Owner 03 - Jupiter War (20 page)

‘Cable detaching – go and get it, Gladys,’ Ghort instructed. ‘Akenon, Alex – get to it.’

As Gladys launched herself up along the slackened cable, Alex and Akenon strode over to the motorized cable drum and at once began taking out all the bolts holding it in place. Necessarily, because of the huge load it had been under, there were a lot of them. Each bolt he took out, Alex carefully placed in the pouch on his belt, since losing a bolt resulted in a loss of pay – and, besides that, no one wanted heavy lumps of metal floating free when the Traveller eventually did fire up.

Shortly, Gladys was on her way back to them with the end of the cable, while the drum continued to wind in the slack. Using her suit impellers, she fell past, slowing beside one of the newly placed beams sticking out from the platform edge. Here she attached the cable end just as Alex turned a corner on the plate securing the cable drum in place. He paused to look up, saw that the base of the engine now lay only fifty metres above, and was steadily drawing closer. There was little risk to anyone, however, since it was travelling so slowly that anyone could get out of the way quickly enough. The only risk was that all of the cable drums might not be shifted out of the way in time, so the impellers would have to fire up again to stop the engine’s descent.

‘That’s the one I was looking for,’ said Akenon, holding up the last bolt.

‘Me too,’ said Alex.

By now, the drum had ceased turning and a slack length of cable arced its way over to where Gladys had attached the other end. Alex and Akenon followed this out, propelling themselves from the edge of the platform into open vacuum. Ghort followed next, one of his robots heading back, past him, to close its forelimbs around the spindle points of the drum and its motor. Even as it did so, and as he propelled himself out after the rest of his team, the drum started turning again, towing itself along the length of the cable towards the anchor point at the end, guided all the way by the robot, out from underneath the descending mass of the engine.

Grabbing one of the new beams, Alex attached his socket driver to it, then his safety line. He gazed up, past the great descending mass, towards the hole, five hundred metres away, out of which poked the throats of the fusion chambers. He recognized now why some had compared this device to the tower of an ancient cathedral, some place of worship, and felt glad to have retained his capacity for awe.

‘No time for gawping,’ urged Ghort. ‘We’ve got work to do.’

There was no conventional dimensionality to the virtual world, and so Saul’s control over his nascent spaceship was no different wherever he actually located his physical self. But he still retained a human conception of power, where to be at the centre of things was to be physically present at that physical centre. At the touch of his mind, the armoured door swung open, leading into what personnel aboard were already calling his ‘inner sanctum’. He stepped inside, leaving the spidergun outside.

No one had seen this place being built, for he had used only robots in its final construction or assembly. The central chamber within was circular. At one side a single acceleration chair hung in reinforced gimbals that were similar in appearance to an orrery, surrounded by curving panoramic screens. He didn’t really need these screens but, as with much in his inner sanctum, like the swing-in keyboards and ball controls on the chair arms, they were a backup should he at any time find himself unable to access all the cams and computers of his new ship mentally. He also had to admit to himself that such
human
access kept him grounded; kept him from losing himself in the world of mind. The rest of the room, but for a cageway leading to rooms above and below, was empty space provided for his leisure, but which he’d yet to equip. Surrounding this central room were four more rooms, all interconnecting: a kitchen area mostly automated, a sleeping area he might never use, a washroom and toilet, and then a final area for storage.

Saul headed across the empty floor to the cageway, not yet required for going down because the room below was empty too – a museum and display area for which he had yet to obtain any exhibits – and now propelled himself to the room above. Here was part of the reason for Hannah’s frustration in obtaining the right equipment for her production floor. The room contained five amniotic tanks with specialized cooling systems, also mainframe computing he could separate from the rest of the ship, a surgery containing the most advanced equipment he could obtain and which would soon be in use, small manufactories, robots and other high-tech items galore. Here he could do just about anything that could be done throughout the entirety of Arcoplex Two, though naturally on a smaller scale. He next walked over to the banks of cylinders running on their own independent cooling system, for here too he had moved Earth’s Gene Bank, along with hard copies of the genetic data kept on file throughout the ship. Was he retreating here? he wondered. No, he was making himself a fortress. And soon he would move his backups here too.

Returning to the central room, he climbed into the array of gimbals and strapped himself down in the acceleration chair. Suddenly he found himself at a still point, his mind utterly clear, and allowed his consciousness to expand throughout the entire ship. He studied its spherical skeleton; the two arcoplexes, the arboretum cylinder and a fourth spindle for another arcoplex were the spokes of the old station wheel. Another arcoplex spindle under construction, which extended above, and the column for the Mars Traveller extending below formed the wheel’s axle. He then focused on some of the detail of the engine itself, which had now been attached, both visually and also in the virtual world.

His new robots had finished constructing the lattice wall inwards from the exterior skeleton ready to attach to the platform for the Traveller engine, and currently human teams and older-style robots were bolting down hydraulic ram plates at the edge of the platform, and reeling out the last of the optics and power cables to reintegrate the engine with the ship’s systems. In the platform-support column robots were now securing themselves to beams while other human workers began streaming away. They had been affixing pipes leading to the location where he intended to place auxiliary fuel tanks – which was a job that could now wait. Meanwhile, the engine warm-up routine and diagnostics had been running for some time, and soon it would be time for the dragon to wake.

Next Saul focused his attention upwards. Lying midway between the old station wheel and the upper pole of the ship was the location planned for the four main weapons. The two railguns were already in place and their magazines filling; most of the maser, which had previously seemed to be just scrap metal, had been salvaged and rebuilt. However, the fourth, uncompleted, weapon was what drew his attention.

Working with a team of twenty humans and forty robots, including two proctors, the Saberhagen twins had been building their plasma weapon there, but had now ceased work and locked everything down. Just like him with his empty rooms for future expansion, they had incorporated extra capacity to allow further development of their latest weapon. Studying their plans, Saul was impressed. Right at that moment, not even he could think of any improvements to make, and he was especially pleased to see that, while they had been installing the heavy electromagnets and power supply they had also detailed a team within Arcoplex Two to manufacture the plasma ‘caps’. When completed, this lethal device would be able to deliver the Newton impact of a railgun, along with an EM blast and heat equivalent to a plug of matter magically extracted from the core of the sun.

Saul’s main attention next strayed into Tech Central, which lay just above him. Le Roque was striding back and forth, his face sheened with sweat as he organized the lockdown of the ship. Those who had finished their work were busy ensconcing themselves in secure areas, all of them in either spacesuits or breach-survival suits. All loose items were being secured, the biggest chore being handled by humans in EVA units stowing the last small chunks of the Argus asteroid in an ore carrier, before internal cable-mesh sheets would be tightened down over them.

‘I’m repositioning in six minutes,’ Saul warned him, ‘but this time I’ll be using the Rhine drive, so there should be no problems.’

‘The drive?’ Le Roque queried. ‘Why?’

‘I can’t use the steering thrusters to reorient.’

As the man looked thoroughly bemused, Saul decided to put him out of his misery. ‘I need to reorient the axis of the ship ready for approach,’ he explained. ‘And, with the vortex generator running, we happen to be sitting in a massive gyroscope. I calculate it would take the output, at full power, of about four Traveller engines to counter the angular momentum.’

‘Ah, I see,’ Le Roque replied.

Because of the angular momentum of the vortex generator, it had quite simply become impossible to change the ship’s axial orientation
at all.
However, that situation would change once the Mach-effect drive was operative.

As was his habit, Saul now checked up on those he cared most about or, rather, those he allowed his human self to care about. Hannah and Var he found huddled together in one of the mobile overseer’s offices that had recently clamped itself down on the new lattice wall.

‘That’s not a particularly safe place to be,’ he observed to them.

‘Argus Station . . .’ began Hannah, then paused before continuing, ‘Nowhere aboard this
ship
is particularly safe.’

The new usage Saul had tried subtly to promote – calling it a ship rather than a station – wasn’t catching on very well, and he realized that at some point he would have to rename his vessel.

‘Where
is
safe these days?’ Var asked. ‘I suspect it’s a very debatable point whether the chances of the people here getting killed are any higher than the chances of those on or around Earth.’

‘You know exactly what I mean, sister,’ replied Saul. ‘The insulation on an overseer’s office is enough to withstand the extremes of space, but hardly adequate for where you are now.’ He made some rapid calculations. ‘The temperature inside there is quite likely to exceed sixty Celsius.’

‘We’re prepared.’ Hannah reached over and opened a fridge door to expose numerous bottles of the same beer brewed in Arcoplex One and served at the Olive Tree in the Arboretum. ‘We have our suits with their cooling systems too.’ She tugged at the collar of her own suit.

‘You should also check out the power supply here,’ Var added, her tone slightly superior.

Saul did so, and saw that it was ready to switch over to a stack of all-but-depleted rectifying batteries. As these converted the heat to stored electricity, they would produce a cooling effect. He also realized that these two women were ganging up on him.

‘That’s all very well, but what about stray debris, which would punch straight through those walls of yours,’ he lectured, feeling like a spoilsport martinet parent. ‘You are simply putting yourselves in unnecessary danger.’

‘Any asteroid debris will have to get through the station wheel first,’ Var observed, ‘and in that respect you are in more danger from them than us.’

‘You know very well I wasn’t talking about asteroid debris but any still unsecured items within the station wheel.’

‘I’m checking stress-sensor readings,’ said Var stubbornly, ‘and, like you, I like to be at the centre of any work I’ve been overseeing.’

A sniping reference there to his inner sanctum.

‘You can check stress readings from anywhere inside the station.’ Saul realized at this point that he had almost unconsciously assigned just a small portion of his human mind to this dispute and that it was now being merely stubborn and just wanted to win a pointless verbal contest. He reabsorbed it and, using pure intellect, assessed their chances of getting hurt as only a little above those in the wheel’s accommodation units. And anyway, in the end, how dictatorial did he want to become?

‘We’re staying here,’ insisted Var, ‘to see the show.’ She reached for a bottle out of the fridge, unscrewed it, then had some problems sucking out the beer. Apparently such bottles were meant to be drunk while the ship was under acceleration. In irritation she pulled the bottle away from her mouth and added, ‘If you don’t like it, you’ll have to send some of Langstrom’s men or even some of your robots to remove us.’

‘That will not be necessary.’ He was already drawing himself away mentally, aware that, even though the human part of him would miss them if they got killed, their loss would have only minimal effect on his overall plans. ‘Enjoy the show.’

It was time. Saul observed that the asteroid chunks were now fully secured and the EVA workers positioned where he wanted them. With a thought he initiated the Rhine drive. Magnetic fields torqued, space glowing red and then winking out all about the ship, and the momentary transition raised a feeling inside him like déjà vu. Afterwards, the stars blinked back into existence all around, and he checked the axial positioning of his ship. It was perfect.

‘Mars Traveller start-up will commence in precisely two minutes,’ he announced to all throughout the ship. ‘You have only that amount of time to finish securing yourselves.’

The Traveller engine reported just a few faults – ones that were more than compensated for by the redundancy in its systems. The seconds began to drag for him, but he suppressed that purely human sense of frustration for, if he allowed it to continue, the ensuing days of acceleration, course changes and deceleration would seem interminable.

‘Firing,’ he finally announced.

The engine cleared its various throats and stuttered into life, then it bellowed as it blasted out a fusion flame half a kilometre long. Saul’s acceleration chair reoriented within its gimbals, and the acceleration pushed him gently down into it. Debris seemed to be shifting all in one direction, but in actuality remained stationary relative to the ship. Saul focused on a single spanner striking the edge of Arcoplex One and tumbling on down, falling straight through the new lattice wall only a hundred metres away from Hannah and Var, before striking the outer skeleton on its way out, then deforming and melting in the glare of fusion flame.