Neal Asher - The Departure

‘Then there’s HQ Athens.’ New pictures appeared on the screens instantly. ‘The Greeks, being such a contentious people, started rioting early. The enforcers don’t have so much to do there now: merely deploying spiderguns to hunt down the remaining dissidents hiding among the olive groves.’ Here came a scene of ragged refugees running from a dilapidated stone building. Sound now, too: Hannah was sure she could hear the sea over the pistoning of hydraulics and the drone of an aero’s fans. Then came the crackle of high-speed machine-gun fire. Shots tracked across the fugitives and they all went down in a cloud of dust. As the viewpoint started to advance, she realized that the scene was actually being viewed through the eyes of a spidergun.

‘I could go on and on,’ Saul continued. ‘But for every minute I stand here talking, your Inspectorate forces are exterminating, at their present average rate, one hundred and twenty thousand civilians across the entire globe.’

Hannah turned to him abruptly. ‘You could stop it. You could stop the spiderguns,’ she pleaded. ‘You could ground the aeros, shut down the readerguns, shut down the shepherds. You could trash their computer systems.’

As he turned towards her, she could see a bloody tear at the corner of his eye. ‘I could do all those things, but the infrastructure would still be there. Inspectorate enforcers would still be there, with their guns and their nerve gas. Some will then realize how it was done, and from where, and they’ll take those readerguns, spiderguns, shepherds and aeros off Govnet, they’ll shut down satellite com dishes, and switch over to different frequencies. It may take them days but eventually they’ll cut me out of the circuit – a task all the easier as radio delays make my task ever more difficult. So, should I follow your suggestions?’

‘You’ll do precisely what you think best.’

He returned his attention to the screens. ‘Yes, I think you may be right.’

‘And what is that?’ Messina interjected.

‘ID codes,’ he said. ‘And then infrastructure.’

He pointed at the screens and everyone turned to watch, seeing the spidergun’s point of view swinging round. A grounded aero slid into frame, Inspectorate enforcers fanning out from it. Shock registered in their expressions as the spidergun suddenly advanced towards them. One of them shouted something in Greek, Hannah did not know what. Machine guns sighed and picked them off the ground, tumbling them backwards in the dust.

‘Fifteen million spiderguns, eight million shepherds and their numerous brethren,’ he recounted. ‘Now for the readerguns.’ He glanced again at Hannah. ‘As with the spiders, I loaded a complex virus which does one simple thing. It’s now loading to their kill lists the ID codes of all local Inspectorate enforcers, execs, Committee officials and political officers.’

‘You cannot do this!’ Messina roared. He stood up; some of the delegates stood as well.

Hannah only caught it at the last moment, as a spidergun here shifted. De Sousa, perhaps considering himself under as great a threat as Messina, raised something from his lap. The sound made by the robot weapon just seemed to ape that of the machines featuring on one of the screens, but the red streaks that issued from two of its limbs were painfully bright. Strapped into his seat, De Sousa juddered, fragments showering out of his back and all over the bodyguard behind him. The gun the delegate had held went flying upwards through the air. Screaming and shouting filled the chamber, and those of the crowd furthest from the exit swarmed towards it. But those nearest to it came face to face with the spidergun posted there and started pushing backwards, with the outcome a milling crush. More firing, and a bodyguard went spinning away with half his head gone, a female delegate vibrating in her seat, something like a make-up compact spilling out of her hand. Hannah found herself crouching, but couldn’t remember dropping into that position.

‘The spiderguns will only kill those of you stupid enough to draw weapons,’ Saul announced, his voice much amplified. ‘Just keep still!’

It took some minutes before the shouting stopped, before someone suffering hysterics was slapped into silence, and by the end of it the whole balance of the room had changed. Some of the delegates abandoned their chairs and joined the main crowd. Others sat alone, their staff and flunkeys having withdrawn. No longer a single entity, the crowd had now separated into protective huddles. Messina himself was leaning forward, his hands laid flat on the table before him. For the first time, he actually looked frightened. Hannah stood upright, edged closer to the real power in the room: Saul, standing there, still as a statue.

‘A salutary reminder,’ he said, ‘that I can and will do this.’

A number in the tens of thousands was now displayed at the bottom of a screen showing shepherds marching through some urban sprawl, and it began to rapidly increase. The views depicted changed constantly: a street somewhere with gunfire crackling across armoured cars, dead enforcers strewn all around; an aero gunship dropping out of the sky; blocks of offices now, Brussels perhaps, where corpses were strewn across the carbocrete and sheets of paper snowed from the sky. And during the time it took Hannah to fully register each scene, the number below had leapt into the hundreds of thousands.

‘The aeros,’ Hannah managed, her throat dry.

A woman in the crowd was moaning loudly, pressing her hands over her face. Perhaps she was De Sousa’s wife, or had some emotional tie to one of the others who had just died. Perhaps she recognized something from one of the screens, or simply did not like seeing her world being torn apart.

‘If they’re already airborne, I’m currently shutting down their engines. If they’re on the ground I’m just feeding the same ID data to their antipersonnel guns,’ Saul explained.

Hannah wanted to beg him to stop, but was he actually wrong to commit such slaughter? Knowing that so many down on Earth would inevitably die, she could not think of any who deserved to die more. Also something ugly deep down inside her – some obscene voyeur – seemed to be taking righteous pleasure in this carnage.

Another scene appeared. Hannah recognized Maunsell Airport, just as a scramjet slammed down and disintegrated, spewing fire and debris over the edge and into the sea.

‘Two thousand and forty scramjets are presently either airborne or in the process of landing or taking off. Their passengers will not be surviving the journey.’ His words fell like lead blocks amid a growing stillness.

Just then, a scramjet on one of the screens, crashing into a sprawl, buildings toppling.

‘It’s unfortunate,’ said Saul, ‘but there will inevitably be innocent casualties too.’

‘Isn’t this . . . enough?’ Hannah asked.

Saul indicated the figure flickering at the bottom of the screen. It took a moment for her to realize that the set of digits was now in the millions.

‘No, I haven’t finished yet. Even now, power is being cut to readerguns, spiderguns are being hit with EM weapons, and aeros are being taken off Govnet and switched over to manual control. I have already taken a large bite out of the Committee apparatus, but there’s a larger bite I can still take.’

Again the first views Hannah had seen, showing the satellite network arrayed about the Earth.

‘Twenty-three lasers,’ he declared. ‘They are firing now, their target sectors primarily government installations. Five million is an overestimate, unless I reposition the lasers or become less selective in choosing sectors.’ He eyed her again. ‘Though only twenty-three lasers are currently operating, all seven thousand satellite drives are in perfect working order.’