Neal Asher - The Departure

‘Surely you know you’re being lied to,’ she said. ‘If we have any chance of survival here it’s with all personnel working on the problems we face.’

‘Don’t you see?’ he said. ‘Incorrect thought already, and yet you are an intelligent person who has only just viewed Le Blanc’s communication.’

Var stared at him for a long moment before saying, ‘So I’m guessing my status has just been downgraded.’

Ricard smiled cheerfully. ‘Certainly not! You are a valued member of the Antares Base staff, whose knowledge will be essential over the coming years.’

‘But Gisender wasn’t,’ she spat.

He shook his head, his expression mournful. ‘Merely a computer and power-systems technician – the kind of person who was useful while resources were abundant, but who would soon have become surplus to requirements.’

That really brought home to Var his cluelessness. He simply had no real idea about the necessities of survival here. Gisender had been exactly the sort of person they needed, someone who could actually repair things rather than merely head down to Stores for another plug-in replacement. Var also had no doubt that Ricard considered himself and his executives and enforcers to be utterly essential, even though they were people with skills generally limited to micromanaging and bullying.

‘So,’ he continued, ‘I want you to return here to Hex Three, without informing anyone of your . . . discovery. To that end I’ve sent someone to bring you in.’

Even then she saw it, striding out from behind Shankil’s Butte and heading towards her, kicking up little puffs of dust each time its two-toed feet thumped down on the peneplain. It seemed Ricard or his men possessed more technical skill than she gave them credit for, because one or more of them had assembled a shepherd and, in some ultimate expression of reality imitating art, a machine like something out of H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds was coming to seize her – out here on the surface of the world that gave it birth in that writer’s imagination.

Earth

In the terms of the society in which Saul found himself, he was a sociopath, though perhaps that might be considered a normal condition in a society that so easily eliminated its innocent citizens. But then who was innocent? Just by following the dictates of selfish genes in an overpopulated world, people were effectively killing each other. Yes, the Committee had turned killer as it expedited the coming resource crash, but that crash in and of itself wasn’t the product of either this political doctrine or that; it was the product of people – manswarm – endlessly breeding. Saul often felt great self-doubt, considering himself a killer without conscience, somehow damaged and not sane, but assured himself that this must have been how he was before, probably made that way by training, indoctrination, something external.

It was a comforting illusion of his that, as the product of civilization, he had once been civilized, and that to become a killer had required some traumatic twisting of his psyche. But, whatever way he looked at things, he knew that to succeed in his aims he must be even more ruthless than those now preparing to cling to power while billions died. It seemed a rather extreme demand on oneself.

It took Saul only a few moments to find an undamaged console, and then a chair not soaked with blood. A couple of those working in here had been wearing machine pistols like the one he had just used, and having deprived them of these weapons, he laid them down on the console and gazed outside.

Some people were standing about in stunned groups, the odd individual pointing towards the monitoring room, but he noted enforcers clad in body armour and grey camo-fatigues beginning to respond – running towards him. To give himself just a little more time, he picked up one of the weapons and fired at one approaching group, not particularly aiming. Carbocrete and earth erupted beside them and they ducked for cover behind a cell block. He fired again, here and there, sending others scurrying for cover, then sat down and opened his briefcase.

After unfolding his laptop on top of the console, the screen instantly bringing up Janus’s ammonite icon, he used a coil of optic cable to plug it into a nearby port, then waited a second until the icon started blinking.

‘Are you good to go?’ he enquired.

‘I am,’ Janus replied.

Immediately a loading bar opened up at the bottom of the screen, as the portion of Janus contained within the laptop began to load itself into the system here. Saul rattled his fingers on the console for a moment, then spotting some further movement down below, picked up a machine pistol and emptied its entire clip in that general direction. However, further out within the complex he saw another troop of Inspectorate enforcers cross the gap between two buildings. They were carrying armourglass shields and heavy assault rifles, and perhaps all that now slowed down their further response was not yet knowing if any hostages were being held here. Doubtless the cams above his head would soon apprise them of the facts, then, given the chance, they would attempt to turn this monitoring room into a pepperpot.

‘I am in,’ Janus informed him, its icon now appearing on every unbroken screen.

‘Cam system first,’ he suggested.

‘Already done,’ Janus replied.

‘Is there a central locking system?’

‘Yes, to all cells. However, three cells in maximum-security block A7 also need to be manually unlocked.’

‘Well, open up everything you can,’ Saul instructed, more just for something to say than anything else, for he knew that Janus would already be doing so. Even now, cell doors would be popping open all across the complex, with prisoners looking up in fear of another visit from their tormentors, but finding no one there. Some such prisoners, he knew, would just crouch inside their cells, too terrified to avail themselves of the open doors. Others would take the chance though, knowing that trying to escape would not make things any worse for them.

‘ID implant codes located,’ Janus informed him. ‘I am deleting prisoner IDs from the readergun system now, and simultaneously uploading staff IDs.’

‘Have you found the one I described?’ he asked.

‘There are four who come close to your description.’

Four faces appeared on the screen, all dark-haired men clad in enforcer uniforms, but none of them possessed those hated features.

‘He’s not there,’ he said, at once feeling both disappointed and relieved, for what he was about to do was just too impersonal. He wanted to meet his interrogator face to face, and then kill the man with his bare hands. ‘Just don’t forget that Coran’s ID must be excluded,’ he added. ‘And make sure Hannah Neumann’s ID isn’t considered a staff one, as we don’t really know for sure what her position is here.’

‘I have located her. She is classified as a prisoner and is located in A7.’

From where he sat, Saul watched one of the readerguns swivel and fire off a three-shot burst, the flare from it just one bright flash and the report only one sound – the shots so close together it was impossible for the human eye or ear to distinguish between them. The guts and much of the chest of an Inspectorate enforcer splashed a grey concrete wall, just before the rest of him slammed into it. Other readerguns began to open up intermittently, then built to a steady thunder as Saul used the fingertips of his right hand to tap out a little ditty on the surface of the console before him. Finally, as the thunder started to die, he stood up and headed for the stairs.

Exiting the lower doors of the monitoring station, he ducked low and quickly slipped behind the vehicle that had brought him here, but a quick glance around revealed that no one was paying attention to him any more. The devastating and gory effectiveness of the readerguns had become immediately apparent. Corpses slumped at the termini of great red splashes of blood and body parts, or lying in spreading pools of blood, were now scattered all across the carbocrete. Whilst he watched, a woman tried to find a better hiding place by moving along a nearby wall. The gun positioned on the building opposite turned and fired, the three shots tracking down her body from the top, first taking off her head, then blowing her spine out of her back.