Adam Robots: Short Stories

by Adam Roberts

  He was put in command over a platoon of Sticks from a previous supplier; he could see not his own face echoed and varied from man to woman all down the rank, but somebody else’s face. Somebody darker than him, with oak-coloured skin and tight, wire-brush hair. All down the line that he inspected he saw the family resemblances, although as he drilled and trained his men he realised how many differences there were too: differences not only in appearance, in width of mouth, sharpness or bluntness of chin, in shape of head and proportion of body, but also in manner and personality. ‘Sticks!’ he announced to them, as he had been instructed to do, ‘I’m going to use you as a stick to beat the enemy.’

  They laughed.

  Sid led his troops into battle for the first time. Intelligence had identified what they thought was a nest world, or nursery world, for the Xflora, although so little was known about the alien creatures that this hadn’t been confirmed. Forty Stick platoons were dropped into the forests of this world, with a Troop ship following behind. Sid led his men and women through the eerily quiet corridors between the trunks. Huge brittle-bark tree-analogues towered around them, throwing everything into a quiet dusk; something powdery stifled their footfalls. When the Xflora came, they came from all sides at once, and almost everybody in Sid’s platoon was killed. But they fought with the ferocity that was habitual to them, and Xflora corpses lay all about them when the dropship picked up the survivors. Sid killed his first alien, hacking and driving at the base of the creature with a firestick until it lay in charred pieces about him. In the process he received four major wounds.

  Sid spent a month having a leg recast and healed, his skin grafted, his cuts treated. He was given command of another platoon. I’m going to use you as a stick to beat the enemy. They laughed, with that childish look of recognition in their faces, I get it! But there was nothing childlike about their scarred skin, about the taut plumpness of their muscles, about the rapid and economical grace of their movements, about their reflexes. He took this platoon to a desert world over which dunes of ground-down glass rolled like slow waves. He took them to a former Imperial colony the Xflora had over-run, and where they had been left to their own devices for a year or more, to see what they would do. Creeping though the wrecked streets, past shattered buildings and fern-grown wildernesses, was spooky. But enemy activity was almost non-existent; some warriors remained, but had rooted themselves and started a process of mutation that left them barely recognisable: the Sticks cut them to cinders with heated microblades, and they did nothing but rock back and forth groaning. Sid took his platoon to a world covered in marshes and ponds, where the enemy reared out of the water. Heated weapons were less effective in this damp atmosphere, and the troops used projectile lances. He took his troops onto an Xflora spaceship of enormous size, where they fought corridor to corridor through the bizarrely asymmetric design of the thing. He took them through a shattered former human arcology, where the fighting was unusually hard. He took them to a world on which the ecosystem had been destroyed by a variety of fungus, the hills and valleys over-run with great foam-rubber folds of grey, pink and white growths. The fungus put up poisonous skeins to trap food, and Sid lost many soldiers to it; the landscape had to be fought as hard as the enemy. On each mission the platoon bonded; they laughed together, fought and tussled like children, copulated as variously and violently as chimpanzees.

  Eventually Sid himself won promotion, and became a captain. He commanded a series of large-scale raids and advances, on a number of worlds, battles more on the scale of the one he had watched with General Luop. In one way this was the most unsettling thing Sid had yet done. His earlier platoons had consisted of veterans, all of them seeded from some other individual, some masturbator previous to Sid’s time. Now he was in command of troops grown from his own sperm. He walked the length of endless ranks of men and women, attended by lieutenants, and looked upon his own face over and over again. He flew down onto the flanks of a mountain with two hundred giant dropships, and poured out his men onto the waiting hordes of Xflora below him. The higher command orders came to him through his two-way with Junior General Caas, but he was there, actually there, as the huge battle unfolded.

  He commanded two-dozen more battles, and those around him started talking openly about his rapid promotions. He was in his thirties now, ridged all over his body with wormy scar tissue, his head shaved and his body muscled. He’d fought more engagements than he could remember. He’d watched his own generation come out upon the field and spend itself in battle, and watched a new generation of Grunts supersede them. These new ones had been seeded from the masturbators who had taken over from him and Dub all those years before. These soldiers were fairer than his own children had been: dark blond hair and lemony complexions with a great variety of freckles, blotches and spots; but clear blue eyes every one of them, and good killing instincts. They came, shipped from the arcologies, millions upon millions every week. In time, a new generation of soldiers came through, and after them another.

  ~ * ~

  Seven

  When recently-promoted Field Marshal (and now Adviser to the Imperial Council) Luop called him for a private conference, Sid assumed his own promotion was nearly upon him. He assumed that this was what Luop wanted to talk to him about.

  Luop had his own command ship now, a scimitar-shaped battleship of immense dimensions called Muscle 7. Inside, Sid was saluted and yes-sirred for a day, and given his own quarters. He watched news on the Screen, something he had not done for many years. The ship created gravity by accelerating at half-a-gee for several hours, then turning and decelerating for the same length of time. The change-around times, when everybody floated, determined the lengths of watches and the internal timetable of life on the ship.

  Second watch the following day, Sid was summoned to the command suite. Luop’s uniform was now a white and gold striped confection of sartorial exuberance, but his face had changed little. He had not been burned, scarred, stabbed or shot in the years since Sid and he had last conversed.

  ‘Captain,’ he said, amiably. ‘Delighted. I’ve just come from an arcology - a new generation of soldiers is due, like the leaves on the tree in springtime.’ He chuckled. ‘A good-looking soldier type, but not as good as your offspring.’

  ‘Thank you sir,’ said Sid, uncertainly.

  ‘Not at all, it’s nothing but the truth. It’s one of the reasons I was so curious to meet you, when you and that other fellow, can’t-think-of-the-name, when you both came zipping towards my arcology. I wanted to see the parent. Well, you’ve lived up to my expectations. I’ve just been briefed on your career . . . very commendable.’

  ‘Again,’ said Sid, ‘I thank you.’

  ‘Come,’ said Luop, patting the upholstery beside him, ‘and sit down, and enough of all those thank-yous and sirs. We have serious business to talk about. My, ahem, superiors, have suggested I talk to you. They think you might be open to a suggestion we have.’

  Sid sat. ‘What suggestion?’

  Luop did not answer at once. ‘Two of the council are coming here, to my ship, in a few days. They’re bringing a remote for the AIs; that’s the way they handle it. The AIs download the remote when they return home.’

  Despite himself, Sid was astonished. ‘Two of the council?’ he gasped.

  ‘It’s not as grand as it seems; the Imperial Council is a War Council after all, and we are the war. Of all the Galactic Empire they’re likely to be more concerned with us than anything else.’

  ‘I’ve never so much as seen a Council Member,’ Sid said, breathily.

  ‘Of course you haven’t,’ replied Luop. ‘What a bizarre thing to say. Of course you haven’t.’

  ‘Why are they coming?’

  ‘Well, as you know, we’ve had difficulties with Xflora prisoners. They’re devilish hard to take in the first place, and doubly hard to examine in the second. We don’t know a way of sedating them; they don’t sleep; they won’t root in captivity; if anybod
y or anything approaches them they fight it, and usually rip themselves to shreds in the process. We’ve dissected lots of corpses of course, but the scientists say they need to dissect living examples if we’re really going to get to the bottom of their life-system. But it’s very hard. Anyway, we’ve recently developed a perfectly transparent diamond-gel that we spray on prisoners from all sides. It immobilises them completely, seals them away. They die, of course, but it takes them several days, which gives us a window of opportunity: cut open a panel, dissect away - in heavy armour, of course, because they’re very tricky, unpredictable.’ He paused, looked around himself, looked back at Sid. ‘That’s why the Council are here, to observe a dissection. They think it may lead to a breakthrough that will shorten the war.’

  ‘Will it?’ Sid asked, interested but in a distant sort of way.

  Luop shrugged. ‘Maybe. That’s not what I want to talk to you about. Sidlan, you’ve studied military history?’

  ‘A little,’ said Sid guardedly.

  ‘The wars that formed the Empire?’

  ‘Not since School.’

  ‘You should go back to them. Very interesting. Very interesting. It started with the great Lord Slew. Of course, he’s a myth now, but do you know how he, and his descendants, came to conquer so widely? Do you? I’ll tell you. They fought war against humans, not aliens as we do. When they were victorious they gave the defeated the options of death, disgrace or joining the Imperial Army. Most chose the last. So each battle augmented the Army with new troops, new life, variety and vitality. And so the Army grew, until eventually it was an unstoppable force. Do you see?’

  ‘I guess so,’ said Sid. He added ‘sir’, a little too late.

  ‘But this war we’re fighting now,’ Luop went on, ‘it’s not the same. There’s no point of contact with the enemy except death. We can’t recruit the Virus Race into our army, that goes without saying.’

  The very idea was so bizarre that Sid had to stifle a chuckle.

  ‘No, of course we can’t,’ Luop said. ‘The result? No cross-fertilisation. The army gets weaker. Even with its billions of troops it gets weaker. This is a dead-end war. A dead-end. Well, senior military staff think we need something to revivify the army. Revivifying the army can’t be a bad thing, can it, Sid?’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘No, sir,’ echoed Luop, beaming. ‘A strong army for a strong empire. I knew you’d agree. I knew you’d be one of us.’

  Sid leant forward in his chair. ‘One of what, sir?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Luop, smiling and nodding. ‘The course of action is clear, isn’t it? We must gather a portion of our strength, and send them back into the Empire itself. We need to fight human beings again, to defeat human armies and bring them within the body of the military, to give variety and strength to our forces.’

  ‘Invade the Empire?’ Sid said, uncertainly. ‘Treason?’

  ‘Technically yes, of course, but in service of a higher good. We start taking worlds on the Imperial border, out here. Soon enough the Council will be forced to levy troops from across their dominions. But they won’t be as tough as the Xflora, they won’t be a match for our numbers or our abilities. We’ll move from world to world, until we’ve put the whole Empire under military command.’

  ‘With yourself,’ said Sid, the idea taking root inside him, ‘one of the commanders.’

  ‘Myself and some others. What we need is skilled local officers, a chain of command we can rely upon. We need people like you, Sid. Eh? Colonel Sid, I should say. Colonel Sid? Do you like the sound of that?’

  ‘Colonel Sid,’ Sid replied. He looked around the command suite. Fighting people, instead of fighting the Xflora. Fighting people - that atavistic, thrilling notion. He fixed his gaze on Luop. ‘Colonel Sid,’ he said again. ‘It has a good sound to it.’

  Luop stared blankly straight at Sid for a full minute, as if he were trying to look beneath his skin. Then he smiled, broadly and beamingly. ‘I’m so glad,’ he said, ‘that you’ve seen the wisdom of this new tactic. We can think of it as a shake-up for the stagnant older ways. Can’t we?’

  ‘Sir,’ said Sid, excitement tightening in his belly. ‘Yes, sir.’

  ~ * ~

  Eight

  It was the year of Galactic Empire 1388, the seventy-ninth year of the reign of the Committee of Seven, on the Battleship Muscle 7 in grav-acceleration orbit around the Red Giant Harvision 33-gamma.

  The council members travelled in on the pulseTug Streifzug 8b, and Luop and various others of the most senior military command met them at the Muscle 7’s docking shelf. Sid was there, in the third row of seven rows of colonels who slapped their feet together in unison, and spread their legs A-shaped in unison, and saluted in unison like drilled recruits. The council members seemed ordinary-looking people, one male and one female. Dressed in the plain-cut deep dark blue singletons of the senior administration they looked elegantly understated beside the gorgeous white-and-gold of the senior military.

  ‘Sidlan,’ called a general. ‘Fraze. Veim.’ Sid and two other colonels stepped from the line and trotted to the front.

  ‘Allow me,’ said Luop, taking a council member by each hand and leading them over, ‘to introduce three outstanding colonels. This is Sidlan Air, thrice-decorated, with an interesting story. Once, long ago, he provided sperm from which billions of soldiers have been grown. Remarkable to think of! Now he has joined the army, and distinguished himself in countless engagements against the Virus Race.’

  ‘Remarkable,’ murmured the councillors. ‘Remarkable.’

  ‘And here are two colonels who have been promoted from the ranks - the first two grunts to have progressed this far. Fraze and Veim.’

  ‘You can see the family resemblance in Veim,’ noted the male councillor. He swayed back and forth to look at Veim’s face from different angles, and then looked at Sid. ‘There is a pronounced resemblance.’

  ‘They have exceptional skills,’ said Luop, smiling. ‘Quite exceptional skills.’

  The three colonels were invited to attend the Councillors, together with the Field Marshals and their honour guard, as they made their way down the corridor towards the dissection rooms. It was a party of fifteen people, not counting the four AIs. Sid walked at the back, his eyes fixed on the backs of the Councillors. Both had shaven heads, but the male Councillor was much older; the back of his neck was creased and seamed like the palm of a hand. The back of the female Councillor’s head overhung her neck like a model of a rock formation. By force of habit Sid imagined how he would place men to storm the formation, were he to encounter it full-size in battle: ascenders here, front-troops there, and a side group to force their way up over the left ear. The crown of the head would be captured in under an hour.

  Sid’s mind worked like that all the time.

  The four AIs wobbled as they floated along. Two force-lasers pressing up and down against ceiling and floor kept them in midair. They looked like stubby metal logs hovering improbably in the middle of the corridor.

  At the end of the corridor the party were elevated into the dissection rooms, where half a dozen Xflora Advance Warriors stood, frozen in a variety of grotesque postures. A faint glittery sheen over their scales and skin was the only indication that the bodies were carapaced in a thin layer of diamond. Technicians stood in their alcoves inset into the far wall of the laboratory. A range of servile-AIs hovered with surgical equipment.

  ‘Councillors,’ said Luop, waving both arms in a theatrical fashion. ‘Allow me to show you the insides of a living Xflora warrior.’

  The nearest servile-AI floated towards one of the statuesque dragons, and a drill-bit floated from the front compartment of the machine. Two curved blades shaped in towards one another, like a tiny bucMetallic model of a spiral-arm galaxy. And like a galaxy the blades began to turn, although soon the rotation was so rapid that the blades resolved themselves into a shimmering disk.

  The cutter sliced th
rough the diamond casing, and cut into the body of the Xflora warrior near the base. The beast started pulsing, its skin moving in little shudders, the only movement allowed by its tightly imprisoning surround. Sid found himself fascinated. He had never, in a thousand battlefield encounters, seen a warrior show obvious symptoms of pain. Was its distress the same thing as a human would experience as pain? Or did this reaction have something to do with its captivity? Perhaps, Sid mused, warriors flooded their bodies with some sort of powerful analgesic chemical when actually fighting, such that they could feel no pain if wounded in battle.

  The group of humans watched the cutting blade work up through the body. Treacly black fluid oozed up against the inside of the diamond glass.

  ‘It is truly absorbing,’ noted the female Councillor. ‘Their innards are always reported as being dry . . .’

  ‘Granular,’ agreed the male Councillor. ‘Like sand.’

  ‘But there you can see a sort of fluid,’ said the female.