The Soldier

by Neal Asher

  Now he fought it.

  I will always be here, it told him.

  What are you? he asked it.

  The past and the future, it replied. MOVE.

  Brogus was forced to pull away the reaver, breaking pseudomatter scaffolds and sending pieces of them tumbling to evaporate in vacuum. The lock connecting it to the destroyer broke and it too tumbled away, but vented atmosphere. Just free of the scaffolds, the reaver shimmered and disappeared, leaving no disturbance behind. Angel, however, continued to fight and realized the Wheel was weakening. It had lost its ability to compel him as he rigidly disobeyed—refusing to take his wormship out of the system.

  Give me reasons, he demanded.

  You hate the humans, the Polity AIs and the prador.

  Do I? he wondered.

  I give you purpose.

  Why do you want to attack the defence sphere?

  The mental battle continued and finally the Wheel replied, It is necessary.

  You want to get through to the accretion disc?

  Yes, and no.

  What is Brogus for?

  On this the Wheel remained stubbornly silent.

  I will remain here and wait for whatever is out there to come in. I will not fight it.

  The first-child had not yet established itself in the captain’s sanctum of the destroyer, and Angel could see it was not under control.

  You will die.

  I have seen the mind of a slave, Angel replied, surprising himself that he had the imagination to put himself in Ruth’s position.

  I can return you to yourself.

  Angel managed a wry smile. The Wheel was not all-powerful. Its grip on him was limited and now it was negotiating.

  And what was I? he asked, then felt a sudden fear as the Wheel turned faster, somehow strengthened by this thought.

  You were this when I found you.

  It seemed everything drained out of him: all will, all purpose and all emotion. The emptiness was appalling. His thoughts existed and interacted but what was the point of them? He felt like something was pulling him down into a deep dark pit from which there could never be any return. But even as he sank, he could feel that grip upon him failing, slipping.

  And once you were this.

  The clutch upon him released and he snapped upwards out of the pit and into light. His thoughts were diamond bright, proud and arrogant. He was utterly sure about everything he must do, and be—and was. He knew in this moment that his mind under the Wheel had sat between these two states. It had raised him up to deploy him as a useful tool, and struggled to stop him climbing further. Then he fell again, and was once more rigidly fighting control, unsure of his own purpose.

  Obey me and you will be free. I will no longer require you and I will leave your mind.

  Angel believed it. He felt at the heart of his being that once the Wheel had achieved its aims he would become irrelevant. It would not be worth it expending one shred of effort upon him.

  I will retrieve this Jain artefact for you, he said. But I will do it in my own way.

  He took full control of his wormship, and finally moved it away.

  TRIKE

  Trike first watched the reaver and then the wormship shift away from the gas giant and drop out of the real. The prador destroyer was still there but did not seem under control. Perhaps Angel considered it dispensable like the rest of the detritus he had left behind. Trike knew he should not be disappointed that the wormship was gone. Logically, what could he do while Angel remained inside it? But logic wasn’t what was controlling his emotions and he wanted to break something. With infinite care, he took his hands away from the arms of his chair and stood up. Stepping closer to the forward screen and the various frames Cog had opened in the laminate, he thrust his hands into his coat pockets to stop himself from doing more damage.

  “Bugger,” said Cog.

  “Indeed,” Trike replied, fighting for calm. He turned to the Old Captain. “But as you said, we have all the time in the world. We can be patient.” It was an effort to keep a sneer out of his voice.

  Cog nodded sharply in agreement and Trike was aware that the man’s ill-concealed disappointment reflected his own. Cog was usually so mild and calm. It had been Cog who, when they arrived, pointed out that they could do nothing while Angel remained in his wormship. And it had been Cog who pointed out that there seemed to be no ground base, so therefore unlikely that Angel would be leaving his ship. So why was he like this now?

  “We follow,” Trike suggested.

  “Yeah,” said Cog, searching for something, different images of surrounding space appearing in a frame on the screen laminate.

  Trike felt a sudden surge of suspicion about the man. Should he simply accept that Cog was still helping him out of the goodness of his heart? Was the ten years Trike spent crewing aboard Cog’s sailing ship on Spatterjay really a basis for trust? What did he really know about the man? Trike bit his lips and closed his eyes for a moment, hands clenching and unclenching in his pockets.

  Stop it.

  Paranoia was just one of the many things wrong with his mind and he must control it. What he didn’t know about Cog didn’t matter. Any suspicions that might grow in him because Cog wasn’t acting as usual should be dismissed. He must focus only on actions. Cog had come when he called and, at considerable risk to himself, had helped Trike try to kill Angel. He opened his eyes again, deliberately breathing evenly, and focused on one of the frames open in the laminate.

  “What are those?” he asked.

  The frame showed a group of silvery objects against the face of the gas giant. They were the things that had fled from their locations in and around the reaver before it departed, and they were now dropping into the upper atmosphere of the gas giant. As Trike watched, a smaller frame brought one of the silvery objects into focus.

  “Some kind of machine,” said Cog. “Looks Polity—like a war drone of some type.”

  “Working for Angel?”

  “They don’t all adhere to Polity law,” Cog replied, then, “In fact, very few do.”

  “So Angel abandoned them and now they’re running for cover?”

  “I guess.”

  Cog returned his attention to another frame, still searching. Eventually he picked out an object against the star field and focused in on it. Here a metallic object, like a rock covered with limpets, floated in vacuum.

  “Damn!” the Old Captain exclaimed. “I didn’t see these. He had detectors out—my ship’s chameleonware defeated them for a little while but they got something in the end. Pretty damned sophisticated.”

  Again that surge of suspicion. The chameleonware of Cog’s ship was pretty sophisticated itself. And how did he know so quickly that the thing out there was capable of penetrating it?

  Let it go.

  “Yet he ran,” said Trike flatly. “He had three ships there and every one of them was more than capable of dealing with us.”

  Cog glanced at him. “He probably didn’t get a good look at us, and thought something else was out here.”

  “Like what?”

  There was something odd in Cog’s expression as he replied, “Maybe a Polity stealth attack ship. Angel would not want to get on the wrong side of one of them.”

  “No, I guess not,” Trike replied, wondering why either Angel or Cog might think such a vessel would arrive here. He tried to tell himself this did not matter. They would follow the wormship and he would have his revenge, eventually.

  THE CLIEN

  Coiled around a crystal tree in the chain-glass cylinder, the Client studied herself through surrounding sensors. Growth had been rapid once she gained access to an ample supply of food. She now consisted of ten conjoined wasp-like forms. At her head was the primary form, its brain larger—the control centre. This was an adult a month away from dying. When it did, the one behind would displace and discard it—the first of many such husks. At her tail, her terminal segment was giving birth to another, which would remain attached and
in its turn give birth as it reached maturity in just a few days. Maintaining this process required a great deal of feeding. All the segments grazed on rubbery nectar exuded by the crystal tree. The crystal roots of this tree were wound into a feeding system Pragus, while under the Client’s control, had created. At the same time, slow-moving wormbots would snare future husks and drag them to a processing plant in the base of the cylinder.

  The Client now turned her gaze out from the weapons platform. At its present rate of travel Dragon was still over a week away. Why it was approaching so slowly was a puzzle not resolved by anything she found in the remains of Pragus’s mind. Perhaps it had been severely damaged during the recent conflict? Perhaps it was still fighting Jain technology within itself? No matter. She was now nearly ready, for the crystal bud she had birthed and attached to one limb of her tree was just about ready to flower. And the intricate U-space communicator at its core was steadily opening a particular kind of portal into that continuum.

  Next she surveyed everything at her command. The weapons platform was loaded with lethal weaponry that took its capabilities beyond that of the planet killers both the Polity and the prador had used during the war. It also contained manufacturing capabilities on a par with the war factories the Polity had used then, though on a smaller scale. It also controlled one hundred and twenty attack pods of a weapons system covering a wide area of space. Each of these had the capability of a wartime attack ship, though the intelligence they contained was sub-AI—they were utterly controlled from the weapons platform. This was yet another precaution against the dangers of AI boredom. So, with all this, what could she do?

  The Client’s prime aim still burned as strong as when she escaped the prador genocide of her species, and as strong as when she worked for the Polity to develop weapons against the prador. She still wanted revenge for what the prador had done, but there would be no help from the Polity now. The AIs had stopped her from ending that race with her far-caster—an open-ended U-space gate that could instantly and accurately place dangerous objects anywhere in the Prador Kingdom. Admittedly those objects were small, because of the farcaster’s energy requirements, but then a lethal virus could be more effective than the biggest bomb. The Client churned over ideas in her serial mind. The simplest option would have been to build another farcaster and deploy it as she had once planned. However, the knowledge of how to make such a device was gone from her mind. And, even when she reclaimed her whole self, she could not build it from here. She had subsumed the mind of Pragus and could pretend to be that AI at any time, but it would be impossible to conceal her attack on the prador once she started it. The other AIs and entities here would know at once, as would Orlandine, and Dragon.

  She should leave . . .

  But not yet. She needed her whole mind. Besides knowledge about the farcaster, there were other things in it that might be critical.

  The Client waited, birthing another sub-form of herself and extending the chain of her being, the U-space communicator in the crystal bud steadily self-building, growing, maturing.

  Two days passed, Dragon still drawing closer at the same speed as before. The bud opened, its intricacies expanding, filling and connecting. In its heart it opened the small coded gate into U-space, to a location there without the physical dimensions of realspace. Here, swirls of pseudo-matter filled a cyst of semi-real existence, and here lay her backups. The Client fed in power to this cyst, and it back-splashed through the gate as data. Now connected to a recording of her own mind stored there, updated at some time just prior to her death, she prepared to receive everything. Then she detected a U-signature close by—something had arrived.

  “Just what I was waiting for,” said Dragon.

  The giant alien had jumped instantly to just a few miles out from the platform. Something routed through, a flickering of shadow matter. The Client realized what had happened just a moment before the detonation. Dragon had fired a U-jump missile. The nature of this missile’s technology, fired into a realspace area where a U-space gate was open, meant it immediately fell through the gate. In horror, the Client saw it detonate inside the cyst, destroying the data recording of her past mind and everything she had been. Then she looked to her own survival, firing a U-jump missile back at Dragon. This was lost through an open gate inside the entity, so she turned to particle beams and railguns. Dragon fired another missile, and with the Client’s communicator gate still open, that too fell into U-space. Powerful particle beams cut deep into Dragon’s hide, and railgun missiles were just a moment away from striking. In the intervening moments the two entities communicated at AI speeds.

  “Why?” asked the Client.

  “You do not know what you are,” said Dragon. “It is better you remain that way—for now.”

  “You could have destroyed me with that missile before my U-space communicator opened, but you destroyed my backup instead.”

  “I just tried to destroy you, after destroying your old self.”

  “You are lying. You knew that would not work.”

  “It’s a habit of mine,” Dragon replied. “Anyway, you do not have the knowledge you had and you never will, and shortly you will be destroyed.” Its U-field closed round it like an eyelid of blackness and Dragon fell away into that continuum, away from danger.

  Now all the other AIs had been made aware. The Client saw five pods of her subsidiary weapons system explode, while particle beams stabbed out from the nearest pods of her neighbour weapons platforms. Various communications came through, hard undeniable orders landed in the mind of Pragus that it could not disobey, but was now incapable of obeying.

  It was time to leave.

  The Client chose a destination from what memory she possessed and initiated a jump for her weapons platform and her remaining pods, even as four more of them exploded and particle beams struck Platform Mu, chewing through armour. As she made the jump she felt the deployment of USERs—weapons to disrupt U-space. And she fell, twisted and cursing out of the real.

  5

  Dragon is an oracle or a liar, a massive biotech charlatan or the alien speaker of truth we either can’t or don’t want to comprehend. Neither humans nor AIs have any clear understanding of this alien. Four Dragon spheres were found on the planet Aster Colora after the war against the prador. It purported to be an emissary from a distant alien race. There this entity conducted confusing dialogues with those who sought to understand it, before delivering vague threats to a human ambassador concerning the extent of its own power, and then disappeared. One sphere made a reappearance and caused a runcible failure that resulted in the deaths of 30,000 humans. That sphere was destroyed. Other spheres assisted in the Polity police action against the entity Erebus and arguably helped the Polity win, saving an incalculable number of lives. One sphere is now assisting in containing a massive infestation of Jain technology in an accretion disc, because this tech destroyed the race that made Dragon. Did it break into four separate entities whose purposes diverged? Does it, or they, have an overall purpose or none at all? Personally, I think our problem in understanding Dragon is our attribution to it of some higher purpose when it may be doing no more than keeping itself entertained. Some contend that much is lost in translation between us and a mind that is wildly different. I contend that it is quite capable of clear communication with us, but enjoys the confusion.

  —from How It Is by Gordon

  ORLANDINE

  Orlandine watched the four drones. They bore the appearance of giant, thick-limbed iron spiders without abdomens, and were carefully easing a mass of tightly wound, superconducting coils into the casing of a complex grav-engine. The drones had to be very strong, because the coil assembly was the size of a small shuttle and massed perhaps four times as much. It also had to be positioned precisely, to the thousandth of an inch. This was all happening at a point in the scaffold running around the inside frame of the runcible U-space gate they were constructing. This grav-engine was the two hundred and fifteenth and there wer
e twenty-five more to affix.

  As she watched, Orlandine completed a final thorough search of the data and found nothing to confirm her suspicions. All the schematics and other technical data the drones were using here matched the original designs she kept in remote storage. If Dragon had done anything, it was simply interfering with supplies to delay the project. She cooled down a little and found some perspective. If Dragon wanted to interfere here it could simply tell Earth Central. Yes, if Polity dreadnoughts arrived, that would piss off the prador, but the project would be dead thereafter. Even as she thought this, finishing minor searches and turning towards the inspection pod she had been using to survey the runcible, remote systems of her being picked up that she had just lost a defence platform. Other data on events at the disc, recently loaded to the system by Dragon, also became available to her.

  “Oh peachy,” said Orlandine out loud, instantly gazing at the realtime schematic of the defence sphere around the accretion disc. She opened com to Dragon. “You never thought to mention this to me before taking action?”

  “You would have attempted to rescue the situation and in so doing made it worse,” Dragon replied.

  Orlandine resisted the impulse to hurry. Her arrival back at the accretion disc a few minutes earlier would make no difference whatsoever. She opened the petals of her sensory cowl as she gazed at the alien entity through distant cams. It was just an instinctive response to threat, rooted in her human component, since the cowl had been offline during her inspection. In irritation, she closed up the petals behind her head again and they slid out of sight into their pocket in the nape of her neck.

  What was Dragon up to?

  Dragon had woken her all those years ago and brought her to the accretion disc to finish constructing the defence against the Jain tech. On the face of it, this was simply about survival and revenge. The species that created Dragon had been wiped out by Jain tech and it was helping the Polity to fight that old enemy. But Dragon’s motives had never been so simple and its behaviour now further aroused Orlandine’s suspicions. It had acted on its own again. And it was being a little parsimonious with the truth.