Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

by Neal Asher

  ‘So it is,’ said Clay.

  ‘But I see no way it can be changed.’

  Clay tried to read the man, but failed. Time to start laying his cards on the table. He turned and punched a button on his keyboard to call up a video clip, and felt a lurch in his stomach at being returned to this familiar scene. The man and the woman were tied to office chairs, their clothing seared, their burns visible.

  The woman was in better condition than the man, with only a raw burn on her neck extending down to show through her charcoaled lab coat at the shoulder. What could be seen of the man’s head was completely raw, his face not visible because his chin was down on his chest. Behind them stood an enforcer; only his torso, legs and the disabler he clutched in one hand were visible.

  Clay’s voice then issued from the recording. ‘The sooner you start talking to me, the sooner you get medical treatment.’

  The woman grimaced. ‘Yeah, but that will just be to keep us alive so we can be eventually interrogated into drooling wrecks.’

  ‘It’s evident that you’ve isolated the Scour and started to modify it,’ said Clay. ‘So, I’ll want to know the names of those who diverted resources to fund this project, and I’ll want to know what your first intended target was.’

  The woman said nothing until the soldier aimed his disabler at the man and activated it. The burned man’s head jerked up, exposing the ruin of his face, and he howled.

  ‘All right! All right!’ the woman yelled. ‘You want to know the truth? All we’ve done is isolate the Scour as it is. We haven’t modified it at all. That data you got was just a description of how it is – not anything we’ve done to it. And do you know where it comes from?’

  ‘Please enlighten me,’ said that Clay from the past, the one just about to be apprised of a horrible reality.

  She nodded towards him, her gaze focusing towards what he had first thought to be the gun he held down at his side, but he soon learned otherwise. She was indicating his forearm.

  She continued, ‘The Scour is generated by a biochip – in fact the body interface chip in your ID implant. Surely you should know that. You worked at the Aldeburgh Complex where it was developed, and from where it was distributed across Earth.’

  ‘That’s nonsense,’ said that past Clay, though the present one remembered that he had believed her at once.

  Galahad’s explanation for why the plague had killed just about every ZA just didn’t add up. The enforcer had believed at once, too, which was why – after he had told Clay about his part in ensuring the laboratory burned – Clay had shot him as well as the other two. The wiser Clay of the present paused the video clip.

  ‘What?’ Scotonis’s Asiatic complexion had paled, and he seemed unable to summon up further words.

  ‘I ran some tests of my own,’ said Clay. ‘It’s all easy enough to see when you stick one of the biochips from a Scour victim under a nanoscope. Getting access to a nanoscope for that purpose wasn’t so easy, however, since Galahad tightened control on their use and utterly clamped down on any Scour or ID-implant-related research.’ Clay continued to gaze at the frozen image, his fingertips pressed together before his mouth, then he swung round to face Scotonis.

  ‘It was Galahad’s own solution to the population problem,’ he continued, ‘and a rather quicker way of wiping out all the zero-asset citizens of Earth than sectoring followed by controlled extermination through starvation or orbital laser.’

  Scotonis took a moment to find his tongue. ‘But it didn’t just kill the zero assets.’

  ‘No,’ Clay agreed, ‘she had to cover up wiping out the delegates remaining from the old regime, so – and I’m guessing here – she also made a random selection of SAs too.’

  ‘Random?’ Scotonis echoed.

  ‘Yes, but, as I understand it, your wife Thespina and your children were later victims of the Scour, who died some months after it first hit.’ Clay paused for a moment, carefully assessing his next words. ‘There are two possible reasons for their deaths. They were either located in an area that Galahad considered to be under a particularly heavy environmental load, so were what Galahad considered to be necessary deaths in order to save Earth’s biosphere, or their deaths were deliberately intended to instil further impetus in you, giving you added motivation to complete your mission.’

  Clay watched a whole mass of conflicting emotions flit across Scotonis’s face, watched his eyes fill with tears, before they were angrily scrubbed away. It took some while longer before Scotonis could manage to talk again.

  ‘We could remove our ID implants,’ he said, ‘and we could shut down all ID-implant reading and recognition aboard this ship, but that leaves us no better off.’ He reached up and touched his collar.

  ‘That is not entirely true,’ Clay replied, opening a drawer in his desk and taking out the device he had used to fuse the motor of his own collar. ‘We can be free of these collars too, but then, of course, we’d need to decide what next?’

  Scotonis gave a slow nod, his expression grim but determined.

  Earth

  After the failure with the seed ships, depression settled around Serene like smog. It sucked out her energy and her interest, made everything around her seem dark and shadowed. As she returned to Italy, she had considered sending the order to have Palgrave drowned in one of his own aquariums, but then shelved that idea. Humans were wasteful and destructive creatures, but some of them were also the best able quickly to put right all the damage their kind had caused. Palgrave was a valuable resource. He had made a mistake that led to the failure of the first attempt at ocean seeding but, because of his knowledge, skill and organizational abilities, further attempts could yet be made.

  As she sat in her office in Tuscany, listening to the sound of a diamond saw filtering up the lift shaft from below, where workers were turning Messina’s torture chamber into a garden of her own design, she contemplated how right her decision had been. Her wall screen showed her a scene underwater. Submarine robots resembling giant iron lobsters were digging up barrels of toxic waste, dumped there from an inland silicon etching and plating plant that had been closed down eighty years earlier, and loading them into nets to be hauled to the surface, while other designs of robots were guiding enormous suction pipes to draw up contaminated sand into a recently recommissioned dredger. Palgrave opined that the entire area should be clean within a few months, since there would be no more seepage once the barrels were gone, and that the portion of the waste that had already killed the seed stock would itself break down in seawater within just a few weeks. Then the contents of the second seed ship could be released into the ocean. Serene hoped he was right because, even though Palgrave was a valuable resource, she could not allow a second failure to go unpunished.

  Serene allowed herself a small smile, but didn’t really feel it. The leaky barrels and contaminated sand would be dumped inland at the site of the etching and plating plant, now occupied by urban sprawl. It was some kind of repayment for any descendants of those who had worked in that plant, and who were doubtless still living in the area. She next turned her attention to other matters, reaching out to her controls to change the view, which immediately divided up into six frames. Each was recorded through the cam overlooking a cell in an Eastern European Region cell complex. Each cell contained a group of ZAs, their total number over fifty. None of them was identifiable, since none of them possessed an ID implant.

  This was becoming something of an ongoing surprise, for just how large and widespread was the illegal population of Earth had only been revealed by the extermination of legal ZAs by the Scour. Really, all of these prisoners were guilty of a capital crime by dint of not possessing ID implants, but the criminality of one group – in cell B45 – was even more serious. Serene gazed at them, trying to summon up some interest in them all, then finally forced herself to open communication with the enforcer in charge. Another frame opened on the screen to show an eager-looking young woman in an enforcer’s uniform.


  ‘Branimir,’ began Serene, ‘I’ve read your report, but now I’d like to hear it from you in your own words.’ It was merely a delaying tactic while she decided what to do. Really she just wanted to give an extermination order and then forget about it, but that was just due to her mood. She needed to step back and use her intellect, since the remaining population of Earth needed to learn a lesson from this.

  ‘Ma’am,’ said Branimir respectfully, ‘after the bones of the only roe deer recently seen were discovered, you ordered that those who killed it be apprehended and for us then to await your decision on their punishment. It seemed unlikely to us that any of the remaining SA population was guilty of killing the deer and eating it, since the site where the bones were found was obviously an indigents’ encampment. We also knew that de-implanted humans were present in the area. Using the encampment as a centre point, we set up a readergun perimeter extended twenty kilometres out. We then moved every implanted human out of the area—’

  ‘How can you be sure that only indigents were involved,’ Serene interrupted. ‘Certainly that was an indigents’ encampment, but I don’t see them as being above selling fresh venison’ – Serene felt slightly disgusted by the thought – ‘to SA residents.’

  ‘We ran stomach contents tests on them all, as they were moved out, ma’am.’

  Serene nodded in acknowledgement of that. The report had been a little vague on that point, but this explanation accounted for the huge forensic investigation bill involved. Testing the stomach contents of nearly three million people was no small operation.

  ‘Continue,’ she said.

  ‘Once the resident population had been relocated, we worked our way in, using human searchers and spiderguns, with razorbirds doing a thermal sweep, and in that way seized everyone else remaining within the area. Nine of the fifty-three we found registered positive to having ingested deer meat. We now hold them all at your pleasure.’

  ‘That wasn’t all you found,’ said Serene, ‘from the stomach contents analyses?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’ The woman looked slightly uncomfortable. ‘Over eight thousand SAs, and all the de-implanted, registered positive for consuming human flesh.’

  This hadn’t surprised Serene, since cannibalism, as a response to famine, had been underway for a long time. What had surprised her was the extent and degree of organization evident in the long-pig black market. This extent had only been revealed as she began closing down the Safe Departure clinics, thus revealing just how many bodies hadn’t made it to the community digesters. Big freezer warehouses had also been found, full of gutted corpses hanging on hooks, and processing plants where the meat was homogenized and turned into something that looked sufficiently acceptable. It had struck her as imminently sensible, so she had told the Inspectorate investigators involved to drop their investigation.

  ‘I need to consider this,’ she told Branimir. ‘I’ll get back to you shortly.’ She then cut the connection.

  So, what to do? Obviously every one of the fifty-three faced a death penalty, but the nine needed a special punishment. This wasn’t about petty vengeance or childish spite but, as she had decided earlier, about delivering a harsh and memorable lesson to the rest of the population of Earth. She sat back and thought about the considerable range of options available to her. It would have to be something highly visible, broadcast on ETV, and fairly long-running. Unfortunately she had dispensed with the skills of Nelson, but there were others available with a similar proficiency.

  She began scanning history files in search of ideas, and discovered that the region where the bones had been found had once been the country called Romania. With something tickling at her memory she searched further and soon found inspiration. It was a method that should work and, with modern techniques and medical technology, it could be extended for a long time – long enough to make it worthwhile instituting a real-time subchannel on ETV. Vlad Tepes himself had shown her the way to deal with these criminals.

  14

  And Down on the Farm

  Out in the million-hectare fields of mass agriculture, leviathan multi-combines cruised about like mobile islands. These simultaneously harvested a crop, pre-processed it, compress-baled waste organics either for digesters or biofuel plants, and ploughed, fertilized, tilled and planted the cleared fields in a stroke. With little supervision, they then took their harvests to processing and distribution plants, from where the crop went by robot truck to be unloaded by robots in hypermarkets. The main human component in this circuit was consumption, and little else. However, humans did still work in other parts of the agricultural industry where a more delicate touch was required: fruit picking, the pruning of orchards and grapevines; anywhere the heavy and bumbling appendages of machines might cause damage. The development of multipurpose robots, eventually refined into the agribots, changed all that. The moment the hardware caught up with computer software, and the first grape picker displaced a hundred workers in the New World, was the beginning of the end of human participation in agriculture. The closest most people now get to the growing of the crops that feed them is as part of the fertilizer produced by community digesters.

  Mars

  As she pulled away from the remains of Antares Base, the work lights had picked out an ATV labouring away ahead of its train of linked trailers, each stacked with bonded regolith blocks from Hex Four. Over to the right of the hex, robots and a number of workers in EA suits had been further disassembling the roof panels, ready to be loaded when the ATV returned with its trailers empty. The move was going well back there, and everyone knew what they were doing, which seemed more than could be said for the team uninstalling the old lifting gear from the edge of the Coprates Chasma.

  It had seemed to be a good idea to send Rhone out here to oversee the work, since he was a former chief of staff who no longer had a department to run – preparations currently being made to dismantle it for transport – but nevertheless he was fudging the new job. Martinez, apparently, could get no sense out of him and no reasonable explanation for the delays. Lopomac’s earlier visit out here had not speeded things up either.

  Things had been starting to look up as she had realized that the general mood of the base was more pessimistic than hostile and that it was not due to her. She pushed herself harder, becoming more diplomatic and more optimistic. She congratulated and cajoled, made frequent reference to what was happening with Argus, and noting what it might be possible to achieve. And, slowly at first, the general mood had changed to one of cautious optimism. However, as she now peered ahead through the Martian dawn, she felt a return of the anger she had managed to control since her brief exchange with Martinez.

  The sun was casting a weak light across the Martian landscape as Var drove her ATV the last few kilometres towards the chasma, and now she could see that the lifting framework had still not been disassembled.

  ‘What did he say: “all the bolts rusted solid and needing to be cut”?’

  ‘That’s what he said,’ Lopomac replied from beside her. ‘He did seem to have a case, but it wasn’t corrosion – they’d used some sort of bonding in the joints.’

  ‘Even so, he’s had cutting equipment there for five days now.’

  ‘Quite,’ agreed Lopomac.

  It wasn’t entirely necessary for her to drive all the way out here to discover why there had been so many delays. Really, she could have ordered Rhone and his crew back, then sent someone else out here instead. However, she needed a bit of time away from the base to think some things over.

  And there was a lot to think about.

  My brother is the Owner. . .

  She had been stunned by the discovery, but the more she thought about it, the more it made sense. She could think of no other single person more likely to manage what he had clearly achieved. If, in the past, someone had asked her to identify one person who could make a difference to the situation on Earth, after she had dismissed the likelihood of someone like Chairman Messina making any changes, Alan woul
d have come to the forefront of her mind. But even Messina, who thought he could have made great alterations to how things worked on Earth, could never have managed the things Alan had done; like getting himself aboard the Argus Space Station, stealing it, then destroying Committee infrastructure on Earth . . . And now, with the station under his control, a space drive . . .

  It was, she felt, a terrible shame that one of the greatest steps forward in human history was being made at a time when humanity itself was in such a dismal position. What Alan was doing aboard Argus Station should really be marking the beginning of some golden age, as wonderful horizons opened up for humanity. It should not be something born out of necessity just for some people to escape the grasp of nightmare totalitarianism. But then, it was ever thus. Hadn’t some of the biggest advances of the past been the result of the horrible necessities of war? Hadn’t nuclear power generation arisen from the ashes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

  But still.

  Var understood herself enough to know that her recent disconnect from the exigencies here, and her present focus on what Hannah Neumann had told her, was a purely selfish thing. In her childhood she had been obsessed with the idea of space travel; as she grew up, that obsession had never waned, and eventually she’d arrived at precisely where she wanted to be. Admittedly her parents had helped her up the first steps of that ladder, but it was her own ability that had taken her all the way to the top, to become the chief overseer of the Mars Traveller project, and of the Alexander – now named the Scourge. And now her brother was about to test out what seemed likely to be one of the biggest advances in the technology of space travel that the human race had ever experienced.

  She wanted to be there for it.

  ‘Here we go,’ she said, as she drew the ATV to a halt.

  Securing their EA suits, she and Lopomac climbed out of the vehicle and looked around. Two other ATVs, both with trailers, were pulled up nearby. A power supply of stacked super-capacitors rested next to the lifting gear, in the framework of which a few people worked. The buzz of a diamond saw could be heard, just a weak mosquito whine out here, and some lengths of the framework had already been stacked on one trailer. It wasn’t enough, though – they should have been a lot further ahead than this. Then her gaze came to rest on one of the ATVs, and she saw something that immediately made her suspicious. The vehicle was one of those possessing a standard-fitting satellite dish, but why was it unfolded and pointing upwards? She began walking towards it.