Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

by Neal Asher

  ‘Oh, happy day,’ said Langstrom. ‘So how did the Mars Traveller VI avoid damage when it went there for the Argus asteroid?’

  ‘Because when it went to the Asteroid Belt there was no disruption zone – it actually caused it.’

  ‘Right, fair enough,’ Langstrom conceded.

  ‘So what do we tell everyone?’ Le Roque asked.

  ‘We’re slowing so as to reduce asteroid debris damage,’ Hannah replied, noticing that he had now called up another picture on his array of screens. ‘They need know no more than that.’

  Le Roque stood staring at the new image, which was a view up the side of the Traveller VI engine and out into space. Trust him to spot that one right away.

  ‘This thing,’ he said, ‘is going to be built right across the mouth of the Traveller engine enclosure. Once it’s there, we won’t be able to use the Traveller engine without destroying this . . . vortex generator.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Hannah replied, ‘but if the space drive works, we won’t need anything else again, and if it doesn’t work, it certainly won’t actually stop us using the Traveller VI.’

  He grunted in agreement and continued staring at the screen. She decided not to add that if Rhine’s space drive was a failure, whether or not they could fire up the Traveller engine was irrelevant.

  The deceleration lasted for a month, bringing their speed down to just above ten thousand kilometres per hour. Hannah expected more, but there was nothing. For three further months life aboard the station continued. Leeran and Pike laboured to convert a whole smelting plant over to the refining of mercury extracted from its ore, and the robots continued building the vortex generator. Then, towards the end of those three months, they finally arrived at the periphery of the Asteroid Belt.

  The dust came first, seemingly without any effect until detectors picked up a slight elevation in the temperature on the station’s skin. Already pre-programmed, the steering thrusters fired up again, turning the Mars Traveller engine away from their course so as to protect it, and tilting the station so that the brunt of any impacts would be taken against its base.

  ‘He prepared for this,’ Le Roque noted.

  ‘How so?’ Hannah asked, yet thought she knew.

  ‘The lower enclosure is thicker: thin case-hardened plates on the outside, closed-cell rock foam laminated with bubble-metal lying under that. The combination should act as a shock absorber, and take out most of the sting of anything small. Also, it appears that most of the collision lasers are concentrated down there.’

  ‘Which only demonstrates how you must trust in his judgement.’ Hannah kept her expression blank as she said it. The enclosure had been all but finished before they made the course change away from Mars, and she now remembered Saul saying something about Mars just being one stop on the way. But on the way where?

  Yet another month passed, and then the collision lasers began to draw power from super-capacitor storage, perpetually topped up by the station’s fusion reactors. Hannah watched the fireworks on a screen in her laboratory, while in her surgery James was detaching all but the monitoring equipment, the fluid and nutrient feeds and muscle tone stimulators from Saul. The spaces in his skull had filled with new growth, but what now resided within that was open to debate. New bone had grown across the gaps in his skull, and was slowly thickening and hardening, while his remaining injuries were just gradually fading scars. Hannah wanted him out of the surgery now so that she wouldn’t have to go through the decontamination routine every time she went in to check on him. Saul had been installed in a bed for five days in her laboratory itself, when Argus Station received its first proper mauling from the Asteroid Belt.

  A piece of debris weighing ten grams, which spectral analysis nailed down as eighty per cent nickel iron, came in so fast that the lasers only managed to warm it over. It hit the lower enclosure, fragmenting and melting as it punched through the laminations, then entered the inner station as a fountain of white-hot vapour which left a shiny plating on a nearby I-beam. A second and a third hit followed shortly afterwards, one failing to penetrate, but the next one cutting into a pressurized section of the station rim, the hole automatically sealed by the layer of rapidly expanding sealant within the walls, and causing a brief fire that was quickly knocked out by a computer-controlled jet of carbon dioxide.

  ‘Breach protocols now apply,’ Le Roque announced a short while later, after which everyone constantly wore spacesuits or at least the more flimsy survival suits. He also moved as many personnel as possible into the quarters located below Tech Central, where the bulk of the asteroid lying below would protect them from further impacts.

  Over the ensuing weeks these became a constant, and initial terror lost its grip on the station population until one of the steering thrusters briefly fired up. The station was now being steered, as far as possible, to avoid some of the larger asteroidal chunks passing by outside. Then the fear generated by that began to wane as the firing up of the thrusters also became routine.

  There was too much to do, and there was also a perpetual war for station resources between those actively at work. Power was at a premium. Le Roque refused to let super-capacitor storage drop below half, just in case the collision lasers had to deal with anything worse than they had encountered thus far, and Hannah agreed with him. However, the retracted smelting plant that was not being converted for mercury refining continued to draw in power to heat its furnaces because it no longer had the input of the sun mirrors. Here the components for the rest of Rhine’s vortex generator were being manufactured, along with the mercury-refining components for the other retracted smelter and the nearly complete selection of new station weapons. Which of these was most important? Hannah asked herself, then, again considering the models that rated their survival chances at zero without having a space drive, she put weapons construction on hold.

  It was a fortuitous choice, she felt, especially when a one-and-a-half-kilo lump of rock and iron smashed into the station rim and turned a ten-metre section of the vortex generator there into slag. Brigitta was soon there to disabuse her of any complacency over her decision.

  ‘Say we build that thing and it works,’ said the more gregarious Saberhagen twin. ‘What then?’

  ‘We’ve then got a fighting chance against the Scourge,’ Hannah replied. ‘But, more importantly, we’ve got an even better chance of running away.’

  They were once again in Tech Central, and again debating the meticulous allocation of resources. Brigitta raised a silencing hand and pointed at one of the three big screens, this one now showing a small swarm of rocks like fragments of black glass. Perfectly on time, they felt the slight drag as a steering thruster again fired up.

  ‘And how quickly do you think we will be able to get out of the belt?’ Brigitta asked.

  ‘She has a point,’ said Le Roque. ‘That first deceleration wasn’t to slow us down to intercept that lump of mercury ore; it was intended so we could get through this intact.’ He gestured at the rocks on the screen, which were now sliding over to one side.

  ‘We need those weapons,’ Brigitta affirmed.

  Hannah turned to Paul, who, as well as the spidergun, had become a constant companion. ‘What’s your assessment?’

  ‘I can only give you highly variable percentages, Hannah Neumann,’ the proctor replied. ‘Without the vortex generator, we are dead. Without Brigitta and Angela Saberhagen’s weapons, the Scourge could disable us while we are still manoeuvring out of the Asteroid Belt. If the generator receives no further asteroidal damage, then it will be complete in time so – on that basis resources can be diverted to finishing the weapons. If, however, the generator is again damaged, resources that were used to finish the weapons will no longer be available, and thus the ring will not be completed in time.’

  ‘Toss the dice,’ said Langstrom.

  Hannah did. ‘No work on the weapons until the vortex generator is complete.’

  ‘I just hope that decision doesn’t kill us,�
�� said Brigitta.

  ‘So do I,’ Hannah replied. ‘So do I.’

  Mars

  The two kilometres of cable had made a distinct difference, and now down in the fissure cavern after the dust had cleared enough for her to see more than a few metres, Var found it rather strange to be gazing at Hex One, with its branching wings already in place, but now located underground.

  ‘Hex Four is a bit of a problem,’ said Martinez, standing beside her.

  ‘Why?’ she asked sharply.

  ‘We have to move the plants out first, so we’ll need to find a place for them.’

  Var nodded towards the structures lying ahead. ‘I take it you’re already getting infrastructure in place?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Martinez slowly, as if telegraphing that she was just about to make some mistake. This kind of attitude had become really annoying – people not telling her things outright.

  She forged ahead anyway. ‘Get lighting and heating for them up in the remaining wings, then you can move down Four.’

  ‘The reactor,’ said Martinez.

  Var suddenly felt stupid. She put that down to merely being distracted by the tension she had been undergoing so long here at Antares Base – the expectation that someone, at some point, was going to turn against her. She returned her attention to the moment.

  ‘Power is going to be a problem, whichever way you cut it,’ she said succinctly.

  ‘Yeah.’ Martinez nodded. ‘As it stands, the reactor supplies the energy for our population and for Hydroponics and for the Arboretum. If we move the reactor first, we’d have enough power in super-cap storage to support them for three or four days, but it’ll take longer than that to move just the contents of Hydroponics.’

  ‘But you have a solution?’ she guessed.

  ‘We move the contents of Hydroponics and the Arboretum into the remaining wings above, take apart those two hexes and assemble them down here, move super-cap storage down here, prepare the reactor for shut-down and removal, then shift population and plants down here all at once beforehand.’

  ‘Which means you have only three or four days to get the reactor located down here,’ Var observed. ‘That can be done?’

  ‘It’ll be tight,’ he said, ‘but there may be a way to speed things up.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ said Var.

  ‘We now have enough cable, but what we could do with in addition is another lifting motor, cable drum and other related equipment.’

  ‘You’re talking about the trench lift?’ she said.

  He nodded, seemed reluctant to continue, then forged on. ‘You were out there yourself with Rhone, while getting hold of that cable. I can’t get anything out of him about the condition of the equipment out there . . .’

  Var considered that statement. After his initial burst of enthusiasm, Rhone had retreated into Mars Science and become increasingly unhelpful. Perhaps their frank conversations out there had brought home to him that the top job wasn’t so great and he was no longer manoeuvring for it. She suppressed that thought: she’d been wasting altogether too much time in worrying about what other people thought or what their motivations might be.

  ‘I see no reason why there should be a problem with it,’ she replied. ‘There’s no record of any of it ever going wrong. There’s no likelihood of any corrosion problems, and the motor and the bearings will all have been sealed.’

  ‘So I’m authorized to collect those items?’

  ‘I already delegated this task to you, Martinez,’ she said. ‘Why are you thinking now that you need my permission just to do your job?’

  He hesitated, then said, ‘It’s never been entirely clear what my job is – and I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes.’

  ‘I thought it was perfectly clear that your job’ – Var was trying to control a sudden flash of anger – ‘is to get the base moved down here, dealing with whatever problems arise. I would say that relocating the trench lift here is completely covered by that remit.’

  ‘Okay.’ He nodded.

  ‘So why are you behaving like you expect me to bite your head off?’

  He gazed at her directly. ‘Because that has become a habit of yours just lately.’

  The anger within Var ramped up by an order of magnitude, and she felt herself on the edge of shrieking at the man. Then, all at once, it began to wane, as the last few months seemed to unfold in her mind as a series of episodes seen from someone else’s point of view. Previously she had seen herself constantly having to deal with problems created by stupid people who neither trusted nor liked her, and now she realized that on every such occasion she had found someone else to bawl at. Self-fulfilling prophecies . . .

  She took a couple of steadying breaths, swallowed drily. ‘Yes,’ she said reluctantly, ‘perhaps it has become a habit.’

  They both just stood there awkwardly, finding nothing else to say.

  ‘Is there anything else I need to know about?’ she asked eventually.

  ‘That’s about it,’ conceded Martinez reluctantly.

  ‘Then I need to get back to base – or rather what remains of Antares Base,’ she replied. ‘We’re coming up for another tanglecom with Argus, and I have some questions to ask.’

  ‘It’s odd,’ said Martinez, obviously glad to move on to something else. ‘When they made that first course change, I thought they were running away.’

  ‘Apparently not,’ said Var. The Argus Station was now slowing into the Asteroid Belt, and even Rhone, when he had put in a brief appearance at the latest meeting, could think of no plausible reason why it was doing so.

  ‘But why . . . why are they slowing?’ Martinez asked.

  ‘Rhone suggested they might be making a fuel stop at one of the ice asteroids there, but that doesn’t add up,’ Var replied. ‘Two coms back, Neumann said they’ve got more than enough water for the Traveller engine and the station reactors.’

  ‘Maybe they’ve built weapons and need more?’ suggested Martinez.

  ‘Only if they’ve managed to build more reactors, which seems unlikely.’ Var shook her head. ‘I’m sure there’s a good reason and that this “Owner” of theirs has some sensible plan in mind.’ She turned and began heading away.

  ‘This “Owner” we’ve seen only once,’ Martinez called after her, ‘and who hasn’t talked to us since?’

  ‘That would be the one,’ she replied, a shiver running down her spine. There was something about that man, about that brief sight of him on tanglecom, that made any mention of him seem to reach down and press buttons deep in the core of her being. She wanted to meet him one day, and then she hoped to understand why he caused such odd reactions in her.

  12

  Cry Wolf

  The warnings of the Malthusians and promoters of environmental catastrophe have been with us, in one form or another, since the dawn of human history. They grew shrill as the media arrived to transmit their hatred of humanity around the world, and as the hungry beast of endless news fed on their trifles. They jumped on every theory or scientific study that could promote the prophecies of doom and demanded worldwide control, more regulation and the subjugation of the individual to the good of all. And it was true that a growing human population was bad for the planet, and that we polluted the air and the seas, destroyed the diversity of life, but it was also true that, by heeding their earlier cries and as new cleaner technologies came into play, we were pillorying the polluters and rebuilding ecosystems. It took the Committee, feeding on the catastrophists’ pleas for worldwide control, to kill off any sensible environmentalism. With its Soviet attitude to industry and its power base built on exploitation of the massive zero-asset population, it again raised the spectre of a dying world. A combination of leaden bureaucratic oversight and plain incompetence eventually returned us to the pollution of the twentieth century, but on a now massive scale; while the catastrophists were silenced by the very mechanisms of control they had eagerly espoused.

  Earth

  The transmiss
ion delay was irritating, and Serene very deliberately fought to quell that sense of annoyance. It was a human reaction to something impossible to control, and was merely giving in to the animal element in her psyche – indulging it. In an attempt to avoid such indulgence, she had even limited these personal face-to-face communications to once every month, for her harrying of Clay was not going to get the Scourge to its target any quicker. Besides if anything important had happened, it would turn up in his regular weekly report, which in this case it had.

  ‘Since there has been no mention of them in your weekly report, I think by now we can safely assume that Messina’s clones are either captured are dead,’ Serene said. ‘I also take it that there has been no further trouble from the troops, especially after Liang recently killed a troublemaker aboard. Was that entirely necessary? Remember, the per-unit cost of sending you all out there has been very high. I also take it that there has still been no communication from Argus. I understand that the station has made further course changes and is now decelerating into the Asteroid Belt. They are not, however, heading towards the asteroid I designated.’

  Serene paused for a moment’s thought, slightly distracted. When her garden was finished she really ought to have the communications gear moved down to it. It would be so much more relaxing down there. ‘In your previous report, you suggested that maybe they are still acceding to my demands but have chosen another asteroid. This lack of communication leads me to suspect that is not the case, and I have to wonder if their course is being set by the random impulses from a man who took a bullet to the head. Okay, reply.’

  Serene stopped there, then glanced aside at the notes on her palmtop. This lumping together of the parts of a conversation had its usefulness, but it did not enable her to read his responses so easily. It also gave people some time to formulate a response, rather than answer on the spur of the moment. She sat back, rattling her fingers against her desktop, then opened up a subscreen on her main screen to watch the ETV news. After a few minutes of that, she turned it off again, bored with news reports whose contents she already knew.