The Soldier

by Neal Asher

  “So Angel wasn’t killed . . . destroyed?”

  “Who can say?” Cog lowered his bag to the floor, now clutching some polished cylindrical item in his hand.

  Trike returned his attention to the shuttle ramp. The inner door to the shuttle had opened and a figure was stepping out, still in shadow. Trike felt anger clenching a fist around his guts—the urge to throw himself forwards and do something fizzing in his limbs. All Cog’s “wait and see” and “softly, softly” seemed irrelevant now. He just wanted to get down there, use the weapons he had against Angel, then go in and finish it with his hands. The figure now stepped out into the light and Trike recognized her at once.

  Ruth.

  It was a hammer blow that smashed all the conflicting impulses within him. She wasn’t dead. Had Angel been killed in the detonation and Ruth survived? Angel must have falsified everything he had sent to Trike! Somehow, because she was really smart—smarter than Trike, despite his years—could she have seized control of the wormship? Trike turned away from the display and began heading for the ramp.

  “I’m so very very sorry about this, Trike,” said Cog.

  Trike glanced round at him. The Old Captain was holding up the object he had taken out of his bag, the polished cylinder. Its end was open and Trike could see into its black glittery interior, as though there were stars inside.

  “What?” he managed.

  Something shimmered and a hand of force picked him up and threw him across the room. He felt a console breaking behind his legs and his back and head slamming into a chain-glass window, which gave way behind him. The shimmer wrapped all around him, oozing darkness as he fell to the bottom of the tower. He hit hard ground, and saw the window bouncing away nearby. Whatever Cog had hit him with could not have hurt him badly, for he was a three-hundred-year-old hooper. He would still get up and head over to that shuttle, Cog had just saved him the trouble of using the ramp. But he remained on the ground, the force-field, or whatever it was, fluttering around him like the wings of a hundred ravens. He tried to fight it, but felt his consciousness sliding away. The last thing he heard, as the wings carried him off into blackness, was Cog speaking to Lyra nearby.

  “What the fuck was that?” she asked.

  “The only thing that could work on someone like him, without ripping this place apart,” Cog replied.

  6

  Cyborg: In the past this meant someone whose physical abilities were extended beyond normal by mechanisms built into the body. But since then the meaning has changed. By the end of the twenty-first century there were few human beings to whom that description could not be applied. At the start of the century, prosthetics were just a replacement for body parts and were often inferior, but very soon those replacements were becoming superior to the parts they replaced. By the latter half of the century people were voluntarily substituting eye lenses with versions that gave them eagle vision, computer displays, and access to virtual reality. Others wove electromuscle into their existing muscle, reinforced their bones, wrapped soft robots around their hearts and transfused artificial blood. Advancements in nanotech gave them swarms of doctor machines inside their body, while the integration of computer tech and the human brain extended memory, processing and thought. Advancements in biotech then tended to confuse the issue. What is a mechanism and what is mechanical? In popular conception the words roused visions of cogs, wheels and motors—the paraphernalia of the previous industrial age. But a bacterium manufactured to track down and eat a particular kind of cancer is a mechanism, as is a manufactured organic arm. Nowadays, when the word cyborg is used people understand it to mean one thing only: a particular sect of humans who replaced part of their body generally with cogs-and-wheels metal-based mechanism. The psychology behind this you will find listed under Anachronistic Mindsets.

  —from Quince Guide, compiled by humans

  THE CLIENT

  Weapons Platform Mu fell into the real as though it was hitting a solid wall. Its slab shape had been twisted one full turn along its length, and it straightened slightly now, spewing wreckage out into vacuum. A series of explosions blew glowing holes in its exterior and ignited hot fires in its interior. But automatic safety systems limited the damage by flinging away CTDs with breached containment vessels. These detonated thousands of miles away, some destroying pods of the platform’s subsystem that were now appearing.

  The Client emitted an ultrasonic screech as she hung, severed in half, on her broken crystal tree. Her scream also strayed into the chemical realm as she emitted complex pheromones, which were one aspect of her language. The life forms she created in a former existence would have moved to protect her in response to this, but none were here. Even as she screamed she knew she must get control of herself if she was to survive.

  The screech died as she shut down the pain nerves to the break in her body. She broadcast chemical communications to her severed lower half and only when there was little response did she realize that the cylinder was losing air. She now concentrated on the essentials of survival—re-establishing contact with the Polity technology that surrounded her. Via radio and microwave frequencies, she began to make connections and get an assessment of the damage. There was just too much data from the entire platform, along with its attack pods, so she cut that down and looked to her immediate surroundings. She began to individually reac-quire all the robots that serviced the cylinder, then the fractured computer system integrated around it.

  The chain-glass of the cylinder itself was intact. It was the nature of this substance that damage serious enough to penetrate it would have unravelled its chain molecules and destroyed the entire cylinder. However, the ceramal top cap was cracked and leaking air, while the breach sealant circuit, which should have been activated to prevent the leak, had failed. The Client immediately dispatched maintenance robots up there and began loading data from the surviving computers and sensors in the end cap to identify the problem. Meanwhile she concentrated her own physical resources in the top segment of her body. Nearly all the air was gone now and, while she could survive in vacuum for a little while, she needed to increase her calorie burn to survive the temperature drop.

  Soon she knew the shape of the problem and realized that the maintenance robots would not be required, so called them back to the base of the cylinder. A critical computer in the automated breach-sealant system had been fried. This stopped the transference of data from the sensors about the crack, or the pressure drop inside the cylinder, to elsewhere. The Client made a link, through herself, from the sensors to another computer in the system and relayed the data. In response, breach sealant expanded explosively from pressurized canisters in the end cap. Fragments of hardening foam snowed down through the cylinder, but the main mass mushroomed into the crack and filled it rapidly. Just a few seconds later the sensors reported a steady rise in pressure. Now, the heaters.

  Here the problem was plain. During the disastrous U-jump, the cylinder had twisted a hundred and eighty degrees at its base, severing superconducting cables. These cables had shorted into the base, burning carbon composite and melting metal, before blowing fuses back at the fusion reactor. The Client dispatched a maintenance robot to replace the fuses, since other automation around the reactor was dead. She then had to open herself into more of the network to find the things she needed. A nearby store contained reels of superconducting cable and she dispatched a robot for one of them. Meanwhile, she set other robots to stripping out ruined cables and wreckage.

  The air pressure had risen appreciably, bringing the temperature up, but it was still too cold in the cylinder and ice frosted all its surfaces. She shed the lower segment of her remaining upper body, for it was dying, then decoded chemical messages from the other severed lower half of her body. This had shut down to its lowest possible function, but it was fast reaching the stage where the energy and effort required to retrieve it would exceed that of growing a new series of segments. The Client felt a sudden surge of anger against Dragon, but as tha
t passed she began to think more deeply about what the creature had done.

  Dragon could have destroyed her completely. Had it sent that U-jump missile before the Client made the U-space link to her recorded mind, that would have been the end. So why hadn’t it done so? By destroying her recorded mind it had killed the Client’s ability to make farcasters—her weapon against the prador. Was that the aim? How did Dragon know that she needed her backup mind to do this? Anyway, that threat would have been eliminated if Dragon had destroyed the Client’s present form rather than her memories. No, there had to be some other explanation. It seemed as if Dragon wanted her to make a breach in the defence sphere of the accretion disc. This was the only explanation that made sense. Certainly, it had not been overly concerned with the Client’s survival once the breach was made, for the subsequent attack had almost destroyed her. It had said, “Shortly you will be destroyed.” The Client relished that the entity had been wrong.

  The robot returned with the reel of cable just as the others finished clearing the mess inside the cylinder. They all worked quickly to replace cable. The Client sank into a lower-energy somnolent state while this was happening, only bringing herself to higher consciousness when the robots put the cables in place and it was necessary to switch the power back on. Red-orange light emitted from flat heating panels scattered throughout the cylinder, steadily raising the temperature. Other repairs ensued; special glue injected to repair her tree, and nutrient feeds reestablished from its roots. The Client’s head-form began to feed first, followed by her other segments. She gained energy and started to bring the lower segments of her front half back up to full function. But by the time she was ready, her severed half was unrecoverable. No matter, the Client could grow herself again. Now it was time to look at the rest of the damage, and survey the place she had brought herself to. Because, despite the disruption to her U-space jump, she had arrived at her chosen destination. And here, she hoped, Dragon would be proved wrong in its other contention: “. . . you do not have the knowledge you had and never will.”

  BLADE

  The Obsidian Blade slid into the real like a shard of lignite surfacing in ink. Scanning from the first microsecond it arrived, Blade confirmed the text message Cog had managed to send—obviously Trike had been aboard his bridge, so they couldn’t speak. The wormship was gone—the show had moved on. With the available data Blade could only suppose the legate had detected Cog’s ship and reacted to its advanced stealth technology, assuming it was a ship like its own.

  Blade was annoyed. Foolish mistake to make, but one that had saved the legate’s life. Cog was not aware that the “softly, softly” orders had been rescinded and replaced by “exterminate with extreme prejudice.” Now that Earth Central knew that the archaeological artefacts were in fact Jain artefacts, it had become rather tetchy. Still, there was time to clear up some loose ends here . . .

  The Blade cruised into the system and spent a leisurely second or two scanning the debris and found three stray prador obviously dislodged during the rapid departure of the reaver that had been here. It detected life signs and power in their suits, but they were harmless and forsaken—destined to run out of air and die slowly in vacuum. It targeted one and fired, the field-concentrated particle beam splashing on armour for a second then punching inside, causing the prador to take off on the rocket blast of its own vaporized insides. Blade then turned its attention to the other two, and didn’t try to convince itself it was being merciful.

  “No prisoners?” asked a voice.

  With U-space triangulating over the duration of the message, Blade traced its source to the upper atmosphere of the gas giant. The large object there had made no attempt to conceal its position but actively resisted scan.

  “I don’t have room for prisoners,” Blade replied. “This is unfortunate, since I am sure they would have interesting stories to tell.” Then added, “Would have had.”

  The attack ship suddenly short-jumped a hundred miles, a particle beam passing through the space it had occupied a moment before. It seemed someone aboard the remaining prador destroyer was taking control, because it was stabilizing, with its weapons operational. It released a swarm of railgun missiles towards the Blade, and started probing with the particle beam again. Blade shrugged out hardfields, deflecting the beam, ramped up realspace acceleration and short-hopped again, ready to splinter up a U-jump missile. Then, because it was a little bored, it decided on another approach and locked on with induction warfare.

  Within seconds it was in the systems of the destroyer, then into the second-child mind of its navcom. The bitter little mind was almost sub-sentient and could not distinguish the orders Blade now sent it from those it had been receiving from the first-child, who was trying to get a grip on the systems in the captain’s sanctum. Blade cut the first-child off and then watched as the destroyer turned on steering thrusters and fired up its main fusion drive, taking it straight towards the face of the gas giant.

  “Are we any better than the enemies we kill?” asked that voice.

  “Don’t be so impatient,” said Blade, “I’ll get to you in a moment.”

  Though it was speaking so casually, Blade was wary. There was nothing in Cog’s limited data to indicate what this was, and it was still evading scan. All Blade had on it thus far was that it was a spherical object about a hundred feet across, with its density varying all the time, which was odd.

  “So what are you?” Blade asked casually.

  “We are,” replied the thing down there, “adaptable.”

  It seemed to be dispersing now—spreading out in the atmosphere. Only a second later did a clearer scan reveal that it had opened out into a circular torus hundreds of feet wide. Blade short-jumped, almost instinctively, as a magnetic iris funnelled gas into the centre of that torus. An intense beam of photonic matter stabbed out of it, just a foot wide. Blade’s course put the destroyer between it and the torus, yet the beam tracked it and struck the destroyer, throwing it into black silhouette. A moment later it punched out the other side and struck the Blade. In the microseconds it took to throw up hardfields, the beam had blistered armour and burned ten feet inside.

  Blade jumped again, splintering missiles, U-jumping them to the source of the beam. Multiple detonations ensued, yet the gate effect of the missiles stayed open longer than it should have, snapped back like broken elastic. Objects appeared exactly where the missiles had disappeared outside the ship, and a moment later thumped into the hull.

  “Surprise!” said the attacker.

  Through exterior cams, Blade identified the interlopers and hit them with anti-personnel lasers, even as they began burrowing through the bottom of the ship’s splinter missile furrows. The Clade, Blade realized.

  Here was a kill-on-sight enemy of the Polity, the deranged swarm AI that had escaped disposal during the war and murdered its way out of the factory station that had made it. Two of the four Clade units curled up and shrivelled in laser fire, while the other two decohered armour and transformed into a pseudo-matter state, sliding in through the hull. Meanwhile the rest of the Clade U-jumped from the gas giant—a writhing mass just like the wormship Blade had come here to destroy.

  Blade hit it with particle beams and released a fusillade of railgun slugs. That just seemed to stir the thing up, as though it was being tickled. A third Clade unit died inside the ship as an anti-intrusion claw grabbed it and then fried its brain with an EMR pulse. However, the fourth unit grew thin, lost density again and slid through the tightly packed systems of the ship. It wrapped itself around a drive node and, giggling over com, self-detonated. The explosion tore through the ship, spewing wreckage out into space.

  “Bye bye,” said the Clade entire, then shimmered and fell out of the real.

  Blade sat in vacuum, ripped open, thoughts disjointed and swamped by error reports. It had enough consciousness for anger, remembering a download that had been forced on it about the dangers of arrogance. Sensor data was sparse, but just enough for it
to watch the prador destroyer fall into the gas giant, be swallowed into a comparatively minor swirl of cloud, and disappear.

  ZACKANDER

  The thing up there could be here for reasons that had absolutely nothing to do with him, but Zackander was taking no chances. All the technology in the chain-glass sphere of his lower cyber body was active and alert as he floated a few feet above the floor and slid along one of the Cube’s subterranean passages. The walls were hewn through bedrock, and two luggage tubes hovered behind him. Finally reaching a studded synthetic-wood door, he transmitted a particular code known only to him. As the door opened ahead of him and he entered, the empty circular room reconfigured—a response only triggered if the door was opened with his code. The floor divided into sections, then irised open to expose a shaft spearing down into darkness. Zackander hovered over this, transmitted yet another code, then turned off his grav and dropped. Without the code, anyone dropping into this shaft would have smashed into the bottom. And anyone entering the shaft using a grav-engine, or some other method to stop them falling, would have been fried by particle cannons positioned all the way down.

  As he fell he checked his feeds and saw a woman leaving the shuttle. Identifying her as Ruth Ottinger increased his fears, since he had had dealings with her before. He scanned her using sensors scattered across the landing field and found the U-mitter in her skull. He had seen this when he scanned her the first time—when she came to sell him those Jain artefacts. But now he also detected a structure like aug nano-fibres in her skull. This could be what remained from a messy aug removal, another kind of augmentation, or perhaps a type of cyber repair to her brain. But he suspected she was some kind of neural lace controlled by whatever was in that ship up there. She couldn’t be the one in charge of it—no human as ordinary as her would be able to control it without Jain tech getting inside her and changing her radically.