Saul was now in, into the Command’s systems, and he found them very cramped indeed. He sucked up strings of code and broke it, isolated the bridge and included the ship’s system in the laser-com network his robots were spreading throughout the craft. Its work done, his robot dropped the remnant of Shiver’s head and turned to speed away, picking up its own discarded sections as it went, quickly replacing their burned-out components and reprogramming them, while making for a part of the ship, indicated on the schematic in its mind, where it could join its fellows in the disassembly.
Saul then shut down all the readerguns, closed down communications between crew and soldiers, took control of all the rest of the Command’s robots and simply added them to his own complement. And now, with most of the front section of the Command gone, and remaining crew and soldiers fleeing to the rear or finding somewhere along the way to retrench, he recalled half of his robots and set them to making repairs within his own ship.
Next he focused on the rival ship’s vortex generator, which was slowly winding down, though still in the process supplying energy to the Command. He connected up superconducting cables from his own ship to suck that power, thus drawing further momentum from the circulating mercury in the Command’s generator. It would, he realized, take at least two days before the liquid metal was moving slowly enough to be tapped, and before the Command’s vortex generator could safely be disassembled, but by then most of the other ship would be gone. It would also take that many days before his smelting plants could even start work on creating components for a new vortex ring for his own ship, and probably months before his ship might be returned to anything like its previous condition.
‘Alan Saul,’ came a voice broadcast from the secondary bridge sphere, where his robots were now busily taking apart the sphere’s acceleration-orientation gear. ‘I need to speak to Alan Saul.’
It seemed that this Admiral Bartholomew, whose name and record Saul had loaded from the Command’s systems, now wanted to speak to him. Saul considered that. Possibly, the surrender of the remaining hold-outs would speed up the present process. Then, again, there were huge inefficiencies involved in conveying the human survivors to captivity, and little of material value to be gained by doing so.
Command
There was, Bartholomew felt, something almost reassuring in having been defeated so comprehensively. He had nothing to bargain with, no terms to negotiate, nothing to offer except the surrender of the crew and soldiers he could still contact, and whom he suspected were only alive because they had not yet got in the way of one of the robots. He swallowed some stale orange juice from his suit spigot, visor closed now because the sounds of slicing and drilling, the crackle of cutting lasers, the thump of rivet removers and the high-speed screech of bolts being unwound was getting very close now. He had witnessed it out there before the cam feeds had blanked. He had seen those things taking apart his ship with the alacrity of an expert black-market butcher gutting, skinning and dismembering a corpse collected from the back door of a Safe Departure clinic, only there was more than one butcher at work here, and a damned sight more than just one knife.
‘Alan Saul,’ he repeated, using isolated broadcasting gear within the bridge sphere, since nothing else was now available. ‘I need to speak to Alan Saul.’
‘And why do you want to do that?’ asked a perfectly calm and apparently sane voice through the PA system.
‘I want to surrender myself and my crew,’ said Bartholomew, glancing round at those watching him and seeing no sign of disagreement there.
‘And the relevance of that to me is what?’ Alan Saul enquired.
‘It’s over now. You’ve won. We’ll do anything you want, go anywhere you send us.’
‘I see,’ said Saul. ‘You’ve conceded defeat and tipped over your king. You’ve acknowledged that you cannot win and have pulled up the stumps. It was all a jolly wheeze while we were fighting, but now let’s all retire to the pavilion for beer and sandwiches.’
Apart from the reference to chess, Bartholomew had no idea what Saul was talking about, so all he could do was dumbly repeat, ‘It’s over.’
‘Hundreds of my personnel are now dead. My sister is dead – irrecoverably dead. And my ship is a wreck. If I had surrendered to you, then my personnel and I would have faced lengthy interrogation under inducement, followed by protracted executions on ETV. You are now in an environment and situation where keeping you and your remaining personnel alive requires an effort on my part. Please explain to me why I should bother to expend that effort.’
Irrecoverably dead? What did that mean?
Bartholomew groped for something – for anything – to say. ‘You were under attack and using your drive at the time, so maybe you didn’t see what happened back at Earth.’
‘I saw,’ Saul replied. ‘And I picked up some communications that you almost certainly did not. It seems that Captain Scotonis was still aboard the Scourge, and that he felt a grudge towards Serene Galahad relating to her extermination of billions of human beings on Earth – whose number included his own family.’
‘Jesus!’ Jepson exclaimed, while Grace merely dipped her head and gave it a shake.
Bartholomew studied each of his remaining command crew in turn. Some looked baffled, some angry, others still managed to retain that long-inculcated trait of showing no emotion at all. Did he believe what he had just been told? Unless Saul had some kind of weakness he knew nothing about, some need for Bartholomew’s support, which in the present situation seemed highly unlikely, he could see no reason why the man should be lying. And, of course, it made utter sense. Many were the suspicions, though aired in utter privacy, about the demographics of that particular catastrophe, and about how it was mostly zero assets who had died – conveniently along with all the remaining members of the previous Committee. Calder had been quite acerbic in his occasional comments about this, and at the time Bartholomew had felt sure he himself was being sounded out. However, he had reacted with complete correctness and loyalty to Serene Galahad, simply because he had been afraid Calder’s comments were made at her behest, in order to test his loyalty.
‘Then, don’t you see?’ he countered. ‘It’s all over. She’s dead. You have no enemy any longer!’
‘That is not necessarily true, since a fast-escape drop shuttle left the Traveller construction station just before the detonation, managed to correct itself after the blast front reached it, and then landed somewhere in India.’
After his initial tirade, something about the way Saul was speaking now sounded a bit off to Bartholomew. It all seemed to have become too correct, too exact and, from his experience with Christopher Shivers, he felt sure he knew why.
‘I’m not speaking to all of Alan Saul now, am I?’
‘You are speaking to enough of him,’ the voice replied.
‘So I am to be judged by a sub-program?’
‘You are in no position to protest about that.’
‘So what must I do?’ Bartholomew asked. ‘Must I beg for the lives of myself and my crew?’
‘No. I will no longer respond to circumstances on the basis of emotion,’ Saul replied. ‘However, I have given limited self-governance to the personnel aboard my ship and, since this is a human matter, I have consulted with Technical Director Le Roque, who is the de facto governor of the human population.’
A human matter?
‘What is his decision?’
‘I have opened your communications to all of your own personnel aboard,’ Saul declared. ‘You will tell them to abandon their weapons and head for the nose of your ship. There you will be met by my police chief, Langstrom, who will conduct you into confinement in Arcoplex One. What Le Roque and Langstrom then decide to do with you is their own concern. You may address your personnel now.’
Bartholomew sat there gaping. What should he say? What could he say? Eventually, after a lengthy throat clearing, he began, ‘This is Admiral Bartholomew. We have lost, we have been defeated absolutely,
and the only alternative to surrender is for us to all die . . .’
When he had finished, the replies came in, neatly ordered one after the other, so doubtless Saul was still controlling their communication. Some argued with Bartholomew, but could not argue with the facts he laid out. Most simply agreed.
‘Okay, let’s go,’ he said at last, when it was all over.
They went out through the bridge sphere airlock in pairs, one of them carrying out their navigator, who was unconscious but still alive. Bartholomew waited until they were all gone, extracted the laminar storage of the ship’s log and inserted it into a belt pouch, for his defence just in case he ever faced trial on Earth, which now seemed unlikely. He already knew that Saul’s robots were tearing his ship apart, but as he stepped out, the extent of it still came as a shock.
The corridor right outside had lost all its wall panels, its ceiling and even most of its floor. He gazed up through the wide-open structure of the ship at busy activity: the flicker of cutting lasers; golden worms seemingly entwined through everything, with their multiple limbs moving at a blur; diamond saws filling vacuum with a snow of glittering swarf; major ship components shifting, then being pulled away. His command crew could be seen further along the corridor, standing back from where one of his own ship’s robots was taking up another floor plate ahead.
‘Go over it,’ he instructed. ‘If he wanted us dead we would be dead by now.’
They launched themselves over the robot, which simply ignored them. Propelling themselves on through the ship, they made their way forward to join up with a party of three troops standing on a lattice of beams halfway from the core to the nose. Here Bartholomew gaped in amazement, for so much of the ship’s structure was gone he could see clearly as far as the vortex ring, and beyond it out into hard vacuum. Peering ahead, he caught sight of Saul’s vessel, in fact could see right inside Saul’s vessel, because such a large part of its hull was missing. As they headed towards this, the whole ship around them shifted in the same direction, like some fish being swallowed by a giant sea anemone.
Others joined them on the way forward as they propelled themselves from beam to beam, and had to throw themselves clear of the paths of great loads of wall plates, beams, reels of cable and optics – and, in one case, the partially dismembered carcass of a fusion side-burner. Five people awaited them on the lip of the giant hole opening into the massive vessel ahead. They were armed, and began beckoning them down. Bartholomew paused against a beam, as those around him headed where directed. He counted just thirty-five of them surviving out of a crew of hundreds.
‘You’re Bartholomew,’ said one of the five figures as he caught up with the rest.
‘I am.’
‘Okay, all of you follow me,’ said the man he now recognized as Langstrom. ‘Don’t do anything stupid, and don’t try to run. I won’t bother going after you, but then I’ve no need to.’
Bartholomew gazed up at the stream of robots and materials flowing through the gap, and then back at the Command. Already it had become skeletal as far back as the wrecked main engine, and he could see right through its length and to the stars beyond. What, in the face of all this, would be more stupid? Was it fighting to the end and thus dying, or allowing oneself to be captured alive?
Earth
Serene just could not believe the pain. She’d pissed in her suit, which was fine since it was designed to absorb it, but she’d also shit herself and it wasn’t intended for that. As Sack had pulled the VC suit from her body, she had been sure he was going to rape her – rape her with a penis covered in that hard lizard skin. She didn’t even try to fight him after he dealt the second blow. She knew how strong he was, and knew it would be futile. Let him have his way, let him do this to her and punish her. Perhaps it was necessary for her to undergo this metaphorical ‘scourging’ to free her of the sin of past crimes, and thence she could move clean-born into the bright future. What she had done, and what she intended to do, were of the utmost importance, so she should expect to suffer some pain along the way. Great deeds were often tied to great suffering. Didn’t the saints and martyrs of the old religions of Earth know about that?
Once she was naked, he tied a length of the preconductor cable to the ankle of her undamaged leg, then to the wrist of her undamaged arm. So, he was going to tie her down first and then have his way with her. She noted that Ruger and Trove were still here, watching in fascination. They would enjoy her personal humiliation, and now she felt glad Sack had not obeyed her instruction to kill them. After this was all over, she would be able to hunt them down and punish them thoroughly for their crimes, including this present voyeurism.
With the cables in place, Sack began towing her along by her ankle. She shrieked again, then concentrated on keeping her shattered knee and elbow off the bony ground. She gritted her teeth, determined not to cry out any more. She would suffer this, and it would pass. Nearer to the bulldozer she became aware of the heat from its blade – as flames still leaped up behind it – and it was here Sack finally deposited her. He took up the cable attached to her wrist and tied its far end to a large chunk of wreckage. Next he returned and pulled the other length of cable round behind the dozer blade, and she could hear him scrabbling somewhere there. The cable flipped over the top of the blade, which rose at least eight metres off the ground, and he then appeared there, amidst the flames and smoke, and began hauling upon it.
How could he survive there in that fire? The suit must help protect him . . . but what about his hands and face? Serene abandoned these thoughts as the cable began tugging her, by the ankle, closer to the hot blade. However, the other cable attached to her wrist then tightened too, and she was lifted up off the ground, the pain of it bringing her near to blacking out. Higher and higher she rose, until she hung suspended at an angle, between the two cables, only the one connected to her wrist stopping her from swinging straight in towards the hot metal.
‘Wonderful stuff this keroskin – you have no idea,’ announced Sack, walking out from behind the dozer blade. Oily flames licked up his legs, his spacesuit was blackened and smoking, and he looked like a demon fresh out of the Pit. He paused and stooped to take up handfuls of bone gravel to put out the flames, seemingly oblivious to the burning oil clinging to his hands.
‘Fire isn’t much of a problem for it,’ he explained, ‘because it has fewer afferent nerves and can resist a lot more damage than normal human skin. Of course, even at the cost of being more vulnerable and less able to withstand damage, I’d prefer to have human skin, and my old face.’
‘It can . . . be done,’ Serene managed. ‘You can have . . . your face back.’
‘But I can’t have my father back.’ Sack gestured all around. ‘And there are millions if not billions of people who also can’t have their friends or family back.’
‘Necessary,’ Serene asserted.
‘Oh, I agree,’ Sack nodded. ‘You did something that was horribly necessary in order to save the planet, but this is personal.’ He walked over to the taut cable that extended from Serene’s wrist to the piece of wreckage. He pulled it tighter to give himself some slack at the knot, which he untied. Next, holding the cable taut, he turned back to face her.
‘My only problem with fire is a psychological barrier I have to overcome.’ He slackened the cable slightly and thus set Serene swinging. ‘I was told that the pain I suffered was just about the worst anyone can suffer, and that of course left scars inside me too.’
‘You . . . don’t do this.’ He clearly wanted her to think he was going to burn her, and she decided it best to play along with this melodrama he was creating. He would toy with her for a while, but in the end he knew she was utterly essential to the future of Earth.
‘But I do,’ Sack replied, then stepped forward to allow her to swing in towards the dozer blade.
He wouldn’t do this. He would pull the cable taut again at the last moment. He would not sacrifice the future to such petty vengeance. Serene continued to believ
e this right up until the moment when her naked body touched metal hotter than a clothes iron. Thereafter she lost the ability to think at all.
The sunrise was spectacular: deep purple clouds turning silver and gold on their undersides, then shading to amethyst shot through with blood red, before being seared by the sun, as it breached the sprawl towers, and then turning to lemon and orange. The clouds seemed to be rainbow islands in the sky, with the bays and coves of some fantasy land people could only dream of ever reaching – or only reach by dreaming. It was, Ruger felt, a sunrise he would remember, and one he could appreciate properly now the screaming had stopped.
‘Do you reckon she’s dead now?’ Trove asked.
‘I should think so,’ Ruger replied. ‘I’m surprised she lasted so long.’
The power of the sun began ramping up very quickly and the clouds lost their romantic appeal. Maybe a couple of kilometres ahead lay more sprawl, though it was difficult to tell for sure in the increasing heat haze, and now, in clear morning light, the surface they walked upon was all too visible. How many thousands . . . how many millions of the dead lay here under his feet?
‘Looks as if we’re getting some activity.’ Trove pointed.
Ruger raised his gaze from the crushed ribcages and empty eye sockets to peer at several shapes rising above the distant sprawl. After a moment he identified a big rotobus, along with two outrider military aeros, heading directly towards them. He wanted to run, get himself to that sprawl and find somewhere to hide while he sorted out what to do next, but having spent so long in zero gravity, having suffered so many injuries and certainly also suffering from radiation sickness, he was having enough trouble just continuing to put one foot in front of the other.