'You're a monster?' Hannah asked, casting an eye over her spotless laboratory and realizing that, at last, there was nothing more to do. She checked the time to see that just a few more minutes remained.

'You always expected me to be as much,' he replied.

Hannah shed her lab coat and went to hang it up neatly in her locker. How long, in real time, would it be before she donned it again? The minimum was four and a half years, since Saul had told them that their first destination would be Proxima Centuri, which lay four-point-two light years away. Four and a half years of undisturbed sleep?

'I never expected it; I just wanted you to be aware of how easily you could become a monster,' Hannah lied.

In truth, she expected only utter cold ruthlessness from him, so wasn't sure that the others had made the right choice in staying on board. She herself had remained because, to some extent, she felt she filled the role of a conscience that he probably lacked. Heading over to the door of her laboratory, she opened it and stepped out, closing it carefully and palm-locking it behind her. Others were on the move too, probably having finished up their final tasks before following the thirty-two people who had thus far delivered themselves to the Meat Locker. She knew that the Saberhagens were already sleeping there now, as were Leeran and Pike. Plenty of others had yet to make the same move, but Hannah felt her own time had arrived. Da Vinci had told her that he had experienced dreams while in hibernation, so perhaps that meant it wasn't just a total shut-down of the body, but also the kind of rest she badly needed.

Halfway along the corridor towards the bank of elevators leading out of Arcoplex Two, she felt the Rhine drive engage. It was so much smoother now, just a brief vertiginous shift in underlying reality, followed by the feeling, lasting for a few minutes, that appalling behemoths were sliding past just out of sight, before settling into a steady creepy doubt about whatever was real and solid. Hannah picked up her pace, entered one of the elevators, shortly stepping out of it onto a small monorail station platform, and boarding one of the single-person cars. All the way to the Meat Locker, she had no need to suit herself up or use an airlock. The whole of Saul's ship was interconnected like this now, or at least, all the areas to which he granted the crew access.

As she entered the Meat Locker she saw that the staff and robots were already busy putting four people into hibernation, so she just headed over to where she knew her own cryogenic capsule was located. She could have waited for one of the staff, or one of the robots, to attend to her, but felt impatient with that idea a after all, she probably knew more about the process involved than any of them. She stripped off her clothes, feeling no embarrassment at her nakedness since, having lived forever under Committee cameras, why would she? These discarded garments went into a small storage compartment in the capsule wall, then she stepped over to the capsule itself. Within a minute she had all the monitoring units fixed in place, and had climbed inside.

'Ah, Dr Neumann,' said one of the medics, approaching, 'do you need any help?'

Hannah waved the man away, 'No, I'm fine,' and reached over to tap the start button on the console beside the capsule. She then lay back in the form specially made to fit her body. It was warm and comfortable, she found, though she had expected it to be cold.

'So tell me, Saul,' she asked, 'will you ever bother to wake us up?'

'Why else would I allow you to remain aboard?'

The needles slid into her arms, injecting the necessary drugs to lull her into natural sleep, then into a coma, before the other automatics dug into her body to suck out her blood and other fluids, replacing them with gels and anti-freeze, and thus chill her to the brink of death.

'I don't know . . . and that worries me,' she said, her voice already slurring. 'Maybe like . . . Da Vinci . . . I'll dream of what's real.'

'Maybe,' Saul replied, the single word falling through the cold blackness filling her mind, and dissolving into nothingness.

They were all in hibernation now and, just as Saul had predicted, it was Rhine, reluctant to shut down his hugely active mind, who had been the last of them to go into the long sleep. The ship was finally devoid of all human activity except Saul's own, but still very active indeed. As Hannah and others had come to understand, he did not need human personnel to get things done here. For such purposes the robots were better, much better. Now, at last feeling free of the distraction of human clamour, Saul shut down the Rhine drive and dumped his ship back out into reality.

'Are you sure about this?' asked the proctor Paul, as he carried his current burden into the mechanism of one of the railguns, and came to stand over the open breach.

'I'm sure,' Saul replied. 'I have enough genetic samples from her to grow a clone and have copied all those parts of her mind it was still possible to copy. Even though my technological capabilities will develop, there will be nothing more I can obtain from her corpse and, as I myself change, I will become more and more disinclined to try.'

'A horribly and precisely logical assessment,' Paul replied, lowering the cylinder containing the body of Varalia Delex into the railgun breach, and closing it.

Saul gazed out into cold interstellar vacuum, as Paul moved away. Once the proctor was clear he aimed the railgun at a distant point and fired it. His sister's corpse sped away on a journey that would last a minimum of five million years, and might quite possibly continue until the end of time.

'No words?' Paul enquired.

'None,' Saul replied but, as he turned his attention to the paint-sprayer robot still working out there on the hull, he acknowledged to himself that 'none' wasn't entirely accurate.

Some hiccup had disrupted the robot's work or, more likely, some unconscious motivation within Saul had revealed itself in its activity. A letter had not been capitalized, and a gap had been missed out, but the name of his ship was, somehow, exactly right. Saul engaged the Rhine drive and took the Vardelex further out into the dark . . . and to the far stars.

In this new age there are government propagandists who would have us believe that Admiral Bartholomew retrieved the genetic data from Saul before destroying him and his ship; that our duly appointed representatives therefore won. But there are those of us left here on the Subnet who still remember Saul's ship looming in the sky, and we remember Bartholomew's statement, and Ruger's story. We must never let the truth be forgotten: how one man brought down two dictators and the entire government of Earth. Now, as we see just such a government re-forming, and see the freedoms we have enjoyed once again being steadily eroded, we must never forget him. We must never forget the Owner, Alan Saul. He's out there somewhere, and one day our descendants will meet him. I hope, for their sake, that by then they will have learned to live . . . differently.

Anon, FreeBlog, the Subnet.

JUPITER WAR.

Neal Asher was born in Billericay, Essex, and divides his time between here and Crete. His previous full-length novels are Gridlinked, The Skinner, The Line of Polity, Cowl, Brass Man, The Voyage of the Sable Keech, Polity Agent, Hilldiggers, Prador Moon, Line War, Shadow of the Scorpion, Orbus and The Technician. Previous Owner series novels are The Departure and Zero Point.

By Neal Asher.

Cowl.

The Technician.

The Owner.

The Departure Zero Point Jupiter War.

Agent Cormac Shadow of the Scorpion Gridlinked The Line of Polity Brass Man.

Polity Agent Line War Spatterjay The Skinner.

The Voyage of the Sable Keech Orbus Novels of the Polity Prador Moon.

Hilldiggers Short-story collections Runcible Tales.

The Engineer The Gabble Novellas.

The Parasite.

Mindgames: Fool's Mate.

Acknowledgements.

Many thanks to those who have helped bring this novel to your e-reader, smart phone, computer screen and to that old-fashioned mass of wood pulp called a book. At Macmillan these include Julie Crisp, Louise Buckley, Ali Blackburn, Ellie Wood, Jessica Cuthbert-Smith, Sophie Portas, Rob Cox, Neil Lang, James Long and others whose names I simply don't know. Further thanks go to Jon Sullivan for his eye-catching cover images, Bella Pagan for her copious structural and character notes and Peter Lavery for again wielding his 'scary pencil'. And, as always, thank you, Caroline, for putting up with a husband who's often a number of light years away.

end.