“…is Thalia Ng, for Panoply. I am recording these words five hours after the end of abstraction. I will keep them on repeat transmission until my bracelet runs out of power. I have secured the polling core, where I’m holding out at the top of the stalk with a small number of survivors. Outside… we’ve seen the machines rounding up people. They’ve started killing them. We don’t know who’s behind this, but they’ve managed to take complete control of the local servitors. Please send immediate assistance. I don’t know how long we can last up here before the machines find a way through to us.” There was a pause, then the message resumed.
“This is Thalia Ng, for Panoply. I am recording these words five hours after the end of abstraction…”
“Thalia,” he said.
“Can you hear me? This is Senior Prefect Michael Crissel. Repeat, this is Michael Crissel. Please respond.”
There was nothing, only her endlessly looped message. Crissel repeated his statement, listened again, then shook his head in defeat.
“No good,” he said.
“She obviously isn’t—”
“Sir,” came a faint but rushed voice.
“This is Thalia. I’m hearing you. Did you get my message?”
“We got your message, Thalia. Your signal’s weak, but audible. We’re in the docking complex. Are you still in the polling core?”
“Still holding out, sir.” Her relief was obvious.
“I’m so glad you’ve arrived. I don’t know how much longer we can stand. The machines are getting cleverer, more adaptable—”
Crissel recalled the map of the interior he had committed to memory before leaving Panoply.
“Thalia, listen carefully. We’re still a long way from you: many kilometres, even after we make it through the locks.”
“But you’re here, sir! I think we can hold out until you get to the stalk, now that we know help’s on its way. How many ships have you brought?”
“Just the one, I’m afraid.”
“One?” Disbelief and anger vied in her voice.
“And the ship isn’t in too good a state, unfortunately. We have a small force of fields, the best we could muster at short notice. We have weapons and we’re ready for a fight.” He made an effort to rally his own spirits.
“We came to take back House Aubusson, and that’s what we’re going to do. You just hold in there, Thalia, and you’ll be right as rain.”
“Sir,” Thalia said, “I have to sign off now, sir. Not much juice left on my bracelet, and I’d like to conserve what I have.”
“Before you go—something you said back there?”
“Sir?”
“About the machines, Thalia. About the servitors. I presume we’re talking about some kind of limited malfunction here? A few machines under the control of an invading party? Not, as you made it sound, a full-scale machine uprising?”
He might have mistaken the hesitation for a failure in the bracelet’s transmission if he hadn’t known her better.
“No, sir. That’s exactly what I mean. The machines have taken over. There is no invading party, as far as we can tell. No one new has arrived in House Aubusson. It’s just the machines, sir. They’ve gone berserk.”
“But abstraction is down. How can machines function without abstraction?”
“There’s enough of it left to control or coordinate them. But we still don’t know who’s doing it. Sir, I’m scared.”
“No need, Thalia. You’ve done excellently to protect any survivors until now.”
“That’s not what I mean, sir. I’m scared that I brought this about. That I played a part in it. I think someone used me, and I was too stupid or naive or vain to notice it. And now it’s too late and we’re all paying for it, all of us here in Aubusson.”
“Then you don’t know,” Crissel said carefully.
“Don’t know what, sir?”
“It isn’t just Aubusson. We’ve lost contact with all four habitats you visited. They all dropped off the network at the same time.”
“Oh, God.”
“We can’t get near any of them. They shoot down any ship that comes close. That’s why we had such a devil of a time getting the Universal Suffrage as close in as we managed.”
“What’s happening, sir?”
“We don’t know. All we do know is that Aubusson’s manufactories are running at maximum capacity.
And now you’ve told us something else we didn’t know, which is that the machines are part of it.”
Thalia’s voice faded and returned.
“I really have to go now, sir. The machines keep trying to get up the stalk. We’ve barricaded as best we can, but we have to keep fighting them back.”
“We’re on our way. Good luck, Thalia. You have nothing to fear, and nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Sir—I’m about to sign off. But I forgot to ask—when help came, I was expecting Prefect Dreyfus to be a part of it.” The tone of her voice became anxious and childlike.
“He’s okay, isn’t he? Please tell me nothing’s happened to him.”
“He’s fine,” Crissel said.
“And I’ll make sure he hears that you’re in one piece. Something came up in Panoply and he had to stay.”
“What kind of something, sir?”
“I’m afraid that’s all I can tell you right now.” The transmission ceased. Thalia must have terminated the endlessly cycling message now that it had reached someone. While he was speaking to her, Crissel and his party of prefects had travelled almost the entire length of the docking tunnel. The conveyor strip ended, losing its adhesive retention at the last moment. In the tunnel’s perfect vacuum, Crissel sped on hopelessly until he was grabbed by one of the prefects who had arrived before him, just in time to stop him crashing into the bulkhead at the tunnel’s limit. Normally the passengers would have glided to a gentle halt, arrested by the resistance of normal atmospheric pressure.
They were facing a heavy armoured door, stencilled with nymphs and faeries.
“There’s air on the other side,” one of the prefects reported.
“Safeties on this door are pretty heavy, and it knows we’re in vacuum here.”
“Can you shoot through?”
“Possible, sir. But if there are hostages on the other side, and they aren’t wearing suits—”.
“Point taken, Prefect. What are our other options?”
“None, sir, except pressurising this part of the tunnel. If we close the door at the other end, the safeties should allow this one to open.”
“Can you do that from here?” Crissel asked.
“Not a problem, sir. We wired a remote trigger on it as we came through. Just wanted to check with you first. It’ll mean blocking our exit route.”
“But you can reopen the other door if you have to?”
“Absolutely, sir. It’ll only take a few seconds.”
“Go ahead, then,” Crissel told him.
Crissel was braced and ready when the door opened and air slammed into the vacuum of the tunnel. Beyond lay a much larger space, a free-fall customs volume at the point of convergence of dozens of docking corridors. Advertisements were still running. The spherical space was hung with wire-stiffened free-fall banners in bright silks, some of which had torn free in the draught. Huge iron sculptures of seahorses and seadragons supported a bewildering tangle of colour-coded conveyor bands looping through the open space. Crissel tried to imagine thousands of passengers riding those bands, unselfconsciously gaudy even without their entoptic plumage, an
