Neal Asher - The Departure

Braddock retrieved a laptop from the shoulderbag, placed it down on a girder, then peremptorily gestured Langstrom over. The man stared at Saul’s back, then, perhaps realizing you don’t argue with the chicken farmer about your position in the pecking order, he moved over to stand beside Braddock. After a brief hesitation, the other three followed him.

‘Here,’ said Braddock, calling up a schematic of the Political Office and outlining one particular section in red.

‘The transformer room,’ Langstrom noted. ‘But why there? You could cut their power from outside, but it’d make no difference. They’ve got hydrox generators in there, and enough fuel for at least twenty days.’

‘We don’t intend to cut their power.’

‘What, then?’

‘Did you question your previous commander like this?’ Braddock enquired.

‘Not a healthy option.’

‘What makes you think it’s a healthy option now?’

Langstrom shrugged. ‘Stupid optimism?’

‘Okay, here’s the deal. We’re all as good as dead now if the Committee regains control of the station.’ He surveyed the faces of those around him. ‘ All of us.’

‘We get that,’ said Langstrom.

Braddock lowered his voice, with a slight nod in Saul’s direction, and hissed, ‘He look human to you? Well, he ain’t. He’s all that’s stands between us and the Committee, and we do it like he says.’ He shook his head. ‘He don’t need us – he doesn’t need anyone here on this station. We’re just a convenience to him, for now. So let’s talk about how we get him where he wants to go, shall we?’

Saul hadn’t coached Braddock on how he should present this, but essentially the soldier’s words were the truth. He now allowed his attention to stray away from them, ensuring his robots were all in position, checking to see if Smith was in any way responding. Nothing evident as yet. Saul tried to discover any holes in his own reasoning, but could find none. In the virtual world, Smith had lost the fight about Saul’s point of penetration, but even if that didn’t happen again this time, their battle for the Political Office should result in that safety protocol that had kicked in before, kicking in again and disabling the readerguns. This should give Langstrom the time to seize control of the place.

‘Okay, we’re done,’ said Langstrom abruptly.

Returning most of his attention to his present surroundings, Saul turned to see Braddock close the laptop and shove it back into the shoulderbag.

‘Shall we go?’ asked Langstrom.

Saul nodded. As Langstrom stepped through the skeleton of the tubeway and launched himself into the station structure, he followed, with Braddock close behind him. Progress then consisted of leaping from I-beam to I-beam, until they began to discern the lights of the Political Office amid the tangled gloom. Whilst they advanced, Langstrom continued issuing instructions, so that by the time they arrived on the lower lattice leading to the ground floor, still more of his men were ready waiting. Saul had meanwhile summoned closer some of his robots, though he hoped not to need them. In terms of utterly ruthless calculation, they were more useful to him – and more trustworthy – than Langstrom or any of his men.

16

Recycling Talent

For the first fifty years, fusion reactors had required highly specialized fuels like lithium pellets, tritium microspheres, Bellington glass or Islington lead. However, the scientists continued to work diligently, and eventually attained their next goal: a reactor using full-sphere laser compression to cause fusion in a wide range of materials. But even these reactors were limited to fusing solid materials, and the final goal of devising a water or gas reactor seemed permanently out of reach. However, finally, a scientist working under Committee political oversight made the breakthroughs that resulted in the water reactor. A simplistic explanation is that he merely froze the water, thus turning it into a solid, but it is still to be revealed how water is kept frozen while being introduced into a reactor core as hot as the sun. The same scientist went on to create the first gas fuser, able to fuse hydrogen down into iron. Though these were brilliant achievements, the identity of the scientist is known only to the Committee, and Subnet rumours claim that, after he showed signs of burnout, his political director considered him too dangerous to live, so his final resting place became a community digester.

Antares Base

The airlock seemed to be taking for ever to cycle. Perhaps it was malfunctioning? No, the ready light now came on, so Var pulled down the handle and pushed open the door. She could grab Kaskan, pull him back inside. But, as she stepped outside, she realized she was already too late.

Ricard must have had the shepherd waiting right outside, and it was already retreating through a cloud of dust, hauling its prize up towards it. Kaskan wasn’t even struggling, just hung inert in tentacles straining to wring him out like a wet dishrag.

‘Build a monument . . . uh . . . something,’ he managed to say to her over com.

His voice sounded strained, and at that moment she noticed the horrible angle of his leg. So far it had not managed to penetrate his suit, but then his helmet fell away, with a great gout of vapour exploding outwards around his exposed skull.

At that point he chose to manually detonate the seismic charge.

Light flashed underneath the shepherd, and Kaskan was just gone. The blast wave picked up Var and slammed her back against the airlock. The robot’s body rose vertically, its legs blown off out to each side. Something smacked into Var’s chest and she peered down at a wormish segment of one of the shepherd’s tentacles. She batted it away and looked back up again, but no sign of either the robot or Kaskan now remained. By detonating right underneath it, the charge could have propelled the robot’s body for kilometres, while Kaskan himself would have instantly turned to slurry. Her back still against the door, Var slid down into a crouch, but then felt it moving, so stood up again and stepped away.

Lopomac came out first, then Carol, and for a moment they stood in silence staring at the wave of dust rolling away from them. Then Var broke into their thoughts.

‘For that to mean something,’ she said, ‘we have to succeed now, so let’s move.’

She broke into a steady lope, making sure that the others were keeping with her. Ahead, the wave of dust broke over the walls of Hex Three, then continued beyond it, dimming further the already waning light of the setting sun. Kaskan’s sacrifice, Var realized, had crystallized the hard determination within her: Ricard was not going to win . They were going to survive here without him and his enforcers, or they were not going to survive at all. If he did not respond in the way Kaskan had predicted, the power was going to stay turned off. Better they all died now than by whatever selection process Ricard had in mind, or by the gradual collapse of the base’s systems later on. She knew that maybe she wasn’t being fair to others, but, damnit, this must end – and soon.

The damage she had already caused to Hex Three soon became evident. They rounded the structure to reach the only remaining airlock – the one into the garage – which took them nearly a quarter of an hour to get through. She entered the garage first, with her machine pistol cocked just in case Ricard had left one of his men behind, but there was no one there.

‘No action yet?’ said Lopomac, stating the obvious as he stepped out behind her.

‘Weapons,’ decided Var. ‘He won’t have taken everything from the cache.’

Kaskan had given them this. Ricard had rightly believed that they stood very little chance indeed of dealing with that shepherd outside Hydroponics. But he had not included in his calculations the fact that one of them might be prepared to die in order to destroy it.