Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2) (20 page)

A massive ship sat in its construction station, big robots peeling away surrounding scaffolds like a loose rind, clearly revealing the gleam of heavy armour, missile ports and a maser turret.
Was this a dream? No, he knew it was real, and that ship was as imminent as a sledgehammer. He had to pull his consciousness out of this well, and back into the
real
, but the effort was too
much and he felt so utterly exhausted . . .
Hannah, help me . . .

After she had suited up, she expected them to take her to Tech Central, but it soon became apparent that they were moving round the circumference of the asteroid rather than
heading up on top.

‘Arcoplex One?’ she enquired over her suit radio.

‘Yes, it seemed best, since there are conference rooms available there,’ said Langstrom. He glanced round at her. ‘Best place for a long sit-down discussion of our situation.
It may take some time because this is
no longer
about a single individual issuing orders.’

Ah, democracy
, thought Hannah, remembering Saul’s opinion of such a concept in this environment – and how they might all die even while the votes were being counted.

Once they were inside Arcoplex One, Hannah studied her surroundings. She had not visited this cylinder world since first coming here with Saul when he dropped the Argus network on Earth and then
issued his ultimatum to Messina and his delegates. No corpses were visible – none of the two thousand victims Messina’s troops had nerve-gassed during their attack – though there
were still stains visible on walls and floors, and the occasional scrap of clothing had stuck in place. All the corpses taken from here had either gone through overworked station digesters or been
moved to the outer ring to be stored in cold vacuum – as a potential resource.

Just beyond the elevator doors, Langstrom and Peach divested themselves of the EM weapon, passing it on to some waiting troops, who swiftly set about remounting it on a tripod. That was a
precaution, doubtless, against the arrival of a spidergun or some other kind of robot. Did this mean they were completely turning against Saul? Peach remained there with the troops, while Langstrom
gestured for Hannah to follow.

It seemed to her that they were heading towards the conference room where Saul had confronted Messina and the delegates, but they soon diverged from that route to come up to a set of sliding
double doors. Langstrom detached his suit glove, pressed his palm against a lock and the doors slid aside. Within lay a long conference table with people already seated, some of whom she recognized
and others she didn’t know. Le Roque sat at the head with Chang to his right and an empty seat to his left. Those seated two down from Chang on the other side were a woman called Dagmar, who
ran Zero-Gravity Hydroponics, and an Asian man called Taffor, another agronomist, who ran the Arboretum. Next along, sat another two men who Hannah vaguely recognized as having something to do with
Construction. At the further side of the table sat an unfamiliar man and woman, then came two empty seats and another empty seat at the end. Le Roque immediately stood up and gestured to the seat
beside him. Hannah gazed at him for a moment, then took the seat at the far end of the table. He acknowledged that gesture with a shrug, and sat down again. Langstrom took one of the other empty
seats.

‘I rather resent being dragged away from my patient like that,’ said Hannah. ‘Why is it so important that I be here?’

‘We need to know the Owner’s condition,’ said Le Roque. ‘I’ve been trying to talk to you about that for some time . . . so has Langstrom. We may be heading away
from Earth but the danger the Committee represents is by no means over, and we face new trials, new dangers. We are in deep vacuum now, and it’s quite possible we won’t survive it. What
is the Owner’s condition?’

Hannah considered various answers, various lies, but in the end decided on a partial truth. ‘Saul was very badly injured by the assault made on him. I’ve repaired most of the damage
and things are looking good, but obviously going slowly. He is currently sleeping, which is perhaps best while he heals.’

‘How long until he wakes?’ asked Langstrom.

‘How long is a piece of string?’ Hannah shot back. ‘Any time now, or maybe a month from now.’

‘He’s not conscious, then,’ Langstrom affirmed, ‘which means we need to get a firmer grip on station security.’

‘Yes, I’m not surprised that you would suggest that,’ said Hannah sarcastically.

‘You have your laptop?’ Le Roque asked.

Hannah unhooked it from her belt and placed it on the table before her. ‘I do.’

‘Check the file attached to the last email I sent you.’

Her laptop blinked on the instant she opened it, and she checked her mail. There had been a lot of it, some from eddresses she did not recognize but nevertheless had to be those of people aboard
this station. She checked down until she found a message from Le Roque, with an attachment.

She read his message: ‘Here is the DNA map of the individual who shot Saul. Check it against the further DNA map below, look at the name, and please get back to me.’

A cross-matching program was imbedded in the attachment. The first map corresponded to the second to within ninety-nine point nine eight per cent. That couldn’t be right. Then she realized
that, of course, it could. Some of the scientists alongside her in the Albanian mountain enclave, before it was broken up, had been working on such projects. She studied the name below the final
DNA print, and shuddered. Really, she shouldn’t feel such superstitious dread, as this surely didn’t mean much.

‘A clone,’ she declared. ‘That doesn’t really make someone any more dangerous, or any less.’

‘I disagree,’ said Langstrom. ‘I’ve seen these Messina clones before. They’re very specialized, surgically altered, totally loyal and trained beyond anything
possible with an unaltered human being. They’re dangerous. That’s been illustrated by the fact that the two remaining ones have evaded capture by us for as long as they have.’ He
paused, looking grim. ‘It is also the case that they were not soldiers surviving from Messina’s forces.’

‘What?’ Hannah asked.

‘The equipment we found in their hide was all from the station – none of it brought in from outside. Also three maintenance staff have gone missing, and if you check a further email
from me, you’ll find that DNA traces found in the cabins of the missing three all match up with Messina’s map too. And with Saul no longer in control . . .’

‘But he will be back in control soon,’ said the male of the two personnel Hannah did not recognize. He looked to her in appeal.

Le Roque held up a finger, pressing the fingers of his other hand against his fone. ‘We should have some data on that shortly.’ He leaned back and listened to whoever was talking,
nodding and making single-word replies as he did so.

‘Perhaps we should be introduced,’ said Hannah, indicating with a smile the two unknowns at the table.

‘Leeran,’ said the woman, then gesturing to her partner, ‘and Pike. We oversee the furnaces.’

So that was why she hadn’t recognized them. They spent most of their time out on the furnaces and bubblemetal plants that currently extended outside the station.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Hannah, instinctively recognizing allies.

‘So that’s it,’ said Le Roque, leaning forward. ‘According to Raiman, Hannah has not been giving us the full truth. The Owner . . .’ he paused for a second,
‘Alan Saul is severely incapacitated. He’s lost enough brain mass to turn any normal human being into a bedridden vegetable. There’s regrowth indeed, but no indication that what
will result afterwards will be any more able than one of our repros.’ He gazed steadily at Hannah. ‘We need to make some decisions.’

‘Raiman has no idea of the true situation,’ said Hannah. ‘He’s a military medic and his is just not the same area of specialization as mine. He doesn’t understand
bio interfaces or the resultant neural growth.’ She paused, groping for the best way to put this. Certainly, if Le Roque, Langstrom and others here were turning against Saul, then it would be
best if they did not know about Saul’s backup, his ‘D drive’. ‘How does Raiman explain Saul speaking to you all after he was shot?’

‘Did he?’ asked Dagmar.

‘Raiman?’ asked Hannah. ‘Did he what?’

Dagmar shook her head, refusing to lift her gaze from the tabletop. ‘Did Alan Saul speak to us?’ She began playing with a pen, tapping it against the table surface. ‘What we
heard could quite easily have been created from recordings of his voice.’ Now she looked up directly at Hannah to add, ‘With someone else providing the words.’

‘Are you really accusing me of that?’ Hannah asked, the back of her neck feeling suddenly hot.

‘I’m merely pointing out a possibility,’ Dagmar replied.

An uncomfortable silence descended for a moment, broken by Le Roque clearing his throat, then continuing, ‘That’s as may be, but we still have decisions to make. I’ve kept this
on ice until this meeting, and now we need to see it.’ He swung his chair round, holding up a small remote which he directed at the screen on the wall behind him. Hannah felt something
tightening in her chest when the United Earth logo flicked into being, then faded to show Serene Galahad standing on the carbocrete of a spaceport, a space plane looming behind her.

‘It is with great pleasure that I can announce to you that vengeance is possible, as is the more important goal of retrieving the Gene Bank database and samples. It perhaps seemed to us
all that the mass murderer Alan Saul had taken himself beyond our reach. However, thanks to the foresight of Chairman Alessandro Messina, this is not the case.’ Serene held up her hand, above
which a frame etched itself out of the air, before accelerating towards the screen to fill it with the blackness of space, liberally sprinkled with stars.

‘Twenty years ago, Alessandro Messina understood the dangers of subversion, terrorism and rebellion in space, and in secret he began to make his plans. He needed something up there beyond
Earth that could move fast and deliver a suitable response to those who might undermine humanity’s future.’

The screen view swung round to show a massive spaceborne construction station, out of which an equally huge spaceship was currently manoeuvring. Hannah stared at this thing. It could quite
easily be some CGI effect that Galahad was using for her own obscure purposes. Some sort of propaganda exercise maybe as a justification for world-resource reallocation and an excuse for resultant
starvation and further death tolls. Or perhaps just a bit of media glitz to take people’s attention away from just such problems . . .

‘Messina named this ship the
Alexander
, but now I feel it is time for a renaming. I considered the
Vengeance
, but perhaps that is a name that has been overused. So of course,
considering what Alan Saul has inflicted upon the people of Earth, there is a more appropriate name available.’

The scene changed, the ship now viewed far out from its construction station. Sounds began to impinge, a repetitive thrum like someone hitting a taut cable with a hammer. These sounds had to be
added, since this view was recorded through vacuum. Perhaps they were what the crew supposedly aboard the vessel were hearing.

The station started to come apart, great pieces of it exploding away, tearing up, the whole thing splintering like the trunk of a tree under machine-gun fire. Then either something else hit it,
or the projectiles had hit something vital. The station exploded, the glare blacking the screen for a second, then the next jerky image showed glowing chunks of it tumbling away. The next view,
probably captured by a camera on the Moon, showed one such mass of material crashing into its surface. Then another scene: debris burning up in Earth’s atmosphere, the view descending past
them down towards the land surface, structures visible, then space planes neatly arrayed across a carbocrete expanse, then onto the surface itself, to Serene – a close-up of her face.

‘The name of this ship is henceforth the
Scourge
– for it is the whip with which we will punish Alan Saul, and all those other traitors up there on Argus Station. I hope you
are watching this up there, you people. We are coming for you now.’

Le Roque clicked his remote, blinking the screen back to the United Earth logo.

‘There’s more in the same vein,’ he said. ‘A lot about how well Earth is doing since the attack on it, how production is up, resources growing, space projects expanding
and advancing faster than they ever have before.’

‘Is that thing for real?’ asked Taffor.

‘It’s real,’ said Le Roque. ‘It must have been concealed under some sort of EM cloak that’s now been removed. We can see that damned ship from here.’

Hannah folded her arms, much of her anger at having been dragged here draining away and a cold dread settling in its place. They needed Saul more than ever now. Without him, without that demigod
mind working for them, they would be defenceless.

‘How quickly could that ship reach us?’ she asked.

‘I haven’t calculated that,’ said Le Roque, ‘since the time it takes depends heavily on when it leaves. But what is certain is that it
will
get to us, and
there’s nothing we can do about that. And you saw those weapons.’ He swung back to the screen again, already holding up his remote. ‘Now there’s this: a personal message for
us.’

It was Galahad again, sitting behind a desk, looking relaxed and tapping idly on the buttons of a palmtop. ‘I’m not entirely sure who I’m addressing right now,’ she said.
‘I’m not entirely sure who now controls Argus Station. Certainly, Alan Saul is no longer at – so to speak – the wheel.’ She smiled. ‘Maybe I’m talking to
Technical Director Le Roque, or Captain Langstrom, or Dr Hannah Neumann – all of whom seem to have risen under the regime of someone arrogant enough to call himself the Owner.’

Le Roque paused it there and turned to address them all. ‘It seems evident to me that she’s letting us be aware that she knows a lot about what is going on here. I’m guessing
she’s in contact with Messina’s clones.’ He turned back and set the broadcast running again.