Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

by Neal Asher

  ‘It’s not that; it’s because of the lack of space.’

  ‘So what do we have, then, in the hold?’ Clay asked, intent on keeping the conversation running as he pushed his way past the next group of troops, even though he was already thoroughly aware of the ship’s manifest.

  ‘There isn’t much in the way of heavy stuff,’ said Liang. ‘We’ve got eighty vacuum-penetration locks, some spiderguns and a hundred and twenty heavy machine guns – ten mils. The rest is ammo, portable weapons, medical supplies and food.’

  Just another two groups of soldiers to push their way past, and they would reach the end of this particular access tube. Then Clay wanted some excuse to get out of here fast. After spending so long in his cabin, in the crew areas of the ship, in the hold, and as much time as possible in Messina’s unfinished quarters, he had finally felt it was his duty to come here and ‘inspect the troops’. He decided now that this would be his first and last such inspection. He halted, a tingling of his skin behind his ear making him aware that someone was trying to fone him. He allowed the connection by reaching up and pressing his forefinger against the fone there.

  ‘Political Officer Ruger,’ said Captain Scotonis, ‘you wished to be kept updated of any changes in Argus’s status. It has fired up a steering thruster and changed course, but only by about half a degree.’

  Clay halted, his finger still up against his fone. ‘Any idea why?’ He glanced at Liang and the other three staff officers, who were gazing at him with a strange blank indifference.

  ‘Not as yet.’

  ‘I’m coming up to the bridge now,’ said Clay.

  ‘No need for that,’ said Scotonis. ‘It’s not as if we need to go rushing about.’

  War is one per cent terror and ninety-nine per cent boredom. Clay was not sure where he had heard that, but it seemed to apply perfectly to this particular journey. He’d been terrified during the initial acceleration of the Scourge but, as the interminable journey dragged on he’d felt as if he was increasingly losing his mind. Anyway, Liang could not hear Scotonis’s side of the exchange, so this seemed a perfect excuse for Clay to get out of this horrible place.

  ‘I’m on my way,’ Clay replied, then with another press of his finger he shut down the communication. Returning his attention to Liang he said, ‘We’ll have to cut this short, I’m afraid. Something has come up.’

  Liang acknowledged that with a serious nod, but was unable to hide a flash of impatience. The man probably considered Clay a waste of time and space that was better occupied by another fighting man or maybe a few more crates of bullets. Liang was certainly all about the job, since his only recreation seemed to be playing fast games of mah-jong against a computer program, and constantly winning.

  Scotonis and Pilot Officer Trove, who had now grown a scrubby Mohican to divide her narrow black skull, occupied the main bridge floor. Trove was in her seat, a virtuality mask over her face, while Scotonis stood towards the edge of the same bridge floor, talking with one of the crew who occupied a cradle suspended before a mass of overcomplicated-looking controls. What had one of them said – yeah, designed by committee. Clay walked over to stand beside the captain.

  ‘Tell me more about this course change,’ he said.

  Scotonis turned towards him, his face devoid of expression. ‘There’s not much to tell, really. They altered their vector by half a degree.’

  ‘Does this course take them towards an asteroid designated as GH467?’ Clay asked.

  Scotonis looked genuinely puzzled for the first time since Clay had met him. ‘GH467?’ he echoed. ‘Why would that be significant?’

  ‘Galahad offered to let them go if they moor a space plane to that asteroid, but one that contained the Gene Bank data and samples – and Alan Saul,’ Clay explained.

  ‘Really?’ said Scotonis, again surprised.

  Clay continued, ‘She made the offer because, if they accepted it, there would be less chance of the Gene Bank stuff being destroyed, and they would then be delayed by an appreciable time and quite likely already at odds with each other.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Scotonis, ‘so it wasn’t an honest offer.’

  ‘Our mission remains the same: get those samples, and capture or kill the rebels aboard Argus. Then, if the Mars Traveller has not been destroyed, we place a small crew aboard the station, to dispatch it back to Earth, while we swing back to Mars and deal with the rebels there.’

  Scotonis gave a brief nod to this, then headed over to Trove, who had just taken her face out of the VR mask. ‘You heard?’

  ‘I heard,’ she replied sourly. ‘This course change does take them closer to GH467, but not directly towards it. Incidentally, that asteroid was maybe not the best choice, since it is now widely diverging from the original route they took towards Mars.’ She shrugged. ‘I suspect it was chosen by someone unacquainted with astrogation.’

  That was an unconcealed criticism of Serene Galahad, and this sort of comment was becoming more common from Scotonis and his senior crew as they realized that Clay simply could not kill them without jeopardizing the entire mission. He decided then that he would have to do something about this before it went any further, for he must maintain his facade of loyalty to Galahad, but not now. Instead he would wait until Trove returned to her cabin.

  ‘So there’s no guarantee that they are heading there?’ Clay asked, pretending he hadn’t noticed her sniping.

  Trove shrugged. ‘They could be, but we won’t know for certain unless they make a further course correction within the next month, then begin deceleration – which is about the window they need for something as unwieldy as Argus Station.’

  Clay headed over to his chair and sat down. ‘I need to speak to Messina’s clones.’ Now familiar with the controls on the console that he could swing across before him on a jointed arm, he quickly punched in his instructions and made the call.

  After the signal delay Alex’s face appeared in a frame on the multi-screen ahead of him. Of course it did: it wasn’t as if the two clones there had much else to do. The face was thinner now, and haggard. Trapped in the hydroponics unit, they weren’t short of water or air, but their supply of food was meagre, for they could only take a limited amount from the food growing in the tanks without the agribots detecting the loss and reporting it. The degree of self-discipline that had kept the two clones inside that unit for so long, nibbling at a few leaves and the odd potato, while steadily making reports on what little data they could glean, had told Clay just how intense was their conditioning, and just how far away they were from being genuine human beings.

  ‘What is your status today?’ Clay asked, and waited impatiently.

  ‘Unchanged,’ Alex eventually replied. ‘The android is still too close for us to risk leaving this unit and, as I stated before, if we don’t leave here within the next month we will be incapable of ever doing so.’

  ‘Understood,’ said Clay, quickly continuing now the pleasantries were out of the way. ‘You’re doing very well there, and your sacrifice will be recognized. However, I have something more for you to do, in addition to your previous instructions. I need to you to find out whether the Gene Bank samples and data are being moved, and if a space plane is currently being prepared for launch. Do as much as you can now towards that end, with the data access you have, and, should you manage to get out of there soon, that is the first thing I want you to check.’

  ‘Understood,’ said Alex, once the instruction was received. ‘Is there anything else?’

  He hadn’t even asked why – another sign of his lack of human characteristics.

  ‘That’s all for now,’ said Clay, noting out of the corner of his eye that Trove had just stood up and was heading for the exit. He shut down the communication, got out of his seat and gazed across at Scotonis. ‘I’ll be here for his next scheduled report, but if Alex gets in contact before then, I must be informed at once.’

  Clay turned and headed after Pilot Officer Trove. Doubtless now was the time f
or her break, and she would head for her cabin, where, if she followed her usual routine, she would enjoy a meagre meal of rice and reconstituted vegetables before sleeping for five hours. Upon waking, she would drink some coffee while awaiting the arrival of a ship’s engineer who had taken her fancy, whereupon they would have frenetic sex for most of the remaining hour allowed to her. She would then wash, dress and return here.

  Clay had seen how others entertained themselves aboard this ship and knew that his own method was unique, because he was the only one with such free access to the cam system. Now he felt it was time for him to utilize his free access to other equipment, namely the pain-inducer in Trove’s cabin.

  11

  Fones

  A great deal of time has passed since the days of the ancient telephone necessitating wired connections and finger-dialling or press-button keypads. The modern fone – a distinct spelling that rose into prominence with the first Internet – is an adaptable piece of technology that has taken many years, perhaps too many years, to reach its present state. More than a hundred years ago, computer voice-recognition enabled the owner of such a device to call someone just by speaking their name, and over fifty years ago the introduction of rugged implant technology ushered in visual cortex interfaces and sensitized skin controls – usually positioned at the temple – to allow us to call up menus to our inner vision, and thereby make all our calls that way. In fact, terabyte processors and old Bluetooth technologies have since made the fone a simple mobile Internet connection. However, it has still taken two centuries to get to where we are today, and those who all those years ago predicted technological singularity would wonder why such a simple thing had taken so long.

  Earth

  Nelson allowed Serene’s father twenty-two hours to stabilize between each two-hour session. In the first week, Donald Galahad gained a four-day respite – if it could really be called that – when Serene dispatched Nelson to attend to some other work that was conducted before a private audience as an object lesson. It was the first and last time she used him like that, for the response had not been good. Many of the staff of the factory whose manager had been the object of that lesson failed to turn up for work the next day, until enforcers went and rounded them all up. Better to kill quickly and cleanly and move on. She had also quickly developed a loathing for Nelson and his ‘art’. The man was like some poisonous insect in which one might show some scientific interest, nothing more. She therefore left him alone in the cellar with her father and attended just one further torture session, affecting a clinical detachment from it all but experiencing the same reaction in the elevator afterwards.

  Why can’t I stop?

  She had thought she would enjoy this, but hated it from the start. She half-expected to come to enjoy it eventually – this personal exercising of ultimate power – but it seemed petty now, a foolish whim, altogether too frivolous. She understood herself enough to know that she would never want to admit to having made a mistake, and surely stopping Nelson from his activities would be such an admission, but there was something more to it than that. The last time she had come down here was after one of the exterminations necessary to rebalance Earth’s ecology; when the Scour had wiped out three million people in the Northeast India region and then the big dozers and macerating machines went in to level that particular area of sprawl.

  Am I punishing myself? she wondered. Had she found it necessary to come down here to feel shame, feel the gorge rising in her throat, for some kind of penance?

  ‘The physical work is complete now,’ said Nelson, stepping back. ‘The level of agony he will experience henceforth will be governed by electrical stimulation of his nerves and by the drugs employed. He will also experience pain from the various infections that will inevitably ensue. How long he remains compos mentis is now dependent on the degree of pain delivered, and how long he will last physically depends on the extent of those infections.’

  Serene felt her father had already lost all the compos from his mentis over the course of the last week.

  So this then was Nelson’s art.

  The frame holding her father’s body now sported numerous silvery extensions supporting polished dishes and glass containers. He seemed a freeze-frame of an exploding human being. Opened up like a gutted fish, his internal organs were arrayed all about him, all the plumbing and nerves of his body stretched, force-grown or otherwise extended in order to support them. In some areas Serene could see his blood running through glass tubes. Wires were interwoven, electrochemical amplifiers connected here and there, nerve interfaces running optics between each other. Serene watched his heart beating in a glass vessel half a metre out from his chest, his kidneys throbbing on dishes up either side of his drooling face, his intestine formed into a neat spiral just below the plastic-enclosed mass of his liver.

  She gazed at this display in bewilderment. Traitors should pay with their lives, and if they possessed information, they should be tortured until they revealed every last scrap of it; then they should be disposed of. The rebels aboard Argus Station and on Mars should face lengthy punishment before the eyes of the world, and an especial place should be reserved in Hell for Alan Saul. But this was far too much punishment for a man who had merely rejected the sexual advances of his own child; this was far too much even for the man who had made the dictator of Earth feel shame both when she was a child and again now.

  It was time for this to end.

  She swung her attention across to Nelson, and studied him intently.

  His expression was one of childlike wonder, and his hand was inside his lab coat, where a bloodstain was showing through. He was probably tugging at one of his numerous piercings and, after she left here, he would doubtless end up jacking off on the output from a disabler. For putting temptation in her way, Nelson should be made to suffer. For distracting her from her prime purpose, he should end up on one of his own frames. But that was pointless, because with his screwed-up wiring, such pain as this would be the ultimate in ecstasy for him.

  ‘Sack,’ she said, glancing round and gesturing her bodyguard forwards.

  Sack stepped up beside her with alacrity, but she had caught him out because it had taken him a moment to wipe from his face an expression of disgust that even showed through his keroskin. ‘Give me your sidearm.’

  He reached under his jacket, removed a heavy automatic, spun it round in his lizard-skin hand and presented it to her butt first.

  ‘This was my father’s,’ he said, which gave Serene a moment of pause. Was that somehow significant? She shook her head in irritation, took the weapon and stepped forward, as close to her father as she could get.

  Donald Galahad’s gaze seemed to focus on her for a moment, then drifted away again. He was making a throaty whimpering and when his mouth opened briefly she saw that he had chewed his own tongue down to a stub.

  ‘Father,’ she said, and his gaze drifted back to her. ‘Father, I am going to end this now.’ No reaction; his attention slid away again and more drool dripped from his chin.

  ‘But you can’t,’ said Nelson. ‘He is perfect now.’

  How did she get here? How did this happen?

  She raised the automatic and snapped off one shot, the recoil nearly throwing the weapon out of her hand. However, her aim had been true and the bullet punched a hole straight through the glass vessel her father’s heart resided in.

  ‘No!’ Nelson yelled, throwing himself at her.

  Sack intervened quickly, catching hold of the man and slamming him face down on the floor, a knee planted in his back.

  Blood arced from the hole in the glass vessel and spattered the floor immediately to Serene’s right. She inspected the weapon she held, realized it was of some antique design, hence the recoil. Now settling into a Weaver stance she fired twice more into the heart, watched it stutter to a halt, then transferred her aim directly to her father. His head was waving from side to side and his lungs, hanging in a large cellophane bag to the right of his heart,
were still sucking and blowing. Obviously all the extra equipment here, the extra venous shunts and feeds of artificial blood, were keeping Donald Galahad functioning beyond the lifespan of his own heart.

  Serene fired twice more, the first shot hitting his cheekbone and taking off the side of his face, the second demolishing his nose and blowing his brains out of the back of his skull. She lowered the weapon, suddenly feeling utterly calm again, utterly centred.

  ‘I understand now,’ she said, stepping back. ‘In my position it is possible for me to gratify every human urge, every single whim. I can indulge in any cruelty, play power games, mind games and never lose. This was necessary.’ She turned and gazed down at Nelson. ‘Kill him.’ Sack responded immediately, reaching down and twisting the man’s head right round with a sound like a tyre going over an apple, then stood up leaving Nelson shuddering on the ground, his head facing backwards.

  Serene handed over the automatic. ‘I’ve outgrown such games now.’ She gestured back to her father’s remains. ‘But I needed to find out.’

  ‘Ma’am?’ Sack asked, puzzled.

  ‘Let us say I needed to get this thing out of my system, so I could at last see what is really important.’ She headed for the elevator, knowing that this time she wouldn’t be throwing up inside it. ‘Clear out this cellar,’ she said, ‘clear it out completely.’ She paused for a second. ‘I want it remodelled. I want sun pipes leading down here, and I want a garden. Yes, I want a garden . . . with a pool . . . with carp in it.’

  She glanced back at her bodyguard even as she reached the elevator doors, again catching one of his usually hidden expressions. Only when she was in the elevator and ascending did she realize what it might signify. She had never seen Sack actually look frightened before, and she found that oddly appealing.

  Argus

  Alex and Alexandra carefully exited the hydroponics unit airlock and looked around. The robots were gone but, when Alex propelled himself to a nearby girder and paused there, he could feel the vibrations of their distant activity in the station rim. According to Alexandra, the robots were over two kilometres away right now.