Owner 03 - Jupiter War (51 page)

‘What about him?’ she had asked, gesturing to Ghort.

‘I will deal with him,’ he had stated. ‘Go quickly now.’

Memory returned hard, vibrant and bright, and clear in every detail:

She turned to hurry after the medics.

‘So what about me?’ Ghort asked, now supporting himself against the wall.

Of course Saul would not now become more murderous and turn into a monster; both of those required an element of negative emotion. Saul did not feel negative about this man. He felt nothing at all as he took control of the construction robot, sent it forward and instructed it to use programming he had not used seemingly in an age.

Moving with eerie fluidity, the robot slammed Ghort back against the wall with a three-fingered steel hand, extruded a drill from the tool-head that its other limb terminated in, and drove this straight through Ghort’s spacesuit and into his chest. The man shrieked, then sagged as the robot backed off, blood jetting from the hole drilled into his heart. Saul did not bother to see him fall all the way, nor watch the robot cart his body off for disposal. He did not have either the time or the inclination.

The numbness he felt had spread from the more human part of himself, infecting the larger more logical parts of his mind. Had the murderousness spread as well? Was he now truly the monster Hannah feared? No, he felt not. The death of his sister had not changed his plans one whit, though perhaps there was no need, anyway, since his plans were murderous enough . . .

‘I’m going to need some elevation for this,’ he declared, addressing Paul who, with several other proctors, was frantically working to repair or replace damaged Mach-effect units at the pole of the ship where the
Fist
’s fusion torch had seared it. ‘We have to remember that there are two vortex generators down here.’

‘Apparently your recent human interaction has led you into stating the obvious,’ Paul replied, incidentally showing signs of a very human irritation himself.

From this Saul realized that the proctor was struggling to keep to the schedule and, upon checking, he saw the efficiency of the Mach-effect rising slowly from just over sixty per cent.

‘I can give you four minutes,’ the proctor continued, ‘then we go down again.’

‘In succumbing to your very human irritation,’ Saul replied, ‘you seem to have forgotten the propulsive effect of the mass ejection, and the concomitant reduction in our overall mass.’

After a pause Paul replied, ‘Quite.’

A brief glance through a cam showed the cryogenic pod sliding home into its slot. The pipes to swap out her blood and other bodily fluids were automatically attaching, but the monitoring equipment had been shut down, since there was no point monitoring a corpse. Saul realized that, though Hannah had used wound glue on the bullet holes, it had been a hasty job and the swapping-out process would still be hampered; replacement fluids would run out into the wrong places in Var’s body.

Meanwhile, the two medics who had taken Var to the Meat Locker had reached nearby acceleration chairs, and were strapped in. Throughout the rest of the ship everyone was now as ready as they could be, and the time had come. Outside the ship the ATVs were disgorging their troops and the spiderguns had arrived.

‘Do it now,’ he said to Paul.

The ship suddenly heaved and strained and, with a massive groan, it began to rise. Saul watched spiderguns scrabbling in an avalanche of sulphur compounds and rock, some of them trying to leap the gap growing between the ship and the ground. He registered weapons fire impacting, but it was mostly from small arms and ineffective. As he reached out to three of the vortex generator’s containment coils, he calculated on eight seconds before the response from the
Fist
, which would be at about the time he was nearly a kilometre up. He touched the Mach-effect drive and tilted his ship just so, counted seven seconds, then turned off three vortex generator containment coils. Thousands of tonnes of liquid mercury, spinning round a fifteen-kilometre course at just under a hundred million metres per second, erupted free in an instant.

Command

Bartholomew felt the drag of a side-burn fusion engine as the
Command
fell into orbit around Io. His crew reported that the damage to the main fusion engine was repairable within a month, if they concentrated on that and not the weapons. He had ordered them to divert the ship’s resources to that same engine, but now, as he studied an image of the sulphurous moon of Jupiter, he wasn’t so sure that it had been a great idea.

The ATVs had drawn to a halt and their crews began piling out, while the spiderguns had been climbing the debris slope ahead. It had all been just a matter of time, with the overwhelming forces disembarked from the
Fist
about to begin their assault. But now Bartholomew stared in horror. Saul’s ship had risen from the ground without any visible form of propulsion. It had taken Bartholomew seconds of just gaping at the screen to realize there was no optical problem involving the drones, and then . . .

What the hell happened?

Bartholomew reached out to his console with a shaking hand and wound back the most recent imagery. He slowed it down and watched most of the spiderguns ending up buried, then the small-arms fire. Saul’s ship then tilted . . .

Must have been a firing from the
Fist
. . .

But Bartholomew had detected no such firing, and the last tacom update on constant feed to him confirmed this. He slowed the video down even further, and watched as part of the equator of Saul’s ship flared and a thing like a giant silver rod stabbed out, struck the
Fist
dead centre, flattened itself into a blade and scythed across, blurring into a gleaming explosion all around the equator of Saul’s ship even as that initial ejection hurled it, at massive acceleration, across the surface of Io.

The
Fist
, the ring of its own vortex generator severed, emitted a similar but smaller ejection, which also chewed up its equator as subsequent coils failed. This tore up a crescent of ground large enough to be visible from orbit, which was the only view Bartholomew next received since the blasts had taken out the drones. He suspected that ejection would have done more damage if its course had not been tangential to the moon, and just gouged a mass out of its surface before continuing on into vacuum.

Subsequently the
Fist
rose on a massive explosion. Bartholomew had assumed it a munitions explosion but, as Oerlon’s ship came apart and fell away in a fountain of silicon lava, he realized that the near-relativistic ejection of liquid mercury from Saul’s ship had punched right down through Io’s crust. In fact, a plume now becoming visible way beyond the horizon line confirmed that it had cut right through the moon and emerged out the other side.

No, he understood, the
Fist
had not hit Saul’s vortex generator; Saul had deliberately shut down its containment and used it as a weapon to destroy both the
Fist
and that ship’s assault force. And now, like a shark rising from the murky depths, Saul’s ship was heading up through the massive dust storms and pyroclastic flows on Io . . . and coming Bartholomew’s way.

His Gently Smiling Jaws

With the ability to grow tissue grafts, and even whole organs, in nutrient tanks becoming an established fact of twenty-second-century medicine, a large body of researchers in transplantation technology were seconded by the Committee to look into further applications that might be useful to the Inspectorate. Often the more esoteric products of such research were at the whimsical behest of some powerful delegate and, since rejection problems had been all but overcome, the delegates concerned often looked to the animal world for inspiration. The results of this further research can often be seen today among Inspectorate enforcers or the bodyguards of delegates. The misnamed cat’s eyes enabled the recipients to see in the dark, though that genetic template was in fact taken from a lemur. Properly named extensible cat’s claws proved a rather useless addition to a bodyguard’s armoury. Keroskin, first based on the skin of crocodiles, was a non-surgical replacement for sub-dermal armouring – actually spreading across the recipient’s body like psoriasis. After numerous tweaks, it included shock-absorbing layers like Kevlar, a high content of insulating fibres that made it resistant to heat, and diminished growth of the afferent nerve fibres, which cut down on the recipient’s perception of pain. Protected by such skin, enforcers could go charging into riots even while inducers were being deployed; however, volunteers to test out what delegates saw as a truly advantageous development were sadly scarce.

Earth

That giant called ‘acceleration’ was bearing down on Clay again, and its breath stank of hot metal and burning plastic. He opened his eyes, not sure if he’d blacked out during what felt like undertaking a short journey inside a trash compactor on a bob sleigh run, and which now oddly seemed to be continuing even in utter silence. Then he realized that what he was feeling wasn’t acceleration at all but his old friend, and sometimes enemy, namely gravity. He looked down at his torso, half expecting to see some ribs protruding, so much did his chest hurt, then he glanced around him.

The air was full of smoke, though it seemed to be clearing. Over to his right, Galahad was still slumped forwards in her chair, while over to his left . . . Clay gaped out at an open plain, now taking on hints of bloody red in the false dawn, scattered with burning wreckage surrounding some great mechanical construct, itself burning, and which it took him a moment to identify. Then he realized he was seeing the caterpillar treads and the underside of that yellow bulldozer. The entire left hand side of the drop shuttle was gone, sheared off, but they were down, and he had survived.

He reached down and pulled his umbilical from the ship’s air feed, which at some point must have developed a leak, for how else could he have smelled the effects of burning? He unclipped his helmet, now seeming so incredibly heavy, and tossed it aside. Sniffing, he now also detected an odd underlying putrid odour. Next he looked directly ahead, as if only just plucking up the nerve to do so, and saw Trove gazing down at the torn metal right beside her seat, and a three-metre drop to the gravelly ground below. Sack was already on his feet, his helmet discarded, and heading back. He came to stand before Clay, reaching down to undo his straps. Clay thought this very kind of him, until the bodyguard relieved him of his sidearm.

‘You okay?’ Sack asked, looking past Ruger.

Before Clay could reply, a muffled voice from behind him replied, ‘Think so . . . broke my fuckin’ nose.’

‘You’ll survive,’ said Sack, and stepped on towards Serene Galahad. He unstrapped and, with frightening ease, casually picked her up and slung her over his shoulder. Ignoring Clay and Trove, who was now heaving herself out of her seat, he marched over to the sheared-off edge of the drop shuttle and jumped down on to the dusty plateau.

Obviously labouring in Earth’s gravity, Trove made her way back to Clay and leaned against the chair next to him.

‘Didn’t keep up with your . . . resistance exercises . . . in the spin gym,’ she noted, after she discarded her space helmet.

Clay guessed she was right because he seemed glued to his chair. He made another effort to get up, rose a little way, then slumped back. Struggling herself, Trove finally helped him up and they moved over to the torn-away side of the drop shuttle. Had he not known that they would be landing on Earth Clay might have supposed they had arrived on Mars, what with the russet hue outside. Though this was a Mars from some VR fantasy rather than the mundane reality.

The soldier was already ahead of them, climbing down to the ground, before glancing up at them with a face that looked as if it had been slammed into a brick wall. On wobbly legs, and feeling as if his body was now fashioned of lead, Clay eased himself down to the edge, grabbed hold of a protruding jag of metal, then snatched his hand away as it sizzled. Trove went down ahead of him, using a twisted skein of optics and preconductor cable as a rope, then waited below as he followed her. At the last his grip could just not support his unaccustomed weight and he fell on top of her, and they both tumbled to the ground.

‘You’re fucking useless, Clay Ruger,’ she said indignantly.

‘Don’t you love me any more?’ he asked, as Trove fought to regain her feet.

‘Only like any other helpless animal,’ she replied, drawing her sidearm from her belt.

Clay, now up on his hands and knees, stared at the ground. He had assumed their landing site to be a cleared and levelled section of sprawl, but now reality began to impinge. Staring up at him, half buried and partially crushed, was a human skull. Extending his inspection of the ground, he identified crushed ribcages, leg and arm bones, wads of clothing, shoes, cheap fones and the occasional glint of fake jewellery. He knew now what their landing field was. It had probably acquired the name ‘Bonefield’ or the ‘Field of Bones’ or the ‘Ossuary’, as had so many similar places all across Earth. He was standing on a great mass of skeletons, all crushed down and levelled. He was standing on just one of many such accumulations of Earth’s dead: the result of Serene Galahad’s Scouring of the planet.

‘Shit!’ he exclaimed and found himself up on his feet in a moment, as if his body had just remembered how to work in gravity. He looked all around and, amidst the scattered and burning wreckage, he saw drifts of skulls, then the small mountain of skeletons the yellow dozer must have been spreading out and compacting down.

‘Nice place, huh?’ remarked Trove.

‘Yeah, wonderful.’ Clay spat the dry, powdery, slightly putrid taste from his mouth, wiped dust from his lips and tried to bat some of it off his spacesuit. He finally looked up: the sky was dull red but with a lighter glare over on one horizon. Meteorites were still cutting across it high up and, even as he watched, some larger piece of wreckage came down, flaring like a firework before breaking into three pieces that went streaking over the horizon.