The Soldier

by Neal Asher

  “I am not what I was before,” he said. Then added, with a laconic smile, “Or rather, I am not what I was under either Erebus or the Wheel. But I am something of what I was before then.”

  Ruth stood and walked over to the hardfield, peering through at him. “This Wheel controlled you,” she said, “so you are not guilty of any crime?”

  Angel spread his hands and shrugged. “What was me and what was the Wheel is debatable. I will let others judge.”

  “You’ll hand yourself over to the Polity for trial?” asked Cog.

  Angel shot him a look. “No, I will not.”

  Dragon was on the move now—he could feel it. He pushed into that presence in his mind and felt no resistance. He pushed further and sensor data became open to him, layer upon layer of thought, too. He only read the surface of it, because below a certain level the machinations strayed beyond his understanding. Dragon did not think anything like a human—his perspective was not limited by mere centuries nor even by linear time. Angel took the data, but then realized he had no way of passing it on other than verbally—Cog’s defences disrupted any kind of EMR emission. Dragon tossed him a bone, as it thought both its long, slow thoughts and its fast, moment-to-moment assessments that strayed down to the level of the quanta. Angel now had control beyond Cog’s ship and he speared out a pseudopod, attaching it to an exterior sensor. Cog noticed something, highlighted one frame and expanded it. This showed a large oblate space station hanging in void.

  “This is the station where the Cyberat research U-space technology,” Angel said, waving one hand elegantly. “It is also the site of a USER.”

  “They activated it,” said Cog.

  Angel shrugged and groped for more data.

  “Do you speak for Dragon now?” asked Ruth.

  “Dragon is in my mind where Erebus and the Wheel were before.”

  “So still you dance to another’s tune?”

  “Yes, and no.” He gestured again, towards the frame. “The station fell out of contact with the Cyberat some hours ago. The USER activated just after Dragon arrived to seize me. I don’t understand Dragon’s reasoning, but it is sure that the Clade now has control of it—its intention is to trap Dragon here, and to keep what Dragon has learned from Orlandine and the accretion disc.”

  “But why?” asked Ruth. “And why are you telling us? Are we to trust you now?”

  Trike did not look at all happy about that, but kept silent.

  Angel probed down through the layers of thought. Disparate facts fell into his compass.

  “Dragon was never happy about Orlandine’s plan to hoover up the accretion disc with a black hole,” he said, still feeling his way. “The attack on the defence sphere by the Jain soldier—its intent to detonate the dead star at the centre of the disc—cannot be all of it.”

  “You will need to elaborate on that,” said Cog.

  Angel thought about what the three before him did and didn’t know.

  “The accretion disc contains dangerous Jain technology—you know this,” he began. “Orlandine and Dragon have worked for a century to build the defence sphere and keep it contained. But Orlandine has a second plan to end the threat. It is her intention to gate a black hole into the accretion disc to suck up all the dangerous tech there—the whole disc, the proto-planets and the dead star itself will go with it.”

  “Is that even possible?” interjected Trike.

  “When it comes to Orlandine, and to Dragon . . .” Cog shrugged.

  “Orlandine’s concern, her entire life’s work now, has been to defuse the threat of Jain technology,” Angel continued. “Her understanding of it is beyond that of most people, because she actually took apart a Jain node and incorporated the technology into herself, while managing to avoid its traps. But she never understood the accretion disc.”

  “Why is that so difficult?” asked Trike.

  Angel focused on him. “Because the Jain tech there remains active without any intelligence and civilization for it to feed upon. At the heart of it there is a weakness in the real that links, somehow, to somnolent Jain AIs in underspace. Is it them that drive it? She does not know.” He shook his head, still not clear on many things. “When my wormship attacked the prador ships here, it broke off a piece of itself to strike one of them. They captured this worm fragment and took it away, but its ability to sequester was beyond anything known. The king of the prador—the prador ships are controlled by the King’s Guard—told Orlandine of this, and she went to investigate. She found a submind of the Wheel in that fragment and interrogated it. She learned that the Wheel’s intention is to use the soldier it obtained here to launch an attack on the defence sphere, get through and . . . detonate the dead star, thus spreading Jain tech throughout the Polity and the Kingdom.”

  Trike let out a bark of disbelief. He then shook his head and went over to sit down again. “This is just . . . twisted.”

  “But that cannot be all,” said Ruth.

  Angel nodded. “Jain technology is a trap, and Dragon found the answer too easy, too neat . . .”

  “So Dragon came here . . .” Cog concluded.

  “It came here for information—to the source, to me. Now it knows about the Clade, and about a prador reaver with two hundred Clade units aboard sent to an unknown location. What is the need of them if the whole plan is simply to detonate the dead star? Why was the Clade sent here to prevent Dragon from taking this information back to the defence sphere?”

  “This is just too Machiavellian,” said Trike.

  It was complicated, Angel agreed, but a Jain AI was trying to out-think an ancient alien entity like Dragon, and a Jain-enhanced haiman like Orlandine. “Complicated” and “Machiavellian” were implicit.

  “Whether the Jain soldier fails in its task or not is perhaps moot,” said Angel. “What Dragon seems to think is that its doubts about Orlandine’s plan have been confirmed. A Jain AI wants her to use that black hole, and it has driven this to happen before Dragon could understand what the fault in that plan might be.”

  After a long silence while the three just looked at each other, waiting for some question, Cog asked, “So what is Dragon doing now?”

  At this point the reasoning of the alien entity fell into the distinctly odd. Dragon was doing what was expected of it because it had foreseen this trap. All it had not seen clearly was the mechanics of it—the Clade. Let the trap be sprung and the trapper not see the larger trap he is falling into. The words ghosted through Angel’s consciousness along with a sense of the inevitability of present events. He sensed that the entity knew all this, that it knew the purpose of the prador reaver with Clade units aboard. He felt the shape of something huge, of Dragon tweaking this, tipping that, and setting things into motion. He saw the image of the Wheel manipulating small events, but others being triggered: like a human standing over a trap in which an animal struggled, unaware that a rock had been moved to fall from the mountain above, generating an avalanche that would sweep the human away. How to put that into words for the three here?

  “Dragon is heading under conventional drive towards the Cyberat USER,” he said. “It will be there in an hour.”

  “And then what?” asked Cog. “U-space disruption doesn’t just go away when a USER is shut down. Seems to me that Dragon fucked up and this Wheel will get precisely what it wants.”

  “Yes, it seems that way,” was all Angel could reply.

  EARTH CENTRAL

  The gravity wave, at its peak, exerted a substantial portion of the gravity of the neutron star that the asteroid orbited. That peak passed through rock and iron like a wrenching matter in the opposite direction of its travel, and then releasing it. The asteroid emitted a flash of EMR. Its rock and iron shattered and in some areas melted, and the thing flew apart. The Cable Hogue, just a few thousand miles behind the wave it had fired, passed close over the spreading mass of smaller asteroids that were now glowing red. Its own mass had a noticeable pull on them as it then turned sharply, leaving a
bright trail from its Laumer engines, and shot away.

  Earth Central, viewing what was unfolding through the sensors on every ship present, now turned to the tactical map. Curved surfaces divided up space, chunks of rock were highlighted for specific weapons, while targets were picked out and given imaginary AI that would require specific induction warfare attacks. Others were described as bearing heavy armour, needing U-jump missile attack or a peppering of high penetration railgun slugs. Diana Windermere was not making it easy for the fleet. The map bloomed with weapons trajectories as dreadnoughts opened fire with fusillades of railgun slugs, fission missiles and CTDs. Destroyers complemented this with lancing particle beams. U-jump signatures abounded. Attack ships surged in, formations shifting as the tactical map changed. The spreading asteroid field became a massive firework display. Chunks of rock blew apart, smaller pieces vaporized—appalling energies focused on this one small area of space. It was all over in twenty-three minutes.

  “Sloppy,” said Windermere.

  A frame appeared on the tactical map highlighting a chunk of asteroid iron the size of a grav-car, which had tumbled beyond one of the imaginary curved surfaces.

  “Let’s try that again,” she added.

  Earth Central now focused the sensors of one dreadnought, some way back from the action, out into the asteroid field. Yes, the two prador watchers were still transmitting. The wartime observation drones possessed brains that were the frozen ganglions of prador second-children. Their shapes were vaguely reminiscent of their old bodies as they clung with armoured legs to small asteroids. Windermere had detected them shortly after her arrival here and EC had ordered her to leave them alone. Sometimes it was a good idea to hide what you were doing. Other times it was a good idea to let a potential enemy know.

  Using another part of its extensive mind, EC gazed through some of its own watchers that the prador had doubtless detected, and which the king had doubtless ordered to be left alone. U-signatures generating beyond the prador watch station had just added twenty big, old-style prador dreadnoughts to the reaver force there. While the vessel that had arrived earlier—ten miles of exotic metal armour and advanced weapons packed into a ship like a titanic dogfish egg case—moved in. This ship’s name translated as Kinghammer. The prador hammer, throughout what might be described as the prador medieval period, had been the prime weapon of choice for creatures with carapaces.

  Contact.

  EC snapped into the virtuality in adult prador form to gaze upon the king’s envoy. “The king,” said the envoy, “feels it necessary to remind you that his agreement with you specifies no war craft from the Polity can enter the region of space around the accretion disc. That area is an independent state under the oversight of firstly the haiman Orlandine and secondly the alien entity known as Dragon.”

  “I hardly need reminding of this,” said EC. “But perhaps the king needs reminding that, despite his apparent friendship with Orlandine and the establishment of a prador enclave on Jaskor, under our agreement prador war craft are not allowed into the area either.”

  “The king says that both Orlandine and Dragon have been absent so preparatory moves by the Polity are understandable. However, Orlandine has returned.”

  “Dragon is absent and the data indicates that it is trapped near the Cyberat world inside USER disruption,” said Earth Central.

  “Irrelevant,” stated the envoy.

  “It is also pertinent to note that Orlandine is acting outside of her agreed remit.”

  “This is true,” said the envoy, “however, she is also acting within her remit—she is still containing the Jain technology in the disc—therefore the agreement stands: no Polity war craft within the accretion disc independent state.”

  “And no prador war craft, either,” EC added.

  They both fell silent, and then withdrew from the virtuality at the same time.

  Earth Central did not like the situation at all. Orlandine was accelerating her plan to fire a black hole into the disc, a Jain soldier was aiming to blow up the dead sun at the centre of the disc, Dragon was out of the equation and there was a wormship buzzing about somewhere. EC wanted control, full control—delegation was something it did not enjoy. It again considered its plan to seize control of the accretion disc platform AIs via the Ghost Drive Facility on Jaskor. But the moment it took control of those platforms, they would then be classified as Polity war craft, and it would be in breach of the agreement. And the reason for that agreement had not gone away.

  The accretion disc was too close to the Kingdom to be under complete Polity control. If it was taken over by the Polity, then the king would have to take actions, though perhaps avoiding full-scale war. Almost certainly those actions would need a Polity response. Jaskor would certainly end up as a cinder and quite possibly other star systems would get involved. EC counted the billions of sentient beings—human, prador and AI—in the vicinity. Calculations then built up of possible outcomes and probable ones. Things would get ugly, and since the Client’s rampage through the Prador Kingdom had taken diplomatic relations to a new low, full-scale war could not be ruled out.

  “You hesitate,” Diana Windermere sent.

  “I calculate,” EC replied.

  “Cold calculations,” she opined, cold herself in the high-tech throne she occupied aboard the Cable Hogue.

  “And I decide,” said EC. “If the prador jump to the accretion disc you go there too. For now, stand down.”

  She smiled without humour. “I hear and obey.”

  Earth Central continued to watch, experiencing doubts it had not had for a very long time.

  THE WHEEL

  The wormship writhed together around the soldier, which now possessed a solidity that extended beyond that of normal matter. Such had been the extreme shifting of mass when the soldier absorbed matter and utilized the caches that it had changed the spin of the icy planetoid they were on. This now looked like an apple with a huge bite taken out of it. The super-soldier rested in a crater five miles deep and twenty wide, its own size having increased to over a mile long. The wormship opened itself up to close around the soldier, before it fired up its distributed grav-engines and pulled the creature away into vacuum. This took all the power it could apply at once, as it slowly heaved itself away from the surface. The soldier was heavy—its super-dense form like that of something forged on the surface of a dead star.

  The Wheel studied how the soldier had changed itself with something approaching maternal approval. In essence, it had packed as much as possible into its form in the real, in material and processing, without turning itself into something overwhelming. This was, after all, supposed to be a sneak attack to penetrate the accretion disc defence sphere and get it to the central dead star. Really, if it arrived in the form it was capable of attaining, all resistance would be completely obliterated, and the Wheel did not want that at all. A careful balance was required.

  Some distance beyond the planetoid, the Wheel put the wormship into U-space. Even this was no easy task because the soldier had substantial U-space drag and its own systems caused interference with the worm-ship’s drive. It was a drawn-out dive into that continuum, the wormship unravelling and stretching as it did so, shimmering out piecemeal.

  Within the grey of U-space the wormship reconfigured, and the Jain super-soldier was now outside, clinging to its exterior. Its own drive began meshing with that of the ship, and they both went deeper into that continuum than any Polity or prador ships had ever gone. Hours of subjective time slid by and they passed both into and under a region of USER disruption. Here the wormship unravelled from the soldier, and that disruption snapped the wormship out into the real, while the soldier hurtled on.

  “Only the dead have seen the end of war,” were the last words the Wheel heard from its errant child.

  The wormship flashed into the real in a loose tangle twenty miles across. Many of its systems were utterly scrambled and its mind, the Wheel, was barely functional. But almost instinct
ively it began reassembling itself and surveying its surroundings.

  It lay far out in the Cyberat system, but not so far out that the light delay prevented it seeing the sphere of Dragon accelerating out from the Cyberat world. But why was it here? Slowly its thinking gained momentum and it remembered the entirety of its plan. So much about the actions of Polity AIs was predictable. So much about how the pra-dor would respond was foreseeable, though less so than in their previous incarnation now they had their new king. However, Dragon was always an outlier.

  Seeking information, it had fallen into the trap the Wheel had laid, yet that it would do so had not been in any way certain. Dragon could extrapolate in ways that were alien to both the Polity and the Kingdom, and it could interfere to change the course of events. The present USER disruption would keep it out of the way of the Wheel’s current plans, which would soon enough reach their conclusion. But once it cleared, Dragon would be able to interfere once again. It was a danger, a loose cannon, and it ultimately needed to be eliminated.

  The Wheel fired a com laser in-system, seeking contact as it used those of its drives still workable to send it hurtling in Dragon’s direction, still a dispersed collection of worm-forms. The light minutes passed and the reply eventually arrived.

  “We are filled with anticipation,” said the Clade.

  KNOBBLER

  The Harding black hole was visible on a gravity map of the system and by its slow evaporation of Hawking radiation. Stray particles and wisps of matter falling in towards it and radiating as they did so also marked its position by their absence beyond its event horizon. But there was nothing spectacular happening, because the hole wasn’t sucking anything major inside it. As Knobbler viewed these signs of its existence, he felt that, having not eaten in a while, the thing must be hungry. He would have shivered, if that particular animalistic reaction had been programmed into him.

  The work had been progressing well, so fast in fact that even now he saw another heat ejection from the runcible. A jet of plasma fountained out into vacuum from the giant hexagonal frame—a blue-green fuma-role that spread as it went and dispersed in a strange metallic aurora. The factory ships had emptied the supply ships, which were even now peeling away from them, firing up drives to take them to a safe distance and then shimmering away into underspace.