Owner 03 - Jupiter War (48 page)

‘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 wondered 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.

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.

Argus

No harm in looking . . .

There had been a surprising lack of pain at first: just a series of hard impacts driving her backwards, detaching her gecko boots from the floor and sending her tumbling. In confusion, she tried to reorient herself, tried to get her feet planted firmly so she could figure out what had happened. Another course change? More railgun strikes nearby? She had just managed to propel herself to a convenient surface and re-engage her boots when he slammed into her.

Var fought to hang onto the rifle he wanted to snatch away, but she felt leaden, as if she had been poured into her suit and set solid. Suit diagnostic warnings scrolled up her visor, but fractured and hard to read. He finally knocked her rifle from her grasp. Through the warnings, she saw his face: Ghort’s face, triumphant and sneering, but only for a moment. As he gazed at her his expression suddenly transformed, and he soon looked frightened and hopeless.

Three suit breaches, the warnings informed her: two of them already sealed but one in her suit’s visor, where the sealant system did not connect. She must return to a pressurized environment at once. She abruptly felt tired and knew her mind wasn’t working at its best when, only after seeing these warnings did she spot the cracks in her visor. That tight leaden feeling inside her torso irritated her lungs and she coughed, spattering her visor with blood, then watched as it beaded and slid down to where all the cracks converged. She could now see the leak clearly. She watched blood oozing through one of the cracks and vaporizing in vacuum outside. But there seemed to be much more blood than she had coughed up, and her neck felt damp, and it hurt.

‘I’m sorry,’ she heard, as Ghort’s voice was carried through to her at the point where their visors touched. ‘I’m sorry.’

It was now getting difficult to breathe, but Var knew that had nothing to do with air loss, since that was something she had experienced many times before. Mere tiredness transformed into a sudden incredible weariness. She was just fed up with it all, fed up with the endless . . . effort. She closed her eyes, and that felt good, but then reopened them, choking for breath like someone suffering from sleep apnoea.

After everything, after Mars, after her being rescued, was this it? She coughed out yet more blood, white and frothy now, and could hear her own pulse stuttering in her ears. Shallow breaths were all she could manage, and there just wasn’t enough air. Her vision turned to shades of black and yellow, and her pulse grew hesitant like the beat of an engine running low on fuel. When she closed her eyes again, it came almost as a relief as night descended. Var wished for morning to return, as do we all.

They were down now, the ship protesting all around and the lists of reported damage redoubling rapidly. Saul concerned himself with detail and tried not to be appalled by the destruction. He began filtering the data, then redirecting his robots to deal with the most critical repairs. For what was to come next, the Arboretum cylinder did not really need to be hauled back up into position and repaired, the spindle for Arcoplex Two did not need to be fixed either: the weapons were beyond repair and the Traveller engine would not be firing again for months – if ever. Instead, he passed control over the bulk of his robots to the proctors, who were working frantically to repair the Mach-effect drive to restore its efficiency to over that critical eighty per cent. Others he had delegated to sealing atmosphere breaches, to working on structural repairs, or to securing wreckage. Some of them were even now dragging cables over and across the Arboretum and welding up its contact points with the ship’s skeleton.