Owner 03 - Jupiter War (13 page)

‘It’s something Dr Myers can’t say now,’ said Scotonis, ‘because he’s dead.’

‘What?’ Clay felt a creeping horror. Myers, thankfully, had been one of the least injured of them all, having managed to escape without any broken bones – just minor cracks – and, with them all in the process of dying, he had become the most essential member of the crew. Now he was dead?

‘Come on,’ Scotonis gestured for them to follow him, and limped off down the corridor.

‘I’ll . . . I’ll leave it for now,’ said Cookson, clinging to one of the handholds set in the wall.

Scotonis halted, turned to study him, then nodded and continued on. Clay followed, wondering just how Cookson was managing to stay alive and how much longer he would survive.

No matter how hard they had tried to seal off the compartments into which they had loaded the corpses, the stench was spreading out into the rest of the ship. As well as the damage throughout it – walls bent and buckled, panels out of line and exposing electronics and plumbing, floors twisted, fluids leaking – a free-floating mess was also accumulating. As they neared the crew medical area, Clay noted occasional dressings, some already used, most simply discarded while dealing with the rush of injuries after the gravity waves struck. Here and there old, brown blood was spattered on the metalwork, and down in one corner lay what looked like mouldering splinters of bone.

‘This needs cleaning up,’ commented Scotonis.

Neither Clay nor Trove replied. Who would do that? Who would care enough to do it?

Finally they reached the section of corridor outside Medical, where three sorry-looking crewmen loitered, arms wrapped protectively around their torsos as they waited for a cure that wouldn’t be available. Scotonis marched past them, opened the door into Medical and stepped through. Clay and Trove followed him.

‘Well,’ Trove eventually managed, ‘he didn’t die of his old injuries.’

Dr Myers sat strapped into his own surgical chair. Someone had removed all the fingers from his right hand, scooped out one eyeball, then cut his throat. The man’s blood still beaded the air, and Clay resisted the urge to try and brush away droplets of it landing on his spacesuit.

‘We have to find out who did this,’ said Scotonis. ‘They must be punished.’

Why bother?
Clay wondered, again sinking into fatalistic depression. Myers had reached the state they would all be reaching soon enough, he reckoned. Then he shrugged and gritted his teeth. He had a mind, he had intelligence and what had once been described to him as a low animal cunning. He would not have risen so high in the Committee administration without these, and they were precisely what would enable him to survive. Somehow there would be a way out of this, and he must find it.

A Theory about Theories

During the reign of Serene Galahad, and because of her response to Alan Saul, technological innovation left conventional science in tatters. Many years had been spent building hypotheses and theories on Einstein’s general and special theories of relativity, while ignoring irrefutable experimental fact that undermined them. It was proven that certain particles could be accelerated beyond the speed of light, and that was ignored. It was found that the mass of the universe did not match up to theory, so invisible undetectable dark matter was invented to fill the gap. A lunatic who believed we were visited by aliens demonstrated antigravity; why even check his work, he’s a lunatic? A working cold-fusion plant is built, and closed down by safety officers. A fool obsessed with fringe studies of ball lightning disappears from his laboratory and is found halfway round the world in the Atacama Desert, burned from head to foot. Bah, meat and bread for conspiracy theorists. And when Alan Saul demonstrated a working Alcubierre drive, which was only theoretically possible with limitless energy and access to exotic matter, this too might have been ignored or explained away. However, having stolen a space station and annihilated a large portion of the Inspectorate by dropping seven thousand satellites on Earth, Alan Saul was someone who really had to be taken seriously.

Earth

No trees
, Serene reflected and, no matter the extent of her power over Earth,
they
were something she could not expedite. Her aero had landed on what had once been an aeroport atop a multistorey car park sunk deep amidst the arcology towers of this sprawl on Madagascar. Now it stood in a shallow valley beside a stream, amidst mountains of rubble. Standing on the edge of the port, Serene studied the view on the screen of a tripod-mounted image-intensifier. Over to the left, a sorting machine, a giant contraption like a steel caterpillar, had nosed into one rubble pile and was passing that steadily through its long alimentary tract as it extracted metals and other usable materials, before shitting out plain concrete, brick and carbocrete into a hopper section positioned at its rear. As Serene watched, this same hopper detached and trundled over to the edge of a long deep trench, to tip its contents inside. At the end of the trench a giant excavator was still digging, piling precious though highly depleted earth to one side, ready to fill in over the rubble.

‘A long and onerous task,’ she noted, swatting at something that had landed on her neck, then removing her sunglasses to frown at the smears.

‘With present machinery and resources it will take twenty years to complete,’ Elkin replied, ever ready with the numbers. ‘This is presupposing that you intend to clear the entire island of its sprawl and will not be diverting resources elsewhere.’

‘How much time would be gained in the space operation if I diverted resources from here?’

This was obviously a more difficult question, for Elkin gave no immediate reply. Serene turned to see her gazing at one of her aides and, after a moment, check what he must have meanwhile sent to her palmtop.

‘Very little,’ she replied, ‘since it’s the bottlenecks that are slowing things down.’

Was that worth shutting down the entire operation here? Serene decided not. There had been a momentary panic, over a week and a half ago, when Argus hurled itself in towards the centre of the solar system, but Saul had not attacked, merely positioned the station on the other side of the sun where, so the experts told her, he was using solar energy to power a rapid rebuild of the station. Image data from solar weather satellites showed the rebuild to be so extensive that the tactical feasibility of him attacking before all the big orbital railguns here were ready was very low. The tacticians further surmised that it was highly likely that he did not intend to attack at all – the likelihood that he was turning Argus Station into something capable of delivering overwhelming force being very small indeed.

‘What’s the latest news on Argus?’ Serene now took a pack of wet wipes from her pocket and extracted one to dab at her face. It was hot and muggy here and the only species that seemed to be doing well were the flying and stinging kind. This ‘being out in the field’ business was all very well, but it brought its discomforts. She glanced over at Sack, standing in patient attendance. Maybe it was time for her to occupy one of the big, comfortable estates offered for her exclusive use by one of her East African delegates.

‘Images show that it is being turned into a sphere with a diameter the same as that of the original ring,’ Elkin replied immediately. ‘They also show the asteroid now cut into two pieces and rapidly being used up, and the Mars Traveller VI being repositioned.’

‘Engineering assessment?’

‘The same as before: he’s turning the station into an interstellar spaceship. There are also elements in the design that are recognizable as originating from Varalia Delex, the previous technical director of Antares Base. Prior to that she was the overseer of both the Mars Traveller Project and the
Alexander
– or
Scourge
. Also some further information has come to light about her.’

‘That is?’ Serene returned her attention to the view before her.

‘Her maiden name is Saul. She is his sister.’

Serene swung back. ‘That explains his abrupt arrival on Mars and the risks he took in rescuing her.’ She nodded to herself. ‘Interesting information, but it gets us no closer to stopping him running.’ Serene stepped away from the image-intensifier. She’d seen enough of Madagascar to know that it would once again be green, but would still lack the millions of species that had lived here previously. They still needed the Gene Bank data and, if possible, the samples. Saul could not be allowed to leave the solar system.

‘Is Calder any further forward in preventing that?’ Serene began to stroll back towards the aero.

Elkin fell in just a step behind her, and other staff scurried to collect up equipment while protective spiderguns moved in from the edges of the aeroport. Time to go, Serene felt, but where next?

‘Just before we landed, he told me that the new weapon will be ready for a test firing within a few days,’ Elkin replied. ‘And now would be the best time to test it since Saul, positioned on the other side of the sun, will have no view of it.’

‘Calder’s sure of that?’

‘Our comlifers have made all our satellites and stations safe from mental incursion, and the test will be disguised amidst a test firing of one of the new railguns.’

Serene paused to gaze up at the leaden sky. So, forget that East African estate. Chairman Messina’s quarters up in the spin section of Core One had recently been renovated, and she would certainly need her bodyguard there alongside her . . . She would make that her base as she toured the other stations above, and she would be there to watch that test: to watch the first deployment of the weapon that would bring Alan Saul at last within her reach.

Argus

There was little sign of the surgery Ghort had undergone other than a few faint lines visible under the stubble on his scalp, and his frequent expression now of perplexed puzzlement. The relay was a mirrored cube just a centimetre across, which he wore on a silver chain around his neck. Neither of these items was visible now that he wore his heavy work suit and clung to an I-beam of the column, which currently extended over a kilometre and a half below the rapidly disappearing central asteroid.

‘What’s it like?’ Alex asked, as he floated out in vacuum ten metres away on the end of a line.

‘Ever used a telefactor?’ Ghort asked.

Alex had once trained on a bomb-disposal telefactor, his hands in special gloves and with VR goggles over his eyes. It seemed as if he had been there defusing the bomb with slightly numb fingers, rather than sitting kilometres away at a console.

‘Yes, I’ve used a telefactor,’ he replied.

‘Nothing like that at all,’ Ghort told him. ‘I get a schematic of the job in hand, break it down with a work-order program perpetually adjusted to materials available, load specific tasks to specific robots, insert you, me and the others in where human dexterity and flexibility will work best, and then watch the entire job slotting together even while I’m working on it too.’ Ghort dipped to peer down at where the five construction robots he controlled were positioning and welding in place bubblemetal I-beams, and where Gladys and Akenon were fixing optics and power cables. They were working on just one corner of the column, while five similar teams were working on the rest. Meanwhile, yet other teams were building the column inwards, as the largest chunk of the asteroid was being hauled to one side, and while mining robots concentrated on the remainder.

‘Here it comes,’ said Alex, now seeing a big loader robot scuttling down towards them carrying a great mass of bubble-metal beams and other items on its back. ‘We should be able to get back up to speed again.’

Var Delex had changed working methods so there would be less competition between humans and robots, which apparently led to a greater number of errors and accidents. However, she had not been able to dispel completely all competitiveness. Those building this column to take the Mars Traveller engine were now racing against the new robots building the framework for the station sphere, trying always to stay ahead of the steady growth of that incurving wall of girders. Alex gazed out towards the rim, watching centipede lines of the robots working around the wall – looking like golden worms from this distance. Of course, it was a futile race. The column would stop at two kilometres, while the sphere wall would continue for half a kilometre more and curve into the blast hole for the Traveller’s fusion torch.

To get out of the big loader robot’s way, Alex hauled himself into the column’s web of girders alongside Ghort. Down at the end of the column, the loader detached from its load, leaving it suspended on the end of a thread out in space, and headed back – like a giant metal beetle that had just rid itself of its wing-encased body. Once it was out of the way, Alex detached his line, then used his wrist impeller to propel himself out then down, settling to land gently on the packed heap of beams and other components. A minute’s search and he found the plastic crate he wanted, peeled it up off its gecko pad and hauled it along with him back to Ghort. Behind him, construction robots began taking the rest of the package apart.

‘Let’s get to it,’ said Ghort, opening the crate and taking out the first of the neatly packed mass of stress sensors, which were crucial for a column expected to support such a load as this one would.

In one week they would be hauling across the already detached Mars Traveller engine, along with its shock-absorbing bed, and attaching it here. Alex looked forward to the sight of that behemoth being moved, and already regretted his wait-and-see attitude to the new cerebral implants, for through such a device he would have been able to make sensory recordings that he could view again at leisure. And apparently there would be masses of file space available for such recordings, since everyone possessing an implant would be linked to his own information repository. Or, at least, that was how Ghort had explained it in a rather offhand and dismissive way.

Five hours later, their shift ended, their tools taken up by another team, whose leader also took control of the robots without even a pause. They returned up the column towards where Tech Central had been disassembled, ready to be slotted into a central sphere which was already in the process of being prefabricated. Halfway there, they launched themselves from the column towards the entrance to their accommodation unit, bringing themselves down neatly with impellers, entering through the airlock two by two and shedding their suits.