to be experiencing hellish nightmares. It was a mind that dwelt within a human brain – with additions – that seemed to be taking on a shape beyond any analysis.
The cageway was attached alongside one of the ore-transport tubes that led from the asteroid to the rim, where one of the big sun smelters and factory plants extended out into space. It was along this tube that raw materials were transported out from the asteroid to the processing plants, and back along which the finished products were conveyed. Glancing back, Hannah noticed that the asteroid had grown visibly smaller, such was the material that had already gone into enclosure, the weapons and now, it seemed, whatever the robots were building in the rim. Reaching the inner face of the rim, she walked up along it on her gecko boots, as if along some massive highway curving up into a metal forest. It occurred to her, even as she walked, that the enclosure hadn’t made a huge difference to the view. True, they could no longer see any stars from inside the station, but the thousands of LED lights scattered through that vast internal space did look remarkably like stars.
A wide cargo lock stood ahead of them with its two hinged doors open. Even as they approached, a construction robot scuttled out of it like some busy termite, carting in its heavy forelimbs what looked like a few tonnes of floor plates. Ignoring them completely, it launched itself into the station interior, tapped a cross-member a hundred metres out in order to alter its course, then sailed on into the distance.
‘And that’s another one,’ Pike added.
‘Another what?’
‘I also found out that the amount of scrap being fed into the plants has increased substantially,’ he replied. ‘They’re obviously ripping stuff out of here to fit this installation inside, whatever it is.’
‘Is that all of it?’ Hannah asked.
‘There’s more,’ said Brigitta. ‘I was going to check it out further before I said anything, but it seems some robots have been making alterations to the transformers that run our EM radiation shield. I only noted that when I found out that the system programming for the field had changed.’
‘Shit!’ said Hannah. ‘Shit! Shit!’
‘That’s about all,’ said Pike.
Hannah grunted acknowledgement at that, then said, ‘Be careful in there. They might not be programmed against riveting us to some wall.’
They entered through the cargo lock and found a massive hole punched through the floors of the rim itself. They followed this down through three floors and soon found what they had come here to see.
An entire rim floor had been cut away, leaving a groove twenty metres wide extending concentrically in both directions for as far as they could see. All around this, considerably more had also been cut away to expose the main structural beams. To these had been attached further beams, which converged in towards the groove, where they supported a section of . . .
‘All round the station rim,’ observed Brigitta.
Hannah nodded. This looked as if someone – or something – was building a particle accelerator right around the inside of the station rim – a particle accelerator fifteen kilometres long.
‘So what the fuck is this?’ asked Pike.
‘I have absolutely no idea,’ said Hannah.
‘I see you have come to inspect,’ said a voice through her suit radio. ‘Optimum build rate would increase with less diversification.’
The proctor walked out onto the remains of the floor that had been mostly cut away, something other than gecko boots keeping it in place. It wore a suit made of some kind of shiny material that covered it entirely, and it carried in its right hand a long metal staff.
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ demanded Brigitta. Obviously they were all hearing this exchange over their radios.
‘But work rate should increase once your weapons are done,’ it continued.
This proctor wasn’t Paul, but the one that had named itself Judd. She recognized it only because of the staff it had taken to carrying – a titanium scaffolding tube packed with esoteric electronics. Paul had called Judd ‘the builder’, but offered no further explanation. However, at that time, Hannah had seen how, now they were free, the proctors were changing quite rapidly, and all of them in different ways. She had also begun to notice, now that she had overcome her initial reaction of stark terror, that there was something quite patronizing about them.
‘What are you building here, Judd?’ she asked.
‘To schematic ADAR 45A, as detailed in work roster.’
Suddenly Hannah remembered an earlier conversation she had been witness to, and things that had been said during their first tangle-box communication with Mars. Recalling this, the situation started to become clearer.
‘I need to talk to Paul,’ she declared. ‘And to that lunatic Jasper Rhine.’
He remembered natural sleep, that moment of sliding from dream or nightmare to a semiconscious state wherein he could distinguish between the real and the unreal. He had
