Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

21

Technology Makes You Free!

The attitude of Committee delegates to technology was always an ambivalent one. They wanted medical technology advanced just as fast as possible so that they could stay healthy and live for as long as possible, but did not want it on general release because that would inevitably exacerbate the world’s population problem. They wanted expert computer systems through which to administrate the world, yet artificial intelligence terrified them for it might displace them. They wanted fast and reliable robots operating in their factories and their Inspectorate, but desired utter control over the experts that built and programmed them. They wanted all the benefits that technology could give, because technology is power, and they wanted that power only for themselves. They micromanaged, controlled and suppressed technology so that, in the end, that product of human genius, intended to free people from the exigencies of the world around them, instead enslaved them.

Argus

The shuddering that ran through the station, as if it had been hit by a gigantic club, was slowly diminishing. Gazing up through one of the few intact windows of Tech Central, Saul watched the cause of it: the Scourge steadily retreating. Why it had pulled away was debatable, because it began to leave only shortly after he had transmitted the codes to the implants of every soldier and every crewmember of that ship, and it struck him as unlikely that they could so quickly have realized what was about to happen.

‘Nearly done,’ said Langstrom over radio, ‘but it’ll take hours to repressurize.’

Langstrom and his soldiers had found replacement windows in a nearby storeroom and were now installing the last of them. This wasn’t Saul’s greatest concern. If everything worked out as expected, then all those aboard the Scourge should be dying or already dead. But the fact that the ship had left so early inclined him to think that maybe something else was going on. He could no longer assume that they were all dead, and it was quite possible that the ship would become a severe danger. For soon it would be able to deploy its weapons again and, quite likely, any survivors aboard it would not be firing merely disabling shots.

‘Judd, tell me you’re ready,’ said Saul, as he turned away, carefully stepping over a corpse, then nudging a second floating carcase out of his path as he came to stand before the newly installed controls.

‘Repairs are complete,’ the proctor replied.

Saul peered into the transformer room and noted how its occupants were clearing up any free-floating detritus. However, Judd was not among them. Searching further, Saul found the proctor standing, surrounded by corpses, in a nearby corridor. Obviously Judd had found it necessary to deal with an attack occurring there too.

He now surveyed the rest of the station. A lot of damage was evident and, though firing up the Rhine drive did not result in acceleration stresses, once it closed down, the station would be subject to gravitational stresses – he hoped. He checked the drive itself and found it undamaged and completely up to speed, as it had been for an hour or more now. Mentally taking control of the consoles ranged in front of him, he began routing his way round some damage to control optics, inputting his own astrogation calculations and conclusions. Then, with a much smaller part of his mind, he started to check on people he primarily cared about.

‘Le Roque,’ he said.

Technical Director Le Roque was in what had once been the Political Office. Saul located him crouching over the corpse of Girondel Chang, and felt a twinge of regret. Le Roque looked up, his expression grim. Reviewing cam data, Saul saw what had happened there. Le Roque and others had been defending the place from multiple penetration-lock attacks but had been unsuccessful. Many of them were killed and the remainder taken prisoner. Chang, along with four others, was killed while their guards were dying from the Scour and began firing their weapons in panic.

‘What is it?’ Le Roque asked.

‘I need the station as secure as you can get it, and as fast as you can,’ Saul replied. ‘Use your secondary control room there to do so.’

‘I’ll need to assess the damage.’

‘We’ve no time – the Scourge has detached itself from the station and could fire on us at any moment. Just do the best you can.’ Meanwhile Saul issued instructions to his robots, sending them to cover those places he considered weak. He was ordering them to make repairs even as human blood dried on their metal skins.

Le Roque stood up wearily and began summoning people to help him as he headed off. Saul felt cruel at pressuring him right then, for he knew, from the records, that Chang and some of the others who had died alongside him were Le Roque’s friends. But, then, their whole situation was cruel, and spending time being sensitive might get them all killed.

Hannah he found in the surgery attached to her laboratory. She was operating on someone who seemed to have been shot an unfeasible number of times to be still alive. Saul decided not to distract her.

In the main laboratory, Brigitta, Angela and others – all of whom appeared to be wounded themselves – were working on the walking wounded or else doing what they could for others more seriously wounded, just to keep them alive until they could go under the knife. Throughout Arcoplex Two, groups were collecting the wounded, but mostly people were just loitering about, looking stunned, or nursing their own wounds. It looked like a slaughterhouse in there, but there were few places on board that did not look similar. The enemy attack had taken a terrible toll.

It took Saul just an instant to count the living and discover exactly what that toll was. Upon its arrival here at the Asteroid Belt, the station had had a population of just over two thousand. Now it contained over three and a half thousand, but nearly two and a half thousand of those were corpses. Nine hundred station personnel had died. Eleven hundred and sixty still remained alive, though how long about fifty of them would survive was debatable.

Even as he finally readied himself to start up the Rhine drive – confident he was doing so faster than any crew could manage, and thus considering how unnecessary any of them was – Saul realized that he did regret the deaths, and he did care. Had the knowledge that his own sister was currently running out of air on Mars restored something of his humanity? That humanity seemed integral to him now, not something he could so easily box off while he made practical decisions.

Time.

Electromagnetic fields played a subtle game with near-light-speed eddies of matter so as to generate exotic energies, and Langstrom leaped back from the newly installed window as reality twisted outside.

‘What the fuck!’ he bellowed.

Saul reached out to rest gloved fingers on a nearby console, perhaps feeling the need of some physical connection to what he was doing, some human dimension to the way he was twisting up space. And it felt like him doing it. He was in it, part of it, suddenly hyper-sensitive everywhere throughout the station, wrapping a warp bubble about himself like someone burrowing into a duvet, shifting as if before the massive exhalation of some god. A jolt ensued as the warp bubble brushed against the Scourge on its way out, doubtless sending tidal forces ripping through the ship, which would make little difference to its dead and dying crew. Then came a further jerk as it collided with and destroyed minor debris, and Saul watched streaks of fire tracking across the blackness of the artificial sky outside. He waited, counted seconds and microseconds, then shut it all down.

‘The Scourge is gone!’ exclaimed one of the soldiers.

‘We’ve moved,’ said Langstrom, his voice sounding unsteady.

Further than you can imagine, my friend.

Recalculation now and instant understanding of why his earlier calculations were out. The drive nailed reality, but reality still moved at the pace of galactic drift. He input that in his new calculations, and knew it would be right, then started up the drive again, felt the solar system grow small, felt an arrogance of inestimable power, and suppressed it in an instant. The warp took Argus again, as he listened to Le Roque issuing instructions, watched erstwhile killer robots working frenetically to weld up cracks and insert structural members, spraying impact foam, gluing, riveting, tightening bolts. It would have to be enough, because every second counted when it might be one’s last breath.

Time passed – a ridiculously small amount of it when divided up over the hundreds of thousands of kilometres involved. The seconds counted away, then the microseconds, and Saul again shut down the drive. Argus groaned as the stars came back. Saul lifted his fingertips from the console, glanced over towards the windows where, bright and clear and disappointingly brown, the so-called red planet Mars hung in void.

He headed for the door.

Earth

Her palmtop opened with a breathy sigh, and just a short search through the menus brought up the program Serene required. It wasn’t that she needed to use her palmtop – the programs she was accessing were available to her in the equipment surrounding her – but it seemed somehow right. Using this method reminded her of that first time when she sent out the signals from the communications room in Aldeburgh to extinguish a large and useless portion of the human race. The palmtop updated its lists as it also updated other software. Two options were now provided for her. She clicked on the list labelled ‘Scourge’ and gazed at it contemplatively. She could kill with the Scour, or she could send the signal to constrict over two thousand strangulation collars

I am calm. I am very calm.

She tried to ignore the shaking of her hands and the ball of something hot and black that seemed to be growing in her stomach. Transferring her gaze to the main screen that stood amid her garden vegetation – whose condition was now much improved – she contemplated the two scenes it displayed. One showed the Scourge, presently under power and on a route taking it out of the Asteroid Belt; the other showed Mars, with Argus Station in orbit about it. Her finger hovered over the send button on her palmtop then she carefully withdrew it.

Why had the Scourge separated from the station? Why did they run away?

She was not sure she wanted to take the time necessary to find out why. They had failed out there – they had failed miserably. She returned her gaze to her palmtop, swallowed dryly, and accepted that she wanted to kill someone. Clay Ruger was already history, but plenty of others remained for her to select from: Commander Liang, Captain Scotonis . . .

What?

The list of ID codes was updating again, each steadily acquiring a tick beside it. No, she hadn’t pressed send; she hadn’t followed through with her instinct for vengeance. What was this? The ticks indicated that those people the codes identified had been sent the signal that would flood their bodies with the Scour, and therefore they would be dying even now. Her immediate thought was that there must have been some sort of software failure; that, as the program opened, it had automatically sent the signal. But that made no sense, since the software she was using was multiply backed-up and mirrored, perpetually ran self-diagnostics, and would close down at any hint of either a hardware or software failure.

Angry and frustrated, she began running checks and it soon became apparent that she had not sent the signal, nor had it been inadvertently sent in any other way. But the status of those ID codes was being updated from the latest transmission from the Scourge. She now turned to that and began frantically searching for some explanation, and soon it became clear. Soon everything started to make sense.

Someone had accessed the Scourge’s personnel files and downloaded all their ID codes. Someone had done this via a console located in the troop section, after the troops themselves had departed. One of the crew? That seemed entirely possible since now, reviewing the data from the Scourge, she saw that there were many gaps in it. Most of the ship cams were offline, so she could not see a recorded view of whoever had accessed that console. It also became apparent that the inducer network had been shut down . . .

Something appeared suddenly on her screen: the blank square indicating a video file. Where had that come from? From the Scourge data – meaning something loaded it even as the ID codes were being downloaded. A worm of apprehension crawled up Serene’s spine. She quickly ensured that all the latest Scourge data had been downloaded to her palmtop, then shut off its modem and put it to one side. She then picked up a console and accessed the hardware all around her, ordering it to ignore any signal from her palmtop – just in case something started up the modem again. Next she focused on the original data download from the Scourge. She sent a copy to hard storage, isolated that same storage and deleted the original. To be utterly safe, she cut the power to the hard drive it had been stored on. Then she picked up the palmtop again, and proceeded to play the video file.

‘Hello, Serene Galahad,’ said Alan Saul, gazing at her with demonic pink eyes. ‘I know it is you that is seeing this since, for it to load, you had to open up your Scour initiation software, and I doubt you trust anyone else with even the knowledge that it exists. By now the ID code status of your personnel currently aboard the Scourge, and aboard my station, is updating and, even as you listen to this, you will know that they are all either dead or dying.’ He paused for a moment, maybe in reflection, though she could read nothing in his expression.

‘Perhaps you should now consider how the weapon you created is double-edged,’ he continued. ‘However, that is not why I am now contacting you. In your arrogance and psychosis, you might find it difficult to accept that I have no interest in you or what you are currently doing on Earth. Your best course now is to ignore me, because I will go away. If you do not take such a course, then I will be forced to take more of an interest in you, and that is something you will definitely not enjoy. That is all.’

His image froze, but it still seemed like he was watching her. After a second, Serene realized she was panting, then with a yell she hurled her palmtop away. It crashed against the low balustrade of the bridge and dropped into the pond.

‘Fuck you!’ she screamed. Then, when Sack appeared, she snarled, ‘Fuck off.’

Sack quickly retreated.

Serene stood up and began pacing. The Scourge’s assault had failed and now there was no one left to punish. How dare he kill her people? How dare he take that away from her? She kicked over the nearest plant pot, then reached down and tore a Japanese shrub out of another one and threw it away, tramped over other plants to reach her main screen and kicked it over. She had to do something. She had to do something now.

‘Sack!’ she shrieked, and went striding over the bridge.

Sack appeared reluctantly and gazed at her in silence. She gestured over her shoulder.

‘Get rid of it! Get rid of it all!’

‘Ma’am?’

‘The garden, you imbecile! Get rid of the fucking garden! Burn the fucking thing!’

She strode for the elevator and climbed inside. Someone was going to pay for this; someone was going to pay for this right away. Saul was the one she wanted most, but he lay too far out of her reach, for now. As the elevator rose she felt slightly better to be doing something at least, even if it was just relocating herself to Messina’s old office.

Time for another Madagascar.

She had previously been considering further candidates such as Crete, Indonesia, Sri Lanka . . . No, screw the islands. Something bigger; it was time to think big.

Maybe get continental.

Argus

Hannah clung on to the edge of the surgical table, even though no force actually threatened to dislodge her. When it stopped and that deep sonorous note ceased sounding, and it no longer felt as if some malevolent god was trying to crowbar up reality, there came a short silent pause before the station structure all around her began making worrying complaints.

‘Saul’s moved us,’ she observed.

‘Yes, he has,’ replied Le Roque tiredly through her fone. ‘The Scourge separated from us a short while ago, and doubtless he wants us well out of range of its weapons.’

Hannah unclamped her hands from the table and glanced through the viewing window into her laboratory. There were still many patients to be tended, but she could see that her earlier request to Le Roque had been answered and that the military medic Yanis Raiman had arrived to relieve her. She now returned to the subject she and Le Roque had been discussing just before the Rhine drive engaged.

‘So you’re intending to spin up this arcoplex,’ she said. ‘What about the damage? What about the potential for breaches around the penetration locks?’ As she spoke, she continued sealing the ugly wounds in her latest patient – almost relishing the distraction of this task.

‘The robots are all over it,’ replied Le Roque. ‘The penetration locks should hold but, as a precaution, I’ve had all adjacent bulkhead doors closed. They shouldn’t be a problem.’

Even as he said it, Hannah felt herself shifting to one side as the arcoplex slowly started to spin again. All around, the clonks and groans and the occasional squeals signifying stressed metal increased. Some of the noise would be from equipment or debris in motion – a noise that would intensify as any floating objects began falling to the floor. Doubtless she could hear corpses in motion too, perhaps even globules of blood dropping out of the air. The thought sickened her, but what seemed worse was that there had been no real alternative.

‘You’re starting them all up?’ Hannah enquired, with a nod to her new assistants as she stepped away from the patient and began peeling off her surgical gloves, her mind firmly clamping down on her emotions.

‘We need to, for air quality,’ explained Le Roque. ‘Too much debris is floating about and it’s blocking the air-filtration systems.

‘Well, as long as you’re sure,’ she said doubtfully.

‘I’m as sure as . . . Shit!’

‘What’s the problem?’ Was something going wrong already?

After a long and worrying delay, Le Roque replied, ‘I just took a look out through exterior cams. We’re in orbit around Mars.’

Weight – or rather a simulacrum of it – began bearing down on her leg and it started to ache. Dumbfounded, Hannah halted her slow progress towards the surgeons’ clean lock. She didn’t know how to respond to this information, but something inside her did as she felt the familiar surge of a panic attack rising up from her chest. On the one hand, the feeling was horrible but, on the other, she now had sure knowledge that these spasms only assaulted her when she wasn’t in any real danger. It was almost a reassurance.

‘Mars,’ she repeated numbly.

‘Which causes further stresses on the station,’ said Le Roque. ‘I need to get back to work.’

‘Okay,’ Hannah replied, cutting the connection.

In the clean lock she stripped, stowed her surgical whites and stepped into the shower. Now that most of the emergency cases were at least stable, it was time to start reinstituting cleanliness protocols. As far as she knew there had never been any case of a superbug taking hold here, but that did not mean they would be immune. By the time she walked back out into the laboratory, another patient was being wheeled in through the patient’s clean lock, and Raiman was waiting his turn to enter the surgery and take charge.

‘All yours,’ she said, moving on.

Brigitta was still in the laboratory, carefully examining her hand, sealed in its transparent form cast. Hannah had managed to reattach her fingers temporarily, so they had a blood supply, but some lengthy work remained to repair the tendons, ligaments and nerves.

‘Where’s Angela?’ Hannah asked.

Brigitta waved her other hand jerkily. ‘Doing what she can.’

Angela’s wound had not actually been from a bullet, but from a fragment of one. It hadn’t hit the bone, and it had not been deep so was easily repaired.

‘He’s all right?’ Brigitta asked, indicating Raiman with a nod of her head.

‘Probably better than me at this sort of stuff,’ Hannah replied. ‘He is a military doctor, after all.’ Hannah touched Brigitta’s shoulder, then made her way to the door, stepping between wounded who had all been provided with analgesic patches and temporary dressings. She had headed fifty metres towards the elevators that led out of the arcoplex before she realized where she was going.

‘Just one more thing, Le Roque,’ she said through her fone. ‘Where is Alan now?’

‘Docking Pillar Two,’ he replied shortly.

Hannah wanted to ask more, but the technical director sounded busy and hassled. She cut the connection and moved on. Near to the rim-side elevator she stepped into a suiting room, half-expecting to find nothing available there, but surprised to find a full range of suits. This was probably Le Roque’s work, too – he certainly knew how to get things organized quickly. She donned a VC suit, headed for the elevator and made her way out of the arcoplex.

Inside the ring-side bearing installation for Arcoplex Two, Hannah entered a building that had probably been intended as some sort of communal area. Absolutely nothing yet marred the spacious bare floor, but its location and the view from the panoramic windows seemed to indicate such future use. She moved over to a window and gazed down, past the rotating curve of the arcoplex into the station itself. The carnage there was horrifying.

The huge volume of space enclosed by the station’s new skin was full of floating debris that included corpses and body parts drifting in a vapour haze. The one railgun she could see was now just a twisted turret of blackened metal, with a glimpse of stars through the hole torn in the station’s outer skin just above it. Robots were already in full action here, and she watched some of the construction model, clutching huge cable-mesh bags, propelling themselves from beam to beam as they collected debris. It was a familiar scene, little different from ones she had witnessed after Saul had put an end to the attack of Messina’s troops on this same station, and she hoped it was one she would never see again. Would the killing end now? Or could it? There was only one person who could answer that question for her.

Hannah exited the bearing installation via a personnel access tube running alongside one of the internal railways, then passed through an airlock into an unpressurized section of the outer ring. She glimpsed the vortex generator over to her right, where walls had been taken out and the station substructure adjusted to accommodate it. Next she entered a pressurized section that took her past a group of three proctors crouching, amidst scattered equipment, around a super-cap power unit. They seemed almost like natives squatting around a campfire, busy at traditional crafts, until Hannah made a closer inspection.

All of them had been severely damaged, but were methodically repairing themselves. It was unnerving to see one of them squatting with its entire torso opened up as it detached its ribs, one at a time, to bend them back into shape or to micro-weld cracks in them. Inside the torso she could see an odd amalgam of dry woody-looking organics and gleaming metal, and something like a big stepper motor where the lungs should be. She shuddered, and moved on.

Back out into vacuum, she followed another railway running around the ring, then turned at a junction to take her out towards the space docks. She only then began considering what precisely she wanted to ask Saul, and in the end realized her questions boiled down to a simple ‘What now?’ When she entered Docking Pillar Two, however, he was nowhere in sight.

‘Alan?’ she enquired through her fone, but there was no response.

She began searching the dock, checking dusty storage rooms, sealed offices containing hardware yet to be touched by human hand, the empty acreage of an embarkation lounge, but still there was no sign of him. Perhaps he was outside? Le Roque had not specifically said Saul was inside the docking pillar. Hannah went to locate a maintenance airlock giving access to the exterior of the pillar and shortly found herself in an area packed with spares for space-plane fuelling systems. Then she was rising out of the face of the docking pillar, and having to make one of those mental changes of perspective just to stand on it, held in place only by her gecko boots.

Mars . . .

If she was honest, this was her prime reason for coming outside, rather than any real expectation of finding Saul out here. There it was, filling up a large portion of the view, the outer rim of Argus seemingly heading towards it like some steel bridge. She was sure she could even see the inky shadow of Argus Station down on the planet, though that might have been some feature integral to the surface. Hannah spent some minutes absorbing the view, also spotting Phobos poised just beyond the curve of its horizon, then almost reluctantly turned to peer at the nearest space plane.

No sign of activity here, but beyond it, higher up the pillar, she could see a hint of movement. She began walking towards it, and on circumventing the wing of the nearest plane, a second space plane came into view. It had been gutted.

Robots were picking amid the remains of the vehicle like ants in the dismembered corpse of a crow. Its wings had been detached, and the cockpit had been taken apart. Most of the passenger and cargo area lay over to one side, and the pillar itself was strewn with fragments of flame-cut metal, pipes, nuts and bolts and other fixings, and wisps of insulating material like some vacuum-resistant moss. Perhaps this plane had been hit by some kind of weapon during the recent attack?

‘Alan is nowhere to be seen either in or on Docking Pillar Two,’ Hannah told Le Roque reproachfully, when he finally responded to her call.

‘You got that right,’ Le Roque replied, sounding irritated.

‘What do you mean?’

‘It looks like he’s gone off to perform a particularly spectacular form of suicide.’

‘What?’

Le Roque dryly explained to her how they were about to lose their Owner . . .

Mars

Var’s head-up display read zero, but there were always a few more minutes of air remaining after that. She lay against a rock, trying to control her breathing. She didn’t want to get into a panic, start panting away her last moments of air and end up trying to tear off her EA suit helmet. She wondered how nitrogen suffocation would feel. Were the contentions that it was a painless way to die just complete bullshit, or would she indeed just drift away? Would it be like sleep with the moment of transition from consciousness to unconsciousness becoming a moment that could never be remembered? Probably. Then afterwards there would be a brief period of unconsciousness before her body started to die.

That hollow roaring in her ears, with a background of irritating tinnitus, was growing steadily. Obviously this was some side effect of oxygen starvation, just like the tightness inside her head, the feeling of growing pressure. She felt warm, too warm, would really have loved to have stripped out of her suit just once more before she died, to feel a cool breeze on her skin—

Cut that out.

Hallucinations now. A Martian wind was blowing dust along the chasma and her mind had connected that to the roaring inside her head. However, she knew the reality: that the winds here, no matter how fast they blew, were wimpish things in such thin air. And they certainly didn’t sound like the full-throated blast of a space-plane rocket motor.

Any minute now, she reckoned. Any minute now things would go dark.

Forever.

A shadow was how it started, as it seemingly passed over her. The start of that final darkness? It was a relief that was short-lived, as the shadow passed and a bright light glared through her visor.

Hah! Here come the angels!

A huge shape descended before her, but it had nothing to do with the supernatural. She was hallucinating again, her mind now creating little fictions to escape the inexorable reality of death. A quadrate framework packed with what looked like the main engine of a space plane – cylindrical fuel tanks and one dark figure seated in an acceleration chair – settled out of the sky on a ribbed flame, adjusting as it descended with scalpel blades of steering-thruster blasts. As it finally thumped down, the dust it had stirred up shrouded it from her sight completely.

Var felt she had to congratulate her imagination for that one, but felt rather critical of its engineering credentials and vector calculus. Okay, present her with comfortable fantasies, but at least try to make them believable ones. It quite simply wasn’t possible to take the engine from a space plane and turn it into what, centuries ago, had been called a flying bedstead. Such an object would be impossible to control, and that was before she even got into thinking about where it might have come from and how it could have been built in the limited time available.

Ridiculous.

A man clad in a black VC suit strode out of the dust and came to stand over her. He squatted, placing the oxygen bottle he was carrying to one side, then reached in and detached her spent bottle. He inserted the new bottle in place and her head-up display rose to a figure of forty hours. Immediately after that, pumps in her suit started working, blowing a breeze around her face, cool as the one she had imagined she would have felt had she pulled off her suit.

Var began to flirt with the idea of surviving.

‘Good, you’re alive,’ said a familiar voice over her suit radio.

She gazed up through his visor. It was her brother’s face; just the eyes were disconcerting. She considered further the impossibility of flying that bedstead contraption still hidden behind a wall of dust. Sure, it was impossible, unless you just happened to be the kind of person capable of stealing space stations and trashing whole planets.

She continued staring at him for long minutes, as reality returned along with its aches, pains and other glorious discomforts.

‘What kept you?’ she asked.