Neal Asher - The Departure

Saul chose a less-travelled route: up over the North Sea, to land for refuelling at Trondheim, then crossing the Scandia province of old Norway and Sweden, down across the Baltic to cross erstwhile Lithuania, finally to Minsk. Refuelling was no problem. It merely required a minor penetration of the airport computers, since unscheduled Inspectorate aero fights weren’t uncommon. Just a minor headache there, and a few warning flashes across his vision. This time, as with his previous minor penetrations of Govnet, no sign of that other presence on the net. He calculated the degree of noise he could create before attracting its attention, now knowing that the moment he did anything related to Coran or Hannah, that would be the equivalent of a shout.

After he landed, a tanker of liquid hydrogen waiting on the carbocrete hooked up its bayonet hoses and completed the job within twenty minutes. Then they were off again, and all the way as far as the Baltic he saw only two other aeros and just a few vapour trails from the high-atmosphere scramjets of space planes. But as soon as they entered Lithuania troposphere traffic became much heavier, with definite aero-lanes visibly punctuating the sky. The activity here was very much more than he had expected.

Information garnered from the Subnet showed that the fortunes of Minsk Spaceport had been on the wane until the Committee started building the Argus satellite network, and that now it was even busier than before. He knew that many of the aeros he saw flying the route from Lithuania to East Germany would be loaded with drugs, data-crystals, 3D silicon chips and the like, whilst the big trucks on the twelve-lane autobahns below him were loaded with bubblemetals or products of the same from the surrounding industrial complexes. The traffic using the same route into the port was mostly of empty vehicles and staff buses, though some commodities were still shipped up to the station. However, the Argus Network was all but complete, and supplying Argus Station itself and ferrying down vital materials and technologies that could only be made in zero gravity would not account for this furious activity. Some other operation was under way.

It was difficult to say where the actual Minsk sprawl began, because in Lithuania the Vilnius sprawl had absorbed Kaunas and also blended across a forgotten border with the district of Minsk. As with the rest of the world, none of the old national borders now divided this area, just various regions of Committee political authority. However, Minsk Spaceport remained under its own authority, the lines of division from its tertiary industries clearly marked by security fences, readergun towers and a no-man’s-land seeded with mines. Ahead, just inside this massive fence, aeros were spiralling down towards a twenty-storey vehicle park that squatted amidst the glassy administration towers located beside the square kilometres of primary direct-support industrial estates attached to the spaceport. It resembled the grey edifices of the ancient communist regime – the kind of buildings demolished during Russia’s emergence from communism, but now being built again under Committee rule.

Air Traffic took control as they approached this spiralling descent, and the orders he’d falsified on the way here gave them primacy, so Traffic inserted their craft lower down in the queue. As the big machine descended, sometimes only tens of metres away from other aeros, so that the roar of surrounding engines penetrated even the high-tech insulation of their craft, he unstrapped himself and headed to the rear. Hannah came to watch as he dragged Taiken’s body to a large integral chest half-full of squat gas canisters, and then shoved it inside.

‘Getting here was the easy part,’ he said.

‘Masterly understatement.’

Her irony had returned, so her sleep during the ten-hour journey must have restored some of her equilibrium.

He shrugged. ‘But though the next part will be difficult, failure is not an option.’

‘Was part of your installation software an arrogance program?’

Again linking into Govnet and the subsidiary spaceport network, cyberspace became as real all around him as the physical world. It seemed in fact part of the real world – just an extra perception of it somewhere between sight and thought, but with the added factor that he could manipulate it. His mind perpetually groped for suitable analogies for describing to himself what he was doing. To a certain extent it seemed like being inside a control space in virtual reality where information came in apparently physical units, to be moved about by hand and ordered by voice, but even this close relationship between man and machine amounted to no more than a more complex keyboard-and-mouse combination. It seemed he had completely closed the gap between man and machine; being actually in the machine, and part of it.

‘When someone knows his own capabilities and states how he intends to use them, is that arrogance?’ he asked.

‘It’s how it was said,’ Hannah replied.

He nodded, realizing that he really had been arrogant, because already he began detecting increased activity on Govnet, and a sampling of the communications soon explained why. Security had upped a level shortly after the destruction of Inspectorate HQ in the London sprawl, but was now ramping up to condition red. Massive troop movements were in progress, critical facilities being locked down, Committee delegates disappearing into their private fortresses. Chairman Messina was off the radar, and execs from the next echelon down were taking refuge in bunkers. Someone had just poked the Inspectorate wasp nest with a big stick, and it wasn’t Saul. Perhaps this explained why that other presence out there seemed unable to find him.

‘Malden,’ he said, as their craft slid into the side of the aero-park and turned to head for its designated slot.

‘What?’

‘Seems the revolution has started.’

Fourteen separate Inspectorate HQs had been hit, all across the world. Tactical nukes were used against two of them, four had been stormed by well-armed insurgents, most of the staff slaughtered and only a few captives taken. One was destroyed with thermal Hyex missiles whilst the remainder had received a taste of what they dealt, for the revolutionaries had used nerve gas. Eight scramjets had been hit by ground-to-air heatseekers before they got up enough speed to outrun the missiles. Three actual Committee delegates had been assassinated, hundreds of lower-echelon execs knifed, shot or blown up. These incidents were just part of a much larger widespread whole that included less lethal sabotage with, for example, a garage of Inspectorate cruisers being disabled, com towers blown up, and viral attacks affecting Govnet. He now related much of this news to Hannah.

‘I’d say they don’t stand a chance, but there’s Malden . . .’

‘Much of what I’m seeing seems likely to have been organized beforehand,’ Saul interrupted, as the aero settled into its slot. ‘I don’t think Malden would be satisfied with just taking out another Inspectorate HQ. He’ll go for something bigger.’

He checked the inventory of equipment aboard their craft, and then, opening a tool chest, took out a couple of large rolls of duct tape before turning and instructing the aero door to open ahead of them. After stepping down to the carbocrete floor, he turned to help Hannah down, but she ignored his hand and moved away to put some space between them. He didn’t react to that rebuff, since he was busy penetrating the cam system in order to cause a temporary fault. Once this sufficiently developed, he decided it was time she ceased to be just a passenger and tossed her one of the rolls.

‘Cover the serial number on the far side,’ he instructed.

She nodded and moved round to the other side of the craft, whilst he covered the number on this side. As Hannah returned, his next mental instruction closed up the machine and locked it, and in considering how to make things even more difficult for anyone who found this machine, he remembered numerous viral programs from that part of his mind that had been Janus. He used just one virus, but including elements of yet another one and a little bespoke tailoring, and it left the machine pondering, so that, about the time they stepped into the park lift, the craft shifted over to auto-defence. He had not set the readerguns to just kill any who got too close to it, but the moment someone started tampering, by either trying to force open the doors or peel that tape off, they would be in for a nasty surprise.