Neal Asher - Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

Serene took another sip of champagne, then flicked her gaze back to the list. Some in the crowd of prisoners were sobbing, four had tried to run and been beaten to the floor, while one had managed to ram his head into an enforcer’s gut and then deliver an excellent kick to another enforcer’s head, before running. A disabler dropped him, screaming, beside a wall of crates.

However, most just remained in a kneeling position, doing nothing. She had previously noticed how, if you first selected a couple of prisoners from a crowd you intended to do away with, the rest somehow convinced themselves that they were being given an object lesson, and that they weren’t going to die, too. She smiled with a feeling of peace easing the tension in her body, selected the whole of the rest of the list and dragged it to the ring icon, left the setting the same, pressed send and sat back.

The noise was abominable, and in a short time the smell was too. Serene finished her champagne, then poured herself another glass. The enforcers moved back from the thrashing, retching mass of humanity. Out of this mass crawled one woman whose collar seemed to have malfunctioned.

‘Deal with her,’ said Serene, pointing.

An enforcer stepped over and beat in the woman’s skull with his rifle butt.

In two minutes it was all over.

‘Santanzer,’ Serene said next.

The man stepped over beside her chair. ‘Ma’am?’ He didn’t look well

‘You are now the technical director of this facility. How soon can you go into production?’

‘Within two days, ma’am.’

‘At what rate?’

‘The furnaces can produce two metres of strip every hour, but motor production and assembly is slower – about five to six thousand collars every twenty-four hours,’ he replied.

‘Not enough and not fast enough,’ she said. ‘That’s only a million in six months. You’ll be provided with all the resources you need to increase that figure.’

‘How many do you want?’

‘Let’s go for a nice round figure,’ she said, standing up. ‘If you haven’t produced a billion within the first year, I’ll be back here to find out why.’

She headed for the stairs feeling slightly woozy; the champagne had gone to her head.

Argus

They had food and water here in this zero-gravity hydroponics unit, and remained safe from discovery after Alexandra had managed to run a program through the local agribots so that they would ignore this apparent new staff complement. But Alex had become frustrated by the lack of action, and by all the sneaking about and spying. However, their instructions from Serene Galahad, then reaffirmed by the leader of the tactical team on Earth, had been quite explicit: no military action. Instead they were to watch and report everything they could and be ready for the arrival of the Scourge . Now, as Alex listened in frustration to the various sounds penetrating the surrounding walls – the clattering, the intermittent whine of a cutter and occasional deep groans and bangs – it seemed that they were trapped here, and that they were about to be found.

‘What are they doing?’ he asked Alexandra.

She continued studying her screen for a moment, then looked up. ‘It looks as if they’re dismounting the whole hydroponics unit.’ She paused for a second, her expression distant. ‘To isolate us?’ she wondered, clearly puzzled.

Alex shook his head. ‘Then why not just send in the robots? In this confined area we wouldn’t stand a chance.’

‘Maybe,’ she suggested, ‘they’re worried about the damage if there’s a firefight in here. Hydroponics is important, so perhaps they just intend to isolate us and wait us out.’

Good, she was starting to think a little bit more outside the box.

‘I don’t think so,’ he opined. ‘We’re just in the way.’

She focused on him. ‘I don’t understand.’

Alex frowned for a second then continued, ‘That thing they’re building in the outer ring . . . we saw how they cut straight through underneath the space dock, took out those big structural beams and repositioned them. They’re building it all the way round, and this unit is standing in the way. So they’re moving it.’

‘Makes more sense, that. I guess if they wanted to isolate us, they just had to weld the doors shut,’ she said, adding, ‘Maybe we should sabotage it?’

‘You heard what Tactical Analysis said,’ he said. ‘They can discern no military application for it, other than maybe some sort of EM defence, which the station already has. It looks more like some sort of fast transport system and, if anything, it’s a good thing that they’re diverting station resources into the project.’

‘I still don’t like it,’ said Alexandra.

At that moment, the whole hydroponics unit shifted and the lights went out. Alex turned on his suit light to compensate, while Alexandra remained focused on her screen.

‘Completely detached,’ she said. ‘We’ve got some big construction robots out there taking hold. I think you’re right and it looks to me as if there’s a place deeper in already prepared. We’re only being moved about twenty metres.’

They now sat in silence, holding on tight as the unit was moved. Then it clanged to a halt, the lurch not enough to disturb the agribots still working all around them. The racket from outside could be heard again, and Alex felt his tension ease when he heard the familiar sizzling of welders. When the lights came back on, he checked his watch. It was time to record another report. He gestured to Alexandra, who moved away from the screen, pulling herself up into the overhead scaffold while he moved into position and set the screen to record.

‘We have data on the other weapon, which I will transmit with this report,’ he began. ‘It is not, as we first supposed, a railgun, but some sort of beam weapon.’ He gave a brief description that provided no more data than the pictures they would send, then continued with, ‘Alexandra has managed to locate some old cargo manifests which indicate the final destination of cargos being sent here. As you surmised, the Gene Bank samples were transported directly to the Arboretum. They went there rather than to Arcoplex Two mainly because of the storage space. The data, however, is another matter. It was brought here in permanent-write carbon-crystal storage, then fed into the station system. We don’t know the location of the PWCC, but copies of the data are stored throughout the station. We tried to access them, but something’s happened – the whole system seems a lot more aware again, as it was when Alan Saul was still in control. We just managed to get away from the console we were using before a spidergun arrived. That’s all for now.’

‘What I don’t understand,’ said Alexandra, ‘is why there aren’t copies of that data all across Earth – you could get all of it on terabyte sticks.’

‘It’s not for us to question that,’ said Alex. ‘Remember, it was under the Chairman’s orders that the data came here, so it was under his orders that none of it should remain on Earth.’

He watched her acquiesce and dismiss the question from her mind, but it still remained in his. With data storage so easy, it seemed ludicrous to confine something so valuable to just one location. The Chairman must have considered this data part of his power base, maybe as a hedge against the possibility of revolution on Earth while he was up on Argus. Those down below would not have been able to maintain power while Earth’s biosphere died all around them, and without the Gene Bank data they would have nothing with which to regenerate it all. All he had to do then was wait them out.

‘Send the report,’ he snapped, uncomfortable with where these thoughts were taking him.