The Departure

by Neal Asher

  This damage was done in less than a second, and Smith, still struggling to fortify his hold on the satellites Saul had now allowed him, hadn’t even noticed.

  But no tanker stood beside the second plane, and already the ground crews were retracting all the umbilicals, and preparing to withdraw all the loaders and passenger tunnels. Again and again, Saul hit the points where those tunnels connected to the plane, until he could see fire and molten metal erupt, then begin to spiral out from that point, crippling loaders and vaporizing chunks out of the caterpillar treads that the mobile access buildings moved about on. Then he got lucky, because one of the loaders on the ground, obviously hydrogen-powered, exploded and rolled underneath the plane. Even if they could manage to detach the passenger ramp and get the airlock closed, it would still take them a long time to clear the rest of the debris out of the way. Time for some insurance, just as Smith—probably informed of what was happening by his contacts below—now tried to seize control of the two active satellites.

  Eight fuel-tanker trucks were drawn up in a neat line inside a heavily secured compound, with a ninth tanker parked alongside the big overground pumps that drew fuel up from an underground cistern. This one tanker was currently being filled, hoses trailing from it across the carbocrete. He didn’t know if the other eight were waiting to be filled or already full, but it didn’t matter. He hit the hose first, then concentrated his aim on the pumps, all to spectacular effect.

  Burning liquid fuel flooded from the ruptured pipe, pursuing three personnel trying to escape across the carbocrete, but even when they reached the compound fence and tried to climb it, they weren’t quick enough. The firestorm expanded from the compound in a steadily widening tide. Within, it flowed underneath the tanker parked beside the pumps, then spread across and underneath all the other tankers, so that in moments their tyres were burning. Next the pumps blew, hurling chunks of heavy machinery high into the air. The blast rolled the loading tanker straight into the neat row of its fellows, spewing a jet of flame from its filler port. At this point, a tanker in the middle of the row exploded, overturning the one next to it. Then the underground tank began itself to spew blazing fuel, erupting from where the pumps had stood like a mini-volcano. Saul saw fences sagging and collapsing, with a few burning remnants still clinging to them of those who had been trying to flee. It was so hot down there that the wire began melting. Another tanker blew, and yet another, a moment later, then his view was blotted out by the thick black smoke cloud rising from the firestorm.

  Saul immediately turned his attention to securing his gains but, oddly, Smith merely retreated from him.

  “Hopefully I’ve delayed any more launches out of Minsk for a while,” Saul declared, “but there are four planes already on their way up here, and we need to find a way of dealing with them within the next hour.”

  The short corridor led directly into the lobby of Tech Central, where Saul could see the result of one of his earlier actions. Two guards sprawled motionless behind overturned metal desks, large portions of their heads spread across the floor and up the wall behind them.

  “And how did you stop further launches?” Hannah enquired, her tone flat, her face pale.

  “You’ll see,” he said.

  “I want to see, too,” said Braddock, glancing at Saul with something akin to admiration.

  They entered Tech Central to the sound of hammering from within the adjacent toilet.

  “Be quiet!” Braddock bellowed.

  A couple of surprised exclamations issued from within, and the noise ceased. Saul peered through the two cams in there to see a man and two women clad in the cheap standard garments of technicians. Then he turned to study the rest of Tech Central as he began finessing his control of every system that originated from here, and still remained within his compass.

  This room was just like the one he had seized control of in the cell complex at Inspectorate HQ London. It bore some resemblance to a flight-control room, with outward-slanting windows running around most of the exterior, but in this case overlooking the asteroid and the full extent of the station wheel radiating all about them. Below the windows lay a range of consoles and screens, which also ran around those walls lacking windows. Saul moved over to a work station with three much larger screens mounted above it. He pulled himself down into a swivel chair and rested his blood pressure-feed on the console. The console was laden with controls he didn’t need because, by just using his mind, he now brought up a repeating series of views on the middle screen, including a close-up of the fire raging down on Earth, and a more distant shot of the whole spaceport.

  “Minsk,” he murmured.

  “You used the lasers?” Braddock frowned. “I thought they had only anti-personnel capacity?”

  “A rifle, too, is an antipersonnel weapon, but it’s amazing what happens when you fire a tracer bullet into a petrol tank.”

  “Point taken,” Braddock conceded.

  “Now these.” Saul gestured, as on all three screens he pulled up views, through the sat cams, of the space planes approaching.

  “And you can’t use the lasers against them,” said Hannah, pulling up a swivel chair beside him, and sitting astride it with her forearms resting on the back.

  “No, they wouldn’t be able to penetrate.”

  “So you’ve no usable weapons out there now?”

  “On the contrary,” replied Saul, an idea taking shape in his mind, “I have a number of satellites at my disposal.”

  “But you said Smith—”

  Saul held up his hand to silence her. “Please, I need to think.”

  It was all about trajectories. The less atmospheric pressure around the planes, as they continued rising, the more dependent they became upon steering jets rather than ailerons and wing-repositioning, and the less manoeuvrable they thus became. The two satellites were still within range and remained under his control, while his defence against Smith’s perpetual probing attacks was steadily growing stronger and almost self-maintaining. He pulled up some nice close-shot pictures of each on two of the three screens and set the cameras to tracking them whilst maintaining a view of the approaching planes on the third screen. “What are you doing now?” Hannah asked.

  “It’s nice that they’re bringing those planes up in such a tight formation,” he noted.

  She shot a look of puzzlement at Braddock, who brought his two fists together with a thwack, and then grinned. Then she nodded in understanding.

  “Now I need to disarm Smith,” continued Saul.

  He opened fire from the other satellites under his control upon the ones that Smith controlled. Smith was quick to reply, and their incandescent battle must have been clearly visible from Earth, as lasers repeatedly targeted fellow satellites. But the whole thing was taking longer than Saul had expected, and on checking stored schematics he discovered that all these satellites were protected externally by a layer of ceramic tiles.

  The contest centred at first on the two satellites located over Minsk, but then it spread. Three hundred satellites in all were disabled within the first six minutes—ten times the timespan involved if they had not been protected by those tiles—so that massive areas of the globe dropped out of coverage.

  Smith’s expected attempt at communication came through shortly after the first satellites went down, but Saul ignored it. The man probably hoped to dissuade Saul from such a mutually destructive battle. Only when those satellites that Saul wanted disabled were out of action did he cease his attacks, whereupon Smith’s attacks ceased a fraction of a second later. Now, of course, Smith had nothing left within range of Argus—or of those two satellites down below.

  Saul began calculating vectors in his head, loading engine-thrust calculations, and even then using the steering jets on the satellites to turn them, whilst simultaneously starting up their engines so as to set them on a rough vector he could correct later … four seconds later. The two satellites now shed their panels, folding and twisting away like discarded Chr
istmas decorations.

  They were now well on their way, but Saul maintained his mental link to the steering thrusters, so he could still make instant adjustments.

  “Twenty-three minutes,” he noted. “Long before then, either Smith will warn them or they’ll figure out what’s going on and start evasive manoeuvres.”

  Just then a scraping sound issued from the toilet, as someone tried to force the door open.

  “Let them out, Braddock,” he said, “then bring them over here.”

  Braddock nodded, without questioning the order, and headed over to the toilet door. A panel beside it contained a motion detector to open it automatically whenever anyone approached. That was until he had put a single shot through it, after the three prisoners were inside. Now he just landed a boot against the door and burst it open inwards. Someone yelled in pain and Saul glimpsed the man tumbling backwards holding his head.

  “Out,” Braddock ordered the three of them.

  The two women pushed their way out first. Both had cropped blonde hair, probably because keeping long hair clean up here was nigh an impossibility, and they were of very similar appearance. They looked remarkably young to Saul, seeming little more than teenagers, but that merely meant they might have been using anti-ageing drugs. He checked personnel files stored in Tech Central itself and discovered that they were twins. Angela and Brigitta Saberhagen were very bright twins who had been born in Berlin twenty years ago, then turned into societal assets from the moment they started dismantling computers at the age of five. The man was bearded, balding and running to fat. Despite the clean technician’s clothing, his hands were ingrained with dirt, and Saul found that somehow reassuring. His name was Girondel Chang, home city Nanking in China, but he certainly didn’t look at all Chinese. Braddock ushered them over and mustered them in a line, but far enough away that he could still bring any one of them down if they decided to attack Saul.

  “Do you have any survival gear in or near here?” Saul asked them, even though he already knew precisely what was available.

  The twins merely looked at each other, and it was their bearded companion who replied, “Emergency survival suits in the lockers.” He nodded towards a column of locker hatches that rose up one wall.

  “Well, get yourselves suited up, then,” Saul instructed, “and fetch two extra suits out for myself and Hannah—Braddock here is fine in his spacesuit.” He paused for a second. “My name is Alan Saul.” He had used their names deliberately, to humanize them, to help transform them from nameless terrorists into real people.

  “We already know your name,” said Brigitta, the twin who, from her record, he had known would speak first. She turned to study the screens, perhaps instantly understanding the need for survival suits.

  Saul nodded to Braddock, and the soldier herded them towards the lockers, where they retrieved baggy survival suits that could easily be pulled on over their clothing. Here and there, wherever views were obtainable, he saw other station personnel already opening similar lockers and donning similar suits. They all clearly knew what was coming. However, there didn’t seem to be enough suits to go around, and in some areas people were already fighting over them.

  “What do you want of them?” Hannah whispered.

  “I’ve got limited control of some sections of the station computer network, and I can also program some of the robots, but even if we manage to deal with Smith, I still cannot become omnipresent and omnipotent.” He glanced at her. “If I gain full control here, I’ll be needing people, so I may as well start recruiting them now.” It was a lie, of course. If he gained full control here, he could easily keep the place running with just the robots. But what to do with the humans then? Slaughter them all?

  “That’s good to hear.”

  “I don’t think there’s any need for sarcasm, at this point, do you?”

  “Actually, I think there’s a very great need for it.” She eyed him carefully.

  “Keeping me grounded, Hannah?”

  “I try, but perhaps it’s already a bit late for that.”

  He smiled tightly, but let that go.

  The three staff returned with Braddock, but had yet to pull up their hoods and seal their visors. Hannah got up and accepted the two suits Chang had draped over one arm. The barrel of Braddock’s gun rested against the back of the man’s neck while Hannah was so close. Saul gestured to three chairs over to his right—the ones he knew they had occupied previously.

  “I want you three to oversee the safety of whatever station residents you can contact,” he told them. “Direct them towards any survival and spacesuits still available. You can perhaps also send some of them to better-protected areas, or put them in EVA vehicles. You have about forty minutes for that. No need to bother about station security staff, as it seems they’ve quite enough vacuum gear available to them.”

  “If we do what you say, we’ll end up in adjustment cells,” protested Brigitta.

  He shook his head. “You can, of course, refuse to help your fellows,” he said. “In which case the adjustment you face will come from the barrel of Braddock’s gun. Make up your minds.”

  After a short, almost embarrassed, pause, Chang announced, “Those in Arcoplex One will be in the most danger, since they’re not trained personnel.”

  Saul eyed him steadily, and began frantically accessing station data. What he found there surprised him immensely. When Janus had originally gathered data regarding this station, the population was about a thousand; now it seemed to have climbed to four thousand. The numbers of the workforce, along with security and political monitoring personnel, had initially doubled, then a surge of a further two thousand had arrived. Most of these newcomers were located in Arcoplex One, and as he checked the relevant data the true situation began to emerge. The Committee, or some part of it, had already begun the process of relocating here. Delegates now occupied the arcoplex cylinder—including names he recognized—along with political staff, all their families, and others whose presence here he suspected was due simply to powerful people they knew. But all of these he would have to deal with later.

  “Whatever,” he said, expressionless. “Just try and keep your people safe.”

  He carefully turned his chair away from them as more chatter suddenly started becoming accessible to him. It seemed that the security hole Smith had recently closed had reopened in the barracks where Langstrom was located. This had to be some sort of trap, surely, involving deliberate misinformation.

  “We have more serious challenges to respond to right now,” said Smith. “We can discuss your rather minor problem once we have nullified the current power instability here within the station.”

  “Well, there we have a problem. I want to discuss this now,” replied Langstrom.

  Three other soldiers were with him and, checking records, Saul noted that they were all sergeants. They all wore the pale-blue uniforms of Inspectorate enforcers, but specially adapted for the near-weightless environment. No one here was clad like an Earth-bound enforcer as the net broadcasts had shown—those broadcasts were either seriously outdated or had simply been falsified. Checking further, Saul began to discern the true shape of the hierarchy here.

  Smith and his Inspectorate execs were the arm of government in overall command of security, political oversight, and ensuring that everyone did what they were told and thought what they were ordered to think. However, someone in the Committee had realized that, where survival depended on science, the scientists and technicians must be allowed independence, therefore authority over technical issues within the station had been handed over to someone called Le Roque. This situation had not lasted too long, for apparently Le Roque now languished inside one of Smith’s adjustment cells. Langstrom’s soldiers, who reported to Smith and his execs, were military-wing Inspectorate enforcers, and the best—as far as the Committee was concerned—that “service” had to offer. Which probably meant that they were all utter shits.

  “The space planes will arrive o
n-station in just half of one hour,” Smith insisted.

  Saul flicked his attention to the robots he controlled, already running self-diagnostics and stretching like cats. They needed to become a little bit more sneaky if they were to end up going against weapons that could fry their electronics, so he began programming them to that purpose. A suitable name for that program was “Ambush Predator.” Except for just a few still gathered about Tech Central, he began dispersing them to the outer limits of the area he currently controlled.

  “Fuck the fucking planes,” was Langstrom’s rejoinder. “You’ve been down on me from the start just because I wouldn’t back you up on Le Roque.”

  “It is advisable to exercise some caution during discourse,” Smith warned him mildly.

  “Oh, right, I might get myself in trouble.”

  After a brief pause, Smith said, “It is unfortunate to note that you have disconnected your system from Political Office Oversight and lowered your security firewall. In circumstances such as the current ones, this must be considered an adjustment offence.”

  Saul was on it in a second, realizing that everything in the barracks now lay open to him. He began seizing control of readerguns and cameras, locking them into his own network, while locking out a sudden flanking attack from Smith—an information serpent looping round to try and shove its way through the same hole Saul was using. Next, Saul had control of the air, the power, even the medical machines. He could kill them all off in an instant, and meanwhile the realm he controlled had just grown significantly in volume, because now his reach extended over to the other side of Arcoplex One. If this was some sort of trap, Saul could not detect it.