11

Earth

‘Admiral Bartholomew,’ enquired Serene, as the man’s image popped up in a small frame at the top corner of the main screen, ‘how much longer before you can undock?’

‘Once all the troops are aboard, which could be any time now, we can separate,’ he replied. ‘All our other supplies are in.’

‘And, thereafter,’ Serene continued, ‘how long until you can head out?’

‘If we run our vortex generators up to speed and forgo any further testing and diagnostics, then twenty-two hours.’

‘Keep me updated,’ Serene concluded and, after a moment, the small frame closed.

Undocking the Command and the Fist from the construction station the moment the supplies and troops were aboard would shave off almost a day, but only if the drives functioned as predicted and there was no requirement to dock the ships again for further work. It was a risk Serene felt it necessary to take in light of the images she was now viewing.

She’d seen just how fast things were progressing here on the construction station, but this development outpaced it tenfold. Saul was building his ship at a phenomenal rate. That skeletal ship had arrived in orbit about Jupiter just a few weeks ago and, despite a lack of clarity to the images because of the ionization thereabouts, the moment it plugged into the flux tube, activity aboard the craft had ramped up so high that its image in infrared showed clearly even beside Io itself. Now the outer skeleton was more than halfway enclosed with hull plates, while the interior had filled up rapidly – even the docking pillars being moved inside with the ease of shifting a few planks rather than thousands of tonnes of metal and the complex support technologies.

‘What have Tactical got to add?’ she asked without turning.

Elkin stood silently behind her, along with her two aides. Calder was also present, but currently off studying something on one of the other consoles in the control room, as if he wanted to disassociate himself from this scene; while Sack was looming close, having detected the tension in Serene the moment she began viewing the video feed.

Elkin replied, ‘They say that his ship still could be ready before the Command and the Fist are ready to launch.’

‘Still could be?’ Serene enquired, silently putting a call through her fone and linking it to the screen before her.

‘This progress is faster than anyone believed possible, so all base parameters have to be changed,’ Elkin stated. ‘It may also have some bearing on the coming conflict.’

‘Some bearing?’ remarked Serene acidly, noting that one of the aides was trying to attract Elkin’s attention. ‘That’s even supposing there is a coming conflict!’ She was starting to get angry now, receiving some intimation that things were beginning to spin out of control.

Elkin had now taken note of something on her palmtop and frowned.

‘What now?’ Serene demanded.

‘I’ve just received a notification, ma’am, from security team leader Vaughan,’ Elkin replied. ‘Apparently our undercover operatives here were relocated with the… less trusted staff.’

‘And I need to know this why?’

Elkin clammed up and, even though Serene had asked what had drawn Elkin’s attention, she felt no guilt about harassing the woman.

‘Well, you can tell team leader Vaughan— What is it?’ she snapped at Bartholomew, who had now reappeared in that tiny frame on her screen.

‘Ma’am?’ he asked carefully.

‘Do go on,’ she said acerbically.

‘I’m just letting you know that all the troops are now aboard, and we will be undocking directly,’ he announced stiffly.

‘Well, get on with it.’ Serene used the chair console to switch views to an exterior cam that showed the spinning-top shape of the Command, with the Fist bulking just beyond it. Already umbilicals were detaching and the scaffolds enclosing them were being whittled away by a veritable swarm of EVA units and robots. She allowed those images to calm her, but Calder’s abrupt arrival at her shoulder set her irritation level rising again.

‘You have something for me?’ she asked, wondering if he had come to present more irrelevant detail, which by now she realized seemed to be the resort of those around her when they understood that her mood wasn’t at its best.

‘We’ve received a communication from the Scourge,’ he said, sounding puzzled.

She turned in her seat to look at him. ‘Look, the concerns of the crew aboard your tug are not exactly my priority right now.’

‘No, ma’am,’ he agreed, ‘but this communication is not from them but from the Scourge itself. It seems there is someone alive aboard that ship. We just received a video file from someone called Clay Ruger.’

Serene stared at him, struggling to fit this new information into recent events but just feeling baffled.

‘Clay Ruger?’ she echoed.

‘He was your political officer aboard that ship,’ Elkin interjected.

‘I know who Clay Ruger was… is.’ He was a man who should have died months ago, strangled once she sent the signal to his collar. And if he had somehow avoided that, then he was a man who should have died a short time afterwards when Alan Saul sent the Scour activation signal to all those aboard the Scourge, or when Argus Station’s warp bubble had brushed against the ship and torn it up. ‘Video file?’ she queried.

Calder pointed to the icons ranged along the bottom of her screen. ‘It’s available there.’

Suddenly her anger and her irritation were gone, and she found herself thinking clearly. It was as if this new information had hit a reset button in her brain. Clay Ruger had survived, which meant that, in some quarters, strangulation collars and Scour implant chips did not offer the degree of control she might have supposed. Abruptly she sensed danger all around her. Suddenly she understood how the arrogance of power could be an ultimate weakness. Glancing beyond Calder, she noted that, while her own security personnel were assembled here, the number of original Inspectorate enforcers had increased. She swung back to her screen and dragged a cursor down to the video icon, clicking it.

Ruger gazed out at her from the screen. He looked pale and ill and very, very thin. She saw at once that he wasn’t wearing a collar and also noted shadowy movement to one side – he wasn’t alone.

‘This is Clay Ruger, the political officer aboard the Scourge,’ he said. ‘I need whoever records and first views this video file to get it to Serene Galahad as quickly as possible.’ He paused, wiped at his face with grubby fingers. ‘It will no doubt come as a surprise to you, ma’am, that I am alive. I can get into lengthy explanations about why, but would need to speak to you alone to give you the full detail. Let it suffice for me to say that Captain Scotonis, after having learned something about the death of his family, turned traitor. Even as I boarded the Scourge, he took control of all readerguns and inducers, and so effectively gained complete control over me and his command crew.’

Serene felt the skin on her back creeping as Ruger waved a hand dismissively. If Scotonis had learned about the source of the Scour, then his turning against her might be considered perfectly understandable. It seemed likely that Ruger also knew, but was being careful not to broadcast such knowledge.

‘The man was insane,’ Ruger continued. ‘He demanded that we free ourselves totally from Earth, and so ordered the removal of all implants and other security devices.’ Ruger reached up and touched his bare neck. ‘However, he said nothing of this to Commander Liang and his troops, because their loyalty to Earth was unquestioning. This was why he carried on through with the attack on Argus, just so he could get Liang and his troops out of the Scourge and onto that station, and there abandon them just as he did. Subsequent events killed most of those remaining, including the captain himself, and have wrecked much of this ship.’

Serene paused the video to give herself time to think. Ruger was obviously making his excuses and hoping he could return to Earth without blame. Though his story was all very interesting, it was probably full of half-truths and outright lies, all of which would be uncovered in an adjustment cell on Earth, prior to his execution on prime-time ETV. Meanwhile, there were other things that now needed her attention – things that she had, in her arrogance, neglected. First and foremost was her personal safety.

‘Have him, and whoever is with him, arrested once the Scourge is in orbit,’ she instructed. ‘I’m sure his story will soon take on a new shape.’ She began to stand up. She would go now to Calder’s apartment and, while heading there, ensure her scattered security team was called in close. Perhaps it also might be an idea to ensure that Calder himself remained at her side…

‘I think you should look at the rest, ma’am,’ suggested Calder. ‘He does have something important to say.’

As she studied him, she deliberately assumed an expression of boredom. ‘Oh, very well.’ She set the video running again.

‘Pilot Officer Trove and I tried to take back control of the ship, for you and for Earth, and therefore presented the greatest danger to Scotonis, so he had us locked in the forward chamber used for storing inert railgun missiles. By imprisoning us he actually ensured our survival, because that part of the ship did not suffer as much damage from the tidal forces of the Argus warp. We’ve since managed to escape that storage chamber, and are now on a shuttle aboard the Scourge, and we are ready to come into one of the Earth orbit stations. But, of course, you are probably wondering, ma’am, what point is served by my sending this message.’

Serene certainly was, and really wished he would hurry up and get to the point. Her sense of personal danger had just ramped up, especially when she glanced round to see Elkin frowning at her palmtop, and her aides obviously busy receiving a heavy com load.

‘I wanted to be sure that, upon leaving the Scourge, we would not immediately be fired upon. I also want utter assurances, from your own mouth, ratified by all the delegates of Earth, that neither Pilot Officer Trove nor I will be punished for real or imagined crimes or handed over to the Inspectorate for interrogation. We have done the best we possibly could in a very bad situation, and we also now have in our control something of great value to the human race.’

Cue the dramatic pause. Really, just for inflicting that irritating bit of theatre, Serene decided Ruger’s public execution should be a spectacular. However, his next words left her dumbfounded.

‘Scotonis informed you that there were no communications with Argus Station, but he lied. Alan Saul tried to buy his way out of being attacked by transmitting all of the Gene Bank data to us. It now resides within computer storage aboard the Scourge, under my personal access codes. I can at once set that data to transmitting on any frequency, coded or otherwise, that you decide.’ Ruger shrugged, sat back a little from the cam. ‘It being subject to my personal coded access, I can do anything with it… anything at all.’

The implication was plain: Ruger had the power to give her the Gene Bank data; he also had the power to wipe it completely from the Scourge’s system.

Serene turned slowly to Calder, thinking fast. ‘Send him a reply. Tell him that once his shuttle leaves the Scourge it will certainly not be fired upon. He must dock here on your construction station. Tell him that I will communicate with him shortly afterwards, once I can ensure that my delegates will ratify a full pardon for his or Pilot Officer Trove’s real or imagined crimes against the state. You may also add that, in my opinion, Earth is as much in need of heroes to laud as villains to pursue and punish.’

‘Certainly, ma’am,’ said Calder, somehow seeming more confident and together, all of a sudden.

Did he suppose that, because she was now close to obtaining at least some portion of what she wanted out here – seeming likely to get her hands on a workable cure for Earth’s ills – she would be leaving soon and he could therefore return to enjoying the prime position in charge, and thus rule over his realm here without interference?

‘What kind of reception should we prepare for him?’ he then asked.

‘I intend to meet him, in person, and I’ll want that meeting broadcast on ETV.’ If necessary, she could pull the security teams closer in around her then – if it turned out that her growing suspicions about Calder were true. ‘We’ll have the broadcast relayed up on screens in the space dock he arrives in, along with the ratification of his pardon from the delegates of Earth. That will go a long way towards assuring him that no blame for previous failures will attach to him, and of course encourage him to begin his transmission of the Gene Bank data.’

Calder nodded thoughtfully. ‘Our new shuttle dock would be the best place. The cam network there is more modern and it has the requisite screens.’

‘Very well,’ said Serene, though slightly suspicious of this latest suggestion.

‘So he is to be a hero,’ remarked Calder.

‘Until the broadcast is over,’ Serene stated. ‘We’ll then extract the full truth in an adjustment cell.’ It annoyed her that a spectacular of Ruger’s execution would never be witnessed. Instead it would have to be something for her private consumption.

‘I see,’ said Calder, his expression hardening. He nodded once, and with a tight ‘Ma’am,’ he moved away, heading across the control room to sit at the console he had been using previously. Casually glancing around her, Serene noted that there were now at least ten of those Inspectorate uniforms nearby – most of them clustered near Calder – while her own security personnel, scattered around her, numbered just eight.

She stood up, realizing she had just made a serious mistake. She had let Calder know that she intended to go back on her word to Ruger, that public knowledge of someone’s status made no difference to whether or not they ended up in adjustment or with a bullet through the brain. Equally, all her promises to Calder himself were therefore worthless.

‘When I’ve made all the arrangements, I’ll speak to Ruger again from your apartment,’ she called out airily, heading towards the exit, her personnel rapidly falling in around her, Sack pacing warily at her shoulder. Right then she did not dare demand that Calder accompany her – feeling sure that to do so would push to a head something that she might not survive.

Argus

The meeting had been moved forward and, as Alex headed for the cam dead spot in Arcoplex One to attend it, as well as his backpack he carried a sidearm he had acquired on the ship’s black market. It might be that the rest of the chipped had decided he was too much of a risk, and he was actually being called to a rendezvous with whoever had been given the chore of getting rid of him. He didn’t consider it overly paranoid to think that way, since people in secret organizations like this one tended to be paranoid, so he was behaving perfectly in character.

The main layout of the buildings inside the arcoplex had changed not at all, but almost everything else had. The commerce thriving here was illustrated by the numerous lurid signs over shops in certain streets. Some of the apartment buildings had even acquired balconies on which plants were growing that, though also ornamental, were mostly for recreational consumption. Here and there, buildings had been painted in certain colours to distinguish them, and right now the conference centre was gradually being gutted – causing much discussion as to what it might be turned into, the most popular choice being a sports centre with its own swimming pool.

Alex passed the fone shop, with its sign depicting an old Bakelite telephone seemingly growing out the top of the skull of someone who looked suspiciously like the Owner. In the next building along, he approached an arched door with the eye of a cam set in the apex and, as the door buzzed open, he guessed this surveillance wasn’t linked into the ship’s computer system.

On entering, he passed a construction robot, squatting in the corridor like a steel gargoyle, and was beckoned forward by a woman he recognized as one of the chipped. Heading towards the murmur of voices, he stepped warily into the room beyond and then relaxed, sliding his hand out of his jacket. Every one of the rebels he had so far identified was present, so this had to be a genuine meeting.

‘Now that we’re all here,’ began Ghort, eyeing Alex with slight annoyance, ‘we need to talk seriously.’

Shrugging off the straps of his backpack, Alex moved over to the nearest available seat.

Meanwhile Ghort continued, ‘You all saw how things ramped up a few days ago, and therefore know about the recall of the space planes?’

‘And we know why,’ interjected Marsin. ‘He saw Galahad’s warships pull out of their construction station, so he’s getting ready to run.’

‘Precisely,’ said Ghort. ‘And the moment he does run is when we strike.’

‘But surely,’ said the woman who had waved Alex in, ‘we’ll just leave ourselves open to attack from those warships? I’m all for getting rid of Saul but not at the price of handing myself over to Galahad.’

‘It won’t work like that,’ Ghort explained. ‘We move just as he fires up the Rhine drive, just when he feels he’s safe, when he feels he’s already escaped. At that stage his death won’t result in the drive shutting down. Alex, you have the necessary devices?’

Alex nodded and reached down to open the backpack, first taking out two objects which, because of their long stems, almost looked like fireworks. These stems were steel, however, and the cylindrical objects attached to the end of each were considerably more destructive than any firework.

‘These,’ he explained, ‘incorporate delayed-action solid-fuel boosters and noses full of high explosive.’ He passed them to someone sitting nearby, who immediately passed them on to Ghort.

‘Enough to take out a spidergun?’ he enquired as he took hold of them.

Alex nodded. ‘If I can get a clear shot.’ Then to himself added silently, in the microseconds of a spidergun’s response time.

Next he took out a large squat cylinder with a gecko pad fitted to one end.

‘Copper head,’ he explained. ‘It’s an old method of armour piercing, but the innovation here is that a fraction of a second later, an incendiary follows the stream of vaporized copper through. This will burn out his inner sanctum.’ He pointed to a small digital display on the side. ‘It works by either a timer or coded signal, and it can also be shut down by coded signal if necessary.’ He passed this over too and watched as Ghort handed it to one of the chipped, called Jean-Pierre, who then took it out of the room. It seemed likely to Alex that the same robot he had seen on the way in would be the one that would deliver it.

‘Let me have the detonation code,’ said Ghort.

Alex nodded and immediately sent it via the scrambled channel. This request, more than anything else, told him who was really in charge here.

‘We’ll set the timer for twenty-five hours,’ Ghort continued, ‘which is somewhat over the time it should take for Galahad’s two warships to get their vortex generators up to working speed, but I can adjust things if necessary later on.’

‘We have our weapons now,’ observed Marsin, ‘and we have our general plan of attack.’ He watched Ghort for a moment before continuing. ‘So how does this run?’

Ghort nodded to Jean-Pierre, who had returned, now empty handed, then said, ‘The moment Saul fires up the Rhine drive, we move to the rendezvous point before heading to the outer ring. The robot will, when ready, take the copper head and position it on Saul’s inner sanctum.’

Ah, checking, thought Alex. Doubtless Ghort himself or someone else familiar with explosives would be vetting Alex’s work. They would find nothing wrong with it, of course.

‘But if we’re on-shift?’ he enquired.

‘Until we’ve done this, try to ensure that you’re wearing either heavy work or VC suits during any shift you undertake,’ Ghort replied. ‘When the drive fires up, or once you receive notification from me, just drop whatever you’re doing and move. The weapons will then be in place.’ He now passed over the two assault rifle grenades to the woman sitting beside him. ‘As we move against Saul’s backups and that spidergun of his, I’ll let Alex here lead, since he’ll know the best approach. Any questions?’

Studying the expressions all around him, Alex noted that some of them looked a little sick. Talking revolution was not quite the same as undertaking the actual act. One of the more frightened-looking men held his hand up.

‘I have one,’ he said, then at Ghort’s nod continued, ‘what happens if we fail?’

‘If we fail, we die,’ said Ghort.

Alex had been determined not to spice the proceedings with horrible reality, but in this instance he could not help adding, ‘And in that case we have to hope Saul allows us just the once-only experience of dying.’

Gilder Main had been the first to arrive, unlocking the door to the building next to the fone shop which Var had only recently learned he was now renting, and he was also one of the last to leave, heading straight back next door. Var lowered her binoculars and unplugged the optic connecting them to her palmtop, then studied the twenty-five faces on her screen. Ghort’s presence had come as a surprise to her, Marsin’s as no surprise at all, while the fact that the Messina clone was involved seemed inevitable. Folding up her palmtop and slipping it into her pocket, she began to walk around the circumference of Arcoplex One towards the fone shop itself.

So what now?

Var fingered the other object in her pocket and considered her options. She knew the names and faces now but still needed to know what their plans were, assuming they had got so far as formulating any plans. She also realized that, if she truly believed her brother was preparing to let this thing run so as to give himself an excuse to either thin out or exterminate the current population aboard, she had to act. She must also operate without reference to his apparently omniscient presence throughout the station. She must operate as she had on Mars, cutting a straight line to her goal with ruthless efficiency.

Soon she was on the street she had been observing from the other side of the arcoplex, then she was passing the door she had actually been watching and heading straight for the door leading into the neighbouring fone shop. Just outside, she paused for a moment. She knew that Scarrow was currently working a shift in Arcoplex Two, and that inside Thomas Grieve would be at the counter while Gilder Main would be working in the rear. She opened the door and stepped inside.

Just as she had supposed, Grieve looked up from a screen and gazed at her with momentary puzzlement before suddenly showing fear. She had pushed him hard the last time they met – trying to find some fragment of the murderer he had once been and thus a true motive for revenge.

‘Varalia Delex!’ he exclaimed.

Too much warning. Groping in her pocket, Var abruptly accelerated, leaped the counter and pushed through the door behind it. As she went through, she saw Main pulling something out from underneath one of the workbenches. Before he could stand upright again, the toe of her boot rammed into his side, then she pulled the stun truncheon from her pocket and stabbed it towards him. He grunted, convulsed, went down on his face, spilling a small torch-like object from his hand. Var snatched it up, feeling triumphant – any doubts about her current actions evaporating. Unlike a stun truncheon, which basically caused an abrupt and brief paralysis, the disabler he had been about to use disabled by causing the most extreme agony.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Grieve from the door.

Var glanced towards him. ‘Come in, Thomas, and close the door behind you.’

With obedient naivety he did precisely as she asked, even as she stood up from Main’s recumbent form and headed towards him. After closing the door, he turned to her uncertainly, just in time to receive the full force of the truncheon on one side of his head. As he went down, Var felt slightly uncomfortable about how good it had felt to do that, how, even though Grieve had been mind-wiped, she still felt in need of some payback from him for the killing of Martinez back on Mars. She then went in search of rolls of electrical tape with which to bind them both.

‘So, how were you intending to assassinate my brother?’ she asked, when Main finally came round.

He stared back at her in a superior way before suddenly looking panicked and peering down at his chest.

‘You’re looking for this?’ she asked, holding up his relay on the end of its chain, the communication device now crushed flat by his bench vice. ‘No, you won’t be talking to your co-conspirators for a while – if ever again.’ She noted that Grieve had now regained consciousness, too, and was staring at her wide-eyed from where she’d bound him tightly to another bench leg. He wouldn’t be interrupting them, since she’d taped his mouth shut.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Main snapped. ‘And you’ve no right to do this. We have laws aboard this station.’

‘You mean “ship” don’t you,’ she noted acidly. ‘Argus ceased to be a space station some while ago.’

‘Whatever.’ He shrugged.

‘I know who the rest are, since you all conveniently had a meeting within my sight. So I’ll go back to my first question: how do you intend to assassinate my brother?’

He kept his mouth stubbornly closed, so she held up his disabler and watched sheer terror flit across his expression.

‘You’re mad,’ he said quickly. ‘We just meet to discuss some business options.’

‘Very private business,’ she said, holding up one of the scramblers.

His eyes widened in shock.

‘Did you really think you could keep these items a secret?’

He said nothing, so Var placed both objects down on the floor, reached out and pinched his nose shut and, when he finally opened his mouth to take a breath, shoved a ball of insulating tape inside. He struggled as she again picked up the disabler and set the intensity to below a level where the agony would knock him out. She pointed it at his chest and triggered it, watched him writhe and grunt, tears streaming from his eyes. After a full ten seconds of this, she turned the disabler off, shuffled back a bit to get away from the pool of urine spreading underneath him – and wrinkled her nose because he’d also shit himself.

Soon he was staring at her in panic, struggling to inhale enough breath through his nostrils. She pulled the wad of tape from his mouth, slimy with blood and saliva, and put it to one side, before waiting for him to recover. He lay gasping and occasionally sobbing, tears still streaming from his eyes. At that moment, Var felt a moment of doubt and began to wonder if she had gone too far. She then stubbornly dismissed the thought. She would carry this through to its conclusion, since no other options were viable.

‘Now, I’ll ask you again: how do you intend to assassinate my brother? And, to save time here, your communications have been penetrated and I know for a fact that killing him is your ultimate aim.’

‘There’s no plan… we were just talking… no law against talking.’

‘So twenty-five of the chipped, having established what they believed to be a secure method of communication – and including in their number that rabble-rouser Marsin and Messina’s ex-bodyguard and clone – were just talking.’ She stared at him steadily for a moment, then reached over and picked up the ball of tape again.

‘If you’ve penetrated our scramblers, you must know!’ he said desperately.

‘But I haven’t,’ she replied. ‘It’s my brother who knows what you’re up to. I’m just making sure something is done to stop that before he uses it as an excuse to exterminate us all.’

‘He won’t kill you.’

‘Okay, before he exterminates all but a few of those close to him.’ She began moving the ball of tape towards his mouth again, and he tried to turn his head aside.

‘Wait! Wait!’ he pleaded.

She jammed the ball of tape back in and gave him a second dose from the disabler then afterwards let him struggle for breath, until he fainted.

‘This will not stop until you answer my questions,’ she told him after he recovered consciousness.

This time, as he stared at her with bloodshot eyes, blood and saliva running down his chin, she knew she would get the answers she required.

‘There’s a bomb,’ he managed.

‘Tell me about it.’

‘Ghort got hold of… demolition charges.’ He coughed, sending more blood running down his chin, and she noted a trickle of blood from one ear and wasn’t sure why he was bleeding there. ‘Alex turned them into a copper-head armour-piercing charge capable of killing him in his inner sanctum… and two assault rifle grenades.’

‘Why the grenades?’

‘Spidergun…’

‘In his sanctum?’

‘No… out in the rim, where he’s hidden his backups.’

Var sat back on her heels and studied him. That answer made no sense at all, and she felt Main must be trying to mislead her. Without jamming the ball of tape in place she hit him with the disabler again. He convulsed, emitted a gargling sound, his back arching. As she clicked off the device, he slumped, his right eye now red with blood and still more of it running out of his ear. She waited patiently for him to recover, but eventually felt her stomach tighten up and a cold dread settle over her. He wasn’t breathing.

Var struggled to cut him free as quickly as she could and tried mouth-to-mouth, thumped his chest, used every technique she could think of to revive him. She even used the stun stick on his chest to try and restart his heart. She lost track of time: how long had it been? Ten minutes? Half an hour? It must have been something to do with his implant. Like many of the chipped, he had yet to heal completely, and she had no idea what harm the application of a disabler might have caused. Finally she gave up and checked the time. She had another two hours before Scarrow went off-shift and then probably turned up here. She had the corpse of someone she had tortured to death and – she swung her head to gaze at Thomas Grieve – she had a witness to that fact.

Would her brother forgive this? He had gone to Mars just to rescue her, and had then put her in charge of the converting of Argus Station into an interstellar vessel. But those uncharacteristic acts of nepotism were no indication of how he might react to what she had done here. When she knew him back on Earth, he had always been a cold fish, and out here he was colder still. He might just decide that forgiving his sister for murder would be inconvenient – that she’d stepped too far over the line – and send her the way of the Committee delegates captured here… and the way of Thomas Grieve. No, it would be best not to put him in the position where he had to make any decision about her.

Still gazing at Grieve, she stood up, opened her palmtop and keyed into the programs she used to monitor the construction work on the station. A quick search revealed precisely what she wanted, and she rerouted a construction robot to pick up an empty sealant drum and fetch it here. It would arrive within an hour. She walked over to Grieve and gazed down at him, saw that he was crying, probably because he knew what was about to happen. There was nothing she could say really, so she reached over to the bench above him and picked up a heavy adjustable spanner, knowing that if there was any uncertainty hitherto about her having stepped over the line, she was just about to banish that.

The two ships whose names, so the latest ETV report informed him, were the Fist and the Command, had made their way clear of their construction station. With his new upgrades in place and beginning to kick in, and the soreness of his body separated from his main consciousness, Saul decided to try something. He had spent hours concentrating on building backup programs to compensate for time delays, and constructing lethal worms and viruses to look for any chink in those distant defences. Now, relaying through the observer satellite lying a few million kilometres out from Earth, he tried a long-range penetration of the systems of the two ships… and failed.

Perhaps the transmission delay was just too much. As data finally started coming back to him, he realized he had hit something amorphous that subsequently reached back towards him and began its own penetration of the observer satellite. Aboard one of those ships was a comlifer, keeping him out. He sent signals to shut down systems within the satellite to deny it access, until he realized the data packets coming through from the satellite were no form of attack but an attempt at communication. He allowed them space within the satellite’s storage and, over the ensuing hours of signal delay, watched in fascination as a subpersona developed there.

‘Hello, Alan Saul, genocidal maniac and all-round psychopath,’ said a voice.

What with the huge communication delays at this distance, it had been Saul’s intention to assign a lesser portion of his mind to respond, only relaying to him any critical data obtained for the duration, and to be reabsorbed later. However, the Rhine drive was up to speed, there were no hitches in the work being conducted, and all other plans were playing out precisely as predicted. His ship did not need him and, really, the data he might be able to obtain through this communication had higher priority. He inverted priorities, leaving the general running of his ship to a lesser portion of his mind while changing the notion of time for the rest of his mind by collapsing his perception of the signal delays. It seemed that the comlifer wanted to chat, or perhaps was looking for some sort of opening which, if conceded, would also provide an opening for Saul himself.

‘So who am I talking to?’

An image presented itself now of a bald fat man confined naked in a chair, tubed, wired, bound and presently being sponged down by a medic. ‘My name is Christopher Shivers, and you can call me Christopher – I only let my friends call me Chris.’

‘Why would you suppose that I am not your friend?’

‘Because you are the arch-demon Alan Saul – enemy to all humanity and all right-thinking souls. You are the one who all but destroyed Earth’s government and visited the Scour upon us.’

‘I detect elements of sarcasm coming from you,’ Saul replied. ‘Perhaps you know that the Scour came from a biochip that is included within all ID implants – a biochip incidentally manufactured at the Aldeburgh Complex which Serene Galahad used to run.’

The subpersona paused to exchange data with its original self, updating rapidly. Saul received a brief request for the subpersona to relay to Saul’s system. It seemed likely that this was now the real attempt to penetrate Saul’s ship, and, if so, it would give Saul a way of getting to Christopher, and the Fist and the Command. He allowed it to relay to secure storage, but of course reduced security simply by communicating with it.

‘It seems you might have a case,’ said Christopher, ‘but you are still my enemy. It is because of you I am now what I am, rather than a lowly robotics engineer. It is because of you my skull feels as empty as it is full.’

‘I understand,’ Saul agreed. ‘You must accept the exigencies of your genetic programming to retain a reason for continuing to exist. You must keep some part of you human or else everything becomes pointless and oblivion the only answer.’

Even as he spoke the words, Saul knew they were no longer entirely true for himself. He existed. He would continue to exist and no longer needed the instinct for brute survival; something more complex was nudging it aside.

‘So you give advice to your enemy?’ Christopher asked. ‘Here’s my human part.’

The image changed, slid back to a stored one: The bald fat man thrashing against his restraints, unable to scream because of a big plastic plug in his mouth – probably there to stop him biting off his own tongue.

‘I want to die but I can’t kill myself. If I try to kill myself the response is the same as with any other form of disobedience: pain. I ache for oblivion – being human is the reason I want to cease to exist.’

‘So how is it that you’re talking to me now?’

‘All part of my duties, if but briefly.’

It was the Fist that had fired the missile, but it would be some hours yet before it reached the satellite and destroyed it, cutting off one source of data for Saul. The comlifer had been distracting him from the attack, whether intentionally was unclear, since there was nothing he could do about it anyway.

‘How long before the Fist and the Command are ready to go?’ he asked.

‘I couldn’t possibly tell you that.’

Saul noticed the emphasis on the ‘I’, and how more data packets were currently queuing up to load to the subpersona.

‘Genetic exigencies?’ he enquired.

‘Certainly,’ replied the growing copy in Saul’s system of the comlifer aboard Command, ‘survival or else trying to make copies of some part of oneself.’

Saul watched the packets loading to his system, while also observing the missile eating up the distance towards the satellite, and calculated that most of the packets would be through before the missile struck, after which he intended to take the time to have a proper talk with Christopher. Now he returned the larger portion of his mind to a more human perception of time, while instantly updating on everything that had happened during the many hours that their apparently brief conversation had taken.

First to come into his focus was, as always, Hannah Neumann. She had been very busy while construction was still underway here in the Io flux tube, and now the number of those who had been chipped – and who possessed backups for their minds – outweighed the rest of the ship’s inhabitants. That number also included the Martian doctor Da Vinci who, at that moment, was monitoring the rapid growth of the fifteen clones under his care. As Saul had expected, the relationship between these two was getting strained. They both put this down to Da Vinci’s choice of trying out a cryogenic pod and her insisting that he also must be chipped and have a backup first, when in reality their problems were due to them both being dominant controlling personalities ill prepared to submit or to make compromises. Within the next five days, extraneous circumstances permitting, one of them would find a reason to start a fierce argument with the other, and that would lead to them breaking up. It was all so prosaic, so human.

Next, Saul focused his attention on the weapon built by the Saberhagen twins, for it was now complete and undergoing diagnostic testing. Magnetic bottle ‘caps’ were loaded and all the weapon’s ultra-capacitor storage was fully up to charge. At the moment, Brigitta and Angela were in Arcoplex Two, monitoring the diagnostic test – Angela mostly silent while Brigitta, from recorded cam footage, had been bemoaning Saul stopping them from test firing their weapon. Saul felt a degree of chagrin, somewhere, at Brigitta’s blinkered intransigence, but decided to speak to her anyway – like a human.

‘I must congratulate you on your success here,’ he stated through their intercom.

Brigitta glanced round to check if he was in the room, then glanced up at a nearby cam. ‘I would have more confidence in our success, if you would let me fire off at least one cap.’

‘Surely the reason for that is quite plain?’

‘Not to me.’

Even as Brigitta spoke, Angela grimaced and shook her head. Obviously the quiet Saberhagen twin had already worked out why, yet, because of her own irritating tendency not to communicate what she felt should be obvious to all, she had not told her sister.

‘The Vision is sitting out there watching us very closely,’ Saul observed, ‘and isn’t it the case that revealing a new weapon to one’s enemy is not a good idea?’

‘We’re as good as in the Io flux tube, where the EM radiation should cover it.’

Oh, good, she had at least been thinking about this, though not deeply enough.

‘Two problems I see there,’ replied Saul. ‘Because we are, as you say, as good as in the Io flux tube, the data you would get from such a firing would be highly dubious. The EM effects would disrupt both targeting and the magnetic bottle of the cap. Furthermore, the Vision would still gather enough imagery to inform Earth that we are capable of firing plasma bolts.’

‘I suppose,’ she replied grudgingly. ‘I haven’t got your omniscience.’

‘So, you must just do what you can without a test firing, okay?’

‘Yeah, okay.’ Brigitta flung herself down in her seat, waved a hand at the cam and began tapping away at a keyboard.

Saul drew away, feeling like a professorial parent irritated by the limited understanding of a child. He spread his awareness now, taking in a full overview of his ship, fleeting irritation dismissed and satisfaction at present progress supplanting it.

Just two square kilometres of hull plates remained still to be fitted for the ship to become a fully enclosed sphere. The docks were now secure inside, while his conjoined robots were building massive sliding space doors in the outer hull. These were back in their open position so presented no hindrance to the space plane currently entering the ship and heading towards Dock One; meanwhile, the remaining space plane was two hours away, still towing in a booster tank. Insulated walls had risen up around the business end of the Mars Traveller engine, while a new steering thruster was being built at the pole of the ship – both of these just a backup should the Mach-effect element of the ship’s overall drive fail. All the rebuilding was in fact ahead of schedule and, thinking of that, Saul decided to check in on the woman whom he had appointed overseer of all this work.

‘It seems, Var, that you’re managing to beat my rebuilding schedule,’ he commented, watching his sister through the cam located in her mobile overseer’s office.

She looked up from her screen, and he at once noted how pale and ill she appeared. Perhaps she had been pushing herself too hard, yet, reading the minutiae of her expression, Saul felt a nag of doubt.

‘Is everything okay?’ he asked.

‘I think so,’ she replied, ‘if you’re utterly sure that these chipped rebels are unlikely to be a threat – I can’t help but feel some concern about them.’

With a fragment of his mind Saul ascertained that those same chipped rebels were moving along nicely with their plans. They’d now stepped over the line from talking to action and everything he’d put in place to deal with them would initiate at the right time. He then noted that one of them was missing – a certain Gilder Main, whose backup relay was no longer signalling – and he ran a search of recorded footage. It took him all of two seconds to realize why something had seemed amiss with his sister.

‘I see you had a chat with Gilder Main.’

It appeared that Main and the repro Thomas Grieve had spent some hours with her in the cam black spot in the workshop of the fone shop. Subsequently neither of the two had reappeared in any cam view.

‘One of the robots they control is carrying a copper-head bomb which it even now has probably attached to your inner sanctum,’ she replied quickly.

‘Where are Gilder Main and Thomas Grieve?’ he countered, noting that, yes, the robot had indeed put the explosive in place and that its timer was running. ‘What happened behind the fone shop?’

Momentary desperation flitted across her expression, then it went flat and blank. ‘I questioned Main and he revealed the plot. He also said something about a plan to destroy your backups, which he seemed to think were somewhere in the old station ring. I think Thomas Grieve overheard us.’ She shrugged. ‘What happened after I left, I’ve no idea.’

She was lying, there could be no doubt. He watched old cam footage of a robot, carrying an empty sealant drum, arriving while she was still in the fone shop, then heading off to one of the smelting plants, where that same drum had gone into one of the furnaces. There was also no data available on who had instructed the robot, so someone expert must have wiped it from the system. Someone like Var.

Gilder Main, he felt sure, would not have willingly revealed the plot contrived by the chipped rebels. With a thought, Saul sent a small maintenance robot to check out that same black spot, certain that it would find neither Main nor Grieve still there. By now they were both furnace slag or part of the ship’s components. Furthermore, from what he had thus far read in Var’s expression and in the intonation of her words, he suspected that she had interrogated and killed Main, and probably killed Grieve too. Saul linked to a particular backup, taking the route he had taken before when he just became suspicious of some of the chipped – whereby he had broken the scrambler codes by reading their recently backed-up thoughts. He set a program to decoding Gilder Main’s last memories, and then returned his full attention to Var.

‘Did you kill them both?’ he asked her.

‘Now you’re being silly,’ she replied, but everything he read in her confirmed the truth.

What should he do about this? Var had been as much a killer as him – killing to survive – except, of course, when she killed Rhone of Mars Science, which was plain vengeance, for he had been no threat at the time. If she had killed Gilder Main, then really that was justifiable since Main, like the rest of the chipped, had crossed a line. However, killing a mind-wiped repro amounted to the plain murder of an innocent.

The decoded memory came through now. Saul experienced Main’s sudden panic upon hearing that Var had walked into the fone shop, his scramble for the disabler he’d stolen, the impact of Var’s kick followed by a similar impact from a stun truncheon… then nothing thereafter.

In a way it was his own fault, he realized. Having yet to decide how to deal with the human population aboard his ship, he did not know how much freedom to allow them, how large a degree of self-governance, or how much information to provide for them. He had not detailed to Var his plan for dealing with the chipped rebels because he felt it to be only his concern. He also had no wish to explain, to someone whose breadth of understanding was so limited, the subtle manipulation he was using and how he was certain it would work. In her turn, Var had felt the need to act decisively, ruthlessly and competitively. He should have foreseen that. Now, in an instant, he made some crucial decisions. The human population aboard would govern and police itself, and he himself would only intervene when his own or the ship’s security was threatened. They would work to pay for their accommodation, the necessities of their existence, the very air they breathed; and, since the system currently developing here was a wealthy one, they could earn much more. Saul now issued a decree to that effect, to be displayed on every screen, fone or personal item of computing. That was how it would be from now until… later.

Through certain cams, Saul noted the production of the main components of the cryogenic pods. When he finally left the solar system, the population here would go into hibernation and then… what? In truth he had no need of any of them. They were basically an encumbrance.

‘I have no intention of judging you,’ he told his sister. ‘Let us hope that you’ve sufficiently covered your tracks for no one to find out, though, for I will not stand in the way of any judgement by your peers.’

She just gazed at the cam, and Saul studied her for a while longer, reading her face down to its very pores, but feeling a mental distance between them rapidly growing. Shortly it seemed as if he was peering down a microscope at some interesting but thoroughly predictable specimen, until external events abruptly dragged his attention elsewhere.

The Vision was on the move.