Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

doctors had been very busy for some time: station staff forming queues outside the doctors’ surgeries during their free time. Just over ten per cent of the people here were now without ID implants, including Saul himself, who had had five implants removed from his forearm.

‘You have everything ready for me?’ he enquired. He knew precisely what they had to show him – had known for three days – but had realized that his omniscience tended to defuse the enthusiasm of those who worked for him.

‘We’re ready. You’ll find the Committee had some interesting projects running here,’ said Brigitta. Angela grimaced, as aware as Brigitta that he had already peered into every nook and cranny of Robotics and knew precisely what was here.

Langstrom, a wiry black man who was now Saul’s police commander, and Peach, a tall Nordic blonde woman who was one of his officers, also waited here.

‘No problems?’ Saul asked.

‘None at all,’ said Langstrom warily.

‘Then let’s go.’ Saul gestured down the corridor.

The spidergun went first, now sufficiently independent to need no mental prod from Saul, and he followed. Hannah fell in beside him, and the twins came next, Langstrom and Peach coming up last. There wasn’t really much need for the last two – they were only here because they felt they had to be, and Saul had not ordered them not to be here. He had already checked out any possible dangers in the arcoplex, and his robots were installed all around him.

‘What about you?’ Hannah asked.

‘I’m good,’ Saul replied.

He could explain to her about the quantities of information he was able to process. He could explain how he could now individually control hundreds of robots, how he now created programs with a thought, some of them almost operating like independent intelligences. But how to explain the synergy arising from the biological interface she had implanted in his skull? How to explain not so much the growth in his abilities as that implant spread its neural network, but the integration? Then again, perhaps he could explain to Hannah, for she was the one most likely to be able to understand.

Numerous successive corridors brought them to an elevator which took them up, in two parties, to the robotics factory near to the arcoplex spindle. They stepped out onto a glass-panelled floor, walking lightly and bouncing in the lower spin. Saul peered down at the assembly floor visible below. It was a combination of production line and specialist workshop. Raw components were transported up by cargo elevators from floors below, three partially assembled carcases of construction robots lay directly below him, while a fourth, all but finished, was undergoing trials in a test rig. Twenty people worked on this floor, but most of the assembly directly below was being conducted by the brethren of these robots – the three humans Saul could see working on specialization of the basic construction robot. In the next area various maintenance robots were being put together. Beyond this lay Large Component Construction, where the parts for the bigger station robots were made.

Brigitta, who had moved up beside him the moment he walked out onto this floor, began a hesitant commentary, with the implication of, of course you know all this, until, from behind, Langstrom interrupted, ‘What about the military stuff?’

Brigitta had glanced at Saul as if seeking permission and, when he nodded, replied, ‘It was never made here – always transported up from Earth. We’ve got some packaged razorbirds and shepherds, but I’ve no idea why. Shepherds are just too big and the razorbirds would need substantial reprogramming to fly in zero gravity. And the only spiderguns here are those Messina brought with him.’ Thereafter Brigitta continued her commentary with more enthusiasm now she had a more congenial audience.

During a pause, Saul said, ‘Of course, this is not what I’ve come to see.’

‘We go to the end, then down a couple of floors,’ explained Brigitta. ‘I’m not quite sure what the aim was.’

‘A police force of unquestioning loyalty, I suspect,’ said Saul, glancing round at Langstrom.

The man frowned, seemed about to wipe this expression from his face, then stubbornly retained it. He said, ‘It was because of people not asking questions that Earth is like it is today.’

‘Precisely,’ said Saul, as he stepped, after his spidergun, into the end elevator.

The chief of Humanoid Unit Development had been one of the casualties of the recent station conflict. He had not been here in Arcoplex Two when Messina’s forces attacked, but in his executive quarters in the Political Office. He hadn’t been involved in the fighting, but stray rounds had punched through a small section of the PO, including his quarters, and vacuum decompression had killed him some minutes later. That was a loss, for he had been a brilliant man. However, had he survived he would have been considered one of those ‘difficult’ cases: a valuable mind in the skull of a multiple murderer who had experimented on human beings, not because he was forced to by the Committee but because he delighted in it. And here, in the HUD, he had applied some of the results from his research.

‘Are they fucking alive?’ asked Langstrom.

Ten of them stood in a line against one wall, frames supporting them, all sorts of umbilical pipes and cables plugged in. Each stood over two metres tall – big leathery-skinned humanoids, male in body shape but without sexual organs.

‘They’re machines,’ Brigitta informed him. ‘The skin is semi-organic and they contain many cross-tech components – quite a lot of what’s inside them being based on human tissue – but these things were assembled, not grown.’ She paused for a moment, forehead wrinkling in a frown. Perhaps such distinctions were not so easy to make in this case.

‘Why?’ Langstrom asked. ‘I thought the multi-task idea had gone out the window.’