Neal Asher - The Departure

‘I want you three to oversee the safety of whatever station residents you can contact,’ he told them. ‘Direct them towards any survival and spacesuits still available. You can perhaps also send some of them to better-protected areas, or put them in EVA vehicles. You have about forty minutes for that. No need to bother about station security staff, as it seems they’ve quite enough vacuum gear available to them.’

‘If we do what you say, we’ll end up in adjustment cells,’ protested Brigitta.

He shook his head. ‘You can, of course, refuse to help your fellows,’ he said. ‘In which case the adjustment you face will come from the barrel of Braddock’s gun. Make up your minds.’

After a short, almost embarrassed, pause, Chang announced, ‘Those in Arcoplex One will be in the most danger, since they’re not trained personnel.’

Saul eyed him steadily, and began frantically accessing station data. What he found there surprised him immensely. When Janus had originally gathered data regarding this station, the population was about a thousand; now it seemed to have climbed to four thousand. The numbers of the workforce, along with security and political monitoring personnel, had initially doubled, then a surge of a further two thousand had arrived. Most of these newcomers were located in Arcoplex One, and as he checked the relevant data the true situation began to emerge. The Committee, or some part of it, had already begun the process of relocating here. Delegates now occupied the arcoplex cylinder – including names he recognized – along with political staff, all their families, and others whose presence here he suspected was due simply to powerful people they knew. But all of these he would have to deal with later.

‘Whatever,’ he said, expressionless. ‘Just try and keep your people safe.’

He carefully turned his chair away from them as more chatter suddenly started becoming accessible to him. It seemed that the security hole Smith had recently closed had reopened in the barracks where Langstrom was located. This had to be some sort of trap, surely, involving deliberate misinformation.

‘We have more serious challenges to respond to right now,’ said Smith. ‘We can discuss your rather minor problem once we have nullified the current power instability here within the station.’

‘Well, there we have a problem. I want to discuss this now,’ replied Langstrom.

Three other soldiers were with him and, checking records, Saul noted that they were all sergeants. They all wore the pale-blue uniforms of Inspectorate enforcers, but specially adapted for the near-weightless environment. No one here was clad like an Earth-bound enforcer as the net broadcasts had shown – those broadcasts were either seriously outdated or had simply been falsified. Checking further, Saul began to discern the true shape of the hierarchy here.

Smith and his Inspectorate execs were the arm of government in overall command of security, political oversight, and ensuring that everyone did what they were told and thought what they were ordered to think. However, someone in the Committee had realized that, where survival depended on science, the scientists and technicians must be allowed independence, therefore authority over technical issues within the station had been handed over to someone called Le Roque. This situation had not lasted too long, for apparently Le Roque now languished inside one of Smith’s adjustment cells. Langstrom’s soldiers, who reported to Smith and his execs, were military-wing Inspectorate enforcers, and the best – as far as the Committee was concerned – that ‘service’ had to offer. Which probably meant that they were all utter shits.

‘The space planes will arrive on-station in just half of one hour,’ Smith insisted.

Saul flicked his attention to the robots he controlled, already running self-diagnostics and stretching like cats. They needed to become a little bit more sneaky if they were to end up going against weapons that could fry their electronics, so he began programming them to that purpose. A suitable name for that program was ‘Ambush Predator’. Except for just a few still gathered about Tech Central, he began dispersing them to the outer limits of the area he currently controlled.

‘Fuck the fucking planes,’ was Langstrom’s rejoinder. ‘You’ve been down on me from the start just because I wouldn’t back you up on Le Roque.’

‘It is advisable to exercise some caution during discourse,’ Smith warned him mildly.

‘Oh, right, I might get myself in trouble.’

After a brief pause, Smith said, ‘It is unfortunate to note that you have disconnected your system from Political Office Oversight and lowered your security firewall. In circumstances such as the current ones, this must be considered an adjustment offence.’

Saul was on it in a second, realizing that everything in the barracks now lay open to him. He began seizing control of readerguns and cameras, locking them into his own network, while locking out a sudden flanking attack from Smith – an information serpent looping round to try and shove its way through the same hole Saul was using. Next, Saul had control of the air, the power, even the medical machines. He could kill them all off in an instant, and meanwhile the realm he controlled had just grown significantly in volume, because now his reach extended over to the other side of Arcoplex One. If this was some sort of trap, Saul could not detect it.

‘Yeah, right, so I might end up in an adjustment cell for that!’ Langstrom responded. ‘Oh, too late, seems I’m already destined for one of your cells, because you don’t like the way I think.’

‘So at this crucial time you betray our plans to enemies of the state?’

Langstrom smashed a hand down on the computer keyboard, cutting off further communication.

‘That’s pretty shitty,’ remarked one of his sergeants.

Langstrom nodded, his expression resolute, then turned on him, pulling a side arm. Without further ado, he raised it and shot the speaker straight through the face, spraying his brains over the door. The impact jerked him up off his gecko boots and sent him tumbling between the two men behind him. His corpse hit the door and bounced, before it began to drift away again. Globules of blood and brain and chunks of skull fell about the room like red-and-pink snow.

‘Fuck, you could have warned me.’ The muscular soldier with coal-black skin flicked a fragment of skull off his shoulder, then raised a boot to field the corpse and press it down to the floor. Blood went on pumping from the head wound, winding out in a thick snake across the floor, its back rippling like red mercury.

‘Right, sorry, Jack. Next time I’ll say “Step aside because I’m just about to shoot Smith’s weasel through the face.” ’ He holstered his side arm. ‘What about the others?’

‘Two in the hospital and eighteen in the disciplinary cell.’

‘How many of the rest are in this with us?’

‘Thirty-two.’

‘So that means we’ve got about a hundred and fifty who might be a problem?’

Jack shook his head. ‘A hundred and eleven, since our friend in Tech Central killed forty-eight.’

‘Do you two have reservations?’

‘None at all,’ said Jack.

The other man, whose name Saul now ascertained, from reading the bar code on his uniform, was called Mustafa, said, ‘I’ve been waiting for something like this to happen all my life.’

What was going on?

The one called Jack had mentioned ‘thirty-two’, and a check showed Saul that thirty-two soldiers were gathered in Barracks One, while the rest were ensconced in the four other barracks. The first thing noticeable about the soldiers was that most, like Langstrom himself, were black men. He started scanning bar codes on their uniforms, and quickly realized that all these soldiers had been transferred from an Inspectorate assault group located in South Africa, specially trained for ground assault and hostage extraction. Though this hinted that they were proper soldiers rather than secret police, it did not necessarily raise them in his estimation.