‘The Vision will launch the moment it is ready,’ said Bartholomew. ‘It will get as close as feasible to Argus, without engaging, and expert tactical teams aboard will relay data back to me. As I believe you are aware, it will be carrying one of the warp missiles. This is our solution to the warp-missile delay. Saul will not consider the Vision much of a threat and so will be unlikely to run. Most probably he will run only when the Command and the Fist set out, whereupon the Vision can use its missile to disable his ship for us.’
‘How will you know whether Saul is running or just relocating within the solar system?’
‘That is a question to which the tactical teams are applying themselves.’ Bartholomew paused, grimaced. ‘Of course, we will not be able to know for sure whether he’s running or not, which is why I’ve designated a perimeter beyond which he can’t be allowed to go.’
‘And that is?’
‘Effectively a sphere enclosing that portion of the solar system that lies within the orbit of Neptune.’
‘That’s a large . . . perimeter,’ said Serene, aware on an intellectual level of the appalling vastness out there, but also aware that full comprehension of it lay far out of reach of her planetary-evolved mind.
‘True,’ Bartholomew shrugged, ‘but it is a sphere that Argus or one of our own ships could cross in nine or so hours, and which one of Calder’s missiles could cross considerably quicker. I had considered expanding that sphere by a factor of ten. However, the chances of the missiles we fire at Argus hitting something else along the way increase by an appreciable factor too, and of course our supply of missiles is limited.’ Bartholomew glanced at Calder for confirmation.
‘By the time the Fist is ready to launch, we should have been able to construct one more,’ Calder said firmly. ‘It’s a matter of resource allocation. Making a warp missile is hardly like packing high explosive into a tube, or even making shaped charges around some fissile . . . it’s not even close. They take a great deal of time and effort – both of which would now be better spent on getting the ships ready.’
‘If one is to suppose that three ships are actually required,’ said Bartholomew.
As the two of them started debating the relative merits of fewer ships and more missiles, Serene found her attention wandering. Damn, but it was so sterile up here, and abruptly she found the presence of these two men irritating.
‘That will be all,’ she interrupted. ‘You both may leave now.’
After a short shocked pause, Bartholomew abruptly stood up, gave a brief and oddly archaic bow. ‘Ma’am.’
Calder stood up next, looking as if he wanted to say something further, but then echoed Bartholomew’s bow before following the admiral to the door. Sack was already peering at her questioningly, but she waved a hand of dismissal at him too. She was tired of human company, and he just about qualified in that regard. Once they were all gone, she stood up and walked over to gaze across the construction station.
Yes, it was sterile here but this was, she felt sure, the environment that the bulk of humanity would end up occupying. Again she considered some of her earlier speculations about what final form those humans would take, while also considering the initial results of laboratory trials she had set in motion.
It was, she now knew, indeed possible to manufacture a virus capable of modifying DNA to her requirements. However, it would be the children of those infected who would have their lifespans shortened and who would die, without senescence, in an approximate age range of between forty and fifty years. Those with such shortened lifespans could have their span increased, however, by the constant administration of drugs. This same virus would not render the recipients infertile, but another virus could be made to achieve that – this infertility continuing into subsequent generations and also amenable to negation by drug therapy. It would also be possible to create vaccines for both viruses, even though, as she considered that, Serene could think of no one who should be so vaccinated beyond herself.
She, the state, would thus be in total control of human lifespan and fertility. Then, while technology continued to advance and as robots and expert computer systems shunted humans aside, the planet would never again be burdened with an excess population. She would, she now decided, hold back on this no longer, but move from laboratory trials to field trials the moment she returned to Earth. Previously, she had considered the possibility of excess population being used for human expansion into the solar system but, in reality, population control became more essential when such populations were moved into environments even more limited in resources than those of Earth.
Serene strolled back to the sofa and sat down, feeling buoyant again – but, as ever, only for a moment or two. She had the future perfectly mapped out in her own mind, but still a large blot marred that map: Alan Saul. Once she had dealt with him, no other human could ever be allowed to get so out of control. No other human would ever obtain such access to personal power.
Argus
The bulge of the dressing on the back of Alex’s skull was a constant reminder of his recent trip to see Hannah Neumann. He kept trying to reach up and finger it, and frequently had to snatch his hand away once his gloved fingers rattled against the helmet of his heavy spacesuit. Apparently she could only take the biopsy, since that was a surgical technique that required little energy, but the cerebral implant would have to wait. All she had in stock were already assigned, and more needed to be manufactured. This could not be done yet while the whole station was conserving energy: the lights were turned off in the Arboretum, and it and the arcoplexes were now free-wheeling, with no energy being provided to their motors; similarly all manufacturing was closed down and the smelting plants were somnolent in their docks.
Alex felt a degree of relief about that. Even though he had decided to have the implant, the idea of someone cutting into his skull evoked vague and unpleasant memories of the numerous cerebral operations he had undergone back on Earth. Hannah Neumann had been swift to note evidence of this while she scanned his skull prior to the biopsy.
‘It’s not usually necessary to do this,’ she had told him, ‘but what lies inside your skull has been altered . . . isn’t the same as standard human.’
Standard human?
‘So what does that tell you?’ he had asked, gesturing to the 3D scan on the nearby screen.
‘You’ve got a micro-wire net inserted to provide electrical stimulation to various brain centres, along with a system of micro-tubules through which various neurochemicals were injected to targeted points,’ she had then explained. ‘It’s all a bit primitive – state-of-the-art about thirty years ago – and it’s what they used to reprogramme you and erase your memories. There’s also a lot of scarring from subsequent updates, along with the addition of a connector to both networks set in the top of your skull, under your scalp. I imagine you were one of the first: one of the prototypes.’
‘Thirty years from that tank,’ he had admitted, ‘but I don’t know if I was one of the first.’
‘Putting an implant in your skull is going to require more extensive surgery,’ she had continued, ‘I’ll need to remove much of what has been added, including a couple of chips that are constantly making neuro-blockers and other odd substances. Also, I must make some repairs and some reconnections. It could be that you’ll then access old memories. It could also be that your character will change.’ She had paused, watching him carefully while displaying a hint of that suspicion of him that others aboard the station tended to show. ‘I’ll need to put you under close observation, and you won’t be able to go back to work for a while.’
Now he was back at work, wondering if he really wanted to go through with that extensive surgery, and observing just what all the spare energy was being used for. He, Gladys, Akenon and Ghort, along with two robots under Ghort’s control, were positioned on one corner of the platform made ready to take the Mars Traveller engine. The behemoth itself was sliding slowly past them, almost like an old-time super-tan
ker drawing past a dock. Such was its sheer scale that it seemed to Alex as if it was the platform he stood upon that was in motion.
The engine was angled in slightly, so its business end would pass through a circular gap allowed in the spherical superstructure of the spaceship. Their team presently waited by a slowly unwinding cable drum – one of eight positioned all across the platform. Once the shock-absorbing base of the Traveller engine passed the platform, every drum would then begin braking, bringing the giant to a halt, while impellers dotted across its surface would begin pushing it into position. Thereafter they would wind in cable to tow it down to its destined resting place.
‘It’s gonna come down on us like Goliath’s boot,’ Gladys predicted, ‘and turn us into mush.’
‘Who’s Goliath?’ asked Akenon.
‘Some fantasy game character,’ replied Gladys.
‘Actually,’ interjected Ghort, ‘Goliath was a biblical character, as in “David and Goliath”. And, considering the context, “Goliath’s sandal” would be more correct.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ concurred Gladys, ‘David was that guy with the spell-hammer and plasma rifle.’
Ghort emitted a low moaning sound and banged the heel of his hand against the side of his space helmet. Alex supposed it was all very well having this instant mental access to the computer library of Argus, but passing on the knowledge thus acquired could be like . . . casting pearls before swine. He then wondered where that phrase had emerged from – and if it might have leaked out of one of those parts of his mind that Neumann seemed to think were now sealed.
Incrementally, the base of the engine came into view over the edge of the platform. Peering across at it, Alex again suffered one of those changes in perspective that seemed a constant while he was working in zero gravity. Now he felt as if he was standing on an elevator platform dropping past some monolithic factory complex. The dome-shaped pellet aggregation plants were now above the platform, while directly opposite him lay the big cylindrical fuel tanks, partially concealed by secured coils of cable and the tied-down fifty-metre-long hydraulic shock absorbers. As these slid past, the spherical start-up fusion reactors then came into view, and next the three-metre-thick layer of foam composite that had been attached to the now practically non-existent central asteroid.
‘Braking now,’ Ghort announced.
The cable drums were computer controlled, so it was not necessary for anyone to do anything, nor had Ghort’s announcement been necessary because they could all feel the sudden vibration through their feet. The cable from their drum – a five-centimetre-thick composite of braided steel and carbon fibre – drew taut over tensioning wheels, above the aggregation plants, to its point of attachment on the other side of the engine. Alex felt the platform push up against his feet as the weight of the engine tugged on it, apparently, as calculated, stretching the column below by nearly eight metres.
Behind the engine, picked out in work lights scattered along the length of the behemoth, clouds of water vapour became visible from impellers firing somewhere out of sight. The engine slowed like a giant train coming into a station, the foam-composite base rising a hundred metres above them, then slowly beginning to swing across.
‘Check your tools,’ Ghort instructed.
Alex gazed down at the socket driver fixed by his feet, shrugged and picked it up, triggered it to watch the socket already in place spin, and checked its small alert screen. Nothing wrong, all perfectly fine . . . then he remembered to set it in reverse, since his next immediate job was to undo bolts rather than tighten them. Meanwhile, the robots under Ghort’s control went over the edge and began hauling up beams and slotting them into sockets all around the platform and, now that the engine was out of the way, Alex could see over to the adjacent section of the outer sphere – directly on the level of the platform about a kilometre and a half away – where the new robots had conjoined themselves into golden centipede forms and were already building inwards the lattice wall that would connect to those same beams. When they were done, the wall would form a section dividing off the half-kilometre-tall hemisphere in which sat the Traveller itself – a wall that would require further strengthening before the engine could be fired up.
‘All drums synchronized,’ said Ghort, ‘we’re winding it in.’
Did having an implant incline one thus to make unnecessary statements? Alex wondered.
The Traveller engine now lay perfectly in position above the platform, and it did indeed seem like a massive weight ready to come down and crush them. However, the tug they were to give it was but a small one for, though the platform and column below could take a great deal in the way of impact shock, they didn’t want the engine to go bouncing away again. The impetus it was now being given had been precisely calculated so that the shock-absorbing layers, and a series of barbed fittings perfectly lined up below, would negate it.
‘Cable detaching – go and get it, Gladys,’ Ghort instructed. ‘Akenon, Alex – get to it.’
As Gladys launched herself up along the slackened cable, Alex and Akenon strode over to the motorized cable drum and at once began taking out all the bolts holding it in place. Necessarily, because of the huge load it had been under, there were a lot of them. Each bolt he took out, Alex carefully placed in the pouch on his belt, since losing a bolt resulted in a loss of pay – and, besides that, no one wanted heavy lumps of metal floating free when the Traveller eventually did fire up.
Shortly, Gladys was on her way back to them with the end of the cable, while the drum continued to wind in the slack. Using her suit impellers, she fell past, slowing beside one of the newly placed beams sticking out from the platform edge. Here she attached the cable end just as Alex turned a corner on the plate securing the cable drum in place. He paused to look up, saw that the base of the engine now lay only fifty metres above, and was steadily drawing closer. There was little risk to anyone, however, since it was travelling so slowly that anyone could get out of the way quickly enough. The only risk was that all of the cable drums might not be shifted out of the way in time, so the impellers would have to fire up again to stop the engine’s descent.
‘That’s the one I was looking for,’ said Akenon, holding up the last bolt.
‘Me too,’ said Alex.
By now, the drum had ceased turning and a slack length of cable arced its way over to where Gladys had attached the other end. Alex and Akenon followed this out, propelling themselves from the edge of the platform into open vacuum. Ghort followed next, one of his robots heading back, past him, to close its forelimbs around the spindle points of the drum and its motor. Even as it did so, and as he propelled himself out after the rest of his team, the drum started turning again, towing itself along the length of the cable towards the anchor point at the end, guided all the way by the robot, out from underneath the descending mass of the engine.
Grabbing one of the new beams, Alex attached his socket driver to it, then his safety line. He gazed up, past the great descending mass, towards the hole, five hundred metres away, out of which poked the throats of the fusion chambers. He recognized now why some had compared this device to the tower of an ancient cathedral, some place of worship, and felt glad to have retained his capacity for awe.
‘No time for gawping,’ urged Ghort. ‘We’ve got work to do.’
There was no conventional dimensionality to the virtual world, and so Saul’s control over his nascent spaceship was no different wherever he actually located his physical self. But he still retained a human conception of power, where to be at the centre of things was to be physically present at that physical centre. At the touch of his mind, the armoured door swung open, leading into what personnel aboard were already calling his ‘inner sanctum’. He stepped inside, leaving the spidergun outside.
No one had seen this place being built, for he had used only robots in its final construction or assembly. The central chamber within was circular. At one side a single acceleration chair hung in reinforced gimbals that were simi
lar in appearance to an orrery, surrounded by curving panoramic screens. He didn’t really need these screens but, as with much in his inner sanctum, like the swing-in keyboards and ball controls on the chair arms, they were a backup should he at any time find himself unable to access all the cams and computers of his new ship mentally. He also had to admit to himself that such human access kept him grounded; kept him from losing himself in the world of mind. The rest of the room, but for a cageway leading to rooms above and below, was empty space provided for his leisure, but which he’d yet to equip. Surrounding this central room were four more rooms, all interconnecting: a kitchen area mostly automated, a sleeping area he might never use, a washroom and toilet, and then a final area for storage.
Saul headed across the empty floor to the cageway, not yet required for going down because the room below was empty too – a museum and display area for which he had yet to obtain any exhibits – and now propelled himself to the room above. Here was part of the reason for Hannah’s frustration in obtaining the right equipment for her production floor. The room contained five amniotic tanks with specialized cooling systems, also mainframe computing he could separate from the rest of the ship, a surgery containing the most advanced equipment he could obtain and which would soon be in use, small manufactories, robots and other high-tech items galore. Here he could do just about anything that could be done throughout the entirety of Arcoplex Two, though naturally on a smaller scale. He next walked over to the banks of cylinders running on their own independent cooling system, for here too he had moved Earth’s Gene Bank, along with hard copies of the genetic data kept on file throughout the ship. Was he retreating here? he wondered. No, he was making himself a fortress. And soon he would move his backups here too.
Returning to the central room, he climbed into the array of gimbals and strapped himself down in the acceleration chair. Suddenly he found himself at a still point, his mind utterly clear, and allowed his consciousness to expand throughout the entire ship. He studied its spherical skeleton; the two arcoplexes, the arboretum cylinder and a fourth spindle for another arcoplex were the spokes of the old station wheel. Another arcoplex spindle under construction, which extended above, and the column for the Mars Traveller extending below formed the wheel’s axle. He then focused on some of the detail of the engine itself, which had now been attached, both visually and also in the virtual world.