Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

by Neal Asher

  It seemed that Lopomac, who had been in the cargo compartment behind, with two recruits from Martinez’s men, had been reading her mind. ‘We become morlocks,’ he said, leaning through into the cockpit, and seemingly amused by the whole idea. ‘Historically, it’s not unusual for rebels or freedom fighters to go literally underground.’

  ‘And that will be our future?’ said Rhone. ‘Always under the ground and skulking in shadows?’

  ‘I’d rather skulk in shadows that spend any time in a nicely well-lit adjustment cell.’

  Rhone seemed to have no answer to that, and Var wondered if his problem was actually accepting that there was no way back to Earth for them. If that was the case, then he would be completely the wrong person to be leader of Antares Base. He would merely get them all killed.

  Var pointed ahead to a distant structure now becoming visible and changed the subject. ‘So, how much cable are we talking about?’

  Rhone seemed happier with this question. ‘The cliff that the lift was positioned above is nearly a kilometre high, and the cradle ran up and down between two cables, so at a minimum there’s two thousand metres of it.’

  ‘More than enough,’ opined Lopomac.

  The distant object was now clearer: a kind of frame around some sort of bulky object, probably a motor or cable drum, though much of it was concealed behind the line of the horizon. Maybe just another half-hour would bring them there and since, throughout the hours of driving, she had gained no further insight into Rhone’s motivations, she decided it was time to be less circumspect.

  ‘Tell me, Rhone,’ she finally said, ‘if you were in charge, what would you do?’

  Rhone stared at her but, as ever, she could read nothing in his expression, so she returned to concentrating on where she was driving.

  ‘There are so many variables,’ he said, then seemed at a complete loss. Maybe he had never really thought about this too deeply. She felt certain he wanted her position but now wondered if that was actually not based on some deep conviction that he could do better, but simply stemmed from the kind of ladder-climbing found in any organization. It frightened her to realize quite how incompetent and vaguely motivated an enemy could be.

  ‘We know some things for certain,’ he continued. ‘Serene Galahad will never leave us alone. We must either be punished or made to submit to her.’

  After that, he said nothing for a long minute, so Var prodded him. ‘Those are facts evident to anyone. I asked you how you would react to them.’

  ‘If we stay on the surface, we’ll be taken,’ he affirmed. ‘That’s certain.’

  ‘And?’ Var turned to study him again.

  He gazed back at her, puzzled. ‘If you’re asking me what I think I would do, in your position, I think the best answer would be that I’d faff about and be frightened of making such a drastic decision as your one to take us underground, and would probably end up getting us all killed.’ He paused reflectively. ‘And, in an attempt to be liked, I probably wouldn’t push people as hard.’

  He sounded so utterly plausible; every time she encountered a response like this from him, she found herself questioning her own sanity. Perhaps her paranoia was more evident to others than she supposed, and it was that which was driving them away from her. Even so, she could not ignore it; she could not afford to put such paranoia aside. Her own life and the lives of everyone at Antares Base depended on her judgement.

  She now concentrated on the structure ahead, which had risen higher and was much more visible. It looked like the elevator equipment that would be found at the pithead of an ancient coal mine. From this oblique angle, it wasn’t possible to see it clearly, but it appeared to be a framework in the shape of a pushed-over triangle, supporting a big wheel at its tip, right over the drop into Coprates Chasma. In the base of the triangle was a big drum and motor set-up, along with a small windowed cabin. However, they weren’t close enough yet to see if any cable was available.

  ‘I understand your anxiety,’ Rhone continued abruptly. ‘There’s an awful lot of pressure on you, and perhaps too much responsibility.’

  Patronizing prick . . .

  ‘Var chose to take it,’ said Lopomac from behind, ‘and we agreed she should take it.’ He paused for a moment, then continued, ‘Power should always come with responsibility, and they should be equivalent. You get big problems when those who want power then renege on the responsibility.’

  Was that it? Was it just Rhone trying to scrabble higher but not wanting the responsibility of the top job? Var chewed that one over in her mind as passing over another ridge brought the lifting gear ahead into full view. Now, seeing cables hanging from the wheel, dispelled such speculation from her mind. They had a job to do.

  Argus

  Obeying Hannah’s instructions, Paul had arrived in Jasper Rhine’s laboratory ahead of her and stood waiting as she stepped through the door, with Brigitta and Pike just a few paces behind her. She looked around, noticing how much things had changed here. The laboratory had been extended on one side to incorporate larger machines for the production of rectifier Casimir batteries, which were now steadily replacing every other battery used in every handheld device aboard the station. An adapted construction robot worked there, too, tending to the machines, packing batteries to be dispatched to station stores and, as a sideline, making stacked arrays of these same batteries to be used in some of the larger devices in the station, even in robots like itself.

  Rhine himself was seated on a revolving chair encircled by a ring of benches, though he was almost concealed by the laboratory machines and the computer hardware stacked on their surfaces. Currently he sat before a scanning-electron microscope, eyeing its screen when not casting nervous glances towards Paul. Hannah strode further into the room, flicked her gaze towards a couple of screens up against one wall cycling grotesque images evidently from Earth, then averted her eyes, placed her hands on her hips, and gazed up at Paul speculatively.

  ‘ADAR 45A,’ she said succinctly.

  Paul waved one of his big long-fingered hands in a curiously graceful gesture towards Rhine. ‘The rough schematic supplied by Jasper Rhine was approved by the Owner. After the completion of the enclosure, work then commenced upon it.’

  Hannah felt suddenly confused. She had expected lies, guilt, something human but got none of those. ‘Why wasn’t I told?’

  Rhine had now come out from his little hideaway. ‘Told what?’ he asked.

  She swung towards him, now finding a more viable target for her anger. ‘Why wasn’t I told that the robots are building your damned vortex generator in the outer ring?’

  ‘Are they?’ said Rhine, looking delighted.

  Hannah swung back to Paul. ‘This is madness. We can’t afford to waste resources on this fantasy while the fucking Scourge is heading directly our way. Every moment of wasted effort gets us that much closer to either dying or ending up in an adjustment cell.’

  Paul just stood there for a long moment, making no discernibly human response. Then he finally said, ‘I am puzzled. You were unaware of ADAR 45A?’

  ‘Yes, I was unaware of ADAR 45A,’ said Hannah. ‘So you need to shut down work on that and concentrate on our defences.’

  ‘I am sorry, Hannah Neumann, but there is conflict and I am therefore unable to comply,’ Paul replied.

  ‘What?’ Hannah stared at this unknowable being standing before her. She still felt angry, but that was being eaten away quickly by a fear that had been with her since she had taken over from Le Roque: that she was not doing enough, that she was losing control. ‘What do you mean? You and all the other robots aboard this station were instructed by the Owner to obey me and me alone.’

  ‘Yes, but obedience to you is secondary to obedience to the Owner himself.’

  ‘He’s awake?’ Hannah asked, feeling a sudden surge of hope.

  ‘He is not yet awake.’ Paul bowed his head for a second, as if in thought, then continued, ‘Before the Owner became comatose, he had queued u
p orders of primary importance, such as full enclosure of the station, securing the power supply’ – Paul gestured towards the machines now making Casimir batteries – ‘and, once resources were available after enclosure, then the construction of the vortex generator. When the threat of the Scourge became evident, ADAR 45A was moved to the head of the queue.’

  By whom? Hannah wondered, but knew the answer to that already. Saul might have released his hold on consciousness, but his unconsciousness wasn’t of the human kind.

  ‘Surely you can see that wasting resources on this could kill us?’ she said.

  ‘On the contrary,’ Paul replied, ‘if we do not construct this device, we are finished.’

  ‘Can you elaborate on that,’ said Hannah, even though the meaning was plain.

  ‘The Scourge will first disable us, then launch an assault. With two thousand troops at their disposal, and doubtless spiderguns too, it is a certainty that we would lose. The only uncertainty is whether or not their victory would be a Cadmean one, because the station and all aboard could be destroyed in the conflict.’

  There it was, stated out loud and in plain terms: everything the tactical models had been telling them, everything Le Roque had banged on about in those early meetings, and everything they had since tried to ignore. She had often wondered about Le Roque’s rather easy acquiescence to her; how, once it was evident she controlled the robots aboard Argus, he hadn’t tried anything else. There had been no assassination attempts, no further efforts to take her captive, no angry protests – just acid observations. She now understood why. Le Roque had sought power not because he loved it, but because he knew someone needed to take charge. The moment Hannah took command away from him, he stepped aside with alacrity, because nobody ever wants to be captain of a sinking ship.

  Hannah turned to Brigitta and Pike, who stood goggle-eyed as they listened to this exchange. Meanwhile, Rhine had returned to his equipment and was now frantically working a console.

  ‘None of this leaves the room,’ she declared. ‘At some point wider knowledge of the construction going on out there will get out, so we need a story to cover it.’

  ‘Ah, I see,’ said Brigitta, who was clearly sharper than the other two.

  ‘What do we do?’ asked Pike.

  Hannah focused on him carefully, feeling less sure about how he would react. ‘I – and a few others I trusted – knew about this all along. I allowed construction of the vortex ring to proceed in secret, because I did not want its purpose generally known. Messina’s clones currently aboard have been in regular contact with Earth, and I did not want them to find out about it and inform Earth.’ It was essential that the likes of Le Roque and Langstrom did not know how this development had blindsided her. They might lose any confidence they had left in her; so might feel the need to try and take control again.

  She glanced next at Paul but the proctor was unreadable. She then strode over to where Jasper Rhine sat working. ‘What are the chances now of this vortex generator working?’

  He glanced up with a slight dreamy smile on his face, which did nothing to inspire her confidence. ‘I never checked this. It’s amazing.’

  ‘Answer the question, Jasper.’

  He waved a hand at the console screen. ‘Another two months and main construction will be completed, after which we’ll need to connect it up properly to the station system. It will, of course, work – but there’s much we still need to do.’

  ‘Like what?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘I checked with our long-range sensors, and I also checked the old asteroid survey maps,’ continued Rhine. ‘We need to further alter our course by half a degree and begin decelerating in about a month, so that we can moor to asteroid HJI457.’

  ‘You what?’ asked Brigitta, from behind Hannah’s shoulder.

  ‘That’s where we’ll get the ore,’ he explained, looking at her happily. ‘We should be able to swing one of the smelters right round to it, and haul the stuff straight across. It’ll be a low-temperature process compared to the usual smelting, and we can condense it in pipes cooled by vacuum, then use vacuum distillation to purify it.’

  ‘This still isn’t very clear, Rhine.’

  ‘Nearly eighty per cent cinnabar and vermilion, eight per cent pure product, and the rest is just rock.’

  ‘What product?’

  ‘Mercury, of course,’ Rhine replied, as if that was patently obvious. ‘You didn’t think the vortex generator would work without it, did you?’

  Her throat trying to close up on her, Hannah asked, ‘And how much mercury do we need, Rhine?’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry. There’s enough there. We’ll have to process about three-quarters of the asteroid to achieve about ten thousand metric tonnes of the pure metal.’

  Pike grunted as if someone had punched him in the stomach.

  ‘Oh, is that all?’ he said.

  Hannah closed her eyes, fighting the urge to start crying, then gritted her teeth as a call came through on her fone from Le Roque.

  ‘What is it?’ she asked sharply.

  ‘We’re in trouble,’ he replied.

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘The smelting plants just folded up their mirrors and are retracting into the station rim.’

  ‘I see,’ she replied. ‘I rather think we’ve been here before.’

  ‘Certainly,’ he continued, ‘and, just like last time, there’s a course correction in the system queue – and it wasn’t there before.’

  ‘Let me guess: a correction of half a degree.’

  ‘Is there something you’re not telling me, Dr Neumann?’

  An hour later she was standing in Tech Central, as the smelting plants locked home in the rim.

  ‘What the hell is going on?’ asked Le Roque.

  Hannah turned to gaze at two unused screens. Nightmarish images appeared there, but they seemed hazy now and, just for a second, she glimpsed the image of one of Argus’s steering thrusters firing up, its flame spearing out into the darkness.

  Scourge

  Commander Liang’s cabin had been small and claustrophobic, and Clay had not wanted to stay inside it for long, but as the small Chinese man took him on a guided tour of the rest of the barracks decks, that claustrophobic feeling only increased. Squeezing past a group of soldiers gathered in the pipe of the hexagonal access tube, who were playing Yahtzee with sticky dice that they threw against a wall, and recording their scores on PDAs, he peered into the space they had abandoned. The hexagonal cabin was occupied by nine zip-up hammocks, and equipment secured to every wall made the space even smaller.

  ‘They get a turn in the corridor every six hours,’ remarked Liang perfunctorily. ‘Then every forty-eight hours they get an hour in the spin-gym.’

  ‘I guess they need it,’ Clay noted.

  ‘Six around each section,’ explained one of Liang’s three staff officers, pointing out the six doors ringing the tube. Clay glanced at the man and couldn’t figure out who he was. Liang had named them all earlier, but their difficult names had since slid out of Clay’s mind. Anyway, they all looked like clones of Liang. Perhaps they were clones – as it wasn’t exactly unheard of.

  Clay stepped over to an open door, peering down into the cabin below it, which was still occupied – the soldiers ensconced in their hammocks because there was nowhere else for them to go. He looked up at the door above, which was closed, then ahead along the tube to the next ring of six doors and the next group of nine men hovering outside one. These had stripped out of their VC suits and were sponging out the insides of the garments. The barracks decks resembled a honeycomb, with hexagonal cabins ringing hexagonal access tubes. The designers had obviously called on nature for the best way of packing living beings into the smallest possible space.

  ‘So, fifty-four troops in each separate section and four hundred and eighty-six in total along each access tube,’ Liang continued. ‘We’ve got six tubes altogether here, around which two thousand troops are bunked.’

  ‘Tha
t doesn’t add up,’ observed Clay.

  ‘They’re not all troop cabins,’ pointed out one of the clone trio accompanying them.

  Clay damned himself for having made such a stupid comment. None of these living cabins had toilets or showers, so those facilities must be located somewhere. The men also needed to eat, drink and, of course, somewhere hereabouts was that ‘spin-gym’. He put his error down to how disorientating this place was, how claustrophobic. At least now he had begun to get used to the smell, which was a ripe mix of body odour, stale cooking and sewage.

  ‘Yeah, I can understand that,’ said Clay. ‘It must be hard for them living down here.’

  ‘Not as bad as you might think,’ opined Liang. ‘They have individual VR entertainment, and they have their tactical updates to learn – that stuff that was coming directly from Argus.’

  These were updates which, since the Messina clones had been isolated and trapped in a hydroponics unit, hadn’t really supplied anything useful for some time now. He nodded thoughtfully, as if this was all of great interest to him, but in fact he was wondering why Liang and his staff officers bunked down here alongside the men. After all, cabins had been made available for them on the executive deck, where Clay had his own cabin. He could only surmise that Liang and his men were the utterly loyal soldier-fanatic type. He’d seen plenty like them – men who focused totally on their ‘duty’ and utterly failed to question their indoctrination.

  ‘They are also allowed an amount of chemical recreation,’ Liang added.

  Clay knew about the various pills and potions the troops were allowed. No stimulants, however; only the kind of chemical recreation that left men and women zoned out for hours on end. Another recreation, sex, had been barred because it might lead to friction of another kind. There had been no complaints about this, since the method of prevention had been introduced into the water supply down here.

  ‘What about weapons drills?’ Clay asked.

  ‘Only in VR, at present.’

  ‘Yes,’ Clay nodded, ‘I take it most of the equipment is packed in the hold.’