Neal Asher - Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

Serene cut the connection and sat back. Vast possibilities were now opening up. If this space drive really was a possibility, then it was even more essential that Argus Station be seized. Jasper Rhine needed to be moved onto the list of those who must be captured alive, and, though minor damage of what had already been built in Argus’s rim might be required to prevent the entire station escaping, its destruction could not be countenanced. Serene at once began recording a message intended for Clay Ruger and Captain Scotonis.

Argus

Much had been torn out and altered to accommodate the new structure in the outer rim. Gazing at it again, Alex now saw what he should have noticed before, which the advisers back on Earth should have seen too. How could this thing possibly be some sort of fast transport system for running personnel and materials around the rim? Before it was closed off, he recollected that the internal pipe had been only half a metre across, which could just about accommodate a man if he was prepared to squash himself into something like one of those hydroponics transport cylinders. Also, the great bulk of electromagnets wrapping round the pipe – expanding the machine to three metres across – seemed far in excess of what would be required for such a purpose, just as the heavy beam-work supporting the thing seemed far more than might be required to keep it stable. This was definitely designed for something else.

Alex crossed the area it occupied, gazing right along its length to where it curved out of sight in the distance. He then followed familiar routes to his destination, and when he arrived he was thankful that things had not changed drastically there. The mortuary was still in place and, after watching it for a while, he ascertained that the robot that had been working here earlier seemed to be absent now. Alex eventually ducked inside to inspect the mortuary’s contents.

The corpse piles were smaller – many more of them now probably having passed through the station’s digesters – and thankfully the robot had not completed its assigned task, no doubt having been reassigned to something more relevant to the very survival of the station. Two piles of corpses still occupied the room, those in one pile yet to be stripped of their spacesuits. Alex headed over and began turning some of them over, finding sometimes he had to apply his boot to separate those that were frozen together. He meticulously checked five of them until he found one whose VC suit seemed undamaged, then ran a diagnostic through the suit’s wrist panel. The suit was clearly fine, so he stripped it off, rolled up its bulk as best he could, strapped it to his back and set off. Now he had a spare and with luck wouldn’t again end up trapped like he had been in the hydroponics unit.

Next he needed to communicate with the Scourge . Plenty of options to that end lay further in towards the centre of the station, but unfortunately the closer he got to the centre the more likely he was to be captured. He headed out, trying to remember the schematics he and Alexandra had used, forever on the lookout for some viable alternative. Eventually he climbed out onto the rim itself and gazed around, astounded by the view.

What the hell were they up to? Only now, out here on the rim, did Alex realize that Argus Station was no longer speeding through vacuum. Yes, while he had been in the hydroponics unit he had felt the changes in acceleration, but his mind hadn’t been functioning at its best, and the effects he felt could just as easily have been the result of ordinary course changes, since at any one time he hadn’t known the position of the hydroponics unit relative to the station’s direction of travel.

Gazing at the red asteroid far over to his right and partially obscured by the station itself, Alex finally gained some sense of scale and began to understand fully what he was seeing. A smelting plant had been extended all the way to the surface and the activity he could see – the movement of glittering metal under the work lights and the steady flow of objects between the plant and the surface – was simply robots on the move. This might account for the absence of the corpse-stripping robot, and why he had spotted no others inside the rim. Maybe heading towards the centre of the station would not be as dangerous for him as he had feared, but there was something else he needed to check out first.

He turned and crossed a few hundred metres of rim to bring himself into the shadow of a steering thruster, and stepped up onto its massive turntable. The device was so crusted with soot that it took him some minutes of scraping to find an access panel. Undoing the bolts that secured the panel was slightly beyond any of the manual tools he had in his small toolkit, but he did have a small diamond wheel cutter that ran off his suit’s power supply, so he merely sliced the heads off the bolts. The panel popped out easily – two layers of bubblemetal sheet sandwiching ten centimetres of insulation – and he placed it down on the deck, holding it in place with his foot. Revealed inside was the control circuitry and, as he had hoped, a secondary transponder should the optic wiring to this steering thruster fail. He unravelled his suit’s optic connector cable and inserted its plug into the first of the transponder’s four ports.

After a second, a display opened in his suit’s visor and, using his wrist panel, he began sorting through the options now available to him. Changing the set-up was a lengthy task, but one he was trained for. He reset the output frequency, input a channel code, but then the suit display informed him of a hardware failure. Biting down on his frustration, he checked through the whole process again, then, feeling like an idiot, stretched a finger out to the transponder board and flipped over a small breaker to power it up manually.

HARDWARE INSTALLED, the display informed him.

Now his suit radio was connected to the more powerful transmitter located in this thruster, so its range now stretched somewhat beyond just a few kilometres.

‘Hello, Scourge , are you receiving?’ he asked, then kept repeating the same words every ten seconds over the next five minutes.

Eventually a reply arrived. ‘This is the Scourge . Com Officer Linden speaking. Who is this?’

‘I would have thought,’ said Alex, ‘since I am using this particular coded channel, that who this is should be obvious.’

‘If you are who I hope you are,’ said another whom Alex recognized as Clay Ruger, ‘you will be able to tell me where Alexandra obtained her Argus system modem.’

‘Rim storage 498A – a storeroom listed on the station manifest, but which hadn’t been used for at least two years and from which, according to Tactical, it was highly unlikely anyone would notice the loss.’

‘Welcome back, Alex. Long time no hear,’ said Ruger. ‘Where have you been?’

‘Hiding in that hydroponics unit Tactical directed us to,’ Alex explained. ‘My suit was damaged so I wasn’t able to leave the unit.’

‘And Alexandra?’

‘Dead.’ It surprised him how much it hurt to say that.

‘That is unfortunate,’ said Ruger, his tone hardly sympathetic. ‘What is your situation now?’

‘I have no resources but for the standard-format spacesuit I’m wearing and one VC suit I managed to steal. Right now I’m standing on the station rim, boosting my suit signal through a thruster’s secondary control transponder, and the longer I stay here the more chance there is that I’ll be spotted.’

‘Wait one moment. Let me check something.’

‘I can’t keep waiting out here.’

‘Patience, Alex.’

Alex waited, glancing around frequently to check. Long slow minutes dragged by until Ruger replied.