2

SCRAPPAGE

With the ID implant, with cams covering just about every populated area, with “adjustment” to correct people’s behaviour and with the shepherds, razorbirds and spiderguns for enforcement, the death rate due to “technical errors” was high under the original Committee. After Alan Saul destroyed much of this apparatus, Serene Galahad discovered that the consequent reduction in control led to greater productivity. However, her Committee instincts had not changed and, also viewing human beings as a plague upon her beloved Earth, it seemed a logical step for her to tighten her grip in a much more direct way. The strangulation collar was her solution. During her time as absolute dictator of Earth, nearly a billion of these devices were manufactured and placed around the necks of those holding essential positions and, as with any such hurriedly mass-produced technology, there were errors. These would not have mattered too much, were it not for security measures within the collars that read any error in the device as an attempt to remove it, and so prompted it to kill the unfortunate wearer. How many people died as a result can only be estimated, since those who died were always conveniently claimed to have been guilty of some crime. A conservative estimate puts the figure at two million, but it could in reality be as high as ten times that.

ARGUS

The shooting continued all around them, streaks of tracer bullets cutting through smoke and debris. The air quality, Alex noted, was getting quite bad, and he had to keep snorting dirt and splinters out of his nose. This was the problem with fighting in zero gravity: the detritus thrown up by bullets and explosions didn’t just settle back to the ground.

Alex blinked, reached up to his face and touched the moisture below his eyes. In this state of meditative recall, replaying memories in order to analyse tactics and learn from mistakes, it all seemed so immediate. But he knew his tears weren’t due to the sharp memory of dust in his eyes.

“It was confusing at first,” Messina continued. “There I was, with no memory of my past—doing what I was told while trying to understand the hatred directed at me. I was assaulted frequently, and nearly got killed on the last occasion. But now my confusion is gone.”

“It’s gone?” said Alex, noncommittally.

“They tried to keep it from me, of course, but the image of the face I possessed before is not something that can be concealed for long.”

Alex looked round to see Messina up on his knees now and gazing back, resting his shoulder against the penetration lock.

“I know who I was,” he said—a little sadly, Alex thought.

“You were Chairman Alessandro Messina, ruler of Earth,” Alex stated firmly. Then his gaze strayed to what he assumed was a chunk of debris sailing through the air towards them. It took him half a second further to realize his mistake.

Alex shuddered, his body trying to respond to something that had happened just a couple of standard days ago now. He opened his eyes and surveyed his surroundings as he prepared himself for the worst memories. His small cabin was located in a workers’ dormitory fixed between lattice walls. The door was locked and, for now, this place had become a prison. But Alex felt fine with that. The cabin was comfortable enough, and the medic had already seen to his various wounds. He had some bottles of drink and even some food, a hammock and a combined zero-gravity toilet and shower unit, the latter of which he had used and as a result felt the cleanest he had felt in a long while. This was substantially more than had been available to him for the many months during which he had scrabbled to stay alive, trapped in a zero-gravity hydroponics unit. He was okay with the solitude, too, because he needed to straighten out his thinking. He closed his eyes again and returned to the not too distant past.

“Grenade!” he shouted, heaving himself to his feet and reaching for Messina.

The erstwhile ruler of Earth stood up, ready to throw himself clear, then took a couple of steps, forced forwards by the impact of the bullets hitting his back and blowing chunks of flesh and rib out of his chest. Alex rolled aside, firing at a half-seen figure, coming back up onto his knees as the same figure staggered, then he sighted properly and emptied the new clip into it. He saw bits of his target flying away, before the grenade detonated and picked him up in a hot fist.

Screaming somewhere …

This was where it got difficult. The blast had thrown him into foliage, where he finally slammed to a halt against a solid branch. With his ears ringing, he had dragged himself back to the penetration lock. There he had found the Chairman’s remains slowly revolving in the air above him, like some grotesque expanded sculpture constructed of offal. He had gone into the trees and found the assailant dead, cut in half, but that hadn’t been enough.

He didn’t care about his own life any more. Chairman Messina was dead and there had to be payment. Firing ahead … Not even trying to take cover, Alex propelled himself through the trees to where the floating debris mostly consisted of chunks of hardening breach foam. A penetration lock protruded from the ground, three of the assault force from the Scourge gathered around it. As one of them turned towards him, Alex braced himself against a trunk and fired his rifle from the hip—half a clip, picking them up and sending them tumbling, blood misting around them.

The next attacker he found opened fire on him from concealment in thick bushes, branches shattering all around him. Alex threw himself towards those bushes, emptied the rest of the clip, inserted another and kept his finger on the trigger. A figure, just glimpsed, tried to escape, shattered assault rifle tumbling away. Alex kept firing until there was no more voluntary movement there, snatched ammunition clips from a belt half-concealed by a bulging mass of viscera, moved on …

Tactical analysis: you weren’t conserving ammunition.

He killed again, then again. He responded to direct fire against him by just confronting it and moving in, firing continuously.

Tactical analysis: how the hell did you survive that?

Through the killing haze he started to realize something was wrong with the attackers. They seemed to be responding to him too slowly. When a grenade flung him tumbling, he located its source and fired on a soldier who seemed to be trying get back out of the Arboretum through a penetration lock. Bullets tore flinders from the lock, but only briefly before they ran out. Alex reached down for another clip as he flung himself forwards, but found none. Hardly thinking about it, he discarded his rifle and drew his commando knife as he came down on the man fumbling to open the lock. The man seemed hardly able to defend himself as Alex dragged him round, scanned the armouring of his VC suit, then drove the carbide blade towards a weak point under the arm. He shoved it in to the hilt, then tilted it down, slicing to the heart, blood jetting out.

Next he was strangling someone, with no recollection of the intervening time. After that it seemed he could only find the dead or dying. He caught one soldier slowly towing himself along the base of the Arboretum dividing wall, pulled him up and gazed in puzzlement at the bloodshot eyes and foam around his mouth, before snapping his neck.

Tactical analysis: they were dying of the Scour virus.

Finally he realized the shooting was over. Then, almost as if operating on some homing instinct, he made his way back to where Chairman Messina had died. He went down on his knees, covered in blood—most of which was not his own.

It was over.

Alex drew the sidearm he had taken earlier from the other corpse here and which, during his killing spree, he had completely forgotten. He put the barrel in his mouth and there he paused for a brief eternity, until he realized he had no reason to pull the trigger …

Alex was a clone of Chairman Alessandro Messina, but also a soldier who was surgically and chemically programmed to be totally loyal to that one man. He had been loyal. He had remained loyal to the best of his abilities, even when Messina had been mind-wiped and turned into someone else—even until the end. But he didn’t pull the trigger because the initial programming was not so strong any more, and he was now older and wiser than a clone new from the vat. He realized in that moment, as so many people do, that having a new purpose might be better than blowing out the back of his skull.

“I know what you’re capable of,” the commander of the station police, Langstrom, had said, shortly after finding him in the Arboretum. “I can offer you a place with my men. You’d be one of the first to be issued with weapons if we’re attacked again which, considering our recent history, seems highly likely.”

Alex had not even needed to think about his answer.

“No,” he’d replied, “I need a totally new purpose, preferably with less guns and blood involved.”

Langstrom had then not known what to do with him, hence Alex ending up in here.

Floating above his hammock, Alex opened his eyes, reached up to wipe his face with a shaking hand. He was covered in sweat but now felt he had severed some link to his past. It was as if he’d finally shaken off a fever. He reached down and grabbed the edge of the hammock, using it to drag himself to the wall. A swift kick against it sent him drifting across the room to a pack, gecko-stuck to a wall-shelf. He took out one of the bottles inside, uncapped it and squeezed its contents into his mouth. After a moment he lowered the bottle and stared at it, realizing he’d been given beer—something he’d only ever sampled once or twice in his life before. He took another swallow, and another—then heard the door lock clunking, before a knock on the door itself. He waited, expecting someone to come in, then registered that the person outside was being polite.

“Come in,” he said, feeling foolish.

The door swung open and in stepped a giant shaven-headed brute of a man. Alex instinctively pushed his gecko soles down against the floor and took a step back, gripping the plastic bottle more tightly, while briefly scanning the room for a more effective weapon.

“Hello, Alex,” the man said mildly, as he folded his arms.

Alex peered at him, with memories slowly surfacing. Of course, here was a man it had been necessary for him to know when he’d been in Messina’s fast-response protection team.

“Ghort,” he said.

Ghort nodded and smiled cautiously.

“I’m surprised you’re alive,” Alex added. “Or should I say I’m surprised you still have a mind.”

“Only the murderers were mind-wiped,” Ghort explained. “Even though I was one of the Chairman’s bodyguards for ten years, I never actually murdered anyone. I told him I’d only kill to defend him or myself.” He paused reflectively. “I could, of course, say the same about you. It’s arguable that you’re responsible for a considerable number of deaths aboard this station, and therefore I’m surprised Saul didn’t kill you when he captured you, or have it done afterwards.”

“Perhaps it’s because of my lack of free will,” Alex suggested.

Ghort’s expression hardened. “Something we are all lacking now.”

Alex just stared at him for a long moment, then asked, “What do you want?”

“Commander Langstrom told me,” said Ghort, “that you want an occupation that doesn’t involve guns and blood. Well, I’ve had you assigned to my team in Construction and Maintenance, and we have work to do, a lot of it, right now.”

Alex hadn’t really thought about what he wanted, just about what he didn’t want.

“Okay,” he shrugged.

Ghort led him out into a station that seemed to have become, in just a few hours, even more chaotic than it had been during the height of the recent battle.

MARS

While Var slept, Saul dropped his body into a similar state of somnolence, but one without the loss of awareness and volition.

In his mind, like a librarian after a recent rush, he began cataloguing and filing, returning books to their correct shelves, clearing up the rubbish and polishing the floors. He felt a slight irritation at not being able to access the whole of his mind, which included his organic backups in Hannah’s clean-room and the whole Argus computer network, but spread across these and everything currently in his skull there was a great deal of redundancy. Much of what he was now doing inside his head would act as a template to lay over some other work in progress elsewhere, when he could again access it. However, the situation wasn’t ideal and would become less tenable in the years, decades and perhaps centuries to come …

Yes, centuries …

Acceptance had slowly crept up on him. He now perfectly understood the changes he had made to his own body even before Smith had erased the earlier Alan Saul, and was now recognizing what other changes he could make. He knew that this, combined with his mental backups, meant that corporeal immortality lay within his reach.

He again considered other possibilities that had occurred to him during the trip out to the Asteroid Belt, and which had been affirmed by recent events. The Alexes were tank-grown clones of Chairman Messina. They were grown to adulthood so fast that the tanks they grew in required powerful cooling systems, so energetic was the cell growth, and each produced an adult Alex in just a few years: a blank slate on which Messina wrote the mind of his choosing. However, the methods of indoctrination used had been crude—surgery even being required. Now, with everything Hannah was coming up with, it should be possible simply to copy across from another mind. Saul could now substantially reduce the danger of physical death to his body in the same way as it had been reduced for his mind. He could make copies of himself. He could, in fact, use copies of himself for risky ventures such as this present one.

Cowardice?

Saul allowed himself a smile. What exactly was cowardice? He’d been in turn frightened, angry and exhilarated while hacking a bloody path from the Calais incinerator out here, but had never backed away from danger. Then, again, as he had seen it at the time, he could never have been safe while the Committee had the power to take away his life. Now that he was, to stretch a term, “safe” from the Committee, other considerations were coming into play. And the main one of these was how much did he value his own life; a life that now might just go on and on? No, he defined cowardice as sacrificing his integrity in order to stay safe, and not as the eliminating of unnecessary risks to his life.

Saul further pondered on the future and, for the first time in a while, felt a surge of unaccustomed excitement. A whole universe lay out there to explore. The Drake equation remained to be solved, while its resultant paradox, described by Fermi, needed to be investigated. Knowledge within and without stood ready to be gathered …

Now, venturing into astrogation data residing inside the hardware in his skull, Saul began mentally exploring the mapped planetary systems that lay beyond Earth, wondering where to go beyond the solar system. Perhaps first some of those least likely to contain life, while he gathered resources and explored the worlds within; perhaps a pause in the light of some binary star system while growing clones of himself and imprinting upon them some honed-down and thoroughly human copy of his mind? Maybe he could bathe in the light of a red hypergiant while extending and cementing his knowledge. So many possibilities.

But one not to be ignored.

He grimaced. Yes, the one possibility he must not ignore was that though he was powerful and now possessed a drive that could take him out into the abyss, Earth did not lie so far behind him. He had managed to extend his mind, but already Serene Galahad had created her comlifers—humans with hardware in their skulls much like his own and similarly linked into computer systems—who were only a step behind him. And, though he had taken Hannah Neumann away from Earth, the slow accretion of knowledge could lead, within just a few years, to bio-interfaces equivalent to the one in his skull. Rhine had managed to design a working warp drive and, with Earth’s resources, Galahad appeared likely to come up with something just like it, and soon. But Galahad was just the latest example of the kind that came to dominate the human race; the near stars, he realized, would never be a safe enough distance away. He would need to lose himself out there, find a place and make himself a fortress.

Then of course there were other things to speculate on. The Drake equation posited that there should be intelligent life out there, but the Fermi paradox posed the question of why it had not been seen. Perhaps the answer to that was related to the likes of Serene Galahad and himself? Too much power in the hands of too few, genocidal rulers, and dark inwardly turned realms where free beings had become just cogs in a machine, perhaps races intolerant of competition dropping warp-drive weapons on inhabited worlds, perhaps whole races sliding into the mental self-destruction he himself had faced when he uploaded Janus? For all he knew, he could be heading out into something more potentially hostile than a solar system controlled by Galahad and her ilk.

The hours slid by as Saul created models in his head of nightmare alien cultures, of dystopias, utopias, of intelligent life based on something other than carbon, and on the myriad possibilities based on carbon alone. At some point his mind slid into the utterly esoteric, and also into a state closer to human sleep. He immediately grasped for himself the utility of this lucid dreaming state and allowed it to continue, and only rose out of it as watery Martian morning wafted its reluctant light through the windows of the cabin. He stood, headed over to the bathroom, attended to the needs of an unfortunately weak human body, gazed at his face in a mirror on the wall, noted how he needed a shave and a haircut but how these faults humanized him, washed his face then returned to the main room and turned on the lights.

“It’s time?” said Var, immediately sitting upright in her sleeping bag.

“We move,” Saul agreed, stepping over to the chair he’d draped his VC suit on.

Var scrambled out of her sleeping bag, frowned at him, then headed for the bathroom. He pulled on his suit, swapped out the oxygen bottle, checked over Var’s EA suit and replaced the air bottle for that too, finishing just as she returned, and handing it over.

Riding on the Martian dawn came his full self, and he felt a visceral pull as they stepped outside, and for a hundred metres after that, as they trudged across the dusty ground. Then he was in and connected to Argus Station, expanding and updating.

Even at that moment, his robots were preparing to launch the fuel drop tank from Docking Pillar Two. Initial thrust came from a dismounted space-plane steering jet, which would be ejected in Martian atmosphere. The thing would take re-entry heat on a ceramic shield, open out parachutes to slow it further, then inflate air bags for a bouncing landing. Now it was nearly complete, he saw, in an instant, some adjustments he could make: how with the addition of an extra parachute and a reduction of the fuel load he could insert some extra weight behind the heat shield; and he issued his instructions. Really, he should have thought of this earlier.

“So what’s the plan?” Var asked.

Saul gazed ahead towards Shankil’s Butte. In just two hours his package would arrive here on Mars. “You know the plan,” he said.

“I mean: how do we deal with Rhone?” she asked, irritated.

Antares Base sat as clear in his mind as Argus Station, but the latter was of more interest to him at the moment. In the few seconds it would take before Var became impatient he further checked the situation up there.

Already two of his new conjoining robots were rolling off the production line. Both smelting plants were running, and producing components for both Robotics and the massive reconstruction of the station into a spherical spaceship. The robot mining machines on the asteroid had nearly filled both of the big ore carriers to keep that process going. However, power supplies were at full stretch, while all the building and manufacturing were nowhere near their proposed maximum, so Saul needed to limit their stay here. It was time to get things done.

“Perhaps, when we are a lot closer, you should speak to him,” he suggested to Var. “Your suit radio is in range of the base even now. You can tell him that I’ve come to rescue them, to relocate them to Argus; that his earlier actions are understandable and are forgiven.”

“You fucking what?”

“What else did you intend to say?”

“Something, but I wasn’t going to talk about forgiveness.”

“Try, anyway—and I’ll ensure that everyone there also hears your exchange. Perhaps if he’s not agreeable you can slant your persuasion at everyone else there …”

She glared at him suspiciously.

What she said didn’t matter all that much, anyway. Rhone would respond precisely as Saul expected him to. Gazing into the base, he could see a man struggling to find some solution to the insoluble, but certain that his grip on power was the right one. Such men always had a maximum response even for small outside threats. It made them feel worthy, useful, that they were doing something.

“He’ll send his people out to take a shot at us,” said Var.

“Of course he will,” Saul replied. “So we need to get to the cover of Shankil’s Butte before you speak to him.” He picked up his pace.

“I still don’t see how this advances our cause any,” Var protested. “I can probably get us inside without him knowing …”

Looking through the base cams, Saul counted eight armed staff. Checking the records there, he saw that most of these were from Mars Science, though some were from Maintenance and Construction. The head of the latter, Martinez, was one of the corpses still lying on a gurney in the medical area, so obviously the eight here were the only ones Rhone trusted with weapons. Saul calculated that Rhone would send a minimum of four of them outside.

“In fact you could not get us in without him knowing, since he’s paranoid enough to be running a recognition system through the exterior cams,” said Saul. “I, however, can get us in, but what then?” He glanced at her. “Eight of his people are armed.”

“You’re as irritating as ever,” she replied. “You’re not going to tell me what you’re planning, are you?”

Saul analysed that and realized that some human element of him was being wary of letting her know how ruthless he intended to be. He considered the idea of detailing his plans to her but then, deciding he did not yet want to explain the cold reasoning behind them, rejected it.

“You’ll have to trust me,” he said. Var growled in irritation.

It took them an hour to reach Shankil’s Butte, a partially collapsed monolith of wind-carved sandstone cut through with layers of conglomerate. On the collapsed side, a path wound up through fallen rubble to the top and, without hesitation, Saul began to tramp up this for no other reason than to gaze at the view, which included the base itself lying a couple of kilometres beyond. As he wended his way up, the fuel drop tank launched from Argus Station, which was now well above the horizon but not visible in the daylight sky. Soon they reached the canted summit of the butte and gazed out at the base. The remaining hexes and linking wings were clearly visible, with stacks of regolith blocks and other building materials marking out where much of it had been disassembled.

“Here,” said Var.

Saul turned to see her prodding at something on the ground with her toe and then gazing back the way they had come. He walked over and peered down at an assault rifle clip lying by her feet.

“It was from here that one of Ricard’s men shot my friend,” she explained.

“You killed Ricard and his men,” Saul noted.

“Will it ever end?” she asked.

“Everything ends,” he opined, turning away and finding a rock to sit down on, and again studying the base.

Over to the right he could see the Mars-format space plane, parked by a low building to one side of a couple of fuel silos, at one end of a rough airstrip where rocks had been dozered to either side and holes filled in and packed down. Checking trajectories in his mind, he focused on the far end of the strip. Half an hour to go now.

“Time for you to talk to Rhone,” he said.

“You’re sure?”

“Have you ever known me not to be?” he asked, not sure what she had known about him.

Var made some adjustments on her wrist console, while Saul reached out to the base and established multiple links between the radio receivers there and the internal public address system. “This is Var Delex calling Antares Base,” she said, her words echoing in his mind as he heard them at both ends. “I need to speak to you, Rhone. There’re some things you need to know.” Saul watched the sudden panic stirred up at the other end.

Rhone, who had been working at a console in Mars Science, now banished the supplies lists from his screen and called up control schematics for the communication system, immediately trying to shut down public address. Saul allowed him a few tries, then put up the words “Talk to Var” on his screen, before freezing out his keyboard.

“Can he hear me?” Var asked on a private channel.

“Yes, he can hear you,” Saul told her, “and so can everyone else in the base.”

“Listen to me, Rhone,” she continued on an open channel, “the Scourge isn’t coming. In fact, Earth now has nothing capable of getting out here, and won’t have anything for years yet.”

Saul didn’t disabuse her of that notion, as she would learn about the huge orbital activity around Earth soon enough.

“You can, if you wish, rebuild the base where it is or move it underground as we planned, but your chances of survival won’t be much different from before. However, I have an alternative offer.”

Rhone had now moved to another console and had summoned a few of his armed staff. He there used the dishes on the roof of the base to triangulate Var’s position. Saul let him do that, as he wanted Rhone to know precisely where they were.

“Alan Saul is here on Mars, Rhone, and he is about to deliver fuel for our space plane. I’m leaving Mars with him to join him on Argus Station. All the staff of Antares Base are welcome to join him too … all the staff, Rhone. I understand why you did what you did and, though I’m not prepared to forgive it, Alan Saul is.”

“Shouldn’t you talk to her?” asked one of those with Rhone.

Rhone rounded on him. “If we submit, Galahad will end up killing us. Var is either lying or doesn’t know what’s happening around Earth … and do you think for one moment that someone who has stolen a space station and launched an attack against Earth that killed millions gives a fuck about us?”

“Still …” replied the man, uncertain.

“You saw that thing that came down?” Rhone asked. “It had just one pilot, and I’m surprised it reached the ground in one piece. We have the advantage now, especially if Saul is outside. Just think how grateful Galahad would be if we could capture him alive or even have his corpse to show her. You two, take Piers and Thorsten out there.” Rhone checked his screen. “They’re on Shankil’s Butte. Capture them if you can, or bring back their corpses.”

So far so predictable: he was sending his most trusted lieutenants to do this job. Replaying cached base recordings, Saul confirmed that all four of them were either directly responsible for or closely involved in the recent killings there.

Rhone now keyed into the frequency Var was using. “Var, what a surprise to hear from you.” He grimaced as his own voice was repeated over the PA system. “I was sure that fall killed you.”

Of course Rhone had told everyone in the base that Var had suffered an unfortunate accident. Would she now let him get away with that?

“Well, I’m alive … and I’m waiting for your answer to Alan’s proposal,” was all she said.

Rhone shut off com and turned to others who had joined him. “They’re desperate to get to our space plane. We do have the advantage here.” Those others, unarmed staff of Mars Science, spectators, nodded dubious agreement. He ignored them as he opened up com again. “I’ll be needing guarantees. Perhaps we should continue this discussion inside … Also, I need to confirm that Alan Saul is indeed with you. I don’t see why he would risk his life coming down to the surface.”

Var turned to him and Saul nodded and spoke. “This is Alan Saul. I came down to the surface of Mars to rescue my sister, whose married name is Delex but whose maiden name was Saul. Everything Var has told you is true. You must also be aware that aboard Argus Station we now have a working version of the Alcubierre drive, which effectively takes us out of the reach of Serene Galahad. We are also completely self-sufficient, have a great deal in the way of resources and can survive out here. Think very carefully about your next decisions, Rhone.”

Rhone sat back, his expression blank as he glanced at a screen showing his four recruits coming one after the other out of a base airlock. Meanwhile, the fuel drop tank had begun its descent and opened its first parachute.

“Galahad is building ships, fast, and I’m told it’s likely they will have similar drive systems,” said Rhone.

“That’s true,” said Saul, glancing at Var and seeing her frown. “But there are other truths you seem to be avoiding. A moment ago you wondered if someone like me, who has killed millions, would give a fuck about you all, yet you seem to be forgetting how Serene Galahad released the Scour on Earth and killed billions. Do you think she cares about rescuing you for anything other than punishing you on ETV prime-time?”

“So you say,” replied Rhone.

Saul saw no point in arguing further. This man knew for certain that the Scour had originated from ID implants. “I’ll want your decision soon.”

Rhone turned to stare up at one of the base cams, now aware that Saul had indeed penetrated the place. Maybe that would be enough to sway Rhone, but Saul doubted it. He swung his attention out towards the horizon, beyond the airstrip. The drop tank had now opened out its second and larger parachute and was inflating its gas bags. Saul estimated that it would be visible within the next twenty minutes. He looked back towards the base. All four of Rhone’s most loyal people were now outside, three of them moving away from the base in Saul’s direction while another was driving an ATV round from the other side.

The timing was almost perfect but—even down to his walking pace in getting here to this butte—Saul had ensured that.

ARGUS

Ghort’s first instruction, upon handing over a powered socket driver—the only tool Alex could first be trusted with—was: “It’s pointless trying to race the robots, but I’m fucked if I want them more than ten joints ahead of us by end of shift.”

The task was simple enough. Structural members were to be anchored to the top and bottom faces of the fifteen-kilometre circumference of the station ring. This first involved cutting away marked-out areas of cladding material to expose one of the stress beams—a beam nearly a metre square, precisely following the curve of the station and made of a complex lamination of bubblemetal and graphyne. With the section of beam exposed, they attached a jig, which Ghort positioned precisely with an integral laser survey device, before heaving the U-plate in to slot over the beam and then clamping it down. Akenon and Gladys then towed over their multi-weld unit and, using nickel-carbon and high-temperature epoxy wire, welded the plate in position. Then the three of them unloaded the beam-end joint from their dray and it was Alex’s turn, using his socket driver to tighten, to the correct tension, the eight bolts the others quickly started in their threaded holes in the U-plate.

The first time Alex had tried to tighten a bolt, he ended up spinning round in vacuum on the end of the socket driver, while the other three laughed. That was the limit of his hazing, however, for there was work to be done and one of the construction robots working along the adjacent beam had already finished its joint and was moving on to the next. Thereafter the work became just mechanical, repetitive and somehow comforting. Alex had assumed that while performing this task, he’d have too much time to reflect on his past, but it didn’t work out that way. All he thought about was the next thing to do, how he could position himself so as not to get in the way of the others, how quickly he could lean in to tighten the bolts and how best to position himself while doing so. However, as they progressed and the nearby construction robot ran out of joint ends and had to wait for one of its kin to bring another load, there was finally time for banter.

“We’re fast becoming fucking obsolete,” said Gladys, pointing back along their course around the rim, where a hemispherical robot on gecko treads was now pausing regularly beside each of their previously affixed joint ends.

“What’s it doing?” Alex asked.

“Inspecting our work,” she replied. “Used to be it was us inspecting their work.”

“Don’t exaggerate, Gladys,” said Akenon. “Last thing you inspected was the crabs on your snatch.”

“Go fuck yourself, Ake.”

“Sure, I got less chance of catching anything nasty that way.”

“Right,” interjected Ghort, as Alex leaned forward and began tightening down the latest set of bolts, “we’ll take a break after this one.” He pointed across to the outer edge of the station ring, where there clung a mobile overseer’s station, overlooking the webwork of beams of partially constructed floors extending from the outer rim.

Alex wound in the last of the bolts and stood upright. They’d now been working solidly for six hours, and muscles he was unaware of during the most severe forms of combat training were now aching. This was the perfect reminder of something one of his instructors had once told him: “Never underestimate the strength of manual workers. You might exercise and train for three or four hours a day, but that length of time involved in hard physical activity only gets them as far as their first tea break.” He stretched his back, then opened the gecko pad on the side of his socket driver, before stooping to secure the tool down by his feet. He quickly followed the other three as they headed towards the overseer’s station.

“All this has got to go.” Ghort gestured to the partially completed new floors. “He wants a clean rim, so all those extensions you guys had started on now have to be dismantled.”

“I guess he knows what he’s doing,” said Gladys, her voice subdued.

“More so than any Committee bureaucrat,” remarked Akenon contemplatively.

Since he had first met them Alex had noticed how Akenon and Gladys always talked in hushed tones when the conversation turned to Alan Saul—the Owner. However, Ghort’s attitude was rather more difficult to pin down. The man seemed to continue working dutifully, as instructed, but his expression closed up when the Owner was mentioned, and he became hard faced and acerbic whenever the conversation turned to politics, any hazy concepts such as freedom or any speculation on what their future might hold.

They passed through the airlock two at a time and, once inside, Ghort delivered the welcome news that the place was fully pressurized, which apparently meant no food paste or metallic-tasting fruit juice from their suit spigots today. After they removed the helmets of their heavy work suits, Akenon popped open the case he had lugged in. Taking out Thermos flasks of hot coffee and individual boxes of pasteurized and sealed sandwiches, he handed them round. Sipping coffee through a straw, Alex headed over to the windows and gazed across the face of the rim. Gladys shortly came up to stand beside him.

The rim face extended for hundreds of metres inward, at which point the station enclosure rose up in a slope for just over two kilometres to the jutting prominence of Tech Central. Over to the right of that, the rest of the station, along with a truncated view of an extended smelting plant, lay silhouetted against the rusty brown face of Mars.

“Never seen it like this,” she said, gesturing to the scene before them.

“Well,” said Alex, “I suppose it looks a bit different to Earth.” He nodded towards Mars.

“I don’t mean that,” she said, and stabbed a finger, “I mean the robots.”

It seemed that the enclosure was another item that “had to go,” because large areas of plates had already been stripped away, while yet more were being rucked up, like fish scales, and carried off. Both there and around the rim, the robots swarmed like steel ants, and the station seemed to be dissolving in some areas and re-crystallizing in others even as they watched.

“What’s that about robots?” Ghort asked, moving up beside them. This interruption reminded Alex that Ghort, though trained in construction before a delegate had spotted his talent for thumping people, was not an old hand like the other two. Alex would have expected seniority issues to arise from the order delivered from on high that Ghort should become foreman of this small team, but the other two seemed perfectly happy with having him in charge. Alex also sensed that this wasn’t down to sheer luck, but to a certain individual’s ability to slot personalities together with the ease of Lego bricks.

“They were never this integrated before,” said Gladys, still watching the robots. “We’d get work orders, a specific job to do, and that would get slotted into the system of a team of robots, and they’d set to work. We had to iron out any errors, sometimes stop them working and ask for reprogramming to include stuff they weren’t programmed to do.”

“The robots are more efficient now,” suggested Alex.

“Nah, the robots were always fine if they were programmed right. The problem was everything behind them.”

“Crap in crap out,” said Akenon, round a mouthful of sandwich.

“Never seen them running this fast,” continued Gladys. “They just ain’t stopping. The bloody things are even anticipating now, and covering stuff that shouldn’t be in their programming. I saw one stop halfway through a job to repair some weapons damage to a beam junction. If one of them ran into anything like that before, it just shut down to wait for its new instructions.”

“It’s him,” Alex suggested, noting a brief and quickly suppressed flash of anger in Ghort’s expression.

“Yup,” Gladys agreed, “it certainly is.”

As he later walked out to start the next six hours of their shift, feeling buoyant after solid food and hot coffee, Alex considered how he was now part of something awesome and thus understood the attitude of his co-workers to the Owner. As he began work once more, he was thinking again about nothing beyond the next bolt to wind down, and then how best to apply the diamond cutting wheel Ghort had begun instructing him on how to use, and how best to make sure he didn’t slice a hole in his suit. The time seemed to flash by till, when Ghort called a halt, Alex stuck his tools to the deck with a feeling of weary satisfaction.

“It’s only eight beam ends ahead,” said Akenon. “That’ll do.”

Another small victory in the human—robot race, with the necessary handicap applied.

Back inside the station, Gladys commented, “The new boy didn’t slow us down.”

“The new boy done good,” said Ghort drily, slapping Alex on the shoulder.

Alex was amazed at how happy he felt to be complimented on performing such simple tasks so ably, and puzzled too because he felt the urge to cry.

Everybody seemed to be working at a frenetic pace, so it should have come as no surprise to Hannah to find tasks queued up in the station’s system for herself, too. In her personal queue she found the names of everyone aboard the station listed in order of importance under “neural tissue samples,” though with a vague proviso in there of “scheduled when available.” On top of that it turned out that a long production floor, provided with power and plumbing points but no equipment, beyond the sealed door adjacent to her clean-room, was to be opened to her. It seemed that this was where she would be growing those tissue samples in aerogel matrices and setting up production of the cerebral hardware and bioware required to link those people the samples were taken from to their backups.

Hannah sighed. She had always preferred focusing on research and did not enjoy the work involved in mass manufacturing the product of such research. However, she couldn’t really fault Saul in his aim to give the people here a chance at a form of immortality.

Investigating further, she found that this was not the last of it. He wanted her setting up artificial wombs and other related devices and, by the look of the list, this meant human cloning. She was uncomfortable with that, but saw how it related to the growing of neural tissue samples: backups for both body and mind. Neither was she comfortable with the plug-ins: exterior hardware that made a link between the internal bioware in their skulls and their backups, and which also enabled limited access to the station’s computer systems and its robots. That gave her pause as she realized that Saul wanted the people here to take some steps up the same ladder he himself had climbed, but did not want them to climb too far. She could see that, with this set-up he would always remain in control: able to shut down that exterior hardware and boot people out of the system at will. Was that moral? Was it right? She didn’t know, but recognized that it was certainly a precaution she would also take, were she in his position.

There came a knock at her door as it opened, and in stepped Le Roque. Hannah gazed at him in puzzlement. “I don’t often see you down here.”

He frowned at her. “Well, that being the case, you shouldn’t have scheduled me to come here. I was about to get something to eat and then catch some sleep. Apparently you want to take neural tissue samples from everyone aboard the station, so you can repair brain damage like you did with Saul.”

It was to be a gradual dissemination of the knowledge: let it spread throughout the station rather than announce it. Don’t actually conceal it but don’t make an effort to let everyone know. This was the kind of news that could cause extreme reactions, both positive and negative. Being able to live forever was a dream of humanity, but never being able to die could be the most extreme of nightmares, especially when your entire experience of life until now had been under the Committee. This could result in people clamouring at her door either to demand immortality or to lynch her. Tell them before you take the sample, had been Saul’s message, therefore give them the choice. “True,” she said, “but I didn’t expect anyone here just yet—the scheduling is automated.”

“You’re not ready? I can always come back another time.” There was no point in opening up her surgery for this task, since it was a quick clean anaerobic operation—inducer to numb the nerves then a narrow-gauge drill needle straight through the skull to take a small biopsy. In her experience, people hardly felt it, though it was always best to go in through the back of the head so they saw neither the drill needle nor the operation itself.

“No, we may as well get it done now.” Hannah waved her hand towards her laboratory’s surgical chair. “But you need to understand the implications of this, and I have to give you the option to refuse.”

Le Roque stared at her. “I know all I need to know: this increases my chances of staying alive should I get a head injury.”

“It’s more than that,” Hannah explained, “and the possibilities are more extensive. I grew samples from Saul’s brain in an aerogel matrix which he connected to via the bioware in his skull. This gave him a backup to his entire mind.” Hannah did not continue, because she could see that Le Roque now understood.

“Immortality,” he said, wide-eyed, excited. “You’ll be setting up artificial wombs and a cloning facility …”

“I’ll divide the samples,” said Hannah. “Some will be used for tissue repair if required. If the damage is too extensive then I see no barrier to the possibility of download into a cloned body.”

“So when do I get this bioware?”

“When your backup is ready,” Hannah replied.

“Is this only for a select elite?” he asked, now starting to see the drawbacks.

“For everyone, but in order of their importance to Saul.” Hannah paused. “Do you want this, then?”

“Of course I do—I’d be a madman not to want it.” Le Roque went over to the chair and sat down decisively. Hannah eyed him for a moment, then stepped over to get her equipment out of a nearby cupboard. She also retrieved a powered sample case with nutrient feeds to fifty temperature-controlled glass sample tubes. She would check the system again, but reckoned she had a busy time ahead of her.

She was not wrong.

After Le Roque, Rhine paid her a visit, then came the Saberhagens. The next person to arrive after them she waved straight to the chair, which worried the man because he had merely come to unseal the door leading through to the adjacent production floor. Between sampling operations, Hannah also began to track down the equipment she would need, some of it held in stores and some of it in closed-off laboratories or other facilities scattered throughout the station, and put through the necessary orders for it to be relocated. Not everything was available, however. The boxes of aerogel with their micro-tubule feeds and other support mechanisms required a special order to various sections of high-tech manufacturing aboard the station and would have to be assembled here.

I need more staff, she thought, and immediately felt a tightness at the back of her throat and tears welling behind her eyes. Her assistant James had been, in the short time she had known him, one of the best. Now he was lying out in the rim morgue. No backups for him; no second chances for him. She allowed the unfairness of this, of life, circumstances, all of it, to wash over her, then she let it go. In this moment she was at the start of something that could stack the deck on the side of humanity, or at least those aboard this particular station. So she got back to work.