Neal Asher - Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

He couldn’t think of anything more to add, any comfort to give her. He now broke into a loping run. They had enough problems here as it was and, even if they got to Mars, the chances of him doing anything for Var were minimal. None of the space planes aboard Argus was capable of flying down through the thin Martian atmosphere. Perhaps that wasn’t an insuperable problem, given time, but time was the one thing that Var did not have. He began running schematics in his mind, seeing what could be stripped away, making vector and power calculations, redesigning things organically as, merely with a thought, he sent a squad of construction robots out to the space docks.

The lock pressurized even as Alex unclipped and pulled off his helmet. He opened the inner door and pushed himself into the wide space available before the storage racks, fully alert for anyone waiting for him in there. He seemed safe for the moment, but that could not last. If that android had seen him, then so had all of them, and perhaps Alan Saul himself would by now know where he was. Therefore more would be on the way, along with members of the station police force. He had only one option.

Tumbling in zero gravity, Alex quickly stripped off his old suit, unpacked the VC and donned it. He did it much faster than most normal troopers could manage, but then he was much better trained and his reactions a lot quicker. No normal trooper would have been able to survive an encounter like the one he had just gone through. Once he had closed the VC suit, he hooked up the oxygen pack from his old suit as a reserve, connected in the radio booster board, and then pushed himself over to the cylinder transport system. Here he found a cylinder that had come from his own hydroponics unit, still in the process of being unpacked by a pedestal-mounted robot arm. He ducked under the arm and dragged the cylinder from its rack. Only when he had it clear did he consider what could have happened if the robotic arm had been controlled by someone hostile. He emptied the cylinder of its remaining contents, then took it over to the other egress and put it in position. There was no guarantee this would work, but he had to try. He climbed inside and closed the lid.

Nothing happened for a moment, and Alex began to wonder if Saul had reached out to shut down his escape. But then, with a clonk, the thing slid into motion, shortly followed by a surge of acceleration pushing his feet against the base of the cylinder. He closed his eyes. If Saul knew he was in this tube, then the chances were that he would do something about it – such as knocking off the braking at the other end and allowing Alex to arrive at his destination at full speed. So Alex might well be about to die. Then again, another option would be to stop the cylinder halfway along its course and just leave it there until he ran out of air. Certainly he had no way of getting out of this thing while it was in its transport tube. Deceleration ensued . . . a further couple of clonks, and the lid opened.

‘What the hell?’ said the man looking down at him.

In one motion Alex jerked upright and swung his rifle in a short vicious arc that connected with the man’s head. He tumbled back and Alex was past him in a moment, realizing he was now in some sort of automated food-preparation room. As he reached the door, he guessed that this must be the place that supplied the refectories and personal dispensers in Arcoplex One – which meant he was getting close to the power feed to that weird space drive.

Out in the adjacent corridor he turned right and headed straight for a bulkhead door, pausing to study the direction icons and colour-coded map above it, which he memorized. Heading straight for the airlock, he passed a woman in the corridor but she wasn’t armed, so he ignored her. Once through the airlock, he moved out into a cageway running alongside the outer endcap. He abandoned the cageway at once, since it was taking him in the wrong direction, then climbed over the top of the unit he had just left and gazed towards his destination. Through partially constructed floors of the outer ring, he could see part of the space drive and the ducts that ran power and control optics to it, extending towards him then sweeping away to the right to disappear into the endcap itself. He was just about to launch himself towards those ducts when suddenly silver shapes were swarming around them, many of them breaking off to launch themselves towards him.

Alex made microsecond calculations before he threw himself in a flat course over towards the side of the endcap. He stood no chance now of severing the power supply to the space drive, but there was still another potential weakness. The EM field seemed to be an integral part of this new drive and, just beyond the endcap lay the main transformer room. After a few seconds in flight, he hit the curved outer edge of the structure around the arcoplex-bearing housing. As he thumped down a foot to secure himself, he caught a glimpse of someone looking up at him in surprise from a rounded window, before he propelled himself further. As he sailed through vacuum, he turned to survey his surroundings. There was absolutely no doubt now that he had been spotted. There were robots closing in on him from every direction, some of them leaving vapour trails from their use of compressed-air impellers.

At high speed and feet first, Alex hit a section of composite wall. Something cracked in his recently healed leg, but he felt no pain. The composite had dented, absorbing a lot of the force, but he still bounced away from it. Seconds later he snagged a long, tensioned beam strap, managed to hold on, then towed himself down its length. He had pulled himself into a partially walled corridor by the time he felt the vibration of multiple impacts on the structures all around him. The robots had arrived.

Moving as fast as he could in his gecko boots, Alex made it to a manual airlock hatch. He opened it, climbed inside, waited for it to pressurize. The constricted space of the airlock would at least keep some of the bigger robots from following him, and any others would have to come through here just one at a time. Once it had fully pressurized, he opened the lower hatch and dropped through it into an oxygenated corridor. In a slow loping run, he headed for the head of a cageway leading down. He jumped into this and scrambled down through numerous floors to reach a short tubeway. At the end of this lay the door to the transformer room, and Alex couldn’t quite believe he had made it this far. However, with air around him to transmit the din of robot movement, he knew he would be going no further. He opened the door on to a platform overlooking a massive collection of transformers.

Packed within a framework extending twenty metres on each side, and rising from floor to ceiling, stood the transformers themselves. These were smoothly rounded-off cubes of laminated metals and graphine composites wrapped in heavy coils of copper and superconductive wire. Quadrate scaffolding filled the rest of the chamber, supporting pan-pipe clusters of heavy ducts that wove away from these transformers and led into the surrounding walls. Alex scanned the scene, remembering how this room had looked the last time he was here, then he focused on the subsequent additions.

Supported amid the scaffolding was a big squat cylinder of hardware with numerous brand-new optic and power feeds leading both in and out of it. Since it was obviously new, this device had to be something to do with the space drive; therefore it had to be crucial. He leaped directly across to catch hold of a scaffolding pole, then began to tow himself towards it. At that moment the door burst open and, one after another, construction robots sped into the room. Hearing sounds from above, he looked up and saw more fast appearing there. Alex halted just a few metres away from the unknown device and trained his rifle on three interconnected translucent boxes that seemed to be packed with electronics. Then he hesitated.