Neal Asher - Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

Whenever the robots weren’t actually testing this machine, communications with the Scourge had continued, Alexandra grabbing everything she could from the station system and sending it that way. All the weird images and sounds had been analysed, all the intercepted communications run through specialized computer programs. Tactical had thereby come back with what seemed to be the correct answer: Alan Saul wasn’t dead but very badly injured, his brain damaged by Two’s shot to the head, but, such was the hardware in his skull and his computer links into the system and to the robots, that he was impossible to cut out. The entire station was now being run by someone who had lost a large chunk of his brain.

‘Okay,’ Alex continued, ‘the space docks next – check your rifle.’

Alexandra set her Kalashtech assault rifle to vacuum function and ran a diagnostic on it. ‘If we have to use these, then that’s probably the end for us.’

Alex switched his rifle over too, also running a diagnostic. Both weapons had recently been in a warm, oxygenated and moist environment, which usually wasn’t a problem but could become one once they were moved into vacuum. Gas pockets forming in some components could expand and cause damage, as could the abrupt temperature change, and trapped moisture might turn to ice. There were no problems with either rifle, but, with the remaining ceramic ammo divided between them, they only had two clips each, one full and the other containing about half its usual load of eighty bullets.

‘If we get into trouble and get separated,’ Alex declared, as he led the way along the surface of the weird new structure, ‘you must head straight for the plane. You know exactly what we want, so, if you encounter a problem there, head straight back to the hydroponics unit.’ He paused reflectively. ‘And you remember what to do if you’re cornered, with no chance of escape?’

‘I give myself up,’ she replied woodenly.

He glanced round at her and noted her frown. It had been hard enough for him to accept that this was the best option, for his own conditioning cried out at the very idea of surrender. Alexandra, in her inexperience and her youth, had great difficulty first accepting that she had been subject to conditioning at all, and utterly rebelled against the thought of giving herself up.

As they crossed from the new structure to a cageway leading into near-space levels of the rim, retracing the route they had taken earlier to get to the hydroponics unit before the robots started tearing this particular area apart, he once again ran through what he had been telling her repeatedly for some time. It was something she seemed to forget every time she slept, but every time he reminded her it seemed to stick in her mind a little more.

‘We have nothing that will be of tactical value to the rebels, because those communicating with us have ensured that,’ he said. ‘We have both been conditioned to fight to the death when facing capture, because the Chairman did not want any information we might possess falling into enemy hands.’ That was not strictly true, though it was what Alex himself had believed for about the first ten years of his life. But he had come to realize, over the ensuing twenty years, that they were conditioned to fight to the death simply because they were a disposable commodity.

‘If we die,’ he continued, ‘we can do nothing for the Chairman and therefore will have failed him. If we are captured, though, there is still a chance, when the Scourge attacks, for us to free ourselves and rescue him.’

‘I understand,’ she said, but still she doubted him.

From the cageway they headed on round, two levels below the outer skin of the rim, towards the space docks. Here the beam-work of walls marked out corridors and rooms, but only a few of the wall plates – ten centimetres of insulation sandwiched between layers of bubblemetal – had as yet been welded in place. Work here had ceased completely during the struggle between Saul and Smith, and never recommenced. Half a kilometre further on, they reached a completed wall with a wide bulkhead door inset. Alex pulled down the manual handle – the fact that he could even move it indicating that vacuum lay on the other side – and they stepped through into a section of the level that was almost complete but had yet to be pressurized.

‘What’s that?’ Alexandra asked, pointing to an object drifting through vacuum ten metres along the corridor they had now entered.

Alex focused on the thing she indicated. It must have been shaken loose during that recent course change but had yet to be dragged to the floor by the nigh-indiscernible gravity of the central asteroid, or pinned against a wall by station spin. For a moment he just could not quite process what he was seeing, so strange did it look in this setting. Then he understood.

‘It’s a boot,’ he said. ‘I think we just found the mortuary.’

It was through the next doorway, a long room along the back wall of which the casualties of past battles aboard the station had been stacked in two heaps, like cordwood. Alex stepped inside and viewed the scene before him. He knew that originally the corpses here had all been clad in fatigues or vacuum combat suits. Now, all the corpses in one pile had been stripped while those in the second pile were awaiting the attention of whatever robot had been given this task. Gazing at the naked dead, Alex could discern which ones had died in VC suits that had remained sealed or had sealed themselves with breach glue: they were the ones that had not deflated as the water evaporated from their bodies – it was now frozen inside them. They were the ones that looked less like something dragged from a hole in Ancient Egypt’s Valley of Kings.

‘We should check those.’ He pointed to the heap of corpses that were still clothed.

‘Why?’ Alexandra asked the question in a whisper, as if her voice might disturb those here, even though vacuum lay between them and the dead.

‘Ammo,’ Alex replied succinctly.

He was about to step forward when her hand clamped on his shoulder and she abruptly jerked him back towards the wall adjacent to the door. He turned suddenly, grabbing her wrist and twisting, thinking for a moment that she was attacking him. Then he saw it, released his hold and squeezed back against the wall beside her.

In vacuum, it came through the door with eerie silence for something so large. Alex recognized it at once as the same design of construction robot that Saul had originally hijacked during his assault against Smith. The thing looked like a giant steel ant, pairs of limbs terminating in flat gecko-pad feet extending from its two rear sections; its front section, arrayed with glassy sensors, was raised up with two limbs extending from it, both sporting numerous cutters and manipulators. In one of these it was carrying a roll of material, which, when it reached the corpses, it shook open to reveal as a large netting bag. Steadily it set to work, picking up a woman in a VC suit and swiftly divesting her of her garment. The suit went straight into the bag, the woman onto the other heap.

‘Out of here,’ muttered Alex, and soon they were moving away from there just as fast as they could.

‘What is that thing doing?’ Alexandra asked.

‘Maybe they’ve decided those VC suits are going to be needed,’ Alex replied, trying to be pragmatic but, in his heart, failing. ‘Come on, let’s speed it up now.’

It took them two hours to reach the exterior of Docking Pillar Two, climbing an access tube for maintenance robots leading out of the rim and up between some fuel silos. Alex found it difficult to shake off the sense of doom that had descended on him since they saw the corpses and, from Alexandra’s monosyllabic replies to anything he said, he knew she felt the same. He gazed out at the stars, trying to develop a better mood from the sight of them, but all he could think was how very far from Earth they were.