Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

13

Rest in Peace

Towards the end of the twenty-first century, with land at a premium and with old traditions dying and religions crumbling, human burial became increasingly unfeasible. In some places that old method of human burial whereby a grave was effectively rented, and the bones were later transferred to an ossuary, did gain a brief foothold but it was soon swept away. Public safety and the recycling meme of preceding decades were used by governments to enforce change. Burial was taxed and legislated into extinction, and graveyards soon cleared for either agriculture or building purposes. Cremations of the singular kind were killed off in the same way – pollution taxes and health and safety ‘issues’ soon making them prohibitively expensive. Communal incinerations quickly became the norm, with the bereaved storing their dead until there were enough for a single burn inside some combined trash-incineration and power-generating plant. Later changes, first in the biotech and macerating technology, then in the laws governing what could go into community digesters which provided methane gas supplies and compost for agriculture enabled a return to individual disposal, since there were no constraints on when a corpse could go into a digester. People could even bring flowers, too – to cast down, after their loved one, into the hopper and the macerating drums.

Argus

As Alex stood over a transport cylinder he was making ready, he felt an overpowering reluctance to follow through with his plan, then turned and gazed at his personal hydroponics trough. He simply did not want to leave his plants alone; nor did he want to leave his little refuge. However, his programming proved stronger, and he returned to the task in hand.

The lock on the cylinder lid had been first. He had removed a plate from the interior, which covered the mechanism, and now, with a pair of pliers from a simple toolkit, he could open the cylinder from inside. This he would only be able to do once it reached its destination – which would be one of the cold stores scattered throughout the station. If he tried opening it while it was being air-blasted along its transport tube, he’d probably emerge out the other end in bits.

The problem he now faced was a computer, one that Alexandra could probably have solved in an instant. He needed the cylinder to inform the hydroponics unit that it was full and therefore ready to be sent on its way. Five hours of working with the computer in the cylinder and in the unit itself got him nowhere. Then he traced some wiring and found the solution so simple it made him laugh hysterically. The cylinder broadcast its readiness to be filled after it arrived and its lid was opened. It then broadcast its readiness to be transported away again simply when the lid was closed.

Alex now collected all the items he could think of that might be of use when he reached the cold store, starting with his rifle. He then ate everything his plants had recently produced, followed by a portion stolen from the unit itself, drank his fill of the water yet to be laced with plant nutrient, then lay down inside the cylinder. As he reached up to close the lid, some strange memory niggled at him and he paused in puzzlement to try and nail it down. After a moment it became clear.

‘Like a coffin,’ he said out loud.

The comparison carried no emotional baggage. Coffins were something he knew about through watching some of the few politically approved films he had been allowed, and so possessed no macabre associations. Putting dead people in boxes in order to bury them was a waste of resources the Earth had been unable to afford for nearly a century. And a funeral was these days a short goodbye next to the hopper of a community digester or waste incinerator.

He closed the lid.

Oddly, lights immediately came on inside, but lights of a deep purplish blue. He realized he was being bathed in ultraviolet, which was regularly used to wipe out free bacteria and viruses. The cylinder began to move, and he felt the clonk as it entered the transport tube. He was on his way; this was going to work!

Then a sulphurous vapour began to fill the cylinder and he realized that ultraviolet was not all they used to prevent the spread of diseases. Immediately he was gasping for breath and then clawing at the lid above him, even as he felt the cylinder accelerate down its tube. He realized that opening the cylinder now might kill him, but the gas most certainly would. But where were the pliers? He groped about, just as the cylinder abruptly decelerated. He held his breath, was relieved to feel another clonk just as he found the pliers down beside his chest. Then, even as he scrabbled at the locking mechanism, the lid suddenly opened.

His eyes were watering and he just could not stop coughing. Something was opening and closing above him, and he reached up and shoved at it and, with a whine of hydraulics, a jointed arm withdrew its four-fingered claw – the computer controlling it obviously confused over what it had found. He grabbed the same claw and used it to heave himself out, and propel himself away. Then, as his vision cleared, he studied his surroundings.

The cylinder had arrived in a hexagonal aisle, surrounded on all sides by translucent boxes packed with produce. Immediately he started shivering but, as he gasped, he realized it was lucky he was still able to breathe. This store had been made for human access so had been kept oxygenated. It was also for preserving food, so it was very cold. He propelled himself along the aisle to the end, out into a metre-wide space between the entrances to six other aisles and the end wall. The store seemed to be arranged like the ammunition cylinder of a six-gun.

In the centre of the near wall sat an airlock, which he immediately went over to and opened, pulling himself inside. Ensuring that the inner door remained open by jamming the pliers into the hole where the hinge curved into the wall, he moved over to the outer door and rubbed at a veneer of ice that was frosting a single porthole. Eventually he obtained a view he could understand. Outside, a cageway extended for ten metres then curved to the right, and visible through the cageway to the left was that thing the robots had been building in the outer rim. He felt like crying. The only improvement in his situation here was access to more food and this additional view. Without a spacesuit, he could go no further than this, and he could not stay here either. The cold in the store behind him, though not sufficient to freeze the produce and thus ruin it, would still eventually kill him. He turned, retrieved his pliers and headed back to see if he could get the cylinder to transport him back home.

The oval screen before Hannah went to a holding logo, which had once been a United Earth one but was now simply a picture of Argus Station taken from one of the smelting plants. But then, oddly, that changed to a still image of Var Delex.

‘Now that’s strange,’ said Rhine.

Hannah glanced across at him questioningly. He was sitting before another screen via which he had been monitoring tanglecom, measuring quantum effects within the tangle box itself or, as he put it, ‘checking the cat’s poison’. Now his screen also showed an image of Var Delex’s face. Hannah turned to look at other screens in the room and saw that they too showed the same image.

‘One of your quantum effects?’ Hannah suggested, then abruptly grabbed the arms of her chair as a deep thrumming noise rose into being and seemed to penetrate her to the bone. It continued for a while and was so intense she saw a pen vibrate across the tabletop nearby and fall to the floor. ‘Shit, what is that?’

Hannah could think of very little that could have caused it, but feared something major: Arcoplex Two itself going out of balance, or the massive motors that turned it breaking down. She punched some commands into her console and disconnected the screen before her from the tangle box, immediately calling up the station log to see if anything had been reported either by the system or by the staff.

‘PA system,’ said Rhine, the image of Var Delex banished from his screen and other data appearing there. ‘Maybe he’s having another nightmare.’

If Saul was stirring uneasily in slumber, the stuff issuing from his mind into the station system had changed radically. Surely this was something else? The station log appeared on her screen, slowly scrolling as new events were added, then suddenly it blurred as the number of those events suddenly rose, and, just at that moment, she got notifications of four calls queued up on her fone. One was from her laboratory, the other three from Brigitta, Langstrom and Le Roque. She answered the technical director’s call first.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘Isn’t that the question I should be asking you?’ he shot back.

‘Le Roque, the station log just went crazy after an image of Var Delex appeared on our screens here, and then some . . . noise over the PA system. I’m not keeping anything from you, so speak to me.’

‘Same screen image in Tech Central,’ he replied grudgingly, ‘and, as far as I can gather, all across the station. That noise was odd because it was largely infrasound, which can have some strange effects. But that’s not all that’s happened. Grab yourself exterior cam views of your arcoplex, as you might find them interesting.’

She banished the log file and called up image feeds, selected four, and her screen now quartered to provide them. Her first impression was of metallic movement, more than should be registered through these cams, for all that should be visible was the steady rotation of Arcoplex Two. It took her a moment to realize that she was seeing masses of robots on the move.

‘What the hell?’ she said.

‘So you know nothing about this?’ said Le Roque.

Hannah selected another more distant view of the arcoplex and saw how robots were swarming around it like ants around a chunk of salami. There were thousands of them, maybe their whole population here.

‘They just finished off whatever job they were doing and headed straight for Arcoplex Two,’ said Le Roque. ‘The only ones not included were the fixed robots, some currently working out on the vortex generator, and the proctors.’

Hannah stood and headed over to the door. ‘Let me start checking things out – I’ll get back to you.’ She opened the door and looked out, and realized that her spidergun was no longer with her. Was this something else that had entered the station queue? Some new order from Saul’s unconscious mind?

‘Brigitta,’ she said quickly, responding to the next call, ‘I’ve no idea what’s going on. Have you?’

‘I take it you saw the robots?’ the Saberhagen twin asked.

‘I’ve seen them.’

‘Every station weapon that was capable just powered up too.’

What the hell was going on?

‘I’ll get back to you.’ She responded to the next call: ‘Langstrom?’

‘Why the alert, Dr Neumann?’ the soldier asked.

‘I’m trying to find out what the hell is going on, Langstrom. What alert are you talking about?’ Maybe the PA system was still issuing infrasound, because her skin suddenly felt cold, as if in response to some invisible wind sweeping through the station.

‘We just got instructed to go to full security alert – all station police called on duty and permission given to employ deadly force. Yet the arms caches are locked down. I checked with Le Roque and it’s nothing to do with him. It makes no sense.’

‘It’s not me, either. I’ll see what I can find out.’ She shut off that line and noted the one left was routed from her laboratory. She then remembered that it was closed off, and that neither James nor any other member of her staff was there. Suddenly she had an intimation of what it might be. She opened the channel in question.

‘Recorded Alert One,’ her own voice told her. ‘Alpha rhythms detected and patient conscious.’

It was the message she had wanted to hear for months but, now it had arrived, she felt numb. She didn’t know what to say to the others. She had to check first. She turned to gaze at Rhine, who took one look at her expression and asked, ‘What’s the problem, Dr Neumann?’

‘No problem, none at all,’ she said, noting the slight edge of hysteria in her voice. ‘It’s Saul – I think he’s awake.’

‘At last,’ said Rhine, looking somewhat smug.

She turned away from him, stepped out into the corridor and began walking. The sleeping god wakes, she thought, not sure where those words had come from. It was all right for Rhine to feel vindicated, to feel that an ally had returned to the conscious world, but he did not know what Hannah knew: that the one now waking up might not even know Rhine, might not even know what it was to be a human being.

Saul gazed steadily upwards, but could see nothing but weird rainbow effects spreading out in watery ripples. The bullet had all but destroyed his visual cortex at the back of his skull, but he had lain here for months with brain matter growing to fill the spaces, which he at once checked, sliding into Hannah’s laboratory computer to assess the extent of the healing. His visual cortex occupied a larger area at the back of his skull than before, and its structure was substantially changed, as were all the other portions of his brain that had been damaged. His optic nerve was also thicker, and the neural density to the rods and cones of his eyes had all but doubled.

Saul groped for connections, activating dormant synapses and firing up the somnolent nerve tissue lying between them. His vision hazed in and out like a TV channel search. He thought that it might be better if he actually had something other than just the ceiling to focus on, so decided to sit up. Just for a moment he could not, then further previously damaged neurons fired up, fed back into a mental partition that defined every function of his physical body, and in an instant he remembered how to control it all, utterly.

The physical effort required in the arcoplex’s gravity was the only downside. He could define and minutely control every muscle in his body, route blood to them and have them working in perfect concert, but they were partially wasted since muscle-tone stimulation though useful, was hardly adequate. For a while at least it might be a good idea to confine himself to the zero-gravity areas of the station.

Now sitting upright, he concentrated on his vision – still trying to tune in to that station. Shapes began to appear and he tried to resolve them, understand them. One came clear: a circle, rainbow ripples distorting it and bright light burning a hole through one section of the circumference. He tuned out that light and the circle became clear. He saw a rim of concentrically ridged plastic with an object lying across looking like a long curved claw. Scattered about this ring were white crusty items like sheets of crunched-up and compressed bubble wrap. He could comprehend none of these objects as he next focused on the glassy eye this ring enclosed.

Here were lines, reflected lights and a distorted image down towards the bottom. Unable to make anything of that, he instinctively cleaned it up with a program now running in his visual cortex but more commonly found in cam systems. The distortions ironed out, presenting him with a clear image of his own reflection. But what was he being reflected from? Another program – a search through his distributed mind – quickly rendered just one result, and he then had to recalculate scale. He was focusing right across the room at one lens of a binocular microscope, and the objects on the plastic rim about that lens were a human eyelash and a scattering of skin flakes. And next, when the lights came on like a sun going nova, he realized he had been seeing that lens in infra-red.

‘You’re awake!’

Now aware of his visual error, he focused on Hannah entire, mapped her features, noted extra lines on her face, a healing cut on her earlobe and some new grey hairs on her head. He was seeing her complete, and not using the visual shorthand the human brain usually employed to identify someone. She was also thinner, he noticed, looking tired and worried. He read fear in her expression too: fear of him, and of what she was going to find here, which kept her hovering just inside the door as if ready to flee.

‘I am awake,’ he agreed, his voice hoarse, the very words opening to his inspection further connections inside and outside his skull.

The words appeared as text in the visual centre of his brain, and via new connections, were open to be expressed in any language he chose. This was just through a simple connection to the station network, which had located a language library. However, while he had been unconscious, the partition of his mind containing his language centre had already analysed that library in depth and he could not only speak the words in any tongue now, but place on them any nuance he required. His mind, partitioned throughout this particular body’s brain, and throughout the extra neural tissue residing in two metre-square boxes in this laboratory’s clean-room, and then throughout the station system, seemed to have been very busy indeed.

‘How are you feeling?’ Hannah inevitably asked.

‘I will answer the question you wanted to ask, rather than give you the conventional response,’ he said flatly. ‘I am sane, I am functional and have become more than I was before I was shot and, to be specific, I will take charge once again.’

She moved further into the laboratory, some of the tension slipping out of her as she briefly focused on some of the laboratory screen displays. Saul knew what she was seeing there: glimpses of a mind functioning smoothly, while efficiently running the nervous system of a human body, revealing no signs of epilepsy or the other crippling effects of brain damage, instead operating in smooth waveforms. These reassured her, and perhaps she was discounting everything else that she could not recognize because she wanted him to take charge again. She wanted the responsibility taken away from her.

‘More than you were before?’ she asked, moving over beside him and immediately busying herself with removing monitor pads from his chest and skull.

‘I kept myself functional because of this Scour, because we needed to know what it was all about. I should not have done so. My body, brain and mind required time to heal. I ideally needed to shut down to allow that process to commence properly. However, our situation was too dangerous for me to release my hold completely. I first ensured that the robots would obey you, and you alone, then as I slid into unconsciousness I partitioned my mind, delegating my will and intentions to its various parts.’

‘It seems that you achieved a lot in a very short time,’ said Hannah, spraying antivibact on the skin behind his ear as she pulled out a hair-thin optical probe penetrating the inside of his skull. ‘I thought you could hardly manage to look through one cam, at the time.’

‘It was instinctive,’ said Saul dismissively, then added, ‘though instinct is a questionable description of what I did.’

‘Like, for example,’ said Hannah, ‘instinctively calling just about every robot on this station to your present location.’

In an instant he was gazing through cams located outside the arcoplex, then into the minds of the massed robots and isolating what had brought them here. It was something that had spread virally from the two spiderguns now stationed outside the door to this laboratory. He could define it as computer code, but an easier description would be that it was their protective instincts kicking in. He shut it down, he reassured them, and sent them back to work, watched them hesitantly moving away as if unsure that he knew what he was doing.

‘They are returning to work now,’ he said.

‘Well,’ Hannah shrugged, ‘that certainly shows that you are in charge but, anyway, we soon found out that you never really weren’t.’

‘Quite so,’ Saul agreed, ‘though my awareness of that fact wasn’t wholly conscious.’ He reached up to pull the teragate plug from the socket in his skull, and switched the data stream going through it over to his internal radio modem, then continued, ‘I lapsed into unconsciousness without preparing any way to wake myself. Partitioning my mind was almost a survival effort, but it has had some beneficial results.’

‘What did wake you?’ Hannah asked.

‘Let me get to that in its turn,’ Saul said.

‘Okay, you’re the boss.’ Hannah’s expression was wry, almost sad.

‘The parts of my mind were not completely separate, however,’ he said. ‘There were those for my senses, the other functions of my body and the functions of my mind, but access was required to them for one other partition. I needed to analyse our situation perpetually and make the best decisions about what to do to improve our chances of surviving. Hence the orders for Rhine’s vortex generator to be built, and the subsequent course changes – these decisions were made inside that partition.’

‘It’s an interesting theory,’ said Hannah sniffily, ‘and I would guess that from your point of view the different parts of your mind would seem like partitions. In reality the human brain, and thus mind, is already a divided thing.’

He understood her reaction at once and knew that she was uttering such half-truths because he had infringed on her territory, her expertise. Even in her computer as she tried to map what was happening to him, she had labelled the partitions. Therefore it was so childish of her to react in this way. He paused in that train of thought, and realized that he had sounded bombastic, pompous and patronizing. He understood that if he clearly stated his thoughts to anyone now, he would always sound that way, while much of what they said to him would seem like the wittering of children.

Re-establish humanity . . .

‘Yeah, I guess so, but it’s much easier to use computer analogies’ – he smiled ruefully at her – ‘especially after someone started sticking computer processors in my head.’

‘Never by choice,’ she said crossly.

‘Ah, choice,’ he said, humanity re-established. ‘Anyway, those bits of my mind that were damaged eventually healed.’ He studied her carefully, deciding it would be best for her to see it for herself rather than have him lecture her. ‘You said the bio-interface in my skull would grow according to demand, and that those bits of my mind governing my senses, the processing of certain kinds of information like mathematics, spatial ability, even aesthetics if there is such a part, were internalized, they had no reference frame . . .’

He saw her expression, blank at first, then frown lines appearing on her forehead as she realized she had something to think about here, rather than just absorb.

‘Without any reference frame, without connections to the other parts of your mind, the bio-interface wouldn’t have known whether or not there was demand,’ she said. ‘It would have had two options. It could simply stop growing its neural net or have it keep on growing.’

‘It kept growing.’ He stabbed a finger towards the clean-room door. ‘And there was room for it.’

‘But that’s . . . separate . . .’

He nodded once, waiting for her to catch up – and she did.

‘Of course, it continued to grow physically in your skull but informationally in your . . . spares.’

‘My vision is a prime example of what’s happened inside this body,’ he said. ‘The net has grown into my optic nerve and done a lot in my visual cortex. I can see into infra-red now, and a little into ultraviolet – though I think that’s the full physical extent available to me. I’m also no longer using the usual mental shorthand for anything I see.’

‘You’re processing everything, every detail?’

‘Different shorthand – using up a few more pages.’

‘Omniscience?’ Hannah asked, opening a container down beside his bed and taking out a standard undersuit for space apparel.

‘Hardly.’

Swinging his legs off the surgical table was not quite so difficult as sitting upright had been, but still he felt exhausted after the effort. He felt disconnected too, but it was the familiar inertia experienced after a long deep sleep. An urgency in him was growing and his focus kept drifting away from this laboratory, out towards the smelting plant and the cinnabar asteroid, to the vortex generator and to the eight proctors now ranged all the way round it like priests guarding some temple relic.

‘We felt you,’ said the proctor named Judd. ‘Your orders?’

‘Unchanged by full consciousness,’ Saul replied mentally. ‘You have done well.’

‘There are inefficiencies,’ said the proctor Paul, who was currently with another proctor called David in the Arboretum cylinder world.

‘If you had taken full charge,’ Saul informed the android, ‘station personnel would have rebelled, creating greater inefficiencies.’

‘I understand.’

‘Yes, of course you do.’

These beings were something Saul needed to focus on closely when the opportunity arose, but right now he needed to get moving, to show himself to the people of this station, to optimize their chances of survival. Because, still, the approaching Scourge felt like a hot nail driving towards his eye.

‘I need to run some tests,’ said Hannah, frowning.

‘Only for your own reassurance,’ he answered. ‘I know my condition.’

‘Okay, so let me ask you again,’ she said. ‘How do you feel?’

He allowed the sensation of pain for a second, then quickly shut that down. ‘Like I was shot three times and then operated on. Like my head has been opened up and most of the contents scooped out, and like I’ve been flat on my back for several months.’

‘Then precisely as you should feel.’ Hannah passed him the undersuit, then stooped down again to the container to begin unpacking a VC suit. In merely storing that clothing here, she had obviously tried to remain optimistic. ‘Do you need any help?’

Despite her keeping garments ready for him, her tone told him she didn’t approve of him getting out of bed now without her checking him over. Perhaps she didn’t understand just how irrelevant his body felt to him. It was a much more complicated device than the robots he had earlier controlled and was now reassuming control of, but to him it was still merely a telefactored biological machine.

Considering that, his mind wandered off into some half-fugue state. There, in a strange way, he felt grateful for the shooting for, even though the manner of its occurrence was catastrophic, Saul had been pushed to what seemed like the next stage of his personal evolution: immortal mind – distributed, copied, safe, and his physical body just one of many he now controlled. In that moment he saw a possible future. As his abilities and the technologies he controlled increased, eventually there would come a time when he could grow replacement versions of himself, place within them the minds he required for any particular task and reabsorb that mind into his whole self after it completed that task.

Then reality came back. All that was still for the future, and he had to survive the now.

‘I can manage,’ he replied – the answer intended for her and for something inside him.

Slowly and methodically he eased himself from the bed, pulled the undersuit on over his scarred and tender flesh, then donned the vacuum combat suit, meticulously tightening its concertinaed seams. As he did this, he was also aware that when the alert had been transmitted to Hannah’s fone to bring her here, she had told Rhine what she was responding to. Rhine had quickly taken an almost childlike pleasure, which wasn’t without malice, in telling Le Roque. The technical director froze like a rabbit in the headlights before informing Langstrom, who had looked equally as frightened before getting himself under control and informing his staff. Thereafter the news had spread by fone and computer throughout the station.

‘How do I look?’ he eventually asked.

‘Like something hot from a Transylvanian tomb.’

‘Thank you for your support.’ He paused, now considering whether to answer her earlier question, and decided there would be no advantage in her not knowing.

‘You asked what woke me,’ he said.

‘Yes – you haven’t really explained that.’

‘It was a connection to the outside world, the conscious world, a connection running so deep it could not be ignored,’ he explained. ‘Even in the state I was in, I was still watching this station and still listening. I heard your recent tanglecom exchange with Varalia Delex.’

‘I don’t see any deep connection,’ said Hannah, puzzled.

‘Perhaps you did not notice her reaction when you told her my name. Maybe it’s understandable that you missed it. As for me, I hardly recognized her – since so few of the memories remain.’

‘Memories of what?’

‘Her name is Varalia Delex, but that’s her married name – from her husband, Latham Delex. Her maiden name is Varalia Saul. Hannah, she’s my sister.’

Hannah’s expression registered shock, then all sorts of rapid calculation and reassessment. ‘You knew she was out here?’ she tentatively asked.

‘I knew she was offworld but I had no idea where. Perhaps that knowledge was a subconscious driving force, but I can’t even speculate on how much influence it has had on my actions and decisions since I found myself on the way into the Calais incinerator.’

‘You knew,’ Hannah asserted.

‘I thought you only dealt with empirical fact, Hannah?’

‘Yes,’ she said, obviously still thinking hard.

‘Let’s get moving, shall we,’ he suggested.

She gazed at him dubiously for a second, then reached up and touched her fone with her fingertips. ‘Langstrom is waiting for you outside, and Le Roque awaits you in Tech Central.’

‘Yes, I am aware of that.’ Saul smiled.

‘What are you going to do?’ she asked.

‘I am not going to kill anyone, Hannah.’ He knew about Le Roque and Langstrom’s attempt to take control of the station, and he understood why they had felt the need.

A dizzy spell hit him as he began to walk, and his vision doubled for a second as he established further control over his brain’s visual centre. Elsewhere within that organ, he could feel other control firmly establishing itself: the unsteady beat of his heart stabilizing as he finally relinquished remote control of it; other functions consciously controlled sliding over to autonomous function; memories copying back from his ‘spares’ as structures connected up in this physical body’s brain to contain them; the new neural network from the biochip firming up and windows flashing open and closed into the virtual world of the station. Opening the door and stepping out, he turned to his police commander, who was now accompanied only by the repro Manuel.

‘Langstrom,’ he said, noting the addition of lines of strain in the man’s face, a few grey hairs and a slight indentation to his jawline that signified the man had lost a tooth and had yet to have it replaced.

‘You’re . . . okay?’ Langstrom asked, gazing at him wide-eyed. ‘I didn’t quite believe . . .’

‘I am functional.’ Saul paused, remembering to appear human. ‘I’m in surprisingly good shape considering what happened to me, but we have the advanced medical technology here and the expertise.’ He reached over and clasped Hannah’s shoulder. ‘I’m alive, let’s put it that way.’ He smiled, then realized from Langstrom’s expression that he hadn’t managed that correctly. The repro, of course, hardly noticed. ‘So, what news on this remaining Messina clone?’

Langstrom looked suddenly shamefaced. ‘No sign of him since a robot winged him when we ambushed both him and his partner aboard Messina’s space plane. I’m beginning to wonder if he just crawled away and died.’

‘We’ll find him,’ Saul assured the man. ‘Come.’ He set off along the corridor, meanwhile sending a mental summons to certain others whose presence he required.

The journey to Tech Central was fraught with dangers for him. The tightness of his VC suit helmet caused psychosomatic pains he only managed to rid himself of by shutting down new nerve growth in his scalp. Outside the arcoplex, the zero-gravity falling sensations returned so strong he nearly lost control of his limbs, while also trying to again get the hang of using gecko boots. The weakness he felt from moving about after being so long bedridden could not be dispelled, and by the time he arrived in Tech Central he felt exhausted. However, he maintained rigid control and did not allow these weaknesses to show as he stepped inside the main control room and studied the people here: his people.

Scourge

Activity in the Scourge had ramped up and every time Clay stepped out of his cabin there would be someone hurrying to some destination, with an expression worried and intense. Throughout the initial months of their journey, everybody had worked efficiently, just doing their jobs, being professional, but as time progressed such activity sank into a kind of robotic boredom. Then there was the fight in the troop section, and Liang’s execution of one of those involved in it, but not its prime instigator. This had knocked any real trouble on the head, and discipline had further tightened up after Liang doubled up on combat theory and tests, for which the punishment for failure involved the use of a disabler, and he instituted weapons drills outside on the hull of the Scourge, which left the soldiers too tired to attack each other. Now that they were decelerating into the Asteroid Belt, however, they were all inside, constantly exercising in the ersatz gravity to rebuild muscle mass.

With the crew there had been no further problems since Clay’s punishment of Pilot Officer Trove, and they remained completely correct around him, but distant. It was time for that to change, though Clay worried about what the extent of that change might be.

‘You summoned me,’ said Scotonis, after Clay had opened the door to his cabin. There was no audible resentment in his words, nor was it visible in his expression. But of course it was there, safely hidden.

Clay returned to his chair, beside his small computer desk, and gestured towards his bed. Scotonis entered, moving a little woodenly, and sat down on it. ‘If you’ll pardon me, Political Officer Ruger, I do still have many preparations to make.’

‘Call me Clay.’

‘Certainly, Political Officer Clay.’

Clay grimaced. ‘Everything is thoroughly prepared and checked,’ he said, gazing at the other man. ‘Commander Liang is still keeping his troops constantly at the point of exhaustion, exercising them now we have gravity, then intends to take that load off them in about two weeks – two weeks before we intercept Argus Station. They will be in the very best condition for boarding the station, at least as far as training and physical fitness are concerned.’

‘I am at a loss to understand what you require, Officer Clay,’ said Scotonis blankly.

Clay held up a finger to still him. ‘You are running your own crew ragged, but they are also willingly complying. Every system is being checked and rechecked, every error corrected just moments after it occurs and every nut and bolt tightened because nothing must be left to chance, because we all know the penalties of failure.’

Unconsciously, Scotonis raised his fingers to touch his strangulation collar, then on realizing what he was doing, snapped his hand back down again. Clay had made his point, and now it was time for the gamble. Failure out here meant he would die, he was certain of that. If they failed to get what they wanted from Argus, yet survived that coming encounter, Galahad would send the signal to his own collar or perhaps to his ID implant and then, when it became evident that he had not died, she would order Scotonis or Liang to arrest him. His control of the inducers and readerguns aboard would give him some advantage over them, but what then? He couldn’t fly this ship alone.

‘If we fail out here,’ he said, ‘we all die.’

Scotonis warily nodded agreement.

‘The least Galahad would do is kill both of us,’ he continued, ‘then perhaps kill some of your staff – but not all, because she’ll want this ship back.’

‘The least?’ Scotonis enquired.

‘I know her, Captain, and I’ve seen how she behaves. It’s quite likely that in a fit of rage she would kill everyone aboard, regret that action afterwards because of the loss of this ship, falsify some story over ETV, then move on.’

‘Our position is unenviable,’ Scotonis suggested.

‘So it is,’ said Clay.

‘But I see no way it can be changed.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Random?’ Scotonis echoed.

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

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

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

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

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

Earth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Continue,’ she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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