by Neal Asher
Switching back to Rhone, Saul addressed him, and the entire base, through the PA system: ‘You’ve been updated on the situation now, Rhone, and must be aware that you’ve run out of options. I have a spidergun with me and I am now coming to take control of Antares Base.’
Rhone sat rigid in his chair, staring blankly at his screen. Others in Mars Science were watching him warily. Sitting in a chair by the door with an assault rifle cradled in his lap, one man closed his eyes and shook his head, then raised his rifle and ejected the clip. Sensible of him, Saul thought.
‘The two armed individuals currently in the community room and Hex One will proceed to the base medical bay and hand over their weapons to Dr Da Vinci,’ Saul continued. ‘After which they will release all those who have been confined to their cabins. I then want you all to gather in the community room.’
‘And what about me?’ asked Rhone, sitting back and crossing his arms.
Saul ignored his question, instead addressing the man sitting by the door, whose name he’d just unearthed from the base’s records. ‘Thomas Grieve, I have individual instructions for you.’ The man looked up. ‘I want you to take Rhone to his cabin and lock him inside. Afterwards you take your weapon to Da Vinci and leave it with him, then head over to the community room.’
Grieve sat indecisively for a moment, his gaze straying to one of the screens in Mars Science that showed Saul’s approaching ATV, with the spidergun pacing alongside. Grieve abruptly reinserted his rifle clip and stood up, walked over to Rhone and just stared down at him. After a moment Rhone rose, looking tired and stooped, then trudged out of Mars Science with Grieve following behind him. Shortly after they departed, the other staff there began heading off towards the community room.
‘Good,’ said Saul.
‘So that’s it, we’re done?’ Var asked him disbelievingly.
‘Would you have preferred further bloodshed?’ Saul enquired.
The first two armed men had now reached Da Vinci and were handing over their weapons, as instructed. The doctor handled these with distaste, quickly depositing them on a gurney and tossing a sheet over them. Meanwhile, Rhone trudged into his own cabin and sat down on the bed. Grieve secured the door, then hurried off to find Da Vinci, who received his gun with similar distaste. On his way out after Grieve, the doctor locked the door behind him. There was nothing quite like a spidergun at your back to smooth things over, Saul felt. Some while later, as he finally drew the ATV to a halt beside the base, he began focusing his mind on the next objectives, already selecting staff, according to their records, for the various tasks he wanted performed.
The spidergun entered the airlock leading into the base first, Saul and Var following. Saul noted that his sister had left the assault rifle behind but brought her sidearm with her, and he wondered if this was as a precaution or if she had in mind a particular use for it. He meanwhile built up a work roster within the base’s system. Crews would have to head out to where Var had previously been relocating the base and there collect a list of items he had just collated, which was just about everything bar the regolith blocks. Another crew would prepare the space plane, whose system he had already penetrated, running diagnostic checks and listing the maintenance needing to be carried out. It would also need to be fuelled. The rest would continue dismantling the base, following Var’s previous plan, but with some minor adjustments. The reactor would go last, on what Saul planned to be the space plane’s sixth and final run up to Argus. And now, with the spidergun proceeding through the doors ahead of him, he entered the community room.
The nervous crowd within instantly moved back, some of them tripping over chairs in their hurry to distance themselves from the spidergun. Saul reached up, unclipped his helmet and removed it. He glanced at the main screen, which now displayed assignments and itineraries, which were copied to the personal screens of every bit of computing in the room. As he surveyed those around him, he tracked Var through the base’s cameras. She clearly had something else in mind and hadn’t followed him inside.
‘There will be no debates right now and there will be no questions,’ he said. ‘Later, when all the work down here is done, and you are all aboard Argus Station, you can debate and question all you like, but by then you will know the situation anyway.’
Var had now opened Rhone’s door and stepped inside. Sitting on his bed, an ancient laptop open beside him, Rhone was studying a view into the community room.
‘Who killed Martinez and Carol Eisen?’ she demanded bluntly.
Looking up, Rhone replied, ‘I’m responsible.’
‘I know that, but I want to know who pulled the trigger.’
Rhone named three personnel, adding that two of them now lay dead in the dust beside Shankil’s Butte. The third was Thomas Grieve. This was inconvenient, since Saul had included Grieve – who had worked in Construction and Maintenance under Martinez – among those assigned to taking this base apart. In his mind, just in case, Saul lined up the man’s replacement as he spoke to those assembled before him.
‘Your individual assignments are indicated here,’ he waved a hand towards the screen, ‘and also queued up in your personal computers. You will get to work now.’ He pointed to one individual: ‘You will lead the space-plane maintenance crew. I expect that plane to be ready for launch by this evening.’
He paused and gazed around at them as, perfectly on cue, three gunshots echoed through the base. Var had made utterly certain: two shots to Rhone’s chest and a final close shot through his skull. She was ruthless, his sister, and very unforgiving – a trait that Saul recognized all too well.
‘Why are you all still here?’ he added, moving aside and gesturing to the door.
As they quickly headed out of the Community Room, Saul contemplated what he now knew about his sister. She was undoubtedly arrogant, and he felt she detected the same trait in Saul himself. At high cost, she had chosen to be no longer subordinate to anyone and that decision had stuck. She was as ruthless as him, but still based her decisions on emotionally slanted human thought processes, just like his own emotionally slanted decision to rescue her. Putting her in charge of the reconstruction of Argus Station was the right thing to do, since it would keep her focused on the specific. However, she would, in time, become a problem.
4
Tweaking
The technology for artificially altering the human genome has been available for a century, mainly in the form of viral recombination to negate hereditary diseases. But, as always, there are rumours of dark goings on in secret government laboratories. In these places the geneticists have tried to make the perfect soldier, have tried to classify what combination of genes leads to high intelligence or even genius. They have tried to make human beings that mature quickly, consume less and die quickly after a limited span. They have tried to make humans more disease- and injury-resistant and to even eliminate death. Anything you can think of has been tried in those dark and secret places, and all of this would have remained rumour if we on the Subnet had not reported the truth. The Committee’s contempt for human life was what let the secret out. All would have remained simply rumour had they properly disposed of the failures, but they did not, as attested to the monstrous corpses pulled from the Ganges just a few kilometres down from the All Health research centre in Pabna. And we can be sure that where there were failures there were also successes, and that they live among us now.
Argus
Alex now stood upon one of the lattice walls beside Arcoplex Two, above the accommodation unit he had been assigned to, which lay sandwiched between the two walls below; a sensation of immanence permeated the station. And everything around him seemed slightly distorted, as if it was slightly out of synch with the surrounding universe. Yet he could not nail the reason for this, and he wondered how much was due to the vortex generator winding up to speed, or his knowledge that it was doing so.
He gazed across to the space-plane docks as the big manta-winged Mars-format space plane, like some
giant metallized fruit bat, swooped towards the limb of Dock Two for the fourth time; he felt amazed that he could now actually see both it and the dock. This was because most of the upper enclosure now rested in a small city of stacks on the upper lattice wall, just a kilometre away from him. It was proof, if any was needed, that Gladys’s observation of five days ago seemed truer than ever. The robots were working much faster and more efficiently – but the humans were too. Alex could never remember anything getting done so quickly throughout his time here undercover when the Committee was in charge. Always there had been technical hold-ups, hitches in supply of materials and components, or jobs getting done in the wrong order and having to be reversed, or the work interfered with by the bureaucracy. He also remembered that the bureaucratic interference included workers disappearing because of some perceived slight towards an Inspectorate executive, and that generally everyone had worked with a complete lack of enthusiasm, doing only the bare minimum to get by.
Now the human teams were actually competing with each other and with the robots, while the robots never stopped, and the proctors, of whom everyone had been wary, had become a reassuring presence always ready to smooth out any of the few irregularities when not themselves employed on something related to the EM shield. Both smelting plants were also working, though at this distance from the sun they were not at full power, and a haze spread out behind them, marking the path of Argus around Mars. The ore transporters were on the move too, though intermittently since it was mostly salvage that was being smelted, while the smelting-plant docks continuously vibrated in sympathy with the busy roar of the rolling mills, extruders, presses and forges. Robots the size of train carriages were taking salvage to the ore carriers, then returning with components – brackets, beams, rolls of welding wire and crates of fixings – and distributing them. And the shape of the station had changed.
Not only had most of the enclosure been taken down, but incurving beams were being fitted to the rim, visible in some areas like the rib bones of titanic beasts decayed on a steel shore, slowly but surely etching out the eventual shape of this station – this ship.
‘That you, Alex?’ came the enquiry through his fone.
He turned to see Ghort – the man’s bulk easily recognizable even in a heavy work suit – climbing up onto the lattice wall and heading over.
‘It’s me,’ Alex replied, raising a hand.
‘Thought so, as most of us enjoy our free time not wearing a suit.’ Ghort sauntered over. ‘Looking good,’ he commented casually when he arrived at Alex’s side, then his gaze strayed to the scene over beside them. ‘But those give me the creeps.’
Even though he knew now that Ghort was perpetually probing people around him for their reactions to the situation they found themselves in, Alex had to agree. On the face of the lattice wall, near where it ended at a gap beside the curved edge of Arcoplex Two, the latest product coming out of Robotics had been arrayed in a neat square – hundreds of them – all laid out like a legion on a gamer’s model battlefield. They gleamed, these things: squat cylindrical bodies supported horizontally by double-jointed limbs terminating in six-fingered hands resting flat against the deck, further cylindrical tool caches affixed to their upper surfaces, all arrayed so close together that from some angles the outlines of them looked like polished brass centipedes. Even as the two men watched, another transport trundled down from the end of the arcoplex on its gecko treads to unload yet another batch of them, forming the corner of a new square.
‘We’ll be obsolete soon, according to Gladys,’ he said.
‘Maybe not just yet,’ Ghort replied. ‘The new boss has reassigned us.’
That had come as a surprise. Alex had expected the Owner, upon his return, to take a firmer grip on the reconstruction, but they now had a human in charge who had been, so Alex was told, the overseer of the Traveller construction project. Even on the first day, she had started making changes, reassignments which had been annoying but after a short time seemed like a squirt of lubricating oil to the station machine. Those doing the reconstruction were now working directly under Varalia Delex, who addressed them daily over the screens, describing further the ship they were to build. She seemed to be everywhere, offering encouragement, actually asking advice, often mucking in with some of the drudge work, and just being there. This had boosted morale, as it made people realize that they truly were part of something amazing, and in the end it had been her rather than the Owner who had given the project its present shape and impetus.
‘Reassigned where?’ Alex asked.
‘It seems these new fellas’ – Ghort stabbed a finger towards the nearby legion of robots – ‘are taking over our job, and will be building the framework of the ship’s sphere. The human teams and a lot of the older-design robots are moving above and below.’ Ghort gestured back towards the asteroid and to Tech Central. ‘We are first slicing up the asteroid – completely removing it – and then we connect all the station spokes and beam-work that used to be bolted to it to a central core, then we divide into groups. Some will be taking apart Tech Central and erecting an arcoplex spindle in its place. The one we’re now in will build downwards, for two kilometres, making a tough shock-absorbing column to support a platform.’
‘Platform?’
‘Yeah, it seems the boss isn’t happy with the current position of the Traveller engine – so we’re going to be moving it.’
Alex stood there, dumbfounded, then ventured, ‘And when are we to start doing this?’
‘Well, right now we’ve got to lock down our previous job and pack away our tools,’ said Ghort, ‘then we start on our new job once the sun is shining.’
Did the tension seeming to lace the very air demonstrate that the vortex generator’s effect on space-time was somehow against nature? No, Hannah decided, it was once more a demonstration of how human technology was outpacing the old naturally evolved human bodies, and further justification of everything she was doing in her laboratory and now also here in this factory area Saul had provided.
‘We’ve been avoiding each other,’ said Var.
Hannah turned to study the woman stepping out from the laboratory and onto the floor of the new biofactory. In one sense Var Delex’s appearance was reminiscent of one of the Saberhagens, what with her pale hair, narrow features and athletic physique. But there was something much harder ground into Var, just as the Martian rouge had been ground into her skin. The Saberhagens were youngsters – just in their twenties – this woman, being Saul’s sister, had to be at least fifty years old, like Hannah herself.
‘It seemed the politic thing to do for now,’ said Hannah. ‘You’ve had a lot to do, I understand: a lot of computer design, reorganizing – in fact all that’s involved in turning a space station into a starship.’
Var gazed at her very directly. ‘And yet I feel as if I’ve been given make-work, as if he left things undone just so I wouldn’t feel redundant.’
Hannah shrugged. ‘One of the penalties of serving a demigod?’
‘So it would seem.’ Var folded her arms and leaned back against the wall. ‘I’ve tried to make the reconstruction completely mine, so as to give the human teams a human face to talk to, and I’m trying to divorce their work from that of the robots – since many of them were starting to feel outmoded.’
‘And it’s working, so I’m told.’
‘It is.’ Var nodded in solemn agreement.
‘How are things with the rest of the . . . Martians?’ Hannah asked. ‘I understand that most of them are located here now.’ Along with one Thomas Grieve, who had recently been a guest in Hannah’s surgery – she hoped he was the last subject she would ever have to mind-wipe.
‘There were a few problems to begin with, when they found out they couldn’t choose where they were assigned, and that therefore they couldn’t stay together,’ said Var. ‘But growing up under the Committee results in obedience.’
Hannah grimaced, decided not to pursue her thoughts about Grieve
. Instead she focused on the problems about the assignment of personnel, since she had already heard and discussed them, if only briefly, with Saul.
‘A good thing about humans is that they form communities,’ she said. ‘A bad thing about humans is that they form ghettos.’
‘Precisely what he said to me.’ Var frowned. ‘My brother seems to have become quite the philosopher. Of course, now the people from the base have to get used to their feeling of obsolescence here.’ She cast an eye across the various machines in Hannah’s factory. ‘What about you?’
Hannah’s hand embraced the same machines. ‘Not obsolete yet.’
‘I understand you’re taking neural tissue samples from everyone, apparently to be grown into grafts for the repair of head injuries,’ Var commented neutrally. ‘I also understand that you’ve asked for volunteers from among the staff to try out some new cerebral hardware.’
Hannah flicked her gaze towards the group of four workers, all clad in paper overalls, steadily making their way up the factory as they installed automated biofactors and the base hardware of cylindrical glass growth tanks that had yet to be manufactured elsewhere. This was effectively a small job, hence the presence of only one small general-purpose robot working alongside them: a thing running on treads supporting a cylindrical upright body wrapped in a carousel of limbs sporting a variety of tool heads. She then swung her gaze to a large temperature-controlled safe.
This contained the remaining hundred and fifty cerebral interfaces. These were an older design than the one Saul currently used and were the same as those employed by the seven comlifers on Earth. They were also the kind she herself had used to wipe the minds of all the Committee delegates surviving here – biological interfaces that were the precursors to the one in Saul’s head, but which in the delegates were now effectively inert, which seemed a kind of justice. Until she made more, of a better design, these interfaces would provide the link for one hundred and fifty personnel to their backups, once they were ready, and would give them limited access to the station system and the robots.
