by Neal Asher
Alex then launched himself towards the new structure just twenty metres away from the hydroponics unit, snagging a cable as he arrived and bringing his feet down on a thick mass of resin-bonded wiring. Alexandra caught the same cable, and pulled herself down beside him. He quickly reeled out their combined safety and communications line, and they connected up.
‘They sure that’s a fast transport system?’ she asked as soon as they could talk.
‘Looks something like a tubeway network,’ he said. ‘Tactical reckons that, with the interior being vacuum, they should be able to squirt passenger or cargo modules around faster than in a scramjet.’
‘Crazy,’ said Alexandra.
‘Exactly,’ he said.
Whenever the robots weren’t actually testing this machine, communications with the Scourge had continued, Alexandra grabbing everything she could from the station system and sending it that way. All the weird images and sounds had been analysed, all the intercepted communications run through specialized computer programs. Tactical had thereby come back with what seemed to be the correct answer: Alan Saul wasn’t dead but very badly injured, his brain damaged by Two’s shot to the head, but, such was the hardware in his skull and his computer links into the system and to the robots, that he was impossible to cut out. The entire station was now being run by someone who had lost a large chunk of his brain.
‘Okay,’ Alex continued, ‘the space docks next – check your rifle.’
Alexandra set her Kalashtech assault rifle to vacuum function and ran a diagnostic on it. ‘If we have to use these, then that’s probably the end for us.’
Alex switched his rifle over too, also running a diagnostic. Both weapons had recently been in a warm, oxygenated and moist environment, which usually wasn’t a problem but could become one once they were moved into vacuum. Gas pockets forming in some components could expand and cause damage, as could the abrupt temperature change, and trapped moisture might turn to ice. There were no problems with either rifle, but, with the remaining ceramic ammo divided between them, they only had two clips each, one full and the other containing about half its usual load of eighty bullets.
‘If we get into trouble and get separated,’ Alex declared, as he led the way along the surface of the weird new structure, ‘you must head straight for the plane. You know exactly what we want, so, if you encounter a problem there, head straight back to the hydroponics unit.’ He paused reflectively. ‘And you remember what to do if you’re cornered, with no chance of escape?’
‘I give myself up,’ she replied woodenly.
He glanced round at her and noted her frown. It had been hard enough for him to accept that this was the best option, for his own conditioning cried out at the very idea of surrender. Alexandra, in her inexperience and her youth, had great difficulty first accepting that she had been subject to conditioning at all, and utterly rebelled against the thought of giving herself up.
As they crossed from the new structure to a cageway leading into near-space levels of the rim, retracing the route they had taken earlier to get to the hydroponics unit before the robots started tearing this particular area apart, he once again ran through what he had been telling her repeatedly for some time. It was something she seemed to forget every time she slept, but every time he reminded her it seemed to stick in her mind a little more.
‘We have nothing that will be of tactical value to the rebels, because those communicating with us have ensured that,’ he said. ‘We have both been conditioned to fight to the death when facing capture, because the Chairman did not want any information we might possess falling into enemy hands.’ That was not strictly true, though it was what Alex himself had believed for about the first ten years of his life. But he had come to realize, over the ensuing twenty years, that they were conditioned to fight to the death simply because they were a disposable commodity.
‘If we die,’ he continued, ‘we can do nothing for the Chairman and therefore will have failed him. If we are captured, though, there is still a chance, when the Scourge attacks, for us to free ourselves and rescue him.’
‘I understand,’ she said, but still she doubted him.
From the cageway they headed on round, two levels below the outer skin of the rim, towards the space docks. Here the beam-work of walls marked out corridors and rooms, but only a few of the wall plates – ten centimetres of insulation sandwiched between layers of bubblemetal – had as yet been welded in place. Work here had ceased completely during the struggle between Saul and Smith, and never recommenced. Half a kilometre further on, they reached a completed wall with a wide bulkhead door inset. Alex pulled down the manual handle – the fact that he could even move it indicating that vacuum lay on the other side – and they stepped through into a section of the level that was almost complete but had yet to be pressurized.
‘What’s that?’ Alexandra asked, pointing to an object drifting through vacuum ten metres along the corridor they had now entered.
Alex focused on the thing she indicated. It must have been shaken loose during that recent course change but had yet to be dragged to the floor by the nigh-indiscernible gravity of the central asteroid, or pinned against a wall by station spin. For a moment he just could not quite process what he was seeing, so strange did it look in this setting. Then he understood.
‘It’s a boot,’ he said. ‘I think we just found the mortuary.’
It was through the next doorway, a long room along the back wall of which the casualties of past battles aboard the station had been stacked in two heaps, like cordwood. Alex stepped inside and viewed the scene before him. He knew that originally the corpses here had all been clad in fatigues or vacuum combat suits. Now, all the corpses in one pile had been stripped while those in the second pile were awaiting the attention of whatever robot had been given this task. Gazing at the naked dead, Alex could discern which ones had died in VC suits that had remained sealed or had sealed themselves with breach glue: they were the ones that had not deflated as the water evaporated from their bodies – it was now frozen inside them. They were the ones that looked less like something dragged from a hole in Ancient Egypt’s Valley of Kings.
‘We should check those.’ He pointed to the heap of corpses that were still clothed.
‘Why?’ Alexandra asked the question in a whisper, as if her voice might disturb those here, even though vacuum lay between them and the dead.
‘Ammo,’ Alex replied succinctly.
He was about to step forward when her hand clamped on his shoulder and she abruptly jerked him back towards the wall adjacent to the door. He turned suddenly, grabbing her wrist and twisting, thinking for a moment that she was attacking him. Then he saw it, released his hold and squeezed back against the wall beside her.
In vacuum, it came through the door with eerie silence for something so large. Alex recognized it at once as the same design of construction robot that Saul had originally hijacked during his assault against Smith. The thing looked like a giant steel ant, pairs of limbs terminating in flat gecko-pad feet extending from its two rear sections; its front section, arrayed with glassy sensors, was raised up with two limbs extending from it, both sporting numerous cutters and manipulators. In one of these it was carrying a roll of material, which, when it reached the corpses, it shook open to reveal as a large netting bag. Steadily it set to work, picking up a woman in a VC suit and swiftly divesting her of her garment. The suit went straight into the bag, the woman onto the other heap.
‘Out of here,’ muttered Alex, and soon they were moving away from there just as fast as they could.
‘What is that thing doing?’ Alexandra asked.
‘Maybe they’ve decided those VC suits are going to be needed,’ Alex replied, trying to be pragmatic but, in his heart, failing. ‘Come on, let’s speed it up now.’
It took them two hours to reach the exterior of Docking Pillar Two, climbing an access tube for maintenance robots leading out of the rim and up between some fuel silos. Alex foun
d it difficult to shake off the sense of doom that had descended on him since they saw the corpses and, from Alexandra’s monosyllabic replies to anything he said, he knew she felt the same. He gazed out at the stars, trying to develop a better mood from the sight of them, but all he could think was how very far from Earth they were.
Directly above them, Messina’s space plane occupied one entire docking face. Each such face could take two of the normal space planes, but the Imperator was much larger. Simply inverting themselves, they walked up the pillar until they reached the plane’s nose, circumvented this and then walked up along one side of it.
‘Access would have been easier from inside,’ said Alex, ‘but the cams are still operating in there and, even if there’s no human watching, recognition software is sure to be.’
‘Yeah, sure,’ Alexandra grunted.
He continued, ‘My guess is that someone is watching and that there will be guards inside. Because I’m betting there are some on the station who have contemplated stealing a plane and escaping.’
‘They won’t know about the hibernation equipment here,’ said Alexandra, gesturing to the plane beside them.
‘Here.’ Alex paused beside a large bulge on the hull, reached out and took hold of a recessed handle and began turning it. ‘No,’ he went on, ‘no one is likely to know about that but, as you grow in experience, Alexandra, you learn not to underestimate the power of human stupidity.’
After turning the handle five times, he pulled out a ten-centimetre-deep plug of nanotube carbon to reveal a simple keypad. He input the required code and stepped back.
‘I bet there are those who, given the chance,’ he said, ‘are prepared to steal a plane and fly off to meet the Scourge, expecting to be picked up and eventually taken home. Scotonis would simply ignore them and continue his pursuit of this station, so they would die aboard their escape craft.’
The bulge rose a little, then slid aside to reveal an airlock. Here another keypad required a code to open the outer door, whereupon they both squeezed inside the narrow space for the lock to pressurize, before stepping on into the space plane itself.
‘The air’s good,’ said Alex, sliding his visor aside.
The Imperator was luxuriously appointed. They had stepped into the section containing the rows of acceleration chairs, but even these were considerably more comfortable than any found aboard a normal plane, for each was even provided with its own mini-bar, swing-over table, screen and entertainment console. The real luxury, however, was in the suite of rooms lying beyond. Alex glanced without interest at a cocktail bar, a fully appointed kitchen, the massage parlour and the zero-G bathroom with its high-tech appliances making it possible for Messina to enjoy a jacuzzi without drowning. Upon passing through the door into Technical and Tacks, both he and Alexandra had to stop and scrape off the layer of fluff that their gecko-boot soles had picked up from the thick carpet. Shortly afterwards Alexandra came to stand before a console and screen.
‘This is more like it,’ she said, sounding a lot happier as she unhitched her pack of equipment, which she had not wanted to leave behind, and shoved it down beside the chair. Unlike the gear inside her pack, this console possessed the full complement of military software, including penetration and sabotage programs. She sat, cracked her knuckles, booted up the console, and was soon into Argus’s system. Alex moved away, and began searching the plane for food, water and ammunition. Soon he returned to her with sealed packs of soldier’s rations.
‘That all?’ she asked.
‘That’s all. All the Chairman’s stocks have been taken – all the luggage too.’
‘Figures.’ Like him, she ate with slow care, aware of what such rich food could do to them after so long without.
‘I’m seeing no sign that they’re moving the Gene Bank samples, and the data remains as widely distributed as it was before,’ she told him.
‘Make absolutely sure of that,’ he replied, ‘then check to see if there’s any sign that they’ve been preparing a space plane.’ He moved off, hoping to find something more than the small box of ration packs he had shoved inside his backpack. Checking the kitchen, he found that it had been totally stripped, too, not even spices remaining. When he finally entered the armoury, just behind the plane’s cockpit, he didn’t even feel any disappointment, for he had expected it to be as empty as he found it. He returned to stand behind Alexandra.
‘Something else is going on,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why, but they’re preparing one of the smelting plants for refining a huge amount of mercury ore.’ Schematics began coming up on the screen.
‘Where would they get the ore?’ he asked. Then he realized: ‘An asteroid.’
‘But why?’ she asked, now frantically searching.
‘What’s that?’ he asked, seeing a system of pipes being highlighted in red.
‘They intend to pipe it in . . . but that’s odd.’ She checked back through schematics, tracing something, then abruptly sat back. ‘It’s that thing the robots are building – it runs below the smelting-plant dock and there’s some sort of junction there. They’re going to pipe the mercury inside it, and there are plans here to connect the ring up with the station’s astrogation system. It makes no sense at all.’
All at once it made perfect sense to Alex. ‘That’s no tube transport system . . .’
Just then, as they gazed at the screen, the soft thump of an airlock door opening was all too audible. Alex looked back the way he had come, from the armoury, to where the main tube airlock entered the docking pillar. Something came through fast, hit the ceiling above the door and bounced down to thump heavily against the floor, where it drove its piton feet straight into the metal.
‘Drop your weapons.’
The voice speaking through the new arrival was recognizable as Langstrom’s. Alex knew they were done, but in that same instant he knew for certain that his partner would not obey his earlier instructions.
‘No!’ he managed, just as Alexandra skidded her chair backwards, snatching up her weapon and raising it. Her weapon thundered, firing a full clip of ceramic ammunition at this jury-rigged mobile readergun. Alex himself staggered back towards the door as the robot replied with a brief burring sound, bright light flashing from its turret. Blood and chunks of flesh sprayed out from the back of Alexandra’s VC suit, and bonelessly she slammed into Alex, knocking him further back into the room behind.
Alex pushed himself away from her, glimpsed the robot now tilted over, the legs on one side of it blown away. With his rifle still strapped across his back, he threw himself aside as its weapon burred again. One shot clipped his oxygen pack and another caught his shin and spun him round, but he fell out of its line of sight. He dragged himself along by handfuls of soft carpet, propelling himself onwards.
Those who had sent this robot in probably did not know about the secret airlock. He finally reached it, dragged himself inside, slapped a repair patch over the bloody wreckage of his leg, then watched breach foam boil out round that, even as the airlock evacuated. Next he pulled himself out into vacuum, and somehow just kept going.
For fifty minutes everyone hung on as the steering thrusters flipped Argus over and stabilized it. Half an hour after this, the big Mars Traveller engine fired up, and Hannah had something more than just her sticky boots to secure her to the floor of Tech Central. It was a weird feeling, and it reminded her of the boost out from the Moon’s orbit and the relief she had felt then, the knowledge that they were moving away from Earth and the Committee. However, despite that memory, she knew that now the same sensation was bringing the reach of the Committee – albeit a rather changed version – closer and closer. As they now decelerated towards the edge of the Asteroid Belt, the Scourge would be rapidly gaining on them. They would have, at best, a month moored to asteroid HJI457 before it was fully upon them. Le Roque and Langstrom were thoroughly aware of this, too, and she could see it in their faces.
‘A space drive,’ said Le Roque, gazing disbelievin
gly at the images relayed to his three big screens from the interior of the rim.
The course correction, which had occurred just after she discovered what the station robots were building in the outer rim, had started Le Roque asking questions. The correction looked as if it had been in the system queue ever since they left the Moon behind them, but Le Roque declared otherwise. When it became evident that Saul was not regaining consciousness, he had checked everything so as to ascertain their status, ensuring there were no surprises awaiting him, and he had seen no course correction in the queue then. It seemed that Saul was giving orders from his sleep, and slipping them in under anything else put in after he entered that state. This present deceleration was a case in point. Le Roque had also found out about the work that Leeran and Pike were doing in one of the station’s smelting plants, and by then Hannah knew she could keep it from him no longer.
‘We can’t allow this to be generally known,’ she explained. ‘We might have taken out one of Messina’s clones, but the other one might still be able to send information straight back to the Scourge.’
‘The woman we shot had a pack of jury-rigged com equipment with her, which was probably what they were using,’ said Langstrom. ‘And the man was shot in the leg, so he is more likely to be struggling to survive rather than trying to find a way to communicate with the Scourge.’
‘Nevertheless,’ said Hannah. ‘We have to keep this under wraps. This is our edge, and this is what will enable us to survive.’
‘If it works,’ said Langstrom gloomily, turning to eye the proctor Paul, who, after Hannah had ordered Tech Central cleared, was the only other being present.
‘It can work, Commander Langstrom,’ the proctor assured him. ‘All that is in doubt is whether it can be made to work in time. The extent of the damage we will receive upon entering the Asteroid Belt can only be calculated within limited parameters that range right up to the complete destruction of this station.’
