Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

She wanted to cry, but felt arid inside.

Mars

With only three hours to go, three hours of her life remaining, Var had exposed three metres of oxygen pipe, unearthed a lone skull and an old-style laptop . . . but still didn’t know if she was any closer to the compressed-air tank. Only after digging for a number of hours had it occurred to her that these pipes might have fed something else. For all she knew, the tank could be under the rubble pile behind her while the pipes she was following terminated at just another airlock.

She paused and stood upright to stretch her back, feeling sore points all over her body where her suit had been rubbing against her. She considered how all the effort she had put in here would result in some unpleasant after-effects, then remembered that if she did suffer sore and aching muscles later, she would be grateful. Funny that – how her mind kept slipping back to its default position of assessing the future. It was as if, on some unconscious level, a part of her kept cautiously approaching the facts of her situation, then skittering nervously away.

On a conscious level she had a problem too. A while ago, when her crunch time lay many hours into the future, she had felt something like acceptance, but now that time was drawing nigh she could feel her desperation increasing. She didn’t want to die. It wasn’t fair. She had so much yet to do. All the protests of someone on the brink of dying rose up in her mind – all the cliches of an organism never programmed to accept death, and rebelling at the last. She tried not to contemplate this further, ducked down again and continued digging, annoyed by the tears of self-pity filling her eyes.

Another hour of digging excited her inner immortal element as the pipes began rising steeply upwards. This was it; this was where they were not crushed down by the rubble, where they rose up to meet something else. She tried to keep calm, but instead found herself hurling rocks away, scooping off dust, frenziedly hacking with her pick. She started to sweat, but worked even harder when she came upon a heavy pipe joint; felt a moment of euphoria on exposing first a power cable, then the side of the small compressor it led to. Further digging revealed the curving perimeter of the compressed-air reservoir. She worked her way up one side of it, tracking along the air pipes, revealed the top of a pressure gauge, tore away the rubble all around it, exposed a broken dial that could no longer give her a reading, began moving away more rubble – and in the process banged a loose rock against the gauge. The gauge itself, pipes and a heavy valve all shifted. She got hold of the entire assembly and pulled it up, until it came away from the bottle below, revealing the hole out of which it had been torn.

Disappointment punched her in the gut, but her internal organism wouldn’t stop. She brushed everything clear of the compressed-air bottle, exposed the top of it completely. The screw-in assembly had been torn out of its thread, leaving the dark eye of a hole. She stared at it, unable to accept what she was seeing. She turned and searched around until she found a length of reinforcing rod she had cast aside earlier, returned to the bottle and inserted it into the hole. It went right down inside the bottle and she rattled it around, a tinny sound carrying to her ears through the thin air. Then she dropped the rod into the bottle and stepped back, reality catching up.

Weariness hit her hard as she climbed out of the excavation. Her head-up display showed that she had maybe two hours left now, and her likelihood of finding anything to extend her time beyond that was minimal. Stepping away from rubble to dusty ground, Var considered going back into the intact building and leaving some message for her brother, but could not see the point. She walked over to a nearby boulder, slumped down and rested her back against it.

Time to die, now.

21

Technology Makes You Free!

The attitude of Committee delegates to technology was always an ambivalent one. They wanted medical technology advanced just as fast as possible so that they could stay healthy and live for as long as possible, but did not want it on general release because that would inevitably exacerbate the world’s population problem. They wanted expert computer systems through which to administrate the world, yet artificial intelligence terrified them for it might displace them. They wanted fast and reliable robots operating in their factories and their Inspectorate, but desired utter control over the experts that built and programmed them. They wanted all the benefits that technology could give, because technology is power, and they wanted that power only for themselves. They micromanaged, controlled and suppressed technology so that, in the end, that product of human genius, intended to free people from the exigencies of the world around them, instead enslaved them.

Argus

The shuddering that ran through the station, as if it had been hit by a gigantic club, was slowly diminishing. Gazing up through one of the few intact windows of Tech Central, Saul watched the cause of it: the Scourge steadily retreating. Why it had pulled away was debatable, because it began to leave only shortly after he had transmitted the codes to the implants of every soldier and every crewmember of that ship, and it struck him as unlikely that they could so quickly have realized what was about to happen.

‘Nearly done,’ said Langstrom over radio, ‘but it’ll take hours to repressurize.’

Langstrom and his soldiers had found replacement windows in a nearby storeroom and were now installing the last of them. This wasn’t Saul’s greatest concern. If everything worked out as expected, then all those aboard the Scourge should be dying or already dead. But the fact that the ship had left so early inclined him to think that maybe something else was going on. He could no longer assume that they were all dead, and it was quite possible that the ship would become a severe danger. For soon it would be able to deploy its weapons again and, quite likely, any survivors aboard it would not be firing merely disabling shots.

‘Judd, tell me you’re ready,’ said Saul, as he turned away, carefully stepping over a corpse, then nudging a second floating carcase out of his path as he came to stand before the newly installed controls.

‘Repairs are complete,’ the proctor replied.

Saul peered into the transformer room and noted how its occupants were clearing up any free-floating detritus. However, Judd was not among them. Searching further, Saul found the proctor standing, surrounded by corpses, in a nearby corridor. Obviously Judd had found it necessary to deal with an attack occurring there too.