Owner 03 - Jupiter War (22 page)

‘Why did you save me?’ Clay asked.

‘Pure chance.’ She stared at him woodenly. ‘Your cabin happens to lie between mine and the bridge, and all the other crew were further away. You were the only one I could reach after I stepped out. The rest were already running directly into his readerguns.’

‘And how did we both get here without being killed?’

‘You again.’

‘What?’

‘After you used my cabin inducer on me I opened up the back wall of my cabin to a service duct. Should it happen again I could thus escape without apparently leaving my cabin. I dragged you down the duct to end up here.’

Clay pulled himself upright. ‘We have to stop him. We have to get to the bridge.’

Trove shook her head. ‘He knows that we escaped.’ She pointed to the ceiling at a cam socket and intercom plate that Trove must have recently bashed in. ‘He was talking to me just a little while ago – basically telling me that any attempt to stop him would be futile.’

‘That can’t be true.’

‘No?’ Trove’s answering sneer was familiar. ‘He’s pumping the air out of every part of the ship but the bridge. If we stay here, we die. If we go after him, we die. Even if there was a way, via service ducts, to the bridge we’d then have to contend with his other protection.’

‘Don’t keep me in suspense.’

‘He’s managed to activate one of the spare spiderguns, and it’s in there with him.’

So that was it: every avenue to Scotonis was closed, and apparently they would soon suffocate down here. Clay gazed at Trove steadily, knowing that she wouldn’t have given up. She reached down, undid the catches on the crate and flipped over the lid. Inside were cellophane packs of neatly folded white garments and, when she skimmed one over to him, he saw the integral hood with its clear plastic visor – and small oxygen bottle.

‘Survival suits,’ Trove confirmed. ‘The air supply lasts for twenty minutes, so should be enough to get us somewhere we can find some more air.’

Clay gestured to the crate. ‘What about the bottles on the other suits?’

‘Designed by committee,’ she stated, extracting a packet for herself. ‘The air bottles aren’t interchangeable.’

It reminded him of the time they first met and her sly comments about bureaucratic inefficiency. Then he had been offended; now he just accepted it. ‘So where’s safe?’

‘Nowhere, if he sends that spidergun after us,’ she replied as she opened her packet and shook out a survival suit. ‘But if he decides we’re no longer a danger to him, we should be able to get aboard one of the troop shuttles and use the air supply there.’

‘Then we might be able to—’

‘Get your suit on!’ she snapped.

Only then did he realize that he was not getting enough air and hastily opened his packet, shook out the suit and donned it. The air supply kicked in immediately and the suit drew taut around him, straining against its quilt lines. A small speaker crackled beside his ear.

‘You hear me?’ she asked, her voice tinny.

‘Yeah.’

‘Let’s go.’

She pushed open the door and they stepped into one of the hexagonal corridors of the hive-like troop section. Clay felt his stomach turn over when he recognized the unit numbers on the walls, and therefore where they were heading. The door at the far end of the corridor opened into what had since become a mortuary. Corpses floated in a haze of vapour, their suits bloated and burned. Brown flakes of what might have been boiled and dried-out blood swirled in the remaining air, clogging around vents in the walls. As she led the way through this horrible scene, Trove snagged an assault rifle and some ammo clips. Clay did the same, even though such weapons would be no use against a spidergun.

Beyond this area they moved into the hold, past munitions crates, a rack of ten-millimetre machine guns and the folded-up but terrifying shape of another spidergun. Clay was glad to reach the airlock at the end, which opened into the shuttle bay. Trove punched a code into the panel beside it and stepped back, but nothing happened.

‘No way through there, I’m afraid,’ came Scotonis’s distorted and tinny voice over his suit radio. ‘Sorry, but one of the Earth orbit tugs is now on its way out, so I can’t have you giving the game away.’

‘We won’t leave,’ said Trove. ‘We just want to keep breathing.’

‘Sorry, but I don’t believe you, and I can’t take that chance.’

Trove stepped back from the door, scanned around, pointed to a nearby stack of crates and headed over. When she pulled off a lid, Clay immediately recognized the butter-like blocks it contained, with their inset timers: demolition charges just like the one she, Scotonis and Cookson had sent him out of the
Scourge
to use on an anchor that had failed to detach from Argus Station. She reached inside and lifted one of them out.

‘The blast will kill you,’ Scotonis observed.

‘If there was air in here to transmit it, probably yes,’ Trove replied, ‘but you yourself have conveniently been removing it.’

She attached the charge to the door, then waved Clay away. They retreated all the way back through the hold and into the mortuary, before moving against the wall on either side of the door. Clay felt the wall thump against his back, then a few shards shot through the door, followed by a cloud of dust. When they returned to the airlock, the first door was gone, while the second was just clinging by one hinge and hung into the shuttle bay. They entered and headed straight over to one of the bricklike shuttles – a vehicle that bore more resemblance to a large armoured car than anything space-going.

‘If you try to leave, you die,’ Scotonis informed them.

‘I told you I had no intention of leaving,’ said Trove. ‘At least, not yet.’

The airlock into the shuttle opened with ease and soon they pulled themselves up into a small storage area, behind rows of acceleration chairs ranged on what Clay perceived as both the floor and the ceiling. The vehicle was cramped and claustrophobic, but he was glad to feel the tautness of his suit relaxing.

‘I have a railgun aimed just beyond the bay doors,’ Scotonis added.

‘So what’s your plan, Scotonis?’ Clay asked. ‘Why did you feel it necessary to try and kill us all?’

‘Ah, our political officer speaks.’

Trove moved forwards, and Clay towed himself after her.

‘Yes, I speak,’ Clay replied evenly. ‘So, apparently you can’t use the nukes?’

‘Nonsense, of course I can.’

‘So why kill the assessment team?’

‘They found a problem,’ Scotonis replied. ‘The entire launching system is wrecked.’

‘So you can’t use them,’ Clay declared, as he followed Trove into the cramped cockpit.

‘I can detonate them,’ Scotonis replied. ‘I just can’t detonate them outside the ship.’

Clay checked a display on the wrist of his survival suit. The air in here was good, so he reached up to open the visor seam, then pushed the hood off his head. Trove glanced at him, reached out and hit some controls on the console before them, then did the same.

‘So I guess you plan to drop the
Scourge
on Galahad’s head,’ she said, her voice humanized again.

‘Not quite,’ Scotonis replied. ‘Once I’ve located her, which I’m trying to do now using radio searches, I’ll drop the
Scourge
on her head and detonate all the warheads too.’

‘Surely you can let us go just before you do that?’ suggested Clay.

Scotonis did not reply.

Argus

Loaded down with tools, cable and long screw-in ice pitons, Alex descended slowly towards the asteroid. Flaky ice crunched under his feet but it offered little grip to the gecko boots of his heavy work suit, so he bounced off again. Floating up from the mass of ice, he surveyed his surroundings as he used his wrist impeller to bring him back down. Over to his right, the mooring cable stretched out towards the two space planes, which hung belly to belly, with a docking tunnel running between them. On the horizon of the asteroid beyond which the two ships lay, he could see some of Ghort’s robots busily drilling holes to plant demolition charges. Alex felt it was no coincidence that all the humans here had been detailed to another task – that of preventing the chunks of the asteroid from tumbling away from each other – and that none of them was directly handling explosives. He considered that a healthy paranoia on the part of the Owner.

Using his implant, which Hannah Neumann had told him would only activate partially until the repairs in his head had fully healed, Alex called up the overlay. Immediately, a network of glowing lines etched out the major faults in the arc of ice lying ahead of him, but the map was incomplete. He banished the overlay then called it up again, and this time it reappeared with numbers hovering above the attachment points. The nearest one lay just a few metres ahead. He used his impeller to propel himself to that spot, unreeled his line from his belt and, clinging with one hand to a rock embedded in the ice, wound in his screw piton. Next, drawing the line taut to hold himself firmly in place, he undid the clip holding a heavy reel of cable at his waist and pushed it down towards the ice. Through a loop in the end of the same cable, he inserted another screw piton, but this one was half a metre long. He now unhitched his powered socket drive and, bracing himself against the ice, used a vibrating torque setting to screw the piton deep into the ice itself.

Now having finished dealing with this anchor, Alex surveyed his physical surroundings, called up various different overlays from the survey data of the asteroid, then paused to run a couple of searches, which were unfortunately limited to the computing available aboard the space planes. Yes, this was good; this expanded his horizons, put knowledge within his immediate reach and there would be more to come. But the greatest advantage was the one Neumann had not made generally known – and which you learned just before your implant went in. Alex now knew that he had a very good chance of living
forever
.

‘Number twelve is in,’ he stated, wondering how much wiser he might become in a thousand years.

‘So you managed not to turn yourself into a helicopter,’ replied Ghort jovially over his suit radio.

‘I managed it,’ said Alex, gazing along to the next anchor point, and noting again that Ghort seemed very reluctant to open implant-to-implant communication with him. He had learned that such communication tended to carry greater nuances, that some of what lay behind the words uttered tended to transfer over. This, Alex surmised, was the reason for Ghort’s reticence in that respect: in using such communication it was more difficult to lie.

Alex picked up the reel of cable, detached his line and, clutching the reel’s spindle, used his impeller to send himself towards the next anchor point. This was no easy task since he needed a lot more impetus to get himself moving, and to keep moving, and the heavy cable now unwinding tended to put him off course. Arriving at the illusory number hanging over the surface, he anchored the cable with another piton before stretching the next length of cable to the next point. Soon he would have to return to the base of the mooring line leading out to the space planes just for more cable. Finally, when he and others, including Akenon and Gladys, were done, the main chunks that the ice asteroid would be separated into, once the demolition charges detonated, would not fly off into space. That was the theory, anyway.

Ten hours later Alex was back aboard one of the space planes, which had acceleration chairs only in a forward section, behind the cockpit, for Ghort and his team; while the section behind had been turned into a temporary living accommodation, and the one behind that into an enlarged hold for their equipment, including Ghort’s robots. Alex, Akenon and Gladys already sat strapped in to watch the show on the big screen on the forward bulkhead.

‘There goes the line,’ said Gladys cheerfully, as the plane jerked and they saw the mooring line on the screen slacken into an arc. A moment later a motor thrummed somewhere and the line began to snake in.

‘We’re keeping the docking tube?’ asked Akenon.

Akenon seemed to have some kind of resentment for the team in the other space plane; he seemed to get offended when they came aboard this plane. This apparently was something to do with a failed affair and the loan of some station credit – Alex was unclear about the details. It all seemed very human and petty, and was certainly far below the concerns of Ghort and the similarly implanted team leader on the other plane, for they remained in constant communication. They tried to hide it, but while conducting implant-to-implant conversations they gave away the fact that they were talking by their facial expression and inadvertent gestures. Thinking of Ghort, Alex now glanced behind. If their team leader did not come soon he would miss the show. He returned his attention to the screen.

The ice asteroid hung in void, now static in relation to their space plane. When they first approached it, Alex had thought it looked vaguely like an anvil, albeit one that had partially melted. Their present perspective showed nothing of that shape – just an irregular lump of dirty ice. Alex used his implant to key into general com and the limited computer network around them, and thus picked up on a countdown.

‘Ten seconds,’ he stated.

‘Sure thing, O omniscient one,’ said Gladys.

Alex instantly relayed an audio recording of the word into a search to get the meaning. He guessed Gladys’s vocabulary was the kind you picked up if you constantly played VR fantasy games in your time off.

The count dropped to zero and the asteroid expanded, blowing out clouds of ice dust, then came a flash, sending rainbow colours skittering over its surface.

‘What the fuck?’ Akenon exclaimed.

‘Complex ices,’ Gladys explained, before Alex could do any research. ‘They fluoresce as they turn into normal water ices, and the demolition charges will have caused a bit of that.’

‘Thank you, O omniscient number two,’ said Akenon.

Alex stood up, the image on the screen now replaying in some part of his mind. The asteroid was heaving like some big beast taking a breath, becoming deformed, clear fragments visibly moving but the cables preventing it from flying apart. As he opened the door into their living quarters, he saw the mooring line snake out again and its explosive harpoon imbed itself into one of the larger chunks. Later they would have to return to detach the cables in preparation for those same chunks to be hauled inside the Owner’s new ship.