Owner 03 - Jupiter War by Neal Asher
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.
3
Where Are They?
Enrico Fermi posed the question ‘Where are they?’ and, being a man of his time, felt sure that the aliens had wiped themselves out with nuclear weapons. And now, long past those innocent nuclear years, in an age of cynicism and self-knowledge, we can think of a thousand answers to his question. They screwed their planet and died, or their planet changed and screwed them. They killed themselves with a whole range of weapons: nuclear, biological, robotic, nanotech or something we’ve yet to think of – but will. They found the perfect EMR frequency to fry their brains or disrupt their genome. A solar flare, meteorite, close nova or some other astronomical event took them out. The exigencies of evolution turned out to be that brains don’t breed, which would surprise no one. Their society was taken over by some self-destructive meme: they started to fear their sun, so built orbital shields and froze to death; they feared the next ice age, so built orbital mirrors and cooked; or they feared overpopulation, so used mass sterilization and died out. But, of course, all of these are a few numbers in Frank Drake’s equation to calculate the number of alien civilizations out in the universe, and it is probable we won’t know those numbers until we can go out there and start counting – we’ll never know the answers until we’ve survived them.
Earth
The darkness had lasted for days. Serene Galahad did nothing, ignored all enquiries, ignored all demands on her time, and just stewed in depression. But that was passing now and at last she had begun taking an interest again – glad to discover that everything she had put in motion had not stuttered to a halt without her. There was, she decided, something to be said for delegation. Though, annoyingly, the new tactical team located just across the estate from her seemed to be delivering very guarded assessments with unacceptable error bars.
Now, at last, she had begun to widen her focus – no longer contemplating how nice it would be to activate the Scour in every ID implant on Earth, sweep all the pieces off the board and let it return to a state last seen just after the last major extinction event.
As she strolled out onto an upper sun deck extending from her Tuscan home, Serene was now thinking clearly enough to be puzzled by some of the retrospective data delivered from Tactical. The crew of the Scourge had put their ship on a course back to Earth, and Tactical had no clear explanation for that. Serene agreed with that, even though she had more data than the tactical analysts themselves. The timings were all wrong, for the Scourge had separated from Argus Station before the Scour had begun killing the assaulting troops and the crew. Perhaps Alan Saul had warned them that they were about to die? Even that didn’t really make sense, because surely they would have assumed he was lying. Like the analysts, they didn’t know that the virus came directly from their ID implants . . .
She untied her robe and dropped it over the arm of the comfortable recliner provided for her up here, stretched out her arms to enjoy the Italian sun on her naked body, then gazed out across the neat groves of olive, orange and lemon trees towards the nearby fence. A shepherd was picking its way through the trees, this monstrous spidery machine of polished chrome and white plastic permanently on patrol there, while in the branches of some of the trees roosted birds like hawks but fashioned out of razors.
Some clear danger must have driven Captain Scotonis to undock his ship from the station while the assault force continued its attack. Perhaps he had decided to put some distance between himself and it, so as to deplo
In reality, Serene was glad no one on board remained alive to stand as a reminder of her failure out there. Sometime hence, when the ship came back within reach, it could quietly be taken to dock, the bodies cleared out and a new crew put aboard, then it could return to service. However, there were so many people who knew of her failure, and it took all of her self-control not to erase them, just as the crew of the Scourge had been erased. She wanted them gone. She wanted a fresh start: a new approach. Unfortunately, those same people were too useful and too deeply involved in her present major off-Earth projects. Serene shook her head in pique, sat down in her recliner, raised the back, then took off her sunglasses and closed her eyes.
Professor Calder was one of them. He was out there now at the old Mars Traveller orbital factory complex, building her an Alcubierre drive which, in just a few weeks, would be ready for testing. Unlike the wider population of Earth, he and thousands working for him knew all – except for the Scour-related details – of what had happened out at the Asteroid Belt, but she couldn’t kill them, or him. Serene shrugged: whatever. Getting rid of Calder would be stupid, and she had to admit that news of his further progress out there had gone some way towards lifting her malaise. Anyway, even people on Earth knew the truth. Previous ETV stories about the Scourge’s successful destruction of the Argus Station were undermined by their distrust of any proclamation from government, along with the present irritating resurrection of the Subnet and its images, somehow obtained directly from the Hubble, of Argus Station sitting in orbit over Mars. And there were limits on how many people she could kill before inefficiencies started kicking in.
The story now being spread among those who knew for sure that Argus still existed was that Saul had used computer penetration to defeat the troops, and had then killed Scotonis and his crew by clipping the Scourge with Argus’s Alcubierre warp. It was a story close enough to the truth to be maintained.
‘Your coffee, ma’am,’ said Sack.
Serene glanced round as her crocodile-skin bodyguard stepped out with a silver coffee pot, cream jug and sugar bowl on a silver tray. He strode over to her and dipped to place the tray on the pedestal table beside her. While he poured, and then stepped back, as previously instructed, she watched him. She now knew that he had no one, no relationship, and she studied his face for some sign of a reaction to her nakedness. She was just considering ordering him to take up the pot of sun cream on the floor beside the pedestal table, wondering what keroskin hands might feel like on her body, when her PA leader Elkin and two aides stepped out and stood there with attentive patience.
‘I was told to inform you that your new aero is ready, ma’am,’ Sack added.
The machine was a behemoth: twenty-four fans run on separate hydrogen Wankel engines, laminated impact armour, auto-defences, a helium bubblemetal structure also incorporating helium closed-cell gas bags so that, even if every engine was destroyed, it would still float to the ground rather than drop like a brick.
Serene added cream and sugar to her cup and stirred. ‘Then perhaps, after this morning’s meeting, it’s time for me to take it for a spin.’ She paused with the spoon held up as she considered. ‘I think we’ll go to Madagascar to see how things are turning out there.’
ETV had broadcast news of a terrible outbreak of the Scour on that huge island – one that had completely depopulated it. Now the only humans to be found there were in the clear-up teams steadily stripping away the island’s layer of concrete, carbocrete and steel – the environmental scum humans always generated. It had been, Serene felt, a rather impulsive decision of hers to activate the Scour in every ID implant there, but the results were pleasing. A chameleon and four plant species, all thought to be extinct, had been rediscovered.
‘Yes, ma’am.’ Sack moved back and Elkin moved forward.
A lusciously sexual woman, wearing a primly loose-cut suit to try and hide her curves, she carried a single notescreen keyed to Serene’s voice and functioning on predictive search so Elkin could provide facts and figures in an instant. The two aides were both pretty, blond men who possessed cerebral hardware just a few iterations below that of the seven comlifers guarding the computer systems of Earth. They were twins and the product of a genetic tweak for intelligence that Serene knew had proved successful in the past, two further examples of which were also aboard Argus Station. Through them Serene’s orders would be acted upon instantly. They were a perfect choice, though Serene wondered how much their pretty appearance had affected Elkin’s decision to employ them.
‘I take it the teleconference room will be ready’ – Serene checked her watch – ‘in twenty minutes, as I specified, and that all those I summoned to be here in person have now arrived?’
‘All but Delegates DeLambert and Chayter, who have simultaneously been delayed by scramjet faults,’ replied Elkin, with no need to check her screen.
Serene nodded, aware that the two delegates mentioned had allowed political manoeuvring to get in the way of the efficient running of their regions, and had thus dropped low in production stats.
‘Have them killed, at once,’ she instructed. ‘And tell their queued replacements to link in via teleconference.’
Elkin nodded to the aide on her right, who merely blinked. The order had instantly been relayed and, even at that moment, two strangulation collars would be closing. Delegation certainly had its usefulness, since Serene had not even needed to put down her coffee cup. She took a sip, contemplating further tasks she intended to delegate.
‘Now give me a precis of the expert assessment requested on Project Push,’ she instructed.
‘With the resources in place, Calder can meet all the offworld targets,’ Elkin began. ‘As you have already divined, the problem is in getting those resources in place. Societal Asset’s living standards will drop, while the general working week will have to be increased to one hundred hours. Those with critical placements will need to work longer still and will need support. However, robot manufacturing and our mining operations have sufficient redundancy already. Calder has already pushed high-tech manufacturing up to spec too.’ Elkin paused, looking uncomfortable.
‘Go on,’ Serene prompted.
‘It can therefore be achieved, unless we have another outbreak of the Scour in some critical area.’
‘I see, well, let’s just hope that doesn’t happen.’ Serene waved the thought away. ‘What suggestions have been made?’
‘We could increase production of military-grade stimulants and make them available to the working population, and also offer further achievement bonuses.’
‘The stimulants are a good idea, but we already offer bonuses.’
‘A suggestion has been that we offer things difficult for many SAs to buy via increased community credit,’ said Elkin, thus ensuring that Serene knew the suggestion did not come from her. ‘It has been suggested that bonuses could include removal of strangulation collars, actual cash for black-market purchases and higher placements in queues for advanced medicine.’
Serene nodded, finished her coffee, then poured herself another cup. ‘So, does anyone offer any guarantees that, with such bonuses, my targets will be met any sooner?’
‘No, ma’am, these are just suggestions based on mass psychological assessments of the SA population.’
‘So, even without such bonuses, we will still have the core stations expanded and fully weaponized within two months, and three working space battleships ready in six months?’
‘That is the expert assessment.’
?
Elkin now glanced at the aide on her right, who also blinked as he issued the orders that would effectively put the entire planet on a war footing. It was, after all, completely necessary to get those ships and Earth’s defences ready, and yesterday if that were possible. With this new drive of his, and what it could do to any object it came into contact with, Alan Saul had now become an even greater danger than before. Moreover, she still needed Earth’s Gene Bank back, and she still needed him visibly punished for his sins. Alan Saul had to die; therefore she needed the means to kill him.
Serene paused reflectively. For such a large change in the very structure of how Earth operated, she felt the need to announce all this to her delegates, and over ETV to the world population at large. She wanted the orders to be less impersonal, wanted the world to know the importance of this, but it also occurred to her that her taking such drastic measures in response to Saul might be perceived as a sign of fear.
‘Sack –’ Serene beckoned him over – ‘get that new aero ready. We’re going to Madagascar after I’ve got this nonsense out of the way. I could do with a bit of a break and then, afterwards, we’ll take a tour on the way back to ensure our delegates are working diligently.’ And maybe, during that trip, those hands . . .
News of her visit to the big island would spread – and so would her apparently nonchalant attitude to the immediate follow-up to her recent orders. Also the future threat of her maybe turning up unexpectedly right on a delegate’s doorstep would prove motivational. Anyway, she felt that it might be a good idea to get a complete assessment of the Madagascar situation before she tried something a bit more ambitious, like, for example, Scouring the human scum from somewhere else equally containable – Indonesia, perhaps. Of course that would all have to wait until after all the human scum still out there had served her purposes.