Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

15

The City Sleeps

In the twenty-first century, the concept of the individual ‘city’ was only just clinging on, as suburbs, industrial complexes and new towns kept spreading and beginning to link up. Already places that were once thus designated had begun dropping the word ‘city’ from their names. As the century progressed, these urban conglomerations absorbed smaller towns and villages, until those living in these areas began to lose any concept of local community. In fact, the ideas of towns and villages were becoming tribal – merely subsets of what was engulfing them. As the Committee – and the nation conglomerates that formed its parts – took a tighter grip on power, it began eliminating old borders and dividing countries up into more easily governed ‘regions’, then arbitrarily dividing those regions up into sectors and areas with numerical designations that nevertheless failed to erase the old names from public consciousness. Such regions were soon appended with the name ‘sprawl’. In high administration this fact was much debated, but in the end simply accepted. It didn’t matter any more: the nation states and national identities were dying, which was the main aim, so a few archaic names surviving gave no cause for concern.

Argus

The Imperator detached from the docking pillar with a resounding crash. Then with a blast of compressed air through the nozzles of its steering jets, it began falling away from Argus Station. Langstrom manipulated the joystick, began fuelling those steering jets, igniting thruster flames in order to turn and cant the plane just so, while bringing the station up in the main screen.

Saul was amazed to find he still possessed some capacity for awe. The massive disc-shaped station seemed like some odd creature of the abyss that had extended a feeding tube into a random chunk of marine debris. But it was neither shape nor analogy that impressed him, rather a combination of the sheer scale of what he was seeing and the knowledge of their position and intent. Here they were, three hundred million kilometres from Earth, engaged in mining an asteroid, while getting ready to start up an engine that was a wet dream of science-fiction writers of the past.

‘So where to?’ asked Langstrom.

From where he was standing by the rear door of the cockpit, Saul glanced back at the six EVA workers, who were now ensconced in the forward travel compartment where Messina himself and anyone with him would have strapped themselves in during either launch or docking. They were gazing at the big screen on the cockpit bulkhead, which displayed the same view as from the cockpit itself. None of them was strapped in, for out here they would be experiencing no unexpected decelerations or course changes. In fact, barring the possibility of the plane crashing into something, neither was possible.

‘The coordinates of the first target are on your screen,’ he replied.

Langstrom swung the nose of the plane away from Argus, steadied it on blackness punctuated by the cold glare of stars, then fired up the main engine. Saul just leaned back against the wall for the duration of the burn. While this was occurring, he could feel his links to the station stretching, delays increasing in ways only noticeable to a computer, or maybe to a being with a mind that was half computer. And now, with this minuscule transmission delay giving him an ersatz breathing space, he began thinking about certain things he had effectively put on hold.

My sister is alive.

It was only as he arrived on Argus Station that he started to realize that, though his motives had seemed quite plain – namely freedom from and vengeance upon the Committee – they were not. Something else in his subconscious had also been driving him, something left over from the person he had been before Smith had destroyed his mind. That earlier self wanted to find his sister, and it was now a moot point as to whether that was the main driver of his actions or just an incidental goal. But, now he had effectively found her, what next?

Using Var’s face, and a program related to facial recognition, he ran a search through his extended mind. Immediately data began to accumulate, and he needed to delete everything concerning recent communications from Mars. What remained was both fascinating and frustrating. Fragments of memory surfaced: escaping their tutors as children and entering a zero-asset area, but no memory of what had occurred before or afterwards, and no memory of what their parents had looked like; talking about death in the Dinaric scientific community, again a dislocated memory, nothing before or after; remembering her determination to build spaceships, the conversation conducted somewhere he just did not recognize; then something new with a brief vision of him gazing over the rim of a glass at her, her arm wrapped round a man. Just using logic, Saul could place these memories in time, but they were like fragments from a film and possessed no emotional content. Really, he didn’t know her any more – hadn’t even been able to recognize her face – so what was he supposed to do about her?

‘It’s an asteroid,’ Langstrom commented.

Saul focused on him as the space plane’s acceleration began to wane.

‘No, it isn’t,’ he replied. Langstrom peered round at him in puzzlement, so he continued, ‘Like a lot of objects out here, it was identified as an asteroid hundreds of years ago, and that designation was never changed despite contrary evidence, and is still retained in astrogation systems. When we get closer, you’ll see what I mean.’

Saul turned and ducked into the passenger area, the six EVA workers watching him with cautious curiosity. He crooked a finger at them. ‘I need two of you with me now.’ He had expected reluctance from them, but was surprised when all of them began to rise. ‘Bring your helmets and the tool chest.’ He gestured to the heavy box that he had ordered to be brought aboard.

Leading the way out of the section occupied by acceleration chairs, then through Messina’s luxurious private apartment, he glanced back to notice two of the EVA workers had fallen in behind him, one of them towing the tool chest, while the other four were hesitantly tagging along beyond them. He had no problem with that, just so long as they didn’t get in each other’s way. Finally he entered the plane’s cargo hold, which was cold and empty, and turned to the six as they finally all trooped in behind. He pointed down to the floor at a panel measuring two metres by one metre, which was secured by a series of heavy bolts set only ten centimetres apart around its rim.

‘General arming or disarming of this plane was carried out from outside, and usually when it was grounded,’ he explained. ‘We could go outside now and use the same route, but there’s an easier way. The missile cache is right underneath here and it contains four thirty-kiloton warheads. I want them taken out and laid on the floor, then secured with magnetic clamps so that I can work on them.’

A heavy shaven-headed individual with the singular name Ghort, whom Saul had already recognized as being one of Messina’s former bodyguards and who surprisingly had not joined Langstrom’s police force but opted for a job in maintenance, gazed down at the floor contemplatively before saying, ‘If they were loaded from the outside, then the compartment they’re in might not be pressurized.’

Saul simply pointed at the space helmet Ghort was holding.

‘Ah, I see.’ Ghort turned to the four that had trailed along behind and gestured for them to move back, himself walking over to the hold door they had all come through.

‘As you see,’ said Saul, ‘you can seal this entire hold while you work. You have two hours now before we start decelerating, so I’m hoping you can have them out and secured in just an hour – which should give me time to prepare them. I’ll leave you to it, then.’ He headed for the door.

‘If I might ask,’ said Ghort, a slight edge to his voice that intimated at hidden resentments, ‘what do you intend to do with them?’

‘As our first target becomes visible, I’ll explain,’ Saul replied. ‘It’ll become clearer then.’

As he left them, the four who had followed remained behind, donning the helmets they had brought. Ghort opened the tool chest and he and one other stooped over it to take out powered socket drivers.

‘You’re going to use the tactical nukes?’ said Langstrom when Saul returned to the cockpit. ‘They’ll certainly make a nice display, but they’ve got a lot of space to cover.’

Saul reached over and patted his shoulder. ‘Patience, and you’ll see.’

Langstrom looked round at him in surprise, but didn’t have anything to add. Saul returned to the passenger compartment, sat down in an acceleration chair and strapped himself in. He then simultaneously watched feeds from the hold where Ghort and the others were working, from the mining of the cinnabar asteroid and from anything else his attention was drawn to in Argus Station. Even while observing these, he continued working on the esoteric maths and theoretical stats of the station’s space drive, both modelling how it should work and figuring out what adjustments would need to be made to the magnetic field in order to make it perform just so. As Ghort and crew were fixing the last missile to the deck, securing the floor plate again and repressurizing the hold, a new feed from Argus drew his attention.

The naked woman that had once been Delegate Vasiliev was donning a fresh spacesuit brought for her, and now telling her story. Saul felt a sudden surge of annoyance. The hydroponics unit had stayed out of his mental compass because it was moved, and while he had still been unconscious. This was why the Messina clone had managed to stay hidden. Additionally irritating to know that, with everything that was currently going on aboard the station, the clone might yet continue to evade capture. Saul stood up and headed back to the hold where, watched by the EVA workers, he removed the warheads from each missile and attached coded transponders. He could now detonate them with just a thought.

Deceleration ensued, and at length their first target came into sight, observed by everyone aboard, all now crammed into the cockpit.

‘An asteroid,’ declared Langstrom, obviously puzzled.

‘Give it a few more minutes and resolution will improve,’ Saul advised him.

His own vision had resolved the grey blob on the screen and programs in his mind cleaned it up, but it would be a short while before any human eyes could detect what it really was. After a minute it became evident that this was no single lump of asteroidal rock, but a huge conglomeration of boulders.

‘It’s a rubble pile,’ observed Ghort.

‘Precisely,’ said Saul, ‘rocks and dust accumulating – one might say coagulating – over billions of years and all held together by minimal gravity. It is not particularly stable despite its great age.’

‘And this helps us how?’ asked one of Ghort’s companions.

‘Consider what a sixty-kiloton detonation on one side of this will do.’

‘Make a hell of a mess,’ someone joked.

‘I get it,’ said Langstrom. ‘And, funnily enough, it looks perfectly in keeping.’

‘Yes,’ said Saul. ‘Just like an ancient fragmentation grenade.’

Mars

Shots cracked over her head, so close. Approximately one-third the gravity of Earth, air resistance . . . not very much, acceleration three point seven metres per second. In the time it would take them to reach the chasma’s edge, maybe five seconds, she would be forty-five metres below them and accelerating. These thoughts flashed through her mind just before she hit the angled-out cliff face and tumbled. Rhone wouldn’t even bother to shoot at her now. With a straight fall of one kilometre, she would be travelling at a hundred and fifty kilometres an hour by the time she hit the bottom. That would undoubtedly kill her. She had to slow herself down.

And if she survived?

Nothing . . . she would die when her air ran out. But still that brute instinct for survival took over.

Var grabbed for holds and felt them being torn out of her hands, wrenching her arms. Each time she hit the cliff she scrabbled desperately for some way to slow her descent, using palms, boot soles, anything. The material of her suit could take it, and anyway, so what if it couldn’t? Play the odds. At one point she noticed a row of ridges below, to her right, and on her next contact with the cliff propelled herself in that direction. They came up very fast and the first one slowed her abruptly, before shattering underneath her. No pain, though she knew for certain that she’d cracked something. Big adrenalin rush. Further ridges jolted against her and, for an insane giggly moment she thought, speed bumps, then was falling alongside a straight drop.

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 SUPPLIES 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.

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.’

‘Is that all?’ Alex asked.

‘How are you for air?’

‘Three hours left in this suit and about an hour and a quarter in the VC suit.’

‘That should be enough for now,’ Ruger replied. ‘Hide yourself while I get our tactical officer here to assess your situation. I will speak to you again in precisely two hours, Ruger out.’

Alex quickly detached the transponder board and, like a night creature fleeing from the glare, returned inside the shadows of the station rim.