by Neal Asher
Hannah’s stomach felt tight, dreading what the android’s response might have been to her instruction to protect Alan Saul, to protect the Owner. Had this Paul and its fellows gone straight to her laboratory to kill Dr Raiman and any other medics found there? Had they also killed the guards Langstrom had left behind? She wished she’d been more specific.
‘One of those things the Saberhagens were working with is now in your laboratory,’ confirmed Le Roque. ‘Raiman and his people are out in the corridor – it won’t let them near the Owner, told them to stay out.’
Some relief there, but this was by no means over. Hannah swung her attention towards Langstrom, who was listening to his own fone, his expression grim. He turned to Le Roque. ‘My men opened fire on it,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘No effect – so I’ve ordered other men to break the armour piercers out of storage.’
Le Roque continued to gaze at Hannah. ‘I need an explanation, Dr Neumann.’
Hannah spread her hands placatingly. ‘I’ve simply ensured that Saul remains protected. He won’t be handed over to Galahad, and he’s going to remain under my care.’ She glanced at Langstrom. ‘You’ve no need of armour-piercing bullets, and they wouldn’t work anyway. The androids were programmed by Saul himself and, until he is well, they will take their orders from me.’
‘A police force he can trust absolutely,’ remarked Langstrom bitterly.
Hannah shrugged, trying to appear confident, though unsure of her ground. ‘Police for Saul only. You still police this station at large.’
‘More like doctrinal police,’ said Langstrom. ‘Real police are real human beings who retain the ability to question, to make decisions based on reality.’
‘Proctors,’ said Hannah abruptly, remembering the enforcers of correct political thinking from her university days, and also remembering how, before the Committee, such proctors had kept the chaotic and undisciplined student body in line. Wasn’t there an older meaning still? Yes, religious police – and that seemed appropriate since they were guarding a being who had, at least for a short time, been a demigod.
‘Proctors,’ said Le Roque. ‘So what else do you intend to do with these proctors, Dr Neumann?’
Hannah stood up. ‘I intend to ensure that we find a way out of this that doesn’t involve giving up Saul or surrendering ourselves. I intend to ensure that we survive, and don’t all end up shitting on the floor of an adjustment cell on Earth.’ She looked around at the others seated at the table. ‘We’re done here now until I can pull together those staff who’ll provide a more positive input. Then I suggest we discuss this matter again.’
‘Langstrom,’ said Le Roque. ‘Take Dr Neumann into custody while we resolve this situation.’
Langstrom stood up, looking very unsure, his hand on his sidearm.
‘Who do you take orders from, Langstrom?’ Hannah asked.
‘I take orders from the Owner,’ he said. ‘However, in the Owner’s absence I must take orders from the next person in authority aboard this station, and that is Technical Director Le Roque.’
‘You merely follow the chain of command, then, and tend not to think for yourself?’
He frowned, then abruptly dipped his head and reached up to press his fingers against his fone. He listened for a moment, then abruptly spat, ‘Get out of its way – then get over to the armoury. We’re going to need something a bit more substantial.’
He glanced pensively at the door before quickly moving round the table. His gun came out of its holster as he caught hold of Hannah’s jacket. He pressed it into her side and dragged her away from the double doors, which at that moment abruptly slid open. One of the newly named proctors ducked inside, the top of its head only a few centimetres below the ceiling. Little pieces of blue ceramic fell off its tough skin – the remains of low-penetration station weapons. It shrugged, shedding further fragments, and a pink haze like St Elmo’s fire rippled across its hide. Hannah did not know precisely how, but she recognized this as the first one that had addressed her, and as the same one that had spoken to her over her fone.
‘The EM weapon couldn’t stop it,’ said Langstrom – his comment directed to Le Roque as he pulled Hannah closer.
‘Hello, Paul,’ she said.
‘Hello Hannah Neumann,’ the proctor replied. ‘Would you like me to disarm Captain Langstrom, and render him harmless?’
‘Not right now,’ Hannah replied, shivering. The resonance of the voice was completely off key and, though the proctor spoke such reasonable words, there seemed to be terrible implications behind them.
She turned to Le Roque, who, along with the others, had stood up and moved back from the table. ‘So where do we go from here, Le Roque? If I order this proctor to free me, how are you going to counter that?’ She paused for a second. ‘And you, Langstrom. Are you going to kill me and then die shortly afterwards just so Le Roque can maintain power here?’
‘Le Roque?’ Langstrom enquired. Hannah could feel the dampness of his sweat through his uniform, could see it on his cheek. He was in a horrible position and knew it. What would he do next? She must not underestimate the possibility that, faced with this thing called Paul, he might not react rationally.
‘Release her,’ said Le Roque.
The gun retracted, a sigh escaping Langstrom as he let her go. Slightly unsteadily she walked over to stand beside the proctor, Paul. The android towered over her, completely immobile, but with a thunderstorm tension in the air all about it. Then it turned and dipped its head as if to peer down at her.
‘Your instructions?’ it asked.
She felt a moment of panic, and suppressed it. She should just concentrate on the words it uttered. She should not see them as a question asked by some demon she’d just summoned up from Hell. ‘We go back to Arcoplex Two,’ she replied, ‘and we’ll take it from there.’ She turned towards the doors.
‘Dr Neumann,’ said Le Roque, ‘you understand that we had no choice?’
Power had shifted abruptly.
She nodded an acknowledgement and stepped outside, Paul looming over her, the doors closing behind them.
‘I want you to secure the station armoury,’ she decided. ‘I don’t want Langstrom’s men running around with guns and rocket launchers.’
‘Already done, Hannah Neumann,’ replied Paul. ‘I sent a spidergun the moment Captain Langstrom dispatched Sergeant Peach there.’
‘Spidergun?’ said Hannah, halting abruptly.
‘We have all been awaiting your command,’ the proctor informed her. ‘You have only to issue instructions.’
‘All the station robots?’ she asked, suddenly horrified.
‘All that can hear you, and all the others through those.’
She hesitated, almost felt like running back to Le Roque and handing power back to him. What horrified her? That same thing Saul had shoved into her hands before, and now again: responsibility.
‘This is not going to be an easy conversation to conduct, so we must both think ahead to anticipate questions we might be asked, and add the further detail our answers might require,’ said the woman on the screen.
‘There’s a tidy-up program running alongside this image feed,’ said Alexandra, pausing the broadcast from Earth.
‘So this Serene Galahad is vain,’ said Alex.
Chairman Messina had once met Galahad during one of his many world tours. She was a British delegate, but not as active in the administration there as others – her rank was bestowed simply because of her scientific expertise and her organization of ID-implant manufacturing. Warned of subversive elements within her vicinity, and of some doubt about her own loyalty, his protection teams had been kept on high alert. Alex One and his brothers had been ready in a fast-drop boat underneath an aero hovering above the Aldeburgh facility, just in case something happened there that the conventional protection teams down on the ground couldn’t handle. This was why, out of the hundreds of other delegates he had encountered, Alex remembered her.
‘I’ll try to clear it up,’ said Alexandra, ‘so we can get a proper look at her.’ She set the broadcast running again.
‘You have by now seen all the data we sent and therefore understand the situation here. I am also told that the station schematic we sent has enabled you to break into some storage rooms to resupply yourselves, and that you have since found a safe hideaway. That’s good.’ She paused for a second in thought, one side of her face blurring and distorting as Alexandra tried to get rid of the tidy-up program. Galahad then continued, ‘For the people of Earth it is essential that we retrieve the Gene Bank data and samples, and that Alan Saul – if he still lives – and the rebels with him, be brought to justice, and that the delegates aboard that station then be freed. And it is, of course, also essential that Chairman Messina be released and returned to Earth. We need his wisdom, his experience and his insight.’
Alex found himself nodding in agreement, then abruptly ceased and felt a little sickened by such a reaction. This woman had been considered a danger to the Chairman when he was still back on Earth and Alex doubted that anything had changed. The delegates had always been the most perfidious and therefore in need of the closest watching.
‘Got it,’ said Alexandra.
Galahad’s image distorted again then resettled, now revealing a big dressing on her face, some hair missing on one side of her head and a black eye.
‘Burn dressing,’ Alexandra noted.
Alex shrugged. Whatever – it wasn’t really relevant.
Galahad continued, ‘To these ends, we are sending the Scourge – the ship whose images we sent to you earlier. This ship is entirely capable of destroying the Argus Station, but obviously we don’t want that. The data must be recovered and Chairman Messina must be secured and rescued. So, your best function for now will be to act as our eyes and ears aboard the station. Your prime objective will be to remain concealed, while you gather tactical data and send it to us on this frequency. I know that you have located Alessandro, but you must not act on that yet. It is also essential that you locate the Gene Bank samples and data. I’ll pause now to give you a chance to reply.’ Her image froze.
Alex and Alexandra sat and discussed the broadcast, only briefly, because they had already gone over what they needed to know. Then they replied.
‘How will the Scourge attack this station, and where would it be safest for us to position ourselves? Is it likely that you will fire on the station, and what are the chances of the Arboretum cylinder world being hit – that is, should we get Messina out before the attack begins? After finding this Gene Bank data, what should we do with it?’ Alex paused, wondering if there was something he had missed. He couldn’t think of anything.
They then waited. He kept checking his watch as the time she would have received it arrived and passed. It took a further ten minutes before they received her reply.
‘The form of the attack,’ she said, ‘will, to a certain extent, be dependent on the tactical information you now supply. There is also a limit to the amount of information I am prepared to provide you with, since there is still a danger that you may be captured and interrogated. However, the rebels aboard will already have surmised that the station will come under disabling fire first, followed by the injection of an assault force. Most of this fire will be concentrated on installations in and about the asteroid itself, where the main population is concentrated. It will be heavy enough to cause atmosphere breaches, disable power supplies and sever communications and transport, but not so heavy as to completely wreck the computer architecture of the station, since we do not want to destroy any recording there of the Gene Bank data. We will therefore tend to avoid any server rooms and data stores. My tactical teams also tell me, you will be delighted to know, that one of the most likely storage places for the Gene Bank samples and data is the Arboretum cylinder, so we will certainly avoid inflicting any damage on that place at all.’
She smiled at them then, and the sincerity in her expression made Alex uneasy. He was one of the first clones created, and so by now, at the physical age of thirty, had learned to recognize deceit, but he could not detect any sign of it in her.
‘I have to add,’ she continued, ‘that if you can, without any high risk of being captured, get to the Gene Bank data and transmit it to me, on this frequency, then you should do so. The Chairman himself would agree on how essential that data is for the regeneration of his beloved Earth. I could warrant that he would even be prepared to sacrifice himself in order to ensure that end. Now I will listen to one further message from you, then I must return to the administration of a planet until the Chairman returns.’
‘Chairman Alessandro Messina will not sacrifice himself – nor will he be sacrificed,’ was all Alex said in reply.
It took a further five minutes, on top of the signal delay, before they received her reply to that statement.
‘My apologies,’ she said. ‘I was only talking about what I believe his opinion would be, for he values himself only as high as he does his duty. However, he is more important to you, to me and to the people of Earth than any data imaginable. Please understand my sincerity in this. Now I must leave you to attend to your duties, while I attend to mine. The leader of the tactical team assigned you will once again take over. I wish you the best of luck, Alex, and hope that in the future we can talk under better circumstances.’
Her image froze again.
‘So what do you think?’ Alex asked.
‘She seems sincere enough,’ said Alexandra. ‘The Chairman would not have made her a delegate if he hadn’t trusted her.’
Alex gazed at her thoughtfully, remembering a fragment of some previous mission he had been engaged on ten years before Alexandra was anything more than a blob of jelly in her amniotic tank. The memory was slightly confused by the many conditioning sessions since, but he certainly recalled, at Messina’s request, torturing to death a delegate who had made an attempt on the Chairman’s life. Poor Alexandra: despite her brilliance with coms she was still, at only four years out of her tank, lacking in experience. To her the world was still divided into black and white. On the one side stood the rebels, subversives and terrorists, while on the other stood Messina, his delegates and the administration of Earth. To her it wasn’t at all complicated. Her naivety made him feel so very tired.
Things were better, as a brief venture into what Saul recognized as semi-consciousness gave him an overview. He felt the bandwidth of connections expanding as those units they extended from or terminated against healed, regrew, came online. He also understood that even when not fully in the world, he had influenced it and set in motion a counter-force; something to stand against that massive ship whose presence in near-Earth space felt like a hot nail being driven into his head. And Hannah had responded, too, taking the reins he had released but had failed to instruct her to hold.
Data continued flowing, and he could understand it better. He could distinguish now the difference between station computing and the events and propaganda broadcast on ETV. The demonization of Alan Saul never stopped and, motivated by the need for vengeance, the people of Earth seemed to all the more willingly wear their chains and work at a killing pace under Serene Galahad. Here another image appeared; here more damnation invoked.
One of the Gobi desert basins had been used as the Asian continent’s inner dumping ground. Any surviving population had been moved out and their buildings levelled. Then the corpses had been brought in by heavy ore trucks, and dumped and dozered up to a thickness of ten metres across an area of a hundred square kilometres. Months of decay, during which the flies had clouded so thick that people venturing into the area had choked to death on them, had reduced this layer to five metres of bones. They called it ‘the Plain of Bones’ now. It was poetically apposite, but by no means unique. In a moment of coherence, he managed to link to Govnet and discover that there were now a hundred and four places called the Plain of Bones, plus hundreds of others with similar titles: the Ossuary, Bonefield, Field of
Skulls and numerous sites that had acquired the name ‘the Scourings’. That was all he managed to get before something – some shadowy force – tipped him out again.
‘For this they must be punished,’ declared Serene Galahad, seated in a plush office, looking all confidence and strength, her clothing plain and almost dowdy to impart the comforting image of motherhood. ‘But we must bring that data back here so we can grow a new Earth in the bones of the old.’
The broadcasts contained nothing new. He could detect the joins, the words reordered, the CGI changes of scene and the changes in her appearance. She had not actually spoken live for a long time now. The ersatz Serene moved on to talk of awards, promotions and the lionization of individuals who had invented something useful, speeded up some process, increased some production figures. It seemed to Saul that the ghost of the hammer-and-sickle shimmered once more on a red background and that Pravda was again alive and well.
She watched, too – the woman etched into underlying reality, the one he had seen somewhere, and heard speak. She had been far away, yet also impossibly close, space seeming an agonized curve in between. Sometimes he felt that curve, and found himself howling from behind a screen in Jasper Rhine’s laboratory. Other times he felt a brief twisting, distorting wrongness, and found himself gazing from the eyes of the proctor called Judd, in the outer ring. He knew, in an utterly theoretical way, what was being built there, and knew that theoretically it should work. But every time Judd tested a new section, and the machine just hinted at what it could do, he saw the working of the universe through utterly unhuman eyes, because that wrongness – that twisting – should not happen now but was a strand of a possible future stretching back to the now. It was a picture of reality that the normal human mind could not grasp.
‘Hannah,’ he somehow managed to say.
‘Alan! Alan, is that you!’
‘Hannahahhahahnonono . . .’
‘Alan! You have to wake up!’
His mental grip slid away, and he glimpsed himself lying all tubed and wired on the table in her surgery, a seeming meld of corpse and machine. He glimpsed someone in a corridor with his hands clasped over his ears, gazing in horror at a public-address speaker. He saw Le Roque leaping out of his chair in Tech Central and backing away from some nightmare images on his screen. Then briefly, for just one steady instant, he saw the station entire: every image from every robot sensor, every cam, every external array and dish, and even through the human eyes of those who wore cortex-linked fones. It was numinous . . . and so seemed the blackness that followed.