Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2) (51 page)

‘We could just ram the
Scourge
,’ suggested Hannah.

‘Yes.’ He nodded and gave her a cold smile. ‘That would knock out the space-time bubble, but there wouldn’t be anything left of that ship to bother us.’

‘So why didn’t you do that?’

‘Perhaps I’m getting soft.’

‘I’m updated now,’ said Chang. ‘Commencing field shift.’

Was it fear that made her feel so hot now, Hannah wondered, then realized that it
had
grown very warm inside the control centre. Next an arc-bright light opened around the rim of the
station, and an effect much like the Northern Lights wiped out the blackness. Another crash ensued, her safety straps bit into her, and surrounding space filled with fire, shattered rock and
laceworks of glowing magma.

Scourge

One of the side-burn fusion engines gave its hollow roar and something tried to shove Clay into the corridor wall. He paused there, gasping as he waited for it to end.
What the hell was Scotonis doing?

The burn finished and Clay checked his watch. The time was 10.15 a.m. ship time, since they had retained earth time aboard. He wiped the sweat off his forehead and wished now that he had done
the same as Scotonis and removed his collar completely. Then he would have felt absolutely sure. As he set off again and passed through the damaged stretch of corridor, he further considered
Galahad’s recent transmission to him. She’d been sitting in a garden somewhere, and had seemed calm and balanced. Her words, however, had reached right into his gut and twisted.

‘Obviously it was Captain Scotonis’s decision to change course,’ she had remarked, ‘so to a limited extent I understand your lack of intervention. You probably told
yourself that, being no expert in the dangers of space travel, you should defer to him. You should not have reacted thus. I gave you risk percentages that you should have perfectly understood, but
which you ignored. That the ship might have been struck by asteroid debris did not change those percentages, Clay Ruger, and now you must be punished for your inaction. This will be a sharp
reminder for Scotonis. Enjoy the time you have left, Clay Ruger. You will die at precisely 10.30 a.m. ship time.’ She paused, turned to gaze at something else for a moment, then turned back.
‘And it will be slow, Clay, because that is the best I can do to adequately punish your betrayal of me and of Mother Earth.’

It was almost as if she had put him aboard in the first place just so, at some future time, she could deliver an ‘object lesson’. Punishing someone lower in the hierarchy
wouldn’t appear shocking enough, while punishing someone high up in the crew would hinder the mission’s chances of success. The words ‘sacrificial goat’ sprang to mind.

As Clay entered the bridge, Scotonis, Trove and Cookson turned to gaze at him. He saw that all three of them had now completely removed their collars. He hesitated: maybe he should just turn
round and head as fast as he could to the engineering shop and employ the diamond shear there. No, the reality was that if his collar wasn’t disabled, then trying to slice it off would be
fatal. If it was disabled, then he had no problem and could remove it later. He entered, aware of them still watching him as he sat down and strapped himself in. He noticed that Scotonis now wore a
sidearm. Maybe this would be Clay’s last resort if his collar was still functioning?

‘I take it Galahad told you her response to our course change?’ he asked.

‘She did,’ said Scotonis. ‘Obviously she considered a political officer less essential to the success of our mission out here than me or any of my crew.’

‘Obviously,’ said Clay bitterly. ‘Did she happen to notice that you weren’t wearing a collar?’

‘I put it back on whenever I record a report for her,’ said Scotonis.

Clay acknowledged that with a dip of his head, then, finally looking up from his straps, asked, ‘Why another course change?’

‘The situation is no longer the same,’ Scotonis replied, gesturing towards the panoramic screen before them. ‘This is a high-resolution recording of what happened just ten
minutes ago.’

Clay focused on the multi-screen. The frozen image of Argus Station lay clearly visible in a single frame, with the red blur of what he assumed must be the asteroid they were mining lying just
behind it.

‘Okay,’ he said, and Scotonis set the recording running.

The Argus station just continued hanging in space, the image unremarkable for a few seconds, then things beginning to change. Any light from behind it faded away, until it lay in a circle of
blackness. It distorted, as if that circle outlined the position of a concave lens, then it was gone, completely enclosed in a large silvery bubble. It was a flattened sphere dimpled at the pole,
on the side they could see, rather like a doughnut whose central hole had just about closed up, while right on the edge of that bubble some sort of explosion ensued, then the image froze again.

‘That blast came from part of the space docks,’ Scotonis noted, ‘sheared off then torn apart by tidal forces.’

‘What?’ Clay had no idea what he was talking about.

‘The next bit,’ Scotonis continued, ‘we put together from the cams we’re using to detect debris, because the cam originally focused on it soon lost sight of
it.’

The image was set in motion again: the stars behind the bubble blurred as it slid off frame. Another frame recaptured it to one side of the first, the object bobbing up and down and then jerking
from view again, until another cam feed picked it up in yet another frame on the multi-screen. Clay was left in no doubt, as the frames proliferated across in front of him, that he was seeing
footage of something travelling very fast indeed. Then the bubble slammed to a halt and a bright flash obliterated the view for a second. The image next slid back from pixelated chaos to show the
Argus Station at the centre of an expanding globe of glowing matter and rocky debris.

‘It struck an asteroid half a kilometre across,’ explained Scotonis. ‘The asteroid was destroyed, but the station itself appears completely undamaged.’

Clay just kept on staring at the image and, as he finally managed to absorb what this meant, he could not resist turning to Trove. ‘Seems you
can
fuck with causality.’

She just glared at him.

‘This changes things,’ he continued. ‘How far did they move?’

‘Six hundred thousand kilometres in about eight seconds,’ Scotonis replied. ‘They were travelling at nearly a quarter of the speed of light.’ A short silence ensued as
they all took that in, then Scotonis continued, ‘It doesn’t make much difference to our arrival time since they seemed to be trying to take the clearest route out of the belt, which ran
transversely to our own approach.’

‘But, still, what is the point in us going after them?’ Clay asked.

‘I’m still amazed at your stupidity,’ Trove interjected. ‘We have to go after them because if we don’t, we’re dead.’

‘Why? I just don’t see your reasoning.’

‘What is your opinion of Commander Liang and his staff?’ asked Scotonis.

‘He’s a useful idiot,’ replied Clay, ‘your archetypal fanatic . . . oh.’

‘Oh, indeed,’ said Scotonis. ‘He and his staff command two thousand troops, most wearing vacuum gear and all heavily armed. If we mutiny now, all the readerguns aboard would
not be enough to stop him taking over this ship.’ Scotonis grimaced. ‘Galahad was careful to ensure that it would be difficult for any of us to tip the balance of power aboard.
That’s either because she’s very clever or very paranoid.’

‘I’d plump for the latter,’ said Clay. ‘So why didn’t you tell me this before?’

‘Because you are an untrustworthy little worm,’ said Trove, before Scotonis could reply.

‘And you trust me now?’ Clay asked.

‘We don’t have to,’ said Trove. ‘You’re dead, remember?’

Decidedly uncomfortable with the implications of that, Clay focused his attention back on Scotonis. ‘So you intend to get Liang and his men out of the ship first?’

‘Damned right,’ the captain replied.

‘But still you need to get to the Argus Station to do that.’

‘Yes, and if that drive remains undamaged and they start it up again . . .’

Clay could see no way round that. After all this time, they were still days away from Argus Station.

‘We’ll have to talk to our friend Alex,’ said Gunnery Officer Cookson. ‘He’s the only resource we can use.’

Clay nodded. ‘If he can sabotage something—’

‘Then, of course, we have another problem,’ interrupted Scotonis, now drawing his sidearm and pointing it at Clay.

‘Problem?’ said Clay.

‘Well,’ said the captain, raising his left arm and peering at his watch, ‘you were supposed to be dead as of two minutes ago.’

Clay didn’t hear the crack of the gunshot, just felt the sledgehammer impact on his chest. Then he felt nothing at all.

Air Supply

For EVA work one of the largest problems to overcome in vacuum has been air supply. During the return to space in the Golden Decade, highly pressurized oxygen was used
in combination with recycled nitrogen and carbon-dioxide scrubbers. However, even these oxygen supplies remained bulky if someone needed to work in vacuum for any length of time. They could also be
highly dangerous if holed by any of the vast collection of micro-meteorites that had built up in Earth’s orbit since the days of
Sputnik
. The invention of the red-oxygen catalytic
bottle solved this problem at a stroke. Red oxygen, otherwise 0
₈
, is solid oxygen that has undergone a phase change which previously could only be achieved under massive pressure.
The specialized nanotube carbon-vanadium catalytic grid in the new bottles enables oxygen to undergo this phase change at low pressures, and then remain stable – only sublimating upon a
current being introduced across the grid. This resulted in oxygen bottles that could supply up to forty hours of air.

Mars

The satellite dish was now centred on, and tracking, the portion of the Asteroid Belt in which Argus Station was located – or rather where she had last known it to
be located. There should be no problem with the station receiving the transmission, since the beam would be a million kilometres across by the time it struck the belt. Var sat waiting, awake and
motionless, hoping for just some sort of reply. However, the time necessary for the signal to reach Argus and for one to be returned passed with no result.

She continued monitoring, intending to stay awake throughout the six-hour window available to her, but weariness began catching up with her. Three hours into the transmission, she found herself
frequently jerking out of a doze. Five hours in, she came out of an hour-long sleep to gaze blurry-eyed at her screen, to see that she had finally received a reply. Var woke up completely, but only
to disappointment. Her signal had been received and recorded, but only by the computer system of Argus. Doubtless it would then go through some sort of robotic winnowing process, so whether it
finally reached human ears was debatable.

Once the window closed, she decided to wait until daylight before further excavating the ruins outside to get to that corpse. She lay down on the floor, folded her arms and drifted into sleep so
quickly that it felt like death.

Consciousness returned abruptly and Var sat upright, sure she had only slept for a moment, until she saw dawn light filtering through the building’s windows. She suddenly felt optimistic:
perhaps Rhone had failed and now Martinez or Carol were coming for her; maybe she would find enough supplies of oxygen in the rubble pile to get her safely back to Antares Base?

She stood up, took a drink from the spigot in her helmet but felt no urge to make that same spigot supply her with any food paste. She felt grubby and urgently wanted to get out of her suit
– she had already used the suit’s toilet facilities, but the seal on them was never great. Trying to ignore her discomfort, she selected a large pick from the abandoned tools, headed
for the airlock, then outside into the Martian morning.

A light carbon-dioxide and water-ice fog hung in a metre-thick stratum at just about chest height, so, as she stepped outside, it seemed she was forging her way through a white sea. The fog was
even then visibly lifting, and by the time she reached the fallen building it had risen up as far as her helmet. She set to work at once, digging out to a good depth around the corpse, in readiness
to try lifting it. However, before she could do that, her head-up display warned her that her oxygen bottle was nearly depleted. Reality hit home hard and her earlier optimism evaporated like the
rising fog layer all around her. Perhaps, she considered, it was just that kind of optimism that Rhone distrusted in her.

She kept working around the corpse, loosening the regolith, occasionally slipping the pick underneath the body to try and lever it up. She ignored the regular warnings until she was panting,
eking every last molecule of her oxygen supply, then she switched over to Lopomac’s bottle and checked its reading. Unless she found something else here, she had just eighteen hours of life
left. Var began levering at the corpse again, not so tentative now because what did it matter if she damaged it?

With a crackling sound that turned tinny in the thin air, and a big puff of vapour, the corpse lifted from the waist. She realized she must have snapped the desiccated flesh and spine inside the
suit for it to be able to fold up that way. She must also have fractured a decayed suit seal to let out that puff of vapour, which was encouraging, since it meant the suit had remained pressurized.
She dropped the pick and took hold of the corpse in both hands, forcing it up and back until it was resting against the rubble slope, unnaturally bent at the waist. Caked in compacted regolith, the
flat oxygen bottle was now visible to her.

Var dropped the pick and knelt down before the bottle. She half-expected to need further tools, but the bayonet hose fittings popped out easily releasing a little puff of vapour. She then pulled
the bottle from its velcro backing and rested it in her lap. Next she disconnected her hoses from the bottle she had taken from Lopomac and plugged them into the new acquisition. She gave it a
moment, then using her wrist panel summoned the head-up display and checked numbers. She had just acquired another ten hours of air.