Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

9

Cloning

By the mid-twenty-first century the cloning of farm animals and domestic pets was commonplace, while the idea that anyone was cloning human beings was dismissed as just a conspiracy theory. Then came the lawsuits initiated by grown human beings who, suffering one genetic malady or another, claimed to be the results of secret Pan Europa experiments in cloning. These claims did not get far because, by then, the power of unaccountable government had grown huge, and the legal system was in the process of being fully incorporated as an arm of the state. Even though such claims were quashed, it had by then become evident that human cloning had been going on for some time. It was the territory of the rich and the thoroughly egotistical, which by then meant the elite of political and media circles – the latter having essentially given up any pretence of being anything other than a propaganda mouthpiece of government.

The Scourge

‘Good to meet you, Captain Scotonis,’ said Clay, reaching out to shake the man’s hand but finding the motion put him off balance in the heavy combined acceleration- and space-suit he wore, so he had to grab for the edge of the airlock. ‘So you would be Clay Ruger, our new political officer,’ said Scotonis, gazing at him with tired and reddened eyes as he reached up and touched the collar he now wore.

‘You may call me Clay.’ Clay reached up and tapped a finger against his own collar. ‘We live in perilous times,’ he added.

He certainly hadn’t wanted to put it on, having witnessed Galahad take such pleasure in killing with this device, but in the end had no choice in the matter. And how much difference did it make to him personally, when he knew that Galahad could render him just as dead by merely sending a signal to his implant? How different, after all, was strangulation to choking on your own blood as the Scour ripped your body apart?

‘So glad to have you aboard,’ said Scotonis, a trifle bitterly, ‘despite your obvious lack of space legs.’ He turned and propelled himself smoothly along the corridor. ‘You’ll have to take care, Political Officer Clay, because here lack of experience can kill.’

Clay followed him. ‘Are you threatening me?’

Scotonis halted abruptly and turned. Clay nearly barrelled straight into him, but managed to stop himself at the last moment.

‘My apologies, Political Officer Clay. That did not come out right.’ He paused reflectingly, his head turned away as he fought to get himself under control. ‘I just lost two of the assault force to a faulty airlock seal.’ He now turned to face Clay, his expression wiped blank. ‘They failed to follow procedure in two ways: they didn’t check their external suit pressure gauges before unsealing, and they unsealed while still inside the airlock.’

This was precisely why Clay did not want to be here: space was dangerous and it could kill you in an instant . . . a bit like Serene Galahad.

‘I thought all suits and airlocks were computer controlled, with safety backups? I thought it was impossible to open a suit to vacuum?’

‘All modern suits are – but most of them went off with Messina and his assault force. In a perfect world we would have been able to take pre-tested and perfectly functional vacuum combat suits. As it is, we are two hundred short, so are having to use adapted Mars external activities suits.’ He continued moving along the corridor, slower this time, with Clay following.

‘I do hope that is not a criticism,’ said Clay.

‘Certainly not,’ said Scotonis. ‘I understand the urgency of our mission and why waiting another two weeks could not be countenanced.’

Back on Earth, Clay could have nailed Scotonis for the subtle criticism. Unfortunately there was no immediate replacement for the man, which was another problem with space, since people sufficiently intelligent to be trained to operate in this highly technical environment tended to have minds of their own. For this very reason, Galahad had ensured that everyone aboard this ship would be wearing one of her collars.

‘Our lives are unimportant,’ he said, ‘but our mission, to retrieve the Gene Bank data, and to bring Alan Saul and his rebels to justice, is essential to all the peoples of Earth.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Scotonis.

At first sight, the bridge of the Scourge appeared to be an armoured dome, but the floor they walked out on was not attached to the walls, with a large gap lying between, and it actually sat inside the top of a sphere. In suspended acceleration couches all around this sphere, members of the crew worked instruments inset in the wall. Before four chairs on the main floor stood a multi-screen – a single curved piece of transparent pixel-laminate. Two of these chairs were occupied by the pilot and the gunner. A third chair was for Captain Scotonis, while the fourth – the one Clay would occupy – had apparently been put here for Messina himself. Scotonis easily walked over and took his seat, Clay following slowly, unfamiliar with gecko boots and not wanting to make a fool of himself by ending up completely detached from the floor.

Having strapped himself in, Scotonis waited with obvious impatience for Clay to finally get to his seat and do likewise. Scotonis then tapped some control and the entire floor revolved, exposing different sections of instrument wall as well as different crewmen. Clay hadn’t understood the purpose of this movable floor until it was explained. During high acceleration, those at the instrument wall would be secured and immobilized by expanding acceleration suits. Those in the command chairs wore a different kind of suit, and would be turned so that they faced the direction of acceleration, just as in conventional vessels on Earth. In this way they would be able to continue to function, and to make command decisions.

‘Pilot Officer Trove and Gunnery Officer Cookson,’ Scotonis introduced the other two.

For a moment the two gazed at him expressionlessly, then Trove, a thin black female with a completely shaven skull, evidently noted that he too wore a collar. She reached up and touched her own then gave him a brief nod. He had started to note a lot of this recognition amidst collar wearers. It seemed a kind of salute, a you too, along with the anger and the fellow feeling.

‘Interesting design,’ said Clay, gesturing to their surroundings.

‘Designed by committee,’ said Cookson flatly – another subtle critic.

‘Attention, all,’ said Scotonis, his voice reverberating throughout the entire ship. ‘Our countdown is at T minus one hundred and ten minutes. Crewmen, you know what to do. All passengers, please check your suit data feeds for any updates to launch-safety protocols. Those without data feeds, check your portable computers and link to Scourge One. The code is SA1276890V and should be appearing on all public screens right now. It’s all there, but to sum up: make sure all loose objects are secured, plug your suit air into the ship feed, and strap yourselves in tightly. This is going to be quite some ride.’

Clay wondered if the ship’s WiFi code was in some way significant, for it sounded like an ID code for a citizen – a societal asset. He unhooked his palmtop and opened it, first linking to the ship Internet to check the safety instructions, then opening up the list of ID codes for everyone aboard, but found no match. A further search linking to a database on Earth, however, revealed the number was Thespina Scotonis’s ID code, or rather it had been when she was alive. He felt a moment of worry, until he discovered that Scotonis’s wife, and his children, had died from the Scour – that same terrible disease Alan Saul had inflicted on Earth.

A hundred and ten minutes ground by with glacial slowness. Scotonis and all the others were constantly checking systems, continually revolving the floor for no apparent reason and bringing up all sorts of views on the multi-screen ahead. Conversation was desultory at best. Clay would ask questions and they would be answered, and that was the end of it. He concentrated on his palmtop, calling up data, checking how things were going back on Earth, sending messages to his staff and wondering why he couldn’t have spent this time in his cabin. He might only make a fool of himself by getting up and leaving now. He would wait here and pretend an interest in the technicalities all around him.

When, at T minus ten minutes, the multi-screen showed massive umbilicals detaching, he finally began to take more interest and his hands started sweating.

‘I understand that the extra fuel tanks and chemical boosters haven’t been tested.’ he enquired genially.

‘Rather difficult to test a one-burn chemical booster,’ Pilot Officer Trove observed.

‘They’re pretty safe,’ said Scotonis, glancing at him. ‘This one was retrieved from the Mars Traveller project. They used to use four of them precisely as we’re going to use this one, providing a big burn to fling us away from Earth before fusion-engine start-up. It’ll shorten our journey time by about three weeks.’

‘I see,’ said Clay. ‘And, as you noted, a few weeks can make all the difference.’

Scotonis gazed at him for a second, then dipped his head in acknowledgement of this point.

‘Why not four boosters, then?’ Clay asked. ‘This ship isn’t much smaller than one of the Mars Travellers.’

‘There was only one available,’ said Scotonis, a hint of a smile twisting his mouth. ‘And, with the present state of the Traveller Project, it would take some weeks to manufacture more, and the cut in journey time would have been cancelled out by those extra weeks, so it was obviously pointless waiting round for that.’

Touché, thought Clay, realizing the lack of spacesuits could have been made up in that time.

The next ten minutes passed rather faster than Clay might have liked. He ensured he was plugged in to the ship oxygen supply but, like the other three, kept his helmet open and breathed ambient ship air. When a robotic voice began the final one-minute countdown, second by second, he noted the others closing up their helmets and he copied them. Next, the floor locked into place with a heavy crump, and meanwhile those all around, suspended from the instrument walls, were locking the suspension arms of their cradles.

The last ten seconds arrived.

‘Pray, if you believe in that shit,’ said Gunnery Officer Cookson reassuringly.

‘Pre-igniters on,’ said Trove. ‘No errors.’

‘Five,’ said the robotic voice. Even it seemed to be counting now with some reluctance: ‘Four . . . three . . . two . . . one.’

‘Hang on to your balls,’ said Scotonis, just as a dragon kicked Clay in the back and roared at him.

‘Ain’t got no balls!’ Trove shouted over the thundering.

‘Lucky you!’ Cookson shouted back.

Clay’s suit tightened around him like a giant fist, and blackness encroached on the periphery of his vision. He didn’t know whether that was due to the acceleration, or the stark terror that seemed to have crawled up his spine and wrapped itself around his brain.

Argus

As she gazed through her spacesuit visor at the new structures slanting out towards the station skin, Hannah refused to let herself get downhearted. She had to keep pushing, to keep other people from letting their own feelings defeat them, to keep people from succumbing to the horrible atmosphere aboard the station and the idea, already expressed, that they were trapped on a ghost ship sailing to Hell.

Of course, Saul’s most recent venture into near-consciousness – there had been fifteen so far – had not helped matters at all. The horrific images that had been appearing on every screen in the station and the sounds issuing from the public-address system were bad enough, but this time the spiderguns went into alert mode, one of them even firing on and destroying a small construction robot, while the proctors had just frozen where they were and howled for a full three minutes, before then moving on as if nothing at all had happened. It was madness, and the only way to keep it from affecting them too deeply was to stick to the practicalities.

The structures she was studying were rather like the cageway she and her companions now stood in, but with numerous bulky objects attached, and some seriously heavy cables snaking into those from newly relocated reactors. Three months it had taken to build them, three months since that particular meeting.

Le Roque had come to it, and so had Langstrom, who was no longer wearing his sidearm and, like all station police not engaged in searching for the Messina clones, was once again carrying just an ionic taser. The two men had both seemed subdued, but had their input once they realized Hannah would not allow this meeting to degenerate into recriminations.

‘We build railguns, we ramp up the output of the collision lasers, we build beam weapons and we turn this station into a fortress,’ Brigitta had asserted, at one point.

‘Apposite observation,’ Le Roque replied. ‘We are therefore just like a fortress in that we are a totally static target.’

They had all seen the figures and could do little to gainsay him, though Pike and Leeran took the opportunity to make some barbed comments about his defeatism.

The programming was available: tactical planning for space warfare – all the modelling they required. All the modelling to cover what they could make, what they could jury-rig, and all the modelling to cover whatever the Scourge carried. And yet nothing worked.

A total of three railguns could be built in the time available, and plentiful iron slugs smelted from the Argus asteroid. The collision lasers were juiced up and, quite possibly, could burn up a good proportion of what the Scourge could throw at them. It was also the case that the station’s EM field would negate the Scourge’s EM pulse weapons. However, manoeuvrability was where it all fell down. The Scourge could detect and avoid railgun fusillades. Here on Argus they could certainly detect them, but could not get the station out of the way in time. Stuff would get through, the station would be stripped of its armament, then the Scourge would dock and spew out its thousands of troops.

According to the models.

What gave Hannah hope was the maser, for the model had discounted it as an option. However, the Saberhagens had cracked that one with some quite brilliant and original ideas, so there was still reason for hope.

Hannah continued making her way along one of the cageways leading to the station rim, a spidergun scouting out the course ahead of her – a robot that Paul now insisted should accompany her everywhere – and with Brigitta and Pike hurrying to catch up.

‘So when did this happen?’ Hannah asked over her suit radio.

‘I’ve been checking program logs,’ Brigitta replied. ‘It started two months ago, directly after the last enclosure hull plates were welded in place, and has been going on ever since.’

‘So let me get this straight,’ replied Hannah. ‘Every time a robot finishes a programmed task here,’ she gestured to the big railguns, ‘or anywhere else on the station, for that matter, rather than go somnolent, it heads out to the station rim, and you never noticed until now?’

‘There’s more to it than that,’ interjected Pike. ‘Furnace-production and factory-component stats haven’t been adding up either. I thought it was all down to the damage we received out there. I didn’t find out the truth until after we started going into serious solar die-off and had to start pulling more power from station reactors.’

This was one of the many problems they now faced. As they moved further away from the sun, the solar mirrors – even complemented by the additional mirrors they had manufactured – weren’t providing as much heat as they could manage before, and so the reactors were under an increasingly heavy drain. In fact it had been necessary to take all the spares out of storage and put them online too.

‘So someone or something has not only infiltrated the robots, but our metals plants as well?’

‘Damned right,’ said Pike. ‘I started checking yesterday and found large quantities of components being delivered to various points on the outer ring. A lot of the stuff is similar to the electromagnets and superconductive wiring Brigitta is using, hence my not noticing before. But, since checking, I’ve seen some weirdly designed electromagnets and other stuff I haven’t even been able to identify. There’re also lots of sections of titanium-alloy cylinders with an internal silicon dioxide hex-chain carbon finish – as near to zero-coefficient of friction as we can get. Christ knows what they’re for. I’ve seen nothing like them before.’

Hannah gazed ahead towards the outer ring. Someone or something . . . Had those clones of Messina’s managed a successful and thorough penetration of the station’s computer systems? It seemed highly unlikely. Was this some kind of project worked out between Langstrom and Le Roque? They had seemed to acquiesce to her leadership, but that could have just been a front. But, even then, she doubted they had the ability and resources to manage something quite like this. That just left Alan and his machines – an idea that scared her thoroughly. All the station machines, including the proctors, were still connected to Alan’s sleeping mind – a mind which, from the images all had seen and the sounds all had heard from the station system, seemed to be experiencing hellish nightmares. It was a mind that dwelt within a human brain – with additions – that seemed to be taking on a shape beyond any analysis.

The cageway was attached alongside one of the ore-transport tubes that led from the asteroid to the rim, where one of the big sun smelters and factory plants extended out into space. It was along this tube that raw materials were transported out from the asteroid to the processing plants, and back along which the finished products were conveyed. Glancing back, Hannah noticed that the asteroid had grown visibly smaller, such was the material that had already gone into enclosure, the weapons and now, it seemed, whatever the robots were building in the rim. Reaching the inner face of the rim, she walked up along it on her gecko boots, as if along some massive highway curving up into a metal forest. It occurred to her, even as she walked, that the enclosure hadn’t made a huge difference to the view. True, they could no longer see any stars from inside the station, but the thousands of LED lights scattered through that vast internal space did look remarkably like stars.

A wide cargo lock stood ahead of them with its two hinged doors open. Even as they approached, a construction robot scuttled out of it like some busy termite, carting in its heavy forelimbs what looked like a few tonnes of floor plates. Ignoring them completely, it launched itself into the station interior, tapped a cross-member a hundred metres out in order to alter its course, then sailed on into the distance.

‘And that’s another one,’ Pike added.

‘Another what?’

‘I also found out that the amount of scrap being fed into the plants has increased substantially,’ he replied. ‘They’re obviously ripping stuff out of here to fit this installation inside, whatever it is.’

‘Is that all of it?’ Hannah asked.

‘There’s more,’ said Brigitta. ‘I was going to check it out further before I said anything, but it seems some robots have been making alterations to the transformers that run our EM radiation shield. I only noted that when I found out that the system programming for the field had changed.’

‘Shit!’ said Hannah. ‘Shit! Shit!’

‘That’s about all,’ said Pike.

Hannah grunted acknowledgement at that, then said, ‘Be careful in there. They might not be programmed against riveting us to some wall.’

They entered through the cargo lock and found a massive hole punched through the floors of the rim itself. They followed this down through three floors and soon found what they had come here to see.

An entire rim floor had been cut away, leaving a groove twenty metres wide extending concentrically in both directions for as far as they could see. All around this, considerably more had also been cut away to expose the main structural beams. To these had been attached further beams, which converged in towards the groove, where they supported a section of . . . something. A massive collection of electromagnets enwrapped a fifty-metre length of mirrored tube that was about half a metre in diameter. Even as she watched, robots were working to fit another two-metre section of tube, while a small, specially designed cylindrical robot was busy actually inside the tube simultaneously welding, grinding down and then spraying and optically polishing the latest join just after it had cooled.

‘All round the station rim,’ observed Brigitta.

Hannah nodded. This looked as if someone – or something – was building a particle accelerator right around the inside of the station rim – a particle accelerator fifteen kilometres long.

‘So what the fuck is this?’ asked Pike.

‘I have absolutely no idea,’ said Hannah.

‘I see you have come to inspect,’ said a voice through her suit radio. ‘Optimum build rate would increase with less diversification.’

The proctor walked out onto the remains of the floor that had been mostly cut away, something other than gecko boots keeping it in place. It wore a suit made of some kind of shiny material that covered it entirely, and it carried in its right hand a long metal staff.

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ demanded Brigitta. Obviously they were all hearing this exchange over their radios.

‘But work rate should increase once your weapons are done,’ it continued.

This proctor wasn’t Paul, but the one that had named itself Judd. She recognized it only because of the staff it had taken to carrying – a titanium scaffolding tube packed with esoteric electronics. Paul had called Judd ‘the builder’, but offered no further explanation. However, at that time, Hannah had seen how, now they were free, the proctors were changing quite rapidly, and all of them in different ways. She had also begun to notice, now that she had overcome her initial reaction of stark terror, that there was something quite patronizing about them.

‘What are you building here, Judd?’ she asked.

‘To schematic ADAR 45A, as detailed in work roster.’

Suddenly Hannah remembered an earlier conversation she had been witness to, and things that had been said during their first tangle-box communication with Mars. Recalling this, the situation started to become clearer.

‘I need to talk to Paul,’ she declared. ‘And to that lunatic Jasper Rhine.’

He remembered natural sleep, that moment of sliding from dream or nightmare to a semiconscious state wherein he could distinguish between the real and the unreal. He had reached it again both here, in his human body, and elsewhere in his backups and also in the computer systems of Argus. A fragment of his awareness recognized that consciousness for him was no longer the simple state experienced by any normal human being. He had too much mind at that moment for it all to surface to the real world, and simultaneously too little control over his disparate parts. And again, as his mental activity ramped up once more, and his mind coughed and spluttered like an engine with a broken block, he found his way towards that state experienced when he was first amalgamating with that AI copy of his mind called Janus.

Why?

Why exist at all? Continued existence was an artefact of evolution first instituted by replicators in the chemical soup of Earth’s early oceans. It was a thing generated by chance, before minds had even existed on Earth. Everything else – every reason for existence that humans deluded themselves with – stemmed from this happenstance. All came down to replication, the avoidance of pain so as to evade damage that might interfere with the process; brute survival for no purpose other than survival itself.

He could readily die now. In a place where the human dead lay in mountains, and oceans of maggots squirmed, he could disconnect and divide. He could shut down the once-autonomous processes he now semi-consciously controlled. He could reach out from his backup and turn off the power that sustained his heart. He could do all this without pain, without feeling loss, and then sink into the nirvana of oblivion.

Why not just die?

Brute survival replied, ‘Because of the wonders.’

A choice to live – a choice to die, and no reason for either.

‘The wonder is the reason,’ said a voice he now recognized as coming from within, yet from the shape of a mind not his own. ‘Nothing worthwhile comes without effort, without sacrifice. If dying is so easy for you – and I think you’re fooling yourself with that idea – then you must know it’s not worthwhile.’

Circular logic.

‘It’s how we stay alive.’

The double fence of the Albanian enclave in the Dinaric Alps stood over to his right, readerguns lying between its two layers, perched on squat and slightly corroded aluminium towers. He could walk over there, climb the fence, continue walking on past the guns. That was no guaranteed route to death, though, since the SAs here were considered just too valuable to be shot while trying to escape. Enforcers would come after him, track his implant by satellite and haul him back. Anyway, if he started heading over that way, his companion would soon grab him, stop him. She’d always known instinctively when he was about to do something that threatened his own survival.

When do you leave?

‘Tomorrow.’

To build spaceships.

‘Yes.’

To live, one must become all one can.

He gazed around at the enclosure, annoyed that visitors were prohibited from speaking to or even seeing any of the other . . . inmates. He would have liked Hannah to be here.

I’m getting out of here.

‘You’ll get yourself killed.’

Probably.

He felt an overpowering déjà vu and also an underlying nostalgia. He wasn’t talking at that moment, he realized, but remembering something from the wreckage that interrogator Salem Smith had made of his mind. In that memory, he turned towards the one he had been speaking to, at last trying to identify her. But again that nameless woman he had seen communicating via the tangle box with Mars was back, and now gazing at him pensively.

He swung away, found himself again amidst the images of Earth’s dead and pictures relayed from cams within Argus. He gazed through the eyes of Judd and sensed impossible reaches of time, and also deep wisdom. Judd dipped his head in acknowledgement, being of the opinion that something had to be done, to complete and to make the machine work. Sliding away again, Saul touched this and that control, then nested in bones.

Mars

Driving out in a crawler towards Shankil’s Butte, Var bitterly remembered the last time she travelled out here. Was there some irony in the knowledge that, just beside where this chunk of rock had been shoved up from the peneplain, lay the fault that Rhone and his assorted crew were currently widening? It was from this butte that Ricard or one of his men had fired the shots that killed Gisender, shots which to Var’s mind had marked a point of no return. It had certainly represented such a point for her when she found Gisender’s corpse, viewed the forbidden broadcast from Earth, then subsequently discovered that Ricard had sent a shepherd out to seize her.

A crump reverberated through the thin air, and a cloud of dust rose from the installation ahead. What looked like a number of large chemical tankers lay near the butte, but they were in fact atmosphere-sealed cabins. They had originally been used while Antares Base was being finished, and had recently been salvaged from their old site just outside Hex Four. Now they clustered about the foot of a derrick which supported heavy hydraulic motors driving cable drums, from which hung every last metre of heavy cable they had been able to find anywhere on the base. Beside this derrick also rested a small mountain of rubble hauled up from the blasting below.

Var drove through the thinning dust cloud, drew to a halt beside one of the cabins, sealed her suit and exited the crawler. The rouge of Mars began rising in a cloud about her feet, before tracking away in an arc behind her as she walked towards the excavation. Reaching the edge, she caught hold of one of the derrick’s beams and peered down. The hole was nearly fifty metres across and cut raggedly down through dusty murk. However, she could just see a big skip down there, laden with rubble, and the work lights glaring from two stripped-down robotic diggers suspended by their own cables. It looked like a hellish place to work.

‘Martinez is two hundred metres down,’ came the comment relayed through her suit radio, which at that moment was set on line-of-sight com. She glanced around, to see Rhone rounding the nearest cabin and heading over. He pointed up at the derrick. ‘We’re almost at full extension now, but it’ll be another hundred metres before we reach the big fault.’

‘So, what now?’ she asked, stepping back from the hole and turning to face him fully.

She wasn’t entirely sure what Rhone was doing out here. Unlike her, he had no need to escape the hostile atmosphere inside the base; unlike her, he wasn’t being viewed as a necessary evil. But, then, even that was better than being considered an unnecessary evil.

He came up to stand before her, resting his hands on his hips. ‘Martinez reckons that cutting a ramp down towards the fault is the only answer. It will be heavy work but, so he says, without any extra cable it’s the only way, and I’m afraid it’s going to take a long time.’

‘He’s the nearest thing we have to an expert on this sort of thing, so we’ll have to take his word for it.’ Var suppressed her frustration. Delays were something she definitely didn’t want to hear about, especially now. ‘How long before we can start moving stuff down there?’

‘A few months yet. Once we’re through to the fault, we’ll need to relocate the lifting rig further down, so as to lower a dozer. Once it’s down there, we can use it to push the rubble up into a ramp, and to infill a road running along the bottom for about five hundred metres. After that, we reach the big ledge, which we’ll need to level out a bit before we can start building.’

Perhaps Rhone had heard she was coming out here, so had come to play his new role as her close scientific adviser. Lately it had been difficult to avoid the man, and his reports and assessments.

‘But if we had more cable,’ said Var, ‘none of this would be necessary?’

‘Just infilling for the road,’ said Rhone. ‘If we didn’t have to blast to make room for the ramp, and spend time building it, we’d gain a month or more.’

It was crazy. They had ways of making so many things on the base, but the kind of high-tensile cable needed for this purpose was, for the present, beyond them.

‘It’s suitable down there?’ Var enquired absently, still thinking over the cable problem. ‘I’ve only seen the seismic map.’

‘Yes, it’s suitable.’ Rhone nodded. ‘It’s about three hundred metres wide and nearly a kilometre long.’

Another crump issued from underfoot and the ground shuddered. They quickly stepped back as a cloud of dust rose out of the hole.

‘What about ice?’ Var asked.

‘Ten kilometres away,’ said Rhone, frowning. ‘Martinez just wants to get on with this, but I wonder if we should ensure we can get to it – by taking some blasting gear and digging equipment through. We don’t want to move the whole base down there only to find we haven’t got access to water. That’d just mean slow death.’

‘No,’ said Var, ‘this is where we are going. We don’t have the time now to change our minds.’

Rhone turned and gazed at her. ‘Bad news?’

‘The Scourge is on its way,’ she replied. ‘Long-range imaging showed it blasting away from Earth orbit just two hours ago, but even if we hadn’t seen that for ourselves, the jingoistic broadcasts on ETV would have been enough warning.’

‘So we have maybe a year and a half?’

‘Yes, that’s all. We need to get this all done as quickly as we can.’

Considering how quickly things were proceeding here, even with the necessity of building a ramp underground, it still seemed that they had plenty of time. But Var knew better. Since their supplies of regolith bonding were limited, they would have to dismantle the original base, transport all the blocks over here and lower them down. The whole infrastructure would have to be transported: all the hexes piece by piece, Hydroponics, the Arboretum, the reactor. In fact she could think of nothing they could afford to leave behind. Their task was essentially like relocating an entire village down into a mineshaft.

‘Do you want to go down for a look?’ Rhone asked.

She did, in fact, but she said, ‘No, I’d just slow Martinez down.’ She turned away and headed towards her crawler.

‘I’ll tell him when he comes up with his next load,’ said Rhone.

‘You do that.’ Var halted and turned round, a sudden thought occurring to her. Perhaps it was simply being here again, being reminded of Gisender and her ostensible mission to collect fibre optics from the old Trench Base radio station. ‘We’ve got lots of equipment in Antares Base that came from the old Trench Base. How was it transported there?’

‘By ATV, I think,’ Rhone replied.

‘That doesn’t make sense,’ said Var, feeling a sudden excitement. ‘An ATV journey would have been thousands of kilometres. A more logical route would have been the direct one, which would mean going up the side of Coprates Chasma.’

‘Cable,’ said Rhone, catching on quickly. ‘I’ll need to check the base records. I can do that from here.’ He stabbed a thumb towards one of the cabins. ‘I should be able to find out for sure if there’s anything still there.’

‘Yes, you do that,’ said Var.

‘If there is cable there, I’ll organize a mission at once. In fact I’ll go myself, as I’m feeling a bit of a loose wheel lately. It’s the practicality of people like Martinez we need most of all here right now.’

Var instantly did not like his eagerness to set off on such a mission. Was this something he had been aiming for?

‘Maybe I’ll go, too,’ she said, just to test his reaction. ‘It would be nice to get away from all the invisible daggers plunging into my back.’

He seemed to accept that comment at once. ‘We’ll need to take cutting equipment, and an ATV trailer with a motor and cable drum.’

‘Check first,’ said Var, ‘then let me know.’

She turned away and continued towards her crawler, then climbed inside and just sat at the controls, thinking hard. Maybe a little trip away from Antares Base would be a good thing in a number of respects. Maybe, by being at close quarters with the man, she could solve the puzzle that was Rhone of Mars Science, and find out for sure if he intended to stick an even more visible knife in her back.

Earth

From an interminably boring childhood to supervised school and then university Serene had never really had any friends. Family being something she wanted to forget, she had quickly forgotten. All she had were colleagues, who would receive the brief and snappy response of, ‘I am interested only in now and in the future,’ if they ever enquired about her past. As far as she was concerned, the immutable past had formed her as she was, and she was satisfied with that. She did not like to think too much about her formative years, but she was thinking about them now.

‘A specialized search program picked it out of the, on average, seventeen million personal messages directed towards you every day, ma’am,’ said Elkin, the new leader of her team of PAs.

Serene gazed steadily at the text message relayed to her palmtop, reading and rereading every word of it, a deep feeling of puzzlement growing within her. He was alive. She had never even considered the possibility. She sent his citizen code to the house mainframe then, forcing her face clear of expression, looked up at Elkin.

Her PA leader was a big-breasted, wide-hipped woman who dressed to try and hide her obvious womanhood. But even clad in a loose grey business trouser suit, with her black hair in a pageboy cut, she still oozed sexuality. Serene smiled to herself, at the forefront of her mind being the knowledge that Elkin quite enjoyed sessions with three men at a time, claiming, as she had recently explained to the three enforcers currently satisfying her needs, that she liked to be ‘all filled up’. Serene regularly watched the security tapes, which were quite a bit better than much of the porn she had seen.

‘Thank you, Elkin, that will be all.’

The woman gave her a brief nod and retreated.

Now alone, Serene called up the file located under the citizen code she had input, studied the current image of a squat muscular man who, after the treatments he could obtain as a valued SA, appeared to be in his forties. This man was actually eighty-six. She reflected on her brief thoughts about sex and, understanding where they had come from, felt a sudden annoying surge of unaccustomed guilt. She checked his history, starting from twenty-eight years ago at the point where she herself had diverged from it. Under tight political supervision, he’d spent a further nine years in Berlin, in the Brandenburg Tower, continuing his research on population genetics, related dynamics and psychology. He’d provided statistical analyses of great use to the Inspectorate: data that had resulted in large savings on resources. It was always useful to know precisely how hard you needed to wield the big stick, and precisely what degree of control might be necessary when dealing with vast populations.

At the end of those nine years, he had taken a partner, and produced twin daughters who, due to his past record, were immediately taken away from him. Next working in South America, his wife of four years, having been caught making illegal enquiries about his record, was sent off for adjustment. She died shortly after being released into supervised accommodation. The surface report cited a domestic accident with some kitchen appliance. The underlying report noted that her kitchen cam had failed and gone into a maintenance backlog, while she had sliced open her wrists with the blade removed from a Safecarver and bled to death on the kitchen floor.

Five years ago he had been sent back to work in Europe, sometimes in the Brandenburg Tower again, more often as an adviser to the four main European delegates. It annoyed Serene that he had been so successful in his way. Her aim had been to get him sent for adjustment twenty-eight years ago, but he had been far too useful for that.

Serene input his call code, ensuring a console contact only, since she wanted to see his face. He must have been waiting because he answered within just a few seconds. He looked haggard, dark under the eyes and, when he saw her, he jerked back from the screen, his expression showing a commingled disgust and fear. She couldn’t understand why he had sent her a message, then she noted him fingering his collar and realized why: he’d grown tired of waiting for the axe to fall.

‘Hello, Papa,’ she said, smiling calmly as she remembered her love for him despite his dictatorial ways. She remembered how, with her mother dead, she had tried to help him, tried at the age of twelve to relieve some of the pressure he was under. Serene knew all about sex, all about the needs of men, since her political officer had already shown her, and she wanted to take control. She wanted to supplant the various ‘nannies’ that visited, taking his attention away from her. But when she had tried, he had pushed her away, and that was the first time she saw that look on his face. The pain of rejection sent a wave of heat through her even now. Yes, she understood his fear, and she understood how he would have felt that to respond to her was plain wrong. But they had been different: they had always been different.

‘Serene,’ he said, ‘I see you’ve done very well for yourself.’

Serene had already found and cued up the code to his collar, and her finger now hovered over the send button. Then, as she gazed at his face, she withdrew her finger. She was now the dictator of Earth, with all Earth’s resources at her disposal. A sudden twisted excitement arose in her, almost sexual. She could do anything she wanted. She was in total control.

‘Yes, I have done very well, Papa,’ she replied. ‘I see that you haven’t done so badly either. You were an adviser to the four top European delegates, I understand.’

‘I did do well,’ he said bitterly, ‘despite being accused by my own daughter of beating and raping her. But I haven’t been trying to reach you so we can discuss the different routes our careers have taken . . . daughter.’ He spat out the last word, then reached up and touched his collar. ‘I want to know about this. When, Serene? When are you going to send the code to this and finish off what you started?’

What an arrogant self-obsessed idiot he was. That he wore such a collar was just chance, just wherever he came in the list, which included over half a billion other SAs. But through his self-obsession, through his belief that this had to be personal, he had revealed himself to her. Now she knew he was alive and well.

‘You are just one of many, Papa, but since you are my father, I will order that your collar be removed at once.’ No way did she want one of those occasional collar malfunctions to take him out, for they still had unfinished business. She paused, momentarily puzzled, not entirely sure what that unfinished business was. ‘I will also be sending an aero for you.’

‘Why?’ he said. ‘Do you want me to be facing you when you kill me? Didn’t you do enough when you reported me to your political officer for the very offence I refused to commit?’

Apparently not, since he had survived the experience.

‘And how did you do it? How did you fake the evidence?’ he asked.

The fact that, at twelve, she was no longer a virgin had been taken care of by her political officer a few months before. She was one of the many young girls that that particular guardian of Committee ideology had used as part of his personal harem. Faking the evidence against her father had been easy. She just waited until after a visit from one of the ‘nannies’ he employed, and then scraped it off his bedsheets.

‘That is all in the past now,’ she replied smoothly. ‘Right now I am in need of advisers in precisely your discipline, and your name has come up on a shortlist. It is in fact quite a happy coincidence that you yourself also tried to get in contact with me.’

‘Well, I guess with two-thirds of the original upper executive being fried, you need to know where to concentrate the razorbirds and shepherds next.’ He grimaced, looked to one side for a moment, then focused back on the screen. She remembered that he’d done a lot of work involving the deployment of shepherds, and also on techniques to increase the public fear of them. ‘But I think you’re lying to me,’ he continued. ‘You were always very good at it.’

‘We’ll talk further after you arrive, and, Papa,’ she gazed at him like a parent humouring a worried child, ‘please understand that the past remains the past. We, here and now, are making the future.’

‘Yeah, right.’

Serene cut the connection, then took a wet wipe from the pack on her desk, to cleanse her hands, which suddenly felt slimy. She felt her lies had sounded close to plausibility, but he had only accepted them because he had no choice. The only real alternative for him now, if he had even a gram of understanding, would be to kill himself at once. He must surely realize that the only person on the planet ever to have caused her to feel shame would have to pay a heavy price indeed.

‘Elkin!’

The woman was back through the door in a second. ‘Ma’am?’

‘Send a grab squad to pick him up at once,’ said Serene. ‘And tell them that if he dies, then they die shortly afterwards.’

‘Ma’am.’

‘I also want you to get Interrogator Nelson here, quick as you like.’ Serene waved a dismissive hand, noting Elkin’s brief look of fear at the mention of that particular interrogator. No one liked Nelson getting too close. He was someone Messina had personally recruited from an Inspectorate HQ in Bangladesh, and everyone knew what he could do. In Inspectorate circles he was known as Leonardo. This related to the artistry of his work, just as that work of his called to mind the anatomical sketches of Leonardo Da Vinci.