'Have you ever known me not to be?' he asked, not sure what she had known about him.

Var made some adjustments on her wrist console, while Saul reached out to the base and established multiple links between the radio receivers there and the internal public address system.

'This is Var Delex calling Antares Base,' she said, her words echoing in his mind as he heard them at both ends. 'I need to speak to you, Rhone. There're some things you need to know.'

Saul watched the sudden panic stirred up at the other end. Rhone, who had been working at a console in Mars Science, now banished the supplies lists from his screen and called up control schematics for the communication system, immediately trying to shut down public address. Saul allowed him a few tries, then put up the words 'Talk to Var' on his screen, before freezing out his keyboard.

'Can he hear me?' Var asked on a private channel.

'Yes, he can hear you,' Saul told her, 'and so can everyone else in the base.'

'Listen to me, Rhone,' she continued on an open channel, 'the Scourge isn't coming. In fact, Earth now has nothing capable of getting out here, and won't have anything for years yet.'

Saul didn't disabuse her of that notion, as she would learn about the huge orbital activity around Earth soon enough.

'You can, if you wish, rebuild the base where it is or move it underground as we planned, but your chances of survival won't be much different from before. However, I have an alternative offer.'

Rhone had now moved to another console and had summoned a few of his armed staff. He there used the dishes on the roof of the base to triangulate Var's position. Saul let him do that, as he wanted Rhone to know precisely where they were.

'Alan Saul is here on Mars, Rhone, and he is about to deliver fuel for our space plane. I'm leaving Mars with him to join him on Argus Station. All the staff of Antares Base are welcome to join him too . . . all of the staff, Rhone. I understand why you did what you did and, though I'm not prepared to forgive it, Alan Saul is.'

'Shouldn't you talk to her?' asked one of those with Rhone.

Rhone rounded on him. 'If we submit, Galahad will end up killing us. Var is either lying or doesn't know what's happening around Earth . . . and do you think for one moment that someone who has stolen a space station and launched an attack against Earth that killed millions gives a fuck about us?'

'Still . . .' replied the man, uncertain.

'You saw that thing that came down?' Rhone asked. 'It had just one pilot, and I'm surprised it reached the ground in one piece. We have the advantage now, especially if Saul is outside. Just think how grateful Galahad would be if we could capture him alive or even have his corpse to show her. You two, take Piers and Thorsten out there.' Rhone checked his screen. 'They're on Shankil's Butte. Capture them if you can, or bring back their corpses.'

So far so predictable: he was sending his most trusted lieutenants to do this job. Replaying cached base recordings, Saul confirmed that all four of them were either directly responsible for or closely involved in the recent killings there.

Rhone now keyed into the frequency Var was using. 'Var, what a surprise to hear from you.' He grimaced as his own voice was repeated over the PA system. 'I was sure that fall killed you.'

Of course Rhone had told everyone in the base that Var had suffered an unfortunate accident. Would she now let him get away with that?

'Well, I'm alive . . . and I'm waiting for your answer to Alan's proposal,' was all she said.

Rhone shut off com and turned to others who had joined him. 'They're desperate to get to our space plane. We do have the advantage here.' Those others, unarmed staff of Mars Science, spectators, nodded dubious agreement. He ignored them as he opened up com again. 'I'll be needing guarantees. Perhaps we should continue this discussion inside . . . Also, I need to confirm that Alan Saul is indeed with you. I don't see why he would risk his life coming down to the surface.'

Var turned to him and Saul nodded and spoke. 'This is Alan Saul. I came down to the surface of Mars to rescue my sister, whose married name is Delex but whose maiden name was Saul. Everything Var has told you is true. You must also be aware that aboard Argus Station we now have a working version of the Alcubierre drive, which effectively takes us out of the reach of Serene Galahad. We are also completely self-sufficient, have a great deal in the way of resources and can survive out here. Think very carefully about your next decisions, Rhone.'

Rhone sat back, his expression blank as he glanced at a screen showing his four recruits coming one after the other out of a base airlock. Meanwhile, the fuel drop tank had begun its descent and opened its first parachute.

'Galahad is building ships, fast, and I'm told it's likely they will have similar drive systems,' said Rhone.

'That's true,' said Saul, glancing at Var and seeing her frown. 'But there are other truths you seem to be avoiding. A moment ago you wondered if someone like me, who has killed millions, would give a fuck about you all, yet you seem to be forgetting how Serene Galahad released the Scour on Earth and killed billions. Do you think she cares about rescuing you for anything other than punishing you on ETV prime-time?'

'So you say,' replied Rhone.

Saul saw no point in arguing further. This man knew for certain that the Scour had originated from ID implants. 'I'll want your decision soon.'

Rhone turned to stare up at one of the base cams, now aware that Saul had indeed penetrated the place. Maybe that would be enough to sway Rhone, but Saul doubted it. He swung his attention out towards the horizon, beyond the airstrip. The drop tank had now opened out its second and larger parachute and was inflating its gas bags. Saul estimated that it would be visible within the next twenty minutes. He looked back towards the base. All four of Rhone's most loyal people were now outside, three of them moving away from the base in Saul's direction while another was driving an ATV round from the other side.

The timing was almost perfect but a even down to his walking pace in getting here to this butte a Saul had ensured that.

Argus Ghort's first instruction, upon handing over a powered socket driver a the only tool Alex could first be trusted with a was: 'It's pointless trying to race the robots, but I'm fucked if I want them more than ten joints ahead of us by end of shift.'

The task was simple enough. Structural members were to be anchored to the top and bottom faces of the fifteen-kilometre circumference of the station ring. This first involved cutting away marked-out areas of cladding material to expose one of the stress beams a a beam nearly a metre square, precisely following the curve of the station and made of a complex lamination of bubblemetal and graphyne. With the section of beam exposed, they attached a jig, which Ghort positioned precisely with an integral laser survey device, before heaving the U-plate in to slot over the beam and then clamping it down. Akenon and Gladys then towed over their multi-weld unit and, using nickel-carbon and high-temperature epoxy wire, welded the plate in position. Then the three of them unloaded the beam-end joint from their dray and it was Alex's turn, using his socket driver to tighten, to the correct tension, the eight bolts the others quickly started in their threaded holes in the U-plate.

The first time Alex had tried to tighten a bolt, he ended up spinning round in vacuum on the end of the socket driver, while the other three laughed. That was the limit of his hazing, however, for there was work to be done and one of the construction robots working along the adjacent beam had already finished its joint and was moving on to the next. Thereafter the work became just mechanical, repetitive and somehow comforting. Alex had assumed that while performing this task, he'd have too much time to reflect on his past, but it didn't work out that way. All he thought about was the next thing to do, how he could position himself so as not to get in the way of the others, how quickly he could lean in to tighten the bolts and how best to position himself while doing so. However, as they progressed and the nearby construction robot ran out of joint ends and had to wait for one of its kin to bring another load, there was finally time for banter.

'We're fast becoming fucking obsolete,' said Gladys, pointing back along their course around the rim, where a hemispherical robot on gecko treads was now pausing regularly beside each of their previously affixed joint ends.

'What's it doing?' Alex asked.

'Inspecting our work,' she replied. 'Used to be it was us inspecting their work.'

'Don't exaggerate, Gladys,' said Akenon. 'Last thing you inspected was the crabs on your snatch.'

'Go fuck yourself, Ake.'

'Sure, I got less chance of catching anything nasty that way.'

'Right,' interjected Ghort, as Alex leaned forward and began tightening down the latest set of bolts, 'we'll take a break after this one.' He pointed across to the outer edge of the station ring, where there clung a mobile overseer's station, overlooking the webwork of beams of partially constructed floors extending from the outer rim.

Alex wound in the last of the bolts and stood upright. They'd now been working solidly for six hours, and muscles he was unaware of during the most severe forms of combat training were now aching. This was the perfect reminder of something one of his instructors had once told him: 'Never underestimate the strength of manual workers. You might exercise and train for three or four hours a day, but that length of time involved in hard physical activity only gets them as far as their first tea break.' He stretched his back, then opened the gecko pad on the side of his socket driver, before stooping to secure the tool down by his feet. He quickly followed the other three as they headed towards the overseer's station.

'All this has got to go.' Ghort gestured to the partially completed new floors. 'He wants a clean rim, so all those extensions you guys had started on now have to be dismantled.'

'I guess he knows what he's doing,' said Gladys, her voice subdued.

'More so than any Committee bureaucrat,' remarked Akenon contemplatively.

Since he had first met them Alex had noticed how Akenon and Gladys always talked in hushed tones when the conversation turned to Alan Saul a the Owner. However, Ghort's attitude was rather more difficult to pin down. The man seemed to continue working dutifully, as instructed, but his expression closed up when the Owner was mentioned, and he became hard faced and acerbic whenever the conversation turned to politics, any hazy concepts such as freedom or any speculation on what their future might hold.

They passed through the airlock two at a time and, once inside, Ghort delivered the welcome news that the place was fully pressurized, which apparently meant no food paste or metallic-tasting fruit juice from their suit spigots today. After they removed the helmets of their heavy work suits, Akenon popped open the case he had lugged in. Taking out Thermos flasks of hot coffee and individual boxes of pasteurized and sealed sandwiches, he handed them round. Sipping coffee through a straw, Alex headed over to the windows and gazed across the face of the rim. Gladys shortly came up to stand beside him.

The rim face extended for hundreds of metres inward, at which point the station enclosure rose up in a slope for just over two kilometres to the jutting prominence of Tech Central. Over to the right of that, the rest of the station, along with a truncated view of an extended smelting plant, lay silhouetted against the rusty brown face of Mars.

'Never seen it like this,' she said, gesturing to the scene before them.

'Well,' said Alex, 'I suppose it looks a bit different to Earth.' He nodded towards Mars.

'I don't mean that,' she said, and stabbed a finger, 'I mean the robots.'

It seemed that the enclosure was another item that 'had to go', because large areas of plates had already been stripped away, while yet more were being rucked up, like fish scales, and carried off. Both there and around the rim, the robots swarmed like steel ants, and the station seemed to be dissolving in some areas and re-crystallizing in others even as they watched.

'What's that about robots?' Ghort asked, moving up beside them. This interruption reminded Alex that Ghort, though trained in construction before a delegate had spotted his talent for thumping people, was not an old hand like the other two. Alex would have expected seniority issues to arise from the order delivered from on high that Ghort should become foreman of this small team, but the other two seemed perfectly happy with having him in charge. Alex also sensed that this wasn't down to sheer luck, but to a certain individual's ability to slot personalities together with the ease of Lego bricks.

'They were never this integrated before,' said Gladys, still watching the robots. 'We'd get work orders, a specific job to do, and that would get slotted into the system of a team of robots, and they'd set to work. We had to iron out any errors, sometimes stop them working and ask for reprogramming to include stuff they weren't programmed to do.'

'The robots are more efficient now,' suggested Alex.

'Nah, the robots were always fine if they were programmed right. The problem was everything behind them.'

'Crap in crap out,' said Akenon, round a mouthful of sandwich.

'Never seen them running this fast,' continued Gladys. 'They just ain't stopping. The bloody things are even anticipating now, and covering stuff that shouldn't be in their programming. I saw one stop halfway through a job to repair some weapons damage to a beam junction. If one of them ran into anything like that before, it just shut down to wait for its new instructions.'

'It's him,' Alex suggested, noting a brief and quickly suppressed flash of anger in Ghort's expression.

'Yup,' Gladys agreed, 'it certainly is.'

As he later walked out to start the next six hours of their shift, feeling buoyant after solid food and hot coffee, Alex considered how he was now part of something awesome and thus understood the attitude of his co-workers to the Owner. As he began work once more, he was thinking again about nothing beyond the next bolt to wind down, and then how best to apply the diamond cutting wheel Ghort had begun instructing him on how to use, and how best to make sure he didn't slice a hole in his suit. The time seemed to flash by till, when Ghort called a halt, Alex stuck his tools to the deck with a feeling of weary satisfaction.

'It's only eight beam ends ahead,' said Akenon. 'That'll do.'

Another small victory in the humanarobot race, with the necessary handicap applied.

Back inside the station, Gladys commented, 'The new boy didn't slow us down.'

'The new boy done good,' said Ghort drily, slapping Alex on the shoulder.

Alex was amazed at how happy he felt to be complimented on performing such simple tasks so ably, and puzzled too because he felt the urge to cry.

Everybody seemed to be working at a frenetic pace, so it should have come as no surprise to Hannah to find tasks queued up in the station's system for herself, too. In her personal queue she found the names of everyone aboard the station listed in order of importance under 'neural tissue samples', though with a vague proviso in there of 'scheduled when available'. On top of that it turned out that a long production floor, provided with power and plumbing points but no equipment, beyond the sealed door adjacent to her clean-room, was to be opened to her. It seemed that this was where she would be growing those tissue samples in aerogel matrices and setting up production of the cerebral hardware and bioware required to link those people the samples were taken from to their backups.

Hannah sighed. She had always preferred focusing on research and did not enjoy the work involved in mass manufacturing the product of such research. However, she couldn't really fault Saul in his aim to give the people here a chance at a form of immortality.

Investigating further, she found that this was not the last of it. He wanted her setting up artificial wombs and other related devices and, by the look of the list, this meant human cloning. She was uncomfortable with that, but saw how it related to the growing of neural tissue samples: backups for both body and mind. Neither was she comfortable with the plug-ins: exterior hardware that made a link between the internal bioware in their skulls and their backups, and which also enabled limited access to the station's computer systems and its robots. That gave her pause as she realized that Saul wanted the people here to take some steps up the same ladder he himself had climbed, but did not want them to climb too far. She could see that, with this setup he would always remain in control: able to shut down that exterior hardware and boot people out of the system at will. Was that moral? Was it right? She didn't know, but recognized that it was certainly a precaution she would also take, were she in his position.

There came a knock at her door as it opened, and in stepped Le Roque. Hannah gazed at him in puzzlement. 'I don't often see you down here.'

He frowned at her. 'Well, that being the case, you shouldn't have scheduled me to come here. I was about to get something to eat and then catch some sleep. Apparently you want to take neural tissue samples from everyone aboard the station, so you can repair brain damage like you did with Saul.'

It was to be a gradual dissemination of the knowledge: let it spread throughout the station rather than announce it. Don't actually conceal it but don't make an effort to let everyone know. This was the kind of news that could cause extreme reactions, both positive and negative. Being able to live forever was a dream of humanity, but never being able to die could be the most extreme of nightmares, especially when your entire experience of life until now had been under the Committee. This could result in people clamouring at her door either to demand immortality or to lynch her. Tell them before you take the sample, had been Saul's message, therefore give them the choice.

'True,' she said, 'but I didn't expect anyone here just yet a the scheduling is automated.'

'You're not ready? I can always come back another time.'

There was no point in opening up her surgery for this task, since it was a quick clean anaerobic operation a inducer to numb the nerves then a narrow-gauge drill needle straight through the skull to take a small biopsy. In her experience, people hardly felt it, though it was always best to go in through the back of the head so they saw neither the drill needle nor the operation itself.

'No, we may as well get it done now.' Hannah waved her hand towards her laboratory's surgical chair. 'But you need to understand the implications of this, and I have to give you the option to refuse.'

Le Roque stared at her. 'I know all I need to know: this increases my chances of staying alive should I get a head injury.'

'It's more than that,' Hannah explained, 'and the possibilities are more extensive. I grew samples from Saul's brain in an aerogel matrix which he connected to via the bioware in his skull. This gave him a backup to his entire mind.' Hannah did not continue, because she could see that Le Roque now understood.

'Immortality,' he said, wide-eyed, excited. 'You'll be setting up artificial wombs and a cloning facility . . .'

'I'll divide the samples,' said Hannah. 'Some will be used for tissue repair if required. If the damage is too extensive then I see no barrier to the possibility of download into a cloned body.'

'So when do I get this bioware?'

'When your backup is ready,' Hannah replied.

'Is this only for a select elite?' he asked, now starting to see the drawbacks.

'For everyone, but in order of their importance to Saul.' Hannah paused. 'Do you want this, then?'

'Of course I do a I'd be a madman not to want it.' Le Roque went over to the chair and sat down decisively. Hannah eyed him for a moment, then stepped over to get her equipment out of a nearby cupboard. She also retrieved a powered sample case with nutrient feeds to fifty temperature-controlled glass sample tubes. She would check the system again, but reckoned she had a busy time ahead of her.

She was not wrong.

After Le Roque, Rhine paid her a visit, then came the Saberhagens. The next person to arrive after them she waved straight to the chair, which worried the man because he had merely come to unseal the door leading through to the adjacent production floor. Between sampling operations, Hannah also began to track down the equipment she would need, some of it held in stores and some of it in closed-off laboratories or other facilities scattered throughout the station, and put through the necessary orders for it to be relocated. Not everything was available, however. The boxes of aerogel with their micro-tubule feeds and other support mechanisms required a special order to various sections of high-tech manufacturing aboard the station and would have to be assembled here.

I need more staff, she thought, and immediately felt a tightness at the back of her throat and tears welling behind her eyes. Her assistant James had been, in the short time she had known him, one of the best. Now he was lying out in the rim morgue. No backups for him; no second chances for him. She allowed the unfairness of this, of life, circumstances, all of it, to wash over her, then she let it go. In this moment she was at the start of something that could stack the deck on the side of humanity, or at least those aboard this particular station. So she got back to work.

3.

Where Are They?

Enrico Fermi posed the question 'Where are they?' and, being a man of his time, felt sure that the aliens had wiped themselves out with nuclear weapons. And now, long past those innocent nuclear years, in an age of cynicism and self-knowledge, we can think of a thousand answers to his question. They screwed their planet and died, or their planet changed and screwed them. They killed themselves with a whole range of weapons: nuclear, biological, robotic, nanotech or something we've yet to think of a but will. They found the perfect EMR frequency to fry their brains or disrupt their genome. A solar flare, meteorite, close nova or some other astronomical event took them out. The exigencies of evolution turned out to be that brains don't breed, which would surprise no one. Their society was taken over by some self-destructive meme: they started to fear their sun, so built orbital shields and froze to death; they feared the next ice age, so built orbital mirrors and cooked; or they feared overpopulation, so used mass sterilization and died out. But, of course, all of these are a few numbers in Frank Drake's equation to calculate the number of alien civilizations out in the universe, and it is probable we won't know those numbers until we can go out there and start counting a we'll never know the answers until we've survived them.

Earth The darkness had lasted for days. Serene Galahad did nothing, ignored all enquiries, ignored all demands on her time, and just stewed in depression. But that was passing now and at last she had begun taking an interest again a glad to discover that everything she had put in motion had not stuttered to a halt without her. There was, she decided, something to be said for delegation. Though, annoyingly, the new tactical team located just across the estate from her seemed to be delivering very guarded assessments with unacceptable error bars.

Now, at last, she had begun to widen her focus a no longer contemplating how nice it would be to activate the Scour in every ID implant on Earth, sweep all the pieces off the board and let it return to a state last seen just after the last major extinction event.

As she strolled out onto an upper sun deck extending from her Tuscan home, Serene was now thinking clearly enough to be puzzled by some of the retrospective data delivered from Tactical. The crew of the Scourge had put their ship on a course back to Earth, and Tactical had no clear explanation for that. Serene agreed with that, even though she had more data than the tactical analysts themselves. The timings were all wrong, for the Scourge had separated from Argus Station before the Scour had begun killing the assaulting troops and the crew. Perhaps Alan Saul had warned them that they were about to die? Even that didn't really make sense, because surely they would have assumed he was lying. Like the analysts, they didn't know that the virus came directly from their ID implants . . .

She untied her robe and dropped it over the arm of the comfortable recliner provided for her up here, stretched out her arms to enjoy the Italian sun on her naked body, then gazed out across the neat groves of olive, orange and lemon trees towards the nearby fence. A shepherd was picking its way through the trees, this monstrous spidery machine of polished chrome and white plastic permanently on patrol there, while in the branches of some of the trees roosted birds like hawks but fashioned out of razors.

Some clear danger must have driven Captain Scotonis to undock his ship from the station while the assault force continued its attack. Perhaps he had decided to put some distance between himself and it, so as to deploy his main weapons again. That was really all that made sense, according to Tactical. Afterwards, as he realized that he and his crew were dying, some homing instinct must have kicked in for him to put the ship on course back to Earth. It would have been good to find out for sure, but the Scourge was no longer responding. Of course the crew were beyond making any response, but something must have happened aboard to damage computer systems a perhaps an explosion a and now the ship was completely silent.

In reality, Serene was glad no one on board remained alive to stand as a reminder of her failure out there. Sometime hence, when the ship came back within reach, it could quietly be taken to dock, the bodies cleared out and a new crew put aboard, then it could return to service. However, there were so many people who knew of her failure, and it took all of her self-control not to erase them, just as the crew of the Scourge had been erased. She wanted them gone. She wanted a fresh start: a new approach. Unfortunately, those same people were too useful and too deeply involved in her present major off-Earth projects. Serene shook her head in pique, sat down in her recliner, raised the back, then took off her sunglasses and closed her eyes.

Professor Calder was one of them. He was out there now at the old Mars Traveller orbital factory complex, building her an Alcubierre drive which, in just a few weeks, would be ready for testing. Unlike the wider population of Earth, he and thousands working for him knew all a except for the Scour-related details a of what had happened out at the Asteroid Belt, but she couldn't kill them, or him. Serene shrugged: whatever. Getting rid of Calder would be stupid, and she had to admit that news of his further progress out there had gone some way towards lifting her malaise. Anyway, even people on Earth knew the truth. Previous ETV stories about the Scourge's successful destruction of the Argus Station were undermined by their distrust of any proclamation from government, along with the present irritating resurrection of the Subnet and its images, somehow obtained directly from the Hubble, of Argus Station sitting in orbit over Mars. And there were limits on how many people she could kill before inefficiencies started kicking in.

The story now being spread among those who knew for sure that Argus still existed was that Saul had used computer penetration to defeat the troops, and had then killed Scotonis and his crew by clipping the Scourge with Argus's Alcubierre warp. It was a story close enough to the truth to be maintained.

'Your coffee, ma'am,' said Sack.