Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2) (34 page)

‘Access would have been easier from inside,’ said Alex, ‘but the cams are still operating in there and, even if there’s no human watching, recognition software is sure to
be.’

‘Yeah, sure,’ Alexandra grunted.

He continued, ‘My guess is that someone
is
watching and that there will be guards inside. Because I’m betting there are some on the station who have contemplated stealing a
plane and escaping.’

‘They won’t know about the hibernation equipment here,’ said Alexandra, gesturing to the plane beside them.

‘Here.’ Alex paused beside a large bulge on the hull, reached out and took hold of a recessed handle and began turning it. ‘No,’ he went on, ‘no one is likely to
know about that but, as you grow in experience, Alexandra, you learn not to underestimate the power of human stupidity.’

After turning the handle five times, he pulled out a ten-centimetre-deep plug of nanotube carbon to reveal a simple keypad. He input the required code and stepped back.

‘I bet there are those who, given the chance,’ he said, ‘are prepared to steal a plane and fly off to meet the
Scourge
, expecting to be picked up and eventually taken
home. Scotonis would simply ignore them and continue his pursuit of this station, so they would die aboard their escape craft.’

The bulge rose a little, then slid aside to reveal an airlock. Here another keypad required a code to open the outer door, whereupon they both squeezed inside the narrow space for the lock to
pressurize, before stepping on into the space plane itself.

‘The air’s good,’ said Alex, sliding his visor aside.

The
Imperator
was luxuriously appointed. They had stepped into the section containing the rows of acceleration chairs, but even these were considerably more comfortable than any found
aboard a normal plane, for each was even provided with its own mini-bar, swing-over table, screen and entertainment console. The real luxury, however, was in the suite of rooms lying beyond. Alex
glanced without interest at a cocktail bar, a fully appointed kitchen, the massage parlour and the zero-G bathroom with its high-tech appliances making it possible for Messina to enjoy a jacuzzi
without drowning. Upon passing through the door into Technical and Tacks, both he and Alexandra had to stop and scrape off the layer of fluff that their gecko-boot soles had picked up from the
thick carpet. Shortly afterwards Alexandra came to stand before a console and screen.

‘This is more like it,’ she said, sounding a lot happier as she unhitched her pack of equipment, which she had not wanted to leave behind, and shoved it down beside the chair. Unlike
the gear inside her pack, this console possessed the full complement of military software, including penetration and sabotage programs. She sat, cracked her knuckles, booted up the console, and was
soon into Argus’s system. Alex moved away, and began searching the plane for food, water and ammunition. Soon he returned to her with sealed packs of soldier’s rations.

‘That all?’ she asked.

‘That’s all. All the Chairman’s stocks have been taken – all the luggage too.’

‘Figures.’ Like him, she ate with slow care, aware of what such rich food could do to them after so long without.

‘I’m seeing no sign that they’re moving the Gene Bank samples, and the data remains as widely distributed as it was before,’ she told him.

‘Make absolutely sure of that,’ he replied, ‘then check to see if there’s any sign that they’ve been preparing a space plane.’ He moved off, hoping to find
something more than the small box of ration packs he had shoved inside his backpack. Checking the kitchen, he found that it had been totally stripped, too, not even spices remaining. When he
finally entered the armoury, just behind the plane’s cockpit, he didn’t even feel any disappointment, for he had expected it to be as empty as he found it. He returned to stand behind
Alexandra.

‘Something else is going on,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why, but they’re preparing one of the smelting plants for refining a huge amount of mercury ore.’
Schematics began coming up on the screen.

‘Where would they get the ore?’ he asked. Then he realized: ‘An asteroid.’

‘But why?’ she asked, now frantically searching.

‘What’s that?’ he asked, seeing a system of pipes being highlighted in red.

‘They intend to pipe it in . . . but that’s odd.’ She checked back through schematics, tracing something, then abruptly sat back. ‘It’s that thing the robots are
building – it runs below the smelting-plant dock and there’s some sort of junction there. They’re going to pipe the mercury inside it, and there are plans here to connect the ring
up with the station’s astrogation system. It makes no sense at all.’

All at once it made perfect sense to Alex. ‘That’s no tube transport system . . .’

Just then, as they gazed at the screen, the soft thump of an airlock door opening was all too audible. Alex looked back the way he had come, from the armoury, to where the main tube airlock
entered the docking pillar. Something came through fast, hit the ceiling above the door and bounced down to thump heavily against the floor, where it drove its piton feet straight into the
metal.

‘Drop your weapons.’

The voice speaking through the new arrival was recognizable as Langstrom’s. Alex knew they were done, but in that same instant he knew for certain that his partner would not obey his
earlier instructions.

‘No!’ he managed, just as Alexandra skidded her chair backwards, snatching up her weapon and raising it. Her weapon thundered, firing a full clip of ceramic ammunition at this
jury-rigged mobile readergun. Alex himself staggered back towards the door as the robot replied with a brief burring sound, bright light flashing from its turret. Blood and chunks of flesh sprayed
out from the back of Alexandra’s VC suit, and bonelessly she slammed into Alex, knocking him further back into the room behind.

Alex pushed himself away from her, glimpsed the robot now tilted over, the legs on one side of it blown away. With his rifle still strapped across his back, he threw himself aside as its weapon
burred again. One shot clipped his oxygen pack and another caught his shin and spun him round, but he fell out of its line of sight. He dragged himself along by handfuls of soft carpet, propelling
himself onwards.

Those who had sent this robot in probably did not know about the secret airlock. He finally reached it, dragged himself inside, slapped a repair patch over the bloody wreckage of his leg, then
watched breach foam boil out round that, even as the airlock evacuated. Next he pulled himself out into vacuum, and somehow just kept going.

For fifty minutes everyone hung on as the steering thrusters flipped Argus over and stabilized it. Half an hour after this, the big Mars Traveller engine fired up, and Hannah
had something more than just her sticky boots to secure her to the floor of Tech Central. It was a weird feeling, and it reminded her of the boost out from the Moon’s orbit and the relief she
had felt then, the knowledge that they were moving away from Earth and the Committee. However, despite that memory, she knew that now the same sensation was bringing the reach of the Committee
– albeit a rather changed version – closer and closer. As they now decelerated towards the edge of the Asteroid Belt, the
Scourge
would be rapidly gaining on them. They would
have, at best, a month moored to asteroid HJI457 before it was fully upon them. Le Roque and Langstrom were thoroughly aware of this, too, and she could see it in their faces.

‘A space drive,’ said Le Roque, gazing disbelievingly at the images relayed to his three big screens from the interior of the rim.

The course correction, which had occurred just after she discovered what the station robots were building in the outer rim, had started Le Roque asking questions. The correction looked as if it
had been in the system queue ever since they left the Moon behind them, but Le Roque declared otherwise. When it became evident that Saul was not regaining consciousness, he had checked everything
so as to ascertain their status, ensuring there were no surprises awaiting him, and he had seen no course correction in the queue then. It seemed that Saul was giving orders from his sleep, and
slipping them in under anything else put in after he entered that state. This present deceleration was a case in point. Le Roque had also found out about the work that Leeran and Pike were doing in
one of the station’s smelting plants, and by then Hannah knew she could keep it from him no longer.

‘We can’t allow this to be generally known,’ she explained. ‘We might have taken out one of Messina’s clones, but the other one might still be able to send
information straight back to the
Scourge
.’

‘The woman we shot had a pack of jury-rigged com equipment with her, which was probably what they were using,’ said Langstrom. ‘And the man was shot in the leg, so he is more
likely to be struggling to survive rather than trying to find a way to communicate with the
Scourge
.’

‘Nevertheless,’ said Hannah. ‘We have to keep this under wraps. This is our edge, and this is what will enable us to survive.’

‘If it works,’ said Langstrom gloomily, turning to eye the proctor Paul, who, after Hannah had ordered Tech Central cleared, was the only other being present.

‘It can work, Commander Langstrom,’ the proctor assured him. ‘All that is in doubt is whether it can be made to work in time. The extent of the damage we will receive upon
entering the Asteroid Belt can only be calculated within limited parameters that range right up to the complete destruction of this station.’

‘Oh, happy day,’ said Langstrom. ‘So how did the Mars Traveller VI avoid damage when it went there for the Argus asteroid?’

‘Because when it went to the Asteroid Belt there was no disruption zone – it actually caused it.’

‘Right, fair enough,’ Langstrom conceded.

‘So what do we tell everyone?’ Le Roque asked.

‘We’re slowing so as to reduce asteroid debris damage,’ Hannah replied, noticing that he had now called up another picture on his array of screens. ‘They need know no
more than that.’

Le Roque stood staring at the new image, which was a view up the side of the Traveller VI engine and out into space. Trust him to spot that one right away.

‘This thing,’ he said, ‘is going to be built right across the mouth of the Traveller engine enclosure. Once it’s there, we won’t be able to use the Traveller engine
without destroying this . . . vortex generator.’

‘That’s true,’ Hannah replied, ‘but if the space drive works, we won’t need anything else again, and if it doesn’t work, it certainly won’t actually
stop us using the Traveller VI.’

He grunted in agreement and continued staring at the screen. She decided not to add that if Rhine’s space drive was a failure, whether or not they could fire up the Traveller engine was
irrelevant.

The deceleration lasted for a month, bringing their speed down to just above ten thousand kilometres per hour. Hannah expected more, but there was nothing. For three further months life aboard
the station continued. Leeran and Pike laboured to convert a whole smelting plant over to the refining of mercury extracted from its ore, and the robots continued building the vortex generator.
Then, towards the end of those three months, they finally arrived at the periphery of the Asteroid Belt.

The dust came first, seemingly without any effect until detectors picked up a slight elevation in the temperature on the station’s skin. Already pre-programmed, the steering thrusters
fired up again, turning the Mars Traveller engine away from their course so as to protect it, and tilting the station so that the brunt of any impacts would be taken against its base.

‘He prepared for this,’ Le Roque noted.

‘How so?’ Hannah asked, yet thought she knew.

‘The lower enclosure is thicker: thin case-hardened plates on the outside, closed-cell rock foam laminated with bubble-metal lying under that. The combination should act as a shock
absorber, and take out most of the sting of anything small. Also, it appears that most of the collision lasers are concentrated down there.’

‘Which only demonstrates how you must trust in his judgement.’ Hannah kept her expression blank as she said it. The enclosure had been all but finished before they made the course
change away from Mars, and she now remembered Saul saying something about Mars just being one stop on the way. But on the way where?

Yet another month passed, and then the collision lasers began to draw power from super-capacitor storage, perpetually topped up by the station’s fusion reactors. Hannah watched the
fireworks on a screen in her laboratory, while in her surgery James was detaching all but the monitoring equipment, the fluid and nutrient feeds and muscle tone stimulators from Saul. The spaces in
his skull had filled with new growth, but what now resided within that was open to debate. New bone had grown across the gaps in his skull, and was slowly thickening and hardening, while his
remaining injuries were just gradually fading scars. Hannah wanted him out of the surgery now so that she wouldn’t have to go through the decontamination routine every time she went in to
check on him. Saul had been installed in a bed for five days in her laboratory itself, when Argus Station received its first proper mauling from the Asteroid Belt.

A piece of debris weighing ten grams, which spectral analysis nailed down as eighty per cent nickel iron, came in so fast that the lasers only managed to warm it over. It hit the lower
enclosure, fragmenting and melting as it punched through the laminations, then entered the inner station as a fountain of white-hot vapour which left a shiny plating on a nearby I-beam. A second
and a third hit followed shortly afterwards, one failing to penetrate, but the next one cutting into a pressurized section of the station rim, the hole automatically sealed by the layer of rapidly
expanding sealant within the walls, and causing a brief fire that was quickly knocked out by a computer-controlled jet of carbon dioxide.

‘Breach protocols now apply,’ Le Roque announced a short while later, after which everyone constantly wore spacesuits or at least the more flimsy survival suits. He also moved as
many personnel as possible into the quarters located below Tech Central, where the bulk of the asteroid lying below would protect them from further impacts.