Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

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 bottle 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 direction 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.

‘This is Captain Scotonis of the Scourge here,’ said a new voice. ‘We’re not far away from you but, as you might have gathered, we’ve got a problem.’

‘I’ve gathered nothing,’ said Alex. ‘I’ve been hiding, remember.’

‘Ah . . . yes.’

‘Why are you talking to me?’ Alex asked. ‘It’s normally that Ruger guy.’

‘He’s a little inconvenienced now,’ the captain replied, ‘and we’re running out of time. Alex, that structure in the outer ring of the station is some sort of space drive. It moved the entire station six hundred thousand kilometres in just eight seconds, but crashed it into an asteroid. There seems to be little damage and, from the readings we’re getting, it seems that drive is powering up again. If they use it again we’re never going to get to you.’

‘What?’ Alex could think of nothing else to say.

‘We need you to knock it out, Alex. I can’t stress enough how important it is that you do so. If they manage to get it running again, Messina will forever be a slave and you’ll end up either captured and killed.’

‘Space drive?’ Alex echoed.

‘An inertia-less drive.’

Alex just had to accept it, because this explanation fitted the facts much better than anything he had so far heard from the tactical team. He turned himself round so he was facing out towards the rim, and through the superstructure there he could just about see the newly built ring – this space drive. It somehow looked incredibly substantial now, as if the station structure all around it was made of balsa and the thing itself was fashioned of blued steel.

‘Any advice on how I stop it?’

‘Do you have explosives?

‘Only ceramic ammo.’

‘That might be enough if you can put enough bullets into it. You have to try. Alternatively, I’m sure you’ve been trained to . . . improvise.’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ said Alex. ‘I’ll call you when I have some news.’

He pulled the aerial wire away from the beam and wound it back into the pouch containing the booster board. Bullets might well be enough, as Scotonis had suggested. The thing bore some resemblance to a particle accelerator and doubtless numerous holes through the surrounding coils and into the accelerator pipe itself should seriously fuck with whatever it was doing. Then there were also the power-supply cables. The schematic Alexandra had already pulled up showed the main feed running in over by the endcap of Arcoplex One, with control optics leading to both Tech Central and the EM field transformer room – a definite weak spot. But first the bullets. He began to make his way through the superstructure towards the ring itself.

As he started to get a clearer view of the device, Alex did not lose that impression of substantiality, and the image of it hung heavy in his mind, almost too heavy, making his head ache with the load. He decided to get right on top of it before opening fire, since that way he would be able to target whatever aspect looked the most critical. However, even as he drew closer to the thing the sensation he was getting through his handholds grew ever more unpleasant. Upon reaching the base of one of the big beams that supported the device, he paused, just holding himself in position by hooking the sight of his rifle on the metal. Even so, that weird vibration travelled up through the weapon and into his arms, which were now aching as if they had been beaten. His recently healed leg had also begun to smart, and the pain in it there was growing steadily. He couldn’t pause, had to move in.

Alex again hung his rifle across his back and scrambled along the beam. The intensity of the pain increased until it felt as if he was being electrocuted through his hands. Abruptly he propelled himself from the beam towards the device, but the pain continued to grow even though he was touching nothing. As he drew closer to the heavy coils and skeins of wiring, his visor display suddenly began flashing a ‘systems failure’ alert and the smell of burning infiltrated his helmet. In an instant he realized what the problem was: being this close to such a mass of powered-up coils was inducing currents in the wiring of his suit. This could kill him.

He prepared to propel himself away but, when he was a metre from the thing, his descent abruptly slowed as if he was dropping into an invisible marsh. He bent his legs and then shoved hard against . . . nothing. It was enough to send him sailing away again, though slowly. He unstrapped his rifle and turned himself so that he could aim it back towards the device. Smoke now filled his suit helmet and he could hear a sizzling from the vicinity of his chest. He opened fire, spraying a full eighty-round clip along the length of the device, the dampened recoil making little difference to his progress away, then automatically loaded another clip before assessing the damage.

Nothing, no damage at all – but he could see objects bobbing about around the device like disturbed wasps, and realized he was seeing the bullets he had fired. As he watched them, they all lined up along the length of the device, then, led by the bullets at one end of that line, they began spiralling around it. Alex finally caught hold of a beam and drew himself to a halt, snapping his hand away immediately afterwards. This made no sense. Certainly the problems with his suit could be attributed to magnetic fields, and maybe a similar effect had worked on the metal within his suit to prevent him landing on the device itself, but what the hell was doing that with his bullets? They were made of ceramic, so could not be affected by magnetism.

He had to accept this and move on. First he needed to get somewhere he could change out of his present suit and into the VC suit strapped on his back. He kicked off from the nearby beam, sending himself on a course parallel with the device, still holding his rifle in readiness. Just half a kilometre round from his present location lay the cold store supplied by the hydroponics unit in which he had concealed himself for so long. He corrected his course off another beam, kept scanning all around for any activity. Maybe, because he had not actually managed to do any damage, his attempt had not yet been detected.

The cold store soon became visible. It had only two tubular transport feeds running into it: one from his hydroponics unit which lay behind him, and one from further along around the rim. He changed course again, pushing off from yet another beam, and thus came down on the surface of the store, absorbing the shock of impact by bending his legs but only just managing to stop himself from bouncing away by catching hold of a nearby support strut. Next he walked round the surface of the store to the airlock, opened it, and was just about to step inside when the nightmare descended on him.

‘We’ve sustained no damage at all,’ Le Roque reported. ‘All the asteroid debris was blown outwards.’

‘Rhine?’ Saul turned towards the man.

‘The tidal forces ripped the asteroid apart,’ Rhine replied. ‘But the impact effectively killed our momentum . . . if it could be described as such.’

Saul would have liked to be able to absorb more data than was being supplied by the hard wiring, but within its vicinity the vortex ring was killing bandwidth and doing some odd things with time. It was also interfering with any equipment out there, which was why Saul had pulled most of the robots back from the rim, for they had started to become a little . . . unreliable.

‘That’s odd,’ said Rhine, ‘some debris did get through – I’m reading impacts on the exotic energy shell.’

Saul was on that in a microsecond. Rhine had just said something which, according to the constantly updated theory of his drive, was practically impossible. He tracked the data Rhine was studying, located the part of the vortex ring concerned, but there were no cams available there.

‘Paul?’ he enquired, and immediately knew he had made a mistake in pulling back his robots. He had been concentrating on the bigger picture, he realized, and, in neglecting the smaller characters in that picture, had thus put them all in imminent danger.

The proctor was descending on a figure in a spacesuit who had been about to enter one of the rim’s cold stores. A data packet from Paul, in speeded-up time, showed this same figure opening fire on the vortex generator, failing to do any damage, then moving away. Paul had tracked him, and now intended to take him out.

As the intruder turned, Saul immediately recognized him as Alex, the Messina clone. The proctor reached out to grab his arm and to swing a clenched fist at his face. But Alex jerked aside very fast and raised his rifle protectively. The proctor only managed to close its fingers on the material of Alex’s suit, and its fist struck the rifle butt before striking the man’s visor. Vapour blew out around the visor, but Saul immediately saw that Alex had just gained an advantage. The blow had turned his rifle so the barrel was pointing straight at Paul’s head. Alex did not fail to use that advantage and the image feed filled with blue fire and flying chunks of ceramic ammunition. As the image cleared again, Saul watched Alex entering the airlock, the ripped arm and visor of his suit gushing vapour.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Paul.

The proctor had received only minor damage, but the fusillade had blown it out into vacuum and it could do nothing until it reached some strut, beam or wall to grab hold of. This would take, at its current trajectory, at least eight minutes.

‘How long until we can fly again?’ Saul asked Rhine, even while running his own calculations.

‘Maybe half an hour,’ Rhine replied. ‘I can’t be more accurate than that.’

Saul acknowledged this news with a nod – he himself had calculated on thirty-three minutes – then immediately headed out of Tech Central. It had been foolish of him to leave this in Langstrom’s hands, in effect to dismiss it as just a matter for the station police. Even now, analysing what little data lay available in the station system about these clones, he realized why this one had escaped something as formidable as a proctor.

Apparently, from the moment they stepped out of their amniotic tanks, the clones underwent severe training and indoctrination. They were also the test beds for new improvements in physical enhancements of the kind less detectable than those seen in Committee bodyguards or some of the enforcers: increased muscle density, genetic mods for nerve-impulse acceleration and mental programming for improved performance.

This one needed to be dealt with, and fast.

Saul picked up his pace, meanwhile making his own assessments of the state of Argus and simultaneously checking instrument readings of all the asteroids in the immediate area – he did not want them to go crashing into something when they used the drive again. As he did this, subprograms he had set in motion some time before flagged up items for his attention. One of the flags indicated high importance, so he checked it. What he found momentarily slammed him to a halt.

A transmission had been picked up from Mars, automatically stored by the system, but containing something he had previously ticked as being of interest to him. The fact that it was a radio signal and not a communication via tanglecom had also raised its importance.

Var . . .

The video file had been retransmitted over a period of six hours. This duration meant it had been sent from some low-lying area on Mars, which in itself was curious, and the contents confirmed that.

In his mind he gazed upon his sister’s face behind the visor of a Mars EA suit.

‘This is Varalia Delex transmitting to Argus Station from Coprates Chasma on Mars. My message is for my brother Alan . . . Alan Saul who, it now seems, is the one you on Argus call the “Owner”,’ she began. ‘Alan, if, by any chance, you survive your encounter with the Scourge there is something you need to know. It pains me for more reasons than one,’ she grimaced at that, ‘to have to tell you that I am no longer the director of Antares Base. Rhone, our director of Mars Science, has seized control and is in communication with the new regime on Earth. Therefore don’t expect any help at the base, and be aware that Rhone has an electromagnetic pulse weapon, while other personnel now have numerous hand weapons. I don’t know what your response will be to this – whether you will simply ignore the Mars base or whether there are things you want from there. In fact I don’t know what your intentions are. Do you intend to remain in the vicinity of Earth? Do you intend to try surviving within the solar system? How any of us could survive Earth has always been a question I’ve found difficult to answer.’ She paused, seemingly searching for words.

She then continued, ‘It seems likely that I will be dead before I know what you intend to do. While inspecting some work being conducted on the edge of Coprates Chasma, I was betrayed by Rhone. He then killed my good friend Lopomac, and attempted to kill me, too, but I threw myself down into the chasma and managed to survive the fall. I am now in one of the last remaining intact buildings of the old trench base. I have about twenty hours of air left and, unless I can find some more, then I will die.’

Again she paused, her expression now turning vicious. ‘If you do come here, Alan, I can only hope that you will . . . deal with Rhone. I hope you feel some familial connection, though of course that’s never been evident in you before. I should add that not all base personnel are complicit in his betrayal. There are some good people there, like Martinez, Carol and others. Please reply – at least to let me know that you have received this message.’

Saul paused in order to reply, just vocally, just to let her know, ‘Var, this is Alan. Your message has been received. Currently we have been delayed because, while running under Jasper Rhine’s new space drive, we collided with an asteroid. The station is undamaged, but it is possible we will come under attack before we can get the drive running again. If we survive we will come for you and, if we cannot get to you in time, be assured that Rhone will pay a heavy price.’ He knew his words sounded without feeling, but he didn’t have the time to deal with that now.

He couldn’t think of anything more to add, any comfort to give her. He now broke into a loping run. They had enough problems here as it was and, even if they got to Mars, the chances of him doing anything for Var were minimal. None of the space planes aboard Argus was capable of flying down through the thin Martian atmosphere. Perhaps that wasn’t an insuperable problem, given time, but time was the one thing that Var did not have. He began running schematics in his mind, seeing what could be stripped away, making vector and power calculations, redesigning things organically as, merely with a thought, he sent a squad of construction robots out to the space docks.

The lock pressurized even as Alex unclipped and pulled off his helmet. He opened the inner door and pushed himself into the wide space available before the storage racks, fully alert for anyone waiting for him in there. He seemed safe for the moment, but that could not last. If that android had seen him, then so had all of them, and perhaps Alan Saul himself would by now know where he was. Therefore more would be on the way, along with members of the station police force. He had only one option.

Tumbling in zero gravity, Alex quickly stripped off his old suit, unpacked the VC and donned it. He did it much faster than most normal troopers could manage, but then he was much better trained and his reactions a lot quicker. No normal trooper would have been able to survive an encounter like the one he had just gone through. Once he had closed the VC suit, he hooked up the oxygen pack from his old suit as a reserve, connected in the radio booster board, and then pushed himself over to the cylinder transport system. Here he found a cylinder that had come from his own hydroponics unit, still in the process of being unpacked by a pedestal-mounted robot arm. He ducked under the arm and dragged the cylinder from its rack. Only when he had it clear did he consider what could have happened if the robotic arm had been controlled by someone hostile. He emptied the cylinder of its remaining contents, then took it over to the other egress and put it in position. There was no guarantee this would work, but he had to try. He climbed inside and closed the lid.

Nothing happened for a moment, and Alex began to wonder if Saul had reached out to shut down his escape. But then, with a clonk, the thing slid into motion, shortly followed by a surge of acceleration pushing his feet against the base of the cylinder. He closed his eyes. If Saul knew he was in this tube, then the chances were that he would do something about it – such as knocking off the braking at the other end and allowing Alex to arrive at his destination at full speed. So Alex might well be about to die. Then again, another option would be to stop the cylinder halfway along its course and just leave it there until he ran out of air. Certainly he had no way of getting out of this thing while it was in its transport tube. Deceleration ensued . . . a further couple of clonks, and the lid opened.

‘What the hell?’ said the man looking down at him.

In one motion Alex jerked upright and swung his rifle in a short vicious arc that connected with the man’s head. He tumbled back and Alex was past him in a moment, realizing he was now in some sort of automated food-preparation room. As he reached the door, he guessed that this must be the place that supplied the refectories and personal dispensers in Arcoplex One – which meant he was getting close to the power feed to that weird space drive.

Out in the adjacent corridor he turned right and headed straight for a bulkhead door, pausing to study the direction icons and colour-coded map above it, which he memorized. Heading straight for the airlock, he passed a woman in the corridor but she wasn’t armed, so he ignored her. Once through the airlock, he moved out into a cageway running alongside the outer endcap. He abandoned the cageway at once, since it was taking him in the wrong direction, then climbed over the top of the unit he had just left and gazed towards his destination. Through partially constructed floors of the outer ring, he could see part of the space drive and the ducts that ran power and control optics to it, extending towards him then sweeping away to the right to disappear into the endcap itself. He was just about to launch himself towards those ducts when suddenly silver shapes were swarming around them, many of them breaking off to launch themselves towards him.

Alex made microsecond calculations before he threw himself in a flat course over towards the side of the endcap. He stood no chance now of severing the power supply to the space drive, but there was still another potential weakness. The EM field seemed to be an integral part of this new drive and, just beyond the endcap lay the main transformer room. After a few seconds in flight, he hit the curved outer edge of the structure around the arcoplex-bearing housing. As he thumped down a foot to secure himself, he caught a glimpse of someone looking up at him in surprise from a rounded window, before he propelled himself further. As he sailed through vacuum, he turned to survey his surroundings. There was absolutely no doubt now that he had been spotted. There were robots closing in on him from every direction, some of them leaving vapour trails from their use of compressed-air impellers.

At high speed and feet first, Alex hit a section of composite wall. Something cracked in his recently healed leg, but he felt no pain. The composite had dented, absorbing a lot of the force, but he still bounced away from it. Seconds later he snagged a long, tensioned beam strap, managed to hold on, then towed himself down its length. He had pulled himself into a partially walled corridor by the time he felt the vibration of multiple impacts on the structures all around him. The robots had arrived.

Moving as fast as he could in his gecko boots, Alex made it to a manual airlock hatch. He opened it, climbed inside, waited for it to pressurize. The constricted space of the airlock would at least keep some of the bigger robots from following him, and any others would have to come through here just one at a time. Once it had fully pressurized, he opened the lower hatch and dropped through it into an oxygenated corridor. In a slow loping run, he headed for the head of a cageway leading down. He jumped into this and scrambled down through numerous floors to reach a short tubeway. At the end of this lay the door to the transformer room, and Alex couldn’t quite believe he had made it this far. However, with air around him to transmit the din of robot movement, he knew he would be going no further. He opened the door on to a platform overlooking a massive collection of transformers.

Packed within a framework extending twenty metres on each side, and rising from floor to ceiling, stood the transformers themselves. These were smoothly rounded-off cubes of laminated metals and graphine composites wrapped in heavy coils of copper and superconductive wire. Quadrate scaffolding filled the rest of the chamber, supporting pan-pipe clusters of heavy ducts that wove away from these transformers and led into the surrounding walls. Alex scanned the scene, remembering how this room had looked the last time he was here, then he focused on the subsequent additions.

Supported amid the scaffolding was a big squat cylinder of hardware with numerous brand-new optic and power feeds leading both in and out of it. Since it was obviously new, this device had to be something to do with the space drive; therefore it had to be crucial. He leaped directly across to catch hold of a scaffolding pole, then began to tow himself towards it. At that moment the door burst open and, one after another, construction robots sped into the room. Hearing sounds from above, he looked up and saw more fast appearing there. Alex halted just a few metres away from the unknown device and trained his rifle on three interconnected translucent boxes that seemed to be packed with electronics. Then he hesitated.

Once he pulled the trigger, it would be the end for him. At the surface of his mind he dismissed the importance of that, but deep down knew this was why he had hesitated. He now rationalized: would destroying this drive increase or decrease Messina’s chances of survival? Would those aboard the Scourge even care about Messina? Would Messina, who was now probably about as mindless as ex-Committee Delegate Vasiliev, be better off here? These arguments circled in his mind, and his trigger finger remained immobile. Then he looked around to find that all the robots had ceased their approach.

‘So where do we go from here, Alex?’ asked a calm and horribly reasonable-sounding voice over his suit radio. ‘Pull that trigger and I can assure you that Messina will die instantly.’

The words seemed to act like a key turning in his brain, and Alex knew precisely how this must play out. Maybe, in the end, Alexandra had been right about so much. He reached up with a free hand to unclip his VC suit helmet and batted it away from him, then, always ensuring he had a finger on his weapon’s trigger, removed each of his VC suit gauntlets in turn.

‘Bring him to me,’ he said. ‘You bring him to me now.’

They were running out of time and Saul did not need the full extent of his abilities to calculate that if Alex caused damage where he was, then it was unlikely to get fixed before the Scourge arrived. Everything possible must be done to prevent him doing so. The urgency of that was intensified by the fact that, right at this moment, Saul’s sister was running out of her air supply on Mars. Such knowledge had an odd effect on him: his instinctive reaction was to view her as a problem that needed to be solved, damage to reality that needed to repaired. Yet, if he stepped back and coldly analysed the situation, she was an irrelevance. The oddity was that, in this one case, the more human part of him had overridden the greater whole. Perhaps he had been fooling himself about the dehumanizing effect of plugging himself into the machine.

‘Langstrom,’ Saul instructed, directly through the police commander’s fone, ‘go to the Arboretum and have Messina secured, but bring him to the EM field transformer room only when I signal. We want to draw this out as long as possible.’

All the while Alex remained in the transformer room doing no damage, the vortex generator was winding up to speed. If Saul could keep him talking for just half an hour, they would then be able to fire up the drive.

‘What the hell is he doing?’ replied Langstrom. ‘Surely he doesn’t think he can escape with Messina now?’

The man was clearly watching image feeds and therefore up to date on what was happening, Saul realized. Others were watching too, and he could not help but feel like an idiot whose folly had been exposed before a crowd. Why had it taken him this long to understand how dangerous this Alex was, and why, when he apparently had the man trapped, hadn’t he shut down the only possible means of escape?

‘He’s been programmed to protect Messina,’ Saul replied, ‘but is now beset by a mass of contradictions that he’s not mentally prepared for. Seen in his terms, we are an obvious danger to Messina, so he has been working along with those aboard the Scourge to stop us leaving. However, he’s not stupid either, and he’ll realize that those aboard that ship are not necessarily as concerned about Messina’s welfare as they are probably telling him.’

‘That still doesn’t answer my question,’ Langstrom grumped.

‘The plain answer is that he doesn’t know what he’s doing,’ Saul replied. ‘He just doesn’t want Messina to die – or to die himself.’

Saul exited the rim-side endcap of Arcoplex One, entering the train tunnel that led outwards then round the rim towards the docks, but exited it through a personnel access tube heading out to the transformer room. At the same time, he continued watching events through the sensors of the robots currently occupying the transformer room, while also urging a couple of spiderguns over that way. Just a couple of shots from one of those could finish this quickly; however, it was quite evident that Alex had positioned himself very carefully. He would notice if Saul tried to move a spidergun into a position where the shots it fired would not damage the new drive hardware. This situation was sticky, very sticky indeed.

‘Alan, what the hell are you doing?’ Saul had been ignoring all attempts to contact him, but had now allowed this one through.

‘I am going to deal with a bad situation resulting from my lack of attention, Hannah,’ he replied.

‘And get yourself killed?’

‘That was not my intention.’

‘He’ll probably try using you as a hostage to get both himself and Messina off the station,’ she protested. ‘Use your robots to deal with him instead.’

‘Not feasible at the moment, unfortunately, but the longer I can draw this out, the nearer we get to Rhine firing up the drive again. But if I don’t go and negotiate now, this Messina clone could destroy vital hardware and kill our chances of escaping.’

‘You’re sure this isn’t some macho need of yours to step outside your computer world?’

‘That was low, Hannah. I’ll speak to you soon.’

As Saul finally reached the door into the transformer room he remembered the last time he had entered here, with Malden – and how Malden had died under a hail of bullets from Director Smith’s troops. That was not a memory he relished.

He opened the door and stepped inside, two construction robots smoothly sliding out of his way as he walked out on the platform – but not moving too far away. They were ready to interpose themselves between him and Alex should the Messina clone decide that Saul made a better target than the drive hardware.

‘So you are Alex,’ Saul said.

‘Where’s Messina?’ Alex asked.

This man was a little difficult to read, even though Saul could study in detail every single pore on his face. Certainly he looked scared, and ever so slightly puzzled, but these seemed like a veneer over blankness, like a smile painted on a doll.

‘Messina will be brought here only when or if I am ready to bring him here, Alex,’ said Saul. ‘I’m curious to know what you hope to achieve. I’ve already told you that the moment you pull that trigger he will die.’

The other man suddenly looked very tired as he shook his head.

‘Alexandra was naive, but maybe naivety is a good thing, because it allows you to function without regard for the consequences,’ he said.

‘I assume Alexandra was your partner – the one killed in Messina’s space plane?’ Human contact now? Saul reached up, unclipped his suit helmet and removed it, trying thus to bridge the emotional gap.

‘She was. She possessed a very black-and-white view of reality that I envy now.’

‘Surely this situation is, though with some complications, also black and white?’

Alex just stared at him for a moment, then he said, ‘The fact that your robots ceased their approach, and that you yourself are here now, tells me I am pointing this weapon at something vital. So here’s what I want: I want you to withdraw all the robots from this room, then I want you to come over here next to me. You will be my hostage, and together we will go to the Chairman’s space plane, where you will instruct your staff to bring the Chairman. There we will arrange a hostage exchange, and I will depart with him safely.’

On the face of it, this seemed a viable option for such a thoroughly programmed Messina clone to achieve, but already Saul was beginning to realize that this man was a bit deeper than that. He decided to test him.

‘So you can then depart and be picked up by the Scourge,’ he suggested.

Alex shook his head. ‘That would have been Alexandra’s expectation. She would have bargained with you similarly. She would have expected to be picked up by the Scourge, but found herself ignored.’

‘And your own expectation?’

‘I will use the cryogenic suspension pods on board,’ he said, ‘and at some time in the future the plane will be picked up, maybe in better times.’

‘So you know about them,’ remarked Saul.

‘I know about them,’ Alex agreed.

‘What makes you think I won’t destroy that plane the moment it is clear of this station?’ Saul asked.

‘Because I will release you. Because you gain no advantage by using up energy or projectiles to kill me, especially when such resources might be better employed in getting this drive up to speed or defending this station against the Scourge.’

‘That seems . . . reasonable.’

‘Then send your robots away. Send away that spidergun I see lurking in the corridor behind you.’

Saul glanced back at the spidergun, then, careful to telegraph his moves, gently propelled himself from the platform towards Alex, seeking to get closer. As soon as he caught hold of the scaffolding, he slowly raised a hand in a gesture of dismissal. The robots began to withdraw and the spidergun in the corridor retreated out of sight, as Saul towed himself even closer. Then he spoke out loud, ‘Langstrom, bring Messina to his space plane,’ though the words never actually reached Langstrom. However this turned out, Saul’s main aim was to get that weapon pointed away from the hardware.

‘That’s close enough,’ said Alex.

Absolutely right, had Saul possessed merely human reactions and human speed. Even at that moment he was consciously controlling every aspect of his body, oxygenating his blood, ensuring nutrients were in place, increasing his heart rate and adrenalin levels and calculating the precise moves he must make. All he needed now was for Alex to turn that weapon towards him.

‘You know that I was made almost incapable of being disloyal to the Chairman,’ said Alex. ‘I was indoctrinated to protect him at all costs, including that of my life. However, I have been alive a long time for one of our kind, and I have also been a long time away from reprogramming.’

Why was he saying this?

Alex continued, ‘Even when I came here, I was still functioning on that basis but only now have I understood the futility of my position. I cannot any longer save the Chairman, because he no longer exists. He is now no more what he used to be than that creature that entered my hydroponics unit is still Delegate Vasiliev. The purpose of my existence is over.’

Something was going badly wrong and just for a second Saul could not understand what it was. He needed to slow this down, calm it.

‘So what is it you want, Alex?’

‘I’m not as trusting as Alexandra was. She would have been easy for you to manipulate, and would have died the moment she left this room. I, however, know I will not be leaving this room alive.’

Saul understood in that instant, and realized he should have guessed it the moment he saw Alex had removed his space helmet and gauntlets. The purpose for which Alex had been shaped was gone, but human motives like vengeance remained. A sheer bloody-minded and suicidal response could therefore not be overruled. Saul launched himself at the man just as the weapon crackled, chunks of plastic, silicon and optics zinging away as its bullets turned the control circuits to ruin.

Forty bullets fired . . .

The rifle swung up towards Saul even as his right hand speared at Alex’s throat. Saul pulled back, turned, and clamped his elbow down to trap the weapon’s barrel against his body. Alex tried to pull it free but Saul reached down, driving a thumb against the man’s trigger finger. The weapon crackled against his side, a searing sensation there, but the bullets impacting somewhere behind. The heel of a hand came up blindingly fast, hammering into Saul’s nose. Levering against the rifle he turned completely, bringing his elbow round and smashing it into the side of Alex’s head. The man turned away to avoid that, catching only part of the blow and spinning further to bring the rifle down like a club. It struck Saul’s upper arm, but without much force since by then Alex had released it, after realizing it was merely a hindrance to close-quarters combat.

Tight, Saul understood. Very tight.

Saul was fast, but so was this Alex. Neither of them telegraphed blows and at this range neither of them could get their blocks into place fast enough. Constricted by the surrounding scaffolding, there was also little room for them to separate. They ended up face to face, short powerful karate punches blurring between them as each tried to drive the other into a bad position.

Stop just responding. Calculate.

Time seemed to slow down as Saul’s thought processes speeded up. He could see that, though they were both managing to deliver solid blows, they weren’t delivering them with maximum effect – the padding and armour in their suits absorbing most of the impact. Saul altered the parameters for himself. Pull back on next strike, the block will drive it into the upper chest: pause – now. His next punch hit a floating rib, between bands of armour, and on the one after that, as Alex shifted his head aside to avoid it, Saul opened out a thumb. His fist grazed along Alex’s temple, but the thumb went straight into his eye. Weakening now, and a loss of depth perception. Saul turned as if evading yet another blow, but raised his leg and slammed his knee into his opponent’s thigh, behind the front pad of armour.

Alex’s next straight-fingered jab aimed at the point just below Saul’s ear missed entirely, and now it was all over. As he drove blow after blow into his opponent’s body, Saul also gazed through the senses of a spidergun, now back in range, as it etched out numerous target points. Other robots were returning to the room too. Alex meanwhile lowered his arms and Saul realized the other man was now waiting to die. Surely this was the next logical step: remove this impediment and then try to repair the damage here. But there was an objection partly within himself and partly distributed amidst all of his mind and those things fashioned by it.

Alex drifted backwards with his eyes closed, but as nothing happened he opened them. He spat blood, then snarled, ‘You must kill me!’

‘An interesting problem,’ whispered a voice in Saul’s mind.

‘What would you suggest?’ Saul asked without speaking.

‘Reprogramming by reality is already underway,’ replied Paul, now actually entering the transformer room. ‘I suggest confrontation followed by a naturalistic approach. Direct intervention is not necessary.’

‘Why?’ Saul asked out loud.

The proctor sailed across from the platform and landed on the scaffolding. It reached in with one long arm and snared Alex by his spacesuit, dragging him out like a rabbit out of a burrow.

‘When it is not necessary to kill,’ said Paul, ‘it is not necessary to kill.’

‘Take him, then,’ said Saul dismissively. Then he spoke directly to Langstrom’s fone: ‘You can forget about Messina now – we’ve got bigger problems.’ Then he turned to inspect the damage.