Resplendent

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘I am a little boy now, and I must study. But when I am big enough to operate a weapon I will join the unending war, and avenge those who have fallen, and fight for the future of mankind.’

  Dolo straightened up. Luca would have sworn he could see a tear in his eye. ‘Novice, it has taken us twenty thousand years - perhaps even longer - to get to this point. But, step by step, we are reaching our goal. I give you the child soldier: the logical future of mankind.’

  When Dolo nodded dismissal the boy turned away and walked back to his section. Luca could see he was struggling to contain his youthful energy, trying not to skip or run.

  When they got back to the Rock, an evacuation and hasty re-equipping was underway. Non-combatants were removed from the Rock, equipment, stores and people hurried underground, weapons, sensor and drive emplacements rapidly completed and tested. Meanwhile the troopers were checking their skinsuits and other kit, and injecting themselves with mnemonic fluid, a record which might help the military analysts reconstruct whatever happened to them.

  It turned out that orders had been changed. The Rock was to be hurled on its new mission to the Front in just a few more days, weeks ahead of the old schedule. Perhaps, Luca thought with a shiver, the prognosticating librarians on distant Earth had discerned some shifting in their misty maps of the future, and the Rock was to be sent to secure some famous preordained victory - or to avert some predetermined disaster.

  But for him the most important consequence of this chain of events was that he was to be taken off the Rock and flown out to another station, while Teel was to ride the Rock once more to the Front itself.

  He hurried to her quarters.

  Aside from a small bathroom area there were just two pieces of furniture, a simple bed and table. She was sitting on the bed studying a data desk. The top button of her uniform was undone; he found his eyes drawn to the tiny triangle of flesh that showed there.

  She put down the desk. ‘I knew you would come.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘You have learned about the new orders. Your emotions are confused.’

  Tentatively he sat beside her on the bed. ‘I’m not confused. I don’t want to be parted from you.’

  ‘Do you think I should defy my duty? Or you yours?’

  ‘No. I just don’t want to lose you.’

  Her blue eyes were wide, deep as oceans. ‘It’s not that. You’ve been to New Earth. Now you know where I come from - what I am. You want to save me, don’t you?’

  He was hot, miserable, perplexed. ‘I can’t tell if you are mocking me.’

  She took his hand and enclosed it in hers. ‘Go home.’

  ‘Take me with you,’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  It was as if he was framing the thoughts even as the words emerged from his mouth. ‘To the Front. Give me a posting on the Rock.’

  ‘That’s absurd. You’re a Commissary - a Novice at that. You don’t have the training.’

  He let his voice harden. ‘I could surely be as useful as the twelve-year-old conscripts who will be riding with you.’

  ‘Do you know what you will face?’

  ‘I know you will be there.’ He moved his face closer to hers, just a little, until he could feel her breath on his mouth. It was his last voluntary act.

  Her passion was primal, like the way she ate, as if after this moment there would be no more to savour. And all through the love-making, and the hours later they spent asleep together, he could sense the strength in her - a strength she held back, as if afraid of damaging him.

  IV

  Luca huddled at the bottom of the trench. It was just a gouge scraped roughly in the surface of the Rock.

  He stared up at a great stripe of sky that was full of cherry-red light, a sky where immense rocks sailed like clouds. Sometimes they came so close to his own Rock he could actually see people moving on their inverted surfaces. It seemed impossible that such vast objects could be crowded so close. The slightest touch of one of these great jostling rocks against another could crush him and these shallow trenches and chambers, utterly erasing him and any trace to show he had ever existed, scraping clean his life from the universe. He was in a heavily armoured skinsuit, but he felt utterly defenceless. He was just a mote of soft blood and flesh, trapped in this nightmare machinery of churning rock and deadly light.

  All of this in utter, inhuman silence, save for the shallow scratch of his own breathing, the constant incomprehensible chatter over his comms.

  The Rock itself was a swarm of continual, baffling activity. Troopers crowded constantly past him, great files of them labouring from place to place carrying equipment and supplies. They were blank-faced, dogged, their suits carefully dusted with asteroid dirt in the probably vain hope that such camouflage would help them survive. Sometimes they stepped on Luca’s feet or legs, and he cowered against the dirt in his trench, trying to make himself small and invisible.

  Bayla, the trooper on the charge of religious sedition, was with him, though. She had been assigned by Teel to ‘supervise’ him. Luca hadn’t seen anything of Teel herself since they had broken through the last cordon of Navy Spline ships and into the full battle light, and the final preparations had begun. Whatever fantasies he had had of working alongside Teel, of somehow participating in this effort, had long evaporated. The only human comfort he drew was from the warm pressure of Bayla’s leg against his own.

  Bayla kept checking a chronometer and consulting lists that scrolled over the surface of her skinsuit sleeve. But every few minutes she took the time to check on Luca. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes.’ Again he had to push back to let a file of troopers past. ‘I don’t understand how they can do their jobs.’

  ‘What else is there to do?’

  ‘They must be afraid.’

  He could see her frown. ‘You learn to live with the fear. Like living with an illness.’

  ‘A fear of death, or injury?’

  ‘No, not that.’ She spoke slowly. She seemed serene. ‘It’s more that it might not make sense. You feel you’re in the wrong world, the wrong time. That it shouldn’t be like this. If you let that in, that’s the true fear.’

  He didn’t understand, of course.

  A patch of Bayla’s sleeve flashed orange. ‘Excuse me.’ Bayla barked a command.

  A file of troopers came scurrying through the dirt and took their position. They were carrying tools, he saw. The troopers all seemed small, light. Young, he realised. Bayla held up her hand, checked the time again - then brought her arm down in a chop. The troopers swarmed up over the side of the trench, using rungs and cables or just footholds gouged into the harder rock.

  In response, light stormed.

  Some of the troops fell back immediately, limp, like dolls. The rest of the troopers flattened themselves on their bellies in the dirt, under the light, and began to crawl away, face down, out of Luca’s sight. Other troopers came scurrying along the trench with med cloaks. They wrapped up the fallen and took them away, limp bundles that were awkward to handle in the low gravity.

  There was a swirl of cubical pixels before Luca. It coalesced into the compact form of Dolo. He wasn’t wearing a skinsuit, and his robe was clean. In this place of dirt and rock and fire he was like a vision of an unattainable paradise. He smiled. ‘How are we bearing up, Novice?’

  Luca found it difficult to speak. ‘Those troopers who went out of the trench in the first wave. They were children.’ Perhaps some of them had come from the induction camp on New Earth.

  ‘Think of it in terms of efficiency. They are agile, easy to command. But they are poor soldiers. They suffer higher casualty rates than their adult counterparts, in part because their lack of maturity and experience leads them to take unnecessary risks. And their young bodies are more susceptible to complications if injured. But little has yet been invested in their training.’

  ‘So they are expendable.’

  ‘We are all expendable,’ Dolo said. ‘But so
me are more expendable than others. They will not suffer, Luca: if it comes, death here is usually rapid. And if they see their fellows fall they will not grieve; their childish empathy has been beaten out of them.’ The Virtual floated closer to Luca, studying his face, close enough for Luca to see the graininess of the pixels. ‘You are still thinking this is inhuman, aren’t you? The evolution of your conscience is proving a fascinating study, Novice. Of course it is inhuman. All that matters are the numbers, the rates of mortality, the probabilities and cost of success. This is a statistical war - as wars have always been.’

  There was a piercing whistle-like blast over the comms unit. Virtual Dolo popped out of existence, grinning.

  A few of the child soldiers scrambled back over the trench’s lip - a very few, and several of them were nursing injuries. More troops came scurrying like files of rats along the trench. Soon there was a double line of them, most carrying hand weapons or tools, peering up at the sky.

  For a few heartbeats everybody was still, waiting.

  Bayla was beside Luca, as intent as the rest. Luca whispered to her, ‘What was the last thing you did before we left the bio facility?’

  ‘I sent my daughter a Virtual.’

  A daughter. Sons and daughters, like family life in general, were strictly anti-Doctrinal. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘On New Earth. I told her how as a baby she laughed when she looked at my face. How she slept in my arms, how we bathed together. I told her that when she grows up and wants to know about me she should ask her father or her aunt. Whatever becomes of me, she must never think of herself as a child without a mother. I will always be watching her.’

  ‘From your place at Timelike Infinity,’ he hazarded.

  ‘I want her to be good, and to be the kind of person others would like. But I told her I was sorry that I had been a poor mother, an absent mother. When she was very small she had a doll, a soldier. I carry it with me as a good-luck charm.’ She patted her dust-covered tunic. Luca saw a slight bulge there. ‘This way she is always with me. The last time I saw her was during my last leave on New Earth. She was with the other children. They lined up to wave flags and sing for us. It’s burned in my mind, her face that day. I told her that when she hears of my death she should be happy for me, for I will have achieved my ambition.’

  ‘You embrace death, but you dream of your family.’

  Bayla glanced at him. ‘What else is there to do?’

  Another piercing shriek in Luca’s comms unit. No, it was a word, he realised, a word yelled so loud it overwhelmed the system itself. In response there was a muffled roar - more voices, thousands of voices, shouting together, maybe every trooper on the Rock.

  Bayla raised her hand again, watching lights flash on her sleeve. ‘Wait, wait.’ The cherry-red light in the sky was growing brighter, shading to pink. It was like a silent, gathering sunrise, as if the Rock was turning to face some vast source of heat, and the noise rose in response.

  Bayla brought her arm chopping down.

  The first row of troopers swarmed forward, struggling to get out of the trench. Red light flared. Most of them fell back immediately, broken, limp, gases venting from ruined suits, and the yelling was broken now by screams of pain. Without hesitation the second line pushed after the first. They trampled on the fallen bodies of their comrades, even those who still moved, pushing their way over flesh and dirt to get to the lip of the trench. But they fell back in their turn, as if their bodies were exploding. Yet another line of troopers gathered and began to rush over the lip of the trench.

  Suddenly Luca felt swept up, as if a great tide of blood was lifting these yelling troopers into battle. Without conscious thought he tore at the dirt with clumsy hands and hoisted his body out of the trench.

  He was standing in a flood of light. Hardly anyone was standing with him, of the hundreds who had gone before him. There was a huddled heap of skinsuit every few paces, and bodies drifted helplessly above like moons of this asteroid, out of contact with the surface, to be pierced by relentless flickering beams of crimson light. When he looked back he saw that still another wave of troops was coming out of the trench. They were twitching like dolls as the darting light threaded through them. Soon the next wave were struggling to advance through a space that was clogged with corpses.

  Space was sewn with cherry-red beams, a great flat sheet of them that flickered, vanished, came again. When he looked up he could see more of the beams, layer on layer, absolutely straight, that climbed up like a geometrical demonstration. The light crowded space until it seemed there wasn’t room for it all, that the beams must start to cut and destroy each other.

  And still people fell, all around him. He had never imagined such things were possible. It was as if he had been transported into some new and unwelcome reality, where the old physical laws didn’t apply—

  Somebody punched him in the back.

  With agonising slowness, he fell to the dirt. Something landed on top of him. It wasn’t heavy, but he could feel how massive it was; its inertia knocked the wind out of him. For an instant he was pressed face down, staring at the fine-grained asteroid soil and the reflection of his own hollow-eyed face. But still the cherry-red light dazzled him; even when he closed his eyes he could see it.

  He twisted and thrashed, pushing the mass off his back. It was a trooper, he saw. She was struggling, convulsing. A crater had been torn in her chest. Blood was gushing out, immediately freezing into glittering crystals, as if she was just pouring herself out into space. Her eyes locked on Luca’s; they were blue like Teel’s, but this was not Teel. Luca, panicking and revolted, thrashed until he had pushed her away.

  But without the trooper on his back he was uncovered. Some instinct made him try to dig himself into the dirt. Perhaps he could hide there. But deeper than a hand’s breadth or so the dirt was compact, hardened by aeons, resistant to his scrabbling fingers.

  A shadow moved across the light. Luca flinched and looked up. It was a ship, a vast graceful ship silhouetted against the light of battle.

  The Xeelee nightfighter was a sycamore seed wrought in black a hundred metres across. The wings swept back from the central pod, flattening and thinning until at their trailing edges they were so fine Luca could see starbreaker fire through them. The Xeelee was swooping low over the asteroid’s surface - impossibly low, impossibly graceful, utterly inhuman. Threads of starbreaker light connected it to the ground, pulses of death dealt at the speed of light. Luca couldn’t tell if their source was the ship or the ground. Where the ship’s shadow passed explosions erupted from the asteroid’s surface, and bodies and bits of equipment were hurled up to go flying into space on neat straight-line trajectories.

  Beneath the gaze of that dark bird, Luca felt utterly exposed.

  There was a fresh crater not metres away, a scrap of shelter. He closed his eyes. ‘One, two, three.’ He pushed himself to hands and knees and tried a kind of low-gravity crawl, pulling at the surface with his hands and digging his toes into the dust, squirming over the ground like an insect.

  He reached the crater and threw himself into it. But again the low gravity had fooled him, and he took an age to complete his fall.

  The massive wing of the nightfighter passed over him. It was only metres above him; if he had jumped up he could have touched it. He felt a tugging, like a tide, passing along his body, and light flared all around him. He clamped his hands over his head and closed his eyes.

  The cherry-red light faded, and that odd sensation of tugging passed. He risked looking up. The Xeelee had moved beyond him. It was tracking over the asteroid’s close horizon, setting like a great dark sun, and it dragged a webbing of red light beneath it as it passed.

  There was a brief lull. The light of more distant engagements bathed the ground in a paler, more diffuse glow.

  Something moved on the ground. It was a trooper, crawling out of a hole a little deeper than Luca’s. He, she, moved hunched over, looking only half human. One leg was dragging
. Luca saw now that the trooper had lost a foot, cleanly scythed, and that the lower leg of the skinsuit was tied off by a crude tourniquet. More troopers came clambering out of holes and trenches, or even out of the cover of the bodies of their comrades. They crawled, walked, flopped back towards their trenches.

  But the red light erupted again, raking flat across the curved landscape. The beams lanced through the bodies of the wounded as they tried to crawl, and they staggered and fell, cut open and sliced - or they simply exploded, the internal pressure of their bodies destroying them in silent, bloody bursts.

  Still Luca was unharmed, as if this withering fire was programmed to avoid him. But, turned around and battered, he didn’t know where his trench was, where he should go. And dust was thrown up around him by silent detonations, obscuring his vision. He saw a brighter light ahead, a cool whiteness, as if seen through a fog of dust and frozen blood. He pulled himself out of the crater and crawled that way.