Saul glanced up at a screen, confirming that the approaching space plane was now only two hours out. This business needed to be resolved before the plane got here – which meant Smith had to die.
‘Hannah,’ he said, ‘I want you to keep watch here. Braddock, you’re ready?’
‘I am,’ the soldier replied.
‘Then we go.’
Braddock and Hannah exchanged an unreadable look, then he handed her one of his collection of machine pistols. She armed it and glanced over at the three seated at their consoles, who looked back at her with some trepidation. Perhaps they thought Saul had just issued their execution order.
‘So you still intend going out to join this Langstrom,’ she stated.
‘Certainly,’ he replied. ‘If I can get direct physical access to the Political Office, I can end this pretty quickly.’
‘This entire situation might have been manufactured just to lure you out there.’
‘Let’s hope not,’ he said. In reality, without Langstrom they didn’t stand a chance.
‘You’re sure?’ she insisted.
‘Sure enough.’ He turned towards the door.
He couldn’t be totally sure, of course, but who could be totally sure about anything? Perhaps undergoing such a dramatic mental transformation could have impaired his judgement. Maybe he had missed some secret communication, some covert agreement between Langstrom and Smith, or between Langstrom and his officers, or perhaps they were following some plan put together long before he arrived here? He just could not know what was going on inside their heads – or, at least, beyond his enhanced ability to read the outward expression of their thoughts. Just as he had already told her: he wasn’t omnipresent nor omnipotent. Yet.
Out in the lobby, they crossed the bloodstained floor. Braddock had been keeping himself busy by dragging the corpses into a storeroom off to one side. Later they would go the way of all corpses here: fed through the digesters that also processed all the sewage and other organic waste, the water drawn off and recycled, the residual compost spread below the twisted trees of the Arboretum. During the planning stages of this project, the idea had been that all materials imported up here must be recycled. Even the ash from the smelting plants was turned into a conglomerate building material. However, this hadn’t been entirely successful and, like a body ridding itself of accumulated toxins, some materials ended up ejected into space within the first year. Later, as demand for foamed metals increased, and ore was even shipped up from Earth, more and more waste was thus ejected, creating meteorite streaks across Earth’s skies.
‘So you want me to take this role,’ said Braddock.
‘Certainly,’ Saul replied. ‘I leave it all to your judgement.’ He eyed the soldier keenly. ‘I’ll also be watching them through the readerguns and robots.’ Some of those robots were now armed with weapons that Langstrom’s troops had earlier abandoned.
They headed for the main cageway running down through Tech Central, then after closing up their suit helmets, passed through an airlock into the same tubeway in which he had fought Smith earlier. They soon passed the two wrecked robots, and the sight of blood spatters decorating the walls, which started the hard lump of Saul’s knife wound throbbing in painful recall.
Eventually the tubeway extended beyond its wall panels to give an unhindered view out into the open structure beside Arcoplex One. Saul glanced aside to confirm the presence of the robots he’d summoned, then picked up his pace, propelling himself forward in a gliding, almost skating stride calculated not to raise his feet too high off the floor. He could have instead just flung himself forward until he encountered something solid, but leaving himself no way to quickly change direction, should there be hostiles nearby, did not seem like a good idea.
The tubeway ended at a junction already completed, a fattened cylindrical chamber with track-switching gear set in the floor. The worm of a stationary train blocked the branch they wanted, but they entered a pullway running alongside it. After exiting at the other end, a few more minutes of travel brought them into unfinished tubeway again. Now the robots were moving along the lattice walls immediately above and below them, like wrought-iron apes. After a further ten minutes of such progress, human figures started becoming visible waiting beside the entrance into the cell complex.
Checking via numerous cameras, Saul identified Langstrom, Sergeants Mustafa and Jack, and the big blonde woman they called Peach. Braddock moved ahead, his machine pistol raised. Saul took his time, however, as he brought the robots in closer. When he finally drew near, one quadruped robot that seemed to have bits of both lobster and earth-mover in its ancestry landed on the beams of the tubeway cage above, whilst numerous other robots became plainly visible beyond it. The four humans looked up pensively, then turned their attention back to Saul. He studied their immediate reaction: the tightening of hands on the weapons slung in front of them, their shock quickly hidden, though Sergeant Jack also took an involuntary step backwards.
On receiving a radio query through his suit, Saul linked up coms.
‘Alan Saul,’ began Langstrom, as Saul stepped up beside Braddock.
‘The same,’ Saul replied.
‘What do you want?’ Langstrom asked.
‘Is that a question general or specific?’
Langstrom shrugged.
‘Generally, I want to be free of the Committee. Specifically, I want to get into the Political Office – and to a particular location.’ He unhooked his shoulder bag and passed it over to Braddock. ‘Braddock, your new commander here, will explain further where I want to go.’ He fixed Langstrom with a steady gaze, noticed a flash of rebellion quickly suppressed, then he turned and strolled away, to apparently gaze unconcernedly through the lattice gaps at the distant arc of Earth. But he was still watching carefully through numerous electronic eyes, including one set belonging to a robot armed with a ten-bore machine gun.
Braddock retrieved a laptop from the shoulderbag, placed it down on a girder, then peremptorily gestured Langstrom over. The man stared at Saul’s back, then, perhaps realizing you don’t argue with the chicken farmer about your position in the pecking order, he moved over to stand beside Braddock. After a brief hesitation, the other three followed him.
‘Here,’ said Braddock, calling up a schematic of the Political Office and outlining one particular section in red.
‘The transformer room,’ Langstrom noted. ‘But why there? You could cut their power from outside, but it’d make no difference. They’ve got hydrox generators in there, and enough fuel for at least twenty days.’
‘We don’t intend to cut their power.’
‘What, then?’
‘Did you question your previous commander like this?’ Braddock enquired.
‘Not a healthy option.’
‘What makes you think it’s a healthy option now?’
Langstrom shrugged. ‘Stupid optimism?’
‘Okay, here’s the deal. We’re all as good as dead now if the Committee regains control of the station.’ He surveyed the faces of those around him. ‘All of us.’
‘We get that,’ said Langstrom.
Braddock lowered his voice, with a slight nod in Saul’s direction, and hissed, ‘He look human to you? Well, he ain’t. He’s all that’s stands between us and the Committee, and we do it like he says.’ He shook his head. ‘He don’t need us – he doesn’t need anyone here on this station. We’re just a convenience to him, for now. So let’s talk about how we get him where he wants to go, shall we?’
Saul hadn’t coached Braddock on how he should present this, but essentially the soldier’s words were the truth. He now allowed his attention to stray away from them, ensuring his robots were all in position, checking to see if Smith was in any way responding. Nothing evident as yet. Saul tried to discover any holes in his own reasoning, but could find none. In the virtual world, Smith had lost the fight about Saul’s point of penetration, but even if that didn’t happen again this time, their battle for the Political Office should result in that safety protocol that had kicked in before, kicking in again and disabling the readerguns. This should give Langstrom the time to seize control of the place.