concentrated on the tumbling landscape and tried to make out the grey line that marked the edge of the window band, she knew that Redon was right. They were clearly off-course, at far too sharp an angle to be explained by the sphere crashing through the remains of the campus grounds.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘We went over this. It should be a straight roll all the way to the window band.’
‘We’re still going to hit the window band,’ Cuthbertson said, his voice reduced to a strangled approximation of itself. ‘You’ve just forgotten about Coriolis force.’
‘We should be moving in a straight line,’ Thalia said.
‘We are. But the habitat’s rotating, and it’s trying to get us to follow a helical trajectory instead. It’s all about reference frames, Prefect.’
‘Coriolis force,’ Thalia said. ‘Shit. After everything they taught me in Panoply, I forgot about Coriolis force. We’re not on a planet. We’re inside a fucking spinning tube.’
She’d become aware that the rate of roll was diminishing, the landscape cartwheeling around at half the speed from when they had begun the journey. She could begin to pick out details, landmarks that the Aubusson citizens had already noted.
‘We’ll be okay,’ Cuthbertson said. ‘We’re just going to hit a different part of the window band than we were expecting.’
‘Will that make any difference?’ she asked.
‘Don’t think so. We should break through as easily there as anywhere else.’
‘Any second now,’ Meriel Redon said. ‘We’re coming up on the band. Get ready, everyone. There’s going to be a jolt when we hit the edge of the land strip.’
Thalia braced herself, in so far as bracing was possible when she was already bound like a sacrificial offering. She felt a moment of giddy vertigo as the sphere rolled over the edge of the landscape strip and crashed down onto the vast glassy plain of the window band. The ride became eerily smooth as they trundled over the geometrically perfect surface. With little friction save air resistance, the rate of roll was holding more or less steady.
‘Break,’ Thalia whispered. ‘Please break. And please let us be airtight when it happens.’
Dreyfus knocked on the door to the tactical room before stepping through. A certain deference was advisable. Dreyfus knew that his Pangolin clearance put him on a level footing with the seniors in some respects, but he saw no point in rubbing salt into that particular wound.
‘Dreyfus,’ Baudry said, breaking off from whatever discussion she’d been having with the other seniors. ‘I’m afraid you’re too late. You’ve just missed the demise of the Persistent Vegetative State.’
Without sitting down, Dreyfus moved to a position close to the Solid Orrery. The number of red lights hadn’t changed since last time he’d seen it, but he could draw no consolation from that, knowing what it had cost just to slow Aurora’s advance. ‘How many’d we get out?’
‘One hundred and seventeen thousand, out of a total population of one hundred and thirty. Not bad, all things considered, especially as we were basically dealing with corpses.’
‘We’ve now concentrated our evacuation efforts on the targets we think Aurora will go for next,’ Clearmountain said. ‘Our monitors show that the weevil flows are already changing direction, now they know the Spindle and the PVS are out of the picture.’
‘You mean “nuked”,’ Dreyfus said.
‘Whatever. So far, though, we can’t say where the flows are most likely to hit next. There are a number of possible candidates. Unfortunately, none of them are habitats where we’ve already started evacuating. We’re starting from scratch.’
‘Where are the evacuees going?’
He could tell from their reactions that his question wasn’t a popular one. ‘In an ideal world, we’d ship them far across the Glitter Band, well beyond Aurora’s expansion front,’ Clearmountain said. ‘But even with the high-burn liners, that would involve an unacceptable round-trip delay. Our only practical strategy has been to move the citizens to relatively close habitats, so that the turnaround time can be minimised.’
‘Go on.’
Clearmountain cast a glance at the other seniors. ‘Unfortunately, Aurora’s projected front is now beginning to impinge on some of the habs where we’ve been moving people.’
‘I see.’
‘Which means that when we start evacuating those habs, we’re also going to have to shift the recent refugees. With our current resources the situation is borderline containable, but as the front expands, and the number of endangered habitats grows geometrically, the refugee burden will soon become the predominant limiting factor.’ Clearmountain offered his palms in a gesture of well-intentioned surrender. ‘Some tough calls may have to be made when that happens, Prefect Dreyfus.’
‘Today we nuked two occupied habitats. We’ve already made tough calls.’
‘What I mean,’ Clearmountain said, with a strained smile, ‘is that we may have to focus our activities where they can do the most good.’
‘Isn’t that exactly what we’re already doing?’
‘Not to the degree that may shortly become necessary. In the interests of maximising the number of citizens we can evacuate away from Aurora’s takeover front, we may have to prioritise assistance to those citizens least likely to hinder our efforts.’
‘I see where you’re going. You think we should leave the coma cases to die.’
‘It’s not as if they’ll know what hit them.’
‘All those citizens went into voluntary coma on the understanding that the PVS would be looking after them, and that Panoply would be standing by if the PVS failed in its care. That was a promise we made to those people.’
Clearmountain looked exasperated. ‘You’re worried about breaking a promise to a citizen with the brain functions of a cabbage?’
‘I’m just wondering where this ends. So the coma cases are inconvenient to us. Fine, we lose them. Who’s next? Citizens who can’t move as fast as the rest? Citizens we just don’t like the look of? Citizens who maybe didn’t vote the right way the last time there was a poll on Panoply’s right to arms?’
‘I think you’re being needlessly melodramatic,’ Clearmountain said. ‘There
‘Clearmountain’s right,’ Jane Aumonier said, her image speaking from her usual position at the table. ‘The coma cases are a blessed nuisance, and we’d have a much easier time of it if we just pulled life-support on the lot of them. They’re going to retard our evacuation programme and therefore increase the danger to the rest of the citizenry. But Tom’s even more right. If we cross this line just once — if we say these citizens matter less than those citizens — we may as well hand Aurora the keys to the kingdom. But we’re not going to do that. This is Panoply. Everything we stand for says we’re better than that.’
‘Thank you,’ Dreyfus said, his voice a hushed whisper.
‘But we can’t let the coma cases impose too heavy a drag on the evacuation programme,’ Aumonier continued. ‘That’s why I want them dealt with
‘That’ll tie up ships and manpower,’ Baudry said.
‘I know. But it has to be done. Do you have any suggestions, Lillian?’
‘We might consider an approach to Hospice Idlewild. They’re used to dealing with sudden influxes of incapacitated sleepers, so they should be able to handle the coma cases.’
‘Excellent proposal. Can you sort that out?’
‘I’ll get right on it.’ After a lengthy pause she said, ‘Supreme Prefect Aumonier…’
‘Yes?’
‘It’s been nearly six hours now. Since Aurora’s transmission.’
‘I’m well aware of that, thank you very much.’
