of nuclear intervention at the production sites. Of course, that won’t stop any weevils that have already departed.”
“Which habitats are the new weevils targeting?” asked Clearmountain.
“If there’s one crumb of comfort to extract from any of this,” Aumonier said, “it’s that Lillian’s simulation appears to accurately predict Aurora’s intentions. That may change in the future if Aurora realises that we’re guessing her movements, but for the moment it does at least allow us to concentrate our evacuation efforts where they’re most useful. The weevil flow from Brazilia is aimed at the Toriyuma-Murchison Spindle, one of the ten habitats we’ve already prioritised.”
“How are we doing, evacuation-wise?” asked Dreyfus, rubbing at his eyes.
“If I might…” Baudry began, clutching a compad as if it was the only thing in the universe she could depend on.
“The Toriyuma-Murchison Spindle contains… contained… five hundred and eleven thousand citizens. According to docking staff, we’ve now processed four hundred and sixty thousand, leaving a surplus of—”
“Fifty-one thousand,” Dreyfus said, before Baudry could finish.
“How long until we get them out?”
“Local constables report a non-compliance level of one per cent. I’m afraid we’ll just have to abandon them —we don’t have time to argue with people if they really don’t want saving. As for those still awaiting transport, our current estimate predicts complete evacuation within four hours, twenty minutes, assuming we can get the liners in and out without incident.”
“There’s a liner docked now?” Dreyfus asked.
“Not a high-capacity vehicle. The biggest ship we have on-station is the medium-capacity liner High Catherine. She can carry six thousand at a time, but she takes a long time to load. The larger ship we’ve been using, the Bellatrix, can take ten thousand, but we’re also using her to offload people from the Persistent Vegetative State.”
“Why are we risking the lives of living citizens to save a bunch of self-induced coma-cases?” Clearmountain asked.
“Because they’re citizens as well,” Aumonier snapped.
“No one gets priority treatment here. Not on my watch.”
“It’s a moot point in any case,” Baudry said, for Clearmountain’s benefit.
“Even if we reassigned the Bellatrix to deal solely with the evacuees from the Toriyuma-Murchison Spindle, we still wouldn’t get them all out in time.”
“Correct,” Aumonier said.
“Weevil contact is anticipated in… fifty-five minutes, eleven seconds. With local constables tasked to assist in the evacuation at the docking hubs, the weevils will have a clear run to the polling core. If events follow the pattern we’ve already seen, the Toriyuma-Murchison manufactory is scheduled to start weevil production in under ten hours.”
“Then the evacuees still have all that time,” Dreyfus said.
“We can get them out.”
“I’m sorry,” Aumonier said, her image looking at him as if no one else was in the room, “but what we’re dealing with here is akin to a state of plague. So far as we know, Aurora can seize control of habitats by reaching their polling cores. What we don’t know is what other capabilities she might have up her sleeve if we give her the chance to try them out. I cannot run the risk of letting her hop from habitat to habitat by another means. And that includes evacuation vehicles.”
“But Jane—”
“We keep moving them out until the absolute last moment,” she said.
“But the instant weevils make groundfall on Toriyuma-Murchison, I’m pulling out the liners.” Just to be absolutely clear to all concerned, she added: “Even if there are still people in the docking tubes.”
“And then what?” Dreyfus asked, even though he knew what she was going to say.
“We nuke. We remove one of Aurora’s stepping stones.”
“There’ll still be tens of thousands of people inside the Spindle.”
“About thirty-five thousand, if the Bellatrix can get in and out one more time. But there’s no other way, Tom. We’ll target the manufactory first, of course, but we’ll have to hit it so hard to take it out completely that we might as well be attacking the entire habitat. We’ll have ships standing by in case, but I’m not expecting survivors.”
“There must be another way.”
“There is. We could nuke the six habitats Aurora already holds, and the two she’s about to take. That would stop her. But then we’d be talking about killing several million people, not just tens of thousands.”
“Taking out that one habitat won’t necessarily stop her.”
“It’ll inconvenience her. I’ll settle for that for now.”
“This is bigger than Panoply,” Dreyfus said desperately.
“We need to call in assistance. Anyone who has a ship and can help.”
“I’ve issued requests for help through the usual channels. Maybe something will arrive, but I’m not counting on it.” She hesitated, her attention still fixed only on him. Dreyfus had the feeling that he was participating in a private conversation, to the exclusion of everyone else in the room.
“Tom, there’s something else.”
“What?” he asked.
“I’m going to have to take down polling and abstraction services, Bandwide. There’s just too much danger of Aurora utilising the network for her own purposes.”
“She spreads by weevil.”
“The weevils are her main agents, but we don’t know for sure that she isn’t using other channels to assist in her spread. I’ve already received a mandate to use all emergency powers at our disposal. That means authorisation to commit mass euthanisation if it means saving other lives. It also means I can take down the networks.”
“We’ll need those networks to coordinate our own efforts.”
“And we’ll retain skeletal data links for just that purpose. But everything else has to go. It’s the only way to be sure.”
Dreyfus examined his thoughts. It startled him to realise that he was less shocked by Aumonier’s planned use of nuclear weapons than he was by the idea of blacking out the entire Glitter Band. But the fact of the matter was that for most of the ten thousand habitats, life was continuing more or less as normally. Some of the citizens would be aware of the crisis, but many would be completely insulated from it, snug in the hermetic cocoons of their private fantasy universes. That wouldn’t necessarily change when Panoply started nuking. But no one—save the citizens of the Bezile Solipsist State, or the Persistent Vegetative State, or the harsher Voluntary Tyrannies—could fail to notice the withdrawal of Bandwide data services. Reality was about to give them a cold, hard slap in the face, whether they liked it or not.
The lights were about to go out across the Glitter Band. There was no choice: it had to be done.
“Just do one thing for me,” Dreyfus said, “before you pull the plug. Tell them Panoply isn’t giving up on them. Tell them that we’re going to be outside, fighting, and that we won’t let them down. Tell them not to forget that.”
“I will,” she said.
CHAPTER 26
Thalia’s trembling hands nearly dropped the whiphound as she finished weakening the final support spar in the sphere of the polling core. It had been agonisingly slow, and not just because the whiphound had grown too hot to hold for more than a minute at a time, even with a scarf wrapped around her palm. The weapon’s sword function had begun to falter, the filament occasionally losing its piezoelectrically maintained stiffness, the molecular cutting mechanisms losing some of their efficacy. The whiphound had ghosted through granite as if she was cutting air with a laser, but now towards the end she had to strain every muscle to persuade the filament to keep working its way through the structural members. The ninth had been the worst; it had taken nearly half an hour just to cut partially
