by Neal Asher
‘I may have the body of a weak and feeble woman,’ she muttered to herself.
‘Pardon, ma’am?’ said Bartholomew, then stepped back abruptly as Sack appeared at her side, his combat suit turning him into even more of a hulking monster.
She glanced at her bodyguard, unreasonably annoyed at him because she had spent so much time either feeling sick or being just too busy to take things any further with him. Perhaps it would be best to wait until they were back on Earth; make it a kind of celebration.
‘Queen Elizabeth the First,’ she explained to Bartholomew. ‘I leave it to you to find the reference.’ She scanned the crowd of personnel swarming all around her, noting the ranks of Bartholomew’s crews and soldiers standing neatly to attention. She wondered if she was expected to make some sort of inspection, then dismissed that idea. Scanning further, she found herself puzzled by the number of Inspectorate enforcer uniforms she was seeing, which were distinct from the attire of her security teams already gathered here. Surely there was little need for so many of them? Surely, up here, so many non-productive personnel would be a drain on resources?
‘Where’s Calder?’ she asked.
‘Here, ma’am.’
The man himself stepped forward, clad in a simple atmosphere-breach suit over jeans and T-shirt, one of the new palette-design palmtops clutched in his right hand, his thumb inserted through the hole to press down on the security reader and his fingers able to work the underside touch controls.
‘A lot of Inspectorate here,’ she noted. But, even while she watched, the Inspectorate staff began to filter away. Perhaps they felt their presence was not really required with all the soldiers and other security here. Even so, she felt a twinge of suspicion and knew this presence was something she ought to check up on.
‘Here to ensure your safety,’ he replied blandly.
‘Then they are rather surplus to requirements.’ She waved a hand towards the ranked troops and crew.
‘Yes, certainly.’ He paused for a moment before adding, ‘Of course, a degree of natural curiosity is not something to be ruled out.’
Perhaps that was it. This was a big station and maybe most of its Inspectorate personnel had come here just to see her. She couldn’t really blame them for wanting to see their ultimate ruler in the flesh, but she would still have to make some comment about them leaving their posts for that idle purpose – though later, for she had more important concerns right now.
‘We go straight into the orbital firing after the test,’ she declared, waiting impatiently for Calder to lead the way. ‘You’ve organized it?’
It took him a moment to draw his gaze away from a nearby Inspectorate officer and focus on what she was saying.
‘I have, ma’am,’ he said, then probingly, ‘though I’m not sure of its purpose.’
‘Shall we go?’ she snapped.
He gestured with his palette and, as she moved off, Serene was thankful that her security personnel moved ahead of her to lead the way. Sometimes all this deference could be quite annoying, especially when people insisted on walking either beside or behind her when she herself didn’t know which direction to go.
‘I would have thought the purpose of the orbital firing quite evident,’ she continued, realizing that this was the first time she had actually physically encountered Calder – that this was the first time she had spoken face-to-face with someone on whom so much depended.
‘If you destroy Argus Station, you lose the Gene Bank data,’ he replied.
‘Then obviously that is not the purpose.’
‘His response might not be what you expect, ma’am,’ Calder suggested.
‘There are only two responses: fight or flight,’ she explained. ‘If he arrives here, my tacticians suggest he won’t be able to stay long enough to cause major damage without putting Argus Station at huge risk. Most likely he will run, which will take him away from the sun and its convenient source of power. But he will not run all the way yet, because he’s not ready to, and he believes he can run at any time. The orbital firing will slow him down and give you more time to commission those ships out there, and take your new weapon against him.’
Calder nodded in dubious agreement.
At the base of the dock they headed for a train where more security personnel were waiting, doubtless there simply to ensure no one slipped a bomb on the vehicle before her arrival. She stepped aboard and gazed in puzzlement at the presence of seats in this zero-gravity environment, then sat down anyway. After a moment, she copied others in pulling her seat straps across. The reason for the seats and the straps soon became evident as the train slid into motion, passing through a complicated array of seals and iris doors, out into bright sunlight and the disperse confusion of the station structure, and then accelerated.
No air to slow it down, Serene realized, as she was first pushed back into her seat, then down into it on one sweeping curve, then eventually lifting out of it against her straps, as the train slowed at a C-section station in the side of something like a steel coliseum located out in vacuum. With a sucking crump, airlocks engaged, and she was soon out into busy corridors and cage-ways, then into a control centre that seemed either in the process of being taken apart or still being put together. Serene strode over to a big outward-slanting window that overlooked something crouching within the station structure: a skyscraper of technology braced and supported by heavy beams, massive carousels at one end, massive cables feeding in all round, unmistakably a weapon.
‘One of the new ones,’ said Calder from behind her.
She glanced round at him. ‘And the new missiles?’
‘I can show you one, but they don’t look particularly impressive – just a half-tonne of plain cone-shaped metal, very much in the form of an old staged-rocket crew capsule.’ He pointed down towards the carousels. ‘I have one ready to be loaded directly after the first test firing of an inert missile.’
‘Then let the test proceed.’
Calder gestured politely to a throne-like seat facing a curving panoramic screen. Of course there would be nothing to see by looking at the railgun itself, other than perhaps some movement in the carousels. Leaving her staff to hover behind her – Elkin and the rest unsure about where to position themselves, so looking like rubes in the big city – Serene went and sat herself down.
Three scenes were visible. One was obviously from a camera positioned down on the Moon’s surface, showing a plain of contorted rock and drifts of dust terminating up against a jagged range of mountains. Nearby, measuring posts had been fixed in the ground to give a sense of scale, while at the foot of the steep mountain slopes lay a scattering of lunar accommodation units and some steel-wheeled lunar rovers that had to be at least a hundred years old. The next view showed the same scene from a satellite located above the Moon – the rovers now reduced to silver specks. The third view was from even further out.
‘We’ve got the Hubble pointing at this, too,’ Calder explained, ‘using a milframer camera.’
Right then, Serene couldn’t remember whether that was a camera taking a million high-resolution frames a minute or a second, and she felt disinclined to ask. It basically meant that, should she want to, she could view extreme slow-motion video of the imminent events. She gestured for him to continue.
‘Okay,’ said Calder, his voice now issuing from a PA system. ‘Power up and fire the test shot, in twenty seconds precisely.’
The movement of people in the room seemed to judder to a halt for a second, as many screen images flickered and changed. Serene shivered as a thrumming in the air ratcheted up into clear audibility: the kind of sound heard in any power station in a major sprawl.
‘Firing test shot,’ announced Calder unnecessarily, as the tone of the hum abruptly changed.
Nothing happened for a few seconds, during which Serene had time to feel annoyed at not asking him for more detail: such as how long it would take the missile to reach its target. Then a bright flash lit up the lunar plain and it
abruptly bulged up, domed, then opened on a deep red explosion. Transferring her gaze to the video captured from orbit, Serene observed a perfectly circular wave spreading out around it. The close view briefly showed a boulder the size of a house tumbling past, before being subsumed in a wall of dust. The view from furthest out then showed a fire fading at the centre of an expanding and ever-diffusing dome of dust.
‘Impressive,’ Serene allowed, then glanced round at Calder. ‘I presume everything was satisfactory?’
He nodded. ‘There was really no reason to test the railgun – the real test comes next.’
‘So, if you would lead me through what happens now?’
‘The weapon is already in its power-up cycle,’ Calder explained. ‘Shortly, we will use the railgun at its lowest power, just as a launcher, since firing on full power would provide far too much acceleration and wreck the weapon’s internal components. Once it’s just clear of the station here, the weapon receives its vector and accelerates. To an outside viewer it will just seem like a railgun test firing, for the weapon will immediately start travelling at a speed equivalent to that of our previous firing, and it will then hit a target point just beyond the previous one.’
Serene smiled and returned her attention to the screens. The dust had cleared now and the old accommodation units and rovers were still in place on the other side of a brand-new crater in the face of the Moon.
‘Firing weapon,’ Calder announced.
This time the thrum of power remained constant, but Serene could feel the skin on her back crawl nevertheless. She waited patiently, blinked on a flash amidst those jagged mountains, then watched the whole landscape ripple. For a second, the mountain range seemed to distort through a fish-eye lens, then it erupted. The close view briefly showed the accommodation units and rovers turning into glittering fragments, before an avalanche of stone ate them up, then greyed and blinked out. The orbital view showed a blast ten times the size of the previous one, tearing an immense hole in the Moon and throwing a great plume out into space, sending rock and dust far beyond any hope of the Moon’s gravity retrieving it. Serene finally gazed upon the face of the ancient satellite, now changed forever.
‘Of course,’ said Calder, ‘the gravity effects around the warp substantially magnify the impact value.’
It had been Calder’s idea to make a missile that used a vortex generator to propel it. Since it was a missile, and without the encumbrance of passengers – who would be fried by the Hawking radiation generated inside its warp bubble – it could travel faster than the speed of light; faster even than Argus Station. Such a missile, on impact, would knock out the warp bubble of that station, thus negating what Alan Saul must perceive as his big advantage: his ability to run and their inability, before going in pursuit, to know where or when he would stop and change course.
‘And this one was just the Alcubierre-drive version?’ she enquired.
‘It was,’ Calder affirmed, ‘the other three are the ones that are fully armed.’
This refinement to the weapon hadn’t been Calder’s idea, but a suggestion from the tacticians. When one of these missiles hit the Argus warp bubble, and knocked it out, the nuclear EM warhead it also contained, which was designed to be primed by the high temperatures generated within the warp bubble, would then detonate, cooking local computers. After that, Alan Saul would no longer be running, and Argus Station would be open to assault.
The only drawback with these missiles was that their small vortex generators interfered with the vortex generators of the ships they were on, and vice versa. The ship’s vortex generator could not therefore be maintained at complete readiness while they were getting a missile ready to fire, which meant a delay of up to half an hour between either drive being used. This was something the tacticians were working on, and Serene felt confident of a solution.
‘So now it’s time to scare the rat out of the woodpile,’ she said, not entirely sure where she had heard that expression. Just then the power note in the air changed again.
‘All the railguns here and on the Core stations are now firing,’ explained Calder. ‘Forty inert missiles. We aren’t firing at full power, because if we did, they wouldn’t swing round the sun towards their target.’
Their target . . . Argus Station.
Alan Saul was just about to get his wake-up call.
6
Why Didn’t He Run?
A question that will bother historians until the end of time is, ‘Why didn’t Alan Saul flee to somewhere far away and safe?’ Surely, once he had tested his Alcubierre warp drive on his flight to Mars, then taking Argus Station to another star system, and there obtaining the materials and energy for its conversion, would have been less risky than staying in the vicinity of Earth? One explanation is that he needed additional resources for the immense journey he was about to make, but I feel that is far too simplistic. Some illumination might lie in his rescue of his sister, Var Delex. We know, from witness statements and available information, that the torture he suffered at the hands of Salem Smith had wiped his mind, so one has to ask what drove him to seek out and rescue a sister he no longer actually knew. Saul was far too logical, too far along the road to machine mentality, to be affected by any belief in fraternal love, or duty but, by his actions, it seems his unconscious still drove him. I believe his unconscious also recognized unfinished business, and a hatred of the regime created by Serene Galahad, which was little different from the one he had already tried to destroy.
Argus
High up within the skeletal sphere of his ship, Saul hung in vacuum, with Var beside him. She had been insistent on his joining her for this tour of the work in progress, despite the fact that he could view it all without being physically present. She needed affirmation of her status and, quite frequently lately, it seemed that she needed reassurance, as if she was losing confidence in her own abilities.
Below them lay what remained of the original station, but with the Mars Traveller engine now being hauled down into its new position. Tech Central, which should have lain directly below him, had been dismembered and reassembled around the station core to which all inward reaching structural members now connected. It occupied the upper hemisphere of the core, the view from its windows now mostly blocked by the inner bearing endcaps of the original arcoplexes. The only really open view from there was through the gap where the Traveller engine had once been, but even that only gave a distant view of the ship’s skeleton and, even now, a second new arcoplex spindle was being assembled in the way of that.
‘It’ll soon all be gone.’ Saul pointed to the remaining pieces of the asteroid that had now been shifted out to hang alongside the new ship’s core.
‘It will never all be gone,’ replied Var.
‘Yes, I know.’ He waved a hand to encompass the surrounding sphere. ‘It’s all out there still.’
‘No, I don’t mean that. Some enterprising soul took a half-tonne chunk of high nickel- and chrome-content iron and is now turning it into jewellery.’
Saul had already known this, down to the detail and dimensions of the jewellery concerned, also who was making it and when and how, and how small a dent this made in station resources. He did not mention this, however, but just let her bolster her confidence with this game of ‘I know something you don’t’. Meanwhile, he slid the larger part of his attention elsewhere, through the cam system and other ship’s sensors, to watch as Paul and two other proctors connected up the twenty-seventh Mach-effect coil array – a device like a huge steel aphid clinging to the inner edge of a structural beam. Except for one team, all the humans had converged for Hannah and Var’s planned celebration, but the proctors stopped only for their own mysterious periods of stillness. He liked seeing them work as smoothly and efficiently as his conjoined robots, but pausing occasionally as if to admire their product.
‘How long?’ he asked them, without actually speaking.
‘With Jasper Rhine running the balancing tests, it will take fifty da
ys,’ Paul replied. ‘Without him it could be done much quicker, perhaps twenty days to install and balance every one of the projected two hundred and thirty coil arrays. They must be synched with the EM component of the Rhine drive.’
The mild implication was evident there: a human was slowing down some of the work in progress. Saul ran some rapid calculations. What with many human members of the work teams now getting ‘chipped’, the balance was nevertheless changing. They were speeding up, becoming more adept, more robotic, but it was still the case that if he replaced every human operating aboard with a robot, the work rate would increase.
‘Should I confine them all to their quarters?’ Saul asked. ‘Or should I exterminate them and thus free up more resources?’
‘I do not respond well to rhetorical questions,’ Paul replied, while smoothly connecting up power cables and propelling himself back from the array.
‘Work round him,’ Saul instructed. ‘But allow him to feel useful.’ Just as he himself was doing with his sister . . .
Saul now focused on a branching tree of his centipede robots working at the top of the sphere. The robots passed a last structural beam up that same tree to the remaining human team, who fielded it and began moving it into place. Even as he watched, the tree of robots fragmented – individual robots heading off in different directions about the sphere ready for their next tasks. Though it would have been much quicker to have just the robots fix the beam, Saul had backed Var’s decision to allow this team, which included the Messina clone and Messina’s old bodyguard, to accomplish this last piece of work. That seemed an extension of his initial choice to allow all the humans to survive. A moral choice? He wasn’t sure he knew the meaning of the concept any more.
