by Neal Asher
‘Okay, you can close the door now.’
After doing so, she headed across to dump her holdall on the sofa and hand him back the keycard. ‘Are you sure that vandalism is not going to be a problem?’
‘Cam service personnel are overstretched almost everywhere, but especially here.’ He looked up at the device as the microphone spat out a spark – the cam now activating in an apartment that had registered vacant until Hannah removed the keycard. ‘They’ll detect the fault instantly, but then it’ll join a maintenance backlog over a month long.’ He gazed at her steadily. ‘You have to understand that our masters are starting to give up on the whole idea of constant surveillance and ideological correction. They’ll only be reinstated when our numbers are sufficiently reduced for them to again be effective.’
She nodded, looking slightly sickened by the thought, then threw herself down on the sofa. He’d already told her about this Straven Conference, and the sectoring of ZA sink estates and other population areas. She’d wanted to disbelieve him, but he guessed the corpses she’d recently seen in the fields went some way towards convincing her. He suspected her doubts had lasted only until he abandoned the lorry in what he hoped was still a cam deadspot adjacent to a sector fence. He felt that the two corpses, one lying on the ground and one still clinging to the fence, must have finally persuaded her.
‘I think,’ she said, ‘that since you took me from the Inspectorate, this is the longest time in my life I’ve been without someone constantly watching me.’ She reached up, pressing a fist against her chest, her shoulders hunched and a bewildered expression on her face.
‘I’m watching you,’ he said. ‘Are you in pain?’
‘Panic attack.’ She gave him a tight, forced grin. ‘They’re a constant with me but, as I’ve recently discovered, I don’t get them when there’s any real reason for panic.’ She waved a dismissive hand and lay back, closing her eyes, deliberately pulling her hand away from her chest and resting it flat on the sofa beside her.
‘You’re watching me,’ she said, ‘but I don’t think you’re about to lecture me about squandering government resources, or deliver any completely inappropriate homilies.’
‘Misuse of government property is theft from the people?’ he suggested.
‘Yeah, because all property belongs to the people, but is controlled by the Committee for the good of the people.’ She opened her eyes and gazed at him. ‘Better then to say that all property and all people belong to the Committee, for its own good.’ She looked up. ‘You know they gave me political prisoners who were scheduled for disposal to experiment with?’
Yes, he already knew that, but it seemed she wanted to repeat herself. She wanted to be certain he knew about the crimes she believed herself to have committed. Perhaps she wanted to revel in her own guilt.
‘I saw one in your surgery,’ he said neutrally. ‘And I released one from his cell. He seemed very self-possessed, so I wonder if he managed to escape.’
‘Malden,’ she said. ‘I hope so too, because, if so, he’s going to be a big thorn in the state’s side. He’s a revolutionary leader, maybe even the revolutionary leader. I put as much hardware in his head as I could, and used the organic interface and comlife they allowed me. He is a lesser version of what you yourself can become.’
He dropped onto the sofa beside her, saying nothing.
She eyed him sideways. ‘I had no choice, you know.’
‘I know.’
‘After Smith made us watch what happened to you, he kept us grouped together for a while longer. Once they brought in the first human subjects for experimentation, Aira objected.’ She was staring at the floor again. ‘He didn’t even try to persuade her otherwise, just took her down to a cell and made us all watch while five enforcers raped her repeatedly. When they were done, he just shot her through the head – no attempt at adjustment.’
‘I can pass judgement on you if you like,’ he said. ‘If you consider a serial murderer’s judgement of any relevance. You, at least, have done the bad things you’ve done to survive. I don’t have that excuse.’
‘I don’t want excuses.’
‘What happened after Aira? Where’s the rest of the research team?’
‘Smith had us separated – the only communication via comlink – and I got to stay in the cell complex. Smith himself got reassigned after that.’ She gazed at him steadily. ‘He was made Political Director on Argus.’
Motives within motives, and now he had another motive to get himself up to that space station. ‘So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at how willing you are to help me?’
She frowned. ‘I just want to be there when you see him again.’
‘You will be. That’s a promise.’
‘There must be . . . justice,’ she said firmly.
It seemed likely to Saul that she would not enjoy his idea of justice.
‘Yes, quite.’
She nodded, then turned away. ‘Does that shower work?’ she asked, pointing.
He shrugged. ‘I think the water’s turned on, but whether it’s hot is another matter.’
‘Do you have any fresh clothing here?’
‘Yes, enough.’
Standing up, she stripped off her lab coat, kicked off her trainers, then began unbuttoning her blouse. He rose too, and began heading for the door.
‘Where are you going?’ she asked.
‘To give you some privacy.’
She pointed up at the cam. ‘You’ve given me more privacy than I’ve ever enjoyed before in my entire life. Please stay.’
She stripped off with determined deliberation, and with equal deliberation he didn’t look away. She had a tightly muscular body, small breasts and a slim waist, her hip bones quite prominent. Her pubis was bald, probably electro-depilated, while a moon-shaped scar lay above her right knee. When she turned round he observed a fade-form tattoo at the base of her spine, its pattern regularly changed by any alterations in her skin temperature. He’d had sex with just two different women over the length of his two-year life, and neither of them had looked so familiar to him. His chest felt abruptly tight and he understood that here was the real reason she so willingly stayed with him.
‘How long were we lovers?’ he asked.
‘You remember?’ she asked, suddenly hopeful.
‘I remember your body.’ He felt ashamed. ‘I’m sorry, but that’s all.’
She headed over to the shower. ‘From about ten years after we first met, then up until Smith burnt up your mind. I like to think that, besides your sister, I was the only other human being you actually cared about.’ Stepping into the shower, she gazed coyly over one shoulder. ‘Maybe we can shake loose some more memories?’
‘I’ll take a shower right after you,’ he replied, smiling at her as she closed the glass doors.
He retained the smile for a while longer, then suddenly he switched it off. He’d been operating alone with perfect if ugly efficiency for two years, yet now he carried a passenger and, if he allowed to grow further what he so far only felt a hint of, his ruthlessness might become impaired.
He couldn’t allow that.
Having placed an apartment door sideways across the communal stairs to act as a toll gate, they searched the woman ahead, removing from her bag a sorry collection of potatoes before letting her through. They’d created their own deadspot by spray-painting over the cams fixed up on the ceiling, which, Hannah supposed, might just mean the cams were now queued in a month-long maintenance backlog. However, the man’s corpse lying up against the wall in a pool of old brown blood, with flies crawling in and out of its nostrils, didn’t look that fresh. It should certainly have been reported by some responsible citizen, but the fact that his killers showed no particular hurry to be elsewhere seemed to confirm that no enforcers were likely to be coming here. Perhaps it was now policy to give free rein to those thinning out the excess population. Hannah did not like to think so, but after Saul had pointed out the corpses rotting on the fence sur
rounding a ‘sectored’ area, she was starting to believe some of the things he had been telling her.
‘What you got in there?’ asked one of the thugs, now turning to Saul and herself.
The four of them – three young men and one woman – were all dressed in Mars and terran combats, rib-effect body warmers with a slick waterproof look, and Velcro-strap training boots. Their dress looked decidedly military, but the only gun visible was an ionic stunner one of them had tucked into his belt. The other three sported home-made weapons consisting of long-handled maces fashioned from lengths of pipe with foam-tape handles, the club end comprising a collection of heavy nuts and bolts welded together into a mass. Judging by the ragged dent in the side of the corpse’s head, one of these implements had been used on him. Hannah glanced at Saul, wondering how he would handle this situation, yet not so sure she really wanted to know. But, no doubt, handle it he would.
It had taken three days before the Subnet became available through Saul’s home computer – accessed via perpetually changing radio frequencies using a receiver it was considered an ‘adjustment’ offence to own. It lasted only four hours before Inspectorate hackers took it down again, but long enough for him to confirm a local deadspot was still in use, and then to learn some other news. Hannah then took a seat beside him to have her first look at what he described as the real world.
With the new food pricing beginning to bite, there’d been sector riots in Manchester, Cardiff and in some of the suburbs of the Outer London sprawl. In the first of these conurbations a Subnet reporter had detailed how a vast crowd surged towards the exit to the Salford sector of Manchester, using short-range missile-launchers to take out the readerguns. As they stormed into the surrounding community, they had grabbed the Inspectorate guards and hanged them with razorwire from the sector’s fence posts. But then enforcers had arrived, flying aero gunships and dropping gas grenades. They didn’t use knockout gas either, because afterwards they had quickly and efficiently loaded dropside tipper trucks with the corpses, using small vehicles equipped with loading buckets to the rear, and digger arms terminating in tri-claw grabs to the fore. Saul pointed out how both vehicles seemed to have been specifically designed for the sole purpose of removing corpses. Similar mobs in other sectors didn’t even get as far as the fences – the readerguns had been reformatted to fire beyond the no-man’s-land adjoining the fences, while enforcers were coming in with the gas even as the mobs were gathering. No clear-up within the sectors, though – which perhaps accounted for the smell of carrion in the air here in the London sprawl as he and Hannah set out from his apartment towards the local deadspot.
‘It’s exponential,’ Hannah observed, trying to apply a scientific frame of mind to the growing horror she felt. ‘Start running out of the basics, and it’s all going to break down fast.’
He nodded in agreement as they strolled down one of the community-block streets towards the communal stairs, since the elevators were out of action again. Hannah noticed that here, even in this block reserved for those considered societal assets only, the people seen out and about all carried backpacks or large flight bags ready to be filled with whatever food they could acquire with their triple Cs or any cash they might possess. Saul explained that the produce grown in the greenhouses on the roof, which about a year ago might only be bought with large wodges of rapidly devaluing currency, could no longer be bought at all, because readerguns and Inspectorate guards were stationed up there now. The few shops in the neighbourhood with goods actually available were easily identifiable by the queues outside. While she nervously waited for him in the apartment, he himself had stood in a few of these during the last few days, using three different identities simply to obtain enough food for the two of them. And still Hannah was hungry, just like those waiting on the stairs.
‘Nothing of interest to you,’ Saul replied to the thug’s question.
The man tilted his head, acknowledging the fact that perhaps Saul was going to cause him a problem. ‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ he replied. His hand dropped to the ionic stunner at his belt, and one of the other men stepped forward, shouldering his mace. Hannah saw then that it seemed the visible corpse was not their only victim. Further spills of blood stained the floor, one still sticky and red with a couple of teeth lying amidst it. Were the others who had been assaulted still alive, or had they merely been dragged out of sight, just the one corpse left on display?
‘Let me show you.’ Saul unshouldered his backpack and dropped it to the ground, glancing at Hannah as he did so. She slid her gaze away from the corpse, to the fresh bloodstain, then back to Saul. What was he going to do? What could he do in this situation? What if they stole the hardware he’d risked his life a second time to retrieve? And what if they stole the payment he had brought to finance the installation of that hardware?
As he glanced down at his backpack then focused back on the man before him, Saul asked, ‘Did you kill him?’
‘He died for a bag of sugar.’ Grinning at that, the man stared at Saul challengingly. ‘Thought he was a tough guy.’
Suddenly Hannah realized that even if they paid whatever toll was demanded, they would still be in trouble. She felt she needed to communicate this to Saul, but how?
‘Inspectorate enforcers could be here at any moment,’ Saul suggested calmly.
Hannah then noticed that two of the four, including the man standing before Saul, wore badges on the shoulders of their body warmers: an emblem of laurel leaves enclosing an Egyptian eye. They were community political officers.
‘They’re not interested,’ the man said fatly. ‘Now open your pack.’
Saul nodded thoughtfully, reached round under the back of his jacket, as if tucking in his shirt, pulled his automatic from its holster and simply shot the man through the throat. He flew backwards till the door caught the rear of his legs and his head slammed down hard on the carbocrete steps behind him. Saul’s second shot punched straight through the chest of the next man, spraying gobbets of flesh over the wall behind him before he thumped into it and slid down it, leaving a wide and bloody trail. The woman threw her mace at him, before turning to run after her remaining colleague, who had already taken off. Saul stepped aside and the weapon clattered past him, then his next shot lifted the top of her head and sent her tumbling down the stairs. Steadying his gun hand, he next put a group of three shots into the back of the feeing man just as he reached the next landing. That dropped him as well.
‘Christ!’ said Hannah, staring at the carnage then turning to face him. ‘Christ!’ She’d thought he had left all his weapons in the truck, along with hers.
‘Not the Alan Saul you remember,’ he remarked.
She shook her head numbly and moved away to steady herself against the wall. Her legs felt suddenly weak, her breathing an effort. She felt she was going to be sick, but managed to hold on to it, perhaps because there wasn’t enough in her stomach for her to bring up.
Saul returned his gun to its holster, shouldered his backpack again, stepped over the door serving as a toll gate, kicked it over then squatted to inspect the haul the four had assembled. It consisted of a couple of bags of potatoes, a few tomatoes and cucumbers, a loaf of bread and some preserved sausage. He shoved these into a large shoulder bag before searching the clothing of the two lying nearest. Some chocolate and a little cash, but not much else of value, though he did pocket the stunner.
‘You carry the bag,’ he instructed, pointing to the haul of food. Feeling utterly out of her depth, Hannah pulled herself away from the wall and tried to be calm as she went to pick up the shoulder bag. Her foot slipped and she nearly went over, then seemingly out of nowhere came the tears.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, shaking her head, and angry with herself. ‘I’m sorry.’
He stepped over and she put her arms round him, burying her head in his shoulder, let some of it go, but all too soon he was pushing her away.
‘We can’t stay here.’ He nodded towards the stairwa
y behind.
People were gathering on the landing above, staring down. She nodded but, when he started to pull away again, she clasped him even tighter. A moment’s pause, then she released him. The flow of tears ceased abruptly, and they headed down.
‘I’m sorry, too,’ he said, once the corpses were well out of sight. ‘But if we’re weak, we die.’
‘Are you really sorry?’ she asked. ‘You didn’t have to kill them all.’
‘No, I didn’t,’ he said. ‘I could have taken us safely through and just left them to carry on doing whatever they wanted, to rob and murder.’
‘That bothers you?’
‘It does.’
He seemed to say that with such sincerity that Hannah tried to suppress her doubts, for he still appeared utterly unaffected by what he had done – almost like he was used to it.
7
And the Dreams Fade
It has long been a dream of humanity to go out into space, but as dreams become reality they lose their mythological quality, sliding into the humdrum day-to-day, and the dreams fade. The first Moon landings marked the dawning of a new age, yet dropped into second place in the headlines when pitched against the latest ‘Politician Buggers Rent Boy’ scandal. So died the public wonder at the space stations in near-Earth orbit, and at the mission to Mars. It’s only human nature, in the end. However, throughout all these ages technology continued its steady advance. The entire computing power of the control room of NASA during those first Moon missions could not match that of an ordinary home PC thirty years later, and then the computing power of a home PC could be fitted into something no bigger than an ear stud a further fifty years down the line. But beyond a certain point, the size of the technology within a computer becomes irrelevant, because there’s a minimum size to which you can reduce the button a finger presses. Humans, unfortunately, are the weak component in the circuit, as also in all their logical creations.
