Total Conflict

by Neal Asher

  “But since you’re clearly going to do it,” Forshaw said, “a word of advice. These people are not the rude peasants of our propaganda. They never were. They were sophisticated and they were ruthless.” He cracked open a yellow lizard eye. “Don’t lose sight of your real enemy. And try not to lose your bloody temper.”

  Shard left. Violently he desired now to be instrumental in the failure of this man’s bid for immortality, to wrest their shared history back from him and strip it of the veneer with which Forshaw had tried to finish it. Besides, loyalty had not rewarded as richly as leadership. Shard could do with the money.

  Liberation +40 years

  Shard’s first night back on Roby was not restful. Exhaustion, jump-lag, a room too sparsely furnished – all of this contributed to his discomfort, not to mention the twinge of some burgeoning dread which he glossed as performance nerves. Eventually, faint light began to creep through the gap between the curtains. Shard gave up torturing himself with the hope of sleep. He got up and went out onto the balcony to contemplate the world outside, the world he had lost.

  It was a cold spring morning, the light as pure and hard as in memory, the hills brown and stony. Deliberately, Shard’s eye followed their line westwards; a squat range deeply riven by vanished glaciers, caught in perpetual convulsion, as if ancient gods or monsters had fought some fundamental struggle here, ages before humanity got its chance. The city’s towers stood in a ring on four low hills, the circle broken by the ruin of the fifth. That was at the centre of his view. No doubt the room had been selected for this purpose.

  The sky above was bright blue, the promise of a warm day. As Shard watched, the mist lying in the hollow formed by the hills began to lift. Piecemeal, their lower reaches came into sight, greened by moss and ivy, shimmering with tiny pale flowers adapted to life in the cracks. Last of all, the undercity was revealed, ramshackle and disorderly, squatting like a beggar in the space between the hills – and here, at last, were the anticipated changes: the barricades completely gone, disappeared without trace; hilltop and undercity now linked by black tramlines, zigzagging surely, inevitably, upwards.

  Forty years ago, all of this – air and land, hill and hollow – had belonged to Shard. Not in any legal sense – the various consortia on behalf of whom the Commonwealth had fought this war would surely have contested that – but it had been his in all the ways that matter beyond possession. He had been the one to decide who of his men and his enemies were to live and who were to die. It was that responsibility which had given him title to this land, in a moral sense at least. Shard had referred to this place as West-20. Now it was named Salvation.

  From deep within the undercity, which Shard had once held but had never mastered, a clock chimed the tenth before the hour. Others began to follow suit, and then Shard’s comm buzzed too. It was Lowe, asking the Marshal to join him on the tower-top, where he was waiting for the car to take them to the Archive.

  They were still waiting an hour later. Lowe was frantic. Shard sat to one side and practiced patience. If the delay was a result of mismanagement, that boded well for the day ahead. If it was intended as an insult – what else should he expect from these people?

  When at last the car landed, the driver offered no explanation. Installed in the back, Lowe fussed over the day’s agenda. Shard stared down at the city as it passed below, picking over the scar left by the obliterated tower. Why had it been left in that state? Forty years had passed. Why not remove it, rebuild it, overwrite it? Was it meant as a memorial? Or a symbol, perhaps; proof that nothing was lasting.

  The second tower hove into view. The car pitched sharply, decelerated, and bumped out a landing. The driver did not get out, but stuck his arm out of the window, reaching to open the back door that way. Shard got out onto the landing bay and went forward to speak to him. An apology was clearly not going to be forthcoming but there would at least be an explanation. Before he could demand it, he heard voices shouting his name. He looked across the roof to see yet another pack heading his way, banners aloft. Forgetting the driver, he turned on Lowe. “What in the name of hell are they doing here?”

  “I’ve absolutely no idea –”

  “How do we get inside? Come on, man, quickly!”

  Lowe looked around helplessly. Shard, meanwhile, had sighted a metal door set in a concrete block about twenty paces away. If memory served correctly, this should provide access to the stairwell. He took Lowe’s arm and shoved him that way. “Over there. Get a move on!”

  They were halfway there when the door opened. A slight figure leaned out and began gesturing to them frantically to come that way. Lowe reached the door first; Shard, panting, just after. He pushed Lowe inside and slammed the door shut behind him. Moments later, there was a hammering on it, but these doors had been built to survive bombardment and siege. A handful of grubby activists should prove no problem. Satisfied, for the moment, that he was safe, Shard turned his wrath upon the new arrival. “How did they get up here? Who let them in?”

  Their saviour – a slight, androgynous youth – stared in frank alarm past Shard’s shoulder at the barricaded door. “Christ, that was close!”

  Shard exploded. He stuck his finger in the youth’s face. “If you’re trying to shake me, it won’t bloody work! Nothing you people threw at me ever shook me! Do you hear me? Nothing!”

  There was a short charged silence. Lowe nervously cleared his throat. As it began to occur to Shard that he might not be entirely in control, he heard slow footsteps coming up the metal steps. From out of the shadowy stairwell, another figure emerged. It was an old woman. Shard looked her up and down, was about to dismiss her – but curiosity got the better of him. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Marshal,” she said. “I’m Ines de Souza. You can stop shouting now.”

  In the lift down into the main body of the tower, de Souza gave Shard his explanation. “Most of the building is public access, but we cordoned off the secondary landing bay in advance of your arrival. For some reason, your driver elected to land at the main bay.”

  Lowe said, “It really is very irregular –”

  De Souza looked him up and down and then looked away. Shard winced. “I can make a formal apology,” she said, “if that would help.”

  “Don’t trouble yourself, ma’am,” Shard said, in a quieter voice than he had used in several days. “No harm was done.”

  De Souza grunted in – dear God, was that approval? Shard eyed her. She was small and nut-brown, and dressed exceedingly badly in a long patterned skirt in green and gold, a pale blue cotton shirt, and scuffed sandals. Slung across her right shoulder was a dilapidated hessian bag which bore a bright orange flower stitched on with pink thread. The bag was stuffed to bursting with papers, many of them yellowed. Shard had expected an elegant academic, perhaps, or a trim administrator. Not confusion, disarray, poverty. Most startling to his eyes was how old she looked. One did not see that within the Commonwealth anymore; one had to be poor, or as sick as Forshaw. Shard took heart. Whatever had happened, Roby remained the poor relation.

  The lift doors opened onto a dim unfurnished corridor. If this was freedom, Shard thought, as they walked along it, he would rather be rich. His good spirits did not last: at the end of the corridor, de Souza led him into a room which for all the world looked exactly like a torture chamber.

  Liberation +39.75 years

  After Xanadu, Shard’s fury flourished. He was a new man, fired with a new purpose – the unmaking of Gabriel Forshaw. He lost no time in responding to the Archive and agreeing to an interview. His greatest fear now was that Forshaw might cheat him, dying before Shard had the chance to give his version of events. He even offered to go to Roby, rather than risk the inevitable delay that would be involved in getting permission for his interviewers to enter Commonwealth space. Friendly they all might be these days, or nearly, but one should never forget the provenance even of one’s friends.

  There was a gap of several weeks before the Archive re
plied; a period during which Shard monitored the obituary feeds compulsively. Forshaw – thank God – was not dead by the time de Souza replied agreeing to his visit. The morning after, Lowe arrived unasked on Shard’s doorstep, sent from the Bureau to assist him. “These are delicate times,” Lowe explained, perched on Shard’s sofa like a dapper heron, handling his cup and saucer with fastidious care. “Relations between us are finely balanced, and it is to the benefit of all that nothing happens to disturb that balance.”

  Presumably he was a spy, but that at least meant he might come in useful. Shard took out the file containing all his correspondence with de Souza and threw it over. The cup slipped in Lowe’s grasp, splashing tea into his saucer, but he steadied it. “If you want to help,” Shard said, “find out what this one got up to during the war.”

  A tall order. Secrecy lingered over the files from that period like flies above a shallow grave. Nonetheless, Lowe returned in a matter of days. “She worked with children. Specifically orphans, resettling them after the war. After that she was a history teacher in Salvation and for the past twelve years she has been co-ordinating their Archive.”

  “What about before the war?”

  “There’s nothing from then.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Date and place of birth, who owned her bond… There’s no reason why there should be anything else. Not everyone on Roby was directly involved in hostilities.”

  Shard grunted. He had never made that mistake. Every last one of them had been either a threat or a threat in the making.

  “But we do have one concern,” Lowe said.

  “Get on with it.”

  “Her name appears on several of the extradition requests we received in the twenties.” There had been a rash of them back then. They asked for Shard on numerous occasions; once or twice, they had even asked for Forshaw. The people of Roby certainly had no trouble determining their enemies. “Our strong advice is that you reconsider travelling to Roby –”

  “No.”

  “She’s not on any outstanding blacklist. She can travel here.”

  “That would take too long.”

  “We have no jurisdiction in Roby –”

  “Do you know, I remember there was a war fought about that –”

  “And you have no diplomatic immunity –”

  “For God’s sake, man, enough! What you’re saying is that if anything goes wrong out there I’m on my own?”

  Lowe pressed a fingertip delicately against the side of his nose. “You have all the protections that any citizen of the Commonwealth can expect, of course. But if there is trouble out there, we might not be in a position to help you.”

  “You mean you don’t want to kick up the diplomatic stink it would need?”

  Shard watched grimly as Lowe struggled to come up with a form of language acceptable to them both. “Times have changed, Marshal. We are no longer enemies and there is the strong possibility that we might become friends. Many of their current organizers were born after the war –”

  This was enough. “Do you really believe they think of us as friends in the making?” Shard said. “They hated us. They will hate us till the end. Every last one of them. If you’d been there, if you’d seen how it was there, you’d understand that. Have you all gone mad at the Bureau? Is there anyone looking out for us these days? Or have you bought into your own propaganda? We fought a war with these people, man! We killed them in their hundreds of thousands, and they would have done the same to us if they’d had the capability. This new generation has been taught by the last. If you and your masters believe this is over, you’re living in a fantasy land.”

  Lowe, uncomfortable, had looked away. He was tweaking his cuffs, unnecessarily. “You’re free to do whatever you choose, of course. But the Commonwealth is now looking to advance its friendship with the people of Roby.” He stretched his hands out in appeal to some final authority. “That’s policy.”

  For one shattering second, Shard surveyed his life, and he saw how all that had once mattered now counted for nothing. Worse than nothing – it was, as Forshaw had said, an embarrassment. His heart burned within him. Even shame would be better, he thought; that at least would accord some significance to all that had happened, all that had been suffered. But they had not even earned that recognition. They were an embarrassment. “Damn you all,” he whispered, thinly, like a voice in the wilderness. “But you won’t stop me going! I will have my say, before the end.”

  Lowe barely covered a sigh. “I’m sure you will, Marshal. But I wonder – who do you imagine is listening?”

  Liberation +40 years

  It was not the bareness of the room that had struck Shard, although it was bare – a table, two chairs, grey walls and a carpetless floor, and a single small window through which light passed feebly to reveal the dust swirling slowly. It was how the room was equipped.

  The chairs were set in opposition, the table between them, and behind each place stood a diptych of screens, positioned at a slight angle to each other. Four screens in total, two on each side. Each of them was connected by a veritable web of cables to two small black boxes, one at either end of the table. Attached to each of these was a set of sensors, one for the arm, two for each temple. Shard recognized every last piece of this equipment; what surprised him was that it was duplicated. That was not the usual arrangement.

  “Forgive the accommodation,” de Souza said, dumping her bag on the table. It slumped under the weight of its contents. She followed his look around the room. “I imagine you recognize all this. Your people left it all behind.”

  Unhurriedly, her bag fell over. Papers spilled out onto the floor. “Blast,” she said, without rancour. She leaned one hand on the table and started to lower herself down, but her aide got there first, kneeling to gather her scattered works and then holding them out to her like an offering. “Bless you, Jay,” she said, and sat down, with a sigh. “Have a seat, Marshal.”

  “Can I get you anything, Ines?” the youth said. “Tea?”

  “Tea, yes, yes – thank you. Please, Marshal,” this with a touch of asperity, “have a seat. It’s exhausting watching you standing to attention. You’ll be giving me your name and number next.”

  Shard made a sweeping gesture that took in the screens, the sensors, the blood flow monitors. “Is that my safest option?”

  “All this? Nothing to lose sleep over.” Deftly, as if this was something she had done countless times before, de Souza began to hook herself up. She rolled up her sleeve, fixing a sensor against her upper arm with an armband. “You must have seen a psycho-imager in use before, surely? While you were here, if not since?”

  Shard stiffened. He gripped the back of his chair and his knuckles turned white. “Mme de Souza, it is a matter of record that I did not conduct any interrogations on Roby. If you’re looking to trap me that way you’ll have to try considerably harder.”

  De Souza, who had been about to attach the other two sensors to her temples, halted with her hand halfway up to her face. “Trap you? You have a very strange idea of what I’m doing here, Marshal. I’m hardly fit for mortal combat, am I?” She finished attaching the sensors. “If I were you I’d sit down in your chair and stop trying to second-guess me. I’m only going to ask you a few questions.”

  Hooked up, de Souza turned her attention to the black box on her right, playing with dials and switches. “Useless bloody… Ah! There we are!” A green light flickered and, behind her, on the left-hand screen, an image appeared, grainy at first, and then coming slowly into focus. It was a sunflower – joyful and riotously bright against the uniform grey wall. Shard glanced over his shoulder: yes, there it was, on the left-hand screen behind him.

  “On my mind,” she said. “No luck with them. Top-heavy.”

  “Try propping them up against a wall,” Shard said faintly. He took his seat, uncomfortably conscious of the two screens behind him and what they might reveal. “But one that gets light. And not too much water. It
loosens the soil so it can’t bear the weight.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind next time. Thank you.”

  Shard examined the second set of sensors on the table in front of him. He picked up the armband. “Marshal,” Lowe said urgently, “I strongly advise against this –”

  “It’s strange how things work out,” de Souza said. “These little devices turned out to be a godsend. I never would have thought that, given what they were used for before Liberation. What we found was that they got people round the table who didn’t trust each other and showed them exactly what it was they could expect from each other.” Behind her, the sunflower transformed into a rapid series of images – memories, Shard imagined – of people gathered round tables, shouting, debating. Back home, they had predicted civil war on Roby; had considered the potential of a humanitarian mission. It hadn’t happened. “If you can’t hide what you’re thinking,” de Souza said, “you’d better have a way of justifying it. And of course, we couldn’t have built the Archive without them.”

  The picture altered. Shard realized that he was seeing from her perspective as she sat at this table, looking back at the place where he was now, talking to another old man, an old man thinking about the war. What else was there? “Not just to document the order of events,” she said, “but to archive the personal recollections, the individual impressions of that time. The marching songs, the stump speeches. I doubt we got the half of it. We suffer from a surfeit of history on Roby.” And she showed him the essence of it: what it was like to crawl out from beneath a pile of bodies, to watch a plantation burn, to see armed men line up in advance of opening fire upon you. “But what never ceased to amaze me,” she said, “was how often people said it was the best time of their life. Because they were young and active, I imagine. Committed to something bigger than themselves. Is that how it was with you, Marshal? Was it the best time of your life?”