by Neal Asher
Perhaps he should take another trip to the food store. His trips there had been stalled by it being moved out of the path of that thing the robots were building in the outer rim, and automatic transport to and from it had only just been reconnected. However, someone must have gone in there between his last two trips because containers of sweetcorn had gone missing. Maybe if he spent more time there he would have a better chance of intercepting someone, and thus obtaining a spacesuit. The big problem was that his visits there were necessarily limited by the cold.
He turned his thoughts again to that object under construction in the outer rim. After Alexandra’s discovery that it was linked in to the station’s astrogation system he understood that it must constitute some way of moving the entire station, but how? Maybe it produced some kind of gyroscopic effect that would enable the station to dodge missiles. That was the only answer he could come up with. They should have sabotaged it while they had the chance.
Alex chewed and swallowed the last bean, but the meagre meal had done nothing to assuage his hunger. Maybe, since the store wasn’t connected up to the automatic distribution system, it hadn’t been connected to the station manifest and therefore no one would notice if he pilfered larger quantities—
Something clonked against the outside of the hydroponics unit, Alex jerked his head up and, in frustration, scanned his surroundings. He had heard sounds like this before but nothing had ever come of them. He assumed they were caused by robots moving past and maybe using the unit to bounce off and change their course through the interior of the station. However, this time another sound ensued that he did not recognize, until after it there came a hissing of air. The airlock was filling. Someone was coming in!
Numb and confused, he gazed at the detritus surrounding him. He had no time to clear up his mess, to conceal that he had been living here. He had no time to empty his own hydroponics trough and pack it away again. Abruptly he realized he must act, he must move. He propelled himself towards the airlock, halting his approach carefully with a foot set against the wall, then pulled himself up among the frameworks extending across the ceiling, and waited.
The inner airlock door opened and someone came through, walking on gecko boots. This figure halted just a metre inside, then reached up to disconnect and take off the helmet of its spacesuit. Alex stared in pure curiosity, long starved of something new to see, and feeling a sudden surge almost of love for this individual – this middle-aged woman, from what Alex could see. Then he threw himself down on top of her, looped his left arm around her neck and locked his right behind it, applying the sleeper lock as she fought to free his hold. They both bounced up against the ceiling framework, then tumbled along through the hydroponics unit.
When she was finally still, Alex quickly set about removing her spacesuit. It wasn’t a VC model but at least it also wasn’t one of the older more bulky suits still much used aboard the station. He removed her undersuit, too, leaving her naked, donned that, then put on the spacesuit itself. He then considered tying her up, but eyeing her flaccid muscles and recalling how ineffectual she had been when he attacked her, he didn’t think there was any need. Instead he settled down to wait until she regained consciousness.
Eventually she shifted position, shuddered then threw up, most of the vomit spattering onto the floor but little globules of it sent tumbling through the air. She raised her head, saw him, then tried to scuttle away from him. But she only managed to propel herself upwards from the floor, and ended up merely drifting, making odd panicked grunting sounds as she tried to grab hold of something. Alex stepped forward and grabbed her, shoving her down beside one of the troughs, to which she clung, cringing, a jet of urine squirting out of her and splashing against the floor.
‘Don’t hit me,’ she babbled. ‘They told me to come here. It’s not my fault.’
There was an odd tone to her voice: here was a fully grown adult, yet speaking like a child caught misbehaving.
‘Why do you always have to hit me?’ she whined.
Alex stepped back, out of range of the spreading cloud of golden globules, and just stared at her, some memory niggling at the back of his mind. Then, causing a lurch in his chest, the memory became clear.
‘What are you doing here, Delegate Vasiliev?’
She stared at him blankly for a moment.
‘Why do you keep calling me that?’ she complained. ‘I’m just here to put on the trough covers and the plant nets.’
It suddenly became clear that she thought he was one of the station personnel. And that ‘you’ she kept mentioning referred to those on the station who hadn’t accepted that little remained of the Committee delegate this woman had once been. But what should he do with her now?
Alex considered killing her. He could clear up the signs of his occupation of the hydroponics unit, then take her body out through the airlock and conceal it somewhere. This would at least delay any searchers from realizing what had really happened. However, the time he would need to expend in doing that would be better spent on him getting away from here and finding somewhere else to conceal himself. He decided to let her live.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Janet,’ she replied.
‘I’m sorry to have taken your suit, Janet, but someone will be returning here soon with another one for you. Meanwhile you must continue with your assigned task. Do you understand?’
She nodded sulkily. Alex quickly put on the suit’s helmet to cut out the smell of her vomit and piss, then headed for the airlock.
15
The City Sleeps
In the twenty-first century, the concept of the individual ‘city’ was only just clinging on, as suburbs, industrial complexes and new towns kept spreading and beginning to link up. Already places that were once thus designated had begun dropping the word ‘city’ from their names. As the century progressed, these urban conglomerations absorbed smaller towns and villages, until those living in these areas began to lose any concept of local community. In fact, the ideas of towns and villages were becoming tribal – merely subsets of what was engulfing them. As the Committee – and the nation conglomerates that formed its parts – took a tighter grip on power, it began eliminating old borders and dividing countries up into more easily governed ‘regions’, then arbitrarily dividing those regions up into sectors and areas with numerical designations that nevertheless failed to erase the old names from public consciousness. Such regions were soon appended with the name ‘sprawl’. In high administration this fact was much debated, but in the end simply accepted. It didn’t matter any more: the nation states and national identities were dying, which was the main aim, so a few archaic names surviving gave no cause for concern.
Argus
The Imperator detached from the docking pillar with a resounding crash. Then with a blast of compressed air through the nozzles of its steering jets, it began falling away from Argus Station. Langstrom manipulated the joystick, began fuelling those steering jets, igniting thruster flames in order to turn and cant the plane just so, while bringing the station up in the main screen.
Saul was amazed to find he still possessed some capacity for awe. The massive disc-shaped station seemed like some odd creature of the abyss that had extended a feeding tube into a random chunk of marine debris. But it was neither shape nor analogy that impressed him, rather a combination of the sheer scale of what he was seeing and the knowledge of their position and intent. Here they were, three hundred million kilometres from Earth, engaged in mining an asteroid, while getting ready to start up an engine that was a wet dream of science-fiction writers of the past.
‘So where to?’ asked Langstrom.
From where he was standing by the rear door of the cockpit, Saul glanced back at the six EVA workers, who were now ensconced in the forward travel compartment where Messina himself and anyone with him would have strapped themselves in during either launch or docking. They were gazing at the big screen on the cockpit bulkhead, which displayed the s
ame view as from the cockpit itself. None of them was strapped in, for out here they would be experiencing no unexpected decelerations or course changes. In fact, barring the possibility of the plane crashing into something, neither was possible.
‘The coordinates of the first target are on your screen,’ he replied.
Langstrom swung the nose of the plane away from Argus, steadied it on blackness punctuated by the cold glare of stars, then fired up the main engine. Saul just leaned back against the wall for the duration of the burn. While this was occurring, he could feel his links to the station stretching, delays increasing in ways only noticeable to a computer, or maybe to a being with a mind that was half computer. And now, with this minuscule transmission delay giving him an ersatz breathing space, he began thinking about certain things he had effectively put on hold.
My sister is alive.
It was only as he arrived on Argus Station that he started to realize that, though his motives had seemed quite plain – namely freedom from and vengeance upon the Committee – they were not. Something else in his subconscious had also been driving him, something left over from the person he had been before Smith had destroyed his mind. That earlier self wanted to find his sister, and it was now a moot point as to whether that was the main driver of his actions or just an incidental goal. But, now he had effectively found her, what next?
Using Var’s face, and a program related to facial recognition, he ran a search through his extended mind. Immediately data began to accumulate, and he needed to delete everything concerning recent communications from Mars. What remained was both fascinating and frustrating. Fragments of memory surfaced: escaping their tutors as children and entering a zero-asset area, but no memory of what had occurred before or afterwards, and no memory of what their parents had looked like; talking about death in the Dinaric scientific community, again a dislocated memory, nothing before or after; remembering her determination to build spaceships, the conversation conducted somewhere he just did not recognize; then something new with a brief vision of him gazing over the rim of a glass at her, her arm wrapped round a man. Just using logic, Saul could place these memories in time, but they were like fragments from a film and possessed no emotional content. Really, he didn’t know her any more – hadn’t even been able to recognize her face – so what was he supposed to do about her?
‘It’s an asteroid,’ Langstrom commented.
Saul focused on him as the space plane’s acceleration began to wane.
‘No, it isn’t,’ he replied. Langstrom peered round at him in puzzlement, so he continued, ‘Like a lot of objects out here, it was identified as an asteroid hundreds of years ago, and that designation was never changed despite contrary evidence, and is still retained in astrogation systems. When we get closer, you’ll see what I mean.’
Saul turned and ducked into the passenger area, the six EVA workers watching him with cautious curiosity. He crooked a finger at them. ‘I need two of you with me now.’ He had expected reluctance from them, but was surprised when all of them began to rise. ‘Bring your helmets and the tool chest.’ He gestured to the heavy box that he had ordered to be brought aboard.
Leading the way out of the section occupied by acceleration chairs, then through Messina’s luxurious private apartment, he glanced back to notice two of the EVA workers had fallen in behind him, one of them towing the tool chest, while the other four were hesitantly tagging along beyond them. He had no problem with that, just so long as they didn’t get in each other’s way. Finally he entered the plane’s cargo hold, which was cold and empty, and turned to the six as they finally all trooped in behind. He pointed down to the floor at a panel measuring two metres by one metre, which was secured by a series of heavy bolts set only ten centimetres apart around its rim.
‘General arming or disarming of this plane was carried out from outside, and usually when it was grounded,’ he explained. ‘We could go outside now and use the same route, but there’s an easier way. The missile cache is right underneath here and it contains four thirty-kiloton warheads. I want them taken out and laid on the floor, then secured with magnetic clamps so that I can work on them.’
A heavy shaven-headed individual with the singular name Ghort, whom Saul had already recognized as being one of Messina’s former bodyguards and who surprisingly had not joined Langstrom’s police force but opted for a job in maintenance, gazed down at the floor contemplatively before saying, ‘If they were loaded from the outside, then the compartment they’re in might not be pressurized.’
Saul simply pointed at the space helmet Ghort was holding.
‘Ah, I see.’ Ghort turned to the four that had trailed along behind and gestured for them to move back, himself walking over to the hold door they had all come through.
‘As you see,’ said Saul, ‘you can seal this entire hold while you work. You have two hours now before we start decelerating, so I’m hoping you can have them out and secured in just an hour – which should give me time to prepare them. I’ll leave you to it, then.’ He headed for the door.
‘If I might ask,’ said Ghort, a slight edge to his voice that intimated at hidden resentments, ‘what do you intend to do with them?’
‘As our first target becomes visible, I’ll explain,’ Saul replied. ‘It’ll become clearer then.’
As he left them, the four who had followed remained behind, donning the helmets they had brought. Ghort opened the tool chest and he and one other stooped over it to take out powered socket drivers.
‘You’re going to use the tactical nukes?’ said Langstrom when Saul returned to the cockpit. ‘They’ll certainly make a nice display, but they’ve got a lot of space to cover.’
Saul reached over and patted his shoulder. ‘Patience, and you’ll see.’
Langstrom looked round at him in surprise, but didn’t have anything to add. Saul returned to the passenger compartment, sat down in an acceleration chair and strapped himself in. He then simultaneously watched feeds from the hold where Ghort and the others were working, from the mining of the cinnabar asteroid and from anything else his attention was drawn to in Argus Station. Even while observing these, he continued working on the esoteric maths and theoretical stats of the station’s space drive, both modelling how it should work and figuring out what adjustments would need to be made to the magnetic field in order to make it perform just so. As Ghort and crew were fixing the last missile to the deck, securing the floor plate again and repressurizing the hold, a new feed from Argus drew his attention.
The naked woman that had once been Delegate Vasiliev was donning a fresh spacesuit brought for her, and now telling her story. Saul felt a sudden surge of annoyance. The hydroponics unit had stayed out of his mental compass because it was moved, and while he had still been unconscious. This was why the Messina clone had managed to stay hidden. Additionally irritating to know that, with everything that was currently going on aboard the station, the clone might yet continue to evade capture. Saul stood up and headed back to the hold where, watched by the EVA workers, he removed the warheads from each missile and attached coded transponders. He could now detonate them with just a thought.
Deceleration ensued, and at length their first target came into sight, observed by everyone aboard, all now crammed into the cockpit.
‘An asteroid,’ declared Langstrom, obviously puzzled.
‘Give it a few more minutes and resolution will improve,’ Saul advised him.
His own vision had resolved the grey blob on the screen and programs in his mind cleaned it up, but it would be a short while before any human eyes could detect what it really was. After a minute it became evident that this was no single lump of asteroidal rock, but a huge conglomeration of boulders.
‘It’s a rubble pile,’ observed Ghort.
‘Precisely,’ said Saul, ‘rocks and dust accumulating – one might say coagulating – over billions of years and all held together by minimal gravity. It is not particularly stable despite its great age.’
<
br /> ‘And this helps us how?’ asked one of Ghort’s companions.
‘Consider what a sixty-kiloton detonation on one side of this will do.’
‘Make a hell of a mess,’ someone joked.
‘I get it,’ said Langstrom. ‘And, funnily enough, it looks perfectly in keeping.’
‘Yes,’ said Saul. ‘Just like an ancient fragmentation grenade.’
Mars
Shots cracked over her head, so close. Approximately one-third the gravity of Earth, air resistance . . . not very much, acceleration three point seven metres per second. In the time it would take them to reach the chasma’s edge, maybe five seconds, she would be forty-five metres below them and accelerating. These thoughts flashed through her mind just before she hit the angled-out cliff face and tumbled. Rhone wouldn’t even bother to shoot at her now. With a straight fall of one kilometre, she would be travelling at a hundred and fifty kilometres an hour by the time she hit the bottom. That would undoubtedly kill her. She had to slow herself down.
And if she survived?
Nothing . . . she would die when her air ran out. But still that brute instinct for survival took over.
Var grabbed for holds and felt them being torn out of her hands, wrenching her arms. Each time she hit the cliff she scrabbled desperately for some way to slow her descent, using palms, boot soles, anything. The material of her suit could take it, and anyway, so what if it couldn’t? Play the odds. At one point she noticed a row of ridges below, to her right, and on her next contact with the cliff propelled herself in that direction. They came up very fast and the first one slowed her abruptly, before shattering underneath her. No pain, though she knew for certain that she’d cracked something. Big adrenalin rush. Further ridges jolted against her and, for an insane giggly moment she thought, speed bumps, then was falling alongside a straight drop.
