Owner 03 - Jupiter War (12 page)

Rhine glanced up. ‘We might hit something on the way in,’ he warned. ‘Not everything is mapped.’

‘The chances are low,’ Saul opined, ‘something like one in a hundred for us hitting something and twice that for it to be big enough to knock out the drive bubble.’ He sat down at the console next to Rhine’s – the one that had before been occupied by Girondel Chang, who now resided in the rim mortuary. Really, there was no need for Rhine or anyone else to be here, since Saul was in full mental control of the whole operation.

‘It’s going to be hot,’ Rhine added.

‘Nothing the station cannot handle, and we need the additional energy.’

To pass the time, Saul again checked the programming he had in place. The moment they arrived at their destination, he wanted action, and he intended to get that – though perhaps not from the humans aboard, since they might take a few hours to adapt.

The first smelting plant locked home in its dock, then the second. He watched as Leeran and Pike – the stalwarts in charge of those plants – and other workers there, headed towards their offices and there strapped themselves into chairs. Most of the robots were now locked in place, while just a few humans had yet to sort themselves out. Le Roque took a seat and fastened his lap strap, while those around him did the same. All of this securing and locking down was completely unnecessary if the drive functioned as before, but there was always a chance of something going wrong. This was, after all, only the third time ever this new technology had been used.

‘Two minutes until shift.’ Saul’s voice issued from intercoms all across the station. ‘If you’ve forgotten something, then it’s too late now. Just leave it and get yourselves strapped in.’

Beyond the windows of Tech Central, the station rim – its inwardly curving rib bones rising up all around it – seemed to lift like the lower jaw of an angler fish. Beyond that the view of Mars turned hazy. With the drive fully up to speed, Saul could now fling them away from here with just a thought, but he allowed the crew some remaining time. While that passed, he watched Hannah securing herself in the surgical chair in her laboratory, the Saberhagen twins strapping into chairs in an office adjacent to Robotics, and his sister standing, in a heavy work suit, on the rim of the station, with her feet solidly planted and a line attaching her to one of the nearby ribs. Everyone else was safely inside the station, but Saul had made no rule about how they should secure themselves, and Var was only putting herself at minimally more risk by staying where she was.

‘Giving yourself a grandstand view, sister?’ he asked her.

‘It’s a bit disconcerting out here. It feels just like I’m standing on the inner face of a tidal wave, and now the stars are changing colour and . . . damn, look at Mars.’

Visible through the windows of Tech Central, Mars was noticeably changing hue, first turning as red as it was supposed to be, before intensifying to something as unnaturally bright as fluorescent paint.

‘I’m surprised I’m the only one outside,’ she added. ‘I would have thought that you, at least, would also want to be this close.’

‘I’m even closer, since I can view through every sensor of the station,’ Saul replied.

‘That’s hardly the same.’

‘You’re quite correct. Ordinary human senses can be so dull.’

Var just snorted at that.

It was time now.

‘Shifting,’ Saul announced.

Everything beyond the station turned black, and again Saul felt as if he was folding space around himself like a thick blanket, and rolling away into another world. He visualized the warp bubble as a droplet of water skittering across a hotplate, as he counted down the seconds then minutes of their journey. It began to grow uncomfortably hot inside the station but, out on the lattice wall, the legions of robots sucked up and rectified that increase of energy into something usable, while elsewhere throughout the station Rhine’s rectifying batteries rose quickly to full charge. A momentary shudder had Saul reaching down to grip the arms of his chair, but it soon passed. The warp bubble must have clipped something, or else destroyed something too small to stop their progress. Saul calculated it must have been an object massing just under half a tonne, before he sank into the esoteric maths concerning warp-bubble impacts, just to pass the remaining interminable yet fantastically short ten minutes of the journey.

Next, the universe suddenly turned the lights back on. Bright sunlight glared, as bright as Mediterranean daytime. They had just travelled across an appreciable portion of the solar system in a matter of mere minutes. Saul blinked. Would an experience as fantastic as this start to become as prosaic as a routine flight in an aeroplane? He unstrapped himself and stood up, walking over to the windows that had already taken on the tint that had disappeared when they had left Earth behind.

‘How was that for you?’ he asked Var.

‘Like nothing else,’ she replied, her voice hushed, sounding slightly depressed. Saul understood her reaction. She had been excited before, but actually seeing the drive work made her feel very small, and she did not like feeling that way. Despite being busy with the reconstruction, her pride was still suffering wounds. Irritated by his sister’s apparent weakness, he slid the fragment of his attention he had allotted her away and elsewhere.

Light and heat suffused the station, as energy storage, which out at Mars had forever been on the point of depletion, continued to rise, and he too felt energized as a thump reverberated under his feet – Leeran and Pike obviously feeling no need to take stock, and already extending the smelting plants. The power of sunlight, it seemed, affected all of those it touched, for even now people were unstrapping themselves and checking work rosters; while others, who knew what to do, were already donning spacesuits.

The old robots first, Saul decided, feeling them unpeeling instantly from the points in the station they had been clinging to, and dispersing to obey their queued-up orders. He then felt further vibrations through his feet as the mining robots again began hacking into the asteroid below, and as the ore carts began hauling their loads towards the big transporters.

‘It’s like . . . like waking up,’ said Le Roque at his shoulder.

‘We’ve been sad,’ quipped Rhine at his other shoulder. ‘That would be—’

‘Yes, I know what seasonal affective disorder is, Rhine,’ Saul interrupted.

‘I need to get back to it,’ said Rhine, unperturbed, as he turned away. ‘This Mach-effect stuff is fascinating.’

Rhine, Saul had realized, possessed the kind of mind best kept at work so, with a little help from the proctors, he was already finessing the design for the Mach-effect drive, and deciding how best to integrate it with what they already had.

‘Crazy, but brilliant,’ Le Roque commented, once Rhine was gone. Then, turning back to Saul: ‘So now we really go to work?’

‘We do, and you yourself need to relocate to the secondary control centre.’ He glanced towards him. ‘They’re already cutting the anchors down below.’

‘Quick work.’

‘Rhine just suggested that we’re all coming out of SAD, out of suffering from a lack of sunlight, but perhaps there’s more to the power of the sun than merely that.’ Saul considered all the possible effects of this relocation, and could not shake off the feeling that the personnel here were as linked into Argus Station, in their own way, as he himself. Certainly, new measurable power was running through everything aboard, but it seemed as if a
psychic
current had been set up, too. He did not believe in any supernatural explanation, of course, but was not prepared to discount an esoteric scientific one.

Steadily increasing activity became visible in the station outside. Saul briefly watched teams of humans and robots heading from their accommodation towards the Mars Traveller engine, which they intended to detach from the asteroid. He watched another team begin work alongside the mining robots, cutting their way towards a fault that would eventually break the steadily shrinking mass of nickel iron in two. Then, through the windows ahead, as well as in his mind, he focused on the extent of lattice wall beside Arcoplex Two.

Now.

Smooth as oil, a neat line of the new robots began flowing across the lattice wall towards the rim, the square formation they were emerging from steadily shrinking. On their way they diverted to a stockpile of beams and other components, and that pile rapidly shrank like ice under the jet of a steam cleaner. The other two squares began to move next, sliding into thicker lines: one going straight over the curve of the arcoplex to start work on the ship’s skeleton beyond, while the other came back towards Tech Central and circumvented it to head over to the other side of the station. The robots moving there began the essential armouring of the vortex generator, thus further stockpiles diminished, and all the materials taken down from the enclosure went too.

A sudden leap in power supply marked the moment the smelting plants began opening out their mirrors – no longer requiring power from the reactors either to move themselves into position or run back up to temperature. Smelters that before had been functioning at only half of their potential performance now went straight to full capacity, as the various plants issued plumes of vapour and ash, turning bright and silvery in the sunlight. Molten metal boiled with inert gases, and coolers that had not been needed out in the orbit of Mars soon came online. The rolling mills, presses, auto-forges and casters; the capstan lathes, milling machines, diamond saws and drills; the matter printers, nano-weavers and bucky-spinners: all of them seemed to let go with joyous abandon until once slow-moving swarf conveyors steadily increased to full speed.

In Arcoplex Two, Robotics screamed with activity – no power outages now, no requirement to build up a charge for any of the high-energy processes. Here the machines seemed to be hearing the message from their larger brothers out in the smelting plants:
Energy to burn, guys. Let’s do it.
There was power now for further high-temperature work, too; and, elsewhere in the arcoplex, silicon quickly turned molten as a chip factory started up, as did a powder forge for making the cutting tools that would soon be needed to replace those already in use.

Saul smiled as power levels just continued to rise. Already the first of his new robots were working around the rim, sometimes singly, sometimes conjoined into short centipede forms, hauling up and affixing structural beams at high speed. And the skeleton of the space ship grew visibly; dream turned into hard reality.

Scourge

Clay Ruger woke to feel the constant ache of his battered body, reached out for the painkillers and iodine pills on his bedside shelf, popped two of each out of their blister packs and washed them down with a gulp of water from his suit spigot, and he waited. There wasn’t one of the survivors without broken bones, wrenched joints and a mottled effect of fading bruises from head to toe. Clay himself had two broken shins, ribs broken all down one side, and few other bones in his body without at least hairline cracks, including his skull. But at least he wasn’t one of those who had ruptured something internal or suffered one of the cerebral haemorrhages that had killed a third of the crew. And at least, unlike Gunnery Officer Cookson, he hadn’t ended up with a snapped spine.

When Argus Station’s warp bubble had brushed against the
Scourge
, gravity waves had travelled the length of the ship like invisible walls. Compression waves were how Pilot Officer Trove described them, her voice slurring because of her broken jaw; while Captain Scotonis called the event a ‘tidal surge’. All Clay knew was that it felt as if, in just a matter of seconds, he had been simultaneously smashed against something, then
stretched
through it. Afterwards he felt as if he had spent months in an old-fashioned adjustment cell – one where they weren’t bothering to use inducers, just batons, army boots and fists.

Finally the painkillers began to kick in and he was able to drag himself from his bed – a laborious exercise even in zero gravity. Just as they all did, he still wore a full spacesuit: after yet another atmosphere breach only two days ago, none of them fully trusted the repairs. The suits also offered some protection from the high levels of radiation caused when one of the warheads in the armoury exploded. It hadn’t gone into fission, but it had acted like a dirty bomb, spreading radioactive material throughout the ship. It was this, Clay knew, that would eventually kill him. Broken bones weren’t the only common injury for not one of them hadn’t suffered radiation sickness, or did not register positive for pre-cancerous cells, if not overt signs of some sort of cancer. Clay was sure that some of the stuff coming up out of his lungs had little now to do with his initial injuries.

Before stepping out of his cabin, he closed his suit visor, then once outside he began making his way up a corridor that was no longer straight, but in fact had taken on a slightly corkscrew shape. A crew member passed him heading in the other direction, dolefully towing herself along like an ancient. They ignored each other – crew generally had little to say to him, and not much more to say to each other, either. Eventually, the doors to the bridge came in sight, but before he reached them the command crew came out.

Scotonis, Trove and even Cookson were there, pulling on their suit helmets. They all looked ill – Cookson the worst of all as he pulled himself along with everything below his waist hanging dead. It struck Clay that they had all been animatedly discussing something before his approach and had now fallen silent, but paranoia was all too easy aboard this ship of the damned.

‘How are you, Cookson?’ Clay asked, as he drew closer.

Cookson swung a corpse-like face towards him. He was deadly white, with a slight bluish tinge to his lips and a yellow mass of bruising down one side of his face. He gave a sickly grin that exposed the missing teeth in that side of his mouth.

‘Not dead yet,’ he replied. ‘I want to live long enough . . . just long enough.’

‘Something we can all say,’ said Clay. Then, studying the others, ‘So what’s up?’