“What is it?”
“Something bad,” Thalia answered. They were not civilian servitors, she realised. They were some kind of war machine, and they were working their way inexorably towards the polling core.
Terror nestled tighter in her stomach, as if it was making itself even more at home.
“Tell me, girl.”
“Military-grade servitors,” she said.
“I’m pretty sure, anyway.”
“Must be some mistake. There was nothing like that here before.”
“I know. It would have been a lockdown offence even to own the construction files.”
“So where have they come from?”
“I think we already know,” she said.
“They’ve been made overnight. There are probably bits of people in them.”
“The manufactories?”
“I think so. I can’t believe these are the only thing they’re spewing out—there’d have been enough material to make millions of them, which is obviously absurd. But at least we know what part of the production flow was meant for.”
“And the rest?”
“I’m too scared to think about it.”
Thalia turned back to the polling core. Perhaps Parnasse was right, that the time had now come to destroy it. The option had been at the back of her mind all along, after all. She believed that the core was playing a vital part in coordinating the activities of the machines via the low-level signals she had already detected. That was why the servitors had not already demolished the stalk, something that she knew would have been well within their capabilities. But she would not risk putting that theory to the test until she took the core out of action. If the machines were somehow able to keep running afterwards, it would all have been for nothing. She had not been prepared to take that risk until now, but the spectacle of the advancing war machines had changed everything.
She walked to the nearest chair and picked up her whiphound. It had become too hot to wear clipped to her belt and she could only tolerate holding it if she had a scarf wrapped around her palm. She let the filament extend and stiffen itself in sword mode, ignoring the buzzing protestation from the handle.
“Are you going to do it?” Parnasse asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe you’re right. Maybe it’s time.”
He steadied her trembling hand.
“And maybe it isn’t. Like you said, girl—if chopping at this thing doesn’t do the job, we’d better have a pretty good backup plan in place. Put the sword away for now. I’m going to test the water with Redon.”
CHAPTER 23
A portion of the Solid Orrery had been reassigned to emulate the three-dimensional form of a weevil-class war robot. The one-tenth-scale representation rotated slowly, the light of the room appearing to gleam off its angled black surfaces. In its space-travel/atmospheric-entry configuration, the machine’s multiple legs and manipulators were tucked hard against its shell, as if it had died and shrivelled up. Its binocular sensor packages were contained in two grilled domes that bore an uncanny resemblance to the compound eyes of an insect.
“They’re as nasty as they look,” Baudry commented to the assembled prefects.
“Banned under seven or eight conventions of war, last seen in action more than a hundred and twenty years ago. Most war robots are designed to kill other war robots. Weevils were engineered to do that and kill humans. They carry detailed files on human anatomy. They know our weak points, what makes us hurt, what makes us break.” As she spoke, reams of dense technical data scrolled down the walls.
“In and of themselves, weevils are containable. We have techniques and weapons that would be effective against them in both vacuum stand-off situations and in close-quarters combat in and around habitats. The problem is the number, not the machines themselves. According to the Democratic Circus, House Aubusson has already manufactured and launched two hundred and sixty thousand units, and the flow isn’t showing any signs of stopping. A weevil only weighs five hundred kilograms, and most of the materials required to make one would be commonplace inside a habitat like Aubusson. If the servitors inside the habitat work efficiently, they can easily supply all the feed materials necessary to build more just by dismantling and recycling existing structures inside the cylinder. We could be looking at an output of millions of weevils before the manufactories need to start eating into the structural fabric of the habitat. Then the numbers become unthinkable.”
“Do we know for a fact that we’re dealing with weevils?” Dreyfus asked.
Baudry nodded.
“The Circus hasn’t secured a sample yet, but the scans are all on the nose. These are weevils, just as Gaffney told us. There’s no reason to doubt that they’re carrying the Thalia code.”
“What about the rest of what Gaffney revealed?” asked the projected head of Jane Aumonier, imaged on a curving pane of glass supported above an empty chair.
“Do we believe that weevils are capable of hijacking a second habitat?”
Baudry faced her superior.
“If Aurora has embarked on this strategy, chances are she has a high expectation of success. She already has intimate knowledge of security holes in the polling apparatus. There’s every reason to think she has the ability to seize another habitat if she can get weevils into it.” All of a sudden Baudry looked shattered, as if the crisis had notched past some personal threshold of endurance.
“I think we must assume the worst.”
The wall displays froze abruptly. Bracelets chorused in unison. The Solid Orrery consumed the weevil and sprang up an enlarged representation of one of the two threatened habitats, a hubless wheel.
“That’s Carousel New Brazilia,” Baudry said.
“Anti-collision systems have begun to engage the incoming flow of weevils. We can expect House Flammarion to begin similar engagements within the next fifteen minutes.”
“How are our assets coping?” Aumonier asked.
“We only had time to place three corvette-class vehicles close enough to Brazilia to make a difference,”. Baudry said.
“Frankly, their pinpoint weapons are next to useless against the scale of the flow. Even if we dropped a nuke into the middle of it, it would only take out a few thousand units. It’s like trying to stop a tsunami with a spoon.”
Aumonier answered calmly: “Then we need an alternative strategy.”
“Our corvettes are standing by to concentrate their fire on the weevils once they make groundfall on the habitat. The war robots will need time to cut through or force their way in via docking apertures.”
“Let’s assume we don’t stop them all. What happens if we lose Brazilia and Flammarion?”
“Both habitats have manufacturies of their own,” Dreyfus said, looking up from his compad.
“If Aurora takes them, she’ll have two new sites of weevil production. From there she can start leapfrogging to new habitats.”
“I’ve prepared a simulation on the Orrery,” Baudry said.
“There’s a lot of guesswork fed into it, obviously, but I can show you how things might progress under some reasonable assumptions.”
“Go ahead,” Aumonier said.