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?’
The level of communication between the conjoined minds around him suddenly increased, and again Saul resisted the temptation to listen in.
‘We think,’ Paul finally said, ‘that you have already made your decision. By allowing them all to be backed up, you consider their minds something unique and worth preserving and that, when your own survival is not threatened, you will make every effort to do so.’
‘But there’s more,’ Saul said.
‘Yes,’ Paul agreed, ‘because of the problems they represent to you, aboard your ship, you will dispense with them . . . eventually.’
Saul allowed clarity to banish indecision. Each genetic combination that resulted in a human body was something he could now easily copy, and it was only the minds that were unique, because of their nurture and not their nature. He knew, then, precisely what he would do, once the exigencies of survival had been attended to.
‘But now we have more immediate concerns to consider.’
The proctors were on the move, both physically and mentally; the meeting now over, and their conjoined communications breaking up. Though he was the one who had summoned them here, Saul could not help but feel that he himself had been judged.
‘You cannot run yet,’ Paul opined.
‘Give me your reasoning,’ Saul instructed, to further clarify his thoughts.
‘They will have developed some means of knocking out the drive warp,’ replied Paul. ‘And it will be located aboard the Vision, as well as the other two ships.’
‘Judd?’ Saul enquired.
‘Either a near-c railgun, or some other sort of high-speed missile or some way of disrupting space-time,’ replied the more practically minded proctor.
‘Disrupting space-time on that level is beyond even me,’ Saul replied, ‘so I doubt they have anything like that. One must also factor in their proximity.’ Was he merely being arrogant? No, not about the space-time disruption. However, after seeing those test shots directed at Earth’s moon, it seemed likely they’d found a way to fire nuclear missiles, at railgun speeds, that would deliver the impact required to knock out his warp. Thereafter they could just keep knocking it out until the other two ships arrived. He needed to deal with the Vision immediately, as he’d suspected.
‘Supposing our warp is knocked out,’ said Saul, ‘they will then try to knock out our vortex generator.’
‘The Mach-effect drive is distributed,’ said Judd. ‘As long as it is supplied with power, the drive can be maintained through constant attention.’
‘It can be used to interfere with their targeting,’ Paul added. ‘We calculate an over eighty per cent chance, on probable attack patterns, that, armoured as it is now, the vortex ring can be kept safe, though supporting infrastructure is certain to be damaged.’
The Mach drive could be used to help Argus dodge bullets, Saul translated, and the armour would stop anything that got too close.
Already Saul had called up the schematic in his mind and was having his robots collect essential materials and components and dispatching them to critical junctures all around the hull of the ship. How unsurprising, he felt, that the critical sectors numbered ten, and that his own communication with the robots might be compromised during any conflict.
‘So you know what to do,’ he stated.
Led by Judd, the proctors headed for the door. Each would control a group of robots, their task being to keep the Mach-effect drive operating. As they left, he considered what must be their point of view. If he deemed the humans aboard an encumbrance he was prepared to be rid of, how then did he view the proctors? In the end, though they had promised to serve him, how highly did they rate their own survival?
‘I will do the right thing,’ he said to Paul, the last proctor to leave.
‘Of course you will, Alan Saul,’ Paul replied, ‘by your own definition of “right”.’
Somewhat uncomfortable with that notion, Saul waited, watching through cams as the proctors rapidly reached their designated locations, where robots gathered around them, clinging to the inner skeleton of the hull. Once they were in position, he considered his own options, deciding in an instant that now it was time for him to change, at least, his own approach.
It was time to take this fight to them.
Even as he made his plans, he sent a warning. Roused from slumber, Le Roque pulled on a ship suit and stumbled from the cabin he had reoccupied in the relocated Tech Central and, not bothering to attach the fones he had seemed reluctant to abandon, began issuing his instructions through his implant – instructions dealing wit
h the human population, which was now his responsibility. Throughout the station, work crews began locking down their latest tasks and heading back to their accommodation, while the robots folded themselves around beam junctures or anywhere else suitable nearby. A further signal transmitted through kilometres of optic went to a couple of explosive charges fixed on the two booster tanks acting as anode and cathode in the flux tube, and bright explosions severed the cables from their anchor points. Since so much cable lay outside, the feed from the tube did not drop immediately, but gradually diminished as the cables wound in. Meanwhile, Saul started up two new fusion reactors and four fission reactors utilizing radioactives mined from the rubble pile, then prepared the Traveller engine to fire.
‘Make sure of your weapons,’ he instructed the Saberhagen twins, even though he felt sure of them himself, and could take control of them in an instant.
‘Are they coming?’ asked Brigitta.
‘No, not yet,’ Saul replied, ‘but they obviously want a war, so that’s what I’m going to give them.’
13
See No Evil
Under the Committee, millions of Earth’s citizens were sent for ‘adjustment’, where the methods used were essentially behavioural, with the subjects being questioned at length and tortured whenever they gave the wrong answer. This resulted in many of them being crippled both physically and mentally and thus becoming of no further use to society, and therefore disposed of. Subsequent refinements such as the pain-inducer cut down on the number being physically crippled, while precise lie detection facilitated the more precise targeting of pain. As a result, those sent for adjustment were truly adjusted, and were often unrecognizable to their relatives and friends after their sojourn in Inspectorate cells. Before the introduction of biochips, which led to the possibility of directly programming a human mind from a computer, other methods had been tried. It is known that a mind can be partially reprogrammed via the body’s senses, but that is a difficult and information-intensive technique. Towards the end of Messina’s reign, most of these techniques were abandoned as a wasteful expenditure of vital resources on yet another resource the state had too much of: human beings. The main instrument of Inspectorate adjustment therefore became the selective cull.
Argus
Var locked down her overseer’s office, on the ship’s skeleton, just fifty metres away from where the hull had yet to be fully enclosed. Despite Le Roque’s order for her to head to one of the more protected accommodation units, or one of the arcoplexes, she remained precisely where she was. Her brother had issued instructions to the effect that Le Roque was in charge of the human complement aboard until such a time as the humans decided otherwise, and Saul’s only interventions would concern the safety of his ship and himself. How he assigned such responsibilities in detail was all very debatable, though it was noticeable how generally terse his instructions and warnings were becoming.
However, one thing was certain: it was Var’s fault.
Var cringed inwardly and could not shake off her own sense of guilt. There were no blood spatters evident on the suit she wore – they had all been cleaned off thoroughly – yet it seemed she could still taste Gilder Main’s mouth, from when she had tried to resuscitate him, and still feel the weight of the adjustable spanner in her hand as she brought it down on Thomas Grieve’s skull. And she could still hear him crying.
These actions of hers had pushed Saul over the edge. She was someone he had risked much to save and to whom he had entrusted the task of turning Argus Station into an interstellar spacecraft, then she had repaid him by displaying a lack of trust in his judgement. Behaving like a member of the Inspectorate, she had committed murder, and now he had washed his hands not just of her but of them all. But didn’t that simply prove her point? He had always been on the edge of something like this, always been on the edge of saying: Damn you, you’ll do what I want, but beyond that I don’t care. Didn’t his very order that humans – as if he was no longer a member of their race – should police and govern themselves prove that he wished merely to dispense with them? Could she not be right in still thinking that his latest action was just one small step on that route, and that he would still use the impending assassination attempt as an excuse to do just that?
Light glared throughout the ship and Var felt as if an invisible hand was trying to shove her to one side. Checking her instruments, she saw that the cables were now all wound in and that the Traveller engine had just fired up, in order to carry the ship away from Io’s flux tube. On an intellectual level she knew he was using that rather than the Mach-effect drive to keep the latter secret from ‘the enemy’, but on a basic emotional level she cursed him for failing to inform anyone where and why he was moving the ship, just as she damned herself.
‘Where are you taking us, Alan?’ she asked through her fone but, as with the other questions she had recently directed at him, no reply was forthcoming.
What to do?
The temptation just to do nothing, simply to wrap herself in misery and wait, was leaden inside her. But Var, who had pushed herself all her life, knew she was incapable of giving in to such a sense of failure. She set her overseer’s office moving, meanwhile putting a call through her fone and routing all imagery available to the screen before her. After just a few minutes she received her reply.
‘Langstrom here,’ said the police commander. ‘What can I do for you, Var?’
‘I have all their names and I know what they’re planning,’ she replied, noting how he had allowed only a static image icon to come through, even for those with fones capable of displaying real-time images.
‘I’m sorry, but I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Langstrom replied. ‘Whose names and what plans?’
Var felt a hollowness in her stomach that had nothing to do with hunger. The police commander must know that someone she had gone to visit had since disappeared. Was he now trying to distance himself from any involvement?
Before she could say anything, he continued, ‘Perhaps we should meet to discuss this. I much prefer talking face-to-face with anyone claiming to have important information.’ He paused for a second. ‘I see you’re moving your office down towards the outer endcap of Arcoplex One. I’ll come out to join you from Lock Seven. See you shortly.’
Ah, perhaps not arse-covering but an understandable caution.
Being utterly sure of its grip on the ship’s skeleton, under the drag of acceleration, the overseer’s office continued its progress down towards the endcap. Meanwhile, Var began working on something she had been neglecting. If she became the focus of an investigation, she had to cover herself properly now. She dispatched a program to hunt down and erase any available data about her previous meeting with Langstrom, and was surprised when it found cam footage taken in this very office and then did manage to erase it. So was Saul actually allowing her to cover her tracks? A moment later she discovered something else: data trails leading to large portions of the station system were now partitioned off so tightly that not even a byte or two could squeeze through. So, while Saul had left the human population to its own devices, he was also leaving them their own portion of the station system, and had separated away his essential self so that what he already knew could never be erased by anyone else.
Next she began shutting down cams and other data recorders inside the office so that the most anyone could ever know was that Langstrom had visited here. Then, as the office reached a tentative limb out onto the bearing endcap, set to make its way over to Airlock Seven, she abruptly had second thoughts. Maybe this was precisely what Langstrom wanted her to do, so that he could then completely remove any evidence of his involvement in the murders she had committed. No – far too paranoid – so she finished the disconnections.
Out on the endcap the office finally paused over the chosen airlock, lowered itself to mate with it, seals and bayonet fittings thunking home. After a moment the floor hatch swung upwards and Langstrom, wearing a VC suit with the helmet detached,
propelled himself inside. He then paused to gaze up at the nearest cam.
‘This is a black spot now,’ Var assured him.
‘So who are they,’ he asked carefully, ‘and what’s their plan?’
Earth
‘We have a problem,’ said Calder. ‘And I am calling to advise you, for your own security and for the security of Earth, to leave the station now.’
Maintaining an expression of slightly distracted boredom, Serene studied his image on the desk screen. The man was difficult to read, perhaps because his face was not so clear through the visor of the vacuum survival suit he wore. Was he frightened?
‘I trust this is not some problem that might delay the departure of the Fist and the Command,’ she replied. Then, realizing she wasn’t reacting properly, she asked, ‘What exactly is this problem?’
‘We have an outbreak of the Scour aboard, and whether or not the crews or soldiers aboard the Fist and the Command have been infected I can’t even guess. It’s very serious, since at least two hundred people have died and many more are infected.’ He paused for a second, then continued, ‘We should have your space planes prepped and ready for departure within the hour.’
Serene stared at him for a moment, reflecting that the planes he mentioned should be ready shortly after the two spaceships were underway, then she glanced up from her screen at Elkin, the woman’s two aides and Sack. Elkin looked terrified, obviously having already gleaned knowledge of this outbreak just beforehand, while the two aides appeared both puzzled and scared. Sack was even more difficult to read than Calder, with his reptilian skin blunting all human expression. Serene returned her attention to the screen, exuding seriousness and concern.
‘Can you give me more detail on this outbreak?’ she enquired, making no comment on his suggestion that she depart.
Blank-faced, Calder replied, noticeably no longer using the honorific, ‘Just that it must have started amidst the Inspectorate personnel, since it seems to be mainly them who are infected.’