He sat in the back with Hannah pressed up against him, her head on his shoulder and the smell of her hair in his nostrils. He connected up again, becoming more of himself once more, feeling a brief bitter ache as he recognized that to be more human he needed to be actually less complete, the human him just being a part of the whole. His inner vision of himself seemed to be one of interfaces: some central entity sitting neither in cyberspace nor in that grey fatty tissue inside his skull, its senses operating through the fleshy gene transporter within this taxi, within cyberspace and the silicon, wires, optics and electromagnetic signals that were its medium, touching the physical world through those surrounding cams and sensors he chose. Did he know what love was before Smith sent him to the incinerator? Was human love possible for him now that it seemed he was no longer really human?
Humming contentedly to itself, the taxi pulled out on to a two-lane highway, away from the park, then joined a six-lane highway where massive trucks loomed about them like mobile buildings. Saul studied these, wondering just what the hell they were carrying; again aware that such massive movement could not be accounted for by standard operations, as of a year ago. Then, with a feeling of unease, he observed that some of these vehicles were troop transporters, and when the taxi swerved into another lane to let two Inspectorate cruisers race by, he sat upright. Surely this could be a reaction to Malden’s revolution, because Minsk would be considered a prime target?
‘What is it?’ Hannah asked, noticing his reaction.
‘Lot of security activity.’
Just a brief modem connection revealed how local network security had escalated. Something had got them really bothered here, some major penetration, yet it wasn’t him. However, this made it increasingly likely that his own interference in the mainframe would be quickly detected. His head started to throb as he tracked diagnostic traffic and and tracer programs.
‘We’ve got trouble,’ he added.
The taxi turned off on to another two-laner utterly devoid of traffic. They sat apart, now gazing out of the windows at their surroundings, taking in sprawling factories with steam towers belching white clouds, cranes etched against the sky, stationary since all construction here had ceased, then the bloated hemisphere of a fusion- reactor building, kilometres of above-ground pipes, with those glassy tower blocks nailing it all to the ground. Notable by its absence was any sign of life that wasn’t human. Neither trees nor grass were visible, and the only green on view glinted in traffic lights or showed on faded signs in Cyrillic declaring the environmental credentials of this place. Saul gritted his teeth, now aware that a search engine had begun riffling through identity files. Almost certainly it would find the two sketchy ones he had put there and immediately delete them.
Then would come a location trace . . .
‘Get ready to run,’ he warned, lights again beginning to jag across his vision. He should be able to deal with nearby cams and readerguns, and hopefully that would be enough.
Soon the taxi turned off again into a single lane that curved round to one side and across a bridge over one of the big highways, then down again. Thunder from above and a dark shadow drawing across, as another space plane hurtled into the sky. Even so high up, the thing seemed massive, and he remembered that standard transporter planes like that one overhead spanned six hundred metres from nose to rocket engines, and were capable of hauling two hundred tonnes of passengers and cargo up into orbit. Amazing that humans could build such a massive, complex and wonderful piece of technology, yet could not apply the same degree of logic and intelligence to building their societies or preventing their eventual decline. He watched the thing continue to rise, as the taxi drew up right beside the doors leading into the long, low Embarkation building. There was now a hollow feeling inside him, a blend of both awe and regret.
Then, suddenly, a massive disruption in the Minsk network, whilst simultaneously something exploded within the back end of the space plane, extinguishing that punctuated glare of its motors and throwing out chunks of dark metal trailing spears of smoke. It dropped out of the sky with all the aerodynamics of a falling chimney pot.
‘Mother of God!’ Hannah exclaimed.
He groped for information throughout cyberspace, hit disruption wherever he looked, then oddly found easy access to cameras positioned on high buildings, giving him multiple views of the disaster. He watched the plane trying to stay level but, with one of its rear wings tearing away, its nose came up as it descended. Another view gave him four seconds of its underside hurtling in, silhouetted against fire, until its rear end struck the building on which the cam was positioned. Back to another view of that same edifice, the plane carving through it, its position in the sky and angle of descent hardly changed by the impact, the wreckage of the top half of the building now strewn across factory complexes below. Then the plane went in like a wounded black swan descending on to a lake, churning up and spraying the lower buildings like water. As the nose slammed down, it disintegrated, becoming a train-shaped firestorm within which could be seen the burning black bones of its structure. It cut a swathe of devastation ten kilometres long.
Only when the final debris rained down did Saul consider why it had been so easy for him to access these views of this disaster. Someone had got there before him, to position the cams.
‘Let’s move,’ he said, shoving his elbow against the door of the taxi.
It wasn’t opening, which meant that from somewhere an instruction had been sent to lock it down. He turned and looked behind him, spotted an armoured troop carrier motoring into sight.
Then something out there. Some pattern forming in surrounding and seriously disrupted cyberspace. Something tentacular expanded, a shadow cast by someone’s manipulation of the network, yet Saul immediately recognized that this wasn’t the comlife that had been hunting him. Hannah became like a distant creature trapped in the taxi, alongside that set of mobile fleshy sensors that seemed to be a minor part of himself – yet within which resided the essential him. It
This new comlife, he realized, was taking control of Inspectorate aeros that were even now ascending into the sky to head for the crash site. They began firing upon each other.
Missile streaks cut above the devastation caused by the space plane, and cartridge cases rained down from machine guns firing continuously. Two of the aeros just dropped like bricks, trailing smoke, and slammed into the ground, one exploding and the other just turning into a fattened mess of wreckage. Another aero blew a fan and began spinning around about its other main fan, until that too blew and tore its guts out. It also went down.
Saul saw it then: a single craft departing the battle, between its fellows, neither firing nor being fired upon. It flew past the face of a tall building built in the shape of a cowl – one he recognized as he withdrew from cam systems and used only his eyes. The building lay just half a kilometre away from them, and he watched the aero fly into view, settle into a hover and revolve towards them. He knew in an instant that they weren’t the target – those troops back there were – but, trapped inside this taxi so close to them, he and Hannah would die.
