But there was still a point to prove. It wasn’t enough just to undergo the Ordeal. Thorne had to be defeated. Pride was at stake, and more. A principle. Men like Ben Thorne had to be shown up for the preening, puffed-up little pricks they were.
Some of the miners seemed to be developing sympathy for Dev. They were no longer hitting him quite as forcefully as before.
Others, though, were redoubling their efforts. They wanted him to weaken, to crumple, to fall.
One unusually savage blow made him bite his tongue by accident. He spat out the blood.
Another caught him between two ribs, injuring an intercostal muscle. It felt like a heart attack.
“Thirteen minutes,” said Thorne. He was trying to keep his tone of voice neutral, but there was evident aggravation in it. Dev was only two and a half minutes away from beating his time.
Unfortunately, Dev felt about a minute and a half away from blacking out.
Someone yelled, “It touched. Did you see that? A tray touched down. I swear.”
“No, it didn’t,” said someone else. “I was watching. Nearly, but not quite.”
Dev, grimacing with the strain, wrenched both arms back up to horizontal. Each tray felt as though it was carrying a ton. His arms, his shoulders, his head – all were shuddering uncontrollably with the burden.
In the military, Dev had endured hazing rituals, or ‘corrective training’ as it was known. On the whole these had been penalties for minor infractions – arriving late for drill, a spot of dirt besmirching his uniform – and had involved running laps and doing press-ups until he puked, or being doused with water and made to stand outdoors in subzero conditions.
On one occasion, though, he had fallen asleep near the end of a combat simulation exercise lasting forty-eight hours. He was supposed to be guarding a munitions depot, but he was so exhausted after nearly two days of endless marching, live-firing, trench digging and reconnaissance that he could barely keep his eyes open.
An instructor caught him napping and decided an example should be made.
“If you nod off and a Plusser crab tank comes crawling over the hill,” the instructor said, “you’re toast, your munitions depot is toast, and your regiment is probably toast, too.”
Dev couldn’t resist pointing out that a crab tank, noisy as it was, would wake him up, giving him plenty of time to raise the alarm. Doubtless he shouldn’t have said this, but he was in trouble already, so what had he got to lose?
“All right, a fucking stealth manta, then,” the instructor said testily. “Now, squat down on your haunches. No, lower. Ladies and gentlemen...”
Dev’s fellow recruits gathered round.
“Private Harmer here, in addition to having a lip on him, is a lazy bastard and a hazard to his brothers and sisters in arms. No unit can afford a weak link. He needs toughening up.”
The instructor gave Dev a cup of water to hold, full to the brim. Then, at his invitation, the other recruits thumped him on the buttocks and thighs with their rifle butts. Every drop of water spilled meant a further minute in the stress position, being pummelled.
The strange thing about it was that afterwards, even though he could barely walk, Dev felt no ill will towards his cohorts or the instructor. He had made a mistake, and had earned redemption. If it had been someone else getting hazed, he, Dev, would have joined in along with the others. Acts of discipline, however harsh, were necessary to foster cohesion and comradeship. Without, the ranks might break. One fail, all fail.
That was the day it dawned on him that he wasn’t just an unwilling participant in the TerCon juvenile offender conscription programme. He might actually be a soldier after all.
Today, he found himself almost pining for the beating he had received back then. Compared with the Ordeal, it was a cakewalk.
“Fifteen,” said Thorne, who was now having trouble concealing his annoyance. And his apprehension.
Dev couldn’t quite believe it. Half a minute left.
He hardly felt the pain any more. There was so much, it seemed to lose its meaning. It lay outside him, like a sphere whose inner surface he couldn’t reach or touch.
Arms.
Stomach.
Back.
Not his.
Nothing to do with him.
“Fifteen-fifteen.”
He was aware of a faint murmuring. The miners, marvelling to one another.
Just a few more seconds.
He closed his eyes. Or were they already closed? Darkness was enfolding him.
Stay with it!
Don’t flake out like at the supply depot!
His eyes snapped open.
“Fifteen-twenty-five.”
Just...
A couple more...
The trays fell, clattering, spilling their contents.
Dev sank to his knees.
He blinked up at Thorne. The union leader’s face gave nothing away.
“Well?” he managed to whisper.
20
KAHLO’S APARTMENT WAS undecorated, unadorned, almost showroom-clean and tidy. It was as though no one lived there. There wasn’t one personal touch: not a picture, not an ornament, no mementos, nothing. This was how a habitat cube looked the day it was offloaded, unpacked and assembled, fresh from kit form.
Dev sat on a couch which, like all the other furnishings, conformed to the default colour scheme of oatmeal and beige. He was bare-chested, and once again the beneficiary of copious amounts of topical curative gel. He had applied it himself to his front, but Kahlo had done his back. She had not been gentle.
The pain was ebbing, the swelling going down. The laceration on his belly had begun to heal.
“So,” Kahlo said. “Pleased with yourself?”
“Shouldn’t I be? The strike is over. Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to work we go. Normal service has been resumed. I’d say that was a good result.”
“Yeah, but did you see Thorne’s face? He looked ready to throttle you.”
“Big deal.” Dev was nonchalant. “He doesn’t scare me. Besides, what’s he got to complain about? It’s not as if I broke his record.”
“You equalled it, though.”
“Best for both of us. He keeps his title, but I showed him he shouldn’t get complacent. Also, some of those miners cheered when he announced my time.”
“Give you a warm, fuzzy feeling inside, did it?”
“Only because it was a sign of dissent. Those people are completely browbeaten by Thorne. He has them under his thumb. He’s a dictator. Now a few of them think less of him than before. It’s a start.”
“Harmer the revolutionary.”
“Come the next leadership election, maybe they’ll vote him out, put someone more reasonable in his place, someone not so vain and self-serving, less of a blowhard. I’ve undermined his authority, if you’ll forgive the pun.”
“I never forgive puns. They’re unforgivable.”
Dev puffed out his cheeks and shook his head. “Fuck. It must be difficult, being such a hardcase all the time. If you could, you’d make having a sense of humour a criminal offence, wouldn’t you?”
“Well, excuse me for being serious,” Kahlo shot back. “Everything may seem like fun and games to you, but I have a city to keep safe, millions of people counting on me to look after them. Frivolity isn’t part of the equation.”
“Surely you can relax sometimes.” But this was not the apartment of someone who relaxed. It was the apartment of someone who had no life outside of work. It was the place Kahlo went when she had to eat, bathe and sleep, and it served no function other than that. It was certainly not a home, not a private space. She would not have brought him here otherwise.
“Never,” she said. “I can never drop my guard. I have responsibilities and I do not shirk them. It’s all right for you. You just breeze in, dick around, do as you feel. I am a Calder’s Edger. This is my city, and policing it is my vocation. When you’re done here you’ll just go, move on to wherever ISS tell you. I have
a long-term, a lifelong commitment.”
“You think I don’t care about anything? It’s all just a big laugh to me?”
“I haven’t yet seen evidence to the contrary.”
“Well, for one thing, my aching torso would beg to differ,” Dev said. “I have responsibilities too. I’m not with ISS just for shits and giggles. I have a vested interest in achieving a successful outcome, not only on Alighieri but everywhere I’m sent.”
“What, you’re on some kind of bonus scheme? A tax-free lump sum for every Polis Plus plot you foil? Maybe it’s like being a bounty hunter – a reward for each Plusser scalp you take.”
“Yes, it’s that simple. I’m that cynical.”
“You’ve probably got a bank account back on Earth, building up a nice, fat, juicy balance. A few more jobs and you can retire a rich man. And that’s all we are to you. That’s all this is. That’s why you can afford to joke around. It’s just a job. Just money.”
“You have me bang to rights, Captain Kahlo. I wither before your penetrating insight. You have seen through to my hollow, mercenary soul.”
“What is it, then?” she said. “Why do you do this?”
“You really want to know?”
“I really want to know. Perhaps if I know, I’ll understand you a bit better and I won’t find you so fucking annoying that every single minute I’m with you I’m having to restrain myself from kicking you in the balls.”
“Better women than you have tried.”
Dev looked down at the mass of bruises on his abdomen, overlapping circles and ovals like some sort of Venn diagram of pain. Already, thanks to the gel, they were visibly reduced in size. Their angry reds and purples had changed to blurry browns and yellows.
“I died,” he said.
“Huh?”
“Five years ago. On Kepler Sixty-One B, also known as Barnesworld.”
“The Battle of Leather Hill.”
“Yes. The decisive conflict of the Frontier War, they call it. The turning point. By which they mean the battle where the slaughter was so massive on either side that we and Polis Plus both realised if we carried on the way we were going, we’d most likely end up annihilating one another.”
“You... died?”
“Along with a million and a half other TerCon troops and about the same number of Plussers. Of course, we’d figured out by then how to jam their inbuilt transfer matrices, so that they couldn’t nip out of crippled mechs and dying organic forms at the last moment. That put the wind up them.”
“They couldn’t respawn immediately in backup units,” Kahlo said. “It cut their tactical effectiveness by a significant factor.”
“Yes. Before jamming, if we didn’t destroy a mech instantly and outright, the Plusser consciousness inhabiting it would just flit back behind lines in a picosecond and commandeer a new one from the reserves. You’d get waves of them coming in one after another, relentless, without end. It seemed futile. But once we’d stopped them being able to hop out and escape at will – well, that changed the whole complexion of the war.”
“The ejector seat button had been disconnected, as it were.”
“That’s it. They still didn’t fear death; that’s the digimentalist mindset for you. The religious fanatic is the worst kind of enemy, because their lives have no value to them. They’ll sacrifice themselves happily for the cause, knowing that afterlife nirvana awaits – in their case, oneness with the Singularity. But we’d taken away their main theatre-of-combat advantage. Leather Hill was when we first drove that point home. It was a huge shock to the Plussers. They’d never experienced casualties like that until then. Neither, unfortunately, had we.”
“Someone said it made the Somme look like a playground squabble.”
“I haven’t heard that one, but I can endorse it. It was... mindless. Just wholesale murder, all around.”
Dev paused, feeling a chill.
Leather Hill.
It was only a shallow rise in the landscape, a blister of rocky ground covering the same sort of acreage as a small town. Brown and knobbly. From a height, it resembled an expanse of freshly tanned cow hide; hence the name.
Nobody lived for hundreds of kilometres around in any direction. Barnesworld was still in the throes of colonisation. Its continents were grassland and savannah; its icecaps were small and stable. It had few mountain ranges, few active volcanoes. Its flora and fauna were attractive and docile. Total population: somewhere in the region of three hundred thousand.
It was a gentle, inoffensive warm-superterran mesoplanet, and it attracted the kind of Diasporan settler who fancied a life of ranching and agriculture, a stressless bucolic existence on rolling plains beneath low-albedo skies, with solitude practically a given.
To this peaceful, unspoiled spot the Frontier War came. Polis+ decided to set up a forward command post on Barnesworld, and then a refuelling dump, and then one of their automated mech factories churning out battlefield-ready robots and vehicles. Never mind that the Terran Diaspora had got there first. Never mind that Barnesworld was officially Earth turf. The Plussers established a presence on it, gambling that TerCon would consider it of too little strategic value to be worth defending.
A few farmers, plenty of wide open spaces, not much in the way of exploitable resources... Who gave a damn about Barnesworld?
It turned out that Polis+ had miscalculated. TerCon did indeed give a damn. A whole heap of damns, in fact.
For here was a planet with negligible heavy-duty infrastructure. Undeveloped, a blank canvas. And TerCon was keen to do some painting.
Troops and matériel were shipped from existing battlefronts to Barnesworld in mass quantities. It was an overkill response to Polis+’s relatively small-scale incursion.
Polis+, understandably alarmed, answered with a huge mobilisation of its own. Barnesworld’s blue skies were filled with gulf cruisers and the columns of space elevators dropping in from near orbit and anchoring. Within a couple of weeks, the Plussers had committed fully a quarter of their war machine to this undistinguished and hitherto insignificant globe that was roughly twice the size of Earth and half the size of their own artificial homeworld.
It was just what TerCon high command wanted. The top brass were forcing a fight on a level playing field. The plan was to deliver a decisive, convincing blow against the enemy. Draw them out and land a haymaker. Stun them so hard they were sent reeling, never to recover, or else lost heart and sued for peace.
The transcription matrix jamming signal was still a secret at that stage. The technology had been selectively field tested and found to work. Leather Hill was the first time it was given widescale deployment. The Plussers would not have their usual endless respawning technique to fall back on. Let them see how they liked that.
Nineteen days the battle raged. Nineteen days spent vying over that barren chunk of highland, that rocky outcrop which had no intrinsic importance but just happened to be where the two armies clashed.
Leather Hill.
It hadn’t even had a name before the battle, but it became synonymous with the worst slaughter ever seen in the Frontier War – or in any war waged by humans, for that matter.
Dev could not recall sleeping during the conflict. Perhaps a half-hour snatched here and there, a few stolen moments of blessed oblivion.
Otherwise, it was continual combat. A cacophony of noise – the jackhammering of ballistic guns, the crunch of explosions, the lightning crackle of beam weapons. Flashes and flickers, night-time as bright as daytime. Mechs churning the soil with their treads or whining through the air on cushions of electrogravitic pulse. Clods of earth thrown up by strafing bombardments. The howling of Polis+ zombie clone battalions as they charged en masse against artillery positions, overwhelming through sheer numbers, clogging the emplacements with several hundredweight of dead meat.
Dev survived almost to the end. He and his sapper unit moved through the carnage, making forays to set traps for Plusser tanks and robot divisions. They demol
ished mechs that had been disabled by missiles or shells but still housed their controlling sentiences, pinned to the shattered hulks by the jamming signal. It was mercy killing, after a fashion. They also provided infantry support when called for, joining the ordinary ranks in the struggle to hold ground against the oncoming Plusser hordes.
Then came the order to assault a modular robot battalion entrenched in a small depression, encircled on all sides by Terran forces. A Polis+ rearguard holdout that was inflicting severe damage even as the human military was making a concerted push forward, thrusting deep into enemy territory.
The beleaguered android mechs were fighting to the last. If one of them lost an arm or a leg to gunfire, it would simply scavenge a replacement component from the heaps of metal bodies lying around it. Occasionally the mechs would fuse themselves together in groups of three or four to create a towering, multi-limbed behemoth that would then go on a rampage, performing a wild suicide run in the hope of taking out as many of the opposition as it could before it was taken out itself.
It was one of these gargantuan atrocities that slew Dev. He would never forget – how could he? – the sight of it zeroing in on his unit, its limbs gangling and flailing with minimal coordination. Its several heads ululating a war cry, proclaiming in unison the majesty and supremacy of its god: “The Singularity! The Singularity! All hail the Singularity!”
Dev and his comrades unleashed volleys of muon beam fire and rocket-propelled homing grenades at the thing. Sections of its armour disintegrated, flying away like chaff. They crippled three of its eight legs.
Still it kept coming.
Limping, spurting yellow hydraulic fluid, guns blazing, it stumbled onto them. It whirled like a top, spraying them with kinetic rounds at more or less point blank range.
Dev’s death was not heroic, or dignified. He just succumbed like the men and women beside him to the hail of fire coming from the robot’s many coilguns. There was no glamour or glory, no last hurrah. There was only unprecedented agony, the violation of his body by countless projectiles travelling at eight thousand kilometres per hour – and then a period of strange numb serenity as he lay on the ground, torn and ruined, waiting for nothingness to come.
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