Owner 03 - Jupiter War (44 page)

Saul gazed through numerous sensors, repeatedly scanned images of the two ships for further data regarding them, and replayed recent events to analyse drive capabilities, but he could find no advantage. His first assessment was correct, so his situation did not look good at all. But surely there had to be something, some other angle; some new move he could make? Even as he thought that, he knew it was the thinking of a victim being dragged down to an adjustment cell.

‘We need to look at worst-case scenarios,’ he stated. ‘We need responses, should we be unable to evade close combat.’ He felt he was missing something, and that it was something quite simple – some datum yet to be fed into his present assessment of the situation.

‘We have been considering this,’ replied Paul, who was presently overseeing repairs to power lines leading to one of the Mach-effect units. The proctor was standing like some technological hunt master amidst massed steel hounds.

‘And the result of your consideration?’ Saul enquired.

The proctor immediately routed a block of information to him. Saul absorbed the overview straight into his mind and saw that, yes, this was a plan that might work. However, the best that could be said about it was that it was a costly one, dependent on numerous variables. A more appropriate description would be suicidally desperate.

‘Io?’ he enquired, after a moment, consciously suppressing a visceral aversion.

‘Their disadvantage is that they do not wish to destroy the Gene Bank samples and data,’ Paul replied. ‘And that they also wish to capture you alive.’

Perhaps it required minds like those of the proctors to see the way clear, but Saul, even as logical as he could be, found it difficult to accept that their only route to survival was by crashing his ship on Jupiter’s moon Io.

He now absorbed the entire plan and studied its many flaws. It would only work if he managed to hit certain parts of the
Fist
, disabling one particular option. It would work if the Mach-effect drive could be maintained at above eighty per cent efficiency throughout the inevitable battering that his ship would receive before it went down. It would work if the Rhine drive wasn’t hit, and it would require that drive being sacrificed later. And it would work, in the end, if the
Command
was positioned just so, had not improved much on its present manoeuvrability and did not tear Saul’s ship apart before a very final encounter.

‘The crash can be made to look real,’ Paul asserted, ‘especially with their scanning equipment being disrupted by EM radiation from Io’s flux tube and torus. There are few other alternatives, as while we remain in flight the
Fist
will be able to pound us to scrap before committing its troops to an assault. The enemy must be convinced that we are down and all but finished.’

‘The robots,’ Saul noted.

‘The troops aboard the
Fist
will be armed with EM-pulse tank-busters, so they must not be allowed to board,’ Paul explained. ‘The
Command
is unlikely to have a significant number of such troops aboard, or such weapons either.’

‘Only if all else fails,’ Saul decided, though as yet he had no idea what that ‘else’ might mean. He swallowed a bitter taste in his mouth. One thing was certain: fleeing the Jovian moon system was not an option: the battlefield would be around Jupiter.

The huge Mach-effect shove, with a parallel firing of the Traveller engine, sent Saul’s ship back in towards Jupiter. He just had to hope that those aboard the
Command
were struggling to get their system up and running, so would not detect the thrust discrepancy. The
Fist
had only just rounded Jupiter, thus was too far away for its sensors to penetrate both the magnetosphere and heavy ionization lying between to get readings accurate enough for them to know the enemy’s present course was not all due to its Traveller engine. Its crew were also probably more concerned about what had happened to the
Command
, and were doubtless reassessing tactics now that a plasma cannon had come into play.

‘Very effective,’ he observed.

‘Why, thank you,’ Brigitta replied casually, but her expression, as she gazed at the screen shots, revealed her shock at just how lethal her new toy had proved. Prior to this moment it had all been about design, calculation, invention and engineering problems to be solved. Prior to this moment, calculations regarding the weapon’s effectiveness had all concerned energy yields and losses, point heat intensity and distribution. It had not been about burning a crater in the main body of the enemy ship, then tearing a chunk out of its rear and seeing human beings burning on their suit oxygen supplies as they tumbled out into vacuum.

As Saul’s ship hurtled back in towards Jupiter, the
Fist
began making course changes to intercept, for their courses lay athwart each other. Firing side-burn fusion engines, it hurled itself up in a curve towards Jupiter’s pole, making a turn on conventional drive that Saul knew would have damaged his own ship and probably killed large numbers on board. The
Fist
was clearly a tough machine, and it seemed likely its crew and troop complement must be using some design of pressure gel-tanks to prevent the g-forces killing them. Such manoeuvrability on the part of the enemy ship seemed to confirm Paul’s assertions, but Saul did not like that at all.

Also, as the
Fist
moved into an area of minimal ionization, and while Saul’s ship drew closer, more of the enemy vessel lay open to inspection. Saul collected data, noting some odd spectral signatures that told him that the armour on the
Fist
was some sort of composite. He also located the space doors to the main shuttle bay, counted numerous railgun ports. Something else to note were the domes of extensible weapons turrets that doubtless contained additional armament.

‘I think you may be right,’ he conceded bitterly to the proctor Paul, just as the
Fist
showered intervening space with shooting stars: a perfect pattern of railgun missiles, in avoiding which Saul would need to decelerate, thus giving the
Fist
a chance to close in.

Thus far, Alex had managed to keep Ghort in sight, but keeping track of him was becoming increasingly dangerous, as the row of shots stitched across the wall of ice at a recent junction had attested. Now the initial immediacy of the hunt, with the prey clearly in sight, must give way to a patient stalking.

‘You’ve got nowhere to go, Ghort,’ he said. ‘Even if you evade me, the Owner will eventually track you down.’

‘You’ve rather limited my choices,’ Ghort replied bitterly.

Alex grimaced. In retrospect, he should not have warned Ghort that he intended to kill him. Then, again, no fancy tapestry of lies would have convinced the man that he had any chance of survival by giving himself up.

‘Yes, I suppose I have.’

Ghort’s reply was just a grunt, but this provided enough. The triangulation and tracking program, which Alex had created over a month ago, now had enough data to work with. Both of them were speaking via laser com, linking in to any receivers nearby and transmitting through the ship’s system; therefore, so long as Ghort continued to communicate through his implant, Alex could continue to track him. He paused to call up a schematic of his surroundings, located his quarry just a hundred metres away, now moving out from the armouring that surrounded the vortex generator. Then, with reference to the schematic, Alex began using the tracking element of his program. Banishing the schematic as being too distracting, he linked to his suit and brought up a simple display in his visor. Two arrows now appeared there, a red one pointing directly to Ghort and a green one indicating the shortest course in order to reach him through the outer maze of the station ring.

At the next T-junction he needed to go right but, before rounding the corner, he walked up the wall then on to the ceiling before stepping round. As half expected, he spotted Ghort squatting at the end of the corridor, but he was up on the ceiling too. Muzzle flashes lit the space ahead of him. Alex replied with a short burst before hurling himself back into cover, feeling a glancing strike on the VC suit armour on one side of his torso. Diagnostics alerted him to a breach as he reached round the corner with his assault rifle and sprayed a couple of bursts in Ghort’s general direction.

‘Incidentally,’ said Ghort, ‘I have made a choice.’

‘And what is that?’ Alex asked, while his suit informed him that sealant had already closed the breach. He inspected his side, noting a hole filled with yellow resin, but the suit’s medscanner informed him that, despite feeling as if he’d been viciously kicked, no bullets had actually penetrated.

‘I’ve chosen at least to kill the fucker who betrayed us before someone or something kills me,’ Ghort continued. ‘Which is why I’m still talking to you, Alex.’

Ah, he knew about the tracking program.

Noting the red arrow on the move, Alex propelled himself to the floor, stepped round the corner, built up speed with loping steps, then launched himself towards Ghort’s previous location. Another glance at the schematic showed the man moving to one of the more open areas of the outer ring, where corridors and rooms had yet to be built.

At the end of the corridor he flipped over, pointing his weapon to the spot where the red arrow indicated Ghort’s position. But only ceiling lay there, above a rectangular opening. Just like the junctions before it, this was a perfect ambush point, and doubtless Ghort had that opening in his sights even now. Alex went the other way, along a corridor that finally ran out of wall panels, then up a temporary cageway into blackness seeded with LED lights and tangled with structural beams. Checking the direction arrows again, he found a structure like a chimney blocking the way. He upped magnification in his visor but could still see no sign of the other man, so he slung his rifle and began making his way up a nearby beam to gain a clearer view. He managed just two paces before the ship jerked as if it had run into a moon. As he fell away from the beam, fire and wreckage exploded into the blackness.

Earth

‘You’re lying,’ said Serene but, gazing at Ruger, she knew he wasn’t.

She turned back to Sack and Trove. ‘Get the
Scourge
on screen,’ she ordered. ‘Show me.’

Trove turned her attention to Sack who, after a lengthy pause, nodded. Then, almost as an afterthought, he retracted his gun from her side.

Trove quickly pulled up an image on the console screen. This wasn’t something someone could have falsified in the limited time that had been available. It was indeed the
Scourge
, truncated by perspective over Earth, with its drive flame glaring behind it.

‘Can we talk to him?’ Serene asked.

Trove worked her instruments again. The screen blanked for a second, ran some odd code which Serene realized was just the visible portion of some kind of defensive program, then showed an image of Captain Scotonis. Serene studied him carefully. He was unshaven, looked slightly dirty, and his face was dotted with sores. If his mind was unbalanced, then he could be manipulated.

‘Captain Scotonis,’ she said, ‘it’s good that you survived.’

He smiled, looking quite sane. ‘Not so good for you, though.’

‘I’m told that you’ve come to believe that I am responsible for the Scour,’ she said, adopting a puzzled expression. ‘I just don’t understand how this has happened.’

‘It’s not a case of
belief
, Galahad,’ Scotonis replied. ‘I’ve seen the biochips that were embedded on the face of every implant we removed aboard my ship. I saw the testimony of the two scientists who first found out about the source of the Scour – you know, scientists working in a secret laboratory you subsequently had burned – while pretending those in that place were trying to weaponize a virus that was already a weapon.’

Serene glanced round at Ruger, who was grinning again, then she tried to stamp down on an upsurge of rage, for such information could only have reached Scotonis through him.

She turned back to the captain. ‘Then you know half the truth.’

Scotonis shrugged. ‘It’s a big enough half for me.’

‘Yes, there are biochips in implants, and they do produce the Scour,’ she said. ‘But it was not me who activated them. When Alan Saul initiated his computer-generated and physical attack on the infrastructure of Earth,
he
activated those chips. All I did was keep the source of the Scour a secret.’

Scotonis smiled, shaking his head. ‘And yet, oddly, those who died from the Scour were not those he would have wanted to kill, but zero-asset citizens. Later, when it was thoroughly convenient for you, Committee members also died of it. But, of course, you covered that rather incriminating selectivity by killing off numerous others within the administration, including my wife and my children. Good try, Galahad, but you’re still going to burn.’

‘You’re making a very foolish mistake,’ she said, scrabbling for some other angle, groping for what to try next, utterly sure that there had to be something she
could
try.

‘Bye bye, Serene Galahad,’ said Scotonis, cutting off the communication.

Serene stared at the blank screen, but now mentally chewing everything over just as fast as possible.

They were trapped inside this station so long as Calder controlled its railguns, while bearing down on them was a spaceship containing enough nukes to flash-burn a continent. However, though she realized her initial reaction to all this had contained its elements of denial, she knew for sure she would survive. Earth
needed
her; therefore her dying up here before her work was done just could not be contemplated. There had to be a way out. No question.

‘The drop shuttle,’ she said abruptly. ‘The fast re-entry shuttle.’

Yes, survival was inevitable, it
had
to be.

‘Ma’am?’ Sack enquired.

‘We can get to it without leaving the station structure,’ she declared, having no idea whether that was true. ‘We can get to it without making ourselves a target for Calder’s railguns.’