Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

Serene did not look up for a moment. She continued studying the various views she could get of what remained of the Mars Traveller construction project. Huge scaffolds hung in vacuum, dilapidated sun mirrors framed the ugly utility of the smelters, big factory cylinders stood open to vacuum within the scaffolding, large areas of their plating now gone. Construction robots, some of them the size of monorail carriages, clung to the scaffold like termites in the remains of a decayed tree.

He continued, ‘The big smelters have been mothballed for twenty years, ever since Argus took over, those that weren’t scrapped, that is, and will take a year to get up to speed. We’ll need more, too, and they’ll take . . . some time to build.’ He leaned further forward, feeling the need to get physically closer to her. She had listened carefully to his reports when he first arrived at Messina’s Italian mansion, then just dismissed him. It was only after they returned from Rome, after seeing the seven comlifers, that she’d made it quite obvious she wanted something else from him. They had fucked on Messina’s huge canopied bed, but only the once. After that, nothing – he returned to being her subordinate and she asked for nothing from him but information. Had he been a disappointment to her, and had she now decided to find that sort of relief from someone trained for the purpose, as had many Committee delegates in the past?

‘And how long before we can actually start building anything?’ she asked.

‘Some processes can start almost at once, but I’m told eight years before the first new-design Travellers can be commissioned.’

‘Not good enough,’ she said. ‘I want more space planes, more people up there, and I want them to work harder.’ She sat back, gazing at him, then reached out with one finger against his chest and pushed. He abruptly backed away, realizing she was uncomfortable with such proximity. He glanced round at Sack, who sat in a chair at the back of the cockpit, with his meaty arms folded and his expression blank. All it would take was a little hand signal from her, and Sack would be up on his feet, probably using his preferred technique of snapping a person’s neck like a stick of celery. She had given that signal quite a few times back at the mansion after – so staff there told him – frequent use of a razorbird had permanently stained the self-cleaning carpet in her office.

‘Messina screwed it up quite badly,’ he said, abruptly straightening his tie and trying to look more businesslike. ‘I’m not sure I understand why.’

‘It’s quite simple,’ she replied, flicking the screen off and looking up. ‘He’d lost interest in Mars and wanted both Argus and . . . his Alexander up and running. He was already diverting resources from the Mars Base ten years ago, but he finally started winding it down a year ago.’ She paused, now staring through the aero cockpit screen. ‘I didn’t quite realize how big a loss Argus was until now.’

‘They should be test firing within the minute.’

She glanced round at him, as he listened to the notification through his fone. She probably knew anyway. He was aware that she relied on numerous sources of information, crosschecking all the time, weeding out the liars, slackers and those stupid enough to audibly contemplate the possibility of being rid of her.

Luckily he had only lied to her once, and the three men who knew about that were all dead. Two of them had survived the incendiary fire in that laboratory she had ordered to be raided. But they had survived long enough to tell Clay exactly where the Scour had come from. The other had been the assault- team commander. After also hearing the story from the badly burned scientists, the commander had gone a little crazy, because he’d fought his own way out of ZA status, leaving a family behind him, all of whom were now dead. He told Clay about the orders he had received directly from Serene Galahad, about how the incendiary fire had been due to him and not the laboratory guards. He had talked too much, which was why Clay shot him through the head, then shot the two scientists.

‘It’s all set up for you,’ he finished.

‘Should I remain here, ma’am?’ asked the pilot.

She was piloting craft less and less. Maybe she considered that one of those earlier quirks that did not sit well with her new status, or maybe it just got in the way of the workload she was dealing with hour upon hour.

‘Just keep us hovering here,’ she replied, and returned her attention to the view.

It had taken some hours by scramjet to get here, to the mass driver facility. The titanic device, a cobwebby relic of a bygone age, sat towards the edge of Outback Spaceport – in fact space planes were visible in the sky either ascending or descending beyond it. Yet, on wide roads spearing off into the distance towards massive opencast mines, giant ore trucks were on the move, and smoke was boiling into the sky from the chimneys of the furnace complex, which sat like a city made for robots between them and the driver itself.

‘It’s the climate,’ said Clay, in search of something to say.

‘What?’

‘It’s because of the climate that this driver could be quickly made operational again. Nothing much rusts here, you see. They had to clear out some bodies and make some internal repairs, though – ZAs had set up house inside the thing. Also, barrel wear was minimal so, before any major maintenance is needed, we should be able to run it at full capacity for at least a year.’

‘Yes, I see.’

Further notification came through his fone. ‘Firing in one minute,’ he told her.

The mass driver lay on a ramp built up at fifty degrees from the ground. The two kilometres of coils and electromagnets looked, from this distance, like a huge busy train terminus tipped upwards by some geological cataclysm.

‘And what is it firing?’

‘Ten-tonne iron cases, each tipped with a ceramic nose cone,’ Clay explained. ‘The inside they load with ingots of whatever other metals might be required up there –