‘This is Captain Scotonis of the Scourge here,’ said a new voice. ‘We’re not far away from you but, as you might have gathered, we’ve got a problem.’
‘I’ve gathered nothing,’ said Alex. ‘I’ve been hiding, remember.’
‘Ah . . . yes.’
‘Why are you talking to me?’ Alex asked. ‘It’s normally that Ruger guy.’
‘He’s a little inconvenienced now,’ the captain replied, ‘and we’re running out of time. Alex, that structure in the outer ring of the station is some sort of space drive. It moved the entire station six hundred thousand kilometres in just eight seconds, but crashed it into an asteroid. There seems to be little damage and, from the readings we’re getting, it seems that drive is powering up again. If they use it again we’re never going to get to you.’
‘What?’ Alex could think of nothing else to say.
‘We need you to knock it out, Alex. I can’t stress enough how important it is that you do so. If they manage to get it running again, Messina will forever be a slave and you’ll end up either captured and killed.’
‘Space drive?’ Alex echoed.
‘An inertia-less drive.’
Alex just had to accept it, because this explanation fitted the facts much better than anything he had so far heard from the tactical team. He turned himself round so he was facing out towards the rim, and through the superstructure there he could just about see the newly built ring – this space drive. It somehow looked incredibly substantial now, as if the station structure all around it was made of balsa and the thing itself was fashioned of blued steel.
‘Any advice on how I stop it?’
‘Do you have explosives?
‘Only ceramic ammo.’
‘That might be enough if you can put enough bullets into it. You have to try. Alternatively, I’m sure you’ve been trained to . . . improvise.’
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Alex. ‘I’ll call you when I have some news.’
He pulled the aerial wire away from the beam and wound it back into the pouch containing the booster board. Bullets might well be enough, as Scotonis had suggested. The thing bore some resemblance to a particle accelerator and doubtless numerous holes through the surrounding coils and into the accelerator pipe itself should seriously fuck with whatever it was doing. Then there were also the power-supply cables. The schematic Alexandra had already pulled up showed the main feed running in over by the endcap of Arcoplex One, with control optics leading to both Tech Central and the EM field transformer room – a definite weak spot. But first the bullets. He began to make his way through the superstructure towards the ring itself.
As he started to get a clearer view of the device, Alex did not lose that impression of substantiality, and the image of it hung heavy in his mind, almost too heavy, making his head ache with the load. He decided to get right on top of it before opening fire, since that way he would be able to target whatever aspect looked the most critical. However, even as he drew closer to the thing the sensation he was getting through his handholds grew ever more unpleasant. Upon reaching the base of one of the big beams that supported the device, he paused, just holding himself in position by hooking the sight of his rifle on the metal. Even so, that weird vibration travelled up through the weapon and into his arms, which were now aching as if they had been beaten. His recently healed leg had also begun to smart, and the pain in it there was growing steadily. He couldn’t pause, had to move in.
Alex again hung his rifle across his back and scrambled along the beam. The intensity of the pain increased until it felt as if he was being electrocuted through his hands. Abruptly he propelled himself from the beam towards the device, but the pain continued to grow even though he was touching nothing. As he drew closer to the heavy coils and skeins of wiring, his visor display suddenly began flashing a ‘systems failure’ alert and the smell of burning infiltrated his helmet. In an instant he realized what the problem was: being this close to such a mass of powered-up coils was inducing currents in the wiring of his suit. This could kill him.
He prepared to propel himself away but, when he was a metre from the thing, his descent abruptly slowed as if he was dropping into an invisible marsh. He bent his legs and then shoved hard against . . . nothing. It was enough to send him sailing away again, though slowly. He unstrapped his rifle and turned himself so that he could aim it back towards the device. Smoke now filled his suit helmet and he could hear a sizzling from the vicinity of his chest. He opened fire, spraying a full eighty-round clip along the length of the device, the dampened recoil making little difference to his progress away, then automatically loaded another clip before assessing the damage.
Nothing, no damage at all – but he could see objects bobbing about around the device like disturbed wasps, and realized he was seeing the bullets he had fired. As he watched them, they all lined up along the length of the device, then, led by the bullets at one end of that line, they began spiralling around it. Alex finally caught hold of a beam and drew himself to a halt, snapping his hand away immediately afterwards. This made no sense. Certainly the problems with his suit could be attributed to magnetic fields, and maybe a similar effect had worked on the metal within his suit to prevent him landing on the device itself, but what the hell was doing that with his bullets? They were made of ceramic, so could not be affected by magnetism.
He had to accept this and move on. First he needed to get somewhere he could change out of his present suit and into the VC suit strapped on his back. He kicked off from the nearby beam, sending himself on a course parallel with the device, still holding his rifle in readiness. Just half a kilometre round from his present location lay the cold store supplied by the hydroponics unit in which he had concealed himself for so long. He corrected his course off another beam, kept scanning all around for any activity. Maybe, because he had not actually managed to do any damage, his attempt had not yet been detected.
The cold store soon became visible. It had only two tubular transport feeds running into it: one from his hydroponics unit which lay behind him, and one from further along around the rim. He changed course again, pushing off from yet another beam, and thus came down on the surface of the store, absorbing the shock of impact by bending his legs but only just managing to stop himself from bouncing away by catching hold of a nearby support strut. Next he walked round the surface of the store to the airlock, opened it, and was just about to step inside when the nightmare descended on him.
‘We’ve sustained no damage at all,’ Le Roque reported. ‘All the asteroid debris was blown outwards.’
‘Rhine?’ Saul turned towards the man.
‘The tidal forces ripped the asteroid apart,’ Rhine replied. ‘But the impact effectively killed our momentum . . . if it could be described as such.’
Saul would have liked to be able to absorb more data than was being supplied by the hard wiring, but within its vicinity the vortex ring was killing bandwidth and doing some odd things with time. It was also interfering with any equipment out there, which was why Saul had pulled most of the robots back from the rim, for they had started to become a little . . . unreliable.
‘That’s odd,’ said Rhine, ‘some debris did get through – I’m reading impacts on the exotic energy shell.’
Saul was on that in a microsecond. Rhine had just said something which, according to the constantly updated theory of his drive, was practically impossible. He tracked the data Rhine was studying, located the part of the vortex ring concerned, but there were no cams available there.
‘Paul?’ he enquired, and immediately knew he had made a mistake in pulling back his robots. He had been concentrating on the bigger picture, he realized, and, in neglecting the smaller characters in that picture, had thus put them all in imminent danger.
The proctor was descending on a figure in a spacesuit who had been about to enter one of the rim’s cold stores. A data packet from Paul, in speeded-up time, showed this same figure opening fire on the vortex gener
ator, failing to do any damage, then moving away. Paul had tracked him, and now intended to take him out.
As the intruder turned, Saul immediately recognized him as Alex, the Messina clone. The proctor reached out to grab his arm and to swing a clenched fist at his face. But Alex jerked aside very fast and raised his rifle protectively. The proctor only managed to close its fingers on the material of Alex’s suit, and its fist struck the rifle butt before striking the man’s visor. Vapour blew out around the visor, but Saul immediately saw that Alex had just gained an advantage. The blow had turned his rifle so the barrel was pointing straight at Paul’s head. Alex did not fail to use that advantage and the image feed filled with blue fire and flying chunks of ceramic ammunition. As the image cleared again, Saul watched Alex entering the airlock, the ripped arm and visor of his suit gushing vapour.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Paul.
The proctor had received only minor damage, but the fusillade had blown it out into vacuum and it could do nothing until it reached some strut, beam or wall to grab hold of. This would take, at its current trajectory, at least eight minutes.
‘How long until we can fly again?’ Saul asked Rhine, even while running his own calculations.
‘Maybe half an hour,’ Rhine replied. ‘I can’t be more accurate than that.’
Saul acknowledged this news with a nod – he himself had calculated on thirty-three minutes – then immediately headed out of Tech Central. It had been foolish of him to leave this in Langstrom’s hands, in effect to dismiss it as just a matter for the station police. Even now, analysing what little data lay available in the station system about these clones, he realized why this one had escaped something as formidable as a proctor.
Apparently, from the moment they stepped out of their amniotic tanks, the clones underwent severe training and indoctrination. They were also the test beds for new improvements in physical enhancements of the kind less detectable than those seen in Committee bodyguards or some of the enforcers: increased muscle density, genetic mods for nerve-impulse acceleration and mental programming for improved performance.
This one needed to be dealt with, and fast.
Saul picked up his pace, meanwhile making his own assessments of the state of Argus and simultaneously checking instrument readings of all the asteroids in the immediate area – he did not want them to go crashing into something when they used the drive again. As he did this, subprograms he had set in motion some time before flagged up items for his attention. One of the flags indicated high importance, so he checked it. What he found momentarily slammed him to a halt.
A transmission had been picked up from Mars, automatically stored by the system, but containing something he had previously ticked as being of interest to him. The fact that it was a radio signal and not a communication via tanglecom had also raised its importance.
Var . . .
The video file had been retransmitted over a period of six hours. This duration meant it had been sent from some low-lying area on Mars, which in itself was curious, and the contents confirmed that.
In his mind he gazed upon his sister’s face behind the visor of a Mars EA suit.
‘This is Varalia Delex transmitting to Argus Station from Coprates Chasma on Mars. My message is for my brother Alan . . . Alan Saul who, it now seems, is the one you on Argus call the “Owner”,’ she began. ‘Alan, if, by any chance, you survive your encounter with the Scourge there is something you need to know. It pains me for more reasons than one,’ she grimaced at that, ‘to have to tell you that I am no longer the director of Antares Base. Rhone, our director of Mars Science, has seized control and is in communication with the new regime on Earth. Therefore don’t expect any help at the base, and be aware that Rhone has an electromagnetic pulse weapon, while other personnel now have numerous hand weapons. I don’t know what your response will be to this – whether you will simply ignore the Mars base or whether there are things you want from there. In fact I don’t know what your intentions are. Do you intend to remain in the vicinity of Earth? Do you intend to try surviving within the solar system? How any of us could survive Earth has always been a question I’ve found difficult to answer.’ She paused, seemingly searching for words.
She then continued, ‘It seems likely that I will be dead before I know what you intend to do. While inspecting some work being conducted on the edge of Coprates Chasma, I was betrayed by Rhone. He then killed my good friend Lopomac, and attempted to kill me, too, but I threw myself down into the chasma and managed to survive the fall. I am now in one of the last remaining intact buildings of the old trench base. I have about twenty hours of air left and, unless I can find some more, then I will die.’
Again she paused, her expression now turning vicious. ‘If you do come here, Alan, I can only hope that you will . . . deal with Rhone. I hope you feel some familial connection, though of course that’s never been evident in you before. I should add that not all base personnel are complicit in his betrayal. There are some good people there, like Martinez, Carol and others. Please reply – at least to let me know that you have received this message.’
Saul paused in order to reply, just vocally, just to let her know, ‘Var, this is Alan. Your message has been received. Currently we have been delayed because, while running under Jasper Rhine’s new space drive, we collided with an asteroid. The station is undamaged, but it is possible we will come under attack before we can get the drive running again. If we survive we will come for you and, if we cannot get to you in time, be assured that Rhone will pay a heavy price.’ He knew his words sounded without feeling, but he didn’t have the time to deal with that now.
He couldn’t think of anything more to add, any comfort to give her. He now broke into a loping run. They had enough problems here as it was and, even if they got to Mars, the chances of him doing anything for Var were minimal. None of the space planes aboard Argus was capable of flying down through the thin Martian atmosphere. Perhaps that wasn’t an insuperable problem, given time, but time was the one thing that Var did not have. He began running schematics in his mind, seeing what could be stripped away, making vector and power calculations, redesigning things organically as, merely with a thought, he sent a squad of construction robots out to the space docks.
The lock pressurized even as Alex unclipped and pulled off his helmet. He opened the inner door and pushed himself into the wide space available before the storage racks, fully alert for anyone waiting for him in there. He seemed safe for the moment, but that could not last. If that android had seen him, then so had all of them, and perhaps Alan Saul himself would by now know where he was. Therefore more would be on the way, along with members of the station police force. He had only one option.
Tumbling in zero gravity, Alex quickly stripped off his old suit, unpacked the VC and donned it. He did it much faster than most normal troopers could manage, but then he was much better trained and his reactions a lot quicker. No normal trooper would have been able to survive an encounter like the one he had just gone through. Once he had closed the VC suit, he hooked up the oxygen pack from his old suit as a reserve, connected in the radio booster board, and then pushed himself over to the cylinder transport system. Here he found a cylinder that had come from his own hydroponics unit, still in the process of being unpacked by a pedestal-mounted robot arm. He ducked under the arm and dragged the cylinder from its rack. Only when he had it clear did he consider what could have happened if the robotic arm had been controlled by someone hostile. He emptied the cylinder of its remaining contents, then took it over to the other egress and put it in position. There was no guarantee this would work, but he had to try. He climbed inside and closed the lid.
Nothing happened for a moment, and Alex began to wonder if Saul had reached out to shut down his escape. But then, with a clonk, the thing slid into motion, shortly followed by a surge of acceleration pushing his feet against the base of the cylinder. He closed his eyes. If Saul knew he was in this tube, then the chances were that he
would do something about it – such as knocking off the braking at the other end and allowing Alex to arrive at his destination at full speed. So Alex might well be about to die. Then again, another option would be to stop the cylinder halfway along its course and just leave it there until he ran out of air. Certainly he had no way of getting out of this thing while it was in its transport tube. Deceleration ensued . . . a further couple of clonks, and the lid opened.
‘What the hell?’ said the man looking down at him.
In one motion Alex jerked upright and swung his rifle in a short vicious arc that connected with the man’s head. He tumbled back and Alex was past him in a moment, realizing he was now in some sort of automated food-preparation room. As he reached the door, he guessed that this must be the place that supplied the refectories and personal dispensers in Arcoplex One – which meant he was getting close to the power feed to that weird space drive.
Out in the adjacent corridor he turned right and headed straight for a bulkhead door, pausing to study the direction icons and colour-coded map above it, which he memorized. Heading straight for the airlock, he passed a woman in the corridor but she wasn’t armed, so he ignored her. Once through the airlock, he moved out into a cageway running alongside the outer endcap. He abandoned the cageway at once, since it was taking him in the wrong direction, then climbed over the top of the unit he had just left and gazed towards his destination. Through partially constructed floors of the outer ring, he could see part of the space drive and the ducts that ran power and control optics to it, extending towards him then sweeping away to the right to disappear into the endcap itself. He was just about to launch himself towards those ducts when suddenly silver shapes were swarming around them, many of them breaking off to launch themselves towards him.
Alex made microsecond calculations before he threw himself in a flat course over towards the side of the endcap. He stood no chance now of severing the power supply to the space drive, but there was still another potential weakness. The EM field seemed to be an integral part of this new drive and, just beyond the endcap lay the main transformer room. After a few seconds in flight, he hit the curved outer edge of the structure around the arcoplex-bearing housing. As he thumped down a foot to secure himself, he caught a glimpse of someone looking up at him in surprise from a rounded window, before he propelled himself further. As he sailed through vacuum, he turned to survey his surroundings. There was absolutely no doubt now that he had been spotted. There were robots closing in on him from every direction, some of them leaving vapour trails from their use of compressed-air impellers.