Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

extending towards him then sweeping away to the right to disappear into the endcap itself. He was just about to launch himself towards those ducts when suddenly silver shapes were swarming around them, many of them breaking off to launch themselves towards him.

Alex made microsecond calculations before he threw himself in a flat course over towards the side of the endcap. He stood no chance now of severing the power supply to the space drive, but there was still another potential weakness. The EM field seemed to be an integral part of this new drive and, just beyond the endcap lay the main transformer room. After a few seconds in flight, he hit the curved outer edge of the structure around the arcoplex-bearing housing. As he thumped down a foot to secure himself, he caught a glimpse of someone looking up at him in surprise from a rounded window, before he propelled himself further. As he sailed through vacuum, he turned to survey his surroundings. There was absolutely no doubt now that he had been spotted. There were robots closing in on him from every direction, some of them leaving vapour trails from their use of compressed-air impellers.

At high speed and feet first, Alex hit a section of composite wall. Something cracked in his recently healed leg, but he felt no pain. The composite had dented, absorbing a lot of the force, but he still bounced away from it. Seconds later he snagged a long, tensioned beam strap, managed to hold on, then towed himself down its length. He had pulled himself into a partially walled corridor by the time he felt the vibration of multiple impacts on the structures all around him. The robots had arrived.

Moving as fast as he could in his gecko boots, Alex made it to a manual airlock hatch. He opened it, climbed inside, waited for it to pressurize. The constricted space of the airlock would at least keep some of the bigger robots from following him, and any others would have to come through here just one at a time. Once it had fully pressurized, he opened the lower hatch and dropped through it into an oxygenated corridor. In a slow loping run, he headed for the head of a cageway leading down. He jumped into this and scrambled down through numerous floors to reach a short tubeway. At the end of this lay the door to the transformer room, and Alex couldn’t quite believe he had made it this far. However, with air around him to transmit the din of robot movement, he knew he would be going no further. He opened the door on to a platform overlooking a massive collection of transformers.

Packed within a framework extending twenty metres on each side, and rising from floor to ceiling, stood the transformers themselves. These were smoothly rounded-off cubes of laminated metals and graphine composites wrapped in heavy coils of copper and superconductive wire. Quadrate scaffolding filled the rest of the chamber, supporting pan-pipe clusters of heavy ducts that wove away from these transformers and led into the surrounding walls. Alex scanned the scene, remembering how this room had looked the last time he was here, then he focused on the subsequent additions.

Supported amid the scaffolding was a big squat cylinder of hardware with numerous brand-new optic and power feeds leading both in and out of it. Since it was obviously new, this device had to be something to do with the space drive; therefore it had to be crucial. He leaped directly across to catch hold of a scaffolding pole, then began to tow himself towards it. At that moment the door burst open and, one after another, construction robots sped into the room. Hearing sounds from above, he looked up and saw more fast appearing there. Alex halted just a few metres away from the unknown device and trained his rifle on three interconnected translucent boxes that seemed to be packed with electronics. Then he hesitated.

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.