Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

  Someone had accessed the Scourge’s personnel files and downloaded all their ID codes. Someone had done this via a console located in the troop section, after the troops themselves had departed. One of the crew? That seemed entirely possible since now, reviewing the data from the Scourge, she saw that there were many gaps in it. Most of the ship cams were offline, so she could not see a recorded view of whoever had accessed that console. It also became apparent that the inducer network had been shut down . . .

  Something appeared suddenly on her screen: the blank square indicating a video file. Where had that come from? From the Scourge data – meaning something loaded it even as the ID codes were being downloaded. A worm of apprehension crawled up Serene’s spine. She quickly ensured that all the latest Scourge data had been downloaded to her palmtop, then shut off its modem and put it to one side. She then picked up a console and accessed the hardware all around her, ordering it to ignore any signal from her palmtop – just in case something started up the modem again. Next she focused on the original data download from the Scourge. She sent a copy to hard storage, isolated that same storage and deleted the original. To be utterly safe, she cut the power to the hard drive it had been stored on. Then she picked up the palmtop again, and proceeded to play the video file.

  ‘Hello, Serene Galahad,’ said Alan Saul, gazing at her with demonic pink eyes. ‘I know it is you that is seeing this since, for it to load, you had to open up your Scour initiation software, and I doubt you trust anyone else with even the knowledge that it exists. By now the ID code status of your personnel currently aboard the Scourge, and aboard my station, is updating and, even as you listen to this, you will know that they are all either dead or dying.’ He paused for a moment, maybe in reflection, though she could read nothing in his expression.

  ‘Perhaps you should now consider how the weapon you created is double-edged,’ he continued. ‘However, that is not why I am now contacting you. In your arrogance and psychosis, you might find it difficult to accept that I have no interest in you or what you are currently doing on Earth. Your best course now is to ignore me, because I will go away. If you do not take such a course, then I will be forced to take more of an interest in you, and that is something you will definitely not enjoy. That is all.’

  His image froze, but it still seemed like he was watching her. After a second, Serene realized she was panting, then with a yell she hurled her palmtop away. It crashed against the low balustrade of the bridge and dropped into the pond.

  ‘Fuck you!’ she screamed. Then, when Sack appeared, she snarled, ‘Fuck off.’

  Sack quickly retreated.

  Serene stood up and began pacing. The Scourge’s assault had failed and now there was no one left to punish. How dare he kill her people? How dare he take that away from her? She kicked over the nearest plant pot, then reached down and tore a Japanese shrub out of another one and threw it away, tramped over other plants to reach her main screen and kicked it over. She had to do something. She had to do something now.

  ‘Sack!’ she shrieked, and went striding over the bridge.

  Sack appeared reluctantly and gazed at her in silence. She gestured over her shoulder.

  ‘Get rid of it! Get rid of it all!’

  ‘Ma’am?’

  ‘The garden, you imbecile! Get rid of the fucking garden! Burn the fucking thing!’

  She strode for the elevator and climbed inside. Someone was going to pay for this; someone was going to pay for this right away. Saul was the one she wanted most, but he lay too far out of her reach, for now. As the elevator rose she felt slightly better to be doing something at least, even if it was just relocating herself to Messina’s old office.

  Time for another Madagascar.

  She had previously been considering further candidates such as Crete, Indonesia, Sri Lanka . . . No, screw the islands. Something bigger; it was time to think big.

  Maybe get continental.

  Argus

  Hannah clung on to the edge of the surgical table, even though no force actually threatened to dislodge her. When it stopped and that deep sonorous note ceased sounding, and it no longer felt as if some malevolent god was trying to crowbar up reality, there came a short silent pause before the station structure all around her began making worrying complaints.

  ‘Saul’s moved us,’ she observed.

  ‘Yes, he has,’ replied Le Roque tiredly through her fone. ‘The Scourge separated from us a short while ago, and doubtless he wants us well out of range of its weapons.’

  Hannah unclamped her hands from the table and glanced through the viewing window into her laboratory. There were still many patients to be tended, but she could see that her earlier request to Le Roque had been answered and that the military medic Yanis Raiman had arrived to relieve her. She now returned to the subject she and Le Roque had been discussing just before the Rhine drive engaged.

  ‘So you’re intending to spin up this arcoplex,’ she said. ‘What about the damage? What about the potential for breaches around the penetration locks?’ As she spoke, she continued sealing the ugly wounds in her latest patient – almost relishing the distraction of this task.

  ‘The robots are all over it,’ replied Le Roque. ‘The penetration locks should hold but, as a precaution, I’ve had all adjacent bulkhead doors closed. They shouldn’t be a problem.’

  Even as he said it, Hannah felt herself shifting to one side as the arcoplex slowly started to spin again. All around, the clonks and groans and the occasional squeals signifying stressed metal increased. Some of the noise would be from equipment or debris in motion – a noise that would intensify as any floating objects began falling to the floor. Doubtless she could hear corpses in motion too, perhaps even globules of blood dropping out of the air. The thought sickened her, but what seemed worse was that there had been no real alternative.

  ‘You’re starting them all up?’ Hannah enquired, with a nod to her new assistants as she stepped away from the patient and began peeling off her surgical gloves, her mind firmly clamping down on her emotions.

  ‘We need to, for air quality,’ explained Le Roque. ‘Too much debris is floating about and it’s blocking the air-filtration systems.

  ‘Well, as long as you’re sure,’ she said doubtfully.

  ‘I’m as sure as . . . Shit!’

  ‘What’s the problem?’ Was something going wrong already?

  After a long and worrying delay, Le Roque replied, ‘I just took a look out through exterior cams. We’re in orbit around Mars.’

  Weight – or rather a simulacrum of it – began bearing down on her leg and it started to ache. Dumbfounded, Hannah halted her slow progress towards the surgeons’ clean lock. She didn’t know how to respond to this information, but something inside her did as she felt the familiar surge of a panic attack rising up from her chest. On the one hand, the feeling was horrible but, on the other, she now had sure knowledge that these spasms only assaulted her when she wasn’t in any real danger. It was almost a reassurance.

  ‘Mars,’ she repeated numbly.

  ‘Which causes further stresses on the station,’ said Le Roque. ‘I need to get back to work.’

  ‘Okay,’ Hannah replied, cutting the connection.

  In the clean lock she stripped, stowed her surgical whites and stepped into the shower. Now that most of the emergency cases were at least stable, it was time to start reinstituting cleanliness protocols. As far as she knew there had never been any case of a superbug taking hold here, but that did not mean they would be immune. By the time she walked back out into the laboratory, another patient was being wheeled in through the patient’s clean lock, and Raiman was waiting his turn to enter the surgery and take charge.

  ‘All yours,’ she said, moving on.

  Brigitta was still in the laboratory, carefully examining her hand, sealed in its transparent form cast. Hannah had managed to reattach her fingers temporarily, so they had a blood supply, but some lengthy work remained to repair the tendons, l
igaments and nerves.

  ‘Where’s Angela?’ Hannah asked.

  Brigitta waved her other hand jerkily. ‘Doing what she can.’

  Angela’s wound had not actually been from a bullet, but from a fragment of one. It hadn’t hit the bone, and it had not been deep so was easily repaired.

  ‘He’s all right?’ Brigitta asked, indicating Raiman with a nod of her head.

  ‘Probably better than me at this sort of stuff,’ Hannah replied. ‘He is a military doctor, after all.’ Hannah touched Brigitta’s shoulder, then made her way to the door, stepping between wounded who had all been provided with analgesic patches and temporary dressings. She had headed fifty metres towards the elevators that led out of the arcoplex before she realized where she was going.

  ‘Just one more thing, Le Roque,’ she said through her fone. ‘Where is Alan now?’

  ‘Docking Pillar Two,’ he replied shortly.

  Hannah wanted to ask more, but the technical director sounded busy and hassled. She cut the connection and moved on. Near to the rim-side elevator she stepped into a suiting room, half-expecting to find nothing available there, but surprised to find a full range of suits. This was probably Le Roque’s work, too – he certainly knew how to get things organized quickly. She donned a VC suit, headed for the elevator and made her way out of the arcoplex.

  Inside the ring-side bearing installation for Arcoplex Two, Hannah entered a building that had probably been intended as some sort of communal area. Absolutely nothing yet marred the spacious bare floor, but its location and the view from the panoramic windows seemed to indicate such future use. She moved over to a window and gazed down, past the rotating curve of the arcoplex into the station itself. The carnage there was horrifying.

  The huge volume of space enclosed by the station’s new skin was full of floating debris that included corpses and body parts drifting in a vapour haze. The one railgun she could see was now just a twisted turret of blackened metal, with a glimpse of stars through the hole torn in the station’s outer skin just above it. Robots were already in full action here, and she watched some of the construction model, clutching huge cable-mesh bags, propelling themselves from beam to beam as they collected debris. It was a familiar scene, little different from ones she had witnessed after Saul had put an end to the attack of Messina’s troops on this same station, and she hoped it was one she would never see again. Would the killing end now? Or could it? There was only one person who could answer that question for her.

  Hannah exited the bearing installation via a personnel access tube running alongside one of the internal railways, then passed through an airlock into an unpressurized section of the outer ring. She glimpsed the vortex generator over to her right, where walls had been taken out and the station substructure adjusted to accommodate it. Next she entered a pressurized section that took her past a group of three proctors crouching, amidst scattered equipment, around a super-cap power unit. They seemed almost like natives squatting around a campfire, busy at traditional crafts, until Hannah made a closer inspection.

  All of them had been severely damaged, but were methodically repairing themselves. It was unnerving to see one of them squatting with its entire torso opened up as it detached its ribs, one at a time, to bend them back into shape or to micro-weld cracks in them. Inside the torso she could see an odd amalgam of dry woody-looking organics and gleaming metal, and something like a big stepper motor where the lungs should be. She shuddered, and moved on.

  Back out into vacuum, she followed another railway running around the ring, then turned at a junction to take her out towards the space docks. She only then began considering what precisely she wanted to ask Saul, and in the end realized her questions boiled down to a simple ‘What now?’ When she entered Docking Pillar Two, however, he was nowhere in sight.

  ‘Alan?’ she enquired through her fone, but there was no response.

  She began searching the dock, checking dusty storage rooms, sealed offices containing hardware yet to be touched by human hand, the empty acreage of an embarkation lounge, but still there was no sign of him. Perhaps he was outside? Le Roque had not specifically said Saul was inside the docking pillar. Hannah went to locate a maintenance airlock giving access to the exterior of the pillar and shortly found herself in an area packed with spares for space-plane fuelling systems. Then she was rising out of the face of the docking pillar, and having to make one of those mental changes of perspective just to stand on it, held in place only by her gecko boots.

  Mars . . .

  If she was honest, this was her prime reason for coming outside, rather than any real expectation of finding Saul out here. There it was, filling up a large portion of the view, the outer rim of Argus seemingly heading towards it like some steel bridge. She was sure she could even see the inky shadow of Argus Station down on the planet, though that might have been some feature integral to the surface. Hannah spent some minutes absorbing the view, also spotting Phobos poised just beyond the curve of its horizon, then almost reluctantly turned to peer at the nearest space plane.

  No sign of activity here, but beyond it, higher up the pillar, she could see a hint of movement. She began walking towards it, and on circumventing the wing of the nearest plane, a second space plane came into view. It had been gutted.

  Robots were picking amid the remains of the vehicle like ants in the dismembered corpse of a crow. Its wings had been detached, and the cockpit had been taken apart. Most of the passenger and cargo area lay over to one side, and the pillar itself was strewn with fragments of flame-cut metal, pipes, nuts and bolts and other fixings, and wisps of insulating material like some vacuum-resistant moss. Perhaps this plane had been hit by some kind of weapon during the recent attack?

  ‘Alan is nowhere to be seen either in or on Docking Pillar Two,’ Hannah told Le Roque reproachfully, when he finally responded to her call.

  ‘You got that right,’ Le Roque replied, sounding irritated.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It looks like he’s gone off to perform a particularly spectacular form of suicide.’

  ‘What?’

  Le Roque dryly explained to her how they were about to lose their Owner . . .

  Mars

  Var’s head-up display read zero, but there were always a few more minutes of air remaining after that. She lay against a rock, trying to control her breathing. She didn’t want to get into a panic, start panting away her last moments of air and end up trying to tear off her EA suit helmet. She wondered how nitrogen suffocation would feel. Were the contentions that it was a painless way to die just complete bullshit, or would she indeed just drift away? Would it be like sleep with the moment of transition from consciousness to unconsciousness becoming a moment that could never be remembered? Probably. Then afterwards there would be a brief period of unconsciousness before her body started to die.

  That hollow roaring in her ears, with a background of irritating tinnitus, was growing steadily. Obviously this was some side effect of oxygen starvation, just like the tightness inside her head, the feeling of growing pressure. She felt warm, too warm, would really have loved to have stripped out of her suit just once more before she died, to feel a cool breeze on her skin—

  Cut that out.

  Hallucinations now. A Martian wind was blowing dust along the chasma and her mind had connected that to the roaring inside her head. However, she knew the reality: that the winds here, no matter how fast they blew, were wimpish things in such thin air. And they certainly didn’t sound like the full-throated blast of a space-plane rocket motor.

  Any minute now, she reckoned. Any minute now things would go dark.

  Forever.

  A shadow was how it started, as it seemingly passed over her. The start of that final darkness? It was a relief that was short-lived, as the shadow passed and a bright light glared through her visor.

  Hah! Here come the angels!

  A huge shape descended before her, but it had nothing to do with the
supernatural. She was hallucinating again, her mind now creating little fictions to escape the inexorable reality of death. A quadrate framework packed with what looked like the main engine of a space plane – cylindrical fuel tanks and one dark figure seated in an acceleration chair – settled out of the sky on a ribbed flame, adjusting as it descended with scalpel blades of steering-thruster blasts. As it finally thumped down, the dust it had stirred up shrouded it from her sight completely.

  Var felt she had to congratulate her imagination for that one, but felt rather critical of its engineering credentials and vector calculus. Okay, present her with comfortable fantasies, but at least try to make them believable ones. It quite simply wasn’t possible to take the engine from a space plane and turn it into what, centuries ago, had been called a flying bedstead. Such an object would be impossible to control, and that was before she even got into thinking about where it might have come from and how it could have been built in the limited time available.

  Ridiculous.

  A man clad in a black VC suit strode out of the dust and came to stand over her. He squatted, placing the oxygen bottle he was carrying to one side, then reached in and detached her spent bottle. He inserted the new bottle in place and her head-up display rose to a figure of forty hours. Immediately after that, pumps in her suit started working, blowing a breeze around her face, cool as the one she had imagined she would have felt had she pulled off her suit.

  Var began to flirt with the idea of surviving.

  ‘Good, you’re alive,’ said a familiar voice over her suit radio.

  She gazed up through his visor. It was her brother’s face; just the eyes were disconcerting. She considered further the impossibility of flying that bedstead contraption still hidden behind a wall of dust. Sure, it was impossible, unless you just happened to be the kind of person capable of stealing space stations and trashing whole planets.