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 preprogrammed 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.