Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

  ‘That blast came from part of the space docks,’ Scotonis noted, ‘sheared off then torn apart by tidal forces.’

  ‘What?’ Clay had no idea what he was talking about.

  ‘The next bit,’ Scotonis continued, ‘we put together from the cams we’re using to detect debris, because the cam originally focused on it soon lost sight of it.’

  The image was set in motion again: the stars behind the bubble blurred as it slid off frame. Another frame recaptured it to one side of the first, the object bobbing up and down and then jerking from view again, until another cam feed picked it up in yet another frame on the multi-screen. Clay was left in no doubt, as the frames proliferated across in front of him, that he was seeing footage of something travelling very fast indeed. Then the bubble slammed to a halt and a bright flash obliterated the view for a second. The image next slid back from pixelated chaos to show the Argus Station at the centre of an expanding globe of glowing matter and rocky debris.

  ‘It struck an asteroid half a kilometre across,’ explained Scotonis. ‘The asteroid was destroyed, but the station itself appears completely undamaged.’

  Clay just kept on staring at the image and, as he finally managed to absorb what this meant, he could not resist turning to Trove. ‘Seems you can fuck with causality.’

  She just glared at him.

  ‘This changes things,’ he continued. ‘How far did they move?’

  ‘Six hundred thousand kilometres in about eight seconds,’ Scotonis replied. ‘They were travelling at nearly a quarter of the speed of light.’ A short silence ensued as they all took that in, then Scotonis continued, ‘It doesn’t make much difference to our arrival time since they seemed to be trying to take the clearest route out of the belt, which ran transversely to our own approach.’

  ‘But, still, what is the point in us going after them?’ Clay asked.

  ‘I’m still amazed at your stupidity,’ Trove interjected. ‘We have to go after them because if we don’t, we’re dead.’

  ‘Why? I just don’t see your reasoning.’

  ‘What is your opinion of Commander Liang and his staff?’ asked Scotonis.

  ‘He’s a useful idiot,’ replied Clay, ‘your archetypal fanatic . . . oh.’

  ‘Oh, indeed,’ said Scotonis. ‘He and his staff command two thousand troops, most wearing vacuum gear and all heavily armed. If we mutiny now, all the readerguns aboard would not be enough to stop him taking over this ship.’ Scotonis grimaced. ‘Galahad was careful to ensure that it would be difficult for any of us to tip the balance of power aboard. That’s either because she’s very clever or very paranoid.’

  ‘I’d plump for the latter,’ said Clay. ‘So why didn’t you tell me this before?’

  ‘Because you are an untrustworthy little worm,’ said Trove, before Scotonis could reply.

  ‘And you trust me now?’ Clay asked.

  ‘We don’t have to,’ said Trove. ‘You’re dead, remember?’

  Decidedly uncomfortable with the implications of that, Clay focused his attention back on Scotonis. ‘So you intend to get Liang and his men out of the ship first?’

  ‘Damned right,’ the captain replied.

  ‘But still you need to get to the Argus Station to do that.’

  ‘Yes, and if that drive remains undamaged and they start it up again . . .’

  Clay could see no way round that. After all this time, they were still days away from Argus Station.

  ‘We’ll have to talk to our friend Alex,’ said Gunnery Officer Cookson. ‘He’s the only resource we can use.’

  Clay nodded. ‘If he can sabotage something—’

  ‘Then, of course, we have another problem,’ interrupted Scotonis, now drawing his sidearm and pointing it at Clay.

  ‘Problem?’ said Clay.

  ‘Well,’ said the captain, raising his left arm and peering at his watch, ‘you were supposed to be dead as of two minutes ago.’

  Clay didn’t hear the crack of the gunshot, just felt the sledgehammer impact on his chest. Then he felt nothing at all.

  17

  Air Supply

  For EVA work one of the largest problems to overcome in vacuum has been air supply. During the return to space in the Golden Decade, highly pressurized oxygen was used in combination with recycled nitrogen and carbon-dioxide scrubbers. However, even these oxygen supplies remained bulky if someone needed to work in vacuum for any length of time. They could also be highly dangerous if holed by any of the vast collection of micro-meteorites that had built up in Earth’s orbit since the days of Sputnik. The invention of the red-oxygen catalytic bottle solved this problem at a stroke. Red oxygen, otherwise 08, is solid oxygen that has undergone a phase change which previously could only be achieved under massive pressure. The specialized nanotube carbon-vanadium catalytic grid in the new bottles enables oxygen to undergo this phase change at low pressures, and then remain stable – only sublimating upon a current being introduced across the grid. This resulted in oxygen bottles that could supply up to forty hours of air.

  Mars

  The satellite dish was now centred on, and tracking, the portion of the Asteroid Belt in which Argus Station was located – or rather where she had last known it to be located. There should be no problem with the station receiving the transmission, since the beam would be a million kilometres across by the time it struck the belt. Var sat waiting, awake and motionless, hoping for just some sort of reply. However, the time necessary for the signal to reach Argus and for one to be returned passed with no result.

  She continued monitoring, intending to stay awake throughout the six-hour window available to her, but weariness began catching up with her. Three hours into the transmission, she found herself frequently jerking out of a doze. Five hours in, she came out of an hour-long sleep to gaze blurry-eyed at her screen, to see that she had finally received a reply. Var woke up completely, but only to disappointment. Her signal had been received and recorded, but only by the computer system of Argus. Doubtless it would then go through some sort of robotic winnowing process, so whether it finally reached human ears was debatable.

  Once the window closed, she decided to wait until daylight before further excavating the ruins outside to get to that corpse. She lay down on the floor, folded her arms and drifted into sleep so quickly that it felt like death.

  Consciousness returned abruptly and Var sat upright, sure she had only slept for a moment, until she saw dawn light filtering through the building’s windows. She suddenly felt optimistic: perhaps Rhone had failed and now Martinez or Carol were coming for her; maybe she would find enough supplies of oxygen in the rubble pile to get her safely back to Antares Base?

  She stood up, took a drink from the spigot in her helmet but felt no urge to make that same spigot supply her with any food paste. She felt grubby and urgently wanted to get out of her suit – she had already used the suit’s toilet facilities, but the seal on them was never great. Trying to ignore her discomfort, she selected a large pick from the abandoned tools, headed for the airlock, then outside into the Martian morning.

  A light carbon-dioxide and water-ice fog hung in a metre-thick stratum at just about chest height, so, as she stepped outside, it seemed she was forging her way through a white sea. The fog was even then visibly lifting, and by the time she reached the fallen building it had risen up as far as her helmet. She set to work at once, digging out to a good depth around the corpse, in readiness to try lifting it. However, before she could do that, her head-up display warned her that her oxygen bottle was nearly depleted. Reality hit home hard and her earlier optimism evaporated like the rising fog layer all around her. Perhaps, she considered, it was just that kind of optimism that Rhone distrusted in her.

  She kept working around the corpse, loosening the regolith, occasionally slipping the pick underneath the body to try and lever it up. She ignored the regular warnings until she was panting, eking every last molecule of her oxygen supply, then she switched over to Lopomac’s bottl
e and checked its reading. Unless she found something else here, she had just eighteen hours of life left. Var began levering at the corpse again, not so tentative now because what did it matter if she damaged it?

  With a crackling sound that turned tinny in the thin air, and a big puff of vapour, the corpse lifted from the waist. She realized she must have snapped the desiccated flesh and spine inside the suit for it to be able to fold up that way. She must also have fractured a decayed suit seal to let out that puff of vapour, which was encouraging, since it meant the suit had remained pressurized. She dropped the pick and took hold of the corpse in both hands, forcing it up and back until it was resting against the rubble slope, unnaturally bent at the waist. Caked in compacted regolith, the flat oxygen bottle was now visible to her.

  Var dropped the pick and knelt down before the bottle. She half-expected to need further tools, but the bayonet hose fittings popped out easily releasing a little puff of vapour. She then pulled the bottle from its velcro backing and rested it in her lap. Next she disconnected her hoses from the bottle she had taken from Lopomac and plugged them into the new acquisition. She gave it a moment, then using her wrist panel summoned the head-up display and checked numbers. She had just acquired another ten hours of air.

  This now meant she would run out of suit power before she lacked air. The power in the building, from the solar panel, would help her in some way, but suit heating tended to eat up watts, despite the insulation. Var returned her attention to the corpse, but realized she would have to unearth more of it to get to the utility belt where any super-caps might be found.

  She stood up and started digging again.

  Earth

  Serene glared at the images on her screen. When she had told Ruger and Scotonis that they must hurry to Argus Station because it seemed some sort of inertia-less drive was being developed there, she had felt like a fraud. She felt like a fraud now, and long moments of introspection occurring while she watched this video clip, again and again, had presented her with an uncomfortable result. She had found a reason to influence events far away from her, and she had influenced them, because she could – because she simply enjoyed exercising power. Those were her prime reasons for telling them that they must not change course. The possibility that this Jasper Rhine could develop an inertia-less drive aboard Argus had been remote, theoretical, producing a reason to throw her weight around but no reason for alarm.

  But now she was alarmed. This was a game changer.

  She abruptly changed the view and gazed at a massive modern factory complex shimmering in South African heat haze. Over to one side, a shanty town had been bulldozed aside, its debris forming a small mountain range, and in the cleared area new buildings were going up fast. Amidst them was something that looked like a sports stadium, but only if those sports involved games with particle accelerators, fusion reactors and giant silos filled with liquid mercury. Professor Calder had already taken a huge bite out of his budget.

  Serene’s gaze now strayed to a flashing icon at the bottom of her screen. Calder had received her latest message and was ready to speak to her. She instinctively wanted to keep him waiting, but felt the situation was too critical to waste time on playing minor power games.

  ‘Professor?’ she said, responding at once.

  ‘Ma’am,’ he replied with a respectful dip of his head.

  ‘You’ve been analysing the video and data feeds from the Scourge,’ she said. ‘You’ve seen that there is indeed an inertia-less drive aboard Argus. How far along are you?’

  ‘My initial tests look promising,’ he replied, ‘but building such a drive will have to be conducted offworld. In a way they were lucky, because they had the structure in which to build a wide enough vortex ring, and they already had the required EM field-generating capability.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘We could begin building some elements of the drive at once,’ he replied. ‘How long thereafter it would take to get ourselves a working drive just depends upon how much in the way of resources you are prepared to dedicate to this.’

  Serene gazed at him steadily for a moment, but he showed no signs of getting nervous about that scrutiny, so she continued, ‘If the Argus Station escapes, and retains its ability to travel as fast as it has, all Earth’s offworld stations, factories and satellites will be at risk.’

  ‘Agreed.’

  ‘That damned thing could attack with little or no warning, and we know it now has some lethal weaponry. We certainly have weapons up there that could damage it, but this means they will have to be permanently manned and ready to respond instantly.’

  ‘That is presupposing it uses its weapons,’ Calder noted.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It doesn’t even need its weapons,’ he explained. ‘You saw what happened to the asteroid it struck?’

  ‘I saw.’

  ‘The warp-bubble interface creates tidal forces you would generally only find near to a fast-spinning black hole. If they solve their obvious navigational problems, all they would need to do is plot a course right through any orbital installations, and afterwards there would be nothing left.’

  It was at this moment that Serene understood for the first time the meaning of the words ‘cold sweat’. That reaction, however, made her tighten her control on herself.

  ‘At present,’ she said carefully, ‘we have three ships being constructed – I mean the new-design Mars Travellers. They will be redesigned to your specifications so that they can incorporate this drive, and weapons. All your requirements will be met, at once.’

  ‘What do you mean, ma’am?’

  ‘I mean, Professor Calder, I am promoting you to a special position. I am giving you control of all offworld industries, and I am allowing you the power to demand from on-world industries anything you require. I am therefore, in effect, putting all of Earth’s resources at your disposal.’

  He just stared at her, saying nothing, obviously shaken alert at last.

  She continued, ‘Aboard Argus Station they managed to build a workable drive during their journey to the Asteroid Belt. With the resources at your disposal I expect you to achieve the same result much more quickly.’

  Finally he managed to speak. ‘I . . . I can’t organize all this by myself.’

  ‘Expert teams are on their way to you right now,’ Serene replied. ‘You tell them what you want, and they will organize it. Anyone you require is yours.’

  ‘So long as they do what I say,’ he risked.

  ‘They will – or they will die. I do not expect you to fail me, Professor Calder.’ Enough of the stick, now a bit more carrot. ‘And, should you succeed, you will receive anything it is within my power to give, for the rest of your life.’

  ‘Ma’am.’ He dipped his head again, this time in serious acknowledgement.

  ‘That’s all for now,’ she said, and cut the connection.

  Threats, she felt, were easy to make and to carry through; promises were equally as easy to make, and as easy to forget. Just like the promises she had made to this character, Rhone, out there on Mars.

  Argus

  Alex’s chances of getting caught had just increased a hundredfold, but if he had stayed a moment longer in that claustrophobic little room he felt sure he would have ended up eating a bullet. There had seemed no point in going on. There he was, again, hiding like a rat in the walls, struggling to get supplies just to keep himself alive. No purpose achievable, reality frustrating him, nothing from the Scourge but the instruction to keep his head down and await orders. And then it had seemed as if he was going insane.

  The weird vibrations from the surrounding metalwork had registered first. They were horribly unpleasant, imparting to his entire body a feeling like ‘restless leg syndrome’ – something he had suffered from during one particularly long hospital stay in the past. Then even his surroundings began to distort. The walls seemed to become concave when he looked at them directly but, as he turned away, they stretched in the other d
irection towards some seemingly infinite point. Odd sounds issued from his suit radio, so that he had to keep turning it off to find some relief, and it was during one of these occasions that the whole room shuddered, as if something had crashed into it or the station itself, and so, finally, he decided to investigate.

  The room he had since occupied lay in what had been intended to be a residential section. It was also where Messina’s forces first gathered when they had attacked. Here he had found oxygen bottles, a scattering of ammo clips and, best of all, a ration pack before concealing himself away as instructed. The corridor outside his hideaway looked no different, and those distortions were no longer evident, yet, when he reached out and touched the wall, that horrible vibration was still present, if less strong than before. He moved further along, intent on heading out of the end of this section to reach a point where he could get a view into the station, down beside Arcoplex One. But only as he reached his destination and carefully made his way out into the station’s framework superstructure did he think to pause and extend his external aerial lead to a nearby beam, and again turn on his suit radio.

  A haze of static and a high-pitched whining filled his suit helmet, but out of it, just discernible, came a voice:

  ‘. . . please reply . . . Come on, Alex, we need to talk to you. This is the Sc . . . calling A . . . please rep . . .’

  ‘Alex here,’ he said at once.

  ‘We’ve got . . .’

  Alex quickly turned on his visor display and sorted through the various menus to find the one for the radio. Since it was being boosted through that same board from the thruster, he might not be able to do anything, but he was sure there was some facility available for cleaning up signals. Soon he found the relevant menu and discovered he could indeed do something, and the words came clearer, though a sound occurring behind them seemed to keep drilling into his spine.