Owner 03 - Jupiter War

  First out of the Fist came a horde of ATVs sporting ten-mil machine guns and EM tank-busters. These were merely ground cover for the crossing towards Saul’s ship, and would be abandoned once the assault proper began. Next came the spiderguns – at the sight of which Bartholomew gave an involuntary shiver. About half of these had their weaponized limbs altered: the lethal firepower of machine guns that fired depleted uranium beads being replaced with EM tank-busters and with launchers firing armour-piercing missiles. These were effectively robot killers.

  Next came seventeen hundred heavily armed and armoured troops, some carrying portable tank-busters, some carrying missile-launchers, and all carrying Kalashtech assault rifles. They seemed overly laden with equipment, but in the low gravity, and with their VC suits motorized, they moved almost as fast as the spiderguns. Now, on seeing this force swarming towards the shattered behemoth that had once been Argus Station and which had come close to being converted into an interstellar vessel, Bartholomew felt a kind of shame. It seemed too much like overkill now that the enemy was all but beaten, and it seemed to grate on some sensitivity to fairness inside him.

  Earth

  Ruger’s first thought, as consciousness returned, was I’m still alive, swiftly followed by not for long.

  The drop shuttle was full of acrid smoke and emitting distinctly unhealthy groans and screeches below the constant roar; Earth kept changing places with sky in the view through the front screen and Trove was screaming obscenities while she wrestled with the controls. Beside him he could hear Galahad muttering something that sounded like a prayer, until he actually heard the words and realized she was reciting the names of extinct animals. Then, with a sound like a bullwhip cracking, followed by another sound like a ground car going into a crusher, deceleration threw him hard against his straps. At the same time, something hit the back of his seat with a gristly thud and a hand flopped loosely past him. It seemed the one remaining soldier had not strapped himself in securely and, if that sound was anything to go by, might not get another opportunity to do so.

  Earth and sky gradually ceased to swap places with such alarming regularity, the horizon settling shakily into the horizontal. Then the bullwhip cracked again and the pressure came off, the hand dropping out of sight.

  ‘Fuck it!’ shouted Trove. ‘Not enough!’

  The horizon started wobbling and began to tilt. Another crack resounded, and once again Ruger was thrown hard against his straps, the hand rising up beside him as if to indicate, yes, I’m still here. He noted flecks of blood spattering his suit’s shoulder pad, gathering into globules and launching for the screen, but guessed it wasn’t his own. The drop shuttle groaned long and hard, and behind he could hear the distinctive sounds of power shorting out – easily recognizable since he had previously heard it aboard the Scourge. With a fourth crack, the pressure came off yet again. But by now the horizon had stabilized.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Trove, ‘we’re all out of chutes.’

  Clay knew that, without her voice coming over his suit radio, it would have been difficult to hear her through the racket all around him, and he certainly would not have detected the fatalism in her tone.

  ‘And what,’ asked Galahad’s brutish bodyguard, ‘does that mean?’

  ‘It means aileron, thruster and undercarriage braking only,’ she replied. ‘That’s if the undercarriage even comes down, which I doubt.’

  Oh, good, though Ruger, we’re going to crash and burn. He felt almost like shrugging to some unseen audience. Galahad seemed to believe that some predestination guided the course of her life, and now Clay Ruger was starting to think the same about himself. Apparently he was fated to die in the crash of some sort of flying vessel. He swore to himself, in that same moment, that if he did survive this, his only route off the ground henceforth would be via stairs or a lift . . . well, maybe not even the lift.

  ‘Map screen,’ said Trove. ‘I need somewhere long and level . . . and over ten kilometres of it.’

  Sack obligingly called up a map on the console screen. ‘What about Outback Spaceport?’

  ‘No good. It’s going to be central India, if we’re lucky.’

  ‘What about a water landing?’ Sack asked calmly.

  ‘It would tear us apart.’

  Sack diligently began searching the screen. ‘What about this?’ He showed a map which, from Clay’s seat, seemed to be all sprawl but for a long white smear through the middle of it.

  ‘Run the navcom,’ Trove replied.

  Apparently this bodyguard was a bit more than just muscle, for he worked the navigation console before him like a pro before coming up with some figures.

  ‘Got it,’ Trove replied, putting the drop shuttle into a slow turn, the horizon tilting. Steering thrusters then rumbled and the horizon rose as Clay’s straps bit into him again. He looked for the rising hand, but it didn’t appear this time. Maybe the soldier behind had managed to get back into his seat . . . or maybe not.

  The sound from outside was now like a gale blowing through an empty windowless office block, and the screen had taken on a reddish tint as if the tough heat-resistant lamination of glass and other materials had come new-made from the furnace. Clay did not know whether this was supposed to happen, but he did know that the internal air conditioning was struggling to get rid of the smoke. The drop shuttle levelled, and now the recognizable shapes of land masses became visible ahead.

  ‘Okay, time to show it our belly,’ said Trove.

  The horizon dropped out of sight to reveal a deep mauve sky scattered with stars. The roaring, which it had seemed impossible could grow any louder, nevertheless rose in a crescendo. This just continued interminably, the sky becoming bluer before taking on an orange blush.

  ‘This isn’t the dawn,’ said Trove. ‘It’s because of Scotonis.’

  Meteorites appeared next, scratching lines across an object glowing in the sky just like Jupiter’s red spot.

  ‘I didn’t think there would be debris,’ remarked Clay.

  Trove glanced round. ‘You’re back with us, are you? Well, no, the construction station was completely vaporized. The debris is from Core One and the Hubble Array. Looks as if Core Two survived, though whether anyone aboard did is another matter.’

  ‘Right,’ said Clay.

  An hour passed, maybe even more time; Clay wasn’t counting and was sure he had been dozing when Trove spoke next. ‘We’ve got the nose cams and screen display back.’

  Three-quarters of the way up, the forward screen divided horizontally. The top section showed just daylight sky while the lower part revealed the view down towards Earth. Oceans sped by underneath, land masses now took on depth and contour, though that image seemed to be of low pixel count, what with all that land having been subsumed by the cubic structures of sprawl buildings.

  At length they entered night again, but a lurid night with a portion of the sky seeming on fire. They were much lower when ocean terminated against electric-lit land mass, and Trove announced, ‘East coast of India.’

  In the new light, and as low down as they were now, the sprawls became much more visible, and Clay spotted occasional cleared areas amidst them where Galahad’s dozers and crushing machines had been at work. Notable too were large areas of sprawl where no electric lights gleamed at all, and he was overcome by a strange spooky feeling on considering how much down there now lay empty. A lake flitted by underneath, divided into fish-farm squares, each reflecting orange but also occupied by black drifts, so probably devoid of fish. Navigational schematics appeared all across the screen, datum lines giving their route in, counters giving speed and desired speed – and much more that Clay did not care to recognize.

  ‘Putting landing gear down now,’ said Trove.

  Clay felt the vibration but he could not hear the motors, pumps or hydraulics at work. However, he did hear the crash and the abrupt change to the exterior roar. This was good, surely?

  ‘It’s down?’ Sack enquired.

  ‘No
,’ Trove replied.

  ‘What did I just hear, then?’

  ‘You heard the landing gear going halfway down and jamming, which means that if it doesn’t get torn off or forced back into the ship when we touch down, we’ll probably be doing somersaults.’

  Okay, not so good.

  ‘Target coordinates in sight,’ said Trove. Gleaming with reflected orange light, something was rising over the horizon, amidst the sprawls. She glanced at the map on the console screen. ‘This your idea of a joke, Sack?’

  ‘It was the biggest level area available,’ he replied.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Ailerons.’ The roar changed in tone again. ‘And thrusters.’ Another sound next: like wind blowing down a drain pipe. The ship tilted forwards, raising the horizon. Trove lost the liquid crystal display so as to give them a lot of sky over a line of orange, with sprawl towers ranged on either side.

  ‘Pray, if you think anyone’s listening!’ Trove shouted.

  The drop shuttle hit, began shuddering horribly and tilting further forwards, bringing more of the plain ahead into view. Then, with a crash and a further shudder as of a ground car running over a zero asset indigent, it dropped again.

  ‘That’s the landing gear gone!’

  They were definitely down, and Clay allowed hope sufficiently out of its box to take a glimpse at the steadily dropping numbers in the bottom corner of the screen. They were slowing and there now seemed to be nothing but that plain ahead.

  ‘We’re down!’ Trove shouted excitedly. ‘We’re going to make it!’

  Out of the plain ahead, which would probably have appeared white in daylight, a yellow smear expanded and resolved. It seemed toy-like at first, but steadily grew into a huge automated bulldozer with a great serrated roller behind it, parked slantwise across their airfield.

  ‘Fuck it!’ Trove added, wrenching the steering column to one side.

  Argus

  Saul gazed numbly at the approaching army and knew that the old robots and his new conjoining robots that crouched throughout his ship would never be enough, could never be enough. Yes, he had thousands of robots under his control, but every one of them could be knocked out easily by an EM pulse. The approaching human troops carried enough tank-busters to do that job, let alone the specially adapted spiderguns he’d just scanned. This was a force that could take his ship with ease, and could achieve all the objectives Serene Galahad had demanded, but for one: capturing him alive. That simply would not happen. He could shut down his body and brain in an instant, and in the same instant scramble his backups. His suit also possessed another option fitted just below his ribcage, in the form of a slab of high explosive. They would not capture him alive, nor would they be taking his body back for Serene Galahad to gloat over.

  Dying always remained an option for him, but not yet.

  Through a cam out in Arcoplex Two, Saul watched as Alex, his leg in a plastic cast, strapped himself into an acceleration chair and lay back, then he switched to another cam and watched the lid of the cryogenic pod thump closed. The numbness he felt had spread through his entire being; it seemed almost part of his make-up now: cold, just like the inside of that canister. He replayed events, now several hours old, in his mind, and tried to see if there was any way he could change the verdict:

  Through the sensors of a construction robot, which had been making repairs outside the outer endcap of Arcoplex Two, Saul watched Hannah, followed by two medics carrying a stretcher as they intercepted Ghort. He handed Var over to the medics without fuss, then just stood there, swaying.

  ‘Prognosis?’ Saul enquired, speaking through all their suit radios.

  After she’d checked the readouts from Var’s suit, then had run some kind of scanner over her body from head to foot, Hannah rocked back on her heels. She took her time in replying: ‘She’s been dead for over an hour. There’s nothing I can do.’

  ‘Of course there’s something,’ Saul immediately replied, then damned that small part of him that had made this response. ‘Get her to a cryogenic cylinder in the Meat Locker,’ he continued coldly. ‘The future is always mutable.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Alan,’ said Hannah as the two medics quickly strapped Var into a stretcher and carted her away. ‘The bullet damage isn’t much different to what you yourself received, but her brain has gone without oxygen for too long, and there’s further damage from the sulphur compounds penetrating her suit.’ There were tears in Hannah Neumann’s voice, and also an underlying fear.

  ‘Yes, I understand,’ said Saul. ‘And my sister was reluctant to have an implant and get herself backed up. That means she is probably irretrievably dead.’

  ‘She was a great woman,’ said Hannah. ‘Very human and humane.’

  No, the past could not be changed . . . at least not yet.

  Saul now recollected, despite the situation, a brief bitter amusement at Hannah’s words. Humane Var who had slaughtered the Inspectorate personnel in Antares Base, later executed Rhone of Mars Science, and here murdered two more people. Even now, Saul found himself constantly amazed by the human propensity for self-deception. He was also aware of the reason for the underlying fear evident in Hannah’s voice. She had expected this loss to tip him over. She had expected it to be the moment he ceased to care at all for anyone, and the moment he turned into the monster she had always expected him to be.

  As Hannah had moved away to follow the two carrying Var’s body, he had said, ‘Get her into the cylinder quickly, Hannah.’

  ‘What about him?’ she had asked, gesturing to Ghort.

  ‘I will deal with him,’ he had stated. ‘Go quickly now.’

  Memory returned hard, vibrant and bright, and clear in every detail:

  She turned to hurry after the medics.

  ‘So what about me?’ Ghort asked, now supporting himself against the wall.

  Of course Saul would not now become more murderous and turn into a monster; both of those required an element of negative emotion. Saul did not feel negative about this man. He felt nothing at all as he took control of the construction robot, sent it forward and instructed it to use programming he had not used seemingly in an age.

  Moving with eerie fluidity, the robot slammed Ghort back against the wall with a three-fingered steel hand, extruded a drill from the tool-head that its other limb terminated in, and drove this straight through Ghort’s spacesuit and into his chest. The man shrieked, then sagged as the robot backed off, blood jetting from the hole drilled into his heart. Saul did not bother to see him fall all the way, nor watch the robot cart his body off for disposal. He did not have either the time or the inclination.

  The numbness he felt had spread from the more human part of himself, infecting the larger more logical parts of his mind. Had the murderousness spread as well? Was he now truly the monster Hannah feared? No, he felt not. The death of his sister had not changed his plans one whit, though perhaps there was no need, anyway, since his plans were murderous enough . . .

  ‘I’m going to need some elevation for this,’ he declared, addressing Paul who, with several other proctors, was frantically working to repair or replace damaged Mach-effect units at the pole of the ship where the Fist’s fusion torch had seared it. ‘We have to remember that there are two vortex generators down here.’

  ‘Apparently your recent human interaction has led you into stating the obvious,’ Paul replied, incidentally showing signs of a very human irritation himself.

  From this Saul realized that the proctor was struggling to keep to the schedule and, upon checking, he saw the efficiency of the Mach-effect rising slowly from just over sixty per cent.

  ‘I can give you four minutes,’ the proctor continued, ‘then we go down again.’

  ‘In succumbing to your very human irritation,’ Saul replied, ‘you seem to have forgotten the propulsive effect of the mass ejection, and the concomitant reduction in our overall mass.’

  After a pause Paul replied, ‘Quite.’

  A brief g
lance through a cam showed the cryogenic pod sliding home into its slot. The pipes to swap out her blood and other bodily fluids were automatically attaching, but the monitoring equipment had been shut down, since there was no point monitoring a corpse. Saul realized that, though Hannah had used wound glue on the bullet holes, it had been a hasty job and the swapping-out process would still be hampered; replacement fluids would run out into the wrong places in Var’s body.

  Meanwhile, the two medics who had taken Var to the Meat Locker had reached nearby acceleration chairs, and were strapped in. Throughout the rest of the ship everyone was now as ready as they could be, and the time had come. Outside the ship the ATVs were disgorging their troops and the spiderguns had arrived.

  ‘Do it now,’ he said to Paul.

  The ship suddenly heaved and strained and, with a massive groan, it began to rise. Saul watched spiderguns scrabbling in an avalanche of sulphur compounds and rock, some of them trying to leap the gap growing between the ship and the ground. He registered weapons fire impacting, but it was mostly from small arms and ineffective. As he reached out to three of the vortex generator’s containment coils, he calculated on eight seconds before the response from the Fist, which would be at about the time he was nearly a kilometre up. He touched the Mach-effect drive and tilted his ship just so, counted seven seconds, then turned off three vortex generator containment coils. Thousands of tonnes of liquid mercury, spinning round a fifteen-kilometre course at just under a hundred million metres per second, erupted free in an instant.

  Command

  Bartholomew felt the drag of a side-burn fusion engine as the Command fell into orbit around Io. His crew reported that the damage to the main fusion engine was repairable within a month, if they concentrated on that and not the weapons. He had ordered them to divert the ship’s resources to that same engine, but now, as he studied an image of the sulphurous moon of Jupiter, he wasn’t so sure that it had been a great idea.