“Just in case you were thinking of turning those missiles on yourselves.”
It had never exactly been day in House Aubusson—the dust-smeared window panels hadn’t let in enough light for that—but now even that half-daylight was sliding back into twilight, and another machine-stalked night would soon be upon them. Thalia supposed they had done well to last this long, but she could extract no comfort from the realisation. They had pushed their luck, that was all. They would not see another dawn unless they left Aubusson, and there was only one way that was going to happen.
She refrained from more detailed elaboration until Jules Caillebot had returned with the barricade squad. Paula Thory was almost incandescent with rage and incomprehension, and her mood was beginning to rub off on some of the others. But Thalia held her ground, standing with her arms folded in front of her. Nothing would be gained by showing even the slightest trace of doubt now. She had to appear in absolute command, utterly certain of success.
“We’re leaving,” she said as soon as Parnasse and Redon managed to quieten the party.
“Cyrus and I have already made the preparations. We either do this or wait for the servitors to arrive. No one’s going to rescue us in the meantime.”
“We can’t leave,” Thory said.
“We’re in a building, Prefect. Buildings don’t move.”
Without answering her, Thalia walked to the architectural model. It was now resting on the flat, damaged surface of the transparent casing that had once covered it. Between them, Meriel Redon and Thalia had removed most of the structures surrounding the stalk, corresponding to the actual demolition work that had taken place overnight.
Thalia reached into her pocket and removed the white ball that represented the sphere of the polling core, dusted it against her thigh and placed it gently atop the stalk.
“For the benefit of anyone who hasn’t been paying attention, this is us. Machines are trying to get at us through the stalk, and more than likely they’re climbing up the outside as well. So we have to leave. Here’s how it’s going to happen.”
She touched a finger against the side of the ball and toppled it from the stalk. It dropped to the side and rolled away across the denuded grounds of the Museum of Cybernetics until it ran off the edge of the model and fell to the floor.
“Oh. My. God,” Thory said.
“You’re insane. This isn’t going to happen.”
“That… doesn’t look survivable,” said Jules Caillebot.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Thalia said.
“For a start, we’re not going to just drop half a kilometre. We’re going to topple and roll. The sphere will travel down the side of the stalk, but it won’t ever hit the ground. The stalk widens near the base and then flares out until it’s almost horizontal. We’ll be moving fast, but there’s nothing to stop us rolling around the bend and continuing along a horizontal trajectory. It’s going to be bumpy, sure, but with the momentum we’ll have gained during the drop we should roll a long way, particularly as there isn’t much left out there to slow us down. We can thank the robots for that. If they’d left the surrounding stalks in place, we wouldn’t have a hope.”
“Girl’s right,” Parnasse said, standing next to Thalia with his arms folded and a look on his face that dared anyone to contradict him.
“Structurally, the sphere’ll hold. We can expect to roll two, three kilometres before we run out of momentum.”
“But surely we won’t be able to just roll off the stalk like that,” said the young man in the electric-blue suit.
“What do you want us to do? Run back and forth until we topple over?”
“We’ve taken care of the rolling part,” Thalia said.
“Cyrus and I have weakened the connections between the stalk and the sphere. It’ll hold for another hundred years as it is, but I’m going to give it a little nudge in the right direction with my whiphound. I’ll set it to grenade mode, on maximum yield. It’ll give us a pretty big bang. It should sever the remaining connections and push us in the right direction. We’ll topple.”
“We’ll be smashed around like eggs in a box,” Caillebot said.
“Not if we secure ourselves first.” Thalia indicated the metal railings encircling the polling core.
“You’re going to strap yourselves to these guards, as tight as you can. Meriel’s going to make sure everyone has enough clothing to do a good job. You’ll need to be secure during the roll. I don’t want anyone breaking loose when we end up upside down.”
“Maybe I’m missing something,” Caillebot said.
“You talk of us rolling two or three kilometres.”
“Correct,” Parnasse said.
“That isn’t going to help us much, is it? By the time we’ve unlashed ourselves, the robots will have caught up with us again.”
Parnasse glanced at Thalia.
“I think you’d better tell them the rest, girl.”
“The robots won’t be catching up with us,” she said.
Caillebot frowned.
“Why not?”
“Because we’re not stopping. We said we could roll two or three kilometres. That should be enough to take us across the nearest window band.”
“Oh no,” Thory said, shaking her head.
“Don’t even think—”
Thalia grimaced. She walked over to the woman and faced her down.
“Here’s the deal, Citizen. I don’t
have a fully functional whiphound any more. If I did, I’d run you through some of the more interesting things I can do with it. But I do have a pair of hands. If you make one more remark, if you open your mouth to speak, even if you so much as give me a funny look, I’m going to wrap those hands around that fat neck of yours and keep squeezing until your eyeballs pop into your lap.”
“I think you’d better listen to the girl,” Parnasse said.
Thalia stepped back and resumed her earlier position.
“Thank you, Cyrus. Yes, we’re going to roll across the window band. The band’s pretty tough, I admit—it’s already holding back air at atmospheric pressure, and it’s designed to tolerate occasional stresses above and beyond its normal loading. It could withstand collision by a small ship, a volantor or a train coming off one the bridges. But it isn’t designed to cope with something as substantial as the sphere. Parnasse and I both agree that the band will collapse under our weight, allowing us to drop into open space.”
“Where we’ll suffocate and die,” Caillebot said.
“Followed quickly by everyone else still inside House Aubusson as the air rushes out through the hundred-metre-wide hole we’ll have just dropped through.”
“There’s no one else to worry about,” Thalia said.
“We’ve kept it from you until now, but all the evidence at our disposal says that the machines have embarked on the systematic murder of all the other citizens. They’ve been rounded up, euthanised and shipped off to the manufactory to be stripped down and scavenged for useful elements.”
“You can’t be certain that there are no other survivors,” said the woman in the red dress, her face pale.
Thalia nodded.
“No, we can’t. Some other groups may have held out for a while. But we’re the only party able to protect ourselves by virtue of being near the polling core. No one else will have had that security. There’ll have been nothing to stop the machines storming everyone else en masse.”
“But what about us?” asked Cuthbertson, his mechanical owl still perched on his shoulder.
“We’ll still need air, even if everyone else is already dead!”
“We’ve got it,” Thalia said.
“There’s enough air inside here to keep us alive until we’re rescued. It won’t be going anywhere because the sphere’s already airtight. Provided the portholes hold, we’ll be fine. Internal doors will stop the air leaking out of the bottom of the sphere, where it used to meet the stalk. If there’s a slow leak, we can live with it. Rescue should be on us within a few minutes of breakout, if my guess is right.”