The Departure to-1

by Neal Asher

  ‘Smith was stronger than me, to begin with, then weaker,’ Saul said, mentally instructing the airlock to open ahead of them now that the spidergun was through. ‘My integration process with Janus is still far from complete, but even so, that should not result in me being able to connect this way to my autonomous nervous system.’

  ‘The interface is growing.’

  He nodded as he entered the airlock ahead of her, and whilst they stood inside, waiting for it to pressurize, he mulled over the implications. Only when they were back inside the arcoplex did he speak again.

  ‘Malden’s was static,’ he said.

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘Mine, however, is growing a neural matrix throughout my brain.’ He paused. ‘What is the organism based upon?’

  ‘Your own DNA,’ she replied.

  He turned and stared at her. ‘So no rejection problems.’

  She nodded. ‘It uses your own neural stem cells and grows its matrix from them. After just one day, the connectivity between your organic brain and the hardware in your skull was about the same as Malden’s. Now it should be about twice that.’

  ‘When does it stop growing?’

  ‘Only when it matches up to the demand you place on the hardware. If you make further demands of it, the matrix will grow further to accommodate that.’

  It struck him as more than likely that such bioware was not on general release. If it had been, then Smith would have acquired it.

  ‘It’s a prototype, then,’ he stated.

  As they propelled themselves up towards the arcoplex spindle, then back along it towards the asteroid-side endcap, Saul quickly tracked down a number of key individuals inside the station. Robert Le Roque, the Technical Controller of the station, remained in a cell and seemed unhurt, and by checking records Saul discovered that he had not been subjected to inducement. Commander Langstrom was currently in the crowded barracks hospital, his knee undergoing a scan. This hospital itself was presently overrun by casualties.

  ‘Langstrom,’ Saul addressed him through the hospital intercom, ‘I want you to collect Le Roque from the cell block and both of you to be in Tech Central within ten minutes.’

  A similar summons soon had other necessary staff heading up from their cabins to the control room. Chang and the twins he could locate nowhere, until he replayed recorded data that tracked their progress from the cell block back to Tech Central. They had ensconced themselves in an unassigned cabin, after looping the cam feed to perpetually indicate the same cabin as empty. To their joint surprise, he summoned them too.

  Even as he and Hannah arrived at the far endcap, Saul registered a cycling of the airlock they had just departed, and glanced back to see the first of the captives already entering the arcoplex. As the pair exited through the second airlock, he considered an old story that might have informed Hannah’s decision about Messina and the rest: how German civilians had been forced to bury the concentration-camp dead. He felt that her first decision was just, and he would go with what she decided next just so long as it did not endanger the Argus Station or themselves. Once the airlock had closed, he instituted another protocol.

  ‘The airlocks at this end of the cylinder are sealed now,’ he explained, as they descended to the surface of the asteroid. ‘But perhaps I’ll place guards here too.’

  Stirring up eddies of dust, their gecko boots did not function as well on asteroidal rock strewn with flakes of stone, so they proceeded slowly and with care. Lifting his gaze from his feet, Saul glanced over to his left, where a construction robot was busy scooping up the last of the corpses here. Next he viewed their destination: a steel chamber in the outer rim where the corpses were all neatly stacked, the same way round, so that one wall seemed to consist entirely of boot soles. He could have ordered the robots to hurl them out into space but, now that he had cut all supply lines from Earth, even corpses had become a potential resource.

  Reaching an airlock in the base of Tech Central, which lay above the lattice walls, offered a clear view out into space. Saul caught Hannah’s shoulder and turned her so that she could look straight across the station wheel, as far as the outer ring where the docks were positioned. These were now effectively the nose of the enormous spacecraft this place had become. He then gestured off to the right of the docks, where the Moon loomed large in the blackness.

  ‘Three more turns around the Earth and we’ll be ready for a low-fuel course change around the Moon,’ Saul explained. ‘I’ll then fire up the Traveller engine once more to boost us on the correct course.’

  They finally entered Tech Central, shedding their helmets whilst waiting for the spidergun to follow them through the lock.

  ‘I was about to remark that we’re free of the Committee now,’ he said. ‘But, of course, you’re not free of it, because you still have that decision to make.’ Hannah’s expression was pained as he continued. ‘That decision aside, what will you do now there’s no political officers to instruct you?’

  A look of panic fitted across her face – perhaps signifying another of her attacks, or the reaction of someone who, having lived a life without choices, was now being confronted with them.

  ‘Arcoplex Two contains state-of-the-art research and surgical facilities, in fact even more than you had down on Earth,’ he noted. ‘Whilst you decide precisely what you want to do, perhaps you can occupy yourself there?’

  ‘More than I had down on Earth?’ Hannah echoed numbly.

  He nodded, glad that the option was now firmly implanted in her mind.

  ‘And if I want to return to Earth?’ she managed.

  ‘That option stays open. A space plane would need half a full fuel load just to counter our present velocity, and one could be fuelled and made ready before we reach the Moon.’ He paused contemplatively. ‘But I wonder if you’d really want to return to Earth aboard a plane that would need to be crewed by Inspectorate military?’

  ‘No,’ she replied firmly. ‘So this station definitely isn’t going back.’

  ‘It isn’t.’ He shook his head. ‘Mars, I feel, is just going to be a stopping point on a very long journey. You need to decide how you’ll fit in here, now. That means more decisions and choices for you – they come with the territory known as freedom.’

  ‘Will anyone really be free aboard this station?’

  ‘Freedom is not an absolute.’

  21

  All the Lovely People . . .

  A belief was once prevalent in ‘modern’ societies that the killer of humans, the murderer, is an aberration. At least this was what the rulers wished their subjects to believe, though, as they ordered their soldiers to war, they knew that the veneer called ‘civilization’ was as thin as whatever ideology they themselves espoused. The truth is that an aversion to killing anyone outside of immediate family is a product of societal indoctrination (and then only in that slightly more than half the population who are not sociopaths), whilst within immediate family it is merely the product of that contradiction in terms called ‘genetic altruism’. It is in fact a harsh reality that he who believes killers are an aberration is also he who has the boot planted firmly on his neck; whilst amongst those who rule the aberration is the one who is not a sociopath, and therefore reluctant to kill.

  Antares Base

  Some cams had survived the grenades, but when she saw the extent of the wreckage through them, she almost wished they hadn’t. All that valuable equipment destroyed: computers, hardware, infrastructure, and items like the crawler lying wrecked out there – all of it vital to their future survival here on Mars. Through the cams she’d also seen an enforcer crawl out of that same crawler, issuing vapour trails from his breached suit. She watched as he managed about three metres away from the wreck, before he started suffocating and desperately clawing at the ground.

  Using what cover he could, one of the three enforcers risked loping out to his fallen comrade, and gently turning him over on to his back. What he then saw through the man’s visor told him all
he needed to know, and he scurried back to join his fellows as they entered the garage through the open crawler lock. It was crucial that they enter the garage, for Var now needed it open to the Martian atmosphere for all of her plan to work. She had expected them to go in through one of the adjacent bulkhead doors, but of course there was no need now.

  Once inside the garage, they didn’t resort to grenades, because here there were so few opportunities for an ambush. Soon they were out again and moving round close to the wall, towards the next window. From her perch up beside the roof hatch, Var felt another blast as they destroyed the window, then through a roof cam she observed a further plume of wasted air. More explosions as the enforcers secured that section too, then appeared outside again, edging up to the last exterior window.

  ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘they’re now going into the final bit.’

  ‘I’m not sure I can do this,’ Carol protested abruptly.

  Var peered across at her, but could think of nothing useful to say.

  Minutes ticked away as the enforcers searched this last section, then one of the snipers waiting outside the base stood up and loped in. Obviously, now that the enforcers had searched all the outer sections, Ricard thought it safe to send in Silberman as his deputy, though apparently it still wasn’t safe enough for Ricard himself. From inside the hex, a fuzzy cam view showed the three enforcers on the move. Var tried tracking them for a moment, then gave up and switched to a workable view of the corridor leading straight towards the reactor room below her. About a minute later the first of the enforcers stepped into sight, with the other two close behind. At the door they hesitated, and turned as Silberman joined them, waving a hand to complement whatever instructions he was giving them over com.

  ‘This is it,’ said Var. ‘They’re right outside.’ Her stomach felt tight as a rock. ‘Carol, I want you to crawl over to the edge – up there.’ She pointed to that side of the hex beyond which Ricard had positioned himself. ‘Silberman is now with our three enforcers, but Ricard himself is still outside. He’s got a scoped rifle on a tripod, so has every chance of killing you if you show yourself, so don’t take a shot at him unless he actually stands up and starts heading in.’

  That put Carol safely out of the way, since if she was not sure she could do this, she might be a liability in the coming firefight.

  ‘Okay.’ Carol’s jerky nod of agreement set her swaying on her rope.

  Firing erupted: the chatter of an assault rifle accompanied by the sounds of ricochets inside the reactor room. Var glanced down and saw five bullet holes stitched across the door. Air began screaming through them, and the corridor outside began fogging up, those in there lost from view.

  ‘Lopomac?’

  He was peering up at the electronic control panel alongside the roof hatch.

  ‘Not yet,’ he said.

  The shrieking continued, slowly reducing in intensity, until it became like the wailing of wind over a desolate landscape. In the corridor the fog began to clear, and Var could now see the enforcers poised by the bulkhead door. They had laid their assault rifles on the floor and were now holding machine pistols. Plastic ammo, just as predicted. Var momentarily wondered if those assessing her in her childhood had chosen right about her education. Perhaps they should have trained her for the Inspectorate military instead. She felt some gratification in having got it right every time, yet her thinking all just seemed like the logical working of a machine, so there was no joy in it.

  ‘Now,’ said Lopomac.

  He keyed something into the control panel, waited a moment, then tried again. Outside, at that instant, one of the enforcers was handing his grenades over to Silberman. Var did not understand the reason until the same enforcer picked up one of the assault rifles, removed its ammunition clip and ejected the shell from the breech, then stepped over to the bulkhead door and balanced the tip of the barrel against the floor. Letting it go, he leapt back so the weapon toppled against the door. They’d obviously assumed this door might be electrified too.

  ‘Fuckit,’ growled Lopomac. ‘Fuckit!’

  ‘What is it?’ she asked.

  ‘Pump’s fucked.’

  He started working a handle back and forth till the hatch doors began to bulge downwards and, with a clonk, the seam opened. He tried the panel again, and this time was rewarded with the familiar hum of a hydraulic pump in action. Slowly the doors continued hingeing downwards.

  Immediately outside the bulkhead door below, the same enforcer tentatively stepped forward and tried the manual handle. The handle crunched over but, with the weight of the forklift pressing against it, the door would not lift from its seals, and therefore could not swing aside on its upper pivot. The enforcer drove his boot against it, but the door moved not at all.

  Var turned her attention elsewhere – time to move.

  She reached up around the rim of the hatch and, aided by the low Martian gravity, easily hauled herself up on to the roof. Carol pulled herself up almost simultaneously, with Lopomac immediately behind her. After they unclipped their climbing motors, Lopomac reattached the piton gun to the length of rope he had hung from and flicked over a switch on one side of it. This transmitted a low current to the pitons, operating micromotors inside them so as to withdraw their barbs. After a couple of tugs, he hauled up the ensuing tangle of rope and pitons. Meanwhile Var rechecked her visor screen, seeing all but one of the enforcers retreating along the corridor. The remaining one placed a grenade beside the lower rim of the door, then retreated too.

  ‘Hurry!’ she urged.

  Already at the external console, Lopomac first keyed in the instruction to close the hatch doors, then grabbed the external manual pump handle and started to work that too. Slowly they began to close up – just as the grenade detonated below, causing the roof to jerk up underneath them. Smoke instantly filled the corridor, so it took a moment for Var to check if the grenade had been successful. Fortunately it had not, and though the door itself was bent inwards at the bottom, there was not enough room for anyone to slip through.

  ‘That’s got it,’ said Lopomac, as the hatch finally sealed shut.

  ‘You go on,’ said Var, gesturing Carol over to the dust cowling along the edge of the roof. She herself began crawling on her belly towards another section of roof.

  ‘I’ll deal with the hatch,’ she said to Lopomac. ‘You put a piton in and give us a line.’

  The hatch above the reactor room was not the only access to the roof. A small vertical airlock sat directly over the garage, built in its previous incarnation when it had simply been a major storeroom. The hatch had allowed personnel access to the roof in order to make repairs to cams, lights and radio dishes, but it hadn’t been used in years, and even the ladder descending from it had been removed. On reaching it, Var thumbed its console whilst Lopomac drove in another piton. The console screen instantly warned her of a pressure differential, but she ran a reboot and it corrected the error to show no differential at all. Finding the manual lever stiff and the seal stuck, she cautiously got up on her knees to provide herself with more leverage, and heaved. The outer hatch eventually came up with a thin tearing sound, strips of torn seal hanging from it. She dropped down inside, and clinging to the upper section of ladder that had been left inside the airlock, she released the lever of the lower hatch, then paused to check image feed.

  Another grenade detonated by the bulkhead door leading into the reactor room. The blast sent the forklift skittering over to one side, and the door tumbling into the room beyond, where it slammed against one side of the reactor itself. Var winced – she’d have to check for damage – but at least Silberman and the others were still where she wanted them.

  ‘Any movement from Ricard?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Carol. ‘He’s keeping his head down.’

  ‘Lopomac, where’s that line?’

  ‘Coming.’ He dropped a coil of rope over the edge, then peered down towards her. She attached her climbing motor, then kicked
down on the hatch, once, twice, until it fell open, then as fast as she could she lowered herself into the garage underneath. After a moment, Lopomac joined her.

  ‘They’re in the reactor room,’ she explained, unshouldering her assault rifle and knocking off the safety. The enforcer who seemed always to get the shit jobs had been sent in first, the other two rapidly following.

  ‘Come on,’ said Var.

  She quickly opened a bulkhead door, leading into the next outer section, then in towards the reactor room beyond. Lopomac unshouldered his assault rifle and held it ready. By now Silberman himself was entering the reactor room. Of course, he would be puzzled: how had they sealed the door like that and yet apparently disappeared? As she reached the junction from which the corridor led up to the reactor room door, she waved Lopomac ahead. ‘When I give the word.’

  He still looked a bit sick, but nodded and moved over to the opposite side of the corridor entrance, resting his back against the wall, with his assault rifle braced before him.

  ‘The reactor?’ he queried.

  ‘Not in line of sight,’ she replied.

  That was true enough, but a stray round might still hit it. She just had to hope the imminent firefight damaged nothing vital, but it was a risk they had to take. Also backing against the wall with her rifle ready, she once more studied her visor screen.

  Silberman sat himself at the control console to work through the menu. After a second, she realized he must be turning the power back on to the rest of base. This accomplished, he stood, gestured to the other three and headed back towards the door. What would he now be thinking? He must realize that there were few places they could be hiding in the outer section, yet would assume they hadn’t been stupid enough to seal themselves inside one of the less vital inner sections.