Owner 03 - Jupiter War (47 page)

‘It looks as if we’re all going to die anyway,’ said Ghort, his voice drifting in and out of audibility, while patched by a program in Alex’s implant. ‘But don’t you want to be the one to pull the trigger on me, Alex?’

Alex didn’t bother replying, he just gazed at the long sliver of metal that had missed impaling him to a wall of asteroidal ice, and then started searching for some way through the tangled mass of wreckage lying between him and Ghort. As he moved, he could feel the steady drag of either acceleration or deceleration, but it was mild and of little consequence. Some of the wreckage glowed red hot, but Alex realized that this did not account for the increase in light hereabouts. Shifting himself away from the ice wall, he obtained a clearer view, through a hole torn in the side of the old station ring, of the bright sulphurous surface of one of Jupiter’s moons speeding along below.

‘Or have you lost the stomach for it?’ Ghort asked, as Alex now wormed his way between splintered beams. ‘It was so much easier for you to shoot people in the back, so I guess facing up directly to someone who knows you’re coming and wants to kill you might not be quite to your taste.’

Alex paused, surprised at Ghort’s attitude. Obviously the man was hoping to lure Alex out from cover, but did he really think him so stupid? Did he think Alex could be goaded into irrational acts of anger? Apparently he did. Alex knew that, in general human terms, he was very naive, but when it came to this sort of thing, this hunting and killing, Alex was Methuselah. Such a misreading of someone, such a complete lack of judgement on Ghort’s part, further confirmed the futility of that man’s rebellion. It never had a chance of success anyway but, had it succeeded, the chipped would probably have been tearing at each other’s throats shortly afterwards.

Finally struggling out into the open, Alex studied his surroundings. He saw that something had smashed through the side of the ship, torn up the outer-ring infrastructure, then buried itself in a blast wall far ahead and over to the right. However, the enclosed section he had quitted just before the latest impact was undamaged, and doubtless Ghort was still covering the rectangular opening below, in the hope of springing an ambush. Alex moved to the right to get a clearer view, checking the direction arrows in his visor, but found them ghosting and intermittent after so many laser-com devices had been destroyed here.

‘It’s not a case of whether I have the stomach for it, Ghort. It’s just a job I do.’ He hadn’t actually wanted to speak, but the program running in his implant needed more communications data to key onto.

‘And now you do it for Alan Saul,’ Ghort replied bitterly. ‘Tell me, Alex, were you recruited by him for this treachery right from the start, or did you go and weasel your way into his good graces after you’d joined us?’

This response was enough. The red arrow steadied and pointed directly at a twisted beam junction covered by a metre-wide strengthening plate twenty metres ahead. Under magnification and protruding from behind it, Ghort’s hand was just visible, supporting the stock of his assault rifle – the barrel predictably directed down towards that same rectangular opening. Alex just needed to move over as far as the nearest blast wall and work his way along it to obtain a clear shot. He began to do so, but also remained curious about Ghort’s attitude.

‘Surely,’ he said, ‘you understand that, even without me here to stop you, you’ve had little chance of success? Did it never occur to you how convenient it seemed to be for you to gain access to explosives? Did you not question how easily you obtained the supposed location of his backups?’

‘So you actually believe the mythology he creates around himself,’ said Ghort. ‘You, too, have been fooled into believing in his omniscience. It’s all a front, Alex, and so long as people believe in him, they enslave themselves and do the majority of his work for him.’

Alex shook his head in irritation. ‘He spoke to me just a short while ago, and that was the first and only time since he spared my life. He simply inserted me in your group like a number in a formula he needed to solve, while at the same time he gave you enough rope with which to hang yourselves.’

‘Oh, you’re so grateful to be alive,’ Ghort spat contemptuously.

Alex paused by the blast wall. ‘Yes, I am. Just as I’m grateful for the possibility, because of him, that I might continue living for a very long time.’

‘As a slave.’

‘Yet with greater freedom than I have ever experienced before.’

‘But you are
not
free and you will never be free, and you could exist just like that for an eternity,’ said Ghort. ‘Those of us with fully functional brains recognize that as a kind of hell.’

‘I thought you said we were all going to die?’

‘Fuck you, Alex,’ Ghort replied, obviously lacking a sensible rejoinder.

‘So things would have been better without the Owner,’ said Alex. ‘With you in charge, we would all have been free to map out our own destinies and just do whatever we want. That’s rubbish. There is no real freedom anywhere: it’s simply an airy concept used to justify power grabs. We are all constrained in some way, either by those who rule over us, or by those we rule, or by our environments and by genetics. I just happen to prefer being ruled by the Owner, because he is the one most likely to keep me alive, and because I myself do not want to rule, and know of no one more worthy to rule over me.’

‘You’re an idiot, Alex.’

‘But I’m not the kind of idiot who wanted to kill the only one with any chance of keeping us alive or out of Serene Galahad’s hands. And I’m not the idiot who is now going to die.’

Ghort laughed. ‘I wouldn’t be so sure about that.’

Muzzle flashes abruptly lit the scene, and a couple of tracers showed Ghort was firing down towards the rectangular opening.

‘Well, I thought you had more patience, Alex,’ he continued. Then he laughed again and propelled himself from cover.

Alex opened fire, at least two bullets hitting home, but with no guarantee of penetration through a VC suit. Ghort nearly lost his rifle as he used his wrist impellers to drive himself downwards and out of sight. Alex squatted and propelled himself from the blast wall, heading for the same opening in the hope of intercepting Ghort there and finishing this pathetic drama. And, as he went, he was forced to wonder just who the hell Ghort had been firing at.

He landed above the opening, caught hold of a jag of twisted metal, pushed himself down and swung inside, bringing his rifle to bear. Ten metres back inside, two figures drifted in a mist of vapour leaking from suit breaches. One rifle was tumbling away behind them, and one was trailing at the end of a broken strap. As Alex pushed himself down for the floor and accelerated towards them, the larger one turned the smaller one round, pressing a sidearm up against her throat. Alex stumbled to a halt on recognizing the bloody face behind the cracked visor.

‘Seems I’ve got something . . . to bargain with now,’ panted Ghort, his voice hoarse, blood all around his mouth, and a leak under his armpit which the sealant just didn’t seem to be containing.

Alex gazed at the face of the Owner’s sister, noted the scabs of yellow breach resin on her stomach and her chest. He observed her cracked visor, and wondered how long she now had left to live.

‘But not . . . with you,’ Ghort added, turning the sidearm on Alex.

The Command

The secondary bridge looked little different from its primary twin but now, of course, Bartholomew did not have all his previous staff. With his stomach tight and his mind hardened as the
Command
limped sideways-on towards Io, he watched the end of the battle between the
Fist
and Saul’s ship. Both vessels had taken huge punishment, but in the end the
Fist
’s better armour and larger complement of weapons had decided the fight.

‘What’s your status?’ he asked Captain Oerlon.

The captain of the
Fist
had lost most of his beard; he had a burn dressing on the front of his neck and soot smears all over his face.

‘We’ve still got all our beam weapons, five railguns and two others that can be repaired within an hour. Main fusion drive is optimal, but the Alcubierre drive is going to be down for weeks. We lost two side-burners but that’s merely cut our manoeuvrability – which is irrelevant now.’

Bartholomew switched his gaze from the screen frame showing Oerlon to the main image – transmitted by the
Fist –
of Saul’s ship struggling with steering thrusters only to try and escape the pull of Io. The ship looked like a cratered moon, so many were the holes punched through it. Internal fires were visible, as was the massive damage to its Traveller engine. It was weapon-less, had no more drive than perhaps enough to steer it clear of impact with some of the mountains down below, and it was now going to go in hard. Bartholomew just hoped it would not go in hard enough to be completely destroyed, as he still needed to retrieve the Gene Bank data and samples, and possibly some prisoners.

‘You didn’t manage to hit his vortex generator,’ Bartholomew commented.

Oerlon shrugged with a wince. ‘No, and luckily he didn’t manage to hit ours either, or rather none of his shots penetrated its armour. Perhaps his drive is armoured similarly.’

‘Perhaps,’ Bartholomew allowed. Then, ‘Your casualties?’

‘Fifty-eight of my crew are dead, another twenty in the infirmary,’ Oerlon replied. ‘We also lost over three hundred of the primary assault group when he hit the shuttle bay – as they were ready aboard shuttles.’

That was the thing about space warfare, Bartholomew surmised. Unlike land battles on Earth, in this unforgiving environment the dead would always outnumber the wounded.

‘Other assault troop casualties?’

‘None,’ Oerlon replied. ‘Our armour took the sting out of the railgun missiles, and nothing penetrated through to core accommodation.’

Again Bartholomew watched Saul’s ship going in, and noted that the steering thrusters were now all pointing in the direction of travel as if to try and slow the vessel down rather than alter its course. He checked another frame on the screen displaying a map of Io’s surface and the changing predictions on the crash site. It would be coming down through the spume emitted from two volcanoes, its impact site a sulphur plain lying beyond. This wasn’t a site Bartholomew would have chosen, but he supposed Saul was all out of choices.

‘What about landing?’ Bartholomew asked.

‘We’ve got some repairs to make, but we should be good for it.’

Bartholomew nodded, feeling a degree of smugness. It had been on his suggestion that the
Fist
be constructed so as to enable it to land on a planet. Tactically it had always been a possibility that Saul, his ship having been partially disabled, might be able to take it down on Mars, or on one of the big planet satellites, in order to make repairs, sitting himself in some deep canyon to deter railgun fire from orbit. It was also the case that the few landing craft the
Fist
possessed would be vulnerable on their way down. Better that the whole ship could go down with all its weapons able to defend itself, and then pound Saul’s ship from close quarters before launching a ground assault. Luckily, after much argument, Calder had agreed, though neither of them had foreseen precisely this current scenario.

‘Well, I guess we can just sit back and watch the show for now,’ Bartholomew said, doing exactly that.

Saul’s ship was low now and trailing vapour. Abruptly, the screen image divided, showing both the view from the
Fist
above and another view from some kilometres behind the descending vessel. Bartholomew enjoyed Oerlon’s foresight. The man had obviously launched surveillance drones to follow the ship in. A better assessment could thus be made of just how much damage it had received after it came to rest but, more importantly, here was plenty of imagery for Serene Galahad to use in subsequent ETV broadcasts. Always a good idea to ensure that Earth’s dictator enjoyed a ringside seat and plenty of material to work with.

From the perspective of the drones, the ship soon lay below Io’s horizon, hurtling over a mosaic of browns, yellows and drifts of icy white dotted with pustules of glowing orange from silicate volcanoes. Ahead lay the twin spumes from the erupting volcanoes, which were blasting gas and molten matter out into space with the constancy of fire hoses. Perspective abruptly changed as the drones climbed. Saul’s ship entered the clouds surrounding these two fountains and abruptly turned mustard yellow from the sulphur deposited on its hull, leaking blue flames from those parts of it still partially molten. The view clouded as the drones entered this same area, then blanked out for a while.

The second view from orbit showed the ship punch its way through between those two eruptions, its steering thrusters spearing out long emerald flames. Saul must have boosted those thrusters somehow because, when the drones regained clear imagery, they were almost on top of his ship and had to decelerate. Even now, with his ultimate defeat in sight, Saul was still managing to surprise them.

A sulphurous plain sped past below, then again the drones became blind as the ship travelled over some kind of white mass and blew up a cloud of icy dust. The vessel had by some means dropped lower abruptly and Bartholomew surmised that Saul must have used the gyroscopic effect of his vortex generator to reposition it. Next, from orbit, the admiral watched a smoky line scar its way across the plain for three kilometres, before primary impact. The ship then ploughed in, the loose surface below somehow preventing it bouncing, but the impact still causing it to shed wreckage. It skidded for a further two kilometres, mounding up sulphur compounds ahead of it, before finally grinding to a halt. Some half an hour later the dust had cleared enough for a close drone view of it. Saul’s ship lay with the wreckage of its fusion drive buried, partially tilted on its axis, brown and weirdly green chemical smoke rising from glowing holes in its hull.

‘And so it ends,’ said Oerlon.

‘Not quite,’ said Bartholomew. ‘He still has his robots and whatever crew have survived. We must never underestimate this man.’