For a long moment, Karsman held his breath. He reached again for Warrior and found only emptiness.
Flet gave a short laugh. “Clear. No implants, no augments. Local baseline genetics. Whoever she is, she’s not Gad-Ayulia.”
Mera turned toward Karsman. Her eyes were full of tears. “I told you,” she said. “I told you I wasn’t anyone special.”
* * *
Flet turned away from Mera, tucking the tablet back into his belt pouch.
“So what was all that about?” he asked Karsman. “Why go to so much trouble to hide her from us?”
“I thought . . . I thought she was the one you were looking for.”
“And you didn’t think to just ask?” The soldier shook his head. “You could have saved everyone a lot of trouble. Now we have bigger problems. To begin with, you killed one of my men.”
“It was him or me,” said Karsman sullenly. “He killed Curinn.”
“Oh, I’m not questioning why you did it. But I would like to know how.” Flet steepled his fingers and paced a few short steps. He turned. “The man you killed was a career soldier, gene-hacked and wired to the eyes. You’re big, but he outweighed you by twenty kilos, all of it muscle. And yet you killed him, apparently with your bare hands. Want to tell me how you did that?”
“Just lucky, I guess,” said Karsman.
“I doubt that.” The soldier reached into his pouch for the tablet again. “Which is why I think I need to take a look and see exactly what you’ve got inside of you. I take it you’re one of hers?”
“One of whose?”
“Gad-Ayulia’s.”
“Never heard of her.”
Flet’s smile was almost gentle. “You have to know that you’ll end up telling us everything.”
“We’ve got activity in the preloader,” interrupted Taran.
Flet turned. “She’s in the network?” he demanded.
“Someone is.”
“How’s the system?”
“Fully configured. All it needs is the seed.”
Flet turned his back on Karsman, his attention now entirely elsewhere. Karsman could read the tension in the set of his shoulders.
For a long time there was silence in the room. At last, Taran looked up and smiled.
“Seed loading,” he said. “She’s in.”
“Doesn’t make sense,” said Flet. “That ship you saw was hours out. There’s no way she could have reached an injection node yet. How’s she doing this?”
“It doesn’t matter. She’s committed now. As soon as she turns it live, we’ll have the whole thing.”
Flet turned back to Karsman for a moment. The smile was back on his face. “I don’t know if this means anything to you,” he said, “but what it comes down to is that you lost. Your employer just walked into the trap that we set for her.” He breathed out slowly, a long sigh of relief.
Not my employer, thought Karsman. I have no idea who any of you people are. And I want nothing more to do with any of this madness.
The Muljaddy said something that Karsman didn’t catch. It sounded like a question.
“Gad-Ayulia’s here,” Flet told him. “She got past your picket ships somehow, found an injection node. She’s loaded a seed matrix into the array.”
“But—”
Flet held up his hand, cutting the Muljaddy off. “No, there’s no risk. We configured the loader with our own ’ware. The minute she activates the seed, it will block her. Stop the seed from propagating and dump the whole thing to storage.”
“And I can have a copy?” There was a note of greed in the Muljaddy’s mellifluous voice.
“If we get safe passage, you get your copy. That was the deal.”
Taran gave a little grunt of surprise. Flet turned around.
“What’s up?” he asked.
“Something’s wrong . . .” the other man said.
“Load failed?” suggested Flet.
Taran shook his head. “It loaded just fine. But the capture layer should have started dumping it by now. I’m getting nothing.”
“Freeze it. You can work out what went wrong later.”
Taran’s eyes flickered left and right, following some unfolding drama visible only to him. “I don’t have control anymore,” he said. “The capture layer’s breaking up. I don’t—” His shoulders slumped. “Oh.”
“What is it?”
“She sandboxed us. There’s another abstraction layer underneath. Made us think we were talking to the core, when all the time we were just sitting on top of her code.” Taran leaned over the desk, reaching for something. “I’m shutting the network down. I have to stop it before it can spread.”
“But how could she do that?” asked Flet. His voice was low and level. You could almost have mistaken it for calm. “How could she possibly do that?”
Something stirred inside Karsman, a persona emerging from deep background and coming to the forefront of his consciousness. For a moment, he thought that Warrior had finally returned. Then he realized that whatever this persona was, it was one he had never felt before. It surged through him, filling his mind with its presence.
“Simple,” said Lisandra Gad-Ayulia, speaking with Karsman’s voice. “I got here first.”
He rose from his chair, unfolding in one smooth, continuous movement. He struck out behind him without looking, slamming his forearm across Magnan’s throat. The guard on his left started to move but Karsman pivoted, stepped in close, and hit him twice with his right hand, striking up under the man’s arm to find the nerve point below the armpit. He caught the guard’s wrist in his other hand and twisted until he felt something snap, then reached down to take the pistol from the man’s suddenly nerveless fingers.
Taran was already sliding away from the desk, reaching for his own gun. Karsman shot him once, saw the hole open between the man’s eyes, the blank look of surprise as his head snapped back. He fired a second shot into the falling soldier’s body, then turned the pistol on Flet.
The off-worlder was fast, faster even than Karsman had expected. He seemed to dance out of the line of fire, the bullets slamming into the metal wall behind him and sending fragments ricocheting around the room, whining like tiny angry hornets. Steck leaped in to try to grab him, but the soldier spun away, kicked out without even looking. His booted foot caught the small man squarely in the chest. Steck threw up his arms and went down, limp as a rag doll. He bounced once and did not rise again.
Karsman’s pistol clicked empty. He flung the useless weapon at Flet’s head and advanced to meet him, his hands raised. New knowledge filled him, the instinctive motions of a martial art that he had never learned: not Warrior’s fast and brutal style, but something more fluid and graceful. He surrendered the keys to his consciousness and let the new persona take over.
* * *
There was a pain in Karsman’s side, not the sharp pain of earlier but a dull ache that seemed to go all the way to the bone. He lifted his head from the floor with difficulty, blinking blood from his eyes.
Flet was leaning against the wall, pale but still standing. One hand was pressed against his side. The other held a pistol.
At his feet, Mera crouched over Steck’s motionless body. From where he lay, Karsman could not tell whether the little man was breathing.
The new persona was still in Karsman’s head, alien thoughts and memories crowding his mind. He remembered worlds he had never seen, people he had never known, a whole life he had never led. At its prompting, he tried to stand up, but he lacked the strength to even push himself off the floor. He fell heavily onto one elbow, feeling the broken bones of his forearm grind in protest. The pain was abstract and far away.
“How did you get so fucking sloppy, Flet?” he heard himself say. “They said you were better than that.”
The mercenary said nothing, but there was a murderous gleam in his eyes. He took a step forward, and Karsman envied him the ability to make even that simple movement. The gun barrel wavered, then came round,
the black hole of the muzzle centered on Karsman’s face.
“Good-bye,” the soldier said.
Something flared brighter than the sun, blue-white and blinding in the dimly lit room. Flet screamed and reeled backward. A line of white fire danced across his eyes, then slashed down across his gun hand. He dropped the pistol and stumbled backward, hands pressed to his face, still screaming.
Mera took a step back, Steck’s cutting torch blazing in her hand.
“Asshole,” she said.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
So what happens now, asked the persona that had been Karsman.
Nothing, said Lisandra Gad-Ayulia. Everything.
He was lying outside in the street where Magnan’s men had carried him, his back propped against the base of a building. He could feel the pain in his legs now, which he thought might be a good sign.
I’ll take a broken leg over a broken spine any day, he said.
Always, said Lisandra.
He listened to his own voice giving instructions to Mera. Doctor was gone now, along with Warrior and most of his other personas, but Lisandra had been a combat medic. Under her direction, Mera was doing what she could to patch the worst of Karsman’s injuries. From time to time, Karsman caught sight of Steck peering worriedly over her shoulder.
You were inside me all along, said Karsman. Ever since the operation.
Asleep, said Lisandra. For many years. And the seed for the processor array too. Both of us buried deep, waiting for our moment.
You couldn’t have acted sooner?
No. It needed someone to override the safeguards, to bring the array online. I didn’t have the skills to do it myself.
Taran.
Yes. He was exceptional. I don’t know if anyone else could have done it.
Karsman remembered that he had killed Taran and he felt an obscure regret. It all seemed so pointless. He still had no idea what the stakes were. He only knew that men had died and that he had killed some of them.
And the real Lisandra, he asked. The original?
Dead for a long time. Or maybe not. Not coming here in any case.
I should have known, thought Karsman. He remembered the Muljaddy asking how it felt to be five people in one. I never counted, he thought, but I always knew there were more than five. And what better place to hide than in a crowd?
He turned his head painfully. A few meters away, the Muljaddy sat on the curb, brilliant white robes stained now with red dust. They held their head cocked slightly to one side, as if listening to something.
Behind them, the towers of the city sang with light, patterns of color racing over the gray metal, pulsing and twisting among the spires. The mist that always clung to the tops of the towers was alive too now, dimming and brightening like a heartbeat. Through the Road beneath him, Karsman could feel the steady vibration of the planetary machine.
Mera pushed gently against Karsman’s ankle, trying to straighten it. A lance of pain shot through him.
“Ah, that hurts,” he said out loud.
Giving birth always does, said Lisandra. Take it from me.
I liked being Karsman, he said. I suppose he was never truly real, though, was he?
Tell me what’s real, said the voice of a dead woman in his mind. Then I’ll tell you.
So who am I now?
Anyone you want to be. Your part in this is over. You’re free again.
He shifted, trying to prop himself up on his elbows.
“Stay still,” Mera told him. “I can’t help you if you keep moving.”
He cleared his throat. “Hey, Mera.”
“Yes?”
“When I’m better, I think I’ll move on. You want to come with me?”
She looked at him. “What do you have in mind?”
“I don’t know exactly,” he said. “But I’ve always wanted to see what there is, farther down the Road.”
About the Author
Photograph by Herbert Hoover
ANGUS MCINTYRE was born in London and lived in Edinburgh, Milan, Brussels, and Paris before eventually finding his way to New York, where he now lives and works. A graduate of the 2013 Clarion Writer’s Workshop, his short fiction has been published in numerous anthologies and on Boing Boing. His background in computational and evolutionary linguistics and in artificial intelligence has given him a healthy respect for positive feedback loops and a certain curiosity about what it might be like to live in a universe filled with intelligent machines. His hobbies include travel and photography. Visit his website at http://angus.pw or follow @angusm on Twitter.
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Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
About the Author
Copyright Page
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
THE WARRIOR WITHIN
Copyright © 2018 by Angus McIntyre
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Martin Deschambault
Cover design by Christine Foltzer
Edited by Justin Landon
A Tor.com Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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New York, NY 10010
www.tor.com
Tor® is a registered trademark ofMacmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
ISBN 978-0-7653-9709-6 (ebook)
ISBN 978-0-7653-9710-2 (trade paperback)
First Edition: March 2018
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