Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2) (25 page)

‘Strange you should put it that way,’ she observed. ‘To my recollection, diamond filament was manufactured in China over eighty years ago, but since cost of production was so
prohibitive, and other much cheaper options were available for the more prosaic tasks it might be used for, it was shelved.’ She eyed him carefully. ‘We can easily manufacture it now
because of a steady improvement in furnace design over those eighty years.’

He didn’t know what to say for a moment, then gulped out a, ‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘What I would prefer you to tell me about,’ she continued, ‘is this motor here and its power supply.’

‘Yes, ma’am.’ He seemed unable to do more than mouth those two words.

‘Perhaps a practical demonstration?’ she suggested nastily. ‘Here and now rather than the one being prepared for us?’

He spoke all in a rush. ‘The battery is a nanotube store, kept up to charge by induction through the strap itself. It discharges into a micro-conveyor, which is an array of micro-wheels on
a—’

‘I know what a micro-conveyor is. Please continue.’ She glanced round at Clay, who nodded, then pointed to the door leading out of there. She began heading towards that door, her
four new bodyguards close behind her, Clay trailing them, and all the other flunkies walking attentively but silently after him.

Santanzer stayed at her side. ‘The conveyor simply closes the strap, which is prevented from being pulled back by spur hairs within the exit hole. As soon as the device receives an ID
code, it checks it against the recipient’s implant and, if there’s a match, it can close the hoop . . . sufficiently in less than a second.’

As she reached the door, two of her bodyguards moved ahead to open it and check the area beyond. That was unnecessary, really, since the place had been swarming with Inspectorate enforcers for a
week before her arrival, but this was what they were trained to do. After a moment they nodded, and she followed them through, Santanzer was still at her side, and frequently looking back towards
his superiors in the vain hope that one of them would take over from him.

‘But there is more than one speed setting,’ she observed as she stepped out onto a platform overlooking a warehouse floor.

A racket greeted her there: the meaty thuds of rifle butts liberally applied, the shouting and begging and the screams from those feeling the touch of a disabler. Steel stairs led down to the
main floor, a large area that had now been cleared of crates. Fifty Inspectorate enforcers had the prisoners all crammed together, and there seemed to be a bit of a riot going on. The prisoners, it
seemed, were objecting to their new neckwear.

‘It allows any setting you choose,’ Santanzer replied, gazing over the rail with horrified fascination as he finally started to accept what might soon happen here.

Two bodyguards went down the stairs first, and she followed, her pelvis complaining at the extra effort. Finally down on the warehouse floor, she walked out to where a large comfortable chair
had been provided for her, a small round table standing beside it, upon which sat a bottle of champagne in a cooler, and a single flute glass. She unhooked her palmtop from her belt and placed it
on the table, then carefully sat down while Clay checked the secure seal on the bottle, before opening it and filling the glass for her. It was one taken from Messina’s stock, specially sent
over for the occasion – and specially sealed and poison-free so long as the seal remained intact. She took a sip, opened her palmtop and studied the list of ID implant numbers displayed, and
the icon for the new program that had just loaded. Then, after a pause, she raised her gaze towards the prisoners.

‘Bring delegate Grace Turpin and Technical Director Rourke forward,’ she instructed.

Enforcers cut the two she named from the crowd, shoved them to the front and then down onto their knees. Their suits were soiled and soaking wet, and only now did Serene detect the slight smell
of faeces and urine. All these people had been kept without access to toilet facilities for some days, because, after their sojourn in Inspectorate cells in Australia, they had spent most of their
time in the holds of aeros or scramjets. Doubtless they were dripping wet because the enforcers here had recently hosed them down to make them at least a little more presentable for her. She eyed
them for a second longer before selecting their two implant codes from the list ranged before her, then dragged them across and dropped them on the ring-shaped icon. A new menu opened to show
numerous settings. The thing was of a gratifyingly simple design: she could govern the speed of strangulation, she could render someone unconscious then open the collar again, and she could snap
the collar closed so quickly it would decapitate whoever was wearing it in, as Santanzer had told her, less than a second.

‘Chairman,’ said Rourke, ‘we were utterly shocked and—’

The slowest setting, she decided, but without full closure since that would make a terrible mess here. Of course, she wouldn’t have to clear it up herself, but felt some sympathy for those
who would. The two began making retching sounds and struggled to free their hands from the plastic ties binding their wrists behind their backs. Grace Turpin toppled over on her side, her legs
kicking, her body thrashing and bucking, and shortly afterwards Rourke lay down beside her too. One and a half minutes of this was followed by a further thirty seconds of death rattles and the
occasional spasmodic twitching.

Serene took another sip of champagne, then flicked her gaze back to the list. Some in the crowd of prisoners were sobbing, four had tried to run and been beaten to the floor, while one had
managed to ram his head into an enforcer’s gut and then deliver an excellent kick to another enforcer’s head, before running. A disabler dropped him, screaming, beside a wall of
crates.

However, most just remained in a kneeling position, doing nothing. She had previously noticed how, if you first selected a couple of prisoners from a crowd you intended to do away with, the rest
somehow convinced themselves that they were being given an object lesson, and that they weren’t going to die, too. She smiled with a feeling of peace easing the tension in her body, selected
the whole of the rest of the list and dragged it to the ring icon, left the setting the same, pressed send and sat back.

The noise was abominable, and in a short time the smell was too. Serene finished her champagne, then poured herself another glass. The enforcers moved back from the thrashing, retching mass of
humanity. Out of this mass crawled one woman whose collar seemed to have malfunctioned.

‘Deal with her,’ said Serene, pointing.

An enforcer stepped over and beat in the woman’s skull with his rifle butt.

In two minutes it was all over.

‘Santanzer,’ Serene said next.

The man stepped over beside her chair. ‘Ma’am?’ He didn’t look well

‘You are now the technical director of this facility. How soon can you go into production?’

‘Within two days, ma’am.’

‘At what rate?’

‘The furnaces can produce two metres of strip every hour, but motor production and assembly is slower – about five to six thousand collars every twenty-four hours,’ he
replied.

‘Not enough and not fast enough,’ she said. ‘That’s only a million in six months. You’ll be provided with all the resources you need to increase that
figure.’

‘How many do you want?’

‘Let’s go for a nice round figure,’ she said, standing up. ‘If you haven’t produced a billion within the first year, I’ll be back here to find out
why.’

She headed for the stairs feeling slightly woozy; the champagne had gone to her head.

Argus

They had food and water here in this zero-gravity hydroponics unit, and remained safe from discovery after Alexandra had managed to run a program through the local
agribots so that they would ignore this apparent new staff complement. But Alex had become frustrated by the lack of action, and by all the sneaking about and spying. However, their instructions
from Serene Galahad, then reaffirmed by the leader of the tactical team on Earth, had been quite explicit: no military action. Instead they were to watch and report everything they could and be
ready for the arrival of the
Scourge
. Now, as Alex listened in frustration to the various sounds penetrating the surrounding walls – the clattering, the intermittent whine of a cutter
and occasional deep groans and bangs – it seemed that they were trapped here, and that they were about to be found.

‘What are they doing?’ he asked Alexandra.

She continued studying her screen for a moment, then looked up. ‘It looks as if they’re dismounting the whole hydroponics unit.’ She paused for a second, her expression
distant. ‘To isolate us?’ she wondered, clearly puzzled.

Alex shook his head. ‘Then why not just send in the robots? In this confined area we wouldn’t stand a chance.’

‘Maybe,’ she suggested, ‘they’re worried about the damage if there’s a firefight in here. Hydroponics is important, so perhaps they just intend to isolate us and
wait us out.’

Good, she was starting to think a little bit more outside the box.

‘I don’t think so,’ he opined. ‘We’re just in the way.’

She focused on him. ‘I don’t understand.’

Alex frowned for a second then continued, ‘That thing they’re building in the outer ring . . . we saw how they cut straight through underneath the space dock, took out those big
structural beams and repositioned them. They’re building it all the way round, and this unit is standing in the way. So they’re moving it.’

‘Makes more sense, that. I guess if they wanted to isolate us, they just had to weld the doors shut,’ she said, adding, ‘Maybe we should sabotage it?’

‘You heard what Tactical Analysis said,’ he said. ‘They can discern no military application for it, other than maybe some sort of EM defence, which the station already has. It
looks more like some sort of fast transport system and, if anything, it’s a good thing that they’re diverting station resources into the project.’

‘I still don’t like it,’ said Alexandra.

At that moment, the whole hydroponics unit shifted and the lights went out. Alex turned on his suit light to compensate, while Alexandra remained focused on her screen.

‘Completely detached,’ she said. ‘We’ve got some big construction robots out there taking hold. I think you’re right and it looks to me as if there’s a place
deeper in already prepared. We’re only being moved about twenty metres.’

They now sat in silence, holding on tight as the unit was moved. Then it clanged to a halt, the lurch not enough to disturb the agribots still working all around them. The racket from outside
could be heard again, and Alex felt his tension ease when he heard the familiar sizzling of welders. When the lights came back on, he checked his watch. It was time to record another report. He
gestured to Alexandra, who moved away from the screen, pulling herself up into the overhead scaffold while he moved into position and set the screen to record.

‘We have data on the other weapon, which I will transmit with this report,’ he began. ‘It is not, as we first supposed, a railgun, but some sort of beam weapon.’ He gave
a brief description that provided no more data than the pictures they would send, then continued with, ‘Alexandra has managed to locate some old cargo manifests which indicate the final
destination of cargos being sent here. As you surmised, the Gene Bank samples were transported directly to the Arboretum. They went there rather than to Arcoplex Two mainly because of the storage
space. The data, however, is another matter. It was brought here in permanent-write carbon-crystal storage, then fed into the station system. We don’t know the location of the PWCC, but
copies of the data are stored throughout the station. We tried to access them, but something’s happened – the whole system seems a lot more aware again, as it was when Alan Saul was
still in control. We just managed to get away from the console we were using before a spidergun arrived. That’s all for now.’

‘What I don’t understand,’ said Alexandra, ‘is why there aren’t copies of that data all across Earth – you could get all of it on terabyte sticks.’

‘It’s not for us to question that,’ said Alex. ‘Remember, it was under the Chairman’s orders that the data came here, so it was under his orders that none of it
should remain on Earth.’

He watched her acquiesce and dismiss the question from her mind, but it still remained in his. With data storage so easy, it seemed ludicrous to confine something so valuable to just one
location. The Chairman must have considered this data part of his power base, maybe as a hedge against the possibility of revolution on Earth while he was up on Argus. Those down below would not
have been able to maintain power while Earth’s biosphere died all around them, and without the Gene Bank data they would have nothing with which to regenerate it all. All he had to do then
was wait them out.

‘Send the report,’ he snapped, uncomfortable with where these thoughts were taking him.

Alexandra dipped her head in acknowledgement, and set to work. However, it soon became evident that she had encountered a problem.

‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. ‘Are you getting that same weird shit again?’

The images and sounds seemed to come out of nowhere, though Alexandra explained it as a kind of inductance effect on her equipment. But what could possibly induce what looked like a nightmare
artistic montage of flesh, blood, bone and insectile machine? What was inducing sounds like the howling of some half-man and half-beast, or the muttering of lunatics in dank dungeons?

‘Nope, it’s not that, thankfully. I think it must come from that thing they’re building out there,’ she said. ‘Every time they run another test on a section of it,
it screws up com. I’m not getting the weird shit now, just weird readings. The carrier wave keeps compressing and expanding.’

‘Time dilation, signal shift, Doppler effect?’ Alex queried. ‘There’s all that stuff about relative velocities, as I recollect.’

She looked up at him, annoyed. ‘We’re not going fast enough for those effects to be very strong, and anyway they are constant and easily corrected for. This is something completely
different.’ She paused for a second to again study her screen. ‘Ah, it’s gone now.’ She stabbed a finger down on a key and sat back with a satisfied look on her face.