Zero Point (Owner Trilogy 2)

‘So I’m authorized to collect those items?’

‘I already delegated this task to you, Martinez,’ she said. ‘Why are you thinking now that you need my permission just to do your job?’

He hesitated, then said, ‘It’s never been entirely clear what my job is – and I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes.’

‘I thought it was perfectly clear that your job’ – Var was trying to control a sudden flash of anger – ‘is to get the base moved down here, dealing with whatever problems arise. I would say that relocating the trench lift here is completely covered by that remit.’

‘Okay.’ He nodded.

‘So why are you behaving like you expect me to bite your head off?’

He gazed at her directly. ‘Because that has become a habit of yours just lately.’

The anger within Var ramped up by an order of magnitude, and she felt herself on the edge of shrieking at the man. Then, all at once, it began to wane, as the last few months seemed to unfold in her mind as a series of episodes seen from someone else’s point of view. Previously she had seen herself constantly having to deal with problems created by stupid people who neither trusted nor liked her, and now she realized that on every such occasion she had found someone else to bawl at. Self- fulfilling prophecies . . .

She took a couple of steadying breaths, swallowed drily. ‘Yes,’ she said reluctantly, ‘perhaps it has become a habit.’

They both just stood there awkwardly, finding nothing else to say.

‘Is there anything else I need to know about?’ she asked eventually.

‘That’s about it,’ conceded Martinez reluctantly.

‘Then I need to get back to base – or rather what remains of Antares Base,’ she replied. ‘We’re coming up for another tanglecom with Argus, and I have some questions to ask.’

‘It’s odd,’ said Martinez, obviously glad to move on to something else. ‘When they made that first course change, I thought they were running away.’

‘Apparently not,’ said Var. The Argus Station was now slowing into the Asteroid Belt, and even Rhone, when he had put in a brief appearance at the latest meeting, could think of no plausible reason why it was doing so.

‘But why . . . why are they slowing?’ Martinez asked.

‘Rhone suggested they might be making a fuel stop at one of the ice asteroids there, but that doesn’t add up,’ Var replied. ‘Two coms back, Neumann said they’ve got more than enough water for the Traveller engine and the station reactors.’

‘Maybe they’ve built weapons and need more?’ suggested Martinez.

‘Only if they’ve managed to build more reactors, which seems unlikely.’ Var shook her head. ‘I’m sure there’s a good reason and that this “Owner” of theirs has some sensible plan in mind.’ She turned and began heading away.

‘This “Owner” we’ve seen only once,’ Martinez called after her, ‘and who hasn’t talked to us since?’

‘That would be the one,’ she replied, a shiver running down her spine. There was something about that man, about that brief sight of him on tanglecom, that made any mention of him seem to reach down and press buttons deep in the core of her being. She wanted to meet him one day, and then she hoped to understand why he caused such odd reactions in her.

12

Cry Wolf

The warnings of the Malthusians and promoters of environmental catastrophe have been with us, in one form or another, since the dawn of human history. They grew shrill as the media arrived to transmit their hatred of humanity around the world, and as the hungry beast of endless news fed on their trifles. They jumped on every theory or scientific study that could promote the prophecies of doom and demanded worldwide control, more regulation and the subjugation of the individual to the good of all. And it was true that a growing human population was bad for the planet, and that we polluted the air and the seas, destroyed the diversity of life, but it was also true that, by heeding their earlier cries and as new cleaner technologies came into play, we were pillorying the polluters and rebuilding ecosystems. It took the Committee, feeding on the catastrophists’ pleas for worldwide control, to kill off any sensible environmentalism. With its Soviet attitude to industry and its power base built on exploitation of the massive zero-asset population, it again raised the spectre of a dying world. A combination of leaden bureaucratic oversight and plain incompetence eventually returned us to the pollution of the twentieth century, but on a now massive scale; while the catastrophists were silenced by the very mechanisms of control they had eagerly espoused.

Earth

The transmission delay was irritating, and Serene very deliberately fought to quell that sense of annoyance. It was a human reaction to something impossible to control, and was merely giving in to the animal element in her psyche – indulging it. In an attempt to avoid such indulgence, she had even limited these personal face-to-face communications to once every month, for her harrying of Clay was not going to get the Scourge to its target any quicker. Besides if anything important had happened, it would turn up in his regular weekly report, which in this case it had.

‘Since there has been no mention of them in your weekly report, I think by now we can safely assume that Messina’s clones are either captured are dead,’ Serene said. ‘I also take it that there has been no further trouble from the troops, especially after Liang recently killed a troublemaker aboard. Was that entirely necessary? Remember, the per-unit cost of