The Departure (39 page)

“How?” Langstrom sat in his office, gazing at station schematics on his screen.

“Smith’s adjustment cell block is only a hundred metres away from your barracks, and it’s situated close to the Political Office.”

Both the adjustment cell block and the Political Office lay between Arcoplexes One and Two, and had been built well inside the lattice walls. The reason for this was obvious, since it gave them both room to expand. Langstrom called up images of both structures on his screen and began to study them intently, only glancing round as Mustafa and Jack rejoined him.

“I want you to hit the cell block first,” instructed Saul. “Secure the place so that you won’t have any of Smith’s guards at your back, and then move on to the Political Office.”

“What about the readerguns?” Mustafa enquired.

Via the multiple viewpoints provided by construction robots clinging to nearby station frameworks, Saul focused first on the barracks, suspended within inner station structure like a starfish caught in a net, then on the cell block that lay a little further away. Certainly, readerguns were in evidence, but it seemed that not one of them was functional.

“They’re disabled in the cell block itself, and along your route to the Political Office,” Saul informed them. “Smith and I both sacrificed readerguns to prevent them falling under each other’s control. However, it seems likely they’re still in operation within Smith’s domain.”

“Why not use the robots to attack?” Mustafa asked.

“I could, of course, but I’m offering second chances.” That was not entirely true, because though he could use his robots, it struck him as unlikely they would prove sufficient to penetrate the Political Office. He needed soldiers, but before he could trust them he needed to assess them in action.

“We never even had a first chance,” grumbled Mustafa. “Your robots gonna leave us alone?”

“My robots will leave you alone,” Saul confirmed.

The three of them now headed off to Barracks One, where their men checked and loaded their weapons while Langstrom delivered the briefest of briefings Saul had ever heard: “Guys, we hit the cell block, let the prisoners go, and stick the guards in the cells.”

“What if the guards resist?” asked a tall Nordic-blonde woman.

“I didn’t say they had to go into the cells alive, did I?”

General laughter greeted this, so it indeed seemed no love was lost.

Within minutes they set off again, propelling themselves, by wall handles, down a long corridor leading from the barracks to a point where it expanded into a tubeway, then through a large airlock, then further along the tubeway for about five hundred metres, until they reached a point where any construction of walls and ceiling ended. From there they progressed along a wide walkway, now down on their feet using their gecko boots. As they proceeded, Langstrom issued brief comments over radio, which his sergeants translated into orders.

“Five in the admissions section, maybe six,” observed Langstrom.

“Peach, your guys in. I want ’em disarmed and on the floor,” ordered Mustafa. “Use zip-cuffs.”

As they reached a crossroads in the walkway, Langstrom gestured right and then left. “We need to cover the other entrances.”

Sergeant Jack raised a fist, held up three fingers, twice, then also gestured right and then left. “Three minutes,” he added. “Let us know when you’re in position.”

Breaking into long loping strides, twelve troops went right and twelve went left. This confirmed for Saul that the men were organized in units of four, below the sergeants. Langstrom now slowed his pace, gazing up at three robots moving through the scaffolds above.

“They ain’t moving the same,” remarked Jack.

“Yeah, I know,” Langstrom replied.

Saul was surprised but a brief analysis provided the reason: the programs that he’d put in place—almost completely displacing their previous programming—displayed his own particular coding quirks, and the robots moved more like living creatures now.

Soon the soldiers reached a point where new wall and ceiling construction extended out from the cell block.

“Top and bottom,” said Langstrom. “The four blind wings.”

Two fingers up from Jack, then a thumb stabbed up and down. Eight men detached their gecko boots from the floor, propelled themselves up on to the top surface of the tubeway and set off. A further eight men headed over one side of the walkway and began making their way across the scaffolding underneath. Saul again checked a schematic of the complex, and immediately saw what Langstrom meant. Four diverging corridors possessed only one conventional way in, and finished up against the exterior walls. However, temporary airlocks were positioned above and below each end to facilitate future installation of vertical shafts. Perhaps waiting for when further levels of cells needed to be added, which indicated the way Smith and his kind thought.

Soon they entered the tubeway into the complex, at which point he lost sight of them, since the staff inside had disconnected the cam system.

“There’s about forty prisoners over there,” Langstrom reported eventually. He paused for a moment. “Are you watching, Saul?”

“Certainly,” Saul replied, though it had taken him a moment to realize he could. Via the barracks, he keyed into the feed transmitted from thirty-five pincams, each fitted at the temple of every soldier and connected to their fones. Langstrom was currently pointing to a doorway above which hung a big blue sign proclaiming: “Adjustment.” Now another view: Peach turned out to be the big blonde and, noticing she had removed her suit helmet, Saul decided they must have already passed through an airlock in the tubeway. She and the other three of her unit were approaching Admissions, where four guards were crouching behind a makeshift barricade composed of tacked-together sheets of bubblemetal.

One propelled himself out as Peach and her men approached. “Good,” he said peremptorily. “It’s about damned time.”

“Time for what?” Peach asked, still moving forward.

“About time we were relieved,” he continued. “You had no problem getting through?”

She paused beside him, while her three fellows stepped on round the barricade. Almost negligently they swung their machine pistols sideways to cover the three crouching men there.

“Drop your weapons,” said Peach.

“What the—?” The standing man’s protest ended in a coughing gurgle as he tumbled back through the air in slow motion, clutching his throat. Her karate chop had been almost too fast for the eye to follow, so Saul replayed it in his mind out of analytical interest. The remaining three were frozen in disbelief, until one of Peach’s men fired into the ceiling, and they discarded their weapons.

“I don’t know why you’re doing this,” protested one of them. “We’ve done nothing wrong.” Even then, they thought this was their own people arresting them—some mistake, perhaps.

Two of Peach’s unit remained outside, gathering up weapons and securing plastic ties to wrists. The Admissions reception area contained an armourglass guard booth to one side, a long desk on the other, with storage cupboards lining the walls behind it. One man began getting up from his desk, while another behind him was already pulling a machine pistol from a rack. That’s what killed him, for as he turned, Peach did not hesitate. A short burst of fire sent him slamming back into the weapons rack whilst the other man began shrieking, “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!” and stabbed his hands in the air, his eyes closed. Whilst the survivor was cuffed, Langstrom and the others moved on through, into the cell blocks.

Just then, Braddock rejoined Saul, so he selected some of the scenes he was currently observing in his head and put them up on the screens. Without comment Braddock strapped himself down in a chair, laid his weapon on his lap, and gazed at the changing images with fatigue-reddened eyes.

Saul enjoyed observing the steady military efficiency of it all. Anyone inside the complex made a wrong move, and they died on the spot. After Langstrom had finished, twenty-eight guards occupied the cells, though one cell containing five served as a temporary morgue. Langstrom released forty prisoners, some of whom were now detailed to help others over to the barracks infirmary.

“Could your men have taken them?” Saul turned to Braddock.

“Huh?” Braddock’s head jerked up, betraying the fact that he’d dozed off. He shook himself awake in irritation, then said, “The idea was to avoid a fire fight.”

“Get some sleep, Braddock,” Saul urged him. “Go and join Hannah—I’m sure there’s room on that hammock for the both of you.”

“What about you?”

What about him? Yes, he felt utterly weary, but his mind had not slowed down at all. Gradually he was embracing more and more of the overall function of his area of the station: its cams, microphones, motion and heat sensors becoming his extended senses, and its readerguns his immune system. By the same analogy the robots had become his eyes and hands. It was as if, during the initial stages of his taking over this area, he had dissipated himself throughout the station network. To him the station had originally felt messy, bits and pieces not integrated as a whole, but now it felt like an extension of himself.

“I’ll be fine, Braddock,” he assured him.

Even as he spoke, he watched Langstrom moving out of the cell block, watched released prisoners heading for Accommodation Sixteen, and noted the space plane at last rising over Earth’s horizon. He was simultaneously refining his robots’ attack programs, and making layered plans about how to deal with the impending assault. It all depended on where the incoming troops penetrated the station.

“Okay, I’ll sleep,” agreed Braddock, wearily unstrapping himself from the chair and propelling himself off to join Hannah. Saul watched him go; watched how careful he was not to wake her as he lay down on the wide hammock beside her.

Now that he wasn’t fighting for his life, Saul decided it was perhaps time to prepare for an option that until then had remained only in the back of his mind. He allowed his senses to range across the station, bypassing the Political Office and zeroing in on an area neither he nor Smith had so far paid much attention to, yet had been of great interest to Malden.

The wheel of Argus Station was interrupted—a quarter section missing from the rim—and below that break, attached to the asteroid itself, sat the Mars Traveller fusion engine. Through various cams in the locality, Saul now studied this behemoth further.

A section of the asteroid had been ground flat, then layered, three metres thick, with the foam composite on which the engine framework rested. This was just a secondary shock-absorber, since the first impact of the engine firing was sustained by the massive hydraulic shock absorbers positioned evenly about the framework, and secured to plates bolted directly onto the asteroid itself. From nearby housings, built into the lattice walls and girder structures, a great number of ducts, cables and pipes fed in just above this secondary layer and connected to the spherical fusion reactors used for start-up, and for maintaining the nozzle fields of the combustion chambers. Above the reactors stood pairs of large cylindrical fuel tanks containing, respectively, liquid deuterium and tritium talc. Above these again were the dome-shaped, pellet-aggregation plants, and above them the six fusion-combustion chambers rose in a rectangular cluster, each surrounded at its rear by fuser lasers and the deuterium-tritium injector guns. The whole massive structure stood half a kilometre tall, secured in place by a web of steel and a framework of I-beams, all of it fixed with integral pivot points so that the engine would be allowed to move against its shock absorbers.

When this thing was up and running, deuterium droplets sprayed into the aggregation plants, where they froze, and were next electrostatically coated with tritium dust. The resulting microspheres were then conveyed to the injectors, to be fired into each combustion chamber. Once a sphere reached the chamber’s centre, it was briefly captured in a magnetic bottle, then targeted with the beams from high-intensity stacked gallium-arsenide lasers. With each ignition, the bottle expanded to form a tubular containment field, focusing the resulting blast out of the rear of the engine. The lasers fired, igniting fusion, then this process repeated itself a hundredth of a second later, and from then on kept repeating. The resulting plasma explosion from the engine provided thrust measurable in millions of tonnes.

Saul ran a diagnostic check through the Traveller engine, just to assess its present condition. As he had learned from Malden, it had still enough fuel to hurl the space station down against the surface of the Earth with catastrophic consequences, or even to throw it out of Earth’s orbit altogether, and take it up to an appreciable portion of 1 per cent of light speed. He received some dodgy readings from two of the injectors in a combustion chamber, but that’s why they installed the chambers in an array of six. If one started to go wrong it simply shut down, while the rest would keep on working. The only other problems seemed to be the cooling system, which was frozen solid, and how frangible some of the engine’s components were at such a low temperature. This meant the engine could not be fired up at once, but would require several hours of warming up, during which process further faults might emerge.

Saul carefully considered the options opening up here, aware of being poised on the brink of some understanding that still eluded his grasp. When he finally transmitted the code that would start the engine-warming process, it seemed like he had made a decision impossible to recall. He waited then for some response from Smith but, after a minute passed with no reaction, he knew Smith could not have been paying attention to the engine. Saul finally let out a long slow breath, and withdrew.

Quiet now, alone at the centre of it all, Saul peered down at his hands, which were resting in his lap. He noticed a large bruise on the back of the right hand, and how thin they looked. Inset amidst numerous other controls on the console before him was a big keyboard, with virtuality half-glove indents on either side of it. He already knew this console from the inside, and directly manipulated the flows of information it controlled. Never again, in this place, would he have to physically press a button, shift a pointer, or open up frames in virtual displays. What use were his hands?