Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

4

The Reaper’s Blunt Scythe

Before doctors and medical technology came along to queer the pitch, death was a quite easily definable state. If your breathing and your heart stopped, you had achieved that state and little else was considered. This, in its time, could lead to some unfortunate results when the person checking the death failed to make absolutely sure, as fingernail marks on the insides of lids of ancient coffins attest. As time progressed, it became possible to restart the heart, restart the breathing and then to maintain both. Brain death due to the total necrosis of cerebral neurons then became the point of no recovery, but even that was a movable feast and a hunting ground for lawyers. This line was then blurred when the necrosis became a matter of degree, when cerebral matter could be regrown or replaced, and then became almost invisible when it became possible to programme new neural tissue. The new line was then the death of the personality, but even that became a moot point and was not necessarily connected to the death of the human body concerned. Combine the fact that we can now clone human beings with the seeming likelihood that we will soon be able to record most of the information a brain contains, and the meaning of death moves into the territory of philosophers – a place where ancient certainties themselves go to die.

Argus

Damn, she didn’t need this now. She wanted to stay with Saul, to be ready if anything went wrong, to be ready to ensure that he lived. But the implications of what Le Roque had told her, and the images she had seen, could not be denied. Her expertise was required, and essential. Not only that: her refusing to come would hint to Le Roque, and others, the extent of Saul’s injuries, which was something she hadn’t broadcast. She would see this through and get back to him just as fast as she could.

Twenty-two people had died, all within an hour of each other, all of them repros and erstwhile delegates. Others had conducted the initial autopsies and revealed some derivative of Ebola, but now, factoring in those pictures from Earth and the fact that the deaths occurred shortly after the EM shield had been shut down . . .

Arcoplex One, where most of the deaths had occurred, was quarantined, as were the quarters outside the arcoplex which the victims had occupied, but there were no further deaths, and subsequent blood tests, both within the arcoplex and throughout the station, had revealed no further spread. The corpses had been consigned to the outer ring, to storage in rooms open to vacuum, along with the numerous other corpses that were a product of this station’s recent history. It was a puzzle Hannah had not been involved in because of her focus on Saul, and it was one to which she suspected little effort had been applied in solving since, in the end, the victims had been Committee delegates. Now she was involved because of what was happening on Earth; because, according to some recent data intercepted, people had been dying back there of something similar.

‘Keep me apprised of what you learn,’ Saul whispered to her through her fone.

These words sounded rehearsed to Hannah, as if he had readied them for this moment.

‘Why? You’ll probably know before I do.’ She pulled on her spacesuit helmet and it automatically dogged down.

‘I did not tell you . . . as others were listening,’ he said, ‘I am . . . much less . . .’

‘What?’ Hannah paused at the airlock, cold fingers drawing down her spine.

‘The copy of me, which is speaking to you now, did not fully load before I was shot. I’ve lost everything I gained through melding with Janus. I’m not even as functional as Malden was. This will change as your tissue implants in my original skull grow and as the neural net reconnects, but right now I can watch through only one cam and maybe control just one robot.’

Pre-compiled, every word; something prepared for this moment. He was still on the surgical table in her private surgery, her two assistants finessing the major repairs to his body. He was, however, now controlling the beat of his own heart along with a few other heretofore autonomous functions. Hannah stepped into the airlock, suddenly frightened. Alan Saul was the glue that held this station together and, if anyone discovered the extent of his debilitation, it could all fall apart. It was significant that the only one he trusted with this knowledge was herself.

The elevator took her out to the endcap, where she departed the airlock, past the massive end bearing, and made her way up to Tech Central. She stepped into one of the new walkway tubes and very shortly reached the temporary airlock inside – put there until the walkway had been built outwards and connected to Arcoplex Two.

Within minutes she had reached the lower corridors of Tech Central, propelling herself along by grab handles in zero gravity. Only when she took a cageway up to the floor Medical was located on, and saw Technical Director Le Roque awaiting her, did she remember to remove her space helmet.

‘You’ve got some of them here?’ she asked.

Le Roque gestured towards the door into Medical. ‘Four of them – and another is on its way and should be here within minutes.’ He appeared puzzled. ‘I’m not sure how they relate to what we’re seeing on Earth.’

‘Timing,’ said Hannah. ‘They all died within an hour of each other and just after we shut down the EM shield and – in my estimation from that video feed you sent me – from the same disease as killed those back on Earth.’

‘I see,’ said Le Roque, still appearing puzzled.

Hannah entered the room ahead of him and, once inside, began stripping off her spacesuit. Three corpses were strapped on gurneys outside the surgery, while a fourth was inside, undergoing a second autopsy conducted by one of the military doctors, Yanis Raiman. She strode up to the glass to study the corpse, which lay open like a gutted fish. Raiman had obviously been struggling at it, for the corpse had vacuum-dried like old leather.

‘What have you got so far?’ she asked.

Raiman looked up. ‘The massive internal haemorrhages I picked up on before, but I’m also finding a lot of nerve damage that was previously missed.’

Only now did Hannah note that he wore a full medical hazmat suit. She glanced round at the other corpses on their gurneys. All of them were contained in sterile body bags. If she was right, there was no need for such precautions, but the chance of her being wrong meant they still had to be taken. She turned to watch as the door opened and two security staff towed in the last gurney and pushed it down to the floor so its gecko feet could stick.

‘The virus . . . nanoscope,’ Saul whispered in her ear.

As the two security staff departed, Hannah went over to a nearby console, and linked up to the surgery nanoscope into which Raiman had placed a number of samples. An image came clear, reams of data scrolling up beside it. Hannah ignored the image but studied the data intently, looking for clues, looking for confirmation.

‘Manufactured,’ she concluded at once.

‘What makes you think that?’ asked Raiman, studying the surgery screen.

‘Easy to mistake it for Ebola, since it is based on that virus. Ebola is a favourite for biological warfare – always has been. But this one has a cybernetic component to produce a nerve toxin. Check the chemical stats – because you don’t find iron molybdenum and platinum catalysts in anything natural.’

‘Ah, I see,’ Raiman replied, quite obviously not seeing.

‘But how did it get here?’ Le Roque asked.

‘It was here already,’ said Hannah. ‘What we need to know is how it was activated.’

She turned away from the screen and from a nearby cupboard removed a medical hazmat suit and donned it, then proceeded through the clean lock. In a moment she was standing over the corpse, noting where it had bled, checking the desiccated organs in glass bottles on a nearby work surface, then rolling closer a mobile ultrasound scanner. Meanwhile Raiman had stepped back, quite prepared to let her take over.

‘I’ll set the scan to the viral signature,’ she said. ‘I want to locate its vector.’

It took five minutes’ scanning. The concentration of the virus was all too plain.

‘His right arm,’ she noted, not exactly pleased to have been right.

‘Did not have . . . ID implants removed,’ Saul whispered through her fone.

Hannah nodded; that was it, of course. The twenty-two victims were those delegates who had not had their ID implants removed before the EM shield shut down. She picked up a scalpel, ran a finger down the corpse’s arm until she felt a slight lump, made an incision and, using a pair of forceps, removed the implant and took it over to the nanoscope.

‘Le Roque,’ said Saul from the intercom. ‘I want you to return to the control centre and get a team busy analysing that data from Earth further and collating anything else they find of relevance.’

Tick-tock – another prepared order.

‘I see,’ said the technical director.

As she stood beside the nanoscope, Hannah turned and glanced back at Le Roque through the glass. He looked pale and grim as he headed away. Did he hear it? Did he notice the disconnection between Saul’s words and Saul himself? Or was that just her imagination working overtime? She returned her attention to the implant and dropped it into a sample tube, which she then inserted into the nanoscope. She concentrated fully on what she was doing but, even so, the implication of Saul’s instruction nagged at her. The video feed she had seen might be only a very small part of the whole story. The implications hit home fully when she studied the implant, checked the hardware that interfaced with the body it occupied and found the biochip. It was saturated with the virus and its surface structures clearly indicated that, when active, it had actually been in the process of generating the thing.

‘Earth was hit first,’ she said leadenly, ‘then the signal got through once our EM shield went down.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Raiman, moving over to stand beside her. He had not seen the video feed; wasn’t entirely sure what this was all about.

‘Check implants already removed . . . if they . . . still available,’ Saul said to her through her fone, then out loud, ‘Yes, Earth.’

He had to hang on in: there was too much to do, too many preparations to make. He drifted about the station, sometimes watching ghostlike through cams, sometimes wholly occupying virtual worlds. He felt weary, utterly drained and at the limit.

Must concentrate.

A view opened into Langstrom’s office, where the soldier sat at his desk gazing at a video file on his screen. It was a transmission picked up from a camera on an aero back on Earth, and the horrifying scene it showed was thoroughly familiar to Saul.

‘You have a report for me,’ he said, speaking from the intercom, his cam reception breaking up even with that small effort.

Langstrom jerked and looked around at the door, then up at the nearest cam. He nodded and cleared his throat. ‘I do.’

‘Make it.’

The soldier cleared his throat again, and stood up. ‘The shooter might have been one of Messina’s troops, because we’re getting no DNA match with anyone we know of in the station. During our search of the outer ring, one of my teams was fired on, and two of my men killed. We returned fire, then went in pursuit and saw two people fleeing.’ He paused, obviously uneasy. ‘We had them backed up against one of the ring sections, where new supports are going in for the enclosure, but they escaped across it and lost themselves somewhere in the next two kilometres of ring.’

Langstrom had relied on Saul’s omniscience; expecting the two shooters to be unable to cross an area swarming with robots, expecting these people to be caught or killed. Here, then, was definite proof of Saul’s debility.

‘Keep searching . . . I want them found,’ he said, unable to put together a plausible explanation for the inaction of his robots in the time he had to talk.

‘We’ve still got them confined to the outer—’ Langstrom began.

‘Later,’ Saul snapped, then set pre-recorded words running. ‘You need to go to Tech Central now. You need to see this . . . I’ve ordered all high-level staff there for the same reason, then afterwards, once they are apprised, we’ll broadcast it throughout the station.’ He hadn’t given the order – he’d relayed it through Le Roque. With luck, the likes of the technical director would see this as Saul merely attempting not to humiliate his underlings by knowing everything and attempting to micromanage everything.

‘To see what?’ Langstrom asked.

‘What . . . you will see. Go.’

Rather than trying to find his own way through virtual space to Tech Central, Saul simply followed Langstrom, using a tracking program through the cam system. He saw Hannah join the soldier, looking very worried about what she had recently learned of the events on Earth, and probably by her knowledge of Saul’s real condition. The two finally arrived in the main control room of Tech Central, where all the other lead staff in the station had gathered. Included in this crowd were Le Roque, Girondel Chang, the Saberhagen twins and other appointees new and old.

‘You are all here,’ said Saul through the intercom.

Le Roque peered up at a nearby cam then, as previously instructed, turned and stabbed a finger down onto his console, turning on a big screen above it. Again the man had not questioned why he should be doing this, which was good – better for him not to know that it represented one too many tasks for Saul to handle mentally. Now it was time for his rehearsed speech, and his prepared answers to expected questions.

‘As some of you will know, twenty-two repros recently died from what looked like Ebola,’ he began, the first image appearing on the screen to show a satellite view of the South American peninsula. ‘After quarantine, sterilization of relevant areas and blood tests, no further infection was found and the issue was shelved. However, new information has now become available, with the consequence that further autopsies have needed to be conducted. I’ll let Hannah explain.’

Hannah dipped her head in acknowledgement towards the nearest cam, then reluctantly stepped forward.

‘The virus is based on Ebola but is an artificial construct with a cybernetic component,’ she said, then paused to close her eyes and rub at her forehead with her forefinger. ‘In the victims I examined, I traced its source and found it to be a biochip within their ID implants.’

A muttered response arose to that, probably, Saul reckoned, from those who had yet to have their implants removed, though he did not now have the resources to check on that.

Hannah continued, ‘I’ve since tested all the ID implants previously removed aboard this station, along with those kept in stock. I found only one that was without the biochip and that came from Technical Director Le Roque, and it was the only ID implant more than fifty years old. This discovery is why, I hasten to add, we’ve speeded up the implant removal programme and now made it compulsory.’

‘What activated the biochips in this way?’ asked Girondel Chang.

‘Good question. They were activated by a signal code specific to each chip.’ Hannah paused. ‘It was probably sent months ago but since then has continued to propagate in computer systems on Earth and throughout the solar system. It only got through to us here after we shut down the EM shield.’

‘But why?’ asked Brigitta Saberhagen.

‘Let me . . . answer that,’ said Saul, then began another prepared speech: ‘From the data we’ve been able to obtain thus far, it seems these biochips were devised as a radical alternative to sectoring, but whoever created them has now also used them in a bid for power on Earth. All but one of the surviving delegates on Earth is now dead. Those who died here on the station were the only delegates still carrying implants. The surviving delegate on Earth, one Serene Galahad, ran the centre for implant research in Britain and the biochip industry all across Earth. She is now claiming that the massive death toll was caused by a rebel-manufactured plague called the Scour.’

‘Massive death toll?’ someone asked.

His tone flat, Saul said, ‘All zero assets with implants, which means ninety-eight per cent of them.’

Right on cue, Le Roque magnified the picture on the screen down towards that South American coastline. In from the shore the regular structure of the sprawls now became evident, while offshore a large half-moon island became visible.

‘The island,’ said Saul, ‘was not there three months ago, but it was not the result of volcanic activity. It is now breaking up, but was previously a floating mass five kilometres long and two wide. The pictures you will now see are from a month and a half ago. Give us that fish-farm cam image, Le Roque.’

A wall of rotting human corpses flashed into view, two metres tall, all tangled together, and crawling with flat white crabs. The view retreated to give the whole horrible panorama, seagulls circling above it like vultures.

‘You’re seeing just a small portion of it here. We estimate, just guessing how many were under water, that this one island consisted of fifty million corpses. There were, and still are, masses like this offshore along just about every coastline on Earth. That is one method of disposal this Serene Galahad ordered to be employed, but there’s more.’

Another view now: a mountain of corpses with roads heading up the sides, up which earth-moving equipment trundled to deposit yet more corpses.

‘Another old clip,’ Saul noted, ‘because as the corpses started to liquefy, her people started losing earth-moving equipment.’

Now a fire belching clouds of smoke into which massive grain conveyors fed a steady stream of the dead, now mostly just rags and bones.

‘This is a current video. This fire has been burning for the best part of three months.’ He paused for a second. ‘A lot of the pyres are going out now, but the skies are still yellow all across Earth and every rainstorm is black, either from the smoke or from trillions of dead flies.’

He’d now said enough. In complete silence, the people in Tech Central had watched the parade of horrifying images. Finally someone spoke up, his voice catching.

‘How many?’ asked Langstrom.

‘Just under eight billion,’ Saul replied and wondered if, even with his mind operating to its full capacity, he could ever truly comprehend such a figure. He also wondered how Earth’s history would remember him, since it seemed this Serene Galahad was claiming that he had actually caused this plague, this worldwide slaughter.

Saul now drifted away, disconnecting from the cam and from the intercom, his mind feeling like the air hollows in a nautilus’s shell, reality slipping away into a dream state. I’m dying, he thought, as if to test the words. I’m dying again.

Mars

Another one, thought Var, as she quickly pulled on her clothing. The disease had hit very fast and killed eight people. Chief Medical Officer Da Vinci had the virus identified as some form of Ebola, but hadn’t committed himself beyond that. In response, Var had ordered the imposition of the virus protocols established under Committee rule. That meant relevant areas were quarantined and disinfected. The personal effects of those who died were placed outside, where the Martian atmosphere would effectively sterilize them, and their bodies were buried outside too. Ultraviolet lights were left on permanently throughout the base, alcohol-based hand-cleaner units placed everywhere, teams constantly cleaning and sterilizing. The community room had been closed in order to minimize human contact, and constant blood tests and physical scans were ongoing. And yet now – after three months and just when Var was relaxing the strictures – another death.

Once dressed, Var headed out of her cabin. Perhaps she should not have considered the results from the blood tests a good enough reason to start opening things up again. Da Vinci had convinced her otherwise, however. In his estimation, the chances of the disease spreading now, after so much time, were very low, but the detrimental effects of keeping the gym closed were quickly becoming evident. The low gravity of Mars simply wasn’t enough to sustain bone growth and muscle mass. Base personnel needed resistance exercises and their regular time in the spinner.

One of Martinez’s men stood guard directly ahead, behind a hazard tape, while twenty metres further along another stood ready behind another tape. They were both armed, which was surprising, but not half as surprising as seeing the corridor still open and no infectious-disease protocols being immediately employed. The two should be wearing hazmat suits, the corridor should have been sealed off with sheets of plastic, and a pressure differential applied. There should have been a suit here waiting for her, too. She was about to question the guard nearest about this, but then realized she might be mistaken. When Lopomac called her he had said, ‘We’ve got a death.’ He hadn’t used the word ‘another’, nor had he mentioned the virus.

Var ducked under the tape, headed straight over to the door leading into the gym, opened it and entered. Amidst the various weight-training and CV machines, Martinez, Lopomac and Da Vinci stood gazing down at a body bag lying on an exercise mat, while Da Vinci’s two assistants were unfolding a gurney nearby. Over to one side stood the spinner, a five-metre-diameter cylinder ten metres long, driven by big electric motors to wind it up to sufficient speed for those who had entered it to experience up to two Gs. It was standing still – all exercise suspended for today.

‘What have we got here?’ she asked, striding forward.

The three exchanged furtive glances, and Lopomac finally said, ‘What do you think, doctor?’

Da Vinci grimaced and kept his eyes down. ‘I won’t give an opinion until I’ve done an autopsy.’

‘Seems quite simple to me,’ said Martinez. ‘He did something stupid in the spinner and broke his neck. That doesn’t require an autopsy.’

There was something odd going on here, and Var felt uneasy. She prided herself on being able to assess any situation quickly and find the right response. It seemed almost as if Martinez and Lopomac were bullying Da Vinci, and he was having none of it. The three now moved back as the two assistants stepped in and picked up the body to load it on the gurney.

‘Let the doctor conduct an autopsy,’ said Var. ‘We should investigate this rigorously – I’ve never heard of anyone getting killed in a spinner accident.’

‘We’re all suffering bone depletion,’ said Lopomac, ‘so it doesn’t seem that unlikely to me.’

She gazed at him for a second, finding she couldn’t read his bland expression, then turned back to Da Vinci. ‘Do you have suspicions?’

The doctor raised his head and gazed at her almost defiantly. ‘Yes, I have my suspicions,’ he said. ‘I’m a little baffled as to how a man could have sustained such a severe break inside a smooth cylinder.’

‘It was up to the two-G setting,’ observed Lopomac.

Da Vinci rounded on him. ‘It would be convenient for people to think that. Maybe someone killed him out here, then threw him into the spinner and set it on two Gs just to make it look like an accident.’

‘This must be investigated,’ repeated Var, ‘and thoroughly.’

She stepped over to the gurney. Even though this might be murder, she was quite relieved it wasn’t another Ebola death. Murderers could be found and punished and, since the number of suspects available here was extremely limited, and generally their locations were known, she didn’t think this would be so difficult a case to solve. In a way she quite welcomed the distraction. She reached down and unzipped the top of the body bag, turned the head inside it to face her, then found her heart hammering in her chest as a whole new set of calculations began running inside her skull. She realized that, from the moment she had stepped in here, she had not asked them who was dead. That would look bad. She also now understood the odd reactions of those already here.

‘Delaware,’ she said. ‘Now that’s awkward.’

‘Or convenient,’ said Da Vinci, ‘depending on your perspective.’ He headed for the door, beckoning his assistants after him. One of them reached out and zipped up the bag, then they followed, heads ducked as if trying not to be noticed.

Var hesitated. Should she stop them leaving? Should she lock down on this? She knew well enough that honesty and truth would play no part in what would ensue; people tended to believe what they wanted to believe, and now everyone in Antares Base knew about the dressing-down Rhone had given Delaware and Christen – the two from Mars Science who had been plotting to unseat her. She did nothing, however, and the door closed behind the gurney.

‘Who killed him?’ Var asked, without turning.

‘It was an accident,’ said Lopomac. ‘Da Vinci won’t be able to prove otherwise.’

Var rounded on him. ‘Did you kill him?’

Lopomac looked surprised and baffled, which meant he was innocent of the crime, or a very good liar.

‘What about you, Martinez?’ she asked.

Standing with his arms folded, the man shook his head briefly. ‘If you’d asked me to make him have an accident, I wouldn’t have been this sloppy. More likely one of his suit seals would have given out while he was outside.’

‘Then you didn’t kill him?’ Lopomac asked her.

‘No, I didn’t,’ Var replied. ‘And if neither of you two did, then that leaves us with a problem.’

They were gazing at her doubtfully, judgement reserved, and she imagined that they were reading a similar expression on her face, too. What to do now? If she didn’t investigate this, then it could poison this entire base, yet how could she spare resources for an investigation when they were still on the edge of survival? And, more importantly, if they did find out who had done it, what then? Whoever did it would have to be killed, since they could not spare the resources for imprisonment either. And she could not afford to lose either Martinez or Lopomac, if it turned out to be one of them.

‘Perhaps Delaware and Christen had a falling out,’ suggested Lopomac.

Now there was an option: two birds with one stone. However, no one would believe the convenience of that, and no one would believe a diminutive woman like Christen to be capable of breaking someone’s neck.

‘No,’ said Var firmly. ‘You, Martinez, will assign one of your men to this. I want everyone located in the relevant timeframe, and I want people questioned. Meanwhile we’ll see what Da Vinci comes up with. Maybe it was merely bone weakness.’ It seemed a vain hope.

‘Okay,’ said Martinez, quickly heading for the door as if he wanted to be gone.

After it closed behind him, Lopomac asked her, ‘You really didn’t kill him or have him killed?’

‘I’m not a savage,’ said Var, well aware that many on the base wouldn’t believe that.

‘Then perhaps we need to consider just how inconvenient a death this is for you.’

Very true, Var felt, the image of Rhone of Mars Science coming to the forefront of her mind. But she mustn’t leap to conclusions. Just maybe someone had decided to ‘rid her of that troublesome priest’, because too much loyalty could be a penalty of leadership too.

‘And you didn’t kill him?’ she repeated, for confirmation.

Lopomac shook his head. ‘I’m with Martinez on that. If I’d done it, there would have been no body to find.’

‘Okay,’ said Var, considering how frangible a thing loyalty could be, and how easily it could be faked.

Earth

In the three months since it struck, ‘the Scour’ had gained currency as an epithet all across Earth, and this particular period of time they were calling the ‘Year of the Flies’. Much organization had been required to deal with its fallout, and so Serene had appointed four hundred delegates to govern the regions of the planet. However, already fifty-eight of her appointees were proving treacherous.

‘I’ll need confirmation sent to my palmtop within the hour,’ she said, as she gazed ahead – through the high-security fences, past the readergun towers, inducer emplacements and across the minefield – towards this surviving twenty square kilometres of Tuscan countryside.

‘It’s on its way to you now,’ Clay replied. ‘They are the ones who set up the laboratory and had recent Scour victims transported there. They staffed the place with scientists kidnapped from our Nanking factories, and diverted resources to it from West China Region’s disposal budget.’

Still the business of sanitizing the planet was continuing, still some fires were burning, and still the befouled earth-movers were dumping their loads in the sea or carrying them to mass graves extending kilometres across. In cold regions the corpses were still intact, in hot and damp regions they were little but bones and clothing, and in desert areas they were dried-out husks. But they all had to go because now they were causing death tolls among the surviving population: thirty million from cholera when a large portion of the North American water table became contaminated; fifty million from Ebola – a cross between the manufactured version and the old original; another twenty million from a resurrected form of the Black Death spread by fleas on the backs of rats, whose populations were so vast now that they swarmed like locusts all across Africa; and a further total of over a hundred and fifty million from other diseases too numerous to count. These tolls were in addition to the deaths caused by the crashed infrastructure; or regional conflicts where Serene had not been able to establish her control quickly enough, and often where the revolutionary council was trying to establish a foothold; besides regional conflicts she ended by tactical nuke. But this was all good, she felt, since, for her purposes, the human population needed to be much smaller – the only irritation being that some useful people were dying, too.

She checked her palmtop as the file came through, and immediately fed it to a program that would check it against other reports she had received from sources other than Clay and his people. Then she looked up at the two armoured vehicles and security van ahead of her limousine as they drove through the gates into Alessandro Messina’s private estate, and her driver followed them.

‘The laboratory?’ she enquired of Clay.

‘When they knew we were closing in, they locked the staff inside and used an incendiary, but by then we’d already got into their computers and copied their files. The evidence is secondary – since none of the fifty-eight would put their name to anything – but it’s firm.’

‘So they were trying to isolate the Scour and turn it into a bioweapon?’ she said.

‘So it would seem,’ Clay replied carefully.

Had she detected something in his voice? Did he know the real aim of that laboratory? When she had first received the report, it was obvious to her that the delegates concerned had been trying to nail down exactly what the Scour was and where it had come from. This she simply could not allow.

Soon her limousine, with its protection team ahead, its motorcycle outriders, and two armoured buses of her staff and then two more armoured cars behind, was motoring down a road seeming transplanted from another century. Maybe, just maybe, even more of Earth could be returned to a similar state. Already she was receiving reports of the benefits resulting from the Scour’s massive death toll.

The seas of the world that were not dead, or in the process of dying, at first extended their coastal dead zones by between ten and twenty kilometres, after having four billion corpses dumped into them. Now they seemed to have picked up after that large protein injection, and then benefited from a massive reduction in the flow of effluent, chemical fertilizers, industrial waste and, apparently, from an increase in sunlight and thus in temperature. Even though some pyres were still burning, because of the eighty per cent reduction in industrial and transport pollution, the world’s air was cleaner than before.

Serene herself had gazed in wonder at videos of enormous shoals of crustaceans like shrimps and krill, then only a few months later at ten square kilometres of sea boiling with squid. She had been told that already plankton levels were higher than they had been in fifty years and that fish stocks, breeding from those escaped from the fish farms, were on the increase. Unfortunately, only a genetic laboratory might be able to bring back now extinct species like the tuna or the grey whale.

‘Keep me apprised of any further developments,’ she told Clay, and cut the connection.

Other benefits were becoming evident on land. With the world population now standing at only about nine and a half billion, with vast areas of sprawl unoccupied and agricultural output scaled back, large swathes of land were blooming. Whole fields, tens of kilometres across, had been left fallow and were sprouting weeds, in some places biofuel crops were growing beyond the point where the harvesters could harvest them, and forests of bamboo and willow were stretching for the sky. In the sprawls, tough GM beans and soya were starting to crack through the carbocrete and thus give access to sunlight to other less hardy wild varieties. In one such sprawl, in the East European Region, someone had even reported seeing a roe deer, though that had yet to be confirmed. Upon learning of all this, Serene had ordered the planting of Gene Bank seed stocks of wild plants, and in Britain the first oaks for a hundred years were starting to grow. However, only after doing this did she learn that while some seed stock was still available, the bulk of the genetic stocks were gone, along with the Gene Bank database. They had been transported to Argus Station not long before that station departed Earth.

Finally, amidst groves of olive, orange and lemon trees, Messina’s mansion came into sight. Her car and its large retinue finally pulled up in the garden-enclosed parking area before a huge sprawling mansion vaguely in the style of a Tuscan farmhouse but constructed of modern materials and with all the modern facilities inside. Though impatient to get inside for a look around, she waited until her security network had been fully established, which took only ten minutes since they were only checking two cam black spots unavailable to them previously.

Gazing through one of the car’s windows she observed a couple of shepherds striding through the grounds, while up on the roof of the mansion a spidergun gleamed in the hot sunlight. She smiled to herself, then looked down as her palmtop beeped for attention. Yes, Clay had neglected to mention the incompetence of the commander of the assault team sent against the laboratory – and that this incompetence had resulted in a destructive fire. However, the man had been punished, and it was an understandable omission on Clay’s part for she was too busy for such details. She regretted that the commander had been executed by Clay’s enforcers, but at least the man would now be unable to say anything about the orders he had received from her directly. She flipped to another program page, where fifty-eight ID implant codes were queued up, and didn’t hesitate for a second as she hit send. By the time she’d entered this house, the fifty-eight would already be dying.

Finally receiving the security all-clear through her fone, she tapped on the glass separating her from her driver and personal bodyguard. They both immediately exited the car, and her new bodyguard, Sack, came round to open the door for her. She stepped out, using her nasal spray, because there was still nowhere outside that was not heavy with the stink of decay. Ten paces from the car, all her personal assistants had quickly fallen in behind her. The constant hiss of nasal sprays accompanied her towards the house until drowned out by a whirring and clattering from above, as five razorbirds swooped into attendance over her head. These amounted to unnecessary security, but the recording they were to make was one she felt wholly desirable. After some touching up and editing, she would later broadcast it across the planet.

‘Motivation,’ she said. ‘The people of Earth have always required motivation, and they have received it.’

The expected question arrived from the head of Global Statistics. ‘To what motivation do you refer, ma’am?’

She came to a halt, her right foot on the first rough stone step leading up to the oak and metal-studded front door of the mansion, which now stood open. ‘Vengeance is a great driver of human endeavour,’ she pontificated, then with one hand made a circular motion above her head, ‘and of course out there live nine billion people who would like some payback.’

She had used a program to make a particular calculation and now knew that over ninety-eight per cent of the survivors would have lost someone close during Alan Saul’s attack upon the Committee Administration or to the Scour. There wasn’t one person in her staff here, or in her now three hundred and forty-two delegates, who had not lost someone similarly, and that’s just how she wanted to keep it.

‘I could say that now the people of Earth must live and work towards the goal of bringing to justice the greatest mass murderer in human history.’ She paused in deep reflection. ‘But we cannot resurrect the billions who have died, so what is the point of vengeance?’ She climbed up onto the steps and turned to face them all. ‘We must have something stronger than vengeance to drive us, and we have that too. This Alan Saul has not only murdered billions, but he has also stolen the genetic heritage of Earth. Most Gene Bank samples and most genetic files of the extinct species of Earth are currently aboard Argus Station. And we must get them back.’

The first space planes were already launching, the two Core stations were changing staff, and materials and resources were once again being relocated offworld. These she would use to recover the genetic heritage of Earth, so she could create Paradise here and – because Paradise always had a ruler – herself rule over it. It was also necessary to establish humanity more firmly offworld, so as to take the pressure off Earth itself. She abruptly turned away from them, climbed the steps and entered the mansion’s front door. Ignoring the line of house staff waiting to greet her, she located the door leading into Messina’s main office and headed straight for it.

‘Kelly Shimbaum only.’ She gestured peremptorily to her entourage, then opened the door and stepped inside.

As expected, the ex-chairman’s office was opulent, supplied with every luxury and every technology available. Serene rounded a massive ebony desk and plumped herself down in the soft-upholstered chair behind it, placed her palmtop on the expanse of wood before her. The desk itself, of course, was otherwise utterly devoid of paperwork and visible hardware. She sat back, fiddling with the controls on the chair arm, then after a suitable delay raised her gaze to the short and tubby Vietnamese man standing before the desk, sweat beading on his forehead.

‘So,’ she said, ‘tell me about the Alexander.’