Neal Asher - The Departure

‘This is not a great idea,’ came a second female voice, very like the first.

Saul’s semi-awareness strayed far enough to capture numerous views scattered throughout the Argus Station, and there he witnessed the battle in progress. Troops clad in vacuum combat suits had penetrated the station rim by the docks, and were quickly entrenching themselves there. He watched a great multi-limbed robot propelling itself about across one lattice wall, guns blazing from the end of each limb. The word ‘spidergun’ arose at once out of his inner chaos.

Above the endcap of Arcoplex One, the underside of the station rim was criss-crossed with gunfire, missile streaks and explosions. Saul saw shattered bodies go tumbling through the dark amid fragments of metal, plastic, flesh, bone and globules of blood. His awareness straying further, he next saw a great fleet of space planes entering an orbital vector leading them towards the station.

‘What are you doing?’ asked the male voice nearby.

‘He’s in REM, and the unit’s set to respond to his EEG. I just copied that.’ A pause. ‘Have you disconnected the restraint monitors yet, Angela?’

‘They’re now on manual release.’

‘Okay, here goes.’

Saul felt a tugging sensation at his temple, which seemed to shift his entire perception. He did not consciously understand what had happened, but his knowledge of how the human brain functions made him aware that the state of consciousness was thoroughly overrated. He accepted its resurgence anyway, the chaotic fragmentation of mind slamming together, with an almost physical sensation, into a strong coherent whole. The spectre of agony assailed him, because his animal mind knew that his body must be a roasted ruin, but his whole mind denied it – did not allow it to affect his essential self. He opened his eyes, and again saw with utter clarity, absorbing hundreds of cam views and data flows, while processing them with a speed even he himself found frightening.

Surely this was some fragment of a dream remaining with him – how could he have integrated so much information so fast? The answer came at once, via a factual assessment of processing speeds alongside active and inactive memory capacity. But he should not be like this because, after suffering a real-time one hundred and forty-three minutes of agony, which subjectively seemed like a thousand years, his mind should have become a total wreck. Therefore something else must be happening inside his head, something beyond the melding of his mind with that of Janus. There must be something else, he realized, that Hannah hadn’t told him. He would find out later. Other concerns came first.

On the other side of the cell, Angela Saberhagen squatted beside an open access panel, wires running from her palmtop, resting on the floor nearby, into the electronics revealed. Sweat beading his brow, Chang stood some way back, by the door, and looked ready to run. Brigitta stood right beside Saul himself. She had unplugged the optic from his temple and plugged it instead into a small optical drive, which she now released to hang by that optic cable.

‘You’re awake,’ she observed.

‘I am,’ Saul agreed, his voice hoarse. He looked down at the manacles still pinning him to the wall. ‘You can release me now.’

‘Why should I?’ she asked.

‘Because that’s what you came here to do.’

She showed a flash of annoyance. ‘Don’t you even want to know why?’

Saul dipped his head in acknowledgement. ‘Because Director Smith is never going to forgive you even the small amount of assistance I forced you to give me. He intends to stick all three of you in cells just like this, put you through hell, and probably end up killing you. You have surely realized by now that he only seeks excuses to satisfy his lust for inflicting pain, and that he is, in fact, insane.’

‘And are you sane?’ asked Angela, now standing up.

Saul glanced at her. ‘By which definition of sanity?’

‘Ours,’ was her simple reply.

‘I have killed, and I will continue to kill,’ Saul replied. ‘But torture is not something I take pleasure in, nor is it something I would ever feel the need to use.’

Brigitta reached up alongside his wrist, pressed a locking button, and the padded manacle sprang open. He swung his arm free of the wall, aware of the psychosomatic pain shooting all along it, but noticed only a slight reddening of the wrist, where it had fought against the manacle. He reached round to undo the other manacle, as Brigitta unclipped the metal band around his waist, before squatting to deal with the restraints about his ankles. Saul pushed himself away from the wall, feet light against the floor.

‘Are you okay?’ Chang asked.

Was he? All his two-year lifespan now lay open to his recollection but seemed distant, utterly shorn from the now by his time under inducement – by that subjective thousand years. To his recollection, he had surfaced to awareness seventeen times, only to be driven under again by the same mind-destroying agony that had deleted the original Alan Saul from existence. This time, however, that same pain, operating in synergy with something new inside his skull, had driven deep into him an awareness that his physical body was not actually him, nor were the computer systems, nor the programs running within his fleshly skull, nor any implanted or external processors. He was all of these, yet none, for he was in a perpetual state of flux. He was not the sea but the waves riding upon it, and not even the same waves from one moment to the next. His definition of self seemed a hazy thing, but that knowledge of self was total. Smith had tempered him all too well in the fire.

‘I have much to do,’ he replied, gazing down at his naked body, then at the shit spattered on the floor. ‘I’ll be needing a VC suit.’

‘They have some here,’ said Brigitta, ‘but I don’t think the guards will care for the idea of you taking one.’

Saul’s perception snapped towards the cameras positioned in the entrance foyer. Three heavily armed figures were watching the progress of the battle on two screens. Another screen nearby showed an image of Saul himself, still manacled to the wall – the twins had looped the image feed. Checking further, with a touch as light as gossamer, Saul felt Smith’s presence extended throughout the station network, waiting ready at the readerguns that the attackers had ceased to advance on, reluctantly tasking robots to attack only to see them trashed by that spiderlike cousin of theirs.

Langstrom’s forces clearly outnumbered the invaders, but since their purpose seemed only to establish a beachhead until the other space planes arrived, Langstrom wasn’t making much headway so far. Looking elsewhere, Saul noted that Arcoplex One had become a mortuary, so he tentatively tried to penetrate stored image files. No reaction from Smith, since Saul chose to play those files at high speed within the memories of the cameras that had recorded them. In just a minute, he had assimilated an outline of what had been happening, surmising that if Alessandro Messina and the delegates he had brought with him now took over, the situation here would be no better than if Smith remained in power.

‘It seems Messina is on his way here with about two hundred of his core delegates,’ Saul observed.

‘Their arrival here won’t relax their grip on things down below,’ Brigitta replied. ‘Not in the slightest.’

He gazed at her. ‘At some point they will completely lose control of Earth, and billions down there will die.’

Brigitta looked a little sick upon hearing this.

‘They will later re-establish their authority, once they get the rest of the laser satellites up here running,’ he continued. ‘But I will try to ensure that those who manage to survive have a chance to establish something new, rather than fall back under the rule of the Committee. I am therefore glad that Messina is coming here.’ He reached back to the wall so as to propel himself off it, towards the door.