Neal Asher - Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

A total of three railguns could be built in the time available, and plentiful iron slugs smelted from the Argus asteroid. The collision lasers were juiced up and, quite possibly, could burn up a good proportion of what the Scourge could throw at them. It was also the case that the station’s EM field would negate the Scourge’s EM pulse weapons. However, manoeuvrability was where it all fell down. The Scourge could detect and avoid railgun fusillades. Here on Argus they could certainly detect them, but could not get the station out of the way in time. Stuff would get through, the station would be stripped of its armament, then the Scourge would dock and spew out its thousands of troops.

According to the models.

What gave Hannah hope was the maser, for the model had discounted it as an option. However, the Saberhagens had cracked that one with some quite brilliant and original ideas, so there was still reason for hope.

Hannah continued making her way along one of the cageways leading to the station rim, a spidergun scouting out the course ahead of her – a robot that Paul now insisted should accompany her everywhere – and with Brigitta and Pike hurrying to catch up.

‘So when did this happen?’ Hannah asked over her suit radio.

‘I’ve been checking program logs,’ Brigitta replied. ‘It started two months ago, directly after the last enclosure hull plates were welded in place, and has been going on ever since.’

‘So let me get this straight,’ replied Hannah. ‘Every time a robot finishes a programmed task here,’ she gestured to the big railguns, ‘or anywhere else on the station, for that matter, rather than go somnolent, it heads out to the station rim, and you never noticed until now?’

‘There’s more to it than that,’ interjected Pike. ‘Furnace-production and factory-component stats haven’t been adding up either. I thought it was all down to the damage we received out there. I didn’t find out the truth until after we started going into serious solar die-off and had to start pulling more power from station reactors.’

This was one of the many problems they now faced. As they moved further away from the sun, the solar mirrors – even complemented by the additional mirrors they had manufactured – weren’t providing as much heat as they could manage before, and so the reactors were under an increasingly heavy drain. In fact it had been necessary to take all the spares out of storage and put them online too.

‘So someone or something has not only infiltrated the robots, but our metals plants as well?’

‘Damned right,’ said Pike. ‘I started checking yesterday and found large quantities of components being delivered to various points on the outer ring. A lot of the stuff is similar to the electromagnets and superconductive wiring Brigitta is using, hence my not noticing before. But, since checking, I’ve seen some weirdly designed electromagnets and other stuff I haven’t even been able to identify. There’re also lots of sections of titanium-alloy cylinders with an internal silicon dioxide hex-chain carbon finish – as near to zero-coefficient of friction as we can get. Christ knows what they’re for. I’ve seen nothing like them before.’

Hannah gazed ahead towards the outer ring. Someone or something . . . Had those clones of Messina’s managed a successful and thorough penetration of the station’s computer systems? It seemed highly unlikely. Was this some kind of project worked out between Langstrom and Le Roque? They had seemed to acquiesce to her leadership, but that could have just been a front. But, even then, she doubted they had the ability and resources to manage something quite like this. That just left Alan and his machines – an idea that scared her thoroughly. All the station machines, including the proctors, were still connected to Alan’s sleeping mind – a mind which, from the images all had seen and the sounds all had heard from the station system, seemed to be experiencing hellish nightmares. It was a mind that dwelt within a human brain – with additions – that seemed to be taking on a shape beyond any analysis.

The cageway was attached alongside one of the ore-transport tubes that led from the asteroid to the rim, where one of the big sun smelters and factory plants extended out into space. It was along this tube that raw materials were transported out from the asteroid to the processing plants, and back along which the finished products were conveyed. Glancing back, Hannah noticed that the asteroid had grown visibly smaller, such was the material that had already gone into enclosure, the weapons and now, it seemed, whatever the robots were building in the rim. Reaching the inner face of the rim, she walked up along it on her gecko boots, as if along some massive highway curving up into a metal forest. It occurred to her, even as she walked, that the enclosure hadn’t made a huge difference to the view. True, they could no longer see any stars from inside the station, but the thousands of LED lights scattered through that vast internal space did look remarkably like stars.

A wide cargo lock stood ahead of them with its two hinged doors open. Even as they approached, a construction robot scuttled out of it like some busy termite, carting in its heavy forelimbs what looked like a few tonnes of floor plates. Ignoring them completely, it launched itself into the station interior, tapped a cross-member a hundred metres out in order to alter its course, then sailed on into the distance.

‘And that’s another one,’ Pike added.

‘Another what?’

‘I also found out that the amount of scrap being fed into the plants has increased substantially,’ he replied. ‘They’re obviously ripping stuff out of here to fit this installation inside, whatever it is.’

‘Is that all of it?’ Hannah asked.

‘There’s more,’ said Brigitta. ‘I was going to check it out further before I said anything, but it seems some robots have been making alterations to the transformers that run our EM radiation shield. I only noted that when I found out that the system programming for the field had changed.’

‘Shit!’ said Hannah. ‘Shit! Shit!’

‘That’s about all,’ said Pike.

Hannah grunted acknowledgement at that, then said, ‘Be careful in there. They might not be programmed against riveting us to some wall.’

They entered through the cargo lock and found a massive hole punched through the floors of the rim itself. They followed this down through three floors and soon found what they had come here to see.

An entire rim floor had been cut away, leaving a groove twenty metres wide extending concentrically in both directions for as far as they could see. All around this, considerably more had also been cut away to expose the main structural beams. To these had been attached further beams, which converged in towards the groove, where they supported a section of . . . something . A massive collection of electromagnets enwrapped a fifty-metre length of mirrored tube that was about half a metre in diameter. Even as she watched, robots were working to fit another two-metre section of tube, while a small, specially designed cylindrical robot was busy actually inside the tube simultaneously welding, grinding down and then spraying and optically polishing the latest join just after it had cooled.

‘All round the station rim,’ observed Brigitta.

Hannah nodded. This looked as if someone – or something – was building a particle accelerator right around the inside of the station rim – a particle accelerator fifteen kilometres long.

‘So what the fuck is this?’ asked Pike.

‘I have absolutely no idea,’ said Hannah.

‘I see you have come to inspect,’ said a voice through her suit radio. ‘Optimum build rate would increase with less diversification.’