‘Much the same conclusion we have all come to.’ Marsin nodded, but he was still watching Alex very carefully. ‘However, Saul is very powerful and if we move against him we must do so with the utmost caution and precision.’
‘Secure communications would have to be first priority,’ Alex opined. ‘The only reason Malden’s revolution wasn’t stillborn was because of its secure subnet communication.’
‘And upon gaining a secure method of communication?’
‘Organization, command structure, arms caches and some sort of assassination plan.’ Alex paused. ‘I would also suggest that recruits be organized into cells of four or five with only one of those able to communicate with the commanders. You wouldn’t want just one fuck-up to result in the whole network being taken out.’
‘We already have our cells,’ said Marsin, now moving beyond simple debate. ‘The problem here is the technology being developed by Hannah Neumann, and effectively controlled by Saul. Anyone captured who possesses a link to command could be mind-reamed for information.’
‘But,’ said Alex, ‘you must ensure that no one within the cells actually knows who they are talking to.’
‘True, but all that secrecy makes both organization and recruitment a very difficult task.’
‘You have two choices, then,’ said Alex. ‘You must do it quick and dirty, sacrificing secrecy, or you must play a long and slow game.’
‘Our choice has been for the former,’ Marsin told him. ‘It’s our contention that, once Saul takes this station out of the solar system, our chances of succeeding against him will rapidly diminish. We need to strike while he is still uncertain of his power.’
Quick and dirty . . . Yes, Alex now remembered persuading certain revolutionaries on Earth of that course, resulting in the death of some delegates who had been an irritation to Messina, followed very quickly by the deaths of the revolutionaries themselves. He sat back and folded his arms. So, this was no debating society, then. He wondered if they’d actually killed anyone yet; if any potential recruits had decided they didn’t want to be involved after hearing too much. During the recent frenzy of construction, there had been two deaths. Could it be that one or both of them had not been accidents at all?
‘So you have a plan?’ he asked.
‘I need to first know if you’re in.’
Alex studied the man, realizing that perhaps there had not yet been any killings, because usually the recruiting process was slower and the weeding out more precise. However, he understood that his own recruitment was to be ‘quick and dirty’ and that therefore the revolutionary command had already contemplated their first killing. Marsin was undoubtedly armed; his body language gave that away. Alex reckoned the remote control he continued to hang on to must control something other than the screen – probably something hidden in the chair Alex sat in.
‘I’m in,’ he said, ‘and, if possible, I want to be in at the front end.’
‘You want to be the one who pulls the trigger on Saul?’
‘I do, since then I will have paid the debt owing to my past, and can move on.’
As Alex was discovering, his past was full of debts and many of them could never be repaid.
‘Though some of us have had reservations about you,’ said Marsin, smiling now though still holding the remote control, ‘most of us were sure your response would be such.’ With his free hand, he rooted in a pocket of his loose-fitting shirt, took out a flat square of dull metal of the kind Alex had seen Ghort surreptitiously attaching to his relay, and tossed it over.
‘What’s this?’ Alex asked, after he had briefly inspected it.
‘You attach it to your relay.’ Marsin pointed to the polished cube hanging on a thin chain around Alex’s neck, ‘and that turns it on. It encodes to the recipient any transmission you send, and you’ll learn how to use it quickly enough.’
‘And who are the recipients?’
‘Your cell commander is your work team leader, Ghort.’
‘As I suspected,’ said Alex, as he pressed the square device against the side of his relay. He wasn’t going to pretend he did not know about Ghort, not now he was about to use a communication method that made attempts at lying difficult.
‘You suspected Ghort was considering rebellion?’ Marsin asked, his lips not moving and the words generating inside Alex’s head without the intervention of his ears.
‘Suspected is too mild a term,’ said Alex. ‘But then I have been trained to look out for stuff like this, which is why you’ll find me useful.’
‘And you still want to be at the sharp end?’ enquired Marsin, implant-to-implant. ‘You still want to be the one who kills Alan Saul?’
‘I want to be the one who kills him, yes.’ Alex paused for a second, watching some remaining tension fading from Marsin’s expression, as he finally released his hold on the remote control. ‘But, tell me, do our cells only consist of those who are chipped like us?’
‘Yes, because we can only be sure of each other like this.’ Alex felt that the revolutionaries had misunderstood the title ‘the Owner’. Hadn’t they realized that Saul did not claim ownership of them but of this ship he was building, of the technology that surrounded them – claiming it in the same way as any pre-Committee human being would have claimed the ownership of his own body. If they had understood that concept, they would not have put such a heavy and dangerous reliance on one piece of technology inside that technological body. They had much to learn, these people, and yet probably not enough time.
When they arrived here, the ship had possessed its supplies of superconducting cable, but not enough. One of the smelting plants – now permanently sited in its dock since most of the ore-transport tube below had been dismantled and most of the carbon composite cable it had been wound out on had been taken away and cut up for other purposes – had, after many days, come close to solving that lack. Saul had watched his robots transport the selected chunks of asteroid matter, out of which the requisite materials could be refined, into the plant where older-style robots had fielded them and fed them into the gravelling machines that led to the smelters. Within an hour, other machines had begun braiding fulleride and copper oxide filaments, spiral-wrapped in HTS tapes, to provide the extra cable required. This, because of a lack of rare earth elements, was not completely superconducting but would be good enough for the job in hand.
Meanwhile, the two space planes that had earlier launched from Dock Two – the same craft that had taken out the two work teams to slice up the ice asteroid – were now arriving at their targets. Saul watched through cams as one plane matched course with and descended upon a Mars Traveller solid-fuel booster tank – one of hundreds currently in orbit about Jupiter. He felt docking bayonets clunk into place in holes prepared in the booster tank for precisely such retrieval, then felt in his bones the space plane’s engines labouring to pull its load to a new course. Just at that moment, the second plane docked with its own load, and likewise began shifting it.
‘ETA approximately twenty hours,’ one of the pilots declared unnecessarily. ‘Work team heading out.’
Saul had selected the personnel with more caution this time. The likes of Ghort and the other wannabe rebels could not be trusted with fielding and bringing in such large and heavy objects. Some inadvertent accident might result in one of those tanks ending up on a fast trajectory towards the centre of the station itself, therefore towards Saul’s inner sanctum, and he had no intention of making things that easy for them.
He watched as the work teams aboard each space plane headed out onto the booster tanks, dragging with them space-plane steering thrusters – specially insulated, electronically hardened and made to run on a simple fixed programme. The tanks even had places ready for the attachment of these, and Saul silently thanked the Committee Mars Missions steering and focus groups for their frankly astounding foresight, though it occurred to him that it might have been Var, as she had worked her way up to become overseer of the construction station,
who had ensured all this. Of course, neither Var nor any others in those numerous political groups could have foreseen such thrusters being used to position the fuel tanks in the Io flux tube. They would probably have quite rightly pointed out that, subject to fluctuations of thousands of amps in a massive current, the thrusters would simply fail. Saul, of course, expected them to fail, but not before they’d done their job of positioning these tanks – a job that would have scrapped the space planes themselves and killed everyone aboard.
‘Le Roque,’ said Saul, and he watched as the technical director looked up in surprise at the nearest cam in Tech Central. ‘Are we all secure?’
Le Roque took a moment to think this over. Saul knew he wasn’t reviewing the most recent preparations for another move of the ship under Mach-effect drive, but deciding on whether to ask why Saul was asking. Le Roque knew everything was secure, and he knew for certain that Saul knew.
‘Yes, we’re ready,’ he said, without moving his lips, before returning his attention to his three main screens.
What else to ask?
Saul knew, in a perfectly intellectual way, how those aboard felt he was becoming remote and disconnected from them and their human concerns. Le Roque’s response was a perfect illustration of this and, in that moment, Saul realized he must reengage so as not to go completely out of touch, at least for now. With great difficulty he again breached the division between his human self and the rest, and allowed the human part to continue the conversation.
‘I ask,’ he said, ‘because it seems this would be a good time to begin reassessing all flight preparations. The possibility of becoming complacent should never be ruled out.’
‘The procedures are fine,’ replied Le Roque, ‘and complacency only gets banished when someone discovers the penalty for not following them.’
Rather cold, really, but then Saul had noted how all the chipped personnel developed a decidedly callous streak shortly after implantation. This had nothing to do with the implants themselves, but was all about how those recipients perceived how the implants should affect their behaviour. Humans – sometimes the novelty of their foibles could become wearing.
‘How are you finding your new implant?’ Saul asked.
‘More efficient,’ Le Roque replied, still without speaking out loud.
‘I’m so glad,’ said Saul, casting irony into the void.
‘And how are you finding your implant?’ he asked Rhine who, rather than stay in Tech Central, had returned to his own lab in order to monitor the Mach drive’s effects.
‘Chipper!’ Rhine almost yelled.
There were of course exceptions to that dehumanizing effect. In some, certain traits became emphasized. In Rhine that trait just happened to be lunacy.
‘How far along are you with your new theories of everything?’
Rhine looked up at the nearest cam. ‘Hypotheses,’ he stated, then returned his attention to the screens. The line between hypothesis and theory had always been one where the arguments were bitterest, and where scientists might sacrifice their careers on the altar of empiricism.
‘I am about to move the ship,’ Saul announced through the PA system, ‘to a lower offset orbit between Io and Jupiter. That’s a position we should be able to maintain.’
He reached out and uncoiled a thick optic cable, with a full teragate plug, from the arm of his acceleration chair and plugged it into the socket in his skull. Rather than switch straight over to this new connection into his ship’s systems, he ran programs to ensure only a gradual change-over as they approached the Io flux tube.
‘Remember, people, that all radio communications will gradually be replaced by laser coms. Usually you wouldn’t notice any difference, but in this case the coms that route through the ship systems will be affected by the massive EM output of the flux tube.’
Saul moved the ship like a human mind guiding a human body. The drive systems were his locomotion, like in running, walking or swimming. He did not consciously work the vector calculus and check against inner maps of the solar system, just as no runner, walker or swimmer would have to make conscious calculation about what they were doing. He did not have to micromanage everything and he knew how to delegate within the complexity that was his mind, his body. He engaged the Mach-effect drive and pursued Io, dropping steadily into a lower orbit. He felt the tidal tug of Jupiter through stress sensors in the structure all around him and in a sensitive gravity detector sited between a pair of lattice walls, and began to read the vastly smaller pull of the distant moon. He gazed upon a gas giant and its satellite, in the human spectrum and beyond, and through electromagnetic vision saw the part of the flux tube he had chosen as a bright tornado curving from the moon to the north pole of the gas giant. Getting closer to it, he felt induction currents building up in the structure of his body – his ship – and felt systems correcting for that, just as a human body might correct for heat or cold or drunkenness, and he sweated electrostatics.
Unlike with a human body, Saul’s vision could extend inwards wherever he wanted it to. He saw Angela Saberhagen halting to stare at her reflection in a glass window pane and trying to smooth down hair that had begun to puff out like a dandelion head, and now crackled under her touch. He saw Hannah Neumann and Dr Da Vinci engaging in sweaty sex in her laboratory, almost as if she wanted to do this somewhere she knew Saul could be watching, and he realized that the human part of him should feel jealousy if he only allowed it the freedom for such petty emotions.
He saw the proctors all gathered together now in a deserted part of the outer wheel of the old station. Linked together hand to hand, they stood in a row that faced towards the EM shield hardware ranged about the inner walls, and were somehow experiencing the charge of the station, but again he resisted the impulse to snoop. He saw static discharges leaping from strut to strut in vacuum, and an eerie blue glow appearing in certain parts of the cylinder worlds. And he saw Rhine suddenly become animated as the sensors under his control detected ball lightning rolling round the rim, in line with the business end of the EM hardware and passing in front of the row of proctors, who now watched as if they had been expecting it.
However, such effects were not as bad as they could have been, for though the Mach-effect drive was operating through the ship’s EM shield, the shield itself was set at its maximum. Though humans could have survived in the sleet of radiation and ionized particles occurring close to the flux tube, they could never have survived the genetic damage that ensued.
Then he was in place, held there by the drive pushing lightly on the surrounding universe, the ship poised beside an ionic storm that might be invisible to human vision, but certainly not beyond the compass of their instruments. Rectifier battery storage was making good use of these surges, but also dumping energy almost as fast to power self-correcting systems and diagnostics throughout, and as repair robots drew power in order to hunt down and repair blown components. Saul now felt a fuzzy edge to his thinking, to his very being, as the computers fought this disruption. He gazed outwards at the approaching space planes and their loads, watched Var and her teams attaching the ends of the new cable, stored on drums twenty metres across, to EVA units ready to be rolled out and attached to the old Mars Traveller booster tanks. And he waited, and his robots waited, and the crew waited, all in that before-a-thunderstorm sense of expectation that he knew would never end so long as they were here.
Scourge
He’d drifted off to sleep four, maybe five times? Clay couldn’t quite remember how many times, nor how many days they’d spent inside the cramped shuttle. They were still okay for water, since they’d found two VC suits aboard that recycled their urine and would do so indefinitely while power was still available, and food wasn’t a problem either. However, the inside of the shuttle was now getting a bit ripe, even though they’d found a sealable plastic container to use as a toilet, and even though enough water was available for sponge baths. Shuttles like this one simply weren’t designed for lengthy occupati
on.
Trove was again tinkering with the shuttle’s computer. She had a couple of hatches open in the cockpit and was busy swapping out chips. She also had computer code frozen on one of the two screens set into the instrument panel. She reckoned she might be able to access the cam system of the Scourge, though how having a grandstand view of their catastrophic entry into Earth’s atmosphere would help them, Clay had no idea.
‘What about the radio here?’ he asked, trying to think of something helpful, but realizing this was a question he must have asked her before.
Trove stared at him as if he was an idiot. ‘Like I said, the Scourge is EM shielded. Our only chance of getting a signal out would be to send it via the ship’s computers to an exterior aerial, and he’s locked them all out.’
‘But you’re accessing the computer system right now?’
‘Yes,’ she replied with exaggerated patience, ‘but the aerials will still be locked out and we’ll only get an exterior view if he allows it.’
‘So what the hell do we do?’ he asked leadenly.
Yeah, another question he had asked on numerous occasions, and a sign of the general malaise he was sinking into. Physically he now felt a lot better; the pain he had experienced a little while after they had arrived here – once the effect of the painkillers had begun to wane – was fading, but mentally he wasn’t so good. With his body seemingly recovering, it was almost as if it felt it could expend some of its renewed energy on dropping him into a deep depression.
‘We’ve already discussed this,’ she snapped. ‘We try to run when he goes after Galahad. The main engine will fire up, so observers will know there’s someone still aboard, so it won’t matter if this shuttle is then seen leaving.’ She paused for a second. ‘I see no reason why he wouldn’t just let us go.’