Neal Asher - The Departure

He stood up a little nervously, but the readerguns did not respond to him as he climbed into the electric buggy and engaged its motor. The short drive over to cell block A7 seemed part of a journey through some lower circle of hell: just canyons of concrete and the partially dismembered dead, blood splashes and body parts. There were no wounded here because the guns were almost incapable of inaccuracy at such close quarters. Only the particular position or angle of each detected target dictated the placing of the shots, but they were always at once lethal, wadcutter bullets slamming nearly head-sized chunks out of the most vital parts of the human body. Saul’s mouth was dry and he felt slightly sickened at the carnage he had achieved, but those feelings were dominated by the other colder and more ruthlessly cruel side of him.

Cell block A7 looked little different from all the other blocks in the vicinity. He noted where an enforcer had tried to get inside but a gun had brought him down on the threshold. Saul dragged the soggy corpse aside before opening the door and stepping through. To his right was a small monitoring station, and two people whirling towards him.

‘Have they stopped?’ asked the woman, clearly scared and horrified.

The man started reaching out for her arm, as if to draw her back, perhaps realizing that anyone entering at that moment probably had something to do with what was happening outside. One burst from the machine pistol flung them both backwards into a vending machine, where they collapsed to the floor under a shower of hot coffee and milk powder.

Moving into the corridor beyond, Saul shoved open a door. A cell, but unoccupied: a single toilet in the corner and nothing else, that sole comfort provided only because Inspectorate enforcers did not want to handle shit-smeared prisoners.

What lay behind the door opposite came as a surprise, for the cell doors on this side of the corridor all opened into one single long room, the intervening walls having been torn out at some time in the past, and replaced here and there with glass partitions. Directly ahead of him lay a very high-tech operating theatre. He entered and turned right, passing two hospital beds on opposite sides of the aisle. A man occupied one of the beds, with numerous monitoring machines hooked up, optics and fluid feeds running into glued-together incisions in his skull, screens to one side running images that might even have been his dreams. Ahead lay further computer hardware, also squat tanks he recognized as artificial wombs, all containing small organic conglomerations rendered almost invisible by the masses of wires, tubes and optic threads plugged into them. He stepped back into the corridor through the next door along, and opened the one opposite. In the corner of this cell squatted a man who just stared at him blankly, his stubble-covered skull webbed with stitched-up wounds.

‘If you run now,’ Saul said, ‘you have a chance to escape.’

The man stood up. ‘Readerguns?’

‘Targeting the staff only,’ Saul explained.

The man stepped past him into the corridor and strolled off slowly down towards the exit. This wasn’t exactly the reaction Saul had expected, and the man’s speed of comprehension was somewhat unnerving.

Saul moved along to open the remaining cell.

Hannah Neumann had been provided with more comforts than the other prisoners, but then she wasn’t here for adjustment, since what resided inside her head was too valuable to risk being damaged by such crude measures. Her double-length cell contained a bed, toilet and shower and even a small kitchen area. She had also been provided with computer access, beside her terminal stretched a work surface strewn with computer components, paper read-outs, extra screens and processing units, and above this the entire wall was shelved with books. She turned her swivel chair away from the terminal and gazed at him with a kind of beaten acceptance.

Though sixty-five years of age, Hannah looked no older than twenty-five, so obviously they’d considered the new anti-ageing drugs sufficiently stable to use on her. She was slim, clad in a short jacket, like those often worn by dentists, over red jeans and trainers. Her hair was brown and up behind her head in a plastic clip, face pale and thin with dark shadows under her eyes. She scanned him from head to foot and, glancing down at himself, he noted too the splashes of blood staining his expensive suit. Her gaze finally came to rest on the machine pistol.

‘I heard the readerguns firing out there,’ she said. ‘I take it there’s been a breakout.’

‘Certainly,’ he replied. ‘Prisoners are escaping but the reader-guns aren’t shooting at them.’

Her expression was at first puzzled then started to show fear. He turned towards the door. ‘I don’t have time for explanations. You must come with me, now.’

She stood up, and meekly followed him out through the carnage.

At first Hannah had assumed the readerguns were test firing, but when she heard the screaming, and the firing just continued, she reckoned on a breakout. A tightness in her chest and throat prewarned of familiar panic, and she was fighting to quell that as he stepped through the door. With blood spattered on his Inspectorate exec’s suit and a machine pistol clutched in his hand, she recognized him at once.

Killer .

Oddly, when here stood a real and deadly reason why she should panic, the panic attack subsided like the liar it was, to be replaced by the genuine article: fear.

Even when he told her that the guns were killing the staff, her assessment of him didn’t change, for he must be an Inspectorate killer sent to ensure she never escaped. Her legs shaking and only a sudden effort of will stopping her peeing her knickers, she went with him meekly, hoping desperately for something, some way out, just some way of delaying the inevitable. He led her out into the room where Ruth and Joseph kept constant close watch on her, saw the pair of them lying dead and frosted with milk powder, coffee still pouring from the machine beside them and mingling with their blood. Outside, the readerguns were firing only intermittently and, stepping through the door, she could see why. Everyone caught in the open appeared to be dead.

Hannah felt she should be sick, but only numb blankness filled her.

‘This way,’ he said, leading her to an electric truck.

She glanced at him, only then realizing that the readerguns could not have been responsible for killing her guards. He had done it. Who was he? And why did his face look so odd?

Corpses everywhere, and here and there orange-overalled prisoners were unsteadily making their escape. As she and her captor reached the main gate, she saw the windows of the guard booth smashed, and even a couple of the mastiffs lying bullet-riddled in their extended enclosure girdling the compound.

‘Transvan.’ He was pointing her towards the nearest vehicle.

‘Who are you?’ she asked, finally.

He gazed at her with those cold eyes that seemed somehow wrong in that face – and yet somehow familiar.

‘A question I, too, am curious to know the answer to,’ he replied, staring at her with peculiar intensity. ‘And to which I hope you can supply an answer.’

She climbed in through the passenger door of the transvan. What else could she do? Or what else did she want to do? Underneath the shock, she felt something like excitement stir. Her life had been one of perpetual confinement and political supervision, the imminent threat of an adjustment cell just around the corner. She had never expected anything else. And now he was taking her out into a world she had never expected to see again.

Malden , she thought. He had to be one of Malden’s people.