‘What do you mean?’ she asked, looking slightly panic-stricken.
‘Something about the organic interface?’
‘I . . .’
‘Let me put it this way: just a moment ago I wondered, because of the way I feel, if I was chemically depressed. Then I checked, which rather tells me that I am now hooking in to my autonomous nervous system.’
‘The interface,’ said Hannah, as they waited for the spider-gun to proceed through the airlock ahead of them, ‘it’s not a static organism.’
As the airlock cycled, Saul glanced back at the other two spiderguns herding the captives towards the same endcap. Then, with negligent ease, he cracked the coding of transmissions passing between the captives. Messina was busy firing off orders and demands for assessments to all about him, though the replies came mainly from a couple of delegates who had risen high in the Inspectorate hierarchy before joining the Committee. The Chairman was demanding an escape – with a few inevitable losses, surely they could reach a different docking pillar and board another space plane? He was currently being informed that, even only one spidergun was watching them, such an attempt would be suicidal.
‘Smith was stronger than me, to begin with, then weaker,’ Saul said, mentally instructing the airlock to open ahead of them now that the spidergun was through. ‘My integration process with Janus is still far from complete, but even so, that should not result in me being able to connect this way to my autonomous nervous system.’
‘The interface is growing.’
He nodded as he entered the airlock ahead of her, and whilst they stood inside, waiting for it to pressurize, he mulled over the implications. Only when they were back inside the arcoplex did he speak again.
‘Malden’s was static,’ he said.
‘Yes . . .’
‘Mine, however, is growing a neural matrix throughout my brain.’ He paused. ‘What is the organism based upon?’
‘Your own DNA,’ she replied.
He turned and stared at her. ‘So no rejection problems.’
She nodded. ‘It uses your own neural stem cells and grows its matrix from them. After just one day, the connectivity between your organic brain and the hardware in your skull was about the same as Malden’s. Now it should be about twice that.’
‘When does it stop growing?’
‘Only when it matches up to the demand you place on the hardware. If you make further demands of it, the matrix will grow further to accommodate that.’
It struck him as more than likely that such bioware was not on general release. If it had been, then Smith would have acquired it.
‘It’s a prototype, then,’ he stated.
As they propelled themselves up towards the arcoplex spindle, then back along it towards the asteroid-side endcap, Saul quickly tracked down a number of key individuals inside the station. Robert Le Roque, the Technical Controller of the station, remained in a cell and seemed unhurt, and by checking records Saul discovered that he had not been subjected to inducement. Commander Langstrom was currently in the crowded barracks hospital, his knee undergoing a scan. This hospital itself was presently overrun by casualties.
‘Langstrom,’ Saul addressed him through the hospital intercom, ‘I want you to collect Le Roque from the cell block and both of you to be in Tech Central within ten minutes.’
A similar summons soon had other necessary staff heading up from their cabins to the control room. Chang and the twins he could locate nowhere, until he replayed recorded data that tracked their progress from the cell block back to Tech Central. They had ensconced themselves in an unassigned cabin, after looping the cam feed to perpetually indicate the same cabin as empty. To their joint surprise, he summoned them too.
Even as he and Hannah arrived at the far endcap, Saul registered a cycling of the airlock they had just departed, and glanced back to see the first of the captives already entering the arcoplex. As the pair exited through the second airlock, he considered an old story that might have informed Hannah’s decision about Messina and the rest: how German civilians had been forced to bury the concentration-camp dead. He felt that her first decision was just, and he would go with what she decided next just so long as it did not endanger the Argus Station or themselves. Once the airlock had closed, he instituted another protocol.
‘The airlocks at this end of the cylinder are sealed now,’ he explained, as they descended to the surface of the asteroid. ‘But perhaps I’ll place guards here too.’
Stirring up eddies of dust, their gecko boots did not function as well on asteroidal rock strewn with flakes of stone, so they proceeded slowly and with care. Lifting his gaze from his feet, Saul glanced over to his left, where a construction robot was busy scooping up the last of the corpses here. Next he viewed their destination: a steel chamber in the outer rim where the corpses were all neatly stacked, the same way round, so that one wall seemed to consist entirely of boot soles. He could have ordered the robots to hurl them out into space but, now that he had cut all supply lines from Earth, even corpses had become a potential resource.
Reaching an airlock in the base of Tech Central, which lay above the lattice walls, offered a clear view out into space. Saul caught Hannah’s shoulder and turned her so that she could look straight across the station wheel, as far as the outer ring where the docks were positioned. These were now effectively the nose of the enormous spacecraft this place had become. He then gestured off to the right of the docks, where the Moon loomed large in the blackness.
‘Three more turns around the Earth and we’ll be ready for a low-fuel course change around the Moon,’ Saul explained. ‘I’ll then fire up the Traveller engine once more to boost us on the correct course.’
They finally entered Tech Central, shedding their helmets whilst waiting for the spidergun to follow them through the lock.
‘I was about to remark that we’re free of the Committee now,’ he said. ‘But, of course, you’re not free of it, because you still have that decision to make.’ Hannah’s expression was pained as he continued. ‘That decision aside, what will you do now there’s no political officers to instruct you?’
A look of panic fitted across her face – perhaps signifying another of her attacks, or the reaction of someone who, having lived a life without choices, was now being confronted with them.
‘Arcoplex Two contains state-of-the-art research and surgical facilities, in fact even more than you had down on Earth,’ he noted. ‘Whilst you decide precisely what you want to do, perhaps you can occupy yourself there?’
‘More than I had down on Earth?’ Hannah echoed numbly.
He nodded, glad that the option was now firmly implanted in her mind.
‘And if I want to return to Earth?’ she managed.
‘That option stays open. A space plane would need half a full fuel load just to counter our present velocity, and one could be fuelled and made ready before we reach the Moon.’ He paused contemplatively. ‘But I wonder if you’d really want to return to Earth aboard a plane that would need to be crewed by Inspectorate military?’
‘No,’ she replied firmly. ‘So this station definitely isn’t going back.’
‘It isn’t.’ He shook his head. ‘Mars, I feel, is just going to be a stopping point on a very long journey. You need to decide how you’ll fit in here, now. That means more decisions and choices for you – they come with the territory known as freedom.’
‘Will anyone really be free aboard this station?’
‘Freedom is not an absolute.’
21
All the Lovely People . . .
A belief was once prevalent in ‘modern’ societies that the killer of humans, the murderer, is an aberration. At least this was what the rulers wished their subjects to believe, though, as they ordered their soldiers to war, they knew that the veneer called ‘civilization’ was as thin as whatever ideology they themselves espoused. The truth is that an aversion to killing anyone outside of immediate family is a product of societal indoctrination (and then only in that slightly more than half the population who are not sociopaths), whilst within immediate family it is merely the product of that contradiction in terms called ‘genetic altruism’. It is in fact a harsh reality that he who believes killers are an aberration is also he who has the boot planted firmly on his neck; whilst amongst those who rule the aberration is the one who is not a sociopath, and therefore reluctant to kill.