Neal Asher - Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

She just glared at him.

‘This changes things,’ he continued. ‘How far did they move?’

‘Six hundred thousand kilometres in about eight seconds,’ Scotonis replied. ‘They were travelling at nearly a quarter of the speed of light.’ A short silence ensued as they all took that in, then Scotonis continued, ‘It doesn’t make much difference to our arrival time since they seemed to be trying to take the clearest route out of the belt, which ran transversely to our own approach.’

‘But, still, what is the point in us going after them?’ Clay asked.

‘I’m still amazed at your stupidity,’ Trove interjected. ‘We have to go after them because if we don’t, we’re dead.’

‘Why? I just don’t see your reasoning.’

‘What is your opinion of Commander Liang and his staff?’ asked Scotonis.

‘He’s a useful idiot,’ replied Clay, ‘your archetypal fanatic . . . oh.’

‘Oh, indeed,’ said Scotonis. ‘He and his staff command two thousand troops, most wearing vacuum gear and all heavily armed. If we mutiny now, all the readerguns aboard would not be enough to stop him taking over this ship.’ Scotonis grimaced. ‘Galahad was careful to ensure that it would be difficult for any of us to tip the balance of power aboard. That’s either because she’s very clever or very paranoid.’

‘I’d plump for the latter,’ said Clay. ‘So why didn’t you tell me this before?’

‘Because you are an untrustworthy little worm,’ said Trove, before Scotonis could reply.

‘And you trust me now?’ Clay asked.

‘We don’t have to,’ said Trove. ‘You’re dead, remember?’

Decidedly uncomfortable with the implications of that, Clay focused his attention back on Scotonis. ‘So you intend to get Liang and his men out of the ship first?’

‘Damned right,’ the captain replied.

‘But still you need to get to the Argus Station to do that.’

‘Yes, and if that drive remains undamaged and they start it up again . . .’

Clay could see no way round that. After all this time, they were still days away from Argus Station.

‘We’ll have to talk to our friend Alex,’ said Gunnery Officer Cookson. ‘He’s the only resource we can use.’

Clay nodded. ‘If he can sabotage something—’

‘Then, of course, we have another problem,’ interrupted Scotonis, now drawing his sidearm and pointing it at Clay.

‘Problem?’ said Clay.

‘Well,’ said the captain, raising his left arm and peering at his watch, ‘you were supposed to be dead as of two minutes ago.’

Clay didn’t hear the crack of the gunshot, just felt the sledgehammer impact on his chest. Then he felt nothing at all.

17

Air Supply

For EVA work one of the largest problems to overcome in vacuum has been air supply. During the return to space in the Golden Decade, highly pressurized oxygen was used in combination with recycled nitrogen and carbon-dioxide scrubbers. However, even these oxygen supplies remained bulky if someone needed to work in vacuum for any length of time. They could also be highly dangerous if holed by any of the vast collection of micro-meteorites that had built up in Earth’s orbit since the days of Sputnik . The invention of the red-oxygen catalytic bottle solved this problem at a stroke. Red oxygen, otherwise 0 8 , is solid oxygen that has undergone a phase change which previously could only be achieved under massive pressure. The specialized nanotube carbon-vanadium catalytic grid in the new bottles enables oxygen to undergo this phase change at low pressures, and then remain stable – only sublimating upon a current being introduced across the grid. This resulted in oxygen bottles that could supply up to forty hours of air.

Mars

The satellite dish was now centred on, and tracking, the portion of the Asteroid Belt in which Argus Station was located – or rather where she had last known it to be located. There should be no problem with the station receiving the transmission, since the beam would be a million kilometres across by the time it struck the belt. Var sat waiting, awake and motionless, hoping for just some sort of reply. However, the time necessary for the signal to reach Argus and for one to be returned passed with no result.

She continued monitoring, intending to stay awake throughout the six-hour window available to her, but weariness began catching up with her. Three hours into the transmission, she found herself frequently jerking out of a doze. Five hours in, she came out of an hour-long sleep to gaze blurry-eyed at her screen, to see that she had finally received a reply. Var woke up completely, but only to disappointment. Her signal had been received and recorded, but only by the computer system of Argus. Doubtless it would then go through some sort of robotic winnowing process, so whether it finally reached human ears was debatable.

Once the window closed, she decided to wait until daylight before further excavating the ruins outside to get to that corpse. She lay down on the floor, folded her arms and drifted into sleep so quickly that it felt like death.

Consciousness returned abruptly and Var sat upright, sure she had only slept for a moment, until she saw dawn light filtering through the building’s windows. She suddenly felt optimistic: perhaps Rhone had failed and now Martinez or Carol were coming for her; maybe she would find enough supplies of oxygen in the rubble pile to get her safely back to Antares Base?

She stood up, took a drink from the spigot in her helmet but felt no urge to make that same spigot supply her with any food paste. She felt grubby and urgently wanted to get out of her suit – she had already used the suit’s toilet facilities, but the seal on them was never great. Trying to ignore her discomfort, she selected a large pick from the abandoned tools, headed for the airlock, then outside into the Martian morning.

A light carbon-dioxide and water-ice fog hung in a metre-thick stratum at just about chest height, so, as she stepped outside, it seemed she was forging her way through a white sea. The fog was even then visibly lifting, and by the time she reached the fallen building it had risen up as far as her helmet. She set to work at once, digging out to a good depth around the corpse, in readiness to try lifting it. However, before she could do that, her head-up display warned her that her oxygen bottle was nearly depleted. Reality hit home hard and her earlier optimism evaporated like the rising fog layer all around her. Perhaps, she considered, it was just that kind of optimism that Rhone distrusted in her.

She kept working around the corpse, loosening the regolith, occasionally slipping the pick underneath the body to try and lever it up. She ignored the regular warnings until she was panting, eking every last molecule of her oxygen supply, then she switched over to Lopomac’s bottle and checked its reading. Unless she found something else here, she had just eighteen hours of life left. Var began levering at the corpse again, not so tentative now because what did it matter if she damaged it?

With a crackling sound that turned tinny in the thin air, and a big puff of vapour, the corpse lifted from the waist. She realized she must have snapped the desiccated flesh and spine inside the suit for it to be able to fold up that way. She must also have fractured a decayed suit seal to let out that puff of vapour, which was encouraging, since it meant the suit had remained pressurized. She dropped the pick and took hold of the corpse in both hands, forcing it up and back until it was resting against the rubble slope, unnaturally bent at the waist. Caked in compacted regolith, the flat oxygen bottle was now visible to her.