Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

by Neal Asher

  ‘We need to calm . . .’

  Gunfire stitched across the wall beside their door. A corridor wall exploded inwards, and the whole area was abruptly filled with smoke from burning plastic. More troops began appearing. Were they mad? Didn’t they realize what had just happened to their fellows?

  Two more missiles sped into the confusion and silhouettes of dismemberment tumbled out on fireballs. Angela carefully saved her shots until she had a clear target, and with the next two turned three of the enemy soldiers into screaming and burning ruin. Then all at once it just seemed to stop – no one else attacking at the far end, though someone was groaning loudly amid the wreckage. Hannah unclenched her hands from her Kalashtech, realizing she still hadn’t fired a single shot.

  ‘What are they doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Probably bringing up something heavier,’ said the other lab assistant, as he passed over more missiles for the launcher.

  ‘Did you hear that back there?’ Hannah called out, glancing back into the factory.

  ‘We heard,’ Brigitta replied.

  ‘Seems inevitable,’ said James, from where he crouched with his weapon laid across a machine cowling.

  Just at that moment a massive explosion shuddered their entire surroundings and the air was filled with shrapnel glass. Hannah ducked her head, her ears ringing, as fragments impacted all around her. When she looked up again, the air inside the factory was filled with lethal glittering flakes, and she quickly slid her visor down. Again she found herself gaping, until gunfire chattered, and James began dancing beside his machine, shedding pieces of his body. She only realized what had happened as she saw the first troops descending through the void where the glass viewing floor above had been. Then she shrieked something wordless, and finally opened fire.

  ‘Over there,’ said the man they called Charlie, whom Alex could still only think of as Chairman Messina.

  The ground was bulging up alongside some kind of fruit tree scattered with white flowers, one of its roots heaving up as if the tree was getting ready to walk. A huffing sound ensued as the ground broke open and the cylinder of a vacuum-penetration lock abruptly rose into sight. As it rose, breach foam exploded all about it to fill the air like green snow, and the circular lid on its end flipped open.

  A soldier rocketed out, his weapon aimed towards the ground while he turned. Messina’s rifle cracked sharply, and the top of the man’s head disappeared in a spray of brains and skull. The impact sent him cartwheeling backwards into the branches of the fruit tree.

  ‘Not very good positioning,’ Messina noted.

  ‘Positioning?’ Alex echoed, pride surging in his chest. That had been one hell of a shot from the erstwhile Chairman.

  ‘Out in the open like that,’ Messina explained. ‘I thought you were a soldier.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ Alex replied, suddenly feeling crestfallen and inadequate.

  ‘Do you want the next one?’ Messina asked cheerfully.

  ‘Sure,’ Alex replied, gazing up to the point where it appeared the trees were growing down towards him. More foam exploded up there, and shortly afterwards he heard a full clip being fired by one of the more inept snipers covering the area. This should be easy, he felt, like shooting fish in a barrel – a phrase he had never really understood because who would waste bullets to destroy such perfectly good food?

  ‘Oops,’ said Messina.

  Objects began to rise out of the first lock and, the moment Alex focused his gaze on them, they exploded. Flash grenades! Black after-images chased each other across his vision, almost blotting out the next figure that rose into view. He tried his best but knew he would not be able to manage a single-shot kill, and so he fired a short burst. He glimpsed a man spinning, one leg hanging on by a thread, fired again to send him bleeding into the foliage.

  ‘Messy,’ observed Messina.

  From behind came the crump of an explosion, and smoke gouted from the doorway into the maintenance building dividing up the Arboretum. The battle had started there too, and it seemed intense – as if that place was the main target. Alex blinked, trying to recover his vision, determined to do better for his Chairman, who seemed singularly unimpressed with his clone’s marksmanship.

  Another lock cylinder rose into view on a green snowstorm, further objects flying outwards. This time Alex closed his eyes before the detonation, then opened them to see a growing smoke cloud. Beside him Messina fired off a shot, then a second one just after gunfire began snapping through the leaves and branches around them. Alex flicked his scope over to infrared, but the intruders’ suits were insulated, so he only picked out his targets in the reflected gleam of the smoke bombs, as they emerged from one of the locks. He calmed his breathing, steadied himself, fired one shot, and saw glowing fragments flying out of his latest target’s neck, then swung to aim at the next lock to rise up.

  ‘Messy,’ Messina repeated.

  Alex knew now that he wasn’t referring to Alex’s marksmanship, but to how things were about to become – and soon.

  Mars

  It was morning, but here the weak Martian sun would not limp into view until almost midday. A fog had rolled in again, and a fine layer of ice crystals had frosted the metal of the airlock. Moving with stolid weariness, Var had now exposed three metres of rock-damaged pipes and was idly wondering how many more metres she might be able to expose in the hours remaining to her. In the mere five hours remaining to her.

  Fatalism and hope were at war within her, and both of them were losing out to a bone-deep fatigue. After clearing the way to another large regolith block which, when she pulled it out, would bring most of the rubble on the slope above down on the area she had cleared, she stood up and stretched. She couldn’t see very far through the fog and imagined shapes emerging out of it: the hidden Martians riding their sand yachts; the red-skinned warriors of Barsoom with swords agleam, the mighty Tars Tarkas looming amid them; the adapted dust farmers or the lurking greys.

  ‘Where are you now, John Carter?’ she wondered, her voice sounding cracked and slightly weird to her.

  She’d passed similar ironic comments previously to personnel at the base regarding the old stories of Mars, until she realized they were mostly falling on deaf ears – Lopomac was the only one to understand. Being the daughter of Committee executives, Var was one of the few who had once had access to such fiction and seemingly one of fewer still who had bothered to read it. In the end the reality of Mars came down to simple facts: such as dust, unbreathable air and the utter hostility of a barren world. It was beautiful, in its way, but then hostile landscapes often were. They were something to be viewed from the cosy comfort afforded by technology – take that away and the beauty began to lose its appeal.

  Var stooped and was at last able to drag out the big regolith block, whereupon with depressing predictability the rubble pile slid down, precisely as she had expected. She stood back and surveyed the task ahead of her, then decided to climb up on top of the rubble for a better view towards where the buried pipes were heading.

  The summit of the rubble pile brought her out of the fog, so that it seemed she was rising up out of some milky river with islands visible ahead and the banks rising on either side. Beauty again, she felt; it was a heart-stoppingly glorious scene that somehow seemed utterly sad. Then she realized that it wasn’t the scene that was sad, but herself, and it wasn’t sadness she was feeling, really, but regret. Acceptance overwhelmed her and she understood that she was really making her goodbyes, but strong on the tail of that came anger. She would give up only when her air ran out, and not before. She peered down through the fog, her gaze tracking along where she felt the pipes were heading. Then she began to map out the building in her mind, trying to see what logic had been followed in its construction.

  It made no sense for them to have positioned the compressed-air cylinder such a long way from the airlock. Why waste the pipework like that? That it wasn’t positioned right next to the airlock probably had something to d
o with whatever lay nearby. Maybe there had been a suiting room just inside the entrance, with decontamination equipment, something like that. Having to position the cylinder a short distance away, they would have run the pipes along the walls. The fact that she found them a metre and a half in from the wall foundation was probably because they had been positioned that same distance up from the floor when the walls had collapsed inwards. Var gazed at a dip in the rubble on the other side of the heap she stood upon. She would dig there instead, and if she didn’t find the pipes, she would work back into the pile, one and a half metres from where the wall had stood. If she did find the pipes there, that meant she would have saved herself a great deal of work and could continue following them.

  She scrambled down to a dip in the rubble and began digging, using blocks she unearthed to build a loose barrier in order to prevent further rubble falling in. She worked frenetically, angrily until, just half an hour later, she was stunned to come across the same pipes running perhaps a metre above the floor. It was a victory, a gain, and she allowed a surge of optimism to buoy her, denying her logical pessimism any purchase on it.

  20

  The Dead Hand on the Helm

  Looking back, we can now see how the introverted gaze of the human race resulted in the disasters of the past, and that this began the moment that socialism and social justice were taken up and perverted by the politicians. Ostensibly focusing on the ‘greatest good for the greatest number – and right now’, while actually gathering more power and wealth for themselves, they failed to learn the lessons of history and failed also to prepare for the future. Had the Committee expended more world resources on building up the space programme rather than on augmenting its leaden bureaucracy and the mechanisms of controlling the growing population, had it not suppressed science that did not directly serve the Committee itself and therefore relegated original thinkers to its cells – effectively bringing technological growth to a halt for over a century – things would have been altogether better. It is contestable that, rather than now looking back on the mass exterminations occurring in the twenty-second century, we would be looking back instead on a flowering of humanity across the solar system, combined with the technological singularity and the beginning of the post-human world. Twenty-twenty hindsight is always too easy, but that’s not to say it isn’t correct.

  Scourge

  All of Liang’s forces had been deployed inside and were now engaged in shooting up the station.

  ‘So now it’s time to go,’ said Clay, because he did not like the introspective silence the three on the bridge had fallen into.

  Scotonis took a moment to reply, so perhaps he was having second thoughts. Perhaps he, too, had felt that odd sense of pride in seeing the troops they had brought here storming the station.

  ‘Make him do it,’ murmured Trove. ‘Let’s see if he has any value at all.’

  ‘Yes, time to go,’ Scotonis said, then turned his gaze up to the camera through which Clay was watching him. ‘And time for you to make yourself useful.’

  A familiar sinking sensation occupied Clay’s gut. ‘In what way?’

  ‘One of our anchors is failing to disengage,’ said Scotonis. ‘I want you to suit up, head down to the barracks section and collect a two-kilo demolition charge from there – Liang left plenty behind for resupply. Then place it on the anchor concerned, which is clearly visible just beyond the disembarkation ramp.’

  ‘You what?’ Clay exclaimed in dismay.

  ‘You know how to put on a suit and you know how to operate that type of charge,’ said Scotonis. ‘Which of my instructions are you finding unclear?’

  ‘Send one of your crew,’ argued Clay.

  ‘Yes, I could do that.’ Scotonis nodded introspectively. ‘I could order one of my crew – twelve of whom have already died and eight more of whom are in Medical – to go and risk their lives while you sit there comfortably in Messina’s quarters.’

  ‘They would be better at it,’ protested Clay desperately. Why was Scotonis doing this? Did he intend to leave Clay behind on Argus, too?

  ‘No, it’s a simple task,’ said Scotonis. ‘All it requires is a little technical knowledge, which you have – and a little bravery, which we have yet to ascertain.’

  Trove’s words finally hit home and Clay realized what this was all about. He reckoned there must have been some disagreement concerning him. Doubtless Trove – and maybe others – had argued against Scotonis’s decision not to kill him. This was therefore in the nature of a test. This was to see if he ‘had value’; it was his hazing, his baptism by fire. Obviously Scotonis knew his crew well enough to consider it necessary. And quite likely it was necessary, if Clay was not to end up being murdered in one of the ship’s corridors during the return journey to Earth. Clay had to show these people he was one of them.

  ‘Very well,’ he said, fighting to keep his voice steady.

  He unstrapped himself from his chair and stood up, tried to think of something appropriate to say, but found his mouth had dried out.

  ‘And close up the space door on your way back in,’ said Scotonis, offering him something. ‘We can’t control that from up here – it can only be accessed remotely by Liang or closed by using the panel beside it. That’s another divisive allocation of control from Galahad.’

  Clay reluctantly turned and headed for the door, and went through it. For a while he walked in a dismal haze, then shook himself out of it as he reached the executive quarters. Here he located a suit storage room, which he quickly entered. He had hoped for a nicely armoured VC suit but his search revealed that only an adapted Martian EA suit remained – offering no protection at all. He began to don it slowly, then mentally pushed himself to hurry up. The quicker he moved, the sooner this nightmare would be over.

  Once he had the suit on, he ran diagnostics and found no further excuse for delay. He headed down to the barracks, now open to vacuum, and stepped through the airlock to gain access. Inside the new disembarkation tube, he gazed at the mess all about him: fragments of material drifting through vacuum; equipment abandoned at the last moment, such as packs, magazines for missile-launchers and one or two weapons; and four corpses with suits burned black, hideously mutilated faces gazing through their spattered visors. He moved along the tube, avoiding the entrance into the section where the maser had struck, and entered the next section. Further equipment here, stacked in a more orderly manner.

  Clay walked over to a stack of plastic crates whose labels indicated that they contained explosives. Checking the contents lists below the labels, he soon found what he wanted and pulled open that particular crate. Two-kilo demolition charges were stacked inside it like packets of butter. He pulled one out and studied the inset detonator, which was no more difficult to operate than setting up a wristwatch. He stood up, still holding it, and headed for the space door.

  The disembarkation tube took him to the open space door, now hinged down to act as a ramp. The vista of Argus Station beyond was nicely lit up by the Scourge’s exterior LED lights. He paused at the threshold and gazed across a plain of metal extending to Tech Central, studying the torn-up areas where the station’s weapons had been destroyed, but the only movement he could detect there was of corpses drifting amidst wrecked robots and other shattered equipment. The battle was now taking place inside the station, so there was no danger for him here. He had been stupid to be so fearful.

  With new confidence Clay strode down the lowered ramp, paused to locate the cable emerging from underneath the ship, and traced it to an anchor embedded in the station’s hull just twenty metres away. He headed over there and started to position the charge against it at the joint where the cable connected.

  ‘Ruger, get a damned move on, will you?’

  This sudden order from Scotonis made him jump, the demolition charge tumbling away from him until he snagged it out of the air.

  ‘It’s not sensible to be too hasty when dealing with explosives,’ Clay replied sniffily, securing the
charge in place before flicking on the timer of the detonator. He set the countdown to five minutes, which should give him plenty of time to get back inside the ship and see the space door safely closed.

  ‘Are you done?’ asked Scotonis.

  ‘Yes, I’m done.’ Clay stood up.

  ‘Then perhaps you’d better take a look over at the station’s technical control centre.’

  Clay glanced that way, and gaped. He could see the flashing of weapons, fragments of metal and the debris of ceramic bullets cutting lines across the station’s hull. A number of Liang’s troops were now running back towards the ship, under fire from Tech Central, where Clay could now see construction robots scuttling into view.

  ‘Move it, Ruger!’ Scotonis bellowed.

  Clay moved it, but had to slow down as, in his panic, his gecko boots threatened to detach themselves from the hull. He concentrated on walking as fast but as safely as possible, which didn’t increase his pace much above a stroll. Finally he mounted the sloping ramp of the space door, headed up inside and turned to the console that controlled the door. A glance at the approaching troops made him realize he might already be too late; nevertheless he clicked through the menu to set the motors running, and slowly the door began to rise.