Total Conflict

by Neal Asher

  Welcome Home, Janissary

  Tim C. Taylor

  Sergeant Escandala McEwan dodged out of her feint to deliver a sweeping kick at Horden’s legs, pivoting on a gauntleted hand attracted to the Osman Bey’s charged outer hull. She committed all her momentum to this one attack.

  Her rival for command, Sergeant Horden, jumped out of the way, an instinctive reaction strong enough to break the electrostatic attraction sticking his boots to the hull.

  An electric thrill of victory surged through Escandala. It hadn’t been the kick that won the zero-gee duel fought without thrust packs, but the leap she had forced out of Horden. With only vacuum to push against, he had no means to resist gravity’s tendrils reaching for him from Akinschet, the gas giant tens of thousands of klicks away

  Reinforcements from out-system always meant change. When Horden’s four hundred human marines had arrived to fill the squadron’s gaps, they had brought trouble too. Dangerous ideas about helping Earth were spreading through Commodore Gjalp’s marines.

  No! He can’t!

  But he had… Horden had suckered her, exaggerating his leap. He’d simply lifted his legs but kept his center of gravity just above the hull. Meanwhile Escandala’s kick was still following its arc toward him. She scrabbled for a firmer hold, grunting with effort. Horden was fighting for prestige and influence, but for Escandala this was all about her son. She had to win.

  But how? She had already converted all the tension stored in her limbs into the thrust behind her kick.

  Horden locked his legs around hers. His added mass slowed her scything motion then snatched away her weak grip on the hull and flung them both into space, circling each other as if dancing.

  Inside her battlesuit, Escandala felt her shoulders slump when she traced forward the pattern of their dance and saw Horden’s victory there. When the slow motion choreography reached its climax, Horden grabbed hold of the communication boom and released his grip on her legs.

  Escandala floated away from the Osman Bey, her cramped world for the last 48 years. She tumbled into the void in nothing but her suit.

  All the humans in the squadron watched her defeat.

  She stealthed her suit and drifted. As victor, Horden was now the senior marine NCO, in command of the human marines in the system.

  No one would dare describe him as a commander, of course. Only Jotuns could be officers, and if humans ever forgot that, executions would surely follow. Escandala had been made to pull the trigger herself, once.

  She sighed. Someone had to take charge, and she had no concerns about his ability as commander; the Jotuns would never have let him challenge for leadership unless they considered him fit. Horden’s perverse attitude of allegiance to Earth bothered her far more.

  The people of Earth had sold the ancestors of every human here as breeding stock, the price of patronage demanded by the masters, the White Knights. It had been a President Horden who had signed the Accession Treaty on behalf of all humanity. Sergeant Horden claimed to be the president’s many-times descendent. True or not, he brought dangerous ideas to the slave-soldiers of the Corps.

  “Please, Little Bird. De-stealth so we can bring you home quickly.” The voice relayed through her helmet speaker belonged to One-Ear, the alien officer responsible for training human marines on the Osman Bey. His Jotun palette clicked as he tried to articulate human speech, sounding like a human boy with his throat half ripped out. “I am sorry you must relinquish your position as senior NCO.”

  “Horden is welcome to that burden.” Escandala was happy to let her voice betray her position. Hiding was not a serious proposition.

  “That is good,” said the Jotun. “You have seven months remaining in defense of Akinschet. Then we return home to Tranquility where you have to give up your son. Horden’s victory means you can spend more of those last months with Zenothon.”

  She laughed, a cracked sound that swamped her helmet with bitterness. When they had taken away her twins, Fraser and Arun, her aching loss had been buttressed with pride. With Zenothon her feelings were too tangled to make out.

  Six years ago, breathless and sweat-drenched, she had shared an irrepressible smile with the gurgling, messy bundle floating nearby in the birthing cocoon. Still secured by a natural umbilical tether, their bond had been unconditional. Since then, not only had the servants of the White Knights cut the cord, they had done things to her boy.

  “Did I speak inappropriately?” Poor One-Ear sounded worried, though who could really guess what an alien felt?

  Gunner Valthrudnir, as One-Ear insisted humans address him, had always been kind. And the Jotun officers were just as much slaves of the White Knights as the humans. She pictured the seven-foot high furry hexaped, good ear erect in concern, contorting his throat painfully to converse in human tongue.

  “Your words are not inappropriate,” she replied. “Merely inaccurate. Now I get to spend more time with Zeno, sure. But that’s why it meant so much that I beat Horden. I want to keep as far away as possible from my son.” A shiver traveled Escandala’s spine. “Zeno scares the life out of me.”

  “Don’t you want to play with the other Osman Bey kids?” Escandala nodded toward the children rampaging back and forth over the gravitoid’s hillocks. Mixed in with them were kids from the Garuda, the other TU currently docked with the Sleeve. Giggles and simulated explosions vibrated through the thin belt of atmosphere coating the artificial worldlet.

  “No, Momma,” said Zenothon, frowning gravely. “Not just yet. This might be the last time we spend on the gravitoid before we go to Tranquility and the Jotuns upgrade me to become a man. I sense this worries you.”

  Escandala suppressed a shudder. Zenothon’s augmentations allowed him to read her feelings like a viewscreen and write his own emotions at will. What was it like to interpret sweat and body temperature and other physical tells, considering such analysis to be as natural as his other senses? The kids even communicated using targeted nano-packets which delivered tailored cocktails of hormones. Gifting. That’s what Zenothon called it.

  Inhuman was his mother’s word for what the children could do.

  “I have made you a model,” said Zenothon. “Do you like it?”

  Escandala guessed her son issued some kind of command signal from his head. From behind a hillock, a half-meter long model of a Sleeve floated toward them, taking up a holding position above her head. The Sleeve itself was a container vessel, a hollow mesh tube containing the spherical tactical units and the gravitoid. A flattened bulge around the middle of the tube contained the command and FTL communication section. Globular engines for interstellar travel took the rear, and the cone-shaped nose housed the gravity lens shield which prevented the seemingly empty vacuum of deep space from turning into a lethal radiation bath at near-lightspeed velocities.

  Zenothon’s model Sleeve shepherded six spherical TUs and a similar sized bumpy globe with a shimmering illusion of atmosphere.

  “It’s our Sleeve,” she said. “Very impressive.”

  Zenothon moved the model in front of her face. “Look. There’s the Osman Bey in front.” Green letters on the hull spelled out the name. “Then behind us, we’ve got Thermopylae and the new TUs that joined us with Sergeant Horden: Dreamwalker, Jade Buddha, and Great Cycle. At the end, I’ve modeled the gravitoid where we’re standing right now.”

  Escandala tried to smile but then quickly dropped the pretense. Zenothon was more perceptive than a human had any right to be. She made to give him a hug, but decided the time for such human affection had passed. She squeezed his shoulder instead. “You’ll be moved to a real planet soon.”

  “Tranquility. I wished I was being moved to Earth. Everyone’s talking about that. Christophe even showed me pictures Sergeant Horden sneaked past the knowledge filters.”

  Escandala sucked in her breath sharply. “Let’s not take things that don’t belong to us. Especially from that man. He’ll cause trouble, mark my words.”

  “I’m sorr
y Sergeant Horden bested you, Momma.”

  “That’s not important.”

  Her little boy looked up and shook his head, disappointed. “Please don’t lie, Momma. I can interpret the micro-tremors in your voice. I know you are fibbing. Please, hold my hand.”

  Like the rest of his generation, Zenothon carried a matrix of subcutaneous implants and these now injected a small army of nanobots through Escandala’s skin, seeking her hypothalamus to deliver their cargo of effector triggers. Her glands began to sing to each other in a harmonious cascade of wellbeing that resonated through her bloodstream.

  Her mind rebelled. These feelings were not her own. She had been programmed, and by the thing her son had become.

  “How can you do this?” she shouted, snatching her hand away. “You’re not even human.”

  Zenothon said nothing, merely observing as Escandala backed away. Then, just for a moment, his eyes reddened and moistened. But the emotion was quickly repaired. Zenothon spoke calmly. “I am sorry if you feel I have failed you in some way. I was never trained to socialize with humans who have your... limited means of communication.”

  Escandala did not even want to know what Zenothon meant. “You’re only six,” she wailed. “You shouldn’t think like that.”

  “You talk of ‘six years’, as if everyone’s mind works to the same clock. That may have been true for earlier generations. The meddies told us that...”

  Escandala had no interest in what the medics said. “You aren’t human,” she said quietly. “I don’t want anything more to do with you.”

  And then she was running, fleeing her son.

  The two war fleets faced-off across the corridor through the minefield surrounding Akinschet and its mineral-rich moon, Utgard. The safe passage was filled with laser-blurring aerosol. Soon, Escandala’s tactical unit warboat would break the lull by bursting through the corridor from the planet side.

  Her squadron was here to ensure the mass driver on Utgard continued to slingshot chunks of refined heavy elements around the local star and out along the interstellar trade routes to fulfill supply contracts, a journey of a thousand years. It scared her to think how the White Knights operated on such inhuman timescales.

  But then so too did their enemy: the Muranyi Accord.

  Escandala studied the Muranyi deployment in the tac-display beamed to her helmet, but that only deepened her unease. It was all wrong. Why was the enemy floating there, as if waiting?

  Survival in ship-to-ship combat depended on speed, and the ability to change velocity rapidly. Instead of shooting through the corridor at a respectable fraction of c, the seventeen enemy vessels had slowed to a halt just outside, like an ancient blockade of a narrow water channel.

  The White Knight’s little empire had been fighting this border war with the Muranyi Accord for seven centuries, but Escandala had never seen tactical records of attacking starships or warboats sitting still.

  This had to be a trap.

  She waited hour upon hour, alone in her gray launch chamber. Overt physical needs were catered for by plumbing directed inside her body openings, yet she still suffered anguish from the pain of forced inaction. Every primitive instinct demanded she fight or flee, and still she waited.

  Zenothon wouldn’t have to live this nightmare when his turn came to wait in an EVA chute. With his freaky control over his body chemistry, he had been engineered to feel whatever he wanted, or had been ordered to feel. This, according to the Jotuns, was the principal reason why the White Knights reworked their client species. The Jotuns left dark hints too of the White Knights’ obsession with forced mutation, speculating that Utgard might be seeded with mutagens.

  In order to protect this mining world, Gjalp had detailed three of his Sleeves to attack the enemy directly. The rest of the squadron kept a fast orbit of Akinschet.

  After Escandala had waited twenty-one hours in the launch chute, events unfolded in rapid escalation. In the tac-display showing in her visor, narrow blue course projections sprang toward her from the enemy markers. They fattened steadily as the Muranyi ships sped up.

  The Osman Bey set off, the violent acceleration slamming her back into the buffer gel in her suit, and pushing her suit against the semi-intelligent amniotic fluid that filled the launch chamber. Despite all this protection, several marines would black out at some point during hard maneuvering. She was determined she would not be going into combat unconscious.

  The tac-display reported the enemy ships hurtling through the aerosol corridor to be Type-47 cruisers: big starships but constructed many objective centuries ago, and no match for the nimble TUs. The intruders wouldn’t have floated there in space unless they possessed some secret advantage, a trap that Gjalp had tasked Osman Bey to spring for the greater benefit of the squadron.

  A missile lock alarm pinged in her helmet, followed by an image of green missile attack paths zigzagging their way toward her.

  Escandala ignored the missiles. Not her problem. If they hit, they hit. She would never know.

  She concentrated on the shape of the Muranyi box formation. Two ships at each vertex and a larger Type-60 ‘colony buster’ in the center.

  Eight of the eleven marine TUs were each paired with one of the enemy ships in the nearest face of the enemy’s box. The Osman Bey, though, was to destroy the colony buster, running the additional risk of crossfire. This was not completely a forlorn hope because Thermopylae and Dreamwalker hung back alongside Osman Bey to act as her flank shields.

  The first wave of TUs ejected a constant confusion of chaff as they split up to close with their target assignments. Escandala tensed when they left the safety of the aerosol corridor and sheltered instead behind the chaff thrown out by Thermopylae and Dreamwalker. An orange flash bottom-left of her display warned that her EVA suit had administered a medical patch.

  Immediately, she needed to kill, the battle lust inspired by a crude hormonal adjustment forced into her endocrine system by the patch’s combat drugs.

  Defensive munitions obscured the TUs. The Muranyi tracking lasers couldn’t find the clear path they needed to trigger the massive increase in beam power that would burn through armor.

  A blue shimmer grew around the Osman Bey in her tac-display. Gunner Skaldi must have initiated a sweep of Osman Bey’s Fermi cannons.

  Fermi levels surged in all matter caught within the focus of the beams. Electrons imprisoned for centuries inside predictable energy functions now frolicked in hitherto unobtainable conduction bands. The semiconductor materials in the missile guidance systems suddenly became conductors, ruining them utterly. If chance brought the now aimless missiles too close, Osman Bey’s defensive munitions would clear them away.

  Osman Bey and its two shield maidens accelerated toward the Muranyi flagship, zigzagging to the limits of their crew’s physiology, still desperately throwing out chaff.

  Thermopylae disappeared from the tac-display. It could have been due to a hidden missile or momentary weakness in her chaff system. Whatever the cause, forty-eight humans and five Jotuns, Escandala’s comrades for decades, were dead.

  She tried to care, but couldn’t. All she wanted was to kill.

  The pressure on her back ceased momentarily as the Osman Bey’s outer propulsion shell spun through 180 degrees, then the crushing force smashed her chest and transfixed her groin. After a thirty-second torrent of hammer blows came an instant of blissful weightlessness… before a squeezing sensation rippled through her as she was vented into chaff-filled space. The shower of amniotic fluid froze instantly into a glittering amber halo.

  Then the TUs accelerated away, leaving Escandala in hard vacuum a few hundred meters away from an enemy warship powerful enough to sterilize an entire planet.

  She was alone, cut off by strict communication silence from the 31 other marines sphinctered from Osman Bey. Stealth suits rendered them invisible. Even the exhaust from her SA-71 assault carbine and the thrust pack pushing her toward the nose of the target ship were cooled to am
bient temperature, with the accumulating excess heat stored in energy batteries.

  She could stay hidden this way for days before the batteries reached full capacity, and hiding was something Horden had ordered her to do. She was one of ten marines ordered to act as a reserve, responding as they saw fit to enemy anti-personnel defense.

  There came a flicker in her peripheral vision. She tilted position and magnified the image. It looked like a ripe seed pod exploding its contents in a gust of wind, but the seeds were jagged scraps of ceramic accompanied by the fragments of frozen blood and viscera from her comrades caught in its blast.

  More flashes now, but the deadly blooms around the hull of the enemy ship did not contain human corpses this time. The enemy was firing at random.

  “They’re making a sally out onto the hull,” said one of the marines though her helmet speaker. “Sweeping from aft—”

  The voice cut off abruptly. Escandala flew from her position near the ship’s nose to hover over the dimpled cylinder that was its main hull section. From the far side of the ship, white-suited quadrupeds — Muranyi marines — had attached swivel-mounted heavy weapons to the hull and were spraying the area in front of them with a hail of lead bullets and dye. A half dozen human marines, made visible by the sticky yellow dye, were now dancing under the lash of the bullets.

  She shouted a primordial battle-cry in the privacy of her helmet and then took off to close with the enemy.

  Below her, Muranyi marines were moving to clear the hull of bacteria bombs left by the humans. She headed for the enemy bullet-and-dye weapons now aiming their fire into space. Their aim was blind but not random. They employed search patterns to seek the hidden human marines. So far, though, the stealthing technology had defeated them.

  Escandala showered them with black kinetic darts fired from her carbine in railgun mode, her battlesuit doing its best to apply thrust to counter the modest recoil. She didn’t need accurate fire anyway because the enemy gun teams were static.