by Neal Asher
A sudden leap in power supply marked the moment the smelting plants began opening out their mirrors – no longer requiring power from the reactors either to move themselves into position or run back up to temperature. Smelters that before had been functioning at only half of their potential performance now went straight to full capacity, as the various plants issued plumes of vapour and ash, turning bright and silvery in the sunlight. Molten metal boiled with inert gases, and coolers that had not been needed out in the orbit of Mars soon came online. The rolling mills, presses, auto-forges and casters; the capstan lathes, milling machines, diamond saws and drills; the matter printers, nano-weavers and bucky-spinners: all of them seemed to let go with joyous abandon until once slow-moving swarf conveyors steadily increased to full speed.
In Arcoplex Two, Robotics screamed with activity – no power outages now, no requirement to build up a charge for any of the high-energy processes. Here the machines seemed to be hearing the message from their larger brothers out in the smelting plants: Energy to burn, guys. Let’s do it. There was power now for further high-temperature work, too; and, elsewhere in the arcoplex, silicon quickly turned molten as a chip factory started up, as did a powder forge for making the cutting tools that would soon be needed to replace those already in use.
Saul smiled as power levels just continued to rise. Already the first of his new robots were working around the rim, sometimes singly, sometimes conjoined into short centipede forms, hauling up and affixing structural beams at high speed. And the skeleton of the space ship grew visibly; dream turned into hard reality.
Scourge
Clay Ruger woke to feel the constant ache of his battered body, reached out for the painkillers and iodine pills on his bedside shelf, popped two of each out of their blister packs and washed them down with a gulp of water from his suit spigot, and he waited. There wasn’t one of the survivors without broken bones, wrenched joints and a mottled effect of fading bruises from head to toe. Clay himself had two broken shins, ribs broken all down one side, and few other bones in his body without at least hairline cracks, including his skull. But at least he wasn’t one of those who had ruptured something internal or suffered one of the cerebral haemorrhages that had killed a third of the crew. And at least, unlike Gunnery Officer Cookson, he hadn’t ended up with a snapped spine.
When Argus Station’s warp bubble had brushed against the Scourge, gravity waves had travelled the length of the ship like invisible walls. Compression waves were how Pilot Officer Trove described them, her voice slurring because of her broken jaw; while Captain Scotonis called the event a ‘tidal surge’. All Clay knew was that it felt as if, in just a matter of seconds, he had been simultaneously smashed against something, then stretched through it. Afterwards he felt as if he had spent months in an old-fashioned adjustment cell – one where they weren’t bothering to use inducers, just batons, army boots and fists.
Finally the painkillers began to kick in and he was able to drag himself from his bed – a laborious exercise even in zero gravity. Just as they all did, he still wore a full spacesuit: after yet another atmosphere breach only two days ago, none of them fully trusted the repairs. The suits also offered some protection from the high levels of radiation caused when one of the warheads in the armoury exploded. It hadn’t gone into fission, but it had acted like a dirty bomb, spreading radioactive material throughout the ship. It was this, Clay knew, that would eventually kill him. Broken bones weren’t the only common injury for not one of them hadn’t suffered radiation sickness, or did not register positive for pre-cancerous cells, if not overt signs of some sort of cancer. Clay was sure that some of the stuff coming up out of his lungs had little now to do with his initial injuries.
Before stepping out of his cabin, he closed his suit visor, then once outside he began making his way up a corridor that was no longer straight, but in fact had taken on a slightly corkscrew shape. A crew member passed him heading in the other direction, dolefully towing herself along like an ancient. They ignored each other – crew generally had little to say to him, and not much more to say to each other, either. Eventually, the doors to the bridge came in sight, but before he reached them the command crew came out.
Scotonis, Trove and even Cookson were there, pulling on their suit helmets. They all looked ill – Cookson the worst of all as he pulled himself along with everything below his waist hanging dead. It struck Clay that they had all been animatedly discussing something before his approach and had now fallen silent, but paranoia was all too easy aboard this ship of the damned.
‘How are you, Cookson?’ Clay asked, as he drew closer.
Cookson swung a corpse-like face towards him. He was deadly white, with a slight bluish tinge to his lips and a yellow mass of bruising down one side of his face. He gave a sickly grin that exposed the missing teeth in that side of his mouth.
‘Not dead yet,’ he replied. ‘I want to live long enough . . . just long enough.’
‘Something we can all say,’ said Clay. Then, studying the others, ‘So what’s up?’
‘It’s something Dr Myers can’t say now,’ said Scotonis, ‘because he’s dead.’
‘What?’ Clay felt a creeping horror. Myers, thankfully, had been one of the least injured of them all, having managed to escape without any broken bones – just minor cracks – and, with them all in the process of dying, he had become the most essential member of the crew. Now he was dead?
‘Come on,’ Scotonis gestured for them to follow him, and limped off down the corridor.
‘I’ll . . . I’ll leave it for now,’ said Cookson, clinging to one of the handholds set in the wall.
Scotonis halted, turned to study him, then nodded and continued on. Clay followed, wondering just how Cookson was managing to stay alive and how much longer he would survive.
No matter how hard they had tried to seal off the compartments into which they had loaded the corpses, the stench was spreading out into the rest of the ship. As well as the damage throughout it – walls bent and buckled, panels out of line and exposing electronics and plumbing, floors twisted, fluids leaking – a free-floating mess was also accumulating. As they neared the crew medical area, Clay noted occasional dressings, some already used, most simply discarded while dealing with the rush of injuries after the gravity waves struck. Here and there old, brown blood was spattered on the metalwork, and down in one corner lay what looked like mouldering splinters of bone.
‘This needs cleaning up,’ commented Scotonis.
Neither Clay nor Trove replied. Who would do that? Who would care enough to do it?
Finally they reached the section of corridor outside Medical, where three sorry-looking crewmen loitered, arms wrapped protectively around their torsos as they waited for a cure that wouldn’t be available. Scotonis marched past them, opened the door into Medical and stepped through. Clay and Trove followed him.
‘Well,’ Trove eventually managed, ‘he didn’t die of his old injuries.’
Dr Myers sat strapped into his own surgical chair. Someone had removed all the fingers from his right hand, scooped out one eyeball, then cut his throat. The man’s blood still beaded the air, and Clay resisted the urge to try and brush away droplets of it landing on his spacesuit.
‘We have to find out who did this,’ said Scotonis. ‘They must be punished.’
Why bother? Clay wondered, again sinking into fatalistic depression. Myers had reached the state they would all be reaching soon enough, he reckoned. Then he shrugged and gritted his teeth. He had a mind, he had intelligence and what had once been described to him as a low animal cunning. He would not have risen so high in the Committee administration without these, and they were precisely what would enable him to survive. Somehow there would be a way out of this, and he must find it.
5
A Theory about Theories
During the reign of Serene Galahad, and because of her response to Alan Saul, technological innovation left conventional science in tatters. Many years ha
d been spent building hypotheses and theories on Einstein’s general and special theories of relativity, while ignoring irrefutable experimental fact that undermined them. It was proven that certain particles could be accelerated beyond the speed of light, and that was ignored. It was found that the mass of the universe did not match up to theory, so invisible undetectable dark matter was invented to fill the gap. A lunatic who believed we were visited by aliens demonstrated antigravity; why even check his work, he’s a lunatic? A working cold-fusion plant is built, and closed down by safety officers. A fool obsessed with fringe studies of ball lightning disappears from his laboratory and is found halfway round the world in the Atacama Desert, burned from head to foot. Bah, meat and bread for conspiracy theorists. And when Alan Saul demonstrated a working Alcubierre drive, which was only theoretically possible with limitless energy and access to exotic matter, this too might have been ignored or explained away. However, having stolen a space station and annihilated a large portion of the Inspectorate by dropping seven thousand satellites on Earth, Alan Saul was someone who really had to be taken seriously.
Earth
No trees, Serene reflected and, no matter the extent of her power over Earth, they were something she could not expedite. Her aero had landed on what had once been an aeroport atop a multistorey car park sunk deep amidst the arcology towers of this sprawl on Madagascar. Now it stood in a shallow valley beside a stream, amidst mountains of rubble. Standing on the edge of the port, Serene studied the view on the screen of a tripod-mounted image-intensifier. Over to the left, a sorting machine, a giant contraption like a steel caterpillar, had nosed into one rubble pile and was passing that steadily through its long alimentary tract as it extracted metals and other usable materials, before shitting out plain concrete, brick and carbocrete into a hopper section positioned at its rear. As Serene watched, this same hopper detached and trundled over to the edge of a long deep trench, to tip its contents inside. At the end of the trench a giant excavator was still digging, piling precious though highly depleted earth to one side, ready to fill in over the rubble.
‘A long and onerous task,’ she noted, swatting at something that had landed on her neck, then removing her sunglasses to frown at the smears.
‘With present machinery and resources it will take twenty years to complete,’ Elkin replied, ever ready with the numbers. ‘This is presupposing that you intend to clear the entire island of its sprawl and will not be diverting resources elsewhere.’
‘How much time would be gained in the space operation if I diverted resources from here?’
This was obviously a more difficult question, for Elkin gave no immediate reply. Serene turned to see her gazing at one of her aides and, after a moment, check what he must have meanwhile sent to her palmtop.
‘Very little,’ she replied, ‘since it’s the bottlenecks that are slowing things down.’
Was that worth shutting down the entire operation here? Serene decided not. There had been a momentary panic, over a week and a half ago, when Argus hurled itself in towards the centre of the solar system, but Saul had not attacked, merely positioned the station on the other side of the sun where, so the experts told her, he was using solar energy to power a rapid rebuild of the station. Image data from solar weather satellites showed the rebuild to be so extensive that the tactical feasibility of him attacking before all the big orbital railguns here were ready was very low. The tacticians further surmised that it was highly likely that he did not intend to attack at all – the likelihood that he was turning Argus Station into something capable of delivering overwhelming force being very small indeed.
‘What’s the latest news on Argus?’ Serene now took a pack of wet wipes from her pocket and extracted one to dab at her face. It was hot and muggy here and the only species that seemed to be doing well were the flying and stinging kind. This ‘being out in the field’ business was all very well, but it brought its discomforts. She glanced over at Sack, standing in patient attendance. Maybe it was time for her to occupy one of the big, comfortable estates offered for her exclusive use by one of her East African delegates.
‘Images show that it is being turned into a sphere with a diameter the same as that of the original ring,’ Elkin replied immediately. ‘They also show the asteroid now cut into two pieces and rapidly being used up, and the Mars Traveller VI being repositioned.’
‘Engineering assessment?’
‘The same as before: he’s turning the station into an interstellar spaceship. There are also elements in the design that are recognizable as originating from Varalia Delex, the previous technical director of Antares Base. Prior to that she was the overseer of both the Mars Traveller Project and the Alexander – or Scourge. Also some further information has come to light about her.’
‘That is?’ Serene returned her attention to the view before her.
‘Her maiden name is Saul. She is his sister.’
Serene swung back. ‘That explains his abrupt arrival on Mars and the risks he took in rescuing her.’ She nodded to herself. ‘Interesting information, but it gets us no closer to stopping him running.’ Serene stepped away from the image-intensifier. She’d seen enough of Madagascar to know that it would once again be green, but would still lack the millions of species that had lived here previously. They still needed the Gene Bank data and, if possible, the samples. Saul could not be allowed to leave the solar system.
‘Is Calder any further forward in preventing that?’ Serene began to stroll back towards the aero.
Elkin fell in just a step behind her, and other staff scurried to collect up equipment while protective spiderguns moved in from the edges of the aeroport. Time to go, Serene felt, but where next?
‘Just before we landed, he told me that the new weapon will be ready for a test firing within a few days,’ Elkin replied. ‘And now would be the best time to test it since Saul, positioned on the other side of the sun, will have no view of it.’
‘Calder’s sure of that?’
‘Our comlifers have made all our satellites and stations safe from mental incursion, and the test will be disguised amidst a test firing of one of the new railguns.’
Serene paused to gaze up at the leaden sky. So, forget that East African estate. Chairman Messina’s quarters up in the spin section of Core One had recently been renovated, and she would certainly need her bodyguard there alongside her . . . She would make that her base as she toured the other stations above, and she would be there to watch that test: to watch the first deployment of the weapon that would bring Alan Saul at last within her reach.
Argus
There was little sign of the surgery Ghort had undergone other than a few faint lines visible under the stubble on his scalp, and his frequent expression now of perplexed puzzlement. The relay was a mirrored cube just a centimetre across, which he wore on a silver chain around his neck. Neither of these items was visible now that he wore his heavy work suit and clung to an I-beam of the column, which currently extended over a kilometre and a half below the rapidly disappearing central asteroid.
‘What’s it like?’ Alex asked, as he floated out in vacuum ten metres away on the end of a line.
‘Ever used a telefactor?’ Ghort asked.
Alex had once trained on a bomb-disposal telefactor, his hands in special gloves and with VR goggles over his eyes. It seemed as if he had been there defusing the bomb with slightly numb fingers, rather than sitting kilometres away at a console.
‘Yes, I’ve used a telefactor,’ he replied.
‘Nothing like that at all,’ Ghort told him. ‘I get a schematic of the job in hand, break it down with a work-order program perpetually adjusted to materials available, load specific tasks to specific robots, insert you, me and the others in where human dexterity and flexibility will work best, and then watch the entire job slotting together even while I’m working on it too.’ Ghort dipped to peer down at where the five construction robots he controlled were positioning and welding in place bubblemetal I
-beams, and where Gladys and Akenon were fixing optics and power cables. They were working on just one corner of the column, while five similar teams were working on the rest. Meanwhile, yet other teams were building the column inwards, as the largest chunk of the asteroid was being hauled to one side, and while mining robots concentrated on the remainder.
‘Here it comes,’ said Alex, now seeing a big loader robot scuttling down towards them carrying a great mass of bubble-metal beams and other items on its back. ‘We should be able to get back up to speed again.’
Var Delex had changed working methods so there would be less competition between humans and robots, which apparently led to a greater number of errors and accidents. However, she had not been able to dispel completely all competitiveness. Those building this column to take the Mars Traveller engine were now racing against the new robots building the framework for the station sphere, trying always to stay ahead of the steady growth of that incurving wall of girders. Alex gazed out towards the rim, watching centipede lines of the robots working around the wall – looking like golden worms from this distance. Of course, it was a futile race. The column would stop at two kilometres, while the sphere wall would continue for half a kilometre more and curve into the blast hole for the Traveller’s fusion torch.
To get out of the big loader robot’s way, Alex hauled himself into the column’s web of girders alongside Ghort. Down at the end of the column, the loader detached from its load, leaving it suspended on the end of a thread out in space, and headed back – like a giant metal beetle that had just rid itself of its wing-encased body. Once it was out of the way, Alex detached his line, then used his wrist impeller to propel himself out then down, settling to land gently on the packed heap of beams and other components. A minute’s search and he found the plastic crate he wanted, peeled it up off its gecko pad and hauled it along with him back to Ghort. Behind him, construction robots began taking the rest of the package apart.