Owner 03 - Jupiter War (3 page)

‘Did he have to kill them all?’ she asked abruptly, then winced. Where had that come from?

‘I’m guessing he didn’t have time to be selective, Hannah.’ Le Roque’s tone sounded somewhat patronizing over the com link. ‘And if he hadn’t been so drastic, we might all either be dead or imprisoned by now.’

Yes, those were the plain facts, but she didn’t want to apologize for her outburst. Why the hell should she? She’d been shot at, she’d killed people, become an unwilling participant in slaughter, damn it! Still, she pulled back on any further outbursts. Le Roque had suffered similar woes, and he had also lost friends. She realized she was behaving like a brat, and it was time to stop.

‘So, what do we do while he’s gone?’ she enquired as she began heading for the arcoplex elevator at this end. ‘Has he relayed any instructions?’

Le Roque emitted a dry laugh. ‘Oh, he’s given us some chores to be getting on with while he’s out of contact in a cave system down there. The detail on them came close to crashing the system, until he slowed things down a little.’

‘What?’

‘We all have our instructions, and reconstruction is ramping up to the maximum possible given the limited power available, and we’ve restarted mining operations on the asteroid. I’m trying to get a handle on it, but it’s not all obvious. He has some robots building a fuel drop tank for the Mars space plane down there, and Brigitta and Angela are running Robotics at full capacity.’

‘More robots?’ Hannah queried.

‘More robots,’ Le Roque confirmed, ‘though we have to await some new schematics that he’ll send once he’s back in contact. We also have provisional – but yet to be approved – designs for thousands of different station components, including what look like new arcoplex spindles.’

Arcoplex spindles?
Hannah wondered as she stepped into the elevator. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘I’m heading back to my cabin now.’ She cut the link.

Suddenly feeling very weary, Hannah leaned back against one wall of the elevator, almost glad that the damage to Arcoplex Two had made it necessary to cut its spin again. She was pleased not to have to trudge through an artificial one gravity to her quarters near her laboratory. As the doors opened to admit her to the arcoplex, she opened her suit visor and was immediately hit by the smell of burned plastic and cooked human flesh, and sharply reminded of what had happened here. To distract herself she thought about the meaning of the instructions Saul had issued.

He seemed to be mapping out the immediate future and keeping everyone busy, but what about afterwards? Obviously he was aiming to rebuild Argus Station, almost certainly turning it into the spaceship he had once named it. Doubtless he intended to ensure it was self-sufficient, manoeuvrable, powerful . . . and then? Did he intend to move against Earth or move away? Did she, in all honesty, have any chance of understanding his future aims and divining his present plans?

Mars

Saul had understood, from the moment Var breathed easily again, that it was time to start acting and stop reacting. Images from Earth he had viewed during his descent to Mars showed that, while the
Scourge
had been out here hunting them, Serene Galahad had not been idle. He counted at least ten mass drivers operating, the framework of three huge ships taking shape amidst the ever-expanding Mars Traveller construction station, also a structure down on Earth that already looked like a test bed for something similar to the Rhine drive. If he continued just
reacting
they would die, so he needed to work harder and faster than the sum industrial and technical might of Earth.

‘We’ll need more power than what’s available out here,’ said Var.

Saul focused his human facet on her, aware already that he was dealing with someone angry and prideful and little in love with being merely a subordinate. Whether his sister had always been like that he did not have sufficient memory of her to know. He also wondered if her recent experiences here might have changed her.

‘Fusion should supply enough power to begin the work, but, yes, I agree: we need more power.’ He turned and stepped into the cave. ‘I’ll take Argus close to the sun when we are done here.’

‘And what do you intend to get
done
here?’

‘As I said, I want to get the Mars-format space plane up and running,’ he said. ‘The people here will be relocated to Argus while I strip Antares Base of anything useful, like the fusion reactor.’

‘You’ll give them no choices?’ she asked, apparently pleased by the idea.

‘They can stay on Mars and die, if they so choose,’ he said bluntly.

The floor of the cave was uneven, and in places they had to scramble over boulders, after which Saul found himself panting, despite weighing just over a third of what he weighed on Earth. Deeper in, he began to note calcite formations – the nubs of stalactites and stalagmites that had never had a chance to get as big as anything similar on Earth. They had to be billions of years old.

‘But, still, there is the problem of Rhone,’ Var observed.

Saul grimaced, annoyed with himself now because he had not thought to bring a weapon. Just getting here and rescuing his sister had been an uncharacteristically overriding concern, while anything after that, down here, had seemed of little importance compared to everything else he had needed to do. Now, because he hadn’t been paying attention, the problems down here could become critical. Once out in the open again, he could take over their systems, but there were no readerguns he could use to remove Rhone. He and Var could sneak in and maybe seize some weapons – he had confidence enough in his own abilities in that respect – but all that seemed untidy, and there was still a chance that one or both of them might get killed.

‘What do you suggest?’ he asked, turning to study her.

‘I want to kill Rhone,’ she said tightly, leaning against the cave wall and seemingly grateful for the pause. ‘But that’s personal. Maybe, if you can link me through, I can talk to the whole base – let Rhone and the rest know the situation and get their response.’

It was vague, imprecise.

‘You could demand that Rhone step down,’ he suggested.

‘I don’t want to be
their
leader.’

‘You’ve fallen out of love with the idea?’ Saul commented, moving on.

‘Give me something to build and teams to command, and I’m fine. Making life-and-death decisions about people’s future I’m not so fine with.’

Of course, her pride had taken a heavy blow, and now Saul had offered her a way out. She wanted to deal with the nuts and bolts of a major space engineering project, as if that would be so much easier.

‘I collected what data we have on you,’ he said. ‘On top of all your other qualifications you’re a synthesist, which makes you much more qualified to lead people than many others who would like the job, including this Rhone. Sometimes the job chooses you and there are no other options.’

He considered Hannah up on Argus as he said this: how sometimes it was necessary to accept responsibility because really there was no one else who could.

They trudged on through the darkness with long slow steps, their suit lights stabbing ahead of them. In his mind, Saul tracked their position on an old seismic map of this cave, pausing occasionally to study his surroundings. Some hours of silence passed as they laboured on, at one point crossing the bed of an ancient underground stream scattered with rounded pebbles. As he paused to aim his light in each direction along the pipe cut through the rock on either side of them, Saul understood that Var’s decision to take Antares Base underground had been the best one in the circumstances, but that would have come to nothing once the might of Earth reached out here. It really did not matter how capable were the individuals or minor groups scattered about the solar system, because they simply could not bring to bear the kind of resources Serene Galahad had available. He started to move on, but Var suddenly swore and sprawled on the ground.

‘You okay?’ he asked.

She got back up onto all fours, then probed her side with one hand. ‘I need to rest.’

‘Are you hurt?’

‘Cracked rib, but that’s not my main problem.’ She stood up. ‘Thinking I was going to die, I didn’t waste much of the little time I had left on sleeping.’

‘We’ll take a break here,’ Saul said. ‘Do you have food?’

‘Some.’

‘Then eat and rest.’ Saul stepped over beside the wall of the stream bed and sat down, feeling grateful for a break himself. Var sat opposite him, sucking from her suit spigot for a while, but did not seem inclined to talk further. He watched her eyelids sag then finally close, detected the change in her breathing, and envied her – she’d fallen straight into a deep sleep. Checking his own physical condition, he felt no need for sleep, for he had slept long enough, but did feel the need for his body to recharge. He sucked from his own suit spigot – a protein paste packed with sugars, vitamins and minerals – until it was dry. He then switched over to fluids and gulped down a litre of some unidentifiable citrus liquid. Then he consciously ramped up the activity of his organs, cleaning out poisons and recharging all round, doing the best to bring his body to optimum efficiency in the shortest time. But even all this, involving considerable detail, occupied only a small portion of his intellect, so he considered other matters meanwhile.

Saul summoned up in his mind a schematic of the standard construction robot, along with ideas he had played with before about how it could be vastly improved. At present it was a singular machine and, though it looked like an ant, the idea of social insects had not been taken to its logical conclusion, and beyond. The robots must be designed as parts of a logical whole – all their components rendered interchangeable down to even their minds. Robots that consisted of three body parts and three sets of limbs should be made capable of both separating and conjoining. He visualized robots with just one body section and one pair of limbs mating up with similar fellows to create robots with any number of body sections and pairs of limbs, even up to centipede monsters. Outlining this general idea, he next concentrated on the specific: the alloys and meta-materials to be used, the dimensions of all the components, a new design of processor to run a whole new kind of software. Seven hours later, by the time Var reopened her eyes, he had perfected every detail.

‘I’m sorry about that,’ she apologized.

‘No problem at all,’ he replied, standing up. He really didn’t resent the delay at all because he felt stronger after those hours of respite, and knew he had designed something truly inspired, even for him.

When they moved on again, Var wanted to talk. Hours passed as she picked at him for details of recent events. In turn, he tried to fill in some of the blanks in his recollection of her history, and occasionally ventured to fill the blanks in his own. He thus learned more about their parents, about their sheltered upbringing, about the tutors he drained of knowledge and discarded, and his steady progress to adulthood. It was all distantly interesting, but Saul could find no emotional connection there. Really, Var was telling him stories about someone else. Then, coming with a kind of inevitability, her next question focused on something he had been skirting around within his own mind.

‘So, you’ll turn Argus Station into something bigger and better – a spaceship the like of which has never been seen before,’ she said. ‘Then what?’

There was the question. Until they first started up the Rhine drive, every effort made had been towards survival. Now the
Scourge
was no longer a problem and, with luck, it would be some time yet before Earth could send anything else against them.

‘Then I leave,’ he replied.

‘Leave?’

‘The solar system.’

‘There will be some aboard Argus who won’t like that.’

‘I’d like to offer them an alternative, but that’s not feasible. I could take Argus to Earth right now, but there are Earth’s defences to consider and also the fact – which I have made plain to them – that their next destination once they set foot on Earth would be an adjustment cell.’

Glittering dust still hung in the air in front of them, even though it had been several days since the mining ahead had ceased. Many more hours had passed since their rest and, glancing at Var, Saul could see that she was again as weary as he himself felt. It would be better, he reckoned, if they did not approach the base in this state. Recollecting what he had seen on the way down, he said, ‘There are some pressurized cabins at the head of the shaft this Martinez began opening out?’

‘Yes – and I don’t think Rhone would have had time to close them down.’ She paused thoughtfully. ‘In fact, I wonder what he is doing, and what he now thinks is best for the base. He must know by now that the
Scourge
isn’t coming here, and that puts him in a bad position. The base either has to be moved underground entirely or everything that has already been moved underground has to be brought back to the surface. Will your people up above have spoken to him?’

‘I left instructions for them to ignore any communications sent from anyone but me.’

‘He’ll be shitting himself,’ said Var. ‘He gambled on Serene Galahad and lost, so he might now be desperate enough to do something stupid.’

Metal glinted under their suit lights and in the next moment they stepped out onto an area of compacted rubble. Looking up, Saul could see, silhouetted against the night sky of Mars, the scaffold leading up to the surface and the derrick above with the lifting platform firmly in place underneath it. No connection here with Argus which, by his calculation, sat just above the horizon and would fall behind it in just another half-hour. He would have liked to have put it geostationary above Antares Base but, with two moons whipping about out there, it was easier to put it into a stable orbit.

The cave directly ahead had been greatly enlarged and at their limit their suit beams vaguely picked out regular shapes: stacks of regolith blocks brought down from the old base, an ATV plus trailer, piles of equipment in plastic packing cases and other stacks of steel frames rescued from a geodesic dome. There were robots here, too, just a couple of them looming in the dark like steel herons. Saul reached out to them and found them on standby, but resisted the temptation to power them up and seize control of them. There seemed no point.