Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2) (60 page)

Allison then detailed for her how the chip was activated. When a microscopic radio receiver within it detected the code of the implant, on the right coded frequency, with the addition of two
zeros, it began its work. It was all quite prosaic. Galahad had simply added those two zeros to the implant codes of every zero-asset citizen on Earth, and killed them. Thereafter she had become
more selective, still killing at will with two extra digits.

Useful information, if you knew the ID codes of your enemy.

The troops were now nearing the lowest floor, so Saul snapped out of his introspection and set all the robots in motion. The enemy spiderguns had to be dealt with first, because they were the
most dangerous. Two construction robots threw themselves at the first spidergun from their place of hiding. It immediately opened fire on them both but, with its firing evenly divided between them,
it could not deliver enough of a fusillade to halt their momentum. The two construction robots were almost completely wrecked under fire, but crashed into the spidergun and tangled themselves in
among its limbs. Also shuddering under fire, the next two were able to reach it while still functional, if marginally so. They then set their diamond saws running, and in a businesslike manner
began hacking it to pieces even while it continued to blow away pieces of their bodies. Other construction robots slammed into the fray until the scene resembled something in a wildlife
documentary: ants swarming over a spider and tearing it apart. Eventually the surviving construction robots propelled themselves away, leaving nothing but pieces of the spidergun amid their wrecked
fellows.

A similar scenario played out with the second gun, but this time enemy troops were involved, even more so when further robots came out of hiding to attack them. At once, Saul was reminded of
when he had first used robots on this station, instructing them to use their integral toolkits against human bodies. Diamond saws sliced through limbs and torsos; drills punched neat, evenly spaced
patterns into chests; spacesuited figures shuddered under welding currents; detached heads tumbled; blood beaded the air and splashed against walls. With the spidergun down, the action ceased to be
a battle and rapidly turned into a slaughter.

‘They’re nearly done,’ said Saul. ‘Let’s get moving.’

Even as he led the way in, Saul watched survivors fleeing along corridors, only to be rapidly brought
down and dismembered. The machines were bloody and remorseless: efficient killers. He felt no sympathy for those dying, for it was they who had attacked and they were now paying the price. Upon
checking, he saw that two construction robots were carting ten cleanly killed corpses up to the top floor. Surveying that same floor through the computer control system, he found only one area not
yet decompressed: it was a surgical unit. This was probably because the troops that had searched it could see, through the glass viewing wall, that no one was in hiding inside. He led the way there
now.

The corridors were littered with corpses, their blood steaming in vacuum.

‘Hell of a mess,’ Langstrom observed, kicking a severed head further down the corridor.

‘It’ll scrape off,’ someone else commented briefly.

When they reached the door leading into Medical, the construction robots were already on their way out, a fog trailing after them. Saul entered and gazed at the stack of corpses, then walked
over and took hold of one to sling it over his shoulder.

‘Follow me through into the surgical area.’ He gestured to the viewing window. ‘The clean lock is vacuum tested, so it should hold. Bring yourselves a corpse each.’

As he stepped into the clean lock he overrode its hygiene safety warnings, since he only wanted to use it as an airlock. Once inside, he quickly stripped off his suit and was down to his
undergarments by the time Langstrom came through.

‘Do what I do,’ he instructed him.

He stripped the suit off the corpse he’d selected, then stepped over to a dispenser for some disposable towels, which he used to clean away the spill of blood around the neck ring. A
repair patch taken from the maintenance kit of his suit sealed the single hole that had killed the wasted-looking soldier. By the time he was donning this second suit, another five of
Langstrom’s men had entered. Twenty minutes later, they were all filing out, every one of them looking like enemy combatants. Saul remembered to warn the robots, and anyone else defending the
station in the vicinity. He wanted only those he had already instructed to shoot at him.

Hannah had once read somewhere how it was the waiting that was the worst part and, though she understood that sentiment, she could not really agree. She would have been quite
happy to just wait forever for a fight and never get involved in one. She’d seen quite enough of the results of warfare to be sure of that.

‘Why haven’t they decompressed the arcoplex?’ asked Angela suddenly.

‘They’ve got vacuum-penetration locks, so what would be the point?’ replied the lab assistant now sporting a missile-launcher.

‘The point would be to kill as many of the enemy as possible, but without putting themselves in danger,’ Hannah replied. ‘Isn’t that always the point of war?’ She
paused for a second. ‘Anyway, the fact that they haven’t done so thus far but are certainly inside doesn’t mean they won’t. So just be ready to close up your suits.’
She nodded in acknowledgement to Angela, who simply shrugged in reply.

The sounds of battle had grown closer, but when it finally arrived, Hannah found herself gaping, unable to respond. Two soldiers appeared first at the end of the corridor, and began loping
forward. They immediately opened fire, ceramic ammunition slamming into the floor plates ahead of them. Belatedly, Hannah realized they must have already encountered Rhine’s explosives and
were now attempting to make this corridor safe. She began to raise her weapon . . . just as bright rose light flared beside her, and something like a pink tracer bullet shot towards the two
intruders. The thing expanded as it travelled, thus creating the illusion that it wasn’t actually moving away, was merely some fault in Hannah’s vision. It struck one soldier on the
shoulder and there detonated like a firework, flinging him back into the trooper behind. Both of them collapsed, licked by flame and screaming. A missile followed shortly afterwards, exploding
against the far wall and tearing it wide open.

‘We need to calm . . .’

Gunfire stitched across the wall beside their door. A corridor wall exploded inwards, and the whole area was abruptly filled with smoke from burning plastic. More troops began appearing. Were
they mad? Didn’t they realize what had just happened to their fellows?

Two more missiles sped into the confusion and silhouettes of dismemberment tumbled out on fireballs. Angela carefully saved her shots until she had a clear target, and with the next two turned
three of the enemy soldiers into screaming and burning ruin. Then all at once it just seemed to stop – no one else attacking at the far end, though someone was groaning loudly amid the
wreckage. Hannah unclenched her hands from her Kalashtech, realizing she still hadn’t fired a single shot.

‘What are they doing?’ she asked.

‘Probably bringing up something heavier,’ said the other lab assistant, as he passed over more missiles for the launcher.

‘Did you hear that back there?’ Hannah called out, glancing back into the factory.

‘We heard,’ Brigitta replied.

‘Seems inevitable,’ said James, from where he crouched with his weapon laid across a machine cowling.

Just at that moment a massive explosion shuddered their entire surroundings and the air was filled with shrapnel glass. Hannah ducked her head, her ears ringing, as fragments impacted all around
her. When she looked up again, the air inside the factory was filled with lethal glittering flakes, and she quickly slid her visor down. Again she found herself gaping, until gunfire chattered, and
James began dancing beside his machine, shedding pieces of his body. She only realized what had happened as she saw the first troops descending through the void where the glass viewing floor above
had been. Then she shrieked something wordless, and finally opened fire.

‘Over there,’ said the man they called Charlie, whom Alex could still only think of as Chairman Messina.

The ground was bulging up alongside some kind of fruit tree scattered with white flowers, one of its roots heaving up as if the tree was getting ready to walk. A huffing sound ensued as the
ground broke open and the cylinder of a vacuum-penetration lock abruptly rose into sight. As it rose, breach foam exploded all about it to fill the air like green snow, and the circular lid on its
end flipped open.

A soldier rocketed out, his weapon aimed towards the ground while he turned. Messina’s rifle cracked sharply, and the top of the man’s head disappeared in a spray of brains and
skull. The impact sent him cartwheeling backwards into the branches of the fruit tree.

‘Not very good positioning,’ Messina noted.

‘Positioning?’ Alex echoed, pride surging in his chest. That had been one hell of a shot from the erstwhile Chairman.

‘Out in the open like that,’ Messina explained. ‘I thought you were a soldier.’

‘Yes, of course,’ Alex replied, suddenly feeling crestfallen and inadequate.

‘Do you want the next one?’ Messina asked cheerfully.

‘Sure,’ Alex replied, gazing up to the point where it appeared the trees were growing down towards him. More foam exploded up there, and shortly afterwards he heard a full clip being
fired by one of the more inept snipers covering the area. This should be easy, he felt, like shooting fish in a barrel – a phrase he had never really understood because who would waste
bullets to destroy such perfectly good food?

‘Oops,’ said Messina.

Objects began to rise out of the first lock and, the moment Alex focused his gaze on them, they exploded. Flash grenades! Black after-images chased each other across his vision, almost blotting
out the next figure that rose into view. He tried his best but knew he would not be able to manage a single-shot kill, and so he fired a short burst. He glimpsed a man spinning, one leg hanging on
by a thread, fired again to send him bleeding into the foliage.

‘Messy,’ observed Messina.

From behind came the crump of an explosion, and smoke gouted from the doorway into the maintenance building dividing up the Arboretum. The battle had started there too, and it seemed intense
– as if that place was the main target. Alex blinked, trying to recover his vision, determined to do better for his Chairman, who seemed singularly unimpressed with his clone’s
marksmanship.

Another lock cylinder rose into view on a green snowstorm, further objects flying outwards. This time Alex closed his eyes before the detonation, then opened them to see a growing smoke cloud.
Beside him Messina fired off a shot, then a second one just after gunfire began snapping through the leaves and branches around them. Alex flicked his scope over to infrared, but the
intruders’ suits were insulated, so he only picked out his targets in the reflected gleam of the smoke bombs, as they emerged from one of the locks. He calmed his breathing, steadied himself,
fired one shot, and saw glowing fragments flying out of his latest target’s neck, then swung to aim at the next lock to rise up.

‘Messy,’ Messina repeated.

Alex knew now that he wasn’t referring to Alex’s marksmanship, but to how things were about to become – and soon.

Mars

It was morning, but here the weak Martian sun would not limp into view until almost midday. A fog had rolled in again, and a fine layer of ice crystals had frosted the
metal of the airlock. Moving with stolid weariness, Var had now exposed three metres of rock-damaged pipes and was idly wondering how many more metres she might be able to expose in the hours
remaining to her. In the mere five hours remaining to her.

Fatalism and hope were at war within her, and both of them were losing out to a bone-deep fatigue. After clearing the way to another large regolith block which, when she pulled it out, would
bring most of the rubble on the slope above down on the area she had cleared, she stood up and stretched. She couldn’t see very far through the fog and imagined shapes emerging out of it: the
hidden Martians riding their sand yachts; the red-skinned warriors of Barsoom with swords agleam, the mighty Tars Tarkas looming amid them; the adapted dust farmers or the lurking greys.

‘Where are you now, John Carter?’ she wondered, her voice sounding cracked and slightly weird to her.

She’d passed similar ironic comments previously to personnel at the base regarding the old stories of Mars, until she realized they were mostly falling on deaf ears – Lopomac was the
only one to understand. Being the daughter of Committee executives, Var was one of the few who had once had access to such fiction and seemingly one of fewer still who had bothered to read it. In
the end the reality of Mars came down to simple facts: such as dust, unbreathable air and the utter hostility of a barren world. It was beautiful, in its way, but then hostile landscapes often
were. They were something to be viewed from the cosy comfort afforded by technology – take that away and the beauty began to lose its appeal.

Var stooped and was at last able to drag out the big regolith block, whereupon with depressing predictability the rubble pile slid down, precisely as she had expected. She stood back and
surveyed the task ahead of her, then decided to climb up on top of the rubble for a better view towards where the buried pipes were heading.

The summit of the rubble pile brought her out of the fog, so that it seemed she was rising up out of some milky river with islands visible ahead and the banks rising on either side. Beauty
again, she felt; it was a heart-stoppingly glorious scene that somehow seemed utterly sad. Then she realized that it wasn’t the scene that was sad, but herself, and it wasn’t sadness
she was feeling, really, but regret. Acceptance overwhelmed her and she understood that she was really making her goodbyes, but strong on the tail of that came anger. She would give up only when
her air ran out, and not before. She peered down through the fog, her gaze tracking along where she felt the pipes were heading. Then she began to map out the building in her mind, trying to see
what logic had been followed in its construction.