Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

  ‘I did shut down radio access to them five days ago, but now we have direct fibre-optic control from here.’ He paused, grimacing. ‘They won’t be enough, though. Glasgow had no problem with their readerguns; they just ran out of bullets.’

  ‘Then it’s time,’ she said. ‘It’s time.’

  She realized that, despite her apparent self-assurance and despite her hardness of purpose, she had been procrastinating. She had allowed herself to sink into bureaucratic time-wasting; pursuing detail and ignoring the central problem. She had not taken charge, and now it was time to. Glasgow was a wake-up call that brought home to her the necessity of what she must do. The face in the mirror returned to her a slow nod. She turned away, methodically stripped off her wrinkled suit, and went to take a shower. Then, just as methodically, she changed her appearance, and hardened her mind.

  Finally, clad in an Inspectorate uniform of light blue slacks, shirt, tie and jacket, her weapon holstered at her hip, Serene again studied herself in her mirror, then carefully applied some make-up. Yes, this was the right choice. For too long now she had been making do, running herself ragged and not really taking control. During a time of emergency she needed to project an air of military efficiency, and of strength. No bureaucratic power suit now, with its associations of Committee fudges and paper shuffling. After a moment she donned the cap, studied it for a moment, then discarded it. No, instead she unpinned her hair and shook it loose, tied it in a ponytail, then clipped a palmtop and a disabler to her belt, finishing the ensemble with a brooch depicting the United Earth logo on her lapel. Yes, just right.

  Next she turned from the mirror and walked over to her display cabinet and peered inside. Various examples of the hardware manufactured here were laid out on white velvet. Four generations of ID implants sat in a row. Three chips, the size of hundred-Euro coins, were the minds of respectively a razorbird, a shepherd and a spidergun. A fourth chip of the same size sat at the centre of an array of sub-chips smaller even than ID implants. These depicted the control hub and subsets of a readergun net. Under glass domes sat some of the biochips manufactured here for research organizations all across the Earth, and seven of these were even now being installed in seven somewhat reluctant ‘volunteers’ who would be deployed on Govnet as a counter to Alan Saul.

  She suffered a sudden cold sweat at the thought. Govnet was still very vulnerable, but as yet there had been no attack from Saul. Almost certainly that was due to the solar storm and, when it finished, he would once again be able to reach back to Earth from Argus. She needed to secure Govnet before that happened. She needed her seven ‘comlifers’ up and running – and soon. However, there was something more urgent that needed dealing with first.

  Many of the chips were too small to study easily with the naked eye, so magnifying screens had been inset in the upper sheet of the display case. She reached out and touched the glass just above one of the chips, starting up the screen so it showed her a clear image of a cube just ten microns across. Five of the faces of this item were studded with gold electrodes, while on the sixth face was a small rectangle – the biological component of the small biochip. Here, at the Complex, they had made the blueprint for this device, also the prototypes, and still made the biological component; fifteen billion of the finished item had since been manufactured in a further three hundred automated factories all across Earth. They were a part of the standard ID implant. Ostensibly – with their biological component facing out into the human body – they were able to read DNA and detect whether the implant had been removed and placed in another body. Apparently they were a failure, because the circuitry was easy to bypass. They were considered a black mark against Serene herself – a failure many of her Committee opponents relished too much to study too closely.

  However, here, only two other people other than her knew that, upon receipt of certain computer codes, these chips would activate and carry out their true purpose. What the other two didn’t know, what had been known to a team of four development engineers who were mistakenly arrested and executed by the Inspectorate three years ago, was that these chips were in all ID implants, including those of Committee delegates, and not just in those of the ZA citizens they were supposedly intended for.

  Serene turned away, strode to the door.

  ‘Anything new?’ she asked Anderson, as she stepped back out into Oversight.

  He turned towards her, looking even more tired and hassled. ‘The twenty survivors from Glasgow are heading here. Another fifteen of our staff have reported in, and I’ve allowed them to come across from the mainland. Sheila’s gone over there to meet them.’

  When she arrived back here ten days ago, Serene had hoped that Sheila Trondheim might be one of the casualties. ‘Your idea?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  Good, because right now she didn’t want Sheila around with her large, self-indulgent and thoroughly inappropriate conscience. ‘Anything else?’

  He paused, obviously reluctant to tell her the next thing, then said, ‘The total of known surviving delegates on Earth is now up to twenty-four. Delegate Angone of Region SE Africa has just made his presence known.’

  Annoying – that now made three delegates in total with authority ranking over hers. ‘He’s been keeping his head down,’ she noted. Probably consolidating gains, making sure of his power base.

  Anderson still looked grave. ‘As soon as he announced his presence, he claimed to assume top authority for the “interim of Chairman Messina’s absence”, and is organizing a teleconference for 20.00 GMT tonight. You are instructed to attend.’

  Serene grimaced. She’d known it wouldn’t take long for the survivors to crawl out of the woodwork and start competing for the top job, but she had hoped to have known about them all by now.

  ‘Nevertheless . . .’ she said, pausing to take a slow breath, ‘we now have work to do in Comtrans One.’

  His expression became even grimmer. He’d known this was coming, ever since she returned. This knowledge had been implicit between them, but perhaps actually accepting it was difficult for him. Perhaps not as difficult as for Sheila Trondheim, who was the other person here who knew, but still difficult enough. Serene would have to deal with this problem. When she carried through her next plan, three people would know precisely what she had done – and that was two people too many.

  He nodded, detached the eye-screen extension to his fone and placed it down on a nearby console, then stood ready and waiting. She surveyed the room, noting that Clay Ruger, Anderson’s lieutenant, was on shift today. Clay was an ambitious and capable man with weaknesses that could be exploited. He was a sociopath but also a coward, like so many in high position, and quite simple to understand and manipulate.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said.

  Outside the door, Anderson signalled for the two guards to follow them.

  ‘No,’ said Serene, without looking round, ‘they stay here.’

  ‘We’re still not as secure here as I would like,’ Anderson warned.

  ‘Nevertheless,’ Serene replied, leading the way from Oversight.

  Comtrans One was where they kept all the communications hardware: the signal boosters and other devices connected to the aerials and satellite dishes on the roof, the coders for laser transmissions, and the Govnet sub-servers and modems. Anderson entered first, halting in the middle of the room while he gazed steadily at the main console there.

  ‘You know I’m with you all the way on this,’ he said.

  Obviously her dismissal of the guards had worried him. She noted how he casually rested one hand on the butt of his holstered pistol. ‘I know you are,’ she replied. ‘If you weren’t you would have done something about it before now. I know you well enough, Simeon, to understand that.’

  ‘They have to go.’ He turned towards her. ‘It’s the only way we can survive – we know that now . . . after Glasgow.’

  She strode past him to the console, unhooking her palmtop from her belt. She placed this down on th
e table to the right of the console and opened it, then gestured to the seat. ‘Set us up for transmission. We want a local burst first, to secure things here, then the full Govnet transmission.’

  He took the seat and quickly keyed in the required instructions, the screen now showing the main aerial and microwave array online, followed by subsections giving admission to other networks across the world, including readerguns, the transponders in all robots, and radio modems and servers. After that first burst, the signal would go viral. Serene Bluetoothed to the console here, sorted through her secure files and found the program required: the one that added just two digits to every zero-asset implant code on Earth. She readied it, then found two individual implant codes additional to that, and cued them up too.

  ‘We’re ready?’ she asked, linkage established and her finger hovering over the return key.

  He had to clear his throat first, then after a nod managed a strangled, ‘We’re ready, ma’am.’

  This then was the moment – so much like when she had pressed down the ball control to activate the guns on the aero she had flown here a seeming age ago, yet so much more.

  ‘I’m reminded of some historical context,’ she said, the politician in her insisting some words be said now. ‘When I press this button it’s like a reset for the whole human race. It’s like the “Year Zero” proclamation made by some of the worst and most genocidal dictators of our past, yet here and now it is utterly necessary.’

  ‘I know it’s necessary, ma’am, but it isn’t easy,’ said Anderson.

  There, that itchy niggling of conscience which could grow into something inconvenient – the risk she just could not take. Nothing could stand in the way of what she intended to do now, and nothing must stand in the way of her future plans. She pressed her finger down on the return button, watched the loading bar appear and begin filling. There, it had started, just like that – easy. It wouldn’t get every zero asset on Earth, since not all had the new implants – just eight billion of them.

  ‘I did this with you. It wasn’t just you,’ he said.

  Of course, he’d expected her to kill him here and now. He thought she’d dismissed the guards just so she could privately dispose of someone who knew too much.

  ‘Yes, we did this together,’ she replied. ‘And now I want you to head out to Sheila, ostensibly to help her with the selection process out there, but mainly to get her reaction. We need her to keep her mouth shut.’

  ‘Understood,’ he said grimly, again resting his hand on the butt of his sidearm.

  He thought he understood, but he didn’t yet. In about an hour’s time he would begin to feel the effects of the biochip now active in his implant. By the time he realized what was going on, it would be too late for him. He might try to get back to Serene to exact some vengeance, but the chances of him achieving the quarter-hour journey from the perimeter back to here were remote.

  Once activated, the biochips would release, from that sixth face on the cube, a potent cybervirus to multiply and spread through the recipient’s body, moving as fast as the beat of a heart. But it released more than just one mass of this thing, half virus and half nanomachine, for it acted as a template for further copies, continuously feeding them into the bloodstream for as long as the body’s bioelectrics kept the ID implant powered up. It was nasty, and fast. Based on the Ebola virus as the safest base agent to cut down on the possibility of air transmission, it also possessed a nano-mechanical component that made a nerve-toxin similar to Novichok agents. It took effect in an hour, whereupon loss of physical control was quickly followed by paralysis. During tests it had been a toss-up between whether paralysis of the heart or massive bleeding in the lungs killed the recipient first.

  In her own mind Serene had named it ‘the Scour’ but, within days, as the signal retransmitted all around Earth, it would become a name familiar to all. She would ensure that her own personal signature became adhered to what she had created.

  Mars

  Var stepped into the agricultural laboratory and gazed at the equipment all around her, some salvaged from the old base, much of it put together from parts scavenged here. Screw you, Ricard, she thought. Switching her gaze downwards to the soil troughs, she considered how Ricard and his enforcers were now themselves components of the new soil used here.

  Gunther, now chief of Hydroponics and Agriculture since Kaskan had sacrificed himself to destroy one of Ricard’s shepherds, gazed pensively at the green shoots spearing up from some of the troughs. He seemed to have developed a nervous tic, which became more pronounced when he coughed into his fist. He then rubbed at his chest, as if it was troubling him.

  ‘We received no seed stock from Earth, obviously,’ he said. ‘But we found that we actually had some stock here.’

  ‘Yes, I know about that,’ Var replied. ‘I wouldn’t have approved the work on Hex Four otherwise.’

  Hex Four had been designated an arboretum right from the start, but completion of its construction had stayed on hold while the Committee constantly failed to send the required seed stock. However, after Var shot Ricard and gained approval from other heads of departments for her assumption of leadership here, she had ordered an intensive survey of the resources immediately available, including all the personal possessions, even those in storage belonging to personnel who had returned to Earth. And it was these last that had made possible what she was seeing here. She had not expected much, since the allowable weight of personal effects wasn’t much more than could be fitted into a wallet. However, for political staff like the enforcers and Ricard himself, things had obviously been different.

  Ricard had actually possessed a small jar of olives, and Gunther’s staff, working non-stop in shifts, had been able to resurrect some of the stones. One of the enforcers had kept an apple carefully stored away in a vacuum-sealed cool box for some special occasion, and Gunther had removed viable pips from that. But the mother lode had been the stored effects of one Tina Bream, who had worked in what was now Gunther’s department and who had returned to Earth four years previously. She had brought in her own small quantity of seeds in very small containers: seeds for blackberries, raspberries, gooseberries and redcurrants, and even two plum stones and two cherry stones. She had also obviously been collecting seed from the empty plates of the political staff too: here some orange, lemon and pear pips, there some peach, nectarine and avocado stones.

  ‘Okay.’ Gunther flinched as if ducking a blow – a reaction to her that seemed all too common, and unjustified. Yes, she had been ruthless, but necessarily so. The reaction of some people to her now she felt stemmed from them being so thoroughly accustomed to Committee rule, to leaders who could have someone dragged off for torture or execution almost on a whim. Gunther gestured to the troughs with one shaky hand. ‘We’ve had no failures at all yet . . . though not everything has been planted. After the dome goes up on Hex Four, we’re going to have to partition it to provide the various environments. My suggestion is that we divide it concentrically: the hottest climate at the centre, then progressively cooler out towards the edge.’

  ‘That seems sensible, as it should make temperature control less wasteful.’ She gestured to the plants already growing from the troughs. ‘What are these?’

  ‘Bream’s own stock – the seeds and stones had all been carefully treated, freed of any fungal or other infections and primed for immediate germination, so they were ready for planting quickly. All the other stuff we have is being carefully nurtured in my clean-room.’ He gestured again, jerkily, towards an airtight door at the far end of the laboratory. ‘What we have here,’ he stabbed a quivering finger at the seedlings before them, ‘are from various berries, and one quince pip I didn’t spot the first time round, along with two plum and two cherry stones.’ He gazed at the plants with something approaching awe, and certainly that would be the reaction of many others here at Antares Base.

  Unlike most of them, Var was herself the daughter of parents high up in the Committee Executive
, so she had eaten blackberries, raspberries, plums . . . in fact she could think of nothing Gunther was growing here in his laboratory that she hadn’t tried at one time or another. It was only when her parents were dead, and her status dropped to that of a valuable societal asset rather than an asset with connections, that Var found out just how luxurious her earlier life had been. Thereafter, like most people on Earth, she had necessarily become accustomed to highly processed foods, tank-grown carbs and proteins artificially flavoured, black-market sausages containing meat you didn’t really want to know about, GM beans with odd physical effects and bread that was more wood pulp than anything else – all flavoured by such occasional luxuries as much-diluted mercury-laden fish paste from one of the offshore fish farms, or the odd gull’s or crow’s egg.

  ‘I understand that you’ve had some other successes too?’ She felt it necessary to keep this conversation running; necessary for her personnel to know she appreciated what they were doing; that she enjoyed their successes and commiserated with their failures.

  ‘After finding those seeds, we decided to have a brain-storming session to see if we could come up with other places to search. We found a large collection of fungal spores in some of the air filters, from which I’m now growing some edible mushrooms.’ He paused to scrub at his unshaven face, then gazed about himself in bewilderment.

  ‘Gunther,’ said Var, ‘you need to get some sleep. You’re no use to me if you start making mistakes.’

  He nodded in full and complete agreement, took one step forward and steadied himself with one hand resting on the edge of a trough. ‘Not been feeling so . . .’ he started, then he clutched at his chest, leaned forward and vomited blood all over his precious plants.

  He was the first.

  Earth

  When the readerguns turned on the guards along the South Cray sector fence, the zero-asset population held back. Only when an aero crash demolished a section of that fence did they finally react. Chingly had been in the middle of the crowd that poured out into the adjacent government district, where he and his fellows had found the world utterly changed. They had found freedom first, and now they found possibility. So much blood and so much death, and Chingly instantly recognized those who had lived high on the hog while his own kind starved, if not by their clothing then by the thickness of the flesh on their bones.