“She thought I was taking the piss.”
Thalia’s feet touched metal flooring.
“And afterwards, when you explained it was my idea?”
“She changed her mind. She thought you were taking the piss. But I think I brought her round in the end. Like you say, it’s not as if we really want to take our chances with those servitors.”
“No,” Thalia said, grimly resigned.
“That we don’t. Did you see any sign that anyone else has noticed the military-grade machines?”
He kept his voice low.
“I don’t think so. Cuthbertson started nosing around the windows, but I managed to steer him away before he saw anything.”
“That’s good. The citizens are spooked enough as it is, without having to deal with the thought of war robots. I don’t expect I have to tell you what those machines would be capable of doing to unarmed civilians.”
“No, got enough of an imagination on me for that,” Parnasse said, taking a kind of grim pleasure in the remark.
“What do you think they’re going to do—try coming up the inside, like the others?”
“No need. These machines are designed for assault and infiltration. They wouldn’t need to climb the stairs to reach the polling core. They can come up the outside, even if they have to form a siege tower with their own bodies.”
“They don’t seem to have started climbing yet.”
“Must be evaluating the situation, working out how to take us down as quickly as possible. But we can’t count on them dithering for ever. You’d better show me where to cut.”
“This way,” Parnasse whispered, pushing Thalia’s head down so that she did not knock it against a ceiling strut.
“You might want to put those glasses of yours on,” he added.
“What about you?”
“I know my way. You just take care of yourself.”
Thalia slipped the glasses on. The image amplifier threw grainy shapes against her eyes. She clicked in the infrared overlay and locked on to Parnasse’s blob-like form, following his every move as if they were passing through a minefield. As silently as they could, they negotiated a forest of crisscrossing struts and utility ducts, descending slowly until they reached the trunk-like intrusion of the three service shafts Parnasse had already described. Thalia had a clear sense that they’d reached the base of the sphere, for she could see where the curve of the outer skin met the top of the stalk. Surrounding the cluster of service shafts was a series of heavy-looking buttresses, arcing back over Thalia’s head into the depths of the chamber. Wordlessly, Parnasse touched a finger against one of the spoke-like buttresses. It was as thick as her thigh.
“That’s what I have to cut?” she asked.
“Not just this one,” he whispered back.
“There are eighteen of these, and you’re going to have to take care of at least nine if we’re to have a hope of toppling.”
“Nine!” she hissed back.
He raised a shushing finger to his lips.
“I didn’t say you had to cut through ’em all. You cut through four or five, say two on either side of this fellow, and you cut partway through another two on either side, and that should be enough. We want to make damned sure the sphere topples in the right direction.”
“I know,” Thalia said, resenting the fact that he felt she needed reminding.
“You want that magic sword of yours?”
“No time like the present.”
Parnasse passed her the thick bundle he’d made of the whiphound. Between them, they unwrapped the insulating layers, then re-wrapped the cool outer part around the scorching-hot shaft of the handle. Her hands trembling as they had done before, Thalia took the damaged weapon and prayed that the filament would extend for her one more time.
Then she started cutting.
Not for the first time, Jane Aumonier found herself both awed and frightened by the submarine processes of her own mind. She had scarcely given the names of the Firebrand operatives more than a second’s thought in nine years, but the process of recall was as automatic and swift as some well-engineered dispensing machine. She dictated the names to Dreyfus while he scratched them into a compad, floating at the end of the safe-distance tether. He always looked awkward when writing, as if it was a skill his hands had not quite evolved for.
When he was done he left her alone, the past amok in her head, while the weevil-class war robots rampaged through the gilded plazas of Carousel New Brazilia.
Many public data feeds had been severed, but the habitat would not be completely isolated until the weevils reached the polling core. The cams would maintain their dispassionate vigilance until that final moment of transmission, even as the streets turned slippery with citizens’ blood, congealing too thickly to be absorbed by the municipal quickmatter. The war robots moved very fast once they were inside the airtight environment of the wheel-shaped structure. They tumbled out of doorways and ramps in a slurry of dark armour, their traction legs a furious grey-black blur. They whisked through plazas and atria in a rampaging column of thrashing metal, as if lumpy black tar was being poured along the alleys and boulevards of the habitat’s great public spaces, a tar that ate and dissolved people as it swept over them. It looked disorganised, almost random, until Aumonier slowed down the time rate and studied the invasion in the accelerated frame of machine perception. Then she saw how fiercely systematic the invaders were, how efficient and regimented. They cut down the citizens with brutal precision, but only when they were directly opposed. Bystanders, or those running in panic, were left quite alone provided they offered no immediate obstruction to the weevils. Local constables, recognisable by their armbands and activated from amongst the citizenry under the usual emergency measures, were taking the brunt of the casualties. The constables’ non-lethal weapons were hopelessly ineffective against the war machines, but still they tried to slow down the invading force, spraying the weevils with immobilising foam or sticky netting. Using their special constabulory authority, they tried to conjure barricades out of the ambient quickmatter, but their efforts were panicked and ineffective. The weevils barged through the obstacles as if they were no more substantial than cobwebs. Most of the constables ran for cover as soon as they’d used their weapons or conjured obstacles, but a few stood their ground and paid a predictable price. Death, when it came, was always mercifully quick—Aumonier remembered what Baudry had told them about the weevils carrying anatomical knowledge—but while there appeared to be no specific cruelty in the machines’ actions, that did not make the process of invasion any less horrific.
The polling core in Carousel New Brazilia lay at the heart of a dizzying multi-tiered atrium crisscrossed by railingless pedestrian bridges. Here the constables had converged from all over the wheel, ready for a courageous last stand. They’d taken up defensive positions around the core, covering the endpoints of all the bridges. In addition to their usual non-lethal weapons, some of them now carried heavier armaments dispensed under the emergency provisions. Aumonier watched as a trio of constables tried to assemble some kind of tripod-mounted cannon, two of them arguing over the right way to attach the angled blast screen. By the time they had the cannon operational, the weevils were already crossing the bridges from the surrounding galleries. The constables opened fire, their gun chugging silently as it spewed out low-velocity munitions, trailing banners of pink smoke. It made no practical difference. Weevils were constructed for the rigours of vacuum warfare, hardened to withstand direct hits from high-energy pulses or penetrating slugs. The constables managed to dislodge a couple of the robots, sending them plummeting from the bridges, but it was as nothing compared to the numbers still crossing. Belatedly, some of the constables realised that they had the authority to conjure gaps in the bridges, and a couple of them ran bravely out into the middle to issue the necessary close-proximity commands. The bridges puckered apart, like strands of toffee being pulled too hard.
But by then it was much too late. The weevils bridged the openings with their own bodies, locking together while other machines flowed over them. They flung the retreating constables aside, into the open space of the atrium. The constables fell with silent screams.
Then the weevils were at the polling core. Aumonier watched until the last bitter instant, until the cam feeds greyed out, filling with static and cascading error messages.
