Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2) (53 page)

He had to accept this and move on. First he needed to get somewhere he could change out of his present suit and into the VC suit strapped on his back. He kicked off from the nearby beam, sending
himself on a course parallel with the device, still holding his rifle in readiness. Just half a kilometre round from his present location lay the cold store supplied by the hydroponics unit in
which he had concealed himself for so long. He corrected his course off another beam, kept scanning all around for any activity. Maybe, because he had not actually managed to do any damage, his
attempt had not yet been detected.

The cold store soon became visible. It had only two tubular transport feeds running into it: one from his hydroponics unit which lay behind him, and one from further along around the rim. He
changed course again, pushing off from yet another beam, and thus came down on the surface of the store, absorbing the shock of impact by bending his legs but only just managing to stop himself
from bouncing away by catching hold of a nearby support strut. Next he walked round the surface of the store to the airlock, opened it, and was just about to step inside when the nightmare
descended on him.

‘We’ve sustained no damage at all,’ Le Roque reported. ‘All the asteroid debris was blown outwards.’

‘Rhine?’ Saul turned towards the man.

‘The tidal forces ripped the asteroid apart,’ Rhine replied. ‘But the impact effectively killed our momentum . . . if it could be described as such.’

Saul would have liked to be able to absorb more data than was being supplied by the hard wiring, but within its vicinity the vortex ring was killing bandwidth and doing some odd things with
time. It was also interfering with any equipment out there, which was why Saul had pulled most of the robots back from the rim, for they had started to become a little . . . unreliable.

‘That’s odd,’ said Rhine, ‘some debris did get through – I’m reading impacts on the exotic energy shell.’

Saul was on that in a microsecond. Rhine had just said something which, according to the constantly updated theory of his drive, was practically impossible. He tracked the data Rhine was
studying, located the part of the vortex ring concerned, but there were no cams available there.

‘Paul?’ he enquired, and immediately knew he had made a mistake in pulling back his robots. He had been concentrating on the bigger picture, he realized, and, in neglecting the
smaller characters in that picture, had thus put them all in imminent danger.

The proctor was descending on a figure in a spacesuit who had been about to enter one of the rim’s cold stores. A data packet from Paul, in speeded-up time, showed this same figure opening
fire on the vortex generator, failing to do any damage, then moving away. Paul had tracked him, and now intended to take him out.

As the intruder turned, Saul immediately recognized him as Alex, the Messina clone. The proctor reached out to grab his arm and to swing a clenched fist at his face. But Alex jerked aside very
fast and raised his rifle protectively. The proctor only managed to close its fingers on the material of Alex’s suit, and its fist struck the rifle butt before striking the man’s visor.
Vapour blew out around the visor, but Saul immediately saw that Alex had just gained an advantage. The blow had turned his rifle so the barrel was pointing straight at Paul’s head. Alex did
not fail to use that advantage and the image feed filled with blue fire and flying chunks of ceramic ammunition. As the image cleared again, Saul watched Alex entering the airlock, the ripped arm
and visor of his suit gushing vapour.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Paul.

The proctor had received only minor damage, but the fusillade had blown it out into vacuum and it could do nothing until it reached some strut, beam or wall to grab hold of. This would take, at
its current trajectory, at least eight minutes.

‘How long until we can fly again?’ Saul asked Rhine, even while running his own calculations.

‘Maybe half an hour,’ Rhine replied. ‘I can’t be more accurate than that.’

Saul acknowledged this news with a nod – he himself had calculated on thirty-three minutes – then immediately headed out of Tech Central. It had been foolish of him to leave this in
Langstrom’s hands, in effect to dismiss it as just a matter for the station police. Even now, analysing what little data lay available in the station system about these clones, he realized
why this one had escaped something as formidable as a proctor.

Apparently, from the moment they stepped out of their amniotic tanks, the clones underwent severe training and indoctrination. They were also the test beds for new improvements in physical
enhancements of the kind less detectable than those seen in Committee bodyguards or some of the enforcers: increased muscle density, genetic mods for nerve-impulse acceleration and mental
programming for improved performance.

This one needed to be dealt with, and fast.

Saul picked up his pace, meanwhile making his own assessments of the state of Argus and simultaneously checking instrument readings of all the asteroids in the immediate area – he did not
want them to go crashing into something when they used the drive again. As he did this, subprograms he had set in motion some time before flagged up items for his attention. One of the flags
indicated high importance, so he checked it. What he found momentarily slammed him to a halt.

A transmission had been picked up from Mars, automatically stored by the system, but containing something he had previously ticked as being of interest to him. The fact that it was a radio
signal and not a communication via tanglecom had also raised its importance.

Var . . .

The video file had been retransmitted over a period of six hours. This duration meant it had been sent from some low-lying area on Mars, which in itself was curious, and the contents confirmed
that.

In his mind he gazed upon his sister’s face behind the visor of a Mars EA suit.

‘This is Varalia Delex transmitting to Argus Station from Coprates Chasma on Mars. My message is for my brother Alan . . . Alan Saul who, it now seems, is the one you on Argus call the
“Owner”,’ she began. ‘Alan, if, by any chance, you survive your encounter with the
Scourge
there is something you need to know. It pains me for more reasons than
one,’ she grimaced at that, ‘to have to tell you that I am no longer the director of Antares Base. Rhone, our director of Mars Science, has seized control and is in communication with
the new regime on Earth. Therefore don’t expect any help at the base, and be aware that Rhone has an electromagnetic pulse weapon, while other personnel now have numerous hand weapons. I
don’t know what your response will be to this – whether you will simply ignore the Mars base or whether there are things you want from there. In fact I don’t know what your
intentions are. Do you intend to remain in the vicinity of Earth? Do you intend to try surviving within the solar system? How any of us could survive Earth has always been a question I’ve
found difficult to answer.’ She paused, seemingly searching for words.

She then continued, ‘It seems likely that I will be dead before I know what you intend to do. While inspecting some work being conducted on the edge of Coprates Chasma, I was betrayed by
Rhone. He then killed my good friend Lopomac, and attempted to kill me, too, but I threw myself down into the chasma and managed to survive the fall. I am now in one of the last remaining intact
buildings of the old trench base. I have about twenty hours of air left and, unless I can find some more, then I will die.’

Again she paused, her expression now turning vicious. ‘If you do come here, Alan, I can only hope that you will . . . deal with Rhone. I hope you feel some familial connection, though of
course that’s never been evident in you before. I should add that not all base personnel are complicit in his betrayal. There are some good people there, like Martinez, Carol and others.
Please reply – at least to let me know that you have received this message.’

Saul paused in order to reply, just vocally, just to let her know, ‘Var, this is Alan. Your message has been received. Currently we have been delayed because, while running under Jasper
Rhine’s new space drive, we collided with an asteroid. The station is undamaged, but it is possible we will come under attack before we can get the drive running again. If we survive we will
come for you and, if we cannot get to you in time, be assured that Rhone will pay a heavy price.’ He knew his words sounded without feeling, but he didn’t have the time to deal with
that now.

He couldn’t think of anything more to add, any comfort to give her. He now broke into a loping run. They had enough problems here as it was and, even if they got to Mars, the chances of
him doing anything for Var were minimal. None of the space planes aboard Argus was capable of flying down through the thin Martian atmosphere. Perhaps that wasn’t an insuperable problem,
given time, but time was the one thing that Var did not have. He began running schematics in his mind, seeing what could be stripped away, making vector and power calculations, redesigning things
organically as, merely with a thought, he sent a squad of construction robots out to the space docks.

The lock pressurized even as Alex unclipped and pulled off his helmet. He opened the inner door and pushed himself into the wide space available before the storage racks, fully
alert for anyone waiting for him in there. He seemed safe for the moment, but that could not last. If that android had seen him, then so had all of them, and perhaps Alan Saul himself would by now
know where he was. Therefore more would be on the way, along with members of the station police force. He had only one option.

Tumbling in zero gravity, Alex quickly stripped off his old suit, unpacked the VC and donned it. He did it much faster than most normal troopers could manage, but then he was much better trained
and his reactions a lot quicker. No normal trooper would have been able to survive an encounter like the one he had just gone through. Once he had closed the VC suit, he hooked up the oxygen pack
from his old suit as a reserve, connected in the radio booster board, and then pushed himself over to the cylinder transport system. Here he found a cylinder that had come from his own hydroponics
unit, still in the process of being unpacked by a pedestal-mounted robot arm. He ducked under the arm and dragged the cylinder from its rack. Only when he had it clear did he consider what could
have happened if the robotic arm had been controlled by someone hostile. He emptied the cylinder of its remaining contents, then took it over to the other egress and put it in position. There was
no guarantee this would work, but he had to try. He climbed inside and closed the lid.

Nothing happened for a moment, and Alex began to wonder if Saul had reached out to shut down his escape. But then, with a clonk, the thing slid into motion, shortly followed by a surge of
acceleration pushing his feet against the base of the cylinder. He closed his eyes. If Saul knew he was in this tube, then the chances were that he would do something about it – such as
knocking off the braking at the other end and allowing Alex to arrive at his destination at full speed. So Alex might well be about to die. Then again, another option would be to stop the cylinder
halfway along its course and just leave it there until he ran out of air. Certainly he had no way of getting out of this thing while it was in its transport tube. Deceleration ensued . . . a
further couple of clonks, and the lid opened.

‘What the hell?’ said the man looking down at him.

In one motion Alex jerked upright and swung his rifle in a short vicious arc that connected with the man’s head. He tumbled back and Alex was past him in a moment, realizing he was now in
some sort of automated food-preparation room. As he reached the door, he guessed that this must be the place that supplied the refectories and personal dispensers in Arcoplex One – which
meant he was getting close to the power feed to that weird space drive.

Out in the adjacent corridor he turned right and headed straight for a bulkhead door, pausing to study the direction icons and colour-coded map above it, which he memorized. Heading straight for
the airlock, he passed a woman in the corridor but she wasn’t armed, so he ignored her. Once through the airlock, he moved out into a cageway running alongside the outer endcap. He abandoned
the cageway at once, since it was taking him in the wrong direction, then climbed over the top of the unit he had just left and gazed towards his destination. Through partially constructed floors
of the outer ring, he could see part of the space drive and the ducts that ran power and control optics to it, extending towards him then sweeping away to the right to disappear into the endcap
itself. He was just about to launch himself towards those ducts when suddenly silver shapes were swarming around them, many of them breaking off to launch themselves towards him.

Alex made microsecond calculations before he threw himself in a flat course over towards the side of the endcap. He stood no chance now of severing the power supply to the space drive, but there
was still another potential weakness. The EM field seemed to be an integral part of this new drive and, just beyond the endcap lay the main transformer room. After a few seconds in flight, he hit
the curved outer edge of the structure around the arcoplex-bearing housing. As he thumped down a foot to secure himself, he caught a glimpse of someone looking up at him in surprise from a rounded
window, before he propelled himself further. As he sailed through vacuum, he turned to survey his surroundings. There was absolutely no doubt now that he had been spotted. There were robots closing
in on him from every direction, some of them leaving vapour trails from their use of compressed-air impellers.

At high speed and feet first, Alex hit a section of composite wall. Something cracked in his recently healed leg, but he felt no pain. The composite had dented, absorbing a lot of the force, but
he still bounced away from it. Seconds later he snagged a long, tensioned beam strap, managed to hold on, then towed himself down its length. He had pulled himself into a partially walled corridor
by the time he felt the vibration of multiple impacts on the structures all around him. The robots had arrived.