16

ENGINEERS AND IDEOLOGUES

The importance of politicians is something that can never be under-estimated, for over the centuries so many of them have strutted on the world stage, prattling their party political and ideological jargon and produced little of real value. The number of them who have had a real effect on the human lot pales in comparison to the number of scientists and engineers who have produced something worthwhile. Who did more for women’s rights than the inventors of the washing machine, the vacuum cleaner and the contraceptive pill? Has righteous nannying improved human health more than Lister, Pasteur, Fleming or any number of a huge list of pioneering biologists? Who gave us more freedom than Henry Ford, or more freedom of speech than the inventors of the Internet, or more to eat than Jethro Tull or John Froehlich? It was Edison who shone real light into our lives, not some dogma. However, let us not presume politicians are ineffectual, for whenever the bombs and napalm are falling, the mines taking off legs and the bullets punching holes in human flesh, they are always behind the firing line, deciding who should die.

ARGUS

Again something smashed into the ship and Hannah knew that what she was feeling was real fear and no mere panic attack.

Beyond that she felt frustrated and ineffectual: what was happening now was as beyond her influence as a tsunami.

“We just lost one of the railguns,” declared Le Roque, his screen image appearing up in a top corner of the right-hand bulkhead screen, looking like a man seeing his own gallows for the first time.

“No shit,” replied Brigitta Saberhagen, her head dipped, trying not to see the same noose.

The left-hand screen, which was linked to a damage-control program, kindly displayed the partially molten and shattered mess that had been one of their railguns, along with a large red-lipped hole to one side of it, where a missile had punched through the hull.

“Is there anything you can do?” the technical director asked.

“I ceased to have any input long ago,” the Saberhagen twin replied. “Saul is now controlling everything.”

“That’s true,” Langstrom interjected. “I don’t know if any of you have tried, but I can’t do much with my implant now. The robots are ignoring me and system access is limited to data retrieval only.”

“Perhaps this was not such a great idea,” Hannah muttered, suppressing transmission of her voice beyond this limited area. “I’m not sure I want to know what’s going on.”

It was Le Roque who had opened up video conferencing to them here in their room at the end of the Meat Locker. The technical director was trying to gather data, exert some influence, trying to do something, but was just being swept along in the wave of wreckage. All the humans aboard were in very much the same position: strapped into either an acceleration chair or a couch, while waiting to find out if they were going to die.

“I do,” Da Vinci replied. “We blank all this out, and the next thing we might see is Galahad’s troops coming in here to grab us.”

Dr Raiman leaned forwards from his chair beside Da Vinci and gazed across at them both. “We are all wearing VC suits, so have medical support.”

“And?” Da Vinci stared at him in puzzlement.

Raiman held out a gloved hand to reveal a couple of drug ampoules. “You can insert them in your support packs, and order suit injection by means of your wrist console or phone.” He shrugged. “Or any other data route you care to name.”

Hannah reached out to take one of the ampoules and held it up, seeing that all it had marked on it was a bar code.

“The rebels on Earth were starting to use explosive implants before this all kicked off,” she reflected. “So what is this?”

“A neurotoxin that only has a number,” Raiman replied. “I’ve always had this stuff ready to hand, even before Saul took over Argus Station.” He nodded to his assistant, who was sitting silently in one of the seats behind him. “Greg and I are ready.”

Da Vinci reached for one of the ampoules and, without hesitation, pressed it down into a drugs port fitted in the support pack on his belt.

“And, in what feels only a short time ago to me,” he said, “I was actually contemplating immortality. Now, it seems, it’s time to think about suicide.”

The view on the left-hand screen was changing like a snap-shot viewer, running through images inside a ship that Hannah felt was distinctly taking on the appearance of a pawnbroker’s sphere clipped by a blast from a shotgun. Another hit left the Meat Locker shuddering, and the view switched to focus on the latest impact point. Hannah gazed numbly at air blasting from a hole in Arcoplex Two, that whole cylinder world turning slowly on its now bent axle. She could have been in there. She could have been right under that. Almost certainly others had been there.

“That’s more power lines down,” observed Rhine, who until then had been saying nothing; instead he had just sat staring at his own screen and cam with a look of myopic surprise.

“So what have we lost?” Le Roque asked him. Rhine had now turned away and did not reply. “Rhine?”

The professor turned back. “The vortex generator will never get up to full speed without major repairs, and I see no robots tending to the problem.”

“We should consider ourselves lucky the thing itself hasn’t been hit,” said Langstrom. “After seeing what happened to the Vision.”

Rhine shook his head. “No luck involved.”

“What do you mean?”

When Rhine didn’t reply, Le Roque did it for him. “Saul is using Mach-effect nudges to make sure the vortex ring isn’t hit, and deliberately firing off steering thrusters at the same time, so as to cover it. He doesn’t want them to know about the Mach-effect drive.”

Wonderful, thought Hannah, hoping such nudges were being used simply to save human lives inside the ship, but sure Saul was just desperately trying to preserve their one shot at escape.

“And then what?” This was Pike speaking from one of the smelting plants—perhaps one of the safest places to be now, since it was close to the vortex ring. “Does this mean he plans to use it against them somehow?”

“I don’t know,” said Le Roque, obviously bewildered. “Has anyone been able to get any response from him? Hannah?”

“Nothing since he told us to take cover here,” she replied.

“Does anyone have any idea what he intends?” Le Roque asked, but no one replied.

Hannah would have liked to believe that Alan had some clever and unforeseen tactic in mind to drag their nuts out of the fire, but instead it seemed they were fleeing desperately while taking a hellish punishment. It wouldn’t be long, she felt, before the Fist hit something major and this ship ceased to be a ship at all, and became just a drifting wreck. Further punishment would then ensue and, if she and those accompanying her survived that, it would be Galahad’s assault force arriving next.

She peered down at the ampoule still resting in her palm, then inserted it into her support pack. Da Vinci was right: on the next few hours depended the chance of eternity or nothing at all.

Var picked herself up and, checking the temperature readings exterior to her suit, saw that without its insulation she would already be dead. The steam fogging the corridor rapidly dissolved into vacuum, but the walls around her were still radiating, still hot. She reached round to probe her shoulder blade: it hurt badly but didn’t feel broken. The ribs below it, however, responded to her fingers with a sharp pain. Almost certainly she’d cracked one. Only now did she properly consider Langstrom’s words.

Her brother was in the midst of a fight, which possibly in his terms meant only for his own life and for the survival of his ship, but nevertheless the crew of this ship and Var herself totally depended on him for their survival. Perhaps she should simply put trust in him: trust that he had already eliminated the threat the chipped had posed; trust that, though he might not have the best interests of the people aboard close to heart, he had still, as Langstrom claimed, always made some effort to ensure their survival. Perhaps now she should just turn back, find an acceleration chair, and wait for the outcome …

No! Var felt suddenly angry at her own weakness. Just because they were in the midst of a space battle, just because others did not believe her contentions and just because she was finding it harder and harder to believe them herself, that should not be an excuse for her to quit. The easy way was not the right way—this was something she had learned on Mars. She had killed other humans there and been perfectly justified in doing so. And the killing here had been perfectly justified too …

Thomas Grieve.

The name nagged at her. The sight of him looking up at her was imprinted on her mind. The sensation of his skull breaking under the spanner seemed to have permanently embedded itself in the nerves of her arm. She headed angrily off down the corridor, her thoughts in disarray, but doubt still knotting together her insides.

At the far end she came to a junction. To the right extended yet another corridor, but to the left a short stretch of passageway opened out into a large space in the outer ring. Which way? She turned towards the opening first, where she could at least use the image-intensifier function of her visor to take a look around and maybe learn if her quarries were in sight. There could be no harm in at least locating them …

Saul noted his hand shaking as he closed his visor, and then violently suppressed human reactions. The shaking stopped as he lowered his hand and studied the spatters of molten metal hardening on his VC suit before peering through the thick smoke towards the hole in the far wall. Veering away from the reality that he had just been a breath away from dying, he descended into the world of pure logic. He surmised that one of the railgun missiles fired by the Fist had consisted of some kind of case-hardened alloy composite that had fragmented after its glancing blow against the Arboretum—one of those fragments then finding its way here to punch through the armour of his inner sanctum. The breach had been quickly sealed with resin, and air pressure restored, but it would take a little while for the air-conditioning system to cycle out the smoke laden with hydrogen cyanide. He speculated on whether this poisonous gas was just an inadvertent result of the processes used to construct the missile, or whether it was a deliberate consequence. He plumped for the former because this bombardment was intended merely to disable his ship, because Galahad still wanted her captives.

His attention focusing throughout the ship, and outwards again, Saul studied the damage inflicted on both sides. Other fragments from the latest missile had cut into Tech Central, further wrecking the support systems for the vortex ring, and incidentally taking off someone’s arm at the elbow. No matter, the arm had been shoved into a fridge and could be reattached later, while, despite Rhine’s chagrin, the present vortex generator would not be taking them out of the solar system ever. He had to accept that now.

The rest of the ship was a mess too—parts of its exterior resembling the lid of a pepper pot. The dislodged end of the Arboretum had shifted again to tear through the lattice walls before grinding to a halt; atmosphere breaches filled the interior space with a fog, and fires burned visibly in pressurized sections. One railgun was slagged and the support column to the Traveller engine was damaged and slowly twisting under the strain of thrust. Beside all this damage Saul counted the number of feeds to backup that had been cut and, running a calculation that included those not yet chipped, he reckoned on over two hundred dead.

Meanwhile the Fist had received its own pounding, but there the damage was much less evident. The enemy’s armour tended to distribute the shock inflicted and in some cases Saul’s missiles had failed to penetrate. One result was that the Fist was no longer spherical, but now resembled a pocked tomato. Two of its equatorial fusion engines had also been badly damaged and many of its weapons ports had been destroyed, but in functional railguns it vastly outnumbered Saul’s ship still.

“Io,” Saul decided.

“Undoubtedly,” the proctor Paul replied, as he scrabbled around the inner hull to make further repairs, with robots swarming all about him.

“Does it hurt?” Saul asked.

“It is agony,” Paul replied.

One of his fellows had been right underneath one of the latest railgun strikes and, as tough as the proctors were, they could not survive being vaporized.

“And he lives still,” Paul added.

The proctors, it seemed, had their own form of backup, in the minds of each other.

“I’m sorry,” said Saul, not quite sure why he felt the need to apologize thus to the proctors but felt no need to comment about the human casualties.

“Is it in position?” Paul asked. “Data exchange is intermittent and we need exact timings.”

Peering through a cam near the fusion engine, Saul watched a robot climbing down towards the hellish flames spewing out from the combustion-chamber array. This was a robot that had been sent to kill him, but now, rather than a dud, it carried a live copper-head explosive which, while he watched, it fixed in position.

“It’s in place,” Saul replied, as he watched Io drawing rapidly closer. “But best if we don’t use it, as I want one of their shots to do the damage.”

“It is good to take precautions,” Paul opined.

“Yes.” Saul was all in agreement on that. The robot was there to cover the very small chance of the enemy ship not managing to hit the fusion engine once Saul stopped using the Mach-effect to dodge its missiles. It was also there to cover the chance that the Fist might not fire on them at the correct moment—a small chance indeed since the enemy ship’s bombardment had been almost constant. Another robot, which walked upright while carrying a ten-mil machine gun, and who was an old friend, if such nomenclature could be applied, moved into position by the plasma cannon. Whether this robot would be needed depended on calculations Saul had to make once his sensors had gathered enough data.

The ship was now down into Io’s orbital path, closing in on the moon itself as it sped round Jupiter. Using steering thrusters only, Saul made some adjustments to their course, then abruptly shut down the Traveller engine. Now at last it was time for Paul’s plan: the proctor’s suicidally desperate ploy.

Within his mind Saul applied sensor data, mapped vectors, carefully adjusted the hydraulic targeting gear of the plasma cannon and included every possible variable in his calculations: the new weight distribution inside his ship after the recent damage; the powerful gyroscopic effect of the vortex generator; the pull of Io and of Jupiter, in fact the whole gravity map around him; further possible damage both from the Fist and the massive deceleration he was about to apply. The calculations multiplied in his mind into a three-dimensional mathematical maze which, as he applied more and more processing power, collapsed into its vector and firing solutions, though with large error bars.

There was, as the plan suggested, an advantage in limiting the number of plasma “caps” fired, for he did not want the Fist unable to continue the pursuit to its conclusion immediately, so he ensured multiple routes of laser com to the robot with the machine gun.

“Now we do it,” he said, to himself and no one else. He could not tell anyone to prepare for this, for they were all as ready as they could be. And, really, it was pointless warning them that more of them might be about to die.

Another lengthy blast from the steering thrusters, complemented by Mach-effect, turned the ship over. The Traveller engine fired again, at full power, and Saul checked stress readings as the column supporting it shrank by fifty metres and a large number of beams splintered. Now off-centre, the engine’s erupting flame ate into the hull around its port and turned a bright orange. The massive deceleration that ensued slammed him down into his chair, and elsewhere throughout in the ship the effect was even worse. The Arboretum tore free, its near end dropping ponderously, and its ring-side end also being wrenched out and thousands of tonnes of metal swinging down against the inner hull and distorting it under the impact. Also ripped free, an accommodation unit dropped to smash into the lattice wall extending from the base of the Traveller engine. Saul measured the various effects of these impacts, found the adjustments he needed to make to correct his course and did so instantly. He noted a safety protocol kicking in, causing the vortex generator to go over to safe holding—induction power being drawn off from the ring to maintain containment. However, he had expected this, knowing it would be more than twenty hours before the mercury spinning round inside dropped to a velocity ineffective for his purposes.

As expected, the Fist turned over and decelerated too. Those aboard it would read his actions as a desperate gamble, an attempt to use Io to cover an abrupt course change heading out-system, but also to bring his plasma cannon into play. And, perfectly as calculated, the Fist’s change in attitude brought the doors to its shuttle and landing craft bay directly into view, along with the least damaged of its weapons arrays. Saul tracked multiple firings from the Fist’s railguns: a high concentration of missiles heading towards the site of his own ship’s plasma cannon. This launch was followed by multiple slower firings, as the other ship deployed mines above its weapons arrays to protect them. Saul adjusted and finely tuned targeting, then fired the cannon.

A line of plasma caps sped out from Saul’s ship, moving faster than the approaching railgun missiles, and glowing like massive welding sparks. More mines seeded from the Fist, but not quickly enough. The first plasma cap struck to one side of a railgun array, the explosion there leaving a glowing caldera. The second two landed perfectly on target, slamming straight into the bay doors, the first destroying them and the second punching straight through to discharge itself inside. The subsequent blast opened out metallic petals of the surrounding hull, before spewing out tonnes of wreckage—chunks of which Saul identified as the rear section of a space plane, along with two badly smashed inter-station shuttles. It was enough.

The latest launch of railgun missiles from the Fist now began hitting, smashing into Argus’s hull and underscoring the plasma-cannon port with a lengthy burning ellipsis. The damage was severe but, though targeting was off, it was still possible for Argus to fire the cannon. Saul queued up shots to fire, targeted by using the ship’s steering thrusters, then began firing. But he simultaneously ordered his robot to open up on the heavy coils of the cannon with its machine gun. One shot sped away before the big weapon lost containment. It exploded, spewing wreckage and molten metal out of its port, thereby signalling to the Fist that it was no longer a danger.

They were close to Io now, feeling its pull, and their speed was down to just thousands of kilometres per hour. Now the Fist was close enough to start using beam weapons. Firing his remaining railgun in apparent desperation, Saul adjusted his course down into the ionization torus and into the thin breath of volcanic smoke around the moon, where beam weapons would prove less effective. Distorted by the brush of a maser, the railgun abruptly tore out its rails. Saul returned fire with his own maser, and saw three railgun ports on the other ship spew debris. Further firings from there put the equator of his ship in danger; it heightened the probability of the vortex generator being hit, which must not happen. Using Mach-effect with a covering firing of steering thrusters, Saul adjusted his ship’s position just so, evading all but two of the missiles. They slammed into the base of his ship: one of them flaring in the Traveller engine’s drive flame and tearing out through the other side like a magnesium fire, but the second hitting the pellet-aggregation plants. The explosion filled the interior of the ship with metal vapour, and then the drive flame sputtered and went out. The robot stationed there had not been required.

“We’re going in,” Saul announced to the whole ship, as he gazed out upon Io’s horizon and the sulphurous landscape below. And, to the proctor Paul, he noted tightly, “Mach-effect is below eighty per cent, I see.”

“It is enough,” the proctor replied. “But not enough to take us up again.”

“We will have time.”

Time …

In the end the primary aim of those aboard the Fist was not his destruction, but seizing the Gene Bank data and samples. Paul had calculated that the coming crash would convince them that further disabling bombardment from orbit might destroy that prime objective, and Saul agreed. If he was wrong, then their chances of getting off the ground again were little above nil, for even though his robots were rapidly at work making repairs throughout the interior of the ship, he doubted the vessel could stand much more punishment. And, more importantly, once they were down, he could no longer use the Mach-effect to dodge the blows, and then the absolutely critical vortex generator might be hit. If that happened, he might just as well step out onto Io and open up his suit.

“It looks as if we’re all going to die anyway,” said Ghort, his voice drifting in and out of audibility, while patched by a program in Alex’s implant. “But don’t you want to be the one to pull the trigger on me, Alex?”

Alex didn’t bother replying, he just gazed at the long sliver of metal that had missed impaling him to a wall of asteroidal ice, and then started searching for some way through the tangled mass of wreckage lying between him and Ghort. As he moved, he could feel the steady drag of either acceleration or deceleration, but it was mild and of little consequence. Some of the wreckage glowed red hot, but Alex realized that this did not account for the increase in light hereabouts. Shifting himself away from the ice wall, he obtained a clearer view, through a hole torn in the side of the old station ring, of the bright sulphurous surface of one of Jupiter’s moons speeding along below.

“Or have you lost the stomach for it?” Ghort asked, as Alex now wormed his way between splintered beams. “It was so much easier for you to shoot people in the back, so I guess facing up directly to someone who knows you’re coming and wants to kill you might not be quite to your taste.”

Alex paused, surprised at Ghort’s attitude. Obviously the man was hoping to lure Alex out from cover, but did he really think him so stupid? Did he think Alex could be goaded into irrational acts of anger? Apparently he did. Alex knew that, in general human terms, he was very naive, but when it came to this sort of thing, this hunting and killing, Alex was Methuselah. Such a misreading of someone, such a complete lack of judgement on Ghort’s part, further confirmed the futility of that man’s rebellion. It never had a chance of success anyway but, had it succeeded, the chipped would probably have been tearing at each other’s throats shortly afterwards.

Finally struggling out into the open, Alex studied his surroundings. He saw that something had smashed through the side of the ship, torn up the outer-ring infrastructure, then buried itself in a blast wall far ahead and over to the right. However, the enclosed section he had quitted just before the latest impact was undamaged, and doubtless Ghort was still covering the rectangular opening below, in the hope of springing an ambush. Alex moved to the right to get a clearer view, checking the direction arrows in his visor, but found them ghosting and intermittent after so many laser-com devices had been destroyed here.

“It’s not a case of whether I have the stomach for it, Ghort. It’s just a job I do.” He hadn’t actually wanted to speak, but the program running in his implant needed more communications data to key onto.

“And now you do it for Alan Saul,” Ghort replied bitterly. “Tell me, Alex, were you recruited by him for this treachery right from the start, or did you go and weasel your way into his good graces after you’d joined us?”

This response was enough. The red arrow steadied and pointed directly at a twisted beam junction covered by a metre-wide strengthening plate twenty metres ahead. Under magnification and protruding from behind it, Ghort’s hand was just visible, supporting the stock of his assault rifle—the barrel predictably directed down towards that same rectangular opening. Alex just needed to move over as far as the nearest blast wall and work his way along it to obtain a clear shot. He began to do so, but also remained curious about Ghort’s attitude.

“Surely,” he said, “you understand that, even without me here to stop you, you’ve had little chance of success? Did it never occur to you how convenient it seemed to be for you to gain access to explosives? Did you not question how easily you obtained the supposed location of his backups?”

“So you actually believe the mythology he creates around himself,” said Ghort. “You, too, have been fooled into believing in his omniscience. It’s all a front, Alex, and so long as people believe in him, they enslave themselves and do the majority of his work for him.”

Alex shook his head in irritation. “He spoke to me just a short while ago, and that was the first and only time since he spared my life. He simply inserted me in your group like a number in a formula he needed to solve, while at the same time he gave you enough rope with which to hang yourselves.”

“Oh, you’re so grateful to be alive,” Ghort spat contemptuously.

Alex paused by the blast wall. “Yes, I am. Just as I’m grateful for the possibility, because of him, that I might continue living for a very long time.”

“As a slave.”

“Yet with greater freedom than I have ever experienced before.”

“But you are not free and you will never be free, and you could exist just like that for an eternity,” said Ghort. “Those of us with fully functional brains recognize that as a kind of hell.”

“I thought you said we were all going to die?”

“Fuck you, Alex,” Ghort replied, obviously lacking a sensible rejoinder.

“So things would have been better without the Owner,” said Alex. “With you in charge, we would all have been free to map out our own destinies and just do whatever we want. That’s rubbish. There is no real freedom anywhere: it’s simply an airy concept used to justify power grabs. We are all constrained in some way, either by those who rule over us, or by those we rule, or by our environments and by genetics. I just happen to prefer being ruled by the Owner, because he is the one most likely to keep me alive, and because I myself do not want to rule, and know of no one more worthy to rule over me.”

“You’re an idiot, Alex.”

“But I’m not the kind of idiot who wanted to kill the only one with any chance of keeping us alive or out of Serene Galahad’s hands. And I’m not the idiot who is now going to die.”

Ghort laughed. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that.”

Muzzle flashes abruptly lit the scene, and a couple of tracers showed Ghort was firing down towards the rectangular opening. “Well, I thought you had more patience, Alex,” he continued.

Then he laughed again and propelled himself from cover.

Alex opened fire, at least two bullets hitting home, but with no guarantee of penetration through a VC suit. Ghort nearly lost his rifle as he used his wrist impellers to drive himself downwards and out of sight. Alex squatted and propelled himself from the blast wall, heading for the same opening in the hope of intercepting Ghort there and finishing this pathetic drama. And, as he went, he was forced to wonder just who the hell Ghort had been firing at.

He landed above the opening, caught hold of a jag of twisted metal, pushed himself down and swung inside, bringing his rifle to bear. Ten metres back inside, two figures drifted in a mist of vapour leaking from suit breaches. One rifle was tumbling away behind them, and one was trailing at the end of a broken strap. As Alex pushed himself down for the floor and accelerated towards them, the larger one turned the smaller one round, pressing a sidearm up against her throat. Alex stumbled to a halt on recognizing the bloody face behind the cracked visor.

“Seems I’ve got something … to bargain with now,” panted Ghort, his voice hoarse, blood all around his mouth, and a leak under his armpit which the sealant just didn’t seem to be containing.

Alex gazed at the face of the Owner’s sister, noted the scabs of yellow breach resin on her stomach and her chest. He observed her cracked visor, and wondered how long she now had left to live.

“But not … with you,” Ghort added, turning the sidearm on Alex.

THE COMMAND

The secondary bridge looked little different from its primary twin but now, of course, Bartholomew did not have all his previous staff. With his stomach tight and his mind hardened as the Command limped sideways-on towards Io, he watched the end of the battle between the Fist and Saul’s ship. Both vessels had taken huge punishment, but in the end the Fist’s better armour and larger complement of weapons had decided the fight.

“What’s your status?” he asked Captain Oerlon.

The captain of the Fist had lost most of his beard; he had a burn dressing on the front of his neck and soot smears all over his face.

“We’ve still got all our beam weapons, five railguns and two others that can be repaired within an hour. Main fusion drive is optimal, but the Alcubierre drive is going to be down for weeks. We lost two side-burners but that’s merely cut our manoeuvrability—which is irrelevant now.”

Bartholomew switched his gaze from the screen frame showing Oerlon to the main image—transmitted by the Fist—of Saul’s ship struggling with steering thrusters only to try and escape the pull of Io. The ship looked like a cratered moon, so many were the holes punched through it. Internal fires were visible, as was the massive damage to its Traveller engine. It was weapon-less, had no more drive than perhaps enough to steer it clear of impact with some of the mountains down below, and it was now going to go in hard. Bartholomew just hoped it would not go in hard enough to be completely destroyed, as he still needed to retrieve the Gene Bank data and samples, and possibly some prisoners.

“You didn’t manage to hit his vortex generator,” Bartholomew commented.

Oerlon shrugged with a wince. “No, and luckily he didn’t manage to hit ours either, or rather none of his shots penetrated its armour. Perhaps his drive is armoured similarly.”

“Perhaps,” Bartholomew allowed. Then, “Your casualties?”

“Fifty-eight of my crew are dead, another twenty in the infirmary,” Oerlon replied. “We also lost over three hundred of the primary assault group when he hit the shuttle bay—as they were ready aboard shuttles.”

That was the thing about space warfare, Bartholomew surmised. Unlike land battles on Earth, in this unforgiving environment the dead would always outnumber the wounded.

“Other assault troop casualties?”

“None,” Oerlon replied. “Our armour took the sting out of the railgun missiles, and nothing penetrated through to core accommodation.”

Again Bartholomew watched Saul’s ship going in, and noted that the steering thrusters were now all pointing in the direction of travel as if to try and slow the vessel down rather than alter its course. He checked another frame on the screen displaying a map of Io’s surface and the changing predictions on the crash site. It would be coming down through the spume emitted from two volcanoes, its impact site a sulphur plain lying beyond. This wasn’t a site Bartholomew would have chosen, but he supposed Saul was all out of choices.

“What about landing?” Bartholomew asked.

“We’ve got some repairs to make, but we should be good for it.”

Bartholomew nodded, feeling a degree of smugness. It had been on his suggestion that the Fist be constructed so as to enable it to land on a planet. Tactically it had always been a possibility that Saul, his ship having been partially disabled, might be able to take it down on Mars, or on one of the big planet satellites, in order to make repairs, sitting himself in some deep canyon to deter railgun fire from orbit. It was also the case that the few landing craft the Fist possessed would be vulnerable on their way down. Better that the whole ship could go down with all its weapons able to defend itself, and then pound Saul’s ship from close quarters before launching a ground assault. Luckily, after much argument, Calder had agreed, though neither of them had foreseen precisely this current scenario.

“Well, I guess we can just sit back and watch the show for now,” Bartholomew said, doing exactly that.

Saul’s ship was low now and trailing vapour. Abruptly, the screen image divided, showing both the view from the Fist above and another view from some kilometres behind the descending vessel. Bartholomew enjoyed Oerlon’s foresight. The man had obviously launched surveillance drones to follow the ship in. A better assessment could thus be made of just how much damage it had received after it came to rest but, more importantly, here was plenty of imagery for Serene Galahad to use in subsequent ETV broadcasts. Always a good idea to ensure that Earth’s dictator enjoyed a ringside seat and plenty of material to work with.

From the perspective of the drones, the ship soon lay below Io’s horizon, hurtling over a mosaic of browns, yellows and drifts of icy white dotted with pustules of glowing orange from silicate volcanoes. Ahead lay the twin spumes from the erupting volcanoes, which were blasting gas and molten matter out into space with the constancy of fire hoses. Perspective abruptly changed as the drones climbed. Saul’s ship entered the clouds surrounding these two fountains and abruptly turned mustard yellow from the sulphur deposited on its hull, leaking blue flames from those parts of it still partially molten. The view clouded as the drones entered this same area, then blanked out for a while.

The second view from orbit showed the ship punch its way through between those two eruptions, its steering thrusters spearing out long emerald flames. Saul must have boosted those thrusters somehow because, when the drones regained clear imagery, they were almost on top of his ship and had to decelerate. Even now, with his ultimate defeat in sight, Saul was still managing to surprise them.

A sulphurous plain sped past below, then again the drones became blind as the ship travelled over some kind of white mass and blew up a cloud of icy dust. The vessel had by some means dropped lower abruptly and Bartholomew surmised that Saul must have used the gyroscopic effect of his vortex generator to reposition it. Next, from orbit, the admiral watched a smoky line scar its way across the plain for three kilometres, before primary impact. The ship then ploughed in, the loose surface below somehow preventing it bouncing, but the impact still causing it to shed wreckage. It skidded for a further two kilometres, mounding up sulphur compounds ahead of it, before finally grinding to a halt. Some half an hour later the dust had cleared enough for a close drone view of it. Saul’s ship lay with the wreckage of its fusion drive buried, partially tilted on its axis, brown and weirdly green chemical smoke rising from glowing holes in its hull.

“And so it ends,” said Oerlon.

“Not quite,” said Bartholomew. “He still has his robots and whatever crew have survived. We must never underestimate this man.”

“We land close and go in hard,” Oerlon asserted. “We’ve got enough EM tank-busters to fry all his robots, seventeen hundred tough and highly trained commandos and forty spiderguns.”

“Try not to kill too much computing,” warned Bartholomew. “We still need to get hold of that Gene Bank data. And try not to cause any more wreckage than necessary, because there are the samples too.” He didn’t add anything about trying to capture Alan Saul alive, since that objective was a given. However, he personally doubted that it was possible, and that Galahad’s orders would only result in a further waste of lives.

Bartholomew paused to wonder if there was anything he could have missed, but just could not discern it. Oerlon’s force was overwhelming; Saul had lost all his major weapons, and only a few of his surviving personnel aboard would be soldiers. And though there were likely to be losses against Saul’s robots, those machines would not be able to stand for long against tank-busters and forty spiderguns. Really, he just had to accept that Oerlon was right.

“I’ll be in orbit within ten hours,” he said. “How long before you can make your descent?”

“We’ll probably be ready just before your arrival,” Oerlon replied.

“Do so when feasible. Don’t wait for me.”

Perhaps now it was time for them to think beyond this little war out here. The Command would be crippled for some time yet so, once they had taken everything they wanted from Saul’s ship, Bartholomew decided, it would be a good idea for him to transfer himself to the Fist for the trip back to Earth. He grimaced at the thought, but could feel the tension draining out of him as he decided it was time to enjoy this victory. He had time enough to think about his future under Earth’s psychotic dictator during the trip back.

EARTH

Clay Ruger flipped up the hatch in the arm of his acceleration chair, uncoiled the umbilical inside and plugged it into the socket in his suit. His visor display now told him he was running on ship air and power, and in the ship’s communication circuit. Next he peered down at the sidearm that had been returned to him, before looking across at Galahad, who had now found her own umbilical and was plugging it in. He contemplated the satisfaction he might still feel by putting a bullet through the side of her head. But what was the point?

Scotonis was now singing over the link he’d made to both Ruger’s and Trove’s fones, some ancient ditty about a “runaway train.” He’d started doing this just after kindly letting them know how many minutes remained before the Scourge struck the Traveller construction station and he detonated the warheads aboard.

“What do you mean by ‘three minutes’?” Galahad asked, turning to him.

“That’s how long we’ve got before Scotonis arrives,” Clay informed her.

At that moment the fast re-entry drop shuttle tilted down as it peeled away from the dock, throwing him up against his restraints. A second later, light glared through the front screen and the vessel shuddered sideways under some sort of blow. Shortly after that the sounds of exterior impacts penetrated through the hull.

“The fuck?” Sack exclaimed.

“Scotonis is firing on the station,” Trove announced.

“Now, that wasn’t very nice, was it?” said Scotonis over the fone link, before recommencing his song.

Another glare of light through the front screen, but it must have been more distant this time, for no blast wave or debris reached the drop shuttle.

“He’s firing on us?” asked Galahad

Trove glanced round. “I think your friend Calder realized Scotonis wasn’t going to stop, so has opened up on him with the station railguns.” She paused as she took a firmer grip on the steering column. “Bit late for that, as they’d never do enough damage to stop him, and now he’s destroying the guns.”

“That’s good for us,” said Galahad. “Calder would have opened fire on us the moment we cleared the station.”

Clay stared at her, annoyed by her certainty, irritated by her expectation of reality ordering itself to suit her wishes. She seemed utterly confident that they could still escape and survive. How could she be sure all the railguns had been destroyed? Because, even before she assumed power, she had been utterly certain that she knew best. Then, over the short period of her reign, that certainty had transformed into a belief in her own unique destiny. She probably thought that she simply could not die before achieving it, and probably even thought she would never die.

As he let that sink in, he finally began to stitch together events in his mind. Seeing Serene Galahad aboard the station, the moment he stepped from the shuttle, and seeing that their meeting was being broadcast on ETV, he’d been thoroughly wrapped up in the fact that he was due to die when Scotonis crashed the Scourge into the construction station. He had found that suddenly ridiculous, amusing. All the efforts he had made to ensure his own survival, once it became apparent that his new boss was a psycho, had thus come to nothing. He’d kept quiet about the evidence of her being behind the Scour, but retained that same proof for later use, while trying to keep his head down. He’d removed his implant and shorted out his strangulation collar, and he’d revealed the evidence of Galahad’s guilt. And all for nothing.

Or maybe not.

His seat kicked him in the back as the drop shuttle’s engine fired up, slinging them away from the station. In the forward screen he saw Earth rise and centre, then incrementally grow larger. The giant called acceleration came and sat on his chest.

Until now he hadn’t properly registered how he’d stepped into the midst of a small rebellion and that this Calder, who controlled off-world resources, had been trying to usurp Gala-had. It had all been too chaotic. He hadn’t understood that getting to this drop shuttle had been a futile exercise at best so long as Calder controlled the station railguns—because he’d still been wrapped up in the certainty of them all dying in a nuclear conflagration. However, he did have some reason for hope: Scotonis had now destroyed those same railguns and, despite her apparent earlier fatalism, Trove was still struggling to keep them alive.

Trove keyed some controls on her chair arm, the acceleration now being too powerful for her to reach either the joystick or the console controls. Part of the forward cockpit screen flickered—a liquid crystal layer in the glass over to one side now giving them a view of what lay behind them. The Traveller constructions station filled up the whole image, still massive even though they were hurtling away from it, in comparative scale like some bug launching itself from a house.

“We’re going to black out … maybe die,” she managed tightly. “No time for the special acceleration suits.”

Really, thought Clay, she hadn’t needed to say that. The drop shuttle was shaking now, a deep-throated roar penetrating. Perhaps it was illusion but the whole vessel seemed to be compacting and contorting around him.

“Thirty … seconds,” Trove said.

Clay fixed his gaze on the rear view. There was some sort of counter running at the bottom of the screen and only then did he realize it was their distance from the construction station measured in kilometres, but at that moment the pressure on his eyeballs blurred it.

“Here … it … comes.”

The construction station was now comfortably small in the rear view, just occupying a small area at the centre. Earth had grown huge, filling most of the true forward view, continental land masses clear below sheaths of cloud, the urban sprawls evident even from this distance, like the etched silicon of integrated circuits, while the streaks of mass-driver firings cut up through atmosphere like white hairs sprouting from an ageing face. For a second Clay glimpsed what looked like the Hubble Array, but it then slid to one side of the view. Next, in the rear view, the bullet of the Scourge speared in towards the station on a tail of fusion fire.

“Goodbye cruel world!” Scotonis cried over the fone link, then began laughing hysterically.

The Scourge struck and slid itself in like a syringe needle being driven into an arm, and a fraction of a second later explosions erupted all around it. For a further fraction of a second, Clay wondered if its armoury might not detonate, then a giant flashbulb went off and the rear view blanked.

“Sweet Jesus,” Trove muttered, doubtless seeing some reading on the console before her.

Clay found himself holding his breath, then blew it out with the help of the giant sitting on his chest. The drop shuttle continued to shudder around him, and he wondered how far you had to get, in vacuum, to be beyond the reach of an explosion that encroached on the gigatonne range. The rear view returned, and it seemed as if a big orange eye was peering in at them. There was no sign of the construction station. With an explosion like that, there would be no debris, just white-hot vapour and plasma.

The ovoid of fire grew and flattened, occupying the entire rear view, which was now just an orange section of the forward screen. Abruptly, the giant increased the pressure on Clay’s chest, while aurora fled ahead of the ship, which began shaking violently. Earth rose and suddenly slid to one side and, as blackness encroached on his vision, Clay was reminded of when the gravity wave had passed through the Scourge, breaking his bones.

Then the blackness closed him down.