'From the beginning, both of you claimed you wanted to work here,' he said, peering down through the glass floor at the hive of activity in the robotics factory.

'That's true,' said Brigitta.

Judd was down below with a small team of humans, stripping down one of the assembly machines only because that was quicker than letting it repair itself. Such malfunctions had been a rarity since Robotics had become ever more . . . robotic, therefore the components called human and proctor were required less and less often. Thus far, three legions of the new-design robots were standing ready, gleaming out there on the lattice wall beside the arcoplex. Saul probed the neat functionality of their minds, the perfectly in-consonance diagnostic returns from their bodies. Just a thought from him, and they would be in motion but, though they were ready, the station was not. Even if they had enough power, they could hardly keep operational for a day before they used everything up. Thus the smelters needed to go over fully to solar power, and begin producing components at their maximum rate. This would free up reactor power for the robots, which would supply themselves from numerous recharging points, even while solar power fed, via cells inlaid into their skins, the rectifying batteries inside their bodies. Once operating together as a large efficient machine constantly supplied with energy and components, they could really go to work.

Saul now transferred his human attention to the weapon he held a one of the plasma rifles Brigitta and Angela had fashioned for use in the fight against the troops from the Scourge.

'I want you to do something else,' he said.

'Evidently,' Brigitta replied.

'I want you to leave Robotics to Judd and go back to work on the station weapons,' Saul continued, 'including the plasma cannon I want you to design and build. I've given you some of the parameters and eventual position of all the weapons in the completed ship. I've also opened up a new area within this arcoplex for you to develop them and, if they are available, will supply the workers and robots you may require.'

The twins exchanged a look, and then Angela gave a brief nod.

'Okay,' said Brigitta. 'Things were starting to get a bit samey here, anyway, and we always like a challenge. By the way, is there any chance of us getting our hands on some radioactives?'

Saul handed the weapon back to her. 'When we go after new materials, yes, but right now it's all about energy.'

'Good, because that's our big disadvantage against anything sent from Earth. Remember, they've got the nukes.'

Saul nodded briefly and turned to head back the way he had come, but most of his mind was already ranging elsewhere. Much more data were available from Earth, and now he saw a further cost of having rescued his sister and salvaging the equipment and personnel from Mars. He should have attacked. Instead he should have taken Argus Station straight from the Asteroid Belt to Earth and methodically destroyed everything in orbit. Since he had not done so, Galahad had responded very quickly to the threat he represented, and he had just watched the test firing of two new heavy railguns, one from the Traveller construction station and another from Core One. Attacking now was still an option, but better for him to spend as much time in the solar system as was safe, and then just run. In the end, if he wanted to keep a lid on Earth, he would have to stay within the solar system, knocking down any attempt by the Earth-bound to reach out into orbit. Why trap himself here in such an onerous chore when a whole universe lay within his reach? At some point the Saberhagens would realize that the weapons they were building weren't intended as a defence against Earth, but against anything they might find way out beyond.

Sixth docking . . .

As Saul arrived at the elevator that would take him out of the arcoplex, his constant companion spidergun climbing in ahead of him, he mentally reached out and locked the docking clamps holding the Mars-format space plane to Docking Pillar One a the disassembled fusion reactor aboard it could wait to be offloaded a then began similarly locking down all the way across the station. The smelting plants had already finished their latest run, and the transporters running between them and the station were parked down in the bases of the smelting-plant docks. Now the smelters began pulling in the mirrors which had been supplying meagre concentrated sunlight to complement the output of the fusion reactors, while the big cable drums jerked into motion for hauling them back towards the station. Having now received the order, both human and robot work parties finished their latest jobs and began putting away their tools a the robots to then head off and cling to some nearby section of the station structure while the humans returned to their accommodation.

An enclosed walkway now led straight from the elevator exit into Tech Central. Saul took this at an unhurried pace, finally entering the cageway leading up to the main control room and propelling himself up after his spidergun. As he entered, the occupants busily working their consoles hardly spared either him or the robot a glance, having become used to seeing both now. Le Roque oversaw the team, speaking to someone through his fone, while Rhine was sitting at the navigation console. Saul headed over to stand beside him.

Rhine glanced up. 'We might hit something on the way in,' he warned. 'Not everything is mapped.'

'The chances are low,' Saul opined, 'something like one in a hundred for us hitting something and twice that for it to be big enough to knock out the drive bubble.' He sat down at the console next to Rhine's a the one that had before been occupied by Girondel Chang, who now resided in the rim mortuary. Really, there was no need for Rhine or anyone else to be here, since Saul was in full mental control of the whole operation.

'It's going to be hot,' Rhine added.

'Nothing the station cannot handle, and we need the additional energy.'

To pass the time, Saul again checked the programming he had in place. The moment they arrived at their destination, he wanted action, and he intended to get that a though perhaps not from the humans aboard, since they might take a few hours to adapt.

The first smelting plant locked home in its dock, then the second. He watched as Leeran and Pike a the stalwarts in charge of those plants a and other workers there, headed towards their offices and there strapped themselves into chairs. Most of the robots were now locked in place, while just a few humans had yet to sort themselves out. Le Roque took a seat and fastened his lap strap, while those around him did the same. All of this securing and locking down was completely unnecessary if the drive functioned as before, but there was always a chance of something going wrong. This was, after all, only the third time ever this new technology had been used.

'Two minutes until shift.' Saul's voice issued from intercoms all across the station. 'If you've forgotten something, then it's too late now. Just leave it and get yourselves strapped in.'

Beyond the windows of Tech Central, the station rim a its inwardly curving rib bones rising up all around it a seemed to lift like the lower jaw of an angler fish. Beyond that the view of Mars turned hazy. With the drive fully up to speed, Saul could now fling them away from here with just a thought, but he allowed the crew some remaining time. While that passed, he watched Hannah securing herself in the surgical chair in her laboratory, the Saberhagen twins strapping into chairs in an office adjacent to Robotics, and his sister standing, in a heavy work suit, on the rim of the station, with her feet solidly planted and a line attaching her to one of the nearby ribs. Everyone else was safely inside the station, but Saul had made no rule about how they should secure themselves, and Var was only putting herself at minimally more risk by staying where she was.

'Giving yourself a grandstand view, sister?' he asked her.

'It's a bit disconcerting out here. It feels just like I'm standing on the inner face of a tidal wave, and now the stars are changing colour and . . . damn, look at Mars.'

Visible through the windows of Tech Central, Mars was noticeably changing hue, first turning as red as it was supposed to be, before intensifying to something as unnaturally bright as fluorescent paint.

'I'm surprised I'm the only one outside,' she added. 'I would have thought that you, at least, would also want to be this close.'

'I'm even closer, since I can view through every sensor of the station,' Saul replied.

'That's hardly the same.'

'You're quite correct. Ordinary human senses can be so dull.'

Var just snorted at that.

It was time now.

'Shifting,' Saul announced.

Everything beyond the station turned black, and again Saul felt as if he was folding space around himself like a thick blanket, and rolling away into another world. He visualized the warp bubble as a droplet of water skittering across a hotplate, as he counted down the seconds then minutes of their journey. It began to grow uncomfortably hot inside the station but, out on the lattice wall, the legions of robots sucked up and rectified that increase of energy into something usable, while elsewhere throughout the station Rhine's rectifying batteries rose quickly to full charge. A momentary shudder had Saul reaching down to grip the arms of his chair, but it soon passed. The warp bubble must have clipped something, or else destroyed something too small to stop their progress. Saul calculated it must have been an object massing just under half a tonne, before he sank into the esoteric maths concerning warp-bubble impacts, just to pass the remaining interminable yet fantastically short ten minutes of the journey.

Next, the universe suddenly turned the lights back on. Bright sunlight glared, as bright as Mediterranean daytime. They had just travelled across an appreciable portion of the solar system in a matter of mere minutes. Saul blinked. Would an experience as fantastic as this start to become as prosaic as a routine flight in an aeroplane? He unstrapped himself and stood up, walking over to the windows that had already taken on the tint that had disappeared when they had left Earth behind.

'How was that for you?' he asked Var.

'Like nothing else,' she replied, her voice hushed, sounding slightly depressed. Saul understood her reaction. She had been excited before, but actually seeing the drive work made her feel very small, and she did not like feeling that way. Despite being busy with the reconstruction, her pride was still suffering wounds. Irritated by his sister's apparent weakness, he slid the fragment of his attention he had allotted her away and elsewhere.

Light and heat suffused the station, as energy storage, which out at Mars had forever been on the point of depletion, continued to rise, and he too felt energized as a thump reverberated under his feet a Leeran and Pike obviously feeling no need to take stock, and already extending the smelting plants. The power of sunlight, it seemed, affected all of those it touched, for even now people were unstrapping themselves and checking work rosters; while others, who knew what to do, were already donning spacesuits.

The old robots first, Saul decided, feeling them unpeeling instantly from the points in the station they had been clinging to, and dispersing to obey their queued-up orders. He then felt further vibrations through his feet as the mining robots again began hacking into the asteroid below, and as the ore carts began hauling their loads towards the big transporters.

'It's like . . . like waking up,' said Le Roque at his shoulder.

'We've been sad,' quipped Rhine at his other shoulder. 'That would be-'

'Yes, I know what seasonal affective disorder is, Rhine,' Saul interrupted.

'I need to get back to it,' said Rhine, unperturbed, as he turned away. 'This Mach-effect stuff is fascinating.'

Rhine, Saul had realized, possessed the kind of mind best kept at work so, with a little help from the proctors, he was already finessing the design for the Mach-effect drive, and deciding how best to integrate it with what they already had.

'Crazy, but brilliant,' Le Roque commented, once Rhine was gone. Then, turning back to Saul: 'So now we really go to work?'

'We do, and you yourself need to relocate to the secondary control centre.' He glanced towards him. 'They're already cutting the anchors down below.'

'Quick work.'

'Rhine just suggested that we're all coming out of SAD, out of suffering from a lack of sunlight, but perhaps there's more to the power of the sun than merely that.' Saul considered all the possible effects of this relocation, and could not shake off the feeling that the personnel here were as linked into Argus Station, in their own way, as he himself. Certainly, new measurable power was running through everything aboard, but it seemed as if a psychic current had been set up, too. He did not believe in any supernatural explanation, of course, but was not prepared to discount an esoteric scientific one.

Steadily increasing activity became visible in the station outside. Saul briefly watched teams of humans and robots heading from their accommodation towards the Mars Traveller engine, which they intended to detach from the asteroid. He watched another team begin work alongside the mining robots, cutting their way towards a fault that would eventually break the steadily shrinking mass of nickel iron in two. Then, through the windows ahead, as well as in his mind, he focused on the extent of lattice wall beside Arcoplex Two.

Now.

Smooth as oil, a neat line of the new robots began flowing across the lattice wall towards the rim, the square formation they were emerging from steadily shrinking. On their way they diverted to a stockpile of beams and other components, and that pile rapidly shrank like ice under the jet of a steam cleaner. The other two squares began to move next, sliding into thicker lines: one going straight over the curve of the arcoplex to start work on the ship's skeleton beyond, while the other came back towards Tech Central and circumvented it to head over to the other side of the station. The robots moving there began the essential armouring of the vortex generator, thus further stockpiles diminished, and all the materials taken down from the enclosure went too.

A sudden leap in power supply marked the moment the smelting plants began opening out their mirrors a no longer requiring power from the reactors either to move themselves into position or run back up to temperature. Smelters that before had been functioning at only half of their potential performance now went straight to full capacity, as the various plants issued plumes of vapour and ash, turning bright and silvery in the sunlight. Molten metal boiled with inert gases, and coolers that had not been needed out in the orbit of Mars soon came online. The rolling mills, presses, auto-forges and casters; the capstan lathes, milling machines, diamond saws and drills; the matter printers, nano-weavers and bucky-spinners: all of them seemed to let go with joyous abandon until once slow-moving swarf conveyors steadily increased to full speed.

In Arcoplex Two, Robotics screamed with activity a no power outages now, no requirement to build up a charge for any of the high-energy processes. Here the machines seemed to be hearing the message from their larger brothers out in the smelting plants: Energy to burn, guys. Let's do it. There was power now for further high-temperature work, too; and, elsewhere in the arcoplex, silicon quickly turned molten as a chip factory started up, as did a powder forge for making the cutting tools that would soon be needed to replace those already in use.

Saul smiled as power levels just continued to rise. Already the first of his new robots were working around the rim, sometimes singly, sometimes conjoined into short centipede forms, hauling up and affixing structural beams at high speed. And the skeleton of the space ship grew visibly; dream turned into hard reality.

Scourge Clay Ruger woke to feel the constant ache of his battered body, reached out for the painkillers and iodine pills on his bedside shelf, popped two of each out of their blister packs and washed them down with a gulp of water from his suit spigot, and he waited. There wasn't one of the survivors without broken bones, wrenched joints and a mottled effect of fading bruises from head to toe. Clay himself had two broken shins, ribs broken all down one side, and few other bones in his body without at least hairline cracks, including his skull. But at least he wasn't one of those who had ruptured something internal or suffered one of the cerebral haemorrhages that had killed a third of the crew. And at least, unlike Gunnery Officer Cookson, he hadn't ended up with a snapped spine.

When Argus Station's warp bubble had brushed against the Scourge, gravity waves had travelled the length of the ship like invisible walls. Compression waves were how Pilot Officer Trove described them, her voice slurring because of her broken jaw; while Captain Scotonis called the event a 'tidal surge'. All Clay knew was that it felt as if, in just a matter of seconds, he had been simultaneously smashed against something, then stretched through it. Afterwards he felt as if he had spent months in an old-fashioned adjustment cell a one where they weren't bothering to use inducers, just batons, army boots and fists.

Finally the painkillers began to kick in and he was able to drag himself from his bed a a laborious exercise even in zero gravity. Just as they all did, he still wore a full spacesuit: after yet another atmosphere breach only two days ago, none of them fully trusted the repairs. The suits also offered some protection from the high levels of radiation caused when one of the warheads in the armoury exploded. It hadn't gone into fission, but it had acted like a dirty bomb, spreading radioactive material throughout the ship. It was this, Clay knew, that would eventually kill him. Broken bones weren't the only common injury for not one of them hadn't suffered radiation sickness, or did not register positive for pre-cancerous cells, if not overt signs of some sort of cancer. Clay was sure that some of the stuff coming up out of his lungs had little now to do with his initial injuries.

Before stepping out of his cabin, he closed his suit visor, then once outside he began making his way up a corridor that was no longer straight, but in fact had taken on a slightly corkscrew shape. A crew member passed him heading in the other direction, dolefully towing herself along like an ancient. They ignored each other a crew generally had little to say to him, and not much more to say to each other, either. Eventually, the doors to the bridge came in sight, but before he reached them the command crew came out.

Scotonis, Trove and even Cookson were there, pulling on their suit helmets. They all looked ill a Cookson the worst of all as he pulled himself along with everything below his waist hanging dead. It struck Clay that they had all been animatedly discussing something before his approach and had now fallen silent, but paranoia was all too easy aboard this ship of the damned.

'How are you, Cookson?' Clay asked, as he drew closer.

Cookson swung a corpse-like face towards him. He was deadly white, with a slight bluish tinge to his lips and a yellow mass of bruising down one side of his face. He gave a sickly grin that exposed the missing teeth in that side of his mouth.

'Not dead yet,' he replied. 'I want to live long enough . . . just long enough.'

'Something we can all say,' said Clay. Then, studying the others, 'So what's up?'

'It's something Dr Myers can't say now,' said Scotonis, 'because he's dead.'

'What?' Clay felt a creeping horror. Myers, thankfully, had been one of the least injured of them all, having managed to escape without any broken bones a just minor cracks a and, with them all in the process of dying, he had become the most essential member of the crew. Now he was dead?

'Come on,' Scotonis gestured for them to follow him, and limped off down the corridor.

'I'll . . . I'll leave it for now,' said Cookson, clinging to one of the handholds set in the wall.

Scotonis halted, turned to study him, then nodded and continued on. Clay followed, wondering just how Cookson was managing to stay alive and how much longer he would survive.

No matter how hard they had tried to seal off the compartments into which they had loaded the corpses, the stench was spreading out into the rest of the ship. As well as the damage throughout it a walls bent and buckled, panels out of line and exposing electronics and plumbing, floors twisted, fluids leaking a a free-floating mess was also accumulating. As they neared the crew medical area, Clay noted occasional dressings, some already used, most simply discarded while dealing with the rush of injuries after the gravity waves struck. Here and there old, brown blood was spattered on the metalwork, and down in one corner lay what looked like mouldering splinters of bone.

'This needs cleaning up,' commented Scotonis.

Neither Clay nor Trove replied. Who would do that? Who would care enough to do it?

Finally they reached the section of corridor outside Medical, where three sorry-looking crewmen loitered, arms wrapped protectively around their torsos as they waited for a cure that wouldn't be available. Scotonis marched past them, opened the door into Medical and stepped through. Clay and Trove followed him.

'Well,' Trove eventually managed, 'he didn't die of his old injuries.'

Dr Myers sat strapped into his own surgical chair. Someone had removed all the fingers from his right hand, scooped out one eyeball, then cut his throat. The man's blood still beaded the air, and Clay resisted the urge to try and brush away droplets of it landing on his spacesuit.

'We have to find out who did this,' said Scotonis. 'They must be punished.'

Why bother? Clay wondered, again sinking into fatalistic depression. Myers had reached the state they would all be reaching soon enough, he reckoned. Then he shrugged and gritted his teeth. He had a mind, he had intelligence and what had once been described to him as a low animal cunning. He would not have risen so high in the Committee administration without these, and they were precisely what would enable him to survive. Somehow there would be a way out of this, and he must find it.

5.

A Theory about Theories During the reign of Serene Galahad, and because of her response to Alan Saul, technological innovation left conventional science in tatters. Many years had been spent building hypotheses and theories on Einstein's general and special theories of relativity, while ignoring irrefutable experimental fact that undermined them. It was proven that certain particles could be accelerated beyond the speed of light, and that was ignored. It was found that the mass of the universe did not match up to theory, so invisible undetectable dark matter was invented to fill the gap. A lunatic who believed we were visited by aliens demonstrated antigravity; why even check his work, he's a lunatic? A working cold-fusion plant is built, and closed down by safety officers. A fool obsessed with fringe studies of ball lightning disappears from his laboratory and is found halfway round the world in the Atacama Desert, burned from head to foot. Bah, meat and bread for conspiracy theorists. And when Alan Saul demonstrated a working Alcubierre drive, which was only theoretically possible with limitless energy and access to exotic matter, this too might have been ignored or explained away. However, having stolen a space station and annihilated a large portion of the Inspectorate by dropping seven thousand satellites on Earth, Alan Saul was someone who really had to be taken seriously.

Earth No trees, Serene reflected and, no matter the extent of her power over Earth, they were something she could not expedite. Her aero had landed on what had once been an aeroport atop a multistorey car park sunk deep amidst the arcology towers of this sprawl on Madagascar. Now it stood in a shallow valley beside a stream, amidst mountains of rubble. Standing on the edge of the port, Serene studied the view on the screen of a tripod-mounted image-intensifier. Over to the left, a sorting machine, a giant contraption like a steel caterpillar, had nosed into one rubble pile and was passing that steadily through its long alimentary tract as it extracted metals and other usable materials, before shitting out plain concrete, brick and carbocrete into a hopper section positioned at its rear. As Serene watched, this same hopper detached and trundled over to the edge of a long deep trench, to tip its contents inside. At the end of the trench a giant excavator was still digging, piling precious though highly depleted earth to one side, ready to fill in over the rubble.

'A long and onerous task,' she noted, swatting at something that had landed on her neck, then removing her sunglasses to frown at the smears.

'With present machinery and resources it will take twenty years to complete,' Elkin replied, ever ready with the numbers. 'This is presupposing that you intend to clear the entire island of its sprawl and will not be diverting resources elsewhere.'

'How much time would be gained in the space operation if I diverted resources from here?'

This was obviously a more difficult question, for Elkin gave no immediate reply. Serene turned to see her gazing at one of her aides and, after a moment, check what he must have meanwhile sent to her palmtop.

'Very little,' she replied, 'since it's the bottlenecks that are slowing things down.'

Was that worth shutting down the entire operation here? Serene decided not. There had been a momentary panic, over a week and a half ago, when Argus hurled itself in towards the centre of the solar system, but Saul had not attacked, merely positioned the station on the other side of the sun where, so the experts told her, he was using solar energy to power a rapid rebuild of the station. Image data from solar weather satellites showed the rebuild to be so extensive that the tactical feasibility of him attacking before all the big orbital railguns here were ready was very low. The tacticians further surmised that it was highly likely that he did not intend to attack at all a the likelihood that he was turning Argus Station into something capable of delivering overwhelming force being very small indeed.

'What's the latest news on Argus?' Serene now took a pack of wet wipes from her pocket and extracted one to dab at her face. It was hot and muggy here and the only species that seemed to be doing well were the flying and stinging kind. This 'being out in the field' business was all very well, but it brought its discomforts. She glanced over at Sack, standing in patient attendance. Maybe it was time for her to occupy one of the big, comfortable estates offered for her exclusive use by one of her East African delegates.

'Images show that it is being turned into a sphere with a diameter the same as that of the original ring,' Elkin replied immediately. 'They also show the asteroid now cut into two pieces and rapidly being used up, and the Mars Traveller VI being repositioned.'

'Engineering assessment?'

'The same as before: he's turning the station into an interstellar spaceship. There are also elements in the design that are recognizable as originating from Varalia Delex, the previous technical director of Antares Base. Prior to that she was the overseer of both the Mars Traveller Project and the Alexander a or Scourge. Also some further information has come to light about her.'

'That is?' Serene returned her attention to the view before her.

'Her maiden name is Saul. She is his sister.'

Serene swung back. 'That explains his abrupt arrival on Mars and the risks he took in rescuing her.' She nodded to herself. 'Interesting information, but it gets us no closer to stopping him running.' Serene stepped away from the image-intensifier. She'd seen enough of Madagascar to know that it would once again be green, but would still lack the millions of species that had lived here previously. They still needed the Gene Bank data and, if possible, the samples. Saul could not be allowed to leave the solar system.

'Is Calder any further forward in preventing that?' Serene began to stroll back towards the aero.

Elkin fell in just a step behind her, and other staff scurried to collect up equipment while protective spiderguns moved in from the edges of the aeroport. Time to go, Serene felt, but where next?

'Just before we landed, he told me that the new weapon will be ready for a test firing within a few days,' Elkin replied. 'And now would be the best time to test it since Saul, positioned on the other side of the sun, will have no view of it.'

'Calder's sure of that?'

'Our comlifers have made all our satellites and stations safe from mental incursion, and the test will be disguised amidst a test firing of one of the new railguns.'