Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2) (28 page)

‘Martinez is two hundred metres down,’ came the comment relayed through her suit radio, which at that moment was set on line-of-sight com. She glanced around, to see Rhone rounding
the nearest cabin and heading over. He pointed up at the derrick. ‘We’re almost at full extension now, but it’ll be another hundred metres before we reach the big
fault.’

‘So, what now?’ she asked, stepping back from the hole and turning to face him fully.

She wasn’t entirely sure what Rhone was doing out here. Unlike her, he had no need to escape the hostile atmosphere inside the base; unlike her, he wasn’t being viewed as a necessary
evil. But, then, even that was better than being considered an
unnecessary
evil.

He came up to stand before her, resting his hands on his hips. ‘Martinez reckons that cutting a ramp down towards the fault is the only answer. It will be heavy work but, so he says,
without any extra cable it’s the only way, and I’m afraid it’s going to take a long time.’

‘He’s the nearest thing we have to an expert on this sort of thing, so we’ll have to take his word for it.’ Var suppressed her frustration. Delays were something she
definitely didn’t want to hear about, especially now. ‘How long before we can start moving stuff down there?’

‘A few months yet. Once we’re through to the fault, we’ll need to relocate the lifting rig further down, so as to lower a dozer. Once it’s down there, we can use it to
push the rubble up into a ramp, and to infill a road running along the bottom for about five hundred metres. After that, we reach the big ledge, which we’ll need to level out a bit before we
can start building.’

Perhaps Rhone had heard she was coming out here, so had come to play his new role as her close scientific adviser. Lately it had been difficult to avoid the man, and his reports and
assessments.

‘But if we had more cable,’ said Var, ‘none of this would be necessary?’

‘Just infilling for the road,’ said Rhone. ‘If we didn’t have to blast to make room for the ramp, and spend time building it, we’d gain a month or more.’

It was crazy. They had ways of making so many things on the base, but the kind of high-tensile cable needed for this purpose was, for the present, beyond them.

‘It’s suitable down there?’ Var enquired absently, still thinking over the cable problem. ‘I’ve only seen the seismic map.’

‘Yes, it’s suitable.’ Rhone nodded. ‘It’s about three hundred metres wide and nearly a kilometre long.’

Another crump issued from underfoot and the ground shuddered. They quickly stepped back as a cloud of dust rose out of the hole.

‘What about ice?’ Var asked.

‘Ten kilometres away,’ said Rhone, frowning. ‘Martinez just wants to get on with this, but I wonder if we should ensure we can get to it – by taking some blasting gear
and digging equipment through. We don’t want to move the whole base down there only to find we haven’t got access to water. That’d just mean slow death.’

‘No,’ said Var, ‘this is where we are going. We don’t have the time now to change our minds.’

Rhone turned and gazed at her. ‘Bad news?’

‘The
Scourge
is on its way,’ she replied. ‘Long-range imaging showed it blasting away from Earth orbit just two hours ago, but even if we hadn’t seen that for
ourselves, the jingoistic broadcasts on ETV would have been enough warning.’

‘So we have maybe a year and a half?’

‘Yes, that’s all. We need to get this all done as quickly as we can.’

Considering how quickly things were proceeding here, even with the necessity of building a ramp underground, it still seemed that they had plenty of time. But Var knew better. Since their
supplies of regolith bonding were limited, they would have to dismantle the original base, transport all the blocks over here and lower them down. The whole infrastructure would have to be
transported: all the hexes piece by piece, Hydroponics, the Arboretum, the reactor. In fact she could think of nothing they could afford to leave behind. Their task was essentially like relocating
an entire village down into a mineshaft.

‘Do you want to go down for a look?’ Rhone asked.

She did, in fact, but she said, ‘No, I’d just slow Martinez down.’ She turned away and headed towards her crawler.

‘I’ll tell him when he comes up with his next load,’ said Rhone.

‘You do that.’ Var halted and turned round, a sudden thought occurring to her. Perhaps it was simply being here again, being reminded of Gisender and her ostensible mission to
collect fibre optics from the old Trench Base radio station. ‘We’ve got lots of equipment in Antares Base that came from the old Trench Base. How was it transported there?’

‘By ATV, I think,’ Rhone replied.

‘That doesn’t make sense,’ said Var, feeling a sudden excitement. ‘An ATV journey would have been thousands of kilometres. A more logical route would have been the direct
one, which would mean going up the side of Coprates Chasma.’

‘Cable,’ said Rhone, catching on quickly. ‘I’ll need to check the base records. I can do that from here.’ He stabbed a thumb towards one of the cabins. ‘I
should be able to find out for sure if there’s anything still there.’

‘Yes, you do that,’ said Var.

‘If there
is
cable there, I’ll organize a mission at once. In fact I’ll go myself, as I’m feeling a bit of a loose wheel lately. It’s the practicality of
people like Martinez we need most of all here right now.’

Var instantly did not like his eagerness to set off on such a mission. Was this something he had been aiming for?

‘Maybe I’ll go, too,’ she said, just to test his reaction. ‘It would be nice to get away from all the invisible daggers plunging into my back.’

He seemed to accept that comment at once. ‘We’ll need to take cutting equipment, and an ATV trailer with a motor and cable drum.’

‘Check first,’ said Var, ‘then let me know.’

She turned away and continued towards her crawler, then climbed inside and just sat at the controls, thinking hard. Maybe a little trip away from Antares Base would be a good thing in a number
of respects. Maybe, by being at close quarters with the man, she could solve the puzzle that was Rhone of Mars Science, and find out for sure if he intended to stick an even more visible knife in
her back.

Earth

From an interminably boring childhood to supervised school and then university Serene had never really had any friends. Family being something she wanted to forget, she
had quickly forgotten. All she had were colleagues, who would receive the brief and snappy response of, ‘I am interested only in now and in the future,’ if they ever enquired about her
past. As far as she was concerned, the immutable past had formed her as she was, and she was satisfied with that. She did not like to think too much about her formative years, but she was thinking
about them now.

‘A specialized search program picked it out of the, on average, seventeen million personal messages directed towards you every day, ma’am,’ said Elkin, the new leader of her
team of PAs.

Serene gazed steadily at the text message relayed to her palmtop, reading and rereading every word of it, a deep feeling of puzzlement growing within her. He was
alive
. She had never even
considered the possibility. She sent his citizen code to the house mainframe then, forcing her face clear of expression, looked up at Elkin.

Her PA leader was a big-breasted, wide-hipped woman who dressed to try and hide her obvious womanhood. But even clad in a loose grey business trouser suit, with her black hair in a pageboy cut,
she still oozed sexuality. Serene smiled to herself, at the forefront of her mind being the knowledge that Elkin quite enjoyed sessions with three men at a time, claiming, as she had recently
explained to the three enforcers currently satisfying her needs, that she liked to be ‘all filled up’. Serene regularly watched the security tapes, which were quite a bit better than
much of the porn she had seen.

‘Thank you, Elkin, that will be all.’

The woman gave her a brief nod and retreated.

Now alone, Serene called up the file located under the citizen code she had input, studied the current image of a squat muscular man who, after the treatments he could obtain as a valued SA,
appeared to be in his forties. This man was actually eighty-six. She reflected on her brief thoughts about sex and, understanding where they had come from, felt a sudden annoying surge of
unaccustomed guilt. She checked his history, starting from twenty-eight years ago at the point where she herself had diverged from it. Under tight political supervision, he’d spent a further
nine years in Berlin, in the Brandenburg Tower, continuing his research on population genetics, related dynamics and psychology. He’d provided statistical analyses of great use to the
Inspectorate: data that had resulted in large savings on resources. It was always useful to know precisely how hard you needed to wield the big stick, and precisely what degree of control might be
necessary when dealing with vast populations.

At the end of those nine years, he had taken a partner, and produced twin daughters who, due to his past record, were immediately taken away from him. Next working in South America, his wife of
four years, having been caught making illegal enquiries about his record, was sent off for adjustment. She died shortly after being released into supervised accommodation. The surface report cited
a domestic accident with some kitchen appliance. The underlying report noted that her kitchen cam had failed and gone into a maintenance backlog, while she had sliced open her wrists with the blade
removed from a Safecarver and bled to death on the kitchen floor.

Five years ago he had been sent back to work in Europe, sometimes in the Brandenburg Tower again, more often as an adviser to the four main European delegates. It annoyed Serene that he had been
so successful in his way. Her aim had been to get him sent for adjustment twenty-eight years ago, but he had been far too useful for that.

Serene input his call code, ensuring a console contact only, since she wanted to see his face. He must have been waiting because he answered within just a few seconds. He looked haggard, dark
under the eyes and, when he saw her, he jerked back from the screen, his expression showing a commingled disgust and fear. She couldn’t understand why he had sent her a message, then she
noted him fingering his collar and realized why: he’d grown tired of waiting for the axe to fall.

‘Hello, Papa,’ she said, smiling calmly as she remembered her love for him despite his dictatorial ways. She remembered how, with her mother dead, she had tried to help him, tried at
the age of twelve to relieve some of the pressure he was under. Serene knew all about sex, all about the needs of men, since her political officer had already shown her, and she wanted to take
control. She wanted to supplant the various ‘nannies’ that visited, taking his attention away from her. But when she had tried, he had pushed her away, and that was the first time she
saw that look on his face. The pain of rejection sent a wave of heat through her even now. Yes, she understood his fear, and she understood how he would have felt that to respond to her was plain
wrong. But they had been different: they had always been different.

‘Serene,’ he said, ‘I see you’ve done very well for yourself.’

Serene had already found and cued up the code to his collar, and her finger now hovered over the send button. Then, as she gazed at his face, she withdrew her finger. She was now the dictator of
Earth, with all Earth’s resources at her disposal. A sudden twisted excitement arose in her, almost sexual. She could do anything she wanted. She was in total control.

‘Yes, I have done very well, Papa,’ she replied. ‘I see that you haven’t done so badly either. You were an adviser to the four top European delegates, I
understand.’

‘I did do well,’ he said bitterly, ‘despite being accused by my own daughter of beating and raping her. But I haven’t been trying to reach you so we can discuss the
different routes our careers have taken . . . daughter.’ He spat out the last word, then reached up and touched his collar. ‘I want to know about this. When, Serene? When are you going
to send the code to this and finish off what you started?’

What an arrogant self-obsessed idiot he was. That he wore such a collar was just chance, just wherever he came in the list, which included over half a billion other SAs. But through his
self-obsession, through his belief that this had to be personal, he had revealed himself to her. Now she knew he was alive and well.

‘You are just one of many, Papa, but since you are my father, I will order that your collar be removed at once.’ No way did she want one of those occasional collar malfunctions to
take him out, for they still had unfinished business. She paused, momentarily puzzled, not entirely sure what that unfinished business was. ‘I will also be sending an aero for you.’

‘Why?’ he said. ‘Do you want me to be facing you when you kill me? Didn’t you do enough when you reported me to your political officer for the very offence I refused to
commit?’

Apparently not, since he had survived the experience.

‘And how did you do it? How did you fake the evidence?’ he asked.

The fact that, at twelve, she was no longer a virgin had been taken care of by her political officer a few months before. She was one of the many young girls that that particular guardian of
Committee ideology had used as part of his personal harem. Faking the evidence against her father had been easy. She just waited until after a visit from one of the ‘nannies’ he
employed, and then scraped it off his bedsheets.

‘That is all in the past now,’ she replied smoothly. ‘Right now I am in need of advisers in precisely your discipline, and your name has come up on a shortlist. It is in fact
quite a happy coincidence that you yourself also tried to get in contact with me.’

‘Well, I guess with two-thirds of the original upper executive being fried, you need to know where to concentrate the razorbirds and shepherds next.’ He grimaced, looked to one side
for a moment, then focused back on the screen. She remembered that he’d done a lot of work involving the deployment of shepherds, and also on techniques to increase the public fear of them.
‘But I think you’re lying to me,’ he continued. ‘You were always very good at it.’