Neal Asher - The Departure

Both dried and fresh blood covered his VC suit, she noticed, the fresh blood looking the same colour as his eyes. A fuzz of white hair now covered his scalp, concealing most of the scars, but to Hannah as he turned to face her, he just didn’t look human.

‘How did you get in here, then?’ she managed.

‘I just walked in along with some of Langstrom’s men,’ Saul shrugged. ‘I knew Smith would come here directly to shut down the EM shield.’

‘What now?’

He raised his head slightly as if listening to something. ‘That’s the shield down again. Now I’m running code crackers on everything he controlled.’ A humourless smile. ‘Since I’m no longer fighting him or need to perpetually look to my defences, I can use station computing . . . there, I have the readerguns. The robots next.’

‘But again, what now?’

He looked momentarily pensive. ‘Presently I have this station set on a spiral course outwards from Earth. At the end of that course, it will swing itself around the Moon. By then, all necessary decisions will have been made.’

‘Decisions?’

‘Yes, Hannah, decisions.’

Saul revelled in the new feeling of freedom and safety as he cracked the last of Smith’s codes, whereupon the last of the functioning readerguns and station robots came under his control. Human feeling like this he now allowed himself to indulge in, since it seemed to give him a reason to continue existing – after all, what was the use of victory if it could not be enjoyed? However, despite this sudden extension of his power, and with areas he had previously been almost blind to now opening up to him, he remained merely a fragile human being in a space station filled with those who, given the chance, would kill him.

‘So that’s it. He’s gone.’ Hannah turned to gaze back at Smith, rather than query Saul’s comment about ‘decisions’.

Saul reached out and grabbed the front of Smith’s VC suit, kicked the dead man’s feet away from him to detach his soles from the floor, and lifted him higher.

‘He won’t get much deader than this,’ he observed, then shoved Smith away to send him drifting across the room.

What now? Hannah had asked. When Saul had fired up the Mars Traveller engine, his decision to fling the Argus Station away from Earth had been founded on the notion that his human self would want to survive. Now, by allowing human emotions to emerge, his reason for going to Mars was obvious: his sister was there. But wouldn’t the moral choice now be to first neutralize Messina and the remaining delegates, then return to Earth to do whatever possible to mitigate the impending horror there? Quite simply, he did not know the answer, for he could do little to avert the catastrophe, and he wondered if he really wanted to set himself up as some kind of arbiter over it. The human race had walked blindly into this disaster, so it was theirs to deal with, wasn’t it?

‘I can see more of the station now,’ he informed Hannah, as the doors swept open ahead of him. ‘It possesses enough fusion plants and enough raw materials and equipment to continue functioning for a century or more without any need of the sun.’

‘What about food?’ asked Hannah, following him out into the corridor beyond.

‘The Arboretum and zero-gravity hydroponics can provide enough food for all those presently on board, and because they sent nearly the entire library from Gene Bank up here, along with tonnes of frozen samples, there’s enough biodiversity available to iron out any instabilities occurring in the ecology.’ He shot her a glance. ‘Arcoplex Two is full of state-of-the-art technology, including the necessary biotech to turn any of those samples into something living. We could resurrect whole species here that Earth hasn’t seen for centuries, or even millennia.’

‘But we’re not going back to Earth.’

Saul paused as he mentally riffled through the inventory of the equipment, laboratories and technologies contained in Arcoplex Two. There he discerned a laboratory and surgery even more advanced than the one Hannah had been using down on Earth, along with hundreds of copies of the hardware that had ended up inside both Malden’s and Smith’s skulls. No doubt this had all been laid on for Messina and his core delegates, so they could elevate themselves to a state of post-humanity. But, as Saul well knew, such equipment could provide a two-way street; what could expand the mind could also be used to scrub it, to totally erase it. He felt that thought for future reference; a viable alternative to death. And, when the time seemed right, he would let Hannah know that this alternative existed.

‘If we went back to Earth, what could I do?’ he asked.

‘You could . . . save people.’

‘Yes, I could, but how exactly would I do that?’ He gazed at her steadily. ‘Whilst in orbit, the tools I would have at my disposal to interract with Earth would consist of the satellite laser network and my ability to penetrate the computer systems down there. I cannot make more food available. I cannot build more power stations or more efficiently channel water supplies. In the end all I could do to ensure that some lived would be to choose which others should die.’

‘But isn’t that what you want to do?’

He felt a wholly human flash of anger at that. ‘The only power I ever wanted was that of deciding my own destiny, which was something I could never hope for while the Committee still controlled Earth. I know that total individual freedom is about as real as the tooth fairy, but I still wanted more than I was being allowed. The power I’ve never sought is that of deciding the destinies of billions of others. I absolutely don’t want such utter power over life and death.’

But even as he said them, those last words rang hollow in his mouth, and he could see by Hannah’s expression that she could hear the echoes. In pursuing vengeance while dressing it up as ‘power over his own destiny’, he had already changed the entire course of history. The lives of a population of just over two thousand people now aboard this station were currently in his hands and, by removing both the Committee and the big stick that was the Argus satellite network from Earth, he had changed the fate of the billions remaining down on the planet.

‘The Committee came to power largely through the complacency of Earth’s population,’ he said. ‘Should I really be interested in them, Hannah? Should I be interested in the manswarm?’

He had influenced events on a massive scale, and in his hands lay the power to influence them further. He had obtained freedom of choice but, seemingly, no freedom from responsibility. Power was not something that would simply go away, and the decisions he now made, though unlikely to prevent the death of billions, could still change a very great deal.

‘What would you do?’ he asked.

‘Whatever I could,’ she replied.

So easy for her to say that. He decided then that there was one decision he would delegate to her, to see how, given power, she handled it. Then he would finally decide on his own course of action. There was time, more than enough time, even though the station was steadily drawing away from Earth. In the end, Earth would still lie within his grasp even from Mars, for even from there he could still penetrate Govnet and thereby so much else. But what about here in the station, inside his own domain?

An idea hard to rid his mind of was that if he set the readerguns to killing, over half of those aboard the station would be dead within the next ten minutes. Turning the rest of the robots, including the five spiderguns, on the survivors would result in a space station full of corpses within six hours. He could then use the robots to clear up the mess and, needing to look to his own survival only, he could gradually reprogram the robots to replace any essential personnel. A plant for producing more robots existed in Arcoplex Two, so making replacements or increasing the robot population would not be a problem either. Then he could be alone and utterly free of contemptible humanity. Only Hannah’s presence, and some remaining dregs of compassion, enabled him to resist this temptation.