Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2) (57 page)

The robots began flowing back inside the station and distributing themselves, according to his ‘ambush predator’ program. They headed past Langstrom’s men, secure behind the
bullet-proof shields of ten-millimetre machine guns and some hardened glass shields recovered during the last battle to occur aboard this station. In what had now been dubbed Police HQ, some
remaining soldiers were distributing weapons to volunteers from among the station staff. Others were spread throughout the station, setting up ambush points and kill zones. Numbers, all numbers:
the plain and horrible fact of warfare.

The assault force now began to enter the station, moving along its inner skin, the troops trying to find cover as fast as they could while still attaching safety lines, for they had learned
that
lesson from the fate of Messina’s original assault on this station. Saul noticed enemy spiderguns departing the
Scourge
and, using radio and microwave dishes up on the
surface, he tried to get a response from them, but they were as utterly indifferent to his blandishments as was the
Scourge
itself. They had also learned not to allow him that opening.
Identification of fellows was by sight, since the attacking force wore VC suits of a silvery grey, and had for some reason painted the old Japanese rising-sun symbol on the fronts and backs of
them. The attack would adhere to a set plan and communications amidst the assault force would be at a minimum – low-bandwidth radio, audio only, so there would be no chance of invading
anything critical via that route. The spiderguns were pre-programmed, probably to kill any humans not wearing those easily identifiable VC suits, and to attack any robot outside their pack. Where
was the opening he needed?

Saul continued to watch the invading troops and noted that some were carrying the components of vacuum-warfare penetration locks. He considered the feasibility of spinning up the cylinder worlds
again, to make it more difficult to use those things on them, but then considered the power better used to keep accelerating the vortex generator up to speed. Then, outside, he saw the chance he
had been waiting for – an opportunity offered by their lack of communication and the way they needed to identify each other.

‘Judd,’ he said it out loud, ‘I presume you do not require me here?’

The proctor, while assembling a chaotic mass of components seemingly at random, swung its blind head towards him.

‘You must go,’ it said, already knowing his intentions.

‘When it is not necessary to kill, it is not necessary to kill,’ he said, repeating Paul’s words and, of course, their implied opposite.

‘Just so,’ Judd replied, returning to its work.

Saul propelled himself from the transformer room, giving his instructions to the spidergun lurking in Tech Central and ordering it to withdraw, then he contacted his commander.

‘Langstrom, I want fast-response team A heading for Tech Central immediately,’ he said. ‘I’ll meet them on the base level. I’ll also be pulling the majority of my
robots over there too.’

‘That’ll weaken us,’ protested Langstrom. ‘We’re having trouble holding them even now.’

‘Beat a steady retreat,’ Saul instructed. ‘Let the invaders do all the work and take all the risks. You’re not fighting to win, but fighting to buy time.’

‘What are you going to do?’ the commander asked.

‘Something unpleasant,’ Saul replied. ‘That’s all you need to know.’

‘Okay, the team is on its way.’

He moved fast, retracing his route to the transformer room to reach the endcap of Arcoplex One. As he travelled, he watched multiple views of the battle in progress. Lang-strom’s men had
remained in their hides around the rimward penetration, strafing the enemy with ten-bores and rifle fire, then suffering under returned fire as the enemy began to get their own heavy machine guns
deployed. Langstrom’s teams subsequently began to retreat, squad by squad, taking up well-prepared positions to cover each step of the way. It all began to fall apart as two enemy spiderguns
came into play with little to match them – the two Saul had deployed now drifting and twitching, having already been knocked out by pulse weapons. Then the proctors intervened.

Saul saw them approaching fast, six of them having launched themselves at high speed from inside the station. They were all carrying lengths of ceramic scaffolding like staffs, and were nearly
upon the enemy, who were spreading along the inside of the station hull, before they were spotted. A ten-bore spat at them, sending two of them tumbling away with chunks flying off their bodies,
then EM radiation pulses hit the others, haloing them with pink fire. In the virtual world, Saul felt their serenity – for even the two that had been so severely hit were calmly reordering
their body’s resources for survival, each aware of its losses but calculating its trajectory to see how quickly it could get back into the fight.

The remaining four slammed into the inner hull, leaving huge dents – and in one case completely crushing an enemy soldier. Then they were up and into it, thrashing to and fro with their
staffs, just about every blow proving a killing one. Why had they chosen to attack with such primitive weapons? Saul did not know and did not try to find out, nor did he try to fathom why they
seized two of the heavy machine guns and tried to use them. It was a futile exercise, for the machine guns obviously required some kind of coded link with the gunners operating them.

The wreckage they caused, in both mechanical and human terms, was horrific, but when the two spiderguns turned on them it began to tell. They started to become sluggish, as chunks of their
bodies were blown away. One of them managed to snag a spidergun that approached too close, and simply tore it in half. Then, as one, they launched themselves away again, suffering further damage as
they escaped. It was enough, though: Langstrom’s troops had meanwhile withdrawn to safer positions – safer still when a multiple launch of missiles intersected the remaining spidergun
and blew it to pieces.

Elsewhere numerous firefights were in progress, but the steady retreat was also becoming evident. The assault force was taking heavy casualties, too, and bodies and bits of bodies were spreading
out in a steady cloud from the two attack points. The third, and smaller, force of about two hundred men was nearing Tech Central, advancing steadily behind two spiderguns and a line of heavy
machine guns motoring across the hull on gecko treads. They were being very cautious, which was good since it gave Saul time to prepare. He exited the asteroid-side endcap of Arcoplex One and began
to make his way towards the base of Tech Central, where the fast-response team was waiting, watching robots entering one after another ahead of them.

‘I’m going to let the force above enter Tech Central,’ Saul declared over suit radio. ‘Unless absolutely necessary, you will not engage them.’

‘Seems pointless us being here at all,’ replied one of the twenty soldiers.

Saul swung towards him. ‘I thought you were overseeing the defence, Langstrom.’

‘I am,’ Langstrom replied, ‘but my people are well enough trained and prepared for them to know what to do.’

Saul snorted in apparent annoyance and headed for the nearest airlock, the multi-armed welding robot that had been about to use it scuttling aside. Within the building, he gazed through numerous
sensors, and quickly deployed his robots throughout the lower two floors. The main problem here would be the two spiderguns and, once they were out of the way, there would be a slaughter which it
was utterly essential that none survived.

He mapped the place in his mind and worked out what would be their most likely mode of attack. The invading force would use the usual methods of urban warfare to secure the place, room by room,
working their way steadily downwards. Maybe the spiderguns would be deployed ahead of the troops as they progressed, to take out all readerguns, and that eventuality should be prepared for.

Stepping inside, he sent his orders immediately, in just a microsecond. Construction robots began cutting away sections of cageway, so as to give themselves a wide angle of approach. Other
robots with similar cutting gear positioned themselves nearby, because cutting gear was just what was required. It was a simple fact that spiderguns were lethal weapons, but they were also strictly
anti-personnel weapons, and as vulnerable to a diamond saw as anything else made of metal. Other robots began concealing themselves for ambush, folding themselves up inside storerooms and cabins,
climbing into ceiling spaces or the spaces under floors, behind wall panels or cramming themselves into air ducts, before welding and sealing themselves in.

Saul now issued further instructions. He wanted ten undamaged VC suits, so it would be necessary for ten of the attackers to die very neatly. Robots would have to deploy their ceramo-carbide
chisels and drills carefully, for a hole punched into the vertebrae just below the neck ring should paralyse and kill, and not be as messy as, say, a heart puncture. Whereupon the suit should be
easy to patch up afterwards.

The crump of an explosion shifted the air of the interior and was immediately followed by the shrieking of a breach alarm. Through cams focused up there, Saul watched a spider-gun leap in and
take out the two readerguns. It then shot through the door and headed for the nearest cageway. The troops followed the second spidergun in, carting two of the heavy machine guns dismounted and
carried ready for use inside. Saul was impressed by the efficient way they progressed, trying to leave nothing to chance as they checked the many niches and hidey-holes. Some robots they did find
and, as a precaution, disabled with pulse weapons, but they missed many more.

‘Nine of you will come with me,’ Saul said to the fast-response team. ‘The rest will remain in Tech Central and fire on us.’

‘You what?’ Langstrom exclaimed.

Saul then explained the plan to him.

Mars

The sun was dropping out of sight and Coprates Chasma sliding back into shadow when Var came across further human remains. But this one would not be supplying her with
further oxygen or super-caps. This person must have been inside, and unsuited, when the building had collapsed. The corpse was as dry and brittle as aged kindling but actually came up all in one
piece, having been stuck to the bottom of a regolith block like a crushed bug. Moving both block and corpse exposed the floor below, which gave Var something to work to. She cleared compacted dust
from this same point back to the wall foundations, then began working along these too, shortly exposing one side of an intact airlock.

Even as she began digging out the airlock, Var wondered what she was hoping to achieve. Would another hour or two of air matter to her? Perhaps now she should really start thinking about how to
ease her passing. She paused, almost resentful of this wholly pragmatic part of her mind. Just a moment’s thought brought home to her the realities.

Opening her suit directly to the Martian atmosphere was probably the worst option. Yes, she would die within a few minutes, but it would be a horrible, agonizing death. She should know, since it
was how she had killed a number of Ricard’s men and she had been there to watch the whole unpleasant process.

The option of just keeping her suit on therefore seemed best. Just let the suit keep scrubbing out the carbon dioxide and, as the oxygen ran out, she would be breathing more and more of the
constantly recycled remainder, which would be nitrogen – and nitrogen asphyxiation was fairly painless and quick.

Var returned to her digging. Nitrogen asphyxiation was what awaited her, but she was not prepared to just sit gazing at her head-up display and counting down the remainder of her life. Keeping
busy enabled her to hold that reality at a slight remove. Contemplating her demise over any length of time might lead to her broadcasting pleas to the cosmos: begging, praying or something
ridiculous like that. She realized that, at that moment, her biggest fear wasn’t death itself but the possibility of it being undignified.

‘Silly woman,’ she muttered to herself.

A further hour of work exposed the outer door of the airlock. She struggled with the manual handle, but it was jammed, so she picked up a rock and hit it with that until it thunked downwards.
She heaved the door open, hoping that someone had been trapped inside and still had an air supply. When she turned on her suit light and found the lock empty she questioned her logic. If anyone had
been inside they would have used up all their air anyway. She checked the electronic control panel and found it dead, as expected, then stepped back and retrieved a multi-driver from her
suit’s toolkit. She leaned in with that to open the panel accessing the oxygen-feed pipework. This exposed simple pressure dials, all of them registering zero. Another hour of digging
revealed the severed feed-in pipes. But usually, with locks like these, the pipes led to a pressurized air reservoir. She had to find it.

It was dark now and, checking the time, Var saw that in another couple of hours the automatic broadcast to Argus would recommence. She did not have to be there for it to happen, but maybe there
had since been a reply. She returned to work, heaving regolith blocks away from the pile around where she had found the severed pipes. In this rubble she found a picture flimsy still displaying its
last image – a bull elephant standing at the edge of a waterhole, some odd fragment of someone’s life, maybe their fantasies. It was an image that made her feel horribly uneasy and
which she instantly skimmed away into the darkness, though she did not know why.

By the time she found the other ends of the pipes, which had been crushed right down to the floor, she was feeling utterly weary. Checking the time, she saw that her broadcast had recommenced as
of an hour before, and she decided that now was the time to check for any response. Afterwards she would come back out here, for what was the point in squandering her remaining time on sleep?

Var trudged back over to the building, where, even though she could see the message icon flashing on the screen, she calmly took her time in sitting down. After a long contemplative pause, she
finally summoned up the nerve to open the message, but in frustration saw it was an audio file, and she had to run an optic from her suit to the console to hear it. Then her brother spoke to
her.