Neal Asher - The Departure

‘How did he manage to penetrate Inspectorate security?’ Malden asked.

Saul abruptly felt the imminence of a bullet through his brain. He had used Janus to penetrate Inspectorate security, an AI hiding on Govnet which he could summon at any moment, in turn alerting the Inspectorate to his location, and he would be dead if Malden found that out. Saul sat up, feeling sick and slightly dizzy, and with a thought called up a menu to some inner visual field.

‘I used a virus,’ he said. ‘I could give you the schematics, but I doubt it will work again now the Inspectorate is aware of it.’ He paused, in his mental space somehow summoning up a virtual screen and beginning to lay down the coding for just such a virus, in case Malden requested it. Even as he did so it felt as if he had started up some sort of pump in his head, his pulse thundering inside it and a pain growing between his eyes. ‘Then, again, the Inspectorate has a bit of a problem at the moment, so might be slow to respond.’ Saul gazed at the man intently. ‘How is it we are here now and what was that blast?’

Malden gave him a humourless smile. ‘My people were watching out for the good Dr Neumann here, so consider my surprise when she walked straight into one of our surgical units.’ He paused. ‘The blast was a tactical nuke, and Inspectorate headquarters London is now a radioactive crater.’

In Bronstein’s mobile surgery they had been quite some distance from the HQ, yet were still at the periphery of the blast. That meant more than just the HQ was gone. As Saul absorbed the implications of this information, the part of his mind trying to build a virus just hung, nothing happening. The pain then peaked and the virtual screen dissolved in a jagged mass of migraine lights. He’d just discovered his limitations.

‘How?’ he asked.

Again that glance: still Malden was comparing the danger Saul represented to how useful he might be, and deciding whether or not to kill him. Saul tried to run a search through his extended mind, and again that pump started up and the pain increased. Nothing happened for a moment, then something seemed to connect inside his head, with an almost physical clunk, and he was in. It was like no search he had ever run before, more like trying hard to remember something. Menus appeared, overlaid and linked, no longer two-dimensional but spreading out in a multidimensional array, and in that instant he remembered how to turn on the beacon that would summon both Janus and the Inspectorate to him.

‘It was a simple matter,’ Malden spat. ‘Inspectorate headquarters had a weapons cache which included tactical atomics. While the staff were hiding from the readerguns, I entered that cache and left them a parting gift. So the moment they offlined their system to shut down the guns, a timer started running.’

Such understatement. To be able to open the cache and then access the computer of an atomic, he must have penetrated Inspectorate security on a level similar to that of Janus. Saul wondered if any of the staff had got in his way, and knew that any who had would have died, quickly and quietly. In the sheer ruthlessness stakes, Malden was some way ahead of Saul.

‘And what are your plans now?’ he asked.

Malden just blinked, then turned back to face Hannah. ‘Can you copy the comlife I’m running, and load it to him?’

‘I could,’ she nodded. ‘but the interface in his head isn’t ready. It’ll take time for it to establish all its connections.’ Now she gazed at Saul with some sort of warning in her expression.

‘How long?’ Malden asked.

‘A few days.’

Malden turned back to Saul. ‘I plan to tear their world government apart. What I need to know is what your plans are. Are you prepared to join me?’

‘Yes,’ Saul replied, realizing that ‘no’ was not a healthy option.

Malden stood up. ‘We need to move. You’ll stay with Bronstein until you’re ready. I’ve meanwhile got to move other assets into place and notify the Council that it begins now.’

‘What begins now?’ asked Hannah.

‘The revolution,’ Malden replied succinctly. ‘Merrick and Davidson here will accompany you and, if you need anything, Bronstein can contact me in an instant.’ He stared at Hannah for a moment longer, and she seemed to be trying to shrink in her chair. ‘I’m still undecided about you, Doctor , so don’t disappoint me.’ He departed, saying to the guards, ‘Take them to Bronstein.’

As the door closed, Saul gazed at Hannah. He wanted to know more before acting, but they needed some time to talk. He bitterly reflected upon the similarity between the Committee and ‘the Council’, and wondered just how extensive this revolution might become. No matter if it was big enough to take down the government, he understood enough history to know that revolutions never ever led directly to a less autocratic regime.

‘Come on,’ said one of the guards.

Saul tried to stand up, and nearly crashed out of the chair. Hannah came over to steady him, and he managed to struggle to his feet. He still wore the disposeralls from Bronstein’s mobile surgery, and his feet were bare. As, with one guard ahead and one behind, they entered a short corridor outside, he considered what it would be safe to ask her.

‘What do you know about this revolution?’ he enquired.

‘Malden was a prime catch for the Inspectorate,’ she said, averting her eyes. ‘That’s why they wanted the hardware put inside his skull – so they could get at all the information it contained.’ She glanced at him briefly. ‘I was present during his first interrogation, when they learnt enough to know that the Council is worldwide and keeps in contact via unbroken code on the Subnet. They were just learning that the revolutionaries possess arms caches and have agents high up in government, when the interrogation had to be stopped before Malden died.’

At the end of a corridor stinking of piss and scrawled with graffiti, they descended a stairway where dirty windows overlooked the sprawl. Above this a distant black cloud trailed across the horizon, strobing with the emergency lights of numerous aeros buzzing about it like flies round a turd. At the base of this he spotted the glare of orange-red fires.

He gestured towards the grim scene. ‘How much damage?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Inspectorate HQ and about four square kilometres of surrounding ’burbs,’ interrupted the guard ahead of them.

‘A lot of innocent people,’ Saul suggested.

The guard glanced over his shoulder. ‘Lot of IHQ staff and other Committee shits who lived in those ’burbs. Might even have been some delegates there, too.’ He shrugged. ‘Anyway, the General had to grab his chance.’

‘You’re Merrick?’ Saul asked, whilst easily making some complex calculations in his head.

‘Yup.’

‘So the General just killed about four million people.’

‘Total war,’ said Davidson, from behind. ‘Better a quick death than starvation.’

Saul controlled his urge to enter a vitriolic debate about this, since he was now supposed to be a new recruit to their cause. He felt in two minds about it all anyway, since billions were going to die over the next few years. Whoever ended up in charge would not be able to change that. Maybe a massive loss of life in order to displace a totalitarian government was a cheap price to pay, when those lives were due to end anyway – that is, if the revolutionaries were likely to be less totalitarian. It just seemed morally wrong, though he then suppressed a self-mocking laugh. Who was he to be sitting in moral judgement over anyone?

Raggedy people, silenced by hunger and lack of hope, just sat numbly on the stairs and in the corridors branching off from each landing. This tenement was ZA, and he started wondering if it lay within a zero-asset sector, until they stepped out into a street thronged with both ZA and SA citizens. A mixed area, then, and clearly one the government had yet to decide what to do with. He was about to step out into the street, when Merrick halted him with a hand held against his chest.