‘Wars used to occupy me,’ Nevil said, sighing. ‘Now they don’t. Being here . . . being what I am, in the green becoming . . . you’d be surprised how my perspectives have changed. I was weary of it all near the end. Now I’m so far past the point of weariness you wouldn’t even recognise my state of mind.’
‘I’m weary too,’ I admitted. ‘We’ve both been through it.’
He gave a small chuckle. ‘Through the wars. Literally.’
‘But this is different. Those old wars were the result of human failings. We made them happen because we were too lazy to think our way to something better. We could have walked away at any point. But not this one.’
He turned to me with a wry amusement crinkling the corners of his eyes: the lines of a man rather than a boy.
‘You think such a distinction matters to me now?’
‘It had better. The sanctuary that you’ve found here may not be as permanent as you imagine.’
‘The wolves won’t touch these waters.’
‘I wondered if you remembered what brought you here.’
‘Hard to forget.’
‘Then put your faith in the wolves if you wish. Maybe there’s an instruction in their deep programming to avoid harming Juggler planets. Maybe that’s held in the past. But do you have absolute confidence that it still holds true, across all space and time? The wolves are still dangerous – we’ve seen ample evidence of that. But the fact that we got as far into space as we did, and for as long, shows that they’re not as efficient as they used to be. Things have been going wrong inside them for millions of years – slow failings. Entropic breakdown. All systems succumb in the end, even ruthless machine ones. With that breakdown, all manner of programmed boundaries might become blurred.’
‘That’s supposition.’
‘Perhaps. But you can’t deny that damage has already been done to Ararat. The shattering of the moon, the infall of the debris, the enhanced volcanism and tectonic activity following that cataclysm. The seas have risen, islands been swallowed up.’
‘The sea will heal. You underestimate its resilience.’
‘But I don’t underestimate your instinct for caution. There’s a seed of doubt there, Nevil. Don’t deny it.’
He was silent for at least a minute. The waves crashed, the grasses swayed. The sky was the same grey as the sea, the wind relentless.
‘You say you came with Scorp.’
‘I did.’
‘I didn’t sense his presence.’
‘He’s here. Or there. In the lagoon. We came with Glass . . . are you aware of Glass?’
‘There was another. This wasn’t her first time.’
I nodded eagerly. ‘She came here looking for you, just as I did. I was rebuffed, and so was Glass. Do you remember something of her?’
‘I looked inside her head.’
‘Now, or then?’
‘The first time. She wasn’t aware.’ He chuckled, amused by himself. ‘I picked her apart like a fruit, studied what little was interesting, reassembled her. Do you know who she is, Warren? Have you worked it out yet?’
‘Glass isn’t the puzzle I came to solve.’
‘Well, we don’t always get to choose. She was with you on Mars. That’s how far back her memories go. She was there, part of the extraction team. You remember, don’t you? You came to rescue me.’
‘No.’
‘You don’t remember?’
‘No, I do remember. But Glass couldn’t have been part of that. It’s not possible. We left her for dead.’
‘You mean, after you killed her.’
My next question left Charity at something of a loss.
‘What planet would you say we’re on?’
But for her nervousness, I think she might almost have laughed at the absurdity of my enquiry. I was being deliberately cruel. I was not normally cruel – ruthless, single-minded, yes – but now that the opportunity was here I found that I felt comfortable with cruelty; comfortable and more than a little regretful that I had not tried it sooner. It was like a garment that turned out to suit me more than I had expected it could; a surprise and a delight.
‘This is . . . Mars, sir. We’re on Mars.’
‘Can you be sure that this is Mars, and not a simulation?’
I caught her hesitation. ‘It’s not a simulation, sir. I’ve been through the training simulations, all of us in Psychosurgical Ops have, and they’re good . . . very good . . . but I’m certain that this is a real operation, happening in real-time, and that we’re really on Mars.’
‘Well, you’re right about that.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Next question: is there air on Mars?’
‘No, sir. I mean, almost none. There’s barely any atmosphere and what there is isn’t breathable. I know there’s thicker, warmer air inside the Great Wall, but it’s building up slowly, and what there is . . .’ Charity faltered. ‘What there is . . . isn’t really breathable yet. No one can survive anywhere on Mars, outside the pressurised compounds or capsules, unless they’re in a suit.’
‘Well, there’s the nub of it.’
Hope made a quiet chuckling sound. ‘There it is.’
‘Suits are the problem, you see. If the extraction goes as planned – and thanks to your excellent work, Charity, there’s no reason it won’t – we’ve still got to get our prisoner, my brother, out of that camp and off the surface of Mars.’
Hope put in: ‘What would come in handy, do you think?’
‘A suit, sir. Sirs.’
‘It most certainly will,’ I said. ‘When we were younger, and used to go swimming in the loch near our home, my brother and I would sometimes play a game to see who could hold their breath underwater the longest.’ I dropped my voice to a confiding register. ‘I have to tell you that Nevil always won. He had far better lungs than me – or far better willpower; I’m not sure which. But even Nevil couldn’t hold his breath long enough to get off Mars.’
‘Perhaps the Conjoiners will have been kind enough to leave one nearby,’ Hope said. ‘Pre-tanked and ready for just such an escape attempt. What do you think, Charity?’
‘I . . . don’t think they’d be likely to do that, sir.’
‘Nor do I,’ I agreed. ’We could try and take one of their own suits off them, of course, but that won’t be much good if we’re in a hurry. Those suits aren’t like anything we use.’
‘Neurally linked to the occupants,’ Hope said, nodding in agreement with me. ‘No conventional controls at all. If we had a day or so, we could patch in our own control harness – but the one thing we won’t have is time. We have to get in and out very quickly – but you know that.’
‘I . . . do,’ Charity said. ‘It’s why a fourth suit came with us. The one that didn’t make it down. You said there’d be a workaround, sir.’
‘You’re the workaround,’ I answered.
Charity became emboldened. ‘My mission deliverable lies in the administering of the neural protocols. I am an expert in that field. I was trained to deliver that element of the operation . . . and I did. I did what I was meant to do. The rest is . . . not my responsibility.’
‘And rest assured that we will always be indebted to you,’ I said.
Quickly, smoothly, I aimed the pistol and shot her through her visor.
Air geysered out through the hole in the glass, until Hope jammed his finger into the hole, giving me time to turn off the life-support valves and prevent further loss of closed-cycle pressure. The flow was reversed and the remaining air sucked back into the reservoir, allowing the suit to be dismantled and removed from Charity and then reassembled as an empty unit. Hope confirmed that the damage to the back of the helmet was minimal: the bullet had not broken through. The old visor was swapped for the new one: a simple field procedure that we had rehearsed until our fingers could do it blind.
It was good that we had brought spares.
‘I hope she was right about those protocols being self-adaptive,’
Hope commented, as we peeled back the mat and dug out a shallow grave.
‘I don’t doubt for a minute that she did everything asked of her,’ I answered. ‘I meant what I told her: we’re indebted. When all this is behind us, she’ll get her due recognition. She deserves nothing less.’
While we worked to bury the rapidly freezing corpse, I reflected on what had been required of me. If and when the operation was declassified, there would be no lie about what had happened here. The facts would be presented exactly as they were: I had shot one of our own, for the sake of the mission. It would not be passed off as an accident or the result of enemy fire. It was cold-blooded – on some level quite indefensible – murder, but there was, in my view, no moral distinction between my killing Charity and a military planner sending a group of soldiers into battle knowing that a third of them were bound to die.
It was just what had to be done.
‘I wonder why she didn’t say something when I put that visor down,’ Hope said.
‘She was task-orientated. She lacked overview.’ Inside my helmet I smiled once. ‘There’s no shame in that. We’ll need both mindsets to win this war.’
‘I hope I’ve got the right one.’
‘I hope both of us have.’
We completed the burial. After that, it was only a question of waiting. The storm had passed and the skies over the shelter were clear and cloudless. Hope and I had no knowledge of the weather conditions outside of our immediate locality, nor could any information be communicated to us, but it seemed likely that the clear conditions extended all the way to the Defection Capsule, now exposed again after the storm.
The storm had been our ally in two aspects: providing cover for our approach and retreat, but also blasting the ground after us, scouring away any traces we left. Still, there would only need to be one lingering hand or stilt print to alert the Conjoiners that someone had been at the capsule, and I was in no doubt at all that they would be looking for signs of interference.
Equally, I was sure the prize would be too tempting for them to ignore.
I shook my head.
‘No. We would never have done that.’
‘Of course we would, brother. It was war.’ He stared out to sea, lost in the past. ‘The Coalition for Neural Purity: doesn’t that suggest a certain . . . self-righteous certainty of purpose? And you and I . . . what part of that were we? The Knights of Cydonia? Masters of war, masters of Mars? We did whatever was needed. Murdering one of our own, even a brilliant, loyal and courageous volunteer, because she needed to die for me to survive? Not a moment’s hesitation.’
‘If I killed Charity . . .’ And this time I stopped short of absolute denial, remembering Glass’s insistence that I had already murdered her once.
‘No if. Would you like to see it, brother? Would you like to remember, properly, what it was you did?’
‘No—’ I began to reply.
‘The trouble is, I think you’re quite a way past the point of getting to have that choice.’ He added helpfully: ‘Let me reach into you a little further. Let me strip away the last of those mental blockades, so that you can finally know yourself.’
‘Nevil, please . . .’
He laughed aside my pleading. I felt him delving into my soul, flicking aside my feeble screens and blinds. Shredding and discarding them like the thin, disposable phantasms of self-denial they had been. Until Charity came back to me, her face behind the visor, the snapping trapdoor logic of that moment, the cold, clear realisation of what I was about to do to her.
The merest distress in her eyes. The tiniest bend to her mouth, as she began to frame a counter-argument, a new plan for our consideration. The squeeze of my finger on the trigger. The release, the recoil. The bullet’s gyring trajectory: barrel to thin vacuum, thin vacuum to visor glass. The visor puncturing as the bullet spun through it. The shards of glass.
The bullet’s continuation. Into air, moist and warm, even as it sucked itself out into the pitiful atmosphere of Mars. Its progress into the first part of her face. Into skin, into the flesh beneath her skin, into muscle and bone and frontal cortex.
Her mouth still struggling to form a word, because nerve signals were still reaching her larynx.
He looped the memory. Made it play back over and again, slower and more horribly each time, until he had eroded me to a sobbing core. A moral remnant that finally understood what it had done to another human being.
Finally understood. Finally knew.
‘How did she come back?’
He answered matter-of-factly: ‘The Conjoiners found her, eventually. Brought her corpse into the nest and took it upon themselves to see what could be salvaged of her. A kind of pet project: an internally run Conjoiner experiment in radical neural reconstruction. Think of the benefits. If they could bring her back to life, after days of exposure, after no end of damage to her brain, then the same principles of memory and personality reconstruction could be applied to their own wounded.’
‘It doesn’t sound all that different to what they did to those of ours they took prisoner. Dragged them to the recruitment theatres, opened up their skulls, stuffed Conjoiner machinery into their heads. Instant conversion to the cause.’ I paused. ‘But Glass isn’t one of them. She has all the gifts of the Conjoined, but she acts alone.’
‘That was another aspect of the experiment. Being Conjoined gave them strength in numbers. Gave us, I should say.’
I nodded, reminded of my brother’s ultimate defection to Galiana’s movement.
‘But like you, Glass was not quite one of them.’
‘In my case, I made a deliberate decision not to commit to full Transenlightenment. I thought I could be more useful, more agile, if I retained a degree of neural autonomy. So it proved, I think. That same autonomy was imposed on Glass by design, from the outset. And made more extreme. It would be an exaggeration to say that she was given engineered sociopathy . . . but also not entirely divorced from the facts.’
‘What were they hoping to achieve?’
‘Insurance, I suppose. One loyal to their cause – our cause – but who could act independently, far from the mental support of other Conjoiners. A lone agent, sent out into the world. Doubtless there were others. But perhaps only Glass has come to us across the centuries.’
I reflected on his words, picking up sand and allowing it to trickle through my fingers. I wondered if the grains were sufficient to count the years that Glass had been travelling.
‘When she found me on Michaelmas, I thought her only interest in me was as a means of defeating the wolves. But that was only half of it. The rest of it was punishment. She knew what I had done, and she required me to remember it too.’
‘You think of this as punishment? Isn’t the truth supposed to set us free?’
I looked down, my eyes stung by the wind. ‘I was a good man on Michaelmas.’
‘You were a lie. Now you have to live with what you are, not with some comforting fiction.’ Nevil shifted, as if he was getting cramp from sitting in the same position. ‘I’ll tell you what. Are you really serious about wanting the name of that world?’
‘We need the location, the identity of the ice giant Glass called Charybdis. Scythe – the ship we came in – has the means to reach whatever you saw inside that atmosphere.’
‘To what purpose?’
‘Glass believes you saw a Nestbuilder vehicle. We know they exist: you saw their relics littering this planet.’
‘Relics don’t bode well.’
‘Glass’s intelligence suggests that the Nestbuilders are the only species within this sector of the galaxy to have attained any sort of technological parity with the Inhibitors.’
‘Then why haven’t they wiped them out already?’
‘It seems they prefer a strategy of managed containment. They have a stick that can poke the wolves, but if they use it too many times the wolves will evolve a countermeasure. So for the Nestbuilders the best approach is to survive by stealth and only use
their weaponry as a last resort, even if that means accepting the occasional defeat. Think of the weapon as a supremely powerful antibiotic, to be used only in direst need, lest the bacteria develop resistance.’
‘And the name of this weapon?’
‘An Incantor. That’s Glass’s translation: the nearest approximation in human terms.’
‘And your aim is . . . what? To extract the Incantor from this wreck.’
‘Better than that: to harvest the information that lets us make our own Incantor, using hypometric technology as an intermediary step. Once we’ve made one, we can make others.’
‘Ambitious.’
‘There is no other course.’
‘Doesn’t it concern you that the Nestbuilders won’t take kindly to this misuse of their technology?’
‘They shouldn’t have been careless with their secrets in the first place. We won’t use it indiscriminately. But if it’s a choice between extinction tomorrow, and incurring the wrath of the Nestbuilders, I’ll take the wrath. If all we do is push the wolves back out from this corner of space, we’ll still have bought time. Besides, Glass told me something else.’
Nevil looked at me with the first real interest since the start of our meeting.
‘Oh?’
‘There’s something that helps us – some leverage. Something she knows that could work to our advantage when it comes to securing the Incantor.’
Inhibitor Phase Page 45