Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

things don’t have fusion engines like Argus or the Scourge.’

‘So, on the face of it,’ said Var, ‘building a DEMP seems to be a reasonable precaution to take.’

‘Then what?’ asked Martinez abruptly.

Var glanced at him. Perhaps he too was seeing the shape of things.

‘Yes, precisely,’ said Var. ‘Then what?’

No one seemed to have any answer.

‘I too have been checking some figures,’ she continued. ‘The Scourge will have to slow down to intercept Argus, and there’ll be a delay while it deals with that station. We can assume it will strafe the station first, then dock and send in troops. Remember, Galahad doesn’t want just to destroy Argus; she wants to get her hands on the Gene Bank data and samples. After that, the Scourge can accelerate again. I estimate, what with the big deceleration it will need on arrival here, the ship will be over us in about two years’ time.’

‘The DEMP will be able to knock out anything self-guided,’ said Haarsen, but seemed at a loss for anything else to add.

‘But would be completely ineffective against line-of-sight railgun slugs. So building a DEMP to deal with a possible threat four years hence when we’re likely to be attacked in two years seems rather pointless, don’t you think?’

Both Rhone and Haarsen suddenly looked peeved. This had clearly been a little power play: Rhone wheeling out his pet weapons designer to demonstrate how useful and forward-thinking he was. Quite obviously, Rhone was no synthesist, or else he would have spotted the enormous hole in his own reasoning.

‘So what other options do we have?’ Var asked, and waited patiently.

Rhone should have been the one to see the only real option, but it was Martinez who now spoke up. The big bulky man leaned forward, tapping one thick calloused finger against the tabletop to emphasize each of his points. ‘Atomics and railgun slugs from orbit? Seems to me the penetration capacity of both ain’t great. A slug at full power probably fragments or even turns to plasma on impact. Both’ll leave nothing but glass on the surface.’

‘And your point is?’ Var asked, perfectly aware of what his point was.

‘Maybe they’ve got some way of dropping troops; I don’t know. But even if they have, those guys will be at a big disadvantage.’ He paused, stabbing his finger down again. ‘We dig. We go underground.’

Var swung her attention to Rhone and waited.

‘Yes,’ he said reluctantly. ‘There are faults down there – some big caves extending right to Coprates Chasma.’ He tapped a fingertip against the table. ‘We’ve still got all the records from the original geological survey, but still this will take a lot of work.’

‘Isn’t there a deep fault twenty kilometres north of here?’ Var asked, feeling sure he knew about it. ‘That means we probably won’t even have to sink shafts.’

‘I believe you’re right,’ he admitted.

Var swung her attention to Haarsen, who was now looking sour-faced. She flung him a bone: ‘We’ll be needing explosives to blast things wider over there, and we’ll be needing defences. It also occurs to me that, should there be landing craft aboard the Scourge, then a DEMP weapon might make them rather difficult to control.’

Now he looked happier. Var sat back, feeling completely dissatisfied with this meeting. Either she had just proved that she was the best person to run this base, by showing the only course they could take to survive, or Rhone had been planning some entirely different course. It could all be in her mind, all a product of faulty paranoid reasoning, but it seemed to her that if they didn’t go underground, the only options were surrender or death.

Maybe Rhone’s main plan was to assume command, ensure she ended up dead, then report back to Earth that the main rebel leader had been dealt with. And perhaps, if that was his aim, he was right. They could defend themselves here, maybe for decades into the future but, beyond then, as Earth’s full might came into play, they would eventually lose – and Var could see no way round that.

Earth

Clay gazed at the fine hairs on the back of Serene’s neck as she studied the scene displayed on the small screen in the aero’s cockpit. He wondered if she now regretted destroying the erstwhile Alexander construction station. It had been an overly dramatic gesture by which to demonstrate the Scourge’s power, and its loss had put back offworld construction, though not for long the way things were ramping up. Even so, she should have had the ship fire on the surface of the Moon – that would have been sufficient to deliver the message to Argus. It would also have sent a message to the people on Mars who, it seemed highly probable, were rebels too. It appeared unlikely that their communications equipment was so damaged that they could not rig up some method of replying to the frequent messages sent to them from Earth.

‘How long?’ she asked.

Clay, whom she had summoned up from the contingent of her staff occupying the body of the craft behind, leaned forward to peer at the image, quickly trying to put his thoughts in order. He knew by now that she would stand for no bullshit and, with her scientific background and a mind like a bacon slicer, she would recognize any such at once.

‘I’m told it’ll take over a month to get the small smelters back online,’ he said. ‘But to replace everything that went into the Argus smelters and bubblemetal plants will take a further six months, presupposing this and the others of its kind still work.’ He now gestured to the landscape lying beyond the cockpit screen, and specifically to the massive facility they had come here to see in the final days of this tour of hers round her planet.