Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

10

Crowd Control

The extreme civil unrest that followed the Golden Decade looked, for a while, as if it might bring everything crashing down, especially when elements of the military and police forces of the world began to side with the protestors. The use of pain amplifiers began to bring this under control, but with the loyalty of those using them sometimes being questionable, governments wanted something more reliable. The first shepherds were quickly designed and rapidly hurried off the production lines. This could all have ended in disaster for the governments concerned, for the machines could have been laughable failures, inefficient, prone to breaking down, which was the usual way that state-instigated projects ran. However, because of the urgency in deploying them, bureaucratic interference in their design was minimal, and the roboticists came up with something fit for purpose, rugged, fast . . . and terrifying. During the first ten years of their deployment, they killed off the rioting and seated themselves firmly in the public consciousness – so much so that, even though better robots are now available, shepherds are the tool of preference for the riot breakers.

Scourge

After hour upon hour under massive acceleration, Clay felt the terror just grow tired and slink away, out of his head. Finally the chemical booster detached, and small steering jets fired up on it to put it on course far behind a long train of other boosters from the old Mars Travellers, which were even now falling into orbit around Jupiter, where, some centuries hence, they could be salvaged either for their metals or for reuse. The floor tilted as the fusion drive took up the load, applying a full gravity of acceleration. For some while yet, crew and passengers would not have to tolerate zero gravity, though to get from one end of the ship to the other they would have to climb ladders as if they were ascending and descending inside a two-kilometre-high tower.

‘Now for you,’ said Scotonis, ‘just a long and boring wait.’

‘And for you?’ asked Clay, undoing his straps.

‘Weapons drills, training, stress testing and diagnostics, and we have to continue fitting out the interior,’ said the captain. ‘The ship is full of materials and components yet to be installed, supplies yet to find their proper home. And it’s also full of people who’ll die if they don’t quickly acquire the right education.’

Clay stood up. ‘I’ll head for my cabin now.’ He felt the need to add at least something else, as he gazed at the captain, his pilot and gunnery officer. ‘Congratulations on a successful launch – may our mission be equally successful.’

‘I’m sure we’ll try our best,’ said Pilot Officer Trove, while fingering her strangulation collar.

Clay headed out through the safety airlock at the back of the bridge, noting that it was even more difficult to walk in gecko boots in full gravity. Outside the bridge it took him a moment to locate himself on the simple map he had memorized: the internal floor and airlock now lying in a different position from when he had entered. Ahead of the bridge was where the railguns, missile ports, armoury for ship’s weapons and access to the single turret-mounted maser were located. The passenger compartments lay directly behind it. Beyond this area lay the holds and barracks, which sat over the massive engine and surrounding engine room. He found his way to a cageway extending downwards, connected his safety cable to a bar beside one of the ladders within, and began to descend.

Halfway down, he paused to watch four crewmen descend past him on two other ladders. They did not have their safety lines attached and went down very fast, almost in a controlled fall. Finally, he reached the entrance into the passenger compartments and strolled along, checking door numbers until finding his own. He pushed his hand against the lock, whereupon a laser above the door briefly scanned his pupil while some other emitter doubtless also checked his implant code. The door lock opened with a clonk, and a push sent it swinging inwards. He felt almost disappointed to find a conventional hinged door here, having been raised on a diet of trashy politically approved SF where every door was inevitably a sliding version.

His one-room apartment was spacious, though that amount of space would soon decrease once he folded down the bed, pulled the shower unit out from the wall or expanded the collapsed cupboards and desk to accept his belongings, which currently resided in a plastic crate resting in the middle of the floor. He headed straight over to the collapsed cupboards and pulled them out from the wall, opened one of them and found a number of highly compressed packages. Clay stripped off his spacesuit, securing each component of it in numbered compartments allocated in the cupboard, then tore open one of the compressed packages. As he shook it out, the ship suit expanded, its quilted layers busily sucking up air. He pulled it on, then tugged on the slippers also provided in the package, before heading over to the desk.

The desk also folded out from the wall and, once out, revealed an inset keyboard which, with a touch, started up the computer, the screen on the wall above instantly flickering on. Again a laser scanned his eye and another emitter read his implant, then he was in. His security clearance aboard this ship was the highest – higher even than the captain’s – and, barring some override from Earth, there were things he could do in this cabin that he had, over the last few months, been unable to achieve.

Within a minute he was into the security system, knew the location of everyone aboard the vessel, and could check them with cams, and in some areas, if he wished, fire up readerguns. These guns were slightly different from the earthbound ones, in that they fired low-impact ammunition so as not to damage the infrastructure of the ship. Another option was inducers, usually in cabins or corridors, but not anywhere critical. He was now very powerful aboard this ship, but killing or torturing anyone was not his aim. Checking the system, he found both the cam and the inducer in his room, and shut them down. After that he lowered the bed from the wall, stood on it and, using a small electrical tool-set, undid the light fitting to reveal the cam and the inducer inside, and disconnected them.

Clay found himself sweating, for such simple actions had long been classified as a capital offence. Now he opened his crate of belongings and took out three items, placing them on the bed. The first was a metal egg which hinged open to reveal a small compartment inside: numerous gold electrical connections lining it and ready lights coming on across the now exposed face. He put it to one side, then picked up the next item: a tool rather like a gun but with a wide flat barrel, inside which surgical steel gleamed. He placed this down on the bed, too, then rolled up his right sleeve before taking up the same tool again and passing it up and down his arm. The thing beeped at one point, like a metal detector, and he finally positioned it so its tone was continuous, before pressing it against his skin and activating it.

Immediately that point on his arm grew numb, since the tool was emitting an inducer signal somewhat like white noise, effectively shutting down his pain response directly underneath it. It did not shut down other nerves, however, and he felt the cut of the blades extruding from the barrel, the four-pronged forceps closing and pulling, then the cold of wound glue and the brief pressure of a clamp. When he took the thing away from his arm, there was hardly any evidence of it having done anything but for a small smear of blood. He opened the side of the device, popped out his implant and then inserted it into the compartment in the ovoid – this being a diagnostic tester which would persuade the implant that it still resided inside a human body. Apparently, Delegate Angone of Region SE Africa had kept his implant in precisely such a tester, which was why Serene had to use a TEB nuke to remove him from existence.

Clay inserted the closed tester into the top pocket of his ship suit. Now the only way his implant could kill him was if someone discovered his second capital offence, in having removed it.

The next device he held in his palm and contemplated pensively. It was just a small cylinder, no larger than a marker pen, with a button on one end and a torch switch to the side. He reached up and touched his strangulation collar. The thing about these collars was that they had fibre diamond imbedded and were ostensibly impossible to remove without specialist equipment that was now on proscribed lists. Even using diamond shears was a very risky option. If you could manage to insert one blade up between neck and collar, you had to then cut through the collar instantly in one go, for, the moment just one imbedded filament was severed, the collar would activate at its fastest setting – so miss just one strand of the diamond, and your head was on the floor. All this, Clay thought, gave the misleading impression that the device could not be disabled.

The device began whining as soon as he clicked on the torch button, building up a massive charge. The weakness in these collars was both the battery and the microscopic motors it drove. Clay took hold of the motor, to locate it precisely, then placed the end of the charging device directly over it. He found himself sweating again, contemplating the calculated ten per cent failure rate of this method, and the five per cent chance of it actually activating the collar instead. Then, when the device reached full charge, he didn’t give himself a chance for further thought and pressed the button. The device made a crack, blue arclight flaring under his chin and the collar warming up under the EM radiation pulse. For a moment it felt tighter but, as he lowered the small DEMP emitter, he realized that was just his imagination, caused by fear. And, really, that fear would never go away because, though he knew there was a ninety per cent chance that he had rendered the collar inactive, he would never know for sure unless Serene sent the signal to tighten it.

Clay put away his tools, considered finding some way of disposing of them but then decided the risk of them being found was minimal out here, and he might yet have use for them. He reconnected the cam but left the inducer detached – just a fault no one had yet picked up. Next, feeling as if he was being watched, he unpacked and stowed the rest of his belongings, before collapsing and putting away the crate. As he did all this, he wished his previous actions had not been necessary, but knew they were. He had finally come to understood that loyal service led to his knowing too much, and that made it all the more likely that Galahad would eventually kill him. Those close to her were in nearly as much danger as those who might rebel against her.

Earth

Messina had ensured that his house – being the residence of Earth’s dictator for a lifetime he had intended never to end – contained everything he might need, hence the underground suite of sound-insulated torture and interrogation cells lying just off the wine cellars, which could easily be reached via the private elevator in his office.

‘I’m an old-fashioned sort of guy,’ said Nelson. ‘I know that an inducer can deliver the same sort of agony as any torture ever imagined and that now, with cerebral implants, it’s possible to convince the victim that he really is being physically tortured, but that’s not the same.’ He shook his head in disappointment. ‘There’s no artistry in it.’

There was something wrong with Nelson. That he was a state-employed psychopath was a given, in fact there was no end to such people available, but he was also something beyond that. She knew from the reports on him that the wiring in his head was linked up in all sort of odd ways, that he possessed a form of synaesthesia so that smells had colour and his sense of touch was audible, that his pain and pleasure circuitry was all tangled and he used an inducer on himself for personal gratification – but he was also thoroughly, unconventionally brilliant. His deep studies of how a body could be ruined – transformed, as he would put it – and his endless exploration of pain and horror had perversely contributed a great deal to the advancement of medical science. In fact his research, statistically, had saved more lives than it had taken. Of course, that had never been his aim. He had only ever wanted to keep his victims alive in their agony for as long as possible.

‘So, what can you do?’ asked Serene, as she studied the white-tiled walls, the surgical table, and next to it the complicated metal framework for full-body restraint, alongside the heart monitors and other equipment usually the preserve of delegates’ private hospitals.

As Nelson began to explain the sheer extent of his craft, Serene quickly realized that, if she actually went through with this, she would be taking a step beyond her purported aims. Everything she had done thus far, no matter how grim, or how cruel, had been justified for the future of Earth. The extermination of billions had been an act that had to be carried out before the pressure on Earth’s ecology passed beyond the point of no return. Her concealment of the fact that she herself had committed this act had been necessary because, without that concealment, the degree of hatred that would have been aroused against her would make it impossible for her to govern. Her wiping-out of the remainder of the Committee had been necessary, too – things needed to be done quickly, so it was foolish to waste time in debate about who should be in power, and foolish to waste resources on infighting. That she had ruthlessly seized power was in itself proof of her fitness to rule. Subsequent exterminations had been necessary too, for Earth’s population was still far too high, and therefore targeted exterminations, where they would do the most good, were the best option. She felt perfectly justified in all that she had done, and every person she had killed had been eliminated out of necessity. What she intended now, however, was altogether unnecessary.

‘I’m bringing him down now,’ said the voice over her fone.

‘Very good,’ she replied, turning away from Nelson’s monologue. ‘I take it he is still unharmed?’

‘Just a few bruises.’

Serene swung back to face Nelson, who was watching her with almost childlike curiosity, his head tilted to one side.

‘Go get ready,’ she said, and watched him head over to a nearby sink to wash his hands, then don his aseptic overalls and pull on surgical gloves. Then she turned to watch the lights ranged on the wall just above the elevator. She suddenly felt hot and cold flushes that were a combination of both shame and excitement. From her childhood she recognized this sensation as the thrill of deliberately doing something she knew to be wrong.

The elevator arrived and the doors slid open. Sack stepped out, lizard-skinned and the colour of graphite, in a cream business suit, like some CGI fantasy figure. His hand lay gently on the shoulder of Donald Galahad, her father, as he guided him into the room. By contrast, her father’s clothing was filthy and torn, with piss stains on the front of his corduroy trousers, his head dipped and his hands bound behind his back. He looked up and his eyes widened when he saw her, but he could say nothing around the big plastic plug jammed into his mouth.

‘Keroskin,’ exclaimed Nelson delightedly. The man was gazing at Sack. This new hard skin had not been approved for general use yet, but was known about in medical circles. ‘How does it feel?’ Nelson asked.

Sack gazed at him doubtfully with ophidian eyes, then glanced questioningly at Serene.

‘Answer the man,’ she said.

‘Feels like a big thick scab all over,’ Sack replied.

‘We must talk further,’ said Nelson, his attention already focusing on the captive as he said, ‘He needs to be stripped.’

Serene felt a surge in her groin, and nodded to Sack. ‘Go ahead.’

Sack first snipped the plastic ties binding her father’s wrists, and one of his hands immediately went to his mouth to grab the plug and lever it out.

‘Serene!’ he hissed, fear and rage in his voice, then he tried to fight Sack off, which was a complete waste of effort as soon as Sack touched him with a disabler and dropped him, writhing into unconsciousness, on the floor. Sack then clicked open a flick knife and made short work of the prisoner’s soiled clothing. Serene stared at her father’s naked body, noted that it had changed very little in twenty-eight years, remembered the hot shame and excitement when, like a loving daughter, she had climbed into his bed to cuddle him, also remembered him violently pushing her away when she reached down and began rubbing his penis. The look on his face had changed from shock to disgust when he had gazed at her then, fear taking hold a second later when he realized the vulnerable position he was in.

‘Into the frame,’ ordered Nelson.

Donald Galahad finally regained consciousness as Nelson was scrubbing him down with some antibiotic and antiviral solution.

‘Why?’ he said, his voice raw. ‘You already destroyed me.’

Serene stepped forwards, folding her arms. ‘You know why you are here?’

He nodded once, briefly. ‘I rejected you. I rejected the advances of a perverted precocious brat, and for that you hate me and will never forgive me.’

‘Quite right,’ said Serene. She glanced at Nelson but he didn’t seem to be listening to this exchange. Instead he walked over to a large wheeled cabinet and folded it open. Then she glanced at Sack, but could read no expression in that lizard face, before returning her attention to her father. ‘You are now,’ she continued, ‘going to experience the most unbelievable agony, Father, and it is just going to go on and on.’

‘Please,’ he said, ‘just kill me. Just kill me, yourself.’ He bowed his head and tears dripped from his eyes. She felt an odd rush of embarrassment at seeing this. ‘Please, my little Serene. Please . . .’

After that ‘little Serene’ – which reminded her that he had never said it to her again after that time she climbed into his bed – tuned him out and focused instead on Nelson, who was viewing the surgical gear packed inside the cabinet.

‘You can get started,’ she told him.

Nelson did not waste a second. First he hooked up a couple of drips, into tubes of which he now injected various prepared concoctions. Her father remained with his head bowed, weeping quietly. Nelson then went back to his cabinet and, like someone choosing chocolates from a box, made his selection.

Donald Galahad’s scream was an endless agonized full-throated warbling that just went on and on. Serene could detect notes of offence, disbelief, injustice – in fact a whole array of underlying emotions. She wondered if she could become a connoisseur of such noises, listening to them like some Epicurean listening to a Mozart clarinet quartet. Then, as Nelson finally reached the top of his victim’s stomach, the note changed, probably because the muscles had been sliced open now and her father couldn’t put everything into his scream.

‘The trick, of course,’ said Nelson, glancing round at her, while holding up the bloody electric cautery knife, ‘is to give them a sufficient quantity of my special cocktail so as to keep them alive, but not enough to dull the pain.’

The split now ran from her father’s groin right up to his solar plexus, layers of yellowish fat and muscle everting like obscene lips. However, the knife he had used had been designed for bloodless surgery, hot cells all across its surface detecting and cauterizing blood vessels just moments after the edge had passed through them. There was therefore hardly any blood at all. Nelson next put the knife aside and picked up a small conventional scalpel, pushed open the fatty lips of the wound and reached inside, snipped neatly at this and that, and then all her father’s intestines flooded out into the wide stainless steel bowl positioned at waist level in front of his abdomen. He screamed again; more in disbelief than in agony as he stared down at his own entrails. Then he made a small grunting sound and his head slumped down on his chest.

‘Ah,’ said Nelson, pulling up her father’s head by the hair and fixing it back into the clamp behind. ‘Overload.’ He turned towards her again, smiling confidently. ‘Don’t worry, five or ten minutes from now he’ll regain consciousness and suffer just as much agony. Our only problem will be in trying to stop him wrecking his vocal cords.’

‘How long can you keep him in agony and still alive?’ Serene asked.

‘My record has been one year and six months,’ he replied proudly. ‘There’s not much point in going on longer than that – because there’s not much left, you understand?’

‘I understand,’ said Serene. She turned to Sack, who had been watching the proceedings impassively. ‘You stay here for the moment. You can tell Nelson all about your new skin.’

He looked at her in puzzlement, but obeyed as she turned and headed for the elevator. The truth was that she didn’t want him or anyone else near her right then. She managed to hold on until the elevator doors drew closed, then she went down on her knees and threw up on the floor. Big body-racking sobs ensued, until she stopped them by banging her forehead against the metal wall until blood ran and dripped off her nose. Back up in her private rooms, she sealed the wound with glue and further tidied herself up. A brief instruction then summoned one of the house staff to clean the elevator floor.

Mars

Shankil’s Butte lay in a haze of dust far behind them. In the low gravity, dust and other particulate matter lingered in the air for a long time. The problem wasn’t as great as in zero gravity – an issue Var had often needed to deal with during construction of those Mars Travellers she worked on – but it still was a problem. Down inside his hole, Martinez solved this with extractor fans pumping the thin air into big bonded fibre bags with a sufficiently loose weave.

‘Thank heavens for the Hoover,’ he had said.

By the puzzled expressions of the rest attending that particular meeting, Var realized they had no idea what he was talking about.

‘Haarsen is doing well,’ said Rhone from beside her. He had run out of conversation after a few hours, gone for a sleep in the cargo compartment of the ATV, but was now back again. She still couldn’t quite fathom him, certainly didn’t trust him.

She glanced at him now. The weapons expert, Haarsen, had rendered chemicals from the Martian regolith to turn into a usable explosive. Once he’d got the process nailed, he had turned it over to Leo in Stores, and turned his attention to other projects. He had designed easy and practical processes for manufacturing weapons, and was now well on his way to building a DEMP emitter.

‘Yes, he is,’ she agreed, ‘but I wonder if it’s going to be enough.’ She stabbed a thumb behind them. ‘He wants to put the DEMP in a bunker on top of Shankil’s Butte. If the Scourge comes here, it can railgun the DEMP emitter then drop a nuke down the hole Martinez is digging. Failing that, the two thousand troops aboard can be landed and come down after us.’

They now knew that the Scourge possessed shuttles capable of descending through Martian atmosphere. And of course, even if the Scourge didn’t come after them this time, it might come in the future, or some other ship would be sent, produced in that sudden hive of industry growing in Earth orbit.

‘What other options do we have?’ asked Rhone, and for the first time she saw fear in his eyes. Maybe until now it had all been just an intellectual exercise for him.

Var gazed steadily ahead, while considering how close Shankil’s Butte stood to their rabbit hole. Perhaps there were some further options . . .

‘We’ll go with what we have now,’ she decided, ‘but maybe we should consider laying some of the new explosive around the butte. A series of properly placed charges might be our last option. You’re the geologist – you tell me.’

‘What do you mean?’ Rhone asked.

‘I mean, would it be possible to drop a few million tonnes of stone into that hole to plug it up?’

‘Yes, it’s possible.’ Rhone seemed a little nauseated at the prospect.

Var recalled how, upon seeing the shepherd that Ricard had sent striding after her across the Martian landscape, she had thought it looked like something out of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Future Martians, she felt, only stood a chance of remaining free and surviving the dictatorship of Earth if they took the route of another such Wellsian creation.

‘A future branch of the human race,’ she said idly.

It seemed that Lopomac, who had been in the cargo compartment behind, with two recruits from Martinez’s men, had been reading her mind. ‘We become morlocks,’ he said, leaning through into the cockpit, and seemingly amused by the whole idea. ‘Historically, it’s not unusual for rebels or freedom fighters to go literally underground.’

‘And that will be our future?’ said Rhone. ‘Always under the ground and skulking in shadows?’

‘I’d rather skulk in shadows that spend any time in a nicely well-lit adjustment cell.’

Rhone seemed to have no answer to that, and Var wondered if his problem was actually accepting that there was no way back to Earth for them. If that was the case, then he would be completely the wrong person to be leader of Antares Base. He would merely get them all killed.

Var pointed ahead to a distant structure now becoming visible and changed the subject. ‘So, how much cable are we talking about?’

Rhone seemed happier with this question. ‘The cliff that the lift was positioned above is nearly a kilometre high, and the cradle ran up and down between two cables, so at a minimum there’s two thousand metres of it.’

‘More than enough,’ opined Lopomac.

The distant object was now clearer: a kind of frame around some sort of bulky object, probably a motor or cable drum, though much of it was concealed behind the line of the horizon. Maybe just another half-hour would bring them there and since, throughout the hours of driving, she had gained no further insight into Rhone’s motivations, she decided it was time to be less circumspect.

‘Tell me, Rhone,’ she finally said, ‘if you were in charge, what would you do?’

Rhone stared at her but, as ever, she could read nothing in his expression, so she returned to concentrating on where she was driving.

‘There are so many variables,’ he said, then seemed at a complete loss. Maybe he had never really thought about this too deeply. She felt certain he wanted her position but now wondered if that was actually not based on some deep conviction that he could do better, but simply stemmed from the kind of ladder-climbing found in any organization. It frightened her to realize quite how incompetent and vaguely motivated an enemy could be.

‘We know some things for certain,’ he continued. ‘Serene Galahad will never leave us alone. We must either be punished or made to submit to her.’

After that, he said nothing for a long minute, so Var prodded him. ‘Those are facts evident to anyone. I asked you how you would react to them.’

‘If we stay on the surface, we’ll be taken,’ he affirmed. ‘That’s certain.’

‘And?’ Var turned to study him again.

He gazed back at her, puzzled. ‘If you’re asking me what I think I would do, in your position, I think the best answer would be that I’d faff about and be frightened of making such a drastic decision as your one to take us underground, and would probably end up getting us all killed.’ He paused reflectively. ‘And, in an attempt to be liked, I probably wouldn’t push people as hard.’

He sounded so utterly plausible; every time she encountered a response like this from him, she found herself questioning her own sanity. Perhaps her paranoia was more evident to others than she supposed, and it was that which was driving them away from her. Even so, she could not ignore it; she could not afford to put such paranoia aside. Her own life and the lives of everyone at Antares Base depended on her judgement.

She now concentrated on the structure ahead, which had risen higher and was much more visible. It looked like the elevator equipment that would be found at the pithead of an ancient coal mine. From this oblique angle, it wasn’t possible to see it clearly, but it appeared to be a framework in the shape of a pushed-over triangle, supporting a big wheel at its tip, right over the drop into Coprates Chasma. In the base of the triangle was a big drum and motor set-up, along with a small windowed cabin. However, they weren’t close enough yet to see if any cable was available.

‘I understand your anxiety,’ Rhone continued abruptly. ‘There’s an awful lot of pressure on you, and perhaps too much responsibility.’

Patronizing prick . . .

‘Var chose to take it,’ said Lopomac from behind, ‘and we agreed she should take it.’ He paused for a moment, then continued, ‘Power should always come with responsibility, and they should be equivalent. You get big problems when those who want power then renege on the responsibility.’

Was that it? Was it just Rhone trying to scrabble higher but not wanting the responsibility of the top job? Var chewed that one over in her mind as passing over another ridge brought the lifting gear ahead into full view. Now, seeing cables hanging from the wheel, dispelled such speculation from her mind. They had a job to do.

Argus

Obeying Hannah’s instructions, Paul had arrived in Jasper Rhine’s laboratory ahead of her and stood waiting as she stepped through the door, with Brigitta and Pike just a few paces behind her. She looked around, noticing how much things had changed here. The laboratory had been extended on one side to incorporate larger machines for the production of rectifier Casimir batteries, which were now steadily replacing every other battery used in every handheld device aboard the station. An adapted construction robot worked there, too, tending to the machines, packing batteries to be dispatched to station stores and, as a sideline, making stacked arrays of these same batteries to be used in some of the larger devices in the station, even in robots like itself.

Rhine himself was seated on a revolving chair encircled by a ring of benches, though he was almost concealed by the laboratory machines and the computer hardware stacked on their surfaces. Currently he sat before a scanning-electron microscope, eyeing its screen when not casting nervous glances towards Paul. Hannah strode further into the room, flicked her gaze towards a couple of screens up against one wall cycling grotesque images evidently from Earth, then averted her eyes, placed her hands on her hips, and gazed up at Paul speculatively.

‘ADAR 45A,’ she said succinctly.

Paul waved one of his big long-fingered hands in a curiously graceful gesture towards Rhine. ‘The rough schematic supplied by Jasper Rhine was approved by the Owner. After the completion of the enclosure, work then commenced upon it.’

Hannah felt suddenly confused. She had expected lies, guilt, something human but got none of those. ‘Why wasn’t I told?’

Rhine had now come out from his little hideaway. ‘Told what?’ he asked.

She swung towards him, now finding a more viable target for her anger. ‘Why wasn’t I told that the robots are building your damned vortex generator in the outer ring?’

‘Are they?’ said Rhine, looking delighted.

Hannah swung back to Paul. ‘This is madness. We can’t afford to waste resources on this fantasy while the fucking Scourge is heading directly our way. Every moment of wasted effort gets us that much closer to either dying or ending up in an adjustment cell.’

Paul just stood there for a long moment, making no discernibly human response. Then he finally said, ‘I am puzzled. You were unaware of ADAR 45A?’

‘Yes, I was unaware of ADAR 45A,’ said Hannah. ‘So you need to shut down work on that and concentrate on our defences.’

‘I am sorry, Hannah Neumann, but there is conflict and I am therefore unable to comply,’ Paul replied.

‘What?’ Hannah stared at this unknowable being standing before her. She still felt angry, but that was being eaten away quickly by a fear that had been with her since she had taken over from Le Roque: that she was not doing enough, that she was losing control. ‘What do you mean? You and all the other robots aboard this station were instructed by the Owner to obey me and me alone.’

‘Yes, but obedience to you is secondary to obedience to the Owner himself.’

‘He’s awake?’ Hannah asked, feeling a sudden surge of hope.

‘He is not yet awake.’ Paul bowed his head for a second, as if in thought, then continued, ‘Before the Owner became comatose, he had queued up orders of primary importance, such as full enclosure of the station, securing the power supply’ – Paul gestured towards the machines now making Casimir batteries – ‘and, once resources were available after enclosure, then the construction of the vortex generator. When the threat of the Scourge became evident, ADAR 45A was moved to the head of the queue.’

By whom? Hannah wondered, but knew the answer to that already. Saul might have released his hold on consciousness, but his unconsciousness wasn’t of the human kind.

‘Surely you can see that wasting resources on this could kill us?’ she said.

‘On the contrary,’ Paul replied, ‘if we do not construct this device, we are finished.’

‘Can you elaborate on that,’ said Hannah, even though the meaning was plain.

‘The Scourge will first disable us, then launch an assault. With two thousand troops at their disposal, and doubtless spiderguns too, it is a certainty that we would lose. The only uncertainty is whether or not their victory would be a Cadmean one, because the station and all aboard could be destroyed in the conflict.’

There it was, stated out loud and in plain terms: everything the tactical models had been telling them, everything Le Roque had banged on about in those early meetings, and everything they had since tried to ignore. She had often wondered about Le Roque’s rather easy acquiescence to her; how, once it was evident she controlled the robots aboard Argus, he hadn’t tried anything else. There had been no assassination attempts, no further efforts to take her captive, no angry protests – just acid observations. She now understood why. Le Roque had sought power not because he loved it, but because he knew someone needed to take charge. The moment Hannah took command away from him, he stepped aside with alacrity, because nobody ever wants to be captain of a sinking ship.

Hannah turned to Brigitta and Pike, who stood goggle-eyed as they listened to this exchange. Meanwhile, Rhine had returned to his equipment and was now frantically working a console.

‘None of this leaves the room,’ she declared. ‘At some point wider knowledge of the construction going on out there will get out, so we need a story to cover it.’

‘Ah, I see,’ said Brigitta, who was clearly sharper than the other two.

‘What do we do?’ asked Pike.

Hannah focused on him carefully, feeling less sure about how he would react. ‘I – and a few others I trusted – knew about this all along. I allowed construction of the vortex ring to proceed in secret, because I did not want its purpose generally known. Messina’s clones currently aboard have been in regular contact with Earth, and I did not want them to find out about it and inform Earth.’ It was essential that the likes of Le Roque and Langstrom did not know how this development had blindsided her. They might lose any confidence they had left in her; so might feel the need to try and take control again.

She glanced next at Paul but the proctor was unreadable. She then strode over to where Jasper Rhine sat working. ‘What are the chances now of this vortex generator working?’

He glanced up with a slight dreamy smile on his face, which did nothing to inspire her confidence. ‘I never checked this. It’s amazing.’

‘Answer the question, Jasper.’

He waved a hand at the console screen. ‘Another two months and main construction will be completed, after which we’ll need to connect it up properly to the station system. It will, of course, work – but there’s much we still need to do.’

‘Like what?’ Hannah asked.

‘I checked with our long-range sensors, and I also checked the old asteroid survey maps,’ continued Rhine. ‘We need to further alter our course by half a degree and begin decelerating in about a month, so that we can moor to asteroid HJI457.’

‘You what?’ asked Brigitta, from behind Hannah’s shoulder.

‘That’s where we’ll get the ore,’ he explained, looking at her happily. ‘We should be able to swing one of the smelters right round to it, and haul the stuff straight across. It’ll be a low-temperature process compared to the usual smelting, and we can condense it in pipes cooled by vacuum, then use vacuum distillation to purify it.’

‘This still isn’t very clear, Rhine.’

‘Nearly eighty per cent cinnabar and vermilion, eight per cent pure product, and the rest is just rock.’

‘What product?’

‘Mercury, of course,’ Rhine replied, as if that was patently obvious. ‘You didn’t think the vortex generator would work without it, did you?’

Her throat trying to close up on her, Hannah asked, ‘And how much mercury do we need, Rhine?’

‘Oh, don’t worry. There’s enough there. We’ll have to process about three-quarters of the asteroid to achieve about ten thousand metric tonnes of the pure metal.’

Pike grunted as if someone had punched him in the stomach.

‘Oh, is that all?’ he said.

Hannah closed her eyes, fighting the urge to start crying, then gritted her teeth as a call came through on her fone from Le Roque.

‘What is it?’ she asked sharply.

‘We’re in trouble,’ he replied.

‘Tell me.’

‘The smelting plants just folded up their mirrors and are retracting into the station rim.’

‘I see,’ she replied. ‘I rather think we’ve been here before.’

‘Certainly,’ he continued, ‘and, just like last time, there’s a course correction in the system queue – and it wasn’t there before.’

‘Let me guess: a correction of half a degree.’

‘Is there something you’re not telling me, Dr Neumann?’

An hour later she was standing in Tech Central, as the smelting plants locked home in the rim.

‘What the hell is going on?’ asked Le Roque.

Hannah turned to gaze at two unused screens. Nightmarish images appeared there, but they seemed hazy now and, just for a second, she glimpsed the image of one of Argus’s steering thrusters firing up, its flame spearing out into the darkness.

Scourge

Commander Liang’s cabin had been small and claustrophobic, and Clay had not wanted to stay inside it for long, but as the small Chinese man took him on a guided tour of the rest of the barracks decks, that claustrophobic feeling only increased. Squeezing past a group of soldiers gathered in the pipe of the hexagonal access tube, who were playing Yahtzee with sticky dice that they threw against a wall, and recording their scores on PDAs, he peered into the space they had abandoned. The hexagonal cabin was occupied by nine zip-up hammocks, and equipment secured to every wall made the space even smaller.

‘They get a turn in the corridor every six hours,’ remarked Liang perfunctorily. ‘Then every forty-eight hours they get an hour in the spin-gym.’

‘I guess they need it,’ Clay noted.

‘Six around each section,’ explained one of Liang’s three staff officers, pointing out the six doors ringing the tube. Clay glanced at the man and couldn’t figure out who he was. Liang had named them all earlier, but their difficult names had since slid out of Clay’s mind. Anyway, they all looked like clones of Liang. Perhaps they were clones – as it wasn’t exactly unheard of.

Clay stepped over to an open door, peering down into the cabin below it, which was still occupied – the soldiers ensconced in their hammocks because there was nowhere else for them to go. He looked up at the door above, which was closed, then ahead along the tube to the next ring of six doors and the next group of nine men hovering outside one. These had stripped out of their VC suits and were sponging out the insides of the garments. The barracks decks resembled a honeycomb, with hexagonal cabins ringing hexagonal access tubes. The designers had obviously called on nature for the best way of packing living beings into the smallest possible space.

‘So, fifty-four troops in each separate section and four hundred and eighty-six in total along each access tube,’ Liang continued. ‘We’ve got six tubes altogether here, around which two thousand troops are bunked.’

‘That doesn’t add up,’ observed Clay.

‘They’re not all troop cabins,’ pointed out one of the clone trio accompanying them.

Clay damned himself for having made such a stupid comment. None of these living cabins had toilets or showers, so those facilities must be located somewhere. The men also needed to eat, drink and, of course, somewhere hereabouts was that ‘spin-gym’. He put his error down to how disorientating this place was, how claustrophobic. At least now he had begun to get used to the smell, which was a ripe mix of body odour, stale cooking and sewage.

‘Yeah, I can understand that,’ said Clay. ‘It must be hard for them living down here.’

‘Not as bad as you might think,’ opined Liang. ‘They have individual VR entertainment, and they have their tactical updates to learn – that stuff that was coming directly from Argus.’

These were updates which, since the Messina clones had been isolated and trapped in a hydroponics unit, hadn’t really supplied anything useful for some time now. He nodded thoughtfully, as if this was all of great interest to him, but in fact he was wondering why Liang and his staff officers bunked down here alongside the men. After all, cabins had been made available for them on the executive deck, where Clay had his own cabin. He could only surmise that Liang and his men were the utterly loyal soldier-fanatic type. He’d seen plenty like them – men who focused totally on their ‘duty’ and utterly failed to question their indoctrination.

‘They are also allowed an amount of chemical recreation,’ Liang added.

Clay knew about the various pills and potions the troops were allowed. No stimulants, however; only the kind of chemical recreation that left men and women zoned out for hours on end. Another recreation, sex, had been barred because it might lead to friction of another kind. There had been no complaints about this, since the method of prevention had been introduced into the water supply down here.

‘What about weapons drills?’ Clay asked.

‘Only in VR, at present.’

‘Yes,’ Clay nodded, ‘I take it most of the equipment is packed in the hold.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Not as yet.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Really?’ said Scotonis, again surprised.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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