now you’ve told us something else we didn’t know, which is that the machines are part of it.’
Thalia’s voice faded and returned. ‘I really have to go now, sir. The machines keep trying to get up the stalk. We’ve barricaded as best we can, but we have to keep fighting them back.’
‘We’re on our way. Good luck, Thalia. You have nothing to fear, and nothing to be ashamed of.’
‘Sir — I’m about to sign off. But I forgot to ask — when help came, I was expecting Prefect Dreyfus to be a part of it.’ The tone of her voice became anxious and childlike. ‘He’s okay, isn’t he? Please tell me nothing’s happened to him.’
‘He’s fine,’ Crissel said. ‘And I’ll make sure he hears that you’re in one piece. Something came up in Panoply and he had to stay.’
‘What kind of something, sir?’
‘I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you right now.’
The transmission ceased. Thalia must have terminated the endlessly cycling message now that it had reached someone. While he was speaking to her, Crissel and his party of prefects had travelled almost the entire length of the docking tunnel. The conveyor strip ended, losing its adhesive retention at the last moment. In the tunnel’s perfect vacuum, Crissel sped on hopelessly until he was grabbed by one of the prefects who had arrived before him, just in time to stop him crashing into the bulkhead at the tunnel’s limit. Normally the passengers would have glided to a gentle halt, arrested by the resistance of normal atmospheric pressure.
They were facing a heavy armoured door, stencilled with nymphs and faeries.
‘There’s air on the other side,’ one of the prefects reported. ‘Safeties on this door are pretty heavy, and it knows we’re in vacuum here.’
‘Can you shoot through?’
‘Possible, sir. But if there are hostages on the other side, and they aren’t wearing suits—’
‘Point taken, Prefect. What are our other options?’
‘None, sir, except pressurising this part of the tunnel. If we close the door at the other end, the safeties should allow this one to open.’
‘Can you do that from here?’ Crissel asked.
‘Not a problem, sir. We wired a remote trigger on it as we came through. Just wanted to check with you first. It’ll mean blocking our exit route.’
‘But you can reopen the other door if you have to?’
‘Absolutely, sir. It’ll only take a few seconds.’
‘Go ahead, then,’ Crissel told him.
Crissel was braced and ready when the door opened and air slammed into the vacuum of the tunnel. Beyond lay a much larger space, a free-fall customs volume at the point of convergence of dozens of docking corridors. Advertisements were still running. The spherical space was hung with wire-stiffened free-fall banners in bright silks, some of which had torn free in the draught. Huge iron sculptures of seahorses and seadragons supported a bewildering tangle of colour-coded conveyor bands looping through the open space. Crissel tried to imagine thousands of passengers riding those bands, unselfconsciously gaudy even without their entoptic plumage, an endless flow of twinkling human jewels. He’d seldom visited such a place, seldom felt himself part of the true arterial flow of Glitter Band society. For a moment he regretted the austere trajectory Panoply had forced upon his life.
‘The red conveyor will take us straight through,’ he said, crushing the thought. ‘Let’s get moving.’
That was when the machines revealed themselves. They’d been in the volume all along, but hidden amongst the black complexity of the ironwork sculptures. When they emerged, Crissel almost laughed. Amusement, a wry sense of having been bettered, was the only human response to a fatal and inescapable ambush.
‘Hostiles,’ he said. ‘Servitors. Target them. Maximum force. Fire at will.’
But even as he spoke the words, he knew there were too many machines, too few field prefects. The squad had already opened fire; had already destroyed a handful of the approaching servitors. But the machines just kept coming. They were everywhere, oozing out of shadow and darkness, flying through the air or picking their way along the curving lines of the conveyors. Even more were scuttling out of some of the other tunnels that connected with the customs space.
Crissel was used to servitors, so accustomed to their presence that he scarcely noticed them under normal circumstances. Yet these machines did not move like ordinary servitors. Their motions were quick, with something of the speeded-up, slapstick quality of insect activity. As a whole, their efforts were coordinated and deliberate. Individually it was chaotic, with some machines getting trampled under the relentless march of the others or even flung aside when they proved too slow or clumsy. They had no weapons in the usual sense, but every limb, manipulator or probe now served an aggressive function. Some of the attachments even appeared to have been modified to make them more effective: claws sharpened to glinting edges, arms terminating in vicious curved scythes or impaling spikes. It was a killing army. And yet the machines still carried the cheerful colours and logos of their former duties: a domestic machine here, a gardener or kindly medical servitor there. A beetle-backed multi- legged nursery supervisor even had the red and black shell of a ladybird, with a happy face painted on the front.
The prefects unleashed the full force of their guns, but it was only enough to slow the advance, not repel it. Most of the machines were so lightly armoured that they blew apart under a direct hit. But those that followed quickly grabbed the pieces of their shattered comrades and employed the broken body parts as shields or clubs. Then it became more difficult to kill any of them.
Crissel almost failed to notice the first human casualties. As the servitors fell upon the armour-suited prefects, it became difficult to tell the difference between people and machines. There was just a thrash and flail of limbs, a squeal of metal and ceramic on armour. It was only when he saw two headless bodies tumble into the open space between the ironwork sculptures, jetting banners of blood from the open circles of their neck rings, that he knew the servitors had begun to murder.
‘Fall back,’ Crissel called above the din of battle, the clash of armour and servitor, the panicked shouts of his team. ‘Return to the ship! We’re outnumbered!’
But even as he spoke the words, Crissel felt himself being pulled to one side by strong metal limbs. He resisted, but it did no good. Then the servitors were upon him, picking apart the puzzle of his armour with the frantic excitement of children trying to get into a parcel.
They were fast about it. He had to give them that.
CHAPTER 20
The holding cell where Dreyfus was detained was not a weightless sphere like the one in which Clepsydra had been imprisoned, but it had the same feeling of deadening impregnability. They had taken away his shoes and bracelet. His only concession had been to loosen his collar so that it didn’t chafe so much against his unshaven jowls. In the room’s silence he had no way of telling what was happening outside, or of confidently judging the passage of time. He was too alert, too fearful, to begin to feel bored. His mind spun with wild mental permutations, trying to guess what had happened to Clepsydra, and what was now happening to the mission to House Aubusson. What was happening to Thalia. More than likely it was his imagination that had supplied the distant thump as the
Dreyfus had put people into cells enough times to have indulged in idle speculation as to what it would feel like to be on the other side of the door when it closed. He realised now that he had never come close to imagining the utter draining hopelessness, or the shame. He had done nothing wrong, he told himself; nothing that merited the slightest degree of self-reproach. But the shame would not listen. The mere fact of confinement was enough.
After what Dreyfus judged to be the passage of two or three hours, the passwall formed the outline of a door. Baudry entered, alone, and had the wall revert to obstruct. She carried no visible weaponry.
‘I wasn’t expecting another visit. What’s the news? Have you heard anything from Thalia?’
She ignored his question. ‘If you did this, Tom, now is the time to tell me.’ She stood by his bunk, hands folded, the hem of her skirt spilling around her heels like the wax from a thin, black candle.
