However, most of the crowd were zero-asset-status citizens who were hungry, thirsty, pissed off about a power shutdown that showed no sign of ending, and doubly pissed off because lights shone inside the compound at night, when the rest of the town was dark. And to heap on a further unacceptable indignity, only that morning two articulated lorries full of provisions, with armed enforcer escorts, had driven into the compound. Committee bureaucrats never went hungry or thirsty.
When the Inspectorate then turned up and started making arrests, things soon turned nasty.
‘You got that from the Subnet?’ Saul asked, rubbing his hand up and down his arm as he turned to watch scattered groups of citizens trudging up the same road. These people weren’t feeing what had happened back in the Luberon sprawl, merely carrying their meagre belongings and getting away in search of something better. It had soon become apparent to him that there wasn’t anything better, unless you were a government employee.
‘Yes, just before the Inspectorate hackers crashed it again.’
He snatched his hand away from his arm. The limb was undamaged though, when they turned the truck-mounted pain inducer on the crowd, it had seemed to work like an invisible flame thrower. He’d only caught part of it before managing to throw himself into an alleyway, yet it felt like his arm had been burnt down to the bone. He meanwhile caught a glimpse of a shepherd snatching up one of those who had been addressing the crowd, from among those screaming in agony, writhing on the ground, shitting and puking. It didn’t carry him away either, just brought him up to its underside and shredded him, dropping the bits. The sight dragged unbearable memories of Saul’s interrogation to the forefront of his mind and he ran away, as much to escape from them as from the inducer and that murderous robot. He managed to get past the enforcers erecting barricades, but a machine gun chattered, bullets thumping into the carbocrete right behind him, so he was forced to use the cover of a line of rusting cars to get safely away.
‘Nothing about what happened back there?’
‘The Subnet is still down.’
‘What have you been able to get from Govnet? Usual shit about them scraping out the last of the shale, and the Arctic oil wells being down to the dregs?’
He moved on, sipping from his water bottle and ignoring the shrivelled apple still in his bag. He wasn’t hungry any more – seemed to have moved beyond that state.
‘I have further penetrated secure communications and am building a general picture of the situation. There is too little energy from the fusion-power stations, not enough hydrogen being cracked to take up the slack, and the power-station building project has stalled.’
‘Why?’
‘Insufficient funding.’
‘Yet there’s enough funding for maintaining the Inspectorate and projects like the Argus Network?’ He paused for just a second. ‘Don’t bother answering that – just tell me more about this general picture you’re building.’
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.