Neal Asher - The Departure

‘For installing in a human body.’

He nodded. They used such ports for access to cerebral computers employed to replace function and control stem-cell regrowth in the severely brain-damaged. It was twenty-second-century medicine.

‘But where?’ she asked.

He tapped his temple where the control for his internal computer resided. ‘We haven’t enough time for me to explain now.’ He turned and headed towards his weapons cache. She followed him over, and watched while he donned a bulletproof jacket, belted on an automatic still in its holster, shouldered the strap of an assault rifle, then loaded ammo and grenades into a backpack, though reserving some of the latter for his pockets. He slipped the briefcase and its precious components in too.

‘Do you know how to use any of this?’ He waved a hand towards the weapons.

‘I know, but I’ve never done so.’

‘You came with me,’ he said, ‘but how long are you prepared to stay with me?’

‘For as long as it takes. I’m not going back.’

She pulled on a bulletproof jacket, then selected a light, short assault rifle and plenty of ammunition. She also took up a couple of press-button grenades and put them in her pocket.

‘Where now?’ she asked.

‘We go down.’

After he’d managed to get things set up in the bunker just as he wanted, and begun formulating the detail of his plan, he had found physical activity a welcome distraction, so had often spent time clearing rubble out of the escape tunnel. At the end of the tunnel he found only bare earth, checked the position of that point on GPS, then dug towards a particular location, sealing the earth walls all along the way behind him with a spray of fibre bonding. His tunnel exited about a hundred metres away from the bunker, through the side of a drainage dyke, and just another few metres from a wide underground pipe.

As Hannah went ahead of him, down the stairs to the lower floor, he felt really reluctant to leave. So much work, so much equipment – and a home of his own. He would have had to abandon it at some point, but hadn’t expected it so early in the game. Saul stepped over to one of the computer consoles to input the code detaching the whole system from the surrounding agricultural network, then input another code, whereupon a number of things happened simultaneously. A proximity explosive activated under the entrance hatch, the computer began scrubbing data and overwriting with nonsense, time and time again, and a three-minute countdown began to trigger detonators within the Hyex laminate buried in the bunker walls, and along the walls of the tunnel below. He took one last regretful look around, then followed Hannah downstairs.

A steel door closed off the entrance to the tunnel. He now unlocked and opened it, pointing his assault rifle inside, just in case the cam images he had seen from down here had in some way been subverted. Nobody home, thankfully, but then they wouldn’t have had time to do seismic scanning here, so hopefully only knew that he’d descended into a hole in the ground. He moved ahead, rifle braced against his shoulder constantly and his nerves on edge. Fragmented memories surfaced of what happened to him the last time the Inspectorate had got him in its tender care, so the weight of the grenades in his pockets was a comforting one. Whether they took Hannah alive, he left up to her, but they certainly would not be capturing him.

The tunnel curved round, lined with concrete until they entered the freshly dug section, where the walls now looked to be made of fibreglass. He then caught a whiff of something: a perfume-like smell that was characteristic of some insecticides.

‘Gas! Run!’

As they hurtled ahead, he could feel the knockout gas starting to haze everything. Soon they reached the exit hatch, where he fought a growing lethargy whilst undogging it. He thrust it open and hauled himself out on to a muddy slope, then had to reach back inside and drag out Hannah, who seemed unable to control her limbs. He slammed the hatch shut.

They lay gasping on the bank, clearing the gas from their lungs, but their limbs still heavy as if they had just woken from a deep sleep.

‘Come on, movement’ll clear it quicker.’

Sliding down the bank, they ended up to their knees in water choked with sickly yellow silkweed, then waded along the V-shaped dyke towards the pipe and ducked inside it. The massive crump of an explosion resounded, and a shockwave sent them staggering. Glancing back, Saul saw an enforcer, his clothing afire, slam into one bank of the dyke and roll down it, sizzling in the water and thrashing about, seemingly unable to put out the flames. His screams pursued them into the darkness.

Hannah knew something about the illegal hospitals Saul had mentioned – she had learned about them from the kind of people supplied for her experimental work. He had originally planned on heading for such a hospital, but as they stepped out of the end of the pipe, and a mobile readergun stepped down into the dyke ahead of them, it seemed they weren’t going to get much further.

The incredible unfairness of it suddenly raged up inside her. ‘Fuck you!’ she shouted, and opened fire, but the kick of her gun put her aim well off, the bullets cutting clods out of the dyke’s lip, some distance above the advancing robot. She then threw herself in one direction, while Saul took the other.

Like a harvestman spider, two metres across and fashioned of wrought iron, it crab-walked and slid down the bank, the sharp tips of its extended legs slicing through the mud. As Hannah lay there expecting to die, she noticed how fast Saul moved. Already he was up in a squat on the bank, swinging his weapon round to target the thing, but then he hesitated.

‘Shoot it!’ she yelled, trying to pull her own weapon out from underneath her.

‘Those attacking us would have taken all the readerguns offline, to prevent them shooting their own soldiers or, worse still,’ he glanced her way, ‘killing you.’ He pointed to the robot. ‘If this thing was back to running its usual program, we’d have been dead less than a second after it spotted us.’

Hannah now managed to get her weapon aimed at the thing, but didn’t open fire. She just stared, taking in its details and wondering how Saul managed to show so little fear. The robot’s main body was a squat upright bullet of metal painted in earthy camouflage patterns, a sensory band under clear glass encircled its circumference. The barrel of its gun protruded like a proboscis, while depending underneath its body, like a prolapsed bowel, hung its magazine and power supply.

‘It might have been reprogrammed just to capture us alive,’ he said speculatively.

She still expected him to open fire, but he abruptly lowered his weapon. The robot was now behaving very strangely, as with one sharp foot it wrote something on the mud bank. After a pause, he scrambled down the bank and waded forward to take a look. Hannah heaved herself to her feet, leg aching again, and waded after him. They both peered down at the mathematically precise letters.

‘PWRFL GOVT COMLF TRCKD U THRU ME. J.’

‘Janus?’ she gasped.

‘Are you?’ Saul asked the robot.

The spider dipped briefly in acknowledgement.

‘Powerful government comlife?’ she queried.

He glanced at her. ‘That would be something you should know more about than I do.’

‘NET UNSAFE MST EXIT’ the thing now wrote.

‘How?’ he asked.

‘DWNLD’

‘Download?’

Again that dip of acknowledgement.

‘We needed it to do so anyway, and we’ve got the right place for it,’ said Hannah shakily. That was the next stage, after the installation of further hardware in Saul’s head.

‘The secondary processor,’ he observed. Then he addressed the spider, ‘You’re fully loaded to this readergun?’