by Neal Asher
‘True,’ he said, ‘but in China, in the twentieth, they actively discouraged breeding, yet China still went into the twenty-first with a population of over a billion. Sorry, but that doesn’t cut it, Hannah. In the end, you can’t engineer a society to go against four billion years of evolutionary instinct.’
His pessimism scared her. Okay for someone to be a pessimist when he was just among billions of other powerless human beings, but it certainly didn’t seem such a good thing when that person might soon be able to seize control of technology capable of slaughtering millions, or even billions.
‘There’s no light in your world, is there?’ she commented. ‘None at all.’
Hannah didn’t know how to take this conversation any further.
The water from the shower hit like needles, before it spattered and diffused in slow motion, filling the air all around him. Across the transparent shower door it ran as thick as jelly, before being sucked into holes in the three walls of the shower and even in the door, linked by vacuum pipes running through the glass. Without this constant suction, he imagined it would be quite easy to drown taking a shower in near-zero gravity. Even as it was, the moisture hanging heavy in the air made it difficult to breathe.
After washing the rest of him, he applied a soapy sponge carefully to his head, wiping away sodden scabs, a couple of wound staples and flakes of wound glue from his scalp. Flicking these off the sponge he watched them swirl about him until sucked away. Next he turned his attention to the knife wound below his ribs. In itself it was relatively small, but the pain lingered, and kept him mindful of the damage that had been done there. After that he just luxuriated till Le Roque’s shower abruptly shut down. He was then blasted with hot air but, not prepared to wait for it to do its job, he pushed himself out of the booth and grabbed up a towel.
‘I think these should fit.’ Hannah gestured to some items of clothing she’d draped over the double hammock. They consisted of an undersuit, cut off at knee and elbow, and a vacuum combat suit equipped with expansion seams enabling it to cover a range of sizes.
Saul pulled on the undersuit, then thrust his feet into the integral boots of the VC suit before releasing the fabric concertinaed at the knee in order to get the right leg length, then finally tightening the upper section around his torso. It was a useful hard-wearing garment fitted with armour pads and inlaid shock and penetration mesh, suitable for stopping any missile from a plastic bullet downwards.
And it certainly seemed likely that he would be needing such protection.
Once the space plane was only four hours out, he attempted putting some satellites on an intercept course, but those aboard were obviously checking satellite positions constantly, and the craft made a sufficient deviation before he could even apply any serious acceleration. Having expected this, he swivelled one satellite, its laser still functional, and fired on the plane, probing all the way along it to look for weaknesses. No result, however, and infrared imaging indicated the point heat dispersing almost immediately.
Next he selected a communications satellite positioned within a few kilometres of the plane’s forward course, and shot at it with the laser until he hit something, like a high-density battery. The satellite flew apart, hurling fragments in the plane’s path: chunks of metal, ceramic and plastic, that it couldn’t hope to avoid. When the plane reached this debris half an hour later, Saul observed a series of impacts on its outer skin, but they neither slowed nor diverted the craft, and he had no idea how much damage they might have inflicted. All this while, Smith did nothing to stop him, which seemed merely to confirm Saul’s earlier speculation about the true mission of those aboard the approaching space plane.
Meanwhile, Langstrom had been moving his men in all around the Political Office, which was a pill-shaped building eight storeys high, both its top and bottom ends terminating against the exterior lattice walls running between two arcoplexes. Simultaneously processing numerous different viewpoints, Saul watched four of Langstrom’s troops hurtle for cover as a continuous fusillade, at two thousand rounds a minute, shredded structural metal behind them. It seemed Smith had no intention of coming quietly.
Langstrom cursed long and hard, before opening communications with Saul. ‘We’re going to have to cause a lot of damage here. He’s got those fuckers posted at every entrance and, knowing him, probably all through the building.’
‘Just keep them covered for now,’ Saul advised.
Now feeling suitably clad, he picked up the suit helmet and a shoulderbag full of items that would soon be necessary, and headed for the door leading out of Le Roque’s apartment. Hannah instantly fell into step behind him. Out in the Tech Central control room, Saul checked that Chang and the twins were now back at their consoles, ready to assess damage, or to move station staff to safer locations. Braddock turned towards him, eyeing his new clothing doubtfully.
Saul glanced up at a screen, confirming that the approaching space plane was now only two hours out. This business needed to be resolved before the plane got here – which meant Smith had to die.
‘Hannah,’ he said, ‘I want you to keep watch here. Braddock, you’re ready?’
‘I am,’ the soldier replied.
‘Then we go.’
Braddock and Hannah exchanged an unreadable look, then he handed her one of his collection of machine pistols. She armed it and glanced over at the three seated at their consoles, who looked back at her with some trepidation. Perhaps they thought Saul had just issued their execution order.
‘So you still intend going out to join this Langstrom,’ she stated.
‘Certainly,’ he replied. ‘If I can get direct physical access to the Political Office, I can end this pretty quickly.’
‘This entire situation might have been manufactured just to lure you out there.’
‘Let’s hope not,’ he said. In reality, without Langstrom they didn’t stand a chance.
‘You’re sure?’ she insisted.
‘Sure enough.’ He turned towards the door.
He couldn’t be totally sure, of course, but who could be totally sure about anything? Perhaps undergoing such a dramatic mental transformation could have impaired his judgement. Maybe he had missed some secret communication, some covert agreement between Langstrom and Smith, or between Langstrom and his officers, or perhaps they were following some plan put together long before he arrived here? He just could not know what was going on inside their heads – or, at least, beyond his enhanced ability to read the outward expression of their thoughts. Just as he had already told her: he wasn’t omnipresent nor omnipotent. Yet.
Out in the lobby, they crossed the bloodstained floor. Braddock had been keeping himself busy by dragging the corpses into a storeroom off to one side. Later they would go the way of all corpses here: fed through the digesters that also processed all the sewage and other organic waste, the water drawn off and recycled, the residual compost spread below the twisted trees of the Arboretum. During the planning stages of this project, the idea had been that all materials imported up here must be recycled. Even the ash from the smelting plants was turned into a conglomerate building material. However, this hadn’t been entirely successful and, like a body ridding itself of accumulated toxins, some materials ended up ejected into space within the first year. Later, as demand for foamed metals increased, and ore was even shipped up from Earth, more and more waste was thus ejected, creating meteorite streaks across Earth’s skies.
‘So you want me to take this role,’ said Braddock.
‘Certainly,’ Saul replied. ‘I leave it all to your judgement.’ He eyed the soldier keenly. ‘I’ll also be watching them through the readerguns and robots.’ Some of those robots were now armed with weapons that Langstrom’s troops had earlier abandoned.
They headed for the main cageway running down through Tech Central, then after closing up their suit helmets, passed through an airlock into the same tubeway in which he had fought Smith earlier. They soon passed the two wrecked robo
ts, and the sight of blood spatters decorating the walls, which started the hard lump of Saul’s knife wound throbbing in painful recall.
Eventually the tubeway extended beyond its wall panels to give an unhindered view out into the open structure beside Arcoplex One. Saul glanced aside to confirm the presence of the robots he’d summoned, then picked up his pace, propelling himself forward in a gliding, almost skating stride calculated not to raise his feet too high off the floor. He could have instead just flung himself forward until he encountered something solid, but leaving himself no way to quickly change direction, should there be hostiles nearby, did not seem like a good idea.
The tubeway ended at a junction already completed, a fattened cylindrical chamber with track-switching gear set in the floor. The worm of a stationary train blocked the branch they wanted, but they entered a pullway running alongside it. After exiting at the other end, a few more minutes of travel brought them into unfinished tubeway again. Now the robots were moving along the lattice walls immediately above and below them, like wrought-iron apes. After a further ten minutes of such progress, human figures started becoming visible waiting beside the entrance into the cell complex.
Checking via numerous cameras, Saul identified Langstrom, Sergeants Mustafa and Jack, and the big blonde woman they called Peach. Braddock moved ahead, his machine pistol raised. Saul took his time, however, as he brought the robots in closer. When he finally drew near, one quadruped robot that seemed to have bits of both lobster and earth-mover in its ancestry landed on the beams of the tubeway cage above, whilst numerous other robots became plainly visible beyond it. The four humans looked up pensively, then turned their attention back to Saul. He studied their immediate reaction: the tightening of hands on the weapons slung in front of them, their shock quickly hidden, though Sergeant Jack also took an involuntary step backwards.
On receiving a radio query through his suit, Saul linked up coms.
‘Alan Saul,’ began Langstrom, as Saul stepped up beside Braddock.
‘The same,’ Saul replied.
‘What do you want?’ Langstrom asked.
‘Is that a question general or specific?’
Langstrom shrugged.
‘Generally, I want to be free of the Committee. Specifically, I want to get into the Political Office – and to a particular location.’ He unhooked his shoulder bag and passed it over to Braddock. ‘Braddock, your new commander here, will explain further where I want to go.’ He fixed Langstrom with a steady gaze, noticed a flash of rebellion quickly suppressed, then he turned and strolled away, to apparently gaze unconcernedly through the lattice gaps at the distant arc of Earth. But he was still watching carefully through numerous electronic eyes, including one set belonging to a robot armed with a ten-bore machine gun.
Braddock retrieved a laptop from the shoulderbag, placed it down on a girder, then peremptorily gestured Langstrom over. The man stared at Saul’s back, then, perhaps realizing you don’t argue with the chicken farmer about your position in the pecking order, he moved over to stand beside Braddock. After a brief hesitation, the other three followed him.
‘Here,’ said Braddock, calling up a schematic of the Political Office and outlining one particular section in red.
‘The transformer room,’ Langstrom noted. ‘But why there? You could cut their power from outside, but it’d make no difference. They’ve got hydrox generators in there, and enough fuel for at least twenty days.’
‘We don’t intend to cut their power.’
‘What, then?’
‘Did you question your previous commander like this?’ Braddock enquired.
‘Not a healthy option.’
‘What makes you think it’s a healthy option now?’
Langstrom shrugged. ‘Stupid optimism?’
‘Okay, here’s the deal. We’re all as good as dead now if the Committee regains control of the station.’ He surveyed the faces of those around him. ‘All of us.’
‘We get that,’ said Langstrom.
Braddock lowered his voice, with a slight nod in Saul’s direction, and hissed, ‘He look human to you? Well, he ain’t. He’s all that’s stands between us and the Committee, and we do it like he says.’ He shook his head. ‘He don’t need us – he doesn’t need anyone here on this station. We’re just a convenience to him, for now. So let’s talk about how we get him where he wants to go, shall we?’
Saul hadn’t coached Braddock on how he should present this, but essentially the soldier’s words were the truth. He now allowed his attention to stray away from them, ensuring his robots were all in position, checking to see if Smith was in any way responding. Nothing evident as yet. Saul tried to discover any holes in his own reasoning, but could find none. In the virtual world, Smith had lost the fight about Saul’s point of penetration, but even if that didn’t happen again this time, their battle for the Political Office should result in that safety protocol that had kicked in before, kicking in again and disabling the readerguns. This should give Langstrom the time to seize control of the place.
‘Okay, we’re done,’ said Langstrom abruptly.
Returning most of his attention to his present surroundings, Saul turned to see Braddock close the laptop and shove it back into the shoulderbag.
‘Shall we go?’ asked Langstrom.
Saul nodded. As Langstrom stepped through the skeleton of the tubeway and launched himself into the station structure, he followed, with Braddock close behind him. Progress then consisted of leaping from I-beam to I-beam, until they began to discern the lights of the Political Office amid the tangled gloom. Whilst they advanced, Langstrom continued issuing instructions, so that by the time they arrived on the lower lattice leading to the ground floor, still more of his men were ready waiting. Saul had meanwhile summoned closer some of his robots, though he hoped not to need them. In terms of utterly ruthless calculation, they were more useful to him – and more trustworthy – than Langstrom or any of his men.
16
Recycling Talent
For the first fifty years, fusion reactors had required highly specialized fuels like lithium pellets, tritium microspheres, Bellington glass or Islington lead. However, the scientists continued to work diligently, and eventually attained their next goal: a reactor using full-sphere laser compression to cause fusion in a wide range of materials. But even these reactors were limited to fusing solid materials, and the final goal of devising a water or gas reactor seemed permanently out of reach. However, finally, a scientist working under Committee political oversight made the breakthroughs that resulted in the water reactor. A simplistic explanation is that he merely froze the water, thus turning it into a solid, but it is still to be revealed how water is kept frozen while being introduced into a reactor core as hot as the sun. The same scientist went on to create the first gas fuser, able to fuse hydrogen down into iron. Though these were brilliant achievements, the identity of the scientist is known only to the Committee, and Subnet rumours claim that, after he showed signs of burnout, his political director considered him too dangerous to live, so his final resting place became a community digester.
Antares Base
The airlock seemed to be taking for ever to cycle. Perhaps it was malfunctioning? No, the ready light now came on, so Var pulled down the handle and pushed open the door. She could grab Kaskan, pull him back inside. But, as she stepped outside, she realized she was already too late.
Ricard must have had the shepherd waiting right outside, and it was already retreating through a cloud of dust, hauling its prize up towards it. Kaskan wasn’t even struggling, just hung inert in tentacles straining to wring him out like a wet dishrag.
‘Build a monument . . . uh . . . something,’ he managed to say to her over com.
His voice sounded strained, and at that moment she noticed the horrible angle of his leg. So far it had not managed to penetrate his suit, but then his helmet fell away, with a great gout of vapour exploding outwards around his exposed skull.
At that point he chose to manually detonate the seismic charge.
Light flashed underneath the shepherd, and Kaskan was just gone. The blast wave picked up Var and slammed her back against the airlock. The robot’s body rose vertically, its legs blown off out to each side. Something smacked into Var’s chest and she peered down at a wormish segment of one of the shepherd’s tentacles. She batted it away and looked back up again, but no sign of either the robot or Kaskan now remained. By detonating right underneath it, the charge could have propelled the robot’s body for kilometres, while Kaskan himself would have instantly turned to slurry. Her back still against the door, Var slid down into a crouch, but then felt it moving, so stood up again and stepped away.
Lopomac came out first, then Carol, and for a moment they stood in silence staring at the wave of dust rolling away from them. Then Var broke into their thoughts.
‘For that to mean something,’ she said, ‘we have to succeed now, so let’s move.’
She broke into a steady lope, making sure that the others were keeping with her. Ahead, the wave of dust broke over the walls of Hex Three, then continued beyond it, dimming further the already waning light of the setting sun. Kaskan’s sacrifice, Var realized, had crystallized the hard determination within her: Ricard was not going to win. They were going to survive here without him and his enforcers, or they were not going to survive at all. If he did not respond in the way Kaskan had predicted, the power was going to stay turned off. Better they all died now than by whatever selection process Ricard had in mind, or by the gradual collapse of the base’s systems later on. She knew that maybe she wasn’t being fair to others, but, damnit, this must end – and soon.
The damage she had already caused to Hex Three soon became evident. They rounded the structure to reach the only remaining airlock – the one into the garage – which took them nearly a quarter of an hour to get through. She entered the garage first, with her machine pistol cocked just in case Ricard had left one of his men behind, but there was no one there.
