by Neal Asher
‘About time we were relieved,’ he continued. ‘You had no problem getting through?’
She paused beside him, while her three fellows stepped on round the barricade. Almost negligently they swung their machine pistols sideways to cover the three crouching men there.
‘Drop your weapons,’ said Peach.
‘What the—?’ The standing man’s protest ended in a coughing gurgle as he tumbled back through the air in slow motion, clutching his throat. Her karate chop had been almost too fast for the eye to follow, so Saul replayed it in his mind out of analytical interest. The remaining three were frozen in disbelief, until one of Peach’s men fired into the ceiling, and they discarded their weapons.
‘I don’t know why you’re doing this,’ protested one of them. ‘We’ve done nothing wrong.’ Even then, they thought this was their own people arresting them – some mistake, perhaps.
Two of Peach’s unit remained outside, gathering up weapons and securing plastic ties to wrists. The Admissions reception area contained an armourglass guard booth to one side, a long desk on the other, with storage cupboards lining the walls behind it. One man began getting up from his desk, while another behind him was already pulling a machine pistol from a rack. That’s what killed him, for as he turned, Peach did not hesitate. A short burst of fire sent him slamming back into the weapons rack whilst the other man began shrieking, ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!’ and stabbed his hands in the air, his eyes closed. Whilst the survivor was cuffed, Langstrom and the others moved on through, into the cell blocks.
Just then, Braddock rejoined Saul, so he selected some of the scenes he was currently observing in his head and put them up on the screens. Without comment Braddock strapped himself down in a chair, laid his weapon on his lap, and gazed at the changing images with fatigue-reddened eyes.
Saul enjoyed observing the steady military efficiency of it all. Anyone inside the complex made a wrong move, and they died on the spot. After Langstrom had finished, twenty-eight guards occupied the cells, though one cell containing five served as a temporary morgue. Langstrom released forty prisoners, some of whom were now detailed to help others over to the barracks infirmary.
‘Could your men have taken them?’ Saul turned to Braddock.
‘Huh?’ Braddock’s head jerked up, betraying the fact that he’d dozed off. He shook himself awake in irritation, then said, ‘The idea was to avoid a fire fight.’
‘Get some sleep, Braddock,’ Saul urged him. ‘Go and join Hannah – I’m sure there’s room on that hammock for the both of you.’
‘What about you?’
What about him? Yes, he felt utterly weary, but his mind had not slowed down at all. Gradually he was embracing more and more of the overall function of his area of the station: its cams, microphones, motion and heat sensors becoming his extended senses, and its readerguns his immune system. By the same analogy the robots had become his eyes and hands. It was as if, during the initial stages of his taking over this area, he had dissipated himself throughout the station network. To him the station had originally felt messy, bits and pieces not integrated as a whole, but now it felt like an extension of himself.
‘I’ll be fine, Braddock,’ he assured him.
Even as he spoke, he watched Langstrom moving out of the cell block, watched released prisoners heading for Accommodation Sixteen, and noted the space plane at last rising over Earth’s horizon. He was simultaneously refining his robots’ attack programs, and making layered plans about how to deal with the impending assault. It all depended on where the incoming troops penetrated the station.
‘Okay, I’ll sleep,’ agreed Braddock, wearily unstrapping himself from the chair and propelling himself off to join Hannah. Saul watched him go; watched how careful he was not to wake her as he lay down on the wide hammock beside her.
Now that he wasn’t fighting for his life, Saul decided it was perhaps time to prepare for an option that until then had remained only in the back of his mind. He allowed his senses to range across the station, bypassing the Political Office and zeroing in on an area neither he nor Smith had so far paid much attention to, yet had been of great interest to Malden.
The wheel of Argus Station was interrupted – a quarter section missing from the rim – and below that break, attached to the asteroid itself, sat the Mars Traveller fusion engine. Through various cams in the locality, Saul now studied this behemoth further.
A section of the asteroid had been ground flat, then layered, three metres thick, with the foam composite on which the engine framework rested. This was just a secondary shock-absorber, since the first impact of the engine firing was sustained by the massive hydraulic shock absorbers positioned evenly about the framework, and secured to plates bolted directly onto the asteroid itself. From nearby housings, built into the lattice walls and girder structures, a great number of ducts, cables and pipes fed in just above this secondary layer and connected to the spherical fusion reactors used for start-up, and for maintaining the nozzle fields of the combustion chambers. Above the reactors stood pairs of large cylindrical fuel tanks, containing respectively liquid deuterium and tritium talc. Above these again were the dome-shaped pellet-aggregation plants, and above them the six fusion-combustion chambers rose in a rectangular cluster, each surrounded at its rear by fuser lasers and the deuterium–tritium injector guns. The whole massive structure stood half a kilometre tall, secured in place by a web of steel and a framework of I-beams, all of it fixed with integral pivot points so that the engine would be allowed to move against its shock absorbers.
When this thing was up and running, deuterium droplets sprayed into the aggregation plants, where they froze, and were next electrostatically coated with tritium dust. The resulting microspheres were then conveyed to the injectors, to be fired into each combustion chamber. Once a sphere reached the chamber’s centre, it was briefly captured in a magnetic bottle, then targeted with the beams from high-intensity stacked gallium-arsenide lasers. With each ignition, the bottle expanded to form a tubular containment field, focusing the resulting blast out of the rear of the engine. The lasers fired, igniting fusion, then this process repeated itself a hundredth of a second later, and from then on kept repeating. The resulting plasma explosion from the engine provided thrust measurable in millions of tonnes.
Saul ran a diagnostic check through the Traveller engine, just to assess its present condition. As he had learned from Malden, it had still enough fuel to hurl the space station down against the surface of the Earth with catastrophic consequences, or even to throw it out of Earth’s orbit altogether, and take it up to an appreciable portion of 1 per cent of light speed. He received some dodgy readings from two of the injectors in a combustion chamber, but that’s why they installed the chambers in an array of six. If one started to go wrong it simply shut down, while the rest would keep on working. The only other problems seemed to be the cooling system, which was frozen solid, and how frangible some of the engine’s components were at such a low temperature. This meant the engine could not be fired up at once, but would require several hours of warming up, during which process further faults might emerge.
Saul carefully considered the options opening up here, aware of being poised on the brink of some understanding that still eluded his grasp. When he finally transmitted the code that would start the engine-warming process, it seemed like he had made a decision impossible to recall. He waited then for some response from Smith but, after a minute passed with no reaction, he knew Smith could not have been paying attention to the engine. Saul finally let out a long slow breath, and withdrew.
Quiet now, alone at the centre of it all, Saul peered down at his hands, which were resting in his lap. He noticed a large bruise on the back of the right hand, and how thin they looked. Inset amidst numerous other controls on the console before him was a big keyboard, with virtuality half-glove indents on either side of it. He already knew this console from the inside, and directly manipulated the flows of information it con
trolled. Never again, in this place, would he have to physically press a button, shift a pointer, or open up frames in virtual displays. What use were his hands?
He raised them off his lap to inspect them more closely, and noticed how they started shaking. What was wrong with them? He knew his body was exhausted, and injured, but what was the problem here? He needed to find out, for whatever his present disconnection from his body, he couldn’t manage to do without it. Right now, if his physical self died, he died too.
Deciding to take a risk, for it seemed Smith was still perfectly content to await the arrival of the assault force, he began closing down his connections to the station network – which seemed almost like deliberately blinding himself, blocking his ears, numbing his senses. By slow degrees that took many minutes, he reduced himself, returning to the primitive level of humanity. The process seemed like trying to cram something into a box too small for it, but eventually he was there in that box, and it wasn’t comfortable at all.
His head ached horribly, both inside and out. His stomach felt tight, his mouth dry, and something seemed to be twisting internally below the iron knot of his knife wound. It took him a moment to recognize the quite simple signals his body was sending him: a full bladder and a thirst so intense that it felt like something solid stapling the back of his throat to his neck bones. He felt sick too, but he reckoned that must be what remained after the hunger pangs departed. Also his back, his legs and his buttocks ached, and if he had been in Earth gravity he would have assumed this discomfort resulted from remaining seated for so long, but it was the result of his body remaining utterly motionless. With a huge effort of will, he loosened the straps securing him to the chair, and propelled himself upwards. Dizziness overwhelmed him and, failing to press his adhesive soles to the floor, he rose to the ceiling. One hand raised against it propelled him back down sufficiently for him to grab the console edge and press his feet floorwards.
With a further effort of will, Saul took firm control of his body, ignoring discomfort and just moving. Shambling like a reanimated corpse, he headed over to the door leading to the toilets, again finding it an effort just to tear the adhesive soles of his survival suit from the floor. Once inside, he paused for a moment, unable to make up his mind what to do first. He chose the toilet, attaching the hose and urinating for so long that he felt he might shrivel up and drop to the floor. The pleasure of the relief was practically euphoric. Next he went to the sink – deep with an incurving rim to hold water in at practically nil gravity, and an extractor bowl above – turned on the tap, and then dipped his head to sip water that shifted gelatinously. Not enough. Mouth closed around acidic metal he allowed the pressure to shove the water down his throat. He only stopped when his thirst started to give way to a further twinge of nausea.
Standing upright again, he gazed at himself in the mirror. His eyes, but for the pupils, were still utterly red, which seemed odd because he felt sure that should have been fading by now. At least they were no longer a dark wine-red, but more an albino pink. The glued and stapled wounds traversing his skull were obviously healing effectively, with a fuzz of pale hair shoving up scabs of dry blood and wound glue, like new grass raising the leaves scattered on a lawn. He looked painfully thin, even the bristles on his face failing to hide how closely the skin clung to the cheekbones and how evident the skull beneath. Conclusion: he needed to take better care of this storage vessel containing part of his mind. He turned, headed to the door, and stepped out.
Hannah stood by the console, her gaze flicking from screen to screen. One showed the approaching space plane, while the other two kept cycling through a limited selection of views of Earth: Minsk spaceport, Brussels, London and another urban sprawl she did not recognize. She turned as she heard Saul exit the toilet, pleased to see him showing at least that sign of human frailty.
‘I brought this for you.’ She pointed to a plastic tray resting on the console.
He moved over, trying but not quite succeeding in hiding his physical debility, sat down in the chair and strapped himself in. He lifted the transparent cover from the tray to find noodles mixed with cubes of vat meat, chopped-up local vegetables, grown in Hydroponics, pancake rolls and a dipping sauce, accompanied by a steaming double espresso.
‘They live well here,’ he remarked.
‘Le Roque’s private stash,’ she replied. ‘He’s got a fridge full of luxuries, which I bet came up in crates listed as essential supplies.’
‘You cynic, you.’
‘Who isn’t these days?’
‘Have you eaten?’ he asked.
‘Some . . . but I’ll have some more later.’
After being woken by Braddock stretching himself out next to her on the hammock, and then lying there for some while, still reluctant to move, Hannah had got up to investigate Le Roque’s large fridge. Almost shocked by the bounty inside, she had stuffed herself with cold food until a sense of guilt compelled her to stop, assuaging her guilt by preparing the tray for Saul. She was now glad she had, since borderline malnutrition, initial surgery, followed by injury, then further surgery, had all combined to knock him down. But she rather thought it was the hardware in his skull that was sucking the physical bulk from him, almost fast enough to be visible. It seemed a fire now burned inside his head – one she herself had ignited.
‘What’s that?’ She nodded towards the screen as the urban sprawl she did not recognize appeared once again.
‘The Luberon Sprawl in southern France,’ he explained. ‘Rather disconcerting to find a disconnected part of my own mind calling up that image. It shows how I am as much inside the machine as the machine is in me.’
He picked up a combined fork-and-spoon implement and shovelled some noodles into his mouth, making, it seemed to Hannah, a deliberate effort to chew slowly, swallow carefully, and then pause between mouthfuls. Both he and Hannah had been gradually starving since they had fled the underground bunker, so if he bolted such rich food he would probably throw it all up over the console. But then he wasn’t unique in his hunger; billions were starving down on Earth, and many millions dying of hunger. He glanced at the screens as he ate and his expression went blank, oddly disconnected. The image cycle disrupted, to be replaced by a randomized feed of views inside and outside the station.
‘You were more human, just for a moment, but now you’re back in the system.’
Even when she had known Saul as a lover, he had always seemed one step away from being truly human, but not in a way that had seemed dysfunctional. He had been strangely unencumbered by the burdens of physical or mental weakness and the millstone of emotion, but now he was partly machine, these traits seemed to be sharply emphasized. This distanced her from him further and, beyond his intention of taking the satellite network out of Committee control, she did not even know his ultimate aims. Perhaps they involved delivering some payback for the billions suffering down below, but was that all he actually intended?
He glanced at her, then deliberately seemed to be fighting something, emotion returning to his face. He turned and gazed at the screens, a sadness, a regret, filling his expression.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked, finally.
‘About how it all went wrong,’ he said. ‘And also of how it was inevitable.’
‘Inevitable?’ She sat up straighter.
‘Yup, just human nature.’
That was so dismissive of human nature, she felt the need to challenge it.
‘I think it’s a little more complicated than that.’
‘Really?’
She gazed at him intently, gathering her mental resources, remembering things she had considered over many years but never allowed herself to voice out loud. ‘Crises used by politicians as excuses to stifle freedom, kill democracy and grab yet more power. Terrorism, energy crises, financial meltdown, climate catastrophe . . . all, of course, global so those same politicians could extend their power globally. Everyone made obedient to the state in pursuit of the so-called gr
eater good.’
‘And your point is?’
‘Well,’ she was on a roll now, ‘all those crises strangely seemed to disappear once the state had gained a sufficient stranglehold on the populations it was supposed to serve. Bit of a joke, really, when fossil fuels genuinely started to run out and we hit the human population upslope. Real crises then, and what was the response? To expand the state into a behemoth even more wasteful than the people it governed.’
He just sat there silently waiting for her conclusions.
‘Less of such waste and they might have actually developed the appropriate technologies to handle the problem.’
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘you’re an optimist.’
‘Perhaps.’ She shrugged, feeling uncomfortable with that label.
‘We’ve got fusion power, remember, Hannah. What we actually needed was a technology that’s been around for a couple of centuries. It’s called birth control.’ He shook his head and gazed pensively at the screens. ‘The real problem is manswarm.’
‘The fault here is ideology,’ she said, feeling sudden doubt upon hearing him use such a dismissive label. The Committee was very definitely a bad thing, but humans were better than that – could be better than that.
‘What?’
‘You know, the forerunners of the Committee weren’t interested in population control. They weren’t interested in making things better, because people who are well off and comfortable wouldn’t be likely to vote for the crappy ideologies they promulgated. Urban sprawls packed with ZAs were perfectly in tune with their interests.’
She had never spoken to him like this before, even in past times when they had lain in bed together. But of course, even during such intimacy, talk of this kind would have been dangerous, their words recorded and reviewed on the following day by a political officer.
‘But none of them prevented people using birth control – only religions tried to do that.’
‘They deliberately created underclasses and gave them a financial incentive to breed,’ she insisted.
