The Soldier

by Neal Asher

  The iris closed above and lights ignited within the shaft. Tilting his bald, ancient head backwards, Zackander looked up to be sure the luggage tubes were falling with him, then raised one wrinkled hand and inspected it. He felt it time to run another rejuve, but he needed to act fast and take some serious precautions. Staying alive was a bit more of a priority than body maintenance. He felt comforted thinking about all the weaponry and other technology at his disposal. Then a stab of fear struck him in his artificial guts when he accepted that everything he had active right now might not be enough.

  Time to wake him . . .

  The thought came from the scared organic human in him, not from the enhanced updated copy of his mind, which ran in the metallo-organic substrate of his body’s machine component. However, it was a thought worthy of consideration and one he had been playing with for some hours now. Jain technology gave its recipient power and, without sufficient care, ultimately destruction. Zackander possessed Jain technology and had developed some interesting devices from it, including weapons, but he had not immersed himself in it. He had always kept his distance from it, and never used anything, or initiated any process, he did not understand completely—except for that one time when his curiosity and fascination overcame his caution.

  The Jain artefacts he possessed could fill a small room if he had not stored them separately, each under their own specially designed heavy security. This was more than in the famous collection of the Viking Museum. Still, it was small when balanced against a wormship, which was an object made by Jain technology if not the technology itself. But what else was up there?

  Most wormships were supposedly without AI, for they had been an extension of Erebus’s being. However, some were piloted, and now Erebus was dead, so this was the latter kind with another controlling intelligence as soaked in Jain tech as the ship itself. Something must have broken away from Erebus or survived the AI’s self-immolation, and then its final eradication by the Polity fleet. Maybe it was one of the AIs that had melded with Erebus when they had abandoned the Polity—whether it was a ship mind, Golem or war drone was immaterial. Or maybe it was one of the things Erebus had made afterwards. Whatever. The ship and the controlling mind were almost certainly more than Zackander could deal with on his own.

  A few hundred feet from the bottom of the shaft, irised gravity fields caught and slowed Zackander, then propelled him into the mouth of a horizontal shaft running deep in the planet’s crust. Almost without thinking, he transmitted the next code—this one prevented him being diverted into another shaft—and then shot at relativistic speed into a nearby mountain range. As he hurtled along he received an application for com.

  “What is it, Lyra?” he asked.

  “Interesting news,” she replied, and sent him a file.

  He ran it at high speed, getting a rapid update on the two hoopers he had been watching, even though his main interest was the wormship. He listened to Captain Cogulus’s story and saw how the captain dealt with Trike when the man recognized his wife stepping out of the shuttle. Now Trike was on a grav sled and Cogulus was heading with him to the Cube.

  “A legate,” Zackander stated, his urgency to be within the higher safety of his home only increasing. He knew the woman couldn’t be the one controlling the wormship. From the limited number of choices, he had just wanted to know which bad news it would be.

  “Do we have any idea how the wormship and this ‘Angel’ survived?” he asked.

  “You have everything I have,” Lyra replied. “I’ll update you if I find anything else. I’ve sent Cog and Trike to my home and will head there once my replacement arrives.”

  “Ask them,” Zackander instructed. “I want everything—every detail.”

  “As you command,” Lyra replied flatly.

  “Yes, as I command,” said Zackander, and cut the link.

  He started to remember the early years here, when he and his fellows had disembarked from the cryo-ship, and their excitement some years later when they found alien artefacts on this world. He was the last of them now. His fellows had died in a disastrous experiment with the technology they found. Killed by just one of their comrades who had actually introduced the tech into his body, before another lured him to the old landing craft and, in an act of sacrifice, detonated the engines. All the other Cyberat here were either descendants of that first group, or newcomers. Zackander was now their ruler and he knew they resented him. They also did not like how he controlled the remaining Jain tech and sought to acquire more. But they did not understand how such control was necessary in a hostile universe.

  At the end of two hundred miles of shaft, grav fields caught Zackander again and propelled him up another shaft, until finally he exited in the basement of his home. The chamber was a mile across, scattered with wide cylindrical chain-glass cases that stretched from floor to ceiling. Within each of these, machines worked on discrete projects—developing some small item copied from the artefacts he possessed. At the top of each cylinder were iron-burners capable of flash-burning everything inside in a matter of seconds. The charred contents would then be shot down shafts straight into the planet’s magma. Even that was not enough, and the upper part of Zackander’s home—the bit that sat just underneath the planet’s surface—possessed grav-engines and a fusion drive. It could reach orbit within just a few minutes, if need be. With Jain tech, no precaution was one too many.

  Zackander floated between the cylinders, briefly inspecting ongoing work both visually and at a mental level. But what he really wanted to take a look at was not here, it was in the upper part of his home that held his collection of artefacts. He ascended and cruised along the ceiling to the upper exit portal. Noting that the luggage cylinders were still following, he dispatched them to storage over the other side of the chamber. He would not be trading or selling their contents any time soon.

  The portal irised open on his command, and he traversed a tunnel through hull metal and shock insulation, then passed through two sliding airlock doors. His home was of course without the usual prerequisites of human existence. The series of connected rooms looked more like a collection of laboratories and workshops. He paused briefly on the way, to eye a series of three replacement body spheres, each three feet across and containing what looked like Cubist metal sculptures of offal. He really hoped he would not find it necessary to use these replacements. Though, of course, if something destroyed his present sphere it was likely his human half would be gone. Though he backed up copies of himself here and there across the planet, and in orbital installations, losing his human half would undermine the ethos of his existence.

  An armoured door with heavy computer security now lay before him, and this would admit him to his collection. But before he reached it he received another alert. Somebody had requested a comlink to him from the Cube. He paused to check the source and saw that the woman Ruth was now sitting in one of its secure com-booths. From there, just like all arriving traders, she could talk to any individual Cyberat she wished to make a deal with. But she couldn’t send anything dangerous over a link she made—the security was very heavy. Though of course “nothing dangerous” covered the kind of computer attack the Cyberat knew about. She might have something Jain-based and lethal she had prepared. Zackander considered ignoring her, but then his curiosity got the better of him as it sometimes did. He put in place his own security—the best he had—then opened the link.

  “Zackander,” she said, a brief shallow smile flitting across her features. “I am here as a representative of my boss, the Golem android Angel.”

  There the first lie, thought Zackander cynically.

  “Hello, Ruth, it’s been a long time. How are you?”

  She blinked. “I’m . . . okay.”

  He noticed her eyes were black and, reviewing recorded memory, saw that they hadn’t been before. Cosmetic enhancement? He doubted it—something radical had happened to her.

  “And what does your boss want of me?”

  She h
eld up a simple plug-in com relay. “He would like to talk to you himself, but I have to have your permission to use this, apparently.”

  “He could be sitting where you’re sitting, if he had so chosen,” Zackander observed.

  “He can explain the reasons why he is not.”

  “Then by all means, use that relay.” Zackander was confident his security would be enough. He could shut down com in an instant if anything looked suspicious. And still, he was curious.

  She reached down and plugged in the relay. An instant later her image was replaced by that of a metalskin android. For a second he wondered if what Lyra had passed onto him had been wrong, but reconsidered. A legate could choose to look however it liked.

  “So what can I do for you?” he asked.

  “You are understandably cautious,” said Angel. “By now you know what my ship is and perhaps have some idea what I am. Obviously, I sent my agent down to your world because if I had come myself your security systems would not have allowed me to land. Nevertheless, you must understand that your own particular interests, and your collection, are what have drawn me here.”

  Zackander just nodded.

  “I am not here to cause you any problems,” said Angel. “I just want to trade—just like any of the others here.” He paused for a second, and a subframe appeared in the corner of the screen with an image. Zackander recognized the Jain artefact. “I want this object.”

  “I see,” said Zackander, playing for time and thinking furiously. “And what do you want to trade for it?”

  “The entire schematic of my ship,” Angel replied. “You will need a great deal of storage to take it.”

  Zackander just stared, acquisitive greed rising up in him. If true, that was one hell of a deal to make. A wormship schematic would be worth more than nearly all the items in his entire collection—but for that one item. The problem was that he now knew what that artefact was, and the bigger problem was that the thing no longer contained what the creature before him was obviously after.

  “I will have to consider this,” he replied. “I am concerned for my own safety—obviously—and will have to make arrangements. I would need to confirm that what you send me is actually a schematic. I will have much to do.”

  “We have a deal?” Angel enquired.

  Zackander allowed a brief silence, then nodded sharply. “We have a deal.”

  “Contact my agent when you have made your arrangements,” said Angel. “She will wait there in the Cube for you.”

  The legate’s image winked out to show Ruth with her head bowed, staring down at her lap. Zackander gazed at her for a second then cut the link. He took a deep breath, and once again focused on the door before him. It clonked open and he floated through into his collection.

  Some of the safer Jain items sat in a cluster of chain-glass cases at the centre of the room. Around the walls circular blast doors opened to other artefacts he either knew were dangerous or had failed to understand fully. Over on one side, another door opened into a part of the ship that could be ejected at high speed. Zackander went through, and felt a chill in the air even though the compartment within it, held at just a smidgen above absolute zero, was perfectly insulated. He sensed this was more psychological than anything to do with the physical temperature. Just inside the square room, he turned on the display wall directly ahead and gazed into the compartment. He ascertained from the regular data updates that, despite being held at such a low temperature, the thing in there was moving in painful, almost undetectable, slow-motion.

  In one of the artefacts Zackander had obtained—a small chunk of black metal triangular in section and about the thickness and length of a human finger—he had found the usual tightly packed and intricate technology. A year or more of analysis revealed that maybe this thing was a discrete device rather than one of the fragments he had often found. All that intricacy seemed directed towards a small bubble in the middle. This bubble, he quickly discovered, was something he could not penetrate. When, some decades later, he was able to upgrade much of the technology he used with Polity technology, he soon ascertained what the bubble was. It was only theorized in Polity science. It was a blister in space-time—a stasis bubble inside which the usual rules of space and time did not apply. Inside it, time had been stopped. After years of research into the device that maintained this anomaly, and which still lay beyond Polity science, he found out how to turn parts of it on and off.

  It was this device that Angel wanted.

  Some years ago, Zackander then found a way to turn the bubble off. But he made extensive preparations before doing anything, for, even though the bubble was just a fraction of an inch across, he knew that the small size of Jain tech did not necessarily reduce its lethality. Finally he managed to turn it off and, when he saw what it contained, worked quickly to preserve it.

  Inside had lain a ring of genetic material laced through with crystal quantum computers. Even as he removed it from the device and sought to preserve it, it activated and began gathering materials from the air. In panic he reinserted it in the device and tried to turn its stasis bubble back on, but it would no longer activate. He took the material out again and put it in a vacuum safe, but the thing steadily unravelled and speared out tendrils towards the walls of the safe. He considered destroying it for he knew that still lay within his power, but could not bring himself to. Instead he stuck it in a cryo-freezer, steadily reducing the temperature until movement stopped, which it only did at absolute zero.

  Further years of study ensued. Here, he realized, was the genome of a discrete organism, but with large amounts of nanotech and even picotech interlaced. This meant that if he let this thing run its course, just tossed it out into any environment where materials and energy were available, it would grow. It would develop into an organism but it would also grow a technology as part of itself. It was a cyborg, just like Zackander, and he felt a fellow feeling for it—a sympathy. Of course, the safest thing to do would be to keep it somnolent and study it further to learn everything about it. This would have been his usual course of action. Perhaps he felt alone, or perhaps he just had a moment of madness? He obtained an even larger zero freezer—the one before him—and carefully inserted the now partially unravelled ring. Raising the temperature had it seeking out nutrients, which he supplied in vaporized form. The thing transitioned into an embryo, growing limbs and becoming larger, and he studied it as it did so. Nanotech spread computing and other systems through its body. The weapons became recognizable . . .

  And here it was.

  There was no doubt that the thing before him was a soldier, but whether it was actually a Jain or something they had created, there was no way to tell. He rather suspected that with technology this sophisticated the Jain could have chosen to be anything they wanted, just as many in the Polity were now able to choose.

  ORLANDINE

  Chunks of bubble-metal, with twisted beams attached, tumbled through vacuum. Orlandine spotted a hemisphere trailing wiring and pipes—all that remained of an antipersonnel laser installation. There was something else that looked like a chromed grand piano with twisted legs she identified as the remains of a heavy maintenance robot. This was the wreckage Platform Mu had left behind upon its departure.

  She turned her attention to Musket Shot, the leaden planetoid out here in the defence sphere, and noted impact sites on its surface still emitting a dull red glow. Then she focused on another sphere—fifty miles across, creamy white, and on closer inspection, covered with diamond-shaped scales.

  “It is only a very small hole in the defence,” Dragon noted.

  “But a hole I must close,” Orlandine stated. “I calculate that using all resources to get the new platform ready and into place will delay my other project by four months.”

  “Quite so,” said Dragon.

  Orlandine absorbed that and analysed her response. It was, she realized, her human component that was hamstringing her with Dragon. She felt gratitude to him for saving her and a
kinship since having worked so long together on the defence sphere. To be simply human was to be weak, and again she questioned her impulses to keep returning to that state. She then decided it was time to stop allowing her feelings to drive circumspection. “The creature that seized control of Platform Mu established itself in a chain-glass cylinder along the open edge of the platform. You could have killed it with one white laser strike and with minimal damage to the platform.”

  “The creature would have deployed hardfields,” Dragon stated.

  “You used a U-jump missile to attack first, in full knowledge that a bounce gate was open in the platform—that the missile would be drawn into U-space.”

  “It all happened so quickly,” said Dragon blankly.

  “Why do you want to delay my plan?” Orlandine asked directly.

  After a long pause Dragon replied, “Precisely describe your plan.”

  She had already sent Dragon a full work-up of it—complete in every detail—but she decided to play along. “I intend to use runcible gates to move a black hole of approximately eight solar masses here to the accretion disc. The black hole will hoover up the accretion disc, the proto-planets and the dead star, along with all the Jain technology. Simple solutions are the best.”

  “The arrival of a black hole may cause the premature ignition of the dead star,” said Dragon.

  “Twenty per cent chance at best.”

  “There are forces at work against us,” said Dragon.

  “What? What the fuck are you saying?”

  Humanity reared up in her with anger and bewilderment.

  “To play the game, without full knowledge of the consequences, is to lose the game.”

  “Oh right, getting all Delphic on me,” Orlandine sneered. “Perhaps if you were clearer about your objections we wouldn’t be one weapons platform down.”

  “Jain history is long, with many evolutionary twists; the loss of a platform may yet be a gain.”

  “Try, just this once, to be clear.”

  “I am clear, but perhaps your abhorrence of what you are blinds you.”