Neal Asher - Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

Splintered bone retracted into his leg and, maintaining the tension, he used his free hand to wrap the duct tape round several times above his knee. He then laved on an antivibact salve, followed that with another layer of skin spray, then wound the rest of the tape round his leg, down to his ankle.

I should surrender , he thought, at last. Then he considered how that thought had not occurred to him until now. What would happen if he did surrender? It was possible that the rebels would hospitalize him first, and then lock him in the cell block. However, Alan Saul had said right from the start that there could be no freeloaders, no people on this station who did not contribute to the overall running of the place and to the survival of its residents. They might just kill him out of hand. Then a further thought occurred to him – one that had not occurred while he was lecturing Alexandra about the benefits of surrender. They might simply do to him what they had done to the delegates here, and to Messina. They might erase his mind, and how then would he rescue the Chairman? He wouldn’t even be able to remember that service to Messina was the sum purpose of his life.

No surrender , he thought, feeling a deep regret for everything he had said earlier to his companion.

The painkillers lasted him only for five days, the medical kit having been made for short-term use to keep a soldier alive until he could be taken to a hospital. The pain then returned, along with fever and hallucinations. He ate sparingly from the ration packs or from the produce grown inside the unit, gazing enviously at a crop of root vegetables being packed into a transport cylinder by the agribots, and wondering if he could get away with stealing more. On the twentieth day, his long rambling conversation with Alexandra and Alex Two, who regularly returned to the unit in ghostly form to check his progress, was interrupted by sounds penetrating from outside. Abruptly recalled to lucidity, he awaited his moment of capture. He then saw the first of the waiting transport cylinders sliding into the conveyor airlock at the end of the unit, and realized that the hydroponics unit had just been properly reconnected to the rest of the station.

Further time passed, and he lost track of it. His moments of lucidity increased for a short time – though interspersed with long periods of black depression, during which he just wanted to die – but they then rapidly began to decrease. In one of those moments, he recognized a smell in the unit over and above the smell of bagged-up excrement. It was decay – the stench of his leg going bad. He managed to pull things together enough to take an overdose of the last of the antivibacts, and then the real world went away again. The soldier’s rations ran out, and he began to forget how much food he was stealing from the unit and, in fear of discovery, starved himself. Later, in one of his better moments, he started using his VC suit palmtop to record his thefts from the unit, and began to eat more.

When not crippled by depression, he towed himself around the unit, constantly searching for some means of escape. During one of these searches he rediscovered an entire hydroponics trough assembly that he and Alexandra had found previously and decided would be of no use to them. He assembled it and, little by little, tapped nutrient fluid into it. He also took the risk of breaking open vacuum-sealed cylinders of seed stock – a theft that would not be reported to system until the next planting took place here – and began growing GM beans, mustard cress and peppers. These seemed to sprout with incremental slowness, but still grew faster than any unmodified plant. Their growth and the departure of the transport cylinders seemed the only marking of time until, in another moment, while salivating over a handful of mustard cress, he remembered where he was and that he was alone, and checked the time display in the visor of his VC suit. An entire month had passed. He sank into blackness, could see nothing beyond the walls enclosing him in the unit, and the darkness in his own mind.

Lucidity returned again with a deep feeling of horror when he realized there was movement underneath the tape around his leg. He carefully stripped it off, the stink unbearable and maggots spilling out. There were flies aboard the station, but he hadn’t noticed them here in the unit laying their eggs on his leg. He understood enough about such matters to realize that, though part of the wound there had gone bad, these creatures, in combination with the overdose he had taken, had actually saved him. They were eating away the dead matter. He cut a piece of material from his VC suit and wrapped up his leg again, leaving the maggots in place, and continued his enforced hermitic lifestyle.

Later, as the maggots turned to chrysalises, he washed them in plant nutrient and then ate them. Later still he removed the splints from his leg and cleaned all the disgusting detritus away to reveal raw but healthy flesh. The last of his skin spray went onto that, while he yelled in pain, then he wrapped it in further strips torn from what remained of his VC suit.

Another month passed, then another. It vaguely occurred to Alex that those searching for him had probably assumed he was dead by now, but he no longer thought much about anything outside the parameters of his small world. Small victories were all he knew: forcing himself out of depression, eating the top shoots of his bean plants and then eating the first raw pods; managing to plant small cuttings snapped off tomato plants; using composted excrement in his own hydroponics trough and seeing healthier growth resulting; watching the scar tissue form over his leg wound. Then the station suddenly moved, and that returned to him the perception that something lay beyond his own microcosm.

‘I have to get out of here,’ he told Alexandra, thoroughly aware that she was dead, but comforted nevertheless by the hallucinatory power of his own mind.

‘ Yes, you must ,’ she replied, noncommittal.

Again he began prowling around the hydroponics unit. He picked up the remains of his VC suit, considered what he might use to repair it, then discarded it again. The movements of the station continued intermittently, and out of his fugue he realized that it must now have reached the Asteroid Belt and was manoeuvring itself around space debris. Understanding this raised him to a new level of consciousness and, when he again examined a transport cylinder and wondered what of the packed produce there he might steal, he finally saw his way out.

Saul gazed at an asteroid of a deep red, and saw there all the blood he had shed coagulated into one massive lump. No, it was actually red because it was mostly made of cinnabar, with an outer dusting of vermilion. Closer inspection also revealed silvery veins of pure frozen mercury.

I brought you here . . .

The station continued to decelerate, which was enough, and some pragmatic partition of his mind went, protesting, into abrupt abeyance. He dreamed now of wondrous technology, formed in a perfect ring, and strange tall beings striding through a realm of metal. He descended into a nightmare in which fire blasted through the corridors of the Political Office and rendered the survival suits of five individuals molten on their very bodies, then was sucked away again and drew them out, through a hole with red-hot lips, to a place where the fluid in their charred skins boiled and bubbled them into grotesque parodies of human beings. They did not even get a chance to scream, but the single female survivor – safely clad in a VC suit – screamed for them.

Saul fled that terrible place and dreamed of a man and woman stepping back from the ranked globular shapes of ceramic furnaces, both standing with their arms akimbo as they studied with satisfaction the plumbing now put in place. Robots retreated past them, folding away tools as they headed for an airlock, before departing one after another into the station enclosure. There they fell in a stream, on a tower of electromagnets and began to take apart a section punched through with a hole whose interior gleamed bright copper. No rest for them, no sleeping, no dreaming.