by Neal Asher
‘Now, I’ll ask you again: how do you intend to assassinate my brother? And, to save time here, your communications have been penetrated and I know for a fact that killing him is your ultimate aim.’
‘There’s no plan . . . we were just talking . . . no law against talking.’
‘So twenty-five of the chipped, having established what they believed to be a secure method of communication – and including in their number that rabble-rouser Marsin and Messina’s ex-bodyguard and clone – were just talking.’ She stared at him steadily for a moment, then reached over and picked up the ball of tape again.
‘If you’ve penetrated our scramblers, you must know!’ he said desperately.
‘But I haven’t,’ she replied. ‘It’s my brother who knows what you’re up to. I’m just making sure something is done to stop that before he uses it as an excuse to exterminate us all.’
‘He won’t kill you.’
‘Okay, before he exterminates all but a few of those close to him.’ She began moving the ball of tape towards his mouth again, and he tried to turn his head aside.
‘Wait! Wait!’ he pleaded.
She jammed the ball of tape back in and gave him a second dose from the disabler then afterwards let him struggle for breath, until he fainted.
‘This will not stop until you answer my questions,’ she told him after he recovered consciousness.
This time, as he stared at her with bloodshot eyes, blood and saliva running down his chin, she knew she would get the answers she required.
‘There’s a bomb,’ he managed.
‘Tell me about it.’
‘Ghort got hold of . . . demolition charges.’ He coughed, sending more blood running down his chin, and she noted a trickle of blood from one ear and wasn’t sure why he was bleeding there. ‘Alex turned them into a copper-head armour-piercing charge capable of killing him in his inner sanctum . . . and two assault rifle grenades.’
‘Why the grenades?’
‘Spidergun . . .’
‘In his sanctum?’
‘No . . . out in the rim, where he’s hidden his backups.’
Var sat back on her heels and studied him. That answer made no sense at all, and she felt Main must be trying to mislead her. Without jamming the ball of tape in place she hit him with the disabler again. He convulsed, emitted a gargling sound, his back arching. As she clicked off the device, he slumped, his right eye now red with blood and still more of it running out of his ear. She waited patiently for him to recover, but eventually felt her stomach tighten up and a cold dread settle over her. He wasn’t breathing.
Var struggled to cut him free as quickly as she could and tried mouth-to-mouth, thumped his chest, used every technique she could think of to revive him. She even used the stun stick on his chest to try and restart his heart. She lost track of time: how long had it been? Ten minutes? Half an hour? It must have been something to do with his implant. Like many of the chipped, he had yet to heal completely, and she had no idea what harm the application of a disabler might have caused. Finally she gave up and checked the time. She had another two hours before Scarrow went off-shift and then probably turned up here. She had the corpse of someone she had tortured to death and – she swung her head to gaze at Thomas Grieve – she had a witness to that fact.
Would her brother forgive this? He had gone to Mars just to rescue her, and had then put her in charge of the converting of Argus Station into an interstellar vessel. But those uncharacteristic acts of nepotism were no indication of how he might react to what she had done here. When she knew him back on Earth, he had always been a cold fish, and out here he was colder still. He might just decide that forgiving his sister for murder would be inconvenient – that she’d stepped too far over the line – and send her the way of the Committee delegates captured here . . . and the way of Thomas Grieve. No, it would be best not to put him in the position where he had to make any decision about her.
Still gazing at Grieve, she stood up, opened her palmtop and keyed into the programs she used to monitor the construction work on the station. A quick search revealed precisely what she wanted, and she rerouted a construction robot to pick up an empty sealant drum and fetch it here. It would arrive within an hour. She walked over to Grieve and gazed down at him, saw that he was crying, probably because he knew what was about to happen. There was nothing she could say really, so she reached over to the bench above him and picked up a heavy adjustable spanner, knowing that if there was any uncertainty hitherto about her having stepped over the line, she was just about to banish that.
The two ships whose names, so the latest ETV report informed him, were the Fist and the Command, had made their way clear of their construction station. With his new upgrades in place and beginning to kick in, and the soreness of his body separated from his main consciousness, Saul decided to try something. He had spent hours concentrating on building backup programs to compensate for time delays, and constructing lethal worms and viruses to look for any chink in those distant defences. Now, relaying through the observer satellite lying a few million kilometres out from Earth, he tried a long-range penetration of the systems of the two ships . . . and failed.
Perhaps the transmission delay was just too much. As data finally started coming back to him, he realized he had hit something amorphous that subsequently reached back towards him and began its own penetration of the observer satellite. Aboard one of those ships was a comlifer, keeping him out. He sent signals to shut down systems within the satellite to deny it access, until he realized the data packets coming through from the satellite were no form of attack but an attempt at communication. He allowed them space within the satellite’s storage and, over the ensuing hours of signal delay, watched in fascination as a subpersona developed there.
‘Hello, Alan Saul, genocidal maniac and all-round psychopath,’ said a voice.
What with the huge communication delays at this distance, it had been Saul’s intention to assign a lesser portion of his mind to respond, only relaying to him any critical data obtained for the duration, and to be reabsorbed later. However, the Rhine drive was up to speed, there were no hitches in the work being conducted, and all other plans were playing out precisely as predicted. His ship did not need him and, really, the data he might be able to obtain through this communication had higher priority. He inverted priorities, leaving the general running of his ship to a lesser portion of his mind while changing the notion of time for the rest of his mind by collapsing his perception of the signal delays. It seemed that the comlifer wanted to chat, or perhaps was looking for some sort of opening which, if conceded, would also provide an opening for Saul himself.
‘So who am I talking to?’
An image presented itself now of a bald fat man confined naked in a chair, tubed, wired, bound and presently being sponged down by a medic. ‘My name is Christopher Shivers, and you can call me Christopher – I only let my friends call me Chris.’
‘Why would you suppose that I am not your friend?’
‘Because you are the arch-demon Alan Saul – enemy to all humanity and all right-thinking souls. You are the one who all but destroyed Earth’s government and visited the Scour upon us.’
‘I detect elements of sarcasm coming from you,’ Saul replied. ‘Perhaps you know that the Scour came from a biochip that is included within all ID implants – a biochip incidentally manufactured at the Aldeburgh Complex which Serene Galahad used to run.’
The subpersona paused to exchange data with its original self, updating rapidly. Saul received a brief request for the subpersona to relay to Saul’s system. It seemed likely that this was now the real attempt to penetrate Saul’s ship, and, if so, it would give Saul a way of getting to Christopher, and the Fist and the Command. He allowed it to relay to secure storage, but of course reduced security simply by communicating with it.
‘It seems you might have a case,’ said Christopher, ‘but you are still my enemy. It is because of you I am now what I am, rathe
r than a lowly robotics engineer. It is because of you my skull feels as empty as it is full.’
‘I understand,’ Saul agreed. ‘You must accept the exigencies of your genetic programming to retain a reason for continuing to exist. You must keep some part of you human or else everything becomes pointless and oblivion the only answer.’
Even as he spoke the words, Saul knew they were no longer entirely true for himself. He existed. He would continue to exist and no longer needed the instinct for brute survival; something more complex was nudging it aside.
‘So you give advice to your enemy?’ Christopher asked. ‘Here’s my human part.’
The image changed, slid back to a stored one: The bald fat man thrashing against his restraints, unable to scream because of a big plastic plug in his mouth – probably there to stop him biting off his own tongue.
‘I want to die but I can’t kill myself. If I try to kill myself the response is the same as with any other form of disobedience: pain. I ache for oblivion – being human is the reason I want to cease to exist.’
‘So how is it that you’re talking to me now?’
‘All part of my duties, if but briefly.’
It was the Fist that had fired the missile, but it would be some hours yet before it reached the satellite and destroyed it, cutting off one source of data for Saul. The comlifer had been distracting him from the attack, whether intentionally was unclear, since there was nothing he could do about it anyway.
‘How long before the Fist and the Command are ready to go?’ he asked.
‘I couldn’t possibly tell you that.’
Saul noticed the emphasis on the ‘I’, and how more data packets were currently queuing up to load to the subpersona.
‘Genetic exigencies?’ he enquired.
‘Certainly,’ replied the growing copy in Saul’s system of the comlifer aboard Command, ‘survival or else trying to make copies of some part of oneself.’
Saul watched the packets loading to his system, while also observing the missile eating up the distance towards the satellite, and calculated that most of the packets would be through before the missile struck, after which he intended to take the time to have a proper talk with Christopher. Now he returned the larger portion of his mind to a more human perception of time, while instantly updating on everything that had happened during the many hours that their apparently brief conversation had taken.
First to come into his focus was, as always, Hannah Neumann. She had been very busy while construction was still underway here in the Io flux tube, and now the number of those who had been chipped – and who possessed backups for their minds – outweighed the rest of the ship’s inhabitants. That number also included the Martian doctor Da Vinci who, at that moment, was monitoring the rapid growth of the fifteen clones under his care. As Saul had expected, the relationship between these two was getting strained. They both put this down to Da Vinci’s choice of trying out a cryogenic pod and her insisting that he also must be chipped and have a backup first, when in reality their problems were due to them both being dominant controlling personalities ill prepared to submit or to make compromises. Within the next five days, extraneous circumstances permitting, one of them would find a reason to start a fierce argument with the other, and that would lead to them breaking up. It was all so prosaic, so human.
Next, Saul focused his attention on the weapon built by the Saberhagen twins, for it was now complete and undergoing diagnostic testing. Magnetic bottle ‘caps’ were loaded and all the weapon’s ultra-capacitor storage was fully up to charge. At the moment, Brigitta and Angela were in Arcoplex Two, monitoring the diagnostic test – Angela mostly silent while Brigitta, from recorded cam footage, had been bemoaning Saul stopping them from test firing their weapon. Saul felt a degree of chagrin, somewhere, at Brigitta’s blinkered intransigence, but decided to speak to her anyway – like a human.
‘I must congratulate you on your success here,’ he stated through their intercom.
Brigitta glanced round to check if he was in the room, then glanced up at a nearby cam. ‘I would have more confidence in our success, if you would let me fire off at least one cap.’
‘Surely the reason for that is quite plain?’
‘Not to me.’
Even as Brigitta spoke, Angela grimaced and shook her head. Obviously the quiet Saberhagen twin had already worked out why, yet, because of her own irritating tendency not to communicate what she felt should be obvious to all, she had not told her sister.
‘The Vision is sitting out there watching us very closely,’ Saul observed, ‘and isn’t it the case that revealing a new weapon to one’s enemy is not a good idea?’
‘We’re as good as in the Io flux tube, where the EM radiation should cover it.’
Oh, good, she had at least been thinking about this, though not deeply enough.
‘Two problems I see there,’ replied Saul. ‘Because we are, as you say, as good as in the Io flux tube, the data you would get from such a firing would be highly dubious. The EM effects would disrupt both targeting and the magnetic bottle of the cap. Furthermore, the Vision would still gather enough imagery to inform Earth that we are capable of firing plasma bolts.’
‘I suppose,’ she replied grudgingly. ‘I haven’t got your omniscience.’
‘So, you must just do what you can without a test firing, okay?’
‘Yeah, okay.’ Brigitta flung herself down in her seat, waved a hand at the cam and began tapping away at a keyboard.
Saul drew away, feeling like a professorial parent irritated by the limited understanding of a child. He spread his awareness now, taking in a full overview of his ship, fleeting irritation dismissed and satisfaction at present progress supplanting it.
Just two square kilometres of hull plates remained still to be fitted for the ship to become a fully enclosed sphere. The docks were now secure inside, while his conjoined robots were building massive sliding space doors in the outer hull. These were back in their open position so presented no hindrance to the space plane currently entering the ship and heading towards Dock One; meanwhile, the remaining space plane was two hours away, still towing in a booster tank. Insulated walls had risen up around the business end of the Mars Traveller engine, while a new steering thruster was being built at the pole of the ship – both of these just a backup should the Mach-effect element of the ship’s overall drive fail. All the rebuilding was in fact ahead of schedule and, thinking of that, Saul decided to check in on the woman whom he had appointed overseer of all this work.
‘It seems, Var, that you’re managing to beat my rebuilding schedule,’ he commented, watching his sister through the cam located in her mobile overseer’s office.
She looked up from her screen, and he at once noted how pale and ill she appeared. Perhaps she had been pushing herself too hard, yet, reading the minutiae of her expression, Saul felt a nag of doubt.
‘Is everything okay?’ he asked.
‘I think so,’ she replied, ‘if you’re utterly sure that these chipped rebels are unlikely to be a threat – I can’t help but feel some concern about them.’
With a fragment of his mind Saul ascertained that those same chipped rebels were moving along nicely with their plans. They’d now stepped over the line from talking to action and everything he’d put in place to deal with them would initiate at the right time. He then noted that one of them was missing – a certain Gilder Main, whose backup relay was no longer signalling – and he ran a search of recorded footage. It took him all of two seconds to realize why something had seemed amiss with his sister.
‘I see you had a chat with Gilder Main.’
It appeared that Main and the repro Thomas Grieve had spent some hours with her in the cam black spot in the workshop of the fone shop. Subsequently neither of the two had reappeared in any cam view.
‘One of the robots they control is carrying a copper-head bomb which it even now has probably attached to your inner sanctum,’ she replied quickly.
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br /> ‘Where are Gilder Main and Thomas Grieve?’ he countered, noting that, yes, the robot had indeed put the explosive in place and that its timer was running. ‘What happened behind the fone shop?’
Momentary desperation flitted across her expression, then it went flat and blank. ‘I questioned Main and he revealed the plot. He also said something about a plan to destroy your backups, which he seemed to think were somewhere in the old station ring. I think Thomas Grieve overheard us.’ She shrugged. ‘What happened after I left, I’ve no idea.’
She was lying, there could be no doubt. He watched old cam footage of a robot, carrying an empty sealant drum, arriving while she was still in the fone shop, then heading off to one of the smelting plants, where that same drum had gone into one of the furnaces. There was also no data available on who had instructed the robot, so someone expert must have wiped it from the system. Someone like Var.
Gilder Main, he felt sure, would not have willingly revealed the plot contrived by the chipped rebels. With a thought, Saul sent a small maintenance robot to check out that same black spot, certain that it would find neither Main nor Grieve still there. By now they were both furnace slag or part of the ship’s components. Furthermore, from what he had thus far read in Var’s expression and in the intonation of her words, he suspected that she had interrogated and killed Main, and probably killed Grieve too. Saul linked to a particular backup, taking the route he had taken before when he just became suspicious of some of the chipped – whereby he had broken the scrambler codes by reading their recently backed-up thoughts. He set a program to decoding Gilder Main’s last memories, and then returned his full attention to Var.
‘Did you kill them both?’ he asked her.
‘Now you’re being silly,’ she replied, but everything he read in her confirmed the truth.
What should he do about this? Var had been as much a killer as him – killing to survive – except, of course, when she killed Rhone of Mars Science, which was plain vengeance, for he had been no threat at the time. If she had killed Gilder Main, then really that was justifiable since Main, like the rest of the chipped, had crossed a line. However, killing a mind-wiped repro amounted to the plain murder of an innocent.