The Departure

want you, Mustafa and Jack, and the thirty-two other men formerly of SA22 Assault Group, to now disarm and confine those other hundred and eleven soldiers with you.’

The three men just stood staring at the source of his voice for a moment, till Jack was the first to snap out of it.

‘Just bring ’em through one at a time,’ he said, gazing fixedly at Langstrom.

Langstrom shook his head. ‘No need. They’ll follow orders now Smith’s spies are out of the way.’

‘Smith’s spies would be the eighteen held in the disciplinary cell?’ Saul suggested. ‘And our friend down at your feet.’

The gory detritus in the air, Saul noticed, was all heading towards the louvres of an air cleaner, which began to make a sound like an air-locked central heating system as it gobbled them down. Langstrom glanced down at the corpse, taking a step back from the spreading blood. He then glanced up at a nearby cam, as if hoping to catch a glimpse of Saul. ‘Yeah, they’re not so hard to spot.’

‘Once you’ve disarmed the rest, SA22 should be ready to fight the troops it was formerly ordered to assist.’

‘We knew that would be necessary.’

Saul studied Langstrom carefully. How was he to judge this man? Could all this be some elaborate scheme to get a killer close enough to Saul to end things quickly?

‘It will only become necessary if their space planes manage to evade the satellites I’m dropping on them … but be ready, all the same.’ He left it at that, returning his attention to the screens in front of him, and the vector calculations inside his head.

‘The pilots have spotted the satellites,’ Braddock informed him.

The four space planes were now separating, their steering jets blasting, and contrails whipping away from their almost retracted wings. Saul adjusted the paths of his two satellites and after a minute, the planes reacted to that. Perfect, they were dropping lower while extending their wings, hoping for greater manoeuvrability within atmosphere. Saul made another course correction to the satellites, whereupon one pilot – obviously a lot smarter than his fellows – raised his plane’s ailerons to aerobrake hard. All the steering jets pushing the plane down, it dropped out of formation just as the pilots of the other planes got wise, too, and tried to do the same thing.

Too late.

He had imaging from the two satellites displayed on the screen, imaging from other satellites, too, and from the station itself. A grandstand view. One of the satellites streaked in, striking a space plane trying to throw itself into a turn. The target became an explosion fifteen kilometres long, stabbing past a second plane, the blastwave setting the second plane into a spin that he hoped it couldn’t correct. The next satellite hit the third plane, shearing off its rear half and leaving the rest to tumble through upper atmosphere, on and out of sight. Calculating its vector, he realized it would never actually hit the ground.

‘It’s recovering,’ Braddock noted, gazing at the spinning plane as it gradually stabilized.

The spinning craft finally managed to correct, then abruptly extended its wings and began arcing down.

‘Heading back to Minsk,’ Saul noted. ‘Or maybe one of the emergency runways in Australia or Canada. Must have been damaged.’

‘It’s out of it, then?’

‘Yes, but we still have this problem.’ Saul called up an image of the plane that had dropped out of formation first. It was once again rising through the upper atmosphere. ‘But we have time,’ he continued. ‘It’ll have to do a full orbit of Earth’ – he ran some calculations based on the fuel the plane had available and its optimum approach speed – ‘which gives us twenty-two hours.’

‘Can you hit it with some more satellites?’

‘No, they’ll be watching out for that now.’ Saul turned his chair so as to face both Braddock and Hannah. ‘We’ll have to kill them near or actually inside the station, if we’re still alive by then.’

15

Drive to Fusion

When, back in 2035, the first commercial fusion reactor went online, scientists speculated that they were now just ten years away from using the same technology to build a fusion drive. It was to prove, however, a lot more difficult to develop than they supposed. Within ten years, the first prototype was assembled in orbit, then towed out from Earth for test firing. It worked for just six tenths of a second before sputtering out, yet it took the engineers a further five years to find out why. The problem was gravity. On Earth, the engine tolerances were correct, but once away from gravity the device distorted. In fact the engine was far too sensitive, since the slightest misalignment could shut it down. It took a further ten years to design and build a more robust machine, and only five years after its first successful test, the next massive fusion engine was being installed in the steadily growing hull of the first Traveller spacecraft.

Chang and the Saberhagen twins ensured that everyone they could communicate with was made as safe as possible. They found every available spacesuit or survival suit and assigned them, before ensconcing those people still without suits in the safer, inner areas of the living accommodation – the sections that could be sealed with bulkhead doors. But in total that amounted to less than eight hundred people, because the moment the three of them tried opening com with those outside the area Saul controlled, Smith shut the communication down. Just as he seemed to be shutting down so much else, for all construction and maintenance work aboard Argus had now ceased. Even the ore carriers were no longer running between the station itself and the smelter plants, which had started folding up and closing their huge mirrors.

‘You’ve now lost your chief security force here,’ Saul observed, ‘and now only one of those space planes looks like having a chance of ever getting here.’

Smith’s image flicked into view on the middle screen, the communication link having been immediately accepted. ‘It has been a consideration of mine at what point you would resort to the infantile gloating of a terrorist. But I feel it necessary for you to understand that, whilst you consider yourself of great significance, to the state and to the people at large you are merely an irritating inconvenience.’