The Prefect

CHAPTER 19

Michael Crissel scrutinised himself in the mirrored surface of the cubicle, anxious that no trace of his true state of mind should be apparent when he emerged. His skin was as pale as a reptile’s belly, his bloodshot eyes verging on the albinotic. He told himself that his pallor was just as likely to be a function of the cruiser’s dehumidified atmospheric mix as his bout of retching, but that was scant consolation. The sickness had come on him hard and fast, with barely enough warning to let him scuttle to the cubicle.

“Get a grip,” he told himself.

He exited the cubicle and moved up through the ship, past the weapons bays and crew quarters, into the main assembly area where the other prefects were waiting, suited and armoured, buckled into deceleration webbing, jammed together like gloss-black toy soldiers, weapons secured between their knees. Not just whiphounds, but the big guns that, technically speaking, the democratic vote had forbidden them. When all this was over, when the people had full access to the information, they’d see that Panoply had done the right thing in disregarding that vote. They’d even applaud when they knew what was really at stake.

The fields watched him as he propelled himself along the gangway, hand over hand in the weightless fall of the Universal Suffrage’s cruise phase. None of them had yet snapped down their visors. He could see their faces, feel their eyes tracking him as he passed. He didn’t recognise any of them. Even their names, stencilled onto the inert-matter armour of their suits, triggered only glimmers of recognition.

The pressure of their attention demanded a response from him, some rousing, rallying speech. His mouth was raw, filled with the aftertaste of his retching session. Dreyfus would surely have said something, Crissel thought. It didn’t need to be much. Just a word or two of encouragement. He brought himself to a halt and turned around slowly, nodding at the young men and women filling those black lobster-like suits.

“None of us are under the illusion that this is going to be easy,” Crissel said, instantly dismayed at how quavery and ineffectual his own voice sounded.

“They’ll have the hub airlocks well guarded and we’ll more than likely be meeting opposition as soon as we reach the interior. It’s quite probable that we’ll be outnumbered. But we do have the advantage of training and equipment. Remember, you are Panoply operatives. You have right on your side.”

The reaction was not what he had been expecting, or hoping for. The prefects just looked bewildered and fearful, as if his words had robbed them of the exact measure of morale he had hoped to bolster.

“When I say it won’t be easy,” he continued, “I don’t mean we won’t succeed. Of course not. I just mean—”. A girl with almond-coloured eyes and a heart-shaped face asked, “How will we distinguish hostiles from locals, sir?”

He tapped the crown of his own helmet.

“Tactical drop-down will overlay all citizens known to the

polling apparatus. Anyone you see who isn’t recognised by the overlay must be assumed a non-indigent hostile.” He flashed her an overconfident smile.

“Naturally, you have authorisation to euthanise.”

“Pardon me, sir,” said a young man with a day’s growth of chin stubble, “but we were informed that we’d probably be operating in an environment without local abstraction.”

“That’s correct,” Crissel said, nodding. If Aubusson had dropped off the external abstraction, there was every reason to believe its internal systems had gone into blackout as well.

“Then how will the tactical overlays know who is who?” the girl asked, with the tone of someone who genuinely expected a reasonable answer.

Crissel opened his mouth to respond, then felt ominous mental trap doors opening. He’d made a mistake. There could be no guarantee that the overlays would work at all.

“The hostiles will be the ones… being hostile,” he said.

The prefects just stared at him. If they’d mocked him, or even fired back another question, it would have been preferable to that dumb, expectant staring, as if what he had told them made perfect operational sense.

Something stirred in the dry embers of his gut again.

“Excuse me,” he said, preparing to turn and make his way back to the cubicle. But just as he spoke, the pilot emerged from the flight deck into the assembly area, holding headphones against his skull.

“Visual on Aubusson, sir. Thought you’d like to see it.”

“Thank you,” Crissel said.

He entered the cruiser’s spacious flight deck with a shaming sense of relief. House Aubusson looked frighteningly close on the allocated display panes, but that was deceptive; they were still thousands of kilometres away, and the habitat’s anti-collision systems would not yet have picked out the approaching cruiser from the confusion of general Glitter Band traffic moving on similar vectors.

“Looks normal enough,” Crissel commented as the end-on view zoomed to reveal the small-scale details of the docking hub, where a handful of spacecraft were still attached.

“I take it there hasn’t been any significant change since we left Panoply?”

“Nothing that will affect our approach,” the pilot said.

“But there’s something you should know about.” He opened windows over the main view, illustrating side-on views of the habitat captured by some other distant vehicle or camera platform.

“Visible light,” he said.

“Six hours apart. The view on the right is the most recent.”

“They look the same.”

The pilot nodded, confirming Crissel’s judgement.

“Now look at the same snapshots in infrared. Anything jump out at you?”

One end of the habitat was a smear of thermal emissions, where it had been cool before. The overlay shaded structures in a gradation of colours, ranging from brick red to fiery orange.

“Judging by those cooling foils, she’s putting out a lot of heat all of a sudden.”

The pilot made an affirmative noise.

“Started up in the last four hours, as far as we can tell.”

Crissel risked a silly question.

“Which end is that?”

“Not the one we’re intending to dock at. The docking hub’s still as cool as it ever was, apart from some small hotspots around the weapons, dumping the waste heat after they fired.”

Weapons, Crissel thought. How easy it was to switch from thinking of the anti-collision systems as instruments for the preservation of life to machines designed to terminate it.

“So what’s happening? Why is she getting hotter at that end?”

“Guesswork so far, but one explanation could be that the manufactories have started up.”

“I didn’t know Aubusson had manufacturing capability.”

“Years back she was a bigger player, apparently,” the pilot said, tapping a finger against a text summary on his fold-up armrest pane.

“Never as large as any of the heavy manufactories, but still putting out a few hundred thousand tonnes a year. High-value, low-bulk products. Construction servitors, mainly, for use in setting up the new industrial centres on the Eye. Good business for a while, but once the lunar manufacturies were up to speed, places like Aubusson lost their business.”

Old history, Crissel thought. Marco’s Eye had been the main industrial supplier in the system for more than a century.

“So what happened to the manufactory?”

“They kept the infrastructure. Must have been betting against a time when they’d be able to compete against the Eye, for one reason or another. Judging by that thermal output, they’ve got the factory wheels spinning again.”

“But they’ve only had control of Aubusson for half a day. They can’t have started up the manufactory so quickly. It isn’t humanly possible.”

“Like I said,” the pilot said defensively, “just guesswork.”

“This doesn’t affect our mission,” Crissel said shakily.

“If anything it makes it more urgent that we get in there and secure the place for Panoply.”

“Just thought you ought to know, sir.”

“You were right to bring it to my attention.” After an uncomfortable pause, during which he was uncertain as to whether his presence on the flight deck was appropriate or not, Crissel said: “How soon now?”

“We’ll be entering the habitat’s collision-avoidance volume in six minutes. The cargo drones were intercepted when they were two hundred kilometres into that volume, or about one hundred kilometres from the hub.” The pilot drew his attention to another read-out, crammed with tactical summary data.

“But we’ll be ready to target the anti-collision weapons with our guns long before then. We already have positive firing solutions for half of them.”

The back of Crissel’s neck bristled.

“Then why don’t we fire? If it isn’t a stupid question.”

“They’d see us then. We’re presenting a highly stealthed cross section now, but as soon as we launch missiles, the enemy aiming systems’ll be able to backtrack from our missiles’ exhaust vectors.”

“We’re talking about anti-collision systems, Pilot, not military hardware. They’re programmed to recognise incoming foreign objects, not to extrapolate back from missile exhausts.”

There was a reticence in the pilot’s voice.

“Prefect Dreyfus said we have to assume they’ve been uploaded with new software.”

Crissel coughed.

“Rightly so, of course. Although the likelihood of that being the case… But are you sure we can’t just fire and take out all the weapons in one hit?”

“Can’t guarantee it, sir. Best strategy is to hold fire until we have clear solutions on all the weapons, which’ll mean suspending our attack until just before we initiate the braking phase.”

“Right. I just needed to be clear on that. And how far outside the avoidance volume will we be at that point?”

“Thirty kilometres inside it,” the pilot said.

Crissel nodded as if the matter were fully settled and need not be raised again.

“Keep on this vector, Pilot. I’m going back to speak to the prefects.”

“You’ll need to secure yourself in five minutes, sir. Things will get bumpy, especially if we have to dodge return fire.”

Crissel clambered out of the cool, clinical sanctuary of the flight deck back into the assembly area. The majority of the prefects had now donned their helmets, and of that number more than half had lowered and sealed their visors.

“Pilot informs me that we shall commence braking phase in just over five minutes,” Crissel said, holding himself in position by a padded handrail as he surveyed the massed black ranks.

“Make no mistake, this isn’t just a lockdown or disciplinary action. There are more than eight hundred thousand people inside House Aubusson, and each and every one of them is counting on our help. There may be times when the agents of Panoply are feared and hated. There isn’t a field in the organisation who doesn’t know how that feels. I’ve been there, too. I know what it’s like to be despised. But today those people will be praying for the sight of someone in Panoply black. And they’ll be expecting us to get the job done. We can do it, too. In all likelihood, we’ll be encountering an armed and efficient takeover force. But remember this: no matter how numerous the enemy, no matter how agile or aggressive, we’ll have eight hundred thousand grateful citizens on our side. Panoply will prevail today. I have never been more certain of anything in my life.” He raised his fist, clenched in the manner of Panoply’s symbol, and drew a cautious roar of approval.

Satisfied with their response, conscious that to push them further might be to risk chastening humiliation, Crissel returned to the flight deck.

“Status, please, Pilot.”

“Braking in four minutes, Prefect. One hundred and twenty-two kilometres to outer edge of avoidance volume. You’d better secure yourself.”

“About those anti-collision systems—you have a clearer view of them now, I take it?”

“Refining all the time.”

“And there’s been no change in the tactical situation? We still can’t guarantee a clean take-out at this range?”

“Can’t promise it, sir.”

But he picked up a nuance in the pilot’s voice.

“But the odds have improved in our favour?”

“Slightly, sir.”

“Do you have firing solutions locked in already?”

“Ready to go, sir, as soon as we hit thirty kilometres inside the volume. Which will be in three minutes, thirty-three seconds.”

“I’m securing for braking phase. Do likewise, Pilot.” He turned to the rest of the flight-deck crew.

“Listen, all of you. We’re moving the battle plan forward. I want to hit those weapons sooner, while we still have some distance to play with. You have my permission to commence missile strikes in sixty seconds.”

The pilot opened his mouth, as if he was about to frame an objection.

Crissel asked, pleasantly enough: “Is there a problem with that?”

“It’s a change of plan, sir.”

“Nothing’s set in stone. We’re simply adapting to improved intelligence.”

“We may not take out all the weapons.”

“And we may not take them all out even when we’re closer. This is war, Pilot. It involves an element of risk. Kindly execute my revised order at the appropriate time.”

He caught a moment of hesitation as the flight crew glanced at each other. A moment that teetered on the edge of mutiny, before pulling itself back.

“Solutions holding,” the pilot murmured.

“Missiles away in thirty-five seconds.”

Crissel returned to the assembly area and slotted himself into his allocated position. He locked his helmet into place at the last moment, feeling the pressure-tight latch engage at exactly the same moment as a series of sequenced thumps announced the cruiser’s missiles darting away from their rapid-deployment launching racks. Until that instant there wouldn’t have been a single external clue that the Universal Suffrage was about to show her claws.

Crissel had already instructed his helmet to layer a representation of the external situation, compiled from the cruiser’s own cams, sensors and battle-management systems, over his normal view of the waiting prefects. He saw the intensely detailed grey disc of Aubusson, the end-on view of the cylinder. The missiles were invisible save for the blue-white hyphens of their fusion exhausts, turned at various angles as they followed different target selections. Green status boxes tracked each missile, filled with tumbling numbers that meant nothing to Crissel. Red crosses marked the intended impact points on the grey disc. Cross hairs, bull’s-eyes and vectors slid across the view in a dance of hypnotic complexity, accompanied by their own cryptic digits and symbols.

“Status, please,” Crissel said.

“Missiles are ten seconds from impact,” the pilot’s voice buzzed back.

“Commencing braking phase.”

Quickmatter cocoons expanded to wrap the prefects, including Crissel, and then the deceleration burn kicked in with savage force. Now that the Universal Suffrage had released its missiles and was directing its exhaust towards House Aubusson, it had become a conspicuous target. The tactical display showed return fire springing up from the anti-collision slug-launchers. The cruiser plotted the trajectories of the slugs, computing and executing high-burn evasive swerves that would allow the slugs to pass by harmlessly. Crissel found himself biting down hard as the gee-force intensified. The angle of his seat was constantly adjusting itself to optimise blood flow to his brain, but he still felt his mental processes growing choppy and interrupted. The hyphenated streaks of the missile exhausts had now diminished to tiny

blue-white sparks, almost lost against the looming face of Aubusson. The ten seconds since the pilot had last spoken felt like unendurable hours.

They began to hit home. Crissel didn’t need the tactical data to see that the missiles were reaching Aubusson. They damped their fusion fires at the last instant, so as not to trigger a thermonuclear explosion upon impact. Kinetic energy was still enough to do visible harm. Grey-white spheres of expanding debris swelled with dreamlike slowness, cored with hot orange fire. When the spheres had dissipated, each had left a perfect hemispherical crater, cutting tens of metres into Aubusson’s crust. They’d have felt that inside, Crissel thought. Not just the thunder of the impacts, loud as those would have been, but the earthquake-like concussion wave as the energy was dissipated along the sixty-kilometre length of the habitat. No matter what was going on inside Aubusson, the beleaguered citizens would know that someone was knocking on the door.

As the braking phase continued, the habitat’s rate of approach diminished. The bulging disc of the endcap now covered half the sky. Most of the impact debris had cleared, revealing the full extent of the damage. The return fire had abated, suggesting that the missiles had indeed neutralised the anti-collision systems in one clean strike. Crissel was also gratified to see that the docking assembly had been spared any visible harm, with the attached vessels still intact.

The gee-force slackened. The cruiser had completed the intense phase of deceleration and was no longer obliged to dodge incoming fire. The cocoon did not relinquish its hold, but Crissel at last found the clarity of mind to manage a sentence.

“Excellent work, Pilot,” he said.

“Complete forced hard docking at your leisure.”

When the incoming fire resumed, it arrived from three points on the outer rim of the endcap, three points which should never have held anti-collision systems of any kind. No missiles had been directed against those sites because the blueprints had shown nothing there that required neutralising.

The Universal Suffrage was still at maximum defensive status. It tracked the emerging slugs and evaluated an optimum course of action. Guns sprang out of its hull and began to lay down intercepting fire. Three more missiles were locked on and launched. At the same time, the engines struggled to shove the cruiser out of harm’s way, striving to find an open path between the scissoring lines of incoming slugs. With ruthless efficiency, it computed which collision would be the least likely to inflict fatal damage on either itself or its passengers. Crissel felt the swerve, and then the barrage of hammer blows as the slugs chewed into the Universal Suffrage’s armour.

Aubusson wheeled to one side as the cruiser lost lateral control and entered a slow tumble. Crissel felt the shove as the steering jets tried to recover stability. The border of his face-patch started flashing red. An emergency siren sounded in his ears, loud enough to be audible but not so loud as to drown out other voices.

“We’re going down,” he heard the pilot say.

The three missiles sneaked through the streams of rushing slugs and found their targets. The incoming fire ceased as abruptly as it had begun. Aubusson floated back into the centre of Crissel’s face-patch, the docking hub reaching towards them like an eager groping hand, ships nibbling at its fingers. Debris from the latest assault had dislodged a couple of transatmospheric shuttles, which were now drifting away from their berths. One instant they were safely distant, fragile-looking things, harmless as moths. The next they were huge, dangerous-looking obstacles tumbling through space towards the cruiser. The Universal Suffrage swerved again and clipped the starboard wing of one of the transatmospherics. Crissel felt the impact rattle down his spine. Everything went dark, the cam view dying in scribbles of ebbing light.

“Pilot?” Crissel said into the silence.

The quickmatter cocoon flowed away and left him unprotected save for his suit. The assembly area was dark, the other prefects all but invisible. Crissel activated his helmet lamp just as three or four of the other suited figures did likewise. He appraised the scene and concluded that no one appeared to have suffered any injury.

Then came a hard thump, too solid and final to be caused by debris knocking against the cruiser. It felt as if they’d hit a landmass, something that didn’t yield in the slightest. The hard docking, Crissel thought, amazed. The pilot had brought them in, despite all the odds. He switched to the general suit-to-suit channel.

“I’m going up front to see what our situation is,” he said, releasing his restraints.

“Remain here but be ready to board as soon as I return. The mission is still go. We took more fire coming in than we expected, but the cruiser did its job. Remember, we don’t need it to get back. If we go in there and secure Aubusson, we’ll have all the time in the world to wait for Panoply to send another ship.”

But as he prepared to enter the flight deck, he was barred from stepping through the connecting passwall. It had detected a pressure loss on the other side. Hard vacuum, if the indicators were to be believed. He tried raising the pilot and flight crew, but this time all he got was the flat warble of a carrier signal.

He looked back at the suited prefects.

“Everyone airtight? Then hold on, because I’m blowing our air.” Crissel moved to the side lock, braced himself, slid up an armoured glass panel and then tugged down on the bright yellow and black bee-striped handle that controlled the atmospheric dump vents. The slats opened almost immediately, allowing the air to gust out in six different directions. No safety interlocks, no cautious queries. Crissel stabilised himself as the air roared and then whistled out. His helmet indicators flicked over to register that he was now in a hard-vacuum environment.

This time, nothing prevented him from accessing the flight deck. But as he stepped through the now-yielding passwall, Crissel found himself looking out through a gaping wound where the front of the Universal Suffrage had been. He could see space, the too-bright stars of other habitats, the waxy yellow curve of Yellowstone’s nearest horizon. The hull ended in strips of ragged laminate, still twitching from aborted repair processes, oozing with the tarlike slime of quickmatter. Jutting into the space formerly occupied by the flight deck was a metre-thick spar that presumably belonged to the docking hub. All but one of the flight crews’ positions had been ripped clean away. The pilot was still there, but impaled on a forking appendage of the docking spar.

The Universal Suffrage hadn’t achieved the hard docking he had hoped for. But it had come in tantalisingly close. The habitat’s own airlock was visible only a few metres beyond the ragged end of the hull. They could reach it easily enough by clambering along the spar. Blanking the predicament of the impaled pilot, confident that it would return to haunt him in due course, Crissel scrambled back into the assembly bay.

“We’ve lost the flight crew,” he said.

“It’s messy ahead, but there’s a way into the habitat. We still have a mission to complete, people. Follow me and be prepared to meet resistance as soon as we clear the lock.”

The prefects followed him like a massed black tide, moving with the ease of those well practised in weightless conditions. They divided into two quickly moving formations, traversing the spar like two lines of black ants until they reached the lock ahead of them.

While they worked to open the lock, Crissel at last found the mental breathing space to review what had just happened. The blueprints in Panoply’s possession should have included every change made to the habitat since its construction. It was possible that House Aubusson had installed the rim-mounted slug launchers secretively, in covert violation of the legal limit on defensive systems for a habitat of that size. Yet of all the places Crissel could think of, Aubusson was one of the least likely to indulge in that kind of furtive upgrading.

Which left a much less palatable explanation. If the manufactories were truly up and running, and if the fabricators had access to sufficient blueprints and raw matter, then the habitat had the means to create almost anything it needed. Forging and installing additional anti-collision systems would not have taxed even a modest facility—it would only require dealing with a few hundred tonnes of new matter. Installing the guns would have been the difficult part, but even that wouldn’t have been insurmountable if one could hijack at least part of the general servitor workforce. The manufactories had been running hot since the cruiser departed Panoply, but they could have been operating for some time before it became necessary to dump that waste heat so visibly. In fact, if all the manufactories had to do was create the new guns, they’d hardly have broken a sweat.

So something else was being made in there.

It did not take long for the prefects to persuade the door to open. It slid into its heavy buttressed frame to reveal the wide mouth of a high-capacity docking connection. It was illuminated, belching pressure into space. A passenger liner could disembark a hundred people down that tube inside a minute, without anyone grazing elbows.

The prefects poured into the empty docking tunnel. Conveyor bands ran the length of the tunnel, moving in both directions. The prefects touched the adhesive bands with one hand and allowed themselves to be hauled toward the far end, as if they had done it a million times before. Crissel followed their lead, but had to press his palm against the band twice before the adhesive bond took hold with enough strength to overcome the momentum of his body and suit. Then he was moving, speeding past a succession of bright, animated advertisements designed to entice the newcomer with deep pockets.

Slowly he became aware of something coming through on the suit-to-suit. It was a small, distant voice, saying something over and over again. The voice, Crissel realised, of a woman.

“Quiet,” he said, silencing what little communication there was.

“I can hear something on our channel.”

“Got it too, sir,” said one of the fields, possibly the girl who had spoken to Crissel earlier.

“It’s someone using Panoply protocols, sir.”

Crissel strained to pick out the voice. Somewhere around the third or fourth repetition, the sense of the words suddenly clicked into place.

“…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 endless flow of twinkling human jewels. He’d seldom visited such a place, seldom felt himself part of the true arterial flow of Glitter Band society. For a moment he regretted the austere trajectory Panoply had forced upon his life.

“The red conveyor will take us straight through,” he said, crushing the thought.

“Let’s get moving.”

That was when the machines revealed themselves. They’d been in the volume all along, but hidden amongst the black complexity of the ironwork sculptures. When they emerged, Crissel almost laughed. Amusement, a wry sense of having been bettered, was the only human response to a fatal and inescapable ambush.

“Hostiles,” he said.

“Servitors. Target them. Maximum force. Fire at will.”

But even as he spoke the words, he knew there were too many machines, too few field prefects. The squad had already opened fire; had already destroyed a handful of the approaching servitors. But the machines just kept coming. They were everywhere, oozing out of shadow and darkness, flying through the air or picking their way along the curving lines of the conveyors. Even more were scuttling out of some of the other tunnels that connected with the customs space.

Crissel was used to servitors, so accustomed to their presence that he scarcely noticed them under normal circumstances. Yet these machines did not move like ordinary servitors. Their motions were quick, with something of the speeded-up, slapstick quality of insect activity. As a whole, their efforts were coordinated and deliberate. Individually it was chaotic, with some machines getting trampled under the relentless march of the others or even flung aside when they proved too slow or clumsy. They had no weapons in the usual sense, but every limb, manipulator or probe now served an aggressive function. Some of the attachments even appeared to have been modified to make them more effective: claws sharpened to glinting edges, arms terminating in vicious curved scythes or impaling spikes. It was a killing army. And yet the machines still carried the cheerful colours and logos of their former duties: a domestic machine here, a gardener or kindly medical servitor there. A beetle-backed multi-legged nursery supervisor even had the red and black shell of a ladybird, with a happy face painted on the front.

The prefects unleashed the full force of their guns, but it was only enough to slow the advance, not repel it. Most of the machines were so lightly armoured that they blew apart under a direct hit. But those that followed quickly grabbed the pieces of their shattered comrades and employed the broken body parts as shields or clubs. Then it became more difficult to kill any of them.

Crissel almost failed to notice the first human casualties. As the servitors fell upon the armour-suited prefects, it became difficult to tell the difference between people and machines. There was just a thrash and flail of limbs, a squeal of metal and ceramic on armour. It was only when he saw two headless bodies tumble into the open space between the ironwork sculptures, jetting banners of blood from the open circles of their neck rings, that he knew the servitors had begun to murder.

“Fall back,” Crissel called above the din of battle, the clash of armour and servitor, the panicked shouts of his team.

“Return to the ship! We’re outnumbered!”

But even as he spoke the words, Crissel felt himself being pulled to one side by strong metal limbs. He resisted, but it did no good. Then the servitors were upon him, picking apart the puzzle of his armour with the frantic excitement of children trying to get into a parcel.

They were fast about it. He had to give them that.