Owner 03 - Jupiter War (55 page)

‘Necessary,’ Serene asserted.

‘Oh, I agree,’ Sack nodded. ‘You did something that was horribly necessary in order to save the planet, but this is personal.’ He walked over to the taut cable that extended from Serene’s wrist to the piece of wreckage. He pulled it tighter to give himself some slack at the knot, which he untied. Next, holding the cable taut, he turned back to face her.

‘My only problem with fire is a psychological barrier I have to overcome.’ He slackened the cable slightly and thus set Serene swinging. ‘I was told that the pain I suffered was just about the worst anyone can suffer, and that of course left scars inside me too.’

‘You . . . don’t do this.’ He clearly wanted her to think he was going to burn her, and she decided it best to play along with this melodrama he was creating. He would toy with her for a while, but in the end he knew she was utterly essential to the future of Earth.

‘But I
do
,’ Sack replied, then stepped forward to allow her to swing in towards the dozer blade.

He wouldn’t do this. He would pull the cable taut again at the last moment. He would not sacrifice the future to such petty vengeance. Serene continued to believe this right up until the moment when her naked body touched metal hotter than a clothes iron. Thereafter she lost the ability to think at all.

The sunrise was spectacular: deep purple clouds turning silver and gold on their undersides, then shading to amethyst shot through with blood red, before being seared by the sun, as it breached the sprawl towers, and then turning to lemon and orange. The clouds seemed to be rainbow islands in the sky, with the bays and coves of some fantasy land people could only dream of ever reaching – or only reach by dreaming. It was, Ruger felt, a sunrise he would remember, and one he could appreciate properly now the screaming had stopped.

‘Do you reckon she’s dead now?’ Trove asked.

‘I should think so,’ Ruger replied. ‘I’m surprised she lasted so long.’

The power of the sun began ramping up very quickly and the clouds lost their romantic appeal. Maybe a couple of kilometres ahead lay more sprawl, though it was difficult to tell for sure in the increasing heat haze, and now, in clear morning light, the surface they walked upon was all too visible. How many thousands . . . how many millions of the dead lay here under his feet?

‘Looks as if we’re getting some activity.’ Trove pointed.

Ruger raised his gaze from the crushed ribcages and empty eye sockets to peer at several shapes rising above the distant sprawl. After a moment he identified a big rotobus, along with two outrider military aeros, heading directly towards them. He wanted to run, get himself to that sprawl and find somewhere to hide while he sorted out what to do next, but having spent so long in zero gravity, having suffered so many injuries and certainly also suffering from radiation sickness, he was having enough trouble just continuing to put one foot in front of the other.

‘There’s going to be trouble,’ Trove commented.

‘There’s always trouble,’ he replied bitterly.

‘I mean, once everyone knows Galahad is gone, her delegates will be fighting each other for the top job,’ Trove continued. ‘I’m betting on numerous police actions, and lots of unfortunate accidents.’

Ruger wondered what relevance that would have for the pair of them inside an adjustment cell, because that was where they were undoubtedly going.

The three aircraft drew closer and closer but, unexpectedly, didn’t come down to land beside them, instead continuing on to the crash site. Maybe they did still have a chance to reach the sprawl and there make themselves scarce. Ruger glanced back as the three craft settled near the giant bulldozer and the wreckage of their drop shuttle, which was now only partially visible through haze. Would they find Galahad still hanging up against that dozer blade, nicely cooked to a turn? Would Sack now face capture and a death sentence?

‘Maybe we can make it,’ he said, turning away and trying to pick up his pace towards the sprawl. Trove had no reply for him.

They tramped on for another half an hour, the sprawl buildings seemingly getting no closer. The sounds of the two aeros and the rotobus, again approaching, suffused Clay with a feeling of utter hopelessness, till he halted abruptly, and sat down on bones. Trove stood beside him, gazing back at the approaching aircraft, her arms folded and her expression bitter.

With a roar, the aircraft slowed down, circling out to one side of them. While the two military aeros hovered, the rotobus descended in a blast of ivory dust. Clay closed his eyes and waited, only opening them when he heard a grunt of surprise emerging from Trove.

Sack and two soldiers walked into visibility. One of the soldiers was the same one Sack had dismissed during the night; the other, by his uniform, was a general in the Inspectorate military wing. They came to a halt just a few paces away.

‘You’ll be needing medical attention,’ said Sack. ‘Though this is a sad moment, what with the tragic loss of Serene Galahad in that drop-shuttle crash’ – he stabbed a thumb over his shoulder – ‘the people of Earth must never forget their heroes.’

Clay slowly heaved himself to his feet.

‘Heroes?’ he echoed.

‘Heroes,’ Sack repeated. ‘Against all odds, you managed to survive and get the Gene Bank data back to Earth.’ He gazed at them blankly. ‘Whoever now assumes the role of Chairman here will be thoroughly aware of the need to court you. Who knows? Your inevitable fame may even propel you into some high position within the new regime – maybe even the highest position of all.’

Clay Ruger felt the cogs and spindles of his mind abruptly run free and begin spinning at high speed. He stood up straighter and transferred his attention to the general.

‘Sack is correct,’ he stated. ‘We are both in need of immediate anti-rad treatments, at the very least.’

The general nodded his head. ‘We can fly you directly to the nearest Committee hospital, sir. And I personally want to thank you for all you’ve done.’

‘Shall we?’ Clay gestured towards the rotobus, now becoming clear in the dusty air.

‘Certainly,’ the general replied, waving them ahead of him.

‘I hope you know what you’re doing, PO Ruger,’ Trove muttered to him, as they walked. ‘Maybe it’d be better if we just kept our heads down.’

‘There will be danger,’ said Sack, who had silently moved in behind to shadow them, ‘but I can recommend to you a good bodyguard, who could also employ the right people for security.’

Clay glanced at him. ‘Any chance of a letter of recommendation from this guy’s previous employer?’

Sack’s smile, in return, was about the nastiest thing Clay had ever seen.

Jupiter War

The term ‘war’ had suffered much abuse over the centuries, what with it being used in hackneyed clichés to describe just about any concerted effort by any group of humans, from a nation downwards. The world had thus seen wars on hunger, poverty, disease, smoking, obesity, terror and climate change, and grown disconnected from the reality – just a century past – of nations using their industrial might to tear each other apart, of cities being annihilated and of millions dying. But this was not why the Committee decided to excise the word from official documentation or state-controlled media. No, the Committee, taking the meaning of war to be ‘open and declared armed hostile conflict between states or nations’, decided that, since we lived in a unified world, the term was obsolete. Any conflict involving soldiers, guns and bombs, up to and including the aforementioned annihilation of cities and millions dying, became an incident, a dissident suppression, a tactical excision or merely a police action. In light of this, and in an effort to rewrite history, the struggle with Alan Saul was described as an ‘extra-solar police action’. However, because Saul had turned what was Argus Station into his own nation state, and gone head-to-head against the full industrial and military might of Earth, and won, Subnet pundits such as your author here insist on calling this the ‘Jupiter War’.

The ship’s new heavily armoured hull plates gleamed in the sun as the Alcubierre warp blinked out around it. Its new vortex generator, filled with mercury from the
Command
’s generator and from further mining of a cinnabar asteroid, was maintained at full power and ready to fling the ship away again. Inside it, the Arboretum, Arcoplexes One and Two and the new and presently empty Arcoplex Three, were all spinning with steady efficiency amidst internal structure steadily expanding to fill all but one space. Meanwhile, the smelting plants and internal factories continued at their previous frenetic pace: their furnaces, presses, forges, automated mills and lathes, assembly plants and other machines besides, all were busily and raucously at work. The Traveller engine, now repaired, rebuilt, improved and refuelled, stood ready to fire up, but with the double-layered Mach-effect drive distributed around the inner layer of hull, it might never need to. The two plasma cannons, two heavy masers and six railguns were in pristine condition, ready with plasma caps, missiles and power supplies endowed with redoubled redundancy. And Saul hoped he would never have any need for
them
.

Through cameras in the hull he watched as the big new space doors opened and a space plane shot out on its way to the wrecked and depopulated Core Two space station. He then turned his attention to an old friend – an early design of robot kitted out for applying spray coatings, and the same one he had used to lead the attack against Salem Smith – as it perambulated around the hull, etching away metal and spraying bright yellow vacuum-set paint. Its task would be completed sometime after his jaunt in taking this ship out of the solar system.

Earth lay below and even from up here it was possible, with just human vision, to see that some areas were greener than they had appeared before the Scour. Saul analysed spectra in his mind and calculated on a close to ten per cent increase in such areas. He also calculated the force of the latest blast – this time on the American east coast – and knew that another tactical atomic had been used, rating at no more than five kilotonnes.

Serene Galahad’s delegates – including officers ranking high in the Inspectorate military wing and others with no particular rank before all this – were busy fighting for power. Thus far, a large portion of the Inspectorate military had rallied to the flag of Pilot Officer Trove and Clay Ruger, whose power base lay in India and who had taken control of much of old Asia. However, they were up against an alliance of European delegates as well as the individual delegates who now respectively controlled the Americas, Australia and Japan, the Arctic and Russia, besides numerous smaller realms between.

Saul reached informational tendrils out to Earth. All the larger warring blocs had either snatched one of Galahad’s comlifers or created their own to defend their computer systems and, with Saul’s ship now in orbit above them, security was at its highest and those same comlifers alert to intrusion. Saul should not even have been able to penetrate, but all those blocs had managed to get hold of copies of the Gene Bank data he had sent to the
Scourge
. When he’d laced that data with every computer worm and virus at his disposal it had been in the hope of penetrating either that ship’s systems or those of Earth. And the latter case had paid off royally now. He thus penetrated with ease, sliding in under their notice, sliding into twenty-two comlifer minds and simply rendering them unconscious. Free to mentally wander through all those disparate systems, he shut down every missile silo capable of firing anything into orbit, then as a precaution insured that the presently idle mass drivers could not be used as weapons either. Then he injected a virus he had created many months before.

In just three hours it spread around the world, seeking out specific information and erasing it. When its work was done, not one scrap of system-stored data remained of either Professor Rhine’s or Professor Calder’s research into the Alcubierre warp drive. The virus then became somnolent and hidden, awaiting the insertion of similar data from other forms of storage, whereupon it would activate itself again and wipe it too. As it sank into somnolence after those three hours, Saul considered his capability of reaching into the human mind via the visual cortex and thus manipulating data inside. But he drew a line at that, deciding that even he did not want to become that ruthless.

Next, he spent hours gathering further data and assessing more closely the situation below. He calculated that, for many years hence, none of the current power blocs would gain complete ascendancy. And if they continued fighting as they were, they would wreck much of the infrastructure of control. Really, it looked as if Earth was dropping back through time to when the separate nation states ruled, which suited Saul just fine. Further analysis rendered the result that, with the vortex generator data missing, none of the separate small blocs would regain the capability of putting up anything like the
Command
or the
Fist
, and when, in at least fifty years, a new world government or large power bloc seized control, it would take them a further fifty years to regain that capability. That would be enough, for Saul would be long gone by then. Withdrawing, he returned his attention to matters closer to home.

Two space planes, retrieved from the partially wrecked ghost station Core Two, had arrived hours ago. Meanwhile the work crew from the space plane he had sent out, along with pilots instructed to retrieve those planes, was busily checking to ensure that Core Two held no nasty surprises. This was prior to Saul shifting his whole ship over and taking the station inside through the massive new space doors, whereupon Core Two would be torn apart for salvage.

One of the Core Two space planes was currently being refuelled and checked over, to ensure it could manage atmospheric re-entry without coming apart. An hour remained before all the checks would be finished, and there might yet be some maintenance to carry out, yet all those departing his ship had gathered in one of the now-pressurized docking pillars.