Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2) (56 page)

The screen blinked back on, and audio returned.

‘Maser! A fucking maser!” Cookson shouted.

‘Shut it down!’ Scotonis yelled, his voice drowned out by another horrible sound.

Something was happening to some of the troops out on the hull. Some had released their holds and were falling away from the ship, legs and arms waving frantically, spacesuits inflating
grotesquely. When some of them began bursting in clouds of vapour and offal, Clay just gaped. The concerted screaming seemed like the feed from a microphone opened into Hell, and it took Clay a
moment to grasp that he should not be hearing this at all, for he only had command channels open. Then, belatedly, he realized he was not hearing it over radio, but distantly through the body of
the ship. He turned his attention immediately to the troops still aboard.

Two of the hexagonal compartments appeared fine, with all the troops neatly ranked and in the process of filing out, but in the third one a chaotic mass of swiftly moving bodies bounced about
like plastic balls in a lottery cylinder. Smoke began to appear too, then some of the bodies that had finally stopped writhing began to sprout fire from their suit seams. Not being out in vacuum,
these men were not inflating or bursting, instead being cooked inside their garments.

Again that deep thrumming echoed throughout the ship. Fire exploded out of another part of the station and rose up into Clay’s range of view. A series of detonations followed and, as he
glimpsed something spearing its way down, trailing cable, he realized that the docking anchors had now been fired. He focused a camera on one of them and watched it hit, driving its hardened talons
into hull metal, then begin closing up, tearing up tens of square metres of surface metal until clamping on the firmer structure underneath. The sounds of heavy motors winding in the anchor cables,
and the stressing of metal, ensued, followed by stuttering bursts of a side-burner, which took the strain off those motors so they wound up to a scream.

The station loomed steadily closer, then with a crash Clay’s view of it blanked. They were down. He searched for other views, finally seeing surviving troops disembarking onto the plain of
the hull and heading out towards where the hull plates were bent upwards around a hole made by a previous explosion inside. Within the
Scourge
, he saw troops exiting even faster. Liang had
decompressed the three sections, incidentally extinguishing the flames in one of them, and opened a space door down to the hull to act as a ramp.

Clay felt an odd moment of pride. The troops had come all this way and now they were ready to complete their mission. That he was complicit in the plan to abandon them here didn’t seem to
have any relevance to this feeling, and in that moment he questioned his earlier notion about Scotonis being a ‘better human being’. The feeling died once he saw the silver swarm rising
up out of a distant hole.

The robots were coming.

Earth

Serene hadn’t realized how tense she had been feeling until the pressure started to ease the moment the
Scourge
was down and anchored. Even if the rebels
re-engaged that new drive of theirs, there would be no escape for them, because the
Scourge
now lay within the compass of the drive’s warp bubble. They were finished. Despite heavy
initial losses on Serene’s side, the attack was proceeding to plan, and the remaining fifteen hundred troops would soon take the station. All that mattered now was what might get destroyed in
the process. Under slightly less pressure at knowing that he no longer had to plan also for an assault on Antares Base on Mars, Commander Liang had assured her of success, and that the Gene Bank
samples and data would be retrieved. He had then been embarrassingly grateful when, in her last message, she had informed him that securing Jasper and an intact drive were no longer important
either. Calder was now absolutely certain he could build one – had bet his life on the certainty, and
knew
it.

Serene watched her troops deploying before the approaching horde of robots – a scene she would have to extract the most entertainment from right now, because very shortly such exterior
inputs would shut down. Alan Saul’s ability to penetrate computer systems made it essential that the assault force left nothing open for him. Liang had pushed for limited-burst transmissions
between him and his troops, for delivering only essential instructions, and nothing leading back to the ship. Open video coms originating from helmet cams would have been positively suicidal, since
they possessed a bandwidth into which Saul might insert himself. Even the view Serene watched now had its dangers, as became evident when a warning icon began blinking down at one corner of the
screen, and then the image froze before blinking out.

Serene gazed in frustration at the blank screen until some words appeared on it: ‘Attempted com laser viral insertion’. She flicked the screen to another view, long-range from the
Hubble, which was clear enough to show the
Scourge
and the station, but not clear enough to reveal any detail of the action. She sat back, surveyed her garden, noting that some of the plants
were dying despite the ministrations of her new expert horticulturalist and the addition of nutrients from the composting of the last one.

‘Sack!’ she shouted.

He appeared on the other side of the bridge in an instant. ‘Ma’am?’

‘Bring me a drink,’ she commanded. ‘The champagne.’

He dipped his head and retreated.

She had intended to have a little celebration as soon as Liang reported success, but why not enjoy that drink now? She could always crack open another bottle later.

Sack shortly returned with a bottle of champagne and a flute glass on a silver tray. He looked a very odd butler indeed. He placed the tray on the table beside her, picked up the bottle and
opened it, the cork arcing through the air to land in her fish pond, and poured her a glass. Serene picked it up and took a sip. Once Sack saw that she was satisfied he turned to go. She held up a
hand to halt him, then pointed over to a stone bench nearby. He obediently went over and eased his bulk down on it.

‘I know so little about you,’ she began.

Obviously Sack did not consider this warranted a reply.

‘Barring everything in your record, of course,’ she added. ‘I understand you have family who were taken by the Scour?’

‘My father,’ he replied.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘that gun . . .’ But the association of the antique weapon Sack carried with the term ‘father’ raised feelings she did not want to examine
too closely. She continued, ‘So tell me, Sack, what do you think of what we have achieved so far?’

Despite his lizard skin concealing almost any human expression, he did look uncomfortable. He dipped his head and sat forwards, elbows on knees and hands clenched together.

‘You have unified Earth in very difficult circumstances,’ he said.

‘Is that all you have to say?’

‘I would need you to ask a more specific question, ma’am.’ He looked up.

‘Very well.’ She took a sip of her drink and collected her thoughts. ‘Do you think that what I am doing is right? Do you think my methods are just?’

‘Right and just for whom?’ he enquired.

‘I am asking you the question, so you must reply from your point of view.’

‘I want for nothing.’

Serene began to feel frustrated with this exchange, and wished she hadn’t started it. As she gazed at him, however, she wondered just how others around her might react to his dehumanizing
skin . . . how things might be for him on a more personal level, and found herself wanting to continue the exchange.

‘What do others feel?’ she asked. ‘Can you give me a sense of their opinions?’

‘They vary,’ he said.

‘Give me an example.’

After a long pause, he said carefully, ‘Those closest to you in Earth’s hierarchy are aware that the power and wealth they obtain is directly proportional to the potential danger to
themselves of such proximity.’

‘Danger from me.’

‘Erm . . . yes, ma’am.’

‘And those not so close . . . for example those in the upper administration?’

‘They have the benefit of employment, they can support themselves and their families, and they know that if they keep their heads down their chances of surviving are good.’

‘And what of those we must now describe as the proletariat?’

‘They have their fears, of course, but they are distanced from them by the fact that they have absolutely no control over their lives.’

This was going nowhere. ‘You’ve merely stated facts I already know. How am I viewed? What are people’s opinions of me?’

‘My contact with people outside of your immediate circle is limited, ma’am.’

‘But we have travelled widely and you have spoken with others . . .’

‘I do not wish to kill myself with my own words, ma’am.’

‘Speak your mind without fear, Sack, just this once.’

He continued gazing at her for longer than felt comfortable, and she knew he didn’t believe her.

‘The world is currently a better place,’ he said, ‘but not because of the way it is ruled but rather because there are more resources now and fewer people. Many I have spoken
to claim to resent their lack of freedom but, because they have been brought up with political officers micromanaging their everyday lives, they are not entirely sure what that lack is. Their
resentment is also less because we no longer have the human resources for that same degree of micromanagement. Moreover, they all fear instability more than they resent being ruled autocratically,
again because that is simply what they are used to. In their eyes you represent stability and, while they are terrified of you, it is not a human terror. You are remote, unpredictable, almost like
fate . . . almost like the Scour.’

It was the longest speech she had ever heard from him and its honesty had a surprising effect, with a tightness in her groin, and she speculated again on how things were for him on a more
personal level . . . She shook her head, annoyed that the occasional reactions she felt to this lizard-skinned man might well have been described by her father as an example of perversion, and
considered the content of his words. Though he had given her some things to consider, they were not new to her. She was, in the end, the head of state. She
was
the state. Realistically, she
had to accept that the old ideologies – on which the Committee’s and her own rule had been built – all collapsed under the weight of the reality of human nature. In the end, she
was no different from the kings and emperors of old. It was very depressing, and a perfect example of the sentiment that the more things change, the more they remain the same.

‘You may go,’ she told him, waving her hand with regal dismissiveness, uncomfortable with her reactions to Sack, and deliberately turning her thoughts elsewhere.

Once Earth was organized precisely as she wanted it, she felt it would then be time to turn her attention to something long overdue. The nature of the human race itself needed to be changed.
Primitive humanity required alteration.

Argus

With one part of his mind, Saul exerted full control of the robot steadily trying to salvage components from the hardware Alex had wrecked. The thing had all of the
detritus now floating in a cloud between its highly complex forelimbs, directly in front of its sensor array, and was sorting through it quickly and methodically. The other two robots assisting the
repair team were fully under Judd’s control, and they seemed to be working faster, as if the proctor’s kinship with them gave it some advantage. The team of eight technicians Le Roque
had sent were working to strip back the damage, replacing a coil destroyed by stray shots, and assembling stock chipsets and other components for the high-voltage requirements here. It would take
them at least two hours and twenty minutes to succeed, by the end of which time their common fate aboard this station might well have been decided.

The Saberhagens had done their best but, with the EM pulses from atomic blasts screwing their targeting, it had not been enough to stop the
Scourge
. Saul had known this anyway. Their
means of escape had been the Rhine drive, and now things weren’t looking so good. If this had been a land battle, the chances of success, as calculated right now, were less than forty per
cent, with an error bar of over twenty per cent. But this was no land battle and, in this environment and with the weapons currently being deployed, the chances of mutual destruction stood at over
eighty per cent.

With most of the rest of his mind, Saul surveyed the entire station. He calculated that, before it had been destroyed, the maser had killed a quarter of the assault force – waiting until
the last moment to deploy it had been the Saberhagens’ best move yet. Saul estimated that this left about fifteen hundred troops, which was still more than enough for them to establish a good
foothold. Sending the robots out was a good tactic until those invading troops got organized, then they would start deploying their EM radiation pulse weapons and the gains achieved by outright
confrontation would be lost. He would pull them inside once that happened, and resort to guerrilla warfare until he found a way to respond with ultimate ruthlessness.

The sight of troops tumbling out into vacuum, generally in pieces, announced the arrival of Saul’s spiderguns at the two breaches in the station’s hull. Clouds of vapour drifted amid
the human wreckage, and returning fire filled the vacuum about the two breaches with splintered ceramic bullets and flinders of metal. Even as the remaining troops were opening fire, the
construction robots reached them and began tearing them apart. It was all horribly graphic out there in the utter silence of space. Next, Saul’s view, through the sensors of one spidergun,
blanked. That happened so fast, Saul only realized why on scanning the hull of the
Scourge
. EM radiation pulse weapons were now being fired from ports in the side of the ship.

Robots began to freeze up, tumble out of control or end up stuck in some kind of loop, which in one case involved a large construction robot perpetually trying to behead a man it had already
beheaded. Saul instructed the remaining spider-guns to direct their fire at the ship, while the army of robot foot-soldiers abruptly reversed their progress and headed back for the holes torn in
the hull. This was utterly necessary, but it frustrated him that they had done so little damage: a hundred and thirteen enemy troops taken out of the fight but, unfortunately, thirty robots and two
spiderguns as well.