Neal Asher - The Departure

‘You’ve had people connect up?’ he asked. ‘Fully?’

Her tea was just as she liked it: strong with two sugars. It bothered her that somehow he had remembered this small fact, yet nothing else about her.

‘Yeah but, with the comlife they allowed me, it was like trying to direct-link laptops using different computer languages. Janus is almost certainly like all the other comlife you created: an almost direct synaptic copy of your own mind.’

‘Alan Saul lives again?’

‘No, there should be no memories there . . . unless you did something no one knows about while you were a free agent. But you claimed Janus activated at about the same time you woke up in that crate?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s . . . odd.’

‘Perhaps Janus just initiated before but wasn’t conscious, and then started searching for the coded signal from the hardware you installed inside my head?’

She nodded. It could be that his earlier self had prepared the AI just before his capture, and that it found him only after the guards removed him from the interrogation cell, perhaps when his brain re-engaged with the processor lodged in his skull. However, she felt a horrible intimation: perhaps Saul had connived at his own capture, knowing that he needed to become something else, and that only by destroying what he already was could he . . . no, no, that way lay madness.

‘You’ll go alone?’ she asked.

‘Far too risky to take you back there,’ he replied.

She didn’t quite manage to hide her relief.

It now being night-time, diode lamps bathed the cell complex in an unforgiving glare. Between the security fences where the mastiffs had once patrolled, leggy, bunched-up steel shapes squatted – spiderguns at rest. The inner areas now swarmed with Inspectorate investigators, and from the surrounding mess, Saul assumed they’d only just managed to get the readerguns offline. With thin plastic film overalls covering their clothes, workers were identifying corpses, scooping them into body bags, then loading them on to electric carts to be conveyed to nearby ambulances. The crowd here was good cover, because one more investigator on the scene would be of no particular note. Also, since they’d yet to unscramble the mess Janus had made of their system, they wouldn’t have figured out who had entered or left during this incident, so no one would be particularly wanting to interrogate Avram Coran. Abandoning his car in the internal car park, he acquired a transvan, drove it over to Cell Block A7 and reversed up to the doors, beside an enforcer’s armoured car.

‘What’s the situation now?’ he asked.

‘All security is offline and all the computers down,’ Janus replied. ‘They had to shut everything down just to stop the read-erguns.’

Good. Confusion was just what he needed. He climbed out of the transvan.

‘You two,’ he pointed to two of the Inspectorate enforcers outside the doors, ‘come with me.’

The things Hannah really needed could be fitted into his briefcase: namely the secondary processor and implant hardware enclosed in a cylinder lit with LEDs to show they were powered up and running interface software; also the organic interface, which resided in a container the size of a cigarette packet – again under power but this time to keep the scrap of semi-organic tissue frozen. However, she had drawn up a secondary list of surgical items, and they would fill up a crate like the one Smith had dispatched him in to the incinerator. It took about half an hour to get this stuff loaded, and just as he headed for Transvan Gate Two, an Inspectorate forensics van, trailed by an Inspectorate limousine, passed him heading in the other direction. He guessed there would be some delay whilst they sorted out how they were going to conduct their investigation, so hopefully it would be a little while before someone got round to mentioning that an Inspectorate officer had already removed certain items from the scene.

On through the gate and out, then into the nearest tunnel. He parked in the underpass where previously he had made the second vehicle change, fifty kilometres from the burnt-out van he’d used in order to get Hannah out. Even though not precisely following the previous route, he was now using the same vehicles a second time, and this worried him. Before moving the crate over to the car, he ran his scanner over it, and found it loaded with trackers, so he just took off the lid and spilled it and its contents out the back of the van, knowing that the whole lot would be spread out among the indigents of the sprawl by the time the Inspectorate even started looking. However, the only trackers he found on the essential items were fixed on their containers and therefore easy to dispose of. Fortunately the items themselves were aseptically sealed, ready for surgical implantation.

By early morning he reached the bunker where Hannah, having only just roused from his bed, greeted him wearily.

‘You did it,’ she observed.

He dropped the briefcase on the worktop and pulled out the objects she had requested.

‘Is that all?’

‘Too many trackers on the other stuff,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to acquire it from elsewhere.’

She looked disappointed, but seemed to shrug it off and move on. ‘That means we’ll need equipment from a high-tech surgery.’ She scanned her surroundings and frowned. ‘Preferably the use of a high-tech surgical theatre.’

‘Mobile black hospital.’

She nodded in agreement, which surprised him. How could she have learned about such illegal concerns from her prison?

‘Problem,’ Janus abruptly warned him.

‘What sort of problem?’

Hannah looked at him oddly, but he pointed a finger at his bonefone, and she nodded in understanding. Janus did not reply; all he got was a fizzing noise from the fone.

Of course, it had all been too damned easy. He grabbed up a scanner from the work top and ran it over himself. Nothing, so what had he missed? They must have worked out what happened to Avram Coran and been tracking him by satellite the moment he departed the Cell Complex – he could see no other possibility. He abruptly stepped over to the two screens allowing him a view outside. The agricultural security net was offline and most of his own cams were now down, the screen becoming a patchwork of fizzing squares with only a few clear views. He realized the clear views came from cams with direct fibre-optic links, but they were enough. One big aero had landed in a nearby field and another was still descending. Inspectorate enforcers were pouring from the first and heading across directly to the old beet storage bay.

‘We’ve got trouble,’ he said, gazing at the screen disbelievingly, the evidence before his eyes not yet really impacting.

‘Oh, Christ.’ Hannah’s voice was full of weary pain.

‘They’re using EM blocking, and have knocked out the agricultural network here,’ he observed. ‘I can’t talk to Janus.’ He abruptly felt a strange sense of loss, not remembering ever having gone without the voice of Janus in his ear . . . never in all his two-year lifespan.

‘We’re dead,’ said Hannah.

He turned to study her. ‘I might be, but they’ll sacrifice anything at all in order to take you alive.’ Simple fact of life: while she was close to him they’d use ionic stunners which didn’t have a great range, maybe disablers or gas, but they certainly wouldn’t be firing live rounds. His mind abruptly kicked into gear again and he jerked round to gaze down at the open briefcase, then after a moment he walked over to a cupboard standing against one wall, took out a package and returned to drop it into the case.

‘An optigate?’ Hannah enquired, eyeing the box as he slammed the case shut.

‘More specifically: a teragate optic socket with skin port and inert fibre-grid exterior.’