Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

18

Suffer the Children

Before the twentieth century, increasing mechanization in industry was only seen as a boon by industry chiefs. Less outlay on labour of course meant more profit, and the only ones complaining were Luddites and could be ignored. In the twenty-first century, industries increasingly fell under the control of the state, while continuing mechanization and ‘social justice’ created an ever-growing underclass of the unemployed and unemployable. This class was generally kept under control by the media bread and circuses of the time, but the problems started with the growth in the number of people being displaced by increasingly ‘expert’ mechanization – people less easy to control. To manage this, the political classes chose to find employment for them, chose to bring them into the fold by creating a huge and pointless bureaucracy, but even that had its limits. It soon became evident that not all could be thus employed. It soon became evident that, in a population boom, too many educated people were available. The answer was simple: cripple education systems, allow the health and social professionals more of a free hand with the pacifying drugs, start damaging people even when they are children and ensure more of them end up in the more easily controlled underclass. However, even this has proved only a temporary solution, and it is certain that more drastic measures will need to be applied.

Scourge

The background noise aboard the ship had changed, as the preparations being made by the troops transmitted through the metalwork like infernal machines ticking over in a cellar. Clay Ruger reached up, touched his aching head, and couldn’t quite believe that he was still alive. Only now, as he hazily recollected events in the bridge, did he realize that the weapon Scotonis had held must have been loaded with taser bullets – the kind that delivered a disabling charge on impact.

He sat upright, then tried to use his fone to get through to Scotonis himself, but heard only a fizzing noise. The taser bullet had obviously taken out his fone too. He carefully climbed out of his bed and went to the door, but it wouldn’t open. Next he began walking over to his console, to reach Scotonis that way, but the ship shuddered, a sound like thunder rumbling through it, then came the throaty roar of a side drive, which sent him staggering against a wall.

Clay clung in place until the shuddering ceased, his eyes closed and a cold sweat sticking his ship suit to his back. Distantly he could hear people shouting and a breach klaxon sounding. He took a deep breath, then turned and walked over to his console, sat down and put through a call, to which the captain immediately responded, but with only his image icon appearing on the screen.

‘How’s your head?’ Scotonis asked distractedly.

‘It’s been better,’ Clay replied. ‘Why did you do that, anyway, and what the hell’s going on now?’

‘The point was that you were supposed to be dead,’ the captain replied calmly, ‘and I couldn’t risk you walking out of the bridge and being seen by the staff officers that Commander Liang had sent up into the executive area. We had you carted out in a body bag to Medical, where Dr Myers checked you out, then we had you moved to your own cabin after Liang’s men were gone.’

Clay absorbed that information, but still a big question remained. Why the hell had Scotonis not just killed him? In the same position, he himself wouldn’t have hesitated. It occurred to him then that maybe Scotonis was a better human being than Clay was, but that wasn’t a thought he wanted to examine too closely.

‘So Liang had been told that I was supposed to die?’ he ventured.

A voice in the background spoke and Clay recognized the gunnery officer, Cookson. ‘Glancing hit,’ he explained. ‘We’re low profile right now. Close defences can handle most of it.’

The captain replied, ‘That’ll change.’ Then, ‘What was that you said, Ruger?’

‘So, now I’ve got to stay in my cabin?’ Clay replied instead.

‘No, too risky,’ said Scotonis. ‘Now you’re awake, I want you to move yourself to Messina’s quarters. You’ll be able to get a good view on the big screens in there.’

‘What’s happening, Scotonis?’

‘We’ve arrived,’ the captain snapped in response. ‘Now get moving – because Liang’s men might be back at any time.’

‘My door is locked.’

‘It isn’t now. I just unlocked it.’

Clay shut down the console, stood up and surveyed his room, considering what personal belongings he needed from here, but decided not to delay further since Messina’s quarters were better protected than the rest of the ship. So he headed for the door. Immediately outside his cabin, the acrid smell of burning plastic hit his nostrils and, looking up, he saw a stratum of smoke across the ceiling. The breach klaxon was still sounding somewhere in the distance and he could hear a robotic voice saying something repetitive but indistinct. The moment he stepped out into the corridor, the ship shuddered once again and another klaxon opened up nearby. Clay stood dumbfounded for a moment, but when, on looking up, he saw the smoke was on the move, he immediately broke into a run. Ten minutes of sweaty panic brought him to Messina’s apartments, which were positioned below the bridge. He entered and hit the control closing the airtight door. In here, he was surrounded by impact armour and breach-foam layers within the walls, similar to those located in every essential bulkhead throughout the ship.

He swung his gaze across the partially completed furnishings, and then headed over to a large and comfortable acceleration chair positioned before a multi-screen which looked like a minimalist sculpture fashioned out of one huge curving sheet of black glass. He sat down, strapped himself in, flipped over the chair-arm console and set both the screen and bridge communication running. Images appeared of the views currently available to the bridge crew, and one more showing them all seated and watching the action on their multi-screen.

‘What’s the situation?’ Clay asked.

‘Tell him, Cookson,’ said Scotonis.

Gunnery Officer Cookson eyed his captain askance, then said, ‘We’ve railed out five test shots, and from them located some of their weaponry, but of course they’re not too happy about that.’

Another image now: a close view of Argus Station. Above it streaks of fire appeared, like white contrails, before deforming and fading down to orange, then to red, and finally disappearing. Targeting frames next appeared all over the station like a sudden pox.

‘We’ve precisely located the two railguns Alex detailed, and will shortly be opening fire on them. But first we’re going to fuck up their targeting.’

‘How?’ asked Clay.

‘You will see shortly,’ said Scotonis. ‘Now, if you don’t mind, we have work to do.’

Clay grimaced at that, then, using his console, he first opened up the command channels so that he could hear all the exchanges between command staff, then began calling up other views and additional data. In the troops’ quarters things had changed drastically. Large areas of the accommodation had been collapsed so as to leave three long hexagonal compartments where now the troops were massing with all their equipment. They were all suited up and carrying weapons, and those behind the primary assault teams were already heading out into a newly connected tube leading to the main exterior airlock, carrying the various sections of vacuum-warfare penetration locks.

‘Detonation in five,’ Cookson announced. ‘Four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . and now.’

The image of Argus Station whited out, then came back with a ball of fire expanding above it. The image fizzed, breaking into squares – the EM radiation pulse delivered by the blast. As this ball of fire inflated, it grew diffuse but even so, when its perimeter hit the station, the effect was visible. The whole massive structure tilted, and debris was blown away like chaff from a plate.

‘Reacquiring,’ said Scotonis.

Clay did not need to ask what had happened. They’d detonated a nuke close to the station to interfere with electronics and now, since the station had shifted, Cookson was retargeting the station’s weapons. Clay tried to sit back and relax, but found he couldn’t. Really, he decided, he had too much intelligence and imagination to be a soldier. It was bad enough having to fight in a place where there was air to breathe, but here?

Next a sonorous thrumming that penetrated bone-deep filled the ship. The first time the railguns fired, Clay must have still been unconscious, for he had never heard or felt this sensation before. But he just knew this had to be their sound.

‘They’re returning fire again,’ Cookson noted, ‘but their targeting is off.’

Even so, the Scourge shuddered again, and somewhere another klaxon started howling. Contrails flared into being all across the top of the station, until it was nearly lost to visibility behind a curiously regular pattern like some epiphyte made of fire, but this only lasted until the next nuclear detonation, which swept it all away before going on to peel hull plates off Argus like a scaling knife. Shortly after this, fire began to glare from inside it, and vapour belched from the newly torn holes.

‘That’s one of them,’ said Cookson and, even as he spoke, another explosion erupted from the station, hurling black chunks of machinery up on a column of fire. ‘And that’s the other,’ he added.

‘Trove,’ prompted Scotonis.

‘Twenty minutes,’ she replied.

The surge of the engines shoved Clay deeper into his chair, then tried to throw him out of it sideways.

‘Liang,’ said Scotonis, ‘twenty minutes. Get in position.’

‘Already clearing first teams in Section One,’ replied Commander Liang.

Troops were crammed into the tube leading to the airlocks. Clay searched for further views, and saw that, even while the tube was full of soldiers, they were still on the move. Soon he found an exterior cam showing them spilling out on the hull of the Scourge like ants boiling from their nest. There they had strung out ropes connected to the hull and were using them to secure themselves. They struck Clay as overly exposed out there, but were those inside the ship any safer?

On Argus Station, detonations were still blooming like brief hot stars, and sending chunks of debris tumbling away. Cookson was now destroying their collision lasers, Clay realized, and maybe any other anti-personnel weapons scattered about the surface. It seemed all very easy and going perfectly to plan, which was worrying.

‘Nothing more from the railguns,’ said Cookson. ‘That means they have to be down.’

‘As things stand, between the first two strike points looks good,’ observed Liang, who must have been studying a head-up display. ‘We assault the station internally through them while a third team goes over the hull to take Tech Central.’

The station was now looming huge on the multi-screen as Trove announced, ‘Ten minutes, docking anchors primed.’

Next Cookson observed, ‘I’m getting an energy spike. There’s something—’

All the hardware around Clay blanked and a hot flu-like sensation passed through his body. Immediately on top of this came a numb terror, as he expected the fire he had seen aboard Galahad’s aero to descend on him now.

The screen blinked back on, and audio returned.

‘Maser! A fucking maser!” Cookson shouted.

‘Shut it down!’ Scotonis yelled, his voice drowned out by another horrible sound.

Something was happening to some of the troops out on the hull. Some had released their holds and were falling away from the ship, legs and arms waving frantically, spacesuits inflating grotesquely. When some of them began bursting in clouds of vapour and offal, Clay just gaped. The concerted screaming seemed like the feed from a microphone opened into Hell, and it took Clay a moment to grasp that he should not be hearing this at all, for he only had command channels open. Then, belatedly, he realized he was not hearing it over radio, but distantly through the body of the ship. He turned his attention immediately to the troops still aboard.

Two of the hexagonal compartments appeared fine, with all the troops neatly ranked and in the process of filing out, but in the third one a chaotic mass of swiftly moving bodies bounced about like plastic balls in a lottery cylinder. Smoke began to appear too, then some of the bodies that had finally stopped writhing began to sprout fire from their suit seams. Not being out in vacuum, these men were not inflating or bursting, instead being cooked inside their garments.

Again that deep thrumming echoed throughout the ship. Fire exploded out of another part of the station and rose up into Clay’s range of view. A series of detonations followed and, as he glimpsed something spearing its way down, trailing cable, he realized that the docking anchors had now been fired. He focused a camera on one of them and watched it hit, driving its hardened talons into hull metal, then begin closing up, tearing up tens of square metres of surface metal until clamping on the firmer structure underneath. The sounds of heavy motors winding in the anchor cables, and the stressing of metal, ensued, followed by stuttering bursts of a side-burner, which took the strain off those motors so they wound up to a scream.

The station loomed steadily closer, then with a crash Clay’s view of it blanked. They were down. He searched for other views, finally seeing surviving troops disembarking onto the plain of the hull and heading out towards where the hull plates were bent upwards around a hole made by a previous explosion inside. Within the Scourge, he saw troops exiting even faster. Liang had decompressed the three sections, incidentally extinguishing the flames in one of them, and opened a space door down to the hull to act as a ramp.

Clay felt an odd moment of pride. The troops had come all this way and now they were ready to complete their mission. That he was complicit in the plan to abandon them here didn’t seem to have any relevance to this feeling, and in that moment he questioned his earlier notion about Scotonis being a ‘better human being’. The feeling died once he saw the silver swarm rising up out of a distant hole.

The robots were coming.

Earth

Serene hadn’t realized how tense she had been feeling until the pressure started to ease the moment the Scourge was down and anchored. Even if the rebels re-engaged that new drive of theirs, there would be no escape for them, because the Scourge now lay within the compass of the drive’s warp bubble. They were finished. Despite heavy initial losses on Serene’s side, the attack was proceeding to plan, and the remaining fifteen hundred troops would soon take the station. All that mattered now was what might get destroyed in the process. Under slightly less pressure at knowing that he no longer had to plan also for an assault on Antares Base on Mars, Commander Liang had assured her of success, and that the Gene Bank samples and data would be retrieved. He had then been embarrassingly grateful when, in her last message, she had informed him that securing Jasper and an intact drive were no longer important either. Calder was now absolutely certain he could build one – had bet his life on the certainty, and knew it.

Serene watched her troops deploying before the approaching horde of robots – a scene she would have to extract the most entertainment from right now, because very shortly such exterior inputs would shut down. Alan Saul’s ability to penetrate computer systems made it essential that the assault force left nothing open for him. Liang had pushed for limited-burst transmissions between him and his troops, for delivering only essential instructions, and nothing leading back to the ship. Open video coms originating from helmet cams would have been positively suicidal, since they possessed a bandwidth into which Saul might insert himself. Even the view Serene watched now had its dangers, as became evident when a warning icon began blinking down at one corner of the screen, and then the image froze before blinking out.

Serene gazed in frustration at the blank screen until some words appeared on it: ‘Attempted com laser viral insertion’. She flicked the screen to another view, long-range from the Hubble, which was clear enough to show the Scourge and the station, but not clear enough to reveal any detail of the action. She sat back, surveyed her garden, noting that some of the plants were dying despite the ministrations of her new expert horticulturalist and the addition of nutrients from the composting of the last one.

‘Sack!’ she shouted.

He appeared on the other side of the bridge in an instant. ‘Ma’am?’

‘Bring me a drink,’ she commanded. ‘The champagne.’

He dipped his head and retreated.

She had intended to have a little celebration as soon as Liang reported success, but why not enjoy that drink now? She could always crack open another bottle later.

Sack shortly returned with a bottle of champagne and a flute glass on a silver tray. He looked a very odd butler indeed. He placed the tray on the table beside her, picked up the bottle and opened it, the cork arcing through the air to land in her fish pond, and poured her a glass. Serene picked it up and took a sip. Once Sack saw that she was satisfied he turned to go. She held up a hand to halt him, then pointed over to a stone bench nearby. He obediently went over and eased his bulk down on it.

‘I know so little about you,’ she began.

Obviously Sack did not consider this warranted a reply.

‘Barring everything in your record, of course,’ she added. ‘I understand you have family who were taken by the Scour?’

‘My father,’ he replied.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that gun . . .’ But the association of the antique weapon Sack carried with the term ‘father’ raised feelings she did not want to examine too closely. She continued, ‘So tell me, Sack, what do you think of what we have achieved so far?’

Despite his lizard skin concealing almost any human expression, he did look uncomfortable. He dipped his head and sat forwards, elbows on knees and hands clenched together.

‘You have unified Earth in very difficult circumstances,’ he said.

‘Is that all you have to say?’

‘I would need you to ask a more specific question, ma’am.’ He looked up.

‘Very well.’ She took a sip of her drink and collected her thoughts. ‘Do you think that what I am doing is right? Do you think my methods are just?’

‘Right and just for whom?’ he enquired.

‘I am asking you the question, so you must reply from your point of view.’

‘I want for nothing.’

Serene began to feel frustrated with this exchange, and wished she hadn’t started it. As she gazed at him, however, she wondered just how others around her might react to his dehumanizing skin . . . how things might be for him on a more personal level, and found herself wanting to continue the exchange.

‘What do others feel?’ she asked. ‘Can you give me a sense of their opinions?’

‘They vary,’ he said.

‘Give me an example.’

After a long pause, he said carefully, ‘Those closest to you in Earth’s hierarchy are aware that the power and wealth they obtain is directly proportional to the potential danger to themselves of such proximity.’

‘Danger from me.’

‘Erm . . . yes, ma’am.’

‘And those not so close . . . for example those in the upper administration?’

‘They have the benefit of employment, they can support themselves and their families, and they know that if they keep their heads down their chances of surviving are good.’

‘And what of those we must now describe as the proletariat?’

‘They have their fears, of course, but they are distanced from them by the fact that they have absolutely no control over their lives.’

This was going nowhere. ‘You’ve merely stated facts I already know. How am I viewed? What are people’s opinions of me?’

‘My contact with people outside of your immediate circle is limited, ma’am.’

‘But we have travelled widely and you have spoken with others . . .’

‘I do not wish to kill myself with my own words, ma’am.’

‘Speak your mind without fear, Sack, just this once.’

He continued gazing at her for longer than felt comfortable, and she knew he didn’t believe her.

‘The world is currently a better place,’ he said, ‘but not because of the way it is ruled but rather because there are more resources now and fewer people. Many I have spoken to claim to resent their lack of freedom but, because they have been brought up with political officers micromanaging their everyday lives, they are not entirely sure what that lack is. Their resentment is also less because we no longer have the human resources for that same degree of micromanagement. Moreover, they all fear instability more than they resent being ruled autocratically, again because that is simply what they are used to. In their eyes you represent stability and, while they are terrified of you, it is not a human terror. You are remote, unpredictable, almost like fate . . . almost like the Scour.’

It was the longest speech she had ever heard from him and its honesty had a surprising effect, with a tightness in her groin, and she speculated again on how things were for him on a more personal level . . . She shook her head, annoyed that the occasional reactions she felt to this lizard-skinned man might well have been described by her father as an example of perversion, and considered the content of his words. Though he had given her some things to consider, they were not new to her. She was, in the end, the head of state. She was the state. Realistically, she had to accept that the old ideologies – on which the Committee’s and her own rule had been built – all collapsed under the weight of the reality of human nature. In the end, she was no different from the kings and emperors of old. It was very depressing, and a perfect example of the sentiment that the more things change, the more they remain the same.

‘You may go,’ she told him, waving her hand with regal dismissiveness, uncomfortable with her reactions to Sack, and deliberately turning her thoughts elsewhere.

Once Earth was organized precisely as she wanted it, she felt it would then be time to turn her attention to something long overdue. The nature of the human race itself needed to be changed. Primitive humanity required alteration.

Argus

With one part of his mind, Saul exerted full control of the robot steadily trying to salvage components from the hardware Alex had wrecked. The thing had all of the detritus now floating in a cloud between its highly complex forelimbs, directly in front of its sensor array, and was sorting through it quickly and methodically. The other two robots assisting the repair team were fully under Judd’s control, and they seemed to be working faster, as if the proctor’s kinship with them gave it some advantage. The team of eight technicians Le Roque had sent were working to strip back the damage, replacing a coil destroyed by stray shots, and assembling stock chipsets and other components for the high-voltage requirements here. It would take them at least two hours and twenty minutes to succeed, by the end of which time their common fate aboard this station might well have been decided.

The Saberhagens had done their best but, with the EM pulses from atomic blasts screwing their targeting, it had not been enough to stop the Scourge. Saul had known this anyway. Their means of escape had been the Rhine drive, and now things weren’t looking so good. If this had been a land battle, the chances of success, as calculated right now, were less than forty per cent, with an error bar of over twenty per cent. But this was no land battle and, in this environment and with the weapons currently being deployed, the chances of mutual destruction stood at over eighty per cent.

With most of the rest of his mind, Saul surveyed the entire station. He calculated that, before it had been destroyed, the maser had killed a quarter of the assault force – waiting until the last moment to deploy it had been the Saberhagens’ best move yet. Saul estimated that this left about fifteen hundred troops, which was still more than enough for them to establish a good foothold. Sending the robots out was a good tactic until those invading troops got organized, then they would start deploying their EM radiation pulse weapons and the gains achieved by outright confrontation would be lost. He would pull them inside once that happened, and resort to guerrilla warfare until he found a way to respond with ultimate ruthlessness.

The sight of troops tumbling out into vacuum, generally in pieces, announced the arrival of Saul’s spiderguns at the two breaches in the station’s hull. Clouds of vapour drifted amid the human wreckage, and returning fire filled the vacuum about the two breaches with splintered ceramic bullets and flinders of metal. Even as the remaining troops were opening fire, the construction robots reached them and began tearing them apart. It was all horribly graphic out there in the utter silence of space. Next, Saul’s view, through the sensors of one spidergun, blanked. That happened so fast, Saul only realized why on scanning the hull of the Scourge. EM radiation pulse weapons were now being fired from ports in the side of the ship.

Robots began to freeze up, tumble out of control or end up stuck in some kind of loop, which in one case involved a large construction robot perpetually trying to behead a man it had already beheaded. Saul instructed the remaining spider-guns to direct their fire at the ship, while the army of robot foot-soldiers abruptly reversed their progress and headed back for the holes torn in the hull. This was utterly necessary, but it frustrated him that they had done so little damage: a hundred and thirteen enemy troops taken out of the fight but, unfortunately, thirty robots and two spiderguns as well.

The robots began flowing back inside the station and distributing themselves, according to his ‘ambush predator’ program. They headed past Langstrom’s men, secure behind the bullet-proof shields of ten-millimetre machine guns and some hardened glass shields recovered during the last battle to occur aboard this station. In what had now been dubbed Police HQ, some remaining soldiers were distributing weapons to volunteers from among the station staff. Others were spread throughout the station, setting up ambush points and kill zones. Numbers, all numbers: the plain and horrible fact of warfare.

The assault force now began to enter the station, moving along its inner skin, the troops trying to find cover as fast as they could while still attaching safety lines, for they had learned that lesson from the fate of Messina’s original assault on this station. Saul noticed enemy spiderguns departing the Scourge and, using radio and microwave dishes up on the surface, he tried to get a response from them, but they were as utterly indifferent to his blandishments as was the Scourge itself. They had also learned not to allow him that opening. Identification of fellows was by sight, since the attacking force wore VC suits of a silvery grey, and had for some reason painted the old Japanese rising-sun symbol on the fronts and backs of them. The attack would adhere to a set plan and communications amidst the assault force would be at a minimum – low-bandwidth radio, audio only, so there would be no chance of invading anything critical via that route. The spiderguns were pre-programmed, probably to kill any humans not wearing those easily identifiable VC suits, and to attack any robot outside their pack. Where was the opening he needed?

Saul continued to watch the invading troops and noted that some were carrying the components of vacuum-warfare penetration locks. He considered the feasibility of spinning up the cylinder worlds again, to make it more difficult to use those things on them, but then considered the power better used to keep accelerating the vortex generator up to speed. Then, outside, he saw the chance he had been waiting for – an opportunity offered by their lack of communication and the way they needed to identify each other.

‘Judd,’ he said it out loud, ‘I presume you do not require me here?’

The proctor, while assembling a chaotic mass of components seemingly at random, swung its blind head towards him.

‘You must go,’ it said, already knowing his intentions.

‘When it is not necessary to kill, it is not necessary to kill,’ he said, repeating Paul’s words and, of course, their implied opposite.

‘Just so,’ Judd replied, returning to its work.

Saul propelled himself from the transformer room, giving his instructions to the spidergun lurking in Tech Central and ordering it to withdraw, then he contacted his commander.

‘Langstrom, I want fast-response team A heading for Tech Central immediately,’ he said. ‘I’ll meet them on the base level. I’ll also be pulling the majority of my robots over there too.’

‘That’ll weaken us,’ protested Langstrom. ‘We’re having trouble holding them even now.’

‘Beat a steady retreat,’ Saul instructed. ‘Let the invaders do all the work and take all the risks. You’re not fighting to win, but fighting to buy time.’

‘What are you going to do?’ the commander asked.

‘Something unpleasant,’ Saul replied. ‘That’s all you need to know.’

‘Okay, the team is on its way.’

He moved fast, retracing his route to the transformer room to reach the endcap of Arcoplex One. As he travelled, he watched multiple views of the battle in progress. Lang-strom’s men had remained in their hides around the rimward penetration, strafing the enemy with ten-bores and rifle fire, then suffering under returned fire as the enemy began to get their own heavy machine guns deployed. Langstrom’s teams subsequently began to retreat, squad by squad, taking up well-prepared positions to cover each step of the way. It all began to fall apart as two enemy spiderguns came into play with little to match them – the two Saul had deployed now drifting and twitching, having already been knocked out by pulse weapons. Then the proctors intervened.

Saul saw them approaching fast, six of them having launched themselves at high speed from inside the station. They were all carrying lengths of ceramic scaffolding like staffs, and were nearly upon the enemy, who were spreading along the inside of the station hull, before they were spotted. A ten-bore spat at them, sending two of them tumbling away with chunks flying off their bodies, then EM radiation pulses hit the others, haloing them with pink fire. In the virtual world, Saul felt their serenity – for even the two that had been so severely hit were calmly reordering their body’s resources for survival, each aware of its losses but calculating its trajectory to see how quickly it could get back into the fight.

The remaining four slammed into the inner hull, leaving huge dents – and in one case completely crushing an enemy soldier. Then they were up and into it, thrashing to and fro with their staffs, just about every blow proving a killing one. Why had they chosen to attack with such primitive weapons? Saul did not know and did not try to find out, nor did he try to fathom why they seized two of the heavy machine guns and tried to use them. It was a futile exercise, for the machine guns obviously required some kind of coded link with the gunners operating them.

The wreckage they caused, in both mechanical and human terms, was horrific, but when the two spiderguns turned on them it began to tell. They started to become sluggish, as chunks of their bodies were blown away. One of them managed to snag a spidergun that approached too close, and simply tore it in half. Then, as one, they launched themselves away again, suffering further damage as they escaped. It was enough, though: Langstrom’s troops had meanwhile withdrawn to safer positions – safer still when a multiple launch of missiles intersected the remaining spidergun and blew it to pieces.

Elsewhere numerous firefights were in progress, but the steady retreat was also becoming evident. The assault force was taking heavy casualties, too, and bodies and bits of bodies were spreading out in a steady cloud from the two attack points. The third, and smaller, force of about two hundred men was nearing Tech Central, advancing steadily behind two spiderguns and a line of heavy machine guns motoring across the hull on gecko treads. They were being very cautious, which was good since it gave Saul time to prepare. He exited the asteroid-side endcap of Arcoplex One and began to make his way towards the base of Tech Central, where the fast-response team was waiting, watching robots entering one after another ahead of them.

‘I’m going to let the force above enter Tech Central,’ Saul declared over suit radio. ‘Unless absolutely necessary, you will not engage them.’

‘Seems pointless us being here at all,’ replied one of the twenty soldiers.

Saul swung towards him. ‘I thought you were overseeing the defence, Langstrom.’

‘I am,’ Langstrom replied, ‘but my people are well enough trained and prepared for them to know what to do.’

Saul snorted in apparent annoyance and headed for the nearest airlock, the multi-armed welding robot that had been about to use it scuttling aside. Within the building, he gazed through numerous sensors, and quickly deployed his robots throughout the lower two floors. The main problem here would be the two spiderguns and, once they were out of the way, there would be a slaughter which it was utterly essential that none survived.

He mapped the place in his mind and worked out what would be their most likely mode of attack. The invading force would use the usual methods of urban warfare to secure the place, room by room, working their way steadily downwards. Maybe the spiderguns would be deployed ahead of the troops as they progressed, to take out all readerguns, and that eventuality should be prepared for.

Stepping inside, he sent his orders immediately, in just a microsecond. Construction robots began cutting away sections of cageway, so as to give themselves a wide angle of approach. Other robots with similar cutting gear positioned themselves nearby, because cutting gear was just what was required. It was a simple fact that spiderguns were lethal weapons, but they were also strictly anti-personnel weapons, and as vulnerable to a diamond saw as anything else made of metal. Other robots began concealing themselves for ambush, folding themselves up inside storerooms and cabins, climbing into ceiling spaces or the spaces under floors, behind wall panels or cramming themselves into air ducts, before welding and sealing themselves in.

Saul now issued further instructions. He wanted ten undamaged VC suits, so it would be necessary for ten of the attackers to die very neatly. Robots would have to deploy their ceramo-carbide chisels and drills carefully, for a hole punched into the vertebrae just below the neck ring should paralyse and kill, and not be as messy as, say, a heart puncture. Whereupon the suit should be easy to patch up afterwards.

The crump of an explosion shifted the air of the interior and was immediately followed by the shrieking of a breach alarm. Through cams focused up there, Saul watched a spider-gun leap in and take out the two readerguns. It then shot through the door and headed for the nearest cageway. The troops followed the second spidergun in, carting two of the heavy machine guns dismounted and carried ready for use inside. Saul was impressed by the efficient way they progressed, trying to leave nothing to chance as they checked the many niches and hidey-holes. Some robots they did find and, as a precaution, disabled with pulse weapons, but they missed many more.

‘Nine of you will come with me,’ Saul said to the fast-response team. ‘The rest will remain in Tech Central and fire on us.’

‘You what?’ Langstrom exclaimed.

Saul then explained the plan to him.

Mars

The sun was dropping out of sight and Coprates Chasma sliding back into shadow when Var came across further human remains. But this one would not be supplying her with further oxygen or super-caps. This person must have been inside, and unsuited, when the building had collapsed. The corpse was as dry and brittle as aged kindling but actually came up all in one piece, having been stuck to the bottom of a regolith block like a crushed bug. Moving both block and corpse exposed the floor below, which gave Var something to work to. She cleared compacted dust from this same point back to the wall foundations, then began working along these too, shortly exposing one side of an intact airlock.

Even as she began digging out the airlock, Var wondered what she was hoping to achieve. Would another hour or two of air matter to her? Perhaps now she should really start thinking about how to ease her passing. She paused, almost resentful of this wholly pragmatic part of her mind. Just a moment’s thought brought home to her the realities.

Opening her suit directly to the Martian atmosphere was probably the worst option. Yes, she would die within a few minutes, but it would be a horrible, agonizing death. She should know, since it was how she had killed a number of Ricard’s men and she had been there to watch the whole unpleasant process.

The option of just keeping her suit on therefore seemed best. Just let the suit keep scrubbing out the carbon dioxide and, as the oxygen ran out, she would be breathing more and more of the constantly recycled remainder, which would be nitrogen – and nitrogen asphyxiation was fairly painless and quick.

Var returned to her digging. Nitrogen asphyxiation was what awaited her, but she was not prepared to just sit gazing at her head-up display and counting down the remainder of her life. Keeping busy enabled her to hold that reality at a slight remove. Contemplating her demise over any length of time might lead to her broadcasting pleas to the cosmos: begging, praying or something ridiculous like that. She realized that, at that moment, her biggest fear wasn’t death itself but the possibility of it being undignified.

‘Silly woman,’ she muttered to herself.

A further hour of work exposed the outer door of the airlock. She struggled with the manual handle, but it was jammed, so she picked up a rock and hit it with that until it thunked downwards. She heaved the door open, hoping that someone had been trapped inside and still had an air supply. When she turned on her suit light and found the lock empty she questioned her logic. If anyone had been inside they would have used up all their air anyway. She checked the electronic control panel and found it dead, as expected, then stepped back and retrieved a multi-driver from her suit’s toolkit. She leaned in with that to open the panel accessing the oxygen-feed pipework. This exposed simple pressure dials, all of them registering zero. Another hour of digging revealed the severed feed-in pipes. But usually, with locks like these, the pipes led to a pressurized air reservoir. She had to find it.

It was dark now and, checking the time, Var saw that in another couple of hours the automatic broadcast to Argus would recommence. She did not have to be there for it to happen, but maybe there had since been a reply. She returned to work, heaving regolith blocks away from the pile around where she had found the severed pipes. In this rubble she found a picture flimsy still displaying its last image – a bull elephant standing at the edge of a waterhole, some odd fragment of someone’s life, maybe their fantasies. It was an image that made her feel horribly uneasy and which she instantly skimmed away into the darkness, though she did not know why.

By the time she found the other ends of the pipes, which had been crushed right down to the floor, she was feeling utterly weary. Checking the time, she saw that her broadcast had recommenced as of an hour before, and she decided that now was the time to check for any response. Afterwards she would come back out here, for what was the point in squandering her remaining time on sleep?

Var trudged back over to the building, where, even though she could see the message icon flashing on the screen, she calmly took her time in sitting down. After a long contemplative pause, she finally summoned up the nerve to open the message, but in frustration saw it was an audio file, and she had to run an optic from her suit to the console to hear it. Then her brother spoke to her.

Var listened to it twice, then once more to be sure. Damn, the inertia-less drive had worked. The science of the impossible had been made real and the human dream of starships had just turned into reality. And here she was, dying on Mars. Alan had given her hope, but that lasted only as long as she didn’t really apply her mind. Then reality bit in. Even if Argus Station survived the Scourge’s attack on it, and shot across at improbable speed to orbit round Mars, the gravity well would still separate it from her, and the Argus Station did not possess Martian-format space planes. Then hope resurged. Maybe they could use something to drop her some oxygen here. All that would be required was some sort of re-entry capsule and a parachute . . .

She shook her head, because it all seemed too implausible. They were probably fighting their own battle for survival out there, so putting together some way of enabling her to survive would be the last thing on their agenda.

Var stared at the screen, contemplating the grim reality of her situation. Nevertheless there was still a little hope, no matter how small. She edited the message she was sending, adding that she had found some extra air, and telling her brother precisely how long she had left. Then she stood up abruptly, headed outside again, fully aware of how hope could be a dangerous thing.