Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2) (50 page)

He stepped over them and moved on, the air smoky all about him, only realizing after he was ten metres beyond them that all three casualties were crew, and that two of them were ones who had
joined his and Scotonis’s conspiracy. Moving further along, he found another crewmember simply standing with her back against the wall. This woman had managed to pull on a survival suit and
just stared at him without comprehension.

Beyond her the corridor was a mess. A hole a metre across had been punched through the wall; whatever made it had come down at an angle, so as to take away most of the floor. Jagged twists of
hot metal splayed out from around the edges of the initial hole, insulation hanging like moss below it, and the whole area was now iced with fire-retardant foam. Clay walked up between both the
holes and peered into them in turn. The one in the wall was only a few centimetres deep, having been otherwise filled with breach sealant, but the one in the floor went down at an angle for at
least twenty metres before terminating at more breach sealant. It seemed likely that whatever had hit the ship had cut right through it.

Hearing a sound behind him, he turned quickly, almost feeling panic. When he saw a maintenance team arriving, hauling sheet metal and a welding unit, he turned away and quickly picked up his
pace, only relaxing a little when the bridge airlock closed behind him.

‘How bad?’ he asked, as he strapped himself into his acceleration chair.

‘Bad enough,’ said Scotonis. ‘It was a mistake to try and head through it.’

Clay gazed at the captain for a moment. There seemed something odd about him, something different, but for a moment he couldn’t quite figure out what. Then, with a sinking sensation in his
gut, he saw that Scotonis had removed his strangulation collar – which seemed like a statement of future intent. Clay shook his head, trying to dismiss what that implied. Best to focus on the
immediate problems.

They’d watched Messina’s space plane head out and moor to two asteroids in turn. Resolution had been good enough for them to see the warheads that the EVA team had secured to each
one. Trove had given the opinion that to divert around the debris clouds the explosions would certainly generate would add at least two days to their journey, and the decision to do that had been
deferred until a tactical assessment could be made. Unfortunately they had all been due to send their latest reports to Galahad, and there was no way any of them could get away with neglecting to
mention this development.

‘She’s not going to like this,’ said Clay. ‘By how much is this going to delay our arrival now?’ He glanced at Trove.

‘Maybe a day,’ she replied.

Galahad had replied very quickly. An Earth-based tactical assessment put their chances of getting hit by something at above fifty per cent, but their chances of being completely destroyed at
below twenty per cent. They must not change course; they must take the quickest and most direct route to Argus Station. She had then gone on to explain why.

‘And even in that short time,’ said Clay, ‘Galahad reckons they might manage to start up this inertia-less drive and escape.’

The other three exchanged sceptical glances.

‘You don’t believe her?’ Clay asked.

‘Do you?’ spat Scotonis. ‘Which is it? Some admittedly technically adept rebels have genuinely managed to build a fantasy space drive, or a psychotic dictator, showing
increasing signs of losing her grip on reality, has finally tipped over the edge?’

‘It’s the latter, for sure,’ said Trove, before Clay could speak. ‘You just can’t fuck with causality like that. Yeah, there’ve been lots of interesting
theories, but they are all over-complications aimed at a desired result. You don’t do science like that. You don’t twist your maths because it’s not giving you the answer you
want. I know, because I’ve seen what happens.’

She sounded quite bitter on the subject, Clay thought.

‘
How
do you know?’ he asked

‘I originally trained as a physicist and astrophysicist, but I ended up here,’ she said. ‘I pushed for it because by then I’d given up in the so-called academic world.
The only advances we’ve made on Earth over the last half-century have been more through luck than judgement. Nothing is discovered when your political officer is telling you what your results
must be.’

‘That’s nonsense,’ said Clay. ‘What about . . . what about Alan Saul and what he has become?’

‘Yeah, some meagre advances on the technology we already had a hundred years ago,’ she snapped. ‘Our technology and our scientific knowledge once had some momentum it took the
Committee decades to kill.’

Clay turned back to Scotonis. ‘This is all beside the point,’ he said. ‘Galahad will be contacting us again soon. She may even be sending a signal to a few selected implants or
collars right now. You have directly disobeyed her.’

Scotonis shrugged. ‘She can’t kill us any longer, but another lump of rock like that last one could, and we were only into the very edge of the cloud.’

Clay felt no inclination to argue with that, but the captain’s attitude seemed to confirm that the man had no intention of ever putting his implant back in. And that he fully intended to
return to Earth and bomb Galahad herself from orbit. Here then was Clay’s penalty for telling the truth: his life was now in the hands of an angry and vengeful man.

However, the previous message from Galahad seemed also to confirm that Clay had made the right move. Seizing the Gene Bank data and samples seemed a difficult enough task as it was, but the plan
for disabling and then assaulting the station
without
wrecking this mythical space drive and
without
killing this Professor Jasper Rhine made it nigh impossible. Galahad might as well
have demanded that they capture the station without knocking any leaves off the trees in the Arboretum cylinder.

‘Perhaps we should just forget about attacking Argus at all,’ he suddenly suggested.

‘No,’ said Scotonis, ‘we complete our mission. We assault the station.’

Clay studied the man carefully but couldn’t read him. Certainly there was something Scotonis wasn’t telling him, didn’t sufficiently trust him to reveal. Clay now firmly
believed that Scotonis’s main aim was to return to Earth and attack Galahad, so why would he bother with this risky assault on the station?

Argus

The tone, that perpetual sound of the station that the mind tuned out after being here for any length of time, had somehow changed. Hannah remembered experiencing an
earthquake when she had been working at the enclave in the Dinaric Alps, and this sound reminded her of that event. In the case of the earthquake it was like thunder, but underscored by a feeling
of huge movement that seemed to penetrate to her bones. This new sound reminded her of an old jet turbine steadily winding up to speed, but deeper in pitch, with hints of vast heavy movement and
the unavoidable sensation that she was sitting right inside the turbine itself. Or perhaps she was just being overly melodramatic, for if she hadn’t known where the sound was coming from, she
probably wouldn’t have put that interpretation on it.

She stretched out her hand and shut down her screens. The samples she had taken from herself, from Rhine, Le Roque and the Saberhagens were all growing well. Given another twenty days, they
could be inserted in aerogel matrices and force-grown to occupy them completely. However, for them to work as backups, those people would need hardware inside their skulls so that they could make a
connection. And for them and any others on this station to have their crack at immortality, they first had to survive the next few days. The
Scourge
was now just two days away from them;
meanwhile Rhine’s vortex generator had built up most of its required momentum. Shortly it would be time for Chang, their pilot, to take his foot off the clutch.

Standing up, Hannah had to catch hold of the back of her chair to stop herself sailing up towards the ceiling. Despite Arcoplex Two now being all but stationary, and with zero gravity inside it,
she had forgotten that fact. Carefully ensuring her gecko boots were properly engaging, she headed for the door and then for the exit from the arcoplex. The top of Tech Central still protruded from
the station enclosure, and the view from there would be the best. Hannah had decided she wanted to see what a space-time bubble looked like.

In the arcoplex corridors she noted how others were on the move too, some of them clearly worried and hurrying back to their apartments, all clad in spacesuits or plain survival suits. Others
were securing loose equipment, battening down the hatches. As she reached the airlock elevator, there was a resounding boom and she realized that the arcoplex brake had finally been applied.

Outside the arcoplex, similar activity was visible but with fewer signs of anxiety. Robots were still at work tying down unsecured equipment or finishing welding jobs, while others were forming
themselves into interlocked masses at beam junctions or up against various enclosed units located within the station structure.

On entering the upper control room of Tech Central, she saw that most of the usual crowd was here, all secured in acceleration chairs in front of various consoles. She headed over to Saul, who
stood by a line of unoccupied consoles, with his arms folded as he gazed out the windows at the view across the newly fashioned outer skin of the station towards the space-plane docks.

‘I see that everything is being secured,’ she said, ‘just as it is before the Traveller engine is ignited.’

He flicked a glance at her. ‘Yes, it is.’

‘This Rhine drive,’ she said, slightly uncomfortable with this new expression, ‘is an inertia-less drive, so we should feel no effects of acceleration or deceleration at
all.’

‘The gap between what should happen and what will happen is somewhat variable when you’re fucking with causality,’ he replied. ‘Not taking any precautions would be
arrogant.’

Hannah managed to stop herself snorting at that, and instead asked, ‘How long until it fires up?’

He stabbed a thumb back towards the consoles at which Rhine, Brigitta and Chang were sitting. ‘Rhine is doing the calculations now. I estimate he’ll start running the eddy currents
in about two minutes, then charge the EM field shortly after that.’

‘You estimate?’

‘Yes, I estimate.’ Saul allowed himself a grimace. ‘Even now the vortex generator is running outside calculated parameters, so he’s having to recalculate
perpetually.’

Hannah focused on the view, blinked and rubbed at her eyes, then realized there was no problem with her vision. The rim of the station did seem to be higher than a few minutes ago, and the
enclosure skin, which only a moment earlier had seemed to slope down from them, now seemed to curve upwards. Also, out at the rim itself, something like a heat haze was shimmering in vacuum.

‘Weird visual effect,’ she said, hoping for some explanation.

‘Yes,’ was Saul’s curt rejoinder.

Hannah folded her arms, too, feeling cold and thoroughly vulnerable. Secure inside Arcoplex Two, it had been easy to forget that she was just a fragile creature kept safe from the indifference
of a lethal universe by only a few layers of metal. Now, looking out into the night as they played around with fundamental physics, she couldn’t help but feel they might make the universe
just a little less indifferent to them, which did not strike her as a great idea.

‘Introducing the eddy currents now,’ Rhine announced.

The general muttering throughout the control room abruptly stilled, then Le Roque began making announcements over the station’s PA system, ordering all tasks to cease and for everyone to
get secured. Even as he spoke, the background noise began ramping up. It seemed almost as if someone had just opened the air inputs on a scramjet ready to take over from the turbine. She glanced
round, then jumped as Saul reached out and touched her arm. He gestured to the two empty acceleration chairs next to the nearby consoles. Hannah quickly sat down in one and strapped herself in,
while Saul did the same beside her.

‘What happens now?’ she asked.

‘We encyst in the universe, and we move,’ he replied, interlacing his fingers over his stomach as if he was feeling perfectly relaxed about all this.

Hannah switched her gaze again to the view. That odd visual effect was now gone, but another quite unpleasant effect was impinging upon her. Everything she could see out there – in fact,
everything she could see in here too – seemed stretched taut and tensioned to an unbearable level, as if at any moment it might snap and just curl up into nothingness. Someone screamed, a
short panicking sound, and Hannah looked round to see the woman Leeran covering her face with her hands.

‘Bringing up EM radiation,’ Rhine announced excitedly.

Now even the stars changed, abruptly dimming and changing colour, speckling vacuum like amethysts, then slowly shifting to a deep indigo, then blue, then to an odd mouldy green. As that green
tinge began to lighten, Hannah realized they were running through the entire visible spectrum. When their colour became a gleaming topaz, the underlying sound changed, smoothing out, and
Hannah’s ears began to hurt. Next the stars turned to rubies, gleamed intensely bright – and winked out. Now utterly impenetrable blackness lay outside.

‘We’re in,’ said Rhine, his tone hushed but the words carrying despite the constant din.

Next came a shuddering crash that shook the chair Hannah was sitting in. She glanced enquiringly at Saul, who shrugged and observed, ‘Slight fluctuation there. We just lost about four
metres of the space docks.’

Slight fluctuation?

‘Chang,’ he continued, ‘move us now.’

‘Will do,’ Chang replied. ‘One million kilometres, as discussed. I need those updates, Jasper.’

‘I’m feeding them through now,’ Rhine replied. ‘You should have a full update in twenty seconds.’

Saul turned to Hannah, then with a tilt of his head he indicated the blackness outside the station. ‘Just beyond that there are massive tidal forces,’ he said. ‘In essence,
with this drive, we really won’t need the weapons the Saberhagens built.’