Owner 03 - Jupiter War

by Neal Asher

  ‘I take it Vaughan is by now aware of the situation?’ she enquired.

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  Serene nodded, then selected the screen tab on her palmtop for the Scour activation program. For a moment she hesitated, considering adding Calder’s name to the list, but decided against that, before abruptly switching to another screen and sitting back. No, not yet – considering how fast the Scour acted, there was still time, and she needed to think hard about the consequences of taking this step.

  Everyone aboard the station would soon realize that the entire Inspectorate complement had died from the Scour. That information would then spread around Earth orbit, and without doubt it would eventually reach Earth. It would then be obvious that the Scour was a lot more specific than previously supposed, that merely air-transmission or some similar form of contagion were unlikely. She would have to concoct some sort of story to cover this outbreak.

  Calder . . .

  The man’s main discipline was nano-technology, so surely it would be possible to contrive some way for him to take the blame. This could all be down to an assassination attempt against her and how he used the Scour to remove the personnel protecting her. Yes, something like that should work. There would be loose ends to tie up, but none that could not be neatly knotted by a strangulation collar, bullet or adjustment cell. Perhaps she could also contrive some sort of alliance between Calder and Alan Saul, as that would neatly—

  ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘What?’ Serene whirled on Elkin.

  ‘All your delegates are assembled ready in video conference, and we are currently recording for ETV their ratification of a pardon for all real or imagined crimes committed by Clay Ruger and Pilot Officer Trove,’ she said. ‘It’s being transmitted here right now, and will soon be ready for insertion into the station ETV broadcast.’

  Serene stared at her blankly, not quite understanding for a moment. Then it all clicked into place in her mind. She must never forget the importance of ensuring that Clay Ruger actually began transmission of the Gene Bank data.

  ‘Vaughan also reports that his team is fully in place around you, while Admiral Bartholomew – confirmed by Calder – has tightened his estimate of departure to just one hour’s time.’

  ‘I see,’ said Serene, wondering where the intervening time had gone.

  Ruger’s shuttle should be docking in about three hours, which should allow her enough leeway to have things sorted out and cleared up for his arrival. It wouldn’t do to have hundreds of Scour victims floating around inside the space dock when the ETV broadcast began – therefore Vaughan and his men would have to deal with that.

  Serene tapped on the tab of the Scour-activation program, poised a finger over the return key projected on the table before her, hesitating for just a moment as she remembered the first time she had done this and the pompous words she had spoken then to the man Ruger had replaced. She then brought her finger down.

  Argus

  Acceleration pushed Hannah back into her seat as the new train headed out towards what someone had dubbed the ‘Meat Locker’. This newly built hall was sandwiched within the lattice walls between Arcoplex Two and the Arboretum. The thing was a kilometre long, two hundred metres wide and extended the depth of the gap between the two lattice walls, which was a hundred metres. Down one side was a station into which the vehicle now slowed, throwing Hannah forward against her straps. Once it had stopped, airlock tubes extended from the near wall to each of the three carriages, the tube accessing the rear cargo carriage being oval in cross-section and ten metres across at its widest point. As all these tubes connected, Hannah could hear movement from the rear as robots began unloading the next batch of components for the Meat Locker.

  She unstrapped and propelled herself over to the door leading into the nearest airlock tube, checked the ready light, opened the door and passed through. A moment later, she found herself in the new hall itself and looking around. Directly ahead of her the wall was honeycombed, with partially assembled cryogenic pods protruding here and there, with the golden centipedes of Saul’s conjoining robots busily at work on them. Over to her right the more conventional station robots were busy ferrying out the cargo, dispatching crates and empty pods through the air to be fielded by their more up-to-date brethren. There were humans here, too: some of the chipped controlling the older robots, engineers working on individual pods, and at the far end of the wall, beside a pod extending near what she supposed she might call the floor – such nomenclature in zero gravity always being difficult – stood a small group apart. She propelled herself towards them, correcting her trajectory with the wrist impeller of her suit because, despite the place being pressurized, using spacesuits was a precaution all ship’s personnel took in any new builds.

  Approaching the group, she slowed and brought herself clumsily face-down towards the floor, but still managed to engage one gecko boot, to secure herself there while she stood properly. One of the figures was without a spacesuit – stripped down to his undershorts while Dr Raiman attached stick-on sensors to his exposed skin. As Hannah walked closer, Da Vinci waved to her cheerfully. She raised her hand in not so cheerful acknowledgement, nodded to Langstrom and the other two officers present, then turned to the remaining individual.

  ‘So you’ve finally come out of your pit,’ she remarked, glancing round to locate the spidergun, squatting over by the further wall. ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘To offer moral support,’ Saul replied.

  ‘It would have to be just that,’ Hannah observed flatly. ‘We mere humans are now expected to govern and police ourselves, which means you’ve effectively washed your hands of us. What’s that decision all about, then? A separation of church and state?’

  ‘Within the limits and constraints of them being aboard my ship, I have given the people living here more freedom. I shall see, in time, what they do with it.’

  ‘That’s big of you,’ Hannah snapped, then wished she hadn’t. ‘Anyway, I would have thought, with everything that’s going on, you’d want to stay at the centre, and in utter control.’

  ‘Generally my location is irrelevant and, anyway, the ship is in no danger right now.’ He paused for a second, his pink eyes blinking. ‘The Vision cannot harm us, and I can get us on the move the moment the other two ships start heading our way.’

  ‘I detect some doubt.’

  He shook his head. ‘I’m just failing to perceive what Galahad hopes to achieve. Unless those two ships have some way of viewing normal space through an Alcubierre warp, and thus tracking us, sending them against us is a futile gesture.’

  ‘I hope you’re right,’ said Hannah, studying him more closely.

  With the Mach-effect drive operating to keep the ship stable and the EM shield protecting them from the ionization in the flux tube, all radio communications were shut down. Previously this had meant that, without a direct optic connection, Saul would be disconnected from the ship’s systems, but Hannah could see he had used the same work-around as he had employed against Salem Smith on first sending his robots against him. An optic cable extended from the socket in his temple down into the neck ring of his suit, while, attached to the shoulder of his suit, was a flat matt disc with green pin lights flickering and glinting around its rim. He was laser-linked to receivers on the robots here, on his spidergun, and on any other item of equipment that used some form of remote control – and therefore through all of these into the ship’s systems.

  Examining him further, she noted other changes, such as the fact that he wasn’t wearing a standard-issue VC suit. His bulked slightly larger, with numerous black boxes attached to its surface; the helmet hanging from his belt had also been redesigned, possessing optic connections all around the neck ring. It seemed that, while holed up in his inner sanctum, Saul had been busy indeed. Then, with a start, she realized that at the base of his neck, small devices had been surgically attached at his carotids, pipes and wires leading from these down inside the suit.

 
; ‘Pressure shunts and nutrient feeds,’ she decided.

  ‘And much else besides,’ he agreed, before turning to glance at Da Vinci, who, held steady by Raiman, was now stepping into the cryogenic pod.

  As Saul turned, she spotted another optic connection at the base of his skull, the cable similarly leading down into his suit, but she could hazard no possible reason for it. She, too, glanced at Da Vinci, feeling abruptly at odds with herself. She had come here because she was concerned about him, because she wanted to make one last attempt to dissuade him from trying out this pod, but now all her concern was focused on Saul.

  ‘You’ve been operating on yourself,’ she said.

  He turned back to her, his expression mild. ‘Well, I wasn’t actually holding the scalpel. I just robotized and programmed a combined micro- and macro-surgery, shut down this body of mine and let the surgery proceed.’

  ‘You should have let me do it,’ said Hannah, feeling both horrified and affronted. ‘I’ll need to run some tests.’

  ‘You have enough to do,’ he replied, ‘and my health, mental or otherwise, is no longer your concern.’

  ‘It’s the concern of us all!’ she countered vehemently.

  He tilted his head and in that moment she realized that his skin now had a slightly metallic hue which was not due to the lighting here, as she had first assumed.

  ‘Your concern is irrelevant,’ he stated, the spidergun beyond him suddenly unfolding and becoming more attentive.

  Had some fragment of humanity left inside him grown angry with her? Hannah wondered. Or had some risk-assessment program running in a mind that effectively spanned this entire ship calculated an increase in danger to its core; this human body and brain that sat at the centre of Alan Saul like the reptile back-brain sits at the core of all humans? Hannah gazed at him for a while longer, but he showed no human response to such scrutiny.

  ‘Hi, Hannah,’ called out Da Vinci, his voice sounding slightly slurred, ‘glad you came.’

  She switched her attention back to him. He was now lying down inside the pod, and Raiman was beginning to close the lid. She hurried over. ‘Wait!’ But, as she arrived and peered down at him, Da Vinci’s eyes were already closed and he was breathing deeply and steadily.

  ‘The process has started,’ explained Raiman.

  Hannah wanted to tell him to stop the process at once, but knew that would be childish, and effectively beyond her authority. As the lid then closed, she switched her attention to the monitor screen showing all the rhythms of a human body, all slowing down. She noted the abrupt change in the pattern there, just as Da Vinci had predicted, at the moment the pod began to exchange blood for a complex form of antifreeze. Thereafter his core temperature began to drop rapidly.

  ‘Time to insert it,’ said Raiman. ‘The control systems in the wall need to engage.’

  She stepped back as he punched a button on the side of the pod. It began to slide into its hexagonal space in the wall, grotesquely like a paper coffin going into a community digester. If it turned out that this process would kill Da Vinci, then she had already lost him. She wondered where this Meat Locker rated in Saul’s calculations. Would the people aboard be given a choice about going into these pods, or did that decision fall under his remit regarding his own and his ship’s safety? Would it in fact be compulsory?

  ‘Couldn’t this have waited until we were away from the solar system and well out of danger?’ she asked. ‘We really needed the opportunity to do much more research into it.’

  ‘Not my decision,’ Raiman replied.

  Hannah flicked him an annoyed glance then turned to Saul – but Saul was gone. He must have walked away while she was checking Da Vinci’s monitor. In that moment she realized that while she might indeed have lost Da Vinci, there was also a good chance he would survive. All the same, she had very definitely lost the human being named Alan Saul.

  He was gone forever.

  ‘It’s called the Vision,’ said the copy of the comlifer located aboard the Command, and who now allowed Saul to address him as Chris, ‘because that’s about the limit of its capabilities.’

  ‘It possesses weapons,’ Saul noted, just as he reached the door leading into his inner sanctum.

  ‘It does, but you could fry it if it gets any closer.’

  That was probably true, though Saul’s main concern had been about its named purpose, which was why, ever since its arrival near Europa, he had switched over to minimal usage of the Mach-effect drive, and was now holding his ship in position using the rim steering thrusters. Just as with the Saberhagens’ weapon, it was best not to apprise the enemy of technologies with tactical relevance, and the Mach-effect drive was certainly that.

  In the virtual world he had created, Chris appeared slimmer than the image Saul had seen of him aboard the Command, and he was now clad in a neat suit. This struck Saul as not the usual dress of a robotics engineer but of an Inspectorate executive, a political officer. Saul was now entertaining some suspicions about his new guest, and so decided to discover Chris’s true thoughts.

  ‘They’re panicking,’ Chris continued. ‘They’ve seen how fast your reconstruction has gone and are worried that you might take off or be too well prepared before their two warships can come after you. I’d bet they’ve moved the Vision closer so as to push you into doing something else that’ll hamper you, just as moving the Command and the Fist out of the construction station made you recall your space planes.’

  The explanation was feasible but, as Saul had just told Hannah, Galahad’s overall approach seemed strangely flawed. She must know that he could engage the Rhine drive at any moment and that though the two warships might be able to pursue him along whatever course he chose, they could not know when he was going to stop and change direction, and would therefore not know when to stop their own drives in order to change direction to go after him. Just one course change was needed, and he would be lost in the universe and utterly beyond Earth’s reach.

  So he had to be missing something.

  Entering his sanctum, the door locks thumping home behind him, and his spidergun settling down like a dog coming home after a lengthy walk, he headed straight for his gimbals chair and quickly strapped himself in, unplugged the optic leading from his temple into his suit, and instead plugged in the one here. There was no interruption in the flow of data, and he was pleased with his trial of his new laser networking device, his life-support suit and the recent upgrade to his human body’s mental function that required that new suit. Now his backups were truly backups – copying everything now running in his skull, in the additional brain matter growing in an artificial cyst in his groin, as well as the terabytes of processing power distributed throughout his suit.

  ‘I’m not sure I would characterize what they are doing as panic,’ Saul stated, now opening links into the subpersona called Chris and injecting specially designed search engines which, if he wanted to draw similes with living organisms, were less like bloodhounds and more like wolves.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Chris asked.

  ‘Getting to the truth,’ Saul replied.

  The moment the search engines hit, the image of Chris began screaming, whereupon the virtual world he occupied tore open and flew apart. But how, Saul wondered, could something that was a mere collection of bytes feel pain? Of course, the same logic could be applied to human beings. Were they not just moist collections of biological information? It occurred to him now to wonder – as had been speculated on before by people of a philosophical turn of mind – how many of those around him were actually conscious.

  The first truth the engines delivered was that, yes, Chris had been a robotics engineer, until his talent for sucking up to the right people and undermining rivals got him the position of political officer in the robotics factory.

  After Saul’s attack on Earth and Galahad’s assumption of power, Chris had tried scrabbling further up the ladder but only managed to annoy someone senior to him. He’d been on his way to adj
ustment when he was offered an alternative – and he’d grabbed it. Who wouldn’t? But, as a comlifer, first losing any will to live, and then going through the agonizing conditioning process, he wished he had chosen the visit to a white-tiled cell instead.

  The next truth was a defining one. This subpersona had so many holes that it was a wonder it had managed to hold itself together. It contained no tactical data of any value to Saul, and some data that was most definitely a plant, like the assertion that the Fist and the Command would not be ready to leave Earth for at least five days. Still, Saul ran all of this ‘Chris’ through filters, pattern-recognition programs, sifted and sieved him to get every last nugget of potentially useful information, then wiped the storage that had contained him, the subpersona expiring with an electronic sigh.

  Certain things now seemed plain. Those moving against Saul wanted him to believe that they were desperate; that if he engaged his ship’s Rhine drive all their plans would come to nothing; that the impossible was being demanded of them by the dictator of Earth. And it was all a lie. They had something, some technology or method, to achieve what Galahad wanted. That they had built and were in the process of dispatching those ships indicated this, for Serene Galahad might be a homicidal autocrat, but she wasn’t insane enough to squander so much on a mere folly. The pattern of holes in the knowledge of this Chris also confirmed this. On the surface the memory erasures looked merely rough, but they covered up some very specific deletions.

  Human frustration arose inside Saul, instantly banished, then its source abruptly reprogrammed itself to rid him of that particular route towards time-wasting emotion. He could go no further than affirm that his enemies had something extra, and that they knew how he had intended to react simply by running. As he considered this he noted that those he had summoned some time earlier were now arriving at the door leading into his inner sanctum, so he opened it for them.