Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

19

Plasma Weapons

It can be argued that that the billions of Euros spent on trying to develop plasma weapons would not have been expended but for these weapons lodging themselves in the public consciousness, first through science-fiction films, then during the boom in computer games of the twenty-first century. The great problems in propelling plasma at a given target have always been air pressure and power. The second of these, for portable devices, was overcome by the development of high-energy density power storage like nano-film batteries and super- and ultra-capacitors, but the first – air pressure – has always remained a problem. Firing plasma through atmosphere to hit a specific target is like firing a jet of water through the sea: it breaks up, loses coherence, and the ratio between distance and energy requirement has always been an exponential one. To some extent this was overcome by laser-guided electric discharges, remote magnetic lenses and tunnelling acoustic shockwaves, all of which resulted in a portable plasma weapon . . . mounted on a tank. But, in the end, one must sometimes go back to the first purpose of the weapon, which is to kill and destroy, and the plasma-firing tank is substantially less effective in this respect than one firing depleted-uranium Hyex shells – and substantially more expensive.

Argus

‘Sometimes there’s just no other option,’ said a voice behind Hannah.

She turned to see that the Saberhagen twins had joined her group, and felt a sudden deep gratitude for their presence. Hannah herself carried a standard Kalashtech assault rifle, but the twins both carried somewhat complicated-looking weapons that they must have fashioned themselves, along with coils of superconducting cable terminating in standard bayonet power plugs. She had seen a lot of this in Arcoplex Two as the defence efforts became more organized, some clever people having been preparing for just such an occasion.

‘What’s he doing?’ Brigitta asked, nodding along the corridor to where Jasper Rhine had a floor plate up and was concealing something underneath.

‘Booby traps,’ Hannah replied. ‘His Casimir batteries have a high-energy density, so inject a little nitric acid and they go off like grenades.’

‘How does he intend to detonate them at the right time?’ asked Angela, with clinical interest.

By now Rhine had replaced the floor plate. He stood up to press some minuscule object against the wall, before returning towards them with a big bag slung over one shoulder.

‘That’s the clever bit,’ replied Hannah. ‘They’re not activated now, but they will be after we’ve all taken our positions. Once activated, they respond to nearby movement.’

‘But you have a danger of chain reactions – one goes off and they could all go off?’ suggested Brigitta.

‘Not so,’ said Rhine, pausing beside them. ‘All the time and resources spent in developing the machinery of oppression was not wasted.’ He gave a crazy smile and headed off.

‘HAD cells,’ Hannah explained, pointing towards a small metal button on the wall. ‘Human activity detectors were developed to save having readerguns perpetually powered-up. They operate at low power and contain shape-identification software. In a readergun, upon detecting the human shape, they send the signal for the gun to power up. Here the signal is picked up by a micro-relay that opens the acid bottle.’

‘Neat,’ Brigitta opined. ‘But is it enough?’

Hannah didn’t want to reply. She had spoken with Saul and he had been quite blunt: they were outnumbered and unless he could find an efficient way to use his own particular talents, they would inevitably lose. And, as he had told Langstrom, the defenders would now be fighting not to win but to buy time. She just hoped Saul had found some way for them to survive this, and was ashamed to admit to herself that she did not care how savage it might be.

‘Let’s hope so,’ she allowed, studying the rest of her group.

Her assistant James was among them, along with four other lab assistants and two robotics engineers. The latter two, and also two of the lab assistants, carried Kalashtechs like herself and James. One of the lab assistants was just a girl, and it would have been nice to tell her to go away and hide herself, but in the end, if they lost here, she would be treated no better by their attackers than any of the adults. The remaining two lab assistants held a sidearm each, while one carried a handheld missile-launcher and the other carried a tube of the ring-shaped magazines this weapon used.

‘Okay,’ said Hannah, ‘Alan managed to take a few seconds out of his busy schedule to organize our defence here.’ They smiled in response; even before Saul had been shot, it had become a standing joke that if he took any more than a few microseconds to think about something, then he was giving it deep and intense thought. ‘The area we have to defend extends from the end of that corridor’ – she pointed to where Rhine had been laying his booby traps – ‘through to the rear of the factory.’ She pointed the other way, along the corridor, to where it flared then terminated against a pair of wide concertinaed doors that opened on to the robotics factory. Then she began walking towards them.

Reaching the doors, she stabbed a finger against the panel to one side of them. They began sliding open to reveal the factory floor of Robotics within. All the machines were shut down now, after that mad rush to get as many robots as possible finished ready in time for the attack.

‘So what have you brought to the party?’ Hannah asked, indicating Brigitta’s unusual weapon with a nod.

Brigitta held the object up. ‘When we thought they could become a threat, we began making something we thought might be useful against the proctors. These comprise arc-heat helium in a Tesla bottle which is fired with what we’ve dubbed caps. They maintain the Tesla bottle around the plasma for about twenty metres, but we’ve only got ten shots each.’

Hannah gaped at the woman. ‘What?’

‘The bottle caps melt in excess of that range, which tends to make the effect even nastier,’ continued Brigitta blithely. ‘At twenty metres, the bolt discharge throws molten metal about too.’

‘So let me get this straight: in your spare time you’ve managed to knock together a couple of plasma rifles?’ said Hannah sharply. ‘As I recollect, the Committee only got as far as reducing them in size so that a tank could carry them, then gave up.’

Brigitta winced. ‘They’re not plasma rifles as such, because the plasma would dissipate over just a few metres, without the caps.’

‘A small point, don’t you think?’ Hannah observed. She was about to ask further questions, but a sound that had been hitherto just a background hum now rose into complete audibility. Hannah recognized the sound of small-arms fire impacting on the outside of the arcoplex, along with the occasional ominous rumble of explosions. The latter worried her more, because the sound must be transmitting through the station’s structure – since vacuum lay outside the arcoplex – and that meant the battle had drawn very close.

‘Let’s get ourselves in position,’ she said.

‘Where do we go?’ asked James.

Hannah repressed the urge to snap at him while pointing out that she wasn’t a soldier, so how did she know? However, none of them was a soldier and she was effectively in charge of this group, therefore it was her responsibility. She needed to think about this with the dry analytical mind of a scientist. The plasma rifles she just could not assess, so decided one should be up here by the doors and one down on the factory floor. The missile-launcher should be up here, too, since the damage it would cause, considering their future survival, would be best wrought outside the factory. Kalashtechs then scattered about the factory, maybe?

‘They’re inside,’ announced one of the robotics engineers, his expression horrified.

Hannah nodded. The sounds had indeed changed, becoming a lot more immediate, the explosions much less muffled and far more vicious.

‘Okay, this is where you go,’ she began.

It took ten minutes to get them all in position, and she felt she had done her best. Perhaps it would have worked out okay if only the attackers had concentrated their assault through the main corridor. They didn’t.

The proctor pulled him from his shoulder and pushed him down. He felt grass underneath his palms, could smell Earth and, unbelievably, he could hear birds tweeting.

‘The birds are distressed,’ declared a wholly terrifying and unhuman voice, ‘they don’t like it when their environment changes so drastically. It is noteworthy how simple creatures will become distressed by such changes.’

Alex pushed himself up, his hands still clenching the grass to stop himself drifting off the ground. He then rose to his knees and looked around. He was in the Arboretum, greenery all around him as if he was clinging to the rim of a well full of it. Trees, shrubs and other plants were familiar to him, on some deeper level, even though he had never seen them in such profusion on Earth. The combination of that atavistic familiarity and being enclosed in a cylinder like this completely screwed his perspective. He had been here once before and hadn’t liked it then. It apparently took people a long time to get fully used to this place.

‘Why am I alive?’ he asked.

The proctor was standing just a few metres away, clad in a survival suit specially altered to fit its huge frame. It was leaning on a long staff made from a scaffolding pole, though it seemed evident, by touch controls on the pole’s surface, that something had been added to the inside.

‘Walk with me,’ it said, its voice seeming to reach down to twist something right inside him.

Alex just stared at the creature’s leathery visored face. The thing spoke perfectly understandable human words, which were yet somehow terrifying. After a moment he managed to summon up the nerve to say, ‘Gecko boots don’t work so well on grass.’

‘Use your toes, foolish man,’ the proctor replied.

Alex grimaced and set about removing his VC suit boots. He then carefully stood up, clenching his toes in the grass. The proctor gave him a short nod and strode away, seemingly unaffected by the lack of anything holding it to the ground. Alex followed, tentatively at first but then with growing confidence. Occasionally he caught hold of a shrub to keep him stable, then did that more cautiously after grabbing at the thorny dark green foliage of a wild rootstock lemon shrub. Within a few minutes they reached one of the section dividers within the Arboretum. Here was where equipment and agricultural chemicals were stored. Beyond this lay a section tiered with concentric floors loaded with hydroponics tanks.

The proctor marched across diamond-pattern metal flooring to a door, its feet still sticking firmly. Alex assumed that the gecko soles of its survival suit allowed this, but then remembered his own recent observation. Gecko soles became swiftly clogged with detritus if used on the kind of natural ground they had just crossed. The proctor must be using some other means to keep itself in place – one Alex couldn’t fathom. He waited until it opened the door and began to step through before launching himself across the intervening metal, catching the door handle and pulling himself through. The thing didn’t even turn round, didn’t seem at all concerned that he might be trying to attack it. Alex now pulled his boots back on, then followed the proctor further inside.

‘You didn’t answer my question,’ he probed. ‘Why am I alive?’ He meanwhile kept his head dipped, tensing up as if the reply might cause him pain.

‘We go this way,’ the proctor merely replied, striding for metal stairs that zigged and zagged towards the axis of the Arboretum cylinder.

Alex contained his frustration and considered what he should do next. He wasn’t stupid enough to think he had a chance of escaping this creature, but at some point it might well leave him, then he could get involved in the fighting – the sounds of which were rapidly impinging. The proctor led him into a storage room where, in an area cleared amidst towers of plastic crates, an armed group of station residents – most of whom worked here, judging by their dress – were holding some kind of meeting.

A small belligerent-looking woman was currently addressing a crowd of about fifty. She shot a glance at the proctor and Alex, then returned her attention to her audience.

‘We have a heavy machine gun directed at the main entrance,’ she said, ‘but that access is not going to be our chief problem. The assault force is using vacuum-warfare penetration locks, so effectively can come in through the endcaps, or wherever the soil is thin enough in the main Arboretum section, or here in the dividing section. So we have to stay mobile – we can’t dig in at any one place yet. Hydroponics is as secure as we can make it, because we have closed all the bulkhead doors and we know which way they’ll come if they come in through there.’

‘Unless they use explosives,’ said a tall bald-headed man holding an assault rifle protectively across his stomach.

‘Unless they use explosives,’ the woman agreed.

‘We’ve got cams covering the outside of the cylinder,’ said the same man.

‘But they may not last very long,’ the woman replied. ‘We’re now a main target because we have the Gene Bank samples here.’

‘And, as a main target,’ the man noted, ‘we’re heavily defended.’

Alex understood the implication. Once the assault force got past the station’s troops immediately outside, it was probably all over for them.

‘Even so,’ said the woman, ‘we have to do whatever we can. We all know what surrendering or being captured will lead to.’ She paused to survey all the faces around her. ‘You all have your particular areas to cover. So keep communications open and be ready to move if or when necessary. Any questions?’ None of them seemed inclined to say anything, so she finished with, ‘Let’s get to our positions.’

The crowd began to break up into groups, and only now did Alex see that there were some more proctors present. The woman picked up a light sniper rifle from where it leaned against the wall behind her, beckoned a stooped and elderly-looking man over to her side, then they approached.

‘This is him?’ she asked, flicking a worried look at the proctor before she gazed at Alex. He realized he wasn’t the only one who felt the sheer impact, the presence of this creature.

‘It certainly is him, Jenny Task,’ the proctor replied.

‘I don’t see how he’s going to be any use to us,’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t it be better just to stick him in a cell.’

Alex glanced at the old man. He was carrying a sniper rifle too, and a pack of ammunition, and was gazing distractedly back towards those currently departing. Alex considered grabbing the rifle and getting out of here. No, the proctor would be on him in a second. He had to bide his time.

‘Charlie,’ the woman addressed the old man, ‘he’s with you, apparently.’

The old guy swung round and recognition struck like a blow. Alex gasped and jerked back, both his feet actually coming away from the floor. The proctor reached out with one hand and caught him by the shoulder, dragging him back down.

‘I’ve built a hide in the big walnut tree,’ explained Charlie. ‘From there we should be able to cover most of the thin-soil areas.’

His face was different, of course, but it was the same one that Alexandra had found. Moreover, Alex recognized him on some deeper visceral level. Here stood Alessandro Messina, or at least what that man had now become. Here in front of him stood the very reason for Alex’s existence.

The woman reached out and patted the Chairman’s shoulder. ‘Charlie here has turned out to be quite useful,’ she said. ‘Though he’s forgotten a lot of his past, his inborn abilities and early training in the Inspectorate military have not been erased. Apparently Charlie once used to be a sniper.’

Alex knew everything it was possible to know about Messina, had treasured that knowledge. The man had indeed been a sniper in the military, eighty years ago, before promotion to command and then promotion out of fatigues into a suit and onto the first rungs of the Executive. A natural ability? Of course, it was one Alex himself possessed.

‘But remember, Charlie,’ said the woman, ‘wait until they are out of the penetration locks. A stray shot inside might result in an atmosphere breach.’

‘Sure,’ said the erstwhile Messina, looking very serious. ‘These bastards are going to be good for my plants – they’re not going to kill them.’

‘Attaboy,’ she said.

‘Good for your plants?’ Alex repeated numbly.

The mind-wiped Alessandro Messina peered at him carefully. ‘Yeah, we turn them into fertilizer.’ He reached out a hand to the woman. ‘Need to get moving now.’

The woman gazed at the proctor, who gave her a nearly imperceptible nod. She shrugged off the strap of the rifle she was carrying and handed it over. Messina swung it round and held it out to Alex. ‘I hear that you should be a good shot, too.’

Alex just stood there dumbfounded. All that was left of his Chairman, his Alessandro Messina, stood before him right now, quite adamantly stating that he would be fighting the Scourge’s assault force. Two contrary views were so at war inside Alex that they caused a physical pain in his torso.

‘If the assault force soldiers manage to get in,’ said the proctor, ‘their prime aim will be to get hold of the Gene Bank samples. They will kill anyone who stands in their way.’

It was a statement that Alex could not deny. In the end the answer was quite simple: he would fight beside his Chairman and do everything he could to prevent him being killed. He would obey his Chairman because that was what he had been programmed to do. Nothing outside of these facts was relevant. He took hold of the rifle.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I am a good shot.’

Earth

It was time to assess broadly how things stood with Earth and to make some plans for the future. To this end Serene began running a computer model of the entire economy and environment of Earth. This particular model was the best available, with its ability to predict about four days into the future – before a butterfly flapped its wings somewhere and the whole thing went tits-up. However, she wasn’t interested in predictions but in the neat and easily digestible way the present and the past were displayed.

Despite everything she was throwing into orbit, and Professor Calder’s massive spend, Earth’s resources were at a hundred-year high. This was simple mathematics really: production itself was mainly robotized and only limited by materials and energy supply, so it had been little damaged by the massive reduction in population. And while Saul’s attack on the Committee had damaged production to a certain extent, it had also benefited it by causing a reduction in political control. Consumption, on the other hand, had been vastly reduced. Running some further calculations, Serene found that Calder’s spend accounted for less than ten per cent of the gain made from reduced consumption.

Economically, Earth was looking good. Environmentally it was also better, but the gain was a questionable one. While wilderness areas were on the increase, there didn’t seem to be much yet that could grow wild in them. Reviewing extinction and environmental-destruction statistics, and specific stories related to them, Serene began to unearth some disconcerting realities, all expressed in a rather neat little graph.

It seemed that, while the extinction and biosphere destruction rate had been steadily increasing in line with the rise in population, that rise had not been as deadly as was claimed at the start of the previous century. Certainly there had been some big, newsworthy extinctions – like those of the tiger, the lion, the elephant and the grey whale – but they were not the kind that could result in the death of Earth’s biosphere. The dangerous stuff had come later; in fact it had ramped up markedly under Committee rule, and one of the stories before her illustrated why.

The North African breadbasket, as it had been called, was a Committee attempt to increase food production. Large portions of North Africa were turned over to agriculture; massive populations were relocated southwards – the whole process wiping out many indigenous species. Desalination plants were built to supply extra water but, due to a cost-based political decision, the resultant salt was dumped in storage bays inland. When, in the middle of the last century, the weather took one of its cyclic turns for the worse, resulting in an upsurge of rain in North Africa, billions of tons of salt had dissolved and run out into the fields, turning them barren. Meanwhile, nitrate and insecticide run-off had caused massive algae blooms and fauna deaths in the Mediterranean, shortly followed by an extension of coastal dead zones, until they met up with those extending out from southern Europe. The North Africa breadbasket had killed a large portion of the Mediterranean Sea.

Serene felt a moment of extreme disgust and annoyance. She had always felt that the Committee was utterly inefficient and this story perfectly illustrated why. Its problem, in the end, was that it had not properly rid itself of its human-centric take on governance. While it understood that humans had to be controlled for their own benefit, it had not grasped that they needed to be controlled for the benefit of more than that. They had to be controlled so as to maintain the ideal that was Earth – something she herself could see plainly but other humans apparently missed. It was the right and proper duty of a ruler to ensure everything in the human world ran at optimum efficiency, while also accepting that the human race was a plague on the face of the planet, an aberration which had its natural-world equivalents but was much more dangerous.

She sat back, scanning her garden, and noticed that some of the shrubs which she had thought were dead had put out new buds. Perhaps the nutrients provided directly by her previous horticulturalist were starting to do the trick. A distraction, however, so she returned to her thoughts.

The human race was a problem, and on those terms she must think to the future. While she herself was alive, it was a problem that could be controlled. Though medical research was reporting further breakthroughs in the banishment of senescence, and she could extend her own life, she still might die and whoever took over might not be as resolute.

Senescence . . .

Research into life extension was certainly right and proper for her, and for those she found useful, but perhaps it was time to consider a complete reversal of that concept as regards the bulk of the human race. In the end it came back to her earlier thoughts about modifying humanity.

Serene closed down the feed from the model, did a brief search and opened up some files she had been studying a few months back. The Alexes were an interesting experiment, undoubtedly. Absolute obedience and belief could be inculcated to deep levels – that was evident – but the whole operation was very labour intensive. She needed something better than that, something longer lasting. And in the end, as far as life forms were concerned, that came down to one thing: the immortal genes.

Another search began to render useful results. Telomere repair and extension and other genetic modifications resulted in a limited prolongation of life, but the reverse applied too. Those who had been seeking out how to make people live longer had, in the process, unearthed how very easy it would be, with some small genetic modifications, also to shorten human lives. This idea had its appeal, but Serene could see problems. Limiting the span of people’s lives could result in a loss of useful expertise. Quite obviously you did not want people like Calder dying by the early age of, say, forty. Also, limiting lifespan would not slow down breeding, which primarily needed to be controlled. So what was the answer?

Serene sat back and glanced at the empty bottle of champagne next to her, wondering if now was the best time to consider such things. Next, she turned her gaze up towards the light tubes in the ceiling. No, the sooner she began grappling with these problems the better, and she was starting to get some sense of the shape of a solution.

Truncation of lifespan and control of fertility were essential. The science of eugenics was the answer, and the way of applying that science had been staring her in the face. Wasn’t it obvious that the best way of controlling the human race was precisely the method she had already used? She could spread a plague.

Viral recombination of DNA was a proven science, with a history nearly a century long. It should be possible to manufacture a virus capable of modifying DNA so that those infected would have only a short lifespan and would die quickly at the end of it, without senescence, maybe at some convenient age, say at forty or fifty. Perhaps the same virus, or another one, could be made to render everyone thus infected infertile, but in such a way that turning fertility back on would just be a matter of administering drugs. That solution seemed best: the actual ability to have children being state controlled.

As far as expertise was concerned, she could ensure some meritocratic immunization programme, but only against the life-shortening aspect of the modification. Those demonstrating brains and ability would be allowed to live long lives, but their ability to breed would still be utterly controlled. This would result in humanity diverging into two different strands, but even that would not be a permanent state of affairs. As technology continued to advance, and as robots became more capable and more expert computer systems emerged, there would come a point when that shorter-lived version of humanity would no longer be needed.

It would, she realized, work perfectly. Therefore ordering the future lay completely within her grasp. The knowledge made her feel almost euphoric. However, the good feeling quickly passed as she realized that this was all merely a distraction from her immediate concern, which centred on events millions of kilometres away.

Argus

Feeling utterly cold, Saul watched through many sensors as the attackers worked their way down through Tech Central, blowing out the bulkhead doors that had closed to prevent atmosphere escaping. While this was occurring he considered the work of one of Hannah’s lab assistants, James Allison. For times when this man wasn’t helping her, she had provided him with a research project of his own. She had wanted him to do a comprehensive analysis of the Galahad biochips inside ID implants.

Allison had not been enthusiastic about that at first but, as with all good researchers, he was methodical and precise and soon did become fascinated with the device he was studying. His first report to Hannah concerned the cybernetic virus, shortly followed by the electro-templating method used to produce it from the recipient’s own venous system. He then delved deeper into the chip, revealing how its genocidal purpose was concealed within its professed aim of ensuring that no one but the original recipient of an implant could use it. It was interesting to note that when those involved in the implant black market shut down the chip’s ostensibly prime process of identification, the chip’s real purpose remained untouched.

Allison then detailed for her how the chip was activated. When a microscopic radio receiver within it detected the code of the implant, on the right coded frequency, with the addition of two zeros, it began its work. It was all quite prosaic. Galahad had simply added those two zeros to the implant codes of every zero-asset citizen on Earth, and killed them. Thereafter she had become more selective, still killing at will with two extra digits.

Useful information, if you knew the ID codes of your enemy.

The troops were now nearing the lowest floor, so Saul snapped out of his introspection and set all the robots in motion. The enemy spiderguns had to be dealt with first, because they were the most dangerous. Two construction robots threw themselves at the first spidergun from their place of hiding. It immediately opened fire on them both but, with its firing evenly divided between them, it could not deliver enough of a fusillade to halt their momentum. The two construction robots were almost completely wrecked under fire, but crashed into the spidergun and tangled themselves in among its limbs. Also shuddering under fire, the next two were able to reach it while still functional, if marginally so. They then set their diamond saws running, and in a businesslike manner began hacking it to pieces even while it continued to blow away pieces of their bodies. Other construction robots slammed into the fray until the scene resembled something in a wildlife documentary: ants swarming over a spider and tearing it apart. Eventually the surviving construction robots propelled themselves away, leaving nothing but pieces of the spidergun amid their wrecked fellows.

A similar scenario played out with the second gun, but this time enemy troops were involved, even more so when further robots came out of hiding to attack them. At once, Saul was reminded of when he had first used robots on this station, instructing them to use their integral toolkits against human bodies. Diamond saws sliced through limbs and torsos; drills punched neat, evenly spaced patterns into chests; spacesuited figures shuddered under welding currents; detached heads tumbled; blood beaded the air and splashed against walls. With the spidergun down, the action ceased to be a battle and rapidly turned into a slaughter.

‘They’re nearly done,’ said Saul. ‘Let’s get moving.’

Even as he led the way in, Saul watched survivors fleeing along corridors, only to be rapidly brought down and dismembered. The machines were bloody and remorseless: efficient killers. He felt no sympathy for those dying, for it was they who had attacked and they were now paying the price. Upon checking, he saw that two construction robots were carting ten cleanly killed corpses up to the top floor. Surveying that same floor through the computer control system, he found only one area not yet decompressed: it was a surgical unit. This was probably because the troops that had searched it could see, through the glass viewing wall, that no one was in hiding inside. He led the way there now.

The corridors were littered with corpses, their blood steaming in vacuum.

‘Hell of a mess,’ Langstrom observed, kicking a severed head further down the corridor.

‘It’ll scrape off,’ someone else commented briefly.

When they reached the door leading into Medical, the construction robots were already on their way out, a fog trailing after them. Saul entered and gazed at the stack of corpses, then walked over and took hold of one to sling it over his shoulder.

‘Follow me through into the surgical area.’ He gestured to the viewing window. ‘The clean lock is vacuum tested, so it should hold. Bring yourselves a corpse each.’

As he stepped into the clean lock he overrode its hygiene safety warnings, since he only wanted to use it as an airlock. Once inside, he quickly stripped off his suit and was down to his undergarments by the time Langstrom came through.

‘Do what I do,’ he instructed him.

He stripped the suit off the corpse he’d selected, then stepped over to a dispenser for some disposable towels, which he used to clean away the spill of blood around the neck ring. A repair patch taken from the maintenance kit of his suit sealed the single hole that had killed the wasted-looking soldier. By the time he was donning this second suit, another five of Langstrom’s men had entered. Twenty minutes later, they were all filing out, every one of them looking like enemy combatants. Saul remembered to warn the robots, and anyone else defending the station in the vicinity. He wanted only those he had already instructed to shoot at him.

Hannah had once read somewhere how it was the waiting that was the worst part and, though she understood that sentiment, she could not really agree. She would have been quite happy to just wait forever for a fight and never get involved in one. She’d seen quite enough of the results of warfare to be sure of that.

‘Why haven’t they decompressed the arcoplex?’ asked Angela suddenly.

‘They’ve got vacuum-penetration locks, so what would be the point?’ replied the lab assistant now sporting a missile-launcher.

‘The point would be to kill as many of the enemy as possible, but without putting themselves in danger,’ Hannah replied. ‘Isn’t that always the point of war?’ She paused for a second. ‘Anyway, the fact that they haven’t done so thus far but are certainly inside doesn’t mean they won’t. So just be ready to close up your suits.’ She nodded in acknowledgement to Angela, who simply shrugged in reply.

The sounds of battle had grown closer, but when it finally arrived, Hannah found herself gaping, unable to respond. Two soldiers appeared first at the end of the corridor, and began loping forward. They immediately opened fire, ceramic ammunition slamming into the floor plates ahead of them. Belatedly, Hannah realized they must have already encountered Rhine’s explosives and were now attempting to make this corridor safe. She began to raise her weapon . . . just as bright rose light flared beside her, and something like a pink tracer bullet shot towards the two intruders. The thing expanded as it travelled, thus creating the illusion that it wasn’t actually moving away, was merely some fault in Hannah’s vision. It struck one soldier on the shoulder and there detonated like a firework, flinging him back into the trooper behind. Both of them collapsed, licked by flame and screaming. A missile followed shortly afterwards, exploding against the far wall and tearing it wide open.

‘We need to calm . . .’

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

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

‘What are they doing?’ she asked.

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

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

‘We heard,’ Brigitta replied.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Not very good positioning,’ Messina noted.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Oops,’ said Messina.

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

‘Messy,’ observed Messina.

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

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

‘Messy,’ Messina repeated.

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

Mars

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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