Free Owner 03 - Jupiter War by Neal Asher

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 – perhaps an explosion – 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 – except for the Scour-related details – 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