That seemed very generous of him, but in reality he wanted to delay alerting station security to their presence for as long as possible. People might see them and still not know they were intruders.
Soon all the troops were safely in the pipe, and again Braddock led the way, hauling himself through the new hole in the wall. When Saul’s turn came he paused on the other side to study an enormous cavity that stretched in every direction, and recognized it as a floor of the station yet to be walled out. Whilst one of the soldiers started up the saw again, cutting through another plate, Malden pointed back at the wall they’d just passed through.
‘Do you see?’ he asked.
Braddock had carefully positioned the hole he had cut, for it emerged through a section of plain wall. Elsewhere numerous ducts cut across, shielded wires branching off to form large squared-off spirals, with some sort of laminate enclosed in clear plastic running round the gaps between.
‘For the EM field,’ Saul suggested.
One of the biggest problems with living in space had always been cosmic rays and the dangerous bursts of radiation from the sun, which the Earth’s magnetic field protected people from down on the surface. With the advent of cheap and plentiful energy from fusion combined with the nearly hundred-year-old invention of room-temperature superconductors, it had become possible to build and run magnetic shielding for this station. It was, however, a very heavy energy user and interfered with local electronics, which needed to be hardened to withstand it, so was only initiated at moments of greatest threat. But even now, the results still weren’t in on its effectiveness. Certainly people working up here would be much safer than those who had first ventured into space two centuries ago, but how much safer was a moot point.
‘A feed from the fusion reactor runs through the transformers and waveform modulators to reach these,’ Malden explained. ‘We just need to cut that link.’
Saul didn’t know why the other man felt the need to explain.
‘Do you feel it?’ Malden asked.
‘Yes,’ he replied.
Of course he felt it. It was as if someone had turned on an AC transformer in his head to create a vibration he could only describe as hot tinnitus. He was grateful when the next hole had been cut through and they dropped gently into an internal corridor, though the shielding in its walls merely muffled the effect to a bearable drone.
He had seen numerous pictures of the interior of the Argus Station during Govnet broadcasts, and these had always shown an aseptic high-tech environment populated by technicians clad in clean grey and white, with reassuring Inspectorate execs clad in futuristic-looking suits overseeing them, and just a few enforcers patrolling the gleaming facilities. However, the reality was nothing like advertised. Scraped, dented and dirty walls enclosed the corridor, and scattered along it were piles of equipment, crates and large plastic water barrels. Oval doors were ranged along one wall, most of them closed but some opening onto rooms packed with similar rubbish.
‘Go to station air,’ said Braddock, pushing aside his visor.
Saul undid his visor, then wished he hadn’t. The place stank like boiled cabbage and some astringent chemical, all underlain by something like body odour. As they set out in a slow loping walk, he noted an open crate filled with small cardboard boxes, to which clung a wash of rust-coloured water, and from this arose the smell of putrid meat.
‘Nice,’ Hannah noted, then stopped to peer at a cockroach moving in slow bounds across the corridor floor like some huge somnolent flea.
‘Looks like a dumping ground,’ observed Malden. ‘Let’s hope there’s not too many people here.’
No sooner had he said it than one of the oval doors ahead opened and a woman clad in filthy overalls and towing an arc welder pushed her way through, welding smoke billowing out all around her. She glanced towards them and paused, then briefly bowed her head and hurried further up the corridor, to disappear into the next room along. The advantage for them, right then, given the society they lived in, was that such people kept their heads down, averse to asking questions.
‘It’s about a hundred metres further down to get to the transformers,’ announced Braddock, checking the display on a palmtop. ‘They’re no longer near the surface.’
So even Malden had not possessed up-to-date knowledge of the station, Saul realized. It must have grown massively. He tried linking into the station network, but as before, the modem in his head just received static. Having glanced into the room the female welder had just exited, and having continued checking all around him since entering the place, he’d observed no facilities for computer access, so must stick with Malden until he came across something he could use.
‘How do you shut down the transformers?’ he asked. ‘Explosives?’
‘We just disconnect them from their power supply – no need to blow anything up.’
Malden surprised him with that, but then he guessed that, once the man assumed control here, he wanted to be sure not to get fried, should solar activity ramp up. Saul wondered how long after assuming control it would take Malden to achieve his goal then depart. Certainly he would need to make it impossible for anyone to shut down the Traveller engine, or in any other way divert the asteroid’s course down to the surface. Maybe it would be necessary for him to accesss readerguns here and depopulate the whole place first.
The droning inside Saul’s head grew yet more irritating and crackly as they finally reached the end of the incredibly long corridor. Next they entered a cageway penetrating down through numerous floors, before they traversed a short tubeway to a door that gave access on to a platform overlooking one side of a massive chamber, with steel steps leading down to the floor below. He could not help wondering what idiot had decided to install ordinary Earth-scale steps here.
At the centre of the great chamber, packed into a framework extending twenty metres on each side and rising from floor to ceiling, were what he presumed must be the transformers themselves, since these vaguely cuboid objects closely resembled antique wire and laminated-steel transformers. Supported by the quadrate scaffolding that filled the rest of the chamber, pan-pipes clusters of heavy ducts wove away from these transformers like some nightmare road junction, before finally disappearing through the walls. The entire area was strewn with cables connected to control boxes and access panels that seemed to be scattered at random. Fluorescent tubes attached to the scaffolding illuminated all of this, and the whole place stank of hot electronics. In Saul’s head, the droning became merely a mumble underneath a nerve-shredding mosquito whine. He couldn’t tell precisely how much of the sound lay inside his head or actually in the air around him, though Braddock nearly had to shout to issue his next order.
‘You know the drill!’ he said.
The soldiers separated into groups of four, taking different routes through the surrounding scaffolding towards the transformers. Malden, Braddock, Hannah and Saul himself descended the steps, or rather they launched themselves straight down to the floor and approached the transformers directly. As Malden led the way, Saul noticed a trickle of blood issuing from one of the man’s ears. Obviously the hardware sitting in his skull rested there about as uncomfortably as that in Saul’s own skull.
‘This is it!’ Malden yelled as they arrived below the massed transformers. He stepped over to a large console peppered with switches, plunger circuit-breakers, dials and buttons seemingly dating from the last millennium, but probably needed because the usual computer-control hardware and software would not be robust enough here. He began by clicking over a long line of twenty switches and the steady drone in the air stuttered, the mosquito whine in Saul’s head wavering. Next Malden turned to the row of twenty plunger circuit-breakers, and as he shoved each one down, the dial above it dropped to zero, and the noise decreased in level each time. When the noise finally ceased, Saul felt hollowed out and slightly bewildered.