Neal Asher - Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

‘Our position is unenviable,’ Scotonis suggested.

‘So it is,’ said Clay.

‘But I see no way it can be changed.’

Clay tried to read the man, but failed. Time to start laying his cards on the table. He turned and punched a button on his keyboard to call up a video clip, and felt a lurch in his stomach at being returned to this familiar scene. The man and the woman were tied to office chairs, their clothing seared, their burns visible.

The woman was in better condition than the man, with only a raw burn on her neck extending down to show through her charcoaled lab coat at the shoulder. What could be seen of the man’s head was completely raw, his face not visible because his chin was down on his chest. Behind them stood an enforcer; only his torso, legs and the disabler he clutched in one hand were visible.

Clay’s voice then issued from the recording. ‘The sooner you start talking to me, the sooner you get medical treatment.’

The woman grimaced. ‘Yeah, but that will just be to keep us alive so we can be eventually interrogated into drooling wrecks.’

‘It’s evident that you’ve isolated the Scour and started to modify it,’ said Clay. ‘So, I’ll want to know the names of those who diverted resources to fund this project, and I’ll want to know what your first intended target was.’

The woman said nothing until the soldier aimed his disabler at the man and activated it. The burned man’s head jerked up, exposing the ruin of his face, and he howled.

‘All right! All right!’ the woman yelled. ‘You want to know the truth? All we’ve done is isolate the Scour as it is. We haven’t modified it at all. That data you got was just a description of how it is – not anything we’ve done to it. And do you know where it comes from?’

‘Please enlighten me,’ said that Clay from the past, the one just about to be apprised of a horrible reality.

She nodded towards him, her gaze focusing towards what he had first thought to be the gun he held down at his side, but he soon learned otherwise. She was indicating his forearm.

She continued, ‘The Scour is generated by a biochip – in fact the body interface chip in your ID implant. Surely you should know that. You worked at the Aldeburgh Complex where it was developed, and from where it was distributed across Earth.’

‘That’s nonsense,’ said that past Clay, though the present one remembered that he had believed her at once.

Galahad’s explanation for why the plague had killed just about every ZA just didn’t add up. The enforcer had believed at once, too, which was why – after he had told Clay about his part in ensuring the laboratory burned – Clay had shot him as well as the other two. The wiser Clay of the present paused the video clip.

‘What?’ Scotonis’s Asiatic complexion had paled, and he seemed unable to summon up further words.

‘I ran some tests of my own,’ said Clay. ‘It’s all easy enough to see when you stick one of the biochips from a Scour victim under a nanoscope. Getting access to a nanoscope for that purpose wasn’t so easy, however, since Galahad tightened control on their use and utterly clamped down on any Scour or ID-implant-related research.’ Clay continued to gaze at the frozen image, his fingertips pressed together before his mouth, then he swung round to face Scotonis.

‘It was Galahad’s own solution to the population problem,’ he continued, ‘and a rather quicker way of wiping out all the zero-asset citizens of Earth than sectoring followed by controlled extermination through starvation or orbital laser.’

Scotonis took a moment to find his tongue. ‘But it didn’t just kill the zero assets.’

‘No,’ Clay agreed, ‘she had to cover up wiping out the delegates remaining from the old regime, so – and I’m guessing here – she also made a random selection of SAs too.’

‘Random?’ Scotonis echoed.

‘Yes, but, as I understand it, your wife Thespina and your children were later victims of the Scour, who died some months after it first hit.’ Clay paused for a moment, carefully assessing his next words. ‘There are two possible reasons for their deaths. They were either located in an area that Galahad considered to be under a particularly heavy environmental load, so were what Galahad considered to be necessary deaths in order to save Earth’s biosphere, or their deaths were deliberately intended to instil further impetus in you, giving you added motivation to complete your mission.’

Clay watched a whole mass of conflicting emotions flit across Scotonis’s face, watched his eyes fill with tears, before they were angrily scrubbed away. It took some while longer before Scotonis could manage to talk again.

‘We could remove our ID implants,’ he said, ‘and we could shut down all ID-implant reading and recognition aboard this ship, but that leaves us no better off.’ He reached up and touched his collar.

‘That is not entirely true,’ Clay replied, opening a drawer in his desk and taking out the device he had used to fuse the motor of his own collar. ‘We can be free of these collars too, but then, of course, we’d need to decide what next?’

Scotonis gave a slow nod, his expression grim but determined.

Earth

After the failure with the seed ships, depression settled around Serene like smog. It sucked out her energy and her interest, made everything around her seem dark and shadowed. As she returned to Italy, she had considered sending the order to have Palgrave drowned in one of his own aquariums, but then shelved that idea. Humans were wasteful and destructive creatures, but some of them were also the best able quickly to put right all the damage their kind had caused. Palgrave was a valuable resource. He had made a mistake that led to the failure of the first attempt at ocean seeding but, because of his knowledge, skill and organizational abilities, further attempts could yet be made.

As she sat in her office in Tuscany, listening to the sound of a diamond saw filtering up the lift shaft from below, where workers were turning Messina’s torture chamber into a garden of her own design, she contemplated how right her decision had been. Her wall screen showed her a scene underwater. Submarine robots resembling giant iron lobsters were digging up barrels of toxic waste, dumped there from an inland silicon etching and plating plant that had been closed down eighty years earlier, and loading them into nets to be hauled to the surface, while other designs of robots were guiding enormous suction pipes to draw up contaminated sand into a recently recommissioned dredger. Palgrave opined that the entire area should be clean within a few months, since there would be no more seepage once the barrels were gone, and that the portion of the waste that had already killed the seed stock would itself break down in seawater within just a few weeks. Then the contents of the second seed ship could be released into the ocean. Serene hoped he was right because, even though Palgrave was a valuable resource, she could not allow a second failure to go unpunished.

Serene allowed herself a small smile, but didn’t really feel it. The leaky barrels and contaminated sand would be dumped inland at the site of the etching and plating plant, now occupied by urban sprawl. It was some kind of repayment for any descendants of those who had worked in that plant, and who were doubtless still living in the area. She next turned her attention to other matters, reaching out to her controls to change the view, which immediately divided up into six frames. Each was recorded through the cam overlooking a cell in an Eastern European Region cell complex. Each cell contained a group of ZAs, their total number over fifty. None of them was identifiable, since none of them possessed an ID implant.