Neal Asher: Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

‘Messy,’ Messina repeated.

Alex knew now that he wasn’t referring to Alex’s marksmanship, but to how things were about to become – and soon.

Mars

It was morning, but here the weak Martian sun would not limp into view until almost midday. A fog had rolled in again, and a fine layer of ice crystals had frosted the metal of the airlock. Moving with stolid weariness, Var had now exposed three metres of rock-damaged pipes and was idly wondering how many more metres she might be able to expose in the hours remaining to her. In the mere five hours remaining to her.

Fatalism and hope were at war within her, and both of them were losing out to a bone-deep fatigue. After clearing the way to another large regolith block which, when she pulled it out, would bring most of the rubble on the slope above down on the area she had cleared, she stood up and stretched. She couldn’t see very far through the fog and imagined shapes emerging out of it: the hidden Martians riding their sand yachts; the red-skinned warriors of Barsoom with swords agleam, the mighty Tars Tarkas looming amid them; the adapted dust farmers or the lurking greys.

‘Where are you now, John Carter?’ she wondered, her voice sounding cracked and slightly weird to her.

She’d passed similar ironic comments previously to personnel at the base regarding the old stories of Mars, until she realized they were mostly falling on deaf ears – Lopomac was the only one to understand. Being the daughter of Committee executives, Var was one of the few who had once had access to such fiction and seemingly one of fewer still who had bothered to read it. In the end the reality of Mars came down to simple facts: such as dust, unbreathable air and the utter hostility of a barren world. It was beautiful, in its way, but then hostile landscapes often were. They were something to be viewed from the cosy comfort afforded by technology – take that away and the beauty began to lose its appeal.

Var stooped and was at last able to drag out the big regolith block, whereupon with depressing predictability the rubble pile slid down, precisely as she had expected. She stood back and surveyed the task ahead of her, then decided to climb up on top of the rubble for a better view towards where the buried pipes were heading.

The summit of the rubble pile brought her out of the fog, so that it seemed she was rising up out of some milky river with islands visible ahead and the banks rising on either side. Beauty again, she felt; it was a heart-stoppingly glorious scene that somehow seemed utterly sad. Then she realized that it wasn’t the scene that was sad, but herself, and it wasn’t sadness she was feeling, really, but regret. Acceptance overwhelmed her and she understood that she was really making her goodbyes, but strong on the tail of that came anger. She would give up only when her air ran out, and not before. She peered down through the fog, her gaze tracking along where she felt the pipes were heading. Then she began to map out the building in her mind, trying to see what logic had been followed in its construction.

It made no sense for them to have positioned the compressed-air cylinder such a long way from the airlock. Why waste the pipework like that? That it wasn’t positioned right next to the airlock probably had something to do with whatever lay nearby. Maybe there had been a suiting room just inside the entrance, with decontamination equipment, something like that. Having to position the cylinder a short distance away, they would have run the pipes along the walls. The fact that she found them a metre and a half in from the wall foundation was probably because they had been positioned that same distance up from the floor when the walls had collapsed inwards. Var gazed at a dip in the rubble on the other side of the heap she stood upon. She would dig there instead, and if she didn’t find the pipes, she would work back into the pile, one and a half metres from where the wall had stood. If she did find the pipes there, that meant she would have saved herself a great deal of work and could continue following them.

She scrambled down to a dip in the rubble and began digging, using blocks she unearthed to build a loose barrier in order to prevent further rubble falling in. She worked frenetically, angrily until, just half an hour later, she was stunned to come across the same pipes running perhaps a metre above the floor. It was a victory, a gain, and she allowed a surge of optimism to buoy her, denying her logical pessimism any purchase on it.

20

The Dead Hand on the Helm

Looking back, we can now see how the introverted gaze of the human race resulted in the disasters of the past, and that this began the moment that socialism and social justice were taken up and perverted by the politicians. Ostensibly focusing on the ‘greatest good for the greatest number – and right now’, while actually gathering more power and wealth for themselves, they failed to learn the lessons of history and failed also to prepare for the future. Had the Committee expended more world resources on building up the space programme rather than on augmenting its leaden bureaucracy and the mechanisms of controlling the growing population, had it not suppressed science that did not directly serve the Committee itself and therefore relegated original thinkers to its cells – effectively bringing technological growth to a halt for over a century – things would have been altogether better. It is contestable that, rather than now looking back on the mass exterminations occurring in the twenty-second century, we would be looking back instead on a flowering of humanity across the solar system, combined with the technological singularity and the beginning of the post-human world. Twenty-twenty hindsight is always too easy, but that’s not to say it isn’t correct.

Scourge

All of Liang’s forces had been deployed inside and were now engaged in shooting up the station.

‘So now it’s time to go,’ said Clay, because he did not like the introspective silence the three on the bridge had fallen into.

Scotonis took a moment to reply, so perhaps he was having second thoughts. Perhaps he, too, had felt that odd sense of pride in seeing the troops they had brought here storming the station.

‘Make him do it,’ murmured Trove. ‘Let’s see if he has any value at all.’

‘Yes, time to go,’ Scotonis said, then turned his gaze up to the camera through which Clay was watching him. ‘And time for you to make yourself useful.’

A familiar sinking sensation occupied Clay’s gut. ‘In what way?’

‘One of our anchors is failing to disengage,’ said Scotonis. ‘I want you to suit up, head down to the barracks section and collect a two-kilo demolition charge from there – Liang left plenty behind for resupply. Then place it on the anchor concerned, which is clearly visible just beyond the disembarkation ramp.’

‘You what?’ Clay exclaimed in dismay.

‘You know how to put on a suit and you know how to operate that type of charge,’ said Scotonis. ‘Which of my instructions are you finding unclear?’

‘Send one of your crew,’ argued Clay.

‘Yes, I could do that.’ Scotonis nodded introspectively. ‘I could order one of my crew – twelve of whom have already died and eight more of whom are in Medical – to go and risk their lives while you sit there comfortably in Messina’s quarters.’

‘They would be better at it,’ protested Clay desperately. Why was Scotonis doing this? Did he intend to leave Clay behind on Argus, too?

‘No, it’s a simple task,’ said Scotonis. ‘All it requires is a little technical knowledge, which you have – and a little bravery, which we have yet to ascertain.’