by Adam Roberts
Sometimes we would be ordered to swap our guns about. Upon encountering one of the lumbering great automates, a club-gun was the most destructive option, although needles and projectiles could do a surprising amount of damage if they happened to strike the right portion. But the enemy would vary their defensive attacks, sometimes pouring hundreds of small remotes at us, in which case the heavier ordnance was worse than useless. Indeed, and since we were ordered never to discard our weapons, but always to return them so that their data could be processed, the bigger guns tended only to hamper resistance.
With the remotes we were at least spared the boomshell. Their handlers were headed, and needed to be relatively proximate to their drones. But they were nimbler and more deadly, two metres tall and possessing human-controlled reflexes rather than the lumbering ones of automates. At one point I was standing shoulder to shoulder with Garten, both of us firing needleguns into the approaching mêlée, when a scyther cut him into two pieces: three quarters of a body falling forwards from below the cut, a wedge of chest and shoulders and two arms tumbling backwards above it. There was a great deal of blood, but, though I was messed by this, I was otherwise unharmed. I fled that scene.
So much for Garten. He had been my friend.
After several days fighting we learned the best way to tackle remotes was for several of us to target their metal heads. Here was where the sensors were located, and destroying those produced a painful feedback in the handlers, plugged in to their sensornets. Presumably (I never discovered for sure) the screams of one handler back in the handling facility discommoded the morale of the others, for after destroying a remote in this manner it was often the case that the remainder would flee the scene.
The boomshell created unpredictable dislocations in air pressure that made it difficult for planes to fly. But, when it was not operating, aircraft would sweep through the blackness above us dropping sheet-ordnance or localised bombs upon us - or upon the enemy, if the planes were ours, although the weapons made no distinction. The murk disoriented attempts at precise targeting. Bil Costra and Cash were killed by overhead bombardment, and Syrophoenician was nearly crushed by a falling plane - caught by the boomshell, and perhaps clipped by shrapnel, ploughing with enormous speed into the hillside, carving a broad road-like furrow, flipping over and over, shedding great spinning chunks of fuselage, and finally exploding into white skimming light, all (Syrophoenician later said, with many theatrical gestures) utterly silent, save only the thrum of the boomshell. ‘How strange it was,’ he said, as we picked fragments of metal out of his stomach and legs, where they had shredded through his armour, and bandaged him, ‘to see this enormous wreck happen, silently, directly before my own artificial eyes.’
I took up a needlegun, and scurried forth to make my pointless antlike runs over and over the hillside. I ate, I slept. I exchanged my weapon for a club-gun, and ran forth again. One sally brought us up against a solid wall of automates, flaring their nozzles and spewing glass shot towards us. It was on this raid that Aolis was killed. Upon his death Syrophoenician was appointed battlefield officer. But the relentless pressure of repeated raids was starting to dent even his enormous liveliness. He paraded about the barrack as we ate our soup shouting, ‘None of this intimate name nonsense with me!’ and, ‘You carcasses had better call me “Superior”, or I’ll truncheon you to jelly!’ and such like. But his heart was not really in it.
Sleep was our only balm, and we all took refuge in it.
Once again I awoke to a space filled with retching and coughing men, and once again I joined them in retching and coughing. We had, in the absence of specific instruction from superiors, agreed a rota, such that we took turns to sweep away the mounds of sludgy foam and spittle that were the result of this mass lung-clearing. Indeed, we so rarely saw a superior these days that we began to forget what it was like to receive specific orders from a headed man.
On the next raid, as had been the case on my very first, I encountered almost nobody on the hill. Our own automates had pushed forward, and only occasionally did we encounter an enemy machine, alone and fleeing. I ranged widely over the black and dusty space, and in fact pushed right to the bottom of the hill. Here there was a broad and irregular pathway of stones, perhaps a dried river-bed, on the other side of which was the start of another upward slope. Three comrades were here, pausing and scanning the darkness with their gun-eyes. ‘This is it,’ I cried. ‘Should we attack?’
‘My orders are not clear,’ replied Syrophoenician. ‘Now that you are here, Cavala, we are four; but surely this is not a large enough force to go clambering through the tiny tunnels and—’
The boomshell started up, and his remaining words were swallowed. He waved us back and we made our way to the breaklands and base.
At soup there was a new excitement. ‘Have we cleared a path?’ Geza was asking. ‘Perhaps now this endless skirmishing can end, and we can push through.’
‘A superior is coming here to advise,’ said Syrophoenician. He had become uncharacteristically subdued since assuming battlefield authority, and a new caution had entered his manner. ‘He will tell us what we must do.’
‘For my part,’ I said, ‘I hope we can rush the boomshell and destroy it. I am sick of this tentative probing forward, all this insect-like scurrying here and there. I want to force a way through. Give me a path, a straight line, a goal.’
‘You are thwarted. You wish to give expression to the passion in your nature,’ said Steelhand.
I was struck by the wisdom of this. ‘Sieur Steelhand,’ I said. ‘You put it very well. For what good is life without passion?’
‘This expresses precisely my philosophy of living,’ said Syrophoenician.
‘A man may be passionate in his work, or his love, or the way he takes his pleasure,’ I said. ‘As soldiers, we should be passionate about our fighting.’
‘But - passionate about killing?’ said Steelhand, without conviction. ‘That doesn’t sound so praiseworthy a passion.’
‘I am no coward,’ said Geza. ‘But I am most passionate about my self preservation. I hope to survive this war.’
‘I want only to atone for what I have done in the past,’ I said.
‘To atone passionately,’ said Geza, laughing.
‘And does it not say, in the Bibliqu’rân . . .’ began Syrophoenician.
‘We must mutiny against this canting preacher!’ cried Steelhand, leaping up. We bundled upon Syrophoenician, and our laughter was the first for a long time.
Two superiors arrived, in their bulkily petalled helmets, with a new set of headless. The taller of the headed men made a brusque speech.
‘Troops!’ he shouted. ‘The new assault will take place in one hour. To the Seventh, the Thirtieth and Fortieth, I say to you: fresh blood and heart comes in the form of the Eleventh Troop of Gable Headless. With these reinforcements, and with the battlefield largely abandoned by the enemy, we will press again at the salient and be successful.’
The new troops cheered ‘Superior!’ in unison. The rest of us were silent.
‘To you,’ said the superior, turning to the men of the Eleventh, ‘I shall say what these others already know. It is usual in battle for headless troops to be commanded by superiors. For strategic reasons on this battlefield this will not be possible. Accordingly, your battlefield commander will be Syrophoenician of the Thirtieth. Follow him unthinkingly into the corridors of the salient, and destroy it! Once it has been eliminated our armies will flood through the gap in the enemy defences. The war will soon be over.’
Syrophoenician stepped forward and made his way over to the new recruits. When he began to address them he did so without levity or jokes.
Eleven
We embarked on the next raid in high spirits, expecting to swarm down to the dried river and then press up. But, instead, we ran straight into a large deployment of remotes. The men of the Eleventh Gable, still awkward and skittish with the wadding in their lungs, and unused to combat, charged
directly at them, and were blasted with scythers and glass shot. Fully a half of them tumbled, dead, to the ground. This was very disconcerting to the rest of us. We scattered back up the hill to the various obstacles and potholes, well known to us now, behind or within which we might find cover. Once there we returned the weapons fire. From where I was, behind a box of fallen girders still corseted with the remains of some of their metal ribbing, I saw Syrophoenician and two of the new soldiers harassed in a foxhole by a dozen remotes. They were crowding all about the space, yet had not taken their chance to destroy the three headless. But their danger was very imminent.
Having only a club-gun I was poorly armed for engaging a large number of remotes, but I did what I could. I aimed my weapon carefully, hoping that a well-placed club might skittle away enough of them to grant Syrophoenician and those others time to kill the rest. I fired. My club struck a single remote, on one of its legs, and detonated upwards, blowing its clamshell-shaped head high into the dark. But this did nothing to dishearten the other machines. I saw Syrophoenician leap up from his hole, attempting physically to bundle through the circle of attackers, and two of the new recruits - bravely - followed him. But the bodies of the remotes, of course, were charged, and all three men staggered back at their contact. This shock must have been fiercely painful, a sensation, even with dampened pain reception, of electric muscle-shredding. But despite it I saw Syrophoenician turn about and raise his needlegun. The entire scene lit up in a glitter cloud of crossfire.
All this happened before a second club was able to slot itself in the breech of my weapon. I aimed again, and only realised too late that three remotes had come up rapidly on my left.
I swung my weapon, or began to, but I knew that this was my own moment of death. Accordingly, I feel I should report to you something of my state of mind at this point. I feel I should report, for instance, whether the prospect of imminent death was alarming to me, frustrating, terrifying, or whether I felt that deep and philosophic calm and certainty of a new life in the All’God of which divines sometimes write. But this would be a feeble pretence. You are reading my account, and so you already know that I did not die. All I can say, to be consistent with my aim in this memoir of absolute truthfulness, is this: had I known, then, that I was about to be taken prisoner by the enemy I would relate to you my state of mind at this prospect - fear, relief, whatever it might be. But I did not realise that. I assumed that I would die. And when, with a bright apparition in my right-side visual sensors of the looming electric-light-encrusted face of a remote, my consciousness abruptly cut-out there was just enough time for me to think: This is the very moment of death! The thing itself ! And to be pleased with myself that I had kept enough of my wits to be able to recognise this moment. A dazzle, a crunch, and nothing after it.
PART THREE
A Brazen Head
One
I did not expect to wake. But I woke. What then? When it occurred to me that I was indeed waking up, I suppose I expected to find myself inside a prison. But I was not in prison.
When I opened my eyes I could see a pale wall, a shelf with books upon it. I could see the edge of a door. I turned my head a little and saw the trappings of an unluxurious but comfortable room. I was lying upon a bed in the middle of this. The sheets felt like cotton, clean and fragrant. I turned my head, and saw a square of lit blue sky. Bright sunlight came washing through this window, dousing all the objects on the floor, saturating everything.
I could see much more clearly and distinctly than was usual for me. Even when my sight had been augmented, for instance with a gun plugged into my ordinator, it had never been as sharp and lively as it now was. Everything in the room picked itself out with unusual clarity. I recognised my shirt, where it lay discarded on the floor, patched with triangular and rectangular blocks of shadow from the various kinks and ruffles in the cloth. But these patches of shade were so darkly distinct that I at first thought, in my half-awake state, that they were actually marks upon the clothing - wine stains, perhaps, or dye patches. I had to rise from the bed and shake the shirt in my right hand to confirm for me that the marks were indeed only shadow. The motion scattered all the black triangles and rectangles away like a conjurer’s trick, revealing only a forked, white stretch of cloth.
I sat back down upon the bed. It was disconcertingly hypervivid. ‘My mind,’ I observed, to myself, ‘is not itself.’ The words, spoken aloud, chimed a different timbre to the usual sound of my voice.
I was still wearing my meadhres. I stood up, and put my arms into the sleeves of the shirt, fumbling the buttons closed with my right hand. I resolved to explore this place.
Through the door led me into a short hallway, at the end of which was another door. Inset in this was a bright-lit panel. Only as I came towards this did I realise it was glass, lit by the outside sun, rather than being some manner of artificial light.
The door opened easily.
I stepped outside into a warm afternoon. The heat was very tangible on my skin. The heat of pine and lavender. A clean and clear heat.
What could I see?
There was a headed man sitting beside a swimming pool. He was sitting upon a white plastic recliner. Light, reflected up from the undulating surface of the pool, wrigglingly caressed his face. Behind him was a low wall fashioned from a warm-looking yellow stone, and beyond that a pale-grassed hillside rising to the left of my field of vision. The texture of the honey-coloured grass on this hill was very clear to me. I could hear the occasional rustle, like a percussive zither, as the wind moved over these dry strands, and then was still. The sky behind the hill was a very dark blue.
I blinked. I shut my eyes, and opened them. Strangely vivid; intensely vivid. Its intense lifelikeness was so pronounced as to give the scene an aura of strangeness.
The man waved to me. He was smiling. His wave said come over here!
I walked over to him. As I walked across the warm patio my point-of-view rotated. To the right, down the precipitous khaki hillside, a whole landscape turned into my sight. Directly below the land on which the house was built there were trees, still carrying full heads of dry and rather metallic-looking leaves. Further down the hill were other houses. At the bottom was a bright blue lake, and on the far side of this was a small lakeside town, and another towering honey-coloured hill behind that. I did not recognise the landscape; neither in its particulars, nor as being consistent with the sort of landscape I had previously seen on this world. But, I told myself, surely planets contain a wide variety of different climates and landscapes, and it was more likely that the enemy had flown me to some other part of Black Athena than that they had shipped me wholly offworld and to another planet. And of course, I reminded myself, the polarising fog could hardly have been disseminated across the entire world.
It was clear enough, however, that I had been captured; and that this man, sitting so blithely alone and unarmed, was my enemy. I tried to prepare myself. But how could I prepare myself? I had quite literally no idea what was going to happen.
As I came closer to him, the man spoke. He said: ‘Hello, my friend!’
I was walking along the side of the pool now. The sunlight threw fat webs of light through the water and onto the swimming pool floor, where the ropes of light shifted and swayed as if blown by an underwater breeze.
‘Don’t fall in!’ said the man brightly. ‘You’re looking rather wobbly on your pins.’
I came up close to him. He indicated a second recliner and I sat myself on this.
The man was perhaps forty, perhaps fifty years of age. There were creases cutting into both side of his face, as if the skin had been removed and folded upon itself and only imperfectly flattened before being refitted to the skull. The hair on his head, grey and black, was close-cropped. His eyes were green. The bristles of his beard, several days old, stood out on his chin and cheek with almost hallucinatory vividness, like those thousands of tiny scores and marks an engraver makes upon a metal plate to indicate the shad
ed areas of an illustration.
A gust of wind moved through the air around me. It rummaged briefly in the leaves of a fat-headed oak growing just beyond the wall, making a sound exactly like a flurry of rain. Then the air was still again. There was an uncanny quality to the silence.
‘Welcome to my eagle’s eyrie, Sieur Cavala,’ said the man, in slightly accented Homish. He waved his hand over his shoulder, indicating the view down the hill towards the lake.
‘Your name?’
‘My name,’ he said, smiling, ‘is Levitt Dunber. You and I are alone here, my friend. I trust myself to you - for you are a trained killer, and I could not defend myself if you decided to attack me. You see how trusting I am?’