the far end, as if they had done it a million times before. Crissel followed their lead, but had to press his palm against the band twice before the adhesive bond took hold with enough strength to overcome the momentum of his body and suit. Then he was moving, speeding past a succession of bright, animated advertisements designed to entice the newcomer with deep pockets.

Slowly he became aware of something coming through on the suit-to-suit. It was a small, distant voice, saying something over and over again. The voice, Crissel realised, of a woman.

‘Quiet,’ he said, silencing what little communication there was. ‘I can hear something on our channel.’

‘Got it too, sir,’ said one of the fields, possibly the girl who had spoken to Crissel earlier. ‘It’s someone using Panoply protocols, sir.’

Crissel strained to pick out the voice. Somewhere around the third or fourth repetition, the sense of the words suddenly clicked into place.

‘… is Thalia Ng, for Panoply. I am recording these words five hours after the end of abstraction. I will keep them on repeat transmission until my bracelet runs out of power. I have secured the polling core, where I’m holding out at the top of the stalk with a small number of survivors. Outside… we’ve seen the machines rounding up people. They’ve started killing them. We don’t know who’s behind this, but they’ve managed to take complete control of the local servitors. Please send immediate assistance. I don’t know how long we can last up here before the machines find a way through to us.’ There was a pause, then the message resumed. ‘This is Thalia Ng, for Panoply. I am recording these words five hours after the end of abstraction…’

‘Thalia,’ he said. ‘Can you hear me? This is Senior Prefect Michael Crissel. Repeat, this is Michael Crissel. Please respond.’

There was nothing, only her endlessly looped message. Crissel repeated his statement, listened again, then shook his head in defeat. ‘No good,’ he said. ‘She obviously isn’t—’

‘Sir,’ came a faint but rushed voice. ‘This is Thalia. I’m hearing you. Did you get my message?’

‘We got your message, Thalia. Your signal’s weak, but audible. We’re in the docking complex. Are you still in the polling core?’

‘Still holding out, sir.’ Her relief was obvious. ‘I’m so glad you’ve arrived. I don’t know how much longer we can stand. The machines are getting cleverer, more adaptable—’

Crissel recalled the map of the interior he had committed to memory before leaving Panoply. ‘Thalia, listen carefully. We’re still a long way from you: many kilometres, even after we make it through the locks.’

‘But you’re here, sir! I think we can hold out until you get to the stalk, now that we know help’s on its way. How many ships have you brought?’

‘Just the one, I’m afraid.’

‘One?’ Disbelief and anger vied in her voice.

‘And the ship isn’t in too good a state, unfortunately. We have a small force of fields, the best we could muster at short notice. We have weapons and we’re ready for a fight.’ He made an effort to rally his own spirits. ‘We came to take back House Aubusson, and that’s what we’re going to do. You just hold in there, Thalia, and you’ll be right as rain.’

‘Sir,’ Thalia said, ‘I have to sign off now, sir. Not much juice left on my bracelet, and I’d like to conserve what I have.’

‘Before you go — something you said back there?’

‘Sir?’

‘About the machines, Thalia. About the servitors. I presume we’re talking about some kind of limited malfunction here? A few machines under the control of an invading party? Not, as you made it sound, a full-scale machine uprising?’

He might have mistaken the hesitation for a failure in the bracelet’s transmission if he hadn’t known her better.

‘No, sir. That’s exactly what I mean. The machines have taken over. There is no invading party, as far as we can tell. No one new has arrived in House Aubusson. It’s just the machines, sir. They’ve gone berserk.’

‘But abstraction is down. How can machines function without abstraction?’

‘There’s enough of it left to control or coordinate them. But we still don’t know who’s doing it. Sir, I’m scared.’

‘No need, Thalia. You’ve done excellently to protect any survivors until now.’

‘That’s not what I mean, sir. I’m scared that I brought this about. That I played a part in it. I think someone used me, and I was too stupid or naive or vain to notice it. And now it’s too late and we’re all paying for it, all of us here in Aubusson.’

‘Then you don’t know,’ Crissel said carefully.

‘Don’t know what, sir?’

‘It isn’t just Aubusson. We’ve lost contact with all four habitats you visited. They all dropped off the network at the same time.’

‘Oh, God.’

‘We can’t get near any of them. They shoot down any ship that comes close. That’s why we had such a devil of a time getting the Universal Suffrage as close in as we managed.’

‘What’s happening, sir?’

‘We don’t know. All we do know is that Aubusson’s manufactories are running at maximum capacity. And