Neal Asher: The Departure

Miska sounded nervous, and well he might, for Political Director Ricard had ordered that all excursions out on to the surface must now receive direct approval from him. Through her suit, Var rubbed at the recent surgery on her arm. If Ricard became suspicious and tried to check on her location through the system, he’d locate her as being in Hydroponics, where her ID implant now resided in a test unit. But if he tried to physically locate her instead, he’d soon discover she was no longer on the base.

‘He give any explanation of why he’s shut us out of Earth-com?’

‘No, did you expect one?’

Political directors did not need to give explanations, and those that asked for them usually ended up in an adjustment cell to correct their thinking. But to get people to Mars had cost upwards of fifty million per person, and the only non-essential personnel within the base were precisely those who would not be so treated, meaning the five Inspectorate execs and the twelve armed enforcers, whereas ‘adjusting’ one of the essential personnel would turn that one into a liability they could ill afford. This was why, as technical director of the base, Var had been given the power to request veto over any decision Ricard made that might endanger the base itself. Only now, that power, backed up by orders from Earth, seemed to be fading. Ricard had cut Earth-com and begun to make decisions – enforced by his men – which might end up getting them all killed.

‘Still nothing from Gisender?’ she asked.

‘Nothing at all,’ Miska replied. ‘Feeds from the crawler do register major damage and massive air loss, but she would have been suited. There’s no reason why she can’t drive it in.’

Except if she’s dead , Var thought.

Over a hundred and seventy people had died here, fifty-four of them when the Marineris Base was crushed by a rock fall, the rest in and around Antares Base. All the dangers of Earth were here, including overzealous enforcement, along with a whole load of new and interesting ways to expire. Though it was next to impossible to inadvertently punch a hole through the mesh fabric of an external activities suit, it still possessed plenty of seals in it that could fail. Over the years, forty-three people had asphyxiated outside the base as the result of such failures. Then there were all the odd chemical compounds generated when Martian materials were introduced into the hot, moist and oxygenated environment of the base. Before Var’s time, four people had died trying to produce viable soil from the Martian dust: a spill of water had resulted in an explosion of sulphur dioxide, and they had died inside the laboratory when emergency bulkhead doors had closed – needlessly, Var reckoned, since the gas would have affected few people beyond the laboratory itself. But, then, safety protocols had been strict for years after the first explosive decompression of part of the base complex. Other interesting ways to die included heavy-metals poisoning, some esoteric cancers solely the product of this place – one of which had killed Var’s predecessor – and suicide, which was often the ultimate choice of some who had been forced to come here against their will. Just like Var herself had been forced.

Her loping stride eating up the distance slowly brought the crawler into full view. One of its big fat tyres, she noticed, was flat, which was unusual because they would usually self-repair and reinflate. She could now see that the front screen was also broken – another unusual event, since the laminated glass shouldn’t yield to anything less than a bullet. Only as she drew closer did she see the line of holes stitched across it, and realize that bullets were precisely what it had yielded to. And when she finally reached the big vehicle, and peered through the broken screen, she saw why Gisender had stopped talking.

‘She’s dead, Miska. The fucker had her shot.’

No reply.

‘Miska?’

Var walked round the side of the vehicle to the airlock, scanning for footprints in the surrounding dust but seeing none. She paused for a moment and looked back in the direction of the base. Whoever had shot at this vehicle had done so from a distance, probably from Shankil’s Butte, which reared up from the plain five kilometres away from here, and just three kilometres from the base. Doubtless the killer had used a scoped assault rifle, which would work easily enough at that range in the low gravity here. One of Ricard’s enforcers, undoubtedly.

The outer airlock door opened easily enough and, requiring no equalizing of pressure, the inner one opened at once. Stepping through the small cargo space, circumventing two big reels of optic cable and the cutting tools Gisender had used to obtain it, Var entered the cockpit and peered in through Gisender’s visor, her own stomach tightening with rage and grief.

After Ricard shut down Earthcom and put recent communications off limits, Gisender had ostensibly gone in search of salvage from the old base in Valles Marineris, but had really gone to obtain a copy of those same communications from the secondary signal station up on the lip of Valles Marineris. And here was the result. Though intellectually Var had accepted that her friend might be dead, only now, finally seeing her right up close, could she accept it in her heart. Even in this condition, Gisender still bore some of that Martian look of false health, with the rouge of Martian dust ground into her skin, as it was ground into all of them, but her dried-out features told the truth. Her lips had shrivelled away from her teeth, and her eye sockets were all but empty now that the moisture had been sucked from her eyeballs. That fucker Ricard must have found out, somehow, and had her murdered.

Var really needed to know what was contained in that communication.

Earth

Behind Saul, as he headed out, Janus made the handlerbot that had first emptied the crate now pick it up and carry it over to the cargo lift. Usually these crates only went up as far as ground level, where they were picked up by a transvan from a loading bay at the back of the building. But this one was going right to the top.

‘No problems?’ Saul asked.

‘If there are any problems I will inform you,’ Janus replied – somewhat snootily, Saul thought.

Back in the mapping control room he retrieved his holdall with its waterproof lining and shed King’s lab coat, though he retained the false ID badge, before heading again to the lifts. There he hit the button for the roofport, and was glad to find the lift empty as the doors opened. His heart went into overdrive when it halted only two floors up and a nervous-looking man clutching a laptop case stepped in. But lift etiquette being what it is, the man merely ignored him and jabbed the button to the floor he required, exiting two floors later. Finally the doors opened on to the roof.

Three aircars were parked there and, oddly, a helicopter. It was probably a casualty of the supposedly smooth transition from fossil-based fuels to fusion energy and hydrogen transport, Saul surmised. That smooth transition seemed to be failing along with everything else, with the result that people were dying every day, in their hundreds of thousands. He now made straight for Coran’s vehicle, holding out the implant test unit before him, the car’s locking system responding to it by disengaging. Stepping inside, Saul tossed the holdall on to the back seat and set the tester down beside him. The console arrayed before the single joystick had also unlocked, so he pressed the start button and immediately the aerofans began to hum up to speed.

‘Now we have a problem,’ Janus informed him.

‘And that is?’

‘Coran’s boss is trying to contact him via his fone.’

‘What’s the boss’s name?’