Neal Asher - The Departure

Smith stared at the screen for a long moment, before repeating numbly, ‘One hundred and seventy.’

‘Yes,’ Messina continued with relish, ‘and for the duration of this emergency the remaining delegates have voted me a position worthy of my ancestry. They have made me dictator for life.’

‘Yet that still does not explain why your troops have embarked upon such a hostile penetration of this station,’ Smith insisted.

‘The Argus Station, as far as we are aware, is under the control of someone evidently hostile to the Committee. How else to explain the laser attack upon Minsk, the subsequent destruction of two space planes, and then the systematic disabling of most of the working portion of the Argus satellite network?’

‘One Alan Saul, a person of whom you have knowledge, temporarily took control of a section of this station. He now languishes in a cell, under inducement,’ said Smith, ‘so now I take it I can expect the hostilities up here to cease?’

‘It will be necessary for me to assess the situation personally,’ replied Messina, putting on a sad expression. Then a thought seemed to perk him up. ‘However, I do look forward to renewing your acquaintance, Smith. I look forward to that very much.’

Messina’s image blinked out, to be replaced by Langstrom’s.

‘What is the current number of planes approaching?’ Smith asked him.

‘Twenty-eight,’ Langstrom replied.

‘And in your estimation, how many troops?’

‘Messina knows exactly how many are based here, and therefore the resistance he may expect to face,’ said Langstrom. ‘He’ll be bringing up no less than two hundred troops, but with that number of planes, he could be bringing as many as a thousand.’

‘Then it is my requirement that you mount your defence on that basis.’

‘We’ve got no defence that’ll work.’

‘When you have your plans ready, submit them to me at once.’

‘Sir, we don’t stand a chance.’

‘You should also prepare a hard copy to keep on file, whilst transmitting a data copy down to Central in Brussels. It is best not to be incautious in such matters.’

Langstrom gazed at him in silence for a long moment, before he said, ‘Whatever,’ and shut off the connection.

Hannah felt no pity whatsoever for Smith. He had tried to seize power for himself and was about to be stomped on by Messina; however, she could see utterly no hope for herself or Saul, either. If neither of them got killed during the impending battle, she herself would end her days in perpetual slavery, whilst Saul would finish up in one of the station’s digesters. She bowed her head, wanting to weep in despair but determined not to.

‘There will be a degree of damage done to the station,’ remarked Smith abruptly, ‘but nothing major. Again, the problem will be to find somewhere suitable to store the resultant human detritus. It is a great shame that inducers and tasers will not be effective over the ranges involved, else I would instruct Langstrom to use them and thus there would be less of a mess.’

Hannah looked up to focus for a moment on the spittle foaming at the corner of Smith’s mouth, then she bowed her head again.

About twenty metres out from Saul, a three-man crew was manoeuvring a heavy machine gun into place, its barrel protruding from a curved metal shield. He paused for a moment to study them, and, even though one of them shot him a glance, they then ignored his presence and continued busily securing the gun to an I-beam. They were preparing for the imminent arrival of Messina’s forces, and, naturally, any soldiers seeing his VC suit would assume he was one of them.

Saul moved on, but abandoned the walkway before it became enclosed again at the point where it entered Langstrom’s barracks. One shove of his hand sent him dropping steadily down towards the asteroid’s surface, and on the way he tried to pick up more information on the present situation; tried to infiltrate further the station network without alerting Smith. Again it seemed so very easy.

Perhaps Smith did not notice him because he was currently focused on the invading troops entrenched above, or upon working out what Messina intended. But Saul doubted that, because this new ease of penetration seemed more likely to be due to the way he was now using his mind. Having utterly subjugated his own organic component, he had assumed a semblance to the station’s computers, till in fact he was just software running within them, and less of a presence, even to himself. Whereas before he had just about been able to match Smith’s abilities, his adversary only withdrawing deliberately so as to lure Saul deeper into a trap, it now felt as if he had taken a decisive step beyond the man. However, this advantage did not place ultimate power neatly in his hands. Even if he could now manage to seize control of the station network, that would not be enough to give him victory over Smith and his troops, or over Messina and his men. Too many readerguns weren’t operating, and against hundreds of troops the robots available here could not win. And, as ever, in this present disconnected state, he did not know how long he would actually care about winning, or even living.

Certainly, Messina was approaching the station with enough troops to ensure capturing it, therefore, despite the hatred he felt in his organic mind towards Smith, Messina’s troops were the greater danger to him. And this he must now prepare for.

The surface of the asteroid came up at him fast, and he hit it bending his legs just sufficiently to absorb the shock, so that he didn’t bounce off and away again. Exactly locating his current position, he headed off in bounding strides for the base structure of Arcoplex One. As he circumvented this, he continued to thrust his mind further inside the station network.

Smith had managed to crack the code Saul had used to secure his small army of robots, but only for a short while before it underwent one of its hidden transforms, and so had not managed to take all of them away from him. Saul found the remaining robots scattered about the lattice walls lying between him and the rim, but most were concentrated around Tech Central, which now loomed up to his left, cast into silhouette by the sun. From their slumber he woke up five construction robots, which he summoned to him along with those smaller members of the robot ecology that Smith had ignored, perhaps because they were of little use against the power of Messina’s troops. Remiss of him, for Saul now linked into them, found twenty belonging to a specific subspecies of maintenance robot, and gave them instructions little different from the kind they would normally receive. He then dispatched them throughout the station to repair disabled readerguns and make them accessible only to him. However, he knew that those readerguns, and the construction robots now heading towards them, would not be enough to bring him victory.

Ahead of him lay a mining complex, out of which an ore transit tube rose, like a massive redwood, towards the station’s rim and the smelting-plant dock located there. A huge robot equipped with twin digging wheels sat there frozen, having been shut down in the process of hacking chunks of ore from the ground and transferring them into the fat carrier comprising much of its body. A giant drilling rig on gecko-treaded tracks stood at rest only thirty metres beyond it, its extended robotic arms clamped around an anchor pillar that speared up into the station’s inner structure above his head. It held a new section of pillar destined to fill the gap where a large mass of ore had been removed below. Of course, as they mined out the asteroid, they built the station inwards as well as outwards. All around Saul could see where massive I-beams had been extended downwards and re-anchored, even cases where a few, which had once abutted the asteroid surface some metres apart, now intersected each other and had been joined into one. After kilotonnes of ore had been mined from it to turn into bubblemetals, the asteroid was now substantially smaller than when first brought here from the asteroid belt.