Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds

by Alastair Reynolds

  That’s when the fight or flight response kicks in. It’s a hard nitrous surge, as if fear itself is being pumped into my blood. I’m not going to just stay here and hope that luck’s on my side. We need to be moving, and moving now.

  Yes, there’s risk in that as well—especially at night. That’s why my extraction is still on hold. But set against my chances of surviving the arrival of those enemy units, running suddenly looks a lot more attractive.

  I pull my point of view back into the trauma pod.

  “Tell the field medical unit to scoop me up. We’re shipping out.”

  “I can’t issue that order, Mike.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  “We’re running simulations now, and they’re telling us that you have a statistically improved chance of survival if you remain right where you are.”

  “By what margin?”

  “Enough of a one that I’d really urge you to consider this course of action very thoroughly.”

  If the odds were that persuasive, she’d tell me up front. My head’s still clamped tight. But if I could shake it I would. “Bring the medical unit in.”

  “Mike, please.”

  “Just do it. There’s no point putting a human being in the combat zone if you won’t trust their judgement.”

  She relents. I don’t need to see KX-457 approaching; I hear the boulders being dislodged around me and then feel the trauma pod lurch and tilt as the robot hauls it from the ground. I’m rotated through ninety degrees, until my head is higher than my feet—or rather, I remind myself, foot. Then I feel the reassuring clunk as the trauma pod is docked with the oval recess in the medical unit’s torso. Systems interface: power, control, sensory. I’m no longer a wounded man in a humming coffin. I’m a baby in the belly of a killer robot, and that has to be an improvement.

  “What are your orders?” the robot asks me.

  Recalling the disposition of enemy forces, I start to tell KX-457 to get me as far west as it can. Then I think of something better than being taken along for the ride. I don’t need to be able to move my own body to control the robot. What remains of my own mesh-suit layer should be more than capable of detecting intentions, the merest twitch of a neuromuscular impulse, and giving me appropriate feedback.

  “Let me drive you.”

  “Mike,” Annabel interrupts. “You don’t need this extra task load. Let the robot extract you, if that’s what you insist on doing. But there’s no need for you to drive it. In your present condition, your reflexes are going to be no match for the robot’s own battle routines.”

  But if I’m going to die out here, I’d sooner be doing something than just being carried along for the ride.

  “I know what I’m doing, Annabel. KX-457, assign me full command authority. Maintain the link until I say otherwise.”

  My point of view shifts again. The field medical unit has no head, but there’s a suite of cameras and sensors built into its shoulder yoke, and that’s where I seem to be looking down from.

  I look down at myself. I feel exactly as tall as the KX-457—there’s no sense that I’m contained in a much smaller body, down in the belly pod. And those titanium legs and arms move to my will, just as if they were part of me. I feel whole again, and strong. That phantom image is still there, but it’s much less troubling than when I was jammed into the trauma pod.

  I’m still in the pod, of course. Need to remind myself of that, because it would be easy to lose track of things.

  WE MOVE, THE KX-457 and I. I should say the KX-457, Annabel, and I, because when those hands reach through to adjust my leg dressing, or the catheter in my arm, or the post-operative clamp on my head, it’s hard not to feel that she’s along for the ride, my wellbeing never less than uppermost in her thoughts. And while it’s clear that she doesn’t entirely approve of my decision to ship out, I’m still glad to have someone to talk to.

  “How long have you been in Tango Oscar, Annabel?” I ask, as I work my past way the shallow, smoke-blackened remains of what was once a glorious air-conditioned shopping mall.

  She considers my question carefully. “It’s been eighteen months now, Mike. They cycled me in from Echo Victor, and before that it was Charlie Zulu.”

  “Charlie Zulu.” I say it with a kind of reverence. “I hear it was pretty intense there.”

  She nods. Her face is projected into a small window in my view, fighting for attention with an ever-changing dance of tactical analysis overlays, flagging every potential threat or hiding place. “We had our work cut out.” She gives a small dry laugh, but it’s clear that the memory’s still raw. “That was before the new pods came on-line. The old units didn’t have anything like as much autonomy as the ones we’re used to now. It was hands-on telesurgery, day and night. We were dying on our feet from exhaustion and stress, and we weren’t even out there, in theatre. We saved as many as we could, but when I think about those we couldn’t help…” She falls silent.

  “I’m sure you did everything you could.”

  “I hope we did. But there are limits. Even now, we can’t always work miracles.”

  “Whatever happens to me, you’ve done all that anyone could expect, Annabel. Thanks for sticking with me, all those hours. You must be worn out.”

  “Whatever it takes, Mike. I’m not going away.”

  “I hope we get to meet up,” I risk telling her, even though it feels like I’m jinxing my chances of ever getting out alive. “Just so I can thank you in person.”

  Annabel’s smile is radiant. “I’m sure we will.”

  In that moment I don’t doubt that I’ll make it.

  That’s when oversight picks up a squadron of enemy scout drones, coming in low just under the cloud deck. My own sensors haven’t seen them at all.

  I scan my field of view for concealment options, and decide to duck into the corrugated shoebox that used to contain an indoor amusement park. I pick my way through rubble and the blackened, snaking wreckage of a roller coaster, until I’m sure the drones won’t pick out my infrared or EM signature. There are fallen machines under my titanium feet, and bodies. I crunch through the shattered carcasses of plastic horses and ride-on centipedes.

  “We’ll need to lie low for a couple of hours, until those drones are out of the area.” I squat, shutting down essential systems. Just a bleed of power to the trauma pod, and another to the KX-457’s central processor core.

  “How will you know it’s safe?”

  The building’s shell is blocking ambient comms, interfering with oversight. “I won’t. But if they’re on the usual sweep pattern, we’ll be fine once they’ve passed over.”

  “Then there’s no reason for me not to take a look at that body image issue, is there?”

  “It’s not bothering me as much as it did.”

  “Let me fix it anyway. If you don’t nip these things in the bud, they can become a big problem during recovery.”

  I offer a mental shrug. “If you think it’s for the best.”

  “I do,” Annabel says. “I do.”

  I GIVE IT two hours, then three to be on the safe side. I creep my way out of the amusement park, until I’m almost back under the open air. I’m expecting full oversight to be restored as soon as I regain normal comms, but that’s not what happens. Coverage is still patchy. I pick up intelligence from nearby eyes and ears, but nothing further out than a few kilometers. The fault may be in my own systems, but it’s much more likely that there’s been an attack against a critical node in our distributed grid. Those drones may not have been looking for me at all, but for a vulnerability in our comms network.

  It’s still dark, and the drones could still be out there. But I have to trust that they’ve left the area, and that the phalanx of heavy Mechs has continued on its original vector. It might take days to repair oversight, assuming the fault isn’t in me. I can’t wait that long. I’d rather die moving, than waste away hiding from an enemy I can’t see.

  “We’ll give it until dawn,” I t
ell Annabel. “It should be okay to cross open ground then, even with limited oversight.”

  “How do you feel now?”

  “Different.”

  That’s an understatement. But it’s true. My phantom twin has vanished. I don’t feel another body tagging along next to mine. And I guess I should be glad of that, because it means Annabel’s neural cross-wiring has had some effect. But I don’t feel the slightest flicker of elation.

  Something else is different.

  It’s not a question of being distressed by my phantom twin any more. He’s gone, and with good riddance. But now it’s my own body that’s changed. I can sense it, hanging beneath my point of view like some withered, useless vestigial appendage, but it doesn’t feel like any part of me. I don’t inhabit it, and I have no wish to. All I want to do is flinch away from it. I was indifferent before, but now it repulses me.

  I retain enough intellectual detachment to understand that this response is neurological. On some level, something has gone catastrophically wrong with my body image. It’s as if my sense of self, what really matters to me, has extracted itself from my injured human body and taken up residence in the armoured perfection of the field medical unit.

  Clearly this is fucked-up.

  But even knowing this, I don’t want to go back to the way things used to be. Definitely not: I’m stronger now, and bigger. I stride this ruined world like a colossus. And as much as that revolting thing disgusts me, it’s a small price to pay. I have a certain dependency on it, after all. That’s a no-brainer.

  But there’s one other detail I need to address.

  Comms is shot to shit. Oversight is a patchwork of blind spots. So how in hell is Doctor Annabel Lyze able to reach over from Tango Oscar and teleoperate her magic green hands?

  More than that: how is Doctor Annabel Lyze able to talk me at all? How am I able to see her always smiling, never-tiring face?

  “Don’t do that, Mike.”

  “Don’t do what?”

  “Don’t do what you’re about to do. Don’t check the comms registry. It won’t do you any good at all.”

  I hadn’t thought of checking the comms registry. But you know, now that she’s put the idea in my head, that’s an excellent fucking idea.

  I call up the history. I scroll through the log, going back minutes, tens of minutes, hours.

  15.56.31.07—zero validated packets

  15.56.14.11—zero validated packets

  15.55.09.33—zero validated packets

  …

  11.12.22.54—zero validated packets

  And I learn that KX-457 has been out of contact with Tango Oscar—or any command sector, for that matter—for more than nineteen hours. In all that time, it’s been acting entirely autonomously, relying on its own in-built intelligence.

  So has the trauma pod. From the moment it was deployed—before I was hauled in and treated—the pod was also operating independently of human control. There was no kindly surgeon on the other side of that screen. There was just…software. Software clever and agile enough to mimic a reassuring presence.

  Doctor Annabel Lyze.

  Doctor Annabel lies.

  The question is: was that software running in the pod, or in my own head?

  IT’S DAY WHEN they find me. Not the enemy, but my own side. Although by that point I suppose the distinction is moot.

  I find voice amplification mode. My words boom out, distorted and godlike. “Don’t come any closer.”

  There are two of them, both wearing full battle armour, backed up by a couple of infantry Mechs. The Mechs have shoulder and arm-mounted plasma cannon batteries locked onto me.

  “Mike, listen to me. You’ve been injured. You went in the trauma pod and…something got screwed up.”

  Some part of me recognises the voice—Rorvik? Lomax? But it’s a small part and easily ignored.

  “Get back.”

  The figure who spoke dares to stand a little taller, even as their companion maintains a nervous, bent-at-the-knees crouch. I admire the speaker’s boldness, even as I don’t pretend to fully understand it. Then the figure reaches up and does something even riskier, which is to undo their face mask, allowing it to flop aside on its hinge. Framed by the air-tight seal of a helmet I see a woman’s face, and again there’s a flicker of recognition, which I instantly crush.

  “Mike, you need to trust us. There’s only one way you’re going to get help, and that’s to relinquish control of the field medical unit. You have brain damage, very severe brain damage, and we need to get it fixed before it gets worse.”

  “I am not Mike,” I tell her. “I am field medical unit KX-457.”

  “No, Mike. KX-457 is the machine treating you. You’re experiencing some kind of body image crisis, but that’s all it is. A neurological fault, caused by the damage to your frontal cortex. You’re inside the robot, but you are not the robot itself. This is very, very important. Can you understand what I’m saying, Mike?”

  “I understand what you are saying,” I tell her. “But you’re wrong. Mike died. I couldn’t save him.”

  She takes a breath. “Mike, listen to me carefully. We need you back. You are a high-value asset, and we can’t afford to lose you, not with the way things have been going. Where you are now, in the machine…you’re not safe. We need you to give up control of the field medical unit and allow us to decouple the trauma pod. Then we can take you back to Tango Oscar and get you fixed up.”

  “There’s nothing that needs fixing.”

  “Mike…” she starts to say something, then seems to abandon her train of intent. Maybe she thinks I’m too far gone for that kind of persuasion. Instead she turns to her comrade, fixes her mask back on, and nods in response to some exchange I can’t intercept.

  The plasma batteries open fire. I’m strong, and well armoured, but I’m no match for two infantry units. They don’t mean to take me out, though. The shots skim past me, wasting most of their energy against the sagging, geologically-layered shell of a collapsed parking structure. Only a fraction of the discharges cause me any harm. I register peripheral armour ablation, loss of forearm weapons functionality, some sensor blackouts. It’s enough to remove my capacity for retaliation, but they haven’t touched my processor core.

  Of course they haven’t. It’s not that they care about me. But foolishly or otherwise, they’re still thinking of the soldier I was meant to save. They want to disable me, but not to do anything that might endanger the still-breathing corpse I carry inside. And now that I’ve been de-clawed, now that I’ve been half-blinded, they imagine they can take me apart like some complex puzzle or bomb, without harming my human cargo.

  Needless to say, I’m not having any of that.

  “Stop,” I say.

  They stop. The plasma batteries glow a vile pink. My two human watchers crouch in wary anticipation. The woman says: “Give us Mike, and we’ll leave you be. That’s a promise.”

  What they mean is, give us Mike, and we’ll happily blast you to slag.

  “You can have Mike back,” I say. “All of him.”

  There’s that wordless exchange again. “Good…” the woman says, as if she can’t quite believe her luck. “That’s good.”

  “Here’s the first installment.”

  I’ve been a busy little beaver, while we’ve been having our little chat. Even holding up my side of the conversation, even being attacked, hasn’t stopped me from working.

  And what work! Exquisite surgery, even if do say so myself. There’s really very little that a trauma pod can’t do, with all the gleaming sharp instruments at its disposal. The beauty is that I don’t even have to know anything about medicine. I just tell the pod what must be accomplished, and the autonomous systems take care of the rest. I no more need to know about surgery than a human needs to know about digestion.

  So, for instance, if I were to say: remove as much of Mike as is compatible with the continued integrity of his central nervous system, then the trauma pod will enact
my order. And when the work has been done, the surplus material will be ejected through the waste disposal vent in the pod’s lower end fairing. Not incinerated, not mashed, but spat out whole, so that there can be no question of its biological origin.

  That’s important, because my witnesses have to understand that I mean what I say. They must grasp that this is no hollow threat. Mike means nothing to me, but he means a lot to them, and by a perverse twist that makes him valuable to me as well.

  While Mike’s inside me, they’ll let me live.

  I back off, and allow them to inspect my offering. There’s a moment when they don’t know quite what to make of it, a hiatus before the horror kicks in. Then they get the picture. That’s a lot of Mike on the ground. But you don’t need to be a brain surgeon to work out that there’s a lot more of Mike still in me.

  “This is what’s going to happen,” I tell them. “You’re going to let me leave. I have no weapons, as you know. You can destroy me, that’s true. But do you think you can do that and get inside me before the trauma pod has ceased operation?”

  “Don’t do this,” the woman says, amplified voice ripping through her mask. “We can negotiate. We can work something out.”

  “That’s what we’re already doing.” Choosing my moment, I turn around to present my back to them. With my sensors damaged, I genuinely don’t know what they’re doing. Maybe they think I’ve already taken Mike apart. Perhaps those plasma cannon batteries are charging up again. If they are, I doubt that I’ll feel a thing when the moment comes.

  I start walking. And from somewhere comes the glimmer of a plan. I’m safe while they think Mike’s inside me. Frankly, though, I’d rather kill myself than walk around with that thing still attached.