Owner 03 - Jupiter War (34 page)

‘I can only apologize,’ said Elkin, shooting a nervous glance at Sack.

Serene gave a dismissive wave of her hand. This was too serious a situation for her to start killing off essential personnel right now. Maybe later Elkin could pay the price for her lapse.

Serene selected the list of Inspectorate personnel and ran it through another program that gave her a list of their implant codes, which she then fed into the Scour activation program. She could kill all of them this way but, if she did, it would become obvious that the Scour was far too specific.

‘You’ve been feeding this through to Tactical?’

‘I have, ma’am.’ Elkin gestured to one of her blank-faced aides. ‘First assessment is that even if Calder’s retention of these people was not originally done with hostile intent, it will be now. He will know that he has been found out and, due to the consequences of that, Tactical puts a high probability on him making some sort of attack on you. However, he will not move against you until after the
Command
and
Fist
have departed under Alcubierre drive.’

Serene said nothing for a moment as she considered that, and realized she had been stupid. Of course her personnel weren’t outnumbered. She nodded as if this was nothing new to her. ‘Because of the troops aboard the
Fist
, obviously.’

‘Still supposing the likelihood of some sort of attack on you, Tactical advises against making the obvious move of ordering the
Fist
to dock again and using its troops to negate that potential threat. If the
Fist
was to return to the station, it seems highly likely that Calder would then realize something is wrong, and act accordingly. His most likely response is to fire the station’s railguns at the
Fist
, and either disable or destroy it.’

Elkin looked even sicker now – scared to complete her tactical assessment. Serene held up a hand to silence her, then called up a station schematic and noted that the new dock Calder had suggested Clay Ruger’s shuttle should arrive at was without a readergun network, and was quite some distance from both the escape drop-ship and the space-plane docks. She also checked timings and noted that Ruger would be arriving after the
Fist
and the
Command
were scheduled to depart.

. . . the likelihood of some sort of attack on you . . .

Calder possessed his own private army, her undercover operatives here had been removed, Calder’s Inspectorate staff had been hindering her own security staff when, if Calder had wanted to avoid discovery, it would have been better for him to have ordered them to keep their heads down. Now it seemed that Calder had directed Ruger – and consequently herself – to an inter-station shuttle dock
without
a readergun network. Calder was moving against her, of that she was now certain.

‘So what’s the best Tactical can give me?’ she finally asked.

Elkin swallowed drily before commencing. ‘You can send your security teams against the Inspectorate complement here, which will give you time to get to the drop shuttle and thus get away from the station. But at the same time you must also order Bartholomew to fire on the station to disable its railguns and control infrastructure, otherwise Calder will be able to hit you on the way down. This gives you an approximate sixty per cent chance of escaping alive, though there is an above eighty per cent chance of both the
Fist
and the
Command
being disabled.’

Not good enough.
Serene coldly contemplated the data available to her. It seemed likely that Calder had planned some sort of attack upon her in this new space dock, once Ruger arrived. She must turn this situation to her own advantage.

‘Vaughan has the usual complement of hardware, I take it?’ she enquired.

‘Enough for a small war,’ Elkin replied, ‘but the Inspectorate personnel aboard will have access to the same sort of hardware.’

‘I don’t know why I bother with Tactical,’ remarked Serene contemptuously. ‘We take them in the space dock.’ She paused reflectively. ‘My security team is kept ready for all circumstances, including vacuum combat. Besides, they will be equipped with VC suits, while I note that, though armoured, the Inspectorate personnel here still wear ordinary uniforms.’

Elkin nodded doubtfully.

‘I take it some of Vaughan’s people are already present in the new dock, to oversee the arrangements for Clay Ruger’s arrival.’

Elkin blinked, rubbed a finger at a menu control located at her temple, and at length replied, ‘Yes, Vaughan has assembled a team there, but station Inspectorate personnel are making all the arrangements.’

Viewing the big desk screen, Serene noted that the tug was no longer firing its main engine, and Earth loomed large behind it and the attached
Scourge.
Meanwhile, the shuttle was out of view. Despite her suggestion that the
Fist
and the
Command
should use the
Scourge
for target practice, Calder had urged that it be dismantled instead. Yes, a lot of it would be highly radioactive – and therefore only good for scrap – but most of the engines were still fine, including the main one, and the plutonium and uranium from the nuclear arsenal could also be salvaged. Serene studied it for a while longer, but could see no ulterior motive from Calder for recommending salvage. He had obviously still been playing the part of a loyal citizen, while making his own arrangements elsewhere.

Rather than use her palmtop, she summoned up to this same screen a number of internal cam views of the station itself, and quickly located the shuttle dock Ruger would be heading for. The view inside showed a great hall with airlocks running down one side, and two levels of station monorail lines running down the middle. Swarming about the area were armed Inspectorate personnel, as well as numbers of Serene’s own security staff.

‘How many?’ she asked.

‘Two hundred of ours, six hundred of Calder’s people,’ Elkin offered instantly.

Serene continued staring at the screen. She had hoped for an easy option here. She had hoped that the Inspectorate personnel would be wearing their usual uniforms. It would then have been simplicity itself for Vaughan to plant a charge on one of the space doors, and then allow vacuum decompression to deal with her problem. Foolish hope that, because Calder was not so stupid as to allow his people into anywhere as vulnerable as a space dock without the requisite gear. She could now only distinguish his people from her own by the older design of VC suit they wore.

‘Tell Vaughan to get himself and all his team here at once.’

‘Ma’am?’

‘Just do as you’re told.’

All her options were running out. If she took Tactical’s advice, she could lose everything: she could lose Alan Saul, she could lose the Gene Bank data – whether acquired from Saul or Ruger – and she could lose her own life.

‘I take it Vaughan is by now aware of the situation?’ she enquired.

‘Yes, ma’am.’

Serene nodded, then selected the screen tab on her palmtop for the Scour activation program. For a moment she hesitated, considering adding Calder’s name to the list, but decided against that, before abruptly switching to another screen and sitting back. No, not yet – considering how fast the Scour acted, there was still time, and she needed to think hard about the consequences of taking this step.

Everyone aboard the station would soon realize that the entire Inspectorate complement had died from the Scour. That information would then spread around Earth orbit, and without doubt it would eventually reach Earth. It would then be obvious that the Scour was a lot more specific than previously supposed, that merely air-transmission or some similar form of contagion were unlikely. She would have to concoct some sort of story to cover this outbreak.

Calder . . .

The man’s main discipline was nano-technology, so surely it would be possible to contrive some way for him to take the blame. This could all be down to an assassination attempt against her and how he used the Scour to remove the personnel protecting her. Yes, something like that should work. There would be loose ends to tie up, but none that could not be neatly knotted by a strangulation collar, bullet or adjustment cell. Perhaps she could also contrive some sort of alliance between Calder and Alan Saul, as that would neatly—

‘Ma’am?’

‘What?’ Serene whirled on Elkin.

‘All your delegates are assembled ready in video conference, and we are currently recording for ETV their ratification of a pardon for all real or imagined crimes committed by Clay Ruger and Pilot Officer Trove,’ she said. ‘It’s being transmitted here right now, and will soon be ready for insertion into the station ETV broadcast.’

Serene stared at her blankly, not quite understanding for a moment. Then it all clicked into place in her mind. She must never forget the importance of ensuring that Clay Ruger actually began transmission of the Gene Bank data.

‘Vaughan also reports that his team is fully in place around you, while Admiral Bartholomew – confirmed by Calder – has tightened his estimate of departure to just one hour’s time.’

‘I see,’ said Serene, wondering where the intervening time had gone.

Ruger’s shuttle should be docking in about three hours, which should allow her enough leeway to have things sorted out and cleared up for his arrival. It wouldn’t do to have hundreds of Scour victims floating around inside the space dock when the ETV broadcast began – therefore Vaughan and his men would have to deal with that.

Serene tapped on the tab of the Scour-activation program, poised a finger over the return key projected on the table before her, hesitating for just a moment as she remembered the first time she had done this and the pompous words she had spoken then to the man Ruger had replaced. She then brought her finger down.

Argus

Acceleration pushed Hannah back into her seat as the new train headed out towards what someone had dubbed the ‘Meat Locker’. This newly built hall was sandwiched within the lattice walls between Arcoplex Two and the Arboretum. The thing was a kilometre long, two hundred metres wide and extended the depth of the gap between the two lattice walls, which was a hundred metres. Down one side was a station into which the vehicle now slowed, throwing Hannah forward against her straps. Once it had stopped, airlock tubes extended from the near wall to each of the three carriages, the tube accessing the rear cargo carriage being oval in cross-section and ten metres across at its widest point. As all these tubes connected, Hannah could hear movement from the rear as robots began unloading the next batch of components for the Meat Locker.

She unstrapped and propelled herself over to the door leading into the nearest airlock tube, checked the ready light, opened the door and passed through. A moment later, she found herself in the new hall itself and looking around. Directly ahead of her the wall was honeycombed, with partially assembled cryogenic pods protruding here and there, with the golden centipedes of Saul’s conjoining robots busily at work on them. Over to her right the more conventional station robots were busy ferrying out the cargo, dispatching crates and empty pods through the air to be fielded by their more up-to-date brethren. There were humans here, too: some of the chipped controlling the older robots, engineers working on individual pods, and at the far end of the wall, beside a pod extending near what she supposed she might call the floor – such nomenclature in zero gravity always being difficult – stood a small group apart. She propelled herself towards them, correcting her trajectory with the wrist impeller of her suit because, despite the place being pressurized, using spacesuits was a precaution all ship’s personnel took in any new builds.

Approaching the group, she slowed and brought herself clumsily face-down towards the floor, but still managed to engage one gecko boot, to secure herself there while she stood properly. One of the figures was without a spacesuit – stripped down to his undershorts while Dr Raiman attached stick-on sensors to his exposed skin. As Hannah walked closer, Da Vinci waved to her cheerfully. She raised her hand in not so cheerful acknowledgement, nodded to Langstrom and the other two officers present, then turned to the remaining individual.

‘So you’ve finally come out of your pit,’ she remarked, glancing round to locate the spidergun, squatting over by the further wall. ‘Why’s that?’

‘To offer moral support,’ Saul replied.

‘It would have to be just that,’ Hannah observed flatly. ‘We mere humans are now expected to govern and police ourselves, which means you’ve effectively washed your hands of us. What’s that decision all about, then? A separation of church and state?’

‘Within the limits and constraints of them being aboard my ship, I have given the people living here more freedom. I shall see, in time, what they do with it.’

‘That’s big of you,’ Hannah snapped, then wished she hadn’t. ‘Anyway, I would have thought, with everything that’s going on, you’d want to stay at the centre, and in utter control.’

‘Generally my location is irrelevant and, anyway, the ship is in no danger right now.’ He paused for a second, his pink eyes blinking. ‘The
Vision
cannot harm us, and I can get us on the move the moment the other two ships start heading our way.’

‘I detect some doubt.’

He shook his head. ‘I’m just failing to perceive what Galahad hopes to achieve. Unless those two ships have some way of viewing normal space through an Alcubierre warp, and thus tracking us, sending them against us is a futile gesture.’

‘I hope you’re right,’ said Hannah, studying him more closely.

With the Mach-effect drive operating to keep the ship stable and the EM shield protecting them from the ionization in the flux tube, all radio communications were shut down. Previously this had meant that, without a direct optic connection, Saul would be disconnected from the ship’s systems, but Hannah could see he had used the same work-around as he had employed against Salem Smith on first sending his robots against him. An optic cable extended from the socket in his temple down into the neck ring of his suit, while, attached to the shoulder of his suit, was a flat matt disc with green pin lights flickering and glinting around its rim. He was laser-linked to receivers on the robots here, on his spidergun, and on any other item of equipment that used some form of remote control – and therefore through all of these into the ship’s systems.