The Departure

by Neal Asher

  “It might have been reprogrammed just to capture us alive,” he said speculatively.

  She still expected him to open fire, but he abruptly lowered his weapon. The robot was now behaving very strangely, as with one sharp foot it wrote something on the mud bank. After a pause, he scrambled down the bank and waded forward to take a look. Hannah heaved herself to her feet, leg aching again, and waded after him. They both peered down at the mathematically precise letters.

  “PWRFL GOVT COMLF TRCKD U THRU ME. J.”

  “Janus?” she gasped.

  “Are you?” Saul asked the robot.

  The spider dipped briefly in acknowledgement.

  “Powerful government comlife?” she queried.

  He glanced at her. “That would be something you should know more about than I do.”

  “NET UNSAFE MST EXIT,” the thing now wrote.

  “How?” he asked.

  “DWNLD.”

  “Download?”

  Again that dip of acknowledgement.

  “We needed it to do so anyway, and we’ve got the right place for it,” said Hannah shakily. That was the next stage, after the installation of further hardware in Saul’s head.

  “The secondary processor,” he observed. Then he addressed the spider, “You’re fully loaded to this readergun?”

  “NO.”

  “How do I download you?”

  “THRU U BUT COMLF WIL KNO LOCA.”

  “I have to tell you when…”

  “BECON,” Janus scribed in the mud, then something crackled inside the spider and, smoking, it sank down into the dyke water, jerked once and lay still.

  “Beacon?” He looked round at Hannah.

  “Janus must have found you by following the beacon in your processor,” she said. “I can only think it’s shut down now, probably by Janus, and that you’ll be able to find some way to start it running again.”

  He nodded. “Yeah, but before then we need to find a mobile surgery.” He stepped over the now burnt-out robot and led the way along the dyke. As she followed, Hannah’s foot kicked against something in the water, and for a moment she gazed down in horror at the skull she had brought to the surface—the thing wearing a wig of yellow silkweed. She then saw bones embedded in the dyke bank, all the way along the bank for as far as she could see.

  6

  THE STARS ARE OURS

  In the late twenty-first century, as the first fusion plants came online and advanced robotics transformed global industries during the “Golden Decade,” it truly looked as if the world was set to make the transition away from fossil fuels with elegant ease. Russia, fooled like so many others by this idiot optimism, negotiated an alliance with the European Union and, along with North Africa, a conglomeration was formed that ultimately became Pan Europa. However, Russia, by controlling gas reserves and oilfields, still wielded a big stick, and thus came away from the negotiating table with huge concessions. In this way the massive industrial complexes and spaceports of the Pan Europan Space Agency were established at Minsk even before the Asian Coalition climbed aboard. Space missions were launched from there, thousands of satellites sent up, and it was there, too, that the dream of the colonization of Mars began to look like a reality. Meanwhile NASA, already moribund under its stifling level of bureaucracy, continued a steady decline, and the Russians, essentially, won a race that began with Sputnik’s first beep. Thirty years later people were actually living and working on the red planet, and Mars camouflage combats had become a must-have fashion item. Ten years after that, Minsk Spaceport began dying, however; sucked dry by a bureaucracy of an order of magnitude even bigger and greedier than NASA’s.

  ANTARES BASE

  Var shut off communication with Ricard and focused instead on the advancing shepherd. As she saw it, she could not allow herself to fall into the Political Director’s power because, even though he had labelled her as essential, giving in to him would still lead to her certain death. They had been abandoned by Earth, and left here to die, but even so they still had energy from the fusion reactor, they had hydroponics and protein production, materials to utilize, and a hundred and sixty-two people, most of them very intelligent as well as highly skilled and motivated. Yes, they had problems over food, air and water production and usage and, yes, by killing off many personnel these could be eked out, but they would still eventually run out and those few remaining here would die. Better by far to apply all those useful minds to their present problems, since brainpower was all that could save them. Ricard had to be stopped.

  Var tried to remember everything she knew about shepherds. Their purpose was utterly specific: they were devised to go into large crowds—riots in fact—and grab up ringleaders already targeted by the Inspectorate, whom the robots generally identified by their ID implants. Ricard had to know by now that Var had removed her implant and, since she wore an EA suit, the shepherd would not be using a facial recognition program to identify her. But then she guessed it wouldn’t be difficult for it to track her down, as it wasn’t as if she was taking part in a riot. The shepherd had probably been instructed to grab the only human around out here, so the moment she stepped out of the crawler it would have her.

  She ran a diagnostic check on the crawler, and was soon examining a list of the damage on the computer screen. The deflated tyre could not reinflate since the pump was offline. Four-wheel drive was out, battery power low, and it seemed that the gearbox contained no lubricant. However, she could engage rear-wheel drive, circumvent the safety cut-out that prevented the gearbox from running, and there just might be enough power to get her all the way back. She performed these things, set the engine running, and the crawler started rolling forward just as the shepherd arrived.

  The thing stopped directly ahead of the vehicle, and its adhesive gecko tentacles, hanging underneath its tick-like body, began writhing as if in anticipation. Var shivered, realizing she’d been frightened of these things from the very first time she’d seen one as a child. Certainly, other robots deployed by the Inspectorate were more effective and dangerous, like spiderguns or razorbirds, but the shepherds had established themselves in the public consciousness as the archetypal Inspectorate bogeymen. She floored the accelerator, a horrible grinding issuing from the gearbox as it spun up the rear wheels and sent the vehicle hurtling directly towards the shepherd. The steering wheel was nearly wrenched out of her hands, and she had to strain to keep it half a turn over to compensate for the flat tyre, for it now seemed the power steering was out too. The shepherd scuttled to one side, and allowing the wheel to slip from her grasp let the crawler skid towards it. With a reverberating clang she clipped one of its legs, but it danced to one side, then turned to keep pace with her as she continued towards the base. Of course, she hadn’t expected to bring it down, as the damned things were too agile and, anyway, part of their programming covered an ability to avoid ground vehicles directed against them.

  After only two kilometres, her arms were aching and an overheat warning kept flashing up on the screen. She resented that. This vehicle was precisely the kind of machine they would desperately need over the coming years, and here she was wrecking its gear box. A further kilometre got her round Shankil’s Butte, and now she could see occasional glints of sunlight off polished metal or laminated glass windows. Only glimpses though, because a wind was now starting to pick up the dust again. Good, that should give the cover she needed.

  If she entered the base’s garage, Ricard’s enforcers would certainly be waiting for her there, and if she parked outside the base and tried to leave the safety of the crawler in order to gain access some other way, the shepherd would grab her. She would have to be thoroughly ruthless to stop Ricard, and even as she drove with the shepherd loping along just to one side, she glanced back at the contents of the cargo section. Entering the base, she would become just one against Ricard, his five executives and twelve enforcers, and would be given no time to explain the situation to the others and recruit them to her cause. Miska,
Lopomac and Carol would immediately be with her, and so would Kaskan once she told him how Ricard had ordered his wife shot: but Miska was certainly being held prisoner and quite likely Ricard had grabbed the other three also. She needed to even the odds, she needed weapons, but first she needed to get out of this crawler without being captured by the shepherd. And it seemed that Gisender and her range of tools provided the means for all of these objectives.

  Antares Base rested in a natural dip in the landscape. After the failure of Valles Marineris base—the unfortunates who occupied it having found that rockfalls, even in the low gravity of Mars, became lethal when erosion dropped boulders the size of this crawler onto your home—this new location had been selected. The robots sent here had first cleared a runway to accommodate planes like the one she could now see over to her right. It was a great manta-winged thing of bubblemetal, perfect for flying in the thin atmosphere of Mars, but which would melt if it ever tried re-entry on Earth. Anyway, it was going nowhere, had been sitting there for five years.

  Beyond this landing strip the robots had cleared another area of rocks, and then stolidly erected the first hexagonal building of the base, then the six wings extending from this, then Hexes Two and Three at the ends of two of these wings. Initially the entire structure had been just bonded regolith a third of a metre thick, with gaps left for windows and airlocks. These were then added, fabricated from bubblemetal and laminated glass, which were themselves refined from ores and silica sand mined from the surface, before the smaller robots moved inside to work on the rest. By the time the first personnel arrived here, the fusion reactor had been assembled and fired up. Hex Two, with its geodesic one-way glass roof to admit meagre sunlight and with internal sunlamps to complement that, was already up and running, with the hydroponics troughs inside already crammed with GM beans, cassava, sugar cane and other high-yield crops. Air and water were provided by a bore drilled down into an underground permafrost pocket—the water was cracked into oxygen and hydrogen, the latter fed straight into the fusion reactor. Hex One contained the laboratories, the artificial wombs and protein tanks, the community room and much else besides. Hex Three contained the garage, the reactor, spacious quarters for the political staff and Ricard himself, whilst everyone else occupied the dorms located along the six wings.

  Soon Var was motoring past the partially constructed Hex Four, where an arboretum was to be established, though the new seed stock had never arrived. Here a block-making machine and a couple of construction robots stood idle, like big steel birds peeking out of their coop. Behind this, stretching in towards Hex One, lay Wing Six, but she did not turn in there, instead driving on past it towards Hex Three. As always, on viewing the base from outside, she got the impression of seeing something long-established and old. The bonded regolith was not sharp-edged and its colour varied from pale yellow to red-umber streaked with black. It had been bonded in blocks using a special epoxy resin, so the entire base looked like it had been built from stone hewn from the planet itself, perhaps by green giants with more than the usual complement of upper limbs, before they went off to do battle with some neighbouring tribe.

  Ricard would probably assume she was heading for the garage, but would want to know what she was up to after she halted, therefore she must park the crawler well out of sight of any of those windows glinting like slabs of mica in the stonework. She chose a wall of the hex that faced in towards the centre of the base, where no windows had been made, and where a couple of large insulated water tanks had been erected. By now the overheat warning continued perpetually and the gearbox was making a sound like ball-bearings being rattled about in a tin can. Upon drawing the crawler to a halt, she noticed a haze of vapour in the cockpit, and bleeding out through the holes in the screen– smoke from that gearbox. The shepherd, obviously recognizing her only possible exit from the vehicle, strode round and squatted just beyond the airlock. Next the com light came on—Ricard wanting to talk to her.

  Var stood up, rubbing at her arms. The left forearm, from which Miska had removed her ID implant, was particularly painful. Stepping into the rear of the crawler, she eyed the tools available. Gisender had taken out a saw with a circular, diamond-tipped blade, probably so as to quickly cut open the ducting that the fibre-optics had run through, also some hydraulic shears for severing the optics themselves. These would do nicely; but first there was the shepherd to deal with.

  She opened the inner door to the airlock, which extended across the rear of the cargo compartment, unlocked the outer door and pushed it open just a little, and peered out. The shepherd immediately rose out of a crouch and drew closer, only a couple of metres away, and looming above. Even in the thin air she could hear the hissing sound its gecko tentacles made. She returned to the cargo compartment, bent over Gisender and hauled off the tarpaulin.

  “I’m sorry about this,” she said, lifting up the corpse.

  She shouldn’t feel so concerned about human bodies, for many had already gone through recycling here, along with the other waste, whilst more recent ones resided in a silo stored for when they would help make up the soil necessary for the arboretum. Manoeuvring Gisender’s body through the airlock itself was easy, though she did wonder if its lack of weight would be noticed. She then pushed the outer airlock door open, just enough to shove the dead woman outside. And the shepherd instantly pounced, its shiny legs clattering against the crawler, tentacles spearing down like the tongues of chameleons. Var held back for a moment as the arachnid machine retreated, then she moved forward to peer outside again. The shepherd was striding away, with Gisender tightly clasped against its underside, clearly with no idea that it had retrieved the wrong EA-suited human.

  Var returned to the cargo compartment to pick up the diamond saw and its battery box. She took the shears too, though the saw ought to be enough. She needed to act quickly now, before Ricard discovered that his shepherd had only retrieved a corpse.

  EARTH

  His other preparations, made after he completed the escape tunnel, were good, though Saul had been hoping not to need them. The dyke curved round for nearly a kilometre, the water in it growing fetid and the silkweed becoming a toxic orange. Glancing back, he could see a pillar of smoke rising from the abandoned bunker’s location and, worryingly, two shepherds patrolling around it. But only as he and Hannah moved into the shadow of a processing plant did he witness more aeros arriving.

  The dyke carried the outflow from apparatus used for cleaning and preserving vegetables. He imagined that the orange tint of the water derived from the antiviral and antibacterial sprays used to extend shelf-life. That was not quite the organic dream of previous ages, but then, over the last century, and faced with the cold realities of trying to feed an out-of-control population, a great many of Earth’s dreams had been abandoned.

  The outflow pipe ran out underneath a security fence, and many months ago he had cut through the bars of the grating at the near end of it and secured them again simply with ducting tape. It came away easily, and they proceeded through darkness, ankle-deep in toxic water, to an inspection hatch he’d previously altered so that it could now be opened from the inside.

  “This way.” They crossed a carbocrete yard and skirted the looming silos and juice tanks, also the big storage barns beside which robotic harvesters were parked.

  From here, when the season arrived, the great combines, diggers and sievers would depart to harvest the crops, before returning to pump, blow or otherwise convey their loads into the processing plant. Keeping in the lee of a wall made from blocks of bonded ash, the pair of fugitives moved round to the forecourt where lorries and tankers awaited. Some of these were robotic, but others of an older make required human drivers. All these took rapeseed oil and bamboo pulp to fuel plants and power stations respectively, vegetables to MegaMalls or other processing plants where they were further preserved, and cereal crops to be turned into all sorts of commodities. Saul knew, for instance, that the big bread factory in Suffolk used a great deal o
f bamboo pulp in its flour mix to bulk its products out.

  “Over there.” He was heading for a nearby grain lorry when he noticed Hannah staring at something over by the fence. He glanced over that way too, but couldn’t figure out what had caught her attention until a swarm of flies rose up. Someone had obviously made it this far through the surrounding fields, and then been brought down at the fence.

  “Why?” she asked, her voice choking.

  It seemed an odd question to be asking him then and there, but then he himself had grown used to seeing the dead scattered across the agricultural landscape, and smelling the occasional stench arising some days after another desperate human being had fallen foul of readerguns or razorbirds.

  “Because human life has been cheapened by its sheer number?” he suggested.

  Hannah had no reply for that, so they now climbed up into the truck’s cab. He paused to watch as a robotic tanker pulled out of the forecourt, probably loaded with sugar syrup that had been processed here during last season.

  “You can drive this?” Hannah asked him, her gaze still fixed on the fly-blown corpse clinging to the razormesh. “It won’t be picked up?”

  “It’s always wise to be prepared,” he replied, reaching under the dashboard and pulling out the black box he’d stashed there previously, which was linked in to the truck’s computer. The click of a switch overrode the recognition system that allowed only approved drivers to operate the vehicle. He pressed the start button and, after the hydrogen turbine had wound up to speed, reversed the lorry round, before heading towards the compound gate. It opened automatically, and soon they were out on the all-but-empty motorway.