the right direction. We’ll topple.”
“We’ll be smashed around like eggs in a box,” Caillebot said.
“Not if we secure ourselves first.” Thalia indicated the metal railings encircling the polling core.
“You’re going to strap yourselves to these guards, as tight as you can. Meriel’s going to make sure everyone has enough clothing to do a good job. You’ll need to be secure during the roll. I don’t want anyone breaking loose when we end up upside down.”
“Maybe I’m missing something,” Caillebot said.
“You talk of us rolling two or three kilometres.”
“Correct,” Parnasse said.
“That isn’t going to help us much, is it? By the time we’ve unlashed ourselves, the robots will have caught up with us again.”
Parnasse glanced at Thalia.
“I think you’d better tell them the rest, girl.”
“The robots won’t be catching up with us,” she said.
Caillebot frowned.
“Why not?”
“Because we’re not stopping. We said we could roll two or three kilometres. That should be enough to take us across the nearest window band.”
“Oh no,” Thory said, shaking her head.
“Don’t even think—”
Thalia grimaced. She walked over to the woman and faced her down.
“Here’s the deal, Citizen. I don’t
have a fully functional whiphound any more. If I did, I’d run you through some of the more interesting things I can do with it. But I do have a pair of hands. If you make one more remark, if you open your mouth to speak, even if you so much as give me a funny look, I’m going to wrap those hands around that fat neck of yours and keep squeezing until your eyeballs pop into your lap.”
“I think you’d better listen to the girl,” Parnasse said.
Thalia stepped back and resumed her earlier position.
“Thank you, Cyrus. Yes, we’re going to roll across the window band. The band’s pretty tough, I admit—it’s already holding back air at atmospheric pressure, and it’s designed to tolerate occasional stresses above and beyond its normal loading. It could withstand collision by a small ship, a volantor or a train coming off one the bridges. But it isn’t designed to cope with something as substantial as the sphere. Parnasse and I both agree that the band will collapse under our weight, allowing us to drop into open space.”
“Where we’ll suffocate and die,” Caillebot said.
“Followed quickly by everyone else still inside House Aubusson as the air rushes out through the hundred- metre-wide hole we’ll have just dropped through.”
“There’s no one else to worry about,” Thalia said.
“We’ve kept it from you until now, but all the evidence at our disposal says that the machines have embarked on the systematic murder of all the other citizens. They’ve been rounded up, euthanised and shipped off to the manufactory to be stripped down and scavenged for useful elements.”
“You can’t be certain that there are no other survivors,” said the woman in the red dress, her face pale.
Thalia nodded.
“No, we can’t. Some other groups may have held out for a while. But we’re the only party able to protect ourselves by virtue of being near the polling core. No one else will have had that security. There’ll have been nothing to stop the machines storming everyone else en masse.”
“But what about us?” asked Cuthbertson, his mechanical owl still perched on his shoulder.
“We’ll still need air, even if everyone else is already dead!”
“We’ve got it,” Thalia said.
“There’s enough air inside here to keep us alive until we’re rescued. It won’t be going anywhere because the sphere’s already airtight. Provided the portholes hold, we’ll be fine. Internal doors will stop the air leaking out of the bottom of the sphere, where it used to meet the stalk. If there’s a slow leak, we can live with it. Rescue should be on us within a few minutes of breakout, if my guess is right.”
“You’re confident of that?” Caillebot asked.
“I’m even more confident that we won’t have a chance against those machines when they break through.” Thalia planted a hand on her hip.
“That good enough for you, or do you want it in writing?”
Meriel Redon coughed.
“I know it sounds like madness, at first. That’s what I thought initially when they told me about this plan. But now that I’ve had time to think things through, I see that this is the only way we’re going to survive. It’s roll or die, people.”
“How soon?” Cuthbertson asked.
“Very,” Thalia said.
“We need to think about it. We need time to talk it over, see if we can’t come up with another plan.”
“You’ve got five seconds,” Thalia said, looking at him belligerently.
“Thought of anything? No, didn’t think so. Sorry, but this is the plan, and there’s no opt-out clause. I want you all to start securing yourselves.
Anything you can’t do, I’ll help you with. But we haven’t got time for a debate on the matter.”
“It’s going to work,” Redon said, raising her arms to silence the party.
“But we have to do it fast, or those machines are going to be through to us before we know it. Thalia’s given us a way out when we had nothing. Don’t think for one second that I’m thrilled about what we’re going to attempt, but I see that we have no choice.”
“What about the polling core?” Caillebot asked.
“Have you forgotten about sabotaging it?”
Thalia produced the whiphound, gripping it in a glove-wrapped hand.
“I’m going to take it down now. Then I’ll head downstairs to see if I can hear any activity behind the barricade. If I don’t, and there’s no sign of the machines trying to break in elsewhere, then I may reconsider our escape plan. But if I decide to go ahead, I won’t have time to come back up and tell you until we’re almost ready to roll. You’d better assume that’s what’s going to happen.”
She stepped through the gap in the railinged enclosure, extending and stiffening the whiphound’s filament. Without ceremony, she swung it into the polling core’s pillar at chest height, straining to push it deeper until the resistance was too much. The core flickered in protest at the damage she was inflicting, fingers of sharp-edged black radiating away from the wound. She withdrew the filament and came in again, slicing at a different angle. The whiphound buzzed fiercely, the handle throbbing in her hand. Thalia sweated. If she failed to disable the core and somehow incapacitated the whiphound’s grenade mode, it would all have been for nothing.
She removed the whiphound. Now most of the pillar was consumed by geometric black shapes. At some level it was still functioning—her glasses confirmed that there was still some low-level abstraction traffic—but she had certainly impaired it, perhaps to a degree where it would not be able to send coherent packets to the servitors. That would have to suffice. The marrow of quickmatter at the heart of the core would prove resilient against the whiphound, healing as the filament passed through it, and she could not risk overtaxing the weapon. Thalia let the filament go limp and spool back into the handle. She had done all that she could.
“Let’s see if we did any damage,” she said to Parnasse.
She left the polling core level, glancing back to make sure the citizens were all engaged in securing themselves to the railings. She was pleased to see that they were, despite the ramshackle nature of some of their bindings. There was some grumbling going on, some indignation, but Meriel Redon was doing her best to make them understand that there was no other way.
Maybe it wouldn’t be necessary, she thought. Maybe taking down the polling core would be the end of it.
But when Thalia and Parnasse reached the top of the barricade, she knew that the machines were still alive. If anything they sounded louder and closer than ever. Thalia had the palpable impression that they were about to
