Neal Asher: The Departure

‘It’s still an expensive process,’ Coran noted. ‘I’ve studied the breakdowns. Mapping one sample costs over eight hundred Euros – equivalent to the community credit for one week for a standard family.’

‘Certainly,’ Saul agreed, but couldn’t help adding, ‘Or about the cost per head at an Inspectorate staff dinner.’ Without looking round to see Coran’s reaction, he headed towards the door at the end of the room leading into the main store, heaved the handle down and drew it open. Cold air washed out. ‘This is our main store.’

‘I am not entirely sure that I like your attitude,’ remarked Coran snippily, as he followed Saul into the icy aisle between the racked crates.

Handlerbots working in here were arrayed along the near wall like steel and plastic herons, either loading or unloading the conveyor belts running to the mapping rooms. One other robot stood at the far end of this store, where it had removed and was steadily unpacking one of the big round-cornered crates taken from the rack along the rear wall, then standing sample cylinders neatly beside it, like skittles. Such rapid unpacking was not normal procedure here, but Saul doubted Coran would notice that. Saul advanced towards this separate crate, and stared at it for a long moment, his hands clenching into fists. Then he turned abruptly. Its familiarity had set his skin crawling, for it looked just like his crate.

‘Your likes and dislikes are a matter of complete indifference to me,’ he stated.

The bodyguard had moved in ahead of Coran, and over to his right, her attention having strayed to the line of robots. Saul waited until both she and Coran were within a couple of metres of him, then he pointed back towards the door.

‘This interests me,’ he added.

Just a contrived distraction.

Coran turned to look but, now having eliminated the robots as a source of potential danger, the bodyguard was again completely focused on Saul. The air hazed, crackling, as his stunner fired its full charge. She staggered but didn’t go down, as copper wires running down through her uniform discharged through her boots. Just as Coran began swinging back towards him, Saul stepped in, the edge of his right hand coming round to slam hard into the man’s throat. Coran crashed into the rack beside him, lost his footing and went down, gagging.

Even as Coran went down, his bodyguard recovered, throwing herself forward, telescopic truncheon already in her hand and extended. Turning, Saul dropped the stunner and thrust-kicked her left knee, whereupon she stooped slightly, and took his first twisting karate punch to her solar plexus. This slammed her to a halt, but her subdermal armour and bulletproof top absorbed most of the shock.

A horrible grin appeared on her face. Saul had attacked an Inspectorate Assessor, and herself, so the gloves were off, and she could justify an extreme response. Her grin winked out, however, as his second punch fattened her nose and drove her back further. She whipped her truncheon across, but he pulled his head back just enough for it to miss. He then drove a punch into her upper ribcage, just below her armpit where there was not so much protection, caught her right wrist and pulled her towards him, drove his knee into her groin, an elbow into her face, followed by stamping down on the arch of her foot. She managed to get in a left-handed blow to his stomach, which he took, before smacking his forehead straight into her already broken and bleeding nose. Then he pushed himself away.

It was over, she assumed, knowing that although slower than him, she could withstand this kind of punishment, and eventually get a grip on one of the other weapons strung on her belt. She dropped her truncheon and groped for the disabler, already relishing the prospect of using it, then her eyes grew wide as the cylinder clamps of one of the handlerbots closed around her neck, its two sets of jaws scissoring shut on hydraulics – one set directly below her jaw and the other a couple of centimetres below that – and hoisted her off the floor. She kicked out for a moment, tried to get a grip on the clamps, but they were already sinking deep into her flesh.

Belatedly she tried for her machine pistol. Too late. A gristly crunch ensued as the upper clamp moved ten centimetres to the side, snapping her neck. She hung shivering for a moment, then sagged, lifeless.

Saul turned his attention to Coran, who was now up on his hands and knees, and still choking. The angle of Saul’s blow hadn’t been enough to crush his larynx or to sufficiently bruise his neck that the swelling rendered him either unconscious, or dead.

‘You should have used your gun,’ Janus berated him. ‘You put yourself in unnecessary danger.’

Saul pressed a hand against the automatic still concealed under his lab coat. The magazine contained ten caseless, ceramic, armour-piercing rounds that would have punched straight through Sheila’s jacket and subdermal armour.

‘It would have made a mess,’ he replied. ‘I don’t like mess.’

‘The ice-scraping cleanbots would have dealt with it.’

‘Even so,’ Saul said, realizing that the sight of that crate had affected him more than he wanted to admit, and the memories it evoked were the reason why he’d chosen to use his hands.

Coran managed to turn to gaze up at him with bloodshot eyes. Saul considered smashing the man’s head against the floor, but he didn’t want to damage Coran’s face. He kicked him back down, pressed his foot against his back, grabbed both his arms and pulled upwards, snapping his spine. Next he flipped Coran over, face up, put a hand across his mouth and pinched his nostrils closed. A short while later it was all over.

Panting only a little, his breath gouting in the still air, Saul paused to gaze at the two whose lives he had so quickly extinguished. He tried to feel something, but found nothing to feel, then stooped to hoist up Coran’s corpse and dump it in the now empty crate. Next he took some of his other equipment out of his pocket – a scalpel and the kind of small combined detector and test unit they used in hospitals when dealing with ID implants – and turned to the still suspended woman. After rolling up her sleeve, he soon found the location of the ID implant in her right forearm – a small bullet of hardware about two millimetres thick – and after cutting round a subdermal plate under her skin, levered that up to get to the object underneath.

‘Throw her in the crate,’ he said out loud, whilst pressing the implant into the test unit. It should not have been damaged and to check that wasn’t the point of the test unit. ID implants shut down if they remained unsupported outside of a human body for long enough, but the test unit would keep this one active.

Moving on rubber treads, the handlerbot gripping the woman trundled over to the box and dropped her in on top of Coran. Saul spent some moments rearranging their limbs until he could slide the lid on and engage the seal. Yes, it was a crate very like this, or perhaps smaller, unless his mind was playing tricks – a crate like this one that he was born in.

Transition to consciousness had been a slow thing. Saul was born in darkness, his mind filled with memories of pain – a chaotic montage of physical damage that had apparently reduced him to little more than bloody and burnt meat on the edge of death – and memories of his interrogator. Saul saw him clearly, clad in a tight pale suit straining at the buttons over a steroid-honed physique, a diamond stud gleaming in his ear, slicked-back black hair, his hatchet face wearing an expression of deep concern that did not reach those glittery blue eyes. Saul expected to hear him speak in his usual convoluted and politically correct manner about ‘treachery’, ‘the purpose we serve’, and the ‘common people’, and he awaited the return of pain, his body’s memory of it as hard as iron under his skin.