The Soldier

by Neal Asher

  “Where the hell is my wife?” said Trike, something vicious in his voice.

  Angel held up one sharp finger, still reviewing the excised memories. “Where did you find them?” he asked.

  “She had a memcording ruby set into a pendant,” Trike supplied tersely. “I found it in our home on Spatterjay.”

  As Angel thought—he had been right to force Trike to retrieve the memcording. Spatterjay was an oceanic world named after its discoverer, a pirate called Spatterjay Hoop, and its human inhabitants were called hoopers. It was a primitive place, and hunting down a mem-cording there would have been a futile exercise. A virus that infected people there made them outrageously strong, dangerous, and contrary, which would have increased Angel’s difficulties. But the main problem was that the Polity kept a watchful eye on the world of the volatile hoopers.

  There . . .

  Angel could see why Ruth had excised these memories. Part of the deal when she sold the cache of Jain artefacts had been for her to forget about them absolutely. The buyer had wanted no comebacks from the Polity AIs, who frowned on such things. But now Angel knew who the buyer was and where to find him. Directing it with a thought, Angel unravelled the tangled mass around the naked woman, and remaining tendrils suspended her limp corpse before him. There was some bacterial decay, he noted, despite the low-pressure helium argon atmosphere in here. Had she allowed herself to be bitten by a Spatterjay leech—the usual infection vector of the virus—as her husband Trike had wanted, things would have been different. Firstly she would not have died so easily under Angel’s ministrations, and by now the virus would have been making strange alterations to her form. This was usually what happened when a hooper human received major physical injury—a survival mechanism of the virus as it struggled to keep its host alive.

  “Payment will be with you shortly,” he said to the Captain, thinking how Ruth Ottinger’s deal had made her, in human terms, disgustingly rich. That wouldn’t do her much good now.

  So what to do? Revive her and dispatch her over to Trike as promised, or not?

  The Wheel did not approve of this. He could feel its agitation as it turned in the dark half of his metallic skull and seemed somehow to draw closer.

  Angel shivered. It was idle speculation really. Part of the cruel games he liked to play which, in themselves, he felt might be a legacy of the intimate connection he’d had with his creator . . . surely just that. Like the game he had played with Trike’s wife.

  No, in reality Trike knew too much and could not be allowed to live. Angel dispatched a recording of what he had done to the man’s wife, then swung back to look at Trike’s image on the screen as he watched it. Trike’s expression went briefly wild and then hardened into immobility as tears welled in his eyes. Soft human. Angel was not sure where that thought arose from, because Trike could hardly be described as soft. He shivered again. Trike had to know this was not going to end well for either his wife or him. He had to have known he was never going to get her back, and that if he did what Angel required of him, there was only one payment.

  They are inferior . . .

  Angel sneered to himself, more sure now. Creatures like Trike were not worthy of their power and position in the universe. Nor were the AIs of the Polity. Nor were the prador. It was right and proper that their time was now drawing to an end. Angel blinked and tried to visualize that end. The defence sphere around the infested accretion disc would be broken and Jain technology would be free to overrun the Polity and the Prador Kingdom. He felt the certainty of this, but the details remained vague. He knew this lack of clarity should bother him, but then it just drifted from his mind.

  The Wheel receded.

  “So,” said Trike, his expression going unexpectedly blank. “As I predicted.”

  “Why did you do as I asked?” Angel enquired.

  “Because I loved her,” Trike replied, “and I had to know for sure that you’d killed her.”

  “Now you know, and very soon you will be able to experience a similar end.” Angel held out his long, metallic and sharp-fingered hands. Two tendrils rose up over them like snakes, and struck, penetrating the palms and connecting him to his ship. “Though,” Angel added, “you being an old hooper, I expect things will be more protracted and interesting.”

  “Come get me, fucker.” Trike showed his teeth, like he wanted to

  bite.

  Now fully engaged, and bathed in approval, Angel powered up his ship. All around him the tangled mass of the wormship began to writhe and slither. Pushing on the very fabric of space, it shot out from the shadow of a rocky planetoid. Three-foot-wide worms broke away from its surface and began to reach for Trike’s ship. In response, he turned his ship on a hard blast of overpowered steering thrusters and fired up its fusion engine. Angel saw that the drive flame would cause some minor damage to the wormship but considered it of no consequence. It would take only a few days for the ship to repair itself and, once it had digested Trike’s vessel, its mass, resources and overall power would be greater.

  The wormship hurtled through vacuum, deforming and writhing. Trike’s ship was seemingly stationary in comparison, even though it was under heavy acceleration. The man’s image remained on Angel’s screen. Angry, crazy. Just a few seconds now.

  With a crash that resounded throughout the wormship, it slammed home on Trike’s old attack barge. Through numerous sensors Angel watched atmosphere explode from the side of the vessel as it bent almost in half. The flames from its fusion drive played like a thermic lance over the invading worm coils, burning them away to expose their glittering inner workings, before stuttering out. New worms speared in, grinding tool faces over the other ship and stripping away hull. They scanned for Trike’s exact location, so they could drag him out intact.

  But his image on the screen lost its angry devastated look, and he now smiled weirdly. He wasn’t there.

  “Do you think I didn’t prepare?” he said.

  Angel had time to realize just how badly he had erred before Trike’s ship exploded in nuclear fire. In that moment, in the dark half of Angel’s mind, the Wheel shimmered and folded out of existence.

  At the white-hot core of the explosion all sensors blanked and the blast wave slammed out, incinerating the structures around it. But wormships were tough, which was why the Polity had experienced so much trouble with them in the past. And, despite his stupid miscalculation and loss of a guiding intelligence, Angel was wily.

  Tendrils began to seal around him rapidly, forming a mesh cage. As it was closing he sent another instruction for the tendrils to pull in the corpse of Trike’s wife. The cage closed around them both, and small protective hardfields flickered on all over its surface, giving it the appearance of a cut gem. Now disconnected from his ship, Angel and the corpse tumbled through fire, laceworks of molten metal and fragments of the ship’s wormish structure scattered all around them.

  TRIKE

  The blast had ignited just inside the wormship and ripped through it. It destroyed everything near Trike’s vessel, while the rest, more than half of the wormship, came apart like a mass of spaghetti hurled from a plate. Engulfed in fire, it unravelled and squirmed as if in pain, spreading out into a long curve writhing still as the blast wave moved beyond it. But the dispersed mass of anguine forms that remained still stayed connected. “Did you get the fucker?” asked Cogulus.

  The intricate wormship tangle seemed to write words across vacuum that Trike was just on the edge of understanding. As he stood trying to decipher them he heard Cog harrumph and wander off to drop into his throne-like chair. The familiar sounds of a pipe being scraped, then stoked with sticky black tobacco began to bring Trike back into the moment. Next came the crackling of tobacco heated by a laser lighter and the smell filled the air, fragrant, a reminder of past times. Trike felt his eyes pricking with tears but he forced them down. Hardening himself, he hunched his shoulders and thrust his hands deeper into his pockets, his gaze still fixed on the display.

&nb
sp; “I don’t know,” he said.

  They had known each other for a mere ten years on Spatterjay—from the first sailing ship Trike had served on—and Trike had trusted the man completely. They remained in contact when Cog, as he always did, made another trip away from that world. Just a few months ago, nearly a century after their last meeting, Trike had been sure Cog would help him, no matter the danger, and Cog had not disappointed.

  “Ruth?” Cog asked.

  Trike glanced round at him, puzzled for a moment by the question, then he realized what the man was getting at. He closed his eyes for a second. Yes, she was still there or, rather, the U-mitter device inside her skull was still intact. And it was out there in that tangled mass.

  “Yes,” was all he said.

  After a short expectant silence, Cog grunted. A moment later the bridge door opened and closed as he left the room. Trike continued to watch as the explosion cooled. His expression was blank and bore no reflection of the turmoil he felt inside, as the strewn mass of the worm-ship began to draw itself back together. Maybe it would have been better if he had stayed aboard his own ship, then he wouldn’t feel like he was coming apart. One moment he felt nostalgic emotion, suppressed it, then paranoia, and now the giggling craziness he had known throughout his life was rising up again inside him. He took his hands out of his pockets and saw that the two ring-shaped blue scars there from leech bites, denizens of his home world, were livid, as they usually were when he was on edge.

  He swung his gaze to the ship’s main screen and looked out across the cratered regolith and weird ice sculptures of the planetoid they were hidden on. Up in starlit space he could see the dull glow of the explosion. He wanted to call Angel to see if he was still alive, but even if he was there was no guarantee that he would reply. Also, though Trike had badly damaged the wormship, it was still very dangerous. He had to be sensible; he had to keep himself under control. If Angel was alive and began searching for him, he would surely penetrate the chameleonware hiding Cog’s ship down here on the surface. Trike might care little for his own life now, but he should at least care about Cog.

  On the display, the wormship continued to pull itself back together, snaring reachable debris as it did so. The thing was tough and Trike’s lack of knowledge about it frustrated him. His searches of the AI net had revealed little that was useful. Two-and-a-half centuries ago there had been some kind of AI police action on the Polity border. Rogue AIs had been involved, as well as Jain technology. The Polity had won, wiping out the opposing forces. There were image files available and information about battle tactics, but all of it was heavily redacted and provided little in the way of technical detail. From his reading of the information, Trike was sure the redaction had less to do with hiding detail about the enemy and its capabilities and more with concealing information about the Polity ships and weapons involved.

  A while later Cog returned and plonked himself down in his throne.

  “It’s re-assembling,” he commented.

  “Yes . . .”

  “Maybe you didn’t get him.”

  Trike forced himself to engage. He swung round to face Cog. “So what should we do now?” he asked, tightly under control.

  Cog was a very Old Captain from the seas of Spatterjay. He was short, and appeared to be fat—a jolly little man who, unusually for an Old Captain, had managed to retain a head of curly brown hair. He was mild and calm, laughed a lot, and was capable of breaking advanced Polity hull armour with his hands.

  After drawing on his pipe then blowing a perfect smoke ring, he stated, “Listen boy, you wanted your revenge.”

  Trike nodded dumbly.

  “And it ain’t confirmed.”

  “Quite,” said Trike.

  Cog pointed at the display with the stem of his pipe. “Then when that thing has finished pulling itself together, we follow it. Another opportunity will arise.”

  “If Angel’s alive and doesn’t find the U-mitter.” Trike had one inside his skull twinned with the device inside Ruth’s. “And if he doesn’t dispose of her remains.”

  “We can be patient, and careful, and we have more time than we can imagine.” Cog grinned, then shrugged. “If it takes a thousand years, what matter?”

  There was that. Neither of them were likely to die any day soon and, as time passed, they would only get stronger, unless the Spatterjay virus inside them underwent some kind of change no hooper had yet seen.

  And if Trike could hold his mind together for that long.

  ORLANDINE

  O rlandine had designed the small shuttle that enclosed her. She sat strapped into an acceleration chair, and two optic leads were plugged into two data sockets she had opened in her side. The chain-glass screen before her gave her a view out into space but all she could see at present were the steadily brightening stars. Functioning as a human, this would have been her only view, so why did she keep wanting to return to that state? It defied logic, and sometimes when she was operating at her highest level she did not understand the impulse. Yet it always returned.

  Now, closely linked into the systems she could control, she was able to gaze from any of tens of thousands of cams. Other sensor data was also available to her, so she could feel the temperature within the pressurized sections of the shipyard, or sense what a robot was feeling through its manipulators as it positioned a sheet of composite in the partially constructed weapons platform. She could detect the flash of electromagnetic radiation as a welder struck an arc, smell the aroma of hot food from a dispenser, and feel the fluctuations in a malfunctioning grav-plate that provided artificial gravity for human workers. She was also processing other data: statistics and logistics, the grumble of communications between computers, AIs, sub-AIs . . . the whole project lay in the grasp of her mind.

  However, right now, her focus was the accretion disc and what was happening there. Again she tried to open a channel to Dragon but again there was no reply, so instead she concentrated on the action and the defence-sphere response.

  The thing sliding out of the disc was eight miles long. Dark and crystalline, like a long chunk of smoky quartz, it was wrapped in what looked like the desiccated corpse of a pterodactyl. Meanwhile Dragon, now free of the Jain tech attacking its surface, drew its pseudopods back inside and heaved like a dog puking. A scan from Weapons Platform Mu revealed a cavity opening on Dragon’s surface, facing the accretion disc. An energy beam stabbed out of it, invisible in vacuum but blinding white when it hit gas and dust that reflected it. Orlandine knew about these full-spectrum white-light lasers. The ECS—Earth Central Security—Weapons Division had developed something similar, though none had yet been installed in the defence sphere.

  The beam struck the Jain-tech object emerging from the disc and played along its length. Chunks like immense bird bones and sheets of skin blasted away as the beam vaporized much of the enclosing, desiccated mass. Dragon then began firing intermittently, heaving with every emission that stabbed out. Chunks of black crystal exploded away. The AI on Platform Mu, Pragus, also opened fire and violet particle beams speared across vacuum. Drilling into the mass, they caused internal pressure explosions which cracked it apart. Meanwhile, via the Ghost Drive Facility on Jaskor, Orlandine was receiving updates from the other platforms. Jain-tech objects were coming out of the accretion disc elsewhere. Another four of these things had shown themselves, while in one area an immense swarm of objects like bats made of grey metal, each just three-feet across, was blasting out into open vacuum.

  Obviously, Dragon had stirred things up inside the disc but there was no intelligence involved in this excursion. Maybe, considering the reason for Dragon’s venture into the disc, some intelligence had caused this? Dragon had gone in because the mass of Jain tech gathered there allowed communication with ancient Jain AIs that were trapped in U-space—an effect that was yet to be understood. But Jain tech by itself did not possess intelligence, just an insentient will to live, procreate and spread. Only when it subsumed intelligence did it
become lethally dangerous. These objects emerging from the disc were like wasps swarming from a nest straight into the path of a flame thrower. Orlandine was enforcing quarantine. She was containing an infection, but it was one that must not be underestimated. The accretion disc was infested with Jain nodes—objects only an inch across. They were seeds for this technology, containing all its possibilities, and just one of them in the wrong hands could cause extensive damage to the Polity, if not destroy it. Orlandine did not underestimate Jain tech, because she knew it intimately.

  As she watched the distant action with one portion of her mind, she flew the shuttle with another, using its grav-motor and thrusters to turn it and bring the partially constructed weapons platform into view. At the moment, it was only a giant slab surrounded by pseudo-matter scaffolds and a mass of robots and handler vehicles. Though she could see all the data on its construction, she decided to make full contact with the AI that had recently been installed and communicate verbally—perhaps some hangover from her human time.

  “Construction is getting further and further behind, I see,” she said.

  “Supply problems,” replied the AI, who had recently named itself Magus—a format of naming that was becoming a bit of a tradition here.

  The platform slid past. Orlandine eyed the factory lying beyond it—a blockish chunk of hardware two miles across that resembled an antique printing press. Two big haulers were moored to it. These ships were penny-shaped vessels with cuboid structures under-slung and protruding from the back to contain both U-drive and crew quarters—the rest of the vessel being cargo space. They were presently pumping materials into the factory: elemental dusts, specially designed liquids containing builder nanites, which were programmable nano-machines capable of building a variety of components, and complex hydrocarbons. These materials were rare here, with more common bulk supplies generally obtained within the Jaskoran solar system. Thinking of those, Orlandine flung her gaze outwards millions of miles, to where machines were deconstructing asteroids to load onto big spherical smelting plants and from there onto ships bringing in ingots of metals, silicon, carbon and other base structural substances.