Neal Asher - The Departure

She headed to one end of the table, placing the laptop in front of her as she sat. The way to play this, she decided, was to approach it as business as usual – but without the political intervention from Earth. Following her lead, the others quickly took their seats.

‘I assume you’ve all had a chance to see Le Blanc’s broadcast?’ she began. Nods all around and grim expressions. ‘Some of you will have learned more but, for the benefit of all, I’ll go through it from the beginning. I’ll meanwhile transmit the evidence to your personal computers.’ She paused to link her own laptop to the main screen on the wall, projecting an image of the first shepherd carrying Gisender’s body.

‘We all had our suspicions, mostly unvoiced, when Ricard cut Earthcom,’ she continued. ‘However, some of us – myself, Lopomac, Carol, Miska, Kaskan and Gisender – managed to free ourselves from surveillance long enough to discuss the matter and decide what to do about it. We arranged it so that one of us could go out and collect optic cable from the old Marineris radio station, meanwhile downloading from there the latest communications from Earth. It was Gisender who went, but what we didn’t realize was that Ricard had access to the security cams in that station too. He saw what Gisender had found out, and had her murdered before she could return.’

‘How?’ asked Gunther.

‘One of the enforcers shot up her crawler from Shankil’s Butte,’ Var replied, then went on covering the next events in cold detail: her removing of her ID implant so that she could go out and find out what had happened to Gisender; Le Blanc’s broadcast, and then her own exchange with Ricard; all the stuff about the Travellers going into the Argus bubblemetal plants, and final rescue in fifteen to twenty years. By the lack of any interruption, she realized they had heard much of this already.

‘So he intended cutting down on our population here, to make it easier to support those who remained?’ suggested Da Vinci.

‘Yes.’

‘How and who?’

‘Not you,’ she replied. ‘I have the figures at hand now from the Inspectorate database. The plan was to gather one hundred and eight of the staff – those designated non-essential – here in Hex One, whilst moving the rest to Hex Three for an “Assessment Meeting”, then to evacuate the air totally from Hex One. Ricard reckoned this would leave just enough people to keep the base running, but that wasn’t the ultimate plan as far as Earth was concerned.’

‘They wanted us all to die,’ said Lopomac. ‘They planned for us to die as quietly and quickly as possible, using up as few resources and causing as little damage as possible, so as to leave this place intact for later reoccupation.’

‘You have proof of this?’ asked Martinez.

Var shook her head. ‘No direct proof, but the most basic study of resource usage, which I have transmitted to your computers, allows us a lifespan here of five years, maybe a little longer. All living here now are essential, and without them, things would break down a lot quicker. Reduce the personnel and you don’t stretch resources over a longer period, you just kill the base faster.’ After this introduction she went on to tell them the rest: how she herself had killed Inspectorate personnel; how Kaskan had killed the two in Hydroponics, and about his subsequent sacrifice. She noted some angry looks as she detailed the cutting of power to lure Ricard out, but, of course, as a result they had all been left sitting in the cold and dark waiting to die. She then bluntly informed them how she had killed Ricard, sensed their approval, realized that some were now looking at her with something approaching awe, or even fear. Finally she called up video footage recorded from around Earth.

‘Whilst the three of us were preparing for Ricard’s attack,’ she continued, ‘we found evidence of some sort of disturbance going on around Earth. Since then, it seems the action there has escalated. Here is recorded footage from over twenty hours ago.’

‘Mother of God!’ Carol exclaimed.

‘What the hell is this?’ Martinez demanded.

Before answering, Var scanned the shocked faces around the table, let them take it in, begin to absorb the implications. ‘The Argus satellite network,’ she eventually explained, just as another ground-based explosion flared down on the night side of Earth. ‘When I recorded this, about half of the network was already gone. Someone’s been dropping the satellites onto Earth. Something major is happening there.’

‘War?’ Lopomac queried. ‘I did wonder —’

‘Who with?’ Gunther interrupted. ‘There’s revolutionary groups down there, we know, but none of them has the resources to achieve something like this.’

A spear of light cut across the night side, terminating in yet another blast.

‘Civil war,’ declared Lopomac. ‘It’s the only possible answer.’

Var nodded, for that seemed to make sense. ‘A schism must have developed within the Committee. They’re fighting each other.’

Such huge events laid out there for them to witness, yet they had only one crucial point of relevance to what must now happen here on Mars.

‘There’s something else too,’ she said. ‘I’m not really sure what to make of it.’

She flicked to another recorded view showing an object at extreme range but drawing rapidly closer.

‘Argus Station,’ said Lopomac.

‘It’s on the move,’ said Var. ‘Someone must have fired up the Traveller engine on the surface of the asteroid.’

‘They’re going to drop that thing on Earth?’ said Carol, her voice hushed.

Var glanced across at her. ‘It doesn’t seem so. Last time I checked, it was on a spiral orbit moving outwards from Earth. In fact that path should have intersected with the Moon’s orbit some hours ago.’

‘They crashed it on the Moon?’ gasped Carol. ‘I don’t know,’ said Var, vexed that she hadn’t checked the same feeds again this morning. But how important were they? Her co-workers had just seen enough that was of relevance to them, because it showed the truth of their own situation. Of course, she understood the concern of those here who still had family back on Earth. Her own brother might still be alive somewhere back there. There was just a chance that he hadn’t ended up in an adjustment cell for, if anyone truly fitted the description her political officer had once applied to herself – too dangerous to live, too valuable to kill – it was her brilliant sibling, Alan Saul.

‘But, in light of all this,’ she said acidly, ‘it seems likely that the rebuilding of Mars Travellers has been postponed way beyond the prediction of fifteen to twenty years. There might not be further missions heading out this way for centuries, millennia . . . or ever.’ She paused for a moment, realizing that none of them knew about Chairman Messina’s private project, none of them knew about the Alexander – that massive spacecraft under construction out beyond the orbit of the Moon. It had been kept very secret, and the construction station it sat within was EM-shielded and invisible from Earth. Whatever, with the events occurring on Earth the project had almost certainly been shelved, if not destroyed.

‘How can you be sure?’ asked Gunther.

‘Last night I ran a rough analysis on those same images,’ she replied, ‘and what you are seeing is not random. Someone is dropping those laser satellites directly onto Inspectorate HQs all around Earth. When I last looked, all seven thousand satellites were on the move. I’m guessing it’s finished now. Someone just annihilated most of the Committee power base on Earth.’

‘I can confirm that,’ said Rhone, of Mars Science, a man so pale that, without the Martian rouge ground into his skin, he would have had an albino complexion. ‘We’ve also been picking up some Govnet chatter, though most of Govnet now seems to be down. It goes beyond what we’re actually seeing. Some kind of computer attack has turned readerguns and military robots against the Inspectorate all across Earth, and even dropped government scramjets and aeros out of the sky. Prior to this, it’s also worth noting, the satellite lasers fired on Minsk and then on each other. There was also a big launch of space planes from a hidden spaceport in central Australia towards the Argus Station. A lot of them didn’t make it, as they got fried by the Traveller VI engine.’