Total Conflict

by Neal Asher

  “Of course,” Kyril called cheerfully. “if I leave you here I wonder how you’ll die: eaten alive or fried when that reactor blows.”

  The tyrannosaurus opened its eyes, shrugged, parted its jaws a little to drop some threads of drool. Kyril stepped round the corner into the alley, first focusing on Coney then, after a moment, his gaze straying upwards.

  “Fuck.”

  The tyrannosaurus roared and charged. Kyril opened fire, his bullets tearing holes in the creature, but to little effect. He turned to run but it ducked down, its jaws crunching shut about his legs. It lifted him screaming into the air, and began eating him legs first.

  Coney crawled across to Thrax’s cannon, awkwardly heaved it round and aimed it up at the mouth of the alleyway in time to see Kyril, still screaming, disappearing down the monster’s gullet. It paused for a moment, dipped its head as if in contemplation, then abruptly coughed, spitting out Kyril’s rifle, before striding out of sight.

  With an absorbent dressing held up against her shoulder, Coney pressed her hand against a control sphere of the mantisal. The organic time machine lifted from the concrete, weird effects propagating around it, then it winked out of existence.

  A moment later the mantisal reappeared high in the sky at a fair distance from the city. Coney checked her watch, nodded to herself and donned protective goggles, before settling down in the craft’s glass bones to observe. An eye of fire ignited deep in the city, spreading into a massive fusion explosion, incinerating all. Coney reached up to a control sphere and before the shockwave could reach it, the mantisal disappeared.

  The Ice Submarine

  Adam Roberts

  Systems were malfunctioning again. This time the fault was in insulation systems: heat was leaking into the living spaces from the superheated outer skin. The Chief Technician reported directly to the Captain to insist, for the third time that week, that the vessel be taken off active service for proper repairs.

  “We follow orders, Chief,” the Captain replied.

  The men had stripped to their waists, their beards heavy with sweat, working with a fuggy slowness that was, the Captain was certain, pregnant with mistake. He was weary too, but always there was a cold spot at the focal point of his mind reminding him that errors in a vessel such as his could be nuclear-catastrophic. He jingled the flat metal key restlessly. His Second Officer had objected to being locked out of the missile launch, but the Captain had over-ruled him. He copied from the data log onto paper, a standard procedure in case Western anti-submarine technology should scramble the electronic storage systems. His pen worked awkwardly: Systems malfunction, heating insulation breakdown. Temperature 48. Trouble with military contingent, who insist incessantly on surfacing. Will continue current voyage for only thirty more kms. Blots of sweat plocked the paper. Experience told him that to wipe them away would be to blur the words. Instead he dabbed at them with the corner of the facing page. He wrote the date at the top, a last thought: January 3rd 1440.

  Before the war the captain had been a scholar. He had specialised in Medieval poetry. Occasionally he pondered the connection between war and poetry. We might, for example, contemplate all those great soldier-poets of tradition. But his own poetry, when he had essayed it as a young man, had been small and derivative, chalky images and conventional sentiments. He had tried to capture in words the grandeur of the sky, the way the stars seemed so far and simultaneously so close; the way some evening sky-colours struck the eye as ordinary, banal, and then a tiny shift in tone would blaze the sky with a glory of red-gold that dug deep into the soul. The proximity of the numinous divine and the rounded nothingness of beast-life that most people lived. But his destiny, it transpired, had not been the contemplation of desert skies. Instead, destiny had sent him to that place that was furthest from the huge open spaces and the heart-reviving sunsets.

  But now, when he remembered life before the war, he no longer thought ‘I was a poet and scholar’. Now he thought: ‘I was a widower’. He was still a widower, of course; but being in the military somehow altered that fact.

  He ordered the engines full stop, and all was silent. For an hour there was no sound at all except the gunshot splitting noises of the ice settling around them, a series of irregularly spaced bangs. Everybody twitched with each enormous crack, even the Captain. He trusted his ship, he trusted that it had been built strong enough to withstand the pressure, but he twitched anyway. He tried to distract himself by encoding his report in random data, ready for the next surfacing. 78 South, 12.8 East, Queen Maud’s Land. Pursuit of Enemy Craft abandoned after eighteen hours. Malfunction of insulation system, operating temperature unacceptably high, request orders to proceed to repair co-ordinates. He knew this would come to nothing as he wrote it, but he continued with the formality. In the name of Allah, the Great, the Compassionate. Victory to the Pan-Islamic People’s Republic. Captain Sayyid Ali Beheshti. He fitted the clip into his personal transmitter, and settled down to read the technical reports. The Chief, handing him another chip with a detailed technical report, grunted. “If I had proper solid bodied men working for me, it’d be good, sweat them down a bit. But the skinny lads I have, if we keep going they’ll just melt away like butter in the oven.”

  “It’ll cool down now, Chief,” said the Captain.

  Another microsense was sent up, wriggling through the ice to the surface. If it picked up the coded launch command, it would wriggle back down to them in twenty minutes. Never more than twenty minutes from the world’s end.

  The Captain sat back, stroking his beard and listening to the bangs from the ice. Reality snapping and buckling all around them. Crocodile noises. Eventually the cracks came less frequently, and finally they stopped altogether. With their immediate environment now set he ordered the sensor-probes poked out into the surrounding ice. These picked up a few possible vibrations, possibly the signatures of following moles. Maybe the whole escapade had been a Western trick, to lure the ship from its secrecy. After a few hours the vibrations died away. Could be anything. “Could be ice settling”, said Gupta, the second-in-command. “Could be a battle on the surface. Could be nothing at all. Sir.” He always said ‘sir’ a tick too late, as if in afterthought, with an unmistakable hint of implied disrespect. Increasingly the Captain found his fury at Gupta harder to block down. He had resorted to internalising a mantra: all of us are brothers, all of us brothers. But the words gave him little purchase on his rage. He could feel himself slipping towards an explosion, towards screaming at Gupta’s surly face. It would be unacceptable for him to lose control like that.

  “Could be those things, Gupta,” he replied, focusing on keeping his voice level. “Could be moles after us. We sit tight.”

  For a day and a night, and then another day, the ice submarine lived in darkness, in blindness. Its crew turned in on themselves. Men got back into their uniforms; then into their woollens; finally into their plasjackets. The Captain, muffled up like the rest in the hellish cold, read the Qu’ran quietly to himself. Third Officer brought reports of restive behaviour among the men, and in the morning of the second day the Captain made a speech on headphone-only. In the hectic storm of this war, soldiers and submariners alike should relish the opportunity provided by an interval like this. If they were cold, they should think of the ground troops being irradiated and heat-blasted on the surface; of the oceanic submariners being blown, lasered or microwaved into nothingness by the latest Western Satanic devices. He concluded by advising his men to spend the time in contemplation of the benevolence of Allah, and in the study of the Qu’ran. But afterwards he sat with a sick feeling in his chest. At the launch, a year and a half previously, he had genuinely believed that the time of confinement would enable all his men, and the soldiers they carried too, to get closer to the One God. But the hermit life seemed only to focus their pettiness and self-concern. The soldiers were worse than the submariners. On the evening of the second day their squad-commander, Baru, clattered through to the bridge.

>   He spoke without preliminary: “Captain, we must move the submarine.”

  The Captain tapped at his beard with all four finger-points at once. His subordinate officers looked at him. The sensible thing would be to avoid a confrontation.

  “Commander Baru,” he said, very softly. “It would be a courtesy to me if you could let me know your reasons.”

  “We must rotate the submarine. My men find it uncomfortable praying to Mecca. The quarters are narrow across, but long alongways. If you twist the submarine through ninety-degrees, we will be able to pray without inconvenience.”

  “But if I rotate the submarine, I will need to heat it up.”

  “For a short time only.”

  “Commander Baru, a moment may be all the Western machines need to determine our position.”

  Baru sniffed noisily. He was scoffing, coming close to publicly disagreeing with his Captain. But the moment of confrontation came and passed, and instead Baru turned and stomped noisily back along the central corridor.

  In the night of the second day the Captain ordered movement. Any moles on their trail would have given up by now. The reactor moaned, the hull heated, and the vessel moved forward, ice subliming to steam before them, congealing back into ice behind. They moved up through half a kilometre, then cooled the hull to a few degree above zero. Their rate of progress slowed, supposedly to become indistinguishable to seismic or other spy-devices. The Captain had never really believed this, just as he never quite trusted the maps of the mountains and landscape thought to exist under the kilometres of Antarctic ice. How did people know that this was the way the hidden land lay? Ice this thick was extraordinarily difficult to sense through. Some Western Satanic satellite had passed by overhead a hundred years previously and determined that the Transantarctic Mountains lay here rather than a hundred metres further over. But an ice-submarine, shuttling along in its envelope of superheated steam, burrowing through the ubiquitous medium of ice at many kilometres an hour, could not afford a hundred metres of error. A collision with unyielding rock would be death.

  In his meditation, in the evening, the Captain had tried to map his consciousness onto the Antarctic continent. The soul was rock, covered in the frozen ice of flesh. God might melt the latter, but the Devil himself could not thaw away the former. He ran his crew through an attack drill to help eat up the time. Only when his inner balance told him that it was the right time did he recall the microsense and order hot ahead.

  They surfaced in the blackness of night, and the Captain, with Gupta and one Technician, climbed up and out onto the conning tower to breathe real air. Dust in the atmosphere hid all but the brightest stars. The blackness tasted of almonds, of grit. There was a strangely metallic decaying smell faint in the cold of the air. The ice stretched away lone and bare in the darkness on all sides, somehow sensible, even through the gloom. The Captain put his report into the stratosphere, to be picked up and decoded from its cloaking noise by Islamic satellites. Or so he hoped.

  He peered at the sky.

  “Battle fought recently, do you think?” he asked his second-in-command. Gupta’s eyes were the only part of him to catch the attenuated starlight, but the Captain sensed the scowl, the irritation. “There’s a lot of dust in the air,” he replied. “Sir.”

  “There are anomalies to the east, sir,” said the Technician.

  The Captain pulled at his beard. “It has been provided for us,” he said.

  Back below he summoned Commander Baru. The soldier was still chewing something, presumably his supper. The insolence of it. Sayyid Ali Beheshti thought of standing on his privilege as Captain, and ordering him to get rid of it. But Baru would probably only have spat the cud straight on the floor of the Captain’s cabin. That would require disciplining, and then there would be even more tension between soldiers and submariners.

  “Commander,” he said. “There seems to be a camp a few kilometres to the east.”

  Baru thought for a while, chewing, swallowing. Then: “Will you move the vessel closer to the camp?”

  The Captain all-but sighed. Baru’s ignorance of sub-ice tactics was deep-set, not to say depressing. “No, Commander. That would simply alert them to our presence. They will most likely be a scientific station, with few arms but much sensor equipment. If we come closer we make it much more likely that we will seismically register.”

  The Commander stood to attention with a smack of heels together. “Your orders, sir?”

  This was mockery, but Beheshti froze his resentment deep inside. No place for it here. “Baru,” he said wearily, rubbing his eyes. “Take your men out and destroy the camp.”

  He took his place on the platform as Baru led his dozen men over the side and onto the ice. Their dark uniforms registered blotchily in the ghost half-light. A hundred meters to the east and they were invisible. Beheshti went below and slept for an hour. Then it was time for prayers, which he took in his cabin. When he poked his head into the frosty night air again it was just in time to hear the first sounds of gunfire, hollowed and flattened by the distance and the echo-index of the ice. It was a spooky series of sounds. A hound’s bark slowed down and broken into fragments, played deep underground. Devilish. Beheshti flicked little pearls of frost from his beard with his thumb. Those had been his breath only moments before.

  Then there was a light, an orange bauble only thumbnail sized near the horizon. The rumble came a little afterwards. At this Beheshti almost lost his composure and swore. What was that idiot Baru playing at? The West would be all over them in minutes.

  “Prepare the engines,” he ordered. His number two coughed, interposed: “But the men, sir? We can’t leave them on the ice.”

  Beheshti wanted to say that idiot Baru has dug his own grave, but he didn’t. Instead he put through a rapid series of orders. “We’ll hold as long as we can,” he told Gupta, his voice pulled thin with anger. “But as soon as we detect air support for that camp, we must go under.” The ship would be a quieter place without Baru and his boneheaded soldiers anyway. It was all he could do to hold back from ordering immediate going-under. The latest version of moles were faster and deadlier than any before. He needed all the head-start he could get.

  But at five minutes a buzzing sound started to swell from the blackness, and a few minutes after that Baru and his men arrived back at the submarine, riding ice-buggies. Baru himself clambered up the platform and breathlessly counted his men past him. “We found a hanger-full of these little cars. They ride along on a cushion of steam, very fast.” His breath, panting out in gouts, flickered faint in the starlight.

  “Aboard, commander,” ordered Beheshti. “Now.”

  “Yes, Captain, yes.” His last man clambered up, carrying a sack over his shoulder. Beheshti thought it was a body bag, and his anger was too much. “You’ve brought one of your dead back with you?” he hissed. “I’ll have you court-martialled.”

  “No, sir, no, sir,” panted Baru. “No, we have no dead. This is a prisoner.”

  Beheshti took the vessel down to five hundred metres and a kilometre from the incident, sent up a microsense and put all his probes into the ice around him. He was angry now, and his men could see it. It wasn’t the anger as such that scared them, more the fact that the Captain’s famous self-control was starting to slip. He ordered the prisoner, an ice-coloured Western woman, locked in one of the toilets, and told Baru to come with him to the Captain’s cabin.

  “What are we to do with a prisoner, you idiot?” he demanded. His control was slipping, he could feel it. A stream of invective came from him, and Baru’s piggish face looked startled. But, to Beheshti’s surprise, the soldier did not give way. Instead he responded in as loud a voice as the Captain’s, “It was a tiny scientific camp, Captain. They were clearly not a military base, and so they must have been engaged on some spy-mission. I thought it best to capture one of the Westerners for interrogation.”

  Beheshti’s anger was stopped by the sheer nerve of the man. He put both hands over his
mouth, trying to hold in his rage. It pulsed, then subsided. He could actually feel the anger going down inside him like something swallowed. Then he breathed.

  “And what are we to do with her? Once she is interrogated?”

  Baru looked a little puzzled. “After, sir?”

  “Do you suggest killing her in cold blood?”

  “Of course not, sir. Couldn’t we take her back?”

  “How long will we have to keep her locked up in a toilet? How much food do you think we can spare?”

  “But, sir, how long will it be before we are recalled for repairs? Surely, given the state of the vessel…”

  “The state of the vessel is my concern,” Beheshti snapped. “As, now, is this woman. You are dismissed.”

  When his wife had died, Beheshti had been staggered by his grief, stupefied by it. His relatives tried to console him by telling him: every husband feels this when their wife dies. But he couldn’t see the consolation in that thought. The realisation that others had suffered precisely this brought only the opposite of consolation. In fact it means a sort of pollution; it means both dilution and contamination of the intense, personal intimacy of grief. Rather than face their offensive expressions of sympathy, Beheshti assumed the external carapace of ordinariness, resuming his daily duties. Only the external shell, though. Inside was molten with pain.

  Beheshti had the woman moved to the mess, and went to see her there. She complained a great deal, but knew only a few basic phrases in Arabic. It seemed that her shoulder was dislocated, and that her head hurt. At any rate, there was blood on her ear. Perhaps one of Baru’s men had knocked the side of her head.