Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2) (2 page)

Serene popped a cover concealing console electronics, found the chip and extracted it, replacing it with a spare chip clipped inside the cover. The console went live, with three LCD screens
coming on to display code prompts. Selecting one of them Serene ordered a selective reboot, ensuring exterior com remained inoperative because there was always the chance that whatever had attacked
Govnet remained active. Even as she did this, her fone signalled to her that an exterior channel had become available to it. She hurriedly shut it down, worried that her rebooting of the aero
computer might have activated something else, then checked carefully: general independent fone network, voice only, no data packets and no computer linkage. Still cautious, she kept her fone shut
down and selected that particular channel through the aero console, then used the wholly archaic method of tapping in a fone number. No response, just the beeping to tell her she had reached the
fone she was after but no one was answering. It could be that this fone remained intact in whatever remained of its owner’s head.

After half an hour of the computer rebooting, Serene saw that the ZAs had drawn closer. They were searching the dead, checking dropped bags, but had yet to summon up the nerve to enter the Dome
itself. However, about twenty of them were gathering by the gate to the executive car park. They were looking for food, as always, and certainly knew that some of the vehicles here would contain
it.

She paused the reboot and ran checks on the weapons system, consigning one screen before her to manual targeting. She had plenty of ammo, since it hadn’t taken many bullets to kill those
within her aero’s vicinity. Using a console ball control, she brought a target frame over the one who seemed to be the leader of the ZAs at the gate, and poised a finger over the ball. If she
waited too long they would enter the car park and then disperse, becoming more difficult to hit, and once inside the car park they would, without a doubt, be a danger to her. No one above a certain
level in government went anywhere near ZAs without a great deal of protection – since their gratitude for the minimal dole they received was . . . somewhat lacking. Why was she hesitating?
This was such a small thing compared to her overall plan. She clicked the ball control down then moved it gently from side to side. The guns, underneath the aero, made a sound like a compressor
starting up, and Serene turned to watch their effect through the side window.

Full automatic: two machine guns, each firing at a rate of two thousand rounds a minute. The crowd disintegrated, flew apart in a mass of body parts and ragged clothing, a bloody mist boiling
out behind it. Another click on the ball control and the guns shut down. Serene studied what she had done. She had expected some to survive, to be running away now, but it looked as if every one of
them had been put through a mincer. No movement at all. She felt something like awe then, and a tight hard excitement. Just a few finger movements had done that. Now here was power. She tried to
dispel the feeling, for what she had just done had been entirely necessary. Somewhat shakily, she returned her attention to the reboot and, long before anyone else ventured near the car park, she
started up the aero’s fans and took it off the ground.

Then, as her view of London expanded and she saw the sheer extent of the devastation, the steady beeping from the console interrupted her inspection and a tired, familiar voice spoke out against
a raucous crackling.

‘I should not be surprised that you survived, ma’am.’

‘Nor should I be surprised that you survived too, Simeon,’ Serene replied curtly, though mildly pleased that her security director, Simeon Anderson, was still alive. ‘Why am I
getting so much interference?’

‘Well, Govnet being down doesn’t help, ma’am, but it’s not only that,’ he replied. ‘I’m told we’re building up to a humdinger of a solar storm
– seems almost to have poetic timing.’

‘Yes, whatever,’ she said. ‘How many of the team survived?’

‘Hard to say,’ he replied. ‘We lost seventeen here, but fifty-four were either at home or outside the Complex for other reasons, and I’ve been unable to contact any of
them.’

Serene grimaced. Readerguns had come as a standard fitting when the Aldeburgh Complex had been built but, as she took charge there and made the place her own domain, she had deactivated
them.

‘What killed the seventeen?’ she asked.

‘Aero guns – they just opened up on anyone within range.’

That figured. ‘How many of you there now?’

‘Twenty-four.’

‘Keep trying to contact the rest. I’ll be with you within an hour.’

‘What happened, ma’am? What the hell happened?’

This was the closest she had heard her security director come to voicing emotion and she paused for a moment, gazing out of the screen as she considered her reply. Everywhere she looked, smoke
was rising into the sky. She had just passed over a long scar cutting through the urban sprawl where it seemed likely another scramjet had come down, and to her right a massive smoke cloud marked
the spot where she knew the Northeast Inspectorate HQ was located.

‘We got hit hard. What data are you getting now?’

‘Nothing from the satellites, which might be due to the storm, and Govnet won’t secure-start at least for another hour. I foned whoever I could get through to – Breckon in
North America, Mouheed in China, Rocheur in Germany – and the same story from them: readerguns, spiderguns, razorbirds and shepherds all turning on government employees, all air traffic
dropping out of the sky. And Breckon, who has access to the Kansas radio telescope array, tells me that, despite the solar interference, he can see that the Argus Network is gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘Dropped out of the sky . . . I saw a few fire trails but I didn’t make the connection until I spoke to him. Apparently it was quite a show, night-side.’

The whole network?
Serene just did not know what to say, but she incorporated this fact into her calculations. More than ever now, her plan seemed the right one.

‘Not just that,’ Anderson continued, ‘Argus itself is currently beyond the orbit of the Moon and heading away.’

‘I see,’ said Serene, trying to keep her voice in keeping with her name. ‘So Breckon, Mouheed and Rocheur weren’t at their respective Inspectorate HQs when this went
down?’

‘All of them at home.’

Serene considered all that had been happening prior to her diving under her desk at the conference. The rebels had penetrated Govnet at an unheard-of level, and taken control of all of
Earth’s military resources. She now suspected she knew what that fire over to her right might be. Clearly, the rebels had dropped the Argus Network satellites on Inspectorate HQs all across
Earth, and that smoke cloud rose from HQ Northeast. It seemed the rebels had also either stolen Argus Station, or dispatched it off into the Solar System.

‘Keep gathering data and be sure we have as much capacity as possible for when Govnet comes back online,’ she said. ‘You’ve checked our system for comlife?’

‘Comlife . . . yeah, had to be. Our system was visited, and a lot scrambled – someone knew every damned access code. We’re now fully hard-system; I’ve changed all the
codes and closed doorways it left behind.’

‘Okay . . . do you still have outside power there?’

‘No, the Sizewell fusion reactors did a safe shutdown. We’re using the wind turbines.’

‘Good enough,’ she replied.

She didn’t need a great deal of electrical power for what she intended. The signal would transmit virally through Govnet, to be rebroadcast from any available radio transmitter. Not too
many of them would be needed either, because those ID implants it reached would then rebroadcast it again, and it would spread, like a plague.

Argus

The scanning helmet completely covered Saul’s head and face. Usually this would not have been disconcerting for him, for he could have kept watch through the cams
pointing down from the ceiling, or through any nearby robots like the spider-gun squatting over by the door into the laboratory. However, after his attack on Committee rule on Earth, it seemed
almost as if the sun itself had registered its protest at the destruction he had wrought.

Just hours after Argus Station swung around the Moon in a low-fuel course change, then fired up the Traveller VI to begin its non-conjunction course for Mars, the solar storm had begun. The last
sight Saul had of the sun was a flare arcing out and back down – forming a bridge large enough to roll entire worlds around – then it had been necessary to put up the station’s EM
field to prevent those inside being roasted by the sleet of radiation. Only the optical telescopes still functioned, and their images weren’t the best. But this also meant that right now he
could not, without plugging an optic directly into his skull, access the station’s computer system and thereby any cams or robots.

‘Your synaptic density is about twice that of a normal human being,’ said Hannah.

‘Do you have all the data you need?’ he asked.

‘You don’t like being blind,’ she remarked.

‘I do not.’

‘Yes, you can take off the helmet.’

Saul quickly lifted it from his head and gazed across to where Hannah had ensconced herself before an array of screens. Did she look unwell? Did she still hate him for the task he had given her?
It was difficult to tell. He swung his gaze across all the equipment occupying her laboratory, to the viewing window into her adjoining surgical theatre. He’d known from the moment he came in
here that she had been preparing for that ghoulish chore.

Arcoplex One, which was one of the three cylinder worlds extending like thick spokes from the centre of Argus Station to the outer ring, contained seventy delegates, along with Chairman Messina.
They were all guilty of murder, whether personally guilty or having issued orders for mass exterminations. They had been given a choice of life or death, though in order to live they must have
their minds erased. None had chosen to die, and Hannah must now carry out the chore of implanting specially designed biochips that changed neuro-chem, zapped synapses and made new connections
– wiping a human brain like a magnet drawn across an old magnetic tape. Of course, mindless humans were a resource drain they could not afford here, so Hannah intended to make the wipe quite
specific, so that a lot of what had been inculcated into them as children and as teenagers would not be erased. They wouldn’t lose their toilet training, for example, or the ability to
communicate, or much of their early education. Saul supposed they would end up much like children, though like children with little urge to play.

He now swung his attention to the screens ranged before her.

Here were pictures of his brain, energy statistics, data-flow diagnostics and much about the medical side of what had happened to him. One screen showed the bio interface as a blur at the centre
of the neurons it had grown. Since those neurons and the synaptic connections they made were based on his own genetic blueprint, they weren’t distinct under resonance scan until Hannah ran a
computer program to utilize data that had been stored in the hardware in his skull. This provided the scan image of his brain
before
she had installed the interface and its related hardware
and, now able to make the distinction, the program coloured new growth in a vibrant green. The interface looked like the core of an epiphyte, its branches spreading throughout his skull and even
penetrating down into his spine.

Mistletoe in my head
, Saul thought, but then remembered that plant was poisonous so decided to drop this analogy.

‘It grew too fast – there are imbalances,’ she said.

‘Inevitable – since it responded to mental pressure, and I was under a lot of it. The epiphyte underwent forced growth. What are the dangers?’

She sat back from her consoles, wiping a hand down her face. ‘Epiphyte, yes, quite . . .’ she said, and then continued, ‘The blood supply in your skull is struggling to keep
up. You’re growing new capillaries, and the old ones are expanding, but still demand is outstripping supply . . . You’re going to need supplements.’ She stood up and walked over
to a cupboard, took out an electrical pill dispenser and began inserting tubes of pills. ‘You’re eating?’

‘There hasn’t been much time to, but, yes, every opportunity I get. I’m always hungry.’

‘To be expected,’ she said. ‘I would say you are near the limit of what your body can handle without further assistance and, frankly, what it’s handling is already beyond
the limit of a normal human body. You should be dead by now.’ She was referring to the things he had done to himself before Smith wiped out his original mind. Using nano-machines and tailored
viruses, he had upgraded what nature had given him. As a result he healed faster now, adapted faster, his immune system was boosted.

‘Any further growth and any increase in processing will put you in danger of embolism. You are also at the point of diminishing returns, due to cell starvation.’ She finished filling
the dispenser and now began programming it.

‘So what can we do?’

‘We can install carotid valves to control the blood pressure in your skull. There are ways of upping your red-corpuscle count, and I can run nutrients straight into your bloodstream.
However, the best option would be for you to shunt some of that processing outside yourself.’

‘Which I already do – since a lot of me is now in the computer systems of this station.’ But, of course, he knew that wasn’t what she was talking about.

‘But you’re disconnected from it right now.’ She shook her head. ‘That’s beside the point, anyway. You do run processing outside yourself, but you mirror and map a
lot of it inside your organic brain, because you’re translating from machine code to organic processes. Though what you can do outside yourself is becoming increasingly complex, your organic
brain is still the control centre.’ She paused, losing her doleful expression to a glint of maniacal enthusiasm, as she always did when venturing to the cutting edge of her research.