The Departure to-1

by Neal Asher

  They waited long minutes as the bar on the graph Kaskan had altered rose up to the marker he had set. Kaskan meanwhile kept utterly still. Var was tempted to peek through the window to see what was happening with the two enforcers, but she knew that just the slightest miscalculation now would leave them all dead. Then, as they waited, the intercom crackled into life.

  ‘It would seem that the usual suspects have gone missing,’ Ricard announced. ‘Lopomac Pearse, Kaskan Lane, Carol Eisen and, of course our Technical Director, Var Delex.’

  For one spine-crawling moment Var feared Ricard had located them, but now she could hear that Ricard’s words were issued from the public-address system throughout the base.

  ‘Director Var has murdered Gisender Lane and caused a number of atmosphere breaches, murdering nine Inspectorate staff along with Miska Giannis. She has also destroyed valuable government property, so it is inevitable that she must be seized and duly tried. However, her guilt does not attach to the other three, who, if they return to the Community Room straight away, will be treated fairly. Surely all four of you must be aware that you have nowhere to run, and surely you understand that, unless you hand yourselves over, I will have to order my men to use deadly force against you.’

  ‘Bastard,’ Kaskan muttered.

  ‘He’s just playing to the crowd,’ Var observed.

  ‘Like anyone will believe him?’

  ‘They’ll pretend to believe him. What else can they do?’

  ‘Having now seen that broadcast from Delegate Margot Le Blanc, you must all understand that we face hard times, in which hard decisions will have to be made,’ Ricard continued, ‘but be assured that the Committee has provided me with a restructuring plan for our survival. Delegate Le Blanc mentioned those dissident elements back on Earth that have brought us to these straits and, as we are seeing, those same elements are here. We cannot allow them to threaten our survival. We must remain strong and firm in our purpose. There . . . there is much work still to do.’

  As Ricard seemed to run out of steam, Kaskan checked his watch, nodded and carefully rose from his crouch to peer over the screen. At that very same moment, a series of shots slammed into the windows, a terrible racket of plastic bullets smashing against the glass. Kaskan ducked again as the glass finally broke, large laminated chunks of it falling inside the computer room.

  ‘What the fuck?’ Lopomac hissed from the door.

  ‘A whole fifty-round clip,’ said Kaskan. He glanced around. ‘Plastic ammo.’ He looked up at the atmosphere sensors in the ceiling, and just then a reverberating clang sounded from the corridor outside, as the nearest bulkhead door closed in Wing One.

  ‘I never thought of that,’ admitted Kaskan. ‘But it doesn’t do them any good – the pressure is higher in there.’

  Var shook her head. One of the enforcers had shot out the internal window in an attempt to let in breathable air, but with the pressure differential all he had done was let some of the unbreathable stuff escape from Hydroponics. Further shots erupted, this time smacking against metal, followed by a clattering noise and gasping, someone falling and then something breaking, the sound of liquid spilling. Kaskan stood up, and Var stood too.

  ‘Best to close up our helmets,’ she advised.

  They all complied, then Kaskan dialled down the CO2 and nitrogen on the screen graph. Var realized it would take some minutes before the air in there became breathable again, which would be too late for the two enforcers. Kaskan led the way over to the broken windows.

  Greenery so crowded the hex troughs that they were difficult to discern. One trough had been holed, so that nutrient-laden fluid was spilling on to the floor. One enforcer lay curled up against the wall, while the other sprawled a few paces away, his machine pistol lying just outside of his reach. By now both men were utterly motionless.

  ‘The bulkhead door into the hex should open now,’ Kaskan reported over com, turning to gesture to the corridor behind where Lopomac stood. ‘The safety protocol cuts out once the mix is the same on each side of a door.’

  Lopomac led the way out, followed closely by Carol and then Var. The short corridor, which terminated at the bulkhead door leading into the hex, was blocked by a similar square door at the other end. Lopomac approached the hex door, pulled down on the lever to disengage the seal, and a pendulum mechanism swung the door on its top pivot back up into the wall cavity. As she stepped into the hex behind him, Var peered up at the geodesic dome, considerably relieved to see it unharmed.

  ‘That was close, Kaskan,’ she remarked. ‘Too close.’

  ‘You’re right,’ he agreed. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Now she felt a stab of guilt at berating someone who had so recently lost his wife – the kind of grief she herself understood so well – and who, despite the unacceptable risk, had now provided them with further weapons and dealt with a further two enforcers. But, when the public address system crackled into life again, it seemed that they had still not done enough, quickly enough.

  Earth

  Braddock swung his weapon hard – hard enough to crush the man’s skull – then caught hold of his shoulder and shoved him down to the floor, pinning him there. Saul stepped out from where he and Hannah had been hiding and headed over, his mind working at high speed as he assessed his current position here on Argus Station and calculated what he must do next.

  It all seemed to make perfect sense to him now he had closely studied the results of Janus’s search for his sister. She had come up here, into space, because her speciality was in massive construction projects like those conducted up here, as well as synthesis, and other scientific disciplines besides. Yes, he himself had come here to exact his vengeance on the Committee, to take Argus away from the rulers of Earth, a belated motivation being the knowledge of Smith’s presence here, but underneath all that obviously lay something of the person he had been previously. On some level he had known that his sister was up here, and just as that same inner self had driven him to search for Hannah, it had similarly been driving him to find the only other person he cared about. But now it seemed his sister was not here after all. She had been forcibly transferred to Mars, so now, perhaps, a new course to pursue . . .

  But first he needed to stay alive.

  Saul again reviewed some of the data recorded within the processors in his brain. Most of the massive ongoing construction and reconstruction was being carried out by robots, ranging from machines the size of monorail carriages which were used to transport materials about the rim, to others only the size of a cockroach, designed to install or repair small electronic devices. A huge number of robots laboured in the three cylinder worlds – the arcoplexes – which were parts of this station he’d known very little about until downloading the schematic. Meteor-repair welding bots constantly searched for holes made by the large amounts of debris drifting out here. Mining robots cut like woodworm into the underside of the central asteroid, while others laboured out in the smelters. Cleaning robots and maintenance robots were constantly at work throughout the station. And his experience with the pair of robots they had recently encountered, did nothing to dispel the certainty that these were the answer.

  From the little cleaning robot, data flow had been immediate, and within a second, and without ill effects, he had encompassed it as part of himself. He reprogrammed it and tightened its computer security, shutting down its response to station signals and making it accessible only by a ten-digit code constantly changing according to a formula that only he – and it – knew. Controlling the robot’s laser com, he had opened a communication channel with the loader robot and at once included it in his personal network. He had input the same changing ten-digit code to the larger robot, then reverted to straightforward laser com, without the code, to check its security by giving it new instructions. No response to this. He tried running every code-cracker he had available, but still no response. Even then, he realized that, given a few hours, he might have managed to get through and therefore, given the sam
e time, Smith would be able to get through too, and break his control of the robots. He must not allow his former interrogator sufficient time to do so.

  Saul glanced at the maintenance technician, who still seemed to be breathing despite the force of Braddock’s blow. Saul calculated that the low gravity here, and Braddock’s purchase on the floor being only through his gecko boots, had diminished the blow’s force by about 40 per cent. Turning to study the contents of the technician’s toolbox, Saul began undoing the clips holding the upper section of his spacesuit. Once he had stripped it off, he selected the necessary tools, then quickly removed the little robot’s cowling, its processor, power supply and communications laser. Next obtaining sufficient optics and carbon power cable from the bot’s control systems, he linked the power supply and processor into his suit’s hardware and main processors, which were located behind the oxygen pack, then stowed them in an arm pocket of the jacket. He epoxied the laser to one shoulder of it, before once again donning it, then ran the optic from his skull into a port situated in the rear of his helmet, before putting that on.

  ‘Seems a bit of an unstable rig,’ commented Hannah doubtfully.

  ‘You should know better,’ he replied. ‘It’s all about programming.’

  ‘You can do this?’

  He didn’t reply as he concentrated on optimizing those disparate items of hardware. In the end, if you avoided shoving a power cable into an optic plug, or an optic into a power socket, it really was all about programming and therefore possible to get most modern computer modules to work happily together. He could now operate the com laser, as before, but most importantly it enabled him to avoid running an optic from his head outside his suit, which would have made it impossible to close his visor, as he would need to do the moment they passed through the first airlock.

  ‘He’d better be able to do this,’ muttered Braddock.

  ‘Just ahead of us there’s an area of the station that’s still under construction,’ Saul said. ‘That’s where we’ll find construction robots.’

  ‘Him?’ Braddock gestured to the prostrate technician.

  Saul knew precisely what Braddock meant. If the technician came to before they were ready, he would certainly alert Smith. And once Smith saw the remains of the little robot, he would guess Saul’s intentions. He was about to instruct Braddock to kill the technician, when he caught Hannah’s eye. It would be nice to say that some degree of compassion influenced his next instruction, but it just wasn’t there.

  ‘Tie him up,’ he said, ‘securely.’

  Braddock took a roll of duct tape from the toolbox and set to work, while Saul stepped across to the scattered remains of the robot, scooped them up and took them over to one of the EVA units affixed against the wall – a one-man vehicle with large manipulator arms used for exterior repairs – opened its hatch and tossed the pieces of robot inside. Even if the technician was found, it would hopefully take Smith some time to work out what Saul had been doing here.

  ‘It’d be better to kill him,’ Braddock remarked, having bound the man securely to the side railing.

  Saul agreed, but realized that such a drastic step would push Hannah further away from him – the emotional considerations weren’t too difficult to slot into his calculations. The risk of this man regaining conciousness, and somehow getting free to report to Smith, was worth taking. Though, admittedly, only if Saul had not overestimated the value he was ascribing to Hannah within the formulae in his head.

  The conveyor had brought them to the outer edge of the station, almost a kilometre and a half from where they had penetrated it, which almost certainly put them outside the main search area for a while. In that odd, seemingly unhurried gait which was the best anyone could manage here, Saul led them along the corridor to the point where it transformed into a walkway cutting left into open and incomplete station structure – just a vast gridwork of girders and distant walls. Soon they came up alongside what looked like a large room suspended in the open structure, with a single door and windows running round the outside. Closer inspection revealed metal arms extending from its corners, terminating in double clamping wheels. These could be clamped to structural beams, so as to propel this ‘room’ to wherever its occupants next wanted it to be. It was a mobile overseer’s office; a base of operations in the immensity of this unfinished section.

  ‘Looks like no one home,’ observed Braddock, since no light shone from within. In fact, the only light hereabouts issued from fluorescent work lamps scattered sparsely throughout the surrounding area, presently powered by the station’s EM field.

  ‘Looks that way,’ Saul agreed, halting to peer at a cluster of shapes suspended underneath the mobile office. ‘Except for our first recruits.’

  He set the com laser probing, and its red light glinted off folded limbs, fisted four-finger claws, sensor heads and three-section jointed bodies. One of these construction robots responded almost at once and began to unfold. The infective component within the signal began operating too, as this robot opened up a channel to its nearest neighbour, passing on Saul’s recoding instructions, and it too began to unfold.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Braddock – his frequent repetition of that word causing a flash of irritation inside Saul, instantly discarded.

  The machine moved fast for something that would weigh in at half a tonne down on Earth, pulling itself neatly through the mesh of surrounding girders until it halted close by them. It possessed four grasping limbs extended, a pair each, from the rear two sections of its body, which it could swivel a full three-sixty degrees in order to position them. Two more limbs extended from the fore section, which both terminated in carousel tool heads. One was a multiweld kit capable of welding beams in place, spot welding and acetylene cutting. The other head bristled with a laser drill, diamond disc cutters and grinders, thread-tapping tools, a bolt winder and a riveter. The next robot to venture out lacked a welder, but in its place sported a spray head for depositing coatings piped from a varied array of tanks fixed on its back. More robots were now in motion till eight of them in all had positioned themselves nearby. Saul focused initially on the one with the sprayer.

  ‘Once Smith figures what we’re doing, he’ll throw everything he’s got at us,’ warned Braddock.

  ‘But still not enough, I hope,’ Saul replied. ‘These things are built to withstand severe impacts from any materials they handle – like the end of a bubblemetal beam travelling at up to five metres a second. Station antipersonnel weapons won’t be sufficient to damage them.’ He turned to look at Braddock for confirmation.

  ‘Yeah, but that ain’t all they’ve got.’

  ‘Agreed, but by the time Smith gets round to deploying something more effective, I intend to be down his throat.’ He did not add that, in order to do that, he would need to discover Smith’s location.

  The spraying robot clambered on to the walkway and, under Saul’s instruction, moved along ahead of them, accelerating to the point where the walkway jagged left and reacquired walls before disappearing from sight.

  ‘Where now?’ asked Hannah.

  ‘We stay out here much longer, we’ll be caught,’ he explained. ‘It’s time to move in now, but as we move further in, we’ll start encountering the hard-wired cam system and reader-guns. Come on, let’s go.’

  He led the way after the departing robot, while all around them came clattering and slithering as the other robots kept pace. Soon they reached a bulkhead door and a steep, rough-surfaced ramp which they descended to reach the next level. The robots followed one after another, folding their limbs so as to get through, then negotiating the ramp two abreast, and descending it neatly like a platoon of giant steel ants. After that, a short, filthy corridor led to yet another ramp, to another corridor, then some steps heading downwards, constructed for Earth gravity, which the robots handled better than the humans. Next they were entering a long, low-ceilinged and brightly lit room, into which natural sunlight was piped from the suncatchers positioned on the statio
n outer rim. It housed several large cisterns containing water soup-thick with green algae.

  Saul pointed up to the frameworks supporting the diffraction ends of the mirrored pipes leading from a suncatcher. ‘Do you see it?’

  ‘What?’ asked Hannah.

  ‘The cam.’

  It was an old-fashioned design of security camera: a motorized socket made to take a disposable cam the size of a man’s thumb. Both cam and socket were now covered with a rapidly hardening layer of orange safety paint. Linking himself through to the spraybot, as it now moved beyond this same room, he found that it had sprayed over twenty-three cams located here, and was now doing the same to the smaller pin cams stationed in the corridor beyond. He had initially been surprised to discover one huge gap in the security system here, for in an effort to cut down on triggering false alarms, and thus not waste resources, it did not bother to register the station robots. All that would happen now was that some program would note that the cams were out. It might even be the case that maintenance would be alerted before Smith was, but Saul did not hold out much hope for that.

  The cams in the following corridor were not visible to the human eye, but the robot – its vision capable of focusing on beam faults just a few microns across – had detected them all with ease. As a result, safety paint ran in an unbroken line along the ceiling, and in a punctuated line along each side wall. But such ease of progress could not last, of course. Just as they approached the entrance to the next hydroponics hall, Saul saw, through the lead robot’s eyes, that troops were now moving into position behind gulley tanks filled with distorted-looking potato plants and bulbous carrots sprouting from nutrient-laden sponges. He immediately instructed the spraybot to come to a halt, and to precisely locate every soldier waiting in ambush, relaying their positions back to its fellows.