He heard a chainsaw-like buzz overhead, and looked up to see a drone moving rapidly towards him. It looked like a metal doughnut, with blades whirring noisily in the centre. Saul shielded his eyes to make sure his UP was active, even as it dropped lower to intercept him.
‘I’m with Array Security and Immigration,’ he called up to the device. ‘I urgently need to get inside the Array.’
‘I can see your authorization, sir,’ boomed a voice from a hidden microphone. ‘I’m sorry, but I thought maybe you were part of that mob.’
‘They’re frightened people, not a mob,’ Saul shouted back. ‘What the hell is going on here?’
‘I don’t know, sir,’ the operator’s voice replied. ‘I just know we’re not supposed to let anybody inside.’
‘Except me, right? I plan to use one of the bunker entrances.’
‘That’s fine, but all active personnel have to report in immediately and help protect the Array.’
‘Protect it from what?’ Saul yelled back. But, before the operator could respond, a crackle of gunfire erupted from the direction he’d just come.
He glanced around and saw a crowd of desperate people converging on the barricades. The drone rose into the air and zoomed in their direction without another word from its operator. Saul stared after it, noticing dozens of other drones also converging there. He forced himself to turn away and keep walking until he finally reached the bunker. A single unmarked steel door in its side swung open as he approached.
Once he was inside, a warning light flashed, and a kind of manhole cover in the floor slid aside, revealing a shaft beneath, and a single ladder extending downwards for about six metres.
Before long, Saul was heading along an echoing, empty corridor, in the direction of the central dome.
NINETEEN
Florida Array, 4 February 2235
Saul continued through stark concrete corridors until he came to a service elevator that carried him back upwards, and into the main Array building. To his shock, it was very nearly deserted, emptier than he had ever known it to be; so the only conclusion he could come to was that gate-travel had been suspended altogether.
Before long, he encountered a small unit of ASI personnel. The three men carrying Cobras were dressed in matte-black armour, and accompanied by a Black Dog whose four thick legs whirred and clanked rhythmically as it trailed after them, its armour-plated torso laden with sonar cannons. The squad was led by a lieutenant named David Murakami, who insisted on checking Saul’s credentials.
‘Sorry,’ Murakami apologized, ‘got to check everyone’s clearance. And I mean everyone’s.’
‘I was forced to walk here from the highway after the traffic snarled up, and it looks like half of Florida is heading for this place. Any idea what the hell is going on out there?’
Murakami let out a heavy sigh. ‘Sir, I’ve been trying to find someone who can give me a straight explanation. You’re from Investigations, so I was kind of hoping you’d be the one to set me straight.’
Saul shook his head ruefully. ‘Sorry.’
‘Yeah, me too,’ Murakami replied, clearly far from happy at that reply. ‘Between you and me, though, I’d swear on my mother’s tits it’s all to do with those things out in the ocean.’
‘Yeah,’ said one of his squad, with a UP tag bearing the name Hall. ‘Tere’s people out there on the other side of the barricades who think it’s the End Times, except far as I can see they’d all rather run for the colonies than wait around for Jesus to come haul their asses to the big fire.’
Some of the others chuckled. ‘Guess they had second thoughts about Jesus being in a forgiving mood,’ said one.
Saul turned to Murakami. ‘Have they shut off access to Copernicus?’
‘Nope.’ Murakami shook his head. ‘I know it looks empty around here, but there’s still a hell of a lot of traffic heading for Luna. Hopper-loads of people have been flying in here twenty-four hours a day for the past couple of days and being sent straight through with no delay.’
Saul frowned. ‘Who?’
Murakami shrugged. ‘Again, sir, I was hoping you could tell me. Civilians mostly, from what I’ve seen.’
‘It’s the government,’ said Hall, with an expression of disgust on his face, ‘They’re getting their own people out and leaving the rest of us here to rot.’
Saul looked over at him. ‘You know that for a fact?’
‘All I can tell you is there are whole families arriving here, and they’re all being escorted by Special Ops types using heavy gear like Fido here.’ He nodded towards the Black Dog. ‘It’s like the lieutenant says. They’ve been bringing them in to the Florida Array day and night and shipping them through the gates to Copernicus as fast as they can.’
‘Special Ops, you said?’
‘Hundreds of them,’ said the soldier. ‘Look to me like they’re armed heavily enough to start a war somewhere. And here’s the other thing,’ he stabbed the air with one finger. ‘Nobody, but nobody, is coming back through, the other way. What the hell’s that about?’
After he left them, Saul signed into the main security database, downloading anything he could on Farad Maalouf that he hadn’t discovered already. At the same time, he continued making his way across one of the huge concourses.
The concourse was eerily silent. Enormous animated advertisements hung in the air, while an electronic display above the immigration checkpoints indicated a variety of off-world destinations. None of the usual civilian staff was visible, and so Saul passed unchallenged through a security gate and entered a transfer station that on any normal day would be processing a couple of hundred passengers at a time on to the shuttle-cars. During peak hours, each transfer station could handle close on three hundred people every seven minutes, both coming and going.
There were further squads of troopers guarding the transfer station, their Black Dogs pounding up and down across the concourse on sturdy steel legs. One swivelled its head towards Saul as he moved towards a shuttle-car, turning away again as soon as its onboard AI registered the newcomer’s clearance.
‘Hey!’
Saul turned to see a man wearing the uniform of a security commander hurrying towards him. ‘Your clearance doesn’t allow you through here,’ the man told him.
‘If it doesn’t,’ Saul replied, ‘that’s a first.’
The commander studied Saul’s UP clearance for a moment, then rolled his eyes in evident irritation. ‘Great, more screw-ups,’ he muttered. ‘Where exactly are you headed?’
‘Newton.’
‘Why?’
Saul forced a laugh, deciding the commander didn’t really need to know. ‘Sorry, sir,’ he replied. ‘I’m really not at liberty to discuss that.’
He watched the other man consider this for a moment, before shaking his head slowly. ‘That’s not good enough. So long as we’re under a state of emergency, you’re going to need to get fresh authorization. Maybe—’
‘Sir!’ A trooper came running up to them just then. ‘We’ve got sixty or more people just broke through a cordon near the secure runway, where we’re expecting another hopper to arrive in the next ten minutes. Johnson wants to know what his orders are.’
‘Shit,’ the commander swore under his breath. ‘All right,’ he instructed the trooper, ‘tell him to use any force necessary to clear the intruders away from the runway. Any force, is that understood?’
‘Sir.’ The trooper nodded, before jogging back the way he’d come.
‘As for you,’ the commander turned back to Saul, ‘I don’t have the time for this. Get into a shuttle-car right now before I change my mind.’