Argus
No harm in looking . . .
There had been a surprising lack of pain at first: just a series of hard impacts driving her backwards, detaching her gecko boots from the floor and sending her tumbling. In confusion, she tried to reorient herself, tried to get her feet planted firmly so she could figure out what had happened. Another course change? More railgun strikes nearby? She had just managed to propel herself to a convenient surface and re-engage her boots when he slammed into her.
Var fought to hang onto the rifle he wanted to snatch away, but she felt leaden, as if she had been poured into her suit and set solid. Suit diagnostic warnings scrolled up her visor, but fractured and hard to read. He finally knocked her rifle from her grasp. Through the warnings, she saw his face: Ghort’s face, triumphant and sneering, but only for a moment. As he gazed at her his expression suddenly transformed, and he soon looked frightened and hopeless.
Three suit breaches, the warnings informed her: two of them already sealed but one in her suit’s visor, where the sealant system did not connect. She must return to a pressurized environment at once. She abruptly felt tired and knew her mind wasn’t working at its best when, only after seeing these warnings did she spot the cracks in her visor. That tight leaden feeling inside her torso irritated her lungs and she coughed, spattering her visor with blood, then watched as it beaded and slid down to where all the cracks converged. She could now see the leak clearly. She watched blood oozing through one of the cracks and vaporizing in vacuum outside. But there seemed to be much more blood than she had coughed up, and her neck felt damp, and it hurt.
‘I’m sorry,’ she heard, as Ghort’s voice was carried through to her at the point where their visors touched. ‘I’m sorry.’
It was now getting difficult to breathe, but Var knew that had nothing to do with air loss, since that was something she had experienced many times before. Mere tiredness transformed into a sudden incredible weariness. She was just fed up with it all, fed up with the endless . . . effort. She closed her eyes, and that felt good, but then reopened them, choking for breath like someone suffering from sleep apnoea.
After everything, after Mars, after her being rescued, was this it? She coughed out yet more blood, white and frothy now, and could hear her own pulse stuttering in her ears. Shallow breaths were all she could manage, and there just wasn’t enough air. Her vision turned to shades of black and yellow, and her pulse grew hesitant like the beat of an engine running low on fuel. When she closed her eyes again, it came almost as a relief as night descended. Var wished for morning to return, as do we all.
They were down now, the ship protesting all around and the lists of reported damage redoubling rapidly. Saul concerned himself with detail and tried not to be appalled by the destruction. He began filtering the data, then redirecting his robots to deal with the most critical repairs. For what was to come next, the Arboretum cylinder did not really need to be hauled back up into position and repaired, the spindle for Arcoplex Two did not need to be fixed either: the weapons were beyond repair and the Traveller engine would not be firing again for months – if ever. Instead, he passed control over the bulk of his robots to the proctors, who were working frantically to repair the Mach-effect drive to restore its efficiency to over that critical eighty per cent. Others he had delegated to sealing atmosphere breaches, to working on structural repairs, or to securing wreckage. Some of them were even now dragging cables over and across the Arboretum and welding up its contact points with the ship’s skeleton.
While supervising all this activity with the larger portion of his mind, he simultaneously focused a smaller, more human, component elsewhere.
‘You have between five and ten hours, at most, before we move again,’ Saul announced as he continued surveying the wreckage – and the death – throughout the ship.
‘Le Roque.’ He next addressed the technical director, who had already unstrapped himself and was walking in low gravity across the sloping floor of Tech Central to gaze through its cracked windows. ‘Do what you can for the injured. System access is limited for the moment, but I’ve given you the locations and circumstances of those in most need of help. The seriously injured should be moved, if possible, to Arcoplex Two, but you’ll have to work fast.’
Le Roque stared out for a long moment before turning away, his face white and shocked behind his visor as he returned to his console. Sitting down, he searched for some pragmatic reply. ‘What about structural damage?’
‘I’m handling priorities,’ Saul replied. ‘Just deal with the injured, and make sure everyone can be quickly secured after a minimum period of five hours.’
‘Then what?’ asked Le Roque.
‘Then we get to find out whether we live or we die.’ Saul next transferred that portion of his human consciousness he was currently using to communicate with others aboard, specifically to the Meat Locker. ‘Hannah, Raiman, Da Vinci, you’re needed in Arcoplex Two.’
Hannah glanced up at the nearest cam. ‘We’re down on Io,’ she pointed out.
‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘but, I hope, for only a maximum of ten hours. Liaise with Le Roque on your timings.’
‘Are we going to survive this?’ she asked.
‘Maybe,’ he answered, his voice catching as he glanced with human eyes at the hardened nubs of once molten metal scattered across his suit. He was doing the best he could in the circumstances, but no amount of processing power or planning could remove every fragment of risk that they might end up at the bad end of a railgun strike or a beam weapon.
Over the next hour he watched the injured and dying being sought out, some needing to be cut from wreckage, others having to be given life-saving treatment where they lay. When Hannah, Raiman and Da Vinci arrived in Arcoplex Two, they were greeted by a constant stream of the injured and were soon up to their elbows in blood. Where he could, Saul diverted robots to help them, but only when such diversion did not slow down crucial work on the Mach-effect drive. His priority was escape from the solar system, and if he didn’t manage that, they would all end up dead anyway.
Next, having assured himself that everything was running at maximum possible efficiency, he diverted a part of his attention to the two still surviving out in the station ring: Messina’s ex-bodyguard, Ghort, and the clone, Alex. He only knew they were alive because their implants kept feeding mental data to their backups.
‘Why is Ghort still alive?’ he enquired.
‘Having . . . some trouble,’ Alex replied, his words laced with pain.
‘You are injured?’
‘Broken leg.’
Saul reviewed the present situation. The only possible way Ghort could now affect their chances would be if he attempted to destroy the vortex generator. But, considering the man’s objectives, he had no real reason for doing so, and it was most likely that he was simply trying to stay alive. Saul calculated that he would remain hiding out there in the old station ring for as long as possible. And, by staying out there, he would eventually solve the problem he had become.
‘He is no longer a real danger to us, Alex,’ declared Saul. ‘Just get yourself to Arcoplex Two and have your leg tended to.’
‘Unfinished business,’ was Alex’s brief reply.
‘If you stay out there you could be dead within five hours.’ Saul felt a hint of human irritation arising within him.
‘Your sister too,’ added the Messina clone.
This information threw Saul into a fugue that lasted a whole second, then he began searching cam data and footage, located Var’s overseer’s office, glanced at a recent report from Langstrom – and realized he had not been keeping his eye on that particular ball. Next he linked through to Alex’s backup and then Ghort’s, and began decoding both present data streams and recent memory.
‘What happened?’ he asked meanwhile.
‘He shot her . . . thought she was me.’
‘Is she dead?’ Even as he flatly asked the question, Saul felt hollowness in the pit o
f his stomach. Just as with the ships out there, he had been in error: he had not done enough, he had got it wrong. The moment he knew they existed he should have killed the chipped rebels. Here then was the price for his attempt to use a light touch, not to be so dictatorial, to try and put humans in a position to solve their own problems.
‘I don’t know,’ Alex replied. ‘She was shot through the gut and chest when I saw her, with maybe one through her visor too.’
The words fell like blows. Saul now felt the terror of some kind of disconnection – as if he was falling into an abyss – and a huge regret. For a second he just could not incorporate this simple data; could not accept what Alex was telling him. Then at last some of the data from Alex began to unravel, visual only, showing the view through his visor of a great mass of rubble and sand. Saul began to work with it and cross-referencing a cam view provided confirmation that Saul was seeing sulphur compounds scraped up from the surface of Io. Alex next switched his attention to the gap in the hull through which all this had poured, before turning aside to peer up at a tall bulkhead wall. Memory decoded then, and Saul replayed the earlier exchange between the two men . . .
Alex had little time to react. He couldn’t fire on Ghort, so he threw himself backwards to the opening and tried to propel himself out of sight. At that moment the entire ship shuddered and he found himself falling away from the opening before slamming feet first into the very same beam juncture Ghort had concealed himself behind. Now looking towards the outer wall of the ring, Alex watched a storm of material pouring in through the hole in the hull and mounding up. This seemed to last an age, the ship shuddering constantly all around him. Then he was falling again, dropping across the ring section till again coming down feet-first on a hard surface. His recently healed leg shrieked in protest, then gave way underneath him. He had time enough to register that it had broken before a wall of sulphurous rubble swamped him.
Saul pulled himself out of the alluring grip of the memory and returned to the moment, still struggling to accept what his logic told him as he began reading the decoding from Ghort. When the ship hit Io, the man had managed to drag Var into a side corridor, so he was not thrown after Alex, nor did he suffer such a fall when it righted itself on the surface. He had moved on, a quarter of the way around the ring, and was now in a branch corridor, one that terminated against a wall of asteroidal ice. A patch sat in place over the persistent leak in his suit, but he was cold, in pain, thoroughly aware of the damp feel of blood inside his suit, though still standing and still able to move. Var lay at his feet, and he hoped to use her to bargain for his life. In a moment he would move on, work further round the ring to get as far away from that homicidal clone as he could.
Back to Alex now, who was glaring at the section of bulkhead leading up to the opening he had fallen from, searching for handholds, while his tracking program gave him Ghort’s location over three kilometres away. The Messina clone was not far from the massive rubble of sulphur compounds scraped up from the surface of Io, and which had swamped him as the ship righted itself on the surface. He had been buried in it and spent the best part of an hour digging himself free. Saul made calculations and realized that, judging by her injuries, Var needed treatment fast, and that with a broken leg Alex could not hope to get to her quickly enough, let alone deal with Ghort. Yet, on another level, Saul also understood that his calculations had their element of denial.
‘Alex,’ he instructed, ‘head to your immediate right. There you’ll find a maintenance tunnel under the vortex generator, which will bring you out in what remains of the Arboretum endcap. From there you’ll easily be able to make your way round to Arcoplex Two. I’ve just sent a map to your implant, so go now and get yourself seen to.’
‘But Ghort . . . your sister?’ Alex protested.
‘Ghort is badly injured and dying, and my sister is already dead,’ Saul replied. He was only saying that to get Alex to desist . . . wasn’t he? Saul had no way of knowing how true his latter statement might be . . . surely. ‘Further effort on your part will prove futile. You’ve done well, Alex, but this is now over.’
Alex hesitated, but then he turned and obeyed.
Saul now hesitated too, then exerted control over his voice and planned the words he would use before he made another call.
‘Ghort,’ he said.
‘Hah . . . wondered when you’d be talking . . . to me.’
‘If you get my sister out of there, you get to live,’ Saul replied, his tone washed of emotion as he sent a map to Ghort’s implant. ‘You’ll be met by Hannah Neumann and some medics at the place I’ve designated.’
‘Go to hell,’ said Ghort, abruptly sitting down.
Saul badly wanted just to kill the man, but again suppressed emotion. Formulae of human responses assembled and solved in his mind, and he knew by Ghort’s attitude that the man thought his bargaining chip was no longer valid, and that Var was indeed dead. Keeping himself utterly under control, Saul explained, ‘She might appear dead to you, but Hannah Neumann might still be able to do something. Please try to get my sister to her swiftly.’
Ghort just sat panting for a moment, then suddenly stood up. In the light gravity of Io, he hauled up Var, loose-limbed and flopping like any new-made corpse, managed to throw her over his shoulder, then set out along the route Saul had detailed. Meanwhile, the medics Saul had summoned from Arcoplex Two were on their way. He had done the best he could, and could now only wait for Hannah Neumann’s verdict.
He focused next on the Fist as it swung in orbit around Io and descended towards the horizon, doubtless with its ground forces getting ready to disembark, and struggled to care. After a long period of just watching, he finally managed to get his thoughts in motion again. From an intellectual distance he considered how it would have been optimal to have ramped up robot activity the moment this ship went out of sensor range, but its drones were still nearby and he did not want the ship’s captain to have any reason to consider firing on him when it rounded the moon and finally landed. He ran calculations on likely landing sites, checked the energy ratios in the vortex generator, and coldly made tentative selections of generator containment coils.
And he waited.
Command
Bartholomew gazed at his screen, studying various drone views of Saul’s ship; registering the numerous holes in its hull, and the peculiar chemical fires burning inside. Deep radar and other sensing techniques showed that there was still life and movement there. Many internal compartments were charged with atmosphere, as were the three cylinder worlds, and certainly there was some metallic movement detectable, which meant Saul’s robots were still a threat. However, the ship was definitely down and would not be going anywhere. Readings showed that the vortex generator, the only drive presently available to it, was incrementally winding down. Bartholomew also wondered if an Alcubierre warp could be generated both in a gravity-well and through the ground beneath.
‘Perhaps I should put some slugs into those,’ suggested Oerlon, speaking from a screen frame and indicating, with pointer arrows, the atmosphere sections on a schematic growing steadily more detailed as more data came in.
‘You can if you wish,’ Bartholomew replied, ‘though I feel that the human crew is hardly a danger. Saul’s robots will be the main problem. You must also avoid hitting the Arboretum cylinder, since that is the last known location of the Gene Bank samples.’
Oerlon grunted and shrugged. ‘Then there’s that new section below the old Argus Station Tech Central. It looks like a likely location for our friend Alan Saul.’
‘Whom we have been instructed to capture alive,’ Bartholomew reminded him. ‘No, you land your ship, and return fire only if fired upon. Once down, you launch the ground assault and use your ship’s weapons to cover the troops.’ He paused thoughtfully for a moment. ‘This was one of the least likely scenarios envisaged, but we do have assault plans drawn up, though they were originally drawn up with Mars in mind. Scenario B of the two, I think.’
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Oerlon nodded. ‘Spiderguns in through the top of the ship, main human assault through the equator, however it’s positioned. Five-man teams covering a sixth man, who carries the tank-buster. Limited EM pulse fire in system-critical areas, because missiles will do less damage to the ship’s computer system.’ Oerlon grimaced. ‘I’ve had plenty of time to memorize all of it.’
‘Then I don’t need to issue you any further orders,’ said Bartholomew. ‘I want constant tacom updates, but, otherwise, go and get the job done, Captain Oerlon.’
The other captain nodded, and his screen frame blanked out.
Now the drone views showed deep black shadows around Saul’s ship as the surface there became subject to an intensity of light it probably had not seen in billions of years. One drone swung round and tilted up to show the Fist descending through the thin atmosphere of Io, its main fusion engine bright as a welding arc while steering thrusters flashed and glared like nighttime gunshots. It came down fast a couple of kilometres to one side of Saul’s ship, poised on its fusion torch, then, with a blast of steering thrusters, slid over the top of the five-kilometre-high mountain of metal. The flame seared the pole of Saul’s ship and hull metal sagged, melted and burned away, opening up an extended view into the interior.
Bartholomew smiled. Using a fusion flame like that had not been part of any of the scenarios, but was a clever move on Oerlon’s part. Now the spiderguns could quickly swarm inside, over a wide area, rather than go one or two at a time through the railgun holes.
The Fist headed two kilometres beyond Saul’s ship and then descended, folding down segments from its lower hemisphere. These were its landing feet, but also the assault force’s disembarkation points. Finally it began to settle, dust clouds and chemical fires blasting out from it – coming down onto the surface like a globe on a plinth. As the fusion flame went out, a big door opened down from the landing foot facing nearest to Saul’s ship and settled as a ramp.