Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

by Neal Asher

  ‘Call it conscience,’ said the watching woman.

  Nightmares resumed, but Saul was aware that they were now old ones. He felt the lasers draining their linked super-capacitors, the wrench of steering thrusters, then the insufficient blast of the Mars Traveller engine. He looked on in guilty helplessness as, unprepared, people fell against the direction of acceleration, slammed into walls, ceilings or floors, hard angles, pipes, beams. A symphony of breaking bones and screams played in his head. It all seemed summed up by one figure in a spacesuit hurtling across the station enclosure, clipping a beam and spinning helplessly down towards the central asteroid before hitting it with a blast of vapour and his suit helmet tumbling away.

  Steering thrusters wrenched again, then the scene lit up with bright light as the fifty-kilo rock which the lasers had been unable to deal with, and the station had been incapable of avoiding, punched through below, turning half its mass to white-hot gas, then a further half of the remainder into molten debris as, like a bullet through a drinks can, it speared on through an accommodation unit before slamming its way out through the upper enclosure. Eight people had occupied the accommodation unit. The rescuers found nothing but an oily residue of them on the walls.

  ‘Breach protocols no longer apply, people,’ someone announced finally, ‘and let me make this perfectly clear, showers are available.’

  In space all around, it seemed that the asteroid debris was slowing as that one giant red asteroid loomed closer. Like a growing steel mushroom, one of the smelting plants began to extrude itself from the station rim, the computer feedback from it again waking up that closed partition in Saul’s mind.

  He now looked for Hannah, as he always did.

  ‘Quite simply,’ said Hannah, gazing at the other woman peering out from the oval screen, ‘we were not sure of your situation there, and whether there might be those on Mars who would merely pass the information back to Earth.’

  ‘Tanglecom is secure,’ replied the same woman who had haunted Saul’s dreams. ‘I am alone, and what you tell me will remain between us. I will tell absolutely no one else.’ She paused, smiled weakly. ‘In fact, your wanting to talk to me in private like this is fortuitous, because I needed some privacy so I could send you something that may be of use to you.’

  Something seemed to flicker through Saul’s mind, then he saw Hannah turning to look at some schematics appearing on a nearby secondary screen.

  ‘What’s this?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve told lies here,’ confessed the woman. ‘When we took over this base, I claimed that Earth could get nothing to us for decades. And when Galahad revealed the Alexander, and then renamed it the Scourge, I pretended to have no previous knowledge of the craft, so obviously I want you to refrain from mentioning this in your further communications with us.’

  ‘You still haven’t told me what this stuff is,’ Hannah remarked, fixedly gazing at the small screen.

  ‘Detailed schematics of the Scourge, down to its last weld and rivet.’

  ‘You’re sure?’asked Hannah. ‘How could you possibly be in possession of these?’

  ‘I’m sure,’ replied the other woman, ‘because I built the damned thing.’

  Hannah switched her attention back to the main screen. ‘What?’

  The other woman nodded slowly. ‘I got transferred out here after my political officer came to the conclusion that I was no longer to be trusted with handling the orbital tools I was using, because I’d discovered that my husband had recently died not in an accident, but in an adjustment cell.’

  ‘I see,’ said Hannah. ‘These plans should be . . . very useful.’

  ‘Now, moving on,’ said the other woman, almost as if embarrassed by her revelation, ‘I’m also quite sure that your diversion into the Asteroid Belt, which you’ve been evasive about for some time, offers you no tactical advantage against the Scourge; rather the opposite, in fact. So, can you now tell me straight why you are really going there?’

  ‘I’d decided to trust you anyway, and now you’ve confirmed that I can.’ Hannah paused to key something into the console before her. ‘I’ve just sent you a schematic of what we’ve built aboard this station. We changed course earlier so that we could swing into the Asteroid Belt and there stop at asteroid HJI457 – which is a twenty-second-century designation for those identified as from Holocene Jupiter impact. There we must acquire the materials to complete our project – specifically ten thousand tonnes of mercury.’

  ‘You’ve decided?’ said the woman, turning her head, presumably to peer at another screen. ‘I would have thought that would be down to this “Owner” of yours.’

  Hannah showed a flash or irritation at that. ‘I don’t really like that title, Var, and I myself am currently in charge of Argus Station.’

  Var?

  ‘You don’t like it? So what do you prefer?’ Var continued looking off to one side, and then added, ‘And what the hell is that thing and why would you need that much mercury?’

  Varalia.

  ‘It’s something Rhine designed,’ said Hannah. ‘It’s based on a theorized engine called an Alcubierre warp drive.’

  The other woman returned her gaze to Hannah, her expression shocked. She obviously understood straight away what Hannah was talking about. She was obviously very quick and very bright this . . . Varalia Delex . . . for she at once continued, ‘Manoeuvring will be a problem within the Belt, but once you’re clear your problems should be over.’ She paused again to gaze at that other screen. ‘That is, if this drive actually works.’ She shook her head in irritation. ‘You said you are currently in charge of the station – so what’s this Owner of yours now doing?’

  Hannah replied, ‘The Owner, Alan Saul, is currently in a coma.’

  Further shock suffused the other woman’s expression.

  ‘Alan,’ she said, her voice catching.

  His name was so familiar coming from her mouth; just her saying it seemed to reveal some underlying structure to his mind, and out of that the memories surfaced. He now saw her walking beside him in that enclave in the Dinaric Alps of old Albania as he talked about dying, talked about escape. He remembered another escape – when they were children – from the suffocating care of their parents, out into a zero-asset area, and that glimpse of another world before the enforcers came for them and dragged them back. By groping for other such memories, he began establishing connections between the disparate parts of his mind. Finding only fragments caused a deep frustration, and made him push harder.

  A muggy day spent in the constant roar of a city arose in his mind. The triple-glazed window shut it out as his gaze slid to a large computer screen showing the exploded schematic of a fusion engine, which was assembling automatically, then shrinking down small and dropping into another schematic recognizable as that of a Mars Traveller. The woman sitting before the screen sat back, for a moment studied the wedding ring on her finger, smiled at it, then swung her chair round to face him.

  ‘Of course I can do better,’ she said.

  You were going to build spaceships . . .

  Varalia Delex, whose second name she had acquired by marriage to her husband Latham Delex. Varalia whose maiden name had been Saul.

  ‘Hello, sister,’ Saul’s voice grated, and he opened his eyes.

  Earth

  The four giant ships had been supertankers in a previous incarnation, and were the last of their kind turned out at the Port of Dalian shipyards. That they had remained functional for so long after the wells ran dry was testament to the then-innovative materials and technologies used in their construction: graphene and metals foamed on Earth before that technology really got into its stride in more suitable zero-gravity environments, new ceramics, tough new forms of glass, nano-coatings, clean-burn fission reactors and computer-controlled robots that continued maintaining those vessels during all the later years they served as floating prison ships. Now the prisoners were all dead: the ZAs killed by the Scour and the remaining SAs dying ei
ther of starvation or diseases prevalent amidst tens of thousands of rotting corpses.

  ‘I am impressed,’ said Serene, as she piloted the big aero down towards the landing deck. ‘I didn’t expect them to be ready so soon.’

  The manager of the new project was a marine biologist called Michael Palgrave, a thin severe-looking man with blond hair and a badly sunburned nose, who stood nervously behind her; Sack was in the seat behind him, arms folded and a bored expression on his lizard face.

  ‘We had the robots here, and it was simple enough to get them to strip out the cell partitions inside the old oil tanks,’ he replied. ‘We then constructed the nursery pools on the old prison floors and utilized plumbing already in place to get things started. It took longer to automate the sea-seeding system, and we have had problems with the stock.’

  ‘I understand,’ said Serene, quite happy to let the man ramble on because she was pleased with what was happening here.

  As she finally settled the aero down on the landing pad, she glanced towards land and noted the green smear extending out across ten kilometres of sea. This was why they had chosen this area for the releases. The Dubai swamps had soaked up over two hundred million Scour victims and thus become poisonously anaerobic. However, from them this algae bloom had spread out to sea, and just beyond it the sea plankton had undergone a resurgence. There was food here now: microscopic food but billions of tonnes of it. She silently thanked the erstwhile rulers of the small but wealthy country that had once lain inland.

  After surviving international crashes of the financial system with copious oil money, the rulers of Dubai had continued their project of turning their country into a tourist destination in readiness for when the oil ran out. After building the Palm Tree and the World island groups on their coastline, they became more ambitious and transformed that coastline from end to end. However, to maintain all this required the constant work of massive dredgers and underwater silt pumps the size of mosques. This was all fine while the oil money flowed and as it began to wane, when the influx of wealthy tourists took up the slack.

  Serene stepped out of the aero behind her close-protection team, Sack immediately behind her and Palgrave a step behind him. She waved the marine biologist forward to stand beside her as her various PAs and other staff also exited the aero. ‘So where first?’

  He pointed ahead to one of the new buildings erected on the hectares of deck. ‘We call it the panoquaria. It’s where we harvest eggs, milt and spores from the adult fauna and flora, and it also serves as the hatchery.’

  ‘Lead on,’ said Serene happily, flicking another glance back towards the coast, and considering the disasters that occurred there before she was born.

  The first oil-quake, which dropped the Burj Al Arab hotel and its population of four hundred and eighty billionaires into the ocean and left the Burj Khalifa tower tilted at twenty degrees, was also the first nail in the lid of the coffin constructed by Middle Eastern fundamentalism. Other nails were soon to follow. No one knew who had fired the missile at Tel Aviv from Iraq, but the warhead the ancient SCUD carried could only have come from Iran’s shiny new collection. Mossad was blamed for the detonation of a similar device in a Baghdad cellar, and was also held responsible for the air-burst biological weapon detonated over Mecca during the Hajj, but that was only after the month-long incubation period of the virus, when it started killing returning pilgrims, as well as their families and friends around them.

  After her close-protection team had checked what lay ahead, then signalled an all-clear, Serene followed Palgrave into the new building and gazed round in wonder. Along a row of tanks a group of human workers clad in hazmat suits – which were actually not protection for them but for what they were handling – were netting fish from tanks and gently squeezing milt and eggs from them into containers strapped to their waists. To her right a long, low aquarium swarmed with shrimp, while in others she spied prawns, crabs and various other crustaceans.

  As she gazed at these, Serene considered the final chapters in the disaster that occurred inland of here. Resources – it was always about resources. As it was finally recognized that the human race had passed over the Hubbert Peak – that Peak Oil had passed – and as new technologies were finally taken out of the laboratory and applied across the world, Middle Eastern fortunes began to wane as oil magnates tried to cash in by overpricing a failing resource. The result of this was that the fundamentalists hereabouts soon learned that religious tolerance began and ended at the petrol pump, and no one felt any inclination to build the new fusion reactors in lands which, in public perception, had constantly supplied the world with bearded lunatics with strap-on bombs or home-brewed biological weapons.

  When the Golden Decade came to an end in an overpopulated world where food and fresh water were running out and financial systems imploding, barren desert countries were the first to suffer, no matter how fat the bank accounts of their rulers. Then, as the nascent Committee gleefully began applying confiscatory taxes, Middle Eastern fortunes plummeted further. Here in Dubai the money eventually ran out and the island project failed, the island groups dissolving into a saltwater swamp that swallowed all the millionaire condos and tower blocks. But it was a failure Palgrave was now making use of.

  ‘The fiddler crab population here shot up just after the Scour,’ explained Palgrave, breaking into her thoughts as he pointed at a tank containing some examples of that species, ‘then it crashed with the spread of a very specific fungal infection. That’s our problem, you see. Monocultures are susceptible to that sort of thing, so we need more variety.’

  ‘I am aware of that,’ Serene replied, frowning, a little of the sunshine going out of her day, ‘which is why, as you must be aware, the Scourge has gone after Argus Station. Once we have recovered the Gene Bank data and samples, we can introduce more variety.’

  ‘Though admittedly,’ Palgrave hurriedly added, ‘every day we’re rediscovering species long thought to be extinct. All it takes is one or two surviving eggs or spores on the seabed . . .’

  There had been some cheering news over the last few months. Some old varieties of bees had been discovered building colonies in defunct agricultural plants – bees thought to have been wiped out in the twenty-first century by mite infections. Serene often found herself now wondering if Earth’s biosphere could recover without all that stuff from the Gene Bank. However, every time her hopes were raised, something else came along and dashed them. The Mediterranean octopus was one example. Amazingly it still existed, yet the proof of that was only washed up on the shore after big infrastructure crashes in the Peloponnese had led to a case-hardening plant dumping a few billion gallons of toxic waste into the sea.

  From the panoquaria they headed down below decks to the nursery tanks, all swarming with fish fry, crustaceans, mollusc larvae and seaweed spores. This place gratifyingly smelt of life, of renewal, of new beginnings.

  ‘It’s begun,’ said Palgrave, pointing out one tank as it began to drain, its tonnes of fish fry draining out through metre-diameter pipes to outlets all along the sides of this erstwhile supertanker. She followed him along two kilometres of aisles, never feeling any of the inclination to boredom she felt in scramjet or space-plane construction plants. At one point, noting their lack of enthusiasm, she dismissed her PAs back up to the deck, retaining only Sack and her close protection team. By the time, four hours later, she reached an elevator leading back up to the deck, many of the nursery tanks had emptied and were now refilling with filtered and purified seawater.

  It had begun; the renewal of Earth had really begun.

  As they came back up onto the deck, Palgrave put his fingers up to his fone, then stumbled. He suddenly looked even paler than before, as he turned to stare at her with terrified eyes.

  ‘A problem?’ she enquired, immediately recognizing his reaction.

  He glanced to one side, towards the distant deck rail. ‘There was always the possibility—’

  She held up a hand to s
ilence him. ‘What is the problem?’

  ‘I have to check something.’ Palgrave started to back away.

  ‘Bring him,’ she said, turning and heading towards the rail.

  Palgrave let out a yelp of surprise and she glanced back to see two of her team grab him and begin dragging him after her. Heat haze shimmered over the deck ahead and the sunlight seemed suddenly too bright. Sweat immediately plastered her blouse to her back and she began to feel extremely irritated. She groped in her top pocket for her sunglasses, put them on, then quickly took them off again to wipe off the smeary fingerprints with a tissue. It was so difficult ever to obtain answers that weren’t utterly distorted by the self-interest of her employees. Putting her sunglasses back on as she reached the edge of the ship, she rested her hands on the hot graphene rail and gazed first in puzzlement, then in growing horror at the scene before her.

  ‘The pumps,’ Palgrave said miserably, ‘they’ve stirred up something from the ocean bed.’

  Hectares of ocean were now covered with a scum of dead and dying fish. Nurtured inside this ship, raised healthy and ready to begin their task of renewal, they’d been pumped straight out into poison. Serene reached up to raise her sunglasses, scrubbed away tears, then slipping the glasses back into place she turned her gaze on Palgrave.

  Of course, the man hung dejectedly between the two enforcers, and fully expected to die. She also noted that every one of her protection team, and Sack too, expected her to give the order, and were only waiting to learn how she wanted Palgrave killed.

  ‘Release him,’ she said.