Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2) (30 page)

As Nelson began to explain the sheer extent of his craft, Serene quickly realized that, if she actually went through with this, she would be taking a step beyond her purported aims. Everything
she had done thus far, no matter how grim, or how cruel, had been justified for the future of Earth. The extermination of billions had been an act that had to be carried out before the pressure on
Earth’s ecology passed beyond the point of no return. Her concealment of the fact that she herself had committed this act had been necessary because, without that concealment, the degree of
hatred that would have been aroused against her would make it impossible for her to govern. Her wiping-out of the remainder of the Committee had been necessary, too – things needed to be done
quickly, so it was foolish to waste time in debate about who should be in power, and foolish to waste resources on infighting. That she had ruthlessly seized power was in itself proof of her
fitness to rule. Subsequent exterminations had been necessary too, for Earth’s population was still far too high, and therefore targeted exterminations, where they would do the most good,
were the best option. She felt perfectly justified in all that she had done, and every person she had killed had been eliminated out of necessity. What she intended now, however, was altogether
unnecessary.

‘I’m bringing him down now,’ said the voice over her fone.

‘Very good,’ she replied, turning away from Nelson’s monologue. ‘I take it he is still unharmed?’

‘Just a few bruises.’

Serene swung back to face Nelson, who was watching her with almost childlike curiosity, his head tilted to one side.

‘Go get ready,’ she said, and watched him head over to a nearby sink to wash his hands, then don his aseptic overalls and pull on surgical gloves. Then she turned to watch the lights
ranged on the wall just above the elevator. She suddenly felt hot and cold flushes that were a combination of both shame and excitement. From her childhood she recognized this sensation as the
thrill of deliberately doing something she knew to be wrong.

The elevator arrived and the doors slid open. Sack stepped out, lizard-skinned and the colour of graphite, in a cream business suit, like some CGI fantasy figure. His hand lay gently on the
shoulder of Donald Galahad, her father, as he guided him into the room. By contrast, her father’s clothing was filthy and torn, with piss stains on the front of his corduroy trousers, his
head dipped and his hands bound behind his back. He looked up and his eyes widened when he saw her, but he could say nothing around the big plastic plug jammed into his mouth.

‘Keroskin,’ exclaimed Nelson delightedly. The man was gazing at Sack. This new hard skin had not been approved for general use yet, but was known about in medical circles. ‘How
does it feel?’ Nelson asked.

Sack gazed at him doubtfully with ophidian eyes, then glanced questioningly at Serene.

‘Answer the man,’ she said.

‘Feels like a big thick scab all over,’ Sack replied.

‘We must talk further,’ said Nelson, his attention already focusing on the captive as he said, ‘He needs to be stripped.’

Serene felt a surge in her groin, and nodded to Sack. ‘Go ahead.’

Sack first snipped the plastic ties binding her father’s wrists, and one of his hands immediately went to his mouth to grab the plug and lever it out.

‘Serene!’ he hissed, fear and rage in his voice, then he tried to fight Sack off, which was a complete waste of effort as soon as Sack touched him with a disabler and dropped him,
writhing into unconsciousness, on the floor. Sack then clicked open a flick knife and made short work of the prisoner’s soiled clothing. Serene stared at her father’s naked body, noted
that it had changed very little in twenty-eight years, remembered the hot shame and excitement when, like a loving daughter, she had climbed into his bed to cuddle him, also remembered him
violently pushing her away when she reached down and began rubbing his penis. The look on his face had changed from shock to disgust when he had gazed at her then, fear taking hold a second later
when he realized the vulnerable position he was in.

‘Into the frame,’ ordered Nelson.

Donald Galahad finally regained consciousness as Nelson was scrubbing him down with some antibiotic and antiviral solution.

‘Why?’ he said, his voice raw. ‘You already destroyed me.’

Serene stepped forwards, folding her arms. ‘You know why you are here?’

He nodded once, briefly. ‘I rejected you. I rejected the advances of a perverted precocious brat, and for that you hate me and will never forgive me.’

‘Quite right,’ said Serene. She glanced at Nelson but he didn’t seem to be listening to this exchange. Instead he walked over to a large wheeled cabinet and folded it open.
Then she glanced at Sack, but could read no expression in that lizard face, before returning her attention to her father. ‘You are now,’ she continued, ‘going to experience the
most unbelievable agony, Father, and it is just going to go on and on.’

‘Please,’ he said, ‘just kill me. Just kill me, yourself.’ He bowed his head and tears dripped from his eyes. She felt an odd rush of embarrassment at seeing this.
‘Please, my little Serene. Please . . .’

After that ‘little Serene’ – which reminded her that he had never said it to her again after that time she climbed into his bed – tuned him out and focused instead on
Nelson, who was viewing the surgical gear packed inside the cabinet.

‘You can get started,’ she told him.

Nelson did not waste a second. First he hooked up a couple of drips, into tubes of which he now injected various prepared concoctions. Her father remained with his head bowed, weeping quietly.
Nelson then went back to his cabinet and, like someone choosing chocolates from a box, made his selection.

Donald Galahad’s scream was an endless agonized full-throated warbling that just went on and on. Serene could detect notes of offence, disbelief, injustice – in fact a whole array of
underlying emotions. She wondered if she could become a connoisseur of such noises, listening to them like some Epicurean listening to a Mozart clarinet quartet. Then, as Nelson finally reached the
top of his victim’s stomach, the note changed, probably because the muscles had been sliced open now and her father couldn’t put everything into his scream.

‘The trick, of course,’ said Nelson, glancing round at her, while holding up the bloody electric cautery knife, ‘is to give them a sufficient quantity of my special cocktail so
as to keep them alive, but not enough to dull the pain.’

The split now ran from her father’s groin right up to his solar plexus, layers of yellowish fat and muscle everting like obscene lips. However, the knife he had used had been designed for
bloodless surgery, hot cells all across its surface detecting and cauterizing blood vessels just moments after the edge had passed through them. There was therefore hardly any blood at all. Nelson
next put the knife aside and picked up a small conventional scalpel, pushed open the fatty lips of the wound and reached inside, snipped neatly at this and that, and then all her father’s
intestines flooded out into the wide stainless steel bowl positioned at waist level in front of his abdomen. He screamed again; more in disbelief than in agony as he stared down at his own
entrails. Then he made a small grunting sound and his head slumped down on his chest.

‘Ah,’ said Nelson, pulling up her father’s head by the hair and fixing it back into the clamp behind. ‘Overload.’ He turned towards her again, smiling confidently.
‘Don’t worry, five or ten minutes from now he’ll regain consciousness and suffer just as much agony. Our only problem will be in trying to stop him wrecking his vocal
cords.’

‘How long can you keep him in agony and still alive?’ Serene asked.

‘My record has been one year and six months,’ he replied proudly. ‘There’s not much point in going on longer than that – because there’s not much left, you
understand?’

‘I understand,’ said Serene. She turned to Sack, who had been watching the proceedings impassively. ‘You stay here for the moment. You can tell Nelson all about your new
skin.’

He looked at her in puzzlement, but obeyed as she turned and headed for the elevator. The truth was that she didn’t want him or anyone else near her right then. She managed to hold on
until the elevator doors drew closed, then she went down on her knees and threw up on the floor. Big body-racking sobs ensued, until she stopped them by banging her forehead against the metal wall
until blood ran and dripped off her nose. Back up in her private rooms, she sealed the wound with glue and further tidied herself up. A brief instruction then summoned one of the house staff to
clean the elevator floor.

Mars

Shankil’s Butte lay in a haze of dust far behind them. In the low gravity, dust and other particulate matter lingered in the air for a long time. The problem
wasn’t as great as in zero gravity – an issue Var had often needed to deal with during construction of those Mars Travellers she worked on – but it still was a problem. Down
inside his hole, Martinez solved this with extractor fans pumping the thin air into big bonded fibre bags with a sufficiently loose weave.

‘Thank heavens for the Hoover,’ he had said.

By the puzzled expressions of the rest attending that particular meeting, Var realized they had no idea what he was talking about.

‘Haarsen is doing well,’ said Rhone from beside her. He had run out of conversation after a few hours, gone for a sleep in the cargo compartment of the ATV, but was now back again.
She still couldn’t quite fathom him, certainly didn’t trust him.

She glanced at him now. The weapons expert, Haarsen, had rendered chemicals from the Martian regolith to turn into a usable explosive. Once he’d got the process nailed, he had turned it
over to Leo in Stores, and turned his attention to other projects. He had designed easy and practical processes for manufacturing weapons, and was now well on his way to building a DEMP
emitter.

‘Yes, he is,’ she agreed, ‘but I wonder if it’s going to be enough.’ She stabbed a thumb behind them. ‘He wants to put the DEMP in a bunker on top of
Shankil’s Butte. If the
Scourge
comes here, it can railgun the DEMP emitter then drop a nuke down the hole Martinez is digging. Failing that, the two thousand troops aboard can be
landed and come down after us.’

They now knew that the
Scourge
possessed shuttles capable of descending through Martian atmosphere. And of course, even if the
Scourge
didn’t come after them this time, it
might come in the future, or some other ship would be sent, produced in that sudden hive of industry growing in Earth orbit.

‘What other options do we have?’ asked Rhone, and for the first time she saw fear in his eyes. Maybe until now it had all been just an intellectual exercise for him.

Var gazed steadily ahead, while considering how close Shankil’s Butte stood to their rabbit hole. Perhaps there were some further options . . .

‘We’ll go with what we have now,’ she decided, ‘but maybe we should consider laying some of the new explosive around the butte. A series of properly placed charges might
be our last option. You’re the geologist – you tell me.’

‘What do you mean?’ Rhone asked.

‘I mean, would it be possible to drop a few million tonnes of stone into that hole to plug it up?’

‘Yes, it’s possible.’ Rhone seemed a little nauseated at the prospect.

Var recalled how, upon seeing the shepherd that Ricard had sent striding after her across the Martian landscape, she had thought it looked like something out of H. G. Wells’s
The War of
the Worlds.
Future Martians, she felt, only stood a chance of remaining free and surviving the dictatorship of Earth if they took the route of another such Wellsian creation.

‘A future branch of the human race,’ she said idly.

It seemed that Lopomac, who had been in the cargo compartment behind, with two recruits from Martinez’s men, had been reading her mind. ‘We become morlocks,’ he said, leaning
through into the cockpit, and seemingly amused by the whole idea. ‘Historically, it’s not unusual for rebels or freedom fighters to go literally underground.’

‘And that will be our future?’ said Rhone. ‘Always under the ground and skulking in shadows?’

‘I’d rather skulk in shadows that spend any time in a nicely well-lit adjustment cell.’

Rhone seemed to have no answer to that, and Var wondered if his problem was actually accepting that there was no way back to Earth for them. If that was the case, then he would be completely the
wrong person to be leader of Antares Base. He would merely get them all killed.

Var pointed ahead to a distant structure now becoming visible and changed the subject. ‘So, how much cable are we talking about?’

Rhone seemed happier with this question. ‘The cliff that the lift was positioned above is nearly a kilometre high, and the cradle ran up and down between two cables, so at a minimum
there’s two thousand metres of it.’

‘More than enough,’ opined Lopomac.

The distant object was now clearer: a kind of frame around some sort of bulky object, probably a motor or cable drum, though much of it was concealed behind the line of the horizon. Maybe just
another half-hour would bring them there and since, throughout the hours of driving, she had gained no further insight into Rhone’s motivations, she decided it was time to be less
circumspect.

‘Tell me, Rhone,’ she finally said, ‘if you were in charge, what would you do?’

Rhone stared at her but, as ever, she could read nothing in his expression, so she returned to concentrating on where she was driving.

‘There are so many variables,’ he said, then seemed at a complete loss. Maybe he had never really thought about this too deeply. She felt certain he wanted her position but now
wondered if that was actually not based on some deep conviction that he could do better, but simply stemmed from the kind of ladder-climbing found in any organization. It frightened her to realize
quite how incompetent and
vaguely
motivated an enemy could be.