Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2) (48 page)

‘Yes, ma’am.’ Calder hesitated.

‘Do go on,’ said Serene. ‘You will not be punished for voicing a reasoned scientific opinion.’

‘Very well. I was given data to assess, but I was also told that Alan Saul had been seriously injured and might even be dead. A further implication was that this project might be the
result of his injured mind still holding sway over Argus. Perhaps, in such a condition, he could have been persuaded by pseudoscience.’

Serene just stared at him for a long moment. ‘What is your opinion of Rhine?’

Calder ducked his head as if trying to physically evade the question, but then he grimaced and replied, ‘He is undoubtedly a genius, unstable, but still a genius. Even putting aside his
zero-point research he has made some huge advances in nanotechnology.’

‘What is your opinion of this theorized space drive of his?’

‘The theory itself is old,’ said Calder, ‘first propounded by the physicist Miguel Alcubierre in the twentieth century. His drive required all sorts of things that just
weren’t considered possible back then, like exotic matter, so was shot down as unviable because of the huge energy requirement calculated, and the probability that anyone using it would be
fried by Hawking radiation.’

‘But what’s Rhine’s take on it?’

‘Brilliant as ever. You don’t need exotic matter if you can use normal matter to create the same effects. You don’t need vast amounts of energy if you’re persuading the
universe itself to comply rather than trying to force it. The Hawking radiation thing might still be a problem, but only at or above the speed of light, but even then the theory has its
holes.’

‘So you think it’s possible?’

Calder’s hunted look had become more pronounced. ‘I’m not sufficiently qualified to judge, but I’m certainly not sufficiently qualified to dismiss anything undertaken by
Rhine.’

‘Thank you for your honesty,’ said Serene. ‘You will be receiving a ten billion Euro supplement to your funding, which you will then use to conduct research into this . . .
Rhine drive. I am presuming Rhine’s data and research notes are still available here?’

‘Every . . . all . . . everything before Messina moved him,’ Calder replied, stunned.

‘Then I will leave you to get to work, since you have much to do.’

Serene cut the connection and sat back. Vast possibilities were now opening up. If this space drive really was a possibility, then it was even more essential that Argus Station be seized. Jasper
Rhine needed to be moved onto the list of those who must be captured alive, and, though minor damage of what had already been built in Argus’s rim might be required to prevent the entire
station escaping, its destruction could not be countenanced. Serene at once began recording a message intended for Clay Ruger and Captain Scotonis.

Argus

Much had been torn out and altered to accommodate the new structure in the outer rim. Gazing at it again, Alex now saw what he should have noticed before, which the
advisers back on Earth should have seen too. How could this thing possibly be some sort of fast transport system for running personnel and materials around the rim? Before it was closed off, he
recollected that the internal pipe had been only half a metre across, which could just about accommodate a man if he was prepared to squash himself into something like one of those hydroponics
transport cylinders. Also, the great bulk of electromagnets wrapping round the pipe – expanding the machine to three metres across – seemed far in excess of what would be required for
such a purpose, just as the heavy beam-work supporting the thing seemed far more than might be required to keep it stable. This was definitely designed for something else.

Alex crossed the area it occupied, gazing right along its length to where it curved out of sight in the distance. He then followed familiar routes to his destination, and when he arrived he was
thankful that things had not changed drastically there. The mortuary was still in place and, after watching it for a while, he ascertained that the robot that had been working here earlier seemed
to be absent now. Alex eventually ducked inside to inspect the mortuary’s contents.

The corpse piles were smaller – many more of them now probably having passed through the station’s digesters – and thankfully the robot had not completed its assigned task, no
doubt having been reassigned to something more relevant to the very survival of the station. Two piles of corpses still occupied the room, those in one pile yet to be stripped of their spacesuits.
Alex headed over and began turning some of them over, finding sometimes he had to apply his boot to separate those that were frozen together. He meticulously checked five of them until he found one
whose VC suit seemed undamaged, then ran a diagnostic through the suit’s wrist panel. The suit was clearly fine, so he stripped it off, rolled up its bulk as best he could, strapped it to his
back and set off. Now he had a spare and with luck wouldn’t again end up trapped like he had been in the hydroponics unit.

Next he needed to communicate with the
Scourge
. Plenty of options to that end lay further in towards the centre of the station, but unfortunately the closer he got to the centre the more
likely he was to be captured. He headed out, trying to remember the schematics he and Alexandra had used, forever on the lookout for some viable alternative. Eventually he climbed out onto the rim
itself and gazed around, astounded by the view.

What the hell were they up to? Only now, out here on the rim, did Alex realize that Argus Station was no longer speeding through vacuum. Yes, while he had been in the hydroponics unit he had
felt the changes in acceleration, but his mind hadn’t been functioning at its best, and the effects he felt could just as easily have been the result of ordinary course changes, since at any
one time he hadn’t known the position of the hydroponics unit relative to the station’s direction of travel.

Gazing at the red asteroid far over to his right and partially obscured by the station itself, Alex finally gained some sense of scale and began to understand fully what he was seeing. A
smelting plant had been extended all the way to the surface and the activity he could see – the movement of glittering metal under the work lights and the steady flow of objects between the
plant and the surface – was simply robots on the move. This might account for the absence of the corpse-stripping robot, and why he had spotted no others inside the rim. Maybe heading towards
the centre of the station would not be as dangerous for him as he had feared, but there was something else he needed to check out first.

He turned and crossed a few hundred metres of rim to bring himself into the shadow of a steering thruster, and stepped up onto its massive turntable. The device was so crusted with soot that it
took him some minutes of scraping to find an access panel. Undoing the bolts that secured the panel was slightly beyond any of the manual tools he had in his small toolkit, but he did have a small
diamond wheel cutter that ran off his suit’s power supply, so he merely sliced the heads off the bolts. The panel popped out easily – two layers of bubblemetal sheet sandwiching ten
centimetres of insulation – and he placed it down on the deck, holding it in place with his foot. Revealed inside was the control circuitry and, as he had hoped, a secondary transponder
should the optic wiring to this steering thruster fail. He unravelled his suit’s optic connector cable and inserted its plug into the first of the transponder’s four ports.

After a second, a display opened in his suit’s visor and, using his wrist panel, he began sorting through the options now available to him. Changing the set-up was a lengthy task, but one
he was trained for. He reset the output frequency, input a channel code, but then the suit display informed him of a hardware failure. Biting down on his frustration, he checked through the whole
process again, then, feeling like an idiot, stretched a finger out to the transponder board and flipped over a small breaker to power it up manually.

HARDWARE INSTALLED, the display informed him.

Now his suit radio was connected to the more powerful transmitter located in this thruster, so its range now stretched somewhat beyond just a few kilometres.

‘Hello,
Scourge
, are you receiving?’ he asked, then kept repeating the same words every ten seconds over the next five minutes.

Eventually a reply arrived. ‘This is the
Scourge
. Com Officer Linden speaking. Who is this?’

‘I would have thought,’ said Alex, ‘since I am using this particular coded channel, that who
this is
should be obvious.’

‘If you are who I hope you are,’ said another whom Alex recognized as Clay Ruger, ‘you will be able to tell me where Alexandra obtained her Argus system modem.’

‘Rim storage 498A – a storeroom listed on the station manifest, but which hadn’t been used for at least two years and from which, according to Tactical, it was highly unlikely
anyone would notice the loss.’

‘Welcome back, Alex. Long time no hear,’ said Ruger. ‘Where have you been?’

‘Hiding in that hydroponics unit Tactical directed us to,’ Alex explained. ‘My suit was damaged so I wasn’t able to leave the unit.’

‘And Alexandra?’

‘Dead.’ It surprised him how much it hurt to say that.

‘That is unfortunate,’ said Ruger, his tone hardly sympathetic. ‘What is your situation now?’

‘I have no resources but for the standard-format spacesuit I’m wearing and one VC suit I managed to steal. Right now I’m standing on the station rim, boosting my suit signal
through a thruster’s secondary control transponder, and the longer I stay here the more chance there is that I’ll be spotted.’

‘Wait one moment. Let me check something.’

‘I can’t keep waiting out here.’

‘Patience, Alex.’

Alex waited, glancing around frequently to check. Long slow minutes dragged by until Ruger replied.

‘The transponder you are using is a plug-in board with the digits ELEC105 on its disc-chip?’

‘It is,’ Alex replied.

‘It’s not just a transponder.’

‘No, really?’ said Alex sarcastically. Of course it wasn’t. A transponder occupying a four-centimetre-square board was only something you would find in a museum. The
transponder itself was probably too small to even see.

‘The board the transponder is sited on also serves as a navigational computer and diagnostics platform,’ said Ruger calmly. ‘In the event of hard-wiring failures, it responds
to signals from the other thrusters and fires itself up in consonance. It contains judgement software too, transponder linked to station sensors – therefore a very complicated piece of kit.
However, it has its own rechargeable power supply and can be unplugged.’

‘So I can get myself out of here now?’

‘Wait and listen,’ Ruger snapped. ‘If you pull that now, you won’t be able to communicate with us. On the back of it are four terminals marked AER 1 to 4. You must use
just AER 4 to connect to a monopole antenna. I am told that, with our distance from you now, all you will need is a couple of metres of metal.’

‘Is that all?’ Alex asked.

‘How are you for air?’

‘Three hours left in this suit and about an hour and a quarter in the VC suit.’

‘That should be enough for now,’ Ruger replied. ‘Hide yourself while I get our tactical officer here to assess your situation. I will speak to you again in precisely two hours,
Ruger out.’

Alex quickly detached the transponder board and, like a night creature fleeing from the glare, returned inside the shadows of the station rim.

Rock Fall

Mars looked ancient, unchanging and eternal. It had remained the same for billions of years, so how could humans possibly hope to make any impression on such immensity?
What wasn’t taken into account was that for billions of years the strongest force on the surface of Mars had been the blowing of winds that, in the thin atmosphere, would struggle to turn a
terran wind turbine, but which had nevertheless sandblasted the planet’s valleys over eternities of time. Putting a human colony, with all its disruption and its machines, in Valles Marineris
was like allowing a family of mice to take up residence in a house of cards. Boulders which would have fallen from the cliffs only after a thousand years more of attrition by the dust storms, now
came loose very quickly and fell. The warnings were there, but the colonists ignored them and instead decided rock climbing might be a good recreation. The result would perhaps have been less
unfortunate if they had not decided to scale the cliffs and slopes directly overlooking their base.

Mars

After finishing the recording in the computer, Var cued it up ready to send on repeat, then she stood up. She had to keep moving, had to keep searching for some way to
change her seemingly inevitable death sentence. Inserting Lopomac’s super-caps into the power box of the building brought all the light back on, and enabled Var to search through the
containers scattered around inside. Rhone was right: there was no oxygen here, but she did find a ten-litre barrel of water that was frozen solid. She gazed at it for a long while, considering what
would be required to crack the water to source its breathable oxygen, but the sums just did not add up. She would first have to thaw the water, then it would be necessary to find some kind of
electrolyte to mix into it. Next she would have to rig up some method of getting the resulting oxygen into her suit, maybe using the bottle-recharging pumps to compress and store it. All that would
take too much power, so it wasn’t an option.

Within the building she also found some tools, a couple of radiant heaters that would have drained the super-caps within an hour, and some packets of dried soup. All of these were useless to
her.

Outside. . .

She mustn’t simply accept Rhone’s word about the lack of oxygen here, because if there was any here he clearly wouldn’t have told her. She stepped out through the airlock into
Martian twilight, now that the sun had gone down behind the mountains, then paused. Perhaps it would be better to wait until morning. She would still have enough air, and the light would be better.
To do a proper search of her surroundings now would require her using her suit lights, which would again use up her remaining power supply. She decided therefore to search as best she could without
the benefit of lights. Even though such activity would burn up her air supply quicker, she could not contemplate just sitting inside doing nothing.