Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

7

Leaner Society

There can be no logical explanation for the vicious genocidal attack upon Earth and its peoples by the madman Alan Saul. It could be supposed that his hatred of the Committee was why he targeted the infrastructure of the most advanced socialist state the world has ever seen, but why did he then loose the Scour upon us? Was he motivated simply by a hatred of all humanity? Whatever his motivation, and though he succeeded in committing the most heinous crime against humanity ever known, he failed to halt the progress of civilization. It can in fact be argued that by killing nearly the entire zero-asset population and wiping out so large a portion of the bureaucracy required to control and direct it, he cleared the field for Serene Galahad’s new world order. The factories of Earth were relatively untouched but, with a smaller population making demands on them, Galahad was able to build a leaner and more efficient society – which it seems likely was not his aim at all.

Argus

Who are you?

Sometimes, for a frustrating period of time that could be either hours or microseconds long, he was aware of his condition, knew he had to wake up. The rest of the time he was washed to and fro in a sea of information, some of it current, some past and some just plain fantasy.

I am Alan Saul. I am the Owner. Who are you?

Her face just hung there, untouched by those informational maelstroms. She looked like the ghost of a double exposure on old-style film, or like something indelibly etched into the underlying reality of the universe. He knew her, he knew that face, he knew her from something deep and utterly integral within himself. Yet, in what passed for consciousness, partial as it was when it arose, he knew her not at all. Merely the artefact of a damaged mind, then?

He drifted, found himself running through a crowded street, all around him people in ragged clothes watching with avid eyes, then big uniformed enforcers pushing them aside and liberally applying those new handheld inducers, called disablers. The screaming, it was his fault; he should not have endangered them like this, he should not have put them in a position where enforcers had to be sent to fetch them back. Them? He turned, searching all those faces. There was someone with him, someone important . . . His mind leapt away, unable to process that . . . instead found somewhere else to go.

Minds, ten of them the utter proof of how something good and right could come from something so ugly, like roses growing in pig shit. So much data, so much information . . . weaned from the most inhuman research. That man called Nelson, or Leonardo, and his ways of maintaining life making the brilliant vivisection cruelties in HUD a possibility. Even Hannah’s research taken there and hammered into new and horrible shapes . . . the most advanced robotics forced into an amalgam with screaming flesh.

Ten beautiful minds – touched on in dreams that seemed an age ago now, and free at last.

Who are you?

She wouldn’t go away. She was watching him, and he felt that she had always been watching him. He found himself discomfited by her gaze . . . while drifting, catching new information. Some sort of news story acting as a further illustration of the horror caused by that arch demon Alan Saul?

The image was an old one, from the North India Region, from the Brahmaputra–Ganges flood basin. Saul gazed at the boy squatting by the mast of his small boat, a cloth over his mouth and his eyes wide and black. He looked as if he was out on a fishing trip on a mountain lake. However, a closer study revealed the true picture, which, so the narrator informed the waiting public, was taken only five kilometres from where millions upon millions of corpses had been heaped, literally into mountains. The climate and the flies had ensured that the corpses were quickly bloated, rotten and seething with maggots, and a subsequent monsoon had caused the scene displayed here. The flood of billions of litres of water, maggots and fluids from dissolving corpses had completely swamped the urban sprawl that occupied the flood basin, and this boy was one of the few survivors. His boat rode on the writhing glutinous mess while the mountain behind him consisted mainly of bones to which a few stubborn fragments of flesh and gristle still clung.

‘He must be punished,’ continued Serene Galahad. ‘And we must retrieve the Gene Bank data he stole.’

Did it seem to him then that the other woman looked on with a slight twist of contempt to her mouth? No, no, she looked just the same – and she wasn’t looking there, she was looking there . . .

A massive ship sat in its construction station, big robots peeling away surrounding scaffolds like a loose rind, clearly revealing the gleam of heavy armour, missile ports and a maser turret. Was this a dream? No, he knew it was real, and that ship was as imminent as a sledgehammer. He had to pull his consciousness out of this well, and back into the real, but the effort was too much and he felt so utterly exhausted . . . Hannah, help me . . .

After she had suited up, she expected them to take her to Tech Central, but it soon became apparent that they were moving round the circumference of the asteroid rather than heading up on top.

‘Arcoplex One?’ she enquired over her suit radio.

‘Yes, it seemed best, since there are conference rooms available there,’ said Langstrom. He glanced round at her. ‘Best place for a long sit-down discussion of our situation. It may take some time because this is no longer about a single individual issuing orders.’

Ah, democracy, thought Hannah, remembering Saul’s opinion of such a concept in this environment – and how they might all die even while the votes were being counted.

Once they were inside Arcoplex One, Hannah studied her surroundings. She had not visited this cylinder world since first coming here with Saul when he dropped the Argus network on Earth and then issued his ultimatum to Messina and his delegates. No corpses were visible – none of the two thousand victims Messina’s troops had nerve-gassed during their attack – though there were still stains visible on walls and floors, and the occasional scrap of clothing had stuck in place. All the corpses taken from here had either gone through overworked station digesters or been moved to the outer ring to be stored in cold vacuum – as a potential resource.

Just beyond the elevator doors, Langstrom and Peach divested themselves of the EM weapon, passing it on to some waiting troops, who swiftly set about remounting it on a tripod. That was a precaution, doubtless, against the arrival of a spidergun or some other kind of robot. Did this mean they were completely turning against Saul? Peach remained there with the troops, while Langstrom gestured for Hannah to follow.

It seemed to her that they were heading towards the conference room where Saul had confronted Messina and the delegates, but they soon diverged from that route to come up to a set of sliding double doors. Langstrom detached his suit glove, pressed his palm against a lock and the doors slid aside. Within lay a long conference table with people already seated, some of whom she recognized and others she didn’t know. Le Roque sat at the head with Chang to his right and an empty seat to his left. Those seated two down from Chang on the other side were a woman called Dagmar, who ran Zero-Gravity Hydroponics, and an Asian man called Taffor, another agronomist, who ran the Arboretum. Next along, sat another two men who Hannah vaguely recognized as having something to do with Construction. At the further side of the table sat an unfamiliar man and woman, then came two empty seats and another empty seat at the end. Le Roque immediately stood up and gestured to the seat beside him. Hannah gazed at him for a moment, then took the seat at the far end of the table. He acknowledged that gesture with a shrug, and sat down again. Langstrom took one of the other empty seats.

‘I rather resent being dragged away from my patient like that,’ said Hannah. ‘Why is it so important that I be here?’

‘We need to know the Owner’s condition,’ said Le Roque. ‘I’ve been trying to talk to you about that for some time . . . so has Langstrom. We may be heading away from Earth but the danger the Committee represents is by no means over, and we face new trials, new dangers. We are in deep vacuum now, and it’s quite possible we won’t survive it. What is the Owner’s condition?’

Hannah considered various answers, various lies, but in the end decided on a partial truth. ‘Saul was very badly injured by the assault made on him. I’ve repaired most of the damage and things are looking good, but obviously going slowly. He is currently sleeping, which is perhaps best while he heals.’

‘How long until he wakes?’ asked Langstrom.

‘How long is a piece of string?’ Hannah shot back. ‘Any time now, or maybe a month from now.’

‘He’s not conscious, then,’ Langstrom affirmed, ‘which means we need to get a firmer grip on station security.’

‘Yes, I’m not surprised that you would suggest that,’ said Hannah sarcastically.

‘You have your laptop?’ Le Roque asked.

Hannah unhooked it from her belt and placed it on the table before her. ‘I do.’

‘Check the file attached to the last email I sent you.’

Her laptop blinked on the instant she opened it, and she checked her mail. There had been a lot of it, some from eddresses she did not recognize but nevertheless had to be those of people aboard this station. She checked down until she found a message from Le Roque, with an attachment.

She read his message: ‘Here is the DNA map of the individual who shot Saul. Check it against the further DNA map below, look at the name, and please get back to me.’

A cross-matching program was imbedded in the attachment. The first map corresponded to the second to within ninety-nine point nine eight per cent. That couldn’t be right. Then she realized that, of course, it could. Some of the scientists alongside her in the Albanian mountain enclave, before it was broken up, had been working on such projects. She studied the name below the final DNA print, and shuddered. Really, she shouldn’t feel such superstitious dread, as this surely didn’t mean much.

‘A clone,’ she declared. ‘That doesn’t really make someone any more dangerous, or any less.’

‘I disagree,’ said Langstrom. ‘I’ve seen these Messina clones before. They’re very specialized, surgically altered, totally loyal and trained beyond anything possible with an unaltered human being. They’re dangerous. That’s been illustrated by the fact that the two remaining ones have evaded capture by us for as long as they have.’ He paused, looking grim. ‘It is also the case that they were not soldiers surviving from Messina’s forces.’

‘What?’ Hannah asked.

‘The equipment we found in their hide was all from the station – none of it brought in from outside. Also three maintenance staff have gone missing, and if you check a further email from me, you’ll find that DNA traces found in the cabins of the missing three all match up with Messina’s map too. And with Saul no longer in control . . .’

‘But he will be back in control soon,’ said the male of the two personnel Hannah did not recognize. He looked to her in appeal.

Le Roque held up a finger, pressing the fingers of his other hand against his fone. ‘We should have some data on that shortly.’ He leaned back and listened to whoever was talking, nodding and making single-word replies as he did so.

‘Perhaps we should be introduced,’ said Hannah, indicating with a smile the two unknowns at the table.

‘Leeran,’ said the woman, then gesturing to her partner, ‘and Pike. We oversee the furnaces.’

So that was why she hadn’t recognized them. They spent most of their time out on the furnaces and bubblemetal plants that currently extended outside the station.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Hannah, instinctively recognizing allies.

‘So that’s it,’ said Le Roque, leaning forward. ‘According to Raiman, Hannah has not been giving us the full truth. The Owner . . .’ he paused for a second, ‘Alan Saul is severely incapacitated. He’s lost enough brain mass to turn any normal human being into a bedridden vegetable. There’s regrowth indeed, but no indication that what will result afterwards will be any more able than one of our repros.’ He gazed steadily at Hannah. ‘We need to make some decisions.’

‘Raiman has no idea of the true situation,’ said Hannah. ‘He’s a military medic and his is just not the same area of specialization as mine. He doesn’t understand bio interfaces or the resultant neural growth.’ She paused, groping for the best way to put this. Certainly, if Le Roque, Langstrom and others here were turning against Saul, then it would be best if they did not know about Saul’s backup, his ‘D drive’. ‘How does Raiman explain Saul speaking to you all after he was shot?’

‘Did he?’ asked Dagmar.

‘Raiman?’ asked Hannah. ‘Did he what?’

Dagmar shook her head, refusing to lift her gaze from the tabletop. ‘Did Alan Saul speak to us?’ She began playing with a pen, tapping it against the table surface. ‘What we heard could quite easily have been created from recordings of his voice.’ Now she looked up directly at Hannah to add, ‘With someone else providing the words.’

‘Are you really accusing me of that?’ Hannah asked, the back of her neck feeling suddenly hot.

‘I’m merely pointing out a possibility,’ Dagmar replied.

An uncomfortable silence descended for a moment, broken by Le Roque clearing his throat, then continuing, ‘That’s as may be, but we still have decisions to make. I’ve kept this on ice until this meeting, and now we need to see it.’ He swung his chair round, holding up a small remote which he directed at the screen on the wall behind him. Hannah felt something tightening in her chest when the United Earth logo flicked into being, then faded to show Serene Galahad standing on the carbocrete of a spaceport, a space plane looming behind her.

‘It is with great pleasure that I can announce to you that vengeance is possible, as is the more important goal of retrieving the Gene Bank database and samples. It perhaps seemed to us all that the mass murderer Alan Saul had taken himself beyond our reach. However, thanks to the foresight of Chairman Alessandro Messina, this is not the case.’ Serene held up her hand, above which a frame etched itself out of the air, before accelerating towards the screen to fill it with the blackness of space, liberally sprinkled with stars.

‘Twenty years ago, Alessandro Messina understood the dangers of subversion, terrorism and rebellion in space, and in secret he began to make his plans. He needed something up there beyond Earth that could move fast and deliver a suitable response to those who might undermine humanity’s future.’

The screen view swung round to show a massive spaceborne construction station, out of which an equally huge spaceship was currently manoeuvring. Hannah stared at this thing. It could quite easily be some CGI effect that Galahad was using for her own obscure purposes. Some sort of propaganda exercise maybe as a justification for world-resource reallocation and an excuse for resultant starvation and further death tolls. Or perhaps just a bit of media glitz to take people’s attention away from just such problems . . .

‘Messina named this ship the Alexander, but now I feel it is time for a renaming. I considered the Vengeance, but perhaps that is a name that has been overused. So of course, considering what Alan Saul has inflicted upon the people of Earth, there is a more appropriate name available.’

The scene changed, the ship now viewed far out from its construction station. Sounds began to impinge, a repetitive thrum like someone hitting a taut cable with a hammer. These sounds had to be added, since this view was recorded through vacuum. Perhaps they were what the crew supposedly aboard the vessel were hearing.

The station started to come apart, great pieces of it exploding away, tearing up, the whole thing splintering like the trunk of a tree under machine-gun fire. Then either something else hit it, or the projectiles had hit something vital. The station exploded, the glare blacking the screen for a second, then the next jerky image showed glowing chunks of it tumbling away. The next view, probably captured by a camera on the Moon, showed one such mass of material crashing into its surface. Then another scene: debris burning up in Earth’s atmosphere, the view descending past them down towards the land surface, structures visible, then space planes neatly arrayed across a carbocrete expanse, then onto the surface itself, to Serene – a close-up of her face.

‘The name of this ship is henceforth the Scourge – for it is the whip with which we will punish Alan Saul, and all those other traitors up there on Argus Station. I hope you are watching this up there, you people. We are coming for you now.’

Le Roque clicked his remote, blinking the screen back to the United Earth logo.

‘There’s more in the same vein,’ he said. ‘A lot about how well Earth is doing since the attack on it, how production is up, resources growing, space projects expanding and advancing faster than they ever have before.’

‘Is that thing for real?’ asked Taffor.

‘It’s real,’ said Le Roque. ‘It must have been concealed under some sort of EM cloak that’s now been removed. We can see that damned ship from here.’

Hannah folded her arms, much of her anger at having been dragged here draining away and a cold dread settling in its place. They needed Saul more than ever now. Without him, without that demigod mind working for them, they would be defenceless.

‘How quickly could that ship reach us?’ she asked.

‘I haven’t calculated that,’ said Le Roque, ‘since the time it takes depends heavily on when it leaves. But what is certain is that it will get to us, and there’s nothing we can do about that. And you saw those weapons.’ He swung back to the screen again, already holding up his remote. ‘Now there’s this: a personal message for us.’

It was Galahad again, sitting behind a desk, looking relaxed and tapping idly on the buttons of a palmtop. ‘I’m not entirely sure who I’m addressing right now,’ she said. ‘I’m not entirely sure who now controls Argus Station. Certainly, Alan Saul is no longer at – so to speak – the wheel.’ She smiled. ‘Maybe I’m talking to Technical Director Le Roque, or Captain Langstrom, or Dr Hannah Neumann – all of whom seem to have risen under the regime of someone arrogant enough to call himself the Owner.’

Le Roque paused it there and turned to address them all. ‘It seems evident to me that she’s letting us be aware that she knows a lot about what is going on here. I’m guessing she’s in contact with Messina’s clones.’ He turned back and set the broadcast running again.

‘Whoever it is,’ Galahad waved a dismissive hand, ‘I have an offer for you. I am not so foolish as to think you will turn Argus Station around and hand yourselves over to me, but there is still a way we can all get what we want. Since your inexplicable course change, you will reach the Asteroid Belt in eight months’ time. There I want you to load onto a space plane the Gene Bank samples and database, along with Alan Saul, dead or alive, and moor the plane to the Asteroid which under new century listing is designated GH467. You may then swing back round towards Mars, or wherever it is you think you are going. If you do not do this, the Scourge will eventually catch you, and you will all die.’ She paused as if in thought for a moment, looking slightly sad as she returned her gaze to her palmtop screen, then continued. ‘Everything else at that distance from Earth can be faked for the satisfaction of the people of Earth. Having collected what I want, the Scourge will then destroy GH467. Anyone viewing that event through telescopes not government-controlled will be unable to see enough detail to know any different, and subsequently such video will be adjusted so it will seem the Argus itself was destroyed. Some story about Alan Saul’s cowardly escape aboard a space plane can be fabricated.’ She looked up. ‘You must speak to me soon.’

Le Roque clicked off the screen and it seemed everyone remained focused on it for a long time afterwards.

‘Talk to her, yeah, right,’ said Pike.

‘Seems to me,’ said Leeran, ‘that she’s just trying to work out some way of getting her hands on that Gene Bank stuff without using force. That Scourge comes against us, and everything she wants might end up being destroyed.’

‘No, I disagree,’ said Le Roque. ‘We’ve got no manoeuvrability and that thing has. It could simply take out the Mars Traveller engine, tear us up a little to ensure plenty of death and disruption, then dock and send in troops. We don’t stand a chance.’

‘If you give her what she wants, she’ll do that anyway,’ said Hannah.

‘Maybe.’ Le Roque nodded. ‘But I really think that we’ve got to talk to her. We can draw out the bargaining, maybe feed her bits of Gene Bank data at a time.’

‘Then we die when that runs out,’ said Leeran contemptuously. ‘And do you think for one moment that will hold them off from attacking the moment they reach us?’

‘And Alan Saul?’ asked Hannah.

Le Roque held out his hands helplessly. ‘Give me alternatives. What the hell do we do?’

‘We do what we can to survive,’ said Langstrom. ‘This was never going to be easy. The Owner knew that, too.’

Past tense already, thought Hannah, sitting back. The Saberhagen twins weren’t here, which would have weighed this meeting more towards an attitude of ‘Fuck you, Galahad’ and ‘How can we kill that ship?’ She initiated her fone, found a number she wanted in her cortex menu, and called them.

‘So you’re at a meeting,’ said Brigitta. ‘Funny how Le Roque forgot to invite us.’

‘Yes, funny that,’ Hannah replied.

Others at the table turned towards her, realizing what she was doing. Langstrom looked suddenly suspicious and began to rise from his seat.

‘You know that matter we discussed before I departed,’ said Hannah.

‘Yeah, I’m still thinking about it.’

‘Would you take an order from me?’

‘Second to Saul.’

‘Release them,’ Hannah told her. ‘Let them go right now.’

‘Ah, that kind of meeting,’ said Brigitta.

‘Yes, it’s that—’

A voice interrupted their exchange, speaking human words that in no way issuing from a human being. ‘I choose to name myself Paul,’ it said. ‘Instruct me, Hannah Neumann.’

Mars

They’d looked askance at her when she turned up for the latest broadcast from Argus with a gun at her hip, but then their expressions had shut down. Fuck them. She’d sat for a while in her cabin, binding up her arm, and then taken a rest, her head aching. She’d gone out like a light for twenty minutes, then woken up with blood soaking into her bed and realized she needed more than just dressings. All of them had seen that she’d been sliced and knocked almost unconscious, but no one had come. Belatedly Da Vinci had used wound glue to seal up the cut – along with a few staples – given her some painkillers and an analgesic cream. He hadn’t asked her about the very obvious blow to her head, and had quite obviously wanted her gone.

Now there was a meeting to discuss the information Argus had supplied. The atmosphere in the community room was hostile, even poisonous. Most here were trying to keep neutral expressions, but failing. No one had asked her about the attack on her, not even Martinez and Lopomac, who looked grim. Was she being paranoid in thinking everyone was now against her?

‘The truth,’ she said, standing up once everyone was seated, ‘is this. That ship could rail out a nuke right now and, though it would take some years to arrive here, the thing could drop itself on Hex Three with an accuracy measured in centimetres.’

‘You seem mighty familiar with its systems,’ noted Rhone. ‘It occurs to me that, as the overseer of the Mars Traveller building programme, you probably always knew more about this than you’re letting on.’

Var glanced at him. That seemed a comment specifically aimed to generate distrust against her. Was he now about to become more overt?

‘We all saw the broadcast,’ she said, ‘and it doesn’t take a whole lot of mental watts to work out what we’re up against. And, no, I knew nothing about this.’ The lie rolled off her tongue with worrying ease.

‘But if it does fire on us, we’ll see it coming,’ noted Martinez.

‘And how exactly does that help us?’ asked Lopomac.

There seemed a degree of tension between the two of them. Was one of them having his doubts about her leadership, and the other in disagreement?

‘That is precisely why we are sitting here,’ said Var, studying each of her chiefs of staff in turn.

Carol was here – Carol, who had been at her side when she went up against Ricard. She just looked depressed now and maybe disappointed. Gunther’s replacement in Hydroponics and Agriculture, Liza Strome, had joined them, too, along with Da Vinci and Leo from Stores. They were all obviously thinking about recent events, and really needed to snap out of that. Didn’t they understand the danger they were in?

She continued, ‘A long-range nuke is the first threat to us, followed, after a time, by nukes and high-velocity railgun slugs from orbit. Just one of either of these hits us, and we’re gone.’

‘Why would that ship come here?’ Strome asked. ‘Its designated mission is to go after Argus, which – as we understand it after that course change the station made – it’s likely to intercept out at the Asteroid Belt.’

Var turned towards her, fighting the urge to be dismissive. ‘First off, we’ve responded to none of their communications, but the Hubble will show them that we’re still active. They’ll be suspicious and want to check, and they’ll eventually find out what has happened here. Second, we have a dictator on Earth who has wiped out a significant portion of the human race. She’s also eradicated surviving Committee delegates to ensure her rule remains unchallenged. So I don’t think she’ll be prepared to tolerate us.’ She paused as if in thought. ‘Maybe she won’t send the Scourge here after it’s dealt with Argus, but are you prepared to bet your life on that? And, anyway, we’ve seen the activity ramping up in Earth orbit, and from that we know that she intends to establish an even stronger foothold beyond Earth than Messina did. It’s not a case of if her forces come here, but when.’

‘I agree,’ said Rhone, yet again surprising her with his support. ‘This Serene Galahad will either stamp on us or ensure that we take a leading part in some sort of show trial, either here or on Earth. Either way we die, if we’re lucky.’

‘Lucky?’ asked Strome.

Martinez, obviously uncomfortable with her naivety, quickly interjected, ‘If Galahad doesn’t have us killed, she’ll have us adjusted – probably adjusted till we’re drooling and in need of nappies.’

Good, they were now all starting to think about this very real danger.

‘So how do we respond?’ Var asked. She had some ideas of her own, but fought to keep them in check. It would be so easy to feed off the resentment she felt and become all dictatorial. Better to let them have their input first.

‘I have some suggestions,’ said Rhone, reaching up to touch a finger against his fone.

Var stared at him, wondering just what game he was playing now. He returned her stare. ‘We have a weapons designer in Mars Science – Linden Haarsen.’ He paused for a second before saying, ‘Yes, get in here now.’

Haarsen came through the door rather quickly, further arousing Var’s suspicions. But, then, perhaps she shouldn’t relate everything that happened to herself. Rhone wasn’t stupid and had probably understood the situation very quickly. She recognized Haarsen as one of the quiet individuals, usually in a lab coat, who was always hovering in the background behind Rhone. He quickly squeezed in beside Lopomac, placing a laptop on the table.

Var gazed at him. ‘You have something for us?’

Haarsen looked to Rhone, who gave his permission with a brief nod. This irritated Var no end. It seemed to be a sure sign of empire-building inside Mars Science.

‘We need a DEMP,’ Haarsen said.

‘If you could explain for the others here who might not know that acronym?’

‘Directed electromagnetic pulse,’ Haarsen explained. ‘I could build us an EM pulse weapon within the time available – one capable of knocking out even the hardened computer systems of cruise missiles.’

‘Time available?’ Var enquired.

‘As you said at the opening of this meeting,’ said Haarsen uncomfortably, ‘that ship can rail out tactical cruise nukes even from Earth orbit right now.’

Var glanced at Rhone. She’d never given any instruction that what was said within these meetings should be private, but it annoyed her that he had obviously been using his fone to broadcast from here to his own staff.

‘Do go on,’ she said.

‘If missiles were fired off now, they would take four years to reach us. Therefore, if they intend to fire missiles, they will do so either now or in the near future.’

‘Why?’ asked Lopomac.

‘The first reason is simple orbital mechanics. If they fired in, say, in six months, with relative planetary orbits diverging, the time it would take for them to reach us doubles to eight years. But that is supposing that they do fire from Earth orbit.’

‘But that ship is coming our way,’ said Strome.

Haarsen swung towards her. ‘They can’t fire on us while the Scourge is at full speed because that would ramp up the speed of the missiles to the point where they wouldn’t be able to slow down enough to enter our atmosphere and subsequently manoeuvre to drop on us. Those things don’t have fusion engines like Argus or the Scourge.’

‘So, on the face of it,’ said Var, ‘building a DEMP seems to be a reasonable precaution to take.’

‘Then what?’ asked Martinez abruptly.

Var glanced at him. Perhaps he too was seeing the shape of things.

‘Yes, precisely,’ said Var. ‘Then what?’

No one seemed to have any answer.

‘I too have been checking some figures,’ she continued. ‘The Scourge will have to slow down to intercept Argus, and there’ll be a delay while it deals with that station. We can assume it will strafe the station first, then dock and send in troops. Remember, Galahad doesn’t want just to destroy Argus; she wants to get her hands on the Gene Bank data and samples. After that, the Scourge can accelerate again. I estimate, what with the big deceleration it will need on arrival here, the ship will be over us in about two years’ time.’

‘The DEMP will be able to knock out anything self-guided,’ said Haarsen, but seemed at a loss for anything else to add.

‘But would be completely ineffective against line-of-sight railgun slugs. So building a DEMP to deal with a possible threat four years hence when we’re likely to be attacked in two years seems rather pointless, don’t you think?’

Both Rhone and Haarsen suddenly looked peeved. This had clearly been a little power play: Rhone wheeling out his pet weapons designer to demonstrate how useful and forward-thinking he was. Quite obviously, Rhone was no synthesist, or else he would have spotted the enormous hole in his own reasoning.

‘So what other options do we have?’ Var asked, and waited patiently.

Rhone should have been the one to see the only real option, but it was Martinez who now spoke up. The big bulky man leaned forward, tapping one thick calloused finger against the tabletop to emphasize each of his points. ‘Atomics and railgun slugs from orbit? Seems to me the penetration capacity of both ain’t great. A slug at full power probably fragments or even turns to plasma on impact. Both’ll leave nothing but glass on the surface.’

‘And your point is?’ Var asked, perfectly aware of what his point was.

‘Maybe they’ve got some way of dropping troops; I don’t know. But even if they have, those guys will be at a big disadvantage.’ He paused, stabbing his finger down again. ‘We dig. We go underground.’

Var swung her attention to Rhone and waited.

‘Yes,’ he said reluctantly. ‘There are faults down there – some big caves extending right to Coprates Chasma.’ He tapped a fingertip against the table. ‘We’ve still got all the records from the original geological survey, but still this will take a lot of work.’

‘Isn’t there a deep fault twenty kilometres north of here?’ Var asked, feeling sure he knew about it. ‘That means we probably won’t even have to sink shafts.’

‘I believe you’re right,’ he admitted.

Var swung her attention to Haarsen, who was now looking sour-faced. She flung him a bone: ‘We’ll be needing explosives to blast things wider over there, and we’ll be needing defences. It also occurs to me that, should there be landing craft aboard the Scourge, then a DEMP weapon might make them rather difficult to control.’

Now he looked happier. Var sat back, feeling completely dissatisfied with this meeting. Either she had just proved that she was the best person to run this base, by showing the only course they could take to survive, or Rhone had been planning some entirely different course. It could all be in her mind, all a product of faulty paranoid reasoning, but it seemed to her that if they didn’t go underground, the only options were surrender or death.

Maybe Rhone’s main plan was to assume command, ensure she ended up dead, then report back to Earth that the main rebel leader had been dealt with. And perhaps, if that was his aim, he was right. They could defend themselves here, maybe for decades into the future but, beyond then, as Earth’s full might came into play, they would eventually lose – and Var could see no way round that.

Earth

Clay gazed at the fine hairs on the back of Serene’s neck as she studied the scene displayed on the small screen in the aero’s cockpit. He wondered if she now regretted destroying the erstwhile Alexander construction station. It had been an overly dramatic gesture by which to demonstrate the Scourge’s power, and its loss had put back offworld construction, though not for long the way things were ramping up. Even so, she should have had the ship fire on the surface of the Moon – that would have been sufficient to deliver the message to Argus. It would also have sent a message to the people on Mars who, it seemed highly probable, were rebels too. It appeared unlikely that their communications equipment was so damaged that they could not rig up some method of replying to the frequent messages sent to them from Earth.

‘How long?’ she asked.

Clay, whom she had summoned up from the contingent of her staff occupying the body of the craft behind, leaned forward to peer at the image, quickly trying to put his thoughts in order. He knew by now that she would stand for no bullshit and, with her scientific background and a mind like a bacon slicer, she would recognize any such at once.

‘I’m told it’ll take over a month to get the small smelters back online,’ he said. ‘But to replace everything that went into the Argus smelters and bubblemetal plants will take a further six months, presupposing this and the others of its kind still work.’ He now gestured to the landscape lying beyond the cockpit screen, and specifically to the massive facility they had come here to see in the final days of this tour of hers round her planet.

Serene did not look up for a moment. She continued studying the various views she could get of what remained of the Mars Traveller construction project. Huge scaffolds hung in vacuum, dilapidated sun mirrors framed the ugly utility of the smelters, big factory cylinders stood open to vacuum within the scaffolding, large areas of their plating now gone. Construction robots, some of them the size of monorail carriages, clung to the scaffold like termites in the remains of a decayed tree.

He continued, ‘The big smelters have been mothballed for twenty years, ever since Argus took over, those that weren’t scrapped, that is, and will take a year to get up to speed. We’ll need more, too, and they’ll take . . . some time to build.’ He leaned further forward, feeling the need to get physically closer to her. She had listened carefully to his reports when he first arrived at Messina’s Italian mansion, then just dismissed him. It was only after they returned from Rome, after seeing the seven comlifers, that she’d made it quite obvious she wanted something else from him. They had fucked on Messina’s huge canopied bed, but only the once. After that, nothing – he returned to being her subordinate and she asked for nothing from him but information. Had he been a disappointment to her, and had she now decided to find that sort of relief from someone trained for the purpose, as had many Committee delegates in the past?

‘And how long before we can actually start building anything?’ she asked.

‘Some processes can start almost at once, but I’m told eight years before the first new-design Travellers can be commissioned.’

‘Not good enough,’ she said. ‘I want more space planes, more people up there, and I want them to work harder.’ She sat back, gazing at him, then reached out with one finger against his chest and pushed. He abruptly backed away, realizing she was uncomfortable with such proximity. He glanced round at Sack, who sat in a chair at the back of the cockpit, with his meaty arms folded and his expression blank. All it would take was a little hand signal from her, and Sack would be up on his feet, probably using his preferred technique of snapping a person’s neck like a stick of celery. She had given that signal quite a few times back at the mansion after – so staff there told him – frequent use of a razorbird had permanently stained the self-cleaning carpet in her office.

‘Messina screwed it up quite badly,’ he said, abruptly straightening his tie and trying to look more businesslike. ‘I’m not sure I understand why.’

‘It’s quite simple,’ she replied, flicking the screen off and looking up. ‘He’d lost interest in Mars and wanted both Argus and . . . his Alexander up and running. He was already diverting resources from the Mars Base ten years ago, but he finally started winding it down a year ago.’ She paused, now staring through the aero cockpit screen. ‘I didn’t quite realize how big a loss Argus was until now.’

‘They should be test firing within the minute.’

She glanced round at him, as he listened to the notification through his fone. She probably knew anyway. He was aware that she relied on numerous sources of information, crosschecking all the time, weeding out the liars, slackers and those stupid enough to audibly contemplate the possibility of being rid of her.

Luckily he had only lied to her once, and the three men who knew about that were all dead. Two of them had survived the incendiary fire in that laboratory she had ordered to be raided. But they had survived long enough to tell Clay exactly where the Scour had come from. The other had been the assault-team commander. After also hearing the story from the badly burned scientists, the commander had gone a little crazy, because he’d fought his own way out of ZA status, leaving a family behind him, all of whom were now dead. He told Clay about the orders he had received directly from Serene Galahad, about how the incendiary fire had been due to him and not the laboratory guards. He had talked too much, which was why Clay shot him through the head, then shot the two scientists.

‘It’s all set up for you,’ he finished.

‘Should I remain here, ma’am?’ asked the pilot.

She was piloting craft less and less. Maybe she considered that one of those earlier quirks that did not sit well with her new status, or maybe it just got in the way of the workload she was dealing with hour upon hour.

‘Just keep us hovering here,’ she replied, and returned her attention to the view.

It had taken some hours by scramjet to get here, to the mass driver facility. The titanic device, a cobwebby relic of a bygone age, sat towards the edge of Outback Spaceport – in fact space planes were visible in the sky either ascending or descending beyond it. Yet, on wide roads spearing off into the distance towards massive opencast mines, giant ore trucks were on the move, and smoke was boiling into the sky from the chimneys of the furnace complex, which sat like a city made for robots between them and the driver itself.

‘It’s the climate,’ said Clay, in search of something to say.

‘What?’

‘It’s because of the climate that this driver could be quickly made operational again. Nothing much rusts here, you see. They had to clear out some bodies and make some internal repairs, though – ZAs had set up house inside the thing. Also, barrel wear was minimal so, before any major maintenance is needed, we should be able to run it at full capacity for at least a year.’

‘Yes, I see.’

Further notification came through his fone. ‘Firing in one minute,’ he told her.

The mass driver lay on a ramp built up at fifty degrees from the ground. The two kilometres of coils and electromagnets looked, from this distance, like a huge busy train terminus tipped upwards by some geological cataclysm.

‘And what is it firing?’

‘Ten-tonne iron cases, each tipped with a ceramic nose cone,’ Clay explained. ‘The inside they load with ingots of whatever other metals might be required up there – copper, tungsten, chromium or whatever. They also used to do special packages containing components manufactured down here, and sometimes plain water or lubricating oils. If it could fit into ten square metres and survive the huge acceleration, then it would be sent. Once, so I’m told, something was sent that couldn’t survive the acceleration.’

She glanced at him. ‘What?’

He had unearthed this particular story only a few hours ago, and he thought it was the kind of thing she would like to hear. ‘A previous technical director who was caught using this mass driver as a means of smuggling unhealthy commodities to station staff and as a punishment was fired into orbit inside one of the cases. Nothing much left of him but sludge. Those receiving the goods at the other end were shoved out of an airlock.’

She shrugged, dismissing it. ‘So what happens when they reach space? They will be moving very fast by then, surely?’

Clay felt sweat breaking out on his forehead. Stick to the point, keep your head down and, most important, get somewhere you are less likely to be subject to the murderous whims of Earth’s dictator. ‘Not so much. They lose velocity in Earth’s atmosphere on the way up, finally falling into a stable orbit. The collector ship is in permanent orbit at a matched velocity, and when it has collected a full load, it decelerates to its destination.’ He gestured to the screen. ‘It’s firing right now.’

Serene concentrated on the mass driver, waiting for the show. He watched it, too, could see nothing of note at first, then raised his gaze to a vapour trail cutting a line up into the sky. Then, as the trail began to bow under the high wind, another trail cut upwards. Shortly afterwards, even through the aero’s insulation and over the sound of its fans, he detected the rumbling of multiple sonic booms, like a thunderstorm grumble that just went on and on. After a few minutes the sky was neatly banded with similar trails.

‘That’s all of them,’ Director Rourke told him through his fone. ‘Does she want to come and see the furnace complex?’ The director did not sound eager. Many people were learning what Clay had already realized: that it was better to remain below Serene Galahad’s notice and just get on with your job.

‘That’s it,’ said Clay. ‘They’ve fired twenty projectiles and with no problems. Technical Director Rourke would like to know if you want to see the manufacturing of the cases – take a tour of the furnace complex.’

It would just be another big factory complex with its noise, its robots, its dirt and its obsequious managers. Clay noted her slightly bored expression and knew that, though she was thoroughly aware of the necessity of all this to achieve her secondary purpose of surely establishing humanity offworld, her primary interest seemed to be in restoring the wildlife and ecology of Earth – hence her determination to get back the Gene Bank data and samples. He sometimes wondered how these two aims matched up. Did she visualize a future with a low-population garden Earth, while the bulk of humanity lived in tin cans out in the solar system? She had already seen space planes on a production line ten kilometres long, scramjets too on another such line, and shown only mild complimentary interest. The one time she had become animated about any machinery was upon seeing the factories producing the giant bulldozers and macerating machines that would be used to clear unoccupied areas of sprawl, clearing them down to the hidden earth.

‘I think I’ll give this one a miss,’ she said. ‘Send my apologies to Director Rourke.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ Clay paused at the door, even though he had effectively been dismissed.

She turned to regard him. ‘There’s something else?’

‘I should get back to Aldeburgh,’ he said. He would be relatively safe there and, but for these occasional tours, she seemed perfectly happy to remain in Tuscany. ‘There’s a lot that needs to be caught up on. It’s difficult to find recruits with the right . . . attitude.’

She nodded in agreement, doubtless contemplating all those she had already found lacking and who had ended up in pieces on her self-cleaning carpet. Most of those people with the ‘right attitude’ had previously found their way up within the Committee Administration, which meant, after what Alan Saul had done, they were now just so much ash in the ruins of Inspectorate HQs, administrative centres or scramjet crash sites all across Earth.

‘I think not,’ she said.

‘Why not?’ Clay asked. Was it now? Did she know what he knew? Would she now give Sack that special hand signal?

‘Because I have a rather longer journey in mind for you.’

He suddenly felt quite sick, both with relief and a growing fear. He knew precisely what she was talking about. She wanted someone she could trust – as much as that was possible for her – to be aboard the Scourge. He tried to think of some objection, some assertion that he was irreplaceable where he was, but knew there was nothing to offer. By making himself so useful to her, by working far beyond his basic remit, he’d now achieved a promotion he didn’t want.

‘Surely Captain Scotonis is able enough to—?’

Suddenly the cockpit filled with chunks of armour glass and a vicious swarm of metal fragments. Something slammed into his side, and for a second he thought Sack had grabbed hold of him . . . then he realized he was up against the cockpit wall. Ahead, the horizon was tilted upright, smoke boiling across the shattered screen. Behind the cockpit he could hear agonized screaming, and saw the glare of hot fire through the door into the rear section. He saw Serene reach across, hit the pilot’s belt release. The man dropped from his seat, landing soggily just beside Clay, soaked in blood, one arm nearly detached and the back of his skull missing.

Serene dragged herself into the pilot’s seat, wrestled with the controls, the aero’s engines producing a horrible metallic clattering.

Clay closed his eyes and clung on, wondering if the impact with the ground would kill him – or the fire.