The Departure

couple of AH ambulances turned round on to the lane the dozers had just vacated, providing a gap through which further bulldozers could pull out on to the other side of the highway. The big machines weren’t making a path towards where Inspectorate HQ had recently stood, but almost certainly scribing a circle with that place as the centre point.

Hannah nodded to herself as the two ambulances now returned along the highway, and other ambulances began breaking away from the main cluster to follow them.

‘They’re sectoring it,’ she said.

‘I imagine they’ll bring in readerguns, in a few hours,’ he said, then pointed to where a number of large aeros had settled in one of the few clearings amidst the rubble. ‘We go there.’

A double crash barrier lay bent down a slope strewn with burnt rubbish and seared grass, a Dascan Hydrobus lying on its side down at the bottom. The windows were all blackened, yet as far as Hannah could see the vehicle had taken very little damage from its impact with the barrier. Then she saw why: the posts securing the barrier had rusted through and it had possessed almost no stopping power at all. In passing, she saw the red palm of a single hand welded against one window of the bus, but only noted it with a kind of numbness. Enough horror surrounded them anyway, like that woman crouching in a doorway, the only part standing of an apartment block, with her face a dripping mess and her plastic sunglasses melted into her eyes.

‘You should have brought the rifle,’ Hannah said, her voice hoarse to breaking point.

Inspectorate enforcers patrolled within the area where the four aeros had landed, while a cylinderbot circled it, crawling round on rubber treads to deposit coils of razorwire behind it like spider silk. If they had waited any longer, they would not have been able to just walk straight in here the way they did. As they crossed in front of the bot, Saul paused for a moment then turned and gazed over to the Inspectorate officer who appeared to be in charge.

‘Walk just ahead of me,’ he told her. ‘You’re my prisoner.’

‘Yeah, I figured that.’ A panic attack nibbled at her, then dissipated because everything here was just too real for its falsity.

‘Citizen Avram Coran, Inspectorate Executive, command designation HQ707,’ he explained to the exec. ‘I’m commandeering one of your aeros.’

How the hell could he get away with this? But even as she asked herself the question, Hannah knew the answer. Now the AI had fully loaded to and begun integrating with his mind, he possessed all its abilities within his skull. He was Saul and Janus all in one, and with every passing moment the synergy between those two components would keep expanding his abilities. But that wasn’t all. She hadn’t yet told him about the organic interface she had used, just how different it was from the one inside Malden’s skull. Whilst Malden’s had been made of organic tissue, it remained inert, merely integrating with his brain like a plug-in electrical component. The interface in Saul’s skull, however, was an active organism: even now it would be growing neurons throughout his skull and making yet further connections. Quite possibly it would kill him, quite possibly it would turn him into something never witnessed before, but whether that would result in a demigod or a monster, she didn’t know.

The two enforcers accompanying the officer already had their machine pistols trained on Saul. All three were staring at him with wary vigilance, and not a little degree of fear. Was it just his red eyes and the stitching in his skull that caused this reaction? Or did something of what was gestating inside him show through to them? Hannah could certainly see it, but then perhaps she was reading more than was actually visible.

The officer meanwhile dropped his hand to the portable scanner at his belt.

‘So it seems you haven’t studied your atomic-incident protocols lately,’ Saul said, inserting what seemed just the right amount of contempt into his voice.

‘Sir?’ the officer enquired.

‘Electromagnetic pulse from the blast.’ Saul pointed at his forearm, where his varied collection of ID implants resided. ‘Do you really think my ID implant is working right now? It’ll take at least an hour for its recovery program to reinstate it.’

‘You’ll understand that I cannot just hand over an aero without checking first, citizen,’ the man replied.

‘You’ve received no orders about me, Commander Taiken?’

Hannah stared at Saul, whose mind must now be in Govnet, absorbing data, perhaps changing data. Taiken straightened up, now he had been offered some small proof that Saul was of the Inspectorate. For how else would Saul know his name?

Saul continued, ‘I managed to make contact from my car, after the blast tipped it over.’ He gestured towards Hannah. ‘It’s important I get her away from here fast, but you don’t need to know any more than that.’

Taiken raised a hand to the fone in his ear, as doubtless his new orders came through. Then, as was only to be expected, he unhooked a palmtop from his belt and did some checking. He directed its integral cam at Saul for a moment, then pointed it at Hannah. After a moment, he snapped the palmtop closed, nodded to himself, then pointed across to the nearest aero.

‘You can take this one.’ He turned to the two enforcers. ‘Go check the gas loading, and tell Latham to speed it up with that fence.’

Hannah was dumbfounded. That was fast – faster than she could have believed possible. Saul’s penetration of the local computer network had to be all but total. He must have been providing data direct to the man’s palmtop even as its recognition programs tried to read their faces. He must have drafted orders, and built a whole fiction to back up their presence here.

‘Gas?’ Saul enquired as the officer turned back to him.

‘They’re writing it all off,’ he replied.

Hannah understood. There would be no survivors.

‘I’ll get you a pilot and put together a squad for you,’ Taiken added.

‘That won’t be necessary,’ Saul replied, and Taiken glanced at him in surprise. ‘I can fly the machine myself and I need to lock down on security.’