by Neal Asher
ANTARES BASE
The airlock seemed to be taking for ever to cycle. Perhaps it was malfunctioning? No, the ready light now came on, so Var pulled down the handle and pushed open the door. She could grab Kaskan, pull him back inside. But, as she stepped outside, she realized she was already too late.
Ricard must have had the shepherd waiting right outside, and it was already retreating through a cloud of dust, hauling its prize up towards it. Kaskan wasn’t even struggling, just hung inert in tentacles straining to wring him out like a wet dishrag.
“Build a monument…uh…something,” he managed to say to her over com.
His voice sounded strained, and at that moment she noticed the horrible angle of his leg. So far it had not managed to penetrate his suit, but then his helmet fell away, with a great gout of vapour exploding outwards around his exposed skull.
At that point he chose to manually detonate the seismic charge.
Light flashed underneath the shepherd, and Kaskan was just gone. The blast wave picked up Var and slammed her back against the airlock. The robot’s body rose vertically, its legs blown off out to each side. Something smacked into Var’s chest and she peered down at a wormish segment of one of the shepherd’s tentacles. She batted it away and looked back up again, but no sign of either the robot or Kaskan now remained. By detonating right underneath it, the charge could have propelled the robot’s body for kilometres, while Kaskan himself would have instantly turned to slurry. Her back still against the door, Var slid down into a crouch, but then felt it moving, so stood up again and stepped away.
Lopomac came out first, then Carol, and for a moment they stood in silence staring at the wave of dust rolling away from them. Then Var broke into their thoughts.
“For that to mean something,” she said, “we have to succeed now, so let’s move.”
She broke into a steady lope, making sure that the others were keeping with her. Ahead, the wave of dust broke over the walls of Hex Three, then continued beyond it, dimming further the already waning light of the setting sun. Kaskan’s sacrifice, Var realized, had crystallized the hard determination within her: Ricard was not going to win. They were going to survive here without him and his enforcers, or they were not going to survive at all. If he did not respond in the way Kaskan had predicted, the power was going to stay turned off. Better they all died now than by whatever selection process Ricard had in mind, or by the gradual collapse of the base’s systems later on. She knew that maybe she wasn’t being fair to others, but, damn it, this must end—and soon.
The damage she had already caused to Hex Three soon became evident. They rounded the structure to reach the only remaining airlock—the one into the garage—which took them nearly a quarter of an hour to get through. She entered the garage first, with her machine pistol cocked just in case Ricard had left one of his men behind, but there was no one there.
“No action yet?” said Lopomac, stating the obvious as he stepped out behind her.
“Weapons,” decided Var. “He won’t have taken everything from the cache.”
Kaskan had given them this. Ricard had rightly believed that they stood very little chance indeed of dealing with that shepherd outside Hydroponics. But he had not included in his calculations the fact that one of them might be prepared to die in order to destroy it.
The garage contained a single crawler, parked on the ramp accessing a passage leading down underneath the hex to the workshop in the adjoining wing. The doors leading into the workshop would be sealed, that being the first area Var had opened to the Martian atmosphere. Spare wheels and engine parts were stacked along one wall, while along another one a row of super-caps was being charged up. To her right a heavy door stood open and she headed over to peer inside. Ricard had been in a hurry, so had not bothered to lock up safely. Assault rifles rested in a rack, also machine pistols and side arms. Stepping inside, Var discarded her machine pistol, selected a rifle and filled her hip pouch with clips of ceramic ammunition. The grenade rack, unfortunately, stood empty.
“The reactor,” prompted Var, after the other two had made their selections.
It resided in a room of its own at the centre of the hex, cut off from the Political Director’s control room and the Executive’s and enforcers’ quarters by bulkhead doors now tightly closed. Four pillars supported the reactor’s housing, a thick coin of bubblemetal, veined with pipes, from which ducts containing superconductive wiring diverged into the walls. A simple console and screen controlled the reactor itself, while most of the other equipment crowding this room was the tool set for taking the thing apart and performing vital maintenance on it.
Var dropped into a chair facing the console and screen, and started by calling up the menu. Then she glanced round and noticed Carol beginning to remove her helmet.
“Find some more air,” she instructed. “We won’t be staying in here.”
Carol stared back at her, looking terrified, but she nodded obediently and left the reactor room.
Having used the reactor’s simple menu a number of times before, while doing some work on the old injectors, she keyed through it quickly. This time she didn’t want to shut the reactor down, just cut the power. In a moment she had a schematic of the entire base up on the screen and, using her finger, selected every section of it except Hex Three, hesitating for only a brief moment over Hydroponics. She did not want to give Ricard a place to retreat to, nor think for a moment that she did not mean what she would shortly be telling him. The lights brightened for a second, then settled again. There, it was done, and now the rest of the base lay in darkness. Var used her wrist console to open a channel via the still flashing icon in the bottom corner of her visor.
“Hello, Ricard,” she began.
It took a moment for him to respond, and he sounded angry, of course. “Really smart, Var. I see they must have missed something during your psyche evaluation.”
“I don’t think they did,” she replied. “They’ve always been aware that intelligence is not a trait normally found in obedient little drones—but that intelligence is needed in places like this. They just took a calculated risk. However, there was no risk with you, Ricard—they roll your kind off the production line every day.”
“So rather than surrender yourself to the legitimately established authority here, you’d kill us all.”
“Yes, because I know that you won’t let me, Carol or Lopomac live. And I also know that under your stewardship, this base will fail within months, so better we all die now. You, Ricard, now have two choices. You can either do nothing, in which case you’ll begin running out of air within a couple of days, and the heat will have bled out meanwhile so that everything in Hydroponics will be dead, or, if you’ve got the balls, you can come over here and try to get the power back on.”
“You wouldn’t do that,” he said.
“Yeah, my psyche report didn’t label me as the kind who would so readily kill Inspectorate staff. Just as Kaskan’s psyche report didn’t have him down as the kind who might sacrifice himself to take out a shepherd. I’m therefore guessing that those psyche reports aren’t really so reliable.”
“A hundred and fifty people here would suffocate—that’ll be on your conscience.”
“See you soon, Ricard,” she said, cutting the connection and spinning her chair round to face Lopomac, and Carol, now back with an armful of spacesuit air bottles.
“We can’t lose Hydroponics,” said Carol.
“It won’t come to that. He’ll send his men over soon, and maybe he’ll even come along himself.”
“He might try to wait you out. He might realize you’re bluffing?”
“Carol,” said Var firmly, “I’m not bluffing. We go independent here or we all die. And I’m making the choice that if we are due to die, that will occur over the next few days rather than a few months down the line.”
“I’m with Var on that,” said Lopomac. “There are no half-measures we can take.”
Var stood up. “
I’m sure they’ll blow out the windows and come in that way…though they might try bringing a crawler into the garage.” It was what she would do. Yes, she could now destroy the garage’s door mechanism to keep them out, but she didn’t want them out. She wanted them inside, then dead. “Ricard will probably hold off, hoping we’ll give in, but once the cold starts killing off Hydroponics, he’ll have to act. So let’s get ready for him. Let’s use some of our brilliant technical know-how to prepare a reception.”
She had doubts still, but couldn’t show them. Ricard might hold off for too long—certainly he could take all remaining air stocks for himself and his men. He might even use this as a method of thinning out base personnel, that way managing to lay the blame on Var. But, no, he would act before the air supply ran too low, and he’d act before he lost Hydroponics. Surely he would.
Argus Station
“Hit it,” Langstrom instructed over com.
A series of explosions ensued, punctuated by the stuttering light of the ten-bore machine guns, all utterly silent in vacuum. Missiles flashed across above them, bullets and tracers sparked off beams, and fires bloomed as of a city under siege at night. In loping strides of three metres each, starlit vacuum visible below them through the lattice partition, they approached the base of the Political Office. Some distance ahead, Peach’s unit reached the blank wall, against which two of her men stuck incendiary worms. Off to the right a ten-bore flashed, tracers streaking across above the latticework, before striking an armoured shield. Then from the point of impact a missile was fired back, hitting the original source of fire. The detonation flung chunks of debris out amid the surrounding substructure.
Peach’s people stepped back as the incendiary worms burned, cutting a doorway, which was then opened by the blast of a centrally positioned charge. Atmosphere blasted out, carrying all sorts of unidentifiable detritus, then just as abruptly it shut off. Two of her unit went through, one of them shouldering a missile-launcher. Detonation inside, lighting the interior, the burr of a machine pistol over com. Peach and the other man followed next, and five more after them.
Langstrom listened to com for a moment, then turned to Braddock and Saul. “We’re clear. We can go in now.”
Saul nodded briefly, then held up a restraining hand: just one moment. Through his boots he felt its approach behind him, and through its robotic eyes he noted Langstrom’s startled expression as the construction robot moved up beside him. It loomed over him like a guardian bear, but this particular bear had six limbs, and in one of its tool-wielding paws it clutched a heavy machine gun.
“Is that thing really necessary?” Braddock asked.
“It may be useful,” Saul replied, not yet ready to rely on the soldiers’ protection alone.
Langstrom led the way into a corridor filled with tendrils of smoke dissipating into vacuum. Blood smeared the floor, blackened by absence of air, yet there was no sign of any corpses. Off to the right lay further wreckage, and the remains of a machine gun embedded in a wall. They headed for a secondary airlock, and after Langstrom opened it, Saul sent his guardian through first. He watched through its eyes as the inner airlock door opened, admitting the robot to a corridor filled with smoke. He and Braddock stepped through next, and at once he picked up sound: suppressing fire from four soldiers racketing like power drills somewhere out of sight. With Langstrom following they proceeded left, then right, the sounds of gunfire almost continuous ahead of them. Saul glanced up at the wrecked dome of a readergun located in the ceiling, surprised that it seemed to have cost no lives.
Next, three corpses at the foot of a vertical cageway—Saul guessed they were Smith’s people, though it was hard to be sure, and odd that the blood on their uniforms looked so dry. They launched their way up the cageway, their progress covered by three of Langstrom’s troops, who began firing into any exposed sections of the Political Office. They continued on through, bullets zinging constantly off surrounding metal. Something thumped against Saul’s thigh, but didn’t penetrate. Smoke lay thick and heavy in the air as they departed the cageway, before entering another corridor where the smoke stank of burning meat. Someone started screaming, but he couldn’t locate the source. Next, a blast ahead, doors disappearing, Langstrom’s troops piling straight in amid gunfire. One of the men bounced out again, blood jetting from his open mouth.
Braddock caught Saul by the shoulder and pulled him down, as the fire fight continued. A minute later, the fighting ahead of them was over, though all about them the Political Office resounded with continuing gunfire and explosions.
“It’s clear now,” said Langstrom.
Braddock preceded Saul into the room beyond: a horizontal cylinder with two bulky transformers protruding from the right, one of them showering a steady stream of sparks and molten metal from its bullet-riddled armature. A man hung from one side of it, his hand melted in place and his body beginning to smoke. Langstrom’s troops were down at the far end, in the corridor extending beyond, crouched behind a barricade consisting of a couple of metal tool cabinets against which they had set doors ripped from their mountings.
“Here.” Saul pointed to a mass of fibre-optic and power-cable junction boxes, and consoles running along the wall facing the transformers, then launched across and steadied himself against the unit he required, planting his gecko boots back on the floor. Removing his helmet, he flipped up the unit lid to expose six teragate sockets, then held out a hand to one side. Braddock delved in the shoulder bag for a coil of optic cable, with teragate plugs at each end, and silently handed it over.
“We don’t have long in here,” Langstrom remarked, watching with curiosity as Saul pulled the plug of synthetic skin from his temple and plugged the cable into his skull, before jabbing the other end of the cable into one of the six sockets, randomly chosen.
Instant connection filled an empty space within his being. Smith was already waiting there, but the man’s attack on him seemed utterly ineffectual as Saul speared his way into the isolated Political Office network. It felt like satiation of vast thirst as he sucked up data, modelling the entire Political Office inside his head, while noting the positions of everyone within it. In a sudden heady rush of power, he swatted Smith aside, felt him retreating, withdrawing—the man now outmatched.
Two major fire fights still continued, and he saw Peach and the remaining two members of her unit pinned down by machine-gun fire from some of Smith’s people positioned on a gantry above them. Only twenty metres away from Saul, another four of Langstrom’s troops, led by Mustafa, were caught up in a shoot-out with more of Smith’s men, who were busy moving additional firepower into position, in the shape of another big machine gun. Elsewhere, Langstrom’s units were intermittently engaging the ten-bore machine guns at the five main entrances, simply to keep them tied down. Whilst he delved into Smith’s database, loading the ID implant codes of everyone currently under Smith’s command, he individually seized control of the readerguns in two relevant areas, and powered them up. Should he give Smith’s soldiers a chance to surrender? Should he hell, since just moments’ delay could result in soldiers on his side dying. Within a minute Saul provided the readerguns with specific targets. And it took the readerguns a further ten seconds to complete.
Their dome turrets flashed like halogen lamps, turning then flashing again. The one positioned in the ceiling immediately above the men trying to creep up on Peach and her two comrades flashed brightly for a full three seconds. Five partially dismembered bodies were blown from the gantry, sailing in a cloud of shattered flesh and bone over above the three below. Another reader then took out those running the machine gun. Just two short bursts left one jammed underneath the great weapon, his form no longer recognizably human, whilst the other one cartwheeled away to one side leaving an arc of blood in the air. Similar scenes played out amongst those attacking Mustafa, and, even from where he stood, Saul heard the sound of the guns through human ears.
“Readerguns,” observed Langstrom.
&nbs
p; “Yes,” Saul replied, turning to gaze at him, but feeling he had nothing more to add.
Smith he finally found in a room filled with yet more computers, screens and consoles than Tech Central itself, but the computers there were used solely to control the station’s hardware and direct its staff. This array ran complex programs to monitor the behaviour of all working aboard Argus Station and thereby try to divine what was going on inside their heads, so that corrective instruction could be issued. Here lay the essential power base of the thought police.
Smith had pushed himself out of his chair and was floating backwards, hand up against his head as the hardware there transmitted his spoken orders. Already others were turning away from their consoles to look round at him. Having just learned that the readerguns were killing his people, he didn’t look as alarmed as he should, but then no readerguns overlooked this particular room. Saul guessed that Smith must be aware of the 5 percent malfunction rate, and wanted to cut down the odds of some nasty accident happening that might involve himself.
Speaking through the intercom so as to broadcast his voice throughout the entire Political Office, Saul began, “This is Alan Saul speaking, and I now control the readerguns here. So put down your weapons and surrender yourselves. This is not a request.”
Smith extended a hand to catch hold of a stable piece of hardware, then pulled himself floorwards and turned to gaze up at the nearest cam. Meanwhile, the gunfire inside the Political Office began stuttering to a halt. As soon as those operating machine guns by the entrances became aware that the nearby readerguns had targeted them, they too began shutting down their weapons and awaited further orders.
“Smith,” he continued broadcasting, “issue the surrender order.”
“Before I can do that, you must acquaint me with whatever guarantees you are laying on the table,” Smith replied, stalling for time. Saul ensured his response was broadcast as well, and studied the defenders’ reaction to it.