Owner 03 - Jupiter War (11 page)

‘Platform?’

‘Yeah, it seems the boss isn’t happy with the current position of the Traveller engine – so we’re going to be moving it.’

Alex stood there, dumbfounded, then ventured, ‘And when are we to start doing this?’

‘Well, right now we’ve got to lock down our previous job and pack away our tools,’ said Ghort, ‘then we start on our new job once the sun is shining.’

Did the tension seeming to lace the very air demonstrate that the vortex generator’s effect on space-time was somehow against nature? No, Hannah decided, it was once more a demonstration of how human technology was outpacing the old naturally evolved human bodies, and further justification of everything she was doing in her laboratory and now also here in this factory area Saul had provided.

‘We’ve been avoiding each other,’ said Var.

Hannah turned to study the woman stepping out from the laboratory and onto the floor of the new biofactory. In one sense Var Delex’s appearance was reminiscent of one of the Saberhagens, what with her pale hair, narrow features and athletic physique. But there was something much harder ground into Var, just as the Martian rouge had been ground into her skin. The Saberhagens were youngsters – just in their twenties – this woman, being Saul’s sister, had to be at least fifty years old, like Hannah herself.

‘It seemed the politic thing to do for now,’ said Hannah. ‘You’ve had a lot to do, I understand: a lot of computer design, reorganizing – in fact all that’s involved in turning a space station into a starship.’

Var gazed at her very directly. ‘And yet I feel as if I’ve been given make-work, as if he left things undone just so I wouldn’t feel redundant.’

Hannah shrugged. ‘One of the penalties of serving a demigod?’

‘So it would seem.’ Var folded her arms and leaned back against the wall. ‘I’ve tried to make the reconstruction completely mine, so as to give the human teams a human face to talk to, and I’m trying to divorce their work from that of the robots – since many of them were starting to feel outmoded.’

‘And it’s working, so I’m told.’

‘It is.’ Var nodded in solemn agreement.

‘How are things with the rest of the . . . Martians?’ Hannah asked. ‘I understand that most of them are located here now.’ Along with one Thomas Grieve, who had recently been a guest in Hannah’s surgery – she hoped he was the last subject she would ever have to mind-wipe.

‘There were a few problems to begin with, when they found out they couldn’t choose where they were assigned, and that therefore they couldn’t stay together,’ said Var. ‘But growing up under the Committee results in obedience.’

Hannah grimaced, decided not to pursue her thoughts about Grieve. Instead she focused on the problems about the assignment of personnel, since she had already heard and discussed them, if only briefly, with Saul.

‘A good thing about humans is that they form communities,’ she said. ‘A bad thing about humans is that they form ghettos.’

‘Precisely what he said to me.’ Var frowned. ‘My brother seems to have become quite the philosopher. Of course, now the people from the base have to get used to their feeling of obsolescence here.’ She cast an eye across the various machines in Hannah’s factory. ‘What about you?’

Hannah’s hand embraced the same machines. ‘Not obsolete yet.’

‘I understand you’re taking neural tissue samples from everyone, apparently to be grown into grafts for the repair of head injuries,’ Var commented neutrally. ‘I also understand that you’ve asked for volunteers from among the staff to try out some new cerebral hardware.’

Hannah flicked her gaze towards the group of four workers, all clad in paper overalls, steadily making their way up the factory as they installed automated biofactors and the base hardware of cylindrical glass growth tanks that had yet to be manufactured elsewhere. This was effectively a small job, hence the presence of only one small general-purpose robot working alongside them: a thing running on treads supporting a cylindrical upright body wrapped in a carousel of limbs sporting a variety of tool heads. She then swung her gaze to a large temperature-controlled safe.

This contained the remaining hundred and fifty cerebral interfaces. These were an older design than the one Saul currently used and were the same as those employed by the seven comlifers on Earth. They were also the kind she herself had used to wipe the minds of all the Committee delegates surviving here – biological interfaces that were the precursors to the one in Saul’s head, but which in the delegates were now effectively inert, which seemed a kind of justice. Until she made more, of a better design, these interfaces would provide the link for one hundred and fifty personnel to their backups, once they were ready, and would give them limited access to the station system and the robots.

‘What has he told you?’ she asked.

‘He talked about travelling to the stars and I talked about human mortality,’ said Var, ‘whereupon he suggested I talk to you about the work you are doing.’

Hannah felt a flash of jealousy upon hearing that, for when had Saul last communicated with her about anything above the completely practical? She suppressed the reaction, then pointed to the racking fixed along one wall, which now held twenty aerogel boxes, all tubed and wired together with secondary power supplies in place and provided with optics ready to attach them to the station’s computer system.

‘The components are here in Arcoplex Two,’ Hannah explained. ‘Aerogel matrices in which to grow organic backups to a human mind, cerebral implants and exterior com hardware linked to those backups.’ She gestured to the safe. ‘And in another area we’re installing the equipment for growing human clones.’

Just as with Le Roque, Hannah needed to explain no more, for Var Delex understood at once, or maybe her suspicions had been confirmed. Her eyes grew wide nevertheless as she processed the news that the inevitability of her own death could be postponed. But then she moved beyond that.

‘Cerebral bioware connecting to
exterior
hardware?’ she queried.

Hannah shrugged, feeling somewhat uncomfortable.

‘He’s put in an off-switch,’ Var continued, ‘so he’ll be able to sever their link to their backups.’ She paused reflectively. ‘Demigod indeed.’

‘I don’t like it,’ Hannah agreed, ‘but – and now I’m going to sound like a Committee executive – too much freedom could be a bad thing.’

‘For him, you mean,’ said Var. ‘Tell me, will you yourself have this exterior hardware?’

Though one of Hannah’s new assistants had taken a sample from her skull, she hadn’t even considered beyond that. How did she feel about Saul being the gatekeeper between her and eternity?

‘I trust him,’ she said. ‘Though he’ll control my link to my backup, I will still have the chance of living forever, or at least for thousands of years, so who knows what might happen in the future? Perhaps one day he will cease to feel the need to control me.’

‘Or perhaps,’ said Var, ‘you will cease to trust him.’

‘Such cynicism,’ said Hannah. ‘Obviously you have a lot to think about and would perhaps prefer not to go this route?’

‘It
seems
a road worth travelling.’

‘So when will you want me to take a sample from you?’ Hannah persevered.

Var Delex grimaced. ‘Not just yet.’

Hannah just watched her, still not quite understanding this woman whom Saul felt was important enough to risk his life in rescuing her from Mars.

‘Later, perhaps after the current shift,’ Var added, ‘I was considering trying out this bar in the Arboretum. Perhaps you could join me and we can start to get to know each other better, since it’s possible we may be in each other’s company for a very long time.’ She gestured to the backups. ‘A very long time indeed.’

Hannah nodded, something tightening in her torso, like that faithless friend, her panic attacks – but a much deeper and more hollow feeling, like awe. She realized that she had been so wrapped up in the detail of what she was doing that she had failed to incorporate the big picture, and yet Var’s simple remark had opened her eyes.

A very long time indeed.

It was as if Saul held space hooked over his finger, drawn taut and ready to be released, but time dragged in the world he occupied, seeming a hundred years behind the intricate images he had constructed in his mind. Many weeks had passed since he had saved his sister’s life and, by any human measure, his plans for Argus had advanced at an amazing rate, but Saul did not measure reality in human terms. It was all too slow; the delays between thought and action and achieving final product were interminable, frustrating. Yet Saul possessed absolute control of his own mind, so frustration, a thoroughly human malady that served no purpose, was something he could just eliminate from his skull. Time dragged but Saul watched with the patience of Jove, while turning a human face to the world.

‘From the beginning, both of you claimed you wanted to work here,’ he said, peering down through the glass floor at the hive of activity in the robotics factory.

‘That’s true,’ said Brigitta.

Judd was down below with a small team of humans, stripping down one of the assembly machines only because that was quicker than letting it repair itself. Such malfunctions had been a rarity since Robotics had become ever more . . . robotic, therefore the components called human and proctor were required less and less often. Thus far, three legions of the new-design robots were standing ready, gleaming out there on the lattice wall beside the arcoplex. Saul probed the neat functionality of their minds, the perfectly in-consonance diagnostic returns from their bodies. Just a thought from him, and they would be in motion but, though
they
were ready, the station was not. Even if they had enough power, they could hardly keep operational for a day before they used everything up. Thus the smelters needed to go over fully to solar power, and begin producing components at their maximum rate. This would free up reactor power for the robots, which would supply themselves from numerous recharging points, even while solar power fed, via cells inlaid into their skins, the rectifying batteries inside their bodies. Once operating together as a large efficient machine constantly supplied with energy and components, they could
really
go to work.

Saul now transferred his human attention to the weapon he held – one of the plasma rifles Brigitta and Angela had fashioned for use in the fight against the troops from the
Scourge
.

‘I want you to do something else,’ he said.

‘Evidently,’ Brigitta replied.

‘I want you to leave Robotics to Judd and go back to work on the station weapons,’ Saul continued, ‘including the plasma cannon I want you to design and build. I’ve given you some of the parameters and eventual position of all the weapons in the completed ship. I’ve also opened up a new area within this arcoplex for you to develop them and, if they are available, will supply the workers and robots you may require.’

The twins exchanged a look, and then Angela gave a brief nod.

‘Okay,’ said Brigitta. ‘Things were starting to get a bit samey here, anyway, and we always like a challenge. By the way, is there any chance of us getting our hands on some radioactives?’

Saul handed the weapon back to her. ‘When we go after new materials, yes, but right now it’s all about energy.’

‘Good, because that’s our big disadvantage against anything sent from Earth. Remember, they’ve got the nukes.’

Saul nodded briefly and turned to head back the way he had come, but most of his mind was already ranging elsewhere. Much more data were available from Earth, and now he saw a further cost of having rescued his sister and salvaging the equipment and personnel from Mars. He should have attacked. Instead he should have taken Argus Station straight from the Asteroid Belt to Earth and methodically destroyed everything in orbit. Since he had not done so, Galahad had responded very quickly to the threat he represented, and he had just watched the test firing of two new heavy railguns, one from the Traveller construction station and another from Core One. Attacking now was still an option, but better for him to spend as much time in the solar system as was safe, and then just run. In the end, if he wanted to keep a lid on Earth, he would have to stay within the solar system, knocking down any attempt by the Earth-bound to reach out into orbit. Why trap himself here in such an onerous chore when a whole universe lay within his reach? At some point the Saberhagens would realize that the weapons they were building weren’t intended as a defence against Earth, but against anything they might find way out beyond.

Sixth docking . . .

As Saul arrived at the elevator that would take him out of the arcoplex, his constant companion spidergun climbing in ahead of him, he mentally reached out and locked the docking clamps holding the Mars-format space plane to Docking Pillar One – the disassembled fusion reactor aboard it could wait to be offloaded – then began similarly locking down all the way across the station. The smelting plants had already finished their latest run, and the transporters running between them and the station were parked down in the bases of the smelting-plant docks. Now the smelters began pulling in the mirrors which had been supplying meagre concentrated sunlight to complement the output of the fusion reactors, while the big cable drums jerked into motion for hauling them back towards the station. Having now received the order, both human and robot work parties finished their latest jobs and began putting away their tools – the robots to then head off and cling to some nearby section of the station structure while the humans returned to their accommodation.

An enclosed walkway now led straight from the elevator exit into Tech Central. Saul took this at an unhurried pace, finally entering the cageway leading up to the main control room and propelling himself up after his spidergun. As he entered, the occupants busily working their consoles hardly spared either him or the robot a glance, having become used to seeing both now. Le Roque oversaw the team, speaking to someone through his fone, while Rhine was sitting at the navigation console. Saul headed over to stand beside him.