Owner 03 - Jupiter War by Neal Asher

ambitious, like, for example, Scouring the human scum from somewhere else equally containable – Indonesia, perhaps. Of course that would all have to wait until after all the human scum still out there had served her purposes.
    Mars
    ‘He’s given them orders to capture us,’ said Saul, ‘and if they can’t do that, then to kill us. Since they’re armed and we are not, I think the former would be more likely.’
    Yes, he was keeping something from her, but this was no game. For a moment, earlier, she had sensed a cold distance in him. He had some sort of surprise in the offing, something that was going to turn things their way, but it seemed likely to be something nasty and he wasn’t sure how she would respond. Now he was coldly factual again, and Var felt she knew what the surprise was going to be. He was going to kill them.
    ‘They’ll be here within twenty minutes,’ she said.
    ‘Certainly,’ he agreed.
    She was damned if she was going to ask him again how he intended to respond. She’d been thinking about this all the way from the underground base, and now realized there could be only one answer. When the
Scourge
had engaged Argus Station, it had been fired upon. The Argus Station was now somewhere above them and probably had workable weapons aboard that he controlled. He must intend to hit the approaching four from orbit, thus reducing the odds against the two of them, but then?
    Var turned from him to watch the ATV pull to a halt beside those proceeding on foot, and the three of them climbing inside. All of them wore vacuum combat suits obviously salvaged from Ricard’s men, and all were armed with assault rifles. She grimaced, not liking the idea of seeing the ATV destroyed, even though it would be of little use where she hoped to end up. Then she too found herself a rock, and sat down.
    ‘There,’ he said, pointing towards the base airstrip.
    Three dots resolved in the sky, grew larger, soon becoming identifiable as an object like a football coming down with two in-series parachutes attached to a line behind. Just a few metres from the ground, right at the far end of the airstrip, it shed its two chutes then hit and bounced. As it bounced for a second time, its outer layer of airbags was already deflating and thus absorbed even more of the shock of its ensuing impacts. Soon it was rolling, soggily, a great cloudy trail of dust behind it, finally coming to halt right up against one of the two fuel silos as its air bags continued deflating.
    ‘Good shot,’ said Var, the skin on her back crawling. Was it pure luck that the fuel drop tank had come down precisely where required? Or had Saul been able to make such a precise atmosphere insertion and adjustments, on its way down, to put it there? If it was the latter explanation, then he had just done something no one else had managed throughout the history of orbital drops on Mars. She shivered, then shrugged – no, just a lucky shot.
    The gas bags finished deflating, and were sucked away into their compartments to deposit a cylindrical tank on the ground. A hemispherical heat shield on the end of it detached and fell away, exposing gleaming equipment underneath – by the looks of the tangle this probably comprised all the pumping gear and hoses. Var transferred her gaze back to the ATV. It was about ten minutes away now – about halfway between the base and the butte.
    ‘Isn’t it about time you took your shot?’ she asked casually. ‘What will you use, a railgun missile or a laser? Or did that maser work out?’
    He glanced at her. ‘None of them. They were all wrecked during the
Scourge
’s attack and are now either being rebuilt or salvaged for undamaged components – the rest going into the smelters.’
    ‘What?’ Var stood up; then, distracted by a silvery flickering, she glanced over towards the airstrip, where she could see a faint dust trail leading away from the drop tank. Something must have overheated and blown up, scattering debris