The Departure to-1

by Neal Asher

  ‘Hostiles ahead,’ he warned the other two.

  ‘Security?’ Braddock asked.

  ‘Very definitely.’

  Braddock sighed, then reached down for one of the grenades clipped on his belt. Saul put a restraining hand out. ‘No need.’

  With a deeper link into the robots, he tampered with their safety protocols. Their systems had been keyed to recognize the human shape, so that they would not inadvertently injure anyone who got in their way while they were working. He now subverted that protocol and inserted new instructions where there would usually occur a 90 per cent drop in work rate or complete safety shutdown. The instructions were simple: grind here, drill there, cut this piece away, spraycoat that, weld this.

  ‘Okay, step aside,’ he said. ‘Up against the wall.’

  Saul stepped back himself, and Hannah moved quickly up beside him. Braddock stood doubtfully staring at the robots, then hastily moved out of the way too, as they shifted smoothly into motion. They flowed towards the bulkhead door, which thumped up on its seals and swung open – already cued to allow through maintenance robots, like the sprayer robot that had gone through earlier. Saul gazed through their sensors, eight views opening up in the virtuality inside his mind. They were fast but then, while engaged in their usual jobs, they were as fast as any automated lathe or milling machine, or the kind of factory robots that assembled ground cars. Using simple location programs that he had no need to load, they followed the most direct routes to their targets, which had been efficiently prioritized.

  Three of the robots sped up into the ceiling frames that supported diffractors, pipes and power ducts directly above the hydroponics gulleys; two went straight across the gulleys themselves, while the remaining three headed down the central aisle, turning into side aisles directly leading to their targets. Saul moved up closer to the door, to give them a better chance of maintaining laser link with him. Communication would become intermittent once they went out of line-of-sight, but that would still not upset their programming. Also, some of them would keep returning into view to update him, and he was running a program to smooth out the data flow. So there weren’t really any noticeable interruptions.

  ‘What the fuck is this?’ he heard someone cry from inside the room beyond, before realizing that the robots lacked the facility of hearing, having been originally constructed to work only in vacuum.

  One of the robots up in the ceiling continued reaching down, its claw closing around one soldier’s neck and hauling him up. The man shrieked, raising an ionic taser and firing it, small lightnings erupting from its impact point. A diagnostic feed from the robot involved threw up multiple errors, but it still laser-drilled a precise one-centimetre hole directly through its captive’s heart.

  ‘Pull back!’ someone else screamed.

  Another taser fired, but to no effect.

  ‘Guns!’ someone shouted.

  Gunfire from automatic weapons racketed about within the hydroponics room. A soldier stumbled away from the paint-sprayer, orange from head to foot and blinded, then another robot pinned him back against a wall, while it tried to weld a non-existent join running from his neck to his groin. The one with the cutting disc casually sliced off someone else’s head, then turned to a smouldering corpse that had just been welded, and cut off its head too. The screams of agony were horrible, and usually quickly truncated. Within a minute they had ceased, as had the gunfire. Still, the robots continued with their allotted tasks until Saul instructed them to desist. Refinement was called for, and at the very thought he altered the programs, now specifying only one operation to be carried out per work task. No need for a robot to behead an electrocuted corpse.

  ‘They’re done,’ he decided, about to step through the door.

  ‘Wait,’ said Braddock, ‘let me check.’

  He knew there was no need, but Saul allowed the soldier his professional pride, so he stepped aside and Braddock ducked in ahead of him. Gazing through the eyes of a single robot, Saul watched the man cautiously advance, then halt to stare up across at the robot still located in the ceiling. A human corpse still hung by the neck from its claw, and it hadn’t moved since being hit by the taser. Diagnostics showed that the electric charge had corrupted its main processor, so it had been a mistake for the soldiers to switch over to automatic weapons, since they’d stood more of a chance using tasers. Braddock checked further, pausing to stare at a headless corpse resting in a bed of potato plants.

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ he gasped, obviously dumbfounded, his hushed tones still audible outside the hydroponics room, but admirably he went on to check every other corpse before shouting, ‘Clear!’

  ‘It’s going to be bad, isn’t it?’ said Hannah.

  ‘Yes, it is.’ He watched her for a moment before continuing. ‘Alternatively, we could always just hand ourselves over to Smith – you know what the choices are now.’ It seemed necessary to emphasize the point, to keep her focused on the current reality of their situation.

  ‘It’s not the choices now I was thinking about.’ She chewed at one of her knuckles for a moment, still gazing towards the open door. Then, abruptly dropping her hand, she said, ‘Let’s go,’ and led the way in.

  It affected him more than he would have expected; the analytical part of his mind momentarily swamped by the emotional reaction. His views, through the robots, were clear – in fact provided much more clarity than through his own eyes – but besides hearing, they lacked one other sense. The robots did not possess a sense of smell and, on entering the hydroponics room the smell of shit assailed him, in the trousers of those who had died or from their ruptured intestines, accompanied by other warm butcher’s-shop odours. Steam spread around the fresh corpses, their blood beaded the air.

  He studied Hannah, trying to gauge her response. She stared at the dead, nodded to herself, before she went over to one man who had been neatly riveted through the forehead, picked up his weapon and then pulled the spare clips from his belt. Saul retrieved the gun from another corpse, and saw Braddock also collecting weapons and ammunition.

  ‘Low-impact ammunition,’ Braddock observed. ‘It won’t last.’

  ‘They won’t know what happened here,’ Saul replied, then instructed the robots to move ahead of them to the next bulkhead door, the spraybot again leading the way. ‘Smith rightly assumed that the cams going out meant we were located here and he sent these men to seize us. They only went over to automatic weapons when they realized what was attacking them, so the tasers were for us.’

  ‘He wants us alive, then,’ said Hannah.

  Saul nodded. ‘That won’t last either, once he has some idea what I’m up to. The next ones will come equipped with ceramic rounds and probably something stronger.’

  Just then the whining in his head faded to leave a hollow emptiness. Obviously Smith had just decided to fix his communications problem, which meant he would be kept in constant contact with the next soldiers he sent against them.

  ‘He knows something’s wrong,’ Saul said. ‘The EM field is now out.’

  ‘Probably others further in heard the shooting.’

  That seemed likely.

  Saul approached the next bulkhead door, transmitting instructions as he did so. He moved three of the robots to the rear, because knowing their location, Smith might send troops that way, whilst the remaining four headed towards the door ahead. Saul also ensured that they would not include himself, Hannah and Braddock as targets in their work roster by tagging the design of their spacesuits. The spraybot went through, and viewing through its sensors he saw a woman wearing the uniform of an Inspectorate enforcer standing there holding a console, its optic cable plugged into a wall socket. At her feet crouched a single soldier armed with an assault rifle rather than a machine pistol, its stock up against his shoulder. He hesitated for just a second before opening fire, whilst the woman instantly detached her console, then turned and ran. Instructing it to now ignore the cams, Saul sent the spraybot in pursuit, just as the
other robots followed it through the door. Diagnostic errors – that assault rifle being loaded with ceramic armour-piercers. Saul was only half aware of Braddock shoving him to one side and dragging Hannah along with them. Bullets zinged into the room they still occupied. Transmission from the robots ahead of them ceased as he crouched safely to one side, but when he moved back up to the door edge and leaned round it, laser com updated him instantly.

  The spraybot hurdled the soldier, who tried to shoot it as it leapt over him. Before he could bring his weapon back down again, one of the following robots slammed into him at floor level and sank a grinding disc into his neck. His shriek curtailed with a spray of blood up one wall. Now the spraybot came down on the woman, just before she entered a vertical cageway running alongside a massive shaft which also contained the mechanical spindle and light-diffusion pipes leading to a single arcoplex cylinder. Saul instantly instructed the robot to just hold her, since it might now be worth his while gathering some information. However one of the other robots arrived and following its program perfectly, laser-drilled her heart. No matter; perhaps it was best they just move as fast as they could now. He summoned the sprayer back into the preceding corridor, and returned it to its task of blinding the cameras. That Smith now knew he controlled robots was almost instantly confirmed when all of their radio receivers activated at once, though whatever orders Smith had sent them could not bypass the ten-digit code.

  ‘Come on,’ Saul said, ‘fast now.’

  He ducked through the door, no longer wanting Braddock to check ahead – they didn’t have time. Leaving behind it the stink of paint, the spraybot disappeared round a far corner. Reaching the corridor beyond, Saul shoved his machine pistol into his thigh pocket and took up the assault rifle. The three humans rounded the corner and entered the cageway. Just ten metres further out from them the cylinder spindle revolved slowly, surrounded by light pipes, and, peering down, he saw a massive mercury-lubricated bearing with numerous suncatchers set into its surface arranged to intercept the light from the ends of the stationary light pipes, as they passed under them, and transmit that harvest into the arcoplex cylinder itself. The robots worked their way down outside the cage, to reach floor levels whose construction had stalled. Yet again the stink of new-sprayed paint, but in this area he didn’t think every cam could possibly be knocked out. Then came the familiar vicious sound of a readergun.

  ‘Still low-impact,’ Braddock decided.

  They wouldn’t risk loading readerguns with armour-piercing rounds, not here.

  Saul was now looking through the eyes of every one of his robots simultaneously. All were still functioning, though the diagnostic returns registered damage, and kept trying fruitlessly to instruct their recipients to return to the maintenance bays left behind them. The readergun was mounted on a column. Shedding splintered plastic all around it, one of the robots closed a claw around the gun’s revolving turret, then laser-drilled inside it until something blew. Four more readerguns followed after that, then they reached an airlock out beyond the rim of the arcoplex cylinder. Whilst Hannah and Saul slid their visors across and ran spacesuit diagnostics, Braddock began operating the airlock’s manual controls. Saul next allowed himself a low-level penetration of the computer architecture operating here, finding safety protocols and permissions for remote access to the airlock, and instantly shutting them down. That took him only a moment but, even in that brief time, he felt Smith starting to zero in on him. Then, almost inevitably, a jag of light flashed across his vision.

  By now, all the robots were clustered around them, waiting.

  ‘We’ll send them all ahead,’ Saul instructed, his mouth feeling dry. No pain yet, and no thundering pulse in his head, but it would return, he felt sure.

  For its first cycling, four robots crammed into the airlock like some weirdly compacted sculpture. It took ten minutes to get all of them through and meanwhile Saul’s contact with them was completely cut off. However, if any soldiers awaited them on the other side of the airlock, the robots would continue to follow their pre-programmed instructions. The three humans stepped into the airlock next.

  ‘Channel 37,’ said Saul, as the atmosphere drained out of the lock, slowly killing his words in the air. As icons flashed up in his visor, he approved them and then shut down exterior applications for inclusion, thus making their radio communications private, at least for a while. Shortly, they propelled themselves out into a tubeway still under construction, at present only a cage of girders curving round and then spearing downwards beside the massive revolving arcoplex cylinder.

  ‘Mother of God!’ Hannah exclaimed, her voice crackling with interference.

  On its outer rim, the station had seemed huge enough, but here, within the wheel, its vastness delivered more impact. From behind, to their left, the inner surface of the wheel’s rim curved almost imperceptibly inwards; while over that way, gazing through the inner structure of the station, they could just see an ore-transit tube foreshortened by perspective. Immediately to their right turned the great curved wall of the nearest cylinder world – the nearest arcoplex extending down to where it connected, at its further end, to the asteroid itself. However, the view of that was blocked by countless intervening tubeways or buildings suspended in the mesh of girders, like insect carcasses trapped in a spider’s web. Ahead and above, where a latticework of girders divided the starlit sky into diamonds, Saul could just see the technical-control building jutting up from the asteroid itself. This entire massive station, he now understood, represented what the Committee had been bankrupting Earth in order to build. There therefore had to be more to it than simply providing a base of operations for the satellite laser network.

  Now clear of the airlock, Saul once again linked back into the personal network with his robots, and only on doing so did he spot the flashing of weapons ahead. Next he registered a detonation, though silent in vacuum, as it erased one of the robots from his network, and with human vision he saw a couple of its steel limbs clinging to beams nearby. As they propelled themselves down towards this spot, and to where the tubeway acquired walls, Saul replayed recorded data and saw a spacesuited soldier lurking in the shadows with a carousel launcher – a big weapon equipped with a round magazine, as on a tommy-gun – but the man didn’t succeed in getting off a second round. Saul was still refining the programs, so it wasn’t a corrupted work order that made the next robot tear off the human assailant’s head, but new programming.

  Heavy machine-gun fire next, a ten-bore hastily clamped to a beam, armour-piercing rounds cutting out from the tube-way’s mouth to punch their way through bubblemetal beams and sheet. The silence of this destruction created an illusion of disconnection, and safety, but the firing didn’t last long. Three robots entered the tubeway, and after one of them had torn the gun crew apart, Saul paused it there and gave new instructions. It picked up the heavy machine gun in one of its clamp claws, swivelled back so as to walk upright on its hind legs, then advanced further like some nightmare ape made of steel.

  ‘Pretty toy,’ said Braddock over com.

  Saul thought the soldier referred to the upright robot, but in fact Braddock had retrieved the missile-launcher and begun examining it. Saul flicked a glance sideways to watch the headless corpse of its previous owner gyrating away from the walkway to impact on the outer surface of the arcoplex cylinder, then be flung on to a new trajectory.

  They entered the tubeway with a few of Saul’s little army of homicidal machines moving ahead of them, some inside and some outside the tubeway itself. Rails ran along the floor here, but they soon petered out, just a short section completed. Then walls, floor and ceiling withered away too, the tubeway once again becoming a cage that continued snaking through the open substructure of the inner station. Here large and stationary habitation and factory units hung suspended in the substructure, even more cageways and tubeways running between. His robots continued to spread out through this, seeking new jobs to perform. The one with the big gun opened
fire as it advanced. Then, suddenly, new laser com feeds began to open up.

  Whilst maintaining the communication between himself and the robots, Saul had left open the option to summon other robots into the same network, their com lasers probing all about them in search of new recruits. First another four, too distant to see clearly but from the feedback he ascertained that they were construction robots put to work on the lower bearing structure of the arcoplex cylinder. He summoned them into the fight, and even as they began moving they hijacked yet more robots near to them. Another five construction robots and a big hauler loaded with tonnes of building materials joined his army, then smaller robots, the size of cats and used to clean out one of the newly built habitation units. They swarmed towards the conflict, moving up on the flank of the attacking enforcers.

  Braddock rapidly propelled himself along the incomplete tubeway, with Saul and Hannah following. The soldier turned abruptly to one side and fired his missile-launcher. In elegant silence, the blast ripped open a partially constructed wall fifty metres to their right, and a burning corpse fell out from behind it, the fire snuffed the moment the suit air feeding it ran out. They were right in the middle of it now, since the open structure all around them made it impossible to maintain a single front.

  ‘Stay beside me,’ Saul instructed Hannah.

  ‘How far to go?’

  ‘Half a kilometre to Tech Central,’ he said, pointing ahead and upwards.

  Directly ahead now, and visible below their destination, lay the rough surface of the asteroid. Saul, at last, restarted his modem and began carefully probing the data spaces all around him. Yes, Smith was there, but at first Saul didn’t venture so deep that he couldn’t pull out in an instant. However, he felt a sudden satisfaction as he mapped signal traffic on to his schematic of the station. Most of it issued from the region of Tech Central, which meant that Smith had to be either there or somewhere nearby.