Neal Asher - Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

‘What the hell is happening?’ he demanded.

‘We’re changing course,’ replied Scotonis. ‘We’ll be making another correction in fifty minutes.’

‘Changing course? You don’t say.’

‘I’m sure I just did,’ was Scotonis’s laconic rejoinder, and then he shut down the call.

Clay swore again as he struggled out of his sleeping bag and into his ship suit. It was frustrating that, now he and Scotonis were effectively conspiring against Galahad, the captain felt free to voice opinions he would otherwise have kept quiet. It would have been nice to be able to reinstate, in all crew cabins, the inducers he had taken offline, but such an act would probably get him killed. Scotonis, Trove, Cookson, and the others among the crew whom they had selected to have implants removed and collars shut down, neither trusted nor liked him.

Once out into the corridor, he quickly began to make his way towards the bridge but, after fifty metres or so, he came up against a closed bulkhead door. He slammed his fist against it. They were cutting him out, they were either going to betray him to Galahad or just . . .

Then he spotted a red light flashing on the panel beside the door, and belatedly remembered what that meant. The section of the ship beyond the door had depressurized. Now he remembered the sound he had heard in half-sleep. He again called Scotonis.

‘Have we been hit?’ he asked.

‘Twice,’ said the Captain.

‘I can’t get to the bridge,’ said Clay, only after he said it realizing how self-concerned that sounded, and quickly added, ‘Was anyone hurt?’

‘The first glanced off the hull but the second penetrated,’ said Scotonis. ‘And, yes, people were hurt. In fact, you’ll be able to see for yourself shortly. The hole was sealed by automatics and the damaged area is repressurizing right now.’

Clay wanted most of all to turn round and head back to his cabin, but forced himself to stay. He leaned against the wall, staring at the panel as the light changed from red to orange, then to yellow and gradually to green. The door emitted a thump as it came off its seals, then, on its top pivot, it swung up inside the wall. Two corpses fell through at Clay’s feet, while another one behind them still seemed to be trying to hold on to the floor.

Clay stared at them in horror. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t seen corpses before; he doubted there was anyone on Earth who hadn’t, even before Alan Saul’s attack and before the Scour. How could he have been a close adviser to Galahad and not see them? In fact, how could he have not seen every stage in the transition from living human being to the bulgy-eyed sacks of flesh lying at his feet? His horror stemmed from the sure knowledge that if he had woken just a few minutes earlier, it might have been him caught in this corridor trying to breathe vacuum. It would have been him lying there with his tongue protruding, broken capillaries in his eyes and face, and vacuum-dried blood in his ears.

He stepped over them and moved on, the air smoky all about him, only realizing after he was ten metres beyond them that all three casualties were crew, and that two of them were ones who had joined his and Scotonis’s conspiracy. Moving further along, he found another crewmember simply standing with her back against the wall. This woman had managed to pull on a survival suit and just stared at him without comprehension.

Beyond her the corridor was a mess. A hole a metre across had been punched through the wall; whatever made it had come down at an angle, so as to take away most of the floor. Jagged twists of hot metal splayed out from around the edges of the initial hole, insulation hanging like moss below it, and the whole area was now iced with fire-retardant foam. Clay walked up between both the holes and peered into them in turn. The one in the wall was only a few centimetres deep, having been otherwise filled with breach sealant, but the one in the floor went down at an angle for at least twenty metres before terminating at more breach sealant. It seemed likely that whatever had hit the ship had cut right through it.

Hearing a sound behind him, he turned quickly, almost feeling panic. When he saw a maintenance team arriving, hauling sheet metal and a welding unit, he turned away and quickly picked up his pace, only relaxing a little when the bridge airlock closed behind him.

‘How bad?’ he asked, as he strapped himself into his acceleration chair.

‘Bad enough,’ said Scotonis. ‘It was a mistake to try and head through it.’

Clay gazed at the captain for a moment. There seemed something odd about him, something different, but for a moment he couldn’t quite figure out what. Then, with a sinking sensation in his gut, he saw that Scotonis had removed his strangulation collar – which seemed like a statement of future intent. Clay shook his head, trying to dismiss what that implied. Best to focus on the immediate problems.

They’d watched Messina’s space plane head out and moor to two asteroids in turn. Resolution had been good enough for them to see the warheads that the EVA team had secured to each one. Trove had given the opinion that to divert around the debris clouds the explosions would certainly generate would add at least two days to their journey, and the decision to do that had been deferred until a tactical assessment could be made. Unfortunately they had all been due to send their latest reports to Galahad, and there was no way any of them could get away with neglecting to mention this development.

‘She’s not going to like this,’ said Clay. ‘By how much is this going to delay our arrival now?’ He glanced at Trove.

‘Maybe a day,’ she replied.

Galahad had replied very quickly. An Earth-based tactical assessment put their chances of getting hit by something at above fifty per cent, but their chances of being completely destroyed at below twenty per cent. They must not change course; they must take the quickest and most direct route to Argus Station. She had then gone on to explain why.

‘And even in that short time,’ said Clay, ‘Galahad reckons they might manage to start up this inertia-less drive and escape.’

The other three exchanged sceptical glances.

‘You don’t believe her?’ Clay asked.

‘Do you?’ spat Scotonis. ‘Which is it? Some admittedly technically adept rebels have genuinely managed to build a fantasy space drive, or a psychotic dictator, showing increasing signs of losing her grip on reality, has finally tipped over the edge?’

‘It’s the latter, for sure,’ said Trove, before Clay could speak. ‘You just can’t fuck with causality like that. Yeah, there’ve been lots of interesting theories, but they are all over-complications aimed at a desired result. You don’t do science like that. You don’t twist your maths because it’s not giving you the answer you want. I know, because I’ve seen what happens.’

She sounded quite bitter on the subject, Clay thought.

‘ How do you know?’ he asked

‘I originally trained as a physicist and astrophysicist, but I ended up here,’ she said. ‘I pushed for it because by then I’d given up in the so-called academic world. The only advances we’ve made on Earth over the last half-century have been more through luck than judgement. Nothing is discovered when your political officer is telling you what your results must be.’

‘That’s nonsense,’ said Clay. ‘What about . . . what about Alan Saul and what he has become?’

‘Yeah, some meagre advances on the technology we already had a hundred years ago,’ she snapped. ‘Our technology and our scientific knowledge once had some momentum it took the Committee decades to kill.’

Clay turned back to Scotonis. ‘This is all beside the point,’ he said. ‘Galahad will be contacting us again soon. She may even be sending a signal to a few selected implants or collars right now. You have directly disobeyed her.’