Total Conflict

by Neal Asher

  “Hey, C,” she said, and I just stood staring.

  You expect me to have some kind of self-restraint when she looks at me like that? You expect me to make the rational decision that, actually, my boss and the man who runs half of this planet is not a person to cross? Really?

  Four days before, I cracked the departure feed and slipped a trojan into the roster for some faraway planet nobody’s heard of. I set it with a timed release: I didn’t want my credentials appearing on that roster until the last possible minute. So even as I stood in line on the day of departure, my name was only just being slipped into the list. Even as I stood in line in the departures hall, I’d set an agent to mimic my own behaviour patterns so that it would appear to any online snoops that I was working on a reconn project from my apartment. I am good at this kind of thing, which is why Geno hired me, and which is why finally I ended up using his own account to buy myself off-planet for a fresh start, on my own, no baggage, nothing.

  I would learn to grow cabbages or rear sheep or whatever the fuck they farmed in my new home. I would sweep streets or learn a trade. I was out of here.

  Like being turned inside out… The lining of my throat is being ripped out… And then, with a soft popping sound, the suspod’s tendrils pull out of my nose and I’m breathing air again.

  I move, for the first time in I don’t know how long, and feel the meaty interior of the pod yielding. I feel at peace. It all seems so far away now.

  The dim light penetrating the suspod gives my gaze a pink glow, like staring at candy-fog, no features visible, just the soft light.

  The pod’s lid lifts with a soft sigh. I feel a sudden draught tickling across my skin, and I hear the deep rumble of the voidship. The lid swings open and I sit, pulling free of my fleshy embrace with a series of squelching sounds. I climb out, and stand by the pod. Around me, others are climbing out, looking disoriented. The mucoid coating on my skin dries quickly to nothing in the air.

  I have never seen so many naked bodies in such a small place. There is something, I don’t know, institutional about it. The other striking thing is that everyone is young and well-muscled. I had not anticipated that the other émigrés would be so well-honed. For the first time I wonder what is really in store for me, just how much of a wild frontier I have chosen.

  They are pulling on grey jumpsuits. I look around, find one by my pod and step into it.

  “Moving out!” yells one of them from the far side of the hall, and I think, Fuck, but I’ve ended up in some kind of boot-camp.

  We walk… we march… out into a gangway, squeezed two abreast in the narrow space. I hang back and then tag on at the end, trying to fall into step with my fellows.

  It is soon clear that we are still on the voidship. I guess we’re heading for a shuttle down to the surface, although it would probably have been simpler just to transport us down while we were still suspodded.

  We file into another hall, one wall of which is a viewscreen showing a moon with networks of encampments scrawled across its surface.

  I feel a tingle in my wristchip. Something is trying to access it, triggering a sentinel routine to warn me. The others around me have paused in what they were doing, clearly absorbing some kind of datafeed, but mine is just a jab of the sentinel and nothing more. I’m clearly not set up to receive whatever is being sent.

  There is a hush now, and two men approach, both wearing military greys, one with some kind of hand-weapon drawn but not raised.

  They stop before me.

  The older man with more stripes on his shoulder stares at me for a long time before saying, “Just who the fuck are you?”

  My cell is long enough to lie down in, so narrow that you can touch both walls simply by raising one arm. The only domestic comfort is a slops bucket. I have been here for more than twelve hours.

  They must be running checks, trying to find out who I am and how I got here.

  I could tell them that.

  It’s Geno. Fucking Geno.

  I’m not the only shit-hot code monkey he has head-hunted over the years. One of them… one of them must have deciphered my trail, tracked me down to the émigré roster, and told Geno. And Geno must have had his monkey reallocate me: no longer on a one-way ticket to a cozy new colony-world. No. Instead they put me on a military ticket into the middle of the war zone. Right now, Geno is probably drinking a toast to me, picturing me waking up with a squad of sweaty grunts and wondering what in hell is happening. Right now, Geno is laughing.

  Lukacs, the commanding officer of the assault squad comes back in and stands across from me. One of his goons stands at the door.

  “So tell me,” he says, “just what is one of Gene Bateman’s lead information specialists doing on a class A military voidship preparing for an assault on a Republic staging post?”

  I smile. “Geno has a sense of humour,” I tell him. “I crossed him, I went on the run and thought I’d escaped, and he thinks it’s funny to divert my suspod so that it gets added to a military consignment.”

  “You’re here as a joke…?”

  I nod. “I hate to tell you this, but Geno must have it on good authority that this assault is going to fail, because I’m sure he doesn’t expect me to emerge alive at the end of it.”

  “Come on,” says Lukacs, “come for a walk with me. Stretch your legs.”

  We pause a few minutes later in an operations room, three military analysts talking into jaw-mikes, fingers dancing over virtual keypads, staring at a bank of screens showing the target: aerial views of one or more military bases set out like maps; street-level views from within domes, army vehicles on the streets, Republic soldiers all around; ground-level moonscapes of no apparent significance.

  “You know what I think?” says Lukacs.

  I shake my head.

  “I think you’re one hell of a surprise, and believe me, when I plan an operation on this scale for this length of time I don’t like surprises. I ask myself what Gene Bateman has to gain by planting someone like you out here.”

  “You think I’m a spy? You think he sent me here?”

  Lukacs shakes his head. “That was my first thought,” he says. “But then my second was, if Bateman wants someone out here then he wouldn’t do it in such a dumb-ass way as this. He’d just make sure one of his people was part of the op. He isn’t stupid.”

  “So you believe me?”

  “Well nobody’s come up with a better explanation. Sensible thing for me to do now is to have you locked up for the duration, keep you out of the way, just to make sure you’re no risk. But then… what you said about Bateman has been nagging at me: he must be pretty damned sure this operation is doomed if he sent you out here.”

  I stare at the screens. It seems odd to just be seeing Reps out on their streets like that. Just humans like any of us.

  “Like I say, you’re a surprise,” says Lukacs. “So maybe we can use that. Maybe you’re a wildcard. You’ve worked on military systems before, haven’t you?”

  I nod. He knows that. He’s had me checked out.

  “You want to sit down here and see what you can make of the Reps’ set-up? See if you can find any holes?”

  I never set out to be a fucking soldier. Military fatigues just aren’t my thing. The real soldiers can tell that I’m not one of their kind. They can see I don’t fit. They don’t know my story, but they clearly don’t trust me. None of them likes surprises.

  I sit at my screens, picking up feeds through my wristchip, planting agents and routines in captured Rep datastreams, trying to find my way in. Their codebases diverged from ours maybe a hundred years ago. A long time in dataspace. They use biological models a lot more than we do; they seem to base everything on wetware and neural processing. But it’s still data, and I recognise the architectures and patterns – information is self-organising, after all, common patterns always an emergent phenomenon. But how to make sense of it all!

  War, I learn, is ninety-nine percent tedium and one percent sheer t
error. Trouble is, you never know when that one percent terror is going to rear up, so you’re always on the edge.

  We’re something like 75,000 kilometres from the planetary surface, mostly out of reach of the Reps’ defences, but they know we’re here and every so often they find a way to lash out.

  The first time, I was walking to the mess after a ten-hour shift when all of a sudden the lights dimmed and a deep rumble shook through the ship like an earthquake. I crumbled to my knees, and could feel the vibrations still ringing from the deck and up through my bones like ringing crystal.

  “What the…?” I gasped.

  A young black soldier who looked about twelve crouched just ahead of me, hanging onto a handrail. She glanced back and said in conversational tones, “Reps buzzing us with a beam.”

  At that moment, the lights went altogether and the ship rattled with another assault. A couple of seconds later the lights came back up and I said, “But… I thought we were shielded?”

  She grinned. “Sure we’re shielded. If we weren’t shielded we wouldn’t be passing the time of day like this – we’d be fried!”

  We’ve had two more assaults like that since then, each time as terrifying as the first even though I know what’s happening. Understanding doesn’t cut down the fear that they might just find a weak spot and we’ll all be burned to hell and back.

  So I sit here, bored stiff, fighting code that doesn’t mean much to me, just waiting to be vaporised in a war I don’t even really understand.

  I never asked to be a soldier.

  Elsa. Do you still think about me, Elsa, or have you found somewhere else to get your kicks? I’m not even sure what it was we had, or what we might have had.

  I didn’t love you Elsa. I hadn’t got that far. But to say it was just fun, like I told Geno, is too dismissive.

  We had good times, didn’t we, Elsa? Good times that could have become more.

  All that… to me it’s only a few days ago that I was back home, having fun with Elsa and living the life. But I asked around here and found out that I spent nearly six months in that suspod, while this ship jumped the void.

  You’ve had six months to move on, six months to get over me.

  When I decided to get away from there I thought I’d get over you quickly, Elsa. I thought it was for the best.

  What did we have, Elsa? What might we have had?

  I’m lost in a data-dream when they strike, drifting in a near-Zen state in the flow, following shapes and patterns, finally starting to understand some of the noise.

  Alarms flash me back to the real world and I feel that ship-quake once again, only this time it lasts for longer and is accompanied by a deep metallic groan. I heard a sound like that down in Malberg when I was a teenager: the sound that glaciers make as they shift. It’s not the kind of sound you want to hear your voidship making.

  Another quake, another primal groan. Voices in the gangway outside our ops room. I look across at Bilby and he’s gone white as one of those icebergs and is crossing himself as if that’s going to make any fucking difference.

  The lights have dimmed again, and now arrows flash on the floor.

  “Come on, Bilby,” I say, pulling at his arm. “Just another drill.”

  We vacate the room, follow the arrows, and soon we’ve joined a steady flow of troopers heading towards the evac bays.

  I’m still with Bilby, still half-walking half-running. We pass through a bulkhead and there’s another strike and we’re thrown into the air, as if the whole ship has been swiped a few metres sideways from under our feet. I find myself on the ground, the wind knocked out of me. My leg is throbbing and when I look down I see that my coverall is ripped, my knee bleeding. Alarms are klaxoning all around now. I feel dizzy, think I’ve hit my head from the dull throb in it, and then I realise that the reason I’m struggling to breathe isn’t that I was winded but that the air seems to have thinned.

  I remember the drills, reach back to my shoulder, find a breather mask and slap it over my face. And breathe.

  Bilby’s there, a few metres back. I crawl over to him, fumble at his shoulder for his mask. I yank it free and make to slap it onto his face but then stop as finally I take in his bloated, purple features and staring eyes.

  I push up to my feet, ignoring the dull throbbing of my damaged knee. I struggle to get my bearings, then look down and see an arrow patiently flashing me This Way.

  Somehow I make it to the evac bay, my head dizzy and hot, the breath ragged in my lungs. I pause, and the ship groans again.

  I find a pod, strip off and stow my coveralls, then climb in.

  Warm flesh folds around me as the lid sighs shut. With my wristchip I signal the all clear and I feel a judder as the pod primes itself for launch.

  Acceleration. Release.

  I am in space, free of the ship. Fleshy tendrils probe, drive into my nose, my trachea, my lungs. Darkness takes me.

  I wake to whiteness. So white it’s hard to make out any features, any detail. Just white.

  I look down at myself and it’s as if suddenly my eyes have learnt to see again, to focus.

  I am naked.

  And I have healed. The bloody mess of my knee has gone, the skin flawless, smooth. More… the scar on my shin from a biking accident is gone. I feel healthy and strong. I feel renewed.

  I sleep.

  Whiteness, still.

  Finally, they come. Two of them. Tall. Human, I think. Or at least, at some point they or their ancestors were human.

  They sit before me, although I cannot make out the form of their seats from the white.

  They have golden hair, mid-brown skin, blue eyes. They wear cloaks of silver, tight bodysuits. They remain silent, although I have the distinct impression that they are communicating somehow.

  “We found you,” says the one of them to my left. “Adrift. We found your vehicle’s signal.”

  “We have reconstructed your language so that we may communicate,” says the other. “It is an ancient tongue.”

  I was lying but now I sit, and support materialises at my back. “Ancient?” I ask.

  “We study your time,” says the first. “We are honoured.”

  “We would wish to understand,” says the second.

  I think of you, Elsa. My first thought. How long have I drifted into your future? For how long have I been in suspension until these beings detected my escape pod’s signal?

  I realise that I am still naked, but these two do not seem bothered.

  “Clothes,” I said, covering myself. “Can I have some clothes?”

  “Of course,” says the first. “We still have much to learn about the norms of your period.”

  I sit in the love-chair, while one of them stands by the balcony door. They have shaped this space so that it resembles my apartment, based on what I have told them. They have paid a lot of attention to detail. They want to get it right.

  “This war,” says my examiner, as she turns back to face me. “What caused it?”

  I shrug. “The Reps. Or at least that’s what they always taught us. Started before I was born. Politics, ideologies, religion, territory… All most of us know or care is that there’s – or there was – a war.” I pause, look into her eyes. “Tell me… do you know who won? Who won the war?”

  “It was a long time ago,” she says. “The archives are not well preserved that far back. This is why you are so fascinating to us. You are a direct connection.”

  “You won, didn’t you?” The Reps. Their mastery of healing, their direct communication with each other, some of the things they said… The Reps had always been far more advanced in the biological sciences. My examiner… she was a Rep.

  “We live in the Republic,” she says evenly. “So does that mean we won? I do not know. Does it really matter?”

  I should feel like some kind of time-delayed prisoner of war. They keep me here, study me, try to understand me.

  But I don’t. Not really. I am alive. That is all that shou
ld matter. I try not to think too much of the future, or of the past.

  “So tell us,” says the examiner who was the first to visit me, “what was it that you did for Geno and his organisation? He was not a political figure and yet he wielded great power. He was a criminal and yet he worked with the government and the military in the effort against the Republic.”

  “He was all of these, yes,” I say. “He pretty much ran the place, and he used people like me to do that. If the planet needed protecting from the Reps then it was in his interests to make that happen.”

  “So what did you do? What was your role?”

  “I did all kinds of things. As far as defence goes, I worked with the sat network people to sharpen the Shield’s reflexes to protect against attack. The Reps broke through occasionally—” I think of the Slash here “—but not nearly as easily as they would have if we’d kept out of it.”

  “Tell me more…”

  Patterns in data are an emergent phenomenon of the data itself. You surf the feeds and you can see those shapes jumping out at you if you know where to look, how to look.

  My examiners started to let me out to walk with them through the corridors of the complex where I was being kept, and later, out into the gardens. At first I marvelled at the act of walking under another sun, at plant-forms and animals that looked familiar and yet were alien, all mixed in with the ubiquitous sparrows and starlings and squirrels that had spread with humankind to probably every settled planet.

  But then… well, the more you explore, the more you come across oddities, anomalies. The white room had been so alien to me and yet out here it was just another set of buildings. I could have been anywhere. Anytime.

  Not far from my room there is a common area, with seats that fold around you as you descend. Always accompanied by my examiners, occasionally here I will see others, but there is no chance to talk with them.