Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

by Neal Asher

  ‘Strip off the spacesuit,’ she instructed them, as she prepared her instruments.

  Blood poured out as they first disconnected all the seals on the suit. They tried to take off the helmet, but with no success.

  ‘Quickly!’ Hannah barked.

  One of the men stepped over to a nearby equipment cabinet and took out a small electric circular saw and quickly affixed to it a diamond wheel, while the other took from the same cabinet a set of bolt croppers. In very short order, Saul’s suit lay in a soggy heap on the floor, the helmet in two halves. Rather than bother with any of the lifting equipment available, they manually shifted him to the surgical table, strapped him down, tweaked the position of the table to bring his head up high, and shortly after that were attaching feeds for artificial blood. Using an external cardio-stimulator that injected a series of hair-thin titanium wires to provide current where required, they restarted his heart, which had failed again, and the blood filled his veins – then came out of the various holes in his body almost as quickly as it went in, pouring over the floor. Under Hannah’s instruction, one of the men pulled over a surgical unit, and it began simultaneously injecting surgical snakes into his two body wounds, quickly sealing the worst bleeds. Meanwhile, Hannah, after slicing away breach foam to expose the wound to his head, pulled over her specialized combined micro- and macro-surgery and set to work.

  As he gazed at all this, Saul understood the detail, but only as a distant spectator. Nothing seemed real; he drifted in a dream, in some half-conscious state. Then, maybe because of some repair she had just made in his skull, everything momentarily slid into proper focus.

  ‘Must remove all . . . damaged matter,’ he told her via the intercom, causing her to jerk and quickly withdraw her hands from the telefactor gloves. He was only aware of having spoken after the fact, and wasn’t entirely sure of how he had accessed the intercom. The two men looked up in amazement, and some horror, for they were being spoken to by the mess on the surgical table before them.

  ‘I think I know what I’m doing,’ Hannah replied, returning her hands to her telefactor gloves, and her attention to the screen images the optics were providing.

  ‘Repair . . . then use tissue stores from the failed unit, rebuild and . . . regrowth.’ Why did he say that? He didn’t know. Time passed; images on a screen, but no emotional content.

  She had shaved and then lifted his scalp to remove a hemisphere of skull from the back of his head. His brain had pulsed blood as she pulled out pieces of shattered bone and ceramic bullet, and injected numerous probes and other instruments. She was now cutting out lumps of tissue killed by the impact shock and depositing them in a kidney dish, then micro-cauterizing and repairing veins, so that the bleeding became less. She had also begun putting in struts and discs of collagen foam for support, for without these his brain would deflate like a speeded-up film of a rotting orange.

  ‘You’ll be on life-support for six months before I can even restore your autonomic nervous system – if I even can.’

  ‘I can guide regrowth,’ he replied. ‘I can run my body . . . through the implants. My body will . . . restore . . . I will . . .’

  She paused, absorbing that.

  ‘You’ll control regrowth, just as you control your robots?’

  ‘Yes.’

  And the truth? The truth was that it was taking a substantial portion of his erratic mental function to keep his body running. His perception of the station had crashed, and his control of the machines within it was now minimal. Maybe he could fully control one spidergun, but definitely not two. His cam vision had dropped back to something wholly human – for he could only manage to look through one cam at a time without becoming confused. But, worse than all this, his perception of himself seemed to have faded, as had his perception of time and place.

  He felt adrift in a dream that was Argus Station.

  4

  The Reaper’s Blunt Scythe

  Before doctors and medical technology came along to queer the pitch, death was a quite easily definable state. If your breathing and your heart stopped, you had achieved that state and little else was considered. This, in its time, could lead to some unfortunate results when the person checking the death failed to make absolutely sure, as fingernail marks on the insides of lids of ancient coffins attest. As time progressed, it became possible to restart the heart, restart the breathing and then to maintain both. Brain death due to the total necrosis of cerebral neurons then became the point of no recovery, but even that was a movable feast and a hunting ground for lawyers. This line was then blurred when the necrosis became a matter of degree, when cerebral matter could be regrown or replaced, and then became almost invisible when it became possible to programme new neural tissue. The new line was then the death of the personality, but even that became a moot point and was not necessarily connected to the death of the human body concerned. Combine the fact that we can now clone human beings with the seeming likelihood that we will soon be able to record most of the information a brain contains, and the meaning of death moves into the territory of philosophers – a place where ancient certainties themselves go to die.

  Argus

  Damn, she didn’t need this now. She wanted to stay with Saul, to be ready if anything went wrong, to be ready to ensure that he lived. But the implications of what Le Roque had told her, and the images she had seen, could not be denied. Her expertise was required, and essential. Not only that: her refusing to come would hint to Le Roque, and others, the extent of Saul’s injuries, which was something she hadn’t broadcast. She would see this through and get back to him just as fast as she could.

  Twenty-two people had died, all within an hour of each other, all of them repros and erstwhile delegates. Others had conducted the initial autopsies and revealed some derivative of Ebola, but now, factoring in those pictures from Earth and the fact that the deaths occurred shortly after the EM shield had been shut down . . .

  Arcoplex One, where most of the deaths had occurred, was quarantined, as were the quarters outside the arcoplex which the victims had occupied, but there were no further deaths, and subsequent blood tests, both within the arcoplex and throughout the station, had revealed no further spread. The corpses had been consigned to the outer ring, to storage in rooms open to vacuum, along with the numerous other corpses that were a product of this station’s recent history. It was a puzzle Hannah had not been involved in because of her focus on Saul, and it was one to which she suspected little effort had been applied in solving since, in the end, the victims had been Committee delegates. Now she was involved because of what was happening on Earth; because, according to some recent data intercepted, people had been dying back there of something similar.

  ‘Keep me apprised of what you learn,’ Saul whispered to her through her fone.

  These words sounded rehearsed to Hannah, as if he had readied them for this moment.

  ‘Why? You’ll probably know before I do.’ She pulled on her spacesuit helmet and it automatically dogged down.

  ‘I did not tell you . . . as others were listening,’ he said, ‘I am . . . much less . . .’

  ‘What?’ Hannah paused at the airlock, cold fingers drawing down her spine.

  ‘The copy of me, which is speaking to you now, did not fully load before I was shot. I’ve lost everything I gained through melding with Janus. I’m not even as functional as Malden was. This will change as your tissue implants in my original skull grow and as the neural net reconnects, but right now I can watch through only one cam and maybe control just one robot.’

  Pre-compiled, every word; something prepared for this moment. He was still on the surgical table in her private surgery, her two assistants finessing the major repairs to his body. He was, however, now controlling the beat of his own heart along with a few other heretofore autonomous functions. Hannah stepped into the airlock, suddenly frightened. Alan Saul was the glue that held this station together and, if anyone discovered the extent of his debilitation, it
could all fall apart. It was significant that the only one he trusted with this knowledge was herself.

  The elevator took her out to the endcap, where she departed the airlock, past the massive end bearing, and made her way up to Tech Central. She stepped into one of the new walkway tubes and very shortly reached the temporary airlock inside – put there until the walkway had been built outwards and connected to Arcoplex Two.

  Within minutes she had reached the lower corridors of Tech Central, propelling herself along by grab handles in zero gravity. Only when she took a cageway up to the floor Medical was located on, and saw Technical Director Le Roque awaiting her, did she remember to remove her space helmet.

  ‘You’ve got some of them here?’ she asked.

  Le Roque gestured towards the door into Medical. ‘Four of them – and another is on its way and should be here within minutes.’ He appeared puzzled. ‘I’m not sure how they relate to what we’re seeing on Earth.’

  ‘Timing,’ said Hannah. ‘They all died within an hour of each other and just after we shut down the EM shield and – in my estimation from that video feed you sent me – from the same disease as killed those back on Earth.’

  ‘I see,’ said Le Roque, still appearing puzzled.

  Hannah entered the room ahead of him and, once inside, began stripping off her spacesuit. Three corpses were strapped on gurneys outside the surgery, while a fourth was inside, undergoing a second autopsy conducted by one of the military doctors, Yanis Raiman. She strode up to the glass to study the corpse, which lay open like a gutted fish. Raiman had obviously been struggling at it, for the corpse had vacuum-dried like old leather.

  ‘What have you got so far?’ she asked.

  Raiman looked up. ‘The massive internal haemorrhages I picked up on before, but I’m also finding a lot of nerve damage that was previously missed.’

  Only now did Hannah note that he wore a full medical hazmat suit. She glanced round at the other corpses on their gurneys. All of them were contained in sterile body bags. If she was right, there was no need for such precautions, but the chance of her being wrong meant they still had to be taken. She turned to watch as the door opened and two security staff towed in the last gurney and pushed it down to the floor so its gecko feet could stick.

  ‘The virus . . . nanoscope,’ Saul whispered in her ear.

  As the two security staff departed, Hannah went over to a nearby console, and linked up to the surgery nanoscope into which Raiman had placed a number of samples. An image came clear, reams of data scrolling up beside it. Hannah ignored the image but studied the data intently, looking for clues, looking for confirmation.

  ‘Manufactured,’ she concluded at once.

  ‘What makes you think that?’ asked Raiman, studying the surgery screen.

  ‘Easy to mistake it for Ebola, since it is based on that virus. Ebola is a favourite for biological warfare – always has been. But this one has a cybernetic component to produce a nerve toxin. Check the chemical stats – because you don’t find iron molybdenum and platinum catalysts in anything natural.’

  ‘Ah, I see,’ Raiman replied, quite obviously not seeing.

  ‘But how did it get here?’ Le Roque asked.

  ‘It was here already,’ said Hannah. ‘What we need to know is how it was activated.’

  She turned away from the screen and from a nearby cupboard removed a medical hazmat suit and donned it, then proceeded through the clean lock. In a moment she was standing over the corpse, noting where it had bled, checking the desiccated organs in glass bottles on a nearby work surface, then rolling closer a mobile ultrasound scanner. Meanwhile Raiman had stepped back, quite prepared to let her take over.

  ‘I’ll set the scan to the viral signature,’ she said. ‘I want to locate its vector.’

  It took five minutes’ scanning. The concentration of the virus was all too plain.

  ‘His right arm,’ she noted, not exactly pleased to have been right.

  ‘Did not have . . . ID implants removed,’ Saul whispered through her fone.

  Hannah nodded; that was it, of course. The twenty-two victims were those delegates who had not had their ID implants removed before the EM shield shut down. She picked up a scalpel, ran a finger down the corpse’s arm until she felt a slight lump, made an incision and, using a pair of forceps, removed the implant and took it over to the nanoscope.

  ‘Le Roque,’ said Saul from the intercom. ‘I want you to return to the control centre and get a team busy analysing that data from Earth further and collating anything else they find of relevance.’

  Tick-tock – another prepared order.

  ‘I see,’ said the technical director.

  As she stood beside the nanoscope, Hannah turned and glanced back at Le Roque through the glass. He looked pale and grim as he headed away. Did he hear it? Did he notice the disconnection between Saul’s words and Saul himself? Or was that just her imagination working overtime? She returned her attention to the implant and dropped it into a sample tube, which she then inserted into the nanoscope. She concentrated fully on what she was doing but, even so, the implication of Saul’s instruction nagged at her. The video feed she had seen might be only a very small part of the whole story. The implications hit home fully when she studied the implant, checked the hardware that interfaced with the body it occupied and found the biochip. It was saturated with the virus and its surface structures clearly indicated that, when active, it had actually been in the process of generating the thing.

  ‘Earth was hit first,’ she said leadenly, ‘then the signal got through once our EM shield went down.’

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Raiman, moving over to stand beside her. He had not seen the video feed; wasn’t entirely sure what this was all about.

  ‘Check implants already removed . . . if they . . . still available,’ Saul said to her through her fone, then out loud, ‘Yes, Earth.’

  He had to hang on in: there was too much to do, too many preparations to make. He drifted about the station, sometimes watching ghostlike through cams, sometimes wholly occupying virtual worlds. He felt weary, utterly drained and at the limit.

  Must concentrate.

  A view opened into Langstrom’s office, where the soldier sat at his desk gazing at a video file on his screen. It was a transmission picked up from a camera on an aero back on Earth, and the horrifying scene it showed was thoroughly familiar to Saul.

  ‘You have a report for me,’ he said, speaking from the intercom, his cam reception breaking up even with that small effort.

  Langstrom jerked and looked around at the door, then up at the nearest cam. He nodded and cleared his throat. ‘I do.’

  ‘Make it.’

  The soldier cleared his throat again, and stood up. ‘The shooter might have been one of Messina’s troops, because we’re getting no DNA match with anyone we know of in the station. During our search of the outer ring, one of my teams was fired on, and two of my men killed. We returned fire, then went in pursuit and saw two people fleeing.’ He paused, obviously uneasy. ‘We had them backed up against one of the ring sections, where new supports are going in for the enclosure, but they escaped across it and lost themselves somewhere in the next two kilometres of ring.’

  Langstrom had relied on Saul’s omniscience; expecting the two shooters to be unable to cross an area swarming with robots, expecting these people to be caught or killed. Here, then, was definite proof of Saul’s debility.

  ‘Keep searching . . . I want them found,’ he said, unable to put together a plausible explanation for the inaction of his robots in the time he had to talk.

  ‘We’ve still got them confined to the outer—’ Langstrom began.

  ‘Later,’ Saul snapped, then set pre-recorded words running. ‘You need to go to Tech Central now. You need to see this . . . I’ve ordered all high-level staff there for the same reason, then afterwards, once they are apprised, we’ll broadcast it throughout the station.’ He hadn’t given the order – he’d relay
ed it through Le Roque. With luck, the likes of the technical director would see this as Saul merely attempting not to humiliate his underlings by knowing everything and attempting to micromanage everything.

  ‘To see what?’ Langstrom asked.

  ‘What . . . you will see. Go.’

  Rather than trying to find his own way through virtual space to Tech Central, Saul simply followed Langstrom, using a tracking program through the cam system. He saw Hannah join the soldier, looking very worried about what she had recently learned of the events on Earth, and probably by her knowledge of Saul’s real condition. The two finally arrived in the main control room of Tech Central, where all the other lead staff in the station had gathered. Included in this crowd were Le Roque, Girondel Chang, the Saberhagen twins and other appointees new and old.

  ‘You are all here,’ said Saul through the intercom.

  Le Roque peered up at a nearby cam then, as previously instructed, turned and stabbed a finger down onto his console, turning on a big screen above it. Again the man had not questioned why he should be doing this, which was good – better for him not to know that it represented one too many tasks for Saul to handle mentally. Now it was time for his rehearsed speech, and his prepared answers to expected questions.

  ‘As some of you will know, twenty-two repros recently died from what looked like Ebola,’ he began, the first image appearing on the screen to show a satellite view of the South American peninsula. ‘After quarantine, sterilization of relevant areas and blood tests, no further infection was found and the issue was shelved. However, new information has now become available, with the consequence that further autopsies have needed to be conducted. I’ll let Hannah explain.’

  Hannah dipped her head in acknowledgement towards the nearest cam, then reluctantly stepped forward.

  ‘The virus is based on Ebola but is an artificial construct with a cybernetic component,’ she said, then paused to close her eyes and rub at her forehead with her forefinger. ‘In the victims I examined, I traced its source and found it to be a biochip within their ID implants.’