The Departure (7 page)

Janus sketched out more of that picture and filled in the colours, mostly shit-brown and battleship-grey. As well as energy stocks, water supplies across the world were low—it sometimes happened, just like here, that officials had to make a choice between supplying a thirsty population or crop irrigation, and, managing to make no choice at all, ended up with dying crops
and
a thirsty population. Janus was able to report one instance of great quantities of food rotting inside warehouses because of the lack of power to supply either the refrigeration systems or the vehicles for transporting it. Meanwhile, just a few kilometres away, a scramjet airport was being extended at great cost, just so that Committee delegates and their numerous personal secretaries and bodyguards could more rapidly zip from location to location while going about their important government business.

The overall picture was that, yes, resources were in short supply for the general population, but only because Earth’s massive government apparatus sucked up nearly 80 per cent of them. And, though Saul instinctively attributed that to the Committee’s huge parasitic bureaucracy, something still didn’t quite add up. At the same time, government organizations seemed busier than ever, killing off industries, rerouting supply lines, while huge amounts of materials and equipment were being shifted to unknown locations.

“I’d like to believe that this crisis is going to result in Committee rule collapsing,” Saul remarked.

“No,” Janus replied, “the Committee controls far too large a proportion of world resources.”

Saul nodded to himself, seeing hints of another picture that perhaps Janus had not spotted.

“A resources crash was inevitable, wasn’t it?”

“With the world population at its present levels, yes.”

“So Messina and the rest of those shits take an even tighter grasp on the reins of power, and hoard resources for their own use. After it’s over, they’ll still be holding those reins very tightly indeed.”

“Yes, that seems to be their intention.”

“How many people will die before the situation stabilizes?”

“Stability will not be achieved until the population level returns to that of the early twenty-first century.”

“So that means about twelve billion people dead. And the remaining six billion ruled by a government that would even like to control their thoughts.”

“Yes.”

Moving higher up the hill, Saul gazed back to see columns of smoke now rising, big aeros hovering about them like steel vultures, lit up by the fires below, through which shepherds were striding. The stars were starting to come out, as they always would, no matter what happened down here.

Twelve billion people were going to die, and even if the five hundred and sixty delegates comprising the Committee disappeared in a puff of smoke then and there, those billions were still inevitably destined for the lime pits. He wasn’t sure which he hated most, the oppressive government of this world or the mindless, ever-breeding swarm it governed.

He looked higher into the sky, focusing on the numerous satellites shooting across it, many of them doubtless part of the Argus Network. Then he spotted Argus Station itself, a three-quarters wheel five kilometres across, built from the nickel-iron asteroid they’d shoved back out of the asteroid belt using the fusion engine cannibalized from Mars Traveller VI, and which now formed its hub. The mirrors that supplied concentrated sunlight to its two cable-extended smelting plants gleamed bright on either side of it, like eyes. At that same moment, all the frustration and anger he’d been feeling for some time, hardened into a cold kernel inside him.

He decided then he would take it away from them.

3

ARGUS IS WATCHING

As larger and larger proportions of Earth’s surface came under Committee control, so did larger and larger sections of the Internet, till it simply gained the title of Govnet. Very little featuring upon it could appear without government approval, whilst Committee political officers even edited and censored what had appeared on it previously, in an effort to rewrite history. Only a small portion of the original Internet survived, often crashed by hackers working directly for the Inspectorate, and it was only there, on the Subnet, that people learned about the final Mars mission and the funding cuts that made further missions an impossibility. There they learned also how the one hundred and sixty colonists would not be coming back home, and how the remaining Mars Travellers were destined for the Argus smelting plants. Of the whole programme only the big fusion drive from VI remained, still attached to the Argus asteroid up there. Yet to be enclosed within the station ring, it remained fuelled and ready, the intention once being to use it to position the station itself at the Lagrange point between Earth and its moon. That was before the Committee decided to position it closer in, as a base from which to establish the Argus satellite network—its ultimate tool of oppression.

Saul was halfway up an escalator when it all kicked off. One moment angry people crowded the Mall, trying to spend their community credit on the few goods available, the next moment these same crowds became a rabid mob intent on tearing the place apart. The escalator jerked to a halt and he found himself being jostled and shoved as all those about him began trying to climb the rest of the way. Grabbing the shoulder of a man next to him, he hoisted himself up on to the sloping aisle between two escalators and ran up it, grateful for stainless steel filthy enough for his boot soles to grip. Ahead of him a woman had got the same idea but, either drunk or ill, was taking too long about it. He shouldered her aside and continued on up, jumping back down amidst the thinner crowd at the top, just as others began following him. Then, from somewhere down on the ground floor, towards the south entrance, an appalling concerted screaming arose.

The enforcers had arrived.

Their intention should have been to try and disperse this mob, but with typical idiocy they’d started using either disablers or larger pain inducers on the way in. Excellent move: now they were driving the panicking crowd into a crush deeper within the Mall. Or perhaps they were under deliberate orders from the Inspectorate Executive? Just hit any protest hard and don’t worry about casualties, since more body bags mean less mouths to feed?

More people jammed around the doors leading to the multi-storey car park and, as they slowly edged in, he heard the thumping and hissing of teargas canisters going off. Even better: now people wouldn’t be able to see where they were going so that they could quickly disperse. As some of the acrid chemical wafted between himself and the cam suspended above, he took the opportunity to lose his hat, just to further frustrate any future computer tracking of him.

When Saul finally pushed through the doors into the car park it became immediately evident that most of those coming through this way weren’t heading for their cars. Yes, there were plenty of vehicles, some of them already starting up and pulling away, but many others rested, thick with long-settled dust, on flat tyres, whilst others had obviously been systematically raided for spare parts. Some local people, it seemed, were managing to obtain blackmarket hydrogen for their vehicles and thus keep them running, however rarely, so spares were needed. And in a cam deadspot like this, thieving was bound to be rife—not that the Inspectorate really responded unless it was theft of government property.

As most of those around him fled towards the exit ramps, Saul headed towards the stairs, while unshouldering his backpack and converting it back into a holdall, then discarding his jacket. Three floors up, he stepped out into a much cleaner level of car park, with strip lights functioning and security cameras hanging from the ceiling. The Hydron SUV, with its mirrored windows, was parked over to his left—still gleaming and, as far as he could tell, untouched. As he approached, it unlocked itself, responding to the implant embedded in his forearm. He climbed into the driver’s seat, dumping the holdall beside him.

“Secure,” he said, and locks clonked shut all around him.

A traffic jam slowed his departure from the car park, until he tried the executive exit, where two Inspectorate enforcers waved him out under the loom of a shepherd. Obviously the theft of this government vehicle had not yet been reported, but then its usual driver, a bureaucrat working for the Water Authority, wasn’t in any condition to report it, since he currently lay at the bottom of a reservoir with a slab of carbocrete roped to his chest.

Saul drove slowly and carefully out on to the highway, and only when the last shepherd was out of sight did Janus direct him to a cam deadspot where he could pull over, climb into the spacious rear of the vehicle, and set to work.

After placing Coran’s head down on a plastic sheet, Saul removed the man’s fones and put them to one side. Then, opening the vehicle’s tool compartment beside him, he folded up a flat screen above a plasfactor specially designed for the theatrical profession, and set it running. He first cleaned Coran’s face of blood, then sprayed a quick-setting sealant around his neck to prevent further leakage. Next he ran a scanner from the dead man’s forehead down to his chin, then down each side of Coran’s face, then over his hair; the head’s three-dimensional image appeared on the screen. Next he clicked the screen stylus against the image of Coran’s hair to get the required dye mix, which the plasfactor provided for him as a spray. After that, he instructed it to run the template, as he converted his own white hair to Coran’s dark brown.

On the screen, Coran’s image shifted over to the left, and on the right appeared a three-dimensional image of Saul’s own head. The two slid together and overlaid to provide a visual representation of the computer making the required depth measurements. Removing a small medical kit from the toolbox, Saul next focused his attention on his arm. Calling up the menus in his eye again, he searched through and found the one accessing the implant presently under his skin, and shut it down. Next he took out the tester containing Coran’s implant, sterilized it, and his arm, then inserted the chip into a small injector to drive it under the skin of his forearm beside the others he hadn’t yet got round to having removed. Plenty of scar tissue was evident in that location, as this was the eighth identity he had stolen—or rather remembered stealing, for there had been scar tissue there before. Perhaps having no real identity of his own made this easier for him.

By the time this was all done, the plasfactor had finished its work and extruded a mask which, when glued into position, would fool most recognition systems. Once he arrived in London, all he would need to get into the Inspectorate cell block was another layer of the multi-refractive nanoskin on his palm, his artificial iris—oh, and the expensive suit neatly boxed beside him. He hadn’t bothered with trying to use Coran’s—too messy.

***

The first time he did it he thought he’d activated a holographic advertising projector, but then he knew that couldn’t be right. Who would bother advertising in an industrial complex overgrown with weeds and now only occupied, for as long as it was safe, by car breakers and those going about other nefarious deeds—like those selling cut implants? He studied the menu hovering to the right of his vision, and realized it must originate from within him.

“Janus,” he asked, “do I have a computer implant in my skull?”

“Yes. My signal is relayed to your bonefones through it,” his unseen companion replied.

“I can see a computer menu hovering before me,” Saul explained, “presumably relayed to my optic nerve from that computer implant. But how do I operate it?”

“The control is in the skin of your right temple,” Janus replied, “though the menu is projected up in the artificial retina inserted in your right eye.” Artificial retina?

He came to a halt and just stood gazing across cracked concrete, noting how a straggle of GM broad beans had punched up through it. Those were another reason people would come here, since they were a ready source of food, though some of the strange proteins they contained could cause stomach cramps. When he reached up and probed his right temple, a sequence of submenus flickered across his vision. He needed to get himself somewhere he could spend time working all this out, so decided on a nearby warehouse.

On the floor, just inside the busted door, lay four skeletons, one of them obviously a child’s, and all of them with bullet holes punched through their skulls. He just glanced at them, then went and sat down with his back to the wall, only then wondering why the sight did not shock him. He knew, just knew, that though these victims might have run foul of the underworld, a more likely explanation for their deaths lay with the government. It was now the biggest killer on the planet, and they’d probably been too much trouble for Inspectorate enforcers to bother processing. He turned the thought away and concentrated instead on the menus.

It soon became evident, once he got back to the first of them, that something was highlighted: IMPLANT ID. Managing, with practice, to select this, he checked through and discovered the menu provided the code of the new implant in his arm, along with options to reprogram it with new personal details. After a little investigation he found he could only edit the identity in the implant to a limited extent. Profession and personal history could be changed, but physical details were firmly set. The surgeon who had injected the implant into his arm had warned him that it would only get him through public scanning, which merely registered that a certain person was in a certain place at a certain time. Now it seemed more options were available to him, though he would not be able to slip through any recognition security.

Gazing down at his arm, he wondered about the reason for all the scarring. In the past, before he ended up in that box heading for the incinerator, had he taken other people’s implants in order to assume their identities? And if he had done so, he doubted that their owners would have willingly given them up. So what was he previously? What the hell was he? It now seemed quite likely that he had once worked for the organization he’d run foul of. Maybe he had served as an Inspectorate agent of some kind, perhaps working undercover to expose dissidents? Had he then decided he agreed more with the dissidents than with his masters? He needed to find out the truth.