Neal Asher - The Departure

‘I don’t want excuses.’

‘What happened after Aira? Where’s the rest of the research team?’

‘Smith had us separated – the only communication via comlink – and I got to stay in the cell complex. Smith himself got reassigned after that.’ She gazed at him steadily. ‘He was made Political Director on Argus.’

Motives within motives, and now he had another motive to get himself up to that space station. ‘So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised at how willing you are to help me?’

She frowned. ‘I just want to be there when you see him again.’

‘You will be. That’s a promise.’

‘There must be . . . justice,’ she said firmly.

It seemed likely to Saul that she would not enjoy his idea of justice.

‘Yes, quite.’

She nodded, then turned away. ‘Does that shower work?’ she asked, pointing.

He shrugged. ‘I think the water’s turned on, but whether it’s hot is another matter.’

‘Do you have any fresh clothing here?’

‘Yes, enough.’

Standing up, she stripped off her lab coat, kicked off her trainers, then began unbuttoning her blouse. He rose too, and began heading for the door.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

‘To give you some privacy.’

She pointed up at the cam. ‘You’ve given me more privacy than I’ve ever enjoyed before in my entire life. Please stay.’

She stripped off with determined deliberation, and with equal deliberation he didn’t look away. She had a tightly muscular body, small breasts and a slim waist, her hip bones quite prominent. Her pubis was bald, probably electro-depilated, while a moon-shaped scar lay above her right knee. When she turned round he observed a fade-form tattoo at the base of her spine, its pattern regularly changed by any alterations in her skin temperature. He’d had sex with just two different women over the length of his two-year life, and neither of them had looked so familiar to him. His chest felt abruptly tight and he understood that here was the real reason she so willingly stayed with him.

‘How long were we lovers?’ he asked.

‘You remember?’ she asked, suddenly hopeful.

‘I remember your body.’ He felt ashamed. ‘I’m sorry, but that’s all.’

She headed over to the shower. ‘From about ten years after we first met, then up until Smith burnt up your mind. I like to think that, besides your sister, I was the only other human being you actually cared about.’ Stepping into the shower, she gazed coyly over one shoulder. ‘Maybe we can shake loose some more memories?’

‘I’ll take a shower right after you,’ he replied, smiling at her as she closed the glass doors.

He retained the smile for a while longer, then suddenly he switched it off. He’d been operating alone with perfect if ugly efficiency for two years, yet now he carried a passenger and, if he allowed to grow further what he so far only felt a hint of, his ruthlessness might become impaired.

He couldn’t allow that.

Having placed an apartment door sideways across the communal stairs to act as a toll gate, they searched the woman ahead, removing from her bag a sorry collection of potatoes before letting her through. They’d created their own deadspot by spray-painting over the cams fixed up on the ceiling, which, Hannah supposed, might just mean the cams were now queued in a month-long maintenance backlog. However, the man’s corpse lying up against the wall in a pool of old brown blood, with flies crawling in and out of its nostrils, didn’t look that fresh. It should certainly have been reported by some responsible citizen, but the fact that his killers showed no particular hurry to be elsewhere seemed to confirm that no enforcers were likely to be coming here. Perhaps it was now policy to give free rein to those thinning out the excess population. Hannah did not like to think so, but after Saul had pointed out the corpses rotting on the fence surrounding a ‘sectored’ area, she was starting to believe some of the things he had been telling her.

‘What you got in there?’ asked one of the thugs, now turning to Saul and herself.

The four of them – three young men and one woman – were all dressed in Mars and terran combats, rib-effect body warmers with a slick waterproof look, and Velcro-strap training boots. Their dress looked decidedly military, but the only gun visible was an ionic stunner one of them had tucked into his belt. The other three sported home-made weapons consisting of long-handled maces fashioned from lengths of pipe with foam-tape handles, the club end comprising a collection of heavy nuts and bolts welded together into a mass. Judging by the ragged dent in the side of the corpse’s head, one of these implements had been used on him. Hannah glanced at Saul, wondering how he would handle this situation, yet not so sure she really wanted to know. But, no doubt, handle it he would .

It had taken three days before the Subnet became available through Saul’s home computer – accessed via perpetually changing radio frequencies using a receiver it was considered an ‘adjustment’ offence to own. It lasted only four hours before Inspectorate hackers took it down again, but long enough for him to confirm a local deadspot was still in use, and then to learn some other news. Hannah then took a seat beside him to have her first look at what he described as the real world.

With the new food pricing beginning to bite, there’d been sector riots in Manchester, Cardiff and in some of the suburbs of the Outer London sprawl. In the first of these conurbations a Subnet reporter had detailed how a vast crowd surged towards the exit to the Salford sector of Manchester, using short-range missile-launchers to take out the readerguns. As they stormed into the surrounding community, they had grabbed the Inspectorate guards and hanged them with razorwire from the sector’s fence posts. But then enforcers had arrived, flying aero gunships and dropping gas grenades. They didn’t use knockout gas either, because afterwards they had quickly and efficiently loaded dropside tipper trucks with the corpses, using small vehicles equipped with loading buckets to the rear, and digger arms terminating in tri-claw grabs to the fore. Saul pointed out how both vehicles seemed to have been specifically designed for the sole purpose of removing corpses. Similar mobs in other sectors didn’t even get as far as the fences – the readerguns had been reformatted to fire beyond the no-man’s-land adjoining the fences, while enforcers were coming in with the gas even as the mobs were gathering. No clear-up within the sectors, though – which perhaps accounted for the smell of carrion in the air here in the London sprawl as he and Hannah set out from his apartment towards the local deadspot.

‘It’s exponential,’ Hannah observed, trying to apply a scientific frame of mind to the growing horror she felt. ‘Start running out of the basics, and it’s all going to break down fast.’

He nodded in agreement as they strolled down one of the community-block streets towards the communal stairs, since the elevators were out of action again. Hannah noticed that here, even in this block reserved for those considered societal assets only, the people seen out and about all carried backpacks or large flight bags ready to be filled with whatever food they could acquire with their triple Cs or any cash they might possess. Saul explained that the produce grown in the greenhouses on the roof, which about a year ago might only be bought with large wodges of rapidly devaluing currency, could no longer be bought at all, because readerguns and Inspectorate guards were stationed up there now. The few shops in the neighbourhood with goods actually available were easily identifiable by the queues outside. While she nervously waited for him in the apartment, he himself had stood in a few of these during the last few days, using three different identities simply to obtain enough food for the two of them. And still Hannah was hungry, just like those waiting on the stairs.