The Prefect

CHAPTER 14

Thalia’s walking party made their way to the elevator shaft that pierced the middle of the sphere from pole to pole. The high-capacity car was still waiting for them, exactly as they had left it, down to the pale-yellow watercolour panels of scenes from Yellowstone.

“It’s powered up,” Parnasse said.

“That’s good. Shouldn’t be any problem getting down now.” Thalia, the last of the five to enter, cleared the trelliswork doors. They scissored shut behind her.

“It’s not moving. I’m asking it and it isn’t moving,” Caillebot said.

“That’s because it isn’t hearing you. Abstraction’s two-way,” Parnasse said, with the weary air of a man who shouldn’t have to explain such things.

“Then how do we get it to move? Are there manual controls?”

“We don’t need them just yet. Do we, Thalia?”

“He’s right,” she said.

“Panoply operatives need to be free to move wherever and whenever we want, even without abstraction. We distribute the voiceprint patterns of authorised personnel to all habitats as a matter of routine.” She spoke up.

“This is Deputy Field Prefect Thalia Ng. Recognise my voiceprint.”

“Voiceprint recognised, Deputy Field Prefect Ng.”

Thalia breathed a little easier.

“Please descend to ground level.”

There was an uncomfortable moment when nothing happened, and then the elevator began to descend.

“Glad that worked,” Thalia said under her breath. Parnasse glanced at her with a sly smile as if he’d overheard.

“That’s good,” Caillebot said.

“I was beginning to wonder what would happen if we’d been stuck up there.”

“We’d have taken the stairs,” Parnasse said witheringly.

“You’re familiar with the concept of stairs, right?”

Caillebot shot him a warning look but didn’t reply.

The elevator continued its smooth descent, passing through the neck connecting the sphere to the stalk. They were in the hollow atrium now. Far below, visible through the trellised glass windows on the outside of the car, the lobby lay completely deserted. Thalia had half-expected that at least some citizens would be converging on the polling core, demanding to know what was wrong and exactly when it would be fixed, but there was no sign of them. She couldn’t exactly say why, but something made her touch the whiphound again.

The car completed its descent, coming to a smooth halt at the lobby level, and the trelliswork doors clattered open. Again, Thalia was struck by the emptiness of the lobby. It felt even more still than when they had first passed through it, their footsteps echoing loudly.

“Okay, people,” she said, “let’s stick together. Like the man said, there could be some angry citizens out there, and we may be the ones they decide to take it out on.”

They walked into blue-hazed sunlight, shining down from the arc of the window band eight kilometres above. Around them stood ornamental ponds and lawns, crisscrossed by neatly tended gravel and marble pathways. Fountains were still burbling somewhere nearby. Everything looked utterly normal, exactly as Thalia had expected save for the absence of a rampaging mob. Perhaps she was doing the citizens of Aubusson a disservice. But then she recalled how quickly the reception committee had turned against her. If they were truly representative of the citizenry, then there was every reason to expect a similarly unpleasant reaction from the other eight hundred thousand of them.

“I hear voices,” Caillebot said suddenly.

“I think they’re coming from the other side of the stalk.”

“I hear them, too,” Parnasse said, “but we’re not going that way. Straightest path is right ahead, through those trees, directly towards the endcap.”

“Maybe I should speak to them,” Thalia said.

“Tell them what’s happened, how it won’t be long before things are sorted out.”

“We had a plan, girl,” Parnasse said.

“The idea was to walk and stay out of trouble. Those voices don’t sound too happy, the way I’m hearing ’em.”

“I agree,” said Meriel Redon.

Thalia bit her lip. She could hear the voices as well, just above the burble of fountains. A lot of people, sounding agitated and angry. Shouts that were threatening to become screams. Her hand tightened on the whiphound again. Something was wrong, she knew. That wasn’t the sound of a crowd high on its own fury and indignation, wanting the blood of whoever had taken down their precious abstraction.

That was the sound of frightened people.

“Listen to me,” Thalia said, fighting to keep the fear out of her own voice.

“I need to see what’s happening. That’s my duty as a prefect. You four keep going, heading towards the endcap. I’ll catch you up.”

“That’s not a pretty sound,” Parnasse said.

“I know. That’s why I need to check it out.”

“It isn’t your problem,” Caillebot said.

“Our constables will take care of any civil unrest. That’s what they’re for.”

“You have a standing police force?” The gardener shook his head.

“No, but the system will have called up a constabulary from the citizenry, the same way we were called up to form the reception party.”

“There is no system,” Parnasse said.

“Then the people who were called up last time will resume their duties.”

“When exactly was last time?” Thalia asked. The agitated noise was growing louder. It sounded more like the whooping of excited wildfowl than any sound produced by people.

“I don’t remember. A couple of years ago.”

“It was more like ten,” Meriel Redon said.

“And even if the constables self-activate, how are they all going to get where they’re needed if the trains are down?”

“We don’t have time to talk this over.” Thalia unclipped her whiphound, tightening her hand around the heavy shaft of the handle.

“I’m going to take a look.”

“On your own?” Redon asked.

“I won’t have to get too close. The whiphound can give me an advance pair of eyes. In the meantime you keep walking along this path, towards that row of trees. I’ll find you.”

“Wait,” Cuthbertson said urgently.

“We have Miracle Bird. Let’s use him.”

“How?” Thalia asked.

“He can overfly the crowd and tell us what he sees when he returns. He doesn’t need abstraction for that.

Do you, boy?” Miracle Bird’s beak clacked in return.

“I can fly,” said the mechanical owl.

“I’m an excellent bird.” “He doesn’t sound as bright as when he met me at the hub,” Thalia said.

Cuthbertson raised his hand, Miracle Bird responding by unfolding and flexing his glittering alloy wings.

“He knows what to do. Shall I release him?” Thalia glanced at the whiphound. She might need its close-up surveillance mode later, but for now an aerial snapshot would be at least as useful.

“Do it,” she said. Cuthbertson pushed his arm higher. Miracle Bird released its talons, its wings hauling it aloft with a whoosh of downthrust. Thalia watched it climb higher and recede, sun flaring off its foil-thin feathers with every wingbeat, until it vanished around the side of the stalk.

“It’ll know to come back to us?” Thalia asked.

“Trust the bird,” Cuthbertson said. It was an uncomfortably long time before the owl reappeared, emerging around the other side of the stalk. It loitered above them, then spiralled down for an awkwardly executed landing on Cuthbertson’s sleeve. He whispered something to the bird; the bird whispered something back.

“Did he get anything?” Caillebot asked.

“He recorded what he saw. He says he saw people and machines below.” Caillebot narrowed his eyes.

“Machines?”

“Servitors, probably. But that’s all he can tell us himself. He’s a smart bird, but he’s still PreCalvinist.” Caillebot looked disgusted.

“Then we haven’t achieved anything, other than wasted time.”

“Let’s find some shade. Then we’ll see what we achieved.”

“What in Voi’s name do we need shade for?” Caillebot snapped.

“Find me some and I’ll show you.” The automaton-maker tapped a finger against the owl’s delicate jewelled eyes. Thalia understood—the eyes looked very much like laser projectors—and started looking around, hoping they would not have to go back into the lobby.

“Will that do?” Meriel Redon asked, pointing to the shadow cast by an ornamental arch at the foot of one of the pond-spanning bridges.

“Good work,” Thalia said. They trooped over to the arch and made room for Cuthbertson to kneel down, bringing Miracle Bird’s head to within thirty centimetres of the dark marbled floor.

“Start playback, boy,” Cuthbertson said.

“Everything you shot, from the moment I let you go.” The owl looked down. A square of bright colour appeared on the dark-grey marble. Thalia saw faces and clothes, a huddle of people diminishing as the bird took flight. Its point of view shifted as it looked away from them. Blue haze, textured by the faint roads, parks and communities of the farside wall. Then the ivory-white spire of the polling core’s stalk filled the owl’s field of view. The stalk widened, then veered to the right as the owl swept past it. Now Miracle Bird’s point of view shifted smoothly downwards, tracking towards the ground beneath him. Geometric divisions of grass and water slid across the image square. One of the escalator ramps down to the train station. Then a larger green space dotted with the pale, foreshortened blobs of people, many dozens of them.

“Hold it there,” Cuthbertson said.

“Freezeframe and zoom in picture centre, boy.” The image enlarged. The blobs resolved into individuals. There were at least fifty or sixty people, Thalia judged; maybe more out of sight. They were not just standing around any more, nor had they assembled into the agitated clumps of a restless, bad-tempered crowd. No. They had formed a single, tight-packed group, jammed closer together than normal social etiquette would have allowed. A thought started to form in Thalia’s mind, but Meriel Redon said it aloud.

“They’re being herded,” she said, very softly.

“They’re being herded by machines.” The furniture-maker was right, Thalia saw. The people had been shunted together by servitors, at least a dozen of them. Their squat forms were quite unmistakable, even from above. Some of them moved on wheels or tracks, some on slug-like pads, some on legs. She thought she recognised at least one of the bright blue gardening servitors that they had passed on the way to the polling core. She recalled the wicked gleam of its trimmer arms as it carved a peacock out of the hedge.

“This isn’t good,” Thalia said.

“The constables must have tasked the servitors to assist them,” Caillebot replied. Parnasse pointed a stubby finger at the image, indicating the shoulder of a man wearing a bright orange armband.

“Sorry to dampen your enthusiasm, but I think that is a constable. The machines seem to be treating him the same way they’re treating everyone else.”

“Then he must be an impostor wearing a constable’s armband. The machines would only be acting under the supervision of the officially designated constables.”

“Then where are they?” Parnasse asked. Caillebot looked irritated.

“I don’t know. Sending instructions from somewhere else.” Parnasse looked suitably unimpressed.

“With no abstraction? What are they using, messenger pigeons?”

“Maybe the machines are programmed to act this way when they sense a civil emergency,” Redon said doubtfully.

“They’re only doing what the constables would do if they were here.”

“Has anything like this happened before?” Thalia asked.

“Not in my memory,” Redon said.

“There have been disturbances,” Parnasse said.

“Storms in a teacup. But the machines have never started acting like constables.”

“Then I don’t think that’s what we’re looking at,” Thalia said.

“What, then?” Parnasse asked. He was starting to rankle her, but she kept her composure.

“I’m starting to worry that this is something more sinister. I’m beginning to think that what we’re seeing here is some kind of takeover.”

“By whom?” asked Caillebot.

“Another habitat?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I need to see things with my own eyes. I want you four to stay here and keep quiet until I’m back. If you don’t hear from me inside five minutes, start making your way to the endcap.”

“Are you insane?” Redon asked.

“No,” Thalia said.

“Just on duty. There are people in distress here. Since the local law enforcement appears to be failing them, they’ve become a matter for Panoply.”

“But there’s just one of you.”

“Then I’d better make myself count, hadn’t I?” Sounding braver than she felt, Thalia tapped her sleeve.

“Five minutes, people. I’m serious.”

She left the shade of the arch, crouching as she made her way from point to point, the whiphound gripped in her right hand like a truncheon. Away from the group, away from their demands and bickering, she found herself starting to think things through. Servitors were programmed with a degree of autonomy, but—unless they’d been uploaded with some very specialised new crowd-control routines—the kind of coordinated action they had seen via the owl implied that someone was pulling their strings from afar. That in turn meant that abstraction could not be down completely.

She remembered her glasses. Furious with herself for not using them sooner, she delved into her tunic pocket with her left hand and slipped them on. The view hardly changed, confirming that abstraction was absent or at least running at a very low level. But symbols were dancing in her lower-right field of view, indicating that the glasses were detecting signals that very much resembled servitor protocols. Someone was puppeting the machines after all. Abstraction wasn’t down; it was just that the people had been locked out.

It was all looking too damned coincidental for comfort. She’d been sent in to make a systems upgrade, and at the very moment when the upgrade had gone through, something had thrown a wrench into the system.

Thalia felt dizzy. She’d had a moment of clarity and it had felt like the thin skin of the world opening up beneath her feet.

She reined her thoughts in before they pulled her somewhere treacherous. Still crouched, moving from cover to cover as if evading a sniper, Thalia finally came in sight of the area of lawn where the machines were herding the citizens. She had the protection of a low hedge, just tall enough to shield her when she was crouching. It had been trained into a lattice pattern, offering diamond-shaped peepholes through to the other side. Thalia was grateful for her black uniform. A military-grade servitor would have spotted her already, using thermal imaging or any one of a dozen other sensors designed to sniff out concealed human prey. But these were servitors manufactured to tend formal gardens, not engage in search-and-destroy missions.

From this low angle, it was not easy to tell exactly what was going on. She could see the cordon of robots, with the humans crammed into a mass behind them. The machines had hemmed the people into a corner of the lawn, backed against the angle formed by two tall hedges. About a dozen servitors appeared to be involved in the herding operation. If someone tried to break free of the mass, they would only manage a few steps before one of the fast machines sped around to block their exit.

Most people were making no effort to escape, Thalia noticed. The crowd was more subdued than before. They were quieter, talking more than shouting, and a handful of people even looked quite relaxed. The physical size and mass of the machines was apparently enough of a deterrent against escape

– some of the servitors were much taller than a person—but they also had makeshift weapons. Thalia had already seen the blades of the hedge-cutter, but that wasn’t all. Amongst their arsenal the servitors also had high-pressure water sprays, to keep the marble tiles clean. They had flails to trim the edges of lawns. They had manipulator arms to handle tools and materials.

Now that the crowd was quieter, she could hear a single voice dominating all others. It was measured, reassuring. It had an amplified edge that suggested it was coming from one of the servitors.

She whispered a command to the whiphound.

“Forward surveillance mode. Advance twenty metres and hold for one hundred seconds before returning. Extreme stealth posture.”

She let go of the handle. With uncanny speed, the whiphound deployed its filament and slithered through one of the diamond-shaped gaps in the hedge. Thalia heard the merest hiss of disturbed foliage, then nothing. She touched a finger to the side of her glasses, opening a window that showed the whiphound’s point of view. The image remained level as the machine slinked to its surveillance point, directly ahead of the Thalia. Through the gaps in the hedge she could just see the thin cord of its filament, coiling along the ground with the handle only a few handwidths above the grass.

The machine reached its surveillance point. Nothing but grass stood between the whiphound and the outer cordon of servitors. It halted and slowly elevated its handle until the crowd came into view again. The image zoomed in, clicking through magnification factors. The whiphound had enough smarts to identify people and concentrate its attention on them. Thalia studied the faces, seeing fear and bewilderment on several, anger on others, but also a kind of trusting acceptance on many.

The whiphound’s audio pickup pushed an amplified voice into her earpiece.

“…state of emergency is now in force,” the voice said.

“Although full information is not yet available, there is credible evidence that House Aubusson has suffered an attack by hostile parties. This incident is still in progress. In addition to the sabotaging of abstraction services, it is believed that an airborne neurotoxic agent has been introduced into the biosphere. Until the focus and extent of this agent have been determined, it is regrettably necessary to suspend normal freedom of movement and communication. In areas where constables cannot be activated or deployed, servitors have been tasked to provide the same function. This temporary measure has been instigated for your safety. Constables are now actively assessing the scale and threat of the attack. Panoply operatives have also been notified of the situation, and are now formulating an appropriate tactical response. In the meantime, please assist the constabulary by cooperating fully with locally designated operatives, be they human or servitor, so that habitat-wide resources can be targeted efficiently on the elimination of the threat. I thank you for your assistance at this difficult time.” The voice fell silent, but only momentarily before what was clearly a recorded loop began again.

“This is Constable Lucas Thesiger, speaking for the constabulary of House Aubusson, under the terms of the Civil Emergency Act. I regret to inform you that a state of emergency is now in force. Although full information is not yet available…”

The whiphound broke off its surveillance and commenced its return to Thalia. She snapped off the glasses, folded them and slid them back into her tunic pocket. With a rustle the whiphound emerged through the hedge. She spread the fingers of her right hand and allowed the handle to leap into her grasp, the filament retracting in the same instant.

She looked back the way she had come, plotting her route, and saw the moving form of a large six-wheeled servitor. Only the top half of the machine was visible, the rest of it obscured by the line of a hedge. It was an orange robot with a high-gloss shell, the claws and scoop of heavy-duty waste-collection apparatus just visible at the front. The machine was trundling along a gravel-lined path, crunching stones beneath its tyres. Thalia replayed the route she had followed and reckoned that the robot would be on her in fifteen or twenty seconds; sooner if she returned the way she had come.

It might do nothing. It might just rumble past her, on some pre-programmed errand.

She wasn’t going to take that chance.

She crouch-walked as fast as she dared, holding the whiphound tight. She reached a dead end where three sets of hedges converged, blocking her in. The servitor rumbled closer. She risked a glance back and saw blue-hazed sunlight flare off its shell. With the outspread axles of its six wheels, its claw-like waste-collection system and the dim-looking cluster of cameras tucked under the shell’s forward lip, there was something fierce and crablike about the advancing machine. An hour ago she would have walked past it without giving it a glance. Now it made her feel mortally frightened.

Thalia thumbed one of the heavy-duty controls set into the whiphound’s handle. Sword mode. The filament whisked out to a length of one metre, but stiffened to the rigidity of a laser beam. Gripping the thing in both hands, Thalia pushed the blade into the hedge. She sliced sideways, the whiphound automatically twisting the blade to bring the microscopic ablative mechanisms of the cutting edge into play. There was no detectable resistance. A downward swoop, a sweep across, a sweep up. She retracted the blade, then pushed against the cube of hedge she had cut free. It eased inwards, then flopped back onto the turf on the other side. With hindsight, she should have cut a wider hole.

She didn’t have time for hindsight.

She wriggled through. Her heels must have been clearing the gap when the robot rounded the final corner. Thalia crouched low and still. She had emerged onto an area of lawn bounding one of the ponds, out of sight of the other servitors. The pond was circular, with an ornamental fountain at its centre.

The machine approached, its progress silent save for the steady crunch of gravel under its wheels. Thalia tensed, convinced that the machine was going to slow or stop. It would see the hole, she thought; it would find her, then it would summon others. But the machine did not stop, even when it reached the cut in the hedge. Thalia remained as still as possible until the crunching noise had receded into the background sounds—the burble of the fountain, the distant voices of the herded crowd and the endlessly cycling message of reassurance from Constable Lucas Thesiger.

When at last she was certain that the machine was not about to return, she poked her head above the level of the hedge. No other servitors were nearby, or at least none large enough to see. The orange machine was turning, changing its course to proceed at ninety degrees to the hedge Thalia had cut, but not in a direction that would take it further away. She looked along the line of the hedge that the machine was traversing and spotted an opening at its far end, one she had missed on her first inspection. If the machine reached that spot and then turned in towards her, she would be exposed and obvious. Thalia stowed the whiphound. She returned through the hole she had cut, the gravel chips digging into the skin of her palms as she pushed herself up to a crouching position. Holding still again, she watched the orange servitor make its way to the end of the hedge and then turn into the enclosure around the pond. She had been right to dodge back through the hedge. Even if the machine carried only a rudimentary vision system, she would have been obvious.

Instinct told her to move while the machine was engaged in its business, but she forced herself to remain still. She had seen something slumped in the servitor’s waste scoop, something that had no business being there.

The machine trundled to the edge of the pond. It raised the scoop, shining pistons elongating. The angle of the scoop tilted down. The slumped thing Thalia had glimpsed slid free into the water. It was a body, a dead man clothed in the brown overalls of a park attendant. As the body entered the pond, limp enough to suggest that death had been recent, Thalia made out a vivid red gash across the man’s chest, where he had been cut through his clothes. Then he was gone. For a moment an elbow jutted out of the water, before disappearing under. The fountain laid a white froth over the surface of the pond, obscuring the body completely.

Thalia was shaking. She unclipped the whiphound again. She had not believed the recorded message from Lucas Thesiger, if there was such a person. But until that moment she had at least been prepared to believe that the servitors were acting under some dire-emergency protocol. Perhaps the truth was simply too unsettling to reveal to the citizenry, for fear of inciting panic.

But even in a state of emergency, you didn’t bury bodies in civic ponds.

“There were a hundred of us once,” Clepsydra said.

“This room is where we slept, or at least rested our bodies, during interstellar flight. Most of us are still alive, connected via neural connections to the Exordium device.”

“Where is it?” Dreyfus asked.

“Somewhere else in the ship.”

“Can you show it to me?”

“I could, but then I’d have to kill you.”

He couldn’t tell if that was an attempt at humour, or whether she was deadly serious.

In total, she’d told him as little about the technology as she could get away with. All Dreyfus was clear about was that Exordium was a kind of quantum periscope, peering into a murky, fog-shrouded sea of overlapping future states. What Clepsydra called the ’retrocausal probability function’ was generated by future versions of the same dreamers, plugged into the Exordium machine further down the timeline. It took the minds of those selfsame dreamers to shape the nebulous Exordium data into coherent predictions about things yet to happen.

He looked at the wounded sleepers.

“Please don’t tell me they’re conscious.”

“It is a state of consciousness akin to lucid dreaming. Their minds have been enslaved for Aurora’s purposes, nothing more. With their minds given over to processing Exordium imagery, the sleepers have scarcely any spare capacity for what you might call normal thought. Aurora has made that impossible.”

“And yet you escaped,” Dreyfus said.

“It was planned, with the full cooperation of the remaining sleepers. In the gaps between monitored thoughts we hatched a scheme. It took us years. We knew only one of us could escape. I was chosen at random, but any one of us would have sufficed.”

“Why just one of you? Once you’d escaped, couldn’t you… free the others, or something?”

“We had hopes that I might make it back to civilisation. That proved impossible.”

“How long have you been free?”

“A hundred days. A thousand. I’m not sure. Now at least you understand how I kept myself alive. I have a hiding place elsewhere in the rock, away from Aurora’s scrutiny. But I can’t stay there all the time. Periodically I must return here, to the ship, and harvest rations. I do it surgically, a little at a time. Just enough to keep me alive for a couple of days, but not enough to cause any additional complications in the

donor. I take the harvested food back with me to my hideaway. I cook it as best I can, using a cauterizing tool.” She looked at Dreyfus, her expression challenging him to judge her.

“Then I eat it, slowly and gratefully. Then I return.”

“It’s monstrous.”

“It’s what we agreed.”

“We?”

“The other sleepers and I. Listen carefully, Dreyfus. This was always the plan. One of us would wake. One and only one. Aurora demanded a single thing of us: a steady stream of Exordium data. If we fell short, if we were perceived not to be performing to expectations, we would be punished. Our neural blockades are effective at neutralising physical pain, but they can do nothing against pain that is administered directly to the brain via cortical stimulation. That was how Aurora made us do what we were told.”

“The helmets?”

“A modification of our own equipment. They connect us to Exordium, but they also administer punishment.”

“Did she hurt you?”

“Aurora hurt all of us. But not by administering pain to the entire group of sleepers. Had Aurora done that, it might have engendered a sense of unity through suffering: a rebellious solidarity that might have given us the strength to refuse to dream. Aurora was cleverer than that.”

“What did she do?”

“Aurora’s way was to select one of us and make that sleeper suffer for our collective failure. Aurora picked on certain sleepers again and again. Because we are Conjoiners, we always felt something of the other sleeper’s pain: not its totality, but a reflection of it, enough to judge the degree of suffering.”

“And that worked?”

“We learned not to fail her. But by the same token we also strove to find a way to cheat. Aurora monitors our thoughts, but not infallibly. We sensed gaps in the flow of our group consciousness when her attention was elsewhere. In these gaps we devised our scheme.”

“Surely Aurora would have noticed at some point?”

“Aurora cares only about dreams and punishment. The mechanics of how the Exordium prognostications arrive are of little concern. Had I gone on to cause trouble… then perhaps things would have been different.”

“How were you selected?”

“The honour was bestowed randomly. There were some who thought the escapee should be one of the sleepers Aurora was prone to punish, but that would have risked drawing too much attention to our plan, when the time for the next punishment came around.”

“I understand.”

“The matter of escape was not simple. It required enormous preparation, artful distraction. I learned how

to fool the helmet into thinking I was still in the dreaming consciousness state, while in fact being fully lucid, fully awake. I learned how to interfere with its mechanism, to release it, yet not trigger any alarms. All this required more than a year of preparation.”

Dreyfus reeled at the enormity of what he was hearing.

“But once you escaped… wouldn’t there still have been an empty position?”

“That was easily dealt with. I mentioned the accident that had already befallen our ship. There were corpses elsewhere on the vessel, due to be returned to the Mother Nest for component recycling. Before my absence was noted, I retrieved one of these corpses and plugged it into the dreaming apparatus. The life-support system kept the corpse animate. It was incapable of thought, but the other dreamers were able to conceal that from Aurora.”

Dreyfus shook his head, dumfounded, appalled and awed at what he had heard. Speech itself felt like a form of blasphemy, set against so much suffering.

“But if you haven’t been able to escape… hasn’t all of this been for nothing?”

“I was beginning to think so. So were the other sleepers. The idea was that I would use my talents to send a message to the Mother Nest, if it still existed. But the machinery in this place would not allow it. I can sense doors opening and closing, the arrival of ships and individuals. But the data architecture depends on optical circuitry, which my implants cannot manipulate.”

Dreyfus nodded grimly.

“Aurora knew exactly which bars would hold you prisoner.”

“Yes, she did. Perhaps your deputy will have more success, if he has the right equipment. But I was mute.”

“But you didn’t give up.”

“I shifted my efforts to constructing a transmitter of my own. The ship could grow me such a thing in hours if I sent the right commands to it. But if I did that, Aurora would sense the changes in the ship. She almost certainly knows that you are here, Prefect. I could not risk her killing the sleepers. I was forced to scavenge what I could from the surrounding structure. I have been piecing together parts and tools in my hiding place.”

“How close are you to success?”

“A hundred days, a thousand days.” Then quietly she added, “Perhaps longer. Nothing is certain.”

“How long could you last?”

“In a few years, I would reach the limit of what could be harvested without causing death. Then difficult decisions would need to be made. I would have made them, without flinching. That is our way. But then something changed.”

“Which was?”

“You arrived, Prefect. And now things can start happening.”

Meriel Redon was waiting for Thalia as soon as she returned to the other four members of the escape party.

“What did you see?” she asked.

Thalia raised a hand until she caught her breath. Her back was aching from all the crouching she’d had to do.

“It’s pretty much what I expected, based on what we saw from the bird.” She kept her voice low, breaking off to take deep breaths.

“But it’s not as bad as it looked at first. The servitors have been activated under an emergency protocol. I heard the voice of a constable explaining why everyone needs to stay calm.”

“I thought there were no constables,” said Caillebot.

“Except for the one we saw in the crowd, being treated like all the other people.”

“I don’t think he had the right to wear a constable’s armband,” Thalia said, her mind racing ahead as she tried to anticipate the questions her party might ask.

“The voice was coming from a servitor, anyway. It was broadcasting a looped statement from someone called Lucas Thesiger. Does the name mean anything to any of you?”

“Thesiger was assigned to the constabulary during the Blow-Out Crisis,” said Redon.

“I remember seeing his face on the reports. He was commended for bravery after he saved some people who were stranded outside near the breach. A lot of us said he should be made a permanent constable, to be activated again the next time there was a crisis.”

“Well, it looks like you got your wish. Thesiger’s calling the shots now, from somewhere else.”

Cuthbertson looked sceptical.

“Why are the machines doing the work of the constables if the constables are still in charge?”

“Constables can’t get everywhere at once,” Thalia told the bird man.

“And there are problems with communication. That’s why the machines have been tasked in some areas, like this one. The people are being told to sit tight and wait for the crisis to blow over.”

“What crisis?” Parnasse asked, so quietly that Thalia almost didn’t hear him.

“It’s not clear. Thesiger says there are indications the habitat was attacked. The attack may even be ongoing. Something nasty might have been released into the air.”

The curator studied her with a look on his face that said Thalia might fool the others, but she wasn’t fooling him.

“Then it was just coincidence that abstraction went down the moment you completed that upgrade?”

“Difficult as it may be to believe, that’s what it looks like.”

“That’s quite some coincidence.”

Thalia nodded earnestly.

“I agree, but right now we don’t have time to dwell on that. What we have to focus on is surviving. Thesiger—whoever he is—is right to enforce martial rule to keep the citizenry from panicking too much. In his shoes, it’s exactly what I’d do—even if that meant tasking servitors to fill in for constables.”

“But those machines weren’t just directing the people to safety,” Cuthbertson said, a strained edge in his voice.

“They were herding them. There was something wrong there.”

“It’s okay. The servitors must have been tasked before Thesiger was able to get his recorded message out. Given what had already happened—abstraction going down, the loss of utilities—I can imagine that the people were pretty spooked when the robots started pushing them around. But the machines were just doing what they were instructed to do. Constables would have done it with a smile and a wave of encouragement, but it’s no different in the end. The crowd was a lot calmer once Thesiger explained what was happening.”

“I think she’s right,” Redon said.

“I can’t hear the voices as much now.”

“So what are you proposing?” Caillebot asked.

“That we go and join those people?” Thalia took her biggest gamble.

“You can if you want. I won’t stop you. But unlike those people, you happen to be under Panoply care already. That overrides any local security arrangements, including a habitat-wide curfew.”

“But you mentioned something in the air,” Redon said. Thalia nodded.

“Thesiger talked about a toxic agent. I’m guessing he has intelligence that says something like that was at least planned. But I think he may be overstating the danger, just to be on the safe side.”

“You can’t know that,” the furniture-maker said, her eyes widening with concern.

“No,” Thalia admitted.

“I can’t. But I can tell you this. Thesiger wants to round people up to prevent panic, and for now that means holding them in the open air.”

“The larger buildings are all airtight,” Caillebot said, as if just realising it himself.

“They’re designed to tolerate another blow-out. Why doesn’t he move them to the larger buildings?”

“He’s probably going to as soon as he has large enough groups under sufficient control. Once one group of people seal themselves into a building, they’re not going to open the door to anyone else. And that will be bad news if the agent is real, and not everyone gets inside in time.”

“But staying with you doesn’t help us,” Redon said.

“It does,” Thalia said.

“Our best strategy is to move, and keep moving. The whiphound has a chemosensor. It’ll detect harmful elements in the air long before they reach sufficient concentration to do harm.”

“And then what?” the woman asked.

“We’ll seek shelter if we have to. But our main objective is to reach my ship. You’ll be safe there.”

“What about the others, the people we left behind in the polling core?” Thalia glanced up at the spherical structure high above them.

“I can’t help them now. The sphere’s airtight, so they’ll be safe from any toxins. They’ll just have to sit it out up there until help arrives.”

Parnasse inhaled through his nose and nodded.

“Then we keep walking, the way we were going before.”

“At least we won’t have any mobs to worry about,” Cuthbertson said, “if the machines are putting everyone else under protection—”.

“No, we won’t have to worry about mobs,” Thalia told him.

“But I don’t want to run into any tasked servitors either.”

“Won’t they let us through when you explain that you’re Panoply?” Caillebot asked.

“One would hope so, but I don’t want to have to put that to the test. Those machines aren’t reporting back to Thesiger every time they need to make a decision. They’re running a one-size-fits-all enforcement program designed to safeguard the mass populace.”

“Then we’ll need to avoid machines,” the gardener said.

“That isn’t going to be easy, Prefect. Have you any idea how many servitors there are in this place?”

“In the order of millions, I’d guess,” Thalia said.

“But we’ll just have to make do as best we can. The whiphound can move ahead of us, securing an area before we enter it.” She unclipped the handle and allowed the whiphound to deploy its filament.

“Beginning now. Forward scout mode. Twenty-metre secure zone. Proceed.” The whiphound raced ahead, a squiggle moving almost too fast to be tracked by the eye.

“We’re moving?” Caillebot asked. Thalia waited until the whiphound had turned back to her and nodded its laser-eye handle, indicating that it was safe to proceed.

“We’re moving,” she said.

“Keep low and keep quiet. Do that, and we’ll be fine.

One way or the other, we’re getting out of here.” They proceeded along gravel- and marble-lined paths, all stooping to stay below the level of the hedges. Now and then the hedges widened out to enclose a small courtyard or ornamental pond. It was less than ten kilometres to the endcap, but ten kilometres like this was going to feel more like fifty. She just hoped they would be able to move more freely once they had cleared the manicured gardens around the museum campus and entered the denser foliage of wooded parklands. Ahead lay the line of trees they had been making for since leaving the stalk.

Parnasse sidled next to her. Short and stocky, he had the easiest time of all of them when it came to stooping down.

“Very good work, girl,” he said quietly.

“Thank you,” she replied through gritted teeth.

“But what aren’t you telling us?”

“Nothing.”

“You came back from the other side of the stalk with a look on your face I haven’t seen in a long time. You saw something bad there, didn’t you? Something you’re frightened to tell us in case we lose it.”

“Just keep moving, Cyrus.”

“Was it true, about that speech from Thesiger?”

“I told you what I heard.”

“But you don’t believe a word of it.”

“This is not the time for discussion. The priority now is to keep moving and keep quiet.” She looked at him sharply.

“Or did you miss that part?”

“What’s happening to those people?” Parnasse persisted.

“Are the machines doing something bad to them?” Ahead, the whiphound shook its handle from side to side. An instant later it flattened itself on the ground, looking just like a coil of discarded cable with a thickening at one end. Thalia raised a warning hand to her party.

“Hold it,” she breathed.

“The whiphound can’t secure the area ahead of us. Something’s there.” The four froze behind her. The whiphound remained deathly still on the ground. It had been securing the area around a circular pond crossed by a red-painted wooden Chinese bridge. Two other hedge-lined paths converged on the same pond.

“I think we should retreat,” Thalia whispered.

“You think?” Caillebot asked.

The whiphound offered no guidance. It was adopting a maximum stealth posture, which could only mean it sensed purposeful movement. Thalia breathed in deeply, forcing herself to make the right decision. If the area could not be secured, it could not be entered. They would be right to retreat, to return to the last junction, where they could explore an alternative route.

“We go back,” she said.

Two servitors emerged into the area around the pond, one from either side. To the left, a gold-carapaced machine moved on three pairs of articulated legs, with a mass of segmented tentacles emerging from its cowled front end. Some kind of general-utility servitor, Thalia decided. To the right, bouncing along on mechanized ostrich-legs, was a multi-limbed household model, its black and white cladding suggestive of a butler’s uniform.

Thalia held out her hand and barked a command.

“Abandon stealth posture. Immediate return.”

The whiphound lashed into action, scattering gravel as it uncoiled and propelled itself, almost flying into the air. Thalia splayed her fingers. The whiphound raced across the twenty metres separating the party from the servitors. The handle flew into Thalia’s grasp, the filament retracting at the last instant. Her palm stung from the impact.

She knelt down, aiming the projected red laser spot at the two machines in turn, thumbing a stud each time.

“Mark as hostile,” she said twice.

“Intercept and detain. Maximum necessary force.”

She flung the handle into the air as if throwing a grenade. The filament lashed out, coiling behind the handle as the whiphound oriented itself. The filament contacted the ground, formed a tractive coil and sped the handle in the direction of the bipedal robot, which the whiphound must have identified as the softer target. Gravel hissed and spat.

“Now we run,” Thalia told her four companions.

She looked back over her shoulder as, still crouching, they worked back the way they had come. Both servitors were now circumnavigating the pond, converging at the foot of the bridge nearest Thalia. The whiphound flung itself into the air at the last moment, then wrapped its filament around the legs of the bipedal robot. Momentum on its own was not enough to topple the machine, but the whiphound constricted its filament, drawing tight the coils it had placed around the robot’s legs.

The servitor took a juddering step, then lost its balance. It crashed to the dirt and immediately started trying to right itself. The whiphound resettled itself, then flexed its filament through one hundred and eighty degrees to bring the cutting edge into contact with the servitor’s legs. As it cut into the machine, blue fluid sprayed out at arterial pressure. The servitor’s upper limbs thrashed the ground, but the whiphound had the better of it. Sensing that the target was immobilised, it slithered free and focused its attention on the larger machine, the six-legged utility robot that was now increasing speed towards Thalia’s party. The segmented tentacles at the front were flailing the air, giving a convincing impression of a machine driven into a berserker-like rage. The whiphound flung itself into combat again, wrapping metres of sharp-edged filament around the roots of the flailing arms. Thalia kept up her running crouch, glancing back all the while.

“Stay this side of the hedge,” she shouted ahead.

The battle between whiphound and servitor had become a blur of furious metal. Thumb-sized pieces of

severed machine parts sprayed in all directions. The whiphound must have impaired the servitor’s guidance system, for it was moving erratically now, swerving from side to side. A larger length of severed tentacle came spinning out of the maelstrom. The sound of the battle was like a hundred lashes being administered in unison against rusted steel. The servitor slowed, one of its legs severed. Blue-grey smoke belched from under the gold carapace.

Perhaps it was going to work, Thalia dared to think.

Then something dark came winging out of the chaos, flung aside by the tentacles. It was the handle of the whiphound, trailing a line of limp filament. It thudded at Thalia’s heels, a buzzing sound coming from the handle, the tail twitching spasmodically.

The servitor was still approaching.

Thalia slowed as a cold, clear thought shaped itself. The whiphound was damaged, useless as a weapon now except in one very terminal sense. Thalia stopped, spun on her heels and grabbed at the handle. There was a gash in the casing, exposing obscene layers of internal componentry, things she had never been meant to see. The handle was warm, and every time it buzzed she felt it tremor in her hands. The tail drooped in a plumb line.

Thalia twisted the knurled dials at the end of the handle, bringing two tiny red dots into alignment. The dots lit up and started pulsing.

Grenade mode. Minimum yield. Five-second fuse on release.

The tail sped back into the housing. The black handle was still buzzing in her hand, but the training slammed home with the icy clarity of something that had been burnt into muscle memory by agonising repetition.

She flung the whiphound. It left her hand, following a smooth arc towards the still-approaching servitor. She had aimed it to land just ahead of the machine, directly in its path. Too close and the manipulators would have time to pick it up and fling it aside. Too early, and it wouldn’t do enough damage. She’d have liked the luxury of requesting maximum yield, but while that would have taken care of the advancing machine, it wouldn’t have done wonders for Thalia or her party.

One second.

“Get down!” she shouted, preparing to fling herself against the ground.

Two seconds.

Suddenly the servitor wasn’t moving. The smoke was billowing out in greater intensity. It was fatally damaged, Thalia thought. The whiphound had done its job, and now she was going to waste it by having it blow up unnecessarily, when the servitor was already immobilised.

Three seconds.

“Rescind!” Thalia shouted.

“Rescind!”

Four seconds. Then five. The whiphound lay still on the ground. Six seconds oozed into seven. The grenade order had been cancelled, but she could still not shake the sense that she had created a bomb, one that was now compelled to detonate, much as a sword must draw blood before it could be returned to its scabbard.

She crept back towards the whiphound, knees wobbling underneath her. The damaged servitor was still twitching its manipulator tentacles, brushing the gravel only a few centimetres from where the handle had fallen. The citizens were looking back, no doubt wondering what she was doing. Thalia knelt and reached out, fingers advancing gingerly towards the damaged whiphound. The servitor’s tentacles stirred and made one last-ditch effort to trap her, but Thalia was faster. Her hand closed around the warm handle of the whiphound and snatched it back. She almost fell on her haunches, before pushing herself to her feet. She quickly turned the arming dials back to their neutral settings.

“What now?” Caillebot asked, his hands on his hips. The party had stopped; they were all looking at her, not so much expecting guidance as demanding it.

Thalia clipped the damaged handle to her belt. It continued to buzz and tremble.

“We can’t go on. It’ll be too risky with the whiphound the way it is.”

“I say we just surrender ourselves to Thesiger’s constables,” Caillebot said.

“What do we care if they’re machines or people? They’ll look after us.”

“Tell them,” Parnasse said, nodding in Thalia’s direction.

Her mouth was dry. She wanted to be anywhere other than here, in this situation, with nothing to protect her or her party but one damaged whiphound.

“Tell us what?” Meriel Redon asked, fear staining her voice.

Thalia wiped gravel dust from her hands onto the hem of her tunic. It left grey finger smears.

“We’re in trouble,” she said.

“Worse trouble than I wanted you to know. But Citizen Parnasse is right—I can’t keep it from you any longer.”

“Keep what?” Redon asked.

“I don’t think Thesiger is in control. I think that’s just a ruse to get the citizens to accept the machines. My guess is Thesiger is either dead, already rounded up or fighting for his life. I don’t think there are any human constables active inside Aubusson.”

“Meaning what?” the woman persisted.

“The machines are running things now. The servitors are the new authority. And they’ve started killing.”

“You can’t know that.”

“I can,” Thalia said. She pushed sweat-damp hair back from her forehead.

“I’ve seen where they bury the bodies. I saw a man… he was dead. He’d been killed by one of those things. Butchered by a machine. And he was being hidden somewhere we wouldn’t see him.”

Cuthbertson took a deep breath.

“Then what we were doing… trying to get out of here… that was the right thing to try. Wasn’t it?”

“It was,” Thalia said.

“But now I see I was wrong. We’d never have made it with just one whiphound to protect us. It was a mistake. My mistake, and I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have left the stalk.”

They all looked back at the slender tower, with the windowed sphere of the polling core still gleaming against the blue-hazed pseudo-sky of the habitat’s opposite wall.

“So what do we do now?” Caillebot asked.

“We get back up there,” Thalia said, “as fast as we can, before more machines arrive. Then we secure it.” If luck had been against them in their attempt to leave the museum campus, it held until they were back inside the cool, shadowed silence of the stalk’s lobby. No machines had arrived to block their way, or shepherd them to be detained with the prisoners on the lawn. On one level, it felt as if many hours had passed since the loss of abstraction and the first hints that this was more than just a technical failure. But when Thalia checked the time she was dismayed to see that less than forty minutes had passed since she had completed her upgrade. As far as Panoply was concerned, she wouldn’t even be overdue yet, let alone a matter for concern. Help might arrive eventually, but for now—and quite possibly for hours to come—Thalia was on her own. As if to emphasize how little time had passed, the elevator car was still waiting in the lobby. Thalia beckoned the others inside, the doors snicking closed behind them. Her voice sounded ragged, on the slurred edge of exhaustion and burnout.

“This is Deputy Field Prefect Thalia Ng. Recognise my voiceprint.” After an agonising wait—which could only have been a fraction of a second—the door answered her.

“Voiceprint recognised, Deputy Field Prefect Ng.”

“Take us up.” Nothing happened. Thalia held her breath and waited for movement, that welcome surge as the floor pushed against her feet. Still nothing happened.

“Is there a problem?” Caillebot asked.

Thalia whirled on him with vicious speed, all her tiredness wiped away in an instant.

“What does it look like? We’re not moving.”

“Try again,” Parnasse said calmly.

“Could be it didn’t understand you the first time.”

“This is Thalia Ng. Please ascend.” But still the elevator refused to move.

“This is Deputy Field Prefect Thalia Ng,” she said again.

“Recognise my voiceprint!”. This time the elevator stayed mute.

“Something’s broken,” Parnasse said, still keeping his voice low and disengaged, as if he was commenting on the action rather than participating in it.

“I suggest we consider using the stairs instead.”

“Good idea,” Meriel Redon said.

“I’m starting to feel locked in here—”.

“Try the doors,” Parnasse said. Thalia pressed her hand against the manual-control panel. Her palm was cut and bruised from her battle with the servitors, tiny chips of stone still embedded in her skin.

“No dice. They aren’t opening.”

“Try again.” Thalia already had.

“Nothing doing. I don’t suppose asking nicely’s going to help either.”

“You could try.”

With a sense of futility, she said, “This is Thalia Ng. Open the doors.” She hammered the panel again.

“Open the doors. Open the fucking doors!”

“Machines,” Cuthbertson said.

They all followed his gaze, through the trelliswork doors, across the shadowed emptiness of the lobby to the daylight beyond, where a squad of servitors glinted and shone as they made a slow but deliberate approach towards the stalk. There were eight or nine of them, all of different designs, wheeling, perambulating or sliding, with manipulators and cutting tools raised high.

“They’ve trapped us,” Caillebot said, marvelling.

“They let us get back here because they knew we’d take the elevator. That was another of your ideas, Prefect.”

“Do you want to shut up now, or after I’ve rammed this down your throat?” Thalia asked, unclipping the buzzing warm handle of her whiphound.

The leading machines had reached the shadow of the overhang sheltering the wide doorway leading into the lobby. Three marbled steps led up to the level of the main floor, where the lift was situated. The walking machines began ascending the steps with slow but deliberate intent.

Thalia felt the whiphound tremble in her grip, as if its heart was racing.

“You already said it was damaged,” Caillebot said.

“How much use is it going to be against all those if it could barely hold back two?”

Thalia thumbed the heavy control that invoked sword mode and hoped that there was still enough functionality left in the whiphound to spool out and stiffen its filament. The handle buzzed like a trapped wasp; nothing happened. She thumbed the control again, willing the whiphound to respond.

The filament inched out, the buzzing intensifying. Ten centimetres, then fifteen. Twenty before it reached its limit. But it appeared to be rigid and straight.

Thalia sliced into the black metal trelliswork of the elevator doors. She felt more resistance than when she had cut through the hedge, but that was only to be expected. Keeping her cool, knowing that nothing would be gained from panicking, she worked her way methodically across and then down. She directed the whiphound blade back up to the point where she had started, the last few cuts taking almost as long as the dozen or so that had preceded them. Then the rectangle of trelliswork clattered outwards onto the marble floor. The servitors had already reached the top of the stairs and were beginning to cross the expanse of the lobby. Two of the ambulatory machines were even assisting one of the wheeled variants over the obstacle of the steps.

“The stairs,” Thalia said.

“Run like hell, and don’t stop running until you get to the top.”

Thalia moved with the party, but kept herself between them and the machines. She walked backwards, facing the servitors, holding the damaged whiphound in front of her. She had turned the arming dials into alignment again, ready to throw the broken weapon as a grenade. But as her heels touched the stairs, something made her change her mind. Nothing would be gained from attacking these machines now; more would always follow.

Thalia clipped the whiphound back onto her belt and started climbing the stairs behind the others.