Neal Asher - Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

The cylinder had arrived in a hexagonal aisle, surrounded on all sides by translucent boxes packed with produce. Immediately he started shivering but, as he gasped, he realized it was lucky he was still able to breathe. This store had been made for human access so had been kept oxygenated. It was also for preserving food, so it was very cold. He propelled himself along the aisle to the end, out into a metre-wide space between the entrances to six other aisles and the end wall. The store seemed to be arranged like the ammunition cylinder of a six-gun.

In the centre of the near wall sat an airlock, which he immediately went over to and opened, pulling himself inside. Ensuring that the inner door remained open by jamming the pliers into the hole where the hinge curved into the wall, he moved over to the outer door and rubbed at a veneer of ice that was frosting a single porthole. Eventually he obtained a view he could understand. Outside, a cageway extended for ten metres then curved to the right, and visible through the cageway to the left was that thing the robots had been building in the outer rim. He felt like crying. The only improvement in his situation here was access to more food and this additional view. Without a spacesuit, he could go no further than this, and he could not stay here either. The cold in the store behind him, though not sufficient to freeze the produce and thus ruin it, would still eventually kill him. He turned, retrieved his pliers and headed back to see if he could get the cylinder to transport him back home.

The oval screen before Hannah went to a holding logo, which had once been a United Earth one but was now simply a picture of Argus Station taken from one of the smelting plants. But then, oddly, that changed to a still image of Var Delex.

‘Now that’s strange,’ said Rhine.

Hannah glanced across at him questioningly. He was sitting before another screen via which he had been monitoring tanglecom, measuring quantum effects within the tangle box itself or, as he put it, ‘checking the cat’s poison’. Now his screen also showed an image of Var Delex’s face. Hannah turned to look at other screens in the room and saw that they too showed the same image.

‘One of your quantum effects?’ Hannah suggested, then abruptly grabbed the arms of her chair as a deep thrumming noise rose into being and seemed to penetrate her to the bone. It continued for a while and was so intense she saw a pen vibrate across the tabletop nearby and fall to the floor. ‘Shit, what is that?’

Hannah could think of very little that could have caused it, but feared something major: Arcoplex Two itself going out of balance, or the massive motors that turned it breaking down. She punched some commands into her console and disconnected the screen before her from the tangle box, immediately calling up the station log to see if anything had been reported either by the system or by the staff.

‘PA system,’ said Rhine, the image of Var Delex banished from his screen and other data appearing there. ‘Maybe he’s having another nightmare.’

If Saul was stirring uneasily in slumber, the stuff issuing from his mind into the station system had changed radically. Surely this was something else? The station log appeared on her screen, slowly scrolling as new events were added, then suddenly it blurred as the number of those events suddenly rose, and, just at that moment, she got notifications of four calls queued up on her fone. One was from her laboratory, the other three from Brigitta, Langstrom and Le Roque. She answered the technical director’s call first.

‘What is it?’ she asked.

‘Isn’t that the question I should be asking you?’ he shot back.

‘Le Roque, the station log just went crazy after an image of Var Delex appeared on our screens here, and then some . . . noise over the PA system. I’m not keeping anything from you, so speak to me.’

‘Same screen image in Tech Central,’ he replied grudgingly, ‘and, as far as I can gather, all across the station. That noise was odd because it was largely infrasound, which can have some strange effects. But that’s not all that’s happened. Grab yourself exterior cam views of your arcoplex, as you might find them interesting.’

She banished the log file and called up image feeds, selected four, and her screen now quartered to provide them. Her first impression was of metallic movement, more than should be registered through these cams, for all that should be visible was the steady rotation of Arcoplex Two. It took her a moment to realize that she was seeing masses of robots on the move.

‘What the hell?’ she said.

‘So you know nothing about this?’ said Le Roque.

Hannah selected another more distant view of the arcoplex and saw how robots were swarming around it like ants around a chunk of salami. There were thousands of them, maybe their whole population here.

‘They just finished off whatever job they were doing and headed straight for Arcoplex Two,’ said Le Roque. ‘The only ones not included were the fixed robots, some currently working out on the vortex generator, and the proctors.’

Hannah stood and headed over to the door. ‘Let me start checking things out – I’ll get back to you.’ She opened the door and looked out, and realized that her spidergun was no longer with her. Was this something else that had entered the station queue? Some new order from Saul’s unconscious mind?

‘Brigitta,’ she said quickly, responding to the next call, ‘I’ve no idea what’s going on. Have you?’

‘I take it you saw the robots?’ the Saberhagen twin asked.

‘I’ve seen them.’

‘Every station weapon that was capable just powered up too.’

What the hell was going on?

‘I’ll get back to you.’ She responded to the next call: ‘Langstrom?’

‘Why the alert, Dr Neumann?’ the soldier asked.

‘I’m trying to find out what the hell is going on, Langstrom. What alert are you talking about?’ Maybe the PA system was still issuing infrasound, because her skin suddenly felt cold, as if in response to some invisible wind sweeping through the station.

‘We just got instructed to go to full security alert – all station police called on duty and permission given to employ deadly force. Yet the arms caches are locked down. I checked with Le Roque and it’s nothing to do with him. It makes no sense.’

‘It’s not me, either. I’ll see what I can find out.’ She shut off that line and noted the one left was routed from her laboratory. She then remembered that it was closed off, and that neither James nor any other member of her staff was there. Suddenly she had an intimation of what it might be. She opened the channel in question.

‘Recorded Alert One,’ her own voice told her. ‘Alpha rhythms detected and patient conscious.’

It was the message she had wanted to hear for months but, now it had arrived, she felt numb. She didn’t know what to say to the others. She had to check first. She turned to gaze at Rhine, who took one look at her expression and asked, ‘What’s the problem, Dr Neumann?’

‘No problem, none at all,’ she said, noting the slight edge of hysteria in her voice. ‘It’s Saul – I think he’s awake.’

‘At last,’ said Rhine, looking somewhat smug.

She turned away from him, stepped out into the corridor and began walking. The sleeping god wakes , she thought, not sure where those words had come from. It was all right for Rhine to feel vindicated, to feel that an ally had returned to the conscious world, but he did not know what Hannah knew: that the one now waking up might not even know Rhine, might not even know what it was to be a human being.

Saul gazed steadily upwards, but could see nothing but weird rainbow effects spreading out in watery ripples. The bullet had all but destroyed his visual cortex at the back of his skull, but he had lain here for months with brain matter growing to fill the spaces, which he at once checked, sliding into Hannah’s laboratory computer to assess the extent of the healing. His visual cortex occupied a larger area at the back of his skull than before, and its structure was substantially changed, as were all the other portions of his brain that had been damaged. His optic nerve was also thicker, and the neural density to the rods and cones of his eyes had all but doubled.