Neal Asher - The Departure

‘Nothing of interest to you,’ Saul replied to the thug’s question.

The man tilted his head, acknowledging the fact that perhaps Saul was going to cause him a problem. ‘I’ll be the judge of that,’ he replied. His hand dropped to the ionic stunner at his belt, and one of the other men stepped forward, shouldering his mace. Hannah saw then that it seemed the visible corpse was not their only victim. Further spills of blood stained the floor, one still sticky and red with a couple of teeth lying amidst it. Were the others who had been assaulted still alive, or had they merely been dragged out of sight, just the one corpse left on display?

‘Let me show you.’ Saul unshouldered his backpack and dropped it to the ground, glancing at Hannah as he did so. She slid her gaze away from the corpse, to the fresh bloodstain, then back to Saul. What was he going to do? What could he do in this situation? What if they stole the hardware he’d risked his life a second time to retrieve? And what if they stole the payment he had brought to finance the installation of that hardware?

As he glanced down at his backpack then focused back on the man before him, Saul asked, ‘Did you kill him?’

‘He died for a bag of sugar.’ Grinning at that, the man stared at Saul challengingly. ‘Thought he was a tough guy.’

Suddenly Hannah realized that even if they paid whatever toll was demanded, they would still be in trouble. She felt she needed to communicate this to Saul, but how?

‘Inspectorate enforcers could be here at any moment,’ Saul suggested calmly.

Hannah then noticed that two of the four, including the man standing before Saul, wore badges on the shoulders of their body warmers: an emblem of laurel leaves enclosing an Egyptian eye. They were community political officers.

‘They’re not interested,’ the man said fatly. ‘Now open your pack.’

Saul nodded thoughtfully, reached round under the back of his jacket, as if tucking in his shirt, pulled his automatic from its holster and simply shot the man through the throat. He flew backwards till the door caught the rear of his legs and his head slammed down hard on the carbocrete steps behind him. Saul’s second shot punched straight through the chest of the next man, spraying gobbets of flesh over the wall behind him before he thumped into it and slid down it, leaving a wide and bloody trail. The woman threw her mace at him, before turning to run after her remaining colleague, who had already taken off. Saul stepped aside and the weapon clattered past him, then his next shot lifted the top of her head and sent her tumbling down the stairs. Steadying his gun hand, he next put a group of three shots into the back of the feeing man just as he reached the next landing. That dropped him as well.

‘Christ!’ said Hannah, staring at the carnage then turning to face him. ‘Christ!’ She’d thought he had left all his weapons in the truck, along with hers.

‘Not the Alan Saul you remember,’ he remarked.

She shook her head numbly and moved away to steady herself against the wall. Her legs felt suddenly weak, her breathing an effort. She felt she was going to be sick, but managed to hold on to it, perhaps because there wasn’t enough in her stomach for her to bring up.

Saul returned his gun to its holster, shouldered his backpack again, stepped over the door serving as a toll gate, kicked it over then squatted to inspect the haul the four had assembled. It consisted of a couple of bags of potatoes, a few tomatoes and cucumbers, a loaf of bread and some preserved sausage. He shoved these into a large shoulder bag before searching the clothing of the two lying nearest. Some chocolate and a little cash, but not much else of value, though he did pocket the stunner.

‘You carry the bag,’ he instructed, pointing to the haul of food. Feeling utterly out of her depth, Hannah pulled herself away from the wall and tried to be calm as she went to pick up the shoulder bag. Her foot slipped and she nearly went over, then seemingly out of nowhere came the tears.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, shaking her head, and angry with herself. ‘I’m sorry.’

He stepped over and she put her arms round him, burying her head in his shoulder, let some of it go, but all too soon he was pushing her away.

‘We can’t stay here.’ He nodded towards the stairway behind.

People were gathering on the landing above, staring down. She nodded but, when he started to pull away again, she clasped him even tighter. A moment’s pause, then she released him. The flow of tears ceased abruptly, and they headed down.

‘I’m sorry, too,’ he said, once the corpses were well out of sight. ‘But if we’re weak, we die.’

‘Are you really sorry?’ she asked. ‘You didn’t have to kill them all.’

‘No, I didn’t,’ he said. ‘I could have taken us safely through and just left them to carry on doing whatever they wanted, to rob and murder.’

‘That bothers you?’

‘It does.’

He seemed to say that with such sincerity that Hannah tried to suppress her doubts, for he still appeared utterly unaffected by what he had done – almost like he was used to it.

7

And the Dreams Fade

It has long been a dream of humanity to go out into space, but as dreams become reality they lose their mythological quality, sliding into the humdrum day-to-day, and the dreams fade. The first Moon landings marked the dawning of a new age, yet dropped into second place in the headlines when pitched against the latest ‘Politician Buggers Rent Boy’ scandal. So died the public wonder at the space stations in near-Earth orbit, and at the mission to Mars. It’s only human nature, in the end. However, throughout all these ages technology continued its steady advance. The entire computing power of the control room of NASA during those first Moon missions could not match that of an ordinary home PC thirty years later, and then the computing power of a home PC could be fitted into something no bigger than an ear stud a further fifty years down the line. But beyond a certain point, the size of the technology within a computer becomes irrelevant, because there’s a minimum size to which you can reduce the button a finger presses. Humans, unfortunately, are the weak component in the circuit, as also in all their logical creations.

Sited on the second-highest floor of a multi-storey car park, the All Health mobile surgery had obviously remained stationary for quite some time, seeing that the power cables extending up from it through holes in the ceiling probably connected to photovoltaic panels above. Gazing at the vehicle and assessing all the people in the vicinity, as he and Hannah headed over, Saul replayed his justification for the four corpses he left behind him, and he wondered how Hannah would have reacted to hearing the truth.

They would eventually be heading back that way, back through that makeshift toll gate on the stairs, and he wouldn’t be in such great shape then, so he had removed a potential threat. And, though he needed to be utterly ruthless to achieve his aims, to be honest he enjoyed being able to blow away any scum found in his path. Did that mean he was a sociopath? Just as the four corpses behind him had demonstrated, the quicker civilization disintegrated, the sooner its veneer was peeled away from those prepared to discard their social conditioning to survive. Of course, it was Smith who had peeled away Saul’s social conditioning in an adjustment cell. In this case the blame was his.

‘Dr Bronstein?’ he enquired.

Bronstein had once been a fat man, so now the skin of his face hung in loose folds, just as his newly outsize clothing hung around his body. He sat in a deckchair, smoking a cigar, his feet up in front of him on a crate marked with All Health’s logo of a caduceus set against a world map. A bottle of clear moonshine and a glass rested on a couple of crates stacked beside him.