Neal Asher - The Departure

After some minutes, the sliding door of the docking pillar revolved sideways, and four figures clad in light spacesuits stepped out. None of these was Messina, though Hannah recognized one woman from broadcast sessions of the Committee. After a moment the name came to her: Delegate Margot Le Blanc of the French region. With her was an older man who might be her husband, and a younger one likely to be her son. The heavily built one with ophidian eyes, and subdermal armouring evident in his face, had to be Le Blanc’s Inspectorate bodyguard.

‘Move over there.’ Saul gestured to a space at the edge of the dock floor, where the spidergun unfolded with fast and eerie silence in the vacuum, three of its weapon-bearing limbs pointed at these four.

Delegate Le Blanc was clearly saying something, but it wasn’t audible over com. Either Saul had not seen fit to include Hannah in the communication, or he himself just wasn’t bothering to listen. She suspected the latter. The spidergun took a few paces forward and, after staring at the machine for a moment, Le Blanc bowed her head and with the three others trailing her walked over to the spot indicated. More people began to emerge, including other familiar faces, along with children looking pathetic and vulnerable in the smallest size of spacesuit available, concertinaed at the joints yet still hanging loose and baggy. The sight of them at once coloured Hannah’s decision as to their fate: she could not allow Saul to kill them all – not now.

‘Messina will come out last,’ she predicted.

‘He’s wriggling like a hooked fish,’ remarked Saul. ‘He’s communicating with people back on Earth, with the rest of his soldiers here and with those still on the other planes, trying to find some way of getting a handle on this situation. It seems he just can’t admit to himself that he no longer possesses any power.’

Hannah detected movement at the periphery of her vision and glanced across at the next docking face, which tilted up at an angle from this one. People were now departing from planes there and, as she looked straight above, she could see others were emerging on all the other docking faces too. Doubtless Saul was still issuing instructions even while he spoke to her for, escorted by spiderguns, they started heading round to the docking face she stood on.

‘There’s nothing he can do?’ Hannah asked.

‘He still thinks so – a notion of which I am about to disabuse him.’ Saul paused for a moment, then continued, ‘If everyone could listen very carefully. Since Chairman Messina has seen fit to issue orders for security personnel to take a shot at me whenever they get the chance, be aware that, before entering this dock, I programmed the spiderguns to react to any weapons fire in one way only. They will kill all of you. Since their sensors range into the infrared, the spill from your suits will be sufficient for them to target every one of you – there will be no place you can hide.’

‘You’re taking a big risk by just being here,’ said Hannah.

‘Not really,’ Saul replied. ‘Messina’s troops destroyed the cams in Dock One, but not here. If someone even raises a weapon, they’ll get no chance to use it.’

Hannah again surveyed the crowds now moving round towards them, then focused on those arriving through the nearest airlock. If Saul was confident he could detect an attempt to kill him from so many different sources, it meant he was functioning at a level way beyond that of most computers. She had always known such ability was possible for him, but hadn’t quite registered the fact until now.

‘You’re really confident of that?’

‘Confdence is not the issue, but speed of image processing, assignment of risk levels and reaction times are. The only chance of someone actually firing a weapon in my direction is if twenty-eight people were to attempt it simultaneously within the same four-second time frame.’ He glanced at her. ‘You yourself installed the hardware in my head, you know what I can do.’

Hannah shrugged. ‘On an intellectual level, yes.’ She nodded towards the airlock. ‘Here’s Messina.’

Still watching her, Saul grinned. ‘Did you think I needed telling?’

He turned to the airlock from which Messina had just emerged, with four large and heavily augmented bodyguards gathered round him. The Chairman wore a vacuum combat suit, doubtless state-of-the-art, but perhaps still wanted to put some flesh between himself and potential bullets. However, rather than go and lose himself in the growing crowd gathered at the dock edge, he walked directly towards Saul, and came to a halt only five metres away, his bodyguards lining up behind him.

‘Your decision,’ said Saul quietly.

Hannah assumed he had addressed the Chairman, but when Messina showed no reaction she realized the words had been for her ears only. She was tired and now wanted to just be somewhere safe, so she could sleep, but the implication of those two words had her chest tightening and her heartbeat thundering in her ears. Panic attack – she’d been here before. Perhaps this meant that somewhere inside she was feeling safe, sufficiently out of danger for her false friend to return. She tried to breathe calmly, to get it all under control: in through her nose and out through her mouth. Saul turned to look at her and waited. Messina was speaking, she could see. Saul probably listened to his words and discounted them. Messina’s control of his own destiny had ceased some while ago.

‘My decision,’ she managed, the thundering in her ears retreating but the tightness in her chest increasing. ‘I am going to defer my decision.’

‘That you cannot do.’

‘Yes, I can.’ She shrugged, trying to get angry enough to drive away the feeling of losing control. ‘It is my decision that, until I come to some final decision, all of these people will be confined to Arcoplex One.’

Saul nodded, with a hint of a smile. ‘Yes, appropriate.’ He then turned back to Messina, snapping, ‘Shut up.’ Hannah heard Messina’s last words tailing off, as Saul now included her and probably everyone else in the communication. ‘Here’s what is going to happen.’ He glanced from those already huddled at the edge of this dock to those still fling across from other docking faces. ‘You will all head towards the back of this pillar, and proceed through to the endcap of Arcoplex One, where you’ll enter through the airlock there. I see there are one hundred and ninety-three of you, so I leave it to yourselves to organize who enters first and who enters last, on the basis of air supply, since each cycling of the lock will take a minimum of two minutes and it will only hold four of you at a time.’

‘You can’t put us in there,’ protested Messina.

‘Why not?’ Saul glanced at the man absently. ‘Because of the two thousand corpses inside?’ When Messina had no answer to that, Saul continued, ‘You will of course need to work fast to feed them all into the five digesters inside the arcoplex. You’ll need to strip them of their clothing and remove any metal augmentations that might jam the digesters. Since each digester can only process one corpse per hour, that means, with all of them operating, the whole process should take about seventeen days. By then it’s going to get rather unpleasant in there, I suspect.’

‘So it amuses you to exact such a petty vengeance.’ Messina’s every word was laden with contempt.

‘No,’ said Saul, ‘it would suit me better to feed you, and every delegate here, feet first into a digester while still alive. And that might yet become an option. For now, I am going to leave two of my spiderguns here to ensure you follow my instructions. Please don’t try anything foolish, since that would only result in a horrible mess any survivors would have to clear up.’ He finally turned to Hannah. ‘Let’s go.’