Epilogue

The ship’s new heavily armoured hull plates gleamed in the sun as the Alcubierre warp blinked out around it. Its new vortex generator, filled with mercury from the Command’s generator and from further mining of a cinnabar asteroid, was maintained at full power and ready to fling the ship away again. Inside it, the Arboretum, Arcoplexes One and Two and the new and presently empty Arcoplex Three, were all spinning with steady efficiency amidst internal structure steadily expanding to fill all but one space. Meanwhile, the smelting plants and internal factories continued at their previous frenetic pace: their furnaces, presses, forges, automated mills and lathes, assembly plants and other machines besides, all were busily and raucously at work. The Traveller engine, now repaired, rebuilt, improved and refuelled, stood ready to fire up, but with the double-layered Mach-effect drive distributed around the inner layer of hull, it might never need to. The two plasma cannons, two heavy masers and six railguns were in pristine condition, ready with plasma caps, missiles and power supplies endowed with redoubled redundancy. And Saul hoped he would never have any need for them.

Through cameras in the hull he watched as the big new space doors opened and a space plane shot out on its way to the wrecked and depopulated Core Two space station. He then turned his attention to an old friend – an early design of robot kitted out for applying spray coatings, and the same one he had used to lead the attack against Salem Smith – as it perambulated around the hull, etching away metal and spraying bright yellow vacuum-set paint. Its task would be completed sometime after his jaunt in taking this ship out of the solar system.

Earth lay below and even from up here it was possible, with just human vision, to see that some areas were greener than they had appeared before the Scour. Saul analysed spectra in his mind and calculated on a close to ten per cent increase in such areas. He also calculated the force of the latest blast – this time on the American east coast – and knew that another tactical atomic had been used, rating at no more than five kilotonnes.

Serene Galahad’s delegates – including officers ranking high in the Inspectorate military wing and others with no particular rank before all this – were busy fighting for power. Thus far, a large portion of the Inspectorate military had rallied to the flag of Pilot Officer Trove and Clay Ruger, whose power base lay in India and who had taken control of much of old Asia. However, they were up against an alliance of European delegates as well as the individual delegates who now respectively controlled the Americas, Australia and Japan, the Arctic and Russia, besides numerous smaller realms between.

Saul reached informational tendrils out to Earth. All the larger warring blocs had either snatched one of Galahad’s comlifers or created their own to defend their computer systems and, with Saul’s ship now in orbit above them, security was at its highest and those same comlifers alert to intrusion. Saul should not even have been able to penetrate, but all those blocs had managed to get hold of copies of the Gene Bank data he had sent to the Scourge. When he’d laced that data with every computer worm and virus at his disposal it had been in the hope of penetrating either that ship’s systems or those of Earth. And the latter case had paid off royally now. He thus penetrated with ease, sliding in under their notice, sliding into twenty-two comlifer minds and simply rendering them unconscious. Free to mentally wander through all those disparate systems, he shut down every missile silo capable of firing anything into orbit, then as a precaution insured that the presently idle mass drivers could not be used as weapons either. Then he injected a virus he had created many months before.

In just three hours it spread around the world, seeking out specific information and erasing it. When its work was done, not one scrap of system-stored data remained of either Professor Rhine’s or Professor Calder’s research into the Alcubierre warp drive. The virus then became somnolent and hidden, awaiting the insertion of similar data from other forms of storage, whereupon it would activate itself again and wipe it too. As it sank into somnolence after those three hours, Saul considered his capability of reaching into the human mind via the visual cortex and thus manipulating data inside. But he drew a line at that, deciding that even he did not want to become that ruthless.

Next, he spent hours gathering further data and assessing more closely the situation below. He calculated that, for many years hence, none of the current power blocs would gain complete ascendancy. And if they continued fighting as they were, they would wreck much of the infrastructure of control. Really, it looked as if Earth was dropping back through time to when the separate nation states ruled, which suited Saul just fine. Further analysis rendered the result that, with the vortex generator data missing, none of the separate small blocs would regain the capability of putting up anything like the Command or the Fist, and when, in at least fifty years, a new world government or large power bloc seized control, it would take them a further fifty years to regain that capability. That would be enough, for Saul would be long gone by then. Withdrawing, he returned his attention to matters closer to home.

Two space planes, retrieved from the partially wrecked ghost station Core Two, had arrived hours ago. Meanwhile the work crew from the space plane he had sent out, along with pilots instructed to retrieve those planes, was busily checking to ensure that Core Two held no nasty surprises. This was prior to Saul shifting his whole ship over and taking the station inside through the massive new space doors, whereupon Core Two would be torn apart for salvage.

One of the Core Two space planes was currently being refuelled and checked over, to ensure it could manage atmospheric re-entry without coming apart. An hour remained before all the checks would be finished, and there might yet be some maintenance to carry out, yet all those departing his ship had gathered in one of the now-pressurized docking pillars.

There were twenty-eight of them, including Admiral Bartholomew and some of his command staff, also Technical Director Le Roque, along with disparate original Argus Station personnel and some other crew from the Command. Saul was disappointed by Le Roque’s decision to return to Earth, but could understand it. The man had been struggling, and often failing, to keep people alive here for too long. He was tired and sick of it all, and he just wanted to go home. He also wanted to find out if his family was still alive in eastern Europe. In fact, all those gathered in that docking pillar were rather like him in that respect. Every one of them retained some hope that those they loved were still living somewhere down there. It seemed that such attachments outweighed the danger of returning to Earth. And their decision to go was strengthened when Saul informed those possessing them that they could take their backups down with them.

‘I understand you are perfectly aware of the situation below?’ he asked Le Roque through the man’s implant.

‘I’m fully aware and I’m still going,’ Le Roque replied. ‘We’ll put down at Minsk and surrender ourselves to the delegates of the Russian and Arctic bloc. Your gift should buy us some good feeling there and, I hope, give us some leverage too.’

Saul conceded that. While rebuilding his ship, he had also set up a small project, under Dr Da Vinci, to map and make physical copies of the Gene Bank samples. Only ten per cent had been copied, while nearly forty per cent had been mapped, but this would be enough to give Le Roque and the rest their leverage. It would also give the same advantage to the Russian and Arctic bloc, but that would not be enough to save it from the growing power of the European Alliance, just as the European Alliance would not survive its internal infighting and the wedge that Trove and Ruger were driving into it. But Le Roque and the rest knew all about this, so with luck had their plans ready to survive the coming clashes.

‘I hope you do find your family, Le Roque,’ Saul said. ‘Good luck to you.’

‘And you,’ Le Roque replied, ‘whenever you too find whatever it is you’re seeking.’

Saul swung his attention away, towards the remainder of those aboard.

The Meat Locker was open and ready, with staff and robots on standby, but only two had thus far chosen to go into hibernation. The rest were clearly waiting for some kind of resolution here, or perhaps for that moment when the ship got underway again.

In one of the smelting plants, Leeran and Pike were happy to be busy, and they didn’t want all this activity to end. In Arcoplex Two, Da Vinci was still overseeing the machines that were mapping and physically copying the stored DNA, while he was occasionally also tuning in to Earth broadcasts with negligent interest. Over the last few months, Hannah Neumann had grown increasingly distant from him, and their relationship had cooled to frigidity. She was currently throwing herself into new research aimed at linking up human minds for serial and parallel processing, perhaps hoping for a future when humanity became all of one mind, and so less inclined to kill its individual parts. Professor Rhine, meanwhile, was considering knocking a few more big holes in conventional science by means of a hammer driven by perpetual motion, while the Saberhagens were working on a weapon based on some of his theories: a way of firing plasma bolts in a Rhine spatial fold, and thus delivering them faster than light.

In an anteroom just off the new heavily armoured store for backups, the Messina clone, Alex, was in the midst of one of his conversations with his old enemy, Ghort.

‘We have to strive to make the reality of our existence conform to an ideal,’ Ghort was saying, ‘else life isn’t worth living.’

‘Which is fine if it’s applied individually,’ Alex replied, ‘because my ideal might not be your ideal.’

‘And because you are happy in your slavery.’

‘No, because I accept that trying to change present reality, in the way you wanted, probably wouldn’t lead to any improvement, and that it might only lead to my death.’

‘Happy slave.’

Alex looked merely weary as he stood up from the console, their dialogue having reached its usual impasse. ‘But you’re lucky, since you get to try again,’ he added.

‘How’s that going?’ asked the facsimile of Ghort’s face from the screen.

‘Its growth is now about that of a two-year-old,’ Alex replied. ‘Raiman has decided to forgo accelerated growth whenever it’s not necessary. It – and all the rest – should be ready by the time we reach our destination.’

They were talking about the clones, of course, and specifically about Ghort’s clone. He would be the first of those in backup to test the process of loading to a clone body, which was some recompense for his crimes, as was his death. Saul had yet to decide what other restitution this man should make. That would depend upon how Saul himself changed his thinking over the ensuing journey, and what his aims might be by the time his ship arrived at its various destinations. The first of these was close, but the second was further away than any of them could possibly imagine. And, thinking on that, deep in that small part of him that was still flesh and blood, Saul felt some human impatience to be gone.

Hannah was surprised at how tearful she had felt upon seeing off Le Roque, but she attributed that to her bone-deep weariness. Finally, shutting down and secure-backing all the data on her research projects, she began to feel relieved. While locking away all her biological samples and growing organic interfaces in a freezer that would store them in a temperature only a little above absolute zero, she began to relish the prospect of enjoying a similar rest.

‘I thought you’d want to send us all back to Earth, Saul,’ she said, speaking into the air.

‘I considered it,’ he replied, always attentive but now never visible. ‘But, even though I’m a selfish and murderous monster, I was still prepared to offer the people aboard a choice.’

‘You’re a monster?’ Hannah asked, casting an eye over her spotless laboratory and realizing that, at last, there was nothing more to do. She checked the time to see that just a few more minutes remained.

‘You always expected me to be as much,’ he replied.

Hannah shed her lab coat and went to hang it up neatly in her locker. How long, in real time, would it be before she donned it again? The minimum was four and a half years, since Saul had told them that their first destination would be Proxima Centuri, which lay four-point-two light years away. Four and a half years of undisturbed sleep?

‘I never expected it; I just wanted you to be aware of how easily you could become a monster,’ Hannah lied.

In truth, she expected only utter cold ruthlessness from him, so wasn’t sure that the others had made the right choice in staying on board. She herself had remained because, to some extent, she felt she filled the role of a conscience that he probably lacked. Heading over to the door of her laboratory, she opened it and stepped out, closing it carefully and palm-locking it behind her. Others were on the move too, probably having finished up their final tasks before following the thirty-two people who had thus far delivered themselves to the Meat Locker. She knew that the Saberhagens were already sleeping there now, as were Leeran and Pike. Plenty of others had yet to make the same move, but Hannah felt her own time had arrived. Da Vinci had told her that he had experienced dreams while in hibernation, so perhaps that meant it wasn’t just a total shut-down of the body, but also the kind of rest she badly needed.

Halfway along the corridor towards the bank of elevators leading out of Arcoplex Two, she felt the Rhine drive engage. It was so much smoother now, just a brief vertiginous shift in underlying reality, followed by the feeling, lasting for a few minutes, that appalling behemoths were sliding past just out of sight, before settling into a steady creepy doubt about whatever was real and solid. Hannah picked up her pace, entered one of the elevators, shortly stepping out of it onto a small monorail station platform, and boarding one of the single-person cars. All the way to the Meat Locker, she had no need to suit herself up or use an airlock. The whole of Saul’s ship was interconnected like this now, or at least, all the areas to which he granted the crew access.

As she entered the Meat Locker she saw that the staff and robots were already busy putting four people into hibernation, so she just headed over to where she knew her own cryogenic capsule was located. She could have waited for one of the staff, or one of the robots, to attend to her, but felt impatient with that idea – after all, she probably knew more about the process involved than any of them. She stripped off her clothes, feeling no embarrassment at her nakedness since, having lived forever under Committee cameras, why would she? These discarded garments went into a small storage compartment in the capsule wall, then she stepped over to the capsule itself. Within a minute she had all the monitoring units fixed in place, and had climbed inside.

‘Ah, Dr Neumann,’ said one of the medics, approaching, ‘do you need any help?’

Hannah waved the man away, ‘No, I’m fine,’ and reached over to tap the start button on the console beside the capsule. She then lay back in the form specially made to fit her body. It was warm and comfortable, she found, though she had expected it to be cold.

‘So tell me, Saul,’ she asked, ‘will you ever bother to wake us up?’

‘Why else would I allow you to remain aboard?’

The needles slid into her arms, injecting the necessary drugs to lull her into natural sleep, then into a coma, before the other automatics dug into her body to suck out her blood and other fluids, replacing them with gels and anti-freeze, and thus chill her to the brink of death.

‘I don’t know… and that worries me,’ she said, her voice already slurring. ‘Maybe like… Da Vinci… I’ll dream of what’s real.’

‘Maybe,’ Saul replied, the single word falling through the cold blackness filling her mind, and dissolving into nothingness.

They were all in hibernation now and, just as Saul had predicted, it was Rhine, reluctant to shut down his hugely active mind, who had been the last of them to go into the long sleep. The ship was finally devoid of all human activity except Saul’s own, but still very active indeed. As Hannah and others had come to understand, he did not need human personnel to get things done here. For such purposes the robots were better, much better. Now, at last feeling free of the distraction of human clamour, Saul shut down the Rhine drive and dumped his ship back out into reality.

‘Are you sure about this?’ asked the proctor Paul, as he carried his current burden into the mechanism of one of the railguns, and came to stand over the open breach.

‘I’m sure,’ Saul replied. ‘I have enough genetic samples from her to grow a clone and have copied all those parts of her mind it was still possible to copy. Even though my technological capabilities will develop, there will be nothing more I can obtain from her corpse and, as I myself change, I will become more and more disinclined to try.’

‘A horribly and precisely logical assessment,’ Paul replied, lowering the cylinder containing the body of Varalia Delex into the railgun breach, and closing it.

Saul gazed out into cold interstellar vacuum, as Paul moved away. Once the proctor was clear he aimed the railgun at a distant point and fired it. His sister’s corpse sped away on a journey that would last a minimum of five million years, and might quite possibly continue until the end of time.

‘No words?’ Paul enquired.

‘None,’ Saul replied but, as he turned his attention to the paint-sprayer robot still working out there on the hull, he acknowledged to himself that ‘none’ wasn’t entirely accurate.

Some hiccup had disrupted the robot’s work or, more likely, some unconscious motivation within Saul had revealed itself in its activity. A letter had not been capitalized, and a gap had been missed out, but the name of his ship was, somehow, exactly right. Saul engaged the Rhine drive and took the Vardelex further out into the dark… and to the far stars.

In this new age there are government propagandists who would have us believe that Admiral Bartholomew retrieved the genetic data from Saul before destroying him and his ship; that our duly appointed representatives therefore won. But there are those of us left here on the Subnet who still remember Saul’s ship looming in the sky, and we remember Bartholomew’s statement, and Ruger’s story. We must never let the truth be forgotten: how one man brought down two dictators and the entire government of Earth. Now, as we see just such a government re-forming, and see the freedoms we have enjoyed once again being steadily eroded, we must never forget him. We must never forget the Owner, Alan Saul. He’s out there somewhere, and one day our descendants will meet him. I hope, for their sake, that by then they will have learned to live… differently.

Anon, FreeBlog, the Subnet.