by Neal Asher
‘I’m sorry about that,’ she apologized.
‘No problem at all,’ he replied, standing up. He really didn’t resent the delay at all because he felt stronger after those hours of respite, and knew he had designed something truly inspired, even for him.
When they moved on again, Var wanted to talk. Hours passed as she picked at him for details of recent events. In turn, he tried to fill in some of the blanks in his recollection of her history, and occasionally ventured to fill the blanks in his own. He thus learned more about their parents, about their sheltered upbringing, about the tutors he drained of knowledge and discarded, and his steady progress to adulthood. It was all distantly interesting, but Saul could find no emotional connection there. Really, Var was telling him stories about someone else. Then, coming with a kind of inevitability, her next question focused on something he had been skirting around within his own mind.
‘So, you’ll turn Argus Station into something bigger and better – a spaceship the like of which has never been seen before,’ she said. ‘Then what?’
There was the question. Until they first started up the Rhine drive, every effort made had been towards survival. Now the Scourge was no longer a problem and, with luck, it would be some time yet before Earth could send anything else against them.
‘Then I leave,’ he replied.
‘Leave?’
‘The solar system.’
‘There will be some aboard Argus who won’t like that.’
‘I’d like to offer them an alternative, but that’s not feasible. I could take Argus to Earth right now, but there are Earth’s defences to consider and also the fact – which I have made plain to them – that their next destination once they set foot on Earth would be an adjustment cell.’
Glittering dust still hung in the air in front of them, even though it had been several days since the mining ahead had ceased. Many more hours had passed since their rest and, glancing at Var, Saul could see that she was again as weary as he himself felt. It would be better, he reckoned, if they did not approach the base in this state. Recollecting what he had seen on the way down, he said, ‘There are some pressurized cabins at the head of the shaft this Martinez began opening out?’
‘Yes – and I don’t think Rhone would have had time to close them down.’ She paused thoughtfully. ‘In fact, I wonder what he is doing, and what he now thinks is best for the base. He must know by now that the Scourge isn’t coming here, and that puts him in a bad position. The base either has to be moved underground entirely or everything that has already been moved underground has to be brought back to the surface. Will your people up above have spoken to him?’
‘I left instructions for them to ignore any communications sent from anyone but me.’
‘He’ll be shitting himself,’ said Var. ‘He gambled on Serene Galahad and lost, so he might now be desperate enough to do something stupid.’
Metal glinted under their suit lights and in the next moment they stepped out onto an area of compacted rubble. Looking up, Saul could see, silhouetted against the night sky of Mars, the scaffold leading up to the surface and the derrick above with the lifting platform firmly in place underneath it. No connection here with Argus which, by his calculation, sat just above the horizon and would fall behind it in just another half-hour. He would have liked to have put it geostationary above Antares Base but, with two moons whipping about out there, it was easier to put it into a stable orbit.
The cave directly ahead had been greatly enlarged and at their limit their suit beams vaguely picked out regular shapes: stacks of regolith blocks brought down from the old base, an ATV plus trailer, piles of equipment in plastic packing cases and other stacks of steel frames rescued from a geodesic dome. There were robots here, too, just a couple of them looming in the dark like steel herons. Saul reached out to them and found them on standby, but resisted the temptation to power them up and seize control of them. There seemed no point.
‘We’ll have to climb,’ Var pointed out.
‘Is that a problem for you?’ Saul asked.
‘Not at all.’
The low gravity made climbing so much easier. However, the low air pressure threatened to rack terminal velocity up high should either of them slip and fall. But, of course, as Saul reminded himself, his sister was quite well aware of that. He reached out and closed a hand on one of the nearest scaffold poles and found his grip firm. Without further ado, he began hauling himself upwards. It was easy enough, and he only had to pause once to rest, wedging himself between the pole and the rock wall of the shaft. Checking Var, he saw that, despite her cracked rib, she had not needed to rest. When he reached the top of the scaffold she was there to help him out onto the surface. He still wasn’t up to full fitness and wouldn’t be for some time yet.
‘Thanks,’ he said, because that was what you were supposed to say.
As he moved away from the shadow of the derrick he could sense the Antares Base computer network, far over to his left, like a three-dimensional flow diagram for a heating system. He could link into it from here, but there seemed no point at the moment. Instead he gazed at Argus over on the horizon. Now that its smelting plants were extended and gleaming like eyes in dimly reflected sunlight, it reminded him of how it had looked from the surface of Earth. A second later he was fully connected with the station’s computer system, whereupon he immediately inserted his new robot schematics, also instantly generating an order for the necessary materials from the smelting plants. Next he tracked down Brigitta Saberhagen to her cabin, checking recent history to discover that she had only gone to bed after being awake for nearly forty hours. He left her alone and instead found the connections to ten particular minds and riffled through them to find the one he wanted.
Judd was one of those minds. The proctor was an amalgam of human and machine, either an android or a cyborg, the product of research carried out in Humanoid Unit Development aboard this station. On discovering the proctors here and understanding the horror involved in that research, Saul had considered destroying them. But he had activated them, and now found them indispensable. In a way, they were more like him than any human aboard.
Judd was repairing and rerouting damaged optics leading from the Rhine drive to Tech Central, assisted by a human team of four people, one of them in an EVA unit. He sent Judd the schematics of the new robots, meanwhile idly checking what the other proctors were doing. Paul was in the Arboretum, pruning shattered trees and replanting those that had been uprooted. Two more proctors were out on the Arboretum skin, working with human teams and construction robots to remove vacuum-penetration locks and to make repairs, while the rest were scattered around the station in similar pairs, doing similar work. They never slept, these proctors, though they did take time out for themselves, sitting like natives around technological camp-fires, communing in some manner Saul did not want to intrude on because he felt that seeing through their eyes was more than enough.
‘Interesting,’ said Judd.
‘When you’re done there, I want you to assist the Saberhagens,’ said Saul. ‘Let them take the lead, and only intervene if they start to go wrong.’
‘I will be done in two hours.’
‘Good.’
A further search now revealed Angela Saberhagen standing on a newly replaced glass floor above the robot factory, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. Saul initiated a connection through her fone.
‘Don’t you know those are bad for you?’ he remarked.
‘The least of my worries,’ she said, taking another drag.
‘How close are you to getting the factory up and running?’ he asked.
‘You already know,’ she replied bluntly.
‘Very well. I have a schematic for new robots for you to build, and the materials requisitions have gone to the smelting plants,’ he said. ‘I want you to retool as quickly as you can. Whenever you need to sleep, I want the work to continue, so I’ve sent Judd to assist.’
She gazed up at the neare
st cam. ‘New robots . . . How long before you start replacing us outdated humans, Alan?’
‘That will never happen,’ he replied, and cut the connection.
It was, he considered, a relevant question. He could allow the people up there to update themselves in the same way he himself had been updated, but he knew what the inevitable result would be. They would then be in competition with him, his power would be diminished and some would try to take it away from him. He might lose control. This was the same fear that turned democracies into totalitarian regimes and he wasn’t immune to it. In fact, he did not care to be immune to it. The people aboard Argus would remain under his heel until he found some viable way to be free of them, though for the moment, he wanted that way not to necessitate exterminating them.
Even as he considered this quandary he accessed some of the brain-implant designs Hannah had stored in her system. He needed something to raise the people there above simple humanity – which, as his new robots came online, would be all but obsolete – but not something likely to raise them beyond his control. Where, though, in the plans developing both inside and outside his skull, to insert human beings? He saw them as control nexuses: either mentally controlling subgroups of robots or else controlling complex telefactored machines. Transforming them to his purpose would seem as dictatorial as the Committee, but what use were they to him if they were not . . . useful?
‘So how are things there?’ asked Var.
He pointed to the station. ‘The smelting plants are extended. One of them is already at work, while the other will be ready within a few hours. The robot factory will start producing our workers within that time too.’
‘We just need to get back there, then,’ she said, turning away and striding over to one of the cabins.
Saul hurried after her, crammed himself into the small airlock with her, and soon the both of them were inside the cabin itself. Var immediately undid her helmet and took it off.
‘At last,’ she said, then turned and stepped through a door into the small washroom and toilet.
Saul removed his helmet and sniffed the stale air before surveying his surroundings. Along one wall of the cabin stood a single workbench loaded with equipment: dismantled electric motors, some hydraulic rams, a vice and a wide selection of hand tools that were run from pressure lines coiling down from a pipe along the ceiling. The rest of the room was occupied by a scattering of chairs around a low table improvised from food and drink boxes, with similar boxes stacked by the near wall, some foam mattresses and rolled-up sleeping bags, and a single desk with an old-style computer sitting on it, optics leading up from this machine into the ceiling.
He sat down at the desk to turn on the computer, and what had been a hazy and distant network suddenly etched itself into his brain as the computer connected to Antares Base and he linked to it via its modem. He slowly began to open up the bandwidth and explore, sampling here and there until he found the protection securing the computer in Mars Science, which he broke with a thought. He then speed-viewed the recorded exchanges between Rhone and Serene Galahad, understood the man’s fears, lack of imagination and naivety, and moved on to locate the cam network and see what the base staff were doing.
The medical bay contained four bullet-riddled corpses on gurneys, while a doctor Saul soon identified as Da Vinci sat on the floor with his back against the wall, drinking some concoction out of an Erlenmeyer flask – probably surgical alcohol cut with fruit juice. Sixty of the personnel were confined to their rooms, each room locked down from Mars Science, while the rest occupied a community room. Those who were armed were gathered about Rhone himself on one side of the room, most of the rest sat in nervous silence while a few of them were arguing with Rhone and those accompanying him.
They wanted assurances but he now no longer had any to give them. He spoke eloquently of the tragic deaths of Var Delex and Lopomac, and expressed his displeasure at how some had sought to blame these deaths on him. The ‘some’ were, Saul suspected, those four corpses in Da Vinci’s surgery. No one believed him, even those around him with the guns, but those busy arguing obviously weren’t prepared to state that outright. He talked about how they must now work together to survive and how the damage done during that lunatic move underground must be swiftly reversed. When they asked about Argus, he told them it was irrelevant, since there was no way anyone on the station could get to them. It seemed everything Saul was hearing had already been said and that Rhone was now reaching the end of his patience. The people were dismissed to their rooms with the instruction to await their work orders, and a warning that disobedience would not be tolerated. Saul withdrew – he now knew all he needed to know.
2
Scrappage
With the ID implant, with cams covering just about every populated area, with ‘adjustment’ to correct people’s behaviour and with the shepherds, razorbirds and spiderguns for enforcement, the death rate due to ‘technical errors’ was high under the original Committee. After Alan Saul destroyed much of this apparatus, Serene Galahad discovered that the consequent reduction in control led to greater productivity. However, her Committee instincts had not changed and, also viewing human beings as a plague upon her beloved Earth, it seemed a logical step for her to tighten her grip in a much more direct way. The strangulation collar was her solution. During her time as absolute dictator of Earth, nearly a billion of these devices were manufactured and placed around the necks of those holding essential positions and, as with any such hurriedly mass-produced technology, there were errors. These would not have mattered too much, were it not for security measures within the collars that read any error in the device as an attempt to remove it, and so prompted it to kill the unfortunate wearer. How many people died as a result can only be estimated, since those who died were always conveniently claimed to have been guilty of some crime. A conservative estimate puts the figure at two million, but it could in reality be as high as ten times that.
Argus
The shooting continued all around them, streaks of tracer bullets cutting through smoke and debris. The air quality, Alex noted, was getting quite bad, and he had to keep snorting dirt and splinters out of his nose. This was the problem with fighting in zero gravity: the detritus thrown up by bullets and explosions didn’t just settle back to the ground.
Alex blinked, reached up to his face and touched the moisture below his eyes. In this state of meditative recall, replaying memories in order to analyse tactics and learn from mistakes, it all seemed so immediate. But he knew his tears weren’t due to the sharp memory of dust in his eyes.
‘It was confusing at first,’ Messina continued. ‘There I was, with no memory of my past – doing what I was told while trying to understand the hatred directed at me. I was assaulted frequently, and nearly got killed on the last occasion. But now my confusion is gone.’
‘It’s gone?’ said Alex, noncommittally.
‘They tried to keep it from me, of course, but the image of the face I possessed before is not something that can be concealed for long.’
Alex looked round to see Messina up on his knees now and gazing back, resting his shoulder against the penetration lock.
‘I know who I was,’ he said – a little sadly, Alex thought.
‘You were Chairman Alessandro Messina, ruler of Earth,’ Alex stated firmly. Then his gaze strayed to what he assumed was a chunk of debris sailing through the air towards them. It took him half a second further to realize his mistake.
Alex shuddered, his body trying to respond to something that had happened just a couple of standard days ago now. He opened his eyes and surveyed his surroundings as he prepared himself for the worst memories. His small cabin was located in a workers’ dormitory fixed between lattice walls. The door was locked and, for now, this place had become a prison. But Alex felt fine with that. The cabin was comfortable enough, and the medic had already seen to his various wounds. He had some bottles of drink and even some food, a hammock and a combined zero-gravity to
ilet and shower unit, the latter of which he had used and as a result felt the cleanest he had felt in a long while. This was substantially more than had been available to him for the many months during which he had scrabbled to stay alive, trapped in a zero-gravity hydroponics unit. He was okay with the solitude, too, because he needed to straighten out his thinking. He closed his eyes again and returned to the not too distant past.
‘Grenade!’ he shouted, heaving himself to his feet and reaching for Messina.
The erstwhile ruler of Earth stood up, ready to throw himself clear, then took a couple of steps, forced forwards by the impact of the bullets hitting his back and blowing chunks of flesh and rib out of his chest. Alex rolled aside, firing at a half-seen figure, coming back up onto his knees as the same figure staggered, then he sighted properly and emptied the new clip into it. He saw bits of his target flying away, before the grenade detonated and picked him up in a hot fist.
Screaming somewhere . . .
This was where it got difficult. The blast had thrown him into foliage, where he finally slammed to a halt against a solid branch. With his ears ringing, he had dragged himself back to the penetration lock. There he had found the Chairman’s remains slowly revolving in the air above him, like some grotesque expanded sculpture constructed of offal. He had gone into the trees and found the assailant dead, cut in half, but that hadn’t been enough.