The gap was closing fast, but this last enemy was not conceding defeat. It sensed the new dynamic in its life, and responded. The fast random movements started as soon as the vehicle changed course, and it peppered the vehicle with pathetic but accurate fire, using the last of its weapon’s energy. The enemy still had fight in it, and it reminded him that he must not let maudlin distraction divert him. His enemy may be finished but whatever its feelings, the aggressor clearly still hoped to prevail somehow or die trying. He knew it must be the latter.
With victory assured he let a question that had troubled him since the fight began emerge into conscious thought. Who or what are these things that wished him dead? He did not mean it in a general sense, because he had no doubt that the lives now extinguished and the one left fleeing, were agents of his enemies. He meant it personally and specifically — are they sentient beings or machines or something of both, and what do they feel towards me? He queried the vehicle and found that while it had made a tactical assessment of the enemy’s speed, agility, weapons and likely combat radius, it had not probed more deeply. There was no time for idle curiosity in the intensity of combat. But combat was now over; this chase was an execution, an execution he could stay if he wished to learn more about his pursuers him. He made a choice that he hoped he would not regret, and flashed the impulse at the vehicle; disable the target, I want to inspect it.
For the briefest of instants it seemed that the vehicle would challenge his command. Its presence in his psyche shifted in a way he felt but could not properly interpret. It did not comply instantly as it usually would, and there was coldness to its aura that he had not felt before. Was it afraid or concerned? Did it think this an unnecessary distraction from the mission? Whatever passed across its sun-forged consciousness ended almost before he could register the change, and now he felt it shift its focus from hunting to trapping.
The last enemy was moving fast and low across the tundra, away from the mesas. From time to time the flowing, rolling terrain blocked his line of fire as the enemy dipped behind a hill or turned to put some obstruction between itself and his weapons. The distance between them was closing fast and for the first time since combat began he caught glimpses of the enemy with unaided sight. At this range it was a speck, an ill-defined point moving in a way that was at odds with the natural flow of the world. Occasionally it fired and he felt radiation leak in through the damaged patches on his suit, but the weapons it chose were spent and even naked he would have felt little more than a warm glow. What was clear, even at this distance, was that the enemy vehicle was sucking in and ejecting atmosphere to keep it above the terrain and to propel it forward. A trail of water vapour and debris followed its path. It was bound by the physics of this world in a way that the vehicle was not. It was a soldier wielding a sword against a demon.
Detail began to appear even as the evasive manoeuvres became more violent. He could make out the thin nozzles that jetted compressed, heated gas down and behind. He could see a sleek design made to part atmosphere efficiently, and the protrusions of weapons and sensors that compromised that efficiency. Distance closed and he saw moving parts; fins and vectored thrusters twitched and pulsed as the enemy attempted ever more desperate changes of direction. He was careful not to follow it directly, fearful that some weapon might still be released into his path or that the whole craft itself might detonate as its ally had. And, he was having trouble moving now. The suit felt heavy and slow. It resisted his commands, and there were patches on the optics that made images float and drift in and out of view. The breather element was feeding him increasingly odd tastes that he guessed were puffs of unprocessed atmosphere. Did the enemy sense the damage to his armour and revel as each moment brought death a little closer, he wondered?
With that thought in mind, he almost released his weapons, but curiosity was stronger than caution. The enemy craft was now off to his front-left, banking and twisting, rising and falling, and failing to shake him off. He could clearly see all the characteristics, and yes it looked like there was space for human — or at least humanoid — occupants. The vehicle was now close enough to target specific points on the exterior. It sought his permission to fire, and he agreed, cautioning it again not to destroy the whole craft. The first streams of disintegrating particles destroyed a lift nozzle and the enemy dipped to one side, a lower part dragging across the landscape and creating a new trail of savaged vegetation and earth. It quickly compensated and attempted a high gee turn. The vehicle followed its path, holding station behind, but the vehicle’s own turn was noticeably more gentle than it had been earlier. It could sense the suit was struggling to protect its occupant from the forces of manoeuvre.
A second release of weaponry melted a propulsion nozzle. It flared and burned and lost its form like wax heated by a flame. Drag took its toll, and the enemy slowed, but still it did not give in. Unbelievably it attempted to ram him. In its crippled state the manoeuvre was easy to avoid, but it showed the fight it still had. The vehicle used the enemy’s attempted collision to change its relative position, opening a new line of fire on the other side. It targeted another nozzle and warned him that this would disable the enemy’s lift. ‘Fire’ he willed and the vehicle released a weapon. The lift nozzle expanded in a ball of heated mass, losing its manufactured shape and being blasted apart by the compressed gases it was designed to control. The enemy could no longer support its own weight and it slid into the ground with a vibrating thunder that he felt in his bones.
Rock and soil, vegetation and machine parts rose into the air behind the enemy. A trail of smashed matter formed a dark cloud, spotted with twisting debris; the friction between the enemy craft’s belly and the living matter of the planet tearing the craft to pieces. It ploughed a furrow in the landscape, stripping grey-green vegetation and revealing the dark peaty soil beneath. For a while it skated across the ground releasing a tortured wail as it shed parts, adding to the boiling mass of its former form that trailed behind. It seemed stable, sliding and decelerating to what would be an eventual halt. But the natural landscape beneath had not been prepared as a landing ground. The rock the craft hit was concealed below a light layer of soil and vegetation; enough to hide the ancient stone from sight but not enough to cushion impact. The rough deceleration suddenly turned into an instant and shocking conflagration.
Fire mushroomed and expanded, pieces of the enemy vehicle spun and twisted out of it, flashing from the orange-black fireball at speeds that registered in the optics only after they had passed by. The atmosphere was filled with torn and shredded parts exploding away from the point of impact with lacerating force. The vehicle reacted first; it rotated fast through ninety degrees, presenting its belly to the shrapnel and shielding him from most of the potential harm. The vehicle did not want to test the suit’s remaining integrity with the wearer’s life. He clung on, using more of his strength than had been necessary earlier in an unnerving test of his fitness. Pieces of accelerated debris pinged and thumped off the vehicle, and mercifully none impacted its rider. He watched a large curved plate bigger than the combined mass of himself and the vehicle cartwheel across the terrain in front of them, creating its own mini-orbit of broken and detached parts. The air was filled with sounds; high pitched buzzes and twangs rose and fell quickly as objects cut a vibrating doppler path through the atmosphere.
Amidst the chaos of ground and enemy craft violently mixing, the vehicle detected an anomaly. It whipped an alert into his consciousness, pinpointing an object that had risen skywards like so many others, but had done so at a speed that was at odds with the power of the blast. It appeared to be moving under its own power, passing through the shower of parts, and moving up and out from the point of impact, away from the weapons that had brought about its downfall. The vehicle reacted before he could form a thought, correctly anticipating his desire to track and pursue the anomalous object. The vehicle decelerated and banked through the disbursing tail of dust and smoke even as the remains of the enemy contin
ued to burn and disintegrate across the landscape ahead of them. The object had risen high into the blustery atmosphere, and was an easy target, but he would not fire on it. He already suspected what it was and what he would find by tracking it to its inevitable fall to earth. The enemy jetsam traced a ballistic trajectory— a rising curve had ended and was now turning into a similarly curving fall as gravity took its gentle but unerring turn. The vehicle had calculated a path to the enemy landing point, and while he glanced at the line on his optics, he did not need it to know where the enemy would hit the ground. They drifted slowly to the point, and he looked up, watching a speck drop from the cloud base and move towards ground-fall with alarming speed. It continued dropping until, just as it seemed it must hit the ground with shattering force, a whistling sound filled the air and the shimmer of gases heated to extreme temperature rippled the atmosphere around it. The deceleration was violent and abrupt and the enemy craft bumped to a stop on the pulpy vegetation beneath. For a moment it stayed upright, and then it toppled gently to one side and settled.
He dismounted from the vehicle and started towards it, eager to confirm his suspicions. The ground was covered in waist high vegetation. A tangle of intertwined stems and large liquid filled pods obstructed his path to the jettisoned object. Yesterday the suit would have powered through the mass like a bulldozer, but today it was doing little to aid his muscles. In fact, the suit was becoming a burden, and as he felt the weight and drag so a reflexive wave of anxiety passed over him again. Time was short, he could not let the suit break whilst it was on him. That would hand the final victory to his enemies. By the time he reached the fallen object he was sweating profusely, and in a telling sign of just how fast the suit was failing, the sweat was not wicked away and recycled, but it pooled in dripped and he felt the dampness cling to his skin.
He reached the ejected object, breathing hard and with a pain in his ankle. That still-not-healed wound was protesting the exertion and stress placed on it. The object itself was coffin sized and streamlined, but like the vehicle it had been pushed from, the streamlining was broken and sculpted in places. Marks and scratches on the dark grey exterior implied it had scraped and torn itself free from the cataclysm that had overtaken its host. He crawled over and probed its flanks with his hands, searching for a familiar shape on the hull, and found it close to the ground under vegetation.
He slid four fingers into a gap, resting a thumb on an indentation that was in just the right place once his fingers were inside, and searched for a button. The functionality designed into this object was an aid to humans, and a hinderance to other sentient races with different digit arrangements. They would find it hard to do what he was about to do. After a moment’s probing he found a small raised bump with his forefinger. He prepared himself and flashed a message at the waiting vehicle; it should to be ready to fire if he was threatened. His thumb applied pressure and the bump hardened further, immediately he pushed down with his finger. The result was a popping hiss. He took that as his cue to extract his hand urgently and roll away from the object. Using the vegetation to cushion himself he kept spinning away — that was faster than trying to walk or run through the cloying mass — until he was clear of the object.
He watched from a short distance away as the object did something. It split lengthways and opened, one half rising up until it was at forty-five degrees to the other, curling back like a drying petal. He stared at what the organic parting revealed. There was a human form inside. The person was not moving; his arms were connected to the upper part and his torso was cocooned inside the lower. Wires and probes penetrated the body at different points and liquid dripped from the upper portions. He looked intensely for a moment and zoomed the optics to examine the form more closely. There was movement in the chest and the atmosphere around its mouth was heated; the person lived. But that life was ebbing fast — the breaths were shallow and irregular and it now gulped in alien atmosphere too weak in oxygen to sustain it for long. On close examination the liquid dripping down had the dark crimson hue of human blood.
He half rolled and half crawled back to his former place by the object, his suspicions now fully confirmed. This was an escape capsule; the last desperate survival option for a crew member as the technology surrounding him failed. To eject on a world like this truly would be an act of desperation. The small capsule contained limited life support and food, but it could not move. If rescue did not come soon, then starvation or asphyxiation would end the life inside. If rescue did not come soon. The prospect of imminent help for his foe disturbed him. It implied more enemies might be close, perhaps tracking the battle somewhere and closing in now. Of course this human could simply have reacted instinctively, preferring a slim chance of life to certain death, but still, he would act fast.
He crawled to the lip of the coffin like object and gazed in. Inside there was a man; a young hairless man who had suffered greatly. Large patches of skin were burned, dark, crisp flesh still smoking gently and weeping blood. One side of the body was smashed, and even through the odd bandage like clothing worn it was clear that the body was grotesquely misshapen. He flicked his optics into overlapping wavelengths and waited as they took a moment to calibrate and steady, then glanced through the clothing to see smashed bones and organs underneath.
No medical facility would save the wounded life, and it could be no threat now. He lifted himself up and straddled the object, looking down closely at his enemy. The probes and wires entering the body were partly medical and partly control mechanisms for the enemy craft. The body was covered in small patches of colour and shiny metallic areas designed to interface a human mind to a machine body. It was the way that those who eschewed the guide patch choose to partner with machines. As he looked he also noticed other markings — letters and numerals embossed in the skin. The man had the look of something partially grown and partially manufactured, as indeed he was.
And so he knew; the enemy had sent their own. This man was vat grown. The human genes had been spliced and twisted and machine parts seeded into the body to grow as the foetus developed. This particular human was optimised to hunt and kill. Men such as this had terrorised his kind and his world — they were the literal embodiment of the enemy’s military technology. They also embodied the fall from grace that many of his kind had reacted to with outrage. Amongst a people who had struggled to stay human in the face of an environment that challenged their humanity, changing bodies in this way was anathema. It represented something base and alien that diminished humanity. In their view, an engineered short cut to a ‘better’ people was as dangerous as it was misguided, it missed the point of human development and perverted the drivers of human evolution.
The philosophy of his people — their very survival — was anchored in emotional and intellectual growth, and the alignment of machine minds and human minds. This vat grown man, had a body readied for one purpose, and a mind untrained in managing true feelings. To some it was little more than a machine; something utilitarian that sacrificed soul for efficiency. Indeed to the more radical, vat-growth was a cancer, a polluting virus that challenged and reversed all that was good in human development. That a man such as this could exist, had fuelled the dispute that led to war. It was not the cause, but it was a catalyst.
He looked down at the dying soldier, and flashed a command to the vehicle. It glided over and stationed itself so he could climb aboard. He did so, clumsily and with exaggerated care as parts of the suit lagged behind the commands of his body. Once aboard he took direct control and drifted away from the object and its dying occupant. In a gesture that repeated an earlier precaution, he looked over his soldier and sent a pulsed command to the vehicle. Burn it, he willed. A stream of destructive particles smashed into the object so it flared white hot, a wave of heat blasting away from it and instantly drying and igniting the damp vegetation around. He turned his back on the inferno, feeling heat penetrate dead patches of suit and seeing vegetation reflect the glow of fires. He settled into
the vehicle, searching around for landmarks to re-establish a course. Spotting a memory-familiar line of low hills like giant’s knuckles, he oriented himself and the vehicle. Lets, go he thought. This battle is won. Let’s find some real people.
They travelled again, gliding fast over the rolling plains, and alert for new threats. The light faded and the cold damp atmosphere seemed more present and real than before. His optics were trying to flick into night vision mode and failing to find the wavelengths they sought. It created a pulsing effect in his eyes and he reluctantly cleared the enhancers and set them simply to see in infra-red; a task they seemed able to perform with limited resolution and range. In order to travel at any reasonable speed he had to hand control to the vehicle, and rely on it to detect enemies. The suit was no longer capable of functioning as a weapon, and barely capable of protecting him from the elements. Cold began to penetrate, and he shivered. He felt wind-chill whip away his body heat and cool the sweat dampened interior as the layers of the suit became mere conductors of the elements outside. The suit was concentrating it's remaining life on the very basics of survival now. It fed him mostly purified air, and kept itself supple so he could move, but that seemed to be the limit of its abilities.
The cold was penetrating deeper into his body. His teeth began chattering and the throbbing ache in his ankle grew into a pain. Although still clad in the suit, he felt naked and exposed. The dark cloud brooded and threatened and the cold, wet environment seemed to have joined him inside the suit. He could also feel weariness start to absorb his will to continue. It was becoming hard to stop eyelids from drooping, and more than once he jerked his head back as he caught his body relaxing into sleep. The fear rose; he was not going to make it. He must be less than half a day from his friends now, but exposure would take him before the reunion. He could slow and reduce the wind-chill but that would increase his journey time and leave him exposed for longer, and it would increase the risk that the suit would fail terminally. And what of other pursuers, did they speed at him now, seeking revenge for their fallen comrades?
The Man Who Talked to Suns Page 11