The Departure (54 page)

“Move over there.” Saul gestured to a space at the edge of the dock floor, where the spidergun unfolded with fast and eerie silence in the vacuum, three of its weapon-bearing limbs pointed at these four.

Delegate Le Blanc was clearly saying something, but it wasn’t audible over com. Either Saul had not seen fit to include Hannah in the communication, or he himself just wasn’t bothering to listen. She suspected the latter. The spidergun took a few paces forward and, after staring at the machine for a moment, Le Blanc bowed her head and with the three others trailing her walked over to the spot indicated. More people began to emerge, including other familiar faces, along with children looking pathetic and vulnerable in the smallest size of spacesuit available, concertinaed at the joints yet still hanging loose and baggy. The sight of them at once coloured Hannah’s decision as to their fate: she could not allow Saul to kill them all—not now.

“Messina will come out last,” she predicted.

“He’s wriggling like a hooked fish,” remarked Saul. “He’s communicating with people back on Earth, with the rest of his soldiers here and with those still on the other planes, trying to find some way of getting a handle on this situation. It seems he just can’t admit to himself that he no longer possesses any power.”

Hannah detected movement at the periphery of her vision and glanced across at the next docking face, which tilted up at an angle from this one. People were now departing from planes there and, as she looked straight above, she could see others were emerging on all the other docking faces too. Doubtless Saul was still issuing instructions even while he spoke to her for, escorted by spiderguns, they started heading round to the docking face she stood on.

“There’s nothing he can do?” Hannah asked.

“He still thinks so—a notion of which I am about to disabuse him.” Saul paused for a moment, then continued, “If everyone could listen very carefully. Since Chairman Messina has seen fit to issue orders for security personnel to take a shot at me whenever they get the chance, be aware that, before entering this dock, I programmed the spiderguns to react to any weapons fire in one way only. They will kill all of you. Since their sensors range into the infrared, the spill from your suits will be sufficient for them to target every one of you—there will be no place you can hide.”

“You’re taking a big risk by just being here,” said Hannah.

“Not really,” Saul replied. “Messina’s troops destroyed the cams in Dock One, but not here. If someone even raises a weapon, they’ll get no chance to use it.”

Hannah again surveyed the crowds now moving round towards them, then focused on those arriving through the nearest airlock. If Saul was confident he could detect an attempt to kill him from so many different sources, it meant he was functioning at a level way beyond that of most computers. She had always known such ability was possible for him, but hadn’t quite registered the fact until now.

“You’re really confident of that?”

“Confidence is not the issue, but speed of image processing, assignment of risk levels and reaction times are. The only chance of someone actually firing a weapon in my direction is if twenty-eight people were to attempt it simultaneously within the same four-second time frame.” He glanced at her. “You yourself installed the hardware in my head, you know what I can do.”

Hannah shrugged. “On an intellectual level, yes.” She nodded towards the airlock. “Here’s Messina.”

Still watching her, Saul grinned. “Did you think I needed telling?”

He turned to the airlock from which Messina had just emerged, with four large and heavily augmented bodyguards gathered round him. The Chairman wore a vacuum combat suit, doubtless state-of-the-art, but perhaps still wanted to put some flesh between himself and potential bullets. However, rather than go and lose himself in the growing crowd gathered at the dock edge, he walked directly towards Saul, and came to a halt only five metres away, his bodyguards lining up behind him.

“Your decision,” said Saul quietly.

Hannah assumed he had addressed the Chairman, but when Messina showed no reaction she realized the words had been for her ears only. She was tired and now wanted to just be somewhere safe, so she could sleep, but the implication of those two words had her chest tightening and her heartbeat thundering in her ears. Panic attack—she’d been here before. Perhaps this meant that somewhere inside she was feeling safe, sufficiently out of danger for her false friend to return. She tried to breathe calmly, to get it all under control: in through her nose and out through her mouth. Saul turned to look at her and waited. Messina was speaking, she could see. Saul probably listened to his words and discounted them. Messina’s control of his own destiny had ceased some while ago.

“My decision,” she managed, the thundering in her ears retreating but the tightness in her chest increasing. “I am going to defer my decision.”

“That you cannot do.”

“Yes, I can.” She shrugged, trying to get angry enough to drive away the feeling of losing control. “It is my decision that, until I come to some final decision, all of these people will be confined to Arcoplex One.”

Saul nodded, with a hint of a smile. “Yes, appropriate.” He then turned back to Messina, snapping, “Shut up.” Hannah heard Messina’s last words tailing off, as Saul now included her and probably everyone else in the communication. “Here’s what is going to happen.” He glanced from those already huddled at the edge of this dock to those still filing across from other docking faces. “You will all head towards the back of this pillar, and proceed through to the endcap of Arcoplex One, where you’ll enter through the airlock there. I see there are one hundred and ninety-three of you, so I leave it to yourselves to organize who enters first and who enters last, on the basis of air supply, since each cycling of the lock will take a minimum of two minutes and it will only hold four of you at a time.”

“You can’t put us in there,” protested Messina.

“Why not?” Saul glanced at the man absently. “Because of the two thousand corpses inside?” When Messina had no answer to that, Saul continued, “You will of course need to work fast to feed them all into the five digesters inside the arcoplex. You’ll need to strip them of their clothing and remove any metal augmentations that might jam the digesters. Since each digester can only process one corpse per hour, that means, with all of them operating, the whole process should take about seventeen days. By then it’s going to get rather unpleasant in there, I suspect.”

“So it amuses you to exact such a petty vengeance.” Messina’s every word was laden with contempt.

“No,” said Saul, “it would suit me better to feed you, and every delegate here, feet first into a digester while still alive. And that might yet become an option. For now, I am going to leave two of my spiderguns here to ensure you follow my instructions. Please don’t try anything foolish, since that would only result in a horrible mess any survivors would have to clear up.” He finally turned to Hannah. “Let’s go.”

As she followed him, two spiderguns overtook them and headed off at high speed. Glancing back, she found just one of their fellows keeping pace behind—the two Saul had left still amidst the crowd back there.

“Where are they going?” she asked.

“To confront Messina’s troops,” he explained. “It’s time for them to acknowledge the new regime here.”

***

When Saul delivered his terse instruction to the commander of Messina’s troops, whilst the two spiderguns he had sent ahead strode amidst them, he felt almost disappointed by their immediate submission. But, then, fifteen of the fifty or so survivors were stretcher cases, whilst another twenty were walking wounded. They quickly abandoned their weapons and began heading for a tubeway into the station, from where they would go to join Langstrom’s men in the barracks, and its hospital.

Saul felt a void within him as, with one of the spiderguns still dogging his and Hannah’s footsteps, he approached the airlock into Arcoplex One. He had not been sucked into Malden’s revolution, he had finally got himself up to Argus Station and here defeated Smith, and as a bonus he had decapitated Earth’s government. He had won, yet still that emptiness remained.

Depression? No, he checked the balance of his neurochemicals and they were fine. He checked his own blood: his blood sugar was low because he needed to eat, and various toxins were present, but this could not be the cause of his present malaise, for it was purely intellectual. He dismissed it, suppressed it, then focused his attention on the odd fact that he
could
now so easily check the state of his own body.

“There is something you didn’t tell me, isn’t there, Hannah?” he said, glancing at her.

“What do you mean?” she asked, looking slightly panic-stricken.

“Something about the organic interface?”

“I…”

“Let me put it this way: just a moment ago I wondered, because of the way I feel, if I was chemically depressed. Then I checked, which rather tells me that I am now hooking in to my autonomous nervous system.”

“The interface,” said Hannah, as they waited for the spidergun to proceed through the airlock ahead of them, “it’s not a static organism.”

As the airlock cycled, Saul glanced back at the other two spiderguns herding the captives towards the same endcap. Then, with negligent ease, he cracked the coding of transmissions passing between the captives. Messina was busy firing off orders and demands for assessments to all about him, though the replies came mainly from a couple of delegates who had risen high in the Inspectorate hierarchy before joining the Committee. The Chairman was demanding an escape—with a few inevitable losses, surely they could reach a different docking pillar and board another space plane? He was currently being informed that, even with only one spidergun watching them, such an attempt would be suicidal.

“Smith was stronger than me, to begin with, then weaker,” Saul said, mentally instructing the airlock to open ahead of them now that the spidergun was through. “My integration process with Janus is still far from complete, but even so, that should not result in me being able to connect this way to my autonomous nervous system.”

“The interface is growing.”

He nodded as he entered the airlock ahead of her, and whilst they stood inside, waiting for it to pressurize, he mulled over the implications. Only when they were back inside the arcoplex did he speak again.

“Malden’s was static,” he said.

“Yes…”

“Mine, however, is growing a neural matrix throughout my brain.” He paused. “What is the organism based upon?”

“Your own DNA,” she replied.

He turned and stared at her. “So no rejection problems.”

She nodded. “It uses your own neural stem cells and grows its matrix from them. After just one day, the connectivity between your organic brain and the hardware in your skull was about the same as Malden’s. Now it should be about twice that.”

“When does it stop growing?”

“Only when it matches up to the demand you place on the hardware. If you make further demands of it, the matrix will grow further to accommodate that.”

It struck him as more than likely that such bioware was not on general release. If it had been, then Smith would have acquired it.

“It’s a prototype, then,” he stated.

As they propelled themselves up towards the arcoplex spindle, then back along it towards the asteroid-side endcap, Saul quickly tracked down a number of key individuals inside the station. Robert Le Roque, the Technical Controller of the station, remained in a cell and seemed unhurt, and by checking records Saul discovered that he had not been subjected to inducement. Commander Langstrom was currently in the crowded barracks hospital, his knee undergoing a scan. This hospital itself was presently overrun by casualties.

“Langstrom,” Saul addressed him through the hospital intercom, “I want you to collect Le Roque from the cell block and both of you to be in Tech Central within ten minutes.”

A similar summons soon had other necessary staff heading up from their cabins to the control room. Chang and the twins he could locate nowhere, until he replayed recorded data that tracked their progress from the cell block back to Tech Central. They had ensconced themselves in an unassigned cabin, after looping the cam feed to perpetually indicate the same cabin as empty. To their joint surprise, he summoned them too.

Even as he and Hannah arrived at the far endcap, Saul registered a cycling of the airlock they had just departed, and glanced back to see the first of the captives already entering the arcoplex. As the pair exited through the second airlock, he considered an old story that might have informed Hannah’s decision about Messina and the rest: how German civilians had been forced to bury the concentration-camp dead. He felt that her first decision was just, and he would go with what she decided next just so long as it did not endanger the Argus Station or themselves. Once the airlock had closed, he instituted another protocol.

“The airlocks at this end of the cylinder are sealed now,” he explained, as they descended to the surface of the asteroid. “But perhaps I’ll place guards here too.”

Stirring up eddies of dust, their gecko boots did not function as well on asteroidal rock strewn with flakes of stone, so they proceeded slowly and with care. Lifting his gaze from his feet, Saul glanced over to his left, where a construction robot was busy scooping up the last of the corpses here. Next he viewed their destination: a steel chamber in the outer rim where the corpses were all neatly stacked, the same way round, so that one wall seemed to consist entirely of boot soles. He could have ordered the robots to hurl them out into space but, now that he had cut all supply lines from Earth, even corpses had become a potential resource.

Reaching an airlock in the base of Tech Central, which lay above the lattice walls, offered a clear view out into space. Saul caught Hannah’s shoulder and turned her so that she could look straight across the station wheel, as far as the outer ring where the docks were positioned. These were now effectively the nose of the enormous spacecraft this place had become. He then gestured off to the right of the docks, where the Moon loomed large in the blackness.