Neal Asher - The Departure

However, before Saul left the place the surgeon who had injected the implant acquainted him with the facts. During euthanasia, he explained, implants were deactivated, so the surgeon’s source was those who sold their implants for cash to buy things unobtainable with a triple C. This was not part of the knowledge Saul had possessed at the time, so it had been either lost along with his shoes and boots or he had been one of those people the Committee defined as a Societal Asset – therefore maintained in living conditions some way above subsistence level because of some expertise, though also kept under constant political supervision.

‘It is estimated that over eight million people have died in the food riots across Asia,’ Janus informed him. ‘The Inspectorate used inducers to begin with but, under direct instruction from Chairman Messina, cut power and water to the most uncontrollable areas for ten days, then followed that with air strikes before sending in the armour, including spiderguns and shepherds.’

On the road winding through the Provence countryside, Saul paused by a steel ‘gate’– an object whose name he had only just acquired during the last week – and leant on it shakily, gazing out at a robotic harvester that sat weeping rust in a field overgrown with weeds. Also in the field were people, scraping at the ground with handtools in search of tubers and wild garlic, or collecting edible seeds, while beyond them the sun was setting, an eye red with fatigue, on the horizon. No real crops here either, but at least this soil was better than the dustbowl he’d trudged through on the other side of the Luberon sprawl. The conditions here were the reason for the protest assembled around the government compound in the century-old town that formed the core of the sprawl – a peaceful but desperate affair to begin with. The nexus of the protest had seemed well organized and the participants’ demands clear. They needed fuel for the robotic harvesters, like the one sitting inactive out here, but more important, they required more than the subsistence trickle of water they were receiving from the Rhône-Durance dam. They needed enough for irrigation.

However, most of the crowd were zero-asset-status citizens who were hungry, thirsty, pissed off about a power shutdown that showed no sign of ending, and doubly pissed off because lights shone inside the compound at night, when the rest of the town was dark. And to heap on a further unacceptable indignity, only that morning two articulated lorries full of provisions, with armed enforcer escorts, had driven into the compound. Committee bureaucrats never went hungry or thirsty.

When the Inspectorate then turned up and started making arrests, things soon turned nasty.

‘You got that from the Subnet?’ Saul asked, rubbing his hand up and down his arm as he turned to watch scattered groups of citizens trudging up the same road. These people weren’t feeing what had happened back in the Luberon sprawl, merely carrying their meagre belongings and getting away in search of something better. It had soon become apparent to him that there wasn’t anything better, unless you were a government employee.

‘Yes, just before the Inspectorate hackers crashed it again.’

He snatched his hand away from his arm. The limb was undamaged though, when they turned the truck-mounted pain inducer on the crowd, it had seemed to work like an invisible flame thrower. He’d only caught part of it before managing to throw himself into an alleyway, yet it felt like his arm had been burnt down to the bone. He meanwhile caught a glimpse of a shepherd snatching up one of those who had been addressing the crowd, from among those screaming in agony, writhing on the ground, shitting and puking. It didn’t carry him away either, just brought him up to its underside and shredded him, dropping the bits. The sight dragged unbearable memories of Saul’s interrogation to the forefront of his mind and he ran away, as much to escape from them as from the inducer and that murderous robot. He managed to get past the enforcers erecting barricades, but a machine gun chattered, bullets thumping into the carbocrete right behind him, so he was forced to use the cover of a line of rusting cars to get safely away.

‘Nothing about what happened back there?’

‘The Subnet is still down.’

‘What have you been able to get from Govnet? Usual shit about them scraping out the last of the shale, and the Arctic oil wells being down to the dregs?’

He moved on, sipping from his water bottle and ignoring the shrivelled apple still in his bag. He wasn’t hungry any more – seemed to have moved beyond that state.

‘I have further penetrated secure communications and am building a general picture of the situation. There is too little energy from the fusion-power stations, not enough hydrogen being cracked to take up the slack, and the power-station building project has stalled.’

‘Why?’

‘Insufficient funding.’

‘Yet there’s enough funding for maintaining the Inspectorate and projects like the Argus Network?’ He paused for just a second. ‘Don’t bother answering that – just tell me more about this general picture you’re building.’

Janus sketched out more of that picture and filled in the colours, mostly shit-brown and battleship-grey. As well as energy stocks, water supplies across the world were low – it sometimes happened, just like here, that officials had to make a choice between supplying a thirsty population or crop irrigation, and, managing to make no choice at all, ended up with dying crops and a thirsty population. Janus was able to report one instance of great quantities of food rotting inside warehouses because of the lack of power to supply either the refrigeration systems or the vehicles for transporting it. Meanwhile, just a few kilometres away, a scramjet airport was being extended at great cost, just so that Committee delegates and their numerous personal secretaries and bodyguards could more rapidly zip from location to location while going about their important government business.

The overall picture was that, yes, resources were in short supply for the general population, but only because Earth’s massive government apparatus sucked up nearly 80 per cent of them. And, though Saul instinctively attributed that to the Committee’s huge parasitic bureaucracy, something still didn’t quite add up. At the same time, government organizations seemed busier than ever, killing off industries, rerouting supply lines, while huge amounts of materials and equipment were being shifted to unknown locations.

‘I’d like to believe that this crisis is going to result in Committee rule collapsing,’ Saul remarked.

‘No,’ Janus replied, ‘the Committee controls far too large a proportion of world resources.’

Saul nodded to himself, seeing hints of another picture that perhaps Janus had not spotted.

‘A resources crash was inevitable, wasn’t it?’

‘With the world population at its present levels, yes.’

‘So Messina and the rest of those shits take an even tighter grasp on the reins of power, and hoard resources for their own use. After it’s over, they’ll still be holding those reins very tightly indeed.’

‘Yes, that seems to be their intention.’

‘How many people will die before the situation stabilizes?’

‘Stability will not be achieved until the population level returns to that of the early twenty-first century.’

‘So that means about twelve billion people dead. And the remaining six billion ruled by a government that would even like to control their thoughts.’

‘Yes.’

Moving higher up the hill, Saul gazed back to see columns of smoke now rising, big aeros hovering about them like steel vultures, lit up by the fires below, through which shepherds were striding. The stars were starting to come out, as they always would, no matter what happened down here.