Neal Asher - The Departure

Circumventing the complex put both it and Arcoplex One behind him, and now only the Arboretum cylinder lay ahead, bright in the sunlight peeking round Tech Central over to his left. As he rounded the base structure of the Arboretum, his suit grew uncomfortably warm in open sunlight. Here, no more cylinders lay ahead, just lattice walls rising above him to the station rim. However, these diamond-pattern partitions now terminated up against a solid wall rising sheer from the asteroid surface ahead, marking the near edge of the single break in the rim wheel. A series of ribs braced this great wall, on which monitoring stations and work habitats clung like shellfish to a sea cliff. This barrier hadn’t been here when he had researched the vicinity down on Earth, but it appeared on the station schematic inside his skull. He realized that it had been built to protect the girders of the inner station from the heat generated by the Traveller engine that lay beyond.

Saul approached and entered a tunnel cut through five metres of foam insulation at the base of the wall, finally coming against a thick bulkhead door with a single armour-glass window incorporated. He brushed aside asteroidal dust and peered through, studying the massive Mars Traveller VI engine standing beyond it, looking like a steel church dedicated to some ultimate god of fire.

A god he now intended to awaken.

18

Democracy in Action

At one time, the Committee Chairman was elected to office by the delegates, and occupied that position for no more than five years. Originally it was a position no one could be elected to more than once, but then Alessandro Messina’s predecessor, Chairman El Afraine, used a manufactured terrorist crisis to defer the election of a new Chairman. Unfortunately for him, his most likely successor, Messina, already had more allies in the Inspectorate than he did, and manipulated that ‘crisis’. The terrorists themselves – a small group of Subnet seditionists who had been monitored by the Inspectorate for years, but left alone precisely because El Afraine wanted to use them for his own ends – suddenly managed to obtain weapons and Hyex explosive, as well as El Afraine’s itinerary and information regarding the gaps in his security. After El Afraine’s scramjet detonated over the Adriatic, Messina swept to power in less than a day. When his own five years drew to a close, the sudden unfortunate demise of any suitable successors kept him in power for another term. Henceforth, nervous candidates were overcome by a great reluctance to put themselves forward, otherwise he lured out the bolder ones by hinting at possible retirement, though not in the usual sense of Committee ‘retirement’. After the first ten years, the five-year rule was quietly dropped and thus Messina occupied the position of Committee Chairman, on Earth, for forty-three years, before deciding to relocate his power base to Argus Station.

Antares Base

A control room was no longer a necessity when even the most complicated of systems could be operated from a simple console, even just a portable one. That Ricard had insisted on a full control room and the executives to staff it demonstrated the usual Inspectorate mindset: that being in charge required inferior ranks to obey you, a precise territory to piss-mark and dominate. And the more important you were, the bigger the office and the larger the staff you had to have, even if neither was strictly necessary.

Finding a wall console rarely used, in a room turned into a store, Var accessed a wide range of the base’s systems. Plenty of the information she could not review, since only Ricard knew the codes, but she still found enough for her purposes. Lopomac and Carol had knocked out the internal cam system throughout the base, but they hadn’t disrupted the external ones, or even the feed originating from the satellites orbiting Mars. After checking those external cams first, she keyed into the satellite feed. Ricard had locked down all communications to and from Earth, and she didn’t have the time to break his codes, but she was still able to pick up image data from satellites orbiting Earth which was being relayed to those immediately above. This she did to confirm that the Mars Travellers really had been decommissioned, and soon discovered that they had. The only evidence she could find of their existence was the nose section of Traveller VIII out in the orbital complex in which the Travellers had been built, but where it was being dismantled. Frustratingly, the shielding around Messina’s private building project prevented her obtaining image data of the Alexander , but while looking she found something else – something odd.

‘We’re done,’ said Lopomac.

Var glanced up to see him and Carol enter the room, and beckoned them over. She pointed at the image on her screen. ‘What do you make of this?’

‘You’re getting feed from Earth?’ said Carol.

‘Satellite cams – that’s all.’

‘What do we make of what?’ asked Lopomac, clearly puzzled.

The screen revealed one hemisphere of Earth, with satellites glinting above it. Using her ball control, Var moved the pointer up alongside one of the satellites, pausing it on a lengthy vapour trail.

‘I see,’ said Lopomac. ‘Maybe they’ve been repositioning them?’

‘Maybe, but there are plenty more vapour trails, and what looks like wreckage of some kind.’ Var paused, called up a menu and selected a long list of cam numbers, then scrolled down through it and selected again. ‘Then there’s this.’

Argus Station was distantly visible, and rising towards it were more space planes than Var had known existed.

‘Something big, I guess,’ said Lopomac. ‘Maybe we’ll be able to find out about it later, if we’re still alive.’

Var frowned, clicked back to exterior cam views of the base itself and was abruptly returned to reality when at random she selected one focused on the area just outside the main garage doors. Though this was night-time the cams possessed light amplification so that everything remained clearly visible. Spotting Gisender’s pathetic dried-out corpse, Var swallowed drily and rapidly checked other views. Still no sign of further action from Ricard, and there was work to be done. She reached out and slid over a laptop she had found earlier, checked its Bluetooth link with the console, and ensured she could call up all the cam views that could help her.

‘Have you fixed the garage doors?’ she asked tightly.

‘I’ve rigged up the supercaps there for full discharge through the garage airlock,’ he replied.

‘How are you delivering it?’

‘If they bring a crawler in, they have to open the outer garage doors and close them behind, then pressurize the airlock before opening the inner doors. I’ve just linked up a power line through the gate valve to the door mechanism and to the inner doors themselves.’ Lopomac stepped over to the console and linked into the internal cam system. ‘As you asked, I put the inside of Hex Three back on camera too. I cut the optics running into Hex One and triple-encoded radio, so Ricard can’t access it, and, as you said, he probably won’t even realize the cams are working.’ He clicked through a list, calling up a view inside the crawler airlock. ‘When that gate valve opens, it feeds power straight into the electronic control of the doors’ hydraulics, burning them out and seizing up the doors. Their only option then is to open them manually. The moment one of them touches a door, he’ll get a full discharge straight down through his body and into the floor.’

‘Rubber soles,’ said Var. ‘Insulated suits.’

‘About as much defence against this as against a lightning strike. Even less in fact. The doors and frames are bubblemetal but contained in bonded regolith, therefore insulated from the metal floor. This means I can run the full discharge of five in-series crawler supercapacitors to them. What’s left of whoever touches them we’ll have to scrub off the walls.’