Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

by Neal Asher

  ‘So we have maybe a year and a half?’

  ‘Yes, that’s all. We need to get this all done as quickly as we can.’

  Considering how quickly things were proceeding here, even with the necessity of building a ramp underground, it still seemed that they had plenty of time. But Var knew better. Since their supplies of regolith bonding were limited, they would have to dismantle the original base, transport all the blocks over here and lower them down. The whole infrastructure would have to be transported: all the hexes piece by piece, Hydroponics, the Arboretum, the reactor. In fact she could think of nothing they could afford to leave behind. Their task was essentially like relocating an entire village down into a mineshaft.

  ‘Do you want to go down for a look?’ Rhone asked.

  She did, in fact, but she said, ‘No, I’d just slow Martinez down.’ She turned away and headed towards her crawler.

  ‘I’ll tell him when he comes up with his next load,’ said Rhone.

  ‘You do that.’ Var halted and turned round, a sudden thought occurring to her. Perhaps it was simply being here again, being reminded of Gisender and her ostensible mission to collect fibre optics from the old Trench Base radio station. ‘We’ve got lots of equipment in Antares Base that came from the old Trench Base. How was it transported there?’

  ‘By ATV, I think,’ Rhone replied.

  ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ said Var, feeling a sudden excitement. ‘An ATV journey would have been thousands of kilometres. A more logical route would have been the direct one, which would mean going up the side of Coprates Chasma.’

  ‘Cable,’ said Rhone, catching on quickly. ‘I’ll need to check the base records. I can do that from here.’ He stabbed a thumb towards one of the cabins. ‘I should be able to find out for sure if there’s anything still there.’

  ‘Yes, you do that,’ said Var.

  ‘If there is cable there, I’ll organize a mission at once. In fact I’ll go myself, as I’m feeling a bit of a loose wheel lately. It’s the practicality of people like Martinez we need most of all here right now.’

  Var instantly did not like his eagerness to set off on such a mission. Was this something he had been aiming for?

  ‘Maybe I’ll go, too,’ she said, just to test his reaction. ‘It would be nice to get away from all the invisible daggers plunging into my back.’

  He seemed to accept that comment at once. ‘We’ll need to take cutting equipment, and an ATV trailer with a motor and cable drum.’

  ‘Check first,’ said Var, ‘then let me know.’

  She turned away and continued towards her crawler, then climbed inside and just sat at the controls, thinking hard. Maybe a little trip away from Antares Base would be a good thing in a number of respects. Maybe, by being at close quarters with the man, she could solve the puzzle that was Rhone of Mars Science, and find out for sure if he intended to stick an even more visible knife in her back.

  Earth

  From an interminably boring childhood to supervised school and then university Serene had never really had any friends. Family being something she wanted to forget, she had quickly forgotten. All she had were colleagues, who would receive the brief and snappy response of, ‘I am interested only in now and in the future,’ if they ever enquired about her past. As far as she was concerned, the immutable past had formed her as she was, and she was satisfied with that. She did not like to think too much about her formative years, but she was thinking about them now.

  ‘A specialized search program picked it out of the, on average, seventeen million personal messages directed towards you every day, ma’am,’ said Elkin, the new leader of her team of PAs.

  Serene gazed steadily at the text message relayed to her palmtop, reading and rereading every word of it, a deep feeling of puzzlement growing within her. He was alive. She had never even considered the possibility. She sent his citizen code to the house mainframe then, forcing her face clear of expression, looked up at Elkin.

  Her PA leader was a big-breasted, wide-hipped woman who dressed to try and hide her obvious womanhood. But even clad in a loose grey business trouser suit, with her black hair in a pageboy cut, she still oozed sexuality. Serene smiled to herself, at the forefront of her mind being the knowledge that Elkin quite enjoyed sessions with three men at a time, claiming, as she had recently explained to the three enforcers currently satisfying her needs, that she liked to be ‘all filled up’. Serene regularly watched the security tapes, which were quite a bit better than much of the porn she had seen.

  ‘Thank you, Elkin, that will be all.’

  The woman gave her a brief nod and retreated.

  Now alone, Serene called up the file located under the citizen code she had input, studied the current image of a squat muscular man who, after the treatments he could obtain as a valued SA, appeared to be in his forties. This man was actually eighty-six. She reflected on her brief thoughts about sex and, understanding where they had come from, felt a sudden annoying surge of unaccustomed guilt. She checked his history, starting from twenty-eight years ago at the point where she herself had diverged from it. Under tight political supervision, he’d spent a further nine years in Berlin, in the Brandenburg Tower, continuing his research on population genetics, related dynamics and psychology. He’d provided statistical analyses of great use to the Inspectorate: data that had resulted in large savings on resources. It was always useful to know precisely how hard you needed to wield the big stick, and precisely what degree of control might be necessary when dealing with vast populations.

  At the end of those nine years, he had taken a partner, and produced twin daughters who, due to his past record, were immediately taken away from him. Next working in South America, his wife of four years, having been caught making illegal enquiries about his record, was sent off for adjustment. She died shortly after being released into supervised accommodation. The surface report cited a domestic accident with some kitchen appliance. The underlying report noted that her kitchen cam had failed and gone into a maintenance backlog, while she had sliced open her wrists with the blade removed from a Safecarver and bled to death on the kitchen floor.

  Five years ago he had been sent back to work in Europe, sometimes in the Brandenburg Tower again, more often as an adviser to the four main European delegates. It annoyed Serene that he had been so successful in his way. Her aim had been to get him sent for adjustment twenty-eight years ago, but he had been far too useful for that.

  Serene input his call code, ensuring a console contact only, since she wanted to see his face. He must have been waiting because he answered within just a few seconds. He looked haggard, dark under the eyes and, when he saw her, he jerked back from the screen, his expression showing a commingled disgust and fear. She couldn’t understand why he had sent her a message, then she noted him fingering his collar and realized why: he’d grown tired of waiting for the axe to fall.

  ‘Hello, Papa,’ she said, smiling calmly as she remembered her love for him despite his dictatorial ways. She remembered how, with her mother dead, she had tried to help him, tried at the age of twelve to relieve some of the pressure he was under. Serene knew all about sex, all about the needs of men, since her political officer had already shown her, and she wanted to take control. She wanted to supplant the various ‘nannies’ that visited, taking his attention away from her. But when she had tried, he had pushed her away, and that was the first time she saw that look on his face. The pain of rejection sent a wave of heat through her even now. Yes, she understood his fear, and she understood how he would have felt that to respond to her was plain wrong. But they had been different: they had always been different.

  ‘Serene,’ he said, ‘I see you’ve done very well for yourself.’

  Serene had already found and cued up the code to his collar, and her finger now hovered over the send button. Then, as she gazed at his face, she withdrew her finger. She was now the dictator of Earth, with all Earth’s resources at her disposal. A sudden twisted excit
ement arose in her, almost sexual. She could do anything she wanted. She was in total control.

  ‘Yes, I have done very well, Papa,’ she replied. ‘I see that you haven’t done so badly either. You were an adviser to the four top European delegates, I understand.’

  ‘I did do well,’ he said bitterly, ‘despite being accused by my own daughter of beating and raping her. But I haven’t been trying to reach you so we can discuss the different routes our careers have taken . . . daughter.’ He spat out the last word, then reached up and touched his collar. ‘I want to know about this. When, Serene? When are you going to send the code to this and finish off what you started?’

  What an arrogant self-obsessed idiot he was. That he wore such a collar was just chance, just wherever he came in the list, which included over half a billion other SAs. But through his self-obsession, through his belief that this had to be personal, he had revealed himself to her. Now she knew he was alive and well.

  ‘You are just one of many, Papa, but since you are my father, I will order that your collar be removed at once.’ No way did she want one of those occasional collar malfunctions to take him out, for they still had unfinished business. She paused, momentarily puzzled, not entirely sure what that unfinished business was. ‘I will also be sending an aero for you.’

  ‘Why?’ he said. ‘Do you want me to be facing you when you kill me? Didn’t you do enough when you reported me to your political officer for the very offence I refused to commit?’

  Apparently not, since he had survived the experience.

  ‘And how did you do it? How did you fake the evidence?’ he asked.

  The fact that, at twelve, she was no longer a virgin had been taken care of by her political officer a few months before. She was one of the many young girls that that particular guardian of Committee ideology had used as part of his personal harem. Faking the evidence against her father had been easy. She just waited until after a visit from one of the ‘nannies’ he employed, and then scraped it off his bedsheets.

  ‘That is all in the past now,’ she replied smoothly. ‘Right now I am in need of advisers in precisely your discipline, and your name has come up on a shortlist. It is in fact quite a happy coincidence that you yourself also tried to get in contact with me.’

  ‘Well, I guess with two-thirds of the original upper executive being fried, you need to know where to concentrate the razorbirds and shepherds next.’ He grimaced, looked to one side for a moment, then focused back on the screen. She remembered that he’d done a lot of work involving the deployment of shepherds, and also on techniques to increase the public fear of them. ‘But I think you’re lying to me,’ he continued. ‘You were always very good at it.’

  ‘We’ll talk further after you arrive, and, Papa,’ she gazed at him like a parent humouring a worried child, ‘please understand that the past remains the past. We, here and now, are making the future.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  Serene cut the connection, then took a wet wipe from the pack on her desk, to cleanse her hands, which suddenly felt slimy. She felt her lies had sounded close to plausibility, but he had only accepted them because he had no choice. The only real alternative for him now, if he had even a gram of understanding, would be to kill himself at once. He must surely realize that the only person on the planet ever to have caused her to feel shame would have to pay a heavy price indeed.

  ‘Elkin!’

  The woman was back through the door in a second. ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘Send a grab squad to pick him up at once,’ said Serene. ‘And tell them that if he dies, then they die shortly afterwards.’

  ‘Ma’am.’

  ‘I also want you to get Interrogator Nelson here, quick as you like.’ Serene waved a dismissive hand, noting Elkin’s brief look of fear at the mention of that particular interrogator. No one liked Nelson getting too close. He was someone Messina had personally recruited from an Inspectorate HQ in Bangladesh, and everyone knew what he could do. In Inspectorate circles he was known as Leonardo. This related to the artistry of his work, just as that work of his called to mind the anatomical sketches of Leonardo Da Vinci.

  10

  Crowd Control

  The extreme civil unrest that followed the Golden Decade looked, for a while, as if it might bring everything crashing down, especially when elements of the military and police forces of the world began to side with the protestors. The use of pain amplifiers began to bring this under control, but with the loyalty of those using them sometimes being questionable, governments wanted something more reliable. The first shepherds were quickly designed and rapidly hurried off the production lines. This could all have ended in disaster for the governments concerned, for the machines could have been laughable failures, inefficient, prone to breaking down, which was the usual way that state-instigated projects ran. However, because of the urgency in deploying them, bureaucratic interference in their design was minimal, and the roboticists came up with something fit for purpose, rugged, fast . . . and terrifying. During the first ten years of their deployment, they killed off the rioting and seated themselves firmly in the public consciousness – so much so that, even though better robots are now available, shepherds are the tool of preference for the riot breakers.

  Scourge

  After hour upon hour under massive acceleration, Clay felt the terror just grow tired and slink away, out of his head. Finally the chemical booster detached, and small steering jets fired up on it to put it on course far behind a long train of other boosters from the old Mars Travellers, which were even now falling into orbit around Jupiter, where, some centuries hence, they could be salvaged either for their metals or for reuse. The floor tilted as the fusion drive took up the load, applying a full gravity of acceleration. For some while yet, crew and passengers would not have to tolerate zero gravity, though to get from one end of the ship to the other they would have to climb ladders as if they were ascending and descending inside a two-kilometre-high tower.

  ‘Now for you,’ said Scotonis, ‘just a long and boring wait.’

  ‘And for you?’ asked Clay, undoing his straps.

  ‘Weapons drills, training, stress testing and diagnostics, and we have to continue fitting out the interior,’ said the captain. ‘The ship is full of materials and components yet to be installed, supplies yet to find their proper home. And it’s also full of people who’ll die if they don’t quickly acquire the right education.’

  Clay stood up. ‘I’ll head for my cabin now.’ He felt the need to add at least something else, as he gazed at the captain, his pilot and gunnery officer. ‘Congratulations on a successful launch – may our mission be equally successful.’

  ‘I’m sure we’ll try our best,’ said Pilot Officer Trove, while fingering her strangulation collar.

  Clay headed out through the safety airlock at the back of the bridge, noting that it was even more difficult to walk in gecko boots in full gravity. Outside the bridge it took him a moment to locate himself on the simple map he had memorized: the internal floor and airlock now lying in a different position from when he had entered. Ahead of the bridge was where the railguns, missile ports, armoury for ship’s weapons and access to the single turret-mounted maser were located. The passenger compartments lay directly behind it. Beyond this area lay the holds and barracks, which sat over the massive engine and surrounding engine room. He found his way to a cageway extending downwards, connected his safety cable to a bar beside one of the ladders within, and began to descend.

  Halfway down, he paused to watch four crewmen descend past him on two other ladders. They did not have their safety lines attached and went down very fast, almost in a controlled fall. Finally, he reached the entrance into the passenger compartments and strolled along, checking door numbers until finding his own. He pushed his hand against the lock, whereupon a laser above the door briefly scanned his pupil while some other emitter doubtless also checked his implant code. The door lock opened with a clonk, and a push sent it swingin
g inwards. He felt almost disappointed to find a conventional hinged door here, having been raised on a diet of trashy politically approved SF where every door was inevitably a sliding version.

  His one-room apartment was spacious, though that amount of space would soon decrease once he folded down the bed, pulled the shower unit out from the wall or expanded the collapsed cupboards and desk to accept his belongings, which currently resided in a plastic crate resting in the middle of the floor. He headed straight over to the collapsed cupboards and pulled them out from the wall, opened one of them and found a number of highly compressed packages. Clay stripped off his spacesuit, securing each component of it in numbered compartments allocated in the cupboard, then tore open one of the compressed packages. As he shook it out, the ship suit expanded, its quilted layers busily sucking up air. He pulled it on, then tugged on the slippers also provided in the package, before heading over to the desk.

  The desk also folded out from the wall and, once out, revealed an inset keyboard which, with a touch, started up the computer, the screen on the wall above instantly flickering on. Again a laser scanned his eye and another emitter read his implant, then he was in. His security clearance aboard this ship was the highest – higher even than the captain’s – and, barring some override from Earth, there were things he could do in this cabin that he had, over the last few months, been unable to achieve.

  Within a minute he was into the security system, knew the location of everyone aboard the vessel, and could check them with cams, and in some areas, if he wished, fire up readerguns. These guns were slightly different from the earthbound ones, in that they fired low-impact ammunition so as not to damage the infrastructure of the ship. Another option was inducers, usually in cabins or corridors, but not anywhere critical. He was now very powerful aboard this ship, but killing or torturing anyone was not his aim. Checking the system, he found both the cam and the inducer in his room, and shut them down. After that he lowered the bed from the wall, stood on it and, using a small electrical tool-set, undid the light fitting to reveal the cam and the inducer inside, and disconnected them.