down mental partitions; separating away parts of his mind both here and in the container in Hannah’s clean-room. He fought to retain control and realized, very quickly, that his complete self could not do so. Only a part of him could do that – just one of those partitions. But to what end? What was the best course to follow?
Seemingly without volition, he found himself gazing through a single cam into Jasper Rhine’s laboratory. The man was working on a schematic of some massive engine, something Saul seemed to recognize almost at once. Here it was, a design loosely based on the theorized Alcubierre warp drive. Saul instantly copied the schematic to his mind, lost himself in its possibilities, nearly dismissed it because of its physical simplicity, but then knew that it was right.
It went into the system queue, but there was something missing, something else needed. He visualized Argus Station’s present non-conjunction class route towards Mars. He felt himself fading as he encompassed it, the effort to stay conscious a Sisyphean labour. He riffled through astronomical maps and surveys and at last found what he wanted, then sent his instruction to the station’s steering thrusters and to the Traveller VI engine. The core of Argus Station would be, albeit briefly in astronomical terms, returning to its original home.
Who could he trust?
But she was powerless without him, unless . . . His instruction spread virally, leaping from robotic mind to robotic mind within the station. Further panic then as that viral spread also included odd semi-organic minds in HUD. But the panic faded, as did Saul.
Then he was gone, mostly.
As she headed back towards her laboratory, Hannah tried to dismiss her growing feeling of panic while recognizing that it was the real thing, the certainty that things were getting out of control and not just one of her panic attacks. She should have stayed with Saul; she should have monitored him more closely. But events seemed to be conspiring against her. First that damned implant virus, then Rhine’s demand for attention. Then that call from
‘Saul?’ she tried again, through her fone, and again got a strange muttering response. Had his physical body died and sent his secondary neural tissue into shock? It seemed highly likely. The monitor in her laboratory showed a general lack of coherence of the synaptic firings in that secondary tissue. It seemed to have descended into a fugue, a dream state.
She reached the corridor leading to her laboratory and noted the spidergun dutifully on station, turning one sensor limb to observe her. It then abruptly pointed two limbs at her – behaviour she hadn’t seen before, unless the robot was assessing a threat. She halted. Was Saul looking at her through those sensors? That seemed unlikely to her now. Instead, the thing was just continuing to run on his programming: a new kind of life set in motion by him before . . . no, she must not think like that.
‘Hannah,’ called Brigitta from the other end of the corridor, as she and her sister came hurrying in response to Hannah’s earlier summons.
The spidergun now turned towards them, and they halted. Then, after a moment, it decided none of them was a threat and it dropped its two raised limbs back to the floor and slowly closed itself up into a big steel fist. Still eyeing the weapon, the three women advanced cautiously to converge at the laboratory door.
‘Hey, it’s good they survived,’ said Brigitta, still eyeing the spidergun. She was talking about Mars.
Hannah paused, then decided to run with this, felt she needed a breathing space before entering her laboratory, then the surgery, and thus finding whatever it was she would find there. ‘There are some good minds out there,’ she replied, referring to Mars. ‘They would have known at once that they’d been abandoned and known that they couldn’t afford any political staff.’ Even as she spoke, she tried to accept the cold realism that must have been involved. Varalia Delex had stated quite simply that she had shot the political director. She had not appeared defensive or challenging – it was the same kind of unemotional murderousness Hannah had witnessed from Saul.
‘And that tangle communicator,’ Brigitta was obviously awed by the new technology, knowing that they stood in a moment of history. ‘We all know how that changes things.’
‘Something of an understatement, certainly,’ Hannah replied. ‘Rhine has proved again that he’s not the lunatic everyone supposed.’
‘There’s the other stuff he’s working on, too,’ interjected Angela, obviously impressed enough to break her usual silence.
‘Yes, there is,’ said Hannah, but her interest was now waning. She needed to go through that door. She didn’t want to talk about hypothetical space drives right now. The tangle communicator was one thing, mostly covered by quantum physics, but actually screwing with relativity on anything larger than the quantum scale seemed like fantasy. With some trepidation she reached out and palmed the reader beside the door, then ducked to accommodate the flash of a retinal scan. She entered, the twins following her, then headed straight for the clean lock leading into her surgery.
‘That communication with Mars was not why I got you here,’ she announced. ‘We may have trouble.’
Providence appeared to back her up right at that moment, as hollow booms echoed throughout the station. Brigitta stepped over to a console and called up station data.
‘The smelter plants just retracted,’ she said. ‘What the hell is he doing?’
Hannah held off on replying that his pulling in of those plants was probably no more than a nerve reaction, impulses from a severely disrupted or dying brain. But she still clung on to hope, and said nothing at all.
