9

Revolt!

The more authoritarian a society becomes, the more there are of the disaffected who are ‘fighting for freedom’. Conversely, the more liberal a society is, the more people you will find who are fighting to exert authoritarian control. Oddly enough, in both cases, they are the same people. The freedom fighter is just a revolution away from becoming a dictator. The concerned and righteous, who wish to make some changes for the good of all, are just an election away from pulling on their jackboots. Never trust the activist who wants to change the world for the better, because their ‘better’ is usually the worse for you.

Argus

‘It just doesn’t feel real,’ said Dr Da Vinci, his gaze fixed on a screen showing Jupiter looming close, and its moon Io closer still. Close enough to identify three volcanoes pumping sulphurous plumes out into space.

‘It isn’t real.’ Hannah injected her latest cerebral biopsy into a sample bottle, then eyed the doctor from Mars. ‘It’s all light-and-colour enhanced and the perspective shortened so we can see both. It all looks very CGI out there.’ She gestured to the screen.

‘I don’t mean that.’ Da Vinci reached up to finger the small dressing at the back of his skull. ‘I mean the speed of it. When I shipped out to Mars, I had months aboard a Traveller to begin to appreciate the scale of it all – to know that I was travelling an immense distance.’ He stood up from his chair. ‘How can we possibly be in orbit around Jupiter? How can we be sure the images we see are real?’

He was being rhetorical and philosophical – a tendency which was only a recent trait, according to the report Saul had given her access to. Da Vinci was a lost soul trying to make sense of it all, but he was also a highly intelligent and capable lost soul. On Mars he had hated the interference of Political Officer Ricard and lodged objections that would have seen him put into an adjustment cell on his return to Earth, had that eventuality not been cancelled for all of them at Antares Base. He had seemed to concur with Var’s takeover there, but had ultimately backed Rhone and, according to Var, had cried over the corpses that generated.

Hannah grimaced. She had initially felt a bond with Saul’s sister, but now that was evaporating. Var Delex was as ruthless as Saul which, in both cases, stemmed from the need to survive. However, with his continued transformation, Saul’s ruthlessness seemed to have disconnected him from base human motives, while Var’s instincts seemed to be wrapped up in resentment, paranoia and some silly need to compete with her brother. Yes, Saul was now a dangerous creature, but Hannah knew that he was no longer vengeful. Var, however, she realized, was not someone to be trusted with the kind of power Saul presently wielded.

‘How can we know the images reflect reality?’ Da Vinci repeated.

Hannah studied him, perfectly understanding his difficulties. After all that had gone before, he had been whisked halfway across the solar system in a partially constructed interstellar vessel by a man who seemed to be breaking every law imaginable, including those of physics. He was, Hannah felt, very much a fellow traveller, for like her he had all the moral objections and shied away from the harsh solutions.

‘You know because of that.’ Hannah held up a finger. ‘Listen.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said after a moment.

‘Of course,’ said Hannah. Being fairly new aboard and this being his first time in Arcoplex Two, he had no idea about the sounds he should be hearing. Hannah could hear it, however: the creaking and low groaning, the occasional snap and ping of a joint realigning; the ship yielding under the unsubtle touch of Jupiter – the same touch that generated the seismic shifts and volcanoes characteristic of Io. It would get worse too, once they moved between Io and Jupiter.

She shrugged. ‘You can hear the gravitational stresses,’ she explained, ‘but if you really want the truth, then get a spacesuit and go outside. You’ll soon lose all your doubts, believe me.’

‘I’ve no doubts, as such,’ said Da Vinci, ‘I’m just divorced from the feeling.’ He now took a look around her laboratory, his expression turning slightly acquisitive. ‘I was told that, after you’d taken my sample, you’d have something for me to do?’

The station’s medical personnel were underemployed, for the moment at least, so there had been no real position for him. However, he was certainly skilled enough to join her in working here. Quite likely he would have moral objections, and ones she wanted to hear, which was why she had saved until now what she revealed to people just before their biopsies.

‘First you need to understand what this is really for.’ She held up his cerebral sample.

‘Not for growing graft tissue?’ He seemed baffled.

‘Come with me.’ She led the way through the door leading to her production floor, which was starting to fill up with equipment and now had a scattering of employees, some of whom were even human. As she explained about the backups and pointed out the various tanks in which bioware was growing, and a small chip-etching plant busily at work, his gaze flicked attentively to every detail. As they reached the far end, he stepped over to a tank inside which resided something organic shot through with shiny wires and plastic optics, suspended in a cloudy fluid at the centre of a web of power and nutrient feeds. He placed a hand against the toughened glass, then gazed at her questioningly.

‘Not here, then?’ he said.

‘What?’ Hannah asked.

‘The clones.’

That was it, right there: he’d gone straight to the heart of it. Hannah wondered if it was truly ergonomics that had made her decide to keep the cloning facility separate from operations here. Perhaps she just preferred it to be out of sight, so that her conscience would not nag her quite so severely.

Da Vinci stepped back from the tank and turned to study the perpetually growing rack of backups.

‘So we can live forever – or at least for longer than our natural span,’ he said. ‘But, as always, such developments have their price.’

Hannah grimaced. ‘I understand the thrust of your remark, but what precisely is a “natural span”?’ She shook her head, experiencing a tightening in her torso like the precursor to one of her panic attacks, and felt it loosen. ‘Our natural span, if you wish to call it that, is long enough merely for us to breed and pass on our genes, then everything after that is just a bonus. People have lived well beyond that span for centuries.’

‘I think you understood my meaning.’ He gazed at her steadily.

‘Perhaps… but what do you reckon the price might be?’

‘One that the clones will be paying, perhaps?’

‘If you could elaborate?’

‘Tank-grown clones are human beings who should be allowed the right to life. By using them as receptacles for these’ – he waved a hand towards the backups – ‘you are effectively destroying that life.’

Perhaps this was a mistake. Now, moving on from ‘natural span’, he was talking about ‘right to life’. Was this man a doctor of medicine or one of divinity and philosophy? Her own feelings about those backups and clones related more to the cheapening of the life a person owned, and the potential for abuse.

‘One has to ask where the line should be drawn,’ she said. ‘Does a sperm have a…’ Hannah paused, seeing a slight twist to his mouth and suddenly remembering something more in his report. He had very firm views on this subject, ones that were in sympathy with her own: human life was nothing special; it was the human mind that was important. ‘Yes, you had me there, for a moment,’ she finished.

‘I just wanted to be sure we are on the same page.’ Da Vinci then nodded towards the backups. ‘So which one is his?’

‘By “his” I presume you’re talking about Alan Saul’s?’ Hannah felt a resurgence of the anger she had experienced only a few days ago.

‘I am but, being at more of a remove from him than you are, I’ll continue to call him the Owner.’ He paused. ‘It seems the politic thing to do.’

‘They’re not here,’ she said tightly. ‘Two days ago he had them removed to his inner sanctum, along with some cloning tanks, if my reading of the ship’s manifest is right. He doesn’t trust us mere mortals…’

‘I feel the need to point out,’ said the Martian doctor, ‘that we are all potentially immortals now.’

‘Still…’ said Hannah grudgingly.

‘I’d also have to wonder whom I would trust, if I were in his position.’ He gestured to the backups, as they strolled towards them. ‘You tell me I’ll also have one of those sometime in the future. Well, in that future I, too, can see myself wanting to take it away from here and lock it in the safest vault I could find. In fact’ – he looked around – ‘the lack of security here concerns me.’

‘He’s always watching,’ said Hannah.

‘That’s not enough,’ said Da Vinci. ‘I’ll no more rely on demigods than I relied on the non-existent gods from which some people claim our morality descends.’

Hannah felt herself beginning to smile – an unfamiliar sensation. She was finding herself starting to like this doctor from Mars. Var Delex had been company of sorts but, despite her great intelligence and drive, she seemed shallow. Da Vinci seemed to have depths she could drown in and, more importantly, he was male.

‘So will you do it?’ she asked, leaping ahead to test just how much was going on in the mind behind that quite attractive face.

‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘I’ll run your cloning facility. I’ll grow your body replacements for you and I’ll even look into something you don’t seem to have considered yet: the cryogenics required for keeping those spares on ice.’

Hannah grinned widely, till it felt as if her lips might split. ‘There are state-of-the-art cryogenic pods aboard Messina’s space plane, so you can work with those.’

‘I will.’ He nodded sharply, then turned to study her. ‘But still, the idea of growing clones makes you uncomfortable, as do all the implications of your work here. I’d suggest that is the real reason I’m here.’

‘In a sense,’ said Hannah suddenly sobering. ‘I’m in undiscovered country here, and I at least need someone to point out the direction of the sun to me.’

‘And the Owner cannot do that.’

‘He knows right from wrong, but his morality is harsh and unforgiving.’

‘Is there any other morality available to us now?’ Da Vinci swung away to survey their surroundings again. ‘To fret over what is right or wrong is a luxury that has to be put aside once questions about survival come along. We can debate these things interminably, but in the end how many people have refused these backups? How many would set the chance of eternity against some questionable morality and still choose the latter?’

‘I think we should take this debate to the Olive Tree,’ said Hannah, only in the last instant changing her proposal of location from her own room.

He turned and touched a hand to the base of her back. ‘Yes, let’s do that.’

Hannah smiled at him, starting to get used to the sensation. For a second her gaze strayed to a nearby cam, as if challenging any watcher to comment. But, of course, Alan Saul was no longer subject to such human frailties; he was out of reach and, if she was honest, had been out of reach since he had stepped out of the Calais incinerator.

The room was devoid of visible cams or other forms of surveillance, so Marsin had assured him. They could talk freely here; they could discuss subjects none dared raise while under the watchful gaze of Alan Saul. They apparently ran a debating group here, and Alex must be properly assessed before he could be allowed to join.

Marsin, a slightly chubby Asian with a generally friendly demeanour was, in view of his history, not quite what Alex had expected. The man sauntered over to the two-seat sofa in the cramped apartment and sat down, picked up a remote control to turn off the wall screen, then gestured with the remote towards the chair opposite. Alex sat down, too.

‘On Earth we were subject to a worldwide dictatorship,’ Marsin began. ‘We could dream of being free but in reality we knew that the only way to personal freedom was by acquiring power, and in trying to do so we just enhanced the power of the state.’

So what exactly is freedom? Alex wondered idly, impatient for him to get to the point. However, the question stirred up memories embedded in his mind which were now, as Hannah Neumann had told him, beginning to shake themselves free. He clearly recollected a doctor, who looked very much like Marsin, slicing into his head and then the horrible feeling of his scalp being peeled back and the subsequent grinding of the bone saw. It was unbelievably agonizing, but he was unable either to scream or to move.

‘Painkillers interfere,’ the man had explained, ‘but perpetual wiping of his short-term memory during the process gives us the same outcome.’

‘I know because I have an interrogator who uses similar techniques,’ Messina had replied.

Alex had been able to see the Chairman just at the edge of his visual field, arms folded, his expression showing mild interest. Then came a jump, a hiatus, whereupon he remembered forgetting the initial cuts, and returned to a world of pain, then another jump found him waking up on his bed in his small cubicle, and feeling a strong resurgence of his love for and loyalty to Chairman Messina.

‘So there we were, clawing our way up firmly embedded ladders, when we were dragged away,’ Marsin was saying. ‘Dragged away from the slavery we knew and made subject to the whims of yet another dictator.’ Marsin shook his head. ‘We can never hope to be free here.’

Alex reached up and touched his skull, the psychosomatic ache fading. He shook his head and focused properly on Marsin.

For all his high-sounding tone, Alex had no recollection of Marsin fighting to keep the Subnet online, being part of the revolution, or hoarding arms in preparation for a fight for his rights and the rights of his fellow man. However, having run a lot of close security for Messina, Alex had encountered this man before, and now, after things were freed up in his head, recollected him as the toady aide to Delegate Lamont, and knew that he had only escaped mind-wipe here because he had always made damned sure that no responsibility for anything could attach itself to him.

‘And yet we had more freedom than you, Alex,’ he said, ‘so you must feel more deeply what we are feeling now.’

Patronizing twit.

Alex had expected Ghort to make the approach, but perhaps they used the likes of Marsin initially because whatever inner council they had, and it was certain they had one, considered Marsin more dispensable. The man had also set himself up as the go-to guy for the disaffected, being very vocal in his criticism of the Owner and the regime aboard the station. He was acting as a filter – perhaps in place to weed out those whose disaffection was only temporary.

‘I agree, we can never be free here, but then I also question if there is anywhere that we can be,’ said Alex.

‘Freedom must be actively strived for,’ said Marsin vaguely.

‘So how do you propose we go about that?’ Alex asked. ‘There’s nowhere we can escape to, and even if we could get to Earth, we’d end up dead or in adjustment.’

‘We must strive for freedom here,’ Marsin observed, becoming a little more specific.

‘I don’t see the Owner turning this ship of his into a democracy.’

‘We don’t call it a ship – we call it a station – and we don’t call him the Owner, since to do so would be acceding to his will and accepting that we are owned.’

‘We?’

‘Before I can tell you any more I need to know where you stand on this issue,’ said Marsin. ‘If you are happy to be one of the supine occupants of this station gratefully receiving the trifles Saul dispenses, then we may as well end this conversation now.’

‘I wouldn’t be here now if I didn’t think there were matters to discuss,’ said Alex, ‘though I’m unsure that such discussion will get us anywhere.’

‘Discussion is a beginning.’ Marsin waved the remote control airily. ‘But after that beginning, what do you yourself think should be done?’

‘Saul will never stand down,’ said Alex. ‘Like all dictators, he will cling to power even to the point of destroying what he has power over.’ He paused in reflection: maybe best to get it out in the open now. ‘Saul had Alessandro Messina mind-wiped and then had him taking part in a military action that resulted in his death, so, as the Chairman’s clone and being conditioned to protect him, I have to say that my feelings are strong. The only way to free ourselves of Saul is to bring him down, and the only way we can do that is by killing him.’ There, it was said. Alex grimaced as another clear recollection slid into his mind: one of him walking into a room where four younger versions of himself sat around a table, clad in hospital whites, with their skulls shaven and covered with scars, trying to play cards but their attention straying, their hand movements jerky, and two of them drooling. There had always been failures, and it had always been best to get rid of them quickly. On that occasion Alex had used an electrostun abattoir tool so there would not be so much mess to clear up afterwards.

‘Much the same conclusion we have all come to.’ Marsin nodded, but he was still watching Alex very carefully. ‘However, Saul is very powerful and if we move against him we must do so with the utmost caution and precision.’

‘Secure communications would have to be first priority,’ Alex opined. ‘The only reason Malden’s revolution wasn’t stillborn was because of its secure subnet communication.’

‘And upon gaining a secure method of communication?’

‘Organization, command structure, arms caches and some sort of assassination plan.’ Alex paused. ‘I would also suggest that recruits be organized into cells of four or five with only one of those able to communicate with the commanders. You wouldn’t want just one fuck-up to result in the whole network being taken out.’

‘We already have our cells,’ said Marsin, now moving beyond simple debate. ‘The problem here is the technology being developed by Hannah Neumann, and effectively controlled by Saul. Anyone captured who possesses a link to command could be mind-reamed for information.’

‘But,’ said Alex, ‘you must ensure that no one within the cells actually knows who they are talking to.’

‘True, but all that secrecy makes both organization and recruitment a very difficult task.’

‘You have two choices, then,’ said Alex. ‘You must do it quick and dirty, sacrificing secrecy, or you must play a long and slow game.’

‘Our choice has been for the former,’ Marsin told him. ‘It’s our contention that, once Saul takes this station out of the solar system, our chances of succeeding against him will rapidly diminish. We need to strike while he is still uncertain of his power.’

Quick and dirty… Yes, Alex now remembered persuading certain revolutionaries on Earth of that course, resulting in the death of some delegates who had been an irritation to Messina, followed very quickly by the deaths of the revolutionaries themselves. He sat back and folded his arms. So, this was no debating society, then. He wondered if they’d actually killed anyone yet; if any potential recruits had decided they didn’t want to be involved after hearing too much. During the recent frenzy of construction, there had been two deaths. Could it be that one or both of them had not been accidents at all?

‘So you have a plan?’ he asked.

‘I need to first know if you’re in.’

Alex studied the man, realizing that perhaps there had not yet been any killings, because usually the recruiting process was slower and the weeding out more precise. However, he understood that his own recruitment was to be ‘quick and dirty’ and that therefore the revolutionary command had already contemplated their first killing. Marsin was undoubtedly armed; his body language gave that away. Alex reckoned the remote control he continued to hang on to must control something other than the screen – probably something hidden in the chair Alex sat in.

‘I’m in,’ he said, ‘and, if possible, I want to be in at the front end.’

‘You want to be the one who pulls the trigger on Saul?’

‘I do, since then I will have paid the debt owing to my past, and can move on.’

As Alex was discovering, his past was full of debts and many of them could never be repaid.

‘Though some of us have had reservations about you,’ said Marsin, smiling now though still holding the remote control, ‘most of us were sure your response would be such.’ With his free hand, he rooted in a pocket of his loose-fitting shirt, took out a flat square of dull metal of the kind Alex had seen Ghort surreptitiously attaching to his relay, and tossed it over.

‘What’s this?’ Alex asked, after he had briefly inspected it.

‘You attach it to your relay.’ Marsin pointed to the polished cube hanging on a thin chain around Alex’s neck, ‘and that turns it on. It encodes to the recipient any transmission you send, and you’ll learn how to use it quickly enough.’

‘And who are the recipients?’

‘Your cell commander is your work team leader, Ghort.’

‘As I suspected,’ said Alex, as he pressed the square device against the side of his relay. He wasn’t going to pretend he did not know about Ghort, not now he was about to use a communication method that made attempts at lying difficult.

‘You suspected Ghort was considering rebellion?’ Marsin asked, his lips not moving and the words generating inside Alex’s head without the intervention of his ears.

‘Suspected is too mild a term,’ said Alex. ‘But then I have been trained to look out for stuff like this, which is why you’ll find me useful.’

‘And you still want to be at the sharp end?’ enquired Marsin, implant-to-implant. ‘You still want to be the one who kills Alan Saul?’

‘I want to be the one who kills him, yes.’ Alex paused for a second, watching some remaining tension fading from Marsin’s expression, as he finally released his hold on the remote control. ‘But, tell me, do our cells only consist of those who are chipped like us?’

‘Yes, because we can only be sure of each other like this.’ Alex felt that the revolutionaries had misunderstood the title ‘the Owner’. Hadn’t they realized that Saul did not claim ownership of them but of this ship he was building, of the technology that surrounded them – claiming it in the same way as any pre-Committee human being would have claimed the ownership of his own body. If they had understood that concept, they would not have put such a heavy and dangerous reliance on one piece of technology inside that technological body. They had much to learn, these people, and yet probably not enough time.

When they arrived here, the ship had possessed its supplies of superconducting cable, but not enough. One of the smelting plants – now permanently sited in its dock since most of the ore-transport tube below had been dismantled and most of the carbon composite cable it had been wound out on had been taken away and cut up for other purposes – had, after many days, come close to solving that lack. Saul had watched his robots transport the selected chunks of asteroid matter, out of which the requisite materials could be refined, into the plant where older-style robots had fielded them and fed them into the gravelling machines that led to the smelters. Within an hour, other machines had begun braiding fulleride and copper oxide filaments, spiral-wrapped in HTS tapes, to provide the extra cable required. This, because of a lack of rare earth elements, was not completely superconducting but would be good enough for the job in hand.

Meanwhile, the two space planes that had earlier launched from Dock Two – the same craft that had taken out the two work teams to slice up the ice asteroid – were now arriving at their targets. Saul watched through cams as one plane matched course with and descended upon a Mars Traveller solid-fuel booster tank – one of hundreds currently in orbit about Jupiter. He felt docking bayonets clunk into place in holes prepared in the booster tank for precisely such retrieval, then felt in his bones the space plane’s engines labouring to pull its load to a new course. Just at that moment, the second plane docked with its own load, and likewise began shifting it.

‘ETA approximately twenty hours,’ one of the pilots declared unnecessarily. ‘Work team heading out.’

Saul had selected the personnel with more caution this time. The likes of Ghort and the other wannabe rebels could not be trusted with fielding and bringing in such large and heavy objects. Some inadvertent accident might result in one of those tanks ending up on a fast trajectory towards the centre of the station itself, therefore towards Saul’s inner sanctum, and he had no intention of making things that easy for them.

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.’

‘But surely, Scotonis, this is going to screw up your plan,’ said Clay. ‘How can you go after Galahad when you’re under tow?’

‘Ah, our political officer shows his ignorance again,’ said Scotonis. ‘I can just release the docking bayonets from here and pull away.’

‘Listen, Captain,’ said Trove abruptly. ‘I know you’ve committed yourself to killing Galahad, but why must we die? Once you’ve located her, you’ve got to put this ship on a re-entry course, and she and everyone else will know that there’s still someone aboard. Just let us go – our leaving won’t interfere with your plan.’

All so utterly reasonable. Clay sighed and gazed at the screen again. The tug was much closer now, and he could see its steering thrusters firing. He watched it roll, bringing into sight a hard docking plate with protrusions that were probably the bayonets Scotonis had mentioned. Clay could see no sign of an airlock, so the captain probably wasn’t lying about them needing to take a space walk.

‘If you leave now,’ said Scotonis, ‘you’ll need something to bargain with – something that might stop whoever is in charge up here from either shooting you down straight away or throwing you into an adjustment cell as soon as they get hold of you.’

The Gene Bank data Saul had transmitted to them in an attempt to forestall their attack and which they had not relayed to Earth, but which they had retained as a bargaining chip? Clay felt a sudden surge of excitement. Did Scotonis really intend to release them?

‘You can’t find her, can you?’ said Trove.

Clay gazed at her in puzzlement. What on Earth was she on about?

Trove continued, ‘You’re coming up blank on your radio and computer searches. I would guess that any information on her present location has been suppressed, simply because that location isn’t completely secure, for some reason.’

‘You were always the most perceptive of my command crew,’ Scotonis declared. ‘Her last known location was Messina’s Tuscan home, but data traffic there has recently waned. She could be, as you say, in a less secure location or else taking one of her tours.’

‘You need something to draw her out,’ said Trove, ‘and that’s where we come in.’

‘Precisely.’

‘I’m still not getting this,’ Clay interjected.

Trove turned and gazed at him. ‘We offer the Gene Bank data and demand to speak to her. We try to extract guarantees from her, some promise of safety, something perhaps witnessed by delegates and supposedly legally binding.’

‘But there’ll be no guarantee. She’ll just go back on her word once she has the data, and have us either killed or adjusted.’

‘Of course.’ Trove nodded.

‘So what’s the point?’

‘The point, Mr Ignorant Political Officer,’ said Scotonis acerbically, ‘is that if she communicates with you aboard the shuttle, I have a greater chance of tracing where her signal is coming from, and to where your signal is being routed.’

‘Not just that,’ said Trove. ‘Considering its original source, she’ll probably want the genetic data transmitted directly to some form of secure storage close to her. She won’t want to risk having something Saul might have attached to it on Govnet.’

‘No,’ said Scotonis, ‘I disagree. The data will go straight to secure storage at Messina’s home. But she will not necessarily be there.’

‘Even so,’ Trove insisted, ‘that might be another way of locating her. If I was her, I’d load the data to multiple secure locations, and I’d be confident that one of them is one I can carry with me.’

‘Perhaps,’ Scotonis allowed.

They were going to live, Clay was now sure of it. They were going to survive this. Of course, they’d probably end up as prisoners on one of the space stations but, once Galahad was dead, everything would change. He felt sure that he and Trove could come up with a plausible explanation as to how they ended up with their chips and collars removed, and why the mission to capture Argus Station had failed. Somehow the blame could all be laid on Scotonis.

‘How will it work?’ he asked. ‘With the data, I mean.’

‘I’m going to return system access to you,’ decided Scotonis, ‘so that you can access it remotely and begin transmission of the data. And just maybe it will all have been sent by the time I drop this ship right on top of Galahad’s head.’

Clay suddenly realized that he could also download the recording he had shown Scotonis: the one showing how Galahad was responsible for the Scour. He could work that angle too, and get them free. Scotonis had found out, and had wanted vengeance for the killing of his family, which was sort of true. He had quickly taken complete control of the ship and forced his command crew to have their implants removed. It was all the captain’s fault…

The ship jerked, shuddered, and he felt vibrations through the deck of the shuttle and through his seat. Returning his attention to the screen, he saw that it was now completely filled with a close-up view of the tug.

‘When can we leave?’ he asked.

‘In another two days… when we are closer to Earth,’ Scotonis replied. ‘And I’ll even let you go if I do locate Galahad before then. There has been enough death already.’

This last comment might have given Clay hope for the captain’s remaining sanity, were it not for the fact that the man intended to drop a spaceship on Earth and detonate enough atomic bombs to erase an entire country.