Neal Asher - The Departure

The garage contained a single crawler, parked on the ramp accessing a passage leading down underneath the hex to the workshop in the adjoining wing. The doors leading into the workshop would be sealed, that being the first area Var had opened to the Martian atmosphere. Spare wheels and engine parts were stacked along one wall, while along another one a row of super-caps was being charged up. To her right a heavy door stood open and she headed over to peer inside. Ricard had been in a hurry, so had not bothered to lock up safely. Assault rifles rested in a rack, also machine pistols and side arms. Stepping inside, Var discarded her machine pistol, selected a rifle and filled her hip pouch with clips of ceramic ammunition. The grenade rack, unfortunately, stood empty.

‘The reactor,’ prompted Var, after the other two had made their selections.

It resided in a room of its own at the centre of the hex, cut off from the Political Director’s control room and the Executive and enforcers’ quarters by bulkhead doors now tightly closed. Four pillars supported the reactor’s housing, a thick coin of bubblemetal, veined with pipes, from which ducts containing superconductive wiring diverged into the walls. A simple console and screen controlled the reactor itself, while most of the other equipment crowding this room was the tool set for taking the thing apart and performing vital maintenance on it.

Var dropped into a chair facing the console and screen, and started by calling up the menu. Then she glanced round and noticed Carol beginning to remove her helmet.

‘Find some more air,’ she instructed. ‘We won’t be staying in here.’

Carol stared back at her, looking terrified, but she nodded obediently and left the reactor room.

Having used the reactor’s simple menu a number of times before, while doing some work on the old injectors, she keyed through it quickly. This time she didn’t want to shut the reactor down, just cut the power. In a moment she had a schematic of the entire base up on the screen and, using her finger, selected every section of it except Hex Three, hesitating for only a brief moment over Hydroponics. She did not want to give Ricard a place to retreat to, nor think for a moment that she did not mean what she would shortly be telling him. The lights brightened for a second, then settled again. There, it was done, and now the rest of the base lay in darkness. Var used her wrist console to open a channel via the still flashing icon in the bottom corner of her visor.

‘Hello, Ricard,’ she began.

It took a moment for him to respond, and he sounded angry, of course. ‘Really smart, Var. I see they must have missed something during your psyche evaluation.’

‘I don’t think they did,’ she replied. ‘They’ve always been aware that intelligence is not a trait normally found in obedient little drones – but that intelligence is needed in places like this. They just took a calculated risk. However, there was no risk with you, Ricard – they roll your kind off the production line every day.’

‘So rather than surrender yourself to the legitimately established authority here, you’d kill us all.’

‘Yes, because I know that you won’t let me, Carol or Lopomac live. And I also know that under your stewardship, this base will fail within months, so better we all die now. You, Ricard, now have two choices. You can either do nothing, in which case you’ll begin running out of air within a couple of days, and the heat will have bled out meanwhile so that everything in Hydroponics will be dead, or, if you’ve got the balls, you can come over here and try to get the power back on.’

‘You wouldn’t do that,’ he said.

‘Yeah, my psyche report didn’t label me as the kind who would so readily kill Inspectorate staff. Just as Kaskan’s psyche report didn’t have him down as the kind who might sacrifice himself to take out a shepherd. I’m therefore guessing that those psyche reports aren’t really so reliable.’

‘A hundred and fifty people here would suffocate – that’ll be on your conscience.’

‘See you soon, Ricard,’ she said, cutting the connection and spinning her chair round to face Lopomac, and Carol, now back with an armful of spacesuit air bottles.

‘We can’t lose Hydroponics,’ said Carol.

‘It won’t come to that. He’ll send his men over soon, and maybe he’ll even come along himself.’

‘He might try to wait you out. He might realize you’re bluffing?’

‘Carol,’ said Var firmly, ‘I’m not bluffing. We go independent here or we all die. And I’m making the choice that if we are due to die, that will occur over the next few days rather than a few months down the line.’

‘I’m with Var on that,’ said Lopomac. ‘There are no half-measures we can take.’

Var stood up. ‘I’m sure they’ll blow out the windows and come in that way . . . though they might try bringing a crawler into the garage.’ It was what she would do. Yes, she could now destroy the garage’s door mechanism to keep them out, but she didn’t want them out. She wanted them inside, then dead. ‘Ricard will probably hold off, hoping we’ll give in, but once the cold starts killing off Hydroponics, he’ll have to act. So let’s get ready for him. Let’s use some of our brilliant technical know-how to prepare a reception.’

She had doubts still, but couldn’t show them. Ricard might hold off for too long – certainly he could take all remaining air stocks for himself and his men. He might even use this as a method of thinning out base personnel, that way managing to lay the blame on Var. But, no, he would act before the air supply ran too low, and he’d act before he lost Hydroponics. Surely he would.

Argus Station

‘Hit it,’ Langstrom instructed over com.

A series of explosions ensued, punctuated by the stuttering light of the ten-bore machine guns, all utterly silent in vacuum. Missiles flashed across above them, bullets and tracers sparked off beams, and fires bloomed as of a city under siege at night. In loping strides of three metres each, starlit vacuum visible below them through the lattice partition, they approached the base of the Political Office. Some distance ahead, Peach’s unit reached the blank wall, against which two of her men stuck incendiary worms. Off to the right a ten-bore flashed, tracers streaking across above the latticework, before striking an armoured shield. Then from the point of impact a missile was fired back, hitting the original source of fire. The detonation flung chunks of debris out amid the surrounding substructure.

Peach’s people stepped back as the incendiary worms burned, cutting a doorway, which was then opened by the blast of a centrally positioned charge. Atmosphere blasted out, carrying all sorts of unidentifiable detritus, then just as abruptly it shut off. Two of her unit went through, one of them shouldering a missile-launcher. Detonation inside, lighting the interior, the burr of a machine pistol over com. Peach and the other man followed next, and five more after them.

Langstrom listened to com for a moment, then turned to Braddock and Saul. ‘We’re clear. We can go in now.’

Saul nodded briefly, then held up a restraining hand: just one moment. Through his boots he felt its approach behind him, and through its robotic eyes he noted Langstrom’s startled expression as the construction robot moved up beside him. It loomed over him like a guardian bear, but this particular bear had six limbs, and in one of its tool-wielding paws it clutched a heavy machine gun.

‘Is that thing really necessary?’ Braddock asked.

‘It may be useful,’ Saul replied, not yet ready to rely on the soldiers’ protection alone.

Langstrom led the way into a corridor filled with tendrils of smoke dissipating into vacuum. Blood smeared the floor, blackened by absence of air, yet there was no sign of any corpses. Off to the right lay further wreckage, and the remains of a machine gun embedded in a wall. They headed for a secondary airlock, and after Langstrom opened it, Saul sent his guardian through first. He watched through its eyes as the inner airlock door opened, admitting the robot to a corridor filled with smoke. He and Braddock stepped through next, and at once he picked up sound: suppressing fire from four soldiers racketing like power drills somewhere out of sight. With Langstrom following they proceeded left, then right, the sounds of gunfire almost continuous ahead of them. Saul glanced up at the wrecked dome of a readergun located in the ceiling, surprised that it seemed to have cost no lives.