Total Conflict

by Neal Asher

  18 tales of strife and mayhem

  edited by

  IAN WHATES

  NewCon Press

  England

  Total Conflict

  First edition, published worldwide January 2015

  by NewCon Press

  Comprising stories from Conflicts (2010) and Further Conflicts (2011)

  Compilation and introduction copyright © 2015 by Ian Whates

  “The Wake” copyright © 2011 by Dan Abnett

  “Psi.Copath copyright © 2010 by Andy Remic

  “Unaccounted” copyright © 2011 by Lauren Beukes

  “The New Ships” copyright © 2011 by Gareth L. Powell

  “The Harvest” copyright © 2011 by Kim Lakin-Smith

  “The War Artist” copyright © 2011 by Tony Ballantyne

  “Proper Little Soldier” copyright © 2010 by Martin McGrath

  “The Maker’s Mark” copyright © 2010 by Michael Cobley

  “Brwydr Am Ryddid” copyright © 2011 by Stephen Palmer

  “Occupation” copyright © 2011 by Colin Harvey

  “Sussed” copyright © 2010 by Keith Brooke

  “The Soul of the Machine” copyright © 2011 by Eric Brown

  “Extraordinary Rendition” copyright © 2011 by Steve Longworth

  “The Legend of Sharrock” copyright © 2011 by Philip Palmer

  “The Cuisinart Effect” copyright © 2010 by Neal Asher

  “The Ice Submarine” copyright © 2011 by Adam Roberts

  “War Without End” copyright © 2010 by Una McCormack

  “Welcome Home, Janissary” copyright © 2011 by Tim C. Taylor

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Tim C. Taylor and Ian Whates

  Cover images: space marine © DM7 / Shutterstock, targeting HUD display © CLUSTERX / Shutterstock

  Invaluable editorial assistance from Ian Watson

  eBook design by Tim C. Taylor

  Text layout by Storm Constantine

  Contents

  Total Conflict: An Introduction - Ian Whates

  The Wake – Dan Abnett

  PSI.COPATH – Andy Remic

  Unaccounted – Lauren Beukes

  The New Ships – Gareth L Powell

  The Harvest – Kim Lakin-Smith

  Proper Little Soldier – Martin McGrath

  The War Artist – Tony Ballantyne

  The Maker’s Mark – Michael Cobley

  Brwydr Am Ryddid – Stephen Palmer

  Occupation – Colin Harvey

  Sussed – Keith Brooke

  The Soul of the Machine – Eric Brown

  Extraordinary Rendition – Steve Longworth

  The Legend of Sharrock – Philip Palmer

  The Cuisinart Effect – Neal Asher

  The Ice Submarine – Adam Roberts

  War Without End – Una McCormack

  Welcome Home, Janissary – Tim C Taylor

  Total Conflict: An Introduction

  Ian Whates

  Conflicts (2010) broke new ground for NewCon Press, in that it contained purely Science Fiction stories. Previous anthologies had deliberately crossed genre boundaries, with SF featuring alongside fantasy, dark fantasy, horror and slipstream, but not this one.

  It proved to be one of the most successful titles NewCon Press has ever published, with the signed limited edition hardback selling out on the weekend of its launch. How could I not want to do that again? So, a year later I published Further Conflicts, an anthology styled along similar lines.

  Essentially the books came about because I wanted to produce books that were brazenly, almost defiantly Science Fiction, not subtly, whimsically, or deceptively so; the sort of book where you can smell the sweat and the engine oil, as muscle-bound marines heft huge death-dealing guns in the face of impossible odds, where space ships cruise between the stars.

  The big guns are here – and how! – with Neal Asher’s protagonists fighting through a city infested with prehistoric monsters, Andy Remic’s Combat-K embarking on a rescue mission which proves to be far more than it seems, Tim C. Taylor’s human slave-soldiers finding loyalties torn, and Dan Abnett’s battle-weary troopers learning that saying goodbye to one of their own isn’t as simple as it should be… Yet there is subtlety too. No NewCon Press collection has ever been one-dimensional, and I wasn’t about to start now. So we have Una McCormack’s tale of a wronged man seeking answers, returning to the scene of a bitter war to discover that historical record and even memory can often hide deeper, darker truths, Martin McGrath’s harrowing account of humans turned fugitive on our own world by alien aggressors, and Lauren Beukes’ dark tale of events in an alien prison.

  And did I mention space ships? Oh yes, there are space ships. In Michael Cobley’s manic planet-hopping yarn of deceit, pursuit and ingenuity, in Keith Brooke’s clever story of love, lust criminality and choices, and Eric Brown’s shoot-out in deep space; spaceships aplenty.

  It always fascinates me to see how different authors interpret the same theme, and the variety of stories received for these two books didn’t disappoint, providing rich and varied interpretations of ‘conflict’. Stephen Palmer gives us a tense and unsettling siege in a Welsh pub, Kim Lakin-Smith delivers a dark and violent tale of a school under attack, and Tony Ballantyne provides the harrowing story of a war artist who begins to think there is more to the conflict he’s caught up in than he realised.

  Gareth L. Powell, on the other hand, chooses to tell us of a reluctant but vital recruit, Philip Palmer of a warrior returning home from war to find that much has changed in his absence, the late Colin Harvey of an Earth under the yoke of alien occupation, Steve Longworth of an interrogator determined to break his enemy, and Adam Roberts takes us to the depths of the ocean rather than the depths of space.

  Conflict, in many shapes and assorted flavours; but yes, there are spaceships, yes, there are guns… What’s not to love? It was a pleasure to edit these stories; I hope you enjoy reading them.

  Ian Whates

  Cambridgeshire,

  January 2015

  The Wake

  Dan Abnett

  We were going to miss Mendozer.

  He’d been with us, what, four tours? Five, Klubs reckons. Five. Well anyway, we were going to miss him. Mendozer was like a tin target. You know the kind? You knock them down, but the motor pops them up again, time after time.

  Mendozer had a tin target quality about him. You get blokes like that. I don’t mean immortal, indestructible fireproof angels of death like Boring, ’cause blokes like Boring, they’re a whole other deal entirely. No, Mendozer’s type, they’re just reliable, like they’re always going to be around, and if something knocks them down they’ll soon be right back up again, thank you, banging away, making a joke.

  Like a tin target on the practice deck. Bang! Down he goes. Then up he pops again.

  When Mendozer got knocked down and didn’t pop back up, we grabbed him and got him to the extract. Moke and me, we hoiked him under the armpits and ran with him, dragging his legs. Moke was yelling medic, but I was pretty confident that Mendozer was dogfood already. None of us actually saw what got him, due to the fact that it had all gone a bit cack-yourself-and-keep-shooting nutty at the time, but it looked like he’d run onto a pitchfork. There was wet everywhere. The stuff was all over us, soaking our sleeves and hips.

  The Surge did his best. Credit for that. Tried everything. Split Mendozer’s body jacket off, cracked the sternum, tried to patch the internal punctures, tried to get the slack heart to restart. We ended up soaking wet up to our armpits, kneeling either side of Mendozer in a blood slick the size of a fish pond, with
dozens of spent injector vials and wadding tear-off strips floating around in it.

  End of. Somebody find him a box.

  The Surge put him in the fridge. We stayed on site four more days, expending our remaining munitions at anything that came inside the floodlit perimeter. It was not the light-hearted fun and frolics we’d been hoping for.

  There was a technical problem with our extract, so we had to layover at Relay Station Delta for a week. All of us knew Relay Delta, because we stopped there every time on the way in to Scary Land, and none of us cared for it. Dark, pokey, rank, no light except artificial, no food except recyc. It was about as roomy and inviting as Mendozer’s casket.

  The trick was to recognise the up-side. A week’s layover meant a week added to resupply turnaround, and a week extra before we’d get deployed back to Scary Land. That was fine by us, even if it meant seven days of breathing farts in the dark at Relay Delta.

  We were all pretty sick of Scary Land, to tell you the truth. We were all pretty sick of banging away at the Scaries. We’d lost sixteen on seven tours, including Mendozer, and that was light compared to some platoons. The Middlemen, best of the best and all that, but banging away at the Scaries was beginning to feel like banging our heads against the proverbial. We’ve tangled with all sorts over the years, no word of a lie, but there was something relentless about the Scaries. Something cack yourself. Something shadow-under-the-bed spooky. I swear even Boring was beginning to get creeped out by them.

  “Bosko,” he says to me, “Scary Land is starting to make me miss Suck Central.”

  Which was saying something, specially coming from Juke Boring, shit-kicking fireproof god of war. Suck Central, as the name suggests, had not been a family bucket of fun and frolics either.

  Anyway, there’s us, Relay Delta, a bit of downtime. So we’re all in the Rec, just dossing around, and in comes Boring carrying a large carton pack, and behind him comes the Surge trundling a shiny plastic casket on a gurney from the ward. It rattles its castors as it comes in over the door trim. It takes us all of no seconds flat to realise this is Mendozer’s bloody box. Everyone gets up. Everyone says a few choice words, the same choice word in most instances.

  Boring, he points with his chin and directs Surge to park Mendozer in the middle of the Rec. The Surge does so, and heels the brake-lock on the gurney’s wheelbase. Boring walks over to a side table, indicates by a narrowing of his eyes that Klubs should instantly remove the hand of clock patience spread out on it, and then dumps the carton. It clinks. Glass.

  “We’re holding a wake,” he announces.

  He opens the carton. It had been a stores pack for cans of rice pudding in a previous life. His big hands scoop out sets of chunky shot glasses, a digit in each, five at a time. Cripes only knows where he managed to scare up real glass glasses.

  Then came the best bit. Twenty four bottles of the good stuff. Litre bottles, actual glass. Boring twists the top off the first one, and I can’t remember how long it’s been since I heard the fresh metal collar of a screw cap strip open like that.

  He starts filling the glasses. Generous measures. It takes more than one bottle. We’re all wary. Juke Boring has a history of playing cruel tricks in the name of character building experience. The stuff he was pouring might just have been cold tea. We’re all braced for a metaphorical smack round the ear and a lecture on taking things at face value.

  But this isn’t a trick. You can’t fake the smell of fifteen year old malt.

  “Where’d you get this stuff?” asks Neats, the platoon sergeant.

  “Station commander owed me a million favours,” Boring says. “Now he owes me a million minus one.”

  He picks up a glass. He doesn’t hand the others out, but there’s a wordless instruction for us all to go help ourselves. We take a glass each, and form a loose circle around the gurney. Twenty-eight men: twenty-four, plus Boring, Neats, the Surge, and Mendozer in his box.

  Boring raises his glass.

  “Here’s to Mendozer,” he says. “Middleman from start to finish. Skull it.”

  “Skull!” we all say, and chug back our glasses. We clonk the empties down on the lid of Mendozer’s box, and Boring nods to Neats to refill them.

  As Neats gets busy, Moke asks the question we’re all thinking.

  “We don’t usually do this,” he says. “Why are we doing this?”

  “Because we should,” says Boring. “Shows respect. Isn’t usually enough time, or there’s no place to do it. Thought it was a custom we should get into.”

  The glasses are full again. We hoist them.

  “Middlemen, best of the best,” says Neats.

  “Skull!” we say. Refill.

  I was told the platoon’s nickname is the Middlemen because we get right in the middle of things. Klubs says it’s because we’re always stuck in the middle of bloody nowhere. In this particular instance, with a dead bloke in a box in a pressurised bunker that smells like bad wind.

  The concept of the wake is unfamiliar to some of our number, so Fewry explains.

  “It’s a mourning custom,” he says. “A watch kept over the departed.”

  “Why?” someone asks.

  “In case they’re not dead,” says Klubs. “In case they wake up.”

  “That’s not right,” says the Surge, who’s the most educated of the Middlemen fraternity.

  “It isn’t?” asks Klubs. “I thought that’s why it was called that.”

  The Surge shakes his head.

  “That’s just a myth,” he says. “One of those old wives’ tales.”

  “But I heard,” says Klubs, never one to let a thing go, “that they used to dig up old coffins and find fingernail scratches on the insides. ’Cause people didn’t have proper medic stuff back then, and sometimes they thought some poor sod was dead when they wasn’t, and they’d bury them and then they’d wake up looking at the lid. So they’d hold one of these things to keep an eye on the body for a while and make sure it wasn’t going to wake up before they bunged it in the ground.”

  “I understand,” says the Surge. He has a patient tone sometimes. “I understand what you mean. It’s just the word comes from a different root.”

  “Oh,” says Klubs.

  We neck a few more (“Death to all Scaries!”, “Mother Earth!”, “2nd Infantry, defenders of the World!”), and in between we remember a few stories about Mendozer. You could count on him. He was an okay shot with the Steiner, but really gifted with the grenade gun. He didn’t snore much. He had a couple of decent jokes. There was that one really funny time with the girl from stores and the ping-pong bat.

  The mood relaxes a bit. Each of us takes a moment to individually tilt a glass to the box sitting there on the chrome gurney, and say a last few words of a personal nature. A few of us sit back. The cards come out. Moke and some others dig out the sticks and the ash tray puck, and start playing corridor hockey on the pitch marked out on the tiled hallway leading through to medical. There’s a lot of shouting and body-slamming into doors. Boring watches them, almost amused. The pitch outlines are wearing away. It’s been there as long as any of us can remember. No one knows who painted them.

  The Surge pulls out a second deck, and starts to do some of his famous card tricks. Nimble fingers. Fewry goes off to get some bacon strips, crackers and pickles from stores.

  Every now and them, someone hoists up his glass and calls out a toast, and everyone stops what they’re doing, even the hockey players, and answers.

  Usually, it’s a simple “Mendozer!” and we all answer “skull!”

  If I’m honest, I’m not sure how long we were kicking back before someone noticed. Couple of hours, minimum. I know that Neats told me to go get another bottle out of the carton for top-ups, and I saw we’d skulled half of them already. The party had broken down a bit, and spread out through the rooms around the Rec.

  Moke suddenly says, “What’s he doing there? That’s not respectful.”

  No one pays Moke that m
uch attention, but I look up. Mendozer’s box is no longer in the centre of the Rec. It’s been wheeled aside, and it’s standing under the big blast ports, three or four metres away from where the Surge parked it.

  No mystery. I mean, it’s obvious as soon as you look at it. The gurney’s spring loaded brake-lock has pinged off and it’s rolled. Maybe someone brushed against it.

  Except they haven’t, and it hasn’t. The brake-lock hasn’t disengaged to such an extent, in fact, Moke is actually having trouble unfastening it so he can roll the gurney back into the middle of the room where it’s supposed to be.

  I go over. Bend down. Help him. The Surge heeled that brake good. The pin needs oil. It takes a moment of effort and a few choice words to unfix it.

  Moke and me, we go to roll the box back into pride of place.

  “Wait,” I says. He can feel it too. He looks at me. It’s a bad look. I immediately wish I’d sat out the last couple of toasts, because the drink has got me paranoid. Maybe I’m being clumsy. Maybe I’m a little happy-handed and everything seems skewy.

  The box feels too light. The gurney’s rolling far too freely. There’s no weight in it.

  “ ’sup?” says Boring. He’s right there at my shoulder all of a sudden. Around us, people are still playing cards and telling jokes. Out in the hall, the corridor hockey tournament is reaching its climax.

  I look at him, say nothing. It’s in the eyes. Boring puts one hand flat on the top of Mendozer’s box and just moves it from side to side. He can feel it too. You can see it. The whole trolley fish-tails slightly under the stir of his palm. Nothing like enough weight. It’d have to be empty to behave like that.

  Boring looks at me, quick, then back at the casket. Someone’s left an empty glass standing on top, and it’s left a ring of condensation on the shiny plastic. Boring picks up the glass and hands it to Moke. Moke has got eyes big as saucers by now.

  Boring runs a finger along the edge of the lid. There are catches, but they’re floppy plastic, nothing secure. He flicks them.