The Departure (8 page)

Leaving the industrial estate, he headed south, always keeping under cover whenever the Inspectorate cruisers came by, avoiding large population centres where possible—though, of course, with the urban sprawls covering much of France, that wasn’t always easy—and surviving as best he could. He ate from trash, consumed GM beans, once shared a stew with other indigents, and only wondered after his stomach was full where they’d obtained the pork. He had used his cash frugally but had spent it all by the time he reached Provence. Only on his return journey up the west coast did he really begin to use Janus as he suspected was intended. Creating a community credit account did not cause the AI any difficulties, nor did obtaining a triple C, but Saul’s real problem was finding anything to buy with it. However, that situation started to change once Janus upgraded him to Societal Asset, and he could now gain access to those shops that weren’t rated at or below subsistence level.

But he needed more, so his first new identity was that of a low-ranking bureaucrat in the Department of Agriculture. He left the man’s body in an empty grain silo—certain it would never be found, because the silo would never be used.

***

The London sprawl occupied a vast portion of southeast England, extending right to the Essex coast and including the massive floating airport in the Thames estuary, where once stood Maunsell forts. Saul didn’t come in by scramjet since even Committee Transport Oversight had decided it wasn’t cost-effective to run a scramjet route from Brussels to Maunsell Airport. Aboard an executive rotobus—a giant bubblemetal transport driven by twelve aerofans and hydrogen Wankl engines—he gazed into the well-lit smog over the urban sprawl and contemplated how satellite cameras would simply be unable to penetrate it.

“Are you here for the Straven Conference?” asked the woman in the seat beside him.

She was a grey suit with cropped ginger hair and a disapproving mouth as tight as a cat’s arse. He reckoned she must be a delegate’s staffer, since some big Inspectorate bodyguards occupied the seats near the door leading into the forward luxury compartment, where doubtless one of the five hundred and sixty was having his or her every whim catered to. He’d so far managed to avoid talking to her by the usual method of focusing on his much modified and barely functional laptop and pretending to be extremely busy and important, occasionally taking imaginary calls over Coran’s fones whenever she ventured a conversational gambit. He simply did not want her, or anyone, inspecting his face too closely. The silicon mask was indistinguishable from real skin, and its join, running under his chin to up behind his ear then following his hairline, was invisible. Air pockets and electro-muscle also enabled the mask to move along with his face, and capillary pores even transferred some sweat from underlying skin. However, he felt it lent him a certain unnatural deadness of expression that someone might be able to detect—might have been trained to detect.

“No,” he replied. “I’m here on Inspectorate business.”

She nodded her head wisely and ventured no further enquiries, since probing into Inspectorate business was a good way of becoming Inspectorate business. With his laptop turned away so she couldn’t see the screen, he typed in: “What the fuck is this Straven Conference?” remembering that Coran’s boss had mentioned it too. His question was directed to the large proportion of Janus presently residing inside the machine, and the AI replied via embedded bonefone.

“They will be discussing the societal consequences of raising the price of staple food items in Britain, i.e. how they’re going to deal with the ensuing increase in riots when ZA citizens here start sliding below the subsistence level like they are in France, and also whether the plan for sprawl sectoring will work.”

“Sprawl sectoring?” he typed.

“Movement restrictions are already in place for ZA citizens. Meanwhile, certain sectors with high ZA populations are being fenced off, and any societal assets moved out. The intention is to further isolate those sectored areas with automatic pain inducers and readerguns, when available, or by bringing online parts of the satellite HF laser network to keep those areas contained.”

“Concentration camps, you mean?”

“Doubtless the Committee will eventually come up with a
final solution
.”

Janus had obviously moved on to another stage—this was the first time Saul had noticed such morbid irony coming from the AI. Of course, if large proportions of the useless zero-asset population were contained and starved, they would be less likely to be able to cause trouble. The Committee Population Logistics Support Group would much prefer those destined to die to do so quietly and without too much fuss.

With a roar, the rotobus drew in over Maunsell Airport, which bore some resemblance to an old-time aircraft carrier, though it extended ten kilometres long and three wide, stabilized all around by massive bollards punched down into the seabed. He’d chosen to use this method of travel here because no Committee bureaucrat came by tunnel any more—that was reserved for cargo or trash trains, and for dissidents in sealed crates. As the aircraft settled, the great hinged arm of a docking corridor opened out towards it like a giant grasshopper’s leg, whilst the fuel and luggage collection posts rose from the deck below to engage and automatically carry out their tasks. Off to the right, a scramjet running on conventional turbines now, with its speed down below Mach 10, lowered its wheels and came in to land like a black swan envisioned in some cubist’s nightmare. Perhaps it carried other Committee bureaucrats from further afield, heading for the Straven Conference.

No staff out there on the runways, he noticed, and on a raised aisle between the rotobus section of the airport and the scramjet strips squatted Dalek readerguns ready to ensure that only essential personnel could venture out. The guns, which constantly checked ID implants against an internal database of approved codes, were deadly accurate up to a thousand metres. The three bullets, which each would fire at one go, were low-penetration wadcutters less likely to end up in any one else near the intended target—though anyone nearby would probably end up covered in bits of the intended target. During the clear-up after another riot, in another place, he’d witnessed what had happened after some Inspectorate exec in charge decided to offline the identification routine. On that occasion they didn’t bother to sort the bits into bags, but used dozers to push the heaps of remains up ramps into tipper trucks, then hosed the smaller gobbets down the drains.

“I wish you luck with your conference,” he told the prim bitch beside him, as he slid his laptop into its slim compartment inside his briefcase.

“It’s not about luck,” she told him. “It’s about the correct application of resources and knowledge-based societal planning.”

What did she have on the way over? Oh, yeah, the champagne dinner, of which she’d eaten only about half before peremptorily summoning the stewardess to take the remains away. He remembered, over by another scramjet port, once eating flight-meal leftovers some enterprising official was selling for a hundred Euros, cash, per half-kilo.

“Of course,” he said, smiling. “You are absolutely right.”

He actually wanted to snap her neck, but comforted himself with the thought of the scumbags he’d already rubbed out, and the mayhem he intended to cause, starting in a few hours from now. Maybe she would become a victim of that. He certainly hoped so.

The softly carpeted exit corridors led to security procedures not much different to those of Gene Bank, since the major security hurdle he’d penetrated had been to get on to the rotobus in the first place. He avoided baggage collection and headed straight out to the large arrivals lounge. This place swarmed with people, and he realized he was probably the only one here who did not actually work for the Committee. Of course, the restriction imposed on public travel—it quickly becoming the privilege of the government bureaucrats only—had started way back with numerous bogus crises used to divert the public eye from what was really fucking over the planet: too many people. That was a problem no democratic government could attain office by offering to solve, and one that would only be cured either by Mother Nature applying her tender mercies, or by some totalitarian regime applying Nazi-like final solutions. It seemed that, here and now, Earth had both.

He strode right across the lounge to the exit doors, beyond which taxis were drawing up, loading up with passengers and pulling away. Escalators also led up to aerocar and aerocab platforms but though, as Avram Coran, he rated that kind of transport, he chose ground taxi instead. Even with his status rated high, he wanted his profile to remain low, and those arriving at the Inspectorate headquarters here by aerocar would become the subject of much scrutiny. Stepping through the doors, he headed over to the nearest vehicle—an old hybrid Mercedes with a combined one-litre multi-fuel and electric engine, which by its smell had been running on synthetic diesel.

As he climbed into the back, the driver didn’t bother looking round. “Conference?” he asked in a bored voice.

“No, Inspectorate headquarters. Cell Complex A.”

At this the driver did turn to peer at him through the security screen. He guessed that, in another age in Germany, this would have been like finding one of the Gestapo had just got into your cab. Inspectorate officials enjoyed their power and weren’t averse to using it.

“Certainly, sir,” the driver replied, very politely, and eased out into the traffic, the Mercedes running on electric until out in the open, then switching over, with only a slight change of tone, to diesel.

The exit road ran down the side of the airport, then up on to a bridge crossing half a kilometre of oily-looking estuary, then over mudflats traversed by numerous pipes from a nearby desalination plant, which stood silent and unlit. Where dirty-looking salt from the defunct plant had been mounded had since become a dumping ground for excess sprawl waste, and upon this roosted hordes of filthy seagulls, pigeons and raggedy starlings. Shacks were visible down below, and half-seen figures moving about in the glow of campfires. Pickings were probably extremely lean now, since even the rankest of food rarely made it as far as a waste tip.

At a roundabout the cab took the second exit, though Saul noted other cabs heading in the opposite direction, and within minutes the road passed through a gap in a long fence still in the process of being erected, and into a GUL section of the sprawl where an attempt had been made at Green Urban Living.

Compressed-fibre tenement blocks rose on either side, interspersed with independent waste incinerators or digesters running tenement-block generators and hot-water systems. It was easy enough to spot the ones still functioning by noting which blocks still had lights shining from their windows. Here and there long garden allotments speared off like side streets, every scrap of exposed soil crammed with vegetables, chicken coops and occasional pigsties. Around these strips rose fences, sometimes repaired with whatever had become available—fibre building board, old doors, parts of the bodywork of cars—though the more well-to-do tenements, perhaps with government employees still in residence, used ceramic-link fencing topped with razorwire. Every allotment was occupied—the participants from each tenement rotating the responsibility of guarding such a valuable food source.

Though certainly not self-sufficient, Saul knew that the system here had worked well enough when the tenements were first built, but as the population continued to rise and what were once single-family apartments absorbed a load of two or three families each, the cracks soon developed. Many of these areas were now considered no-go for the Inspectorate, and even the block political officers were powerless in districts where someone could be killed just for a bag of onions.

After passing the last tenement, the cab drove out again through a gated fence, similar to the one they’d driven in by, though this time it was complete. Readerguns were positioned on either side, and probably unnecessary Inspectorate guards sat in a lit-up guard booth. The gun barrels immediately tracked the vehicle’s progress, a laser doubtless scanning the bar code on the car’s screen, whilst a radio pulse also elicited responses from both his own and the driver’s ID implants. Saul noted how buildings had been demolished to make way for the fence, and to clear a space about twenty metres wide on either side of it. To the left, as the cab entered a more salubrious neighbourhood, he noted a minibus tipped over on its side, its bodywork peppered with holes and blackened by fire. It looked to him like those who had been trying to escape from the sectored area behind might still be inside. Just beyond this point, the driver breathed a sigh of relief.

“Not your usual route?” Saul suggested.

“I normally take the M25C, through the Chelmsford arcoplex, sir,” he explained. “But this is the quickest route to IHQ—though I won’t be coming back this way.”

“Why not?”

“Readerguns ain’t reliable.”

“Why did you choose this route this time, then?” he asked.

The driver remained silent for a moment, perhaps remembering who his passenger worked for and frightened lest his comments might be taken as some sort of criticism of the authorities Saul represented.

“No readerguns here last time.” He hunched his shoulders, clearly not wanting to say any more, but finally impelled to continue, “Weren’t no fence neither.”

So sectoring was well and truly under way, and no one wanted to be on the wrong side of the fence when all the gaps were finally sealed.

***

Saul had studied Argus Station for a year before information about the place became increasingly difficult to obtain. With Janus’s help, during that year, he managed to gain access to hidden files and secret information. He learnt that the station’s population then stood at just over a thousand, and it was a damned sight closer to self-sufficiency than any GUL developments or the green villages of the early twenty-first century. However, right from the start that self-sufficiency had been difficult to assess, what with the frequent changes in staff, space planes running up supplies or bringing down to Earth the loads of bubblemetal rendered out of the station’s asteroid, along with numerous other products that could only be manufactured in zero gravity. It wasn’t a closed system, therefore, and this applied particularly to its nascent ecology.