Owner 03 - Jupiter War (39 page)

‘So what now?’ asked Langstrom, folding his arms, still reserving judgement.

‘The bomb first,’ said Var.

He acknowledged that with a nod. ‘I suppose I could do something there.’

‘You must. What have you got to lose?’

Langstrom watched her warily for a moment, then reached up to touch his fone. ‘Colson, I want Disposal One over to the Owner’s sanctum. I’ve an unconfirmed statement that someone might have planted a copper-head armour-piercing bomb against the outer wall. I want you to run a full search and report back.’ After a pause as he listened to the reply, he calmly continued, ‘Yes, maybe he does know about it, but you still do the search, and you still disarm anything you find there. Is that understood?’ After another pause, ‘Yes, right now.’ Langstrom lowered his fingers from the fone.

Var wasn’t sure if she was relieved that things were now in motion. She couldn’t help but feel that the police commander was only humouring her because she was Alan’s sister.

Too many assumptions . . .

‘If they do find something we’ll have some physical evidence to act on,’ he conceded. And in that moment she knew she had lost him; even if he believed her, he thought there was no reason to do anything about it. Langstrom trusted too much in Saul and therefore did not follow her reasoning, did not see her brother’s arrogance and contempt for humanity.

‘We should head to the outer ring,’ she declared. ‘We’ll need some of your men.’

‘You have no indication of where he’s supposedly concealed his backups out there,’ he stated.

‘None at all, but they are supposedly guarded by a spidergun,’ she replied, pulling herself down to sit at a console, before sliding across the overseer’s office manual control.

‘We won’t be able to trace that spidergun, especially if he’s trying to keep these backups hidden.’ He paused, frowning, as the mobile building lurched into motion, then he just gave a shrug. ‘However, these chipped rebels of yours are still dark which means, if they are moving around out there, they’re moving through cam black spots. There are just two places—’

‘Attention all personnel,’ Saul suddenly announced over the PA system. ‘I have evidence that the two remaining Earth warships are currently on their way out towards us. We will therefore be undergoing severe acceleration, so adhere to fusion-drive safety protocols for the moment.’

Var wavered for a second, then instructed her overseer’s office to lock itself down, watching through the windows as it clamped its claws about nearby protuberances before dropping to press the gecko pads on its belly against the metal below. Langstrom could not hide his relief, for they would not be going anywhere for a while. Var suppressed her frustration and contented herself with the knowledge that the chipped rebels would similarly be hindered and, if caught away from some place of safety during the coming acceleration, some of them might be hindered dead. It then occurred to her to wonder why the ship was undergoing such acceleration rather than immediately engaging the Rhine drive. It seemed a pointless thing to do because, surely, once the Rhine drive engaged they were safe until it cut out again, probably deep in interstellar space and far away from Earth and its concerns?

Saul noted a bomb-disposal team had been ordered to head towards his sanctum and, despite his warning, were still following their orders. They weren’t to know that the device Langstrom had dispatched them to find wasn’t really a problem – Saul knew, because he had seen it being made – so he spoke to their leader directly: ‘Colson, get yourself and your men back into some acceleration chairs.’

The man addressed looked up at the nearest cam in the suiting room. ‘Commander Langstrom has ordered me to search for a copper-head explosive on the outer wall of your sanctum.’

‘And I am ordering you to stand down. Langstrom is mistaken. There is no explosive.’

Colson and the rest looked relieved, as they quickly headed out of the suiting room and back the way they had come. Saul pondered for a microsecond the fact that, while he had decided to leave the humans here to look after themselves, he had interfered yet again. Then he focused on other concerns.

If he had engaged the Rhine drive immediately, it would be knocked out before his ship built up enough real space momentum to carry him to the
Vision
. He needed to be closer and his velocity needed to be higher. By now the crew of the
Vision
had probably found some way to work around their blindness, therefore he needed to take some risks. He mentally slid into the controls of the Traveller engine, while announcing, ‘Prepare for further acceleration.’ In the engine, he overrode safeties; he put back online two combusters that automatics had shut down; ramped up everything as high as possible without regard for the dirty radioactive wake he would leave. With a huge rumble, the ship shuddered and accelerated, its drive flame sputtering like a gas torch running out of oxygen, a red line of radioactive tritium sketching out behind the ship. Acceleration increased, climbed steadily to one gravity and then beyond. The whole ship’s structure was protesting, but still it wasn’t enough.

Next risk: without notifying the proctors, Saul ramped up the Mach-effect drive, further stabilizing the ship’s structure and increasing its acceleration. There was a danger now that the crew of the
Vision
would spot the disparity between actual acceleration and what the Traveller engine was capable of. But the Mach-effect was a card he needed to play now. Hands gripping the arms of his chair, he waited – ten minutes, twenty – as velocity began approaching what he required, and the distance between the two ships rapidly diminished.

Time, now.

‘Prepare for possible impact,’ he announced, knowing that most people were already prepared, and showing that he still cared enough to deliver the extra warning.

The proctors, and the robots they controlled, were the most vulnerable now, and he waited just thirty seconds until certain they were all locked down in their respective sectors located around the ship’s skeleton. During a final pause, he ascertained that everything within his purview was as it should be as the ship strained all around him, centred now on Europa and on the
Vision
.

‘Engaging Rhine drive,’ he then announced.

The colours changed. Jupiter shifted through the spectrum until it glowed a fluorescent orange, its red spot glaring like a ruby held up to the sun. The ship itself seemed to be trying to fold itself in towards some centre point – and then the stars went out. Saul counted down microseconds then, when the entire ship crashed and the warp went out, he felt a momentary satisfaction at this proof of a weapon that could knock out the Alcubierre warp, and chagrin, because he had not divined the nature of that weapon. As an old expression went, he had been unable to see the wood for the trees.

Of course, a warp missile . . .

Then a blast wave slammed into the ship, peeling away hull plates so the glare of atomic fire could peek inside, and as he lost over sixty per cent of his system, he added the thought:

. . . and one carrying an atomic warhead.

Backup

The idea of backing up a human mind, as you would back up one of the drives on a computer or any other data, has been with us from the days of recording to magnetic tape. However, in essence, we have been backing up our minds ever since the first cavemen cut notches in sticks as a memory aid. Cave paintings were the human mind rendered in vegetable dyes, cuneiform expressed it in clay, and books are even closer representations of the thought processes of those who wrote them. But, of course, none of these is an exact copy of a human mind, but just small parts of it. We are, in essence, information and every piece of information from our mind that we record is part of our mind. Thus it can be seen that the only drawback of such a back-up technology for the whole of a human mind is the exactitude of that recording. It is certain, for example, that no computer storage could possibly copy all the chemical and quantum atomic processes within the human brain, so any type of copy made could never be exact. However, a human being is never the same from moment to moment, since we are all in a state of perpetual flux, so the copying process could be seen as just part of that flux. The only reason for reluctance to accept this technology as a real possibility stems from religious thinking about a human soul, combined with the contrary belief in the finality of death.

Argus

They left Jean-Pierre strapped against one of the stanchions of the cageway. Most of them were bruised, and one of them was supporting a broken arm after that last massive acceleration. Jean-Pierre had been unlucky: slamming headfirst into a wall and his neck snapping; dead before any of them could reach him.

‘But he still lives,’ Ghort opined, referring to his backup.

The lack of enthusiastic response from the rest told Alex that, though they accepted their potential immortality on an intellectual level, the fact of physical death was not so easy to step around. Maybe some of them were having second thoughts.

The Rhine drive engaged just minutes before they reached the weapons cache, then disengaged just a moment later. The ensuing blast added to their bruises and caused two further broken bones: one a finger and the other in Ghort’s foot. The idea of mortality became of even greater concern as their suits notified them of radiation levels, and how they were way beyond safe limits.

‘Not much data available,’ said Ghort, grimacing in pain. ‘Seems the
Vision
hit us with a nuclear warhead, and that has taken us out of drive.’

‘Lucky shot,’ Marsin added.

Alex said nothing, though he felt that it had to have been more than a lucky shot to hit them with an atomic warhead, since they were probably moving at a good portion of the speed of light. It had to have been a practically miraculous shot.

As they reached their weapons cache, which had been inserted in a three-metre-thick composite blast wall, four metres out from another wall of iron-hard asteroidal ice, both of which were part of the elaborate armouring around the vortex generator, he waited for one of them to state the obvious.

‘Look,’ said Marsin, as two of the others towed the crates out of concealment, ‘if we do this now, we’ll probably just be handing ourselves over to Serene Galahad. We need to wait until we’re out of the solar system and safe.’

Ghort shook his head. ‘You seem to put too much faith in the abilities of one man, so perhaps you’re starting to believe in his mythological status.’ He turned and gazed at the ring of faces gathered around him. ‘Whether Alan Saul is alive or not makes little difference to our chances of survival. We can control the robots, we can control this ship, and we can achieve as much as he ever could.’

Alex wondered just when Ghort had slid from being merely a rebel into being a
delusional
rebel, nay even a rebel possessing delusions of grandeur. By all means dismiss mythology and anything based on faith, but facts should never be ignored. Saul was way beyond each and every one of them, and probably beyond all of them combined.

‘What about the proctors?’ someone piped up.

Alex gazed at the woman who had spoken – the same one who had first escorted him into that meeting in Arcoplex One. She was only considering this now? He studied the rest of his fellows and realized that being mentally hooked into computers, also able to control robots and knowing you were practically immortal was no cure for naivety. Perhaps, in reality, it worsened such a condition. Perhaps the feelings of godlike power had led to a supreme arrogance and the people around him found it difficult to accept that some things were still outside their control, that some things lay beyond their abilities, and that there was someone who could crush them like a bug under heel.

Ghort opened the crate and began distributing the weapons.

‘We have to do this now, else we’ll probably never get a chance later,’ he said.

Perhaps ‘delusional’ was too mild a description.

Alex received his weapon, along with the two grenades he himself had made, which he hooked onto his belt. Like the rest of them, he checked the action of his Kalashtech, inspected the ammo clip and received further ammo to drop into a belt pouch. As he did so, he nodded to himself with a feeling of deep sadness. They had been given every opportunity to see the error of their ways, and yet they were stubbornly persisting with their silly plan. He considered what a coincidence it appeared that he should have ended up in the work team of the leader of these rebels, and though he believed in coincidence, he knew enough to recognize when it wasn’t there.

‘So I am precisely where you want me?’ he said, voicelessly speaking to none of those around him, just into the system.

The reply was instant, perhaps because his message had been expected.

‘I wondered when you would figure it out,’ replied Alan Saul.

‘They just don’t understand how much you can see, do they?’

‘But you do, Alex,’ Saul replied. ‘Now, why is that?’

‘Because I knew myself to be a simple creature programmed like a machine, and I know myself to be a simple creature now. I just looked at the odds.’

‘Never underestimate yourself. Your own self-knowledge has led you to understand that the simple answer, as Occam tells us, is often the right one. You do not overestimate your strengths, nor do you underestimate your enemies. You know where the greatest dangers lie, and how best to choose your allies.’

Ghort was leading the way now, between the blast wall and a wall of ice, the others trooping dutifully after him. Now set on their course, they could only murmur weak protests and ask the questions they should have asked long ago. Were all humans programmed thus for self-destruction? Alex wondered.

‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked.

‘What you must,’ Saul replied, whereupon Alex knew the conversation had ended.

The Owner had other concerns: the survival of his ship, countering the forces of Earth arrayed against him, perhaps the contemplation of his route into future centuries or millennia. The chipped rebels were a small matter, and one he had countered with minimal effort, almost an autonomous one, simply by inserting Alex in place like an extra number in a formula.