The Departure (45 page)

“It is essential that you remain within the arcoplex,” declared Smith. “You will be perfectly safe there and, at present, facilities external to the arcoplex are unable to guarantee your full protection.”

The man peering from the screen frowned, and Hannah felt sure she recognized him from somewhere but could not place him just then. Meanwhile, the view over his right shoulder was distracting, for it showed a window through which the interior of Arcoplex One could be seen, which resembled a city distorted through a fish-eye lens.

“Why have you shut down rotation?” the man enquired. “Zero gravity is making a lot of people in here feel sick.”

“It is a safety protocol, Delegate Shanklin, which negates the possibility of catastrophic failure of the cylinder motors, should they suffer munitions damage.”

Shanklin was the Committee delegate for East India, and therefore controlled the Asian voting bloc, but other than that, Hannah knew little about him.

“Yet you didn’t shut it down when either Malden or Saul penetrated the station?”

“The threat they presented to the structure of the Argus Station was negligible. Should those currently approaching us aboard the space plane be prepared to use force on Messina’s behalf, they will be equipped to the highest level of Committee military requirements.”

Shanklin stared at him for a long moment. “I’m hoping, Smith, that we haven’t all made a big mistake with you.”

“Considering that you have,” Smith replied, “the time in which you might have corrected that mistake has already expired.” Then he shut off the transmission.

“Your backers?” Hannah risked asking him.

“Committee delegates tend to get overly attracted to power and its trappings,” he replied distractedly.

“How many are here?”

Without looking round he replied, “Fifty delegates in all, along with their staff and families. Over two thousand people.” Coming from him it was a surprisingly direct response.

“So they got you here, didn’t they?” ventured Hannah. “And now they’re just a millstone round your neck.”

He turned to give her an unreadable look. “They certainly would have been useful in re-establishing the rule of the people back on Earth, but a further one hundred and seventy delegates have made a provisional commitment to back me for the chairmanship.”

To Smith, it seemed, “the people,” “the state” and “the Committee” were all the same thing, but only if it meant he himself got to give the orders.

“Would have been?” she asked.

He shrugged. “Alessandro Messina’s tyrannical arrogance is such that he would likely not let it come to a vote.”

Hannah glanced out through the windows allowing a view across the wheel of the space station. From where she was seated, she could just about see the space plane dropping down behind the station’s rim. Next she transferred her gaze back to the screens, one of which now showed the space plane moving in to dock, whilst another displayed the interior of that same dock.

“His failure is inevitable,” Smith added, studying the screens.

The docking pillar, one of five sticking out from the rim, was pentagonal in section, each external face of it wide enough to encompass the largest type of space plane. As the plane settled against it, she could just about discern the docking clamps engaging underneath it. A belly lock in the plane could be opened to the inside of the docking pillar for loading and unloading cargo, whilst a separate passenger airlock would be engaged via an extending tube. She focused on the interior of the dock, wondering if Smith’s reliance on such views showed how less able he was than Saul, who had no need for such extra aids.

The interior view showed four of Langstrom’s troops making their way alongside the cargo train that serviced the dock, and then descending an internal face of the pillar itself. Ahead of them emerged one end of the passenger embarkation tube, a cylinder three metres high and two wide. As the soldiers approached, the two doors in its side opened to show three figures clad in VC suits, and upside-down. They instantly pushed themselves out, flipping over to come down upright on the floor, legs bending to absorb the shock so that their boots did not disengage. They then moved back-to-back, checking their surroundings.

To one side of the passenger tube, a pair of long double doors hinged up from the floor, opening directly into the belly of the plane. Out flew an object a couple of metres across, looking not unlike a balled-up mass of water pipes.

Smith hissed with anger, and immediately readerguns opened fire, sending the three men tumbling away, but seemingly uninjured. The balled-up thing opened, into a chaotic collection of robotic arms terminating in twin-barrelled guns which at once began firing, so it seemed rather like a flaming tumbleweed. Munitions debris spread out in a cloud as readerguns exploded all around the dock. Then, even as the onslaught diminished, the three figures in vacuum combat suits righted themselves and started firing too—at the four personnel who had come to greet them. Hannah found herself flinching as she watched bullets tearing into their bodies, jerking them about helplessly, spewing chunks of flesh and bone out in every direction.

“Low-impact ammunition in the readerguns,” observed Hannah. “You should have thought of that.”

Smith glared round at her and, by the look on his face, she half expected him to come over and hit her.

“They were dispensable,” he replied coldly.

Did he mean the human troops who had just died or the readerguns themselves?

In the dock itself, more troops in VC gear piled out of the airlock, as the big robot settled quietly to the floor. One squad of about twenty troops moved swiftly to the base of the dock and through, down beside the train there, whilst others began removing equipment from the space plane’s hold. Smith watched this activity for some minutes before speaking again.

“I am assuming that you were watching that, Langstrom?” he demanded.

Down in the righthand corner of the screen a frame opened up to show Langstrom. “I saw—and we’re ready. We’ve got ten-bores and rocket-launchers deployed,” the commander grimaced, “which we’ll need seeing as they’ve got a spidergun with them.” He glanced at something off-screen. “The first of them are not coming straight in but, as you predicted, they’re heading for the upper spindle anchor. Maybe they’ll pass through Arcoplex One to get down here.”

“Most unlikely,” Smith replied. “Though an arcoplex offers them cover, traversing it will be a slow process, for they would consider it necessary to use urban-warfare techniques. There are also few exits, all of which could provide ambush points.”

“They’ll blow it?” Langstrom suggested.

“This is not likely either, since Chairman Messina will want as little damage done to the station as possible.” Smith raised a hand to the side of his head, an unconscious gesture as new information became available to him. The screen previously showing Delegate Shanklin now revealed the first squad of invading troops deployed in and about the massive machinery at the far end of Arcoplex One. Some were gathered about an airlock, which opened even as she watched. One of them made some adjustments to a package, then tossed it inside before the outer airlock door closed again.

“They are physically bypassing the airlock’s electronics,” explained Smith. “In those circumstances there is little I can do.”

Now a fresh view: the interior of the arcoplex cylinder. It resembled a long street of buildings tilting inwards, with further buildings projecting from the sides and down from overhead, some of which were actually connected to the cylinder spindle. Sunlight flooded from the dispersal units positioned at intervals along the spindle jacket, bathing everything in a bright, almost Mediterranean light. Enough illumination, therefore, to see a troop of enforcers heading towards the airlock situated at the street’s end, while civilians were heading in the opposite direction. Men, women and children were down on the street itself using gecko boots, while others higher up were propelling themselves from surface to available surface, or aboard a couple of aeros. Most of those fleeing the scene carried bundles and bags just like any refugee throughout history.

Then the airlock opened.

Hannah could not understand what the attackers hoped to achieve here if they were not using the arcoplex as a route to the station core. The inner door of the airlock just stood wide open now, and nothing much seemed to be happening there at first. But next some sort of detonation within the airlock blew out a cloud of vapour like smoke from the muzzle of a cannon. It dispersed as rapidly as milk in water and, almost at once, people started writhing in mid-air. Then one of the aeros slammed into the side of a building, and stuck there, its rear fan spitting out debris. Several enforcers rose from the floor, tearing at their clothing, while the others just began contorting where they were. Within just a few seconds all of them were motionless but for those on trajectories they’d set themselves upon as they died.

“Quick,” observed Langstrom.

Smith replied, “In my opinion, they have just made use of the Novichok agent the Department of Warfare was developing. It was efficiency-tested during the Chicago riots and found to be very effective.”

“Take some clearing up.”

“That nerve agent has an active life of only about an hour,” replied Smith dismissively, “so in itself should not be a problem for us. Though effecting sanitary measures to clear up the human detritus might not be so pleasant.” He pondered this for a moment. “I will follow Saul’s lead and reprogram construction robots to accomplish the chore. They can move a proportion of the deceased to cold sections of the station, to prevent any immediate overload of the digesters.”

This exchange seemed so blandly conversational that Hannah felt a creeping horror. The two men were talking about the death of two thousand fellow citizens, yet Smith’s biggest concern seemed to be organizing the funeral arrangements.

***

Somewhere down in that part of his mind where decisions were made even before coherent thoughts could express them, some dreg of pure reason alerted Saul to the impending agony, utterly certain, the moment the optic plugged into his skull registered his rise to full consciousness. In a state between unconsciousness and waking, Saul rejected wakefulness and yet, deep amid a morass of dreams and undesignated data, he managed to apply logic and found the ability to think. He discerned reality below that filter that led into the conscious world, and without any sense of self he managed to process it. His organic brain demanded that he return to that world above the surface, but what did it amount to? Just the fleshly vessel for part of his mind, a part that he’d so far found necessary only because within it lay his reason for physical existence. He remained detached from the now and, on one level, wondered how long it would take him to decide not to bother continuing with such an existence at all.

“It’s monitoring him,” said a vaguely familiar female voice.

“Just unplug it?” suggested a male voice. “Do something like you did with the cams?”

“Dangerous.”

“Smith’s busy out there.”

The words murmured out of some abyss, and seemed almost irrelevant to him. All but the last four words made no real sense to him, but with those Saul felt a need to agree. For, in the current halfway house of his mind, his awareness of fighting out in the station seemed like a raw point inside his own skull. But to agree with the words he needed dangerous consciousness, and that was not an option.

“This is not a great idea,” came a second female voice, very like the first.

Saul’s semi-awareness strayed far enough to capture numerous views scattered throughout the Argus Station, and there he witnessed the battle in progress. Troops clad in vacuum combat suits had penetrated the station rim by the docks, and were quickly entrenching themselves there. He watched a great multi-limbed robot propelling itself about across one lattice wall, guns blazing from the end of each limb. The word “spidergun” arose at once out of his inner chaos.

Above the endcap of Arcoplex One, the underside of the station rim was criss-crossed with gunfire, missile streaks and explosions. Saul saw shattered bodies go tumbling through the dark amid fragments of metal, plastic, flesh, bone and globules of blood. His awareness straying further, he next saw a great fleet of space planes entering an orbital vector leading them towards the station.

“What are you doing?” asked the male voice nearby.

“He’s in REM, and the unit’s set to respond to his EEG. I just copied that.” A pause. “Have you disconnected the restraint monitors yet, Angela?”

“They’re now on manual release.”

“Okay, here goes.”

Saul felt a tugging sensation at his temple, which seemed to shift his entire perception. He did not consciously understand what had happened, but his knowledge of how the human brain functions made him aware that the state of consciousness was thoroughly overrated. He accepted its resurgence anyway, the chaotic fragmentation of mind slamming together, with an almost physical sensation, into a strong coherent whole. The spectre of agony assailed him, because his animal mind knew that his body must be a roasted ruin, but his whole mind denied it—did not allow it to affect his essential self. He opened his eyes, and again saw with utter clarity, absorbing hundreds of cam views and data flows, while processing them with a speed even he himself found frightening.

Surely this was some fragment of a dream remaining with him—how could he have integrated so much information so fast? The answer came at once, via a factual assessment of processing speeds alongside active and inactive memory capacity. But he should not be like this because, after suffering a real-time one hundred and forty-three minutes of agony, which subjectively seemed like a thousand years, his mind should have become a total wreck. Therefore something else must be happening inside his head, something beyond the melding of his mind with that of Janus. There must be something else, he realized, that Hannah hadn’t told him. He would find out later. Other concerns came first.

On the other side of the cell, Angela Saberhagen squatted beside an open access panel, wires running from her palmtop, resting on the floor nearby, into the electronics revealed. Sweat beading his brow, Chang stood some way back, by the door, and looked ready to run. Brigitta stood right beside Saul himself. She had unplugged the optic from his temple and plugged it instead into a small optical drive, which she now released to hang by that optic cable.