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 burn-out.
‘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!’