Neal Asher - Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

Once he pulled the trigger, it would be the end for him. At the surface of his mind he dismissed the importance of that, but deep down knew this was why he had hesitated. He now rationalized: would destroying this drive increase or decrease Messina’s chances of survival? Would those aboard the Scourge even care about Messina? Would Messina, who was now probably about as mindless as ex-Committee Delegate Vasiliev, be better off here? These arguments circled in his mind, and his trigger finger remained immobile. Then he looked around to find that all the robots had ceased their approach.

‘So where do we go from here, Alex?’ asked a calm and horribly reasonable-sounding voice over his suit radio. ‘Pull that trigger and I can assure you that Messina will die instantly.’

The words seemed to act like a key turning in his brain, and Alex knew precisely how this must play out. Maybe, in the end, Alexandra had been right about so much. He reached up with a free hand to unclip his VC suit helmet and batted it away from him, then, always ensuring he had a finger on his weapon’s trigger, removed each of his VC suit gauntlets in turn.

‘Bring him to me,’ he said. ‘You bring him to me now.’

They were running out of time and Saul did not need the full extent of his abilities to calculate that if Alex caused damage where he was, then it was unlikely to get fixed before the Scourge arrived. Everything possible must be done to prevent him doing so. The urgency of that was intensified by the fact that, right at this moment, Saul’s sister was running out of her air supply on Mars. Such knowledge had an odd effect on him: his instinctive reaction was to view her as a problem that needed to be solved, damage to reality that needed to repaired. Yet, if he stepped back and coldly analysed the situation, she was an irrelevance. The oddity was that, in this one case, the more human part of him had overridden the greater whole. Perhaps he had been fooling himself about the dehumanizing effect of plugging himself into the machine.

‘Langstrom,’ Saul instructed, directly through the police commander’s fone, ‘go to the Arboretum and have Messina secured, but bring him to the EM field transformer room only when I signal. We want to draw this out as long as possible.’

All the while Alex remained in the transformer room doing no damage, the vortex generator was winding up to speed. If Saul could keep him talking for just half an hour, they would then be able to fire up the drive.

‘What the hell is he doing?’ replied Langstrom. ‘Surely he doesn’t think he can escape with Messina now?’

The man was clearly watching image feeds and therefore up to date on what was happening, Saul realized. Others were watching too, and he could not help but feel like an idiot whose folly had been exposed before a crowd. Why had it taken him this long to understand how dangerous this Alex was, and why, when he apparently had the man trapped, hadn’t he shut down the only possible means of escape?

‘He’s been programmed to protect Messina,’ Saul replied, ‘but is now beset by a mass of contradictions that he’s not mentally prepared for. Seen in his terms, we are an obvious danger to Messina, so he has been working along with those aboard the Scourge to stop us leaving. However, he’s not stupid either, and he’ll realize that those aboard that ship are not necessarily as concerned about Messina’s welfare as they are probably telling him.’

‘That still doesn’t answer my question,’ Langstrom grumped.

‘The plain answer is that he doesn’t know what he’s doing,’ Saul replied. ‘He just doesn’t want Messina to die – or to die himself.’

Saul exited the rim-side endcap of Arcoplex One, entering the train tunnel that led outwards then round the rim towards the docks, but exited it through a personnel access tube heading out to the transformer room. At the same time, he continued watching events through the sensors of the robots currently occupying the transformer room, while also urging a couple of spiderguns over that way. Just a couple of shots from one of those could finish this quickly; however, it was quite evident that Alex had positioned himself very carefully. He would notice if Saul tried to move a spidergun into a position where the shots it fired would not damage the new drive hardware. This situation was sticky, very sticky indeed.

‘Alan, what the hell are you doing?’ Saul had been ignoring all attempts to contact him, but had now allowed this one through.

‘I am going to deal with a bad situation resulting from my lack of attention, Hannah,’ he replied.

‘And get yourself killed?’

‘That was not my intention.’

‘He’ll probably try using you as a hostage to get both himself and Messina off the station,’ she protested. ‘Use your robots to deal with him instead.’

‘Not feasible at the moment, unfortunately, but the longer I can draw this out, the nearer we get to Rhine firing up the drive again. But if I don’t go and negotiate now, this Messina clone could destroy vital hardware and kill our chances of escaping.’

‘You’re sure this isn’t some macho need of yours to step outside your computer world?’

‘That was low, Hannah. I’ll speak to you soon.’

As Saul finally reached the door into the transformer room he remembered the last time he had entered here, with Malden – and how Malden had died under a hail of bullets from Director Smith’s troops. That was not a memory he relished.

He opened the door and stepped inside, two construction robots smoothly sliding out of his way as he walked out on the platform – but not moving too far away. They were ready to interpose themselves between him and Alex should the Messina clone decide that Saul made a better target than the drive hardware.

‘So you are Alex,’ Saul said.

‘Where’s Messina?’ Alex asked.

This man was a little difficult to read, even though Saul could study in detail every single pore on his face. Certainly he looked scared, and ever so slightly puzzled, but these seemed like a veneer over blankness, like a smile painted on a doll.

‘Messina will be brought here only when or if I am ready to bring him here, Alex,’ said Saul. ‘I’m curious to know what you hope to achieve. I’ve already told you that the moment you pull that trigger he will die.’

The other man suddenly looked very tired as he shook his head.

‘Alexandra was naive, but maybe naivety is a good thing, because it allows you to function without regard for the consequences,’ he said.

‘I assume Alexandra was your partner – the one killed in Messina’s space plane?’ Human contact now? Saul reached up, unclipped his suit helmet and removed it, trying thus to bridge the emotional gap.

‘She was. She possessed a very black-and-white view of reality that I envy now.’

‘Surely this situation is, though with some complications, also black and white?’

Alex just stared at him for a moment, then he said, ‘The fact that your robots ceased their approach, and that you yourself are here now, tells me I am pointing this weapon at something vital. So here’s what I want: I want you to withdraw all the robots from this room, then I want you to come over here next to me. You will be my hostage, and together we will go to the Chairman’s space plane, where you will instruct your staff to bring the Chairman. There we will arrange a hostage exchange, and I will depart with him safely.’

On the face of it, this seemed a viable option for such a thoroughly programmed Messina clone to achieve, but already Saul was beginning to realize that this man was a bit deeper than that. He decided to test him.

‘So you can then depart and be picked up by the Scourge ,’ he suggested.