Neal Asher - The Departure

‘What about Smith?’ Braddock asked.

‘He got away,’ she replied bluntly, trying to stamp down on her fears. She just had to be pragmatic; no use wondering when Inspectorate enforcers would come piling in here to drag them away, no use thinking about what lay in store if Smith managed to get to them.

‘So we’re fucked,’ replied Braddock, equally blunt.

She quickly stripped off her spacesuit and undersuit, hardly noticing Braddock’s embarrassment as he turned away. She then propelled herself through into the surgeon’s lock, quickly donning surgeon’s whites and forgoing the decontamination process. Now in utterly familiar surroundings, she connected up a pressurized blood feed to her patient, before administering a general anaesthetic through it. While Saul was relaxing into unconsciousness, she began sifting through the tools she required, picking up a wound ring of the appropriate size.

‘We need him awake again as quickly as possible,’ warned Braddock, from the other side of the isolation window, having obviously located the intercom. ‘If Smith discovers he’s out of it, his people will be down on us in a second.’

‘No, really?’ said Hannah, sarcastically.

She stripped away the dressing to expose the weeping hole in Saul’s side, then folded up the wound ring and inserted it into the gash, before opening it out to leave a neat round hole into his body, out of which oozed black, jelly-like blood. Next she swung over the microsurgery unit and positioned its slow-worm head in the mouth of the wound. The head pushed its way in, tentatively exploring inside the patient’s body, suction pipes slurping as they cleared out yet more congealing blood or leaking fluids, while sensors mapped out the internal damage to its screen, for her inspection.

The knife had penetrated his side, slicing straight through his liver and pancreas, and, just missing the splenic artery, had twisted upwards and into the lobe of one lung. The comprehensive damage ended only a couple of centimetres from his heart, but, even so, the lesser vena cava had been nicked. Starting with that vein, Hannah began repairing the damage, working the microsurgery head gradually back out, cauterizing and gluing on its way. Most of this repair work could be left to automatic programming now the damage was mapped into the machine’s processor, but she did pause it a couple of times to inspect the situation more closely. This was all wrong, she soon realized. Some of the damage within Saul had already begun to heal up, and checking his bloodwork, she found it flooded with unassigned stem cells and other elements she just did not recognize. And she felt renewed awe of the man he had once been.

The work continued until the slow-worm head slipped obscenely out of the wound carrying the wound ring with it. Micro-manipulators then drew it closed, the astringent smell of wound glue arose, then a brief sound like that of a fingernail being run along the teeth of a comb as the surgical head stitched in a neat row of staples just to make doubly sure.

‘I’m done now,’ said Hannah.

‘That was quick,’ remarked Braddock.

‘Left untended, a normal person would probably have died quickly,’ she explained fatly as she folded the microsurgery head back down into its sterilizer. ‘He was already beginning to heal up.’

‘Heal up?’ Braddock echoed, puzzled.

‘His predecessor’s nano-viral fix.’

‘Nano-viral fix?’ asked Braddock. ‘Predecessor?’

‘It’s a long story,’ she replied.

‘Right,’ Braddock snarled, obviously annoyed. ‘So what happens now?’

‘You think I know?’ Hannah spat back.

She shifted the microsurgery unit away from the gurney, then headed over to the drug dispensary. There she tapped her requirements into a touch screen, and waited while it buzzed and hummed to itself. Shortly a drawer emerged, holding three loaded syringes: one containing a counter-agent for his anaesthetic, the second a mix of sugars, anti-shocks, viral and bacterial applications, the third a wide-spectrum stimulant package. She injected just the counter-agent and waited.

Saul lay utterly still for a short while, then suddenly jerked, his left hand rising to touch the wound in his side. He opened his eyes and licked his lips, then slowly sat upright, using his arms to lever himself up. Just as well, because straining his stomach muscles didn’t seem like a great idea right then. For a moment Hannah assumed that the chilly distance of his expression was due to the drugs, then she realized that he was back inside the station’s computer network.

‘The pain . . . has gone,’ he slurred. ‘And I can see again.’

See?

He reached up and probed his forehead, closed his eyes and for a moment fell utterly still. Then abruptly his eyes reopened.

‘Unbelievable,’ he said, the slur vanishing from his tone.

‘What is?’ demanded Braddock from behind the glass, before peering suspiciously at the door behind him, cradling his machine pistol even closer.

‘The Argus satellite system,’ Saul explained, shaking his head slowly. ‘There are seven thousand satellites in all, of which only ten per cent are functional. I’ve just managed to achieve a limited penetration, but that’s enough to interpret how it’s intended to run.’

Saul carefully swung his legs off the gurney, then didn’t appear strong enough to proceed any further, besides which, the pressure feed was still plugged into his arm.

‘How, then?’ Hannah asked, as she uncapped each in turn of the remaining two syringes.

‘All queued up and ready for mass slaughter,’ he continued. ‘But in the typically fucked-up way of any operation run by government.’

‘How fucked up?’ asked Braddock.

‘The satellites can pick up ID implant signals and target individuals, but what criminal or revolutionary ever sticks to the same identity?’

‘True enough.’

‘So they tried recognition systems.’ Saul glanced across at him. ‘The satellites all possess high-definition cameras capable of reading the writing on a cigarette packet from orbit. The images they obtain can then be run through complex recognition systems – the aim being to target selected individuals.’

‘Yeah, and so?

‘A slight problem is that such recognition systems are keyed to a human’s face, not to the top of his head.’

‘You’re shitting me.’

Hannah held her syringes ready. ‘So that means the Committee’s dream of being able to identify and eliminate single insurgents from orbit is still very much a dream?’

‘It is, but governments never let go of a bad idea.’

Saul finally pushed himself away from the gurney, standing up for a moment, still wobbly. In Earth gravity, he would already have been flat on the floor. Hannah stepped forward to squeeze the larger syringe into the pressure feed plugged into his forearm. Then she swabbed his biceps before injecting the smaller syringe, containing stimulants. Saul watched this procedure with a kind of impatient detachment.

‘So what’re they using now?’ Braddock asked.

‘A rather less specific option called DAS.’

As the stimulants began slowly kicking in, Saul straightened up and began to look marginally more alert. He gazed around the surgery, eyed the blood pooled on the gurney for a moment, then turned back to meet Hannah’s gaze. He gave a nod of acknowledgement. ‘Thanks.’

‘Think nothing of it,’ she replied. ‘It wasn’t exactly brain surgery.’

He managed a grin, but it seemed an expression delivered by rote.

‘Is that portable?’ He was pointing at the pressure feed – a device positioned on the side of the gurney, into which square blood packs were plugged like ink refills.

Hannah detached the object from the gurney and held it up.