The Mammoth Book of SF Wars

by Ian Whates

  Her laughter was a crackling shadow in the sunlight.

  THE RHINE’S WORLD INCIDENT

  Neal Asher

  The Polity holds sway across human space, but not everyone embraces the human/AI alliance at its heart. Some choose to hit back against the system. What happens when a terrorist strike you’re involved in goes inexplicably wrong? You start to doubt your colleagues and closest friends; you grow suspicious and increasingly uncertain, until fear is your only reliable companion.

  Neal Asher lives sometimes in England, sometimes in Crete and mostly at a keyboard. Having over eighteen books published he has been accused of overproduction (despite spending far too much time ranting on his blog, cycling off fat and drinking too much wine) but doesn’t intend to slow down just yet. His fiction is famed for containing fast-paced action delivered with the sensibilities of cyberpunk. Neal can be found online at: theskinner. blogspot.com and freespace.virgin.net/n.asher.

  THE REMOTE CONTROL rested dead in Reynold’s hand, but any moment now Kirin might make the connection, and the little lozenge of black metal would become a source of godlike power. Reynold closed his hand over it, sudden doubts assailing him, and as always felt a tight stab of fear. That power depended on Kirin’s success, which wasn’t guaranteed, and on the hope that the device the remote connected to had not been discovered and neutralized.

  He turned towards her. “Any luck?”

  She sat on the damp ground with her laptop open on a mouldering log before her, with optics running from it to the framework supporting the sat dish, spherical laser com unit and microwave transmitter rods. She was also auged into the laptop, an optic lead running from the bean-shaped augmentation behind her ear to plug into it. Beside the laptop rested a big flat memstore packed with state-of-the-art worms and viruses.

  “It is not a matter of luck,” she stated succinctly.

  Reynold returned his attention to the city down on the plain. Athelford was the centre of commerce and Polity power here on Rhine’s World, most of both concentrated at its heart where skyscrapers reared about the domes and containment spheres of the runcible port. However, the unit first sent here had not been able to position the device right next to the port itself and its damned controlling AI – Reynold felt an involuntary shudder at the thought of the kind of icy artificial intelligences they were up against. The unit had been forced to act fast when the plutonium processing plant, no doubt meticulously tracked down by some forensic AI, got hit by Earth Central Security. They’d also not been able to detonate. Something had taken them out before they could even send the signal.

  “The yokels are calling in,” said Plate. He was boosted and otherwise physically enhanced, and wore com gear about his head plugged into the weird scaley Dracocorp aug affixed behind his ear. “Our contact wants our coordinates.”

  “Tell him to head to the rendezvous as planned.” Reynold glanced back at where their gravcar lay underneath its chameleoncloth tarpaulin. “First chance we get we’ll need to ask him why he’s not sticking to that plan.”

  Plate grinned.

  “Are we still secure?” Reynold asked.

  “Still secure,” Plate replied, his grin disappearing. “But encoded Polity com activity is ramping up, as is city and sat-scan output.”

  “They know we’re here,” said Kirin, still concentrating on her laptop.

  “Get me the device, Kirin,” said Reynold. “Get me it now.”

  One of her eyes had gone metallic and her fingers were blurring over her keyboard. “If it was easy to find the signal and lock in the transmission key, we wouldn’t have to be this damned close and, anyway, ECS would have found it by now.”

  “But we know the main frequencies and have the key,” Reynold observed.

  Kirin snorted dismissively.

  Reynold tapped the com button on the collar of his fatigues. “Spiro,” he addressed the commander of the four-unit of Separatist ground troops positioned in the surrounding area. “ECS are on to us but don’t have our location. If they get it they’ll be down on us like a falling tree. Be prepared to hold out for as long as possible – for the Cause I expect no less of you.”

  “They get our location and it’ll be a sat-strike,” Plate observed. “We’ll be incinerated before we get a chance to blink.”

  “Shut up, Plate.”

  “I think I may—” began Kirin, and Reynold spun towards her. “Yes, I’ve got it.” She looked up victoriously and dramatically stabbed a finger down on one key. “Your remote is now armed.”

  Reynold raised his hand and opened it, studying with tight cold fear in his guts the blinking red light in the corner of the touch console. Stepping a little way from his comrades to the edge of the trees, he once again gazed down upon the city. His mouth was dry. He knew precisely what this would set in motion: terrifying unhuman intelligences would focus here the moment he sent the signal.

  “Just a grain at a time, my old Separatist recruiter told me,” he said. “We’ll win this like the sea wins as it laps against a sandstone cliff.”

  “Very poetic,” said Kirin, now standing at his shoulder.

  “This is gonna hurt them,” said Plate.

  Reynold tapped his com button. “Goggles everyone.” He pulled his own flash goggles down over his eyes. “Kirin, get back to your worms.” He glanced round and watched her return to her station and plug the memstore cable into her laptop. The worms and viruses the thing contained were certainly the best available, but they wouldn’t have stood a chance of infiltrating Polity firewalls before he initiated the device. After that they would penetrate local systems to knock out satellite scanning for, according to Kirin, ten minutes – enough time for them to fly the gravcar far from here, undetected.

  “Five, four, three, two … one.” Reynold thumbed the touch console on the remote.

  Somewhere in the heart of the city a giant flashbulb came on for a second, then went out. Reynold pushed up his goggles to watch a skyscraper going over and a disk of devastation spreading from a growing and rising fireball. Now, shortly after the EM flash of the blast, Kirin would be sending her software toys. The fireball continued to rise, a sprouting mushroom, but despite the surface devastation many buildings remained disappointingly intact. Still, they would be irradiated and tens of thousands of Polity citizens reduced to ash. The sound reached them now, and it seemed the world was tearing apart.

  “OK, the car!” Reynold instructed. “Kirin?”

  She nodded, already closing her laptop and grabbing up as much of her gear as she could carry. The broadcast framework would have to stay though, as would some of the larger armaments Spiro had positioned in the surrounding area. Reynold stooped by a grey cylinder at the base of a tree, punched twenty minutes into the timer and set it running. The thermite bomb would incinerate this entire area and leave little evidence for the forensic AIs of ECS to gather. “Let’s go!”

  Spiro and his men, now armed with nothing but a few hand weapons, had already pulled the tarpaulin from the car and were piling into the back row of seats. Plate sat at the controls and Kirin and Reynold climbed in behind him. Plate took it up hard through the foliage, shrivelled seed husks and swordlike leaves falling onto them, turned it and hit the boosters. Glancing back, Reynold could only see the top of the nuclear cloud, and he nodded to himself with grim satisfaction.

  “This will be remembered for years to come,” he stated.

  “Yup, certainly will,” replied Spiro, scratching at a spot on his cheek.

  No one else seemed to have anything to say, but Reynold knew why they were so subdued. This was the comedown; only later would they realize just what a victory this had been for the Separatist cause. He tried to convince himself of that …

  In five minutes they were beyond the forest and over rectangular fields of mega-wheat, hill slopes stitched with neat vineyards of protein gourds, irrigation canals and plascrete roads for the agricultural machinery used here. The ground transport – a balloon-tyred tractor towing
a train of grain wagons – awaited where arranged.

  “Irrigation canal,” Reynold instructed.

  Plate decelerated fast and settled the car towards a canal running parallel to the road on which the transport awaited, bringing it to a hover just above the water then slewing sideways until the vehicle nudged the bank. Spiro and the soldiers were out first, then Kirin.

  “You can plus-grav it?” Reynold asked.

  Plate nodded, pulled out a chip revealed behind a torn-out panel, then inserted a chipcard into the reader slot. “Ten seconds.” He and Reynold disembarked, then, bracing themselves against the bank, pushed the car so it drifted out over the water. After a moment, smoke drifted up from the vehicle’s console. Abruptly it was as if the car had been transformed into a block of lead. It dropped hard, creating a huge splash, then was gone in an instant. Plate and Reynold clambered up the bank after the others and onto the road. Ahead, waiting about the tractor, stood four of the locals, or “yokels” as Plate called them – four Rhine’s World Separatists.

  “Stay alert,” Reynold warned.

  As he approached the four he studied them intently. They all wore the kind of disposable overalls farmers clad themselves in on primitive worlds like this and all seemed ill at ease. For a moment Reynold focused on one of their number: a very fat man with a baby face and shaven head. With all the cosmetic and medical options available it was not often you saw people so obese unless they chose to look that way. Perhaps this Separatist distrusted what Polity technology had to offer, which wasn’t that unusual. The one who stepped forwards, however, clearly did trust that technology, being big, handsome and obviously having provided himself with emerald-green eyes.

  “Jepson?” Reynold asked.

  “I am,” said the man, holding out his hand.

  Reynold gripped it briefly. “We need to get under cover quickly – sat eyes will be functioning again soon.”

  “The first trailer is empty.” Jepson stabbed a finger back behind the tractor.

  Reynold nodded towards Spiro and he and his men headed towards the trailer. “You too,” he said to Kirin and, as she departed, glanced at Plate. “You’re with me in the tractor cab.”

  “There’s only room for four up there,” Jepson protested.

  “Then two of your men best ride in the trailer.” Reynold nodded towards the fat man. “Make him one of them – that should give us plenty of room.”

  The fat man dipped his head as if ashamed and trailed after Kirin, then at a nod from Jepson one of the others went too.

  “Come on fat boy!” Spiro called as the fat man hauled himself up inside the trailer.

  “I sometimes wonder what the recruiters are thinking,” said Jepson as he mounted the ladder up the side of the big tractor.

  “Meaning?” Reynold enquired as he followed.

  “Me and Dowel—” Jepson flipped a thumb towards the other local climbing up after Reynold “—have been working together for a year now, and we’re good.” He entered the cab. “Mark seems pretty able too, but I’m damned if I know what use we can find for Brockle.”

  “Brockle would be fat boy,” said Plate, following Dowel into the cab.

  “You guessed it.” Jepson took the driver’s seat.

  Along one wall were three fold-down seats, the rest of the cab being crammed with tractor controls and a pile of disconnected hydraulic cylinders, universal joints and PTO shafts. Reynold studied these for a second, noted blood on one short heavy cylinder and a sticky pool of the same nearby. That was from the original driver of this machine … maybe. He reached down and drew his pulse-gun, turned and stuck it up under Dowel’s chin. Plate meanwhile stepped up behind Jepson and looped a garrotte about his neck.

  “What the—” Jepson began, then desisted as Plate tightened the wire. Dowel simply kept very still, his expression fearful as he held his hands out from his body.

  “We’ve got a problem,” said Reynold.

  “I don’t understand,” said Jepson.

  “I don’t either, but perhaps you can help.” Reynold nodded to one of the seats and walked Dowel back towards it. The man cautiously pushed it down and sat. Gun still held at his neck, Reynold searched him, removing a nasty-looking snubnose, then stepped back knowing he could blow the top off the man’s head before he got a chance to rise. “What I don’t understand is why you contacted us and asked us for our coordinates.”

  Plate hit some foot lever on Jepson’s seat and spun it round so the man faced Reynold, who studied his expression intently.

  “You weren’t supposed to get in contact, because the signal might have been traced,” Reynold continued, “and there were to be no alterations to the plan unless I initiated them.”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” Jepson whispered. “We stuck to the plan – no one contacted you.”

  “Right frequency, right code – just before we blew the device.”

  “No, honestly – you can check our com record.”

  Either Jepson was telling the truth or he was a very good liar. Reynold nodded to Plate, who cinched the garrotte into a loop around the man’s neck and now, with one hand free, began to search him, quickly removing first a gas-system pulse-gun from inside his overalls then a comunit from the top pocket. Plate keyed it on, input a code, then tilted his head as if listening to something as the comunit’s record loaded to his aug.

  “Four comunits,” said Plate. “One of them sent the message but the record has been tampered with so we don’t know which one.”

  Jepson looked horrified. Reynold tapped his com button. “Spiro, disarm and secure those two in there with you.” Then to Jepson, “Take us to the hideout.”

  Plate unlooped the garrotte and spun Jepson’s seat forwards again.

  “It has to be one of the other two,” said Jepson, looking back at Reynold. “Me and Dowel been working for the Cause for years.”

  “Drive the tractor,” Reynold instructed.

  The farm, floodlit now as twilight fell, was a great sprawl of barns, machinery garages and silos, whilst the farmhouse was a composite dome with rooms enough for twenty or more people. However, only three had lived there. One of them, according to Jepson, lay at the bottom of an irrigation canal with a big hydraulic pump in his overalls to hold him down. He had been the son. The parents were still here on the floor of the kitchen adjoining this living room, since Jepson and Dowel had not found time to clear up the mess before going to pick up their two comrades. Reynold eyed the two corpses for a moment, then returned his attention to Jepson and his men.

  “Strip,” he instructed.

  “Look, I don’t know—” Jepson began, then shut up as Reynold shot a hole in the carpet moss just in front of the man’s work boots.

  The four began removing their clothes, all with quick economy but for Brockle, who seemed to be struggling with the fastenings. Soon they all stood naked.

  “Jesu,” said Spiro, “you could do with a makeover, fat boy.”

  “Em all right,” said Brockle, staring down at the floor, his hands, with oddly long and delicate fingers, trying to cover the great white rolls of fat.

  “Em all right is em?” said Spiro.

  “Scan them,” Reynold instructed.

  Plate stepped forwards with a hand scanner and began running it from head to foot over each man, first up and down their fronts, then over them from behind. When Plate reached Brockle, Spiro called out, “Got a big enough scanner there, Plate?” which was greeted with hilarity from his four troops. When Plate came to the one who had been in the grain carriage with Brockle, he reacted fast, driving a fist into the base of the man’s skull then following him down to the floor. Plate pulled his solid-state laser from his belt, rested it beside the scanner then ran it down the man’s leg, found something and fired. A horrible sputtering and sizzling ensued, black oily smoke and licks of flame rising from where the beam cut into the man’s leg. After a moment, Plate inspected the readout from his scanner, nodded and stepped back.

&
nbsp; “What have we got?” Reynold asked.

  “Locater.”

  Reynold felt cold claws skittering down his backbone. “Transmitting?”

  “No, but it could have been,” Plate replied.

  Reynold saw it with utter simplicity. If a signal had been sent, then ECS would be down on them very shortly, and shortly after that they would all be either dead or in an interrogation cell. He preferred dead. He did not want ECS taking his mind apart to find out what he knew.

  “Spiro, put a watchman on the roof,” he instructed.

  Spiro selected one of his soldiers and sent him on their way.

  Having already ascertained the layout of this place, Reynold pointed to a nearby door. “Now, Spiro, I want you to take him in there,” he instructed. “Tie him to a chair, revive him and start asking him questions. You know how to do that.” He paused for a moment. They were all tired after forty-eight hours without sleep. “Work him for two hours then let one of your men take over. Rotate the watch on the roof too and make sure you all get some rest.”

  Spiro grinned, waved over one of his men and the two dragged their victim off into the room, leaving a trail of plasma and charred skin. Like all Separatist soldiers they were well versed in interrogation techniques.

  “Oh, and gag him when he’s not answering questions,” Reynold added. “We all need to get some sleep.”

  Reynold turned back to the remaining three. “Get in there.” He pointed towards another door. It was an internal storeroom without windows so would have to do.

  “I didn’t know,” said Jepson. “You have to believe that.”

  “Move,” Reynold instructed.

  Jepson stooped to gather up his clothing, but Plate stepped over and planted his boot on the pile. Jepson hesitated for a moment then traipsed into the indicated room. One of the troops pulled up an armchair beside the door and plumped himself down in it, pulse-gun held ready in his right hand. Reynold nodded approval then sank down on a sofa beside where Kirin had tiredly seated herself, her laptop open before and connected to her aug. Plate moved over and dropped into an armchair opposite.