Owner 03 - Jupiter War Read Online Free Page A

turning to study her.
    ‘I want to kill Rhone,’ she said tightly, leaning against the cave wall and seemingly grateful for the pause. ‘But that’s personal. Maybe, if you can link me through, I can talk to the whole base – let Rhone and the rest know the situation and get their response.’
    It was vague, imprecise.
    ‘You could demand that Rhone step down,’ he suggested.
    ‘I don’t want to be
their
leader.’
    ‘You’ve fallen out of love with the idea?’ Saul commented, moving on.
    ‘Give me something to build and teams to command, and I’m fine. Making life-and-death decisions about people’s future I’m not so fine with.’
    Of course, her pride had taken a heavy blow, and now Saul had offered her a way out. She wanted to deal with the nuts and bolts of a major space engineering project, as if that would be so much easier.
    ‘I collected what data we have on you,’ he said. ‘On top of all your other qualifications you’re a synthesist, which makes you much more qualified to lead people than many others who would like the job, including this Rhone. Sometimes the job chooses you and there are no other options.’
    He considered Hannah up on Argus as he said this: how sometimes it was necessary to accept responsibility because really there was no one else who could.
    They trudged on through the darkness with long slow steps, their suit lights stabbing ahead of them. In his mind, Saul tracked their position on an old seismic map of this cave, pausing occasionally to study his surroundings. Some hours of silence passed as they laboured on, at one point crossing the bed of an ancient underground stream scattered with rounded pebbles. As he paused to aim his light in each direction along the pipe cut through the rock on either side of them, Saul understood that Var’s decision to take Antares Base underground had been the best one in the circumstances, but that would have come to nothing once the might of Earth reached out here. It really did not matter how capable were the individuals or minor groups scattered about the solar system, because they simply could not bring to bear the kind of resources Serene Galahad had available. He started to move on, but Var suddenly swore and sprawled on the ground.
    ‘You okay?’ he asked.
    She got back up onto all fours, then probed her side with one hand. ‘I need to rest.’
    ‘Are you hurt?’
    ‘Cracked rib, but that’s not my main problem.’ She stood up. ‘Thinking I was going to die, I didn’t waste much of the little time I had left on sleeping.’
    ‘We’ll take a break here,’ Saul said. ‘Do you have food?’
    ‘Some.’
    ‘Then eat and rest.’ Saul stepped over beside the wall of the stream bed and sat down, feeling grateful for a break himself. Var sat opposite him, sucking from her suit spigot for a while, but did not seem inclined to talk further. He watched her eyelids sag then finally close, detected the change in her breathing, and envied her – she’d fallen straight into a deep sleep. Checking his own physical condition, he felt no need for sleep, for he had slept long enough, but did feel the need for his body to recharge. He sucked from his own suit spigot – a protein paste packed with sugars, vitamins and minerals – until it was dry. He then switched over to fluids and gulped down a litre of some unidentifiable citrus liquid. Then he consciously ramped up the activity of his organs, cleaning out poisons and recharging all round, doing the best to bring his body to optimum efficiency in the shortest time. But even all this, involving considerable detail, occupied only a small portion of his intellect, so he considered other matters meanwhile.
    Saul summoned up in his mind a schematic of the standard construction robot, along with ideas he had played with before about how it could be vastly improved. At present it was a singular machine and, though it looked like an ant, the idea of social insects had not been taken to its