Neal Asher - Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

‘Call it conscience,’ said the watching woman.

Nightmares resumed, but Saul was aware that they were now old ones. He felt the lasers draining their linked super-capacitors, the wrench of steering thrusters, then the insufficient blast of the Mars Traveller engine. He looked on in guilty helplessness as, unprepared, people fell against the direction of acceleration, slammed into walls, ceilings or floors, hard angles, pipes, beams. A symphony of breaking bones and screams played in his head. It all seemed summed up by one figure in a spacesuit hurtling across the station enclosure, clipping a beam and spinning helplessly down towards the central asteroid before hitting it with a blast of vapour and his suit helmet tumbling away.

Steering thrusters wrenched again, then the scene lit up with bright light as the fifty-kilo rock which the lasers had been unable to deal with, and the station had been incapable of avoiding, punched through below, turning half its mass to white-hot gas, then a further half of the remainder into molten debris as, like a bullet through a drinks can, it speared on through an accommodation unit before slamming its way out through the upper enclosure. Eight people had occupied the accommodation unit. The rescuers found nothing but an oily residue of them on the walls.

‘Breach protocols no longer apply, people,’ someone announced finally, ‘and let me make this perfectly clear, showers are available.’

In space all around, it seemed that the asteroid debris was slowing as that one giant red asteroid loomed closer. Like a growing steel mushroom, one of the smelting plants began to extrude itself from the station rim, the computer feedback from it again waking up that closed partition in Saul’s mind.

He now looked for Hannah, as he always did.

‘Quite simply,’ said Hannah, gazing at the other woman peering out from the oval screen, ‘we were not sure of your situation there, and whether there might be those on Mars who would merely pass the information back to Earth.’

‘Tanglecom is secure,’ replied the same woman who had haunted Saul’s dreams. ‘I am alone, and what you tell me will remain between us. I will tell absolutely no one else.’ She paused, smiled weakly. ‘In fact, your wanting to talk to me in private like this is fortuitous, because I needed some privacy so I could send you something that may be of use to you.’

Something seemed to flicker through Saul’s mind, then he saw Hannah turning to look at some schematics appearing on a nearby secondary screen.

‘What’s this?’ she asked.

‘I’ve told lies here,’ confessed the woman. ‘When we took over this base, I claimed that Earth could get nothing to us for decades. And when Galahad revealed the Alexander , and then renamed it the Scourge , I pretended to have no previous knowledge of the craft, so obviously I want you to refrain from mentioning this in your further communications with us.’

‘You still haven’t told me what this stuff is,’ Hannah remarked, fixedly gazing at the small screen.

‘Detailed schematics of the Scourge , down to its last weld and rivet.’

‘You’re sure?’asked Hannah. ‘How could you possibly be in possession of these?’

‘I’m sure,’ replied the other woman, ‘because I built the damned thing.’

Hannah switched her attention back to the main screen. ‘What?’

The other woman nodded slowly. ‘I got transferred out here after my political officer came to the conclusion that I was no longer to be trusted with handling the orbital tools I was using, because I’d discovered that my husband had recently died not in an accident, but in an adjustment cell.’

‘I see,’ said Hannah. ‘These plans should be . . . very useful.’

‘Now, moving on,’ said the other woman, almost as if embarrassed by her revelation, ‘I’m also quite sure that your diversion into the Asteroid Belt, which you’ve been evasive about for some time, offers you no tactical advantage against the Scourge ; rather the opposite, in fact. So, can you now tell me straight why you are really going there?’

‘I’d decided to trust you anyway, and now you’ve confirmed that I can.’ Hannah paused to key something into the console before her. ‘I’ve just sent you a schematic of what we’ve built aboard this station. We changed course earlier so that we could swing into the Asteroid Belt and there stop at asteroid HJI457 – which is a twenty-second-century designation for those identified as from Holocene Jupiter impact. There we must acquire the materials to complete our project – specifically ten thousand tonnes of mercury.’

‘ You’ve decided?’ said the woman, turning her head, presumably to peer at another screen. ‘I would have thought that would be down to this “Owner” of yours.’

Hannah showed a flash or irritation at that. ‘I don’t really like that title, Var, and I myself am currently in charge of Argus Station.’

Var?

‘You don’t like it? So what do you prefer?’ Var continued looking off to one side, and then added, ‘And what the hell is that thing and why would you need that much mercury?’

Varalia.

‘It’s something Rhine designed,’ said Hannah. ‘It’s based on a theorized engine called an Alcubierre warp drive.’

The other woman returned her gaze to Hannah, her expression shocked. She obviously understood straight away what Hannah was talking about. She was obviously very quick and very bright this . . . Varalia Delex . . . for she at once continued, ‘Manoeuvring will be a problem within the Belt, but once you’re clear your problems should be over.’ She paused again to gaze at that other screen. ‘That is, if this drive actually works.’ She shook her head in irritation. ‘You said you are currently in charge of the station – so what’s this Owner of yours now doing?’

Hannah replied, ‘The Owner, Alan Saul, is currently in a coma.’

Further shock suffused the other woman’s expression.

‘Alan,’ she said, her voice catching.

His name was so familiar coming from her mouth; just her saying it seemed to reveal some underlying structure to his mind, and out of that the memories surfaced. He now saw her walking beside him in that enclave in the Dinaric Alps of old Albania as he talked about dying, talked about escape. He remembered another escape – when they were children – from the suffocating care of their parents, out into a zero-asset area, and that glimpse of another world before the enforcers came for them and dragged them back. By groping for other such memories, he began establishing connections between the disparate parts of his mind. Finding only fragments caused a deep frustration, and made him push harder.

A muggy day spent in the constant roar of a city arose in his mind. The triple-glazed window shut it out as his gaze slid to a large computer screen showing the exploded schematic of a fusion engine, which was assembling automatically, then shrinking down small and dropping into another schematic recognizable as that of a Mars Traveller. The woman sitting before the screen sat back, for a moment studied the wedding ring on her finger, smiled at it, then swung her chair round to face him.

‘Of course I can do better,’ she said.

You were going to build spaceships . . .

Varalia Delex, whose second name she had acquired by marriage to her husband Latham Delex. Varalia whose maiden name had been Saul.

‘Hello, sister,’ Saul’s voice grated, and he opened his eyes.

Earth

The four giant ships had been supertankers in a previous incarnation, and were the last of their kind turned out at the Port of Dalian shipyards. That they had remained functional for so long after the wells ran dry was testament to the then-innovative materials and technologies used in their construction: graphene and metals foamed on Earth before that technology really got into its stride in more suitable zero-gravity environments, new ceramics, tough new forms of glass, nano-coatings, clean-burn fission reactors and computer-controlled robots that continued maintaining those vessels during all the later years they served as floating prison ships. Now the prisoners were all dead: the ZAs killed by the Scour and the remaining SAs dying either of starvation or diseases prevalent amidst tens of thousands of rotting corpses.