by Neal Asher
He didn’t care about his own life any more. Chairman Messina was dead and there had to be payment. Firing ahead . . . Not even trying to take cover, Alex propelled himself through the trees to where the floating debris mostly consisted of chunks of hardening breach foam. A penetration lock protruded from the ground, three of the assault force from the Scourge gathered around it. As one of them turned towards him, Alex braced himself against a trunk and fired his rifle from the hip – half a clip, picking them up and sending them tumbling, blood misting around them.
The next attacker he found opened fire on him from concealment in thick bushes, branches shattering all around him. Alex threw himself towards those bushes, emptied the rest of the clip, inserted another and kept his finger on the trigger. A figure, just glimpsed, tried to escape, shattered assault rifle tumbling away. Alex kept firing until there was no more voluntary movement there, snatched ammunition clips from a belt half-concealed by a bulging mass of viscera, moved on . . .
Tactical analysis: you weren’t conserving ammunition.
He killed again, then again. He responded to direct fire against him by just confronting it and moving in, firing continuously.
Tactical analysis: how the hell did you survive that?
Through the killing haze he started to realize something was wrong with the attackers. They seemed to be responding to him too slowly. When a grenade flung him tumbling, he located its source and fired on a soldier who seemed to be trying get back out of the Arboretum through a penetration lock. Bullets tore flinders from the lock, but only briefly before they ran out. Alex reached down for another clip as he flung himself forwards, but found none. Hardly thinking about it, he discarded his rifle and drew his commando knife as he came down on the man fumbling to open the lock. The man seemed hardly able to defend himself as Alex dragged him round, scanned the armouring of his VC suit, then drove the carbide blade towards a weak point under the arm. He shoved it in to the hilt, then tilted it down, slicing to the heart, blood jetting out.
Next he was strangling someone, with no recollection of the intervening time. After that it seemed he could only find the dead or dying. He caught one soldier slowly towing himself along the base of the Arboretum dividing wall, pulled him up and gazed in puzzlement at the bloodshot eyes and foam around his mouth, before snapping his neck.
Tactical analysis: they were dying of the Scour virus.
Finally he realized the shooting was over. Then, almost as if operating on some homing instinct, he made his way back to where Chairman Messina had died. He went down on his knees, covered in blood – most of which was not his own.
It was over.
Alex drew the sidearm he had taken earlier from the other corpse here and which, during his killing spree, he had completely forgotten. He put the barrel in his mouth and there he paused for a brief eternity, until he realized he had no reason to pull the trigger . . .
Alex was a clone of Chairman Alessandro Messina, but also a soldier who was surgically and chemically programmed to be totally loyal to that one man. He had been loyal. He had remained loyal to the best of his abilities, even when Messina had been mind-wiped and turned into someone else – even until the end. But he didn’t pull the trigger because the initial programming was not so strong any more, and he was now older and wiser than a clone new from the vat. He realized in that moment, as so many people do, that having a new purpose might be better than blowing out the back of his skull.
‘I know what you’re capable of,’ the commander of the station police, Langstrom, had said, shortly after finding him in the Arboretum. ‘I can offer you a place with my men. You’d be one of the first to be issued with weapons if we’re attacked again which, considering our recent history, seems highly likely.’
Alex had not even needed to think about his answer.
‘No,’ he’d replied, ‘I need a totally new purpose, preferably with less guns and blood involved.’
Langstrom had then not known what to do with him, hence Alex ending up in here.
Floating above his hammock, Alex opened his eyes, reached up to wipe his face with a shaking hand. He was covered in sweat but now felt he had severed some link to his past. It was as if he’d finally shaken off a fever. He reached down and grabbed the edge of the hammock, using it to drag himself to the wall. A swift kick against it sent him drifting across the room to a pack, gecko-stuck to a wall-shelf. He took out one of the bottles inside, uncapped it and squeezed its contents into his mouth. After a moment he lowered the bottle and stared at it, realizing he’d been given beer – something he’d only ever sampled once or twice in his life before. He took another swallow, and another – then heard the door lock clunking, before a knock on the door itself. He waited, expecting someone to come in, then registered that the person outside was being polite.
‘Come in,’ he said, feeling foolish.
The door swung open and in stepped a giant shaven-headed brute of a man. Alex instinctively pushed his gecko soles down against the floor and took a step back, gripping the plastic bottle more tightly, while briefly scanning the room for a more effective weapon.
‘Hello, Alex,’ the man said mildly, as he folded his arms.
Alex peered at him, with memories slowly surfacing. Of course, here was a man it had been necessary for him to know when he’d been in Messina’s fast-response protection team.
‘Ghort,’ he said.
Ghort nodded and smiled cautiously.
‘I’m surprised you’re alive,’ Alex added. ‘Or should I say I’m surprised you still have a mind.’
‘Only the murderers were mind-wiped,’ Ghort explained. ‘Even though I was one of the Chairman’s bodyguards for ten years, I never actually murdered anyone. I told him I’d only kill to defend him or myself.’ He paused reflectively. ‘I could, of course, say the same about you. It’s arguable that you’re responsible for a considerable number of deaths aboard this station, and therefore I’m surprised Saul didn’t kill you when he captured you, or have it done afterwards.’
‘Perhaps it’s because of my lack of free will,’ Alex suggested.
Ghort’s expression hardened. ‘Something we are all lacking now.’
Alex just stared at him for a long moment, then asked, ‘What do you want?’
‘Commander Langstrom told me,’ said Ghort, ‘that you want an occupation that doesn’t involve guns and blood. Well, I’ve had you assigned to my team in Construction and Maintenance, and we have work to do, a lot of it, right now.’
Alex hadn’t really thought about what he wanted, just about what he didn’t want.
‘Okay,’ he shrugged.
Ghort led him out into a station that seemed to have become, in just a few hours, even more chaotic than it had been during the height of the recent battle.
Mars
While Var slept, Saul dropped his body into a similar state of somnolence, but one without the loss of awareness and volition. In his mind, like a librarian after a recent rush, he began cataloguing and filing, returning books to their correct shelves, clearing up the rubbish and polishing the floors. He felt a slight irritation at not being able to access the whole of his mind, which included his organic backups in Hannah’s clean-room and the whole Argus computer network, but spread across these and everything currently in his skull there was a great deal of redundancy. Much of what he was now doing inside his head would act as a template to lay over some other work in progress elsewhere, when he could again access it. However, the situation wasn’t ideal and would become less tenable in the years, decades and perhaps centuries to come . . .
Yes, centuries . . .
Acceptance had slowly crept up on him. He now perfectly understood the changes he had made to his own body even before Smith had erased the earlier Alan Saul, and was now recognizing what other changes he could make. He knew that this, combined with his mental backups, meant that corporeal immortality lay within his reach.
He again considered other possibilities that had
occurred to him during the trip out to the Asteroid Belt, and which had been affirmed by recent events. The Alexes were tank-grown clones of Chairman Messina. They were grown to adulthood so fast that the tanks they grew in required powerful cooling systems, so energetic was the cell growth, and each produced an adult Alex in just a few years: a blank slate on which Messina wrote the mind of his choosing. However, the methods of indoctrination used had been crude – surgery even being required. Now, with everything Hannah was coming up with, it should be possible simply to copy across from another mind. Saul could now substantially reduce the danger of physical death to his body in the same way as it had been reduced for his mind. He could make copies of himself. He could, in fact, use copies of himself for risky ventures such as this present one.
Cowardice?
Saul allowed himself a smile. What exactly was cowardice? He’d been in turn frightened, angry and exhilarated while hacking a bloody path from the Calais incinerator out here, but had never backed away from danger. Then, again, as he had seen it at the time, he could never have been safe while the Committee had the power to take away his life. Now that he was, to stretch a term, ‘safe’ from the Committee, other considerations were coming into play. And the main one of these was how much did he value his own life; a life that now might just go on and on? No, he defined cowardice as sacrificing his integrity in order to stay safe, and not as the eliminating of unnecessary risks to his life.
Saul further pondered on the future and, for the first time in a while, felt a surge of unaccustomed excitement. A whole universe lay out there to explore. The Drake equation remained to be solved, while its resultant paradox, described by Fermi, needed to be investigated. Knowledge within and without stood ready to be gathered . . .
Now, venturing into astrogation data residing inside the hardware in his skull, Saul began mentally exploring the mapped planetary systems that lay beyond Earth, wondering where to go beyond the solar system. Perhaps first some of those least likely to contain life, while he gathered resources and explored the worlds within; perhaps a pause in the light of some binary star system while growing clones of himself and imprinting upon them some honed-down and thoroughly human copy of his mind? Maybe he could bathe in the light of a red hypergiant while extending and cementing his knowledge. So many possibilities.
But one not to be ignored.
He grimaced. Yes, the one possibility he must not ignore was that though he was powerful and now possessed a drive that could take him out into the abyss, Earth did not lie so far behind him. He had managed to extend his mind, but already Serene Galahad had created her comlifers – humans with hardware in their skulls much like his own and similarly linked into computer systems – who were only a step behind him. And, though he had taken Hannah Neumann away from Earth, the slow accretion of knowledge could lead, within just a few years, to bio-interfaces equivalent to the one in his skull. Rhine had managed to design a working warp drive and, with Earth’s resources, Galahad appeared likely to come up with something just like it, and soon. But Galahad was just the latest example of the kind that came to dominate the human race; the near stars, he realized, would never be a safe enough distance away. He would need to lose himself out there, find a place and make himself a fortress.
Then of course there were other things to speculate on. The Drake equation posited that there should be intelligent life out there, but the Fermi paradox posed the question of why it had not been seen. Perhaps the answer to that was related to the likes of Serene Galahad and himself? Too much power in the hands of too few, genocidal rulers, and dark inwardly turned realms where free beings had become just cogs in a machine, perhaps races intolerant of competition dropping warp-drive weapons on inhabited worlds, perhaps whole races sliding into the mental self-destruction he himself had faced when he uploaded Janus? For all he knew, he could be heading out into something more potentially hostile than a solar system controlled by Galahad and her ilk.
The hours slid by as Saul created models in his head of nightmare alien cultures, of dystopias, utopias, of intelligent life based on something other than carbon, and on the myriad possibilities based on carbon alone. At some point his mind slid into the utterly esoteric, and also into a state closer to human sleep. He immediately grasped for himself the utility of this lucid dreaming state and allowed it to continue, and only rose out of it as watery Martian morning wafted its reluctant light through the windows of the cabin. He stood, headed over to the bathroom, attended to the needs of an unfortunately weak human body, gazed at his face in a mirror on the wall, noted how he needed a shave and a haircut but how these faults humanized him, washed his face then returned to the main room and turned on the lights.
‘It’s time?’ said Var, immediately sitting upright in her sleeping bag.
‘We move,’ Saul agreed, stepping over to the chair he’d draped his VC suit on.
Var scrambled out of her sleeping bag, frowned at him, then headed for the bathroom. He pulled on his suit, swapped out the oxygen bottle, checked over Var’s EA suit and replaced the air bottle for that too, finishing just as she returned, and handing it over.
Riding on the Martian dawn came his full self, and he felt a visceral pull as they stepped outside, and for a hundred metres after that, as they trudged across the dusty ground. Then he was in and connected to Argus Station, expanding and updating.
Even at that moment, his robots were preparing to launch the fuel drop tank from Docking Pillar Two. Initial thrust came from a dismounted space-plane steering jet, which would be ejected in Martian atmosphere. The thing would take re-entry heat on a ceramic shield, open out parachutes to slow it further, then inflate air bags for a bouncing landing. Now it was nearly complete, he saw, in an instant, some adjustments he could make: how with the addition of an extra parachute and a reduction of the fuel load he could insert some extra weight behind the heat shield; and he issued his instructions. Really, he should have thought of this earlier.
‘So what’s the plan?’ Var asked.
Saul gazed ahead towards Shankil’s Butte. In just two hours his package would arrive here on Mars.
‘You know the plan,’ he said.
‘I mean: how do we deal with Rhone?’ she asked, irritated.
Antares Base sat as clear in his mind as Argus Station, but the latter was of more interest to him at the moment. In the few seconds it would take before Var became impatient he further checked the situation up there.
Already two of his new conjoining robots were rolling off the production line. Both smelting plants were running, and producing components for both Robotics and the massive reconstruction of the station into a spherical spaceship. The robot mining machines on the asteroid had nearly filled both of the big ore carriers to keep that process going. However, power supplies were at full stretch, while all the building and manufacturing were nowhere near their proposed maximum, so Saul needed to limit their stay here. It was time to get things done.
‘Perhaps, when we are a lot closer, you should speak to him,’ he suggested to Var. ‘Your suit radio is in range of the base even now. You can tell him that I’ve come to rescue them, to relocate them to Argus; that his earlier actions are understandable and are forgiven.’
‘You fucking what?’
‘What else did you intend to say?’
‘Something, but I wasn’t going to talk about forgiveness.’
‘Try, anyway – and I’ll ensure that everyone there also hears your exchange. Perhaps if he’s not agreeable you can slant your persuasion at everyone else there . . .’
She glared at him suspiciously.
What she said didn’t matter all that much, anyway. Rhone would respond precisely as Saul expected him to. Gazing into the base, he could see a man struggling to find some solution to the insoluble, but certain that his grip on power was the right one. Such men always had a maximum response even for small outside threats. It made them feel worthy, useful, that they were doing something.
‘He�
�ll send his people out to take a shot at us,’ said Var.
‘Of course he will,’ Saul replied. ‘So we need to get to the cover of Shankil’s Butte before you speak to him.’ He picked up his pace.
‘I still don’t see how this advances our cause any,’ Var protested. ‘I can probably get us inside without him knowing . . .’
Looking through the base cams, Saul counted eight armed staff. Checking the records there, he saw that most of these were from Mars Science, though some were from Maintenance and Construction. The head of the latter, Martinez, was one of the corpses still lying on a gurney in the medical area, so obviously the eight here were the only ones Rhone trusted with weapons. Saul calculated that Rhone would send a minimum of four of them outside.
‘In fact you could not get us in without him knowing, since he’s paranoid enough to be running a recognition system through the exterior cams,’ said Saul. ‘I, however, can get us in, but what then?’ He glanced at her. ‘Eight of his people are armed.’
‘You’re as irritating as ever,’ she replied. ‘You’re not going to tell me what you’re planning, are you?’
Saul analysed that and realized that some human element of him was being wary of letting her know how ruthless he intended to be. He considered the idea of detailing his plans to her but then, deciding he did not yet want to explain the cold reasoning behind them, rejected it.
‘You’ll have to trust me,’ he said.
Var growled in irritation.
It took them an hour to reach Shankil’s Butte, a partially collapsed monolith of wind-carved sandstone cut through with layers of conglomerate. On the collapsed side, a path wound up through fallen rubble to the top and, without hesitation, Saul began to tramp up this for no other reason than to gaze at the view, which included the base itself lying a couple of kilometres beyond. As he wended his way up, the fuel drop tank launched from Argus Station, which was now well above the horizon but not visible in the daylight sky. Soon they reached the canted summit of the butte and gazed out at the base. The remaining hexes and linking wings were clearly visible, with stacks of regolith blocks and other building materials marking out where much of it had been disassembled.