Owner 03 - Jupiter War (26 page)

He watched as the work teams aboard each space plane headed out onto the booster tanks, dragging with them space-plane steering thrusters – specially insulated, electronically hardened and made to run on a simple fixed programme. The tanks even had places ready for the attachment of these, and Saul silently thanked the Committee Mars Missions steering and focus groups for their frankly astounding foresight, though it occurred to him that it might have been Var, as she had worked her way up to become overseer of the construction station, who had ensured all this. Of course, neither Var nor any others in those numerous political groups could have foreseen such thrusters being used to position the fuel tanks in the Io flux tube. They would probably have quite rightly pointed out that, subject to fluctuations of thousands of amps in a massive current, the thrusters would simply fail. Saul, of course, expected them to fail, but not before they’d done their job of positioning these tanks – a job that would have scrapped the space planes themselves and killed everyone aboard.

‘Le Roque,’ said Saul, and he watched as the technical director looked up in surprise at the nearest cam in Tech Central. ‘Are we all secure?’

Le Roque took a moment to think this over. Saul knew he wasn’t reviewing the most recent preparations for another move of the ship under Mach-effect drive, but deciding on whether to ask why Saul was asking. Le Roque knew everything was secure, and he knew for certain that Saul knew.

‘Yes, we’re ready,’ he said, without moving his lips, before returning his attention to his three main screens.

What else to ask?

Saul knew, in a perfectly intellectual way, how those aboard felt he was becoming remote and disconnected from them and their human concerns. Le Roque’s response was a perfect illustration of this and, in that moment, Saul realized he must reengage so as not to go completely out of touch, at least for now. With great difficulty he again breached the division between his human self and the rest, and allowed the human part to continue the conversation.

‘I ask,’ he said, ‘because it seems this would be a good time to begin reassessing all flight preparations. The possibility of becoming complacent should never be ruled out.’

‘The procedures are fine,’ replied Le Roque, ‘and complacency only gets banished when someone discovers the penalty for not following them.’

Rather cold, really, but then Saul had noted how all the chipped personnel developed a decidedly callous streak shortly after implantation. This had nothing to do with the implants themselves, but was all about how those recipients perceived how the implants
should
affect their behaviour. Humans – sometimes the novelty of their foibles could become wearing.

‘How are you finding your new implant?’ Saul asked.

‘More efficient,’ Le Roque replied, still without speaking out loud.

‘I’m so glad,’ said Saul, casting irony into the void.

‘And how are you finding
your
implant?’ he asked Rhine who, rather than stay in Tech Central, had returned to his own lab in order to monitor the Mach drive’s effects.

‘Chipper!’ Rhine almost yelled.

There were of course exceptions to that dehumanizing effect. In some, certain traits became emphasized. In Rhine that trait just happened to be lunacy.

‘How far along are you with your new theories of everything?’

Rhine looked up at the nearest cam. ‘Hypotheses,’ he stated, then returned his attention to the screens. The line between hypothesis and theory had always been one where the arguments were bitterest, and where scientists might sacrifice their careers on the altar of empiricism.

‘I am about to move the ship,’ Saul announced through the PA system, ‘to a lower offset orbit between Io and Jupiter. That’s a position we should be able to maintain.’

He reached out and uncoiled a thick optic cable, with a full teragate plug, from the arm of his acceleration chair and plugged it into the socket in his skull. Rather than switch straight over to this new connection into his ship’s systems, he ran programs to ensure only a gradual change-over as they approached the Io flux tube.

‘Remember, people, that all radio communications will gradually be replaced by laser coms. Usually you wouldn’t notice any difference, but in this case the coms that route through the ship systems will be affected by the massive EM output of the flux tube.’

Saul moved the ship like a human mind guiding a human body. The drive systems were his locomotion, like in running, walking or swimming. He did not consciously work the vector calculus and check against inner maps of the solar system, just as no runner, walker or swimmer would have to make conscious calculation about what they were doing. He did not have to micromanage everything and he knew how to delegate within the complexity that was his mind, his body. He engaged the Mach-effect drive and pursued Io, dropping steadily into a lower orbit. He felt the tidal tug of Jupiter through stress sensors in the structure all around him and in a sensitive gravity detector sited between a pair of lattice walls, and began to read the vastly smaller pull of the distant moon. He gazed upon a gas giant and its satellite, in the human spectrum and beyond, and through electromagnetic vision saw the part of the flux tube he had chosen as a bright tornado curving from the moon to the north pole of the gas giant. Getting closer to it, he felt induction currents building up in the structure of his body – his ship – and felt systems correcting for that, just as a human body might correct for heat or cold or drunkenness, and he sweated electrostatics.

Unlike with a human body, Saul’s vision could extend inwards wherever he wanted it to. He saw Angela Saberhagen halting to stare at her reflection in a glass window pane and trying to smooth down hair that had begun to puff out like a dandelion head, and now crackled under her touch. He saw Hannah Neumann and Dr Da Vinci engaging in sweaty sex in her laboratory, almost as if she wanted to do this somewhere she knew Saul could be watching, and he realized that the human part of him should feel jealousy if he only allowed it the freedom for such petty emotions.

He saw the proctors all gathered together now in a deserted part of the outer wheel of the old station. Linked together hand to hand, they stood in a row that faced towards the EM shield hardware ranged about the inner walls, and were somehow experiencing the charge of the station, but again he resisted the impulse to snoop. He saw static discharges leaping from strut to strut in vacuum, and an eerie blue glow appearing in certain parts of the cylinder worlds. And he saw Rhine suddenly become animated as the sensors under his control detected ball lightning rolling round the rim, in line with the business end of the EM hardware and passing in front of the row of proctors, who now watched as if they had been expecting it.

However, such effects were not as bad as they could have been, for though the Mach-effect drive was operating through the ship’s EM shield, the shield itself was set at its maximum. Though humans could have survived in the sleet of radiation and ionized particles occurring close to the flux tube, they could never have survived the genetic damage that ensued.

Then he was in place, held there by the drive pushing lightly on the surrounding universe, the ship poised beside an ionic storm that might be invisible to human vision, but certainly not beyond the compass of their instruments. Rectifier battery storage was making good use of these surges, but also dumping energy almost as fast to power self-correcting systems and diagnostics throughout, and as repair robots drew power in order to hunt down and repair blown components. Saul now felt a fuzzy edge to his thinking, to his very being, as the computers fought this disruption. He gazed outwards at the approaching space planes and their loads, watched Var and her teams attaching the ends of the new cable, stored on drums twenty metres across, to EVA units ready to be rolled out and attached to the old Mars Traveller booster tanks. And he waited, and his robots waited, and the crew waited, all in that before-a-thunderstorm sense of expectation that he knew would never end so long as they were here.

Scourge

He’d drifted off to sleep four, maybe five times? Clay couldn’t quite remember how many times, nor how many days they’d spent inside the cramped shuttle. They were still okay for water, since they’d found two VC suits aboard that recycled their urine and would do so indefinitely while power was still available, and food wasn’t a problem either. However, the inside of the shuttle was now getting a bit ripe, even though they’d found a sealable plastic container to use as a toilet, and even though enough water was available for sponge baths. Shuttles like this one simply weren’t designed for lengthy occupation.

Trove was again tinkering with the shuttle’s computer. She had a couple of hatches open in the cockpit and was busy swapping out chips. She also had computer code frozen on one of the two screens set into the instrument panel. She reckoned she might be able to access the cam system of the
Scourge
, though how having a grandstand view of their catastrophic entry into Earth’s atmosphere would help them, Clay had no idea.

‘What about the radio here?’ he asked, trying to think of something helpful, but realizing this was a question he must have asked her before.

Trove stared at him as if he was an idiot. ‘Like I said, the
Scourge
is EM shielded. Our only chance of getting a signal out would be to send it via the ship’s computers to an exterior aerial, and he’s locked them all out.’

‘But you’re accessing the computer system right now?’

‘Yes,’ she replied with exaggerated patience, ‘but the aerials will still be locked out and we’ll only get an exterior view if he allows it.’

‘So what the hell do we do?’ he asked leadenly.

Yeah, another question he had asked on numerous occasions, and a sign of the general malaise he was sinking into. Physically he now felt a lot better; the pain he had experienced a little while after they had arrived here – once the effect of the painkillers had begun to wane – was fading, but mentally he wasn’t so good. With his body seemingly recovering, it was almost as if it felt it could expend some of its renewed energy on dropping him into a deep depression.

‘We’ve already discussed this,’ she snapped. ‘We try to run when he goes after Galahad. The main engine will fire up, so observers will know there’s someone still aboard, so it won’t matter if this shuttle is then seen leaving.’ She paused for a second. ‘I see no reason why he wouldn’t just let us go.’

Clay grimaced. Scotonis had slaughtered his entire crew and committed himself to suicide, death and destruction, yet Trove was talking about the man making a rational decision. Clay thought it unlikely that the captain was in the frame of mind to allow anyone a get-out clause.

‘There,’ she said, clicking the two panels closed again. At once the code began to scroll, then, after a moment, the second screen blinked on to show a holding image. It was the old space-exploration logo of a space plane penetrating the ring chain of the united world, all its links differently coloured to represent the various regions of Earth. This was something that Galahad had ordered to be changed into something more representative of her regime, but an idea that had been shelved until the future, when resources could be spared for such ephemera. Clay felt that her efficiency and the speed with which she managed to get things done would have been admirable, had she not been as barking mad as Scotonis.

‘There, what?’ he asked.

She clicked down a ball control and the logo disappeared to divide the screen up into twenty numbered squares, which Clay knew comprised just one page of a sequence of five. Each square was a cam view taken from either inside or outside the main ship. Dragging the cursor over each one expanded it, and by this method Trove worked through each of the cameras aboard the ship, pausing at corridors that had been turned into abattoirs filled with the floating dead, or bits of them, and where the drying blood on the walls had turned brown.

‘Bastard,’ she muttered.

After a while it became evident she wasn’t yet finding what she wanted, and Clay enquired, ‘He’s not letting you look into the bridge, is he?’

Just then, for the first time since they had boarded the shuttle, Scotonis addressed them. ‘Of course I’m not letting you look into the bridge. I require my privacy.’ He paused, then continued, ‘Perhaps you’d like to check out the views through exterior cams twenty to twenty-eight.’

Trove immediately selected number twenty-eight, which revealed the distant blade of a drive flame. She switched to twenty, because every tenth cam outside had telescopic functions and better resolution, and focused in.

‘They’ve sent a tug to collect us,’ she stated.

Scotonis gave a lethargic handclap in response.

The vehicle was three hundred metres long and essentially a squat Mars Traveller engine wrapped in towing and grapnel mechanisms, fuel tanks and jutting the combustion throats of hundred-year-old hyox rocket motors, with the small bubble of a crew cabin lost amidst all this panoply. Clay recollected that space tugs like this usually carried a crew of three, two of whom were unnecessary – the Committee had never considered it a good idea to allow just one person control of so much power, unless of course he was a delegate or the Chairman himself. The three consisted of the pilot, who was the only one really needed, his second officer to whom was delegated the minor job of observer, and a political officer specially seconded from the Inspectorate complement in Earth orbit.

However, since Serene’s ascension to power after Saul’s ruthless thinning-out of Earth’s bureaucracy, such political oversight there had become impossible and, so she claimed, unnecessarily interfering. So perhaps there was only the pilot aboard.

‘If we could only get to that shuttle,’ he said, imagining them secretly getting themselves aboard, then onto whatever Earth-orbit station it docked with, then onto a space plane heading down to the surface . . . No, that just wouldn’t run.

‘That shuttle will hard dock,’ announced Scotonis, and Clay wished he had kept his big mouth shut. ‘You’d have to suit up and exit through one of the hull airlocks, every one of which I control. Of course you could blow the airlock, as you did before, but then you’d need to face the anti-personnel lasers positioned out there.’