Neal Asher - Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

It was a fortuitous choice, she felt, especially when a one-and-a-half-kilo lump of rock and iron smashed into the station rim and turned a ten-metre section of the vortex generator there into slag. Brigitta was soon there to disabuse her of any complacency over her decision.

‘Say we build that thing and it works,’ said the more gregarious Saberhagen twin. ‘What then?’

‘We’ve then got a fighting chance against the Scourge ,’ Hannah replied. ‘But, more importantly, we’ve got an even better chance of running away.’

They were once again in Tech Central, and again debating the meticulous allocation of resources. Brigitta raised a silencing hand and pointed at one of the three big screens, this one now showing a small swarm of rocks like fragments of black glass. Perfectly on time, they felt the slight drag as a steering thruster again fired up.

‘And how quickly do you think we will be able to get out of the belt?’ Brigitta asked.

‘She has a point,’ said Le Roque. ‘That first deceleration wasn’t to slow us down to intercept that lump of mercury ore; it was intended so we could get through this intact.’ He gestured at the rocks on the screen, which were now sliding over to one side.

‘We need those weapons,’ Brigitta affirmed.

Hannah turned to Paul, who, as well as the spidergun, had become a constant companion. ‘What’s your assessment?’

‘I can only give you highly variable percentages, Hannah Neumann,’ the proctor replied. ‘Without the vortex generator, we are dead. Without Brigitta and Angela Saberhagen’s weapons, the Scourge could disable us while we are still manoeuvring out of the Asteroid Belt. If the generator receives no further asteroidal damage, then it will be complete in time so – on that basis resources can be diverted to finishing the weapons. If, however, the generator is again damaged, resources that were used to finish the weapons will no longer be available, and thus the ring will not be completed in time.’

‘Toss the dice,’ said Langstrom.

Hannah did. ‘No work on the weapons until the vortex generator is complete.’

‘I just hope that decision doesn’t kill us,’ said Brigitta.

‘So do I,’ Hannah replied. ‘So do I.’

Mars

The two kilometres of cable had made a distinct difference, and now down in the fissure cavern after the dust had cleared enough for her to see more than a few metres, Var found it rather strange to be gazing at Hex One, with its branching wings already in place, but now located underground.

‘Hex Four is a bit of a problem,’ said Martinez, standing beside her.

‘Why?’ she asked sharply.

‘We have to move the plants out first, so we’ll need to find a place for them.’

Var nodded towards the structures lying ahead. ‘I take it you’re already getting infrastructure in place?’

‘Yes,’ said Martinez slowly, as if telegraphing that she was just about to make some mistake. This kind of attitude had become really annoying – people not telling her things outright.

She forged ahead anyway. ‘Get lighting and heating for them up in the remaining wings, then you can move down Four.’

‘The reactor,’ said Martinez.

Var suddenly felt stupid. She put that down to merely being distracted by the tension she had been undergoing so long here at Antares Base – the expectation that someone, at some point, was going to turn against her. She returned her attention to the moment.

‘Power is going to be a problem, whichever way you cut it,’ she said succinctly.

‘Yeah.’ Martinez nodded. ‘As it stands, the reactor supplies the energy for our population and for Hydroponics and for the Arboretum. If we move the reactor first, we’d have enough power in super-cap storage to support them for three or four days, but it’ll take longer than that to move just the contents of Hydroponics.’

‘But you have a solution?’ she guessed.

‘We move the contents of Hydroponics and the Arboretum into the remaining wings above, take apart those two hexes and assemble them down here, move super-cap storage down here, prepare the reactor for shut-down and removal, then shift population and plants down here all at once beforehand.’

‘Which means you have only three or four days to get the reactor located down here,’ Var observed. ‘That can be done?’

‘It’ll be tight,’ he said, ‘but there may be a way to speed things up.’

‘Tell me about it,’ said Var.

‘We now have enough cable, but what we could do with in addition is another lifting motor, cable drum and other related equipment.’

‘You’re talking about the trench lift?’ she said.

He nodded, seemed reluctant to continue, then forged on. ‘You were out there yourself with Rhone, while getting hold of that cable. I can’t get anything out of him about the condition of the equipment out there . . .’

Var considered that statement. After his initial burst of enthusiasm, Rhone had retreated into Mars Science and become increasingly unhelpful. Perhaps their frank conversations out there had brought home to him that the top job wasn’t so great and he was no longer manoeuvring for it. She suppressed that thought: she’d been wasting altogether too much time in worrying about what other people thought or what their motivations might be.

‘I see no reason why there should be a problem with it,’ she replied. ‘There’s no record of any of it ever going wrong. There’s no likelihood of any corrosion problems, and the motor and the bearings will all have been sealed.’

‘So I’m authorized to collect those items?’

‘I already delegated this task to you, Martinez,’ she said. ‘Why are you thinking now that you need my permission just to do your job?’

He hesitated, then said, ‘It’s never been entirely clear what my job is – and I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes.’

‘I thought it was perfectly clear that your job’ – Var was trying to control a sudden flash of anger – ‘is to get the base moved down here, dealing with whatever problems arise. I would say that relocating the trench lift here is completely covered by that remit.’

‘Okay.’ He nodded.

‘So why are you behaving like you expect me to bite your head off?’

He gazed at her directly. ‘Because that has become a habit of yours just lately.’

The anger within Var ramped up by an order of magnitude, and she felt herself on the edge of shrieking at the man. Then, all at once, it began to wane, as the last few months seemed to unfold in her mind as a series of episodes seen from someone else’s point of view. Previously she had seen herself constantly having to deal with problems created by stupid people who neither trusted nor liked her, and now she realized that on every such occasion she had found someone else to bawl at. Self-fulfilling prophecies . . .

She took a couple of steadying breaths, swallowed drily. ‘Yes,’ she said reluctantly, ‘perhaps it has become a habit.’

They both just stood there awkwardly, finding nothing else to say.

‘Is there anything else I need to know about?’ she asked eventually.

‘That’s about it,’ conceded Martinez reluctantly.

‘Then I need to get back to base – or rather what remains of Antares Base,’ she replied. ‘We’re coming up for another tanglecom with Argus, and I have some questions to ask.’

‘It’s odd,’ said Martinez, obviously glad to move on to something else. ‘When they made that first course change, I thought they were running away.’

‘Apparently not,’ said Var. The Argus Station was now slowing into the Asteroid Belt, and even Rhone, when he had put in a brief appearance at the latest meeting, could think of no plausible reason why it was doing so.