He glanced round at his command crew, all busily at work on the final diagnostic runs and checks. He clicked a screen tab for the latest updates from the medics aboard both the Command and the Fist and was relieved to see that no instances of the Scour had yet been reported. Then he again addressed his comlifer.
‘So, since we destroyed that satellite, Saul has no access to data from Earth apart from anything he can pick up with his telescopes, which will therefore be already out of date,’ he said.
‘Not unless he’s found another way around causality,’ Shivers replied.
An image up in the corner of the big curved screen facing Bartholomew’s chair showed the construction station rapidly receding. Presently both the Fist and the Command were under fusion drive, putting themselves between the brightness of Earth and distant Jupiter, and both using a shielding technique that had hidden the station in which the Scourge had been built – coherent projection of whatever lay behind it towards any eyes that might be looking, in this case some pink eyes out in orbit of the gas giant Jupiter itself. Alan Saul would not know that the message to the Vision, which he had certainly intercepted after so quickly cracking their communications, had in fact been a lie; and that Bartholomew’s two ships were not yet on their way out and would not be underway for half an hour.
‘Let’s hope this has worked,’ he said.
‘The Vision was blind and in danger,’ Shivers replied. ‘Even though targeting remained available for its warp missile, it could not use it because Saul was approaching on conventional drive, and the impact would have completely destroyed his ship. The Vision’s choices were then either to fight or to move. If it had fought, it would have lost. Due to Saul’s approach velocity, it could only have used its Alcubierre drive to move, and in that case there was a chance that Saul would have run – and then, especially with the warp missile balancing delay, we would have lost him.’
‘I’m aware of that,’ said Bartholomew.
‘The assessment of our tactical team,’ Shivers lectured him, ‘or rather of those of them not presently in Medical, was that, upon intercepting that message, he will run, whereupon the Vision can use its warp missile, and the plan can continue as before. My own assessment is the same. Even though he’s obviously decided to become a bit more proactive, he’ll see no benefit in hanging round to face us.’
‘Let’s hope they’re right.’
‘We won’t know until we are there,’ Shivers replied.
Bartholomew nodded to himself: by the time any data from the Vision regarding how things had transpired out there reached the Command and the Fist, they would already be under drive and unable to receive it. The admiral again considered the possibility of dropping the Command out of Alcubierre drive in order to receive that data, and he finally made his decision. Yes, he would. In tactical terms it was not such a great idea to divide one’s forces, but if Saul had managed to escape the trap laid for him, they needed to know, for there was a remote chance, depending on whatever route Saul took out of the solar system, of the Command being able to use its own warp missile to stop him.
Bartholomew issued his orders, then opened a channel to Captain Oerlon, aboard the Fist, to keep him apprised.
‘The disabling shot from the Vision should at least take me out of the balancing delay time,’ said Oerlon, tugging at the thick collar of a gel-tank acceleration suit. ‘I’ll make final approach through the Jovian system on fusion, and if he manages to get his drive functioning before I’m on him, I should be able to knock him out again.’
‘You’ll make sure it’s an accurate shot,’ said Bartholomew.
Oerlon, who was a morose-looking individual with a large straggly beard, pale sick-looking skin and some sort of gang tattoo on his temple, nodded gravely and said, ‘None of us can afford to miss.’
The essence of their tactical problem was that Saul could run at any time, and the only way of stopping him was with a warp missile, and they had only four of them: the Fist had two and the Vision and the Command had one each. While the vector calculations made before firing these missiles would be very accurate, and little could change their course once they were fired, the distances involved were huge and the margin for error minimal. Including the acquisition of further tactical data, this was the main reason Bartholomew had ordered the Vision to move in closer to Saul’s vessel. Out of pride, Bartholomew did not want that first critical shot to miss, and beyond that he was aware of what would happen to him if Saul escaped – which was precisely what Oerlon meant.
‘Twenty-three minutes to go,’ said Bartholomew, feeling his stomach tightening.
Within a day, perhaps two, they would either have succeeded or would be contemplating whether or not it was worth returning to Earth.
Argus
Var eased her grip on the stanchion and glanced out the windows of the overseer’s office, but received no clue there about their sudden recent course change.
‘Le Roque tells me he’s taking us towards that ship over Europa.’ Langstrom shook his head. ‘But I’ve not had warnings to prepare for any kind of battle.’
‘Don’t you think we should deal with those concerns that we can deal with?’ Var suggested.
He nodded doubtfully, and continued, ‘The two who were in the accommodation below Tech Central moved over to join the others’ – he glanced at Var – ‘probably because of this alleged bomb. Just a short while ago, however, they all trooped out and disappeared into the nearest cam black spot.’
‘We need to act,’ Var asserted.
‘But you have no real evidence of any of this, and you continue being evasive about how you obtained this information. It needs to be verified. You also say that he already knows about this plot, so he certainly knows all about the bomb too.’
‘He’ll probably let it blow but not be there himself when it happens,’ said Var, not really sure of her own reasoning. ‘Either that or he’s disarmed it.’
‘So why am I here?’ the police commander asked. ‘You’ve given me nothing I can act on and it seems to me that, if what you’re telling me is true, he probably has something already planned for them.’ He gestured towards the mosaic of mug shots displayed on the screen. ‘As he’s stated, we have to look after ourselves, but he’ll react to any direct danger to the ship or himself. Perhaps you can explain your part in this, sister of Alan Saul . . . our Owner.’
Var studied the police commander for a long moment, with a sinking sensation in her stomach. She felt sure she had lost him now, but she had to try.
‘The question that has to be asked is what will be the extent of his reaction to this,’ she replied, still unsure of herself but determined to do something. ‘Hannah Neumann once told me that her greatest fear is that Alan will tire of having to fit all his plans about the needs of the human population aboard this ship – aboard his ship. We all know that he is entirely capable of running it now without us. I’ve known from the moment I stepped aboard that, though I was appointed overseer of the rebuild, my position has been completely superfluous. The implants that enable us to control robots and mentally access the ship’s systems were an apparent effort to raise us above our uselessness to him, and what’s been the result of that? Combined robot and human teams are less efficient than the new robots he’s created, and now chipped rebels are seeking to kill him.’
‘The extent of his reaction, you said?’ Langstrom prompted.
‘He might just be searching for a reason to be rid of us altogether,’ said Var, studying the man’s expression, ‘and this attack on him could provide it. He could turn his robots on us in an instant, and then be free of the encumbrance we represent.’ She paused to collect her thoughts. ‘I don’t think he will do that, though I think we’ll all be heading soon for the Meat Locker, and whether we wake up again after that sleep is . . . debatable.’
‘I’m still not sure what you want me to do,’ said Langstrom.
‘We stop it,’ Var replied, searching for some way to couch thing
s for Langstrom – a man who had probably stuck her brother high on a pedestal. ‘As I see it, he’s given us power over our own affairs and we must therefore take responsibility. I think his recent actions indicate that he wants us to take responsibility; that he demands us to do so and that, if we don’t, he’ll simply finish with us.’
Second guessing the mind of a god, reflected Var, trying to keep the sneer off her face.
‘He’ll have something in place to deal with the threat,’ she continued. ‘Of course he will. But if he is forced to use it, then he’ll see us all as useless as he has already supposed. We must act.’
‘So what now?’ asked Langstrom, folding his arms, still reserving judgement.
‘The bomb first,’ said Var.
He acknowledged that with a nod. ‘I suppose I could do something there.’
‘You must. What have you got to lose?’
Langstrom watched her warily for a moment, then reached up to touch his fone. ‘Colson, I want Disposal One over to the Owner’s sanctum. I’ve an unconfirmed statement that someone might have planted a copper-head armour-piercing bomb against the outer wall. I want you to run a full search and report back.’ After a pause as he listened to the reply, he calmly continued, ‘Yes, maybe he does know about it, but you still do the search, and you still disarm anything you find there. Is that understood?’ After another pause, ‘Yes, right now.’ Langstrom lowered his fingers from the fone.
Var wasn’t sure if she was relieved that things were now in motion. She couldn’t help but feel that the police commander was only humouring her because she was Alan’s sister.
Too many assumptions . . .
‘If they do find something we’ll have some physical evidence to act on,’ he conceded. And in that moment she knew she had lost him; even if he believed her, he thought there was no reason to do anything about it. Langstrom trusted too much in Saul and therefore did not follow her reasoning, did not see her brother’s arrogance and contempt for humanity.
‘We should head to the outer ring,’ she declared. ‘We’ll need some of your men.’
‘You have no indication of where he’s supposedly concealed his backups out there,’ he stated.
‘None at all, but they are supposedly guarded by a spidergun,’ she replied, pulling herself down to sit at a console, before sliding across the overseer’s office manual control.
‘We won’t be able to trace that spidergun, especially if he’s trying to keep these backups hidden.’ He paused, frowning, as the mobile building lurched into motion, then he just gave a shrug. ‘However, these chipped rebels of yours are still dark which means, if they are moving around out there, they’re moving through cam black spots. There are just two places—’
‘Attention all personnel,’ Saul suddenly announced over the PA system. ‘I have evidence that the two remaining Earth warships are currently on their way out towards us. We will therefore be undergoing severe acceleration, so adhere to fusion-drive safety protocols for the moment.’
Var wavered for a second, then instructed her overseer’s office to lock itself down, watching through the windows as it clamped its claws about nearby protuberances before dropping to press the gecko pads on its belly against the metal below. Langstrom could not hide his relief, for they would not be going anywhere for a while. Var suppressed her frustration and contented herself with the knowledge that the chipped rebels would similarly be hindered and, if caught away from some place of safety during the coming acceleration, some of them might be hindered dead. It then occurred to her to wonder why the ship was undergoing such acceleration rather than immediately engaging the Rhine drive. It seemed a pointless thing to do because, surely, once the Rhine drive engaged they were safe until it cut out again, probably deep in interstellar space and far away from Earth and its concerns?
Saul noted a bomb-disposal team had been ordered to head towards his sanctum and, despite his warning, were still following their orders. They weren’t to know that the device Langstrom had dispatched them to find wasn’t really a problem – Saul knew, because he had seen it being made – so he spoke to their leader directly: ‘Colson, get yourself and your men back into some acceleration chairs.’
The man addressed looked up at the nearest cam in the suiting room. ‘Commander Langstrom has ordered me to search for a copper-head explosive on the outer wall of your sanctum.’
‘And I am ordering you to stand down. Langstrom is mistaken. There is no explosive.’
Colson and the rest looked relieved, as they quickly headed out of the suiting room and back the way they had come. Saul pondered for a microsecond the fact that, while he had decided to leave the humans here to look after themselves, he had interfered yet again. Then he focused on other concerns.
If he had engaged the Rhine drive immediately, it would be knocked out before his ship built up enough real space momentum to carry him to the Vision. He needed to be closer and his velocity needed to be higher. By now the crew of the Vision had probably found some way to work around their blindness, therefore he needed to take some risks. He mentally slid into the controls of the Traveller engine, while announcing, ‘Prepare for further acceleration.’ In the engine, he overrode safeties; he put back online two combusters that automatics had shut down; ramped up everything as high as possible without regard for the dirty radioactive wake he would leave. With a huge rumble, the ship shuddered and accelerated, its drive flame sputtering like a gas torch running out of oxygen, a red line of radioactive tritium sketching out behind the ship. Acceleration increased, climbed steadily to one gravity and then beyond. The whole ship’s structure was protesting, but still it wasn’t enough.
Next risk: without notifying the proctors, Saul ramped up the Mach-effect drive, further stabilizing the ship’s structure and increasing its acceleration. There was a danger now that the crew of the Vision would spot the disparity between actual acceleration and what the Traveller engine was capable of. But the Mach-effect was a card he needed to play now. Hands gripping the arms of his chair, he waited – ten minutes, twenty – as velocity began approaching what he required, and the distance between the two ships rapidly diminished.
Time, now.
‘Prepare for possible impact,’ he announced, knowing that most people were already prepared, and showing that he still cared enough to deliver the extra warning.
The proctors, and the robots they controlled, were the most vulnerable now, and he waited just thirty seconds until certain they were all locked down in their respective sectors located around the ship’s skeleton. During a final pause, he ascertained that everything within his purview was as it should be as the ship strained all around him, centred now on Europa and on the Vision.
‘Engaging Rhine drive,’ he then announced.
The colours changed. Jupiter shifted through the spectrum until it glowed a fluorescent orange, its red spot glaring like a ruby held up to the sun. The ship itself seemed to be trying to fold itself in towards some centre point – and then the stars went out. Saul counted down microseconds then, when the entire ship crashed and the warp went out, he felt a momentary satisfaction at this proof of a weapon that could knock out the Alcubierre warp, and chagrin, because he had not divined the nature of that weapon. As an old expression went, he had been unable to see the wood for the trees.
Of course, a warp missile . . .
Then a blast wave slammed into the ship, peeling away hull plates so the glare of atomic fire could peek inside, and as he lost over sixty per cent of his system, he added the thought:
. . . and one carrying an atomic warhead.
14
Backup
The idea of backing up a human mind, as you would back up one of the drives on a computer or any other data, has been with us from the days of recording to magnetic tape. However, in essence, we have been backing up our minds ever since the first cavemen cut notches in sticks as a memory aid. Cave paintings were the human mind rendered in vegetable dyes, cuneiform expressed it
in clay, and books are even closer representations of the thought processes of those who wrote them. But, of course, none of these is an exact copy of a human mind, but just small parts of it. We are, in essence, information and every piece of information from our mind that we record is part of our mind. Thus it can be seen that the only drawback of such a back-up technology for the whole of a human mind is the exactitude of that recording. It is certain, for example, that no computer storage could possibly copy all the chemical and quantum atomic processes within the human brain, so any type of copy made could never be exact. However, a human being is never the same from moment to moment, since we are all in a state of perpetual flux, so the copying process could be seen as just part of that flux. The only reason for reluctance to accept this technology as a real possibility stems from religious thinking about a human soul, combined with the contrary belief in the finality of death.
Argus
They left Jean-Pierre strapped against one of the stanchions of the cageway. Most of them were bruised, and one of them was supporting a broken arm after that last massive acceleration. Jean-Pierre had been unlucky: slamming headfirst into a wall and his neck snapping; dead before any of them could reach him.
‘But he still lives,’ Ghort opined, referring to his backup.
The lack of enthusiastic response from the rest told Alex that, though they accepted their potential immortality on an intellectual level, the fact of physical death was not so easy to step around. Maybe some of them were having second thoughts.