by Neal Asher
He landed above the opening, caught hold of a jag of twisted metal, pushed himself down and swung inside, bringing his rifle to bear. Ten metres back inside, two figures drifted in a mist of vapour leaking from suit breaches. One rifle was tumbling away behind them, and one was trailing at the end of a broken strap. As Alex pushed himself down for the floor and accelerated towards them, the larger one turned the smaller one round, pressing a sidearm up against her throat. Alex stumbled to a halt on recognizing the bloody face behind the cracked visor.
‘Seems I’ve got something . . . to bargain with now,’ panted Ghort, his voice hoarse, blood all around his mouth, and a leak under his armpit which the sealant just didn’t seem to be containing.
Alex gazed at the face of the Owner’s sister, noted the scabs of yellow breach resin on her stomach and her chest. He observed her cracked visor, and wondered how long she now had left to live.
‘But not . . . with you,’ Ghort added, turning the sidearm on Alex.
The Command
The secondary bridge looked little different from its primary twin but now, of course, Bartholomew did not have all his previous staff. With his stomach tight and his mind hardened as the Command limped sideways-on towards Io, he watched the end of the battle between the Fist and Saul’s ship. Both vessels had taken huge punishment, but in the end the Fist’s better armour and larger complement of weapons had decided the fight.
‘What’s your status?’ he asked Captain Oerlon.
The captain of the Fist had lost most of his beard; he had a burn dressing on the front of his neck and soot smears all over his face.
‘We’ve still got all our beam weapons, five railguns and two others that can be repaired within an hour. Main fusion drive is optimal, but the Alcubierre drive is going to be down for weeks. We lost two side-burners but that’s merely cut our manoeuvrability – which is irrelevant now.’
Bartholomew switched his gaze from the screen frame showing Oerlon to the main image – transmitted by the Fist – of Saul’s ship struggling with steering thrusters only to try and escape the pull of Io. The ship looked like a cratered moon, so many were the holes punched through it. Internal fires were visible, as was the massive damage to its Traveller engine. It was weapon-less, had no more drive than perhaps enough to steer it clear of impact with some of the mountains down below, and it was now going to go in hard. Bartholomew just hoped it would not go in hard enough to be completely destroyed, as he still needed to retrieve the Gene Bank data and samples, and possibly some prisoners.
‘You didn’t manage to hit his vortex generator,’ Bartholomew commented.
Oerlon shrugged with a wince. ‘No, and luckily he didn’t manage to hit ours either, or rather none of his shots penetrated its armour. Perhaps his drive is armoured similarly.’
‘Perhaps,’ Bartholomew allowed. Then, ‘Your casualties?’
‘Fifty-eight of my crew are dead, another twenty in the infirmary,’ Oerlon replied. ‘We also lost over three hundred of the primary assault group when he hit the shuttle bay – as they were ready aboard shuttles.’
That was the thing about space warfare, Bartholomew surmised. Unlike land battles on Earth, in this unforgiving environment the dead would always outnumber the wounded.
‘Other assault troop casualties?’
‘None,’ Oerlon replied. ‘Our armour took the sting out of the railgun missiles, and nothing penetrated through to core accommodation.’
Again Bartholomew watched Saul’s ship going in, and noted that the steering thrusters were now all pointing in the direction of travel as if to try and slow the vessel down rather than alter its course. He checked another frame on the screen displaying a map of Io’s surface and the changing predictions on the crash site. It would be coming down through the spume emitted from two volcanoes, its impact site a sulphur plain lying beyond. This wasn’t a site Bartholomew would have chosen, but he supposed Saul was all out of choices.
‘What about landing?’ Bartholomew asked.
‘We’ve got some repairs to make, but we should be good for it.’
Bartholomew nodded, feeling a degree of smugness. It had been on his suggestion that the Fist be constructed so as to enable it to land on a planet. Tactically it had always been a possibility that Saul, his ship having been partially disabled, might be able to take it down on Mars, or on one of the big planet satellites, in order to make repairs, sitting himself in some deep canyon to deter railgun fire from orbit. It was also the case that the few landing craft the Fist possessed would be vulnerable on their way down. Better that the whole ship could go down with all its weapons able to defend itself, and then pound Saul’s ship from close quarters before launching a ground assault. Luckily, after much argument, Calder had agreed, though neither of them had foreseen precisely this current scenario.
‘Well, I guess we can just sit back and watch the show for now,’ Bartholomew said, doing exactly that.
Saul’s ship was low now and trailing vapour. Abruptly, the screen image divided, showing both the view from the Fist above and another view from some kilometres behind the descending vessel. Bartholomew enjoyed Oerlon’s foresight. The man had obviously launched surveillance drones to follow the ship in. A better assessment could thus be made of just how much damage it had received after it came to rest but, more importantly, here was plenty of imagery for Serene Galahad to use in subsequent ETV broadcasts. Always a good idea to ensure that Earth’s dictator enjoyed a ringside seat and plenty of material to work with.
From the perspective of the drones, the ship soon lay below Io’s horizon, hurtling over a mosaic of browns, yellows and drifts of icy white dotted with pustules of glowing orange from silicate volcanoes. Ahead lay the twin spumes from the erupting volcanoes, which were blasting gas and molten matter out into space with the constancy of fire hoses. Perspective abruptly changed as the drones climbed. Saul’s ship entered the clouds surrounding these two fountains and abruptly turned mustard yellow from the sulphur deposited on its hull, leaking blue flames from those parts of it still partially molten. The view clouded as the drones entered this same area, then blanked out for a while.
The second view from orbit showed the ship punch its way through between those two eruptions, its steering thrusters spearing out long emerald flames. Saul must have boosted those thrusters somehow because, when the drones regained clear imagery, they were almost on top of his ship and had to decelerate. Even now, with his ultimate defeat in sight, Saul was still managing to surprise them.
A sulphurous plain sped past below, then again the drones became blind as the ship travelled over some kind of white mass and blew up a cloud of icy dust. The vessel had by some means dropped lower abruptly and Bartholomew surmised that Saul must have used the gyroscopic effect of his vortex generator to reposition it. Next, from orbit, the admiral watched a smoky line scar its way across the plain for three kilometres, before primary impact. The ship then ploughed in, the loose surface below somehow preventing it bouncing, but the impact still causing it to shed wreckage. It skidded for a further two kilometres, mounding up sulphur compounds ahead of it, before finally grinding to a halt. Some half an hour later the dust had cleared enough for a close drone view of it. Saul’s ship lay with the wreckage of its fusion drive buried, partially tilted on its axis, brown and weirdly green chemical smoke rising from glowing holes in its hull.
‘And so it ends,’ said Oerlon.
‘Not quite,’ said Bartholomew. ‘He still has his robots and whatever crew have survived. We must never underestimate this man.’
‘We land close and go in hard,’ Oerlon asserted. ‘We’ve got enough EM tank-busters to fry all his robots, seventeen hundred tough and highly trained commandos and forty spiderguns.’
‘Try not to kill too much computing,’ warned Bartholomew. ‘We still need to get hold of that Gene Bank data. And try not to cause any more wreckage than necessary, because there are the samples too.’ He didn’t add anything about trying to capture
Alan Saul alive, since that objective was a given. However, he personally doubted that it was possible, and that Galahad’s orders would only result in a further waste of lives.
Bartholomew paused to wonder if there was anything he could have missed, but just could not discern it. Oerlon’s force was overwhelming; Saul had lost all his major weapons, and only a few of his surviving personnel aboard would be soldiers. And though there were likely to be losses against Saul’s robots, those machines would not be able to stand for long against tank-busters and forty spiderguns. Really, he just had to accept that Oerlon was right.
‘I’ll be in orbit within ten hours,’ he said. ‘How long before you can make your descent?’
‘We’ll probably be ready just before your arrival,’ Oerlon replied.
‘Do so when feasible. Don’t wait for me.’
Perhaps now it was time for them to think beyond this little war out here. The Command would be crippled for some time yet so, once they had taken everything they wanted from Saul’s ship, Bartholomew decided, it would be a good idea for him to transfer himself to the Fist for the trip back to Earth. He grimaced at the thought, but could feel the tension draining out of him as he decided it was time to enjoy this victory. He had time enough to think about his future under Earth’s psychotic dictator during the trip back.
Earth
Clay Ruger flipped up the hatch in the arm of his acceleration chair, uncoiled the umbilical inside and plugged it into the socket in his suit. His visor display now told him he was running on ship air and power, and in the ship’s communication circuit. Next he peered down at the sidearm that had been returned to him, before looking across at Galahad, who had now found her own umbilical and was plugging it in. He contemplated the satisfaction he might still feel by putting a bullet through the side of her head. But what was the point?
Scotonis was now singing over the link he’d made to both Ruger’s and Trove’s fones, some ancient ditty about a ‘runaway train’. He’d started doing this just after kindly letting them know how many minutes remained before the Scourge struck the Traveller construction station and he detonated the warheads aboard.
‘What do you mean by “three minutes”?’ Galahad asked, turning to him.
‘That’s how long we’ve got before Scotonis arrives,’ Clay informed her.
At that moment the fast re-entry drop shuttle tilted down as it peeled away from the dock, throwing him up against his restraints. A second later, light glared through the front screen and the vessel shuddered sideways under some sort of blow. Shortly after that the sounds of exterior impacts penetrated through the hull.
‘The fuck?’ Sack exclaimed.
‘Scotonis is firing on the station,’ Trove announced.
‘Now, that wasn’t very nice, was it?’ said Scotonis over the fone link, before recommencing his song.
Another glare of light through the front screen, but it must have been more distant this time, for no blast wave or debris reached the drop shuttle.
‘He’s firing on us?’ asked Galahad
Trove glanced round. ‘I think your friend Calder realized Scotonis wasn’t going to stop, so has opened up on him with the station railguns.’ She paused as she took a firmer grip on the steering column. ‘Bit late for that, as they’d never do enough damage to stop him, and now he’s destroying the guns.’
‘That’s good for us,’ said Galahad. ‘Calder would have opened fire on us the moment we cleared the station.’
Clay stared at her, annoyed by her certainty, irritated by her expectation of reality ordering itself to suit her wishes. She seemed utterly confident that they could still escape and survive. How could she be sure all the railguns had been destroyed? Because, even before she assumed power, she had been utterly certain that she knew best. Then, over the short period of her reign, that certainty had transformed into a belief in her own unique destiny. She probably thought that she simply could not die before achieving it, and probably even thought she would never die.
As he let that sink in, he finally began to stitch together events in his mind. Seeing Serene Galahad aboard the station, the moment he stepped from the shuttle, and seeing that their meeting was being broadcast on ETV, he’d been thoroughly wrapped up in the fact that he was due to die when Scotonis crashed the Scourge into the construction station. He had found that suddenly ridiculous, amusing. All the efforts he had made to ensure his own survival, once it became apparent that his new boss was a psycho, had thus come to nothing. He’d kept quiet about the evidence of her being behind the Scour, but retained that same proof for later use, while trying to keep his head down. He’d removed his implant and shorted out his strangulation collar, and he’d revealed the evidence of Galahad’s guilt. And all for nothing.
Or maybe not.
His seat kicked him in the back as the drop shuttle’s engine fired up, slinging them away from the station. In the forward screen he saw Earth rise and centre, then incrementally grow larger. The giant called acceleration came and sat on his chest.
Until now he hadn’t properly registered how he’d stepped into the midst of a small rebellion and that this Calder, who controlled off-world resources, had been trying to usurp Galahad. It had all been too chaotic. He hadn’t understood that getting to this drop shuttle had been a futile exercise at best so long as Calder controlled the station railguns – because he’d still been wrapped up in the certainty of them all dying in a nuclear conflagration. However, he did have some reason for hope: Scotonis had now destroyed those same railguns and, despite her apparent earlier fatalism, Trove was still struggling to keep them alive.
Trove keyed some controls on her chair arm, the acceleration now being too powerful for her to reach either the joystick or the console controls. Part of the forward cockpit screen flickered – a liquid crystal layer in the glass over to one side now giving them a view of what lay behind them. The Traveller constructions station filled up the whole image, still massive even though they were hurtling away from it, in comparative scale like some bug launching itself from a house.
‘We’re going to black out . . . maybe die,’ she managed tightly. ‘No time for the special acceleration suits.’
Really, thought Clay, she hadn’t needed to say that. The drop shuttle was shaking now, a deep-throated roar penetrating. Perhaps it was illusion but the whole vessel seemed to be compacting and contorting around him.
‘Thirty . . . seconds,’ Trove said.
Clay fixed his gaze on the rear view. There was some sort of counter running at the bottom of the screen and only then did he realize it was their distance from the construction station measured in kilometres, but at that moment the pressure on his eyeballs blurred it.
‘Here . . . it . . . comes.’
The construction station was now comfortably small in the rear view, just occupying a small area at the centre. Earth had grown huge, filling most of the true forward view, continental land masses clear below sheaths of cloud, the urban sprawls evident even from this distance, like the etched silicon of integrated circuits, while the streaks of mass-driver firings cut up through atmosphere like white hairs sprouting from an ageing face. For a second Clay glimpsed what looked like the Hubble Array, but it then slid to one side of the view. Next, in the rear view, the bullet of the Scourge speared in towards the station on a tail of fusion fire.
‘Goodbye cruel world!’ Scotonis cried over the fone link, then began laughing hysterically.
The Scourge struck and slid itself in like a syringe needle being driven into an arm, and a fraction of a second later explosions erupted all around it. For a further fraction of a second, Clay wondered if its armoury might not detonate, then a giant flashbulb went off and the rear view blanked.
‘Sweet Jesus,’ Trove muttered, doubtless seeing some reading on the console before her.
Clay found himself holding his breath, then blew it out with the help of the giant sitting on his chest. The drop shuttle continued to shudder around him, and he won
dered how far you had to get, in vacuum, to be beyond the reach of an explosion that encroached on the gigatonne range. The rear view returned, and it seemed as if a big orange eye was peering in at them. There was no sign of the construction station. With an explosion like that, there would be no debris, just white-hot vapour and plasma.
The ovoid of fire grew and flattened, occupying the entire rear view, which was now just an orange section of the forward screen. Abruptly, the giant increased the pressure on Clay’s chest, while aurora fled ahead of the ship, which began shaking violently. Earth rose and suddenly slid to one side and, as blackness encroached on his vision, Clay was reminded of when the gravity wave had passed through the Scourge, breaking his bones.
Then the blackness closed him down.
17
Brain Dead
With tank-grown replacement organs, cancer-hunting nanomachines, bespoke drugs and micro-surgical techniques to repair just about any kind of damage the body is known to suffer, there are those who say that the human lifespan is possibly without end. The problem with this contention is that it can never be proven, since that would be like trying to plumb the depth of a bottomless well. Certainly we no longer have any incurable diseases, whether bacterial, viral or genetic; however, there are still strict limitations on the amount of physical damage that can be repaired. Most damage can be dealt with, since all organs and limbs can be replaced or repaired, but if a brain is destroyed there is little point in keeping the body alive, and there has consequently been much debate about how much brain damage makes it unsalvageable. If a victim suffers heart failure due to injuries or disease, and the brain is then starved of oxygen, it currently becomes unsalvageable in a little over twenty minutes. And, even though some may theorize that brains can be revived after a longer spell, they also admit that the revived brain would be merely a blank slate, and that nothing of the original personality would remain.
