Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2) (47 page)

Eventually she reached the airlock tube and boarded the ore carrier. It jerked into motion once the airlock tube detached, and rose up towards the smelting plant. A hard vibration within the
carrier as it rose impelled Hannah to grab hold of one of the handles on the wall to steady herself. She didn’t know if such a vibration was usual, never having travelled this route before.
Twenty minutes later, she left the carrier compartment and ascended a tubeway taking her up to the control block. Even here that vibration persisted, and Hannah assumed it must be down to the
processes they were currently employing.

She found Pike and Leeran inside. The former stood facing the inward windows that overlooked the interior of the plant, while the latter was working at a bank of screens that displayed various
views of the asteroid.

‘Yes, I know,’ said Pike, without turning. ‘I just read your messages. At our present rate, the
Scourge
will be here before we’ve finished.’ Now he turned.
‘But that will change.’

‘How?’ asked Hannah, as she removed her helmet, feeling slightly uncomfortable in asking. She wasn’t in charge of Argus Station any more but, while browsing the station stats,
she had found herself unable to ignore that the refining rate simply wasn’t fast enough, and that intended alterations to the process still wouldn’t speed it up sufficiently. It seemed
that when you started taking responsibility for something, it was difficult to give it up.

‘The ovens aren’t anywhere near up to capacity yet,’ Pike replied, ‘but we’ll soon sort that out.’

‘As I understand it,’ said Hannah, ‘you’re about to send over another mining robot – the one that’s being transported up from underneath Tech Central right
now.’

‘That’s true,’ replied Pike, almost dismissively.

‘So that will effectively double the rate,’ Hannah suggested, again making the mental calculations she had made already, just to confirm. ‘That’s still not enough, as
we’ll only have three-quarters of the mercury we need before the
Scourge
arrives.’

‘Yes, but those are the only
mining
robots it’s feasible to use,’ said Pike.

Hannah just stared at him, appalled. How was it possible that she was here having to ask these questions? Why hadn’t Saul seen this and done something about it, rather than go gallivanting
off into the Belt, as he had?

‘Is that all you can say?’ she asked.

‘He is merely stating the facts, Hannah.’ Saul’s voice issued from the PA speakers near to hand. ‘We could move one of the big mining robots out, but that would probably
take us a week to achieve.’

‘Where are you?’ Hannah asked.

‘Just coming in to dock.’

‘So, tell me, how the hell are we going to get enough ore mined quickly enough?’

Saul simply said, ‘Show her, Pike.’

Pike gestured Hannah over and pointed into the plant’s interior. Extending along one wall below, an ore tube was feeding the distributor into a row of oblate furnaces. The distributor
itself was a large rectangular container that divided up the ore and impelled it, by Archimedean screw, down into each furnace. The furnaces meanwhile had been disconnected from the usual processes
they served in this area of the plant: the ceramic pipes and metal-foaming tanks, the carousels of moulds; the wire, bar stock and sheet-making machines. Instead, new pipes had been connected to
the furnaces, leading to rotary pumps then to cylindrical purification columns. From these, further pipes entered a single large pump from which extended the half-metre-wide pipe she had seen
outside.

‘There,’ said Pike, pointing upwards.

‘What am I looking at?’

‘The installation hatch is opening,’ he replied. ‘The interior is normally pressurized, so we had to make some adjustments to open it up to vacuum. Now it’s ready.’
He glanced at her. ‘Do you feel them?’

‘Feel what?’ Hannah asked, irritated.

‘The vibration.’

‘I thought that—’

Hannah now saw the big hatch opening, where Pike had pointed. It was just wide enough now for the first construction robot to come through, hauling a huge compressed-fibre sack. It attached this
to the neck of a port in the upper surface of the distributor and, like a spider handling a silk-shrouded corpse in its web, squeezed the contents down into the distributor. By the time it detached
the sack, another construction robot was attaching its own sack to yet another port, and had begun emptying it.

‘They started arriving just after you began heading up here,’ said Pike, gesturing back towards Leeran. ‘I thought you knew.’

Hannah turned to look at the other woman, who now sat back with her fingers interlaced behind her head and a smile on her face. The screen she was looking at displayed a view of the entire
asteroid, now resembling a fallen apple covered with steel ants. Hannah at once understood that these vibrations were nothing to do with the usual processes conducted within the plant, but
signified the arrival of Saul’s robot army – now diverted to the task of mining.

‘So everything is under control,’ she said.

Pike shrugged, and it was Saul who replied. ‘If the two little surprises I’ve left out there sufficiently slow down the
Scourge
, and if the drive works as predicted and
doesn’t fry us with Hawking radiation, then our chances have significantly improved.’

A super-mind he might possess, Hannah decided, but he still needed to learn a little diplomacy.

Earth

The garden was now finished: water tinkled down an obsidian waterfall into a long pool two metres wide, which extended from one side of the erstwhile torture chamber to
the other. An arched bridge crossed the centre of this pool, taking Serene from what she had called the jungle garden into her own little hideaway. Here, a Japanese pagoda shaded her from the
output of the sun pipes above. Underneath it, she sat in a comfortable lounger, which could be turned by means of a ball control lodged in one arm to face any of the four big free-standing screens
positioned amid the surrounding undergrowth.

All morning she had worked with her fold-across console and a small screen, checking reports, approving actions, sending queries, keeping her finger – as best she could – on the
pulse of a busily functioning world. However, it was gratifying that her underlings were now handling most of the detail, and much less was getting flagged for her personal attention than before.
It was possible for her to go for hours at a time now without having to respond to some query, and she utilized that extra time well, studying her world, flicking from one scene to another on her
screens, trawling up data that was of special interest to her, life-affirming data. Sometimes she even managed to grab herself some hours of natural sleep.

The screen she was presently studying showed various views and data displays from the Mars Traveller construction station. Every now and again an image or a report would appear on one of the
subdivided screen sections, a colour-coded marker up in one corner signifying its degree of importance. Generally all of these were low on the spectrum, and quite often blinked out again as soon as
one of her staff began dealing with them. They would only be passed on to her if some major decision was required that directly affected the goals she had laid out. The commissioning of the station
was going well. Already most of the fusion reactors were up and running, and fresh spaceship components were being manufactured. Admittedly there had been, thus far, nine hundred and sixty deaths
in the process, but not one of those who had died was irreplaceable.

The adjoining subscreen showed views of the Asian clearance, and they were quite astounding. After a recent monsoon, the soil exposed between the mountains of unburied rubble had sprouted plants
in an almost desperate profusion. It was as if the spores and seeds that had been trapped under the stony layers of the now-obliterated sprawls had at last seen their chance, and thrown all their
effort into new growth. It was as if Serene had at last allowed Gaia to breathe. But, again, the teams of biologists she had sent out there reported back much the same as did other teams elsewhere:
a lack of diversity, acres of plant life consisting mainly of human food crops, very few pollinating insects, a dearth of rotifers and the kind of subterranean life necessary to return the soil to
its optimum condition.

The same was true of the Madagascan clearance, even though it was still some way behind the Asian one; but the story in the surrounding seas was a better one. Serene had ordered demolition teams
in to destroy the walls of the thousands of square kilometres of west-coast fish farms. Changes in tidal patterns and a subsequent algae bloom had led to a small resurgence of sea life between
Madagascar and the coast of Africa. Palgrave’s opinion on this wasn’t all that enthusiastic, since that sea life generally consisted of genetically modified sea foods that were not
sufficiently diverse to avoid being swiftly destroyed by some viral infection.

They still desperately needed the Gene Bank data and samples, which, since recent events on Mars, was now the
Scourge
’s only mission.

This last thought focused her attention on the next screen. Four screen sections there showed frozen images of four people. These represented reports from Clay Ruger, Captain Scotonis, Commander
Liang and – ever since Serene’s private message to the woman – from Pilot Officer Trove. She had hoped that by demanding weekly reports from Trove, whom Clay had punished with her
own cabin inducer, she would get a truer picture of the situation aboard the
Scourge
. Trove would surely report any misbehaviour on Ruger’s part. However, all the latest reports had
been perfectly in order and everything seemed to be proceeding according to plan. All four reports had been quite similar in nature, which seemed somewhat suspicious, but Serene put that down to
her own ‘leadership paranoia’.

Yet another screen section showed the current Hubble image of Argus Station, which, just like any broadcast coming from out there, was always going to be nearly half an hour old. Her experts had
told Serene that the asteroid it was moored to consisted almost entirely of mercury ore, but few of them seemed to be able to come up with a plausible reason why it was being mined. But maybe this
related to some startling news she had received from Rhone on Mars, who had apparently found something in Var Delex’s files which in turn related to an earlier report from a professor working
in the South African Region nanotech development division. The professor’s verbal report she kept readily available to her on this same screen, and she now set it running again.

The grey-haired black man resembled a screen actor of the twenty-first century. Serene couldn’t remember the actor’s name, but did remember that he had played the role of an American
president, when that nation still existed, in a film she had watched during her history lessons. There had been something reassuringly mature about him, and the same applied to this Professor
Calder.

‘It is probably not generally known, because it was one of Messina’s private projects, that Professor Jasper Rhine was aboard Argus Station when it was stolen,’ Calder had
said.

‘And what precisely is this Professor Rhine’s field of study?’ Serene had asked.

‘His speciality is zero-point energy or, more specifically, realspace interaction with the zero-point field . . . that’s about as close as I can get, because then it all gets pretty
complicated.’

‘I know what zero-point energy is,’ Serene responded. ‘You forget that my own speciality was nanotech.’

‘Yes, quite so,’ he had responded. ‘When he was down here with us, Rhine was working on Casimir batteries and quantum-entangled materials that might lead to instantaneous
communication. He did actually construct his tangle boxes, as he called them. One was transported to Mars and the other remained here on Earth. When they didn’t work, Messina had him moved to
Argus Station to conduct research into . . . erm, the more esoteric areas involving the implications of zero-point energy.’

‘I think I can guess what that was, knowing Messina’s obsession with immortality,’ Serene had replied. ‘But how does all this relate to that device reportedly now being
built in the rim of Argus Station?’

‘Rhine was a serious researcher and development engineer, ma’am,’ had been Calder’s reply. ‘He actually did develop functioning Casimir batteries, though
unfortunately our political masters here did not see fit to pass that knowledge on.’ Calder paused, looking a bit uncomfortable. ‘He might well have conducted the research required of
him by Messina, but he would not have given up on his personal dream.’

‘And that is?’

‘An FTL drive.’ Calder nodded to himself. ‘Judging by all the information that was sent to me by your tactical team, that might well be what you are now seeing in Argus
Station.’

She had thanked Calder for his input and cut him off, then considered sending someone to arrest him for wasting her time. However, she had decided against that, and hung on to this recording.
Now she moved a cursor down to the bottom of the frozen screen section and hit the link to reopen communication with the same man.

After a five-minute delay, during which the screen segment just showed a wall mostly covered with a huge nanotech-development cladogram, Calder arrived and sat down, obviously out of breath.

‘Ma’am,’ he said, ‘how can I help you?’

‘It’s regarding our previous conversation,’ said Serene. ‘You expressed the opinion that the structure being built within the rim of Argus Station might be something
related to Jasper Rhine’s research.’ She found it difficult to herself say what Calder said next.

‘An FTL drive, yes.’

‘You are still of that opinion?’

Calder looked abruptly worried. ‘I’m merely putting that forward as a possibility. I expressed no opinion on whether it might be a working proposition.’

‘Alan Saul,’ said Serene, ‘is what we are now calling here on Earth a “comlifer”, that is a human mind melded with computer systems. In his case, it gave him the
ability to take over Argus and thereafter trash a large portion of the Committee infrastructure on Earth. One would then suppose that someone possessing such abilities would not be fooled by any
pseudoscience.’