Men and Machines I

by Charlie Nash

  His head droops. He is tired of this. Tired enough to be done with me, so I speak into his mind. You’ve no idea what it’s like to be trapped inside a non-body prison. That’s what happened to those sentients. They were wired to see and taste and touch and smell, and instead they were ships. The first time they touched a human consciousness, they touched sense. And then they knew. They went crazy behind their bars.

  “She has men’s minds and bodies broken behind her. Some of them served in the forces,” Riley says.

  Yes. That is her legacy. But the wrong was done first to her. She killed for necessity. I have to put it right.

  Why? He slips and speaks into my mind, asking with the bitterness of someone who wants my love, and sees my attention given to a murdering ship. “You don’t know she isn’t broken herself. How do you know she won’t just go rogue again?” He shakes his head. “Never asked anyone for trust, huh? How about when you asked me?”

  The sting has the bright edge of truth. My secret is on the edge of my consciousness, just needing the final shove. I think of how Riley rescued me when I lost my mind inside the Freya. I could speak this to no one but him. And I must.

  Because I have been there. That is how I was made. They took my mind and I lived with the master neural-graft machine for as long as it took for me to transfer neurons and develop resonance. It was a prison of thought without sense, without relief, and I thought I would die. Many did. Some minds never returned to their bodies, others couldn’t shake the nightmares and ended it themselves. I live with all that. My appetites are part of my coping. So, can you understand? She has lived that her entire existence. Give her what she should have had and she will be whatever she wants. She may seek redress. She may have to be stopped. But I can’t walk away from her now. I won’t.

  My gaze is on the floor. I can’t look at him after this confession. I have never felt more exposed. Then he pushes his hand behind me. The doors slide open, and he is gone. Lost.

  I stand on the floor of the transport’s dock, thinking this is the end of all things. I’ve touched that part of my mind again, and I don’t know how I will leave it and be the same again. I will play this moment over and again, this defeat.

  Minutes tick by as I try to find the path back. And then, I hear footsteps.

  Riley appears at the freight door with a console, and two transfer spheres in his fist. He shakes his head. “I don’t know if I believe this is right,” he says. “But you do, and I haven’t forgotten what you’ve done for me. You saved me more times that I’ve counted. So I’ll trust you, not knowing where this leads.”

  Most emotions I feel in my gut. They’re unpleasant things, warnings and churnings that have saved me many times. This one, I feel bright in my chest. And I wonder if it won’t save me more than all the others.

  By the time we make the way-gate, the transport is back into regular activity. There’s an inquiry, of course, but all there is to find is an old ship in the dock bay, ten crew in neural compromise. Two look like they might live. The rest of the dock will be quarantined, and when we make the jump to Earth, handed over to whichever authority has subsumed control of the old Program. Some news of the find will leak out, stoking up the legends of the Dellinger. But no one will know she walked off the transport, sharing the storage drive of a cyborg who looked like an old drunk.

  And that’s where things will start again for me, putting right what the Program got wrong all those decades ago. In the shop of a cyborg reconditioner, the Dellinger will have her vessel changed to a body, as it should have always been. A long loop closed, with an unknown future path. And then, when I’ve seen that through, maybe Riley and I can step back on a long haul, across a distant vacuum, and begin again on mutual trust. We need it for the next adventure’s run.

  The Ship’s Doctor will return in a forthcoming novel.

  Tartarus

  Somewhere deep inside, she told me once, I was still a man. I never believed her. She was a Stelline psych, and they work on commission. It was her job to make me useful again; even though I was in the GIMP, prison of prisons. Even though I remember things that make me not a man.

  I remember her now. Here, on this foreign planet, my ankles deep in mud, my StrafeMaster pressed against a fleshy chin. This guy I want to kill … I feel his pulse through the gun grips. He is nothing like me: he’s full of a self he likes and memories he wants to keep. But he is expendable.

  There is only one way out, and this is it. One more.

  But I remember that psych now. Her calculating gaze; the way she always touched her lips. The things she got out of me; the one thing she didn’t. And reality shifts.

  Five hours earlier

  The drop boat stunk of burning metal and new-grunt fear. They put us together moments before they chucked us out of orbit: twenty guys straight from the GIMP transport cells, all volunteers. Sheathed in fatigues, familiar strangers. And one of them had a Mouth.

  “Aw, shit man, what’s that smell?”

  Everything reeked. A busted latrine was leaking something pure, bright and chemical. The gear was old and musty. But one stink cut above the rest. And anyone who’d ever left a desk in the Stellines would have known what it was.

  “Ablative shields burning down,” I growled.

  “Ablative shields?” he asked.

  I know how to pick the ones who won’t last long. Mouth had a half-collar neck tattoo of binary digits: mark of the Hacker Corp. He was a lanky, wide-eyed desk jockey. Probably got slammed for a cybercrime, and should have known better than to try this way out. Code-happy kids don’t win at Deputized Combat.

  “Yeah, carbonizing phenolic sacrificial tiles. Last just long enough to get down.”

  “What the fuck, man? This is one way? What if we need evac?”

  I didn’t like the way Mouth talked to me. The guy next to him picked it and thumped Mouth hard in the solar plexus: shut the fuck up. I liked this guy a little better. Morale Boy. He had a tat too: a third eye with a crystal blue iris right on his forehead. Intel Corp, serious shit. But another desk jockey. Second to die.

  I grinned at them both. “Didn’t they tell you? They don’t waste fancy reusables on us pressgang arseholes. You gotta finish the game and make the pod to get out.”

  Smart guys like these should know that, but I’d been here before. Twice. So I knew not to assume about the gear or the gamefield. The ballistic in my arms said StrafeMaster™, but who knew if it was the real biz. I had CamSkin implanted face color, because I used to be in the field. But everyone else had camo paint that stank like an oil field. Real subtle.

  But all I had to do was survive Tartarus.

  Just once more.

  We crashed into the jungle, short of the open field. The gunwale opened with a wet crack. Outside was a mess of broken branches, undergrowth and giant trunks. Last trip, one of the guys went on about primeval forest, but he was a sucker. You let the blue sky get to you, you think clear liquid is water, you think about Earth … that’s the moment you die. There’s a reason this planet was kept for war.

  We weren’t the only boat. Deputized Combats happen all the time; cheaper to buy into lawfare than actually go to courts, and more entertainment. Might have been anything; patent infringement, industrial action. Each side could commission a squad of Stelline slammer volunteers and send them to Tartarus to work it out. They could spend their lawyer budget on equipment, or alienoid enforcement. Whatever; still cheaper than the traditional channels, which said a lot for paperwork. Cheaper for the Grand Interplanetary Military Prison, too, because lots of us die. And the other boat must have been full of cleanskins, because they left the boat too fast. And that’s never a good idea.

  Mouth got his jittery voice up in my ear. “What’s waiting Cap? Other boys are going?”

  They’d put me in charge just like that. My gut clenched. Being in charge is a bad memory. But I could hear splashes, right overhead, and something sizzling like the Sunday-morning bacon pan.

  Screaming s
tarted then, the hysterical kind. My heart valves kicked into overdrive, probably voiding the SyncoTech® warranty, and some of those bad memories tried to creep back in. I’d heard those screams before.

  “Came down in some Atlantic fire-weed,” I told the others. “Hydrofluoric acid raining on us. Get some something over your head and move it.”

  “Holy Fuck,” said Mouth.

  I slapped my visor down, hefted the StrafeMaster up. Through the monocle, I tried to pick a path out into the clear. I’d have gone it alone, but the bigger the squad, the better my odds of surviving till the end.

  The squad made it to the edge of the cleared field through shape-shifting undergrowth, and the trees, which twenty feet up branched and grew into their neighbors: many trunks, but all connected. Creepy Tartarus shit.

  Across the field was the Waypoint, but I pulled up in the open space. Time to up my chances. “Anyone got visualizers?”

  Two grunts pulled down slimline goggles.

  “Good. UV’s dominant spectrum so turn down the filter or you’ll blow out your retinas. Comms?”

  The comms op gave me the diver’s ok – index finger to thumb – which stopped me dead. I breathed, and took in the details: she had a nasty old wireless hacking pack, and signal jamming dish; looked like a camouflage Hulk. But there was some other stuff too: a slimline console peaked from a pocket, and I saw the matt, cubic-patterned side of a high-end EMP device. No way that stuff was issued. No way. So I picked her for a smuggler, and divers are useful in smuggling. Made sense; and let me roll the memory of my old squad diver away.

  I gave Comms longer than Mouth or Morale Boy, which was good, because we needed her to keep the enemy blind. But we still weren’t friends. “You keep the Deltas off our signal,” I said. Then, just like the commander I didn’t want to be again, I told them: we’re going to the Waypoint for orders, then to the Hot Gate.

  They moved, and Mouth fell in step beside me. “How many times you done this, Cap?”

  “Can’t tell you that. You know better,” I said, giving him the hard eye. Superstition; bad luck to say it; but I held up two fingers for them all to see. One more and I was free.

  That let them think there was hope. That it might happen for them too.

  A refuse pit marked the Waypoint like a grim, stinking target. There were bodies in the pit; not everyone made it that far. I let the others look while I scanned my chest implant against the pill box. It spat out the SCM-wafer.

  Which was black.

  I thumped on the ground-mounted shutter. Twice.

  An irritated voice answered through a tinny speaker. “What?”

  “Open the fucking shutter.”

  Curses accompanied the roll-back, revealing a hollow-eyed gamemaster down in the pit. The headset hung off his ear. “What?” he repeated.

  “This order card is blank.”

  “Name and rank,” he said, bored.

  I told him, and he punched at the console.

  “Just go to the damn coordinates,” he said finally.

  The shutter began closing. I stuck my foot in the close-space, letting the all-carbon sole take the pressure. The rams squealed. “I want the orders,” I said. “When did you guys stop doing your fucking jobs?”

  The gamemaster flicked his gaze to the console, then narrowed his eyes. “The card will activate inside the Hot Gate. You have five minutes to get there. Now remove your foot before I report you.”

  A countdown timer had started in the SCM’s top-left corner, showing negative time. I pushed down the qualm that was writhing, right down in the soles of my boots. Blank orders meant no advanced warning: type of game, map to the pod; who’d hired us to resolve their real-world squabble. And I remember the last time I went on a mission without info. The one that landed me in the GIMP; the whole reason I was there. But the time was a bigger problem. If we didn’t make the Hot Gate, the game was forfeit. Ka-boom.

  It might have been the better option. But I wanted that memory wipe. I wanted to be clean and new.

  So we moved.

  Hot Gate is a pretty fancy name for a pair of flimsy poles sticking up out of the undergrowth. They were right on a ridge, a gap in the perimeter fence, and beyond, the combat zone dropped into an undulating, continuous-canopy valley. The tree tops were blue, capped with white spackle. The squad conversation murmur stopped; all except for Mouth.

  “Cap? What’s with the trees? Don’t look right.”

  I knew what they were. But Tartarus was hardly a secret. “Why don’t you ask your Intel friend,” I said, nodding at Morale Boy.

  He shifted under my stare. “Frost-trees. Integrated biological heat exchanger. Ecosystem soil warming function.”

  I grunted. “You forgot about carnivorous. Now, inside the gate.”

  They passed through and I kept my insides in check. Took a deep, silent breath. I was ready to kill, ready to brave Tartarus, just once more.

  And then everything changed.

  Inside the gate, the SCM lit, as did everyone’s timepieces. And what I read liquefied my insides.

  You see, both other trips to Tartarus had been standard us vs. them. Two teams, one winner. And if you were still alive, you got out in the pod. Last time, that was me and another guy. All the opponents, the Deltas, were gone. But we’d made it. We’d evac’ed in the pod with twelve empty seats. And I’d known I just had to do one more …

  But this was different. I stood holding that card while the seconds ticked loud; as my throat dried out and my heart thudded against my stomach. I thought, just once more: I could do this, and I was out.

  So I lied to them. “Listen up. This combat game resolves a conflict between Magenta Corp and FibreStorm.” That part was straight off the card but I knew it was bullshit.

  “Our duly deputized opponents are human.” I could tell them that much.

  “But there’s a problem. The maps are corrupted. We’ve got no game rules, and no pod location.” Lies, all lies.

  The squad shifted on their feet, but no one asked to see the orders, not even Mouth. I stared round them, daring someone to challenge me. Daring someone to save themselves. But no one did.

  They all looked at me. “So whaddawe do?” asked Mouth.

  “Pod’s got a control screen with a copy of the orders, right?” said Morale Boy.

  Comms jerked her chin in agreement.

  I looked down at the SCM card. The timer had gone through zero, and was now counting up.

  “Game’s started,” I said, softly. “Better move.”

  Nothing happened for what seemed like a long time. The squad moved downhill, under the vaulted, under-canopy space. Among the massive frost-tree trunks with their fat, fleshy bases, the air was tropical-hot and stank like the refuse pit.

  I swung the taser-tipped StrafeMaster as I crept forward, but I wasn’t really there. I was thinking about how I would do this. My thoughts fragmented; I remembered the first time I’d been to Tartarus, when the Deltas had been temporal-substantial alienoids, freaky things that could shift between energy and matter, go poofing across the landscape. They’d used poison darts, and only showed up in UV. We’d lost half the squad before we’d realized they were there. Not that it would help me now, but I thought: that’s what happened in these combats. Men died. You did what you had to do. Just once more.

  “Cap?”

  I pulled myself back before memory could reload something darker. Comms and Morale Boy were in a huddle, checking out her scope. Three other grunts were arguing with each other, pointing off into the trees. Mouth, who was orchestrating all this, beckoned me over.

  “What?”

  Morale Boy spoke first. “The pod’s linked to the game system. It has to be to activate when the game is over. So we can bounce a signal off the perimeter fence, look for a disturbance from a big receiver and track it back to the pod.”

  “Whaddaya think, Cap?” said Mouth.

  “I think you’ll give away our position,” I said, even though it didn’t matt
er. I was checking over the rest of the squad, still assessing. Too many.

  More furious discussion. What about passive? said Comms. An executing program? Mouth said, What type of console you got?

  I left them to it. I slid away, soaking in the silence of the alien forest. It was a harsh place; dangerous. The heat was bloody murder; every skin crease oozed salty grime. Further down, the land folded into a narrow crease, stuffed with darkling ferns.

  Then Mouth was back in my ear. “We got a solution, Cap.” He pointed towards the ferns. “Signal says we should go that way.”

  I didn’t move my gaze. “Then let’s go that way.”

  It was further than it looked. They trekked down through the jungle, arms up, on alert. The frost-trees were high above us down there. We approached the ferns, which looked more and more angular. I’d seen them before. I stopped and tossed a small rock at one; its fronds ratcheted high, creaking like old ropes, before a limit passed and the branch flared. Metallic spurs unfolded and the front struck, like a moving bear trap. Viper bush. The path through was pretty narrow.

  I could hear the heavy swallows of the whole squad. “Fuck that,” mumbled someone. Morale Boy and Mouth chattered about the viper bush. Incessant chatter, like old-school radios. Radios. Like in terran choppers. I sucked in some hot air, teetering; the connection on reality held. I turned back to Comms. “You really want to go through there?”

  She checked her scope. “Getting close, Cap. Point one-one, bearing five degrees and minus four elevation. Right below us.”

  I looked around. I knew we were nowhere near the pod, but they didn’t know that. Someone might make a mistake. And if we went higher, I’d have to pass some frost-tree trunks. I faced down the valley. “Fine,” I said.

  We skirted round each bush, in the halo where each had carved out its fellows. We dropped into more oppressive air. Mouth grumbled about saunas.

  Finally, Comms pulled up in the lee of a stunted viper bush. “There,” she said, pointing at one of the frost-tree megatrunks.