Neal Asher - Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

Scotonis shrugged. ‘She can’t kill us any longer, but another lump of rock like that last one could, and we were only into the very edge of the cloud.’

Clay felt no inclination to argue with that, but the captain’s attitude seemed to confirm that the man had no intention of ever putting his implant back in. And that he fully intended to return to Earth and bomb Galahad herself from orbit. Here then was Clay’s penalty for telling the truth: his life was now in the hands of an angry and vengeful man.

However, the previous message from Galahad seemed also to confirm that Clay had made the right move. Seizing the Gene Bank data and samples seemed a difficult enough task as it was, but the plan for disabling and then assaulting the station without wrecking this mythical space drive and without killing this Professor Jasper Rhine made it nigh impossible. Galahad might as well have demanded that they capture the station without knocking any leaves off the trees in the Arboretum cylinder.

‘Perhaps we should just forget about attacking Argus at all,’ he suddenly suggested.

‘No,’ said Scotonis, ‘we complete our mission. We assault the station.’

Clay studied the man carefully but couldn’t read him. Certainly there was something Scotonis wasn’t telling him, didn’t sufficiently trust him to reveal. Clay now firmly believed that Scotonis’s main aim was to return to Earth and attack Galahad, so why would he bother with this risky assault on the station?

Argus

The tone, that perpetual sound of the station that the mind tuned out after being here for any length of time, had somehow changed. Hannah remembered experiencing an earthquake when she had been working at the enclave in the Dinaric Alps, and this sound reminded her of that event. In the case of the earthquake it was like thunder, but underscored by a feeling of huge movement that seemed to penetrate to her bones. This new sound reminded her of an old jet turbine steadily winding up to speed, but deeper in pitch, with hints of vast heavy movement and the unavoidable sensation that she was sitting right inside the turbine itself. Or perhaps she was just being overly melodramatic, for if she hadn’t known where the sound was coming from, she probably wouldn’t have put that interpretation on it.

She stretched out her hand and shut down her screens. The samples she had taken from herself, from Rhine, Le Roque and the Saberhagens were all growing well. Given another twenty days, they could be inserted in aerogel matrices and force-grown to occupy them completely. However, for them to work as backups, those people would need hardware inside their skulls so that they could make a connection. And for them and any others on this station to have their crack at immortality, they first had to survive the next few days. The Scourge was now just two days away from them; meanwhile Rhine’s vortex generator had built up most of its required momentum. Shortly it would be time for Chang, their pilot, to take his foot off the clutch.

Standing up, Hannah had to catch hold of the back of her chair to stop herself sailing up towards the ceiling. Despite Arcoplex Two now being all but stationary, and with zero gravity inside it, she had forgotten that fact. Carefully ensuring her gecko boots were properly engaging, she headed for the door and then for the exit from the arcoplex. The top of Tech Central still protruded from the station enclosure, and the view from there would be the best. Hannah had decided she wanted to see what a space-time bubble looked like.

In the arcoplex corridors she noted how others were on the move too, some of them clearly worried and hurrying back to their apartments, all clad in spacesuits or plain survival suits. Others were securing loose equipment, battening down the hatches. As she reached the airlock elevator, there was a resounding boom and she realized that the arcoplex brake had finally been applied.

Outside the arcoplex, similar activity was visible but with fewer signs of anxiety. Robots were still at work tying down unsecured equipment or finishing welding jobs, while others were forming themselves into interlocked masses at beam junctions or up against various enclosed units located within the station structure.

On entering the upper control room of Tech Central, she saw that most of the usual crowd was here, all secured in acceleration chairs in front of various consoles. She headed over to Saul, who stood by a line of unoccupied consoles, with his arms folded as he gazed out the windows at the view across the newly fashioned outer skin of the station towards the space-plane docks.

‘I see that everything is being secured,’ she said, ‘just as it is before the Traveller engine is ignited.’

He flicked a glance at her. ‘Yes, it is.’

‘This Rhine drive,’ she said, slightly uncomfortable with this new expression, ‘is an inertia-less drive, so we should feel no effects of acceleration or deceleration at all.’

‘The gap between what should happen and what will happen is somewhat variable when you’re fucking with causality,’ he replied. ‘Not taking any precautions would be arrogant.’

Hannah managed to stop herself snorting at that, and instead asked, ‘How long until it fires up?’

He stabbed a thumb back towards the consoles at which Rhine, Brigitta and Chang were sitting. ‘Rhine is doing the calculations now. I estimate he’ll start running the eddy currents in about two minutes, then charge the EM field shortly after that.’

‘You estimate?’

‘Yes, I estimate.’ Saul allowed himself a grimace. ‘Even now the vortex generator is running outside calculated parameters, so he’s having to recalculate perpetually.’

Hannah focused on the view, blinked and rubbed at her eyes, then realized there was no problem with her vision. The rim of the station did seem to be higher than a few minutes ago, and the enclosure skin, which only a moment earlier had seemed to slope down from them, now seemed to curve upwards. Also, out at the rim itself, something like a heat haze was shimmering in vacuum.

‘Weird visual effect,’ she said, hoping for some explanation.

‘Yes,’ was Saul’s curt rejoinder.

Hannah folded her arms, too, feeling cold and thoroughly vulnerable. Secure inside Arcoplex Two, it had been easy to forget that she was just a fragile creature kept safe from the indifference of a lethal universe by only a few layers of metal. Now, looking out into the night as they played around with fundamental physics, she couldn’t help but feel they might make the universe just a little less indifferent to them, which did not strike her as a great idea.

‘Introducing the eddy currents now,’ Rhine announced.

The general muttering throughout the control room abruptly stilled, then Le Roque began making announcements over the station’s PA system, ordering all tasks to cease and for everyone to get secured. Even as he spoke, the background noise began ramping up. It seemed almost as if someone had just opened the air inputs on a scramjet ready to take over from the turbine. She glanced round, then jumped as Saul reached out and touched her arm. He gestured to the two empty acceleration chairs next to the nearby consoles. Hannah quickly sat down in one and strapped herself in, while Saul did the same beside her.

‘What happens now?’ she asked.

‘We encyst in the universe, and we move,’ he replied, interlacing his fingers over his stomach as if he was feeling perfectly relaxed about all this.

Hannah switched her gaze again to the view. That odd visual effect was now gone, but another quite unpleasant effect was impinging upon her. Everything she could see out there – in fact, everything she could see in here too – seemed stretched taut and tensioned to an unbearable level, as if at any moment it might snap and just curl up into nothingness. Someone screamed, a short panicking sound, and Hannah looked round to see the woman Leeran covering her face with her hands.