The Man Who Talked to Suns

by Stephen Andrews

  The vehicle performed another momentum-free manoeuvre, and for the briefest time they moved in cool moist air again, shedding heat by turning rain drops to steam on the heated exterior of the suit and vehicle. Time enough for half a breath before the remorseless attacks found them again. His enemies must have been surprised by his endurance. The opening assault would have vaporised most targets, and they would have been confident that no living thing could sustain itself at the centre of their combined attack. They had under-estimated his resources. The first of them paid the price of miscalculation as the others found their mark again. He saw it as a flowering pinpoint of heat and a chimed marker on his optics. One of the attackers had succumbed to his suit’s response, transforming itself from life and mass into an expanding cloud of debris and energy under the attention of his automated weapons.

  It gained him advantage but not victory. Five weapons still followed him, their aim constant and unnerving, and while he was being heated less slowly he was still absorbing energy much faster than it could be shed. The vehicle bought them time again. Sensing his growing fear it turned hard in a tight spine snapping curve, then accelerated at a target. His foes had started in a broad arc, each positioned a long way apart, presumably because they did not know his exact position. Over the course of the brief, intense combat they had shifted, taking evasive manoeuvres and trying to optimise their position. In so doing they had lost formation. The vehicle was taking them closer to one and increasing the distance to the others. The same move had also put one attacker in the weapons path of another, forcing it to temporarily cease combat or destroy a friend. The vehicle fought with intelligence as well as speed and power. Little by little it was eroding their advantage and increasing its own.

  They surged at the nearest attacker. It was still outside of visual range but the systems at his disposal were far more able than human eyes. The enemy fluttered and danced attempting to avoid a lock by his weapons, perhaps sensing its own imperilled state, but the vehicle, blessed as it was by the power of suns found nothing to trouble its targeting. It took control of all the weapons systems, focussed them on this one target and released. Such concentrated power left traces even in the visual spectrum. A dead straight line of atmosphere and rain turned to plasma and marked the path of his weapon’s attack. The foe ceased to exist, the components of its former self expanding away in a cloud of energised molecules. Two destroyed.

  The remaining enemies’ own energy weapons still had him pinpointed, and while the loss of two allies had degraded their capability, the others did not give up. He wondered at the power source behind such sustained attacks. Surely, expending this much energy would soon see them run out of power? Weapons like this were designed to destroy in an instant, to penetrate defences and kill at distance before the victim even saw the attack coming. They released massive bolts of power in micro-seconds, and as a result their endurance was limited. And yet, he was still suffering their combined attention. Both the suit and the vehicle had vented their entire liquid water supplies attempting to cool and deflect enemy weapons. The suit had turned its exterior to a reflective mirror surface, eschewing the now useless camouflage for radiation reflecting tones. They fought with guile and power and superior abilities, and still the enemy persisted.

  There were small patches on the suit that had turned blue and purple, taking on the look of polished, heated metal. It was a bad sign. Of course the suit was not metal; its complex structure was a living community of natural and artificial compounds, but the change of colour signalled a terminal failure in sections of armour. Parts of it were dying, succumbing to the relentless bombardment. As they died, so did their protective properties. He felt scolding heat penetrate — it hit like an instant blast of sunburn. Skin prickled in dry pain, each tiny crease of flesh seeming to form a channel for nerve endings to fire in protest as they died. The once shielding armour now acted to conduct the heat, and he instinctively tried to recoil from it, failing as the perfectly fitting suit followed his body’s every movement.

  Until now the vehicle and suit had been leading the fight, their hair-trigger responses and advanced senses had kept them all alive, and while that had seen them through the first moments of ambush, he had to join the fight too. No doubt his enemies had calculated the odds at six against one. They were wrong, it was six against two at best, and now with him entering the fight fully and two of the attacker’s number already lost it was about to become four against three. That was not the overwhelming odds they had assumed, and while they still had the advantage in firepower they were about to feel the combined ferocity of a mind evolved to survive, matched with things grown to fight. He pondered all this, and felt a twinge of sympathy for his enemy, that was replaced as swiftly as it had come by angry predatory focus.

  An alert chimed in his ear, as the suit detected a new threat; one of the targets had released a swarm of tiny hyper velocity killers. They were small enough to avoid detection at range and had closed on him swiftly. The suit found them now and sorted them from the background clutter. Each identified individual was marked and tracked and targeted. As they closed, the energy weapons of the other adversaries stopped firing; they did not want to obliterate the attacking flock as it approached him. Both the suit and the vehicle released a wide spray of offensive fire, hosing the path of the tiny attackers with broad beams of energy. There were too many to target individually and their capabilities were not known, but the rapidly decreasing gap implied a deadly end result. Many of them were roasted, turned to little sparks of molten debris by his weapons. But not all; enough still came at them.

  The point of impact was approaching. The cloud of killers had thinned but still contained enough individuals to guarantee a contact, and they were consciously regrouping, closing gaps in their ranks and forming a smaller but formidable phalanx. He had one thought for the vehicle — jump somewhere now! Twist the fabric of the world again and move us away. It had sensed his command before the thought was finished and it executed another instant shift in velocity and location. This time it was accompanied by the feeling of physical dislocation he had felt when they ascended the mesa. He sensed the vehicle struggling to execute the move. It had done so while tracking enemies, tracking the swarm of killers, monitoring the environment, moving itself and continuing to select and engage targets. It was at its limits once again; even the sun-blessed did not possess infinite resources.

  The shift had barely moved them but it was enough to take them out of the path of the minute attackers. The objects shot past, disappearing behind. He looked around and over his shoulder to help the suit focus and to use his own senses, trying to see if they would reverse course and pursue him. The turn of his head and torso were accompanied by a sudden loud forceful smack. There had been a small and dense impact on his chest. It rocked him back a little before the suit took charge, preventing him from flipping backwards. He had not avoided every attacker. He looked down to see a thumbnail sized black splatter of matter on the exterior of the suit, and as he watched a slowly expanding circle of purple-blue moved out from the point of impact. The missile was an assassin bug. Its job was to kill the suit, shut down its systems, and trap the occupier inside. It would turn armour into a suffocating coffin.

  Had the enemy released this new attack because their weapons were empty, or had they now identified their intended victim’s real capabilities? Either way this new attack had released him from fire but exposed him to slow death. The suit operated by bonding itself to him. It would take medical and engineering facilities to remove it if it died while on him, and in the meantime the breather would fail, toxins would build inside it and his body’s excretions would not disperse. It would be a very unpleasant death.

  The battle shifted from a long distance duel to a close quarter fight. He felt relief that there was only one assassin bug impact. Multiple attacks from these micro-killers would have started cancerous spots spreading all over the suit. The volume of attacking bugs indicated they worked together, a
nd he might have been lucky, perhaps one was not enough to disable more than a small part of the suit, and it seemed the attackers were disbursing. The battered but still functioning suit tracked them along with the vehicle’s own systems. Yes, they were moving back. Did this mean they had given up, or did they think a fatal blow had been dealt, or was it perhaps a tactical move to allow a new attack? He did not know, but the spot was growing slowly still and he needed to tend to the suit, and if necessary remove it before it stopped functioning altogether. There was only one decision possible; clear the field of enemies and then find his friends quickly. He ordered the vehicle to full velocity and into pursuit. He had not forgotten his hunter’s desire.

  The vehicle raised itself above the ground a little more. It was still close but it did not hug the contours so closely. At the speeds they were about to attain the vertical changes needed to follow detailed contours would have rattled his eyes from their sockets. Acceleration entered his world again and speed built on speed. Once more the abilities of this tiny craft amazed him. As it smashed atmosphere out of its path, it aimed for the last point of contact with the enemy, and soon contact was re-established. The suit found them first, targeting alerts and pinpoints blipping back onto the optics with a communicated sense of caution and elation. It wanted to make sure he would get the message; they had found the enemy again.

  The four remaining adversaries had slowed and grouped beyond the horizon. Clearly they did not consider counter-attack a possibility. They were close to each other and moving at ordinary speeds. His sudden, high-velocity presence must have surprised and shocked them. For the briefest of moments they did nothing, and the suit and vehicle locked their weapons, cooperating to distribute fire in a way that would obliterate each target one after the other in fury of precisely directed energy. The first target just had time to start an evasive manoeuvre before the forces holding its atoms together ceased to cooperate under his attack. It lost its physical cohesion and popped apart in a cloud of dispersing matter.

  The deceased enemy bought a little time for its comrades. Taking advantage of the moments of its dying, they split; one moved left, one moved right, and one — in what might have been an act of suicidal bravery or simple brainless panic — accelerated directly at him. His weapons instantly responded and locked on the new target. In the fractions of a second it took his systems to prioritise the threats and aim weapons, they closed the distance between themselves, and the enemy’s intentions became clear. As his weapons powered up to fire, there was a sudden bright flash. For a moment he thought his own weapons had destroyed another target, but the scale of the flash and the fact that his weapons had not fired suggested only one other possibility. The adversary had sacrificed itself in an attempt to save its allies and engulf him in an explosive fire-ball. It had been clever, turning his advantage of speed against himself, for now he hurtled into an inferno of fire and debris that could not be avoided.

  He felt the shockwave first; the vehicle bumped and shook as compressed atmosphere pummelled them. The dead and dying patches of armour were the first to transmit the heat of the explosion. A vapourising cloud of gas blasted across him as the optics blackened to stop his retinas being burned by the flash. His vision returned to see collected detritus on the optics glowing like paper embers. Pieces of debris thwacked against the vehicle and the suit in a hail-stone ripple of impacts. The force of these and the heat penetration indicated just how degraded the suit was becoming. He had no time to examine the assassin bug’s progress, but he suspected that it still ate away and compounded the battle damage. His body was becoming more and more exposed to a fight between systems that boiled and detonated living tissue mercilessly.

  This adversary had been clever, but not clever enough. Although he passed through the explosion, it was a spent force by the time the vehicle rattled and bounced through its depleting shockwave. The experience was unpleasant and painful but it was not the deadly blast his foe had hoped for. The enemy had detonated too early. It was a massive explosion, and it had tested the battle damaged suit, but it was miss-timed and it did not kill. He emerged on the far side of the blast with the vehicle already scanning for foes. It had been temporarily blinded by the blast as it shut down systems to avoid damage, and now it hunted again. It had once survived the nuclear inferno that is the heart of a sun, and while these attackers posed a threat, they were nothing compared to the gravity, mass and heat at the heart of its origins.

  Twin contacts moving rapidly in opposite directions re-appeared in the optics. He was close to bisecting the starting point of both enemies, and each appeared as a target marker in his peripheral vision — one left and one right. They continued moving apart, now taking on the psyche of prey trying to divide the hunter’s attention. No weapons found him, no attacks materialised. He had broken the enemies will to fight, and all that remained to them was the basic, primordial urge to survive. He checked for the swarm of assassin bugs and found no evidence that they were still pursuing him; their tiny lift engines must be spent. He was clear to attack. All that remained now was to choose a target.

  The vehicle sensed his dilemma and intervened ‘target left’ it flashed at his consciousness, accompanying the proposition with a sense of urgency and imminent victory. It pumped data into his brain and the illusion of instant intuitive tactical brilliance bubbled up from his subconscious. The target on the left was closer and heading back towards the mesas where it would find cover, and if it recovered its own senses, might even be able to fight back. He concurred, and as soon as the thought formed, the vehicle responded by executing a rapid banked turn to the left, leaning at ninety degrees to the vertical and squashing him against the flat surface in front of his chest. To his discomfort the suit had difficulty in responding. Its systems were failing as it diverted more and more power to try and repair itself and suppress the slow inexorable march of the assassin bug.

  The target flew straight and fast, running hard for the safety of cover. It did not manoeuvre or attempt to deviate from its course; it simply fled. The aggressor had, it seemed, chosen to die. The vehicle targeted it, chose weapons and offered him release before he could ponder the motives of his enemy. He took a moment to do so, sure that it could not escape. If it had indeed given up hope, why did it not simply stop and present itself for destruction, or detonate itself in an attempt to kill them both; a suicidal victory of sorts would be better than losing the battle and its life. It could not hope to outrun the vehicle. And yet, it barrelled on as if speed offered immunity from his weapons.

  He drew a breath, closed his eyes and sent an impulse to the vehicle. ‘End its life’ he thought. He did not feel victorious, rather a sadness swept over him. He remembered the hollow hearted, emotional wounds of defeat. His enemy must be feeling this now, and for a moment he wished it would all end. People had moved from the struggle to survive on a planet that they were rapidly consuming, to the limitless bounty of an infinite universe. Did this killing really need to go on? Every individual could in theory have his or her own planet. What was it that drove people to fight and dominate each other still? For all the years of progress, and for all the wonder they now commanded, his kind still struggled with the ego and insecurity that led one group to kill another. The primitive impulse to take at another’s expense still clamoured and fought for the dominance of people’s souls. Kill or be killed was now a truly universal principle of human kind.

  A small nova in the middle distance reminded him that he too was part of this game. The enemy burned and disintegrated under the power of his weapons. Some core of it survived, and glowing white hot, it smashed into the earth and then spun into the air, showers of molten matter sparking from it. The remains bounced and then split into drops of melted matter that ploughed their own furrows until they were too spent to register on his sensors. It had been an easy victory over an enemy that knew it had lost. Such an easy win diminished his sense of victory. It was no longer a fight but a termination of life. He consciously thought
of the par-born’s attack hoping that the threat to his life from that alien killer would rekindle his desire to find revenge. It did not. He was alive and the enemy was not. It was another death in a cycle of deaths he had known for most of his adult life, and in this moment he was tired of the dying, and he longed to sail the seas of his home free from fear and anger.

  But, his world was not free. Sailing its seas was not an option for him anymore. Others controlled and monitored the lives of his people, and those same others hunted him. If there had to be killing, then the freedom of his world was worth killing for. Others lives would depend on what he achieved next. To resign his course and flee into his own peace would be to abandon those whose salvation he could deliver. Personal qualms had no place here. Later he could let himself reflect and perhaps regret. Now he must finish. The vehicle had been tracking the last surviving enemy as they blasted in different directions and increased the gap between themselves. At his command it executed a one hundred and eighty degree turn and started the inexorable processes of closing on the final aggressor. It was far away, but he was swift, and the vehicle accelerated again, objects in the distance seeming to move from stationary to flinchingly close in an instant. He would close a little and then release the final focused rounds that would end his pursuers’ mission and free him to complete his.