you did terrible things to people like me, once. Many of them would do the same things again if the chance arose. Please do not give me cause to regret this.”
“I won’t,” Dreyfus said.
Dusk was falling in the long shaft of House Aubusson. The mirror-directed sunlight pouring through the window bands was being slowly dimmed as the bands lost their transparency. Soon the habitat would be dark even when its orbit brought it around to Yellowstone’s dayside.
From the curved viewing gallery of the polling core, more than five hundred metres above the ground, Thalia watched the shadows encroach like an army of stalking cats. She could still make out the pale-grey trajectory of the pathway they had tried to follow out of the formal gardens, towards the objective of the endcap wall. But the grey was darkening, losing definition as darkness won. Soon even
the concentric black hoops of the window bands would be indistinguishable from the surrounding terrain. She would be able to make out neither the path nor the endcap. The attempted crossing, which had seemed achievable only hours earlier, now struck her as hopelessly misguided. It would have been ill-conceived if all they had to contend with was enraged and panicked citizenry looking for someone to mob. But now Thalia knew that the darkening landscape was in all likelihood crawling with dangerous machines, serving an agenda that definitely did not involve the preservation of human life.
But, she thought, seeking composure before she turned around, the citizens in her care must not see how frightened she was. She had come into their world bearing the authority of Panoply and that was the role she was obliged to continue playing. She had failed them once; twice if she included the mistake with the polling core that had created this mess in the first place. She could not let them down again.
“So what’s the next step in your plan?” Caillebot asked, with a sarcastic lilt that Thalia couldn’t help but detect.
“The next step is we stay put,” she said.
“Up here?”
“We’re safe here,” she said, mentally deleting the ’for now’ that she had been about to add.
“This is as good a place to wait as anywhere we could have picked in the habitat.”
“Wait for what, exactly?” Caillebot asked.
She’d been expecting the gardener to start needling her as soon as they were inside the core.
“For Panoply, Citizen. They’re on their way. There’ll be a deep-system cruiser docked with us before you can blink.”
“It’ll take more than a few prefects to deal with those machines.”
Thalia touched the buzzing remains of her whiphound. It was uncomfortably hot against her thigh, like a metal bar cooling down from a furnace.
“They’ll have the tools for the job, don’t you worry about that. All we have to do is hold out until they get here. That’s our part of the equation.”
“‘Hold out’,” repeated Paula Thory mockingly. The plump woman was sitting on one of the inert-matter benches encircling the pearl-grey pillar of the polling core.
“You make it sound so easy, like waiting for a train.”
Thalia walked over to the woman and knelt down to bring them face to face.
“I’m not asking you to run a mile. We’re perfectly safe up here.”
“Those barricades won’t hold for ever.”
“They don’t have to.”
“Well, isn’t that reassuring.”
Thalia fought to keep herself from snapping at the woman, or worse. Paula Thory had only joined the chain gang grudgingly, when she realised that she would be the only one refusing to assist in the work effort. It had been difficult and exhausting, but between them they must have shoved at least three tonnes of junk down the elevator shaft, and at least as much again down the winding spiral of the staircase. They’d created a barricade out of ancient dead servitors and decrepit computers and interface devices, many of which must have come to the Yellowstone system from Earth and were probably several hundred years old at the very least. There’d even been something huge and metal, a kind of open iron
chassis crammed with cogs and ratchets. It had made a most impressive racket as it tumbled down the stairs.
Thalia had called for a rest period, but three citizens—Parnasse, Redon and Cuthbertson—were still shovelling junk down the lift shaft and stairs. Every now and then Thalia would hear a muffled crump as the material hit the bottom of the shaft, or a more drawn-out avalanche of sound as something tumbled down the stairs.
“It doesn’t have to hold for ever because we’re not staying up here for ever,” she said.
“Help will arrive before the machines get through the barricades. And even if it doesn’t, we’re working on a contingency plan.”
Thory looked falsely interested.
“Which would be?”
“You’ll hear about it when all the pieces are in place. Until then all you have to do is sit tight and help with the barricades when you feel willing and able.”
If Paula Thory took that as a barb, she showed no evidence of it.
“I think you’re keeping something from us, Prefect—the fact that you haven’t got a clue how we’re going to get out of this mess.”
“You’re perfectly welcome to leave, in that case,” Thalia said, with exaggerated niceness.
“Look!” Jules Caillebot called suddenly from his vantage point by the window.
Thalia stood up, grateful for any excuse not to have to deal with Thory.
“What is it, Citizen?” she said as she strolled over.
“Big machines are moving in.”
Thalia looked out over the darkening panorama. Though it was becoming increasingly difficult to make out distinct objects anywhere in the habitat—nightfall had come with dismaying speed—the machines Caillebot spoke of were at least partially illuminated. As large as houses, they were moving in several slow processions through the civic grounds around the Museum of Cybernetics. They advanced on crawler tracks and huge lumbering wheels, crushing their way across walkways and through tree lines.
“What are they?” Thalia asked.
“Heavy construction servitors, I think,” Caillebot said.
“There’s been a lot of building work going on lately, especially around the new marina at Radiant Point.”
Thalia wondered what kind of damage those machines could do to the stalk supporting the polling core. Although she had not voiced her thoughts to the others, she had convinced herself that the machines would not do anything that might damage the core itself. Abstraction might be down for the citizens, but as far as she could tell, the machines were still being coordinated via low-level data transmissions that were dependent on the core. But that was just her theory, not something she was in any mood to see put to the test.
“They’re carrying stuff,” Caillebot reported.
“Look at the hopper on the back of that one.”
Thalia struggled to make out detail. She remembered her glasses and slipped them on, keying in both magnification and intensity-amplification. The view wobbled, then stabilised. She tracked along the procession until she identified the machine Caillebot had indicated. It was a huge wheeled servitor, thirty or forty metres long, with scoops at either end feeding the trapezium-shaped hopper it carried on its
back. The hopper was piled high with debris: rubble, dirt, torn sheets of composite mesh, chunks of machined metal of unfathomable origin. Thalia moved her viewpoint along the procession and saw that there was at least one other servitor hauling a similar load.
“You say those machines were working at the marina?”
“I think so.”
“If they’re being tasked to work elsewhere, why would they be carrying all that junk?”
“I don’t know.”
“Me neither. Maybe it’s just debris left over from the work on the marina, and they just haven’t been sent a specific command to unload it before moving elsewhere.”
