Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2) (37 page)

Later, as the maggots turned to chrysalises, he washed them in plant nutrient and then ate them. Later still he removed the splints from his leg and cleaned all the disgusting detritus away to
reveal raw but healthy flesh. The last of his skin spray went onto that, while he yelled in pain, then he wrapped it in further strips torn from what remained of his VC suit.

Another month passed, then another. It vaguely occurred to Alex that those searching for him had probably assumed he was dead by now, but he no longer thought much about anything outside the
parameters of his small world. Small victories were all he knew: forcing himself out of depression, eating the top shoots of his bean plants and then eating the first raw pods; managing to plant
small cuttings snapped off tomato plants; using composted excrement in his own hydroponics trough and seeing healthier growth resulting; watching the scar tissue form over his leg wound. Then the
station suddenly moved, and that returned to him the perception that something lay beyond his own microcosm.

‘I have to get out of here,’ he told Alexandra, thoroughly aware that she was dead, but comforted nevertheless by the hallucinatory power of his own mind.

‘
Yes, you must
,’ she replied, noncommittal.

Again he began prowling around the hydroponics unit. He picked up the remains of his VC suit, considered what he might use to repair it, then discarded it again. The movements of the station
continued intermittently, and out of his fugue he realized that it must now have reached the Asteroid Belt and was manoeuvring itself around space debris. Understanding this raised him to a new
level of consciousness and, when he again examined a transport cylinder and wondered what of the packed produce there he might steal, he finally saw his way out.

Saul gazed at an asteroid of a deep red, and saw there all the blood he had shed coagulated into one massive lump. No, it was actually red because it was mostly made of
cinnabar, with an outer dusting of vermilion. Closer inspection also revealed silvery veins of pure frozen mercury.

I brought you here . . .

The station continued to decelerate, which was enough, and some pragmatic partition of his mind went, protesting, into abrupt abeyance. He dreamed now of wondrous technology, formed in a perfect
ring, and strange tall beings striding through a realm of metal. He descended into a nightmare in which fire blasted through the corridors of the Political Office and rendered the survival suits of
five individuals molten on their very bodies, then was sucked away again and drew them out, through a hole with red-hot lips, to a place where the fluid in their charred skins boiled and bubbled
them into grotesque parodies of human beings. They did not even get a chance to scream, but the single female survivor – safely clad in a VC suit – screamed for them.

Saul fled that terrible place and dreamed of a man and woman stepping back from the ranked globular shapes of ceramic furnaces, both standing with their arms akimbo as they studied with
satisfaction the plumbing now put in place. Robots retreated past them, folding away tools as they headed for an airlock, before departing one after another into the station enclosure. There they
fell in a stream, on a tower of electromagnets and began to take apart a section punched through with a hole whose interior gleamed bright copper. No rest for them, no sleeping, no dreaming.

‘Call it conscience,’ said the watching woman.

Nightmares resumed, but Saul was aware that they were now old ones. He felt the lasers draining their linked super-capacitors, the wrench of steering thrusters, then the insufficient blast of
the Mars Traveller engine. He looked on in guilty helplessness as, unprepared, people fell against the direction of acceleration, slammed into walls, ceilings or floors, hard angles, pipes, beams.
A symphony of breaking bones and screams played in his head. It all seemed summed up by one figure in a spacesuit hurtling across the station enclosure, clipping a beam and spinning helplessly down
towards the central asteroid before hitting it with a blast of vapour and his suit helmet tumbling away.

Steering thrusters wrenched again, then the scene lit up with bright light as the fifty-kilo rock which the lasers had been unable to deal with, and the station had been incapable of avoiding,
punched through below, turning half its mass to white-hot gas, then a further half of the remainder into molten debris as, like a bullet through a drinks can, it speared on through an accommodation
unit before slamming its way out through the upper enclosure. Eight people had occupied the accommodation unit. The rescuers found nothing but an oily residue of them on the walls.

‘Breach protocols no longer apply, people,’ someone announced finally, ‘and let me make this perfectly clear, showers are available.’

In space all around, it seemed that the asteroid debris was slowing as that one giant red asteroid loomed closer. Like a growing steel mushroom, one of the smelting plants began to extrude
itself from the station rim, the computer feedback from it again waking up that closed partition in Saul’s mind.

He now looked for Hannah, as he always did.

‘Quite simply,’ said Hannah, gazing at the other woman peering out from the oval screen, ‘we were not sure of your situation there, and whether there might be those on Mars who
would merely pass the information back to Earth.’

‘Tanglecom is secure,’ replied the same woman who had haunted Saul’s dreams. ‘I am alone, and what you tell me will remain between us. I will tell absolutely no one
else.’ She paused, smiled weakly. ‘In fact, your wanting to talk to me in private like this is fortuitous, because I needed some privacy so I could send you something that may be of use
to you.’

Something seemed to flicker through Saul’s mind, then he saw Hannah turning to look at some schematics appearing on a nearby secondary screen.

‘What’s this?’ she asked.

‘I’ve told lies here,’ confessed the woman. ‘When we took over this base, I claimed that Earth could get nothing to us for decades. And when Galahad revealed the
Alexander
, and then renamed it the
Scourge
, I pretended to have no previous knowledge of the craft, so obviously I want you to refrain from mentioning this in your further
communications with us.’

‘You still haven’t told me what this stuff is,’ Hannah remarked, fixedly gazing at the small screen.

‘Detailed schematics of the
Scourge
, down to its last weld and rivet.’

‘You’re sure?’asked Hannah. ‘How could you possibly be in possession of these?’

‘I’m sure,’ replied the other woman, ‘because I built the damned thing.’

Hannah switched her attention back to the main screen. ‘What?’

The other woman nodded slowly. ‘I got transferred out here after my political officer came to the conclusion that I was no longer to be trusted with handling the orbital tools I was using,
because I’d discovered that my husband had recently died not in an accident, but in an adjustment cell.’

‘I see,’ said Hannah. ‘These plans should be . . . very useful.’

‘Now, moving on,’ said the other woman, almost as if embarrassed by her revelation, ‘I’m also quite sure that your diversion into the Asteroid Belt, which you’ve
been evasive about for some time, offers you no tactical advantage against the
Scourge
; rather the opposite, in fact. So, can you now tell me straight why you are really going
there?’

‘I’d decided to trust you anyway, and now you’ve confirmed that I can.’ Hannah paused to key something into the console before her. ‘I’ve just sent you a
schematic of what we’ve built aboard this station. We changed course earlier so that we could swing into the Asteroid Belt and there stop at asteroid HJI457 – which is a
twenty-second-century designation for those identified as from Holocene Jupiter impact. There we must acquire the materials to complete our project – specifically ten thousand tonnes of
mercury.’

‘
You’ve
decided?’ said the woman, turning her head, presumably to peer at another screen. ‘I would have thought that would be down to this “Owner” of
yours.’

Hannah showed a flash or irritation at that. ‘I don’t really like that title, Var, and I myself am currently in charge of Argus Station.’

Var?

‘You don’t like it? So what do you prefer?’ Var continued looking off to one side, and then added, ‘And what the hell is that thing and why would you need that much
mercury?’

Varalia.

‘It’s something Rhine designed,’ said Hannah. ‘It’s based on a theorized engine called an Alcubierre warp drive.’

The other woman returned her gaze to Hannah, her expression shocked. She obviously understood straight away what Hannah was talking about. She was obviously very quick and very bright this . . .
Varalia Delex
. . . for she at once continued, ‘Manoeuvring will be a problem within the Belt, but once you’re clear your problems should be over.’ She paused again to gaze
at that other screen. ‘That is, if this drive actually works.’ She shook her head in irritation. ‘You said you are currently in charge of the station – so what’s this
Owner of yours now doing?’

Hannah replied, ‘The Owner, Alan Saul, is currently in a coma.’

Further shock suffused the other woman’s expression.

‘Alan,’ she said, her voice catching.

His name was so familiar coming from her mouth; just her saying it seemed to reveal some underlying structure to his mind, and out of that the memories surfaced. He now saw her walking beside
him in that enclave in the Dinaric Alps of old Albania as he talked about dying, talked about escape. He remembered another escape – when they were children – from the suffocating care
of their parents, out into a zero-asset area, and that glimpse of another world before the enforcers came for them and dragged them back. By groping for other such memories, he began establishing
connections between the disparate parts of his mind. Finding only fragments caused a deep frustration, and made him push harder.

A muggy day spent in the constant roar of a city arose in his mind. The triple-glazed window shut it out as his gaze slid to a large computer screen showing the exploded schematic of a fusion
engine, which was assembling automatically, then shrinking down small and dropping into another schematic recognizable as that of a Mars Traveller. The woman sitting before the screen sat back, for
a moment studied the wedding ring on her finger, smiled at it, then swung her chair round to face him.

‘Of course I can do better,’ she said.

You were going to build spaceships . . .

Varalia Delex, whose second name she had acquired by marriage to her husband Latham Delex. Varalia whose maiden name had been Saul.

‘Hello, sister,’ Saul’s voice grated, and he opened his eyes.

Earth

The four giant ships had been supertankers in a previous incarnation, and were the last of their kind turned out at the Port of Dalian shipyards. That they had remained
functional for so long after the wells ran dry was testament to the then-innovative materials and technologies used in their construction: graphene and metals foamed on Earth before that technology
really got into its stride in more suitable zero-gravity environments, new ceramics, tough new forms of glass, nano-coatings, clean-burn fission reactors and computer-controlled robots that
continued maintaining those vessels during all the later years they served as floating prison ships. Now the prisoners were all dead: the ZAs killed by the Scour and the remaining SAs dying either
of starvation or diseases prevalent amidst tens of thousands of rotting corpses.

‘I am impressed,’ said Serene, as she piloted the big aero down towards the landing deck. ‘I didn’t expect them to be ready so soon.’

The manager of the new project was a marine biologist called Michael Palgrave, a thin severe-looking man with blond hair and a badly sunburned nose, who stood nervously behind her; Sack was in
the seat behind him, arms folded and a bored expression on his lizard face.

‘We had the robots here, and it was simple enough to get them to strip out the cell partitions inside the old oil tanks,’ he replied. ‘We then constructed the nursery pools on
the old prison floors and utilized plumbing already in place to get things started. It took longer to automate the sea-seeding system, and we have had problems with the stock.’

‘I understand,’ said Serene, quite happy to let the man ramble on because she was pleased with what was happening here.

As she finally settled the aero down on the landing pad, she glanced towards land and noted the green smear extending out across ten kilometres of sea. This was why they had chosen this area for
the releases. The Dubai swamps had soaked up over two hundred million Scour victims and thus become poisonously anaerobic. However, from them this algae bloom had spread out to sea, and just beyond
it the sea plankton had undergone a resurgence. There was food here now: microscopic food but billions of tonnes of it. She silently thanked the erstwhile rulers of the small but wealthy country
that had once lain inland.

After surviving international crashes of the financial system with copious oil money, the rulers of Dubai had continued their project of turning their country into a tourist destination in
readiness for when the oil ran out. After building the Palm Tree and the World island groups on their coastline, they became more ambitious and transformed that coastline from end to end. However,
to maintain all this required the constant work of massive dredgers and underwater silt pumps the size of mosques. This was all fine while the oil money flowed and as it began to wane, when the
influx of wealthy tourists took up the slack.

Serene stepped out of the aero behind her close-protection team, Sack immediately behind her and Palgrave a step behind him. She waved the marine biologist forward to stand beside her as her
various PAs and other staff also exited the aero. ‘So where first?’

He pointed ahead to one of the new buildings erected on the hectares of deck. ‘We call it the panoquaria. It’s where we harvest eggs, milt and spores from the adult fauna and flora,
and it also serves as the hatchery.’