Neal Asher - The Departure

‘You can take this one.’ He turned to the two enforcers. ‘Go check the gas loading, and tell Latham to speed it up with that fence.’

Hannah was dumbfounded. That was fast – faster than she could have believed possible. Saul’s penetration of the local computer network had to be all but total. He must have been providing data direct to the man’s palmtop even as its recognition programs tried to read their faces. He must have drafted orders, and built a whole fiction to back up their presence here.

‘Gas?’ Saul enquired as the officer turned back to him.

‘They’re writing it all off,’ he replied.

Hannah understood. There would be no survivors.

‘I’ll get you a pilot and put together a squad for you,’ Taiken added.

‘That won’t be necessary,’ Saul replied, and Taiken glanced at him in surprise. ‘I can fly the machine myself and I need to lock down on security.’

‘Security?’

‘The fewer people who know about her,’ he gestured at Hannah, ‘the better.’

Officer Taiken didn’t like that, since it suggested that not all of his men were to be trusted. As they reached the craft, its recognition system picked up on him, opened its doors and lowered some steps. Taiken stepped up inside first, and even as Saul waved Hannah up ahead of him, she realized something was wrong. Saul seemed to be in pain, pressing the heel of his hand between his eyes before climbing in behind her. Door motors hummed into life, closing the door behind them, and Taiken turned, with a brief look of confusion on his face, just before the edge of Saul’s hand slammed into the base of his skull. He went down like a sack of potatoes.

‘Ack! Jesus!’ Saul stumbled away from the fallen man, and went down into a squat. He retched, bringing up nothing but bile, then just crouched there, gasping.

‘Saul . . .’ Hannah took a step over towards him, but just then Taiken groaned and began to make an effort to rise. Saul’s head snapped up, and she saw his eyes were weeping bloody tears. He lurched to his feet and stumbled over towards Taiken, descending to drive a knee into the man’s spine, then, grabbing Taiken’s head, he pulled it back and twisted hard.

The horrible gristly sound seemed to punch Hannah in the stomach, and she turned away, pressing herself against the wall of the aero. ‘Is it necessary always to kill them?’ she protested, but that seemed about as effectual as appealing to a guillotine, and she hated the whine in her voice.

‘I’ve shut down all their links to Govnet here,’ Saul rasped, ‘but it won’t take them long to open up some other channel, once they find they’re offline. Then he could identify us.’

Already he had the aero’s engines starting up, its fans whirling up to speed. It had to be him, since the cockpit stood empty.

‘So can others out there,’ she remarked.

‘Yes, I know.’

Just that? Did he mean he had already set something in motion to deal with the problem?

He moved past her towards the cockpit, and she followed him inside. As he strapped himself in, he gestured to the seat beside him. She plumped herself down and began to fumble with the straps.

‘You have reservations,’ he suggested, his voice tight and angry.

‘You might be just like Malden: possibly worse than what you’re fighting.’

Saul winced, wiped his eyes and studied the watery blood smeared on his hand. ‘You heard what they’re intending here?’

‘They’re going to gas the survivors.’

‘Whether I’m worse than them or not is irrelevant,’ he snapped. ‘This is about survival now, not morality.’

He took the override off the controls before him, and grabbed hold of them, then lifted the aero up into the sky.

Lights still jagged across his vision, but the pain in his skull was beginning to disperse. Apparently, each time he pushed himself too far mentally, as he had back in the aero camp, either the software or the hardware crashed in his mind.

Things had been fine while he was approaching the camp, reinstating his internal radio modem at last and cautiously exploring his near surroundings in cyberspace. Govnet had lain around him like an infinite city constructed of edifices of information, webbed with highways and lanes, paths, rivers and canals of information all in transit. With a thought he had highlighted the networks relevant to the Inspectorate, picked out the aero section, and absorbed as much data as possible related to the imminent gassing of survivors and the squadron of aeros being used.

Therefore, once in the camp he had jumped inside the nearest aero’s computer in an instant, made a coded link direct to the modem in his head and simultaneously disconnected the craft from Govnet. He had then disconnected all local hardware from Govnet too, by scrambling connection software, isolating the aero camp, and incidentally cutting himself off from that distant dark thing he had first sensed in Bronstein’s surgery. But by that time his pulse was thudding inside his head and the pain growing constantly.

He had managed to hold on just long enough to get himself inside the aero, and to eliminate Taiken, but then had come the crash. Yet, each time he recovered from one of these painful episodes, like now, it seemed his abilities were expanded. Saul now considered dumping the aero and going into hiding until whatever was going on inside his head was completed and he had found his new limits. But he soon dismissed that idea, for the longer he waited, the greater the likelihood that the Inspectorate would move to tighten up computer security because, certainly, someone or something out there had got to know about him. He needed to now move fast and with utter ruthlessness to achieve his goal.

By confining his mental compass to the aero and its systems, he could see everything in them with a clarity that had been missing before. This vehicle was a fast transport with jet assist, internal and external readerguns, external missile-launchers and inducers, state-of-the-art armour and autodefences. And, having seized control through the command override, it had become his absolutely.

Now airborne, he considered the evidence he’d left behind. Time to remove it. All the aeros possessed similar command overrides, so could be flown and their weapons controlled remotely – this to prevent them being hijacked.

Useful that, and precisely the route he now followed to hijack them.

The identities of the two enforcers who had actually seen Hannah and himself, he transmitted to the recognition systems of the aeros still on the ground, and fixed a delay of about two minutes. After that brief time, the other crafts’ readerguns would identify the two of them as dissidents, and that would be the end of them. He doubted the Inspectorate would be able to – or even be bothered to – work out what had happened, or at least not until his and Hannah’s journey was over. He neglected to mention this to her, however. Next he finally severed his connection to the aero camp.

That was it. Done.

9

Blame the Robots

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, massive processing power and memory outpaced other technologies. It took many years before the software was invented to utilize it efficiently, and before sufficiently intelligent systems could be designed. When those were finally invented, this advance created its own mini-revolutions in personal entertainment and access to information; unfortunately it also created a mini-revolution in the ability of governments, already increasingly totalitarian as political elites gathered more and more power to themselves, to monitor their citizens and become even more totalitarian. Following the socialist dream into the territory of nightmare, those elites now took increasing control of society. Next to catch up was robotics, displacing the weak human components utilized in so many walks of life, and in the end those not included in the massive bureaucracies that controlled Earth became just client citizens – mostly on the dole, mostly zero-asset. Was the technology itself to blame: should people have Luddite-fashion smashed it? No, technology is merely a tool and any blame always rests squarely on the one wielding that tool.