‘I’ve shut down all their links to Govnet here,’ Saul rasped, ‘but it won’t take them long to open up some other channel, once they find they’re offline. Then he could identify us.’
Already he had the aero’s engines starting up, its fans whirling up to speed. It had to be him, since the cockpit stood empty.
‘So can others out there,’ she remarked.
‘Yes, I know.’
Just that? Did he mean he had already set something in motion to deal with the problem?
He moved past her towards the cockpit, and she followed him inside. As he strapped himself in, he gestured to the seat beside him. She plumped herself down and began to fumble with the straps.
‘You have reservations,’ he suggested, his voice tight and angry.
‘You might be just like Malden: possibly worse than what you’re fighting.’
Saul winced, wiped his eyes and studied the watery blood smeared on his hand. ‘You heard what they’re intending here?’
‘They’re going to gas the survivors.’
‘Whether I’m worse than them or not is irrelevant,’ he snapped. ‘This is about survival now, not morality.’
He took the override off the controls before him, and grabbed hold of them, then lifted the aero up into the sky.
Lights still jagged across his vision, but the pain in his skull was beginning to disperse. Apparently, each time he pushed himself too far mentally, as he had back in the aero camp, either the software or the hardware crashed in his mind.
Things had been fine while he was approaching the camp, reinstating his internal radio modem at last and cautiously exploring his near surroundings in cyberspace. Govnet had lain around him like an infinite city constructed of edifices of information, webbed with highways and lanes, paths, rivers and canals of information all in transit. With a thought he had highlighted the networks relevant to the Inspectorate, picked out the aero section, and absorbed as much data as possible related to the imminent gassing of survivors and the squadron of aeros being used.
Therefore, once in the camp he had jumped inside the nearest aero’s computer in an instant, made a coded link direct to the modem in his head and simultaneously disconnected the craft from Govnet. He had then disconnected all local hardware from Govnet too, by scrambling connection software, isolating the aero camp, and incidentally cutting himself off from that distant dark thing he had first sensed in Bronstein’s surgery. But by that time his pulse was thudding inside his head and the pain growing constantly.
He had managed to hold on just long enough to get himself inside the aero, and to eliminate Taiken, but then had come the crash. Yet, each time he recovered from one of these painful episodes, like now, it seemed his abilities were expanded. Saul now considered dumping the aero and going into hiding until whatever was going on inside his head was completed and he had found his new limits. But he soon dismissed that idea, for the longer he waited, the greater the likelihood that the Inspectorate would move to tighten up computer security because, certainly, someone or something out there had got to know about him. He needed to now move fast and with utter ruthlessness to achieve his goal.
By confining his mental compass to the aero and its systems, he could see everything in them with a clarity that had been missing before. This vehicle was a fast transport with jet assist, internal and external readerguns, external missile-launchers and inducers, state-of-the-art armour and autodefences. And, having seized control through the command override, it had become his absolutely.
Now airborne, he considered the evidence he’d left behind. Time to remove it. All the aeros possessed similar command overrides, so could be flown and their weapons controlled remotely – this to prevent them being hijacked.
Useful that, and precisely the route he now followed to hijack them.
The identities of the two enforcers who had actually seen Hannah and himself, he transmitted to the recognition systems of the aeros still on the ground, and fixed a delay of about two minutes. After that brief time, the other crafts’ readerguns would identify the two of them as dissidents, and that would be the end of them. He doubted the Inspectorate would be able to – or even be bothered to – work out what had happened, or at least not until his and Hannah’s journey was over. He neglected to mention this to her, however. Next he finally severed his connection to the aero camp.
That was it. Done.
9
Blame the Robots
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, massive processing power and memory outpaced other technologies. It took many years before the software was invented to utilize it efficiently, and before sufficiently intelligent systems could be designed. When those were finally invented, this advance created its own mini-revolutions in personal entertainment and access to information; unfortunately it also created a mini-revolution in the ability of governments, already increasingly totalitarian as political elites gathered more and more power to themselves, to monitor their citizens and become even more totalitarian. Following the socialist dream into the territory of nightmare, those elites now took increasing control of society. Next to catch up was robotics, displacing the weak human components utilized in so many walks of life, and in the end those not included in the massive bureaucracies that controlled Earth became just client citizens – mostly on the dole, mostly zero-asset. Was the technology itself to blame: should people have Luddite-fashion smashed it? No, technology is merely a tool and any blame always rests squarely on the one wielding that tool.
Saul chose a less-travelled route: up over the North Sea, to land for refuelling at Trondheim, then crossing the Scandia province of old Norway and Sweden, down across the Baltic to cross erstwhile Lithuania, finally to Minsk. Refuelling was no problem. It merely required a minor penetration of the airport computers, since unscheduled Inspectorate aero fights weren’t uncommon. Just a minor headache there, and a few warning flashes across his vision. This time, as with his previous minor penetrations of Govnet, no sign of that other presence on the net. He calculated the degree of noise he could create before attracting its attention, now knowing that the moment he did anything related to Coran or Hannah, that would be the equivalent of a shout.
After he landed, a tanker of liquid hydrogen waiting on the carbocrete hooked up its bayonet hoses and completed the job within twenty minutes. Then they were off again, and all the way as far as the Baltic he saw only two other aeros and just a few vapour trails from the high-atmosphere scramjets of space planes. But as soon as they entered Lithuania troposphere traffic became much heavier, with definite aero-lanes visibly punctuating the sky. The activity here was very much more than he had expected.
Information garnered from the Subnet showed that the fortunes of Minsk Spaceport had been on the wane until the Committee started building the Argus satellite network, and that now it was even busier than before. He knew that many of the aeros he saw flying the route from Lithuania to East Germany would be loaded with drugs, data-crystals, 3D silicon chips and the like, whilst the big trucks on the twelve-lane autobahns below him were loaded with bubblemetals or products of the same from the surrounding industrial complexes. The traffic using the same route into the port was mostly of empty vehicles and staff buses, though some commodities were still shipped up to the station. However, the Argus Network was all but complete, and supplying Argus Station itself and ferrying down vital materials and technologies that could only be made in zero gravity would not account for this furious activity. Some other operation was under way.
It was difficult to say where the actual Minsk sprawl began, because in Lithuania the Vilnius sprawl had absorbed Kaunas and also blended across a forgotten border with the district of Minsk. As with the rest of the world, none of the old national borders now divided this area, just various regions of Committee political authority. However, Minsk Spaceport remained under its own authority, the lines of division from its tertiary industries clearly marked by security fences, readergun towers and a no-man’s-land seeded with mines. Ahead, just inside this massive fence, aeros were spiralling down towards a twenty-storey vehicle park that squatted amidst the glassy administration towers located beside the square kilometres of primary direct-support industrial estates attached to the spaceport. It resembled the grey edifices of the ancient communist regime – the kind of buildings demolished during Russia’s emergence from communism, but now being built again under Committee rule.