Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

by Neal Asher

  Beyond her the corridor was a mess. A hole a metre across had been punched through the wall; whatever made it had come down at an angle, so as to take away most of the floor. Jagged twists of hot metal splayed out from around the edges of the initial hole, insulation hanging like moss below it, and the whole area was now iced with fire-retardant foam. Clay walked up between both the holes and peered into them in turn. The one in the wall was only a few centimetres deep, having been otherwise filled with breach sealant, but the one in the floor went down at an angle for at least twenty metres before terminating at more breach sealant. It seemed likely that whatever had hit the ship had cut right through it.

  Hearing a sound behind him, he turned quickly, almost feeling panic. When he saw a maintenance team arriving, hauling sheet metal and a welding unit, he turned away and quickly picked up his pace, only relaxing a little when the bridge airlock closed behind him.

  ‘How bad?’ he asked, as he strapped himself into his acceleration chair.

  ‘Bad enough,’ said Scotonis. ‘It was a mistake to try and head through it.’

  Clay gazed at the captain for a moment. There seemed something odd about him, something different, but for a moment he couldn’t quite figure out what. Then, with a sinking sensation in his gut, he saw that Scotonis had removed his strangulation collar – which seemed like a statement of future intent. Clay shook his head, trying to dismiss what that implied. Best to focus on the immediate problems.

  They’d watched Messina’s space plane head out and moor to two asteroids in turn. Resolution had been good enough for them to see the warheads that the EVA team had secured to each one. Trove had given the opinion that to divert around the debris clouds the explosions would certainly generate would add at least two days to their journey, and the decision to do that had been deferred until a tactical assessment could be made. Unfortunately they had all been due to send their latest reports to Galahad, and there was no way any of them could get away with neglecting to mention this development.

  ‘She’s not going to like this,’ said Clay. ‘By how much is this going to delay our arrival now?’ He glanced at Trove.

  ‘Maybe a day,’ she replied.

  Galahad had replied very quickly. An Earth-based tactical assessment put their chances of getting hit by something at above fifty per cent, but their chances of being completely destroyed at below twenty per cent. They must not change course; they must take the quickest and most direct route to Argus Station. She had then gone on to explain why.

  ‘And even in that short time,’ said Clay, ‘Galahad reckons they might manage to start up this inertia-less drive and escape.’

  The other three exchanged sceptical glances.

  ‘You don’t believe her?’ Clay asked.

  ‘Do you?’ spat Scotonis. ‘Which is it? Some admittedly technically adept rebels have genuinely managed to build a fantasy space drive, or a psychotic dictator, showing increasing signs of losing her grip on reality, has finally tipped over the edge?’

  ‘It’s the latter, for sure,’ said Trove, before Clay could speak. ‘You just can’t fuck with causality like that. Yeah, there’ve been lots of interesting theories, but they are all over-complications aimed at a desired result. You don’t do science like that. You don’t twist your maths because it’s not giving you the answer you want. I know, because I’ve seen what happens.’

  She sounded quite bitter on the subject, Clay thought.

  ‘How do you know?’ he asked

  ‘I originally trained as a physicist and astrophysicist, but I ended up here,’ she said. ‘I pushed for it because by then I’d given up in the so-called academic world. The only advances we’ve made on Earth over the last half-century have been more through luck than judgement. Nothing is discovered when your political officer is telling you what your results must be.’

  ‘That’s nonsense,’ said Clay. ‘What about . . . what about Alan Saul and what he has become?’

  ‘Yeah, some meagre advances on the technology we already had a hundred years ago,’ she snapped. ‘Our technology and our scientific knowledge once had some momentum it took the Committee decades to kill.’

  Clay turned back to Scotonis. ‘This is all beside the point,’ he said. ‘Galahad will be contacting us again soon. She may even be sending a signal to a few selected implants or collars right now. You have directly disobeyed her.’

  Scotonis shrugged. ‘She can’t kill us any longer, but another lump of rock like that last one could, and we were only into the very edge of the cloud.’

  Clay felt no inclination to argue with that, but the captain’s attitude seemed to confirm that the man had no intention of ever putting his implant back in. And that he fully intended to return to Earth and bomb Galahad herself from orbit. Here then was Clay’s penalty for telling the truth: his life was now in the hands of an angry and vengeful man.

  However, the previous message from Galahad seemed also to confirm that Clay had made the right move. Seizing the Gene Bank data and samples seemed a difficult enough task as it was, but the plan for disabling and then assaulting the station without wrecking this mythical space drive and without killing this Professor Jasper Rhine made it nigh impossible. Galahad might as well have demanded that they capture the station without knocking any leaves off the trees in the Arboretum cylinder.

  ‘Perhaps we should just forget about attacking Argus at all,’ he suddenly suggested.

  ‘No,’ said Scotonis, ‘we complete our mission. We assault the station.’

  Clay studied the man carefully but couldn’t read him. Certainly there was something Scotonis wasn’t telling him, didn’t sufficiently trust him to reveal. Clay now firmly believed that Scotonis’s main aim was to return to Earth and attack Galahad, so why would he bother with this risky assault on the station?

  Argus

  The tone, that perpetual sound of the station that the mind tuned out after being here for any length of time, had somehow changed. Hannah remembered experiencing an earthquake when she had been working at the enclave in the Dinaric Alps, and this sound reminded her of that event. In the case of the earthquake it was like thunder, but underscored by a feeling of huge movement that seemed to penetrate to her bones. This new sound reminded her of an old jet turbine steadily winding up to speed, but deeper in pitch, with hints of vast heavy movement and the unavoidable sensation that she was sitting right inside the turbine itself. Or perhaps she was just being overly melodramatic, for if she hadn’t known where the sound was coming from, she probably wouldn’t have put that interpretation on it.

  She stretched out her hand and shut down her screens. The samples she had taken from herself, from Rhine, Le Roque and the Saberhagens were all growing well. Given another twenty days, they could be inserted in aerogel matrices and force-grown to occupy them completely. However, for them to work as backups, those people would need hardware inside their skulls so that they could make a connection. And for them and any others on this station to have their crack at immortality, they first had to survive the next few days. The Scourge was now just two days away from them; meanwhile Rhine’s vortex generator had built up most of its required momentum. Shortly it would be time for Chang, their pilot, to take his foot off the clutch.

  Standing up, Hannah had to catch hold of the back of her chair to stop herself sailing up towards the ceiling. Despite Arcoplex Two now being all but stationary, and with zero gravity inside it, she had forgotten that fact. Carefully ensuring her gecko boots were properly engaging, she headed for the door and then for the exit from the arcoplex. The top of Tech Central still protruded from the station enclosure, and the view from there would be the best. Hannah had decided she wanted to see what a space-time bubble looked like.

  In the arcoplex corridors she noted how others were on the move too, some of them clearly worried and hurrying back to their apartments, all clad in spacesuits or plain survival suits. Others were securing loose equipment, battening down the hatches. As she reached the airloc
k elevator, there was a resounding boom and she realized that the arcoplex brake had finally been applied.

  Outside the arcoplex, similar activity was visible but with fewer signs of anxiety. Robots were still at work tying down unsecured equipment or finishing welding jobs, while others were forming themselves into interlocked masses at beam junctions or up against various enclosed units located within the station structure.

  On entering the upper control room of Tech Central, she saw that most of the usual crowd was here, all secured in acceleration chairs in front of various consoles. She headed over to Saul, who stood by a line of unoccupied consoles, with his arms folded as he gazed out the windows at the view across the newly fashioned outer skin of the station towards the space-plane docks.

  ‘I see that everything is being secured,’ she said, ‘just as it is before the Traveller engine is ignited.’

  He flicked a glance at her. ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘This Rhine drive,’ she said, slightly uncomfortable with this new expression, ‘is an inertia-less drive, so we should feel no effects of acceleration or deceleration at all.’

  ‘The gap between what should happen and what will happen is somewhat variable when you’re fucking with causality,’ he replied. ‘Not taking any precautions would be arrogant.’

  Hannah managed to stop herself snorting at that, and instead asked, ‘How long until it fires up?’

  He stabbed a thumb back towards the consoles at which Rhine, Brigitta and Chang were sitting. ‘Rhine is doing the calculations now. I estimate he’ll start running the eddy currents in about two minutes, then charge the EM field shortly after that.’

  ‘You estimate?’

  ‘Yes, I estimate.’ Saul allowed himself a grimace. ‘Even now the vortex generator is running outside calculated parameters, so he’s having to recalculate perpetually.’

  Hannah focused on the view, blinked and rubbed at her eyes, then realized there was no problem with her vision. The rim of the station did seem to be higher than a few minutes ago, and the enclosure skin, which only a moment earlier had seemed to slope down from them, now seemed to curve upwards. Also, out at the rim itself, something like a heat haze was shimmering in vacuum.

  ‘Weird visual effect,’ she said, hoping for some explanation.

  ‘Yes,’ was Saul’s curt rejoinder.

  Hannah folded her arms, too, feeling cold and thoroughly vulnerable. Secure inside Arcoplex Two, it had been easy to forget that she was just a fragile creature kept safe from the indifference of a lethal universe by only a few layers of metal. Now, looking out into the night as they played around with fundamental physics, she couldn’t help but feel they might make the universe just a little less indifferent to them, which did not strike her as a great idea.

  ‘Introducing the eddy currents now,’ Rhine announced.

  The general muttering throughout the control room abruptly stilled, then Le Roque began making announcements over the station’s PA system, ordering all tasks to cease and for everyone to get secured. Even as he spoke, the background noise began ramping up. It seemed almost as if someone had just opened the air inputs on a scramjet ready to take over from the turbine. She glanced round, then jumped as Saul reached out and touched her arm. He gestured to the two empty acceleration chairs next to the nearby consoles. Hannah quickly sat down in one and strapped herself in, while Saul did the same beside her.

  ‘What happens now?’ she asked.

  ‘We encyst in the universe, and we move,’ he replied, interlacing his fingers over his stomach as if he was feeling perfectly relaxed about all this.

  Hannah switched her gaze again to the view. That odd visual effect was now gone, but another quite unpleasant effect was impinging upon her. Everything she could see out there – in fact, everything she could see in here too – seemed stretched taut and tensioned to an unbearable level, as if at any moment it might snap and just curl up into nothingness. Someone screamed, a short panicking sound, and Hannah looked round to see the woman Leeran covering her face with her hands.

  ‘Bringing up EM radiation,’ Rhine announced excitedly.

  Now even the stars changed, abruptly dimming and changing colour, speckling vacuum like amethysts, then slowly shifting to a deep indigo, then blue, then to an odd mouldy green. As that green tinge began to lighten, Hannah realized they were running through the entire visible spectrum. When their colour became a gleaming topaz, the underlying sound changed, smoothing out, and Hannah’s ears began to hurt. Next the stars turned to rubies, gleamed intensely bright – and winked out. Now utterly impenetrable blackness lay outside.

  ‘We’re in,’ said Rhine, his tone hushed but the words carrying despite the constant din.

  Next came a shuddering crash that shook the chair Hannah was sitting in. She glanced enquiringly at Saul, who shrugged and observed, ‘Slight fluctuation there. We just lost about four metres of the space docks.’

  Slight fluctuation?

  ‘Chang,’ he continued, ‘move us now.’

  ‘Will do,’ Chang replied. ‘One million kilometres, as discussed. I need those updates, Jasper.’

  ‘I’m feeding them through now,’ Rhine replied. ‘You should have a full update in twenty seconds.’

  Saul turned to Hannah, then with a tilt of his head he indicated the blackness outside the station. ‘Just beyond that there are massive tidal forces,’ he said. ‘In essence, with this drive, we really won’t need the weapons the Saberhagens built.’

  ‘We could just ram the Scourge,’ suggested Hannah.

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded and gave her a cold smile. ‘That would knock out the space-time bubble, but there wouldn’t be anything left of that ship to bother us.’

  ‘So why didn’t you do that?’

  ‘Perhaps I’m getting soft.’

  ‘I’m updated now,’ said Chang. ‘Commencing field shift.’

  Was it fear that made her feel so hot now, Hannah wondered, then realized that it had grown very warm inside the control centre. Next an arc-bright light opened around the rim of the station, and an effect much like the Northern Lights wiped out the blackness. Another crash ensued, her safety straps bit into her, and surrounding space filled with fire, shattered rock and laceworks of glowing magma.

  Scourge

  One of the side-burn fusion engines gave its hollow roar and something tried to shove Clay into the corridor wall. He paused there, gasping as he waited for it to end. What the hell was Scotonis doing?

  The burn finished and Clay checked his watch. The time was 10.15 a.m. ship time, since they had retained earth time aboard. He wiped the sweat off his forehead and wished now that he had done the same as Scotonis and removed his collar completely. Then he would have felt absolutely sure. As he set off again and passed through the damaged stretch of corridor, he further considered Galahad’s recent transmission to him. She’d been sitting in a garden somewhere, and had seemed calm and balanced. Her words, however, had reached right into his gut and twisted.

  ‘Obviously it was Captain Scotonis’s decision to change course,’ she had remarked, ‘so to a limited extent I understand your lack of intervention. You probably told yourself that, being no expert in the dangers of space travel, you should defer to him. You should not have reacted thus. I gave you risk percentages that you should have perfectly understood, but which you ignored. That the ship might have been struck by asteroid debris did not change those percentages, Clay Ruger, and now you must be punished for your inaction. This will be a sharp reminder for Scotonis. Enjoy the time you have left, Clay Ruger. You will die at precisely 10.30 a.m. ship time.’ She paused, turned to gaze at something else for a moment, then turned back. ‘And it will be slow, Clay, because that is the best I can do to adequately punish your betrayal of me and of Mother Earth.’

  It was almost as if she had put him aboard in the first place just so, at some future time, she could deliver an ‘object lesson’. Punishing someone lower in the hierarchy wouldn’t appear shocking enough, while
punishing someone high up in the crew would hinder the mission’s chances of success. The words ‘sacrificial goat’ sprang to mind.

  As Clay entered the bridge, Scotonis, Trove and Cookson turned to gaze at him. He saw that all three of them had now completely removed their collars. He hesitated: maybe he should just turn round and head as fast as he could to the engineering shop and employ the diamond shear there. No, the reality was that if his collar wasn’t disabled, then trying to slice it off would be fatal. If it was disabled, then he had no problem and could remove it later. He entered, aware of them still watching him as he sat down and strapped himself in. He noticed that Scotonis now wore a sidearm. Maybe this would be Clay’s last resort if his collar was still functioning?

  ‘I take it Galahad told you her response to our course change?’ he asked.

  ‘She did,’ said Scotonis. ‘Obviously she considered a political officer less essential to the success of our mission out here than me or any of my crew.’

  ‘Obviously,’ said Clay bitterly. ‘Did she happen to notice that you weren’t wearing a collar?’

  ‘I put it back on whenever I record a report for her,’ said Scotonis.

  Clay acknowledged that with a dip of his head, then, finally looking up from his straps, asked, ‘Why another course change?’

  ‘The situation is no longer the same,’ Scotonis replied, gesturing towards the panoramic screen before them. ‘This is a high-resolution recording of what happened just ten minutes ago.’

  Clay focused on the multi-screen. The frozen image of Argus Station lay clearly visible in a single frame, with the red blur of what he assumed must be the asteroid they were mining lying just behind it.

  ‘Okay,’ he said, and Scotonis set the recording running.

  The Argus station just continued hanging in space, the image unremarkable for a few seconds, then things beginning to change. Any light from behind it faded away, until it lay in a circle of blackness. It distorted, as if that circle outlined the position of a concave lens, then it was gone, completely enclosed in a large silvery bubble. It was a flattened sphere dimpled at the pole, on the side they could see, rather like a doughnut whose central hole had just about closed up, while right on the edge of that bubble some sort of explosion ensued, then the image froze again.