Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2) (15 page)

‘Take that mess away,’ she said. Eyeing the spatters of blood on her desk and the long spray of red up one wall, she added, ‘Oh, and get some of the cleaning staff in here,
too.’

A team of four house staff arrived to wipe down her desk and clean the spray off the wall, then bag up and cart off Shimbaum’s remains, by which time the pool of blood had been reduced to
a pinkish stain by the self-cleaning carpet. Meanwhile Serene manipulated further controls on the desk, opening a communications link through the screen wall and, just as the staff were about to
depart, the person she wanted to speak to was gazing at her from the screen.

‘Captain Scotonis,’ she said, smiling. ‘You are now in charge of the entire
Alexander
Project. I want that ship commissioned within . . .’ she paused to recheck
some statistics, ‘. . . within four mouths. Don’t let me down.’

Scotonis, a heavy-set Asian with narrow moustache and tuft of hair just below his bottom lip, lowered his gaze for a second, doubtless studying the bloodstain on the carpet. He had been in com
long enough to have witnessed Shimbaum going into the body bag.

‘Certainly, ma’am. We’ll be ready for you.’

The bloodstain was completely gone by the time Serene began studying a report concerning effluent pollution of the American
Great Lakes, gathering statistics on the remaining population surrounding them – in what had once been the state of Michigan – and considering what degree of thinning-out there might be
required.

Argus

Hannah’s surgery seemed just another place in his head, it being easy, if he allowed it, for his focus to become unstuck from time. If he allowed the waves of
weariness assailing him to triumph, if he released his rigid control for just a second, he could just as easily be talking to Rhine in his laboratory, or walking towards the ruination caused by the
nuclear blast at Inspectorate HQ London, or even lying again in that crate that had conveyed him to the Calais incinerator. Only a firm intellectual knowledge of his position in time allowed him to
keep hold of things. Only sheer strength of will kept him together. But this was just part of his malaise, for his sense of self had no location, and the physically real was no more immediate than
some processing space either in his damaged skull, that brain tissue in a container in the clean-room adjoining Hannah’s laboratory, or some silicon within the station itself.

Saul opened his eyes but, because of the bullet damage to his visual cortex, his body was blind. Closing his eyes did not shut down vision; only stopping the program he was running through
surrounding cams could do that. His perception of this body of his was no more than that possessed by the spidergun presently waiting in a corridor outside. Yet, he did feel weary, and sleep
– which he had forgone for so long – beckoned to him.

‘Shall I sleep?’ he asked himself, not sure if he had spoken the words out loud, and as if his physical being was making an appeal to some other.

The coldly functional part of him opined that sleep might be a good idea, since it would help with the healing of this physical body and the brain it contained. So he began flicking over mental
switches, allowing that purely human function to take over; parts of his mind comfortably sinking into a place where he could release control, relinquishing . . . everything. Then, on the border of
oblivion, he felt a sudden panic, because the whole process seemed to be going into cascade. This was coma, so how could he wake up again? He was allowing himself to slide into normal human sleep
without a chemical timer, without the neural safeguards to bring him out again, and he now seemed unable to stop the process.

He fought to stay conscious, but found the only way to retain some grip on the conscious world was by driving down mental partitions; separating away parts of his mind both here and in the
container in Hannah’s clean-room. He fought to retain control and realized, very quickly, that his complete self could not do so. Only a part of him could do that – just one of those
partitions. But to what end? What was the best course to follow?

Seemingly without volition, he found himself gazing through a single cam into Jasper Rhine’s laboratory. The man was working on a schematic of some massive engine, something Saul seemed to
recognize almost at once. Here it was, a design loosely based on the theorized Alcubierre warp drive. Saul instantly copied the schematic to his mind, lost himself in its possibilities, nearly
dismissed it because of its physical simplicity, but then knew that it was right.

Approved.

It went into the system queue, but there was something missing, something else needed. He visualized Argus Station’s present non-conjunction class route towards Mars. He felt himself
fading as he encompassed it, the effort to stay conscious a Sisyphean labour. He riffled through astronomical maps and surveys and at last found what he wanted, then sent his instruction to the
station’s steering thrusters and to the Traveller VI engine. The core of Argus Station would be, albeit briefly in astronomical terms, returning to its original home.

Must see this through . . .

Who could he trust?

Hannah . . .
He managed to utter, just that one word through her fone.

But she was powerless without him, unless . . . His instruction spread virally, leaping from robotic mind to robotic mind within the station. Further panic then as that viral spread also
included odd semi-organic minds in HUD. But the panic faded, as did Saul.

Then he was gone, mostly.

As she headed back towards her laboratory, Hannah tried to dismiss her growing feeling of panic while recognizing that it was the real thing, the certainty that things were
getting out of control and not just one of her panic attacks. She should have stayed with Saul; she should have monitored him more closely. But events seemed to be conspiring against her. First
that damned implant virus, then Rhine’s demand for attention. Then that call from
him
– just her name – and now no coherent response from him.

‘Saul?’ she tried again, through her fone, and again got a strange muttering response. Had his physical body died and sent his secondary neural tissue into shock? It seemed highly
likely. The monitor in her laboratory showed a general lack of coherence of the synaptic firings in that secondary tissue. It seemed to have descended into a fugue, a dream state.

She reached the corridor leading to her laboratory and noted the spidergun dutifully on station, turning one sensor limb to observe her. It then abruptly pointed two limbs at her –
behaviour she hadn’t seen before, unless the robot was assessing a threat. She halted. Was Saul looking at her through those sensors? That seemed unlikely to her now. Instead, the thing was
just continuing to run on his programming: a new kind of life set in motion by him before . . . no, she must not think like that.

‘Hannah,’ called Brigitta from the other end of the corridor, as she and her sister came hurrying in response to Hannah’s earlier summons.

The spidergun now turned towards them, and they halted. Then, after a moment, it decided none of them was a threat and it dropped its two raised limbs back to the floor and slowly closed itself
up into a big steel fist. Still eyeing the weapon, the three women advanced cautiously to converge at the laboratory door.

‘Hey, it’s good they survived,’ said Brigitta, still eyeing the spidergun. She was talking about Mars.

Hannah paused, then decided to run with this, felt she needed a breathing space before entering her laboratory, then the surgery, and thus finding whatever it was she would find there.
‘There are some good minds out there,’ she replied, referring to Mars. ‘They would have known at once that they’d been abandoned and known that they couldn’t afford
any political staff.’ Even as she spoke, she tried to accept the cold realism that must have been involved. Varalia Delex had stated quite simply that she had shot the political director. She
had not appeared defensive or challenging – it was the same kind of unemotional murderousness Hannah had witnessed from Saul.

‘And that tangle communicator,’ Brigitta was obviously awed by the new technology, knowing that they stood in a moment of history. ‘We all know how that changes
things.’

‘Something of an understatement, certainly,’ Hannah replied. ‘Rhine has proved again that he’s not the lunatic everyone supposed.’

‘There’s the other stuff he’s working on, too,’ interjected Angela, obviously impressed enough to break her usual silence.

‘Yes, there is,’ said Hannah, but her interest was now waning. She needed to go through that door. She didn’t want to talk about hypothetical space drives right now. The tangle
communicator was one thing, mostly covered by quantum physics, but actually screwing with relativity on anything larger than the quantum scale seemed like fantasy. With some trepidation she reached
out and palmed the reader beside the door, then ducked to accommodate the flash of a retinal scan. She entered, the twins following her, then headed straight for the clean lock leading into her
surgery.

‘That communication with Mars was not why I got you here,’ she announced. ‘We may have trouble.’

Providence appeared to back her up right at that moment, as hollow booms echoed throughout the station. Brigitta stepped over to a console and called up station data.

‘The smelter plants just retracted,’ she said. ‘What the hell is he doing?’

Hannah held off on replying that his pulling in of those plants was probably no more than a nerve reaction, impulses from a severely disrupted or dying brain. But she still clung on to hope, and
said nothing at all.

It seemed to take forever to strip off, shower and pull on some disposeralls, but finally she was inside the surgery gazing down at Saul. He still lay tubed and wired to the machines, and all
the displays indicated that he was still alive. However, she walked over to him, held the back of her hand over his mouth, and felt the soft whisper of breath through her surgical gloves. She felt
some relief, of course, but realized it could be false. He had run some sort of mental program in the hardware within his skull to control that autonomic function. The program would continue
running even if the rest of his organic brain was dead. Checking pupil response was useless, since most of his visual cortex lay in a kidney dish in her laboratory fridge. Pinching him was
pointless too, since it seemed he had shut down his sensitivity to pain just to enable himself to function.

‘What’s going on, Hannah?’ asked Brigitta, through the surgery intercom.

‘I’m getting nothing from him,’ Hannah replied. ‘No response.’ She took hold of his shoulder and shook him. ‘Saul?’ No reaction: in fact his body was
locked rigid. She turned on her fone and spoke his name again: ‘Saul?’ All that came through was that odd muttering sound, as if from a distant spectre in some haunted house.

‘This is the trouble you were talking about?’ Brigitta asked.

‘It is.’

Saul had been shot and was now in a coma – she dared not think any other way – so who was now in charge? Obviously he wasn’t capable of making decisions. The debates and the
demands for proof of Saul’s competence would soon begin, and Hannah reckoned the division into power bases and the infighting would surely ensue. Doubtless there would be those who wanted the
station turned round and heading back to Earth immediately . . . and then there would be blood in the air supply.

‘Is he dead?’ asked Brigitta.

Hannah gazed down at the figure on the bed, then abruptly staggered and had to reach out to steady herself against the bed. A moment of disorientation ensued and she wondered if she had been
pushing herself too hard, then she saw that the two sisters had also been put off balance, Angela righting herself with a hand pressed against the partition glass.

‘Steering thrusters,’ said Brigitta, looking puzzled. ‘So he’s not dead, is he?’

‘No,’ said Hannah. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Can he die?’ asked Angela. She rarely spoke, this Saberhagen twin – but when she did it was directly to the point.

Earth

The monorail journey to Rome had been fast and comfortable, and Serene had hated it. Despite the line being bordered by a no-man’s-land packed with readerguns and
genetically modified mastiffs, despite the escort of aero gunships and the elevated security all down the length of Italy, it just didn’t feel safe. When the train ran at ground level, it
could not help but be overlooked by sprawl arcologies or government tower blocks, many of which were empty of life, admittedly, but contained just too much ground for her security teams to cover,
and too much space in which a sniper could hide. And when the train track ran above these, on pillars a kilometre high, she felt even more exposed. Just one missile and it would all be over for
her.

‘I’ll be taking an aero back,’ she told Clay huffily. ‘And I’ll be flying it myself.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ he replied obediently.

The Centre for Advanced Medicine – established sixty years ago in the Vatican City by Pope Michael the Last, as Govnet media had dubbed him – had grown until it occupied the City
entire. Of course, it had been necessary to move out a lot of art treasures to accommodate it, whereupon they had ended up spread across the world, decorating the homes of those delegates who had
been overseeing the slow dismantling of the Roman Catholic Church. Serene stepped through a door held open for her by Sack, and into a corridor whose modern appearance gave no hint of the ancient
stonework surrounding it. Her entourage, excepting Clay, remained in the reception room as instructed.

‘So bring me up to speed,’ she instructed as she strode ahead. She was, of course, already completely up to speed, but she had found that pretending ignorance tended to reveal any
underlying agenda on the part of whoever was answering her enquiry.

‘We had to recruit more “volunteers”,’ he told her. ‘Two of the original seven died under surgery, and another three died a few hours after they woke up. They just
shut themselves down and there was nothing we could do about it.’