by Neal Asher
‘The aeros,’ Hannah managed, her throat dry.
A woman in the crowd was moaning loudly, pressing her hands over her face. Perhaps she was De Sousa’s wife, or had some emotional tie to one of the others who had just died. Perhaps she recognized something from one of the screens, or simply did not like seeing her world being torn apart.
‘If they’re already airborne, I’m currently shutting down their engines. If they’re on the ground I’m just feeding the same ID data to their antipersonnel guns,’ Saul explained.
Hannah wanted to beg him to stop, but was he actually wrong to commit such slaughter? Knowing that so many down on Earth would inevitably die, she could not think of any who deserved to die more. Also something ugly deep down inside her – some obscene voyeur – seemed to be taking righteous pleasure in this carnage.
Another scene appeared. Hannah recognized Maunsell Airport, just as a scramjet slammed down and disintegrated, spewing fire and debris over the edge and into the sea.
‘Two thousand and forty scramjets are presently either airborne or in the process of landing or taking off. Their passengers will not be surviving the journey.’ His words fell like lead blocks amid a growing stillness.
Just then, a scramjet on one of the screens, crashing into a sprawl, buildings toppling.
‘It’s unfortunate,’ said Saul, ‘but there will inevitably be innocent casualties too.’
‘Isn’t this . . . enough?’ Hannah asked.
Saul indicated the figure flickering at the bottom of the screen. It took a moment for her to realize that the set of digits was now in the millions.
‘No, I haven’t finished yet. Even now, power is being cut to readerguns, spiderguns are being hit with EM weapons, and aeros are being taken off Govnet and switched over to manual control. I have already taken a large bite out of the Committee apparatus, but there’s a larger bite I can still take.’
Again the first views Hannah had seen, showing the satellite network arrayed about the Earth.
‘Twenty-three lasers,’ he declared. ‘They are firing now, their target sectors primarily government installations. Five million is an overestimate, unless I reposition the lasers or become less selective in choosing sectors.’ He eyed her again. ‘Though only twenty-three lasers are currently operating, all seven thousand satellite drives are in perfect working order.’
‘What do you intend?’ Hannah asked, and glanced at Messina, who was now focused on Saul like a rabbit mesmerized by a fox.
‘The satellites are made of bubblemetal and each weighs upwards of five tonnes. They were even given ceramic shielding to armour them in the event of extraplanetary war – another one of those hugely wasteful Committee inefficiencies that no one thought to review later.’ He fixed his gaze on Messina for a moment. ‘As we know, the Committee has freed us from the likelihood of warfare.’
Messina just licked his lips.
Saul swung his gaze around the chamber. ‘As such,’ he said, ‘the satellites can in most cases survive atmospheric re-entry. If we use the old-style nuclear weapons measurement of TNT yield, I calculate that the impact energy of each will be in the region of ten kilotonnes.’
‘Impact where?’ some brave soul asked.
‘I am still making the ballistics and re-entry calculations – which means I’m having to do some processing outside my head and in the Political Office mainframe. I should then be able to bring each satellite down within one square kilometre of its target area.’
‘Where?’ Hannah repeated, when the previous questioner did not persist.
The overall view of Earth, seen on one screen, suddenly bloomed with seven thousand stars as all of the satellite drives fired up. Two of the screens now showed previous views, Inspectorate HQs Brazilia East and Athens, whilst a third and fourth showed other Inspectorate headquarters. The remaining screen still showed that same list of names.
‘Where do you think?’ He gestured to the screens. ‘There are just over eleven thousand world regional Inspectorate HQs, but I think I can take care of the main ones.’ He nodded to himself. ‘The first impacts will occur in the Asian Bloc, in about one hour and forty minutes.’ He raised a hand and immediately the spidergun at the door moved forward, leaving space behind and on either side of it. ‘Now, all those I have listed will exit this chamber and head towards the asteroid-side endcap. Those not on that list will remain here – and should they attempt to leave, they will die.’
The main crowd made straight for the exit, almost falling over each other to get out, thronging down either side of the spidergun on their way. Even as Hannah watched, the machine swung one limb sideways and the weapon at the end of it spat red fire, just once. A woman was slammed back against the wall, the top of her head missing. Hannah did not get a chance to recognize the delegate, as her corpse was shoved to one side by the crowd.
‘No warnings,’ Saul added.
Within minutes, only the designated murderers were left in the chamber – along with four corpses.
‘Now, Hannah,’ said Saul. ‘I want to know if I can offer those who remain here the choice.’
She stared up at the screens, and particularly at the one showing an Inspectorate HQ so very similar to her former prison: where she had done her research, where she had operated on people’s minds and inserted ever more sophisticated hardware and bioware. In a place just like that she herself had invented the things that had made Saul what he now was. But in a similar place Smith had used similar hardware to erase the mind of the Saul she had once known and loved. Smith had used pain, because that was his personal preference and because the hardware in Saul’s head had not been so sophisticated then. But now, using the new organic interfaces stored in Arcoplex Two, pain would no longer be necessary. It should be perfectly possible to rub out a human mind with the ease of wiping a computer file.
‘Yes, you can offer them the choice,’ she replied.
Antares Base
They had only two viable crawlers left. Var watched as the flat trailer towed behind one of them was loaded with the corpses from Hex Three, alongside Miska’s, which had been recovered first.
‘No reactor damage,’ reported Lopomac, over com. ‘But plenty of other stuff here is totally screwed.’
‘Is the hex recoverable?’ Var enquired, now sitting in a chair back in her own quarters.
‘We’ve got three replacement windows, and the rest can be sealed with regolith blocks. Martinez’s crew is fetching all the materials now. Those aren’t the possible problem, however.’
‘Possible problem?’
‘Structural damage from the grenades. Martinez is in there right now, using ultrasound scan to check for it.’
‘Tell him to hand that job over to someone else,’ Var replied. ‘I want to see him and all the other chiefs of staff over in the Community Room in ten minutes. You and Carol, too.’
‘Still keeping the same chain of command?’ Lopomac asked.
‘We have to. Democracy and freedom are only available to societies that can afford the dithering and time wasting.’ She hated stating such a truth, because it sounded like it came right out of the Committee manual, but that didn’t make it less valid.
Upon her return to Hex One, weariness had bludgeoned Var. With Lopomac and Carol, she then stepped into the Community Room to inform about a hundred and fifty personnel that the Inspectorate no longer had power over the base, and henceforth the technical staff would control it completely. There had been few questions to begin with; there never were many, since discussing orders or policy statements had never been allowed. Then Martinez had spoken up to ask some of the most relevant ones and, emboldened by his example, others then began to ask questions too. Silence fell again when Var informed them that the enforcers, execs and Ricard himself were all dead.
‘Return to your duties, or to your beds if that’s where you were,’ she urged them, ‘as I’m now going to my own. In the morning I want all the chiefs of staff assembled here at nine, when I’ll tel
l you exactly what’s happened – and what is going to happen.’
Back in her own quarters, Var turned on her laptop and again took a look at image feeds from the satellites surrounding Earth. What she found there was utterly confusing at first but, on checking back through recorded footage from over the previous ten hours, the images began to make sense. It suddenly felt as if someone had grabbed hold of her intestines and twisted them, and the relevance of this to their own situation could not be denied. Since she had first studied the images from Earth, the situation had changed substantially, indeed catastrophically. She extracted the same footage for use later, at that morning meeting, then fell at once into a deep sleep.
Waking at six, Var showered and got some breakfast. Whilst she consumed scrambled eggs, she remembered Gisender telling her to never close her teeth here whilst eating, because the Martian grit made its way into everything.
After working with her laptop for nearly three hours, she had broken into and studied carefully a substantial portion of the Inspectorate database. She now had everything she needed and must use it to try and get things in order here. She finally closed the laptop and turned her gaze to the object lying on her bed. Undecided about wearing anything so blatant, she picked up the belt and its holstered side arm, studied it for a long moment, then abandoned it. She could not rule by force here, nor did she want to.
Next she turned to inspect herself in the wall mirror. Her spiky cropped hair gave her a boyish appearance, belied by a face subtly touched with make-up to make her look even harder, tougher, more capable. Var picked up her laptop, tucked it under her arm, and headed for the door.
Besides Lopomac and Carol, six chiefs of staff waited in the Community Room, along with a few of their subordinates. One was Martinez, a swarthy lump of a man who ran building and buildings maintenance, and particularly atmosphere security. Lopomac himself dealt with most of the other infrastructure, including water and power supply, air control and the recycling system, with Carol and formerly Miska acting as his lieutenants. Here also was Gunther, now assuming Kaskan’s job as chief of Hydroponics and Agriculture. The three remaining were Chief Medical Officer Da Vinci, Rhone from Mars Science, which covered geology, meteorology and survey; and Leo from the Store, whose duties were to keep the base manifest and ensure the repair and maintenance of all equipment deployed on the base. They were now gathered around a single table, some sitting and some still standing. As Var entered, those seated stood up too, which seemed a good sign.
She headed to one end of the table, placing the laptop in front of her as she sat. The way to play this, she decided, was to approach it as business as usual – but without the political intervention from Earth. Following her lead, the others quickly took their seats.
‘I assume you’ve all had a chance to see Le Blanc’s broadcast?’ she began. Nods all around and grim expressions. ‘Some of you will have learned more but, for the benefit of all, I’ll go through it from the beginning. I’ll meanwhile transmit the evidence to your personal computers.’ She paused to link her own laptop to the main screen on the wall, projecting an image of the first shepherd carrying Gisender’s body.
‘We all had our suspicions, mostly unvoiced, when Ricard cut Earthcom,’ she continued. ‘However, some of us – myself, Lopomac, Carol, Miska, Kaskan and Gisender – managed to free ourselves from surveillance long enough to discuss the matter and decide what to do about it. We arranged it so that one of us could go out and collect optic cable from the old Marineris radio station, meanwhile downloading from there the latest communications from Earth. It was Gisender who went, but what we didn’t realize was that Ricard had access to the security cams in that station too. He saw what Gisender had found out, and had her murdered before she could return.’
‘How?’ asked Gunther.
‘One of the enforcers shot up her crawler from Shankil’s Butte,’ Var replied, then went on covering the next events in cold detail: her removing of her ID implant so that she could go out and find out what had happened to Gisender; Le Blanc’s broadcast, and then her own exchange with Ricard; all the stuff about the Travellers going into the Argus bubblemetal plants, and final rescue in fifteen to twenty years. By the lack of any interruption, she realized they had heard much of this already.
‘So he intended cutting down on our population here, to make it easier to support those who remained?’ suggested Da Vinci.
‘Yes.’
‘How and who?’
‘Not you,’ she replied. ‘I have the figures at hand now from the Inspectorate database. The plan was to gather one hundred and eight of the staff – those designated non-essential – here in Hex One, whilst moving the rest to Hex Three for an “Assessment Meeting”, then to evacuate the air totally from Hex One. Ricard reckoned this would leave just enough people to keep the base running, but that wasn’t the ultimate plan as far as Earth was concerned.’
‘They wanted us all to die,’ said Lopomac. ‘They planned for us to die as quietly and quickly as possible, using up as few resources and causing as little damage as possible, so as to leave this place intact for later reoccupation.’
‘You have proof of this?’ asked Martinez.
Var shook her head. ‘No direct proof, but the most basic study of resource usage, which I have transmitted to your computers, allows us a lifespan here of five years, maybe a little longer. All living here now are essential, and without them, things would break down a lot quicker. Reduce the personnel and you don’t stretch resources over a longer period, you just kill the base faster.’ After this introduction she went on to tell them the rest: how she herself had killed Inspectorate personnel; how Kaskan had killed the two in Hydroponics, and about his subsequent sacrifice. She noted some angry looks as she detailed the cutting of power to lure Ricard out, but, of course, as a result they had all been left sitting in the cold and dark waiting to die. She then bluntly informed them how she had killed Ricard, sensed their approval, realized that some were now looking at her with something approaching awe, or even fear. Finally she called up video footage recorded from around Earth.
‘Whilst the three of us were preparing for Ricard’s attack,’ she continued, ‘we found evidence of some sort of disturbance going on around Earth. Since then, it seems the action there has escalated. Here is recorded footage from over twenty hours ago.’
‘Mother of God!’ Carol exclaimed.
‘What the hell is this?’ Martinez demanded.
Before answering, Var scanned the shocked faces around the table, let them take it in, begin to absorb the implications. ‘The Argus satellite network,’ she eventually explained, just as another ground-based explosion flared down on the night side of Earth. ‘When I recorded this, about half of the network was already gone. Someone’s been dropping the satellites onto Earth. Something major is happening there.’
‘War?’ Lopomac queried. ‘I did wonder —’
‘Who with?’ Gunther interrupted. ‘There’s revolutionary groups down there, we know, but none of them has the resources to achieve something like this.’
A spear of light cut across the night side, terminating in yet another blast.
‘Civil war,’ declared Lopomac. ‘It’s the only possible answer.’
Var nodded, for that seemed to make sense. ‘A schism must have developed within the Committee. They’re fighting each other.’
Such huge events laid out there for them to witness, yet they had only one crucial point of relevance to what must now happen here on Mars.
‘There’s something else too,’ she said. ‘I’m not really sure what to make of it.’
She flicked to another recorded view showing an object at extreme range but drawing rapidly closer.
‘Argus Station,’ said Lopomac.
‘It’s on the move,’ said Var. ‘Someone must have fired up the Traveller engine on the surface of the asteroid.’
‘They’re going to drop that thing on Earth?’ said Carol, her voice hushed.
; Var glanced across at her. ‘It doesn’t seem so. Last time I checked, it was on a spiral orbit moving outwards from Earth. In fact that path should have intersected with the Moon’s orbit some hours ago.’
‘They crashed it on the Moon?’ gasped Carol. ‘I don’t know,’ said Var, vexed that she hadn’t checked the same feeds again this morning. But how important were they? Her co-workers had just seen enough that was of relevance to them, because it showed the truth of their own situation. Of course, she understood the concern of those here who still had family back on Earth. Her own brother might still be alive somewhere back there. There was just a chance that he hadn’t ended up in an adjustment cell for, if anyone truly fitted the description her political officer had once applied to herself – too dangerous to live, too valuable to kill – it was her brilliant sibling, Alan Saul.
‘But, in light of all this,’ she said acidly, ‘it seems likely that the rebuilding of Mars Travellers has been postponed way beyond the prediction of fifteen to twenty years. There might not be further missions heading out this way for centuries, millennia . . . or ever.’ She paused for a moment, realizing that none of them knew about Chairman Messina’s private project, none of them knew about the Alexander – that massive spacecraft under construction out beyond the orbit of the Moon. It had been kept very secret, and the construction station it sat within was EM-shielded and invisible from Earth. Whatever, with the events occurring on Earth the project had almost certainly been shelved, if not destroyed.
‘How can you be sure?’ asked Gunther.
‘Last night I ran a rough analysis on those same images,’ she replied, ‘and what you are seeing is not random. Someone is dropping those laser satellites directly onto Inspectorate HQs all around Earth. When I last looked, all seven thousand satellites were on the move. I’m guessing it’s finished now. Someone just annihilated most of the Committee power base on Earth.’
‘I can confirm that,’ said Rhone, of Mars Science, a man so pale that, without the Martian rouge ground into his skin, he would have had an albino complexion. ‘We’ve also been picking up some Govnet chatter, though most of Govnet now seems to be down. It goes beyond what we’re actually seeing. Some kind of computer attack has turned readerguns and military robots against the Inspectorate all across Earth, and even dropped government scramjets and aeros out of the sky. Prior to this, it’s also worth noting, the satellite lasers fired on Minsk and then on each other. There was also a big launch of space planes from a hidden spaceport in central Australia towards the Argus Station. A lot of them didn’t make it, as they got fried by the Traveller VI engine.’