to her own belt. Then she single-handedly unclipped her own unit, a Model C, and deployed the filament. It hissed against the floor, its sharp edge a coiling scratch of bright silver. Deftly flipping the haft in her hand to turn the laser eye towards Dreyfus and Sparver, she marked them both then released the handle.
“Confirm target acquisition,” she said; the whiphound nodded its handle in reply.
“Maintain target surveillance. If targets approach within five metres of me, or move more than ten metres from me, intercept and detain both subjects with maximum lethal force. Indicate compliance.”
The whiphound nodded.
“I think we’re clear on the ground rules,” Dreyfus said.
Saavedra moved to the rifles she had told them to discard, put down her own weapon and removed the ammo cells from the other two guns. She clipped the cells to her belt, next to the two captured whiphounds. Then she collected her own rifle and shrugged it back over her shoulder, the muzzle aimed at the ceiling.
“This is called a gesture of trust. Don’t abuse it.”
“We’re cool with not abusing it,” Sparver said.
“Follow me, and remember what I just told the whiphound. I’ll show you the Clockmaker, if you really want to see it.”
CHAPTER 31
Saavedra led them deeper into Ops Nine, down one of the sloping ramps that Dreyfus had already noticed leading away from the atrium. Her whiphound slinked along behind the party, constantly triangulating the distance between Saavedra and her guests, waiting for one of them to transgress the parameters she had laid down. Dreyfus was relieved not to have a gun aimed at him, but the whiphound was only a marginal improvement. If he had been concerned about dying because of a twitch from Saavedra’s finger, now he had to worry about the inflexible thought processes of a machine that really wasn’t much brighter than a guard dog. Not that he had any intention of deliberately violating the rules, but what if he tripped, or accidentally crossed the five-metre line?
“I will show it to you,” she said, “but you can forget any idea of negotiating with it. It is not a rational intellect.”
“It doesn’t have to be rational to understand that Aurora wants it dead,” Dreyfus replied.
“You think that will give you leverage?”
“It’s all I’ve got. Better make the most of it.”
“How did you manage to install a containment facility down here at such short notice?” Sparver asked.
“We didn’t. There was only just time to clear out of Ruskin-Sartorious before it was destroyed. Fortunately, there was a kind of cage already here. It needed some alterations, but nothing beyond our resources.”
“You’re talking about the tokamak,” Dreyfus said, wonderingly.
“The what?” Sparver asked.
“He means the fusion reactor that would have powered this facility during the Amerikano era,” Saavedra said loftily.
“And he’s right. That’s exactly what we used. It’s one large magnetic containment bottle. Hideously inefficient compared to the portable generators we brought with us, but it has its uses. It needed to be checked, and the field geometry adjusted, but none of that was particularly taxing. It was much easier than installing our own containment equipment: we’d have needed to hollow out another cavern for that.”
“I hope you trust Amerikano engineering,” Dreyfus said.
“Keeping a psychopathic machine prisoner wasn’t exactly in the design specs.”
“I trust it not to fail. Do you think I’d have come here if I didn’t?”
“Where’s everyone else?” Dreyfus asked.
“The rest of Firebrand? Apart from Simon Veitch, I’m the only one down here.”
Dreyfus remembered that name from the list of Firebrand members Jane had given him. It had impressed itself on his memory for a reason.
“Where are the others?”
“Wherever their duties require them to be. Since Jane pulled the plug on us, we’ve all had to live dual lives. How do you imagine we managed to maintain Firebrand while we also had our regular duties to attend to?”
“I did wonder.”
“The same therapeutic regime designed to keep Aumonier awake proved equally useful to the agents of Firebrand. Most of us have been getting by on only a few hours of sleep a week.” Saavedra lifted her arm and spoke into the bracelet clamped around the pale stick of her wrist.
“Simon? I’ve found the intruders.” She paused, listening to Veitch’s reply.
“Yes, just the two. I’m bringing them down to the reactor.” She paused again.
“Yes, I have them under control. Why else would I have allowed them to live?”
The tunnel levelled out. They passed along a corridor lined with equipment storage rooms, then emerged onto a balcony overlooking a chamber only slightly smaller than the atrium they’d left behind. There was enough room for all three of them on the balcony without triggering the whiphound into action. The reactor filled most of the chamber, squatting on shockproof supports like an enormous magic cauldron. It was painted a pale green, with faint lines of rust along panel joints. A handful of panels and parts shone like chrome. Other than that it appeared superficially intact. Dreyfus guessed that little repair had been
necessary before its magnetic generators were coaxed back to strength. A catwalk girdled the reactor at its fattest point. A figure, dressed in black, was attending a monitor panel next to a dark observation window. The figure looked around and up, a grimace on his face. Veitch was as thin and cadaverous-looking as Saavedra, but conveyed the same impression of wiry strength.
“You should have killed them,” he said, raising his voice above the low hum of the reactor.
“They have information about the Clockmaker,” she said.
“Dreyfus says he knows where it came from.
I’d like to hear what he has to tell us.”
Veitch looked irritated.
“We know where it came from. They made it in SIAM. That’s where it ran amok.”
“But it didn’t begin there,” Dreyfus said.
“It came of age in SIAM, reached its true potential there, but it originated somewhere else entirely.”
“Descend the stairs,” Saavedra snapped.
“You can call the whiphound off now,” Dreyfus said.
“I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Just descend the stairs. I’ll worry about the whiphound.” Dreyfus and Sparver edged past Saavedra, taking care not to come closer to her than five metres. They clattered down the stairs and crossed the chamber’s equipment-cluttered floor until the reactor was looming over them.
“Climb to the observation deck,” Saavedra said, “and tell Veitch why you want the Clockmaker.” Looking up at Veitch, Dreyfus reiterated the argument he had already presented to Saavedra—that the Clockmaker was now the only effective weapon against Aurora.
“So what are you proposing? That we just let it loose and hope it crawls back to us when it’s done?”
Dreyfus placed a hand on the railing and began to climb the stairs to the observation deck, Sparver immediately behind him.
“I’m hoping we won’t have to let it loose at all. It’s a matter of self-preservation. If I can impress upon it how much Aurora wants to destroy it, I can make it see the sense in defeating her. It will help us by helping itself.”
“From inside the cage?”
“It’s a form of machine intelligence,” Dreyfus said.
“So is Aurora, no matter what she started out as.”
“How does that help us?”
“Aurora isn’t a disembodied intelligence. She’s a collection of software routines emulating the structure of an individual human brain. But she’s nothing unless she has a physical architecture to run on.”
Above him, Veitch nodded impatiently.
