wished to kill those people, she would achieve it the easy way, by depressurising the habitat or tampering with the life-support in some equally decisive fashion. It was only now that Aumonier realised the fatal flaw in her thinking. Aurora had indeed wanted those people dead: not because she hated them, not because they were capable of derailing her plans, but because they were of no conceivable use to her. And yet, as Thalia’s debriefing testimony made clear, Aurora had been at pains to conceal her murder of the citizenry from the outside world. It had to be done the old-fashioned way, the historical way: not with a single catastrophic release of air or heat, something that would have been detectable from afar, but with the apparatus of state: armed force, applied via her new army of servitors. The citizens had been rounded up, pacified with lies and then executed by machine. And then their remains had been shovelled into bigger machines and conveyed to the matter-consuming furnaces of the manufactories, where they were smelted down and made into parts for other machines.
Aumonier cursed the way Aurora had manipulated her unwillingness to strike against habitats that she still believed contained living citizens. But without Thalia’s escape with her tiny party of survivors, she would still not have known. There was probably no one left alive in any of those four habitats. Even if some survivors had managed to hide or hold out against the machines, Panoply could do nothing for them now.
Well, there was one thing, Aumonier reflected. It could end their torment now, before the machines reached them. It was not much of a kindness, but it was the only one she had left to give.
“Captains Sarasota, Yokosuka, Ribeauville and Gilden. This is Jane Aumonier. You have my permission to open fire on your designated targets.”
This time there was no questioning of her order, no doubt that she meant what she had said.
“Nukes deployed and running,” Gilden said.
“Deployed and running,” Yokosuka reported.
“Deployed and running,” Sarasota and Ribeauville said, in near-unison. Aumonier closed her eyes before the first flash reached her. Even though she was only seeing a monitor feed, the brilliance of the nuclear explosions— twelve in all, three per habitat—still pushed through her eyelids. She counted twelve pink flashes. When she opened her eyes, nothing remained of the targets except four slowly expanding nebulae: the atomised, ionised remains of what had once been homes to more than two million of her citizens. There’d been beauty and misery in those habitats, wonder and sadness, every facet of human experience, history reaching back two hundred years. Between one breath and the next all that had been wiped out of existence, like a delirious dream that never happened.
“Forgive us,” she said to herself. A little later, she received confirmation that the weevil flows from Aubusson and Szlumper Oneill had both been curtailed. The weevils that had been manufactured just before the attack were still crossing space, but their predicted destinations were already subjects of the evacuation effort. Aumonier knew that they would not clear all the citizens out in time, that they would be doing well to remove seventy per cent of them before the weevil contamination infected another habitat. Nothing more could be done, given the limiting bottlenecks of airlocks and ships and round-trip travel times. Her best people had been on the problem around the clock, and she had no doubt that they had already squeezed the last fraction of a percentile out of that figure. Attempts were now under way to mobilise enough ships to change the orbits of habitats lying beyond Aurora’s current expansion front, but the technical challenge of moving a billion-tonne city state was awesome, and Aumonier knew that this was not a solution she could count on in the long term. At best, it would just take the weevils a little longer to reach their targets. Her bracelet chimed. She glanced down and saw that it was the call she had been hoping for.
“This is Baudry, Supreme Prefect.”
“Go ahead, Lillian.”
“We’re receiving reports from CTC.” Aumonier heard a catch in Baudry’s voice.
“They’re tracking massive ship movements from the Parking Swarm. Dozens of Ultra vessels, Supreme Prefect. Lighthuggers leaving their assigned orbits in the Swarm.”
“Are they leaving the system, Lillian?”
“No.” Baudry sounded flustered.
“Some of them, yes. Most of them… no. Most of them appear to be on vectors that will bring them into the Glitter Band.”
“How long until they arrive?”
“Six to seven hours, Supreme Prefect, before the lead vehicles enter Glitter Band airspace. If we are to consider a tactical response, we need to start making arrangements now. Deep-system vehicles will need to be retasked, fuelled and weaponed in readiness—”.
“You consider this a hostile gesture?”
“What else could it be? They’ve had designs on control of the Glitter Band for decades. Now that we’re facing a crisis, they’ve seen their moment. They’re going to use the Aurora emergency to stage a takeover of their own.”
“I don’t believe so, Lillian. I actually requested assistance from the Ultras. I sent my plea to Harbourmaster Seraphim. I’d heard nothing from him since Dreyfus’ departure, so I assumed… but I
assumed wrongly, I think.” Aumonier paused, conscious that it had been a mistake not to inform the other seniors of her contact with Seraphim.
“Have any attempts been made to speak to the incoming ships?”
“Standard approach queries were transmitted, Supreme Prefect. No valid response has been received.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. We’re dealing with Ultras here. They have their own way of doing things.”
“But Supreme Prefect… we have to assume the worst.”
“I’ll assume the worst when I have evidence of hostile intent. Until then, no one so much as fires a ranging laser on one of those ships. Is that clear?”
“Clear,” Baudry said sullenly.
“Lillian, we have less than forty nuclear devices left in our arsenal. Do you honestly think we’d get very far if it came to open war against the Ultras?”
“I’m just saying… we can’t trust them. We’ve never been able to trust them. That’s always been a cornerstone of our operational policy.”
“Then maybe it’s time we got a new cornerstone. They’re people, Lillian. They might be people who make us uncomfortable, people with very different values from ours, but when we’re facing local extinction at the hands of a genocidal machine intelligence, I don’t think the differences between us look massively significant, do you?”
“I’ll keep you informed,” Baudry said.
“You do that. I’m not having the best of days here, Lillian, and the one thing I’m sure of is that we really, really don’t want to add any new enemies to our list.”
She closed the connection with Baudry and allowed her hand to drift down from her mouth. As it did so, she saw the red scratch of the laser cut across her cuff. She had been aware of that thin line for some hours now, without allowing herself to be distracted by pondering its purpose. Now, however, there was a window in her schedule. The Ultra ships would not arrive for six or seven hours. Dreyfus would take even longer to reach Ops Nine.
She had time to ponder.
She raised the bracelet again and spoke softly.
“Put me through to Doctor Demikhov.”
He answered almost immediately, almost as if he’d been watching her place the call.
“Supreme Prefect. This is a surprise.” Aumonier smiled: for all his talents, Demikhov was a poor liar.
“I wasn’t expecting to hear from you.”
“Doctor,” she said, “perhaps I’m mistaken, but I can’t help feeling that you have something planned for me.” She waited a handful of seconds, listening to his breathing.
“I’m right, aren’t I? This laser, which wasn’t here yesterday. The noises Dreyfus did his best to explain away. What’s going to happen, Doctor?”
After a silence that made her wonder whether the link had been broken, Demikhov said, “It’s best if you don’t know.”
“You’re probably right. It’s not as if I’ve ever had cause to doubt your clinical wisdom, after all. But I just wanted to say something.”
“Go ahead,” Demikhov answered.
“I’ve done all I can for the next few hours. If you’re intending to remove the scarab, now might be the best
