Owner 03 - Jupiter War (16 page)

‘And this one was just the Alcubierre-drive version?’ she enquired.

‘It was,’ Calder affirmed, ‘the other three are the ones that are fully armed.’

This refinement to the weapon hadn’t been Calder’s idea, but a suggestion from the tacticians. When one of these missiles hit the Argus warp bubble, and knocked it out, the nuclear EM warhead it also contained, which was designed to be primed by the high temperatures generated within the warp bubble, would then detonate, cooking local computers. After that, Alan Saul would no longer be running, and Argus Station would be open to assault.

The only drawback with these missiles was that their small vortex generators interfered with the vortex generators of the ships they were on, and vice versa. The ship’s vortex generator could not therefore be maintained at complete readiness while they were getting a missile ready to fire, which meant a delay of up to half an hour between either drive being used. This was something the tacticians were working on, and Serene felt confident of a solution.

‘So now it’s time to scare the rat out of the woodpile,’ she said, not entirely sure where she had heard that expression. Just then the power note in the air changed again.

‘All the railguns here and on the Core stations are now firing,’ explained Calder. ‘Forty inert missiles. We aren’t firing at full power, because if we did, they wouldn’t swing round the sun towards their target.’

Their target . . . Argus Station.

Alan Saul was just about to get his wake-up call.

Why Didn’t He Run?

A question that will bother historians until the end of time is, ‘Why didn’t Alan Saul flee to somewhere far away and safe?’ Surely, once he had tested his Alcubierre warp drive on his flight to Mars, then taking Argus Station to another star system, and there obtaining the materials and energy for its conversion, would have been less risky than staying in the vicinity of Earth? One explanation is that he needed additional resources for the immense journey he was about to make, but I feel that is far too simplistic. Some illumination might lie in his rescue of his sister, Var Delex. We know, from witness statements and available information, that the torture he suffered at the hands of Salem Smith had wiped his mind, so one has to ask what drove him to seek out and rescue a sister he no longer actually knew. Saul was far too logical, too far along the road to machine mentality, to be affected by any belief in fraternal love, or duty but, by his actions, it seems his unconscious still drove him. I believe his unconscious also recognized unfinished business, and a hatred of the regime created by Serene Galahad, which was little different from the one he had already tried to destroy.

Argus

High up within the skeletal sphere of his ship, Saul hung in vacuum, with Var beside him. She had been insistent on his joining her for this tour of the work in progress, despite the fact that he could view it all without being physically present. She needed affirmation of her status and, quite frequently lately, it seemed that she needed reassurance, as if she was losing confidence in her own abilities.

Below them lay what remained of the original station, but with the Mars Traveller engine now being hauled down into its new position. Tech Central, which should have lain directly below him, had been dismembered and reassembled around the station core to which all inward reaching structural members now connected. It occupied the upper hemisphere of the core, the view from its windows now mostly blocked by the inner bearing endcaps of the original arcoplexes. The only really open view from there was through the gap where the Traveller engine had once been, but even that only gave a distant view of the ship’s skeleton and, even now, a second new arcoplex spindle was being assembled in the way of that.

‘It’ll soon all be gone.’ Saul pointed to the remaining pieces of the asteroid that had now been shifted out to hang alongside the new ship’s core.

‘It will never all be gone,’ replied Var.

‘Yes, I know.’ He waved a hand to encompass the surrounding sphere. ‘It’s all out there still.’

‘No, I don’t mean that. Some enterprising soul took a half-tonne chunk of high nickel- and chrome-content iron and is now turning it into jewellery.’

Saul had already known this, down to the detail and dimensions of the jewellery concerned, also who was making it and when and how, and how small a dent this made in station resources. He did not mention this, however, but just let her bolster her confidence with this game of ‘I know something you don’t’. Meanwhile, he slid the larger part of his attention elsewhere, through the cam system and other ship’s sensors, to watch as Paul and two other proctors connected up the twenty-seventh Mach-effect coil array – a device like a huge steel aphid clinging to the inner edge of a structural beam. Except for one team, all the humans had converged for Hannah and Var’s planned celebration, but the proctors stopped only for their own mysterious periods of stillness. He liked seeing them work as smoothly and efficiently as his conjoined robots, but pausing occasionally as if to admire their product.

‘How long?’ he asked them, without actually speaking.

‘With Jasper Rhine running the balancing tests, it will take fifty days,’ Paul replied. ‘Without him it could be done much quicker, perhaps twenty days to install and balance every one of the projected two hundred and thirty coil arrays. They must be synched with the EM component of the Rhine drive.’

The mild implication was evident there: a human was slowing down some of the work in progress. Saul ran some rapid calculations. What with many human members of the work teams now getting ‘chipped’, the balance was nevertheless changing. They were speeding up, becoming more adept, more robotic, but it was still the case that if he replaced every human operating aboard with a robot, the work rate would increase.

‘Should I confine them all to their quarters?’ Saul asked. ‘Or should I exterminate them and thus free up more resources?’

‘I do not respond well to rhetorical questions,’ Paul replied, while smoothly connecting up power cables and propelling himself back from the array.

‘Work round him,’ Saul instructed. ‘But allow him to feel useful.’ Just as he himself was doing with his sister . . .

Saul now focused on a branching tree of his centipede robots working at the top of the sphere. The robots passed a last structural beam up that same tree to the remaining human team, who fielded it and began moving it into place. Even as he watched, the tree of robots fragmented – individual robots heading off in different directions about the sphere ready for their next tasks. Though it would have been much quicker to have just the robots fix the beam, Saul had backed Var’s decision to allow this team, which included the Messina clone and Messina’s old bodyguard, to accomplish this last piece of work. That seemed an extension of his initial choice to allow all the humans to survive.
A moral choice?
He wasn’t sure he knew the meaning of the concept any more.

Saul felt it almost as a visceral clunk deep inside his torso as that same beam went into place, then as a gradual easing inside him as bolts were tightened through perfectly lined-up holes before welders glared distantly in vacuum. He now hung in a complete spherical cage, five kilometres across, in orbit about the sun, though admittedly some parts of the cage were not permanently secured since access would be needed for further materials.

‘The last beam is in,’ declared Var, almost belligerently.

‘So a watershed has been passed?’ Saul asked.

‘Yes,’ she affirmed. ‘On the Traveller construction station, I always found that marking these occasions with some sort of celebration, no matter how minor or constrained by political oversight, increased the subsequent work rates.’

‘Certainly,’ Saul replied, noting to himself how robots did not need such motivation. However, the bulk of his attention remained focused elsewhere, because new data were coming in.

Serene Galahad’s comlifers had blocked his access to all of Earth’s satellites and computer systems, also the solar observation satellites, but they had not extended their range far, merely cut off all other installations beyond Earth’s orbit from any contact with Earth. The Martian satellites were available to Saul, but they were far away and transmission delays were long. Still, just a few million kilometres out, an old satellite orbited the sun in a parallel path to the Earth’s. It had been overlooked because it remained mostly powered down until it detected comets or asteroids arriving in-system that might be a danger to Earth. Saul had sent a relay out from behind the sun, made a connection through it to that elderly satellite, and turned its radio and optical telescope array so as to now watch the home world.

‘Railgun,’ he remarked, his tone belying his sudden qualms. Galahad was working
fast
.

‘What?’ asked Var.

‘About twenty minutes ago, Galahad fired a very powerful railgun at the Moon.’ So saying, Saul instituted an immediate check on Argus’s weapons. Two railguns were operational but the plasma cannon that the Saberhagen twins were building was still far from completion. Perhaps his allocation of resources had been in error? Yes, Earth was a danger that could not be ignored – and in an instant he began to divert resources. The Saberhagens would shortly be receiving the components they were waiting for.

‘Second firing,’ he now said, appalled at the destructive power of what he had just witnessed. ‘They must have solved the component distortion problem, because that looked like a railgun-fired nuclear weapon.’

‘Seems a bit advanced for them,’ said Var sniffily.

‘Any more advanced than building vortex . . .’ Saul felt a sudden surge of both annoyance and frustration, immediately followed by the realization that he had become arrogant. Even as he sent the orders for the smelting plants to close down immediately and retract, he considered how, if he had only been watching still from Mars, they would have been in serious trouble, because he was now witnessing a launch of railgun missiles around the sun directly towards their position. Thankfully, so as to obtain the correct orbital vector, they were travelling slowly, but he was well aware that if he hadn’t been watching, he would have had to sacrifice both smelting plants just to save his ship.

‘This is a problem?’ Var enquired.

‘Yes, and I’ve just given orders for everyone to prepare for a shift in precisely one hour,’ he replied. ‘It seems Galahad wants to let us know she hasn’t forgotten us. Forty railgun missiles are now heading round the sun towards us.’

Using the impeller on the wrist of his suit, Saul rapidly sent himself down towards the ship’s core, with Var in quick pursuit.

‘We need the solar energy,’ she protested.

‘We’re not moving far,’ he replied.

To avoid these approaching missiles, they only had to move a small distance relative to the sun, which could have been achieved with the steering thrusters or even the Mach-effect drive, were it operational. However, there was too much equipment, not to mention the remainder of the asteroid and the Traveller engine, unsecured inside the station. They must move without inertia, therefore the Rhine drive was required so Saul checked its status, as he had been checking it so often. Major changes to the station’s structure, including the heavy armour being put in place in the station ring, had caused distortions in the vortex generator that had been necessary to straighten out. It was good, as he knew from the last time he checked it, just a few minutes before.

Approaching the surface of the ship’s core, he slowed himself with his impeller just enough so he could absorb the remaining impact by bending his knees and have his gecko soles still remain in place. Var landed shortly after him and he was pleased, for her, to see that she had landed as perfectly as himself. He strode towards the nearest airlock, heaved open the door, pushed himself down inside, and waited until his sister crammed in beside him. The airlock gave them access to a corridor leading to the Tech Central control centre, which internally had been left much as before. Saul removed his VC suit helmet and clipped it to his belt.

‘Humans in space really need to start thinking less two-dimensionally,’ Var commented, as she followed him.

‘To do that,’ Saul replied, ‘humans either have to change, or have been raised in a zero-g environment.’

‘Well, even that’s started now.’

Saul nodded in grave agreement. Those being ‘chipped’ provided an example of the former . . . but he didn’t know how to react to the news that some station personnel were getting pregnant, and that thus far eight in all had refused termination. This could be taken as meaning they were starting to feel safe, but this urge to procreate was more probably a response to the constant danger: a biological imperative and a hedge against the future.

He entered Tech Central to find that Hannah, the Saberhagens, Rhine, Le Roque and even Langstrom were present. This event was something cooked up by Hannah and Var between them, Hannah having brought two bottles of fizzy wine, which was brewed on the station, and a collection of the special glasses required for drinking such a beverage in zero gravity. This gathering was so that the main players aboard the station could celebrate the fixing of the last structural beam. Var had also allowed all the work crews a shift off to celebrate similarly – a humanizing event – and a large number of them were waiting in the Arboretum for the return of Ghort’s team, before the party began. Currently, however, Le Roque and Brigitta were speaking into their fones, and Langstrom and Rhine were working consoles, while Hannah stood on her own beside a medical gurney wheeled in specially to carry the drink and glasses. The rest of the station’s personnel, meanwhile, were receiving the news that the station would shortly be on the move, and the party atmosphere was fast dissipating.

‘Too human for you?’ Hannah snapped at Saul.

‘No, it seems Galahad wants to spoil your party,’ he replied tightly, then shot at Le Roque, ‘You have tracking on them?’