Neal Asher - The Departure

Five in-series supercapacitors: enough to power five crawlers over distances amounting to nearly a thousand kilometres each.

‘How many discharges?’

‘One at full power, the next one at half – exponentially downwards. I don’t suppose any of them will volunteer to touch a door to check if it’s still live, after the first of them has done so. The only way they might get by this is if they use something, some lump of metal, to make a connection between the doors and the floor to discharge the capacitors. Even then, it’s likely the locking mechanisms will have become fused.’

‘You also located that mountaineering equipment I mentioned?’

‘I did, though I’ve yet to see what use it will be to us.’

‘You will.’ Var turned away from him. ‘Carol?’

‘Nothing so dramatic,’ she said. ‘If they blow out all the windows, as you suggest, it’ll equalize pressure so that all bulkhead doors linking the outer sections of Hex Three can be opened, whilst anyone still in the internal compartments and corridors will be trapped.’

‘It’s what I would do,’ agreed Var. ‘If they blow out all the windows they can hunt us down in the outer sections, but if we’re in one of the inner sections after that, we’d be trapped and no longer a problem.’

Carol nodded, then reached into her hip pouch for a long, pressurized bottle. It took Var a moment to recognize it but, when she did, she felt a stirring of macabre amusement. ‘Contact adhesive,’ she said.

Carol nodded. ‘A Martian mix based on Terran hyperglues. Whilst exposed to Martian air, it remains in gel form, but the moment it is sealed against atmosphere, for example when sandwiched between metal and a gloved hand, it takes only about two seconds to set. I’ve smeared some on the exterior frames of any unbroken windows, also on the window frames and bulkhead door handles of the sections you’ve already opened to atmosphere.’

‘What about the door handles inside the pressurized sections, like here or in the garage?’ Lopomac asked.

‘In Earth atmosphere the glue oxidizes in about three minutes,’ Carol replied. ‘I could maybe fix that once we see them coming, but only then.’

Var considered that. Once Ricard and the rest made a move, assuming they used a crawler, they could get themselves here within ten minutes. Only ten minutes for Carol to spray glue on every bulkhead door handle within reach, then get safely back to the reactor room.

‘Too much of a risk.’ She shook her head. ‘You’d be very exposed and there’s a chance they could either kill you or cut you off from us before you got back to the reactor room.’ She called up a schematic of Hex Three on the computer screen. ‘Including Ricard himself, there’ll be seven of them,’ she decided. ‘He won’t know for certain where we are inside the hex, so he’ll keep one or two men outside to snipe at us if we try to escape. They’ll blow each remaining window in turn, searching each room after its window has been blown. Almost certainly they’ll throw in grenades before entering, and probably spray the interiors with gunfire too.’

‘But they can’t come through the garage windows, because there aren’t any,’ observed Carol.

‘Precisely,’ Var glanced at her. ‘Which is why I wanted Lopomac here to set up a booby trap.’

‘But even if we do manage to kill some of them in the airlock, the rest will still enter through the bulkhead doors. They’ll know we’re either in the garage or in one of the closed-off inner sections . . . as we will be.’

Var nodded. ‘Certainly. They’ll blow bulkhead doors leading into the garage, and then secure it just as they have all the other outer rooms of the hex, before they move on to open each of the inner sections and search them.’

‘We’ll be trapped in the reactor room, so what’s our angle?’ asked Lopomac.

‘The roof,’ said Var.

Argus Station

It was now evident that the warming process was well under way. When he reached his hand to rest it against the door, Saul could feel the vibration of machinery through his fingers, and through the window saw plumes of vapour jetting here and there from the engine itself. Probing the computer network in the immediate vicinity, he checked to see how close the engine was to firing temperature, then inspected the diagnostic data. Despite a couple of minor faults, the engine was now ready and, with just a thought, he could start it running. However, even though the process of shutting it down was a lengthy one, Smith could initiate that with a thought too.

Saul moved back out into the open, then skirted the wall, studying in his mind a schematic of all the hardware nearby as he progressed. Finally reaching a certain point, he looked up, and noted a mass of optic cables that emerged from the wall above then ran along a beam continuing out of sight somewhere behind him. He leapt up towards it, caught hold and pulled himself over, coming down astride the cables just at the point where they exited the wall.

Here the sheer mass of cables was further distended by a great number of connector plugs all gathered together. Slowly and methodically he checked the codes etched into the side of each plug, till on the eighth one found the optic connection he sought. This plug, however, could not simply be pulled apart, being tightly secured by a ring of screws. Saul pulled it away from the others, drew his pistol and fired a shot. The cable was whipped out of his hand, the shattered plug parting, while the frayed optic cables provided a display of green and yellow laser light. Retrieving the plug, he could now pull it apart. That ensured that the hardwire connection was removed and, when the Traveller VI engine fired up, the EM interference produced would make it impossible to issue radio instructions able to shut it down. Saul propelled himself back to the floor. Time now to stack the dice even further.

Saul waited at the entrance to the tunnel leading through the wall insulation, gazing back at the Arboretum cylinder. How much force could the structural beams here withstand? They were much more widely spaced than would be required for a building on Earth, but would soon be subjected to levels of stress halfway approaching the same. Since he had set the engine to fire up at its maximum, the initial thrust would be in the region of half a gravity. He paused for a moment to make some complex calculations and discovered that, though the massive shaft spindles of the Arboretum and the arcoplexes would take a huge amount of the resulting strain, there would be substantial damage caused to the intervening areas. That was unavoidable, however. As he finished making calculations which confirmed that any internal buildings still under construction – like the Political Office and the cell block – might tear loose from their mountings, he finally sensed that his five construction robots were approaching, and turned to face them.

With animal grace they headed down the face of the asteroid, coming from Tech Central, and he began firming up his connection with them and further preparing them for action. Soon they were gathered around him, his pack of eager steel wolves. Instructing them to follow, he turned and entered the short tunnel that took him to the edge of the engine enclosure. Bracing his feet against the ground, he hauled up a simple mechanical latch and pushed open the door. The engine loomed above him, and when he gazed up past it he could see the stars. Now he propelled himself upwards, catching hold of occasional protrusions from the inner ceramic-tiled wall to keep himself close to it, and avoid flying out into open vacuum. In another moment he ascended past the open throats of the fusion chambers, and then understood why the insulated wall had been built. Remembering the specs of the Traveller VI engine, he knew that the fusion torch would lance out way beyond the station, its length nearly two kilometres, and producing sufficient heat to melt anything nearby. He glanced down to see his robots following him up the wall, their limbs never out of contact with its sheer expanse of tiles.