by Neal Asher
Serene glanced round at Ruger, who was grinning again, then she tried to stamp down on an upsurge of rage, for such information could only have reached Scotonis through him.
She turned back to the captain. ‘Then you know half the truth.’
Scotonis shrugged. ‘It’s a big enough half for me.’
‘Yes, there are biochips in implants, and they do produce the Scour,’ she said. ‘But it was not me who activated them. When Alan Saul initiated his computer-generated and physical attack on the infrastructure of Earth, he activated those chips. All I did was keep the source of the Scour a secret.’
Scotonis smiled, shaking his head. ‘And yet, oddly, those who died from the Scour were not those he would have wanted to kill, but zero-asset citizens. Later, when it was thoroughly convenient for you, Committee members also died of it. But, of course, you covered that rather incriminating selectivity by killing off numerous others within the administration, including my wife and my children. Good try, Galahad, but you’re still going to burn.’
‘You’re making a very foolish mistake,’ she said, scrabbling for some other angle, groping for what to try next, utterly sure that there had to be something she could try.
‘Bye bye, Serene Galahad,’ said Scotonis, cutting off the communication.
Serene stared at the blank screen, but now mentally chewing everything over just as fast as possible.
They were trapped inside this station so long as Calder controlled its railguns, while bearing down on them was a spaceship containing enough nukes to flash-burn a continent. However, though she realized her initial reaction to all this had contained its elements of denial, she knew for sure she would survive. Earth needed her; therefore her dying up here before her work was done just could not be contemplated. There had to be a way out. No question.
‘The drop shuttle,’ she said abruptly. ‘The fast re-entry shuttle.’
Yes, survival was inevitable, it had to be.
‘Ma’am?’ Sack enquired.
‘We can get to it without leaving the station structure,’ she declared, having no idea whether that was true. ‘We can get to it without making ourselves a target for Calder’s railguns.’
Sack abruptly turned to the console and took control of the screen image. He worked through a series of menus, finally calling up a schematic of the entire station, then he pointed to one part of it, a module protruding underneath at the end of a short cylinder.
‘Can you get us here?’ he asked Trove.
‘Why should I even try?’ asked the pilot officer.
Serene waited for Sack to hit the woman, or maybe take out a disabler and use it on her. But he did not, and instead turned back to Serene.
‘She needs a reason,’ he stated.
Serene stared at him for a long moment, assessing, calculating. She had been stupid to allow petty vengeance to get in the way. The fates of both Trove and Ruger were irrelevant to her ultimate purpose. She could let them go and whether or not they survived just did not matter. What mattered was her getting back to Earth and regaining her seat of power. Anyway, the pair of them could always be hunted down later . . .
‘As I understand it, the controls of the drop shuttle, though they can take us down to Earth on automatic, can be overridden.’ Still feeling her way, she continued, ‘You can take control and land it wherever you choose . . . we will give you weapons so you can assure your own safety . . . you can run, you can go wherever you wish . . . I will say that you died aboard the construction station.’
Trove gazed at her for a long moment, then, turning to Sack, held out her hand palm upwards. In one almost dismissive motion, as if he just did not care, he took out his automatic and handed it over. Serene felt her stomach tighten as Trove studied the weapon, clicked the safety on and off, ejected the magazine and inspected it, then slammed it back in. She then pointed it casually at Serene’s stomach. But Serene knew that the trigger would not be pulled, for destiny rode on her shoulders like a guardian angel. She folded her arms and waited.
Trove abruptly retracted the weapon and shoved it into the belt of her suit. She glanced over to Ruger and watched as, upon Serene’s nod, his guard handed over a sidearm and moved away.
‘Okay,’ said Trove, turning back to her controls. She quickly began calling up new views within the schematic, overlaid the shape of the shuttle they occupied, its relative dimensions correct, and began plotting a course through the station. Seeing what she was doing, Serene realized that this was something she could have done herself, and that there had been no need to put herself in danger by allowing Trove and Ruger to be armed.
Trove grabbed the joystick in her right hand, left hand working the console and her feet working the pedals that controlled the shuttle’s attitude. The shuttle turned and lifted, giving a view across the side of the dock where inter-station shuttles clung like steel bracket fungi. A blast from steering thrusters caused Serene to stagger and now the shuttle sped along above the others, a bubblemetal wall speeding past them to the right. Deceleration followed and the shuttle turned its nose in at the end of the dock, spider webs of structural beams looming ahead.
‘It’ll be a bumpy ride,’ said Trove, ‘but this shuttle is built to take a few knocks.’ She glanced at Sack. ‘I want a helmet suitable for the VC suit I’m wearing.’
Without any instruction from either Sack or Serene, the guard who had handed his gun to Ruger brought forward a replacement helmet, which Trove donned. Serene stepped back into the passenger compartment, whereupon the same man passed her a helmet to replace her own, which she had lost somewhere inside the shuttle bay. Everyone secured their suits, before the remaining soldier thought to check on his injured fellow, but found he had meanwhile ceased to have any need of air.
Trove drove the shuttle forwards and the first crash ensued shortly afterwards, dragging the vessel round until the beam it had just struck was visible, though with no apparent damage. The impact detached Serene’s gecko boots from the floor and she had to struggle to propel herself down again, but only after the second impact, when she was thrown against the cockpit bulkhead and a breach alarm started sounding, did she concede that she needed to strap herself into a seat like the rest of them.
Another crash ensued and, from her seat behind the cockpit, Serene watched a crack snake across the screen.
‘I’m dumping internal,’ Trove shouted. ‘Go to channel fifteen.’
For a second, Serene did not know what the woman was talking about, but then came a roaring sound and her suit stiffened, her visor display noting a rapid drop of pressure inside the shuttle. Trove had dumped their air, probably to prevent the screen from being blown out, and now they needed to use their suit radios. Serene searched radio channels using a wrist console, the menu summoned up in her visor. Finding channel fifteen, she noted the option to link it to her fone, but that seemed pointless.
Ahead, the entire station seemed to be gyrating as Trove corkscrewed the shuttle between the metal-webbed blocks of factory units, venting chimneys and globular clusters of accommodation units. Gripping her seat arms tightly, Serene tracked the slow-moving seconds and then minutes on a clock in her visor. For a moment they were out in open vacuum and she glimpsed people in EVA units firing emergency jets to get out of the way, then she closed her eyes as the shuttle turned back into the station, swung sideways to get itself between two massive beams, next leapfrogging some gargantuan ship component being towed along a tunnel resembling a lizard’s throat. Coming out of the other side of this tunnel, the shuttle turned, with the curve of the Large Component Construction Floor coming into view to the right, then dropped down past it.
‘We’ll have to go outside,’ Trove announced. ‘The docking mechanism is fucked.’
Deceleration threw Serene against her straps as they sped down past a column she recognized from the station schematic. Then finally they were zero gravity again, turning slowly in vacuum as everyone unstrapped. They were now beside the drop-shuttle dock, the
drop shuttle itself suspended underneath it like a giant black door wedge. Ruger and Sack were first to the airlock, and first through. Trove and Serene went next, the surviving member of her security team last. By the time Serene was out in vacuum, Sack had opened an airlock leading into the dock. She propelled herself across to it, fighting a terror of the yawning spaces all around her, but was soon safely inside and through the airlock. The corridor beyond was octagonal in section, windows looking out on to vacuum and the gleam of Earth below. Sack led the way down towards another airlock at the further end.
‘You know, Ruger,’ said Trove, ‘despite everything, I was starting to like you.’
‘Likewise,’ Ruger replied as he followed her through into the drop shuttle. ‘Shame it’s going to be such a short relationship.’
‘What do you mean?’ Serene interrupted, pulling herself down into one of the seats inside.
As she strapped herself down in the pilot’s chair, Trove glanced round and, ignoring Serene’s question, said, ‘Plug in your umbilicals and go over to ship air. If we’re really lucky, we might even get to make a dent in the supply.’ She directed her next words at Ruger. ‘Yeah, three minutes really isn’t enough time for us to get to know each other better.’
16
Engineers and Ideologues
The importance of politicians is something that can never be underestimated, for over the centuries so many of them have strutted on the world stage, prattling their party political and ideological jargon and produced little of real value. The number of them who have had a real effect on the human lot pales in comparison to the number of scientists and engineers who have produced something worthwhile. Who did more for women’s rights than the inventors of the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner and the contraceptive pill? Has righteous nannying improved human health more than Lister, Pasteur, Fleming or any number of a huge list of pioneering biologists? Who gave us more freedom than Henry Ford, or more freedom of speech than the inventors of the Internet, or more to eat than Jethro Tull or John Froehlich? It was Edison who shone real light into our lives, not some dogma. However, let us not presume politicians are ineffectual, for whenever the bombs and napalm are falling, the mines taking off legs and the bullets punching holes in human flesh, they are always behind the firing line, deciding who should die.
Argus
Again something smashed into the ship and Hannah knew that what she was feeling was real fear and no mere panic attack. Beyond that she felt frustrated and ineffectual: what was happening now was as beyond her influence as a tsunami.
‘We just lost one of the railguns,’ declared Le Roque, his screen image appearing up in a top corner of the right-hand bulkhead screen, looking like a man seeing his own gallows for the first time.
‘No shit,’ replied Brigitta Saberhagen, her head dipped, trying not to see the same noose.
The left-hand screen, which was linked to a damage-control program, kindly displayed the partially molten and shattered mess that had been one of their railguns, along with a large red-lipped hole to one side of it, where a missile had punched through the hull.
‘Is there anything you can do?’ the technical director asked.
‘I ceased to have any input long ago,’ the Saberhagen twin replied. ‘Saul is now controlling everything.’
‘That’s true,’ Langstrom interjected. ‘I don’t know if any of you have tried, but I can’t do much with my implant now. The robots are ignoring me and system access is limited to data retrieval only.’
‘Perhaps this was not such a great idea,’ Hannah muttered, suppressing transmission of her voice beyond this limited area. ‘I’m not sure I want to know what’s going on.’
It was Le Roque who had opened up video conferencing to them here in their room at the end of the Meat Locker. The technical director was trying to gather data, exert some influence, trying to do something, but was just being swept along in the wave of wreckage. All the humans aboard were in very much the same position: strapped into either an acceleration chair or a couch, while waiting to find out if they were going to die.
‘I do,’ Da Vinci replied. ‘We blank all this out, and the next thing we might see is Galahad’s troops coming in here to grab us.’
Dr Raiman leaned forwards from his chair beside Da Vinci and gazed across at them both. ‘We are all wearing VC suits, so have medical support.’
‘And?’ Da Vinci stared at him in puzzlement.
Raiman held out a gloved hand to reveal a couple of drug ampoules. ‘You can insert them in your support packs, and order suit injection by means of your wrist console or phone.’ He shrugged. ‘Or any other data route you care to name.’
Hannah reached out to take one of the ampoules and held it up, seeing that all it had marked on it was a bar code.
‘The rebels on Earth were starting to use explosive implants before this all kicked off,’ she reflected. ‘So what is this?’
‘A neurotoxin that only has a number,’ Raiman replied. ‘I’ve always had this stuff ready to hand, even before Saul took over Argus Station.’ He nodded to his assistant, who was sitting silently in one of the seats behind him. ‘Greg and I are ready.’
Da Vinci reached for one of the ampoules and, without hesitation, pressed it down into a drugs port fitted in the support pack on his belt.
‘And, in what feels only a short time ago to me,’ he said, ‘I was actually contemplating immortality. Now, it seems, it’s time to think about suicide.’
The view on the left-hand screen was changing like a snapshot viewer, running through images inside a ship that Hannah felt was distinctly taking on the appearance of a pawnbroker’s sphere clipped by a blast from a shotgun. Another hit left the Meat Locker shuddering, and the view switched to focus on the latest impact point. Hannah gazed numbly at air blasting from a hole in Arcoplex Two, that whole cylinder world turning slowly on its now bent axle. She could have been in there. She could have been right under that. Almost certainly others had been there.
‘That’s more power lines down,’ observed Rhine, who until then had been saying nothing; instead he had just sat staring at his own screen and cam with a look of myopic surprise.
‘So what have we lost?’ Le Roque asked him.
Rhine had now turned away and did not reply.
‘Rhine?’
The professor turned back. ‘The vortex generator will never get up to full speed without major repairs, and I see no robots tending to the problem.’
‘We should consider ourselves lucky the thing itself hasn’t been hit,’ said Langstrom. ‘After seeing what happened to the Vision.’
Rhine shook his head. ‘No luck involved.’
‘What do you mean?’
When Rhine didn’t reply, Le Roque did it for him. ‘Saul is using Mach-effect nudges to make sure the vortex ring isn’t hit, and deliberately firing off steering thrusters at the same time, so as to cover it. He doesn’t want them to know about the Mach-effect drive.’
Wonderful, thought Hannah, hoping such nudges were being used simply to save human lives inside the ship, but sure Saul was just desperately trying to preserve their one shot at escape.
‘And then what?’ This was Pike speaking from one of the smelting plants – perhaps one of the safest places to be now, since it was close to the vortex ring. ‘Does this mean he plans to use it against them somehow?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Le Roque, obviously bewildered. ‘Has anyone been able to get any response from him? Hannah?’
‘Nothing since he told us to take cover here,’ she replied.
‘Does anyone have any idea what he intends?’ Le Roque asked, but no one replied.
Hannah would have liked to believe that Alan had some clever and unforeseen tactic in mind to drag their nuts out of the fire, but instead it seemed they were fleeing desperately while taking a hellish punishment. It wouldn’t be long, she felt, before the Fist hit something major and this ship ceased to be a ship at all, and became just a drifting
wreck. Further punishment would then ensue and, if she and those accompanying her survived that, it would be Galahad’s assault force arriving next.
She peered down at the ampoule still resting in her palm, then inserted it into her support pack. Da Vinci was right: on the next few hours depended the chance of eternity or nothing at all.
Var picked herself up and, checking the temperature readings exterior to her suit, saw that without its insulation she would already be dead. The steam fogging the corridor rapidly dissolved into vacuum, but the walls around her were still radiating, still hot. She reached round to probe her shoulder blade: it hurt badly but didn’t feel broken. The ribs below it, however, responded to her fingers with a sharp pain. Almost certainly she’d cracked one. Only now did she properly consider Langstrom’s words.
Her brother was in the midst of a fight, which possibly in his terms meant only for his own life and for the survival of his ship, but nevertheless the crew of this ship and Var herself totally depended on him for their survival. Perhaps she should simply put trust in him: trust that he had already eliminated the threat the chipped had posed; trust that, though he might not have the best interests of the people aboard close to heart, he had still, as Langstrom claimed, always made some effort to ensure their survival. Perhaps now she should just turn back, find an acceleration chair, and wait for the outcome . . .
No! Var felt suddenly angry at her own weakness. Just because they were in the midst of a space battle, just because others did not believe her contentions and just because she was finding it harder and harder to believe them herself, that should not be an excuse for her to quit. The easy way was not the right way – this was something she had learned on Mars. She had killed other humans there and been perfectly justified in doing so. And the killing here had been perfectly justified too . . .
Thomas Grieve.
The name nagged at her. The sight of him looking up at her was imprinted on her mind. The sensation of his skull breaking under the spanner seemed to have permanently embedded itself in the nerves of her arm. She headed angrily off down the corridor, her thoughts in disarray, but doubt still knotting together her insides.