Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

  The adjoining subscreen showed views of the Asian clearance, and they were quite astounding. After a recent monsoon, the soil exposed between the mountains of unburied rubble had sprouted plants in an almost desperate profusion. It was as if the spores and seeds that had been trapped under the stony layers of the now-obliterated sprawls had at last seen their chance, and thrown all their effort into new growth. It was as if Serene had at last allowed Gaia to breathe. But, again, the teams of biologists she had sent out there reported back much the same as did other teams elsewhere: a lack of diversity, acres of plant life consisting mainly of human food crops, very few pollinating insects, a dearth of rotifers and the kind of subterranean life necessary to return the soil to its optimum condition.

  The same was true of the Madagascan clearance, even though it was still some way behind the Asian one; but the story in the surrounding seas was a better one. Serene had ordered demolition teams in to destroy the walls of the thousands of square kilometres of west-coast fish farms. Changes in tidal patterns and a subsequent algae bloom had led to a small resurgence of sea life between Madagascar and the coast of Africa. Palgrave’s opinion on this wasn’t all that enthusiastic, since that sea life generally consisted of genetically modified sea foods that were not sufficiently diverse to avoid being swiftly destroyed by some viral infection.

  They still desperately needed the Gene Bank data and samples, which, since recent events on Mars, was now the Scourge’s only mission.

  This last thought focused her attention on the next screen. Four screen sections there showed frozen images of four people. These represented reports from Clay Ruger, Captain Scotonis, Commander Liang and – ever since Serene’s private message to the woman – from Pilot Officer Trove. She had hoped that by demanding weekly reports from Trove, whom Clay had punished with her own cabin inducer, she would get a truer picture of the situation aboard the Scourge. Trove would surely report any misbehaviour on Ruger’s part. However, all the latest reports had been perfectly in order and everything seemed to be proceeding according to plan. All four reports had been quite similar in nature, which seemed somewhat suspicious, but Serene put that down to her own ‘leadership paranoia’.

  Yet another screen section showed the current Hubble image of Argus Station, which, just like any broadcast coming from out there, was always going to be nearly half an hour old. Her experts had told Serene that the asteroid it was moored to consisted almost entirely of mercury ore, but few of them seemed to be able to come up with a plausible reason why it was being mined. But maybe this related to some startling news she had received from Rhone on Mars, who had apparently found something in Var Delex’s files which in turn related to an earlier report from a professor working in the South African Region nanotech development division. The professor’s verbal report she kept readily available to her on this same screen, and she now set it running again.

  The grey-haired black man resembled a screen actor of the twenty-first century. Serene couldn’t remember the actor’s name, but did remember that he had played the role of an American president, when that nation still existed, in a film she had watched during her history lessons. There had been something reassuringly mature about him, and the same applied to this Professor Calder.

  ‘It is probably not generally known, because it was one of Messina’s private projects, that Professor Jasper Rhine was aboard Argus Station when it was stolen,’ Calder had said.

  ‘And what precisely is this Professor Rhine’s field of study?’ Serene had asked.

  ‘His speciality is zero-point energy or, more specifically, realspace interaction with the zero-point field . . . that’s about as close as I can get, because then it all gets pretty complicated.’

  ‘I know what zero-point energy is,’ Serene responded. ‘You forget that my own speciality was nanotech.’

  ‘Yes, quite so,’ he had responded. ‘When he was down here with us, Rhine was working on Casimir batteries and quantum-entangled materials that might lead to instantaneous communication. He did actually construct his tangle boxes, as he called them. One was transported to Mars and the other remained here on Earth. When they didn’t work, Messina had him moved to Argus Station to conduct research into . . . erm, the more esoteric areas involving the implications of zero-point energy.’

  ‘I think I can guess what that was, knowing Messina’s obsession with immortality,’ Serene had replied. ‘But how does all this relate to that device reportedly now being built in the rim of Argus Station?’

  ‘Rhine was a serious researcher and development engineer, ma’am,’ had been Calder’s reply. ‘He actually did develop functioning Casimir batteries, though unfortunately our political masters here did not see fit to pass that knowledge on.’ Calder paused, looking a bit uncomfortable. ‘He might well have conducted the research required of him by Messina, but he would not have given up on his personal dream.’

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘An FTL drive.’ Calder nodded to himself. ‘Judging by all the information that was sent to me by your tactical team, that might well be what you are now seeing in Argus Station.’

  She had thanked Calder for his input and cut him off, then considered sending someone to arrest him for wasting her time. However, she had decided against that, and hung on to this recording. Now she moved a cursor down to the bottom of the frozen screen section and hit the link to reopen communication with the same man.

  After a five-minute delay, during which the screen segment just showed a wall mostly covered with a huge nanotech-development cladogram, Calder arrived and sat down, obviously out of breath.

  ‘Ma’am,’ he said, ‘how can I help you?’

  ‘It’s regarding our previous conversation,’ said Serene. ‘You expressed the opinion that the structure being built within the rim of Argus Station might be something related to Jasper Rhine’s research.’ She found it difficult to herself say what Calder said next.

  ‘An FTL drive, yes.’

  ‘You are still of that opinion?’

  Calder looked abruptly worried. ‘I’m merely putting that forward as a possibility. I expressed no opinion on whether it might be a working proposition.’

  ‘Alan Saul,’ said Serene, ‘is what we are now calling here on Earth a “comlifer”, that is a human mind melded with computer systems. In his case, it gave him the ability to take over Argus and thereafter trash a large portion of the Committee infrastructure on Earth. One would then suppose that someone possessing such abilities would not be fooled by any pseudoscience.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’ Calder hesitated.

  ‘Do go on,’ said Serene. ‘You will not be punished for voicing a reasoned scientific opinion.’

  ‘Very well. I was given data to assess, but I was also told that Alan Saul had been seriously injured and might even be dead. A further implication was that this project might be the result of his injured mind still holding sway over Argus. Perhaps, in such a condition, he could have been persuaded by pseudoscience.’

  Serene just stared at him for a long moment. ‘What is your opinion of Rhine?’

  Calder ducked his head as if trying to physically evade the question, but then he grimaced and replied, ‘He is undoubtedly a genius, unstable, but still a genius. Even putting aside his zero-point research he has made some huge advances in nanotechnology.’

  ‘What is your opinion of this theorized space drive of his?’

  ‘The theory itself is old,’ said Calder, ‘first propounded by the physicist Miguel Alcubierre in the twentieth century. His drive required all sorts of things that just weren’t considered possible back then, like exotic matter, so was shot down as unviable because of the huge energy requirement calculated, and the probability that anyone using it would be fried by Hawking radiation.’

  ‘But what’s Rhine’s take on it?’

  ‘Brilliant as ever. You don’t need exotic matter if you can use normal matter to create the same effects. You don’t need vast amounts of energy if you’re
persuading the universe itself to comply rather than trying to force it. The Hawking radiation thing might still be a problem, but only at or above the speed of light, but even then the theory has its holes.’

  ‘So you think it’s possible?’

  Calder’s hunted look had become more pronounced. ‘I’m not sufficiently qualified to judge, but I’m certainly not sufficiently qualified to dismiss anything undertaken by Rhine.’

  ‘Thank you for your honesty,’ said Serene. ‘You will be receiving a ten billion Euro supplement to your funding, which you will then use to conduct research into this . . . Rhine drive. I am presuming Rhine’s data and research notes are still available here?’

  ‘Every . . . all . . . everything before Messina moved him,’ Calder replied, stunned.

  ‘Then I will leave you to get to work, since you have much to do.’

  Serene cut the connection and sat back. Vast possibilities were now opening up. If this space drive really was a possibility, then it was even more essential that Argus Station be seized. Jasper Rhine needed to be moved onto the list of those who must be captured alive, and, though minor damage of what had already been built in Argus’s rim might be required to prevent the entire station escaping, its destruction could not be countenanced. Serene at once began recording a message intended for Clay Ruger and Captain Scotonis.

  Argus

  Much had been torn out and altered to accommodate the new structure in the outer rim. Gazing at it again, Alex now saw what he should have noticed before, which the advisers back on Earth should have seen too. How could this thing possibly be some sort of fast transport system for running personnel and materials around the rim? Before it was closed off, he recollected that the internal pipe had been only half a metre across, which could just about accommodate a man if he was prepared to squash himself into something like one of those hydroponics transport cylinders. Also, the great bulk of electromagnets wrapping round the pipe – expanding the machine to three metres across – seemed far in excess of what would be required for such a purpose, just as the heavy beam-work supporting the thing seemed far more than might be required to keep it stable. This was definitely designed for something else.

  Alex crossed the area it occupied, gazing right along its length to where it curved out of sight in the distance. He then followed familiar routes to his destination, and when he arrived he was thankful that things had not changed drastically there. The mortuary was still in place and, after watching it for a while, he ascertained that the robot that had been working here earlier seemed to be absent now. Alex eventually ducked inside to inspect the mortuary’s contents.

  The corpse piles were smaller – many more of them now probably having passed through the station’s digesters – and thankfully the robot had not completed its assigned task, no doubt having been reassigned to something more relevant to the very survival of the station. Two piles of corpses still occupied the room, those in one pile yet to be stripped of their spacesuits. Alex headed over and began turning some of them over, finding sometimes he had to apply his boot to separate those that were frozen together. He meticulously checked five of them until he found one whose VC suit seemed undamaged, then ran a diagnostic through the suit’s wrist panel. The suit was clearly fine, so he stripped it off, rolled up its bulk as best he could, strapped it to his back and set off. Now he had a spare and with luck wouldn’t again end up trapped like he had been in the hydroponics unit.

  Next he needed to communicate with the Scourge. Plenty of options to that end lay further in towards the centre of the station, but unfortunately the closer he got to the centre the more likely he was to be captured. He headed out, trying to remember the schematics he and Alexandra had used, forever on the lookout for some viable alternative. Eventually he climbed out onto the rim itself and gazed around, astounded by the view.

  What the hell were they up to? Only now, out here on the rim, did Alex realize that Argus Station was no longer speeding through vacuum. Yes, while he had been in the hydroponics unit he had felt the changes in acceleration, but his mind hadn’t been functioning at its best, and the effects he felt could just as easily have been the result of ordinary course changes, since at any one time he hadn’t known the position of the hydroponics unit relative to the station’s direction of travel.

  Gazing at the red asteroid far over to his right and partially obscured by the station itself, Alex finally gained some sense of scale and began to understand fully what he was seeing. A smelting plant had been extended all the way to the surface and the activity he could see – the movement of glittering metal under the work lights and the steady flow of objects between the plant and the surface – was simply robots on the move. This might account for the absence of the corpse-stripping robot, and why he had spotted no others inside the rim. Maybe heading towards the centre of the station would not be as dangerous for him as he had feared, but there was something else he needed to check out first.

  He turned and crossed a few hundred metres of rim to bring himself into the shadow of a steering thruster, and stepped up onto its massive turntable. The device was so crusted with soot that it took him some minutes of scraping to find an access panel. Undoing the bolts that secured the panel was slightly beyond any of the manual tools he had in his small toolkit, but he did have a small diamond wheel cutter that ran off his suit’s power supply, so he merely sliced the heads off the bolts. The panel popped out easily – two layers of bubblemetal sheet sandwiching ten centimetres of insulation – and he placed it down on the deck, holding it in place with his foot. Revealed inside was the control circuitry and, as he had hoped, a secondary transponder should the optic wiring to this steering thruster fail. He unravelled his suit’s optic connector cable and inserted its plug into the first of the transponder’s four ports.

  After a second, a display opened in his suit’s visor and, using his wrist panel, he began sorting through the options now available to him. Changing the set-up was a lengthy task, but one he was trained for. He reset the output frequency, input a channel code, but then the suit display informed him of a hardware failure. Biting down on his frustration, he checked through the whole process again, then, feeling like an idiot, stretched a finger out to the transponder board and flipped over a small breaker to power it up manually.

  HARDWARE INSTALLED, the display informed him.

  Now his suit radio was connected to the more powerful transmitter located in this thruster, so its range now stretched somewhat beyond just a few kilometres.

  ‘Hello, Scourge, are you receiving?’ he asked, then kept repeating the same words every ten seconds over the next five minutes.

  Eventually a reply arrived. ‘This is the Scourge. Com Officer Linden speaking. Who is this?’

  ‘I would have thought,’ said Alex, ‘since I am using this particular coded channel, that who this is should be obvious.’

  ‘If you are who I hope you are,’ said another whom Alex recognized as Clay Ruger, ‘you will be able to tell me where Alexandra obtained her Argus system modem.’

  ‘Rim storage 498A – a storeroom listed on the station manifest, but which hadn’t been used for at least two years and from which, according to Tactical, it was highly unlikely anyone would notice the loss.’

  ‘Welcome back, Alex. Long time no hear,’ said Ruger. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Hiding in that hydroponics unit Tactical directed us to,’ Alex explained. ‘My suit was damaged so I wasn’t able to leave the unit.’

  ‘And Alexandra?’

  ‘Dead.’ It surprised him how much it hurt to say that.

  ‘That is unfortunate,’ said Ruger, his tone hardly sympathetic. ‘What is your situation now?’

  ‘I have no resources but for the standard-format spacesuit I’m wearing and one VC suit I managed to steal. Right now I’m standing on the station rim, boosting my suit signal through a thruster’s secondary control transponder, and the longer I stay here the more chance there is that I’ll be spotted
.’

  ‘Wait one moment. Let me check something.’

  ‘I can’t keep waiting out here.’

  ‘Patience, Alex.’

  Alex waited, glancing around frequently to check. Long slow minutes dragged by until Ruger replied.

  ‘The transponder you are using is a plug-in board with the digits ELEC105 on its disc-chip?’

  ‘It is,’ Alex replied.

  ‘It’s not just a transponder.’

  ‘No, really?’ said Alex sarcastically. Of course it wasn’t. A transponder occupying a four-centimetre-square board was only something you would find in a museum. The transponder itself was probably too small to even see.

  ‘The board the transponder is sited on also serves as a navigational computer and diagnostics platform,’ said Ruger calmly. ‘In the event of hard-wiring failures, it responds to signals from the other thrusters and fires itself up in consonance. It contains judgement software too, transponder linked to station sensors – therefore a very complicated piece of kit. However, it has its own rechargeable power supply and can be unplugged.’

  ‘So I can get myself out of here now?’

  ‘Wait and listen,’ Ruger snapped. ‘If you pull that now, you won’t be able to communicate with us. On the back of it are four terminals marked AER 1 to 4. You must use just AER 4 to connect to a monopole antenna. I am told that, with our distance from you now, all you will need is a couple of metres of metal.’