by Adam Roberts
‘You,’ he made a sweeping gesture with his arm, ‘will collect needleguns. You,’ picking some further back, including myself, ‘will collect club-guns. And you at the back, pick out frock weaponry - all save you. . .’ He was pointing now at Syrophoenician.
‘My name is Syrophoenician,’ said Syrophoenician
‘I do not care to know your name,’ Aolis said without emotion. ‘By tomorrow, or the day after at the latest, many of you will be dead. I choose not to clutter my memory with the names of people I won’t need to remember hereafter.’
I thought to myself, This is a poor way to plump up the morale of soldiers about to go to war! But of course I said nothing.
‘As soon as I am finished speaking go fetch your guns. You will need them outside - I mean, or course, that you will need them for fighting, but just as important you will need them as eyes. It is murky, and you will need the guns to help see your way.’ He stopped, seemed to be thinking. Then he said: ‘Your pain sensitivity has been tuned down. They cannot turn your pain off wholly, or you lose coordination and sensation and become useless. But they have turned it down, so you will not feel the pain as badly as otherwise you might.’
‘I am not afraid of pain, Aolis,’ said Syrophoenician grandly.
Aolis angled his torso to look at him, but said nothing.
‘Our salient is a hill, well fortified. There are no enemy troops there, so the defenders are all distance-remotes and automates. But there are very many of these, and more are being shipped-in all the time. The battle resolves itself into destroying as many of these as possible, until such time as we are able to break through and destroy the salient.’ He thought some more, and even turned back to his comrades away on the other side of the warehouse, such that several of us thought he had finished and started getting up to go and fetch our weapons. But then he turned back and said: ‘We have our own remotes and automates, of course, but they are as sluggish and dim as the enemy’s. If we left the battle to the machines it would be like . . .’ He dried, unable to summon words. He rubbed his hands together, and then had a thought: ‘It would be like watching two computers of equal processing power play chess together, a thing seemingly endless, and bound eventually to be drawn.’ He seemed pleased with this analogy.
We all started getting to our feet again and then Aolis turned back to us. There was momentary confusion, some of us sitting down again, some standing up properly; but he stood before us until everybody had sat down again.
‘You’ll know me on the battlefield,’ he said, ‘by these stripes.’ And he put a thumb to his own chest. ‘Then there’s the boomshell. It’s that on the hill.’ He fell silent again.
‘Are our orders to destroy it, Aolis?’ asked Syrophoenician.
‘Of course!’ For the first time Aolis spoke with some emotion, sounding a little peeved. ‘Naturally! But you do not know what a boomshell is. Do you know what a boomshell is, soldier?’
‘My name,’ said Syrophoenician, puckish, ‘is Syrophoenician. And I do not know what a boomshell is.’
Aolis still had his thumb on his chest. He dropped the hand to his side. ‘Syrophoenician is an unusual name,’ he said. ‘I fear I shall remember it even though I do not wish to. The boomshell is the reason why there are no headed officers with us on this assault. It is the reason why, before we step out, we must pack our lungs with an aerating stiff foam. The operative will give you your wadding.’
‘What is wadding?’ asked Steelhand.
‘It is not comfortable,’ replied Aolis, as if this answered Steelhand’s question. ‘But it will transfer oxygen to your bloodstream, and will soak up carbon from your bloodstream. It is oxygen rich,’ he added, as if this was explaining matters, ‘and configured chemically in such a way as to be able to transfer the oxygen to the blood in your lungs. It is not comfortable, but you will get used to it.’
He fell silent again.
‘Aolis!’ said Syrophoenician loudly. ‘I do not understand.’
Aolis looked at him. ‘You are simple-witted?’
‘By no means, Aolis,’ returned Syrophoenician, evidently enjoying the unusual liberties this situation granted him with respect to the officer in command over him. ‘It is the case, rather, that your explanation was deficient.’
Aolis looked at Syrophoenician for a long time. My heart was hurrying, wondering whether Aolis had been given a truncheon, and whether he was about to use it on Syrophoenician. But instead he started speaking, with more force and urgency. ‘I apologise, soldier,’ he said, sounding like somebody waking up for the first time. ‘I forget that you know nothing at all. The boomshell lays down a wide sonic footprint. It is a deeply discomforting thing, and worse than discomforting - it will collapse the brain of a headed soldier. I mean the physical organ, the skull; it will clench that cavity inwards and squeeze the brain. The brain cannot be wadded. It is like a jelly, very vulnerable.’
‘This is some manner of sonic projection?’
‘A very low frequency. An anti-sonics. It cannot harm your skull cavities because you have none. But it will try to collapse your lungs. Without wadding you would die; and so, uncomfortable though it is, wadding is better than nothing. The worst,’ he added, as an afterthought, ‘is coughing the stuff up after each raid. That is a rasping and drawn-out process.’
‘What of the other cavities in our bodies?’ asked Steelhand, alarmed.
‘It will give you pains in the gut, and possibly flatulence and diarrhoea, but this will not kill you, and it will pass when you are out of range of the weapon.’
‘Does it not collapse the cavities of the heart?’ asked Geza.
‘It does.’
‘Your pardon, Aolis, but is this not a fatal circumstance?’
Aolis seemed to contemplate this. ‘It is not comfortable,’ he said slowly.
‘But even a headless soldier needs a beating heart to . . .’ began Syrophoenician in his best theatrically-outraged voice.
‘For the heart is designed to collapse,’ said Aolis. Then he said: ‘All your arteries will collapse too, or they will try to. But blood - water, you see - is incompressible. By trying to collapse this network of vessels the boomshell will move your blood about your body as effectively as any heart. And the heart recovers when you move out of the weapon’s range. But there has been enough talking now. We must all go to war in a moment. Go fetch your weapons.’
After we had plugged in our guns, and opened the eyes in the barrels, we spent a minute or more accustoming ourselves again to the more vivid visual inputs. Then we formed a line, and one by one we presented ourselves to an operative, who fed a tube through our neck valves and down to our lungs. ‘This feels diagreeable, especially the first time,’ Aolis announced. ‘It feels as if you cannot breathe. But you can. Five minutes, and you’ll get used to it.’
The headless from the Fortieth and the Seventh received their wadding foam without demur. But the first of our troop to take it - Garten, as it chanced - jerked and threw out his arms. It made no difference that he resisted; the pumping tube was lengthy and flexible, and was locked in at his neck stump, and no matter how he danced, or how he wrestled with the join, it filled him up. After it was withdrawn he danced awkwardly away, his hands over his chest or fumbling at his neck as if suffocating. But he was still alive five minutes later, and ten, and by the quarter hour he had settled down.
‘I apologise,’ he said, to nobody in particular, or to everybody. ‘I acted with a panic unbecoming a soldier.’ He was, of course, able to speak, since a headless’s voice depends only upon his will and the speakers mounted in his body, and not on his lungs.
By this time I had experienced the same discomfort as he, and although I did not react so outrageously I was far from happy. As the tube slid in there was some small discomfort; but it was trivial compared to the drowning sense of fear that I felt as the foam packed itself into every alveolus. I held myself straight, and afterwards staggered a little distance away; and it took many long minutes
before my body got used to the idea that it was not about to choke and asphyxiate.
Aolis said only one further thing, and that was after we had come to terms, as far as we each were able, with our heavy filled-in lungs. He said: ‘If we can destroy the boomshell then headed troops will be able to move in and secure the ground, and that will end our work for the day.’ Then he reminded us of the signal for retreat.
Then he formed us up in ranks. The Fortieth and the Seventh, or what remained of them, were in front of us by the doorway, each with their own headless battle commands.
We waited.
There was no signal that I could see, but at one moment the front troop moved forward. They pushed the button to open the door and trotted out. We followed.
This, my first experience of battle, was a clammy and choked experience, the fog all about me leeched fighting spirit; it was a grim combination of shadow and blackness with occasional misty patches of bottle-green or with red glows like coals. Even when I opened the eye of my gun it was hard to make out any details. Through my gun-eye the texture of the fog became highlighted, a bitty, swirly semolina-thick quantity. I could glimpse only oblique hints of the things that the fog hid.
It was also the case that the compact density of the matter filling my lungs oppressed me. The cough reflex was useless in the face of so complete a stimulus. I later discovered that the mucus inside the lung began a chemical reaction that started breaking the foam down. This was a process that took about three hours, whereafter the foam started to emerge in gobbets and tight spirals and strands of phlegm, and coughing became the body’s main activity. But until then it was as solid as expanded polystyrene inside.
It angered me. I became more angry as we trotted along zigzag paths that seemed, perversely, to be taking us the longest way about. I did not see why we were made to move two hundred metres to the left and then two hundred to the right to move forward only fifty, when the bare land we avoided seemed perfectly traversible - a little parched and black and dusty, but firm and uncluttered. But we followed the path, single-file, and I, eager to get to the battlefield, kept knocking into the man in front of me. Receiving these repeated checks stoked up my fury. I shuffled forward, under the dun and black sky, and in my eagerness to fight the whole frustrating, infuriating experience became caught up with my resolution for revenge. Mark Pol was, by some unclear connection and a new logic, associated with the enemy. By killing them I would be killing him.
Finally we came to the breaklands. These were thick walls, remnants of some baffling architectural project that interpenetrated the upward and downward swells of the black hills and so provided cover. Defiles were cut through these structures, and it was via such insets that we were to move through and begin the assault.
There were no headed soldiers of any kind in this place.
Aolis gathered us and gave us our orders. ‘Through the defile and over the hill. You’ll start feeling the boomshell soon, but do not be distracted by it. Press on together. Do not fire upon our automates - they have green lights upon their rears. But fire upon every enemy machine you see.’
I expected to burst through the defile and begin using my gun, but this was not what happened. Instead I followed Geza through and emerged onto a gently upsloping black hill. We sprinted forward, leaning into the upward incline, purple dust kicking up beneath our heels. The brow of the hill was visible through the murk as a frowning line above which the blackness was tinged with a dimly glowing red. But this colour was very dimly constituted indeed.
I came up over the top of the hill, and saw a cluster of machines to my near left. The man in front of me dropped down, and began firing, and I followed suit. I shot a club that collided with the superstructure of the machine, but it pulled back and clanked away into the murk seemingly unhurt.
After that the raid became frustratingly stop-start and unfocused. I ran hither and thither over the far flank of the hill, occasionally crossing paths with my comrades. I caught glimpses of our own remotes, sea-green clusters of light swaying as they stumbled along. Once I ran into a tangle of metal wreckage, striking my shins against it and falling forwards. I felt very little pain, although later I discovered I had cut my skin deeply enough to expose bone.
It was not clear in which direction the target was to be found.
I ran to the left, jumping over corpses and wreckage. The dead bodies were all headless, but they excited in me neither pity nor fear. Something in the black dust, I believe, reacted with the flesh to shrink and wizen it; some military weapon or other, I assumed. After a few weeks the flesh desiccated completely and only brittle body armour and corroded weapons remained.
I soon encountered the effect of the boomshell, as the ubiquitous rumbling sub-base noise suddenly swelled, or intensified, something felt in the fabric of the body rather than heard as such. It felt, I might say, like a fist trying to squeeze me; or, to be more precise, and since the pressure came not from the outside but was felt internally, it felt like a sucking from some visceral black-hole. It was intensely unpleasant. But it was not debilitating. The worst thing was the stuttering spasming sensation in the midst of my chest. It felt much as I imagine a heart attack must. But, after the initial surprise, I became acclimatised to it quickly enough.
An automate loomed up from the fog, very close to me, and I dropped to both knees to fire a club at it. This struck home in a visually spectacular but utterly silent chrysanthemum of lights and dazzle. The boomshell swallowed all sound. The machine reared up, deformed its wheels to long ovals and stalked away on them, again weirdly silent in the swamping throb of the boomshell. I fired off another club, and struck it again, but this also failed to fell the device.
The boomshell reduced in intensity, and then passed away. It was replaced by a series of high-pitched squeals, feedback noises, and then, as my heart relaxed, pulsed and relaxed, the ordinary sounds of the battlefield became audible again.
Shortly after this I saw Syrophoenician running up the hill towards me. ‘The retreat has been ordered,’ he called.
‘But our objective remains uncaptured!’
‘Come along, my friend,’ said Syrophoenician, grabbing me. Together we ran up the hill, down the near side and in through the breaklands.
We made our way back to the temporary barrack, and slotted our guns into the general rack, through which the central processor could download data from our gun-eyes. ‘They’ll find nothing useful from mine,’ said Geza, in digust. ‘I did nothing but run up and down like a wet hen.’
‘A curious idiom,’ said Syrophoenician.
‘I too accomplished very little,’ I said. ‘I fired twice upon a machine, but failed to destroy it.’
‘At least,’ said Aolis, in a weary voice, ‘we sustained no casualties.’
My sense was of mere anticlimax. I had anticipated the assault heroic, and instead I had experienced a frustrating and occluded hour of scurrying.
Soup bins trundled in, and we gathered to eat.
‘Why do we not simply blast this boomshell machine from above?’ asked Geza, as we took our soup together. ‘There must be funnel nukes or pruning missiles that can reach it.’
‘It is very deeply set, under the ground,’ said Aolis. ‘Nor is this merely a matter of protection. It uses the ground as a sounding board to focus its attack.’
‘So we must, eventually, crawl through tunnels in the dark and the cramp, to get to this beast?’ Syrophoenician complained, making a contorted shape with his two arms to express his dislike of this notion.
Aolis, unused to Syrophoenician’s theatricality, was puzzled at our general laughter. ‘We shall do as we are ordered,’ he said sharply.
‘At least,’ I said, ‘we shall not bang our heads upon the low ceilings.’
‘It is also the case,’ said Aolis, ignoring my levity, ‘that the polarising agent makes it almost impossible to coordinate any attack from above.’
At this point I discovered the injury to my shin, and spent ten min
utes bandaging it. By the time I had finished most of the others had fallen asleep. I joined them. I was, I discovered, immensely tired.
I woke myself up with coughing. The wadding in my lungs had turned to sludge, and although it still possessed aerating properties my body was rejecting it. I sat up, leant forward and spat quantities of the stuff through my neck valve and onto the floor. It was a remorseless and uncomfortable business, especially towards the end of it, when I was coughing up as much of my own phlegm as I was foam. But eventually, and after many sips of water, my chest settled itself. It felt peculiar, and not particular enjoyable, being able to draw air into my lungs again. Later, when I became used to the effect that the fringes of the boomshell had upon my body - the asthmatic tightening and spluttering it produced even when it passed glancingly and at the extreme edge of its effectiveness - I came to crave the solid sense of a filled chest.
Ten
The pattern into which the fighting was to fall soon became apparent to me. Every six or seven hours we scurried through the defile, and spread out over the forward hill like ants. Our objectives were never very clear to me, except to shoot upon such enemies as we encountered. This we would do until the time came to scurry, like ants, back through our slot and to our barracks: eat, perhaps talk, sleep. Then we would do it all again.