Jupiter War by Neal Asher

Author:Neal Asher [Asher, Neal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781597804936
Amazon: 1597804932
Publisher: Night Shade Books
Published: 2014-05-13T00:00:00+00:00

Argus

With the clamping wheels on the ends of its legs powering up, the overseer’s office began its slow crawl up the ship’s skeleton to a new position five hundred metres from the top pole of the ship. The inside of the office was now decked out just like one Var had used while working on the Mars Traveller project. However, here she was finding herself having to move the office a lot more often, just to keep out of the way of the astounding pace of construction.

She gazed at her array of screens and could not help but feel a bitter sense of awe. All three of the massive docking pillars were now inside, suspended one above the other in a cubic framework that gave room for the manoeuvring of space planes alongside with support and maintenance equipment, all currently crawling with robots and humans and glinting under a constellation of welding lights. The two new arcoplex cylinders were growing visibly even as she watched. Their bones were going in place at the same pace as the ship’s skeleton had been constructed, while that skeleton was steadily being shrouded in hull plates – their dark shadow swiftly blotting out the view of Jupiter. Asteroid matter was disappearing fast, while the need for raw materials was being filled by the steady supply of booster tanks being dragged in from around Jupiter, and by frequent missions to some of the smaller encircling moons in quest of rarer earth elements as they ran dry. The Saberhagens’ weapons were now all but complete, the stream of robots from Arcoplex Two seemed never-ending, the abortive structures that had sprung from the outer rim of the old station wheel had been stripped away and the ship was filling up and felt gravid – girder walls rising to meet each other, accommodation units, small factories, additional hydroponics units and more besides, sprouting everywhere like tree buds.

After staring for a while at the screens, Var returned her attention to recent reports and updated schematics; finding there was not much she needed to attend to, she began checking the messages she’d had relayed to her communications system. All the work schedules were meshing together nicely and the smelters were completely on top of answering demand. The only problems to be encountered were system disruption caused by induction and static discharges, which were an inevitable result of having the ship positioned beside the Io flux tube. Beyond these, she noted that Commander Langstrom was on his way to see her and should be here in a few minutes, and meanwhile all but one remaining item had been responded to.

Var gazed at the message from Hannah Neumann. They had not talked for a while, since it seemed Hannah was currently more interested in getting her bones jumped by that weasel Da Vinci rather than drinking beer with Var in the Olive Tree. But this wasn’t a personal message: it was one automatically generated by Hannah’s system to inform Var that her backup had reached maturity and yet still no connection had been made with her implant.

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