Adam Robots: Short Stories

by Adam Roberts

  ‘Thick, almost mud-like,’ added the male, leaning closer to the dissection. ‘I’ve never heard of such a thing.’

  ‘Indeed,’ said Luop, brightly. He stepped over to a table at the side of the room, and picked up a single severed Xflora limb. It was hard to tell whether this was a head-arm or an abdominal arm, though it was too small to be one of their lifting limbs. The party turned to face him as he walked back towards them.

  ‘The fluid you have observed seems to be a form of sap,’ he said. ‘Few forms of Xflora life manufacture it, and then only at very infrequent intervals. We’ve had no reports of sap-producing Xflora in battle, although the specimens we have here are - as you can see - Advance Warriors. At the moment we are not sure of the sap’s purpose. It is doubtless a misnomer to call it sap; it contains no sugars, and no recognisable amines, proteins or genetic materials. It’s a strange chemical soup, strongly alkaline. Now this,’ he said, with a slightly puzzling tremor of pride in his voice, ‘this is the arm of a sap-excreting specimen.’ He lifted the limb, almost as if it were a gun. A cap of diamond was fastened over the severed end, but otherwise it was bare. It looked, to Sid’s eyes, swollen.

  Something was wrong somewhere. Sidlan shifted his weight from foot to foot.

  ‘We discovered,’ said the Field Marshal, ‘that with the right frequency of high oscillation sound-waves the tissue can be encouraged to produce an excess of sap. Even dead tissue, like this broken-off limb.’

  Luop brought the distended limb up to his chest height, as if it were a rifle, with the severed end aimed towards the two Councillors.

  ‘With prolonged stimulation,’ he said, ‘the pressure of sap builds to a very pronounced degree.’

  The cap at the cut end of the arm popped off. A jet of darkly glistening sap fizzed from the limb, fanning out and striking both Councillors in the chest and faces. They made no sound; they slipped straight down like discarded clothes dropped to the floor.

  Sid did not take a step towards them. He knew better than that. Besides, there was no need: it was obvious that they were both dead. Their faces, slimed with black, had lost all the definition of usual features: lacking noses, cheeks, chins.

  Luop dropped the arm. ‘What,’ he said, smoothly, ‘what a terrible accident. I fear the Councillors have both been killed.’

  ‘The balance of probabilities,’ cooed the unrufflable voice of one of the AIs, ‘is between an accident and a deliberate act of political assassination on your part; the latter enormously more probable than the former.’

  ‘A balance of likelihood in this case,’ murmured a second AI, ‘in the order of twelve or fourteen times in favour of assassination.’

  Luop smiled again, and started to raise his arm. The AIs, seeing the gesture as some variety of order, probably addressed to the honour guard, made the decision to exit the Muscle 7 instantly and avoid destruction. All four accelerated rapidly in different directions, punching holes through the wall, and straight on through the four hull layers, bulleting out into space. The laboratory filled with hurricane. The sap on the dead bodies began to boil. Instruments flew off the dissection table and out of unfastened cubbies in poltergeist fashion. Everybody lurched and staggered. The motionless figures of the Xflora rocked and tumbled. A moment later the breaches had been foam-sealed, and pressure was restored.

  Luop looked, distantly, pained. ‘A shame,’ he said. ‘I had hoped to immobilise them and speak with them later — to reason with them. Still,’ he said, wiping his hands against his tunic where they had been in contact with the Xflora flesh, and then smoothing down his ruffled hair. ‘They cannot travel faster than light by themselves. And, general, the Streifzug is secured?’

  It was not obvious to whom this question was addressed, but the answer came out of the air. ‘Sir, we secured the Streifzug six minutes ago. Its crew have been eliminated.’

  ‘Then we need not worry about the AIs,’ said Luop. ‘It will be centuries before they arrive anywhere.’

  ~ * ~

  Nine

  Assured that the battlefront at the Xflora mass advance was stable, Luop launched his first attack on human settled worlds. The initial thrust was ambitious: over six hundred settled worlds. The reasoning, Luop told a similitude meeting of his four hundred generals and two hundred colonels, Sid included, was that the first attack would be aided by surprise. ‘Once we have established these six hundred worlds as our bridgehead,’ Luop said, ‘the rest of the empire will understand the pointlessness of opposition. We will move smoothly through the remaining Imperial worlds in the next few years.’

  Where his uniform had once been white with gold braid, it was now gold with white braid.

  Sid was given three commanders, sixty captains, and near-enough a million men along with his mission details. Two-thirds of his force was Spurts, the remainder more experienced Sticks. He was, according to Luop’s orders, to capture the system called Navemona, and to pacify the population within five days. This system consisted of fourteen planets orbiting a yellow-white star, but only three of these were inhabited - called, after the manner of the local dialect, Ab-Navemona, Ec-Navemona and Gy-Navemona. Ec-Navemona was the most populous, and contained the three cities where local administration was concentrated. Sid decided that if those cities were captured and the rest of Ec-Navemona over-run it would take only a small force to pacify the other two worlds.

  Ec-Navemona operated orbit-chutes instead of the more usual cable-elevators to move peoples and materials into orbit. These were minimally-flexible tubes a kilometre or so in diameter and many kilometres in length, whose centre points were fixed in geosynchronous orbit with strand-tethers. Balloon-barges and other atmosphere craft would lift cargo or passengers up to the cave-mouth lower end of these chutes; matter was propelled into the other end at great speed and the chutes hinged about their centre points carrying their cargos up to vacuum orbit. Sid would, from a military point of view, have preferred more conventional cables - tethered to the ground, they could be felled easily by his ships such that, collapsing to the ground with increasingly devastating momentum, they would scorch the air and melt the landscape where they landed to lava. Chutes were less satisfactory from a military point of view. He ordered his troops to destroy the chute tethers as a matter of course, but dozens of the massy tubes fell away into looser orbits and did no damage.

  It didn’t matter. Sid’s dropships were the standard Imperial Military design, and could transfer hundreds of thousands of troops from orbit to ground positions in minutes. The Ec-Navemona administration were still broadcasting messages of puzzled enquiry and polite greeting to Sid’s command ship Great Kant as the dropships were screaming red-hot down through the atmosphere. Ec-Navemona’s capital city, Sac’igen (the apostrophe represents a glottal-stop), was captured before most of the world knew they were under attack. The two other administrative centres fell with minimal fighting. Two days of saturation deployment brought the whole planet under Sid’s single military control.

  But events did not proceed as smoothly as planned. The other two Navemona worlds did not capitulate as Sid had expected them to. Navemona culture was predominantly neoMoralist, based on an elaborate and ritualistic code that ranked a bewildering array of Disobediences, Offences, Crimes and Sins (in that order of increasing significance) with strict exactitude. For the native population, obeying these complex webs of rule and law was second nature. Collaboration with military invaders was deemed a Crime, punishable with long periods of immobilisation. Treason was deemed a Sin, punishable with death. Sid found it impossible to gain the assistance of the native population in even the smallest matters of day-to-day governance: each request was regarded by the locals as either Collaborationist or Treasonable.

  He had a morning-long session with the chief administrator of the system, a woman known as the Morality-Trumpeter of Sac’igen. But according to the moral code of the planet the Morality-Trumpeter could only converse with somebody recognised in law as an �
��Intelligible Character’. She was permitted to ‘trumpet’, or proselytise for morality, with lesser people, and this she did with Sid for long hours, ignoring all of his requests, orders, exhortations and other forms of communication. In the end Sid ordered her incarcerated, and later, had her stripped of her red and green cloak and hat (omitting to wear these clothes of office during the hours of daylight constituted a Disobedience, punishable by a fine; a fact that visibly discommoded her).

  On the sunward world of Ab-Navemona the Imperial expeditionary force met resistance that increased exponentially. Once the dazed population realised that their own Imperial troops had indeed turned on them - their own army! - they initiated a Moral Declaration. First a few declared themselves Moral Fanatics; then more and more took on this designation. Soon virtually the entire population had declared themselves in this fashion. ‘Moral Fanatic’ was a legal category that enabled the population to take up arms against their invaders without committing Crimes or Sins of wounding, murder, life-crippling, double-murder, multiple-murder or mass-murder (each of which moral category carried its own legal discourse and range of appropriate punishments). Used to a regimented life, and unafraid of death, the Ab-Navemonans proved a formidable resistance force, and Imperial casualties on that world escalated alarmingly, quickly overtaking the casualties that had been suffered during the invasion of Ec-Navemona. The Spurts, who were fine and fearless soldiers in open battle, were too limited intellectually to respond to a guerrilla and camouflaged enemy. They were familiar with the straightforward hostility of the Xflora and they succumbed like children to all manner of military subterfuge: booby-traps, hidden ambushes, false trails, and the like.

  Sid had been given only five days to subdue the entire system; a request for more time was unthinkable. ‘I’m sure you won’t need even that long,’ Luop had said. But now Sid began to worry that he was botching his first major command. Three days had passed, and none of the three worlds could be said to be subdued. He flew shuttle to Ab-Navemona to observe progress.

  The landscape of that planet added to the difficulty. It was a warm and lush world, with hundreds of shallow seas, hundreds of thousands of different mud-beaches and nearly a million kilometres of salt-grove coastline. This was difficult terrain to master, with ample hiding places for the increasingly fanatical Moral Fanatics. The technology of the world had been given over to weapon-production with remarkable efficiency, and Imperial casualties mounted in increments of thousands by the hour.

  Sid couldn’t sleep. He found himself imagining the disappointment of Luop when he returned to the command ship to report his inability to achieve the mission objective; visualising Luop’s disgust and disdain. Subsequent consequences, even his own execution for incompetence, bothered Sid less than the agonising embarrassment of this interview.

  Each Navemonan conurbation possessed at least one Morality-Crier, and the larger ones often had one of the more senior category of Morality-Trumpeter. On the fourth day Sid ordered all these administrators brought together and executed by tourniquet, broadcasting the killings to the three worlds. He picked forty settlements more-or-less randomly and had them area-denied, reducing the landscape, the buildings and the population (human and AI) to ashes and hot dirt. He recorded himself making a speech of intimidation and victory. This was broadcast on the usual media channels, but Sid also had the image projected onto the underside of clouds, onto larger buildings, mountains, cliffs, whilst his words were amplified by hundreds of drones. His booming words filled every sky.

  ‘I am Colonel Sidlan Air of the Imperial Army,’ he announced. ‘I have captured this system; it now belongs to my commanding officer. As a corollary to this state of affairs the previous system of morality has been superseded. I declare myself system-wide Morality Trumpeter, and Trumpet the following: a morality of Victory takes precedence over all other moralities. Opposition to the occupying forces is now the premier Sin. Killing any Imperial soldier is Sin. Refusing to co-operate is now Sin or Crime, depending upon the nature of the co-operation required. Executions for these Sins will begin at eighty past seven, Imperial time.’

  The fifth day began and it seemed that his proclamation had had no effect. Attacks on Imperial patrols increased. Sid’s own command centre (a former Morality Palace) was attacked by a thousand audacious locals, flying with balance-packs and armed with heat lances. Sid’s own personal guard suffered twenty-per cent casualties and Sid himself was wounded in the foot. Angry and in pain, Sid ordered air-strikes on a lengthy list of settlements and population centres.

  With only a few Imperial hours remaining before Sid would have to present himself, as similitude, before Luop and admit failure, victory was finally achieved. Seventy Fanatic commanding officers surrendered, on condition that the executions of civilians be stopped. Sid called halt to the attacks, and contented himself with executing these seventy. He felt a rush of adrenalised relief as he contacted Luop’s command base, the Battleship School of Velocity 32. He presented himself in similitude and reported that the system had been taken. Luop smiled, beamed, grinned, and ordered him to attend personally. ‘I’m very pleased with your achievement, colonel,’ he said. ‘Come and take tea.’

  ~ * ~

  Ten

  Sid rode a military transport to School of Velocity 32. This took three hours. He spent that time going over and over in his head the statistics of his conquest. On Ec-Navemona civilian casualties had been thirty per cent; fifteen million people out of the fifty million that lived on that world. On Ab-Navemona and Gy-Navemona the casualty rate had been over fifty per cent. Whilst caught up in the business of capturing and pacifying the system, the constant flow of deaths had not troubled Sid, used as he was to far greater casualty rates (both for his own troops and for the enemy) in Xflora warfare. But, alone for the first time in five days, Sid found himself dwelling on the casualties. Had it been essential for so many people to die? Did the enormousness of the figures show Sid up as a poor commander? A better, a more experienced senior commander would surely have taken the System with much less death. The thought bit at his conscience, worrying him continually. He had preferred life as a common soldier, as a junior captain; at least then the fighting had been straight and honest. Mess it up and die, get it right and live. Now that he was so senior the possibilities for failure hemmed him close about, and he hated it. As the shuttle docked Sid became convinced that Luop had summoned him to reprimand him for his sloppiness.

  But the opposite was the case.

  ‘You are to be commended,’ said a smiling Luop. He was fatter now than he had been before, and he had had his hair replaced with plasmetal strands of gold-silver twine. It gave him a raffish, party-loving air that clashed with the fact of his military uniform, even though his uniform was now gaudier and shinier than any other Sid had ever seen.

  ‘Commended?’ said Sid. He was standing to attention before Luop, who was sitting in a gold-coloured gel-chair surrounded by his personal guard. They were in the main state-room of the School of Velocity 32. Luop was drinking Finnerack tea from a crystal beaker, but Sid was not offered refreshment.

  ‘Certainly,’ said Luop. He smiled broadly, but Sid thought he could, for the first time, detect a falseness in the smile, a sense of strain to the good humour. ‘Few of my other generals and colonels were able to keep casualty figures so low.’

  ‘Low? I had thought them very high.’

  ‘Oh, not at all. The attack on Pur Vert killed almost the entire population. On Id, Mountain-of-Light, Egral and Stella Primum between ninety and ninety-five per cent of the natives were killed.’

  Sid could hardly believe such figures. Luop went on: ‘On some of the worlds the populations surrendered without a fight - we are their army, after all, the Imperial Army. But on more than half resistance was much, much fiercer than I had anticipated. It was fierce on your system?’

  ‘Very, sir.’

  Luop waved his hand vaguely in the air. ‘Still, you reduced them, that’
s the point. You prevailed. How did you keep the casualty figures so low, I wonder?’

  ‘I continually think,’ said Sid, carefully, ‘of what you once said to me, sir.’

  Luop uttered an upward-inflected mew, a questioning noise.

  ‘You told me,’ said Sid, feeling nervous, ‘that the army would grow in strength from recruiting amongst the defeated peoples, sir. You told me that by this process of mixing and intermingling, the army would leaven the monotony of its constituents with diversity from outside. It is a noble aim.’

  ‘Did I say that?’ Luop said, languidly. ‘Really?’

  ‘Is that no longer the plan, sir?’ Sid asked.

  But Luop didn’t seem to be paying attention. ‘Later today,’ he said, apparently addressing Sid although he was looking in a different direction. ‘The subalterns will look after you until then.’

  ~ * ~

  Eleven

  Luop’s later today referred to a meeting of select senior staff, to which (the subaltern declared) Sidlan was also invited. The subaltern’s tone of voice made it clear that this was a very profound honour indeed.

  The subaltern’s uniform was purple with pale blue trimmings, and white starburst insignia over breast, groin and knees. Sid had never seen such a uniform before.