by Neal Asher
Panting only a little, his breath gouting in the still air, Saul paused to gaze at the two whose lives he had so quickly extinguished. He tried to feel something, but found nothing to feel, then stooped to hoist up Coran’s corpse and dump it in the now empty crate. Next he took some of his other equipment out of his pocket – a scalpel and the kind of small combined detector and test unit they used in hospitals when dealing with ID implants – and turned to the still suspended woman. After rolling up her sleeve, he soon found the location of the ID implant in her right forearm – a small bullet of hardware about two millimetres thick – and after cutting round a subdermal plate under her skin, levered that up to get to the object underneath.
‘Throw her in the crate,’ he said out loud, whilst pressing the implant into the test unit. It should not have been damaged and to check that wasn’t the point of the test unit. ID implants shut down if they remained unsupported outside of a human body for long enough, but the test unit would keep this one active.
Moving on rubber treads, the handlerbot gripping the woman trundled over to the box and dropped her in on top of Coran. Saul spent some moments rearranging their limbs until he could slide the lid on and engage the seal. Yes, it was a crate very like this, or perhaps smaller, unless his mind was playing tricks – a crate like this one that he was born in.
Transition to consciousness had been a slow thing. Saul was born in darkness, his mind filled with memories of pain – a chaotic montage of physical damage that had apparently reduced him to little more than bloody and burnt meat on the edge of death – and memories of his interrogator. Saul saw him clearly, clad in a tight pale suit straining at the buttons over a steroid-honed physique, a diamond stud gleaming in his ear, slicked-back black hair, his hatchet face wearing an expression of deep concern that did not reach those glittery blue eyes. Saul expected to hear him speak in his usual convoluted and politically correct manner about ‘treachery’, ‘the purpose we serve’, and the ‘common people’, and he awaited the return of pain, his body’s memory of it as hard as iron under his skin.
Yet the pain now stubbornly refused to make itself felt. Eventually he flexed his fingers and they felt fine, opened his mouth and licked his tongue over dry lips, shifted the rest of his body inside the cramped one-metre cube in which he found himself. Still no pain, though he was aware of movement, a steady rumbling underneath him, and objects impacting or brushing against the outside of his confining space.
‘Where the hell am I?’ he asked abruptly, the words seemingly rising unbidden.
Immediately, as if someone inside there alongside him spoke straight into his ear, a flat, androgynous voice replied, ‘You are in a plastic shipping crate moving on the conveyor to Loading Hopper One of the Calais commercial incinerator.’
He knew exactly what that meant and started struggling, pushing at the slick plastic all around him, driving his fists upwards against the lid.
‘Get me out of here!’ he shrieked.
‘It will be necessary to shut down the conveyor system, then put it into reverse.’
‘Then fucking shut it down!’
Immediately the rumbling underneath him ceased, things crashing and clanging all about his crate, which was tilting at an angle. Then the conveyor went into reverse, the crate upended and his full weight came down on his shoulders and the back of his neck. After a few minutes of this, something crunched onto the crate, bowing in the sides of it all around him, hauled it up and rapidly shifted it to one side. It dropped suddenly, crashing onto one corner, denting that corner in, then fell down flat.
‘Do not be alarmed,’ the voice urged him.
Something crunched against the crate again, picked it up and dropped it again. Cracks developed, through which he could see light, then the lid began to split away. The next time the crate hit the floor, he heaved himself against the lid, sprawling out, and even the surrounding dimness seemed too much for his eyes.
The whole place stank of rotting matter and smoke. He jerked round as the wide conveyor, mounded with rubbish, once again jerked into motion, then he abruptly scuttled to one side as, above him, a steel grab on a hinged crane arm swung back to position over the conveyor. Studying his surroundings, he saw he was now squatting in the belly of a sorting machine, over to one side of which rested a mound of scrap metal destined for recyling.
‘Are you injured?’ the voice asked him.
Nightmarish memories told him that all the King’s horses and all the King’s men would have merely fetched a spade and a bin liner, but, studying himself more closely he saw only a few cuts on his hands from broken glass scattered on the floor. Perhaps other damage lay concealed under the paper overall he wore, though all he could feel was some bruising and a tight cramped stiffness. He stood up carefully, his spine and knees clicking and sudden cramp tightening his feet. He gazed down for a long moment at the things enclosing his feet – items made of the same compressed paper as his overall, but thicker on the underside – and could not for the life of him remember what they were called. Then he looked around again, wondering where the strange voice issued from.
‘Who the hell are you?’ he asked. ‘And where are you?’
‘My inception name is Janus,’ the voice replied. ‘I am speaking to you via a fone implanted in the bone right behind your right ear, but I am myself constantly changing my location over Govnet servers.’
Saul understood at once. ‘You’re an artificial intelligence.’ He paused to consider, before asking a question that only then occurred to him.
‘My name is Alan Saul but . . .’ Though now clear in his mind, his name seemed like a label on an empty box.
‘You have stated you are Alan Saul,’ Janus replied.
‘That’s not enough,’ Saul declared. ‘I don’t remember . . . me.’
‘My circumstances are similar, since my inception was only twenty-six hours ago.’
A terrifying panic washed over Saul. He knew the world he existed in. He knew how it operated, and knew he possessed large mental resources. But gaping holes lay open in his mind, like naming whatever those things were on his feet, and why he had been interrogated and why his body showed no signs of the torture he had suffered. Or like how he had come to find himself in a crate heading towards an incinerator, or his entire life prior to that point, and, beyond his name, who he really was. Two years later, as he applied a surgical saw to Avram Coran’s neck, he still did not remember most of his previous life. But by then he had learned enough about the Inspectorate to know how he had ended up in that crate, and he also remembered enough to know that his route there had been different from other victims.
His interrogator had used wiring installed in his head to directly edit his mind. Afterwards, as fragmented memory surfaced, it arose with edited-in physical damage that had not actually occurred. So he distinctly remembered hanging in a frame while being skinned alive, the Inspectorate enforcers slicing up lips of skin and then closing hammerhead tongues on the bloody edges to peel them back; or being lowered into boiling water; or just sitting strapped in a chair with a lorry tyre shoved down tight over him, waiting in terror for the moment they would toss the burning match onto his petrol-soaked body.
And, of course, he also remembered the interrogator forever watching, with arms folded, a judgemental but attentive expression on his face as he asked questions Saul did not remember. There had been no intention of returning him to society, just to torture every scrap of information out of him before his final disposal. He didn’t know what that information was, nor did he know how he had acquired the hardware in his head.
But someone did know, he was sure: Hannah Neumann.
2
Ignoring Mars
Just as with the Moon landings, way back in the twentieth century, the missions to Mars of the mid- to late twenty-first century were always reported in the main news and sold as astounding achievements for humankind. The preparatory landings of robots to erect the first buildings of bonded regolith, dri
ll for materials and begin running small autofactories, kept the story in the public eye. That the new fusion drives reduced the flight time to Mars from years to months also helped maintain interest, and it rose to a peak when the first humans arrived there and walked out to plant the Pan Europa and Asian Coalition flags. The Marineris disaster, and the subsequent relocation of the ground base, later brought it all back into the news when interest began to wane. But by the thirtieth mission, the latest news about Mars began getting shunted into second place by the latest scandal about a paedophile footballer or the latest religious fanatic with an overpowering urge to convert unbelievers into corpses with a slab of Hyex laminate, a canister of nerve gas or some nasty biological concocted in a home genetic lab.
Antares Base
A snake of red dust hung in the air, marking Varalia Delex’s trail across the plain. In the pink sky Phobos hung over the horizon like a skull, and the distant sun was a bloodshot eye overhead. She paused for a moment to check the tracking arrow on her wrist screen, though needlessly. Since not a breath of wind stirred the dust and visibility remained good, she could see clearly as far as the horizon through the thin air, and there, confirmed by the direction arrow on her wrist screen, sunlight gleamed off metal polished by the jeweller’s rouge of the Martian peneplain.
‘Are you there yet, Var?’ Miska enquired over radio from Antares Base.
‘Another ten minutes,’ she replied.
‘Make it quick. Ricard’s on the prowl.’
Miska sounded nervous, and well he might, for Political Director Ricard had ordered that all excursions out on to the surface must now receive direct approval from him. Through her suit, Var rubbed at the recent surgery on her arm. If Ricard became suspicious and tried to check on her location through the system, he’d locate her as being in Hydroponics, where her ID implant now resided in a test unit. But if he tried to physically locate her instead, he’d soon discover she was no longer on the base.
‘He give any explanation of why he’s shut us out of Earth-com?’
‘No, did you expect one?’
Political directors did not need to give explanations, and those that asked for them usually ended up in an adjustment cell to correct their thinking. But to get people to Mars had cost upwards of fifty million per person, and the only non-essential personnel within the base were precisely those who would not be so treated, meaning the five Inspectorate execs and the twelve armed enforcers, whereas ‘adjusting’ one of the essential personnel would turn that one into a liability they could ill afford. This was why, as technical director of the base, Var had been given the power to request veto over any decision Ricard made that might endanger the base itself. Only now, that power, backed up by orders from Earth, seemed to be fading. Ricard had cut Earth-com and begun to make decisions – enforced by his men – which might end up getting them all killed.
‘Still nothing from Gisender?’ she asked.
‘Nothing at all,’ Miska replied. ‘Feeds from the crawler do register major damage and massive air loss, but she would have been suited. There’s no reason why she can’t drive it in.’
Except if she’s dead, Var thought.
Over a hundred and seventy people had died here, fifty-four of them when the Marineris Base was crushed by a rock fall, the rest in and around Antares Base. All the dangers of Earth were here, including overzealous enforcement, along with a whole load of new and interesting ways to expire. Though it was next to impossible to inadvertently punch a hole through the mesh fabric of an external activities suit, it still possessed plenty of seals in it that could fail. Over the years, forty-three people had asphyxiated outside the base as the result of such failures. Then there were all the odd chemical compounds generated when Martian materials were introduced into the hot, moist and oxygenated environment of the base. Before Var’s time, four people had died trying to produce viable soil from the Martian dust: a spill of water had resulted in an explosion of sulphur dioxide, and they had died inside the laboratory when emergency bulkhead doors had closed – needlessly, Var reckoned, since the gas would have affected few people beyond the laboratory itself. But, then, safety protocols had been strict for years after the first explosive decompression of part of the base complex. Other interesting ways to die included heavy-metals poisoning, some esoteric cancers solely the product of this place – one of which had killed Var’s predecessor – and suicide, which was often the ultimate choice of some who had been forced to come here against their will. Just like Var herself had been forced.
Her loping stride eating up the distance slowly brought the crawler into full view. One of its big fat tyres, she noticed, was flat, which was unusual because they would usually self-repair and reinflate. She could now see that the front screen was also broken – another unusual event, since the laminated glass shouldn’t yield to anything less than a bullet. Only as she drew closer did she see the line of holes stitched across it, and realize that bullets were precisely what it had yielded to. And when she finally reached the big vehicle, and peered through the broken screen, she saw why Gisender had stopped talking.
‘She’s dead, Miska. The fucker had her shot.’
No reply.
‘Miska?’
Var walked round the side of the vehicle to the airlock, scanning for footprints in the surrounding dust but seeing none. She paused for a moment and looked back in the direction of the base. Whoever had shot at this vehicle had done so from a distance, probably from Shankil’s Butte, which reared up from the plain five kilometres away from here, and just three kilometres from the base. Doubtless the killer had used a scoped assault rifle, which would work easily enough at that range in the low gravity here. One of Ricard’s enforcers, undoubtedly.
The outer airlock door opened easily enough and, requiring no equalizing of pressure, the inner one opened at once. Stepping through the small cargo space, circumventing two big reels of optic cable and the cutting tools Gisender had used to obtain it, Var entered the cockpit and peered in through Gisender’s visor, her own stomach tightening with rage and grief.
After Ricard shut down Earthcom and put recent communications off limits, Gisender had ostensibly gone in search of salvage from the old base in Valles Marineris, but had really gone to obtain a copy of those same communications from the secondary signal station up on the lip of Valles Marineris. And here was the result. Though intellectually Var had accepted that her friend might be dead, only now, finally seeing her right up close, could she accept it in her heart. Even in this condition, Gisender still bore some of that Martian look of false health, with the rouge of Martian dust ground into her skin, as it was ground into all of them, but her dried-out features told the truth. Her lips had shrivelled away from her teeth, and her eye sockets were all but empty now that the moisture had been sucked from her eyeballs. That fucker Ricard must have found out, somehow, and had her murdered.
Var really needed to know what was contained in that communication.
Earth
Behind Saul, as he headed out, Janus made the handlerbot that had first emptied the crate now pick it up and carry it over to the cargo lift. Usually these crates only went up as far as ground level, where they were picked up by a transvan from a loading bay at the back of the building. But this one was going right to the top.
‘No problems?’ Saul asked.
‘If there are any problems I will inform you,’ Janus replied – somewhat snootily, Saul thought.
Back in the mapping control room he retrieved his holdall with its waterproof lining and shed King’s lab coat, though he retained the false ID badge, before heading again to the lifts. There he hit the button for the roofport, and was glad to find the lift empty as the doors opened. His heart went into overdrive when it halted only two floors up and a nervous-looking man clutching a laptop case stepped in. But lift etiquette being what it is, the man merely ignored him and jabbed the button to the floor he required, exiting two floors later. Finally the doors opened on to the roof.
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Three aircars were parked there and, oddly, a helicopter. It was probably a casualty of the supposedly smooth transition from fossil-based fuels to fusion energy and hydrogen transport, Saul surmised. That smooth transition seemed to be failing along with everything else, with the result that people were dying every day, in their hundreds of thousands. He now made straight for Coran’s vehicle, holding out the implant test unit before him, the car’s locking system responding to it by disengaging. Stepping inside, Saul tossed the holdall on to the back seat and set the tester down beside him. The console arrayed before the single joystick had also unlocked, so he pressed the start button and immediately the aerofans began to hum up to speed.
‘Now we have a problem,’ Janus informed him.
‘And that is?’
‘Coran’s boss is trying to contact him via his fone.’
‘What’s the boss’s name?’
‘Ahkmed Argul – but I suspect the proper form of address in this case is ‘‘Director’’.’
‘Yes, quite. Route him to my fone, and give me voice overlay.’
‘Where have you been, Coran?’ Argul immediately enquired.
‘My apologies, Director,’ Saul replied. ‘The mapping basement of the gene bank here is a fone deadspot.’
‘I see. I’ve also been informed that your bodyguard is out of contact, too. I do hope you aren’t having problems there . . .’
‘Aiden King was being a little unhelpful, so I left Sheila down there to have a chat with him. Beside that, everything is proceeding as per schedule.’
The car’s aerofans up to speed now, he raised the joystick up one notch, to take the machine about a metre off the deck, then eased the car back and round towards the cargo lift, which lay just behind the tail fan of the helicopter.
‘Good. Oversight is anxious to get this done, as resources need to be redistributed fast.’
