Owner 03 - Jupiter War by Neal Asher Read Free Book Online Page A

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,