Owner 03 - Jupiter War (35 page)

Examining him further, she noted other changes, such as the fact that he wasn’t wearing a standard-issue VC suit. His bulked slightly larger, with numerous black boxes attached to its surface; the helmet hanging from his belt had also been redesigned, possessing optic connections all around the neck ring. It seemed that, while holed up in his inner sanctum, Saul had been busy indeed. Then, with a start, she realized that at the base of his neck, small devices had been surgically attached at his carotids, pipes and wires leading from these down inside the suit.

‘Pressure shunts and nutrient feeds,’ she decided.

‘And much else besides,’ he agreed, before turning to glance at Da Vinci, who, held steady by Raiman, was now stepping into the cryogenic pod.

As Saul turned, she spotted another optic connection at the base of his skull, the cable similarly leading down into his suit, but she could hazard no possible reason for it. She, too, glanced at Da Vinci, feeling abruptly at odds with herself. She had come here because she was concerned about him, because she wanted to make one last attempt to dissuade him from trying out this pod, but now all her concern was focused on Saul.

‘You’ve been operating on yourself,’ she said.

He turned back to her, his expression mild. ‘Well, I wasn’t actually holding the scalpel. I just robotized and programmed a combined micro- and macro-surgery, shut down this body of mine and let the surgery proceed.’

‘You should have let me do it,’ said Hannah, feeling both horrified and affronted. ‘I’ll need to run some tests.’

‘You have enough to do,’ he replied, ‘and my health, mental or otherwise, is no longer your concern.’

‘It’s the concern of us all!’ she countered vehemently.

He tilted his head and in that moment she realized that his skin now had a slightly metallic hue which was not due to the lighting here, as she had first assumed.

‘Your concern is irrelevant,’ he stated, the spidergun beyond him suddenly unfolding and becoming more attentive.

Had some fragment of humanity left inside him grown angry with her? Hannah wondered. Or had some risk-assessment program running in a mind that effectively spanned this entire ship calculated an increase in danger to its core; this human body and brain that sat at the centre of Alan Saul like the reptile back-brain sits at the core of all humans? Hannah gazed at him for a while longer, but he showed no human response to such scrutiny.

‘Hi, Hannah,’ called out Da Vinci, his voice sounding slightly slurred, ‘glad you came.’

She switched her attention back to him. He was now lying down inside the pod, and Raiman was beginning to close the lid. She hurried over. ‘Wait!’ But, as she arrived and peered down at him, Da Vinci’s eyes were already closed and he was breathing deeply and steadily.

‘The process has started,’ explained Raiman.

Hannah wanted to tell him to stop the process at once, but knew that would be childish, and effectively beyond her authority. As the lid then closed, she switched her attention to the monitor screen showing all the rhythms of a human body, all slowing down. She noted the abrupt change in the pattern there, just as Da Vinci had predicted, at the moment the pod began to exchange blood for a complex form of antifreeze. Thereafter his core temperature began to drop rapidly.

‘Time to insert it,’ said Raiman. ‘The control systems in the wall need to engage.’

She stepped back as he punched a button on the side of the pod. It began to slide into its hexagonal space in the wall, grotesquely like a paper coffin going into a community digester. If it turned out that this process would kill Da Vinci, then she had already lost him. She wondered where this Meat Locker rated in Saul’s calculations. Would the people aboard be given a choice about going into these pods, or did that decision fall under his remit regarding his own and his ship’s safety? Would it in fact be compulsory?

‘Couldn’t this have waited until we were away from the solar system and well out of danger?’ she asked. ‘We really needed the opportunity to do much more research into it.’

‘Not my decision,’ Raiman replied.

Hannah flicked him an annoyed glance then turned to Saul – but Saul was gone. He must have walked away while she was checking Da Vinci’s monitor. In that moment she realized that while she might indeed have lost Da Vinci, there was also a good chance he would survive. All the same, she had very definitely lost the human being named Alan Saul.

He was gone forever.

‘It’s called the
Vision
,’ said the copy of the comlifer located aboard the
Command
, and who now allowed Saul to address him as Chris, ‘because that’s about the limit of its capabilities.’

‘It possesses weapons,’ Saul noted, just as he reached the door leading into his inner sanctum.

‘It does, but you could fry it if it gets any closer.’

That was probably true, though Saul’s main concern had been about its named purpose, which was why, ever since its arrival near Europa, he had switched over to minimal usage of the Mach-effect drive, and was now holding his ship in position using the rim steering thrusters. Just as with the Saberhagens’ weapon, it was best not to apprise the enemy of technologies with tactical relevance, and the Mach-effect drive was certainly that.

In the virtual world he had created, Chris appeared slimmer than the image Saul had seen of him aboard the
Command
, and he was now clad in a neat suit. This struck Saul as not the usual dress of a robotics engineer but of an Inspectorate executive, a political officer. Saul was now entertaining some suspicions about his new guest, and so decided to discover Chris’s true thoughts.

‘They’re panicking,’ Chris continued. ‘They’ve seen how fast your reconstruction has gone and are worried that you might take off or be too well prepared before their two warships can come after you. I’d bet they’ve moved the
Vision
closer so as to push you into doing something else that’ll hamper you, just as moving the
Command
and the
Fist
out of the construction station made you recall your space planes.’

The explanation was feasible but, as Saul had just told Hannah, Galahad’s overall approach seemed strangely flawed. She must know that he could engage the Rhine drive at any moment and that though the two warships might be able to pursue him along whatever course he chose, they could not know when he was going to stop and change direction, and would therefore not know when to stop their own drives in order to change direction to go after him. Just one course change was needed, and he would be lost in the universe and utterly beyond Earth’s reach.

So he had to be missing something.

Entering his sanctum, the door locks thumping home behind him, and his spidergun settling down like a dog coming home after a lengthy walk, he headed straight for his gimbals chair and quickly strapped himself in, unplugged the optic leading from his temple into his suit, and instead plugged in the one here. There was no interruption in the flow of data, and he was pleased with his trial of his new laser networking device, his life-support suit and the recent upgrade to his human body’s mental function that required that new suit. Now his backups were truly backups – copying everything now running in his skull, in the additional brain matter growing in an artificial cyst in his groin, as well as the terabytes of processing power distributed throughout his suit.

‘I’m not sure I would characterize what they are doing as panic,’ Saul stated, now opening links into the subpersona called Chris and injecting specially designed search engines which, if he wanted to draw similes with living organisms, were less like bloodhounds and more like wolves.

‘What are you doing?’ Chris asked.

‘Getting to the truth,’ Saul replied.

The moment the search engines hit, the image of Chris began screaming, whereupon the virtual world he occupied tore open and flew apart. But how, Saul wondered, could something that was a mere collection of bytes feel pain? Of course, the same logic could be applied to human beings. Were they not just moist collections of biological information? It occurred to him now to wonder – as had been speculated on before by people of a philosophical turn of mind – how many of those around him were actually conscious.

The first truth the engines delivered was that, yes, Chris had been a robotics engineer, until his talent for sucking up to the right people and undermining rivals got him the position of political officer in the robotics factory.

After Saul’s attack on Earth and Galahad’s assumption of power, Chris had tried scrabbling further up the ladder but only managed to annoy someone senior to him. He’d been on his way to adjustment when he was offered an alternative – and he’d grabbed it. Who wouldn’t? But, as a comlifer, first losing any will to live, and then going through the agonizing conditioning process, he wished he had chosen the visit to a white-tiled cell instead.

The next truth was a defining one. This subpersona had so many holes that it was a wonder it had managed to hold itself together. It contained no tactical data of any value to Saul, and some data that was most definitely a plant, like the assertion that the
Fist
and the
Command
would not be ready to leave Earth for at least five days. Still, Saul ran all of this ‘Chris’ through filters, pattern-recognition programs, sifted and sieved him to get every last nugget of potentially useful information, then wiped the storage that had contained him, the subpersona expiring with an electronic sigh.

Certain things now seemed plain. Those moving against Saul wanted him to believe that they were desperate; that if he engaged his ship’s Rhine drive all their plans would come to nothing; that the impossible was being demanded of them by the dictator of Earth. And it was all a lie. They had something, some technology or method, to achieve what Galahad wanted. That they had built and were in the process of dispatching those ships indicated this, for Serene Galahad might be a homicidal autocrat, but she wasn’t insane enough to squander so much on a mere folly. The pattern of holes in the knowledge of this Chris also confirmed this. On the surface the memory erasures looked merely rough, but they covered up some very specific deletions.

Human frustration arose inside Saul, instantly banished, then its source abruptly reprogrammed itself to rid him of that particular route towards time-wasting emotion. He could go no further than affirm that his enemies had something extra, and that they knew how he had intended to react simply by running. As he considered this he noted that those he had summoned some time earlier were now arriving at the door leading into his inner sanctum, so he opened it for them.

They entered quickly, arranging themselves about his gimbals chair like alien priests around some technological god. There was no real need for them all to be present, but by summoning them Saul was making a statement both to them and to himself: in the hierarchy of this ship they stood higher than the humans since they were allowed here, while they also remained totally at his beck and call. But it went beyond that: a need for direct contact both in them and in him, to bring clarity and order.

Swinging his chair round in a slow circle, he studied the ten proctors. Over the time since their initiation, they had every one of them changed. They now wore human clothing or vacuum suits of one kind or another to fit their larger forms. This, Saul knew, was so that they did not look quite so alien and threatening to the humans aboard. Many carried devices of their own manufacture, most of which were staffs like the one Judd first constructed, which was packed with electronics and a power source based on the rectifying batteries, and was both a multipurpose tool and a weapon. But the most radical changes were in the minds that Saul sensed floating like satellites around him. Each was a different shape, each had diverged and specialized, yet they remained conjoined – sharing information like a group of servers. They were like one being with ten facets, but also ten experts, each of which could quite comfortably survive on its own. He also now realized that the one that had named itself Paul was their interface with Saul himself. Paul served as the one designated as both their legate and expert as regards Alan Saul.

‘Humans,’ Saul began, switching straight to the concern that had inspired this meeting.

‘Your ship could be more efficient without them,’ Paul replied, ‘but it could also be more efficient without you. It could be more efficient without us and without individual robots and with all its systems automated.’

Saul smiled as he followed this logical chain. ‘Without the arcoplexes and the Arboretum, efficiency would increase. Without the metal of the hull and much of the superstructure, the engines would prove more efficient. The Traveller engine would operate better without having to haul about the Rhine drive, and the Mach-effect drive would be more efficient without having to incorporate both the Rhine drive and the EM shield. The hull would be better without the holes, and could be made smaller if there was less contained inside. In fact, if there was nothing actually inside this ship, there would be no need for a hull at all . . .’

Stone soup
, Saul thought, allowing them to register that.

Seeing, on a virtual level, the ramped-up communication now occurring between the ten minds, he wondered if they were struggling with rhetoric and irony but, no, Paul had started in with the same, so they should all be able to handle it. This communication was of a much higher order.

Saul continued, ‘My initial purpose was based on my genetically based need for safety and survival.’

‘Which you are now transcending,’ Paul observed.

Saul wasn’t so sure about that, but allowed it.

‘Beyond survival, what is my purpose now?’

‘It is whatever
you
decide.’

‘And the humans?’

‘What you decide.’

Saul felt a moment of chagrin that was immediately tracked down and analysed. He realized he had some difficulty in just asking a simple question because of complicated reasons involving its human source and a growing arrogance within him. He negated those reasons and asked, ‘What do you think?’