Neal Asher - Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

‘That’s one of them,’ said Cookson and, even as he spoke, another explosion erupted from the station, hurling black chunks of machinery up on a column of fire. ‘And that’s the other,’ he added.

‘Trove,’ prompted Scotonis.

‘Twenty minutes,’ she replied.

The surge of the engines shoved Clay deeper into his chair, then tried to throw him out of it sideways.

‘Liang,’ said Scotonis, ‘twenty minutes. Get in position.’

‘Already clearing first teams in Section One,’ replied Commander Liang.

Troops were crammed into the tube leading to the airlocks. Clay searched for further views, and saw that, even while the tube was full of soldiers, they were still on the move. Soon he found an exterior cam showing them spilling out on the hull of the Scourge like ants boiling from their nest. There they had strung out ropes connected to the hull and were using them to secure themselves. They struck Clay as overly exposed out there, but were those inside the ship any safer?

On Argus Station, detonations were still blooming like brief hot stars, and sending chunks of debris tumbling away. Cookson was now destroying their collision lasers, Clay realized, and maybe any other anti-personnel weapons scattered about the surface. It seemed all very easy and going perfectly to plan, which was worrying.

‘Nothing more from the railguns,’ said Cookson. ‘That means they have to be down.’

‘As things stand, between the first two strike points looks good,’ observed Liang, who must have been studying a head-up display. ‘We assault the station internally through them while a third team goes over the hull to take Tech Central.’

The station was now looming huge on the multi-screen as Trove announced, ‘Ten minutes, docking anchors primed.’

Next Cookson observed, ‘I’m getting an energy spike. There’s something—’

All the hardware around Clay blanked and a hot flu-like sensation passed through his body. Immediately on top of this came a numb terror, as he expected the fire he had seen aboard Galahad’s aero to descend on him now.

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.