Neal Asher: The Departure

‘The cam system here,’ he began, moving closer, dipping his head conspiratorially.

In that moment, as a calm readiness suffused him, Saul felt sure he must have received training somewhere before ending up in that crate. But, oddly, it felt to him that only during the few minutes since his incinerator rebirth had he acquired a sudden capacity for such ruthlessness. His covered foot slammed up into the man’s testicles, bending him forward, and Saul moved in, hook fist into the gut, retracted then up, heel of the hand smashing nose. The man went down like a sack of offal. Saul stooped and turned him over onto his face, took his stunner away, jammed his arm up behind his back and drove a knee down behind it.

‘You just delivered a crate to the incinerator,’ he said. ‘Where did it come from?’

After sneezing blood for a moment, the man managed, ‘Head . . . quarters.’

‘Be specific.’

‘In . . . spectorate . . . London . . . Adjustment Cell Complex.’

‘Why all the way across the Channel?’

‘It’s just always been that way.’

Saul integrated that and blinked. He just knew that the trash-trains had been running rubbish out of London to the Calais incinerator for nearly a hundred years. Somewhere, he surmised, some bureaucrat had chosen the same destination for what needed to be disposed of from the adjustment cells, probably because procedure declared that all government waste should go for green disposal. It was horribly funny, in its way.

‘You know what’s in those crates, don’t you?’ he said.

The van driver went still for a moment, then, ‘No . . . fuck no. I’m just a driver!’

Saul wondered how many crates the man had brought over here, and how often those inside them had woken up, if they were still capable. ‘Just a driver’ didn’t have much need for an ionic stunner, and he guessed the man used it when his cargo got a little too noisy. Saul released him to step back, and the man rolled over to wipe blood and snot from his face.

‘You’re a fucking liar,’ Saul said fatly, pointing the stunner at him. ‘And I was in that last crate.’

‘I’m only doing a job!’

‘Who gave the disposal order?’

‘I don’t know!’

Saul fired and lightnings shorted to the ground all around the driver as he jerked and grunted into unconsciousness. Saul stared for a long moment, considering what he now knew. The Inspectorate had obviously had him in their cells and then sent him off for disposal. He had been a marked man but was now supposedly a dead one. He walked over to the driver and searched him, finding cash money, a palmtop and little else. No papers, but the man wouldn’t need them, since he’d have an ID implant embedded in his arm. Saul then took off the fellow’s foot coverings and held them towards the nearest cam post.

‘What are these?’

‘They are boots,’ Janus supplied.

‘Boots are the rear compartments in ground cars,’ he argued.

‘Nevertheless, what you are holding are also boots – or perhaps shoes.’

The words just weren’t there in his head and their absence both frightened him and locked inside him a sudden determination. He pulled on the footwear and stood up, then walked round and climbed into the transvan.

‘I need to be free of the Inspectorate,’ he declared.

‘That is not possible. The Inspectorate is everywhere on Earth.’

Saul had no reply to that.

He started the van’s turbine, then realized something significant.He had told the driver he was in the last crate the man had delivered here. This information would eventually reach the driver’s masters, as he tried to explain the loss of his vehicle, and one master, one interrogator , would certainly know who Saul was, would know he was alive and start looking for him. As he reversed the van out onto the road, Saul ran it over the driver’s chest, then stopped the vehicle and searched under the passenger seat for a while before stepping out with a heavy wheel jack to finish the job. As he drove away he noticed some of the indigents cautiously closing in. They would take the driver’s clothing and maybe, just maybe, the body would disappear too – subsequently to turn up in sealed plastic packets on a stall in one of the black markets. It was an all too common occurrence in this new age.

The Mall possessed twelve main entrances. The four at the top consisted of two providing access from adjacent multi-storey car parks, one from the monorail and one set higher which connected to the aerocar port. Four more entrances lay underground, connecting to the tube network and the subterranean highway, whilst the remaining four were at ground level and at each point of the compass. Saul headed for the ground-level entrance facing south where, and even as he arrived, the hordes began jostling him and governing his pace. Checking his watch, he saw that ten minutes remained before the grenade detonated to scatter Coran and Sheila across the polluted waters of the Channel. In retrospect he realized he might get unlucky with the debris ending up on one of the giant cargo barges bringing goods in from China, or the supposed breadbasket of North Africa, which meant Inspectorate Forensics would be able to put things together a bit quicker. Finally entering the Mall itself, he began to notice something odd about the crowds, and notice a stink in the air, and then realized he faced more immediate problems.

The stink was desperation.

‘We have another problem,’ Janus informed him, on cue.

‘Yeah, don’t I know it,’ he replied.

Nobody looked at him oddly for openly talking to himself; such behaviour wasn’t unusual when most people wore fones and conducted most of their conversations with people several kilometres away from them. He studied those around him, the hollow cheeks and cheap clothing already turning thready at the seams, the collapsible flight bags and the scarred forearms resulting either from fucked-up All Health ID implantion, or the illegal removal of the same. Everything about them announced minimum-welfare and zero-asset status. No cash here, none at all. And, glancing at the store fronts, he saw little they could buy with their triple Cs – their community credit cards – though, inevitably, the doors to a Safe Departure clinic stood open to offer a free service for all. An angry murmur permeated the air, and even as he moved deeper in, a fight broke out at the entrance to a store that obviously did offer a little something on its shelves.

‘The Inspectorate is closing the upper levels,’ observed Janus.

Damn, that meant he’d have to move fast to get to the multistorey before things turned ugly here. However, the imminent chaos was to his benefit, since it would very much confuse matters when the whole area went under a communications blackout. He just needed to be out of the middle of it before Inspectorate riot police turned up with their disablers, weighted batons and gas – a scene that he’d witnessed all too often. Of course, they wouldn’t use shepherds inside the mall, because of the lack of space – they’d be waiting outside.

After selling the blackmarket cigarettes and booze, then selling the Inspectorate transvan to be immediately broken up into spares, Saul had acquired enough cash to buy a cut ID implant and have it inserted in his arm. The people that did this were very professional, and their hygiene standards much higher than those of All Health. They didn’t ask him why his own implant was blank, and he didn’t ask where the new one came from, even though he knew that an ID implant died once its temperature dropped 10 per cent below human body temperature. Maybe they murdered people for their implants? Maybe they lurked like vultures about the dying rooms in hospitals whenever the ‘Safe Departure’ nurses called by.