Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

blinking, indicating that its battery didn’t hold enough energy to charge up the capacitor. No problem, he walked round to a multipurpose induction charger sitting on a shelf by his bed, and inserted it. When he turned round from doing that, Scotonis was on his feet again.

‘So who next?’ Clay asked.

‘Cookson and Trove,’ Scotonis replied, watching him carefully.

‘I hope Trove will not continue to resent me,’ said Clay. ‘I felt I had to behave perfectly in keeping with my role until now.’

‘So what’s changed now?’

‘The communications delay,’ Clay replied. ‘Galahad has almost a sixth sense for liars, but she’s becoming impatient with the com delay so she’s talking to me less, and with that delay she’s finding it more difficult to read me.’

Scotonis acknowledged that explanation with a brief nod, then asked, ‘What about the ID implants?’

Clay opened the desk drawer and took out the device he had used to remove his own implant. ‘I’m told these were made to turn a profit, so aren’t made to last and can take out only about ten implants before they fail. I think the next person on your list should be your crew medic, Dr Myers.’ He handed the device over.

Scotonis took the thing warily, glanced at his own forearm, then returned his gaze to Clay. ‘Then what?’

‘We could have done nothing – kept our collars and our implants and hoped for success. But you agreed that it wasn’t worth risking.’

‘No,’ Scotonis shook his head, ‘I wanted to be free of Galahad – simple as that.’

Clay paused for a moment, tried to order his thoughts. ‘We’re not transmitting the Gene Bank data back to Earth,’ he said. ‘And we will attack Argus to grab the physical samples, prisoners if we can, and the station. These will be our bargaining chips. Maybe we can then—’

‘You haven’t thought this out at all,’ said the Captain. ‘You only looked as far as ensuring your own survival.’

Clay tried to keep his expression calm, but in truth Scotonis was absolutely right. Clay had removed the immediate threats to his own life – the collar and his implant – then moved on to the next threat, which was Galahad discovering that he had done so; then to the further danger to himself, which was that he could not survive out here alone.

‘This is not an easy situation,’ he said.

‘It doesn’t matter what bargains we strike with Galahad,’ said Scotonis. ‘If we fail and she finds out we’ve disabled our collars and removed our implants, she’ll still kill us once we set foot on Earth. So, unless you’ve already planned to spend the rest of your existence aboard this spaceship, we need another option.’

‘You have a suggestion?’

‘I do,’ he said. ‘We carry on through with our mission, and what we then do depends on whether or not we succeed. We have the capability aboard this ship to rig up some way of storing ID implants so they don’t deactivate. We should even be able to find a way of removing those biochips from them. If we succeed in taking Argus Station, we’ll head on to our next objective: Mars. As we head back to Earth, we can put our implants back.’

‘And if we don’t succeed?’

‘Galahad will quickly learn what we’ve done, so we still head back to Earth. Almost certainly she’ll be in the process of upgrading orbital defences right now – they’d started on them before we left – so we buy ourselves safe passage into orbit with the Gene Bank data we already have aboard. Once we get there, we make Earth safe for us.’

‘How?’

Scotonis shrugged. ‘You know what armaments we have aboard. It’ll just be a case of locating her. Even if she goes to ground in one of the deep Committee bunkers, a number of nuclear strikes should cut her off from the rest of Earth and seal her inside it.’

‘I see,’ said Clay. And he did. He saw that, by telling Scotonis the truth about what had happened on Earth, he had set events in motion he could no longer control. He saw that, even if they did succeed out here and take Argus Station, retrieve the Gene Bank samples and capture the rebels, Scotonis still aimed to carry through his proposal in the event of failure. No matter what the outcome, Scotonis intended to kill Chairman Serene Galahad.

Searching his conscience, Clay could see no reason why this might present a problem for himself.

Argus

The proctor awaited Saul in the docking pillar, some distance away from the cylinder airlock leading into the Imperator. As he stepped out on the walkway beside the dock railway, Saul probed this proctor in the virtual world, but found some barrier in his way. It wasn’t something that could bar him – he could break through it in an instant, for it was more like a curtain put up for privacy, which relied on the good manners of anyone approaching it. Saul decided then to respect it, focusing his attention elsewhere.

The robots had finished cutting away and grinding down the welds on the docking clamps holding the Imperator in place, and began obediently trooping away to rejoin the bulk of the station robots which were now hard at work on completing the station weapons. Other robots were also routing optic controls from those same weapons to Tech Central, while yet others were completing the alterations to the station’s EM radiation shield projector.

At the moment this last task entailed adding separate linkages to each section all around the station rim, and further controls in the transformer room so the shield would possess more states than just ‘on’ and ‘off’. When they had finished, the shield strength would be variable as a whole and also in sections; its frequency could then be changed, as could its