through, so that the strut would give way when she detonated the whiphound in grenade mode.
“Is that enough?” she whispered, even though the sound of the buzzing, crackling whiphound seemed loud enough to render whispering pointless.
“It’d better be,” Parnasse said.
“I don’t think that thing of yours is good for much more cutting.” Thalia retracted the filament.
“No, I don’t think it is.”
“I guess we’d best just thank Sandra Voi that that thing held out as long as it did. Only has to do one more thing for us now.”
“Two things,” Thalia said, remembering that she still intended to sabotage the polling core.
“Show me where we have to place it, anyway.”
“Anywhere around here should do the trick. A centimetre’s not going to make the difference between life and death.” Thalia placed the bundled whiphound under one of the weakened spars.
“Like here?”
“That’ll do, girl.”
“Good. I should be able to find this spot when I come down again.”
“How does grenade mode work on that thing?” Thalia eased aside the wrapping surrounding the shaft until she had revealed the whiphound’s twist-controls.
“You twist that dial to set the yield. I’ll turn it to maximum, obviously. It’ll give us about point one to point two kilotonnes, depending on how much dust’s left in the power bubble.”
“And time delay?”
“Those two dials there, in combination.”
“How long a delay will it give you?”
“Long enough,” Thalia said. Parnasse nodded wordlessly. They had done what they could down there, and while it might have been possible to weaken one or two more struts, Thalia doubted that they had the time. The barricade teams were already reporting that the noise of the servitors was louder than it had ever been, suggesting that the machines were only metres from breaking through. Thalia had heard them while she had been cutting. They had begun to climb past the top of the stalk, into the sphere itself. We’ve probably get less than an hour, she thought. Even thirty minutes might be pushing it now. And that was without considering the war machines that she believed were planning to ascend the outside of the stalk, or even the inside of the elevator shaft.
Thalia and Parnasse climbed back through the forest of structural supports until they reached the ceiling door that led into the lowest inhabitable section of the sphere. A minute later they reached the floor of the polling core, where most of the party were now awake and nervous, aware that something was afoot but as yet ignorant of Thalia’s plan.
They had questions for her, but before she spoke to them, Thalia moved to the nearest window and looked down towards the very base of the stalk. She noted, with a knife-twist of apprehension in her stomach, that the concentration of military-grade servitors was now much less than it had been before. It could only mean that most of the machines were now ascending the stalk, working with methodical inevitability towards the level of the polling core.
“Call off the work squad,” she told Caillebot.
“Tell them to drop what they’re doing and get back up here.”
“Why?” he asked.
“What about the barricade? Someone needs to keep watch on it.”
“Not now they don’t. It’s served us well but we won’t be needing it any more.”
“But the machines are getting close.”
“I know. That’s why it’s time we got out of here. Get the squad, Jules. We don’t have time to debate this.”
He stared at her, frozen as if on the verge of framing an objection, then turned and descended the short staircase down to the next level, where the current barricade team was still doing what they could to reinforce the obstruction.
“What’s going to happen?” asked Paula Thory, standing up from the sprawl of clothes that she had made into a makeshift bed.
“We’re getting out of here,” Thalia said.
“How? You’re not expecting us to climb down those stairs, are you? We can’t very well fight our way past those machines.”
“We won’t be fighting our way past anything. If all goes well, we won’t have to deal with a single servitor. Before you know it, we’ll be outside House Aubusson, in clear space, waiting to be rescued.”
“What do you mean, in space? None of us have suits! We don’t have a ship. We don’t even have an escape pod!”
“We don’t need an escape pod,” Thalia said carefully.
“We’re in one.”
Dreyfus noticed that Aumonier was clenching and unclenching her hands, her chest rising and falling with deep breaths.
“I thought you’d appreciate some company,” he said.
“In person, I mean.”
“Thank you, Tom. And yes, you’re right. I do appreciate it.” She paused.
“I just issued that statement, by
the way—including your remarks.”
“They needed reassurance.”
“They did. You were right.”
“Have we gone dark yet?”
“No—I’m holding off on removing network services until we’ve finished with the Spindle. I want the citizens to know that we’re dealing with something bad, but that we’re doing all in our power to keep as many of them safe as we can.”
“Won’t seeing the Spindle nuked to kingdom come scare them half to death?”
“More than likely. But if it means they start listening to local constabulary, it’s a price worth paying.”
Dreyfus looked at the largest screen.
“How long now?”
“Three minutes.”
Three minutes until the weevil flow hit the Toriyuma-Murchison Spindle, he thought. Panoply ships had done what they could to thin or deflect the flow, but their efforts had proved almost entirely ineffectual. They were only holding station now in case there were survivors after the Democratic Circus had done her work.
The deep-system cruiser hovered aft of the Spindle, two missiles locked on target and armed, dialled to a yield high enough to take out the as-yet-dormant machinery of the habitat’s manufactory. Panoply had always had a contingency procedure in place for the act of destroying a habitat, and the crew would have run through such a scenario many times during training. The sequence, from the issuing of the command to the firing of the weapons, was supposedly immune to error. It required not just the authorisation of the supreme prefect, but also a majority of seniors. Mechanisms even existed to deal with the possibility of sudden changes in rank due to death or injury, so that the order could still be given even if there’d been a direct attack on Panoply.
And yet, Dreyfus thought, the crew wouldn’t have been human if they didn’t at least consider the possibility that the order was erroneous, or had originated through malicious action. They were being asked to do the one thing that cut against everything Panoply stood for. Like a surgeon putting out his hand to receive a scalpel, and being handed a gun instead.
But they’d do it, he thought. They’d allow themselves that one flicker of doubt, and then they’d get over it. The protocol was watertight. No mistake was possible: if the order had come in, then it was logically guaranteed that it had been issued by the supreme prefect herself, with the approval of her seniors.
The crew had no choice but to act upon it.
“One minute thirty,” Aumonier said. Then her tone shifted.
“Tom: I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”
“Go on.”
