Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

  An angled surface came up at her hard and she turned her shoulder to take the impact, hoping to roll with it. Dust exploded around her and she went tumbling through it, blind. Next she was in free fall again, glimpsing the cradle rails far over to her left. They’d run the lift straight up the steepest section of cliff, but she was well away from that now. Debris fell all about her and then she was in against the sloping cliff face, trying to slow herself with palms and soles, rocks falling with her seeming to touch her gently then bounce away.

  Then at all once she was tumbling in a great cloud of dust and rubble, instinctively grabbing and trying to slow herself, expecting some bone-crunching impact at any moment. It seemed to go on forever but could only have lasted a few seconds. Twenty-three seconds she calculated for a straight drop, but overall this had to have been longer. She tumbled out of the dust cloud on a forty-degree slope, loose rocks racing her down, shale dragging at her limbs . . . then she was sliding, coming to a stop.

  Var lay there panting as the dust cloud caught up with her like a shroud, then she quickly ducked her head and covered it with her arms. Having survived that fall she did not need some boulder to come slamming into her helmet. An age seemed to pass.

  ‘Well, I wonder if you survived that,’ said Rhone from above.

  He had to be peering over the edge now, or line-of-sight suit radio wouldn’t have worked.

  Var considered replying, then thought better of it. Bullets could travel the same distance she had travelled, but so much faster.

  ‘It doesn’t really matter if you did survive,’ he continued thoughtfully. ‘Even if you could manage to climb back up here, you’d have a long walk back to base – somewhat longer than your air supply.’

  The dust rushed on past, the thin air around her clearing.

  ‘Yes,’ said Rhone, ‘dump him over.’

  Something glinted as it tumbled down the slanted cliff face. They’d just thrown Lopomac over the edge. She watched him disappear in the dust and debris created by his impacts against the cliff face, then a big explosion of dust as he hit the bottom. The anger surging inside her was strong and bitter, but frustrated. She had survived the fall but the likelihood of her surviving afterwards and getting some payback was remote. Climbing the cliff to the top would take her at least an hour and, if she wasn’t shot while climbing, by the time she arrived there Rhone and his crew would be gone.

  Optimize my chances, she thought.

  Heaving herself upright she felt her ribs protesting. Inevitably she had cracked a few of them but they didn’t hurt enough to signal that they were completely broken. She tentatively started making her way across the slope, causing little landslides with every step, expecting pain from some further quarter, but there was none. Was that lucky? It meant that if there was some way for her to survive, she had a better chance of discovering it. However, it also meant that, if she was doomed, she was doomed to die of suffocation.

  She picked up her pace across the slope towards the settling dust cloud where Lopomac had fallen, finally finding him buried up to his waist in rubble and powdery sand, his busted-open helmet still issuing vapour as the Martian atmosphere freeze-dried him. She dragged him out of the debris and then took everything from his suit that might be of value to her. First his oxygen bottle, fitted over hers to give her a further eighteen hours of air, then all his suit spares and patches, super-caps for his suit’s power supply, his water bottle, a small ration-paste pack and a geologist’s rock hammer. Then she stepped back and gazed down at him. She wouldn’t waste time burying him – and knew he would have understood.

  Now what?

  Even with the extra air, she would not be able to walk the distance back to Antares Base. She only had one real option, therefore. There was more than enough air to get her to the remains of the old trench base which, as she recollected, had often been used as a supply station, so there was a chance she might find more air stored there. After that there was another option. Opening not far from the old trench base, an underground fault stretched into the cave in which Antares Base was being relocated. If she could find some more oxygen, maybe she could use that as her route back, which would get her close without being seen. Then, given the chance, she would need to be as ruthless as she had been with Ricard.

  Var turned and headed downslope in big gouging strides that brought a lot of the slope down with her, determinedly refusing to think too deeply about any doubts, because to do so might result in her just sitting down on a rock and waiting to die. Within a very short time she reached the bottom, but pressing on to get herself ahead of the landfall that had accompanied her down. She then headed along the base of the chasma, and soon began to notice human footprints here and there. Next, some paths made by one-time residents of the trench base became distinguishable, until she passed an area scattered with cairns composed of rounded black stones, and realized she had stumbled upon the trench-base graveyard. Had she not known precisely where she was she might have assumed from her surroundings that she was walking through a mountain gorge, rather than a canyon. As she progressed, the rising sun slowly ate away the shadows from the cliff faces and slopes, revealing colourful layers of sedimentary rock and rare layers of obsidian jutting out like black bracket fungi. She would enjoy a few hours of the sunlight, which would save her some power – maybe an irrelevance since her air supply would run out before her power supply, and she would suffocate before she froze.

  Further signs of previous human habitation began to appear, including the stripped-out hulk of an ATV resting on its side. This was one she already knew about, since a report existed in the Antares Base system suggesting that it should be retrieved for its reusable metals. This meant she was only a few kilometres away from the old base; in fact, several of the boulders from the landslip that had destroyed most of it were now visible. Impatient now, she picked up her pace and, trailing a cloud of dust, soon arrived by a wall built of regolith blocks. After a moment spent surveying her surroundings, she got herself oriented and headed for the one building that was still standing – a long structure with a roof fashioned out of curved bonded-regolith slabs. The edifice looked like an ancient Anderson shelter, and it was here that the personnel from Antares Base usually kept a cache of supplies.

  The airlock and windows had not been removed from this structure, and a solar panel on the roof topped up a super-cap inside, which in turn provided enough power to provide light. However, there wasn’t enough power available to run the airlock’s hydraulic motors, so Var had to struggle to open it manually. Within a moment she stepped inside, the low-power LED lights flickering to life in the ceiling, and looked around.

  Against one wall stood an old-style computer, cables leading from it snaking up the wall to penetrate the roof. Var felt a sudden surge of excitement as, only then, the realization dawned on her that the solar panel was not all that was installed on the roof. There was a satellite dish up there, too. She headed straight over and pulled out the single desk chair, and sat down. The keyboard, of an antique push-button type, had a brush lying on top of it, the need for which she understood the moment she picked it up. The keyboard was thick with dust, likewise the single-pane perspex screen standing behind it. She brushed them off meticulously, then finally hit the power button. The single-pane screen went from translucence to blank white . . . then a menu appeared. If she was right, here was a satellite uplink – and therefore a way she could communicate with Antares Base. She should be able to get hold of Carol, or else Martinez, maybe get something in motion even before Rhone got back there.

  Words appeared on the screen: NICE TRY, VAR.

  She gazed at them with a feeling of hopelessness overcoming her. Rhone must have taken precautions, and now he knew she was alive.

  AMAZING THAT YOU SURVIVED THE FALL.

  Did he want to chat now? She sat back and just stared at the screen. He continued:

  WITH THE OXYGEN YOU TOOK FROM LOPOMAC, I’D GIVE YOU MAYBE FORTY HOURS. THERE’RE NO OTHER SUP
PLIES OF OXYGEN DOWN THERE. SORRY, VAR, BUT I CAN’T LET YOU KILL US ALL. I’M SHUTTING DOWN THE SATELLITE RECEIVER NOW.

  She stared at the words, desperately thinking of some reply that might change his verdict.

  WAIT, she typed. DO YOU REALLY THINK SOMEONE WHO HAS KILLED BILLIONS ON EARTH IS GOING TO LET YOU LIVE? She hit ‘send’ and waited. A loading bar appeared briefly, then blinked out.

  UPLINK DISCONNECTED were the next words to appear.

  Var just sat staring, angry and frustrated. She just wanted to get Rhone within her grasp, but now knew that would never happen. She was dead, there was no doubt about it. She would do everything she could to survive, but just forty hours of oxygen was nowhere near enough to get her back to Antares Base on foot.

  However, while still gazing blankly at the screen, she realized that there was at least one blow she could strike against Rhone. She reached out and flicked the screen back to the main menu, from there entered the uplink menu, and after a moment found ‘dish positioning’. After studying that for a moment, she keyed through to an astrogation program and ran a coordinates search, found what she was looking for and input some coordinates. The dish on the roof repositioned; the power drain involved was enough to knock out a few of the interior lights.

  After two hours fifty-three minutes of further rotation of Mars, the dish would be in the right position. If she connected up the super-caps she had taken from Lopomac’s corpse, she should then be able to keep it on target for the ensuing six hours. An icon down in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen indicated that it possessed an integral cam. All she needed to do now was decide how she would inform the people on Argus of the betrayal here.

  Argus

  At the base of the smelting-plant dock, the giant ore carrier looked like the framework of an ancient zeppelin standing on its end, attached by one of the cables leading out to the smelting plant itself. However, a small compartment occupied the lower end, and it could be reached by an extendible airlock tube. This was how those working out at the smelter – any who weren’t robots – travelled back and forth between it and the station.

  Hannah gazed up towards the plant itself, silhouetted against the lit-up asteroid. A half-metre-wide ribbed pipe carrying the mercury flow extended down from this, well outside the path of the ore carrier. All along its length were reaction motors, computer controlled to keep it in position against any station or asteroid drift. Presently the flow rate measured at under ten tonnes an hour – and that wasn’t enough.

  Hannah turned away from the porthole and continued along the corridors which, having to skirt an evacuated area of the outer rim, would eventually get her to that same airlock tube. She had tried to contact both Leeran and Pike but received no response. An attempt to question Le Roque on her concerns had elicited just a shrug and, ‘He knows what he’s doing.’ Now she felt she had to get some answers, and just retreating to her laboratory wasn’t an answer.

  Eventually she reached the airlock tube and boarded the ore carrier. It jerked into motion once the airlock tube detached, and rose up towards the smelting plant. A hard vibration within the carrier as it rose impelled Hannah to grab hold of one of the handles on the wall to steady herself. She didn’t know if such a vibration was usual, never having travelled this route before. Twenty minutes later, she left the carrier compartment and ascended a tubeway taking her up to the control block. Even here that vibration persisted, and Hannah assumed it must be down to the processes they were currently employing.

  She found Pike and Leeran inside. The former stood facing the inward windows that overlooked the interior of the plant, while the latter was working at a bank of screens that displayed various views of the asteroid.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ said Pike, without turning. ‘I just read your messages. At our present rate, the Scourge will be here before we’ve finished.’ Now he turned. ‘But that will change.’

  ‘How?’ asked Hannah, as she removed her helmet, feeling slightly uncomfortable in asking. She wasn’t in charge of Argus Station any more but, while browsing the station stats, she had found herself unable to ignore that the refining rate simply wasn’t fast enough, and that intended alterations to the process still wouldn’t speed it up sufficiently. It seemed that when you started taking responsibility for something, it was difficult to give it up.

  ‘The ovens aren’t anywhere near up to capacity yet,’ Pike replied, ‘but we’ll soon sort that out.’

  ‘As I understand it,’ said Hannah, ‘you’re about to send over another mining robot – the one that’s being transported up from underneath Tech Central right now.’

  ‘That’s true,’ replied Pike, almost dismissively.

  ‘So that will effectively double the rate,’ Hannah suggested, again making the mental calculations she had made already, just to confirm. ‘That’s still not enough, as we’ll only have three-quarters of the mercury we need before the Scourge arrives.’

  ‘Yes, but those are the only mining robots it’s feasible to use,’ said Pike.

  Hannah just stared at him, appalled. How was it possible that she was here having to ask these questions? Why hadn’t Saul seen this and done something about it, rather than go gallivanting off into the Belt, as he had?

  ‘Is that all you can say?’ she asked.

  ‘He is merely stating the facts, Hannah.’ Saul’s voice issued from the PA speakers near to hand. ‘We could move one of the big mining robots out, but that would probably take us a week to achieve.’

  ‘Where are you?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘Just coming in to dock.’

  ‘So, tell me, how the hell are we going to get enough ore mined quickly enough?’

  Saul simply said, ‘Show her, Pike.’

  Pike gestured Hannah over and pointed into the plant’s interior. Extending along one wall below, an ore tube was feeding the distributor into a row of oblate furnaces. The distributor itself was a large rectangular container that divided up the ore and impelled it, by Archimedean screw, down into each furnace. The furnaces meanwhile had been disconnected from the usual processes they served in this area of the plant: the ceramic pipes and metal-foaming tanks, the carousels of moulds; the wire, bar stock and sheet-making machines. Instead, new pipes had been connected to the furnaces, leading to rotary pumps then to cylindrical purification columns. From these, further pipes entered a single large pump from which extended the half-metre-wide pipe she had seen outside.

  ‘There,’ said Pike, pointing upwards.

  ‘What am I looking at?’

  ‘The installation hatch is opening,’ he replied. ‘The interior is normally pressurized, so we had to make some adjustments to open it up to vacuum. Now it’s ready.’ He glanced at her. ‘Do you feel them?’

  ‘Feel what?’ Hannah asked, irritated.

  ‘The vibration.’

  ‘I thought that—’

  Hannah now saw the big hatch opening, where Pike had pointed. It was just wide enough now for the first construction robot to come through, hauling a huge compressed-fibre sack. It attached this to the neck of a port in the upper surface of the distributor and, like a spider handling a silk-shrouded corpse in its web, squeezed the contents down into the distributor. By the time it detached the sack, another construction robot was attaching its own sack to yet another port, and had begun emptying it.

  ‘They started arriving just after you began heading up here,’ said Pike, gesturing back towards Leeran. ‘I thought you knew.’

  Hannah turned to look at the other woman, who now sat back with her fingers interlaced behind her head and a smile on her face. The screen she was looking at displayed a view of the entire asteroid, now resembling a fallen apple covered with steel ants. Hannah at once understood that these vibrations were nothing to do with the usual processes conducted within the plant, but signified the arrival of Saul’s robot army – now diverted to the task of mining.

  ‘So everything is under control,’ she said.

  Pike shrugged, and it
was Saul who replied. ‘If the two little surprises I’ve left out there sufficiently slow down the Scourge, and if the drive works as predicted and doesn’t fry us with Hawking radiation, then our chances have significantly improved.’

  A super-mind he might possess, Hannah decided, but he still needed to learn a little diplomacy.

  Earth

  The garden was now finished: water tinkled down an obsidian waterfall into a long pool two metres wide, which extended from one side of the erstwhile torture chamber to the other. An arched bridge crossed the centre of this pool, taking Serene from what she had called the jungle garden into her own little hideaway. Here, a Japanese pagoda shaded her from the output of the sun pipes above. Underneath it, she sat in a comfortable lounger, which could be turned by means of a ball control lodged in one arm to face any of the four big free-standing screens positioned amid the surrounding undergrowth.

  All morning she had worked with her fold-across console and a small screen, checking reports, approving actions, sending queries, keeping her finger – as best she could – on the pulse of a busily functioning world. However, it was gratifying that her underlings were now handling most of the detail, and much less was getting flagged for her personal attention than before. It was possible for her to go for hours at a time now without having to respond to some query, and she utilized that extra time well, studying her world, flicking from one scene to another on her screens, trawling up data that was of special interest to her, life-affirming data. Sometimes she even managed to grab herself some hours of natural sleep.

  The screen she was presently studying showed various views and data displays from the Mars Traveller construction station. Every now and again an image or a report would appear on one of the subdivided screen sections, a colour-coded marker up in one corner signifying its degree of importance. Generally all of these were low on the spectrum, and quite often blinked out again as soon as one of her staff began dealing with them. They would only be passed on to her if some major decision was required that directly affected the goals she had laid out. The commissioning of the station was going well. Already most of the fusion reactors were up and running, and fresh spaceship components were being manufactured. Admittedly there had been, thus far, nine hundred and sixty deaths in the process, but not one of those who had died was irreplaceable.