by Neal Asher
‘Angela?’ Hannah repeated.
‘It won’t kill me,’ she replied, now tightening a tourniquet about her leg.
‘Are we all good?’ Hannah called.
‘No more deaths,’ Brigitta replied.
Only then did Hannah notice that her own leg was hurting and look down to see it soaked with blood around an embedded chunk of glass. When had that happened? She had no idea. She reached out and touched the bloody shard, before deciding it would be best to leave it where it was.
‘It will take effect quickly,’ Saul whispered to her, through her fone. ‘High heart rate, adrenalin . . .’
‘What was that?’ Hannah asked. ‘Alan?’
Reception was terrible: a perpetual buzzing broke up his next words, turning them into nonsense. Then he spoke again, clearly. ‘They’re stopping now,’ he told her. ‘They know something is wrong.’
‘Alan?’
‘I’ve killed them all,’ he said. Then her fone made a sound like some small animal dying, and nothing more emerged.
Sudden movement behind them.
Hannah whirled round and raised her weapon. One of the attackers was there, but he wasn’t armed. He had just propelled himself into a space amidst the burning wreckage, his arms wrapped tightly around his chest. He seemed to be convulsing.
After another twenty minutes had passed, Hannah finally pushed herself to her feet. She didn’t want to think too deeply about what Saul had said. Keeping to cover as best she could, she moved into the factory, first to check on James, who couldn’t have been more dead, then to check on the one called Tyson, who, it turned out, was the girl. She too was irrecoverable. Tired and frightened, all of the others just watched.
She finally headed back to the door, calling over her shoulder, ‘All of you, with me.’
‘Are you sure about that?’ Brigitta asked.
Suddenly Hannah was very sure. ‘It’s over.’
The survivors dragged themselves out of hiding, then moved cautiously out of the factory and joined her.
‘We’ll head back to my lab . . . if it’s still intact,’ she decided.
There wasn’t one of them without injury. Hannah began assessing whom to treat first, then decided that it should be herself, since she probably had a lot of serious work ahead of her.
‘Rhine’s explosives,’ she said, pausing on the threshold of the wrecked corridor.
With her undamaged hand, Brigitta tapped a palmtop fastened at her waist. ‘He sent their location and disarming codes.’ She propped the palmtop on the mass of material she had wrapped round her hand, which was pulled in close to her chest, sorted through menus, then strode ahead.
Once Brigitta had led them out of the wreckage, they came on the first of the invading soldiers, some floating free, but most huddled on the floor, with military equipment scattered all around them. Hannah paused to inspect one of them closely, noted the blood on the lips and one bloody tear below the eye. She knew for sure then what Saul had done – did not need to do an autopsy to know more.
She wanted to cry, but felt arid inside.
Mars
With only three hours to go, three hours of her life remaining, Var had exposed three metres of oxygen pipe, unearthed a lone skull and an old-style laptop . . . but still didn’t know if she was any closer to the compressed-air tank. Only after digging for a number of hours had it occurred to her that these pipes might have fed something else. For all she knew, the tank could be under the rubble pile behind her while the pipes she was following terminated at just another airlock.
She paused and stood upright to stretch her back, feeling sore points all over her body where her suit had been rubbing against her. She considered how all the effort she had put in here would result in some unpleasant after-effects, then remembered that if she did suffer sore and aching muscles later, she would be grateful. Funny that – how her mind kept slipping back to its default position of assessing the future. It was as if, on some unconscious level, a part of her kept cautiously approaching the facts of her situation, then skittering nervously away.
On a conscious level she had a problem too. A while ago, when her crunch time lay many hours into the future, she had felt something like acceptance, but now that time was drawing nigh she could feel her desperation increasing. She didn’t want to die. It wasn’t fair. She had so much yet to do. All the protests of someone on the brink of dying rose up in her mind – all the clichés of an organism never programmed to accept death, and rebelling at the last. She tried not to contemplate this further, ducked down again and continued digging, annoyed by the tears of self-pity filling her eyes.
Another hour of digging excited her inner immortal element as the pipes began rising steeply upwards. This was it; this was where they were not crushed down by the rubble, where they rose up to meet something else. She tried to keep calm, but instead found herself hurling rocks away, scooping off dust, frenziedly hacking with her pick. She started to sweat, but worked even harder when she came upon a heavy pipe joint; felt a moment of euphoria on exposing first a power cable, then the side of the small compressor it led to. Further digging revealed the curving perimeter of the compressed-air reservoir. She worked her way up one side of it, tracking along the air pipes, revealed the top of a pressure gauge, tore away the rubble all around it, exposed a broken dial that could no longer give her a reading, began moving away more rubble – and in the process banged a loose rock against the gauge. The gauge itself, pipes and a heavy valve all shifted. She got hold of the entire assembly and pulled it up, until it came away from the bottle below, revealing the hole out of which it had been torn.
Disappointment punched her in the gut, but her internal organism wouldn’t stop. She brushed everything clear of the compressed-air bottle, exposed the top of it completely. The screw-in assembly had been torn out of its thread, leaving the dark eye of a hole. She stared at it, unable to accept what she was seeing. She turned and searched around until she found a length of reinforcing rod she had cast aside earlier, returned to the bottle and inserted it into the hole. It went right down inside the bottle and she rattled it around, a tinny sound carrying to her ears through the thin air. Then she dropped the rod into the bottle and stepped back, reality catching up.
Weariness hit her hard as she climbed out of the excavation. Her head-up display showed that she had maybe two hours left now, and her likelihood of finding anything to extend her time beyond that was minimal. Stepping away from rubble to dusty ground, Var considered going back into the intact building and leaving some message for her brother, but could not see the point. She walked over to a nearby boulder, slumped down and rested her back against it.
Time to die, now.
21
Technology Makes You Free!
The attitude of Committee delegates to technology was always an ambivalent one. They wanted medical technology advanced just as fast as possible so that they could stay healthy and live for as long as possible, but did not want it on general release because that would inevitably exacerbate the world’s population problem. They wanted expert computer systems through which to administrate the world, yet artificial intelligence terrified them for it might displace them. They wanted fast and reliable robots operating in their factories and their Inspectorate, but desired utter control over the experts that built and programmed them. They wanted all the benefits that technology could give, because technology is power, and they wanted that power only for themselves. They micromanaged, controlled and suppressed technology so that, in the end, that product of human genius, intended to free people from the exigencies of the world around them, instead enslaved them.
Argus
The shuddering that ran through the station, as if it had been hit by a gigantic club, was slowly diminishing. Gazing up through one of the few intact windows of Tech Central, Saul watched the cause of it: the Scourge steadily retreating. Why it had pulled away was debatable, because it began to leave only shortly after he had transmitted the code
s to the implants of every soldier and every crewmember of that ship, and it struck him as unlikely that they could so quickly have realized what was about to happen.
‘Nearly done,’ said Langstrom over radio, ‘but it’ll take hours to repressurize.’
Langstrom and his soldiers had found replacement windows in a nearby storeroom and were now installing the last of them. This wasn’t Saul’s greatest concern. If everything worked out as expected, then all those aboard the Scourge should be dying or already dead. But the fact that the ship had left so early inclined him to think that maybe something else was going on. He could no longer assume that they were all dead, and it was quite possible that the ship would become a severe danger. For soon it would be able to deploy its weapons again and, quite likely, any survivors aboard it would not be firing merely disabling shots.
‘Judd, tell me you’re ready,’ said Saul, as he turned away, carefully stepping over a corpse, then nudging a second floating carcase out of his path as he came to stand before the newly installed controls.
‘Repairs are complete,’ the proctor replied.
Saul peered into the transformer room and noted how its occupants were clearing up any free-floating detritus. However, Judd was not among them. Searching further, Saul found the proctor standing, surrounded by corpses, in a nearby corridor. Obviously Judd had found it necessary to deal with an attack occurring there too.
He now surveyed the rest of the station. A lot of damage was evident and, though firing up the Rhine drive did not result in acceleration stresses, once it closed down, the station would be subject to gravitational stresses – he hoped. He checked the drive itself and found it undamaged and completely up to speed, as it had been for an hour or more now. Mentally taking control of the consoles ranged in front of him, he began routing his way round some damage to control optics, inputting his own astrogation calculations and conclusions. Then, with a much smaller part of his mind, he started to check on people he primarily cared about.
‘Le Roque,’ he said.
Technical Director Le Roque was in what had once been the Political Office. Saul located him crouching over the corpse of Girondel Chang, and felt a twinge of regret. Le Roque looked up, his expression grim. Reviewing cam data, Saul saw what had happened there. Le Roque and others had been defending the place from multiple penetration-lock attacks but had been unsuccessful. Many of them were killed and the remainder taken prisoner. Chang, along with four others, was killed while their guards were dying from the Scour and began firing their weapons in panic.
‘What is it?’ Le Roque asked.
‘I need the station as secure as you can get it, and as fast as you can,’ Saul replied. ‘Use your secondary control room there to do so.’
‘I’ll need to assess the damage.’
‘We’ve no time – the Scourge has detached itself from the station and could fire on us at any moment. Just do the best you can.’ Meanwhile Saul issued instructions to his robots, sending them to cover those places he considered weak. He was ordering them to make repairs even as human blood dried on their metal skins.
Le Roque stood up wearily and began summoning people to help him as he headed off. Saul felt cruel at pressuring him right then, for he knew, from the records, that Chang and some of the others who had died alongside him were Le Roque’s friends. But, then, their whole situation was cruel, and spending time being sensitive might get them all killed.
Hannah he found in the surgery attached to her laboratory. She was operating on someone who seemed to have been shot an unfeasible number of times to be still alive. Saul decided not to distract her.
In the main laboratory, Brigitta, Angela and others – all of whom appeared to be wounded themselves – were working on the walking wounded or else doing what they could for others more seriously wounded, just to keep them alive until they could go under the knife. Throughout Arcoplex Two, groups were collecting the wounded, but mostly people were just loitering about, looking stunned, or nursing their own wounds. It looked like a slaughterhouse in there, but there were few places on board that did not look similar. The enemy attack had taken a terrible toll.
It took Saul just an instant to count the living and discover exactly what that toll was. Upon its arrival here at the Asteroid Belt, the station had had a population of just over two thousand. Now it contained over three and a half thousand, but nearly two and a half thousand of those were corpses. Nine hundred station personnel had died. Eleven hundred and sixty still remained alive, though how long about fifty of them would survive was debatable.
Even as he finally readied himself to start up the Rhine drive – confident he was doing so faster than any crew could manage, and thus considering how unnecessary any of them was – Saul realized that he did regret the deaths, and he did care. Had the knowledge that his own sister was currently running out of air on Mars restored something of his humanity? That humanity seemed integral to him now, not something he could so easily box off while he made practical decisions.
Time.
Electromagnetic fields played a subtle game with near-light-speed eddies of matter so as to generate exotic energies, and Langstrom leaped back from the newly installed window as reality twisted outside.
‘What the fuck!’ he bellowed.
Saul reached out to rest gloved fingers on a nearby console, perhaps feeling the need of some physical connection to what he was doing, some human dimension to the way he was twisting up space. And it felt like him doing it. He was in it, part of it, suddenly hyper-sensitive everywhere throughout the station, wrapping a warp bubble about himself like someone burrowing into a duvet, shifting as if before the massive exhalation of some god. A jolt ensued as the warp bubble brushed against the Scourge on its way out, doubtless sending tidal forces ripping through the ship, which would make little difference to its dead and dying crew. Then came a further jerk as it collided with and destroyed minor debris, and Saul watched streaks of fire tracking across the blackness of the artificial sky outside. He waited, counted seconds and microseconds, then shut it all down.
‘The Scourge is gone!’ exclaimed one of the soldiers.
‘We’ve moved,’ said Langstrom, his voice sounding unsteady.
Further than you can imagine, my friend.
Recalculation now and instant understanding of why his earlier calculations were out. The drive nailed reality, but reality still moved at the pace of galactic drift. He input that in his new calculations, and knew it would be right, then started up the drive again, felt the solar system grow small, felt an arrogance of inestimable power, and suppressed it in an instant. The warp took Argus again, as he listened to Le Roque issuing instructions, watched erstwhile killer robots working frenetically to weld up cracks and insert structural members, spraying impact foam, gluing, riveting, tightening bolts. It would have to be enough, because every second counted when it might be one’s last breath.
Time passed – a ridiculously small amount of it when divided up over the hundreds of thousands of kilometres involved. The seconds counted away, then the microseconds, and Saul again shut down the drive. Argus groaned as the stars came back. Saul lifted his fingertips from the console, glanced over towards the windows where, bright and clear and disappointingly brown, the so-called red planet Mars hung in void.
He headed for the door.
Earth
Her palmtop opened with a breathy sigh, and just a short search through the menus brought up the program Serene required. It wasn’t that she needed to use her palmtop – the programs she was accessing were available to her in the equipment surrounding her – but it seemed somehow right. Using this method reminded her of that first time when she sent out the signals from the communications room in Aldeburgh to extinguish a large and useless portion of the human race. The palmtop updated its lists as it also updated other software. Two options were now provided for her. She clicked on the list labelled ‘Scourge’ and gazed at it contemplatively. She could kill with the Scour, or she co
uld send the signal to constrict over two thousand strangulation collars
I am calm. I am very calm.
She tried to ignore the shaking of her hands and the ball of something hot and black that seemed to be growing in her stomach. Transferring her gaze to the main screen that stood amid her garden vegetation – whose condition was now much improved – she contemplated the two scenes it displayed. One showed the Scourge, presently under power and on a route taking it out of the Asteroid Belt; the other showed Mars, with Argus Station in orbit about it. Her finger hovered over the send button on her palmtop then she carefully withdrew it.
Why had the Scourge separated from the station? Why did they run away?
She was not sure she wanted to take the time necessary to find out why. They had failed out there – they had failed miserably. She returned her gaze to her palmtop, swallowed dryly, and accepted that she wanted to kill someone. Clay Ruger was already history, but plenty of others remained for her to select from: Commander Liang, Captain Scotonis . . .
What?
The list of ID codes was updating again, each steadily acquiring a tick beside it. No, she hadn’t pressed send; she hadn’t followed through with her instinct for vengeance. What was this? The ticks indicated that those people the codes identified had been sent the signal that would flood their bodies with the Scour, and therefore they would be dying even now. Her immediate thought was that there must have been some sort of software failure; that, as the program opened, it had automatically sent the signal. But that made no sense, since the software she was using was multiply backed-up and mirrored, perpetually ran self-diagnostics, and would close down at any hint of either a hardware or software failure.
Angry and frustrated, she began running checks and it soon became apparent that she had not sent the signal, nor had it been inadvertently sent in any other way. But the status of those ID codes was being updated from the latest transmission from the Scourge. She now turned to that and began frantically searching for some explanation, and soon it became clear. Soon everything started to make sense.