by Neal Asher
His new robots had finished constructing the lattice wall inwards from the exterior skeleton ready to attach to the platform for the Traveller engine, and currently human teams and older-style robots were bolting down hydraulic ram plates at the edge of the platform, and reeling out the last of the optics and power cables to reintegrate the engine with the ship’s systems. In the platform-support column robots were now securing themselves to beams while other human workers began streaming away. They had been affixing pipes leading to the location where he intended to place auxiliary fuel tanks – which was a job that could now wait. Meanwhile, the engine warm-up routine and diagnostics had been running for some time, and soon it would be time for the dragon to wake.
Next Saul focused his attention upwards. Lying midway between the old station wheel and the upper pole of the ship was the location planned for the four main weapons. The two railguns were already in place and their magazines filling; most of the maser, which had previously seemed to be just scrap metal, had been salvaged and rebuilt. However, the fourth, uncompleted, weapon was what drew his attention.
Working with a team of twenty humans and forty robots, including two proctors, the Saberhagen twins had been building their plasma weapon there, but had now ceased work and locked everything down. Just like him with his empty rooms for future expansion, they had incorporated extra capacity to allow further development of their latest weapon. Studying their plans, Saul was impressed. Right at that moment, not even he could think of any improvements to make, and he was especially pleased to see that, while they had been installing the heavy electromagnets and power supply they had also detailed a team within Arcoplex Two to manufacture the plasma ‘caps’. When completed, this lethal device would be able to deliver the Newton impact of a railgun, along with an EM blast and heat equivalent to a plug of matter magically extracted from the core of the sun.
Saul’s main attention next strayed into Tech Central, which lay just above him. Le Roque was striding back and forth, his face sheened with sweat as he organized the lockdown of the ship. Those who had finished their work were busy ensconcing themselves in secure areas, all of them in either spacesuits or breach-survival suits. All loose items were being secured, the biggest chore being handled by humans in EVA units stowing the last small chunks of the Argus asteroid in an ore carrier, before internal cable-mesh sheets would be tightened down over them.
‘I’m repositioning in six minutes,’ Saul warned him, ‘but this time I’ll be using the Rhine drive, so there should be no problems.’
‘The drive?’ Le Roque queried. ‘Why?’
‘I can’t use the steering thrusters to reorient.’
As the man looked thoroughly bemused, Saul decided to put him out of his misery. ‘I need to reorient the axis of the ship ready for approach,’ he explained. ‘And, with the vortex generator running, we happen to be sitting in a massive gyroscope. I calculate it would take the output, at full power, of about four Traveller engines to counter the angular momentum.’
‘Ah, I see,’ Le Roque replied.
Because of the angular momentum of the vortex generator, it had quite simply become impossible to change the ship’s axial orientation at all. However, that situation would change once the Mach-effect drive was operative.
As was his habit, Saul now checked up on those he cared most about or, rather, those he allowed his human self to care about. Hannah and Var he found huddled together in one of the mobile overseer’s offices that had recently clamped itself down on the new lattice wall.
‘That’s not a particularly safe place to be,’ he observed to them.
‘Argus Station . . .’ began Hannah, then paused before continuing, ‘Nowhere aboard this ship is particularly safe.’
The new usage Saul had tried subtly to promote – calling it a ship rather than a station – wasn’t catching on very well, and he realized that at some point he would have to rename his vessel.
‘Where is safe these days?’ Var asked. ‘I suspect it’s a very debatable point whether the chances of the people here getting killed are any higher than the chances of those on or around Earth.’
‘You know exactly what I mean, sister,’ replied Saul. ‘The insulation on an overseer’s office is enough to withstand the extremes of space, but hardly adequate for where you are now.’ He made some rapid calculations. ‘The temperature inside there is quite likely to exceed sixty Celsius.’
‘We’re prepared.’ Hannah reached over and opened a fridge door to expose numerous bottles of the same beer brewed in Arcoplex One and served at the Olive Tree in the Arboretum. ‘We have our suits with their cooling systems too.’ She tugged at the collar of her own suit.
‘You should also check out the power supply here,’ Var added, her tone slightly superior.
Saul did so, and saw that it was ready to switch over to a stack of all-but-depleted rectifying batteries. As these converted the heat to stored electricity, they would produce a cooling effect. He also realized that these two women were ganging up on him.
‘That’s all very well, but what about stray debris, which would punch straight through those walls of yours,’ he lectured, feeling like a spoilsport martinet parent. ‘You are simply putting yourselves in unnecessary danger.’
‘Any asteroid debris will have to get through the station wheel first,’ Var observed, ‘and in that respect you are in more danger from them than us.’
‘You know very well I wasn’t talking about asteroid debris but any still unsecured items within the station wheel.’
‘I’m checking stress-sensor readings,’ said Var stubbornly, ‘and, like you, I like to be at the centre of any work I’ve been overseeing.’
A sniping reference there to his inner sanctum.
‘You can check stress readings from anywhere inside the station.’ Saul realized at this point that he had almost unconsciously assigned just a small portion of his human mind to this dispute and that it was now being merely stubborn and just wanted to win a pointless verbal contest. He reabsorbed it and, using pure intellect, assessed their chances of getting hurt as only a little above those in the wheel’s accommodation units. And anyway, in the end, how dictatorial did he want to become?
‘We’re staying here,’ insisted Var, ‘to see the show.’ She reached for a bottle out of the fridge, unscrewed it, then had some problems sucking out the beer. Apparently such bottles were meant to be drunk while the ship was under acceleration. In irritation she pulled the bottle away from her mouth and added, ‘If you don’t like it, you’ll have to send some of Langstrom’s men or even some of your robots to remove us.’
‘That will not be necessary.’ He was already drawing himself away mentally, aware that, even though the human part of him would miss them if they got killed, their loss would have only minimal effect on his overall plans. ‘Enjoy the show.’
It was time. Saul observed that the asteroid chunks were now fully secured and the EVA workers positioned where he wanted them. With a thought he initiated the Rhine drive. Magnetic fields torqued, space glowing red and then winking out all about the ship, and the momentary transition raised a feeling inside him like déjà vu. Afterwards, the stars blinked back into existence all around, and he checked the axial positioning of his ship. It was perfect.
‘Mars Traveller start-up will commence in precisely two minutes,’ he announced to all throughout the ship. ‘You have only that amount of time to finish securing yourselves.’
The Traveller engine reported just a few faults – ones that were more than compensated for by the redundancy in its systems. The seconds began to drag for him, but he suppressed that purely human sense of frustration for, if he allowed it to continue, the ensuing days of acceleration, course changes and deceleration would seem interminable.
‘Firing,’ he finally announced.
The engine cleared its various throats and stuttered into life, then it bellowed as it blasted out a fusion flame half a kilometre long. Saul’s acceleration chair reor
iented within its gimbals, and the acceleration pushed him gently down into it. Debris seemed to be shifting all in one direction, but in actuality remained stationary relative to the ship. Saul focused on a single spanner striking the edge of Arcoplex One and tumbling on down, falling straight through the new lattice wall only a hundred metres away from Hannah and Var, before striking the outer skeleton on its way out, then deforming and melting in the glare of fusion flame.
‘We’re on our way,’ he whispered, purely to himself, for only now did some residual human part of him feel that the journey had truly begun. Then, just seconds later, serendipity took a hand and reminded him of everything that lay behind him.
‘Fuck it,’ he said, preparing to shut down the Traveller engine and divert power throughout the station back into the Rhine drive; preparing to run.
It was a gravity-wave detector aboard the observation satellite orbiting parallel to Earth that alerted him. The anomaly was one it couldn’t quite process because it lay so far out of the parameters its processing had been devised to handle. Secondary visual images came in as a confirmation – the tracking intermittent because the object was moving so fast. One of the three ships had left the Traveller construction station, engaged a drive similar to Rhine’s creation and was now on its way out. He glimpsed jerky images of the shiny bubble of an Alcubierre warp heading directly towards them. Travelling at sub-light speed, it was behind the signals from the satellite, but it could still be here in well under an hour.
Extrapolating from the size of its warp bubble, he realized that it was the smaller ship that had left – the prototype – the one with a very vulnerable drive ring and with other combat disadvantages. Still, it was unexpected and it was a danger, for Galahad might have decided to send it to attack in the hope that it would cripple Saul’s ship, even though the attacking ship would itself surely end up being destroyed.
‘One of Galahad’s ships is on its way out towards us,’ he stated over the intercom, ‘and it may be that we will have to run.’ Really, he needed to say no more, and there were no preparations that needed to be made since personnel who were already secure for the thrust of the Traveller engine were over-prepared for inertia-less flight. He could go right now, but he waited. If the other ship continued on this course, it had a very high risk of knocking out its own drive bubble on asteroid debris on the way. Saul calculated tactics. Maybe the intention was to use this approaching ship’s drive bubble to stop or attempt to damage Argus, in which case it would have to halt first, then come in on a new trajectory.
‘Paul,’ he said, ‘we have partial on the Mach-effect drive?’
‘We do,’ replied that proctor.
‘Give me stats.’
The figures arrived in an instant, and Saul felt a brief sense of tension dispersing. If the other ship used its warp bubble to knock out his bubble, the problem thereafter would have been manoeuvrability, since his ship carried a lot of inertia so could not dodge bullets easily. However, the partial Mach-effect they possessed, combined with the Traveller engine and steering thrusters, meant that, after both drive bubbles were knocked out, the other ship would have no advantage in manoeuvrability. And if it came within range of the Saberhagens’ weapons, it would end up being destroyed.
Next, as Saul continued to make his preparations, the other ship halted some half a million kilometres in from the orbit of Mars. For a moment Saul thought it must have struck something, but swift analysis of the gravity anomaly assured him that it hadn’t. In the next moment he realized what was going on. Galahad had sent out an observer which, if required, might attempt to stop Saul leaving the solar system. Within a matter of weeks, if his estimations regarding what he could see at the Traveller construction station were correct, the other two ships would be able to follow. It was therefore worth spending time gathering necessary materials and continuing to build his ship inside the solar system, Saul felt – even at risk of attack from this small ship – for a long and perilous journey lay ahead. However, its two sister ships were not worth risking so, henceforth, he would ensure the Rhine drive was sufficiently powered up to engage before those other two craft arrived.
‘We’re okay for now,’ he announced. ‘It’s just an observer.’
As he sent images to all the screens and delegated a smaller part of his mind to deliver a commentary on what had happened, he felt a deep disquiet. He had been too arrogant on occasion before, so what might he have missed this time?
8
Impossible Robots
Even with our own comlifers and the rapid development of cyber technologies, nothing yet has been developed to match Alan Saul’s ‘conjoining robots’. The reasons posited for this by those working in robotics have been of the same tone: he was lucky, the reports on their efficiency were exaggerated, or even that the robots never really existed. However, that Saul was able to turn Argus Station into an interstellar vessel in such a short time is undeniable, and the truth is perhaps difficult to accept. Alan Saul was a genius even before he was turned into what we now call a comlifer. Every time we have tried to take people with similar mental advantages and do the same with them, the result has always been disastrous – the recipient of the cerebral technology and AI mental template rapidly self-destructing or going insane, or turning into a moron. We must accept that Alan Saul was unique and we should not slide into a denial of what he managed. For our future, and for the sake of us all, we must believe in the impossible – and similarly achieve it.
Earth
The image on the screen was as clear as anything broadcast locally, yet its source lay millions of kilometres away, focused on by the telescopes aboard the Vision and relayed back here. Serene felt an extreme frustration with the clarity of it all, for screen images as detailed as this had been, ever since she assumed total power over Earth, ones of scenes she could affect at once. However, she could not touch Argus Station, she could not touch this ship Alan Saul was building, or at least not yet.
‘What are they doing?’ she asked tightly.
‘Exactly what the tactical assessment predicted, ma’am. They’re taking on more materials,’ said Bartholomew. ‘Professor Calder should be able to give you more detail on that.’
Calder cleared his throat then, in dry tones, explained, ‘The Argus asteroid, as we see, is nearly all gone. It was mostly nickel iron, so Saul will need other materials. His EVA units, robots and work teams are currently using demolition charges and cutting equipment to take apart a rubble pile consisting of a wide variety of metallic ores, including some radioactives.’
Calder leaned forward, past Serene, and made some adjustments with a ball control, bringing the focus in closer so that now they could see the conglomerate of the rubble pile lying just hundreds of metres away from the ship’s outer skeleton. One-man EVA units – spherical machines sporting a pair of arms and claws to the fore – were ferrying chunks of the pile in through a gap in the skeleton, while robots of a kind Serene recognized were carrying other lumps across and down into a smelting-plant dock. However, there were things there she did not recognize, and the sight of them made her skin crawl. Things that looked like golden centipedes were crawling over the rubble pile and disassembling it.
‘What the hell are they?’ she demanded.
‘Some new form of robot, ma’am,’ said Calder. ‘Now we’ve managed to get a close look at them, I can confirm that they are the reason the outer skeleton of the ship was built so fast – but previous images weren’t clear enough for us to see them. I have my robotics staff analysing the data. An initial report suggests conjoining robots: single units that can join up into larger wholes.’
‘We have nothing like that?’ said Serene.
‘No,’ Calder agreed, ‘the degree of programming sophistication is not available to us as yet.’
Serene turned on him. ‘And why not?’
He gazed at her steadily, obviously reassessing the snap answer he had been about to give. ‘We have been working with already known met
hods to build our defences and ships as quickly as possible, rather than apply resources to that kind of research and development, ma’am. However, now we know that Saul can build robots like this, and now we are close to completing the two remaining ships, I have assigned a team to work on a similar project.’
She couldn’t really fault that answer and spent a moment analysing why she kept seeking ways to attack the professor. He had created his own little realm up here and, though she couldn’t detail a specific instance of it, she felt he resented stepping into second place while she was here. It seemed to her that he was always on the edge of rebelliousness, but his survival instincts kept restraining him. She turned back to the screen. ‘There was something about a space-plane launch.’
Calder leaned forward again to make further adjustments. The view changed abruptly to show two space planes heading under power away from Argus.
‘They will reach their target within a day,’ he explained. ‘They’re heading now for a single asteroid consisting of mostly water ice and salts. We suspect the main targets there are the water and rare earth elements.’
‘They’ll tow it back?’
‘It seems more likely that they’ll begin cutting it apart,’ said Calder. ‘Then, when Saul has all he needs from the rubble pile, he’ll move Argus itself over.’
‘Then what?’ asked Serene.
‘Once he has the materials,’ interjected Bartholomew, ‘we reckon on him wanting power, ma’am. Tactical says he has three options: he comes back to the sun, he flees the solar system or he taps into some other solar system source, the mostly likely being the Io flux tube. That’s where—’