Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2) (33 page)

She gazed at this display in bewilderment. Traitors should pay with their lives, and if they possessed information, they should be tortured until they revealed every last scrap of it; then they
should be disposed of. The rebels aboard Argus Station and on Mars should face lengthy punishment before the eyes of the world, and an especial place should be reserved in Hell for Alan Saul. But
this was far too much punishment for a man who had merely rejected the sexual advances of his own child; this was far too much even for the man who had made the dictator of Earth feel shame both
when she was a child and again now.

It was time for this to end.

She swung her attention across to Nelson, and studied him intently.

His expression was one of childlike wonder, and his hand was inside his lab coat, where a bloodstain was showing through. He was probably tugging at one of his numerous piercings and, after she
left here, he would doubtless end up jacking off on the output from a disabler. For putting temptation in her way, Nelson should be made to suffer. For distracting her from her prime purpose, he
should end up on one of his own frames. But that was pointless, because with his screwed-up wiring, such pain as this would be the ultimate in ecstasy for him.

‘Sack,’ she said, glancing round and gesturing her bodyguard forwards.

Sack stepped up beside her with alacrity, but she had caught him out because it had taken him a moment to wipe from his face an expression of disgust that even showed through his keroskin.
‘Give me your sidearm.’

He reached under his jacket, removed a heavy automatic, spun it round in his lizard-skin hand and presented it to her butt first.

‘This was my father’s,’ he said, which gave Serene a moment of pause. Was that somehow significant? She shook her head in irritation, took the weapon and stepped forward, as
close to her father as she could get.

Donald Galahad’s gaze seemed to focus on her for a moment, then drifted away again. He was making a throaty whimpering and when his mouth opened briefly she saw that he had chewed his own
tongue down to a stub.

‘Father,’ she said, and his gaze drifted back to her. ‘Father, I am going to end this now.’ No reaction; his attention slid away again and more drool dripped from his
chin.

‘But you can’t,’ said Nelson. ‘He is perfect now.’

How did she get here? How did this happen?

She raised the automatic and snapped off one shot, the recoil nearly throwing the weapon out of her hand. However, her aim had been true and the bullet punched a hole straight through the glass
vessel her father’s heart resided in.

‘No!’ Nelson yelled, throwing himself at her.

Sack intervened quickly, catching hold of the man and slamming him face down on the floor, a knee planted in his back.

Blood arced from the hole in the glass vessel and spattered the floor immediately to Serene’s right. She inspected the weapon she held, realized it was of some antique design, hence the
recoil. Now settling into a Weaver stance she fired twice more into the heart, watched it stutter to a halt, then transferred her aim directly to her father. His head was waving from side to side
and his lungs, hanging in a large cellophane bag to the right of his heart, were still sucking and blowing. Obviously all the extra equipment here, the extra venous shunts and feeds of artificial
blood, were keeping Donald Galahad functioning beyond the lifespan of his own heart.

Serene fired twice more, the first shot hitting his cheekbone and taking off the side of his face, the second demolishing his nose and blowing his brains out of the back of his skull. She
lowered the weapon, suddenly feeling utterly calm again, utterly centred.

‘I understand now,’ she said, stepping back. ‘In my position it is possible for me to gratify every human urge, every single whim. I can indulge in any cruelty, play power
games, mind games and never lose. This was necessary.’ She turned and gazed down at Nelson. ‘Kill him.’ Sack responded immediately, reaching down and twisting the man’s head
right round with a sound like a tyre going over an apple, then stood up leaving Nelson shuddering on the ground, his head facing backwards.

Serene handed over the automatic. ‘I’ve outgrown such games now.’ She gestured back to her father’s remains. ‘But I needed to find out.’

‘Ma’am?’ Sack asked, puzzled.

‘Let us say I needed to get this thing out of my system, so I could at last see what is really important.’ She headed for the elevator, knowing that this time she wouldn’t be
throwing up inside it. ‘Clear out this cellar,’ she said, ‘clear it out completely.’ She paused for a second. ‘I want it remodelled. I want sun pipes leading down
here, and I want a garden. Yes, I want a garden . . . with a pool . . . with carp in it.’

She glanced back at her bodyguard even as she reached the elevator doors, again catching one of his usually hidden expressions. Only when she was in the elevator and ascending did she realize
what it might signify. She had never seen Sack actually look frightened before, and she found that oddly appealing.

Argus

Alex and Alexandra carefully exited the hydroponics unit airlock and looked around. The robots were gone but, when Alex propelled himself to a nearby girder and paused
there, he could feel the vibrations of their distant activity in the station rim. According to Alexandra, the robots were over two kilometres away right now.

Alex then launched himself towards the new structure just twenty metres away from the hydroponics unit, snagging a cable as he arrived and bringing his feet down on a thick mass of resin-bonded
wiring. Alexandra caught the same cable, and pulled herself down beside him. He quickly reeled out their combined safety and communications line, and they connected up.

‘They sure that’s a fast transport system?’ she asked as soon as they could talk.

‘Looks something like a tubeway network,’ he said. ‘Tactical reckons that, with the interior being vacuum, they should be able to squirt passenger or cargo modules around
faster than in a scramjet.’

‘Crazy,’ said Alexandra.

‘Exactly,’ he said.

Whenever the robots weren’t actually testing this machine, communications with the
Scourge
had continued, Alexandra grabbing everything she could from the station system and sending
it that way. All the weird images and sounds had been analysed, all the intercepted communications run through specialized computer programs. Tactical had thereby come back with what seemed to be
the correct answer: Alan Saul wasn’t dead but very badly injured, his brain damaged by Two’s shot to the head, but, such was the hardware in his skull and his computer links into the
system and to the robots, that he was impossible to cut out. The entire station was now being run by someone who had lost a large chunk of his brain.

‘Okay,’ Alex continued, ‘the space docks next – check your rifle.’

Alexandra set her Kalashtech assault rifle to vacuum function and ran a diagnostic on it. ‘If we have to use these, then that’s probably the end for us.’

Alex switched his rifle over too, also running a diagnostic. Both weapons had recently been in a warm, oxygenated and moist environment, which usually wasn’t a problem but could become one
once they were moved into vacuum. Gas pockets forming in some components could expand and cause damage, as could the abrupt temperature change, and trapped moisture might turn to ice. There were no
problems with either rifle, but, with the remaining ceramic ammo divided between them, they only had two clips each, one full and the other containing about half its usual load of eighty
bullets.

‘If we get into trouble and get separated,’ Alex declared, as he led the way along the surface of the weird new structure, ‘you must head straight for the plane. You know
exactly what we want, so, if you encounter a problem there, head straight back to the hydroponics unit.’ He paused reflectively. ‘And you remember what to do if you’re cornered,
with no chance of escape?’

‘I give myself up,’ she replied woodenly.

He glanced round at her and noted her frown. It had been hard enough for him to accept that this was the best option, for his own conditioning cried out at the very idea of surrender. Alexandra,
in her inexperience and her youth, had great difficulty first accepting that she had been subject to conditioning at all, and utterly rebelled against the thought of giving herself up.

As they crossed from the new structure to a cageway leading into near-space levels of the rim, retracing the route they had taken earlier to get to the hydroponics unit before the robots started
tearing this particular area apart, he once again ran through what he had been telling her repeatedly for some time. It was something she seemed to forget every time she slept, but every time he
reminded her it seemed to stick in her mind a little more.

‘We have nothing that will be of tactical value to the rebels, because those communicating with us have ensured that,’ he said. ‘We have both been conditioned to fight to the
death when facing capture, because the Chairman did not want any information we might possess falling into enemy hands.’ That was not strictly true, though it was what Alex himself had
believed for about the first ten years of his life. But he had come to realize, over the ensuing twenty years, that they were conditioned to fight to the death simply because they were a disposable
commodity.

‘If we die,’ he continued, ‘we can do nothing for the Chairman and therefore will have failed him. If we are captured, though, there is still a chance, when the
Scourge
attacks, for us to free ourselves and rescue him.’

‘I understand,’ she said, but still she doubted him.

From the cageway they headed on round, two levels below the outer skin of the rim, towards the space docks. Here the beam-work of walls marked out corridors and rooms, but only a few of the wall
plates – ten centimetres of insulation sandwiched between layers of bubblemetal – had as yet been welded in place. Work here had ceased completely during the struggle between Saul and
Smith, and never recommenced. Half a kilometre further on, they reached a completed wall with a wide bulkhead door inset. Alex pulled down the manual handle – the fact that he could even move
it indicating that vacuum lay on the other side – and they stepped through into a section of the level that was almost complete but had yet to be pressurized.

‘What’s that?’ Alexandra asked, pointing to an object drifting through vacuum ten metres along the corridor they had now entered.

Alex focused on the thing she indicated. It must have been shaken loose during that recent course change but had yet to be dragged to the floor by the nigh-indiscernible gravity of the central
asteroid, or pinned against a wall by station spin. For a moment he just could not quite process what he was seeing, so strange did it look in this setting. Then he understood.

‘It’s a boot,’ he said. ‘I think we just found the mortuary.’

It was through the next doorway, a long room along the back wall of which the casualties of past battles aboard the station had been stacked in two heaps, like cordwood. Alex stepped inside and
viewed the scene before him. He knew that originally the corpses here had all been clad in fatigues or vacuum combat suits. Now, all the corpses in one pile had been stripped while those in the
second pile were awaiting the attention of whatever robot had been given this task. Gazing at the naked dead, Alex could discern which ones had died in VC suits that had remained sealed or had
sealed themselves with breach glue: they were the ones that had not deflated as the water evaporated from their bodies – it was now frozen inside them. They were the ones that looked less
like something dragged from a hole in Ancient Egypt’s Valley of Kings.

‘We should check those.’ He pointed to the heap of corpses that were still clothed.

‘Why?’ Alexandra asked the question in a whisper, as if her voice might disturb those here, even though vacuum lay between them and the dead.

‘Ammo,’ Alex replied succinctly.

He was about to step forward when her hand clamped on his shoulder and she abruptly jerked him back towards the wall adjacent to the door. He turned suddenly, grabbing her wrist and twisting,
thinking for a moment that she was attacking him. Then he saw it, released his hold and squeezed back against the wall beside her.

In vacuum, it came through the door with eerie silence for something so large. Alex recognized it at once as the same design of construction robot that Saul had originally hijacked during his
assault against Smith. The thing looked like a giant steel ant, pairs of limbs terminating in flat gecko-pad feet extending from its two rear sections; its front section, arrayed with glassy
sensors, was raised up with two limbs extending from it, both sporting numerous cutters and manipulators. In one of these it was carrying a roll of material, which, when it reached the corpses, it
shook open to reveal as a large netting bag. Steadily it set to work, picking up a woman in a VC suit and swiftly divesting her of her garment. The suit went straight into the bag, the woman onto
the other heap.

‘Out of here,’ muttered Alex, and soon they were moving away from there just as fast as they could.

‘What is that thing doing?’ Alexandra asked.

‘Maybe they’ve decided those VC suits are going to be needed,’ Alex replied, trying to be pragmatic but, in his heart, failing. ‘Come on, let’s speed it up
now.’

It took them two hours to reach the exterior of Docking Pillar Two, climbing an access tube for maintenance robots leading out of the rim and up between some fuel silos. Alex found it difficult
to shake off the sense of doom that had descended on him since they saw the corpses and, from Alexandra’s monosyllabic replies to anything he said, he knew she felt the same. He gazed out at
the stars, trying to develop a better mood from the sight of them, but all he could think was how very far from Earth they were.

Directly above them, Messina’s space plane occupied one entire docking face. Each such face could take two of the normal space planes, but the
Imperator
was much larger. Simply
inverting themselves, they walked up the pillar until they reached the plane’s nose, circumvented this and then walked up along one side of it.