Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

decelerating, so I’m hoping you can have them out and secured in just an hour – which should give me time to prepare them. I’ll leave you to it, then.’ He headed for the door.

‘If I might ask,’ said Ghort, a slight edge to his voice that intimated at hidden resentments, ‘what do you intend to do with them?’

‘As our first target becomes visible, I’ll explain,’ Saul replied. ‘It’ll become clearer then.’

As he left them, the four who had followed remained behind, donning the helmets they had brought. Ghort opened the tool chest and he and one other stooped over it to take out powered socket drivers.

‘You’re going to use the tactical nukes?’ said Langstrom when Saul returned to the cockpit. ‘They’ll certainly make a nice display, but they’ve got a lot of space to cover.’

Saul reached over and patted his shoulder. ‘Patience, and you’ll see.’

Langstrom looked round at him in surprise, but didn’t have anything to add. Saul returned to the passenger compartment, sat down in an acceleration chair and strapped himself in. He then simultaneously watched feeds from the hold where Ghort and the others were working, from the mining of the cinnabar asteroid and from anything else his attention was drawn to in Argus Station. Even while observing these, he continued working on the esoteric maths and theoretical stats of the station’s space drive, both modelling how it should work and figuring out what adjustments would need to be made to the magnetic field in order to make it perform just so. As Ghort and crew were fixing the last missile to the deck, securing the floor plate again and repressurizing the hold, a new feed from Argus drew his attention.

The naked woman that had once been Delegate Vasiliev was donning a fresh spacesuit brought for her, and now telling her story. Saul felt a sudden surge of annoyance. The hydroponics unit had stayed out of his mental compass because it was moved, and while he had still been unconscious. This was why the Messina clone had managed to stay hidden. Additionally irritating to know that, with everything that was currently going on aboard the station, the clone might yet continue to evade capture. Saul stood up and headed back to the hold where, watched by the EVA workers, he removed the warheads from each missile and attached coded transponders. He could now detonate them with just a thought.

Deceleration ensued, and at length their first target came into sight, observed by everyone aboard, all now crammed into the cockpit.

‘An asteroid,’ declared Langstrom, obviously puzzled.

‘Give it a few more minutes and resolution will improve,’ Saul advised him.

His own vision had resolved the grey blob on the screen and programs in his mind cleaned it up, but it would be a short while before any human eyes could detect what it really was. After a minute it became evident that this was no single lump of asteroidal rock, but a huge conglomeration of boulders.

‘It’s a rubble pile,’ observed Ghort.

‘Precisely,’ said Saul, ‘rocks and dust accumulating – one might say coagulating – over billions of years and all held together by minimal gravity. It is not particularly stable despite its great age.’

‘And this helps us how?’ asked one of Ghort’s companions.

‘Consider what a sixty-kiloton detonation on one side of this will do.’

‘Make a hell of a mess,’ someone joked.

‘I get it,’ said Langstrom. ‘And, funnily enough, it looks perfectly in keeping.’

‘Yes,’ said Saul. ‘Just like an ancient fragmentation grenade.’

Mars

Shots cracked over her head, so close. Approximately one-third the gravity of Earth, air resistance . . . not very much, acceleration three point seven metres per second. In the time it would take them to reach the chasma’s edge, maybe five seconds, she would be forty-five metres below them and accelerating. These thoughts flashed through her mind just before she hit the angled-out cliff face and tumbled. Rhone wouldn’t even bother to shoot at her now. With a straight fall of one kilometre, she would be travelling at a hundred and fifty kilometres an hour by the time she hit the bottom. That would undoubtedly kill her. She had to slow herself down.

And if she survived?

Nothing . . . she would die when her air ran out. But still that brute instinct for survival took over.

Var grabbed for holds and felt them being torn out of her hands, wrenching her arms. Each time she hit the cliff she scrabbled desperately for some way to slow her descent, using palms, boot soles, anything. The material of her suit could take it, and anyway, so what if it couldn’t? Play the odds. At one point she noticed a row of ridges below, to her right, and on her next contact with the cliff propelled herself in that direction. They came up very fast and the first one slowed her abruptly, before shattering underneath her. No pain, though she knew for certain that she’d cracked something. Big adrenalin rush. Further ridges jolted against her and, for an insane giggly moment she thought, speed bumps, then was falling alongside a straight drop.

An angled surface came up at her hard and she turned her shoulder to take the impact, hoping to roll with it. Dust exploded around her and she went tumbling through it, blind. Next she was in free fall again, glimpsing the cradle rails far over to her left. They’d run the lift straight up the steepest section of cliff, but she was well away from that now. Debris fell all about her and then she was in against the sloping cliff face, trying to slow herself with palms and soles, rocks falling with her seeming to touch her gently then bounce away.

Then at all once she was tumbling in a great cloud of dust and rubble, instinctively grabbing and trying to slow herself, expecting some bone-crunching impact at any moment. It seemed to go on