Owner 03 - Jupiter War

  ‘Power status?’ he asked.

  ‘Not enough to maintain everything,’ replied one of the engineers monitoring the ship’s systems.

  ‘Prioritize weapons, steering and side-burners.’

  ‘The vortex generator?’

  ‘Go to holding . . . no, go to induction draw. We certainly won’t be able to use it to move us, but we can use the power it’s stored up.’

  Still studying his screen, he noted the distance between Saul’s ship and the Command rapidly diminishing. Perhaps Saul did have further weapons to deploy, but needed to get closer to use them, so it would be best to keep him at a metaphorical arm’s length.

  ‘Take us out.’ He directed the order to the two personnel at the helm and navigation console – two whose names he had yet to learn, for they were replacements for the pair who had died. ‘I want a minimum distance between him and us of twenty thousand kilometres, until all of his ship – but for the Arboretum cylinder – is reduced to scrap.’

  Visuals now showed the railgun impacts on Saul’s ship: red spots appearing on its surface, like freckles on a face, and then fading, with glowing wreckage strewing out behind. This was the thing about the enemy, Bartholomew reckoned: Saul’s ship was a sphere with a fifteen-kilometre circumference and, though they could try and target vital parts of it, completely turning the majority of it to scrap, as Bartholomew had ordered, would be like turning a full-length train to scrap with just hand-held weapons.

  Steering thrusters turned the Command and then a remaining side-burn fusion engine kicked in, thrusting him down in his seat but not as forcefully as their scrapped main engine had done.

  ‘He’s at twenty thousand,’ someone stated.

  ‘Have we hit his command centre yet?’ Bartholomew enquired.

  ‘Not yet,’ Grace replied. ‘Either our targeting is off or . . . Jepson?’

  After checking his instruments for a short while, Jepson replied, ‘I’m getting positional changes in response to our firings.’

  Now it was Grace’s turn to study her own instruments intently. ‘He’s using that drive of his to dodge.’

  ‘But I’m seeing impacts,’ said Bartholomew.

  ‘He can’t dodge everything, but is taking a lot of our shots in already severely damaged portions of the ship.’ She paused again, studying data, then went on. ‘Most of his vital equipment is on an equatorial plane, and he’s edge on to us but with a slight tilt. He’s making sure a lot of our hits are right on the equator, where they lose energy in remaining vortex generator armour, or then hit the smelting plants and bearing endcaps and he’s spinning to distribute the damage.’

  ‘Give me bracketed firing solutions,’ Bartholomew ordered. ‘This new drive is probably located somewhere on that plane.’ He turned to Jepson. ‘Any effect yet on that drive?’

  ‘His acceleration is increasing,’ said Jepson.

  ‘Eighteen thousand kilometres,’ declared their new navigator.

  ‘What?’ Bartholomew roared. ‘I told you the minimum safe distance!’

  ‘He’s still accelerating,’ said the pilot, ‘and we can’t maintain minimum distance, Admiral.’

  Bartholomew felt his tension growing. Saul had caught Bartholomew out by deploying a plasma cannon and had destroyed the Fist by ruthlessly wrecking his own Alcubierre drive. Time and time again he had been underestimated, and no way would he be coming after them like this without some means of attacking.

  ‘Fifteen thousand kilometres,’ stated the navigator.

  ‘Start with the maser,’ Bartholomew ordered. ‘He at least won’t be able to dodge that.’

  ‘Firing,’ Grace replied, and the lights again dimmed, ‘but he’s tilted in response and is now completely edge on, so we’ve still got that equatorial infrastructure in the way. That means we’re mostly frying wreckage. I suggest we go to grid plot and hit every surface section that becomes available.’

  ‘No.’ Bartholomew shook his head. ‘Concentrate on the equatorial plane: he probably has some weapon in there that we haven’t seen yet.’

  ‘Present drive efficiency dropping,’ said the pilot.

  ‘Ten thousand kilometres,’ the navigator added, with a catch in his voice.

  ‘Tactical suggests reduced firing so as to increase suggested safe distance,’ said Grace, still appearing calm. ‘Our weapons are putting a power drain on pellet aggregation in the side-burner.’

  ‘Maintain maximum fire rate,’ Bartholomew ordered. He was damned if he was going to run from such a heavily damaged vessel, new drive or not, and suspected this might be a tactical feint on Saul’s part precisely to induce him to run.

  ‘I’m getting some strange visuals, sir,’ said Jackson. ‘But the maser and railgun firings are interfering . . .’

  ‘Relay to me.’

  On the screen the image of Saul’s ship jumped closer, but then blurred and shimmered. It almost looked as if the hull was burning and boiling in certain areas. Maybe this was an effect of this Mach drive, or maybe the Command’s maser was starting to melt sections of the hull. However, something here definitely seemed wrong.

  ‘Cease firing for a full scan,’ he commanded. ‘And recommence firing immediately afterwards. Jepson, full link to my screen, updating as soon as scan data comes in.’

  ‘Yessir!’

  The lights brightened as all firing shut down, then dimmed again while Jepson used ship’s sensors to do a full sweep of the approaching vessel as EM interference cleared. On his screen, Bartholomew watched Saul’s ship divide into small squares, image data in each rapidly cleaning up before it winked out again, the blur and the shimmering effect wafting away. From the pole downwards, the squares disappeared, soon revealing an area perhaps a kilometre across: a great blemish where the hull appeared to be melting.

  ‘Five thousand kilometres!’ the navigator shouted, his voice breaking.

  Jepson focused down on that same blemish, and Bartholomew slowly grasped that Saul’s ship wasn’t burning or melting there; it was crawling. He saw the hull was swarming with those golden conjoined robots, thousands of them, and he realized precisely how Saul intended to attack.

  ‘Target that with all weapons!’ he shouted but, even as he gave the order, the blemish slid round and out of sight as the approaching behemoth turned on its axis.

  ‘Three thousand kilometres!’ Hysterical now, without doubt.

  ‘Shut down weapons and give me full power to the facing side-burner, until we’re at one thousand,’ Bartholomew ordered, sounding as controlled and calm as a pilot taking a scramjet down for a crash landing. ‘Then divert power to Side-burner Three – complemented with chemical steering thrusters.’

  ‘Yessir!’ replied the pilot and, shortly afterwards, new acceleration pressed Bartholomew down into his chair.

  ‘Sir,’ said Grace. ‘Our vortex generator?’

  It was an idea, and one he had briefly checked. However, the planning behind the building of the Command had been heavily influenced by fear of sabotage. But perhaps still worth checking further.

  ‘Can we shut down any section of vortex generator containment?’ he asked the engineer he had addressed earlier.

  ‘Two thousand kilometres.’ Now the hysteria had evaporated from the navigator’s voice and it had taken on a leaden edge – like an acceptance of the inevitable.

  The engineer looked round. ‘Only if we send someone out to the ring with explosives.’

  ‘One thousand.’

  The pressure of acceleration came off, then back on again, as if now trying to throw Bartholomew sideways out of his chair. By slow degrees that same pressure swung round, as the bridge sphere reoriented. It was too late now to send anyone off to destroy containment before the imminent impact. Bartholomew gripped the arms of his chair, stared at the close loom of Saul’s ship and at a tactical display indicating relative positions. The Command had begun to slide out of the other vessel’s path, so maybe . . .

  No, at the last moment, the other ship swung s
harply to the side, out of danger from the vortex ring, then came in hard on the Command’s nose. Bartholomew felt the force of it rip sideways through the bridge sphere, felt as if one of his own ribs had given way. The racket was terrible – like a bomb blast in a scrap yard – but the navigator’s shriek was all too audible as he hurtled past and slammed into the engineering monitor wall, and hung there in the indentation, power shorting out all around him. The fool obviously hadn’t secured himself properly – the kind of mistake the previous navigator would never have made, but even that had not saved him from a chunk of metal punching through his chest. The lights went out, came on again, and went out again, before switching over to emergency LED.

  The racket continued: the shouting, the agonized protests of metal giving way, the explosions and the hollow roaring of flames. Screens flickered and tactical displays lost any sense. Somebody was repeating, ‘Oh God, Oh God,’ in a steady monotone. Then another sound began to impinge, and it was one that sent cold fingers crawling down Bartholomew’s spine. As from an automated factory operating at full tilt, he could hear distant saws, drills and hammering sounds. Then came a din of scrabbling and clattering that reminded him of lizards running over a tin roof, but big lizards whose weight was buckling the roof, and then inevitably the crackle of weapons.

  The Command apparently now had some unwelcome visitors.

  Earth

  Clay Ruger closed his eyes. At least it would be quick: no lengthy agonizing death under an inducer, or being impaled on a metal spike, or slowly strangled, or coughing out his lungs as the Scour ravaged throughout his body. He waited for the impact of the bullets . . . and waited . . . then eventually opened his eyes again.

  Sack stood gazing down at his weapon, holding it in one hand while running a finger of his other hand along the barrel, his expression contemplative.

  ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘this gun is not a replica. It’s over a century old. Admittedly it required heat treatment to reverse metal crystallization, and further metal layered in to repair general wear and tear, but it’s worked perfectly for all that time.’

  ‘Then it’s time for you to work it again,’ said Galahad, now looking both puzzled and wary. ‘Obey me, Sack.’

  Sack nodded. ‘You asked Calder why, if you were the one who caused it, you would have surrounded yourself with those who had lost family to the Scour. Maybe you remember me telling you about my father, maybe not. This was his gun.’

  ‘This is all very interesting, Sack, but it doesn’t change the fact that it was Alan Saul who released the Scour on Earth’s population, and my only sin was not revealing its original source.’

  Sack took his free hand away from the gun and held it up to inspect his lizard-skin fingers. He then reached down to his belt and extracted something from it, clicked a button to bring a blade gleaming into the firelight, then tossed the flick knife to stab into the bone ground at Trove’s feet.

  ‘You.’ He turned to the soldier who was now standing up again. ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘There’s no need,’ the soldier replied.

  ‘Nevertheless.’

  The man nodded and headed over towards his sidearm, and stooped carefully to pick it up. Sack did not react. The man slid the weapon back into its holster, then turned and strode off into the night.

  ‘You two,’ he said to Trove and Clay, ‘get over there’ – he nodded to the drop shuttle – ‘and cut me two of the longest lengths of that preconductor cable you can find, and bring them back here.’

  ‘Sack, you really—’ began Galahad.

  The weapon swung round and back, hard, smashing her in the mouth, crushing her lips and splintering her teeth, and sending her sprawling on the ground.

  ‘And you,’ Sack added, ‘can shut up.’

  Her bloody mouth open in shock, Galahad began to scrabble away from him. He stepped after her and fired twice, shattering her kneecap and then her elbow. She shrieked and lay writhing, then, after a moment, desperately began dragging herself along with her undamaged arm and leg, groaning and panting all the while as Sack kept pace with her.

  ‘Do you really think anyone believes you any more?’ he asked. ‘I made sure I was by your side because you got things done, and you then seemed to be the one who would get me – and all the other people I know – some payback.’

  She had no reply, just glanced up at him with her eyes wide and tried to crawl faster. He halted her by bringing one foot down on the shattered joint of her leg and, as she whimpered in agony, he turned back to the other two. Clay met his gaze for a moment then stooped and took up the flick knife.

  ‘Best we do what the man says,’ he said to Trove.

  She numbly followed him to the drop shuttle and helped unravel the lengths of cable that he then cut. The stuff was not actually a superconductor, but a cheaper alternative that came very close. Eventually they had secured what Sack required and brought it over to him, dropping it on the ground beside Galahad. Putting away his weapon and stooping, the bodyguard busily began stripping off her suit. She fought him, but he smacked a hard lizard-skin hand against her ruined mouth and she desisted.

  ‘You can go now,’ he said, ‘if you want.’

  They stayed for a short while – just a short while.

  Argus

  The Command soldiers, moving to defend certain areas of their ship, came pouring through the airlock fast, with the weight of their VC suits only partially slowing their rapid deployment of the ten-mil machine gun on its tripod. That Saul could watch them at work was only due to the optic pushed through a hole drilled in the airlock at the further end of the corridor, for the comlifer was still keeping him from penetrating the Command’s computer systems. No matter, and really Saul wasn’t trying very hard to penetrate those systems, but instead just sufficient attacks to keep the comlifer busy, with the systems on the edge of overload and communication channels slow and unreliable. This was all now proceeding much as he had supposed it would once they were past the danger of the Command using its vortex ring as a weapon.

  The other physically penetrative attacks were already deep inside the ship. His robots had cut power to any railgun still capable of targeting Saul’s ship and had reached the maser, which they were now dismantling. The nuclear arsenal had just fallen, too, and been isolated with a full six-section conjoined robot inside it, which was making the weapons completely safe by dismantling them. Others had reached as far as the vortex ring and captured three of the five fusion reactors that powered it. Even though its plane now lay away from his own ship, and a containment shutdown would just blow its mercury out into space, Saul did not want it totally destroyed, since there were a lot of valuable materials to be harvested there.

  Elsewhere the robots had not penetrated and were responding only when necessary to attacks from the crew, from the readerguns, from the Command’s own robots and its soldiers. Already they had stripped away the wreckage lying at the contact point between the two ships, which was now being conveyed inside by older-style robots, and they were proceeding along the length of the Command into the expanded waist volume underneath its vortex ring, and there busy dismantling it. Whole, undamaged components, which – with perhaps just a little alteration – could be used in Saul’s own ship, were being diligently unbolted or cut at welds so as to be removed. Other items, after being identified as of little use in their present form, were quickly cut free to be taken to a central pool of materials destined for the smelting plants, whereupon the huge damage they had suffered could be repaired. In fact, his robots weren’t so much attacking the Command as eating it.

  The eight-section robot positioned beyond the airlock which was being guarded by that ten-mil machine gun had by now removed the hinges and the seal, as well as much of the surrounding structure. Like a golden centipede carrying a buckler, it surged on its way through with the heavy airlock door held in front of it. The defending soldiers fired their machine gun, the heavy ceramic rounds slamming into the airlock door and in places cutting
through it into the leading robot section. By the time the whole robot reached them the door itself was in shreds, and so was the vanguard of the robot chain. It swiftly discarded both, and in a blur, fell on both men and machine gun and swarmed over them, leaving weapon and body components in its wake.

  Another fusion reactor was now isolated, and an engineering team was retreating from the last. Here some Command robots remained to launch a clumsy defence, as Saul’s robots closed in. New programming then kicked in and the Command’s robots were overwhelmed and immobilized one at a time, cowlings swiftly de-riveted and removed. Processing chips were extracted and plugged into sockets in Saul’s robots and there wiped; laminar memory EM pulsed at close range, the blank chips reinserted, then fast-and-dirty programs fed in via optics. Thus enemy robots became beasts of burden, conveying away the substance of the Command.

  Next, a chunk of the data plenum dropped out. Saul did a fast replay to get imagery of a tank-buster being deployed to knock out the first section of the now seven-section robot. The team firing at it looked like crew, not soldiers, but they were still doing a good job. They kept hitting his robot as it hurtled towards them, dropping overloaded front sections as it approached. A conjoining of two sections hit the men at the last, and they, with their weapon, joined the stream of components being hauled out of the Command. The robot next cut fast with a thermic lance alongside a door, extracted a thick plug of metal, then inserted a tool head into the perfect five-centimetre-diameter hole this created. The door thumped open and the robot entered, took fire from two readerguns before tearing one down from the wall and hurling it into the other with the force of a bullet. From the acceleration couch, to which he had been secured with metal straps, Christopher Shivers opened crusted eyes now that no cams were still available for him there.

  ‘At last,’ he managed. ‘Be quick.’

  Doubtless the equipment monitoring him would detect his expectancy of death, gauge his relief at the prospect of finding peace and admonish him with some degree of suffering. Saul’s robot did not move fast because of this, or because of some feeling of sympathy in the one who had programmed it and still controlled it at will. No, it moved fast because that was how it was designed to move. Using just a few quick motions, it sliced a circular saw blade through his neck, snatched up his head and divided his skull like an avocado. It quickly pared away brain, even while blood still spurted from the man’s neck, found the hardware located behind the optic plugs in his skull, sliced away the biological component, then opened tiny covers to insert hair-thin optic and electrical connections.