The Departure

by Neal Asher

  Then, suddenly, a massive disruption in the Minsk network, whilst simultaneously something exploded within the back end of the space plane, extinguishing that punctuated glare of its motors and throwing out chunks of dark metal trailing spears of smoke. It dropped out of the sky with all the aerodynamics of a falling chimney pot.

  “Mother of God!” Hannah exclaimed.

  He groped for information throughout cyberspace, hit disruption wherever he looked, then oddly found easy access to cameras positioned on high buildings, giving him multiple views of the disaster. He watched the plane trying to stay level but, with one of its rear wings tearing away, its nose came up as it descended. Another view gave him four seconds of its underside hurtling in, silhouetted against fire, until its rear end struck the building on which the cam was positioned. Back to another view of that same edifice, the plane carving through it, its position in the sky and angle of descent hardly changed by the impact, the wreckage of the top half of the building now strewn across factory complexes below. Then the plane went in like a wounded black swan descending on to a lake, churning up and spraying the lower buildings like water. As the nose slammed down, it disintegrated, becoming a train-shaped firestorm within which could be seen the burning black bones of its structure. It cut a swathe of devastation ten kilometres long.

  Only when the final debris rained down did Saul consider why it had been so easy for him to access these views of this disaster. Someone had got there before him, to position the cams.

  “Let’s move,” he said, shoving his elbow against the door of the taxi.

  It wasn’t opening, which meant that from somewhere an instruction had been sent to lock it down. He turned and looked behind him, spotted an armoured troop carrier motoring into sight.

  Then something out there. Some pattern forming in surrounding and seriously disrupted cyberspace. Something tentacular expanded, a shadow cast by someone’s manipulation of the network, yet Saul immediately recognized that this wasn’t the comlife that had been hunting him. Hannah became like a distant creature trapped in the taxi, alongside that set of mobile fleshy sensors that seemed to be a minor part of himself—yet within which resided the essential him. It had to survive because, even in this new state, he knew himself unready to depart physical existence; knew that without that human connection he would lose any real reason to stay alive.

  This new comlife, he realized, was taking control of Inspectorate aeros that were even now ascending into the sky to head for the crash site. They began firing upon each other.

  Missile streaks cut above the devastation caused by the space plane, and cartridge cases rained down from machine guns firing continuously. Two of the aeros just dropped like bricks, trailing smoke, and slammed into the ground, one exploding and the other just turning into a flattened mess of wreckage. Another aero blew a fan and began spinning around about its other main fan, until that too blew and tore its guts out. It also went down.

  Saul saw it then: a single craft departing the battle, between its fellows, neither firing nor being fired upon. It flew past the face of a tall building built in the shape of a cowl—one he recognized as he withdrew from cam systems and used only his eyes. The building lay just half a kilometre away from them, and he watched the aero fly into view, settle into a hover and revolve towards them. He knew in an instant that they weren’t the target—those troops back there were—but, trapped inside this taxi so close to them, he and Hannah would die.

  ***

  Hannah had told him that in his previous incarnation, as well as being a semi-autistic genius with enough going on in his head to frighten members of the Inspectorate, he had excelled in the martial arts. And, as he had since discovered, he still did. His body still possessed the muscle and coordination developed through all that previous training. However, that alone would not have been enough—it was knowledge acquired from Janus that tipped the balance. His AI, which was now part of him, knew the design of autotaxis like this one down to the smallest detail. The lockdown was a security protocol usually employed by the Inspectorate to secure suspects remotely, before they themselves could arrive on the scene.

  A lockdown would seal the doors, then shut down the vehicle’s computer so those trapped inside could not access it to open them. No mental access for him there, but he knew precisely how the vehicle was constructed. Two steel locking bars had engaged to the rear of the door, and these could only be physically disengaged from outside by arresting officers. The window glass wasn’t glass at all but a laminated perspex which here, in the spaceport where many important people might use the taxis, was capable of stopping a bullet. The weakness lay at the hinges, being angled steel plates riveted to the body and the door, connected by five-millimetre steel hinge pins. He spun in the seat, grabbed a hand support provided for less able passengers, drew back both his legs and kicked out hard at the front of the door, over those hinges, the force of the blow running from his rigid arms right down through his body. The top hinge broke, the door tilting out. He kicked it again, and the second hinge broke away, but the door still hung suspended from its two locking bars. Leaning over, he shoved the door forward off its bars, and it clattered to the ground.

  Saul got out, turning to drag Hannah after him, but she was already close on his heels. Behind them, troops were still piling out of the armoured car and, noticing someone trapped in a taxi just ahead, he realized the lockdown hadn’t been directed at only his taxi. Somebody began shouting, and he saw a crowd of people, outside Embarkation, pointing over towards the aero. A glance in that direction, fire flaring under the craft, a stream of missiles spewing out, smoke trails heading directly towards them. Less than ten seconds, he calculated, as he grabbed Hannah’s hand and they ran.

  One man stood at the scanner beside the entrance to Embarkation, the glass doors drawing apart for him. Saul shouldered him aside, just hoping the readerguns in the foyer beyond would still ignore them. Just for a fraction of a second, the sight of numerous potted plants—the first green he had seen in a while—fazed him, but then he dragged Hannah towards a guard booth stretching all along the left side of the foyer. The doors to this stood open, an enforcer halfway across the blue-carpeted floor, on her way to the main doors. The woman turned towards him, to say something, he didn’t know what. He pushed Hannah ahead of him to reach the door into the booth, where she threw herself on the floor with her hands over her head. An enforcer within the booth turned on his revolving chair, hand dropping to the ionic stunner at his belt. Saul dropped down on top of Hannah, shoving his fingers in his ears just as a sound impacted like that of an avalanche in a scrapyard.

  Then came the light and the fire.

  ***

  The blasts blended into one hollow roar, and Hannah felt something grab and drag Saul backwards off her. Heat washed over her legs and then the roar receded, as if some angry fire god had just paid a brief visit, then departed. She raised her head and saw that the vacuum created by the blast had dragged Saul halfway out of the booth. Glancing up she realized the armoured glass had been blown in, sheets of it now resting against the back wall to form a low ceiling. The enforcer seated in the revolving chair had not ducked fast enough and lay on the floor, his head weeping blood.

  Saul stood up and mouthed something at her. She gazed at him, puzzled and stunned. Her ears were ringing and his words an indistinct mutter. He studied her for a moment, then, crouching below the armourglass, reached out a hand to haul her up, and they ducked out of the booth.

  The autotaxis outside were gone or, rather, all she could now see of them was the remains of a hydrovane embedded in the rear wall of the foyer. Outside, she could see other burning wreckage, and smoking fragments she did not want to identify. The glass doors lay strewn in mostly hexagonal chunks, each the size of a spectacles lens, across the floor. The plants were blackened, some of them burning, but the carpet below, though scorched and hot underfoot, yielded neither smoke nor flame, from its fire-resistant ceramoplastic. An arm lay on it b
efore them; a torso, one leg still attached, reclined beside a steaming money tree positioned against the far wall. The enforcer they had seen on the way in lay flat on her back, utterly still, her uniform seared but surprisingly little damage to her body; merely a little blood in her ears and nostrils, despite the fragments of glass all around her.

  “Why?” Hannah managed to utter, her voice oddly off-key.

  He replied, but again she heard only that indistinct mutter. She pinched her nose and blew, popping her eardrums, shook her head. Hearing returned slightly: the sounds of metal and rubble falling on hard surfaces, the oily crackle of fire and a couple of whumphs, of things exploding, maybe gas canisters, fuel tanks or overheated batteries.

  “Seems the revolution just arrived,” he said, the words now clear but a perpetual buzzing behind them. He beckoned her after him and headed towards the rear of the foyer, where long corridors, ceilinged with smoke, speared towards the trains used to transport passengers to the space planes.

  More people were starting to appear, and the first to reach them, running down that corridor, were two Inspectorate enforcers. She noticed that both possessed the kind of mods more usually seen in bodyguards: subdermal armour, black artificial wide-spec eyes, and the exterior control units at elbow, shoulder and wrist that showed they possessed implant motors and bone reinforcing. But she knew in an instant that if they got in Saul’s way they were dead.

  “What the hell happened?” one of them asked.

  That he even asked demonstrated that communications must be down—if only temporarily.

  “Hey, I’m damned if I know,” Saul replied.

  The enforcer stared, hand dropping to the butt of his machine pistol, doubtless taking in Saul’s reddened eyes and the marks of surgery on his shaven skull. Hannah knew that, in this situation, Saul was sufficiently abnormal for the enforcers to want to detain him, and when Saul moved to step past, the man reached out and grabbed his upper arm in a cyber-assisted grip. The killing would resume very shortly.

  “You know a space plane went down?” Hannah interjected, before she even knew where she was going with this.

  “We saw.” The enforcer was still gazing at Saul suspiciously.

  “It was probably wreckage that hit here. Officer Coran needs to get to Damage Control now before this situation gets any worse,” she declared imperiously. “Don’t you two have things to do?” She stabbed a thumb behind her. “There are people back there who need your help.”

  The bluff was good, but needed reinforcing. Saul did not disappoint her. He looked down in annoyance at the hand closed on his arm, then up at the enforcer, just the right amount of arrogance in his expression. “Govnet,” he said, “is severely disrupted, so I am unable to obtain full access.” His gaze strayed to the bar code on the top pocket of the man’s uniform. “What’s your name, officer?”

  The enforcer let go of his arm as if it had suddenly heated up, seemed about to say something further, then abruptly stepped past and headed towards the foyer, his companion pausing only for a moment before trailing after.

  “I just saved their lives, didn’t I?” Hannah said.

  “Yes,” Saul acknowledged. “Yes, you did.”

  More staff appeared in the corridor further along, some heading towards the foyer and others moving away. Two teams clad in fluorescent hazmat suits were pushing wheeled stretchers towards the incident. Moving beyond these, Hannah and Saul got far enough away to just be part of the crowd, and entered a lift to take them down a floor to one of the train stations. Once inside the lift, Saul pressed his hands against his head.

  “No, not now.” He looked up. “Did Malden suffer this pain?”

  She nodded. “Yes, he did.” The lie tasted sour on her lips.

  The sliding doors drew aside and he forced himself into motion again. They crossed a short platform to board a waiting train. Five other people were already inside, deep in nervous conversation.

  “Our flight has to be cancelled,” said a woman wearing the same grey flight suit as the rest of them. “For Christ’s sake, that plane just dropped out of the sky!”

  “Don’t bet on it,” replied her nearest male companion.

  “No, don’t,” said one of the other men. “We’d have been notified of a blanket grounding, and been recalled by now.”

  The woman looked at her watch. “There’s still time. I’ll bet the orders’ll catch up just when we’re strapping in.”

  “Ever the optimist, Eva,” said another woman.

  “They’ll need to know why it happened,” Eva insisted. She then noticed Saul and gazed at him disbelievingly for a moment, before abruptly looking away. She glanced queryingly towards one of her companions, who shrugged. Always better not to ask.

  After a moment, the train moved out of the Embarkation complex, following its rails out towards the hectares of carbocrete comprising the spaceport runways.

  ***

  The front end of the space plane reared up out of the surrounding support vehicles, fuel silos and tangles of umbilicals like some monstrous Gulliver trying to escape its Lilliputian captors. It rested on the specially formulated carbocrete like a prehistoric beast reformatted for a new cybernetic age: all hard angles and black solidity.

  The train drew to a halt at the end of its line, directly opposite a large mobile building poised on enormous caterpillar tracks, from which an entrance tunnel rose towards the belly of the plane itself. The five on board with them exited the train first, carrying an assortment of laptops and short cylindrical flight bags containing their personal effects. Saul and Hannah were certainly the odd ones out, and because of that would come under scrutiny. Time for him to once again penetrate local computers to ensure that they got safely aboard. He did not relish the prospect and wondered if he had been foolish to push so far so quickly. A mental crash now and it would all be over for them both.

  Saul linked into Govnet, found it still disrupted, then into the subnets of the spaceport and brought his focus down on to everything concerning this plane, and it didn’t take him long to find problems. The woman called Eva was right: a general order had been issued to cancel all further missions, and the concert of groaning and swearing from the five ahead confirmed that they had now received this instruction through their fones. Orders specific to space-plane crew and passengers were that they must return to quarters whilst an investigation was put in place. All space planes were to undergo a thorough inspection.

  These were the orders on the surface, but there seemed a great deal more activity going on below this. The spaceport authority was aware that the plane had been brought down by computer penetration, the same sort of penetration that resulted in the aeros turning on each other and wreaking destruction elsewhere about the port. Saul discovered that the missile firing, having wiped out an Inspectorate security squad sent to apprehend suspects at Embarkation, was under heavy suspicion, and further squads had been dispatched. It seemed likely to him that he and Hannah had been detected, but so far the Inspectorate just had a general location.

  Deeper penetration now, the thumping in his head growing, and some invisible tormentor trying to drill him another eye socket.

  He sent orders to whatever crew was aboard the plane, and in its surrounding infrastructure, to expect an investigator plus his assistant. By way of a cam within the train he made visual files of both their faces and sent them through, with no more than the name Agent Green, and which gave him complete authority here. After the five crew had climbed back aboard the train, ready to return to their quarters, Hannah and he disembarked.

  “We are now investigators,” he told Hannah as they stepped from the vehicle.

  “Very good,” she replied. “But how does that help us get the plane off the ground?”

  “We’ll see when we get there.”

  She stared at him. “Nothing planned here? Nothing prepared?”

  “No, but I know how to fly this thing now and, once I have it isolated up in the air, there’s nothing
they can do. I don’t see them quickly making a decision to shoot twenty billion Euros worth of their own hardware out of the sky, and once the scramjets fire up they won’t be able to.”

  She flinched and shook her head. “I wish I could trust your superior intelligence, but obviously I can’t. Even a space plane travelling at Mach 15 can’t outrun a laser.”

  “You’re talking about the Argus Network?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then you can trust my intelligence. The lasers were designed for accurate antipersonnel use against people on Earth’s surface, and even when they’re at close range they haven’t got the power to penetrate a carbon nanofibre, heat-dispersing hull.”

  “I’ll trust to your judgement,” she decided, doubtfully.

  “Yes, you must.”

  Outside the train, the chilly air was redolent with the odours of oil and some other acrid chemical smell. He shrugged his jacket more closely about himself, then reached up to touch his scalp as the cold added to his misery by causing sharp stabbing pains all over it. He was also hungry and thirsty, not having eaten since they delved into the supplies aboard the aero they had used to travel here. He realized that the computer hardware in his skull, and the constant pain from the surgery employed to install it, had distanced him from his body to the point that he was neglecting it. He glanced at Hannah, who had made no complaints even though she must be as worn down as himself, but he could do nothing for either of them now.