Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

by Neal Asher

  A total of three railguns could be built in the time available, and plentiful iron slugs smelted from the Argus asteroid. The collision lasers were juiced up and, quite possibly, could burn up a good proportion of what the Scourge could throw at them. It was also the case that the station’s EM field would negate the Scourge’s EM pulse weapons. However, manoeuvrability was where it all fell down. The Scourge could detect and avoid railgun fusillades. Here on Argus they could certainly detect them, but could not get the station out of the way in time. Stuff would get through, the station would be stripped of its armament, then the Scourge would dock and spew out its thousands of troops.

  According to the models.

  What gave Hannah hope was the maser, for the model had discounted it as an option. However, the Saberhagens had cracked that one with some quite brilliant and original ideas, so there was still reason for hope.

  Hannah continued making her way along one of the cageways leading to the station rim, a spidergun scouting out the course ahead of her – a robot that Paul now insisted should accompany her everywhere – and with Brigitta and Pike hurrying to catch up.

  ‘So when did this happen?’ Hannah asked over her suit radio.

  ‘I’ve been checking program logs,’ Brigitta replied. ‘It started two months ago, directly after the last enclosure hull plates were welded in place, and has been going on ever since.’

  ‘So let me get this straight,’ replied Hannah. ‘Every time a robot finishes a programmed task here,’ she gestured to the big railguns, ‘or anywhere else on the station, for that matter, rather than go somnolent, it heads out to the station rim, and you never noticed until now?’

  ‘There’s more to it than that,’ interjected Pike. ‘Furnace-production and factory-component stats haven’t been adding up either. I thought it was all down to the damage we received out there. I didn’t find out the truth until after we started going into serious solar die-off and had to start pulling more power from station reactors.’

  This was one of the many problems they now faced. As they moved further away from the sun, the solar mirrors – even complemented by the additional mirrors they had manufactured – weren’t providing as much heat as they could manage before, and so the reactors were under an increasingly heavy drain. In fact it had been necessary to take all the spares out of storage and put them online too.

  ‘So someone or something has not only infiltrated the robots, but our metals plants as well?’

  ‘Damned right,’ said Pike. ‘I started checking yesterday and found large quantities of components being delivered to various points on the outer ring. A lot of the stuff is similar to the electromagnets and superconductive wiring Brigitta is using, hence my not noticing before. But, since checking, I’ve seen some weirdly designed electromagnets and other stuff I haven’t even been able to identify. There’re also lots of sections of titanium-alloy cylinders with an internal silicon dioxide hex-chain carbon finish – as near to zero-coefficient of friction as we can get. Christ knows what they’re for. I’ve seen nothing like them before.’

  Hannah gazed ahead towards the outer ring. Someone or something . . . Had those clones of Messina’s managed a successful and thorough penetration of the station’s computer systems? It seemed highly unlikely. Was this some kind of project worked out between Langstrom and Le Roque? They had seemed to acquiesce to her leadership, but that could have just been a front. But, even then, she doubted they had the ability and resources to manage something quite like this. That just left Alan and his machines – an idea that scared her thoroughly. All the station machines, including the proctors, were still connected to Alan’s sleeping mind – a mind which, from the images all had seen and the sounds all had heard from the station system, seemed to be experiencing hellish nightmares. It was a mind that dwelt within a human brain – with additions – that seemed to be taking on a shape beyond any analysis.

  The cageway was attached alongside one of the ore-transport tubes that led from the asteroid to the rim, where one of the big sun smelters and factory plants extended out into space. It was along this tube that raw materials were transported out from the asteroid to the processing plants, and back along which the finished products were conveyed. Glancing back, Hannah noticed that the asteroid had grown visibly smaller, such was the material that had already gone into enclosure, the weapons and now, it seemed, whatever the robots were building in the rim. Reaching the inner face of the rim, she walked up along it on her gecko boots, as if along some massive highway curving up into a metal forest. It occurred to her, even as she walked, that the enclosure hadn’t made a huge difference to the view. True, they could no longer see any stars from inside the station, but the thousands of LED lights scattered through that vast internal space did look remarkably like stars.

  A wide cargo lock stood ahead of them with its two hinged doors open. Even as they approached, a construction robot scuttled out of it like some busy termite, carting in its heavy forelimbs what looked like a few tonnes of floor plates. Ignoring them completely, it launched itself into the station interior, tapped a cross-member a hundred metres out in order to alter its course, then sailed on into the distance.

  ‘And that’s another one,’ Pike added.

  ‘Another what?’

  ‘I also found out that the amount of scrap being fed into the plants has increased substantially,’ he replied. ‘They’re obviously ripping stuff out of here to fit this installation inside, whatever it is.’

  ‘Is that all of it?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘There’s more,’ said Brigitta. ‘I was going to check it out further before I said anything, but it seems some robots have been making alterations to the transformers that run our EM radiation shield. I only noted that when I found out that the system programming for the field had changed.’

  ‘Shit!’ said Hannah. ‘Shit! Shit!’

  ‘That’s about all,’ said Pike.

  Hannah grunted acknowledgement at that, then said, ‘Be careful in there. They might not be programmed against riveting us to some wall.’

  They entered through the cargo lock and found a massive hole punched through the floors of the rim itself. They followed this down through three floors and soon found what they had come here to see.

  An entire rim floor had been cut away, leaving a groove twenty metres wide extending concentrically in both directions for as far as they could see. All around this, considerably more had also been cut away to expose the main structural beams. To these had been attached further beams, which converged in towards the groove, where they supported a section of . . . something. A massive collection of electromagnets enwrapped a fifty-metre length of mirrored tube that was about half a metre in diameter. Even as she watched, robots were working to fit another two-metre section of tube, while a small, specially designed cylindrical robot was busy actually inside the tube simultaneously welding, grinding down and then spraying and optically polishing the latest join just after it had cooled.

  ‘All round the station rim,’ observed Brigitta.

  Hannah nodded. This looked as if someone – or something – was building a particle accelerator right around the inside of the station rim – a particle accelerator fifteen kilometres long.

  ‘So what the fuck is this?’ asked Pike.

  ‘I have absolutely no idea,’ said Hannah.

  ‘I see you have come to inspect,’ said a voice through her suit radio. ‘Optimum build rate would increase with less diversification.’

  The proctor walked out onto the remains of the floor that had been mostly cut away, something other than gecko boots keeping it in place. It wore a suit made of some kind of shiny material that covered it entirely, and it carried in its right hand a long metal staff.

  ‘What the hell are you talking about?’ demanded Brigitta. Obviously they were all hearing this exchange over their radios.

  ‘But work rate should increase once your weapons are done,’ it continued.

  This proctor wasn’t P
aul, but the one that had named itself Judd. She recognized it only because of the staff it had taken to carrying – a titanium scaffolding tube packed with esoteric electronics. Paul had called Judd ‘the builder’, but offered no further explanation. However, at that time, Hannah had seen how, now they were free, the proctors were changing quite rapidly, and all of them in different ways. She had also begun to notice, now that she had overcome her initial reaction of stark terror, that there was something quite patronizing about them.

  ‘What are you building here, Judd?’ she asked.

  ‘To schematic ADAR 45A, as detailed in work roster.’

  Suddenly Hannah remembered an earlier conversation she had been witness to, and things that had been said during their first tangle-box communication with Mars. Recalling this, the situation started to become clearer.

  ‘I need to talk to Paul,’ she declared. ‘And to that lunatic Jasper Rhine.’

  He remembered natural sleep, that moment of sliding from dream or nightmare to a semiconscious state wherein he could distinguish between the real and the unreal. He had reached it again both here, in his human body, and elsewhere in his backups and also in the computer systems of Argus. A fragment of his awareness recognized that consciousness for him was no longer the simple state experienced by any normal human being. He had too much mind at that moment for it all to surface to the real world, and simultaneously too little control over his disparate parts. And again, as his mental activity ramped up once more, and his mind coughed and spluttered like an engine with a broken block, he found his way towards that state experienced when he was first amalgamating with that AI copy of his mind called Janus.

  Why?

  Why exist at all? Continued existence was an artefact of evolution first instituted by replicators in the chemical soup of Earth’s early oceans. It was a thing generated by chance, before minds had even existed on Earth. Everything else – every reason for existence that humans deluded themselves with – stemmed from this happenstance. All came down to replication, the avoidance of pain so as to evade damage that might interfere with the process; brute survival for no purpose other than survival itself.

  He could readily die now. In a place where the human dead lay in mountains, and oceans of maggots squirmed, he could disconnect and divide. He could shut down the once-autonomous processes he now semi-consciously controlled. He could reach out from his backup and turn off the power that sustained his heart. He could do all this without pain, without feeling loss, and then sink into the nirvana of oblivion.

  Why not just die?

  Brute survival replied, ‘Because of the wonders.’

  A choice to live – a choice to die, and no reason for either.

  ‘The wonder is the reason,’ said a voice he now recognized as coming from within, yet from the shape of a mind not his own. ‘Nothing worthwhile comes without effort, without sacrifice. If dying is so easy for you – and I think you’re fooling yourself with that idea – then you must know it’s not worthwhile.’

  Circular logic.

  ‘It’s how we stay alive.’

  The double fence of the Albanian enclave in the Dinaric Alps stood over to his right, readerguns lying between its two layers, perched on squat and slightly corroded aluminium towers. He could walk over there, climb the fence, continue walking on past the guns. That was no guaranteed route to death, though, since the SAs here were considered just too valuable to be shot while trying to escape. Enforcers would come after him, track his implant by satellite and haul him back. Anyway, if he started heading over that way, his companion would soon grab him, stop him. She’d always known instinctively when he was about to do something that threatened his own survival.

  When do you leave?

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  To build spaceships.

  ‘Yes.’

  To live, one must become all one can.

  He gazed around at the enclosure, annoyed that visitors were prohibited from speaking to or even seeing any of the other . . . inmates. He would have liked Hannah to be here.

  I’m getting out of here.

  ‘You’ll get yourself killed.’

  Probably.

  He felt an overpowering déjà vu and also an underlying nostalgia. He wasn’t talking at that moment, he realized, but remembering something from the wreckage that interrogator Salem Smith had made of his mind. In that memory, he turned towards the one he had been speaking to, at last trying to identify her. But again that nameless woman he had seen communicating via the tangle box with Mars was back, and now gazing at him pensively.

  He swung away, found himself again amidst the images of Earth’s dead and pictures relayed from cams within Argus. He gazed through the eyes of Judd and sensed impossible reaches of time, and also deep wisdom. Judd dipped his head in acknowledgement, being of the opinion that something had to be done, to complete and to make the machine work. Sliding away again, Saul touched this and that control, then nested in bones.

  Mars

  Driving out in a crawler towards Shankil’s Butte, Var bitterly remembered the last time she travelled out here. Was there some irony in the knowledge that, just beside where this chunk of rock had been shoved up from the peneplain, lay the fault that Rhone and his assorted crew were currently widening? It was from this butte that Ricard or one of his men had fired the shots that killed Gisender, shots which to Var’s mind had marked a point of no return. It had certainly represented such a point for her when she found Gisender’s corpse, viewed the forbidden broadcast from Earth, then subsequently discovered that Ricard had sent a shepherd out to seize her.

  A crump reverberated through the thin air, and a cloud of dust rose from the installation ahead. What looked like a number of large chemical tankers lay near the butte, but they were in fact atmosphere-sealed cabins. They had originally been used while Antares Base was being finished, and had recently been salvaged from their old site just outside Hex Four. Now they clustered about the foot of a derrick which supported heavy hydraulic motors driving cable drums, from which hung every last metre of heavy cable they had been able to find anywhere on the base. Beside this derrick also rested a small mountain of rubble hauled up from the blasting below.

  Var drove through the thinning dust cloud, drew to a halt beside one of the cabins, sealed her suit and exited the crawler. The rouge of Mars began rising in a cloud about her feet, before tracking away in an arc behind her as she walked towards the excavation. Reaching the edge, she caught hold of one of the derrick’s beams and peered down. The hole was nearly fifty metres across and cut raggedly down through dusty murk. However, she could just see a big skip down there, laden with rubble, and the work lights glaring from two stripped-down robotic diggers suspended by their own cables. It looked like a hellish place to work.

  ‘Martinez is two hundred metres down,’ came the comment relayed through her suit radio, which at that moment was set on line-of-sight com. She glanced around, to see Rhone rounding the nearest cabin and heading over. He pointed up at the derrick. ‘We’re almost at full extension now, but it’ll be another hundred metres before we reach the big fault.’

  ‘So, what now?’ she asked, stepping back from the hole and turning to face him fully.

  She wasn’t entirely sure what Rhone was doing out here. Unlike her, he had no need to escape the hostile atmosphere inside the base; unlike her, he wasn’t being viewed as a necessary evil. But, then, even that was better than being considered an unnecessary evil.

  He came up to stand before her, resting his hands on his hips. ‘Martinez reckons that cutting a ramp down towards the fault is the only answer. It will be heavy work but, so he says, without any extra cable it’s the only way, and I’m afraid it’s going to take a long time.’

  ‘He’s the nearest thing we have to an expert on this sort of thing, so we’ll have to take his word for it.’ Var suppressed her frustration. Delays were something she definitely didn’t want to hear about, especially now. ‘How long before we can start
moving stuff down there?’

  ‘A few months yet. Once we’re through to the fault, we’ll need to relocate the lifting rig further down, so as to lower a dozer. Once it’s down there, we can use it to push the rubble up into a ramp, and to infill a road running along the bottom for about five hundred metres. After that, we reach the big ledge, which we’ll need to level out a bit before we can start building.’

  Perhaps Rhone had heard she was coming out here, so had come to play his new role as her close scientific adviser. Lately it had been difficult to avoid the man, and his reports and assessments.

  ‘But if we had more cable,’ said Var, ‘none of this would be necessary?’

  ‘Just infilling for the road,’ said Rhone. ‘If we didn’t have to blast to make room for the ramp, and spend time building it, we’d gain a month or more.’

  It was crazy. They had ways of making so many things on the base, but the kind of high-tensile cable needed for this purpose was, for the present, beyond them.

  ‘It’s suitable down there?’ Var enquired absently, still thinking over the cable problem. ‘I’ve only seen the seismic map.’

  ‘Yes, it’s suitable.’ Rhone nodded. ‘It’s about three hundred metres wide and nearly a kilometre long.’

  Another crump issued from underfoot and the ground shuddered. They quickly stepped back as a cloud of dust rose out of the hole.

  ‘What about ice?’ Var asked.

  ‘Ten kilometres away,’ said Rhone, frowning. ‘Martinez just wants to get on with this, but I wonder if we should ensure we can get to it – by taking some blasting gear and digging equipment through. We don’t want to move the whole base down there only to find we haven’t got access to water. That’d just mean slow death.’

  ‘No,’ said Var, ‘this is where we are going. We don’t have the time now to change our minds.’

  Rhone turned and gazed at her. ‘Bad news?’

  ‘The Scourge is on its way,’ she replied. ‘Long-range imaging showed it blasting away from Earth orbit just two hours ago, but even if we hadn’t seen that for ourselves, the jingoistic broadcasts on ETV would have been enough warning.’