Read Owner 03 - Jupiter War for Free Online Page B

realizing he’d been given beer – something he’d only ever sampled once or twice in his life before. He took another swallow, and another – then heard the door lock clunking, before a knock on the door itself. He waited, expecting someone to come in, then registered that the person outside was being polite.
    ‘Come in,’ he said, feeling foolish.
    The door swung open and in stepped a giant shaven-headed brute of a man. Alex instinctively pushed his gecko soles down against the floor and took a step back, gripping the plastic bottle more tightly, while briefly scanning the room for a more effective weapon.
    ‘Hello, Alex,’ the man said mildly, as he folded his arms.
    Alex peered at him, with memories slowly surfacing. Of course, here was a man it had been necessary for him to know when he’d been in Messina’s fast-response protection team.
    ‘Ghort,’ he said.
    Ghort nodded and smiled cautiously.
    ‘I’m surprised you’re alive,’ Alex added. ‘Or should I say I’m surprised you still have a mind.’
    ‘Only the murderers were mind-wiped,’ Ghort explained. ‘Even though I was one of the Chairman’s bodyguards for ten years, I never actually murdered anyone. I told him I’d only kill to defend him or myself.’ He paused reflectively. ‘I could, of course, say the same about you. It’s arguable that you’re responsible for a considerable number of deaths aboard this station, and therefore I’m surprised Saul didn’t kill you when he captured you, or have it done afterwards.’
    ‘Perhaps it’s because of my lack of free will,’ Alex suggested.
    Ghort’s expression hardened. ‘Something we are all lacking now.’
    Alex just stared at him for a long moment, then asked, ‘What do you want?’
    ‘Commander Langstrom told me,’ said Ghort, ‘that you want an occupation that doesn’t involve guns and blood. Well, I’ve had you assigned to my team in Construction and Maintenance, and we have work to do, a lot of it, right now.’
    Alex hadn’t really thought about what he wanted, just about what he didn’t want.
    ‘Okay,’ he shrugged.
    Ghort led him out into a station that seemed to have become, in just a few hours, even more chaotic than it had been during the height of the recent battle.
    Mars
    While Var slept, Saul dropped his body into a similar state of somnolence, but one without the loss of awareness and volition. In his mind, like a librarian after a recent rush, he began cataloguing and filing, returning books to their correct shelves, clearing up the rubbish and polishing the floors. He felt a slight irritation at not being able to access the
whole
of his mind, which included his organic backups in Hannah’s clean-room and the whole Argus computer network, but spread across these and everything currently in his skull there was a great deal of redundancy. Much of what he was now doing inside his head would act as a template to lay over some other work in progress elsewhere, when he could again access it. However, the situation wasn’t ideal and would become less tenable in the years, decades and perhaps centuries to come . . .
    Yes, centuries . . .
    Acceptance had slowly crept up on him. He now perfectly understood the changes he had made to his own body even before Smith had erased the earlier Alan Saul, and was now recognizing what other changes he could make. He knew that this, combined with his mental backups, meant that corporeal immortality lay within his reach.
    He again considered other possibilities that had occurred to him during the trip out to the Asteroid Belt, and which had been affirmed by recent events. The Alexes were tank-grown clones of Chairman Messina. They were grown to adulthood so fast that the tanks they grew in required powerful cooling systems, so energetic was the cell growth, and each produced an adult Alex in just a few years: a blank slate on which Messina wrote the mind of his choosing. However, the methods of indoctrination used had been crude