Total Conflict

by Neal Asher

  “You sound like a Marxist,” said Huang.

  “Bah,” retorted Li, “anyone who can see the truth is dismissed as an extremist with a discredited ideology. The stark unpalatable reality is that half the world is poised to exploit the wealth of the solar system and the other half still doesn’t have access to clean water, basic healthcare and a primary education. It stinks. I’m sick of it.”

  Li was on the observation deck, his hands manacled behind his back, gazing at the Earth. The pale blue disc, swirled in white, hung majestically above the jagged, undulating grey lunar surface. Huang stood at an angle where he could watch the Earth and subtly observe Li’s reactions. The security droids waited patiently on either side of Li, indifferent to the awesome spectacle before them.

  “Magnificent,” uttered Li. He turned and looked at Huang. “How many human beings have seen this first hand? We’re privileged, you and I.”

  They stood for several minutes in reverent silence, watching their home world, a lonely, dynamic speck of life in the dark void.

  “How far away?” asked Li.

  “Four hundred thousand kilometres,” replied Huang.

  Li nodded.

  “Beauty and despair,” said Li. “Now I know ‘why the Moon’: beauty and despair. Sun Tzu said, ‘All men know the utility of useful things; but they do not know the utility of futility’. You think this will succeed where all your other methods have failed. It won’t.”

  But in the tenor of Li’s voice Huang detected the tiniest quaver.

  “You had a reputation as someone prepared to do whatever was required to meet your objective, no matter how extreme. Yu always went the extra li, and you always got a result.”

  Following the visit to the observation deck Huang had allowed Li a full uninterrupted eight hours of sleep. He had adjusted the temperature in the cell to a steady, comfortable level and dimmed the lights while Li slept. He had no idea if these counterintuitive measures would help to soften up his adversary, but he felt he had nothing to lose.

  If Li had been affected by the subtle improvements in his living conditions he failed to show as much, maintaining the same calm demeanour as always.

  “So why the anonymous blog?” asked Huang.

  “I’ve told you why,’” replied Li.

  “But you must have known that it was only a matter of time before you were identified.”

  Li shrugged.

  “You compromised half a dozen secret detention centres, identified dozens of extraordinarily rendered detainees, revealed details of interrogation techniques that embarrassed our government and senior statesmen across the world.”

  “Others were doing the same. Still doing it when I was arrested and I’ll bet still doing it even now. I’m not the only one unhappy with what’s been going on.”

  “But you are the most prominent, the most unexpected.”

  Li shrugged again. “If there’s one thing my experience taught me it’s this: we know nothing about other people.”

  “Who helped you to escape?”

  “So now we finally come to the reason why I’m here,” said Li.

  “Who?” asked Huang again.

  “Cultivated people who consider justice foremost.”

  Huang narrowed his eyes. “Confucius,” he muttered.

  “Confucius taught that ‘when cultivated people have courage without justice they become rebellious. When petty people have courage without justice they become brigands.’ That’s what the Party is, a band of nuclear-armed, space-faring, two-faced petty brigands.”

  “Who helped you?” repeated Huang.

  “Dangerous idealists who’ve asked themselves an important question: ‘How far can a society compromise its values in order to preserve them?’ Can we uphold the rule of law by trampling over it?” Li shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Who are these dangerous idealists?”

  “I don’t know. They very sensibly keep their identities secret.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Of course not. But I wouldn’t tell you even if I knew.”

  “Why do you think our political system is doomed?” asked Huang.

  “Because it’s inherently unstable. You can’t have such a lopsided arrangement with such glaring disparity between haves and have-nots and expect it to continue indefinitely.”

  “Surely the entire history of humanity proves you wrong.”

  “The entire history of humanity is the chronicle of the consequences of global disparity – war, famine, disease, climate change, eco-disasters. We’re on the threshold of the greatest leap forward ever for our species, the colonisation of the solar system, the promise of interstellar travel within two or three generations, plenty for everyone. And you just know that ninety-nine percent of the wealth will be in the control of one percent of the population, utilised for their benefit alone.”

  Li remained calm and defiant, but he looked pale and drawn. He had lost weight since his arrival, and his face and body had visibly aged. Huang thought that he might be close to cracking.

  “How long have I been here?” asked Li.

  Six months had passed, all of it spent inside the same cell, apart from the one visit to the observation deck.

  “Long enough for me to do this.”

  Huang tapped instructions into his smartsheet. The droid that had been Li’s constant companion stepped forward and released his manacles. Li rubbed his wrists and narrowed his eyes.

  “Reverse psychology…?”

  “Security override code Oscar Romeo three seven six five three,” announced Huang. Both security droids immediately slumped into an electronic stupor.

  Li stared suspiciously at Huang.

  “I must confess, this one is new to me…”

  “Six months,” said Huang.

  “What?”

  “You’ve been here six months.”

  “I don’t…”

  “The transport ship returned today. It touched down about fifteen minutes ago. My collaborators have spent the last six months cracking the security codes and flight algorithms. I’ve now cut all communications with Earth.”

  Li simply stared.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you before now, but as you know this place is thoroughly wired for sound and vision. We’ll be on our way before anyone at home can work out what’s going on and try to wrest back control. It’s all been carefully planned. When we leave I’ll send a mayday message to the other lunar bases. They’ll rescue the rest of the prisoners and tell the world about the true nature of this place. Launch windows are too short for anyone to intercept us. We’ll land somewhere remote enough so the Party can’t find us.”

  “You mean you…”

  “We’ve been infiltrating the Party for years. Waiting for the right person to emerge, a leader who can take us on to the next level. That’s you, Li. Your planet-side captors are not the only ones who have been observing you during your time here.” He picked up his smartsheet. “My network has been too. They’re all connected through this. Via me they’ve been silently monitoring our every move over the past six months. You’re a hero Li, a new Liu Xiaobo. Come on,” he said, standing, “time’s tight. We have to get moving right way.”

  “You know, that speech was the most extraordinary rendition I’ve heard in all my life,” said Li as he stood and walked around the table.

  Huang smiled.

  Li smiled too.

  “Security override Oscar Romeo eight eight five nine five,” announced Li. The security droids jerked back into life. The one nearest to Huang grabbed his arms, manacled his hands behind his back, marched him over to Li’s chair and pushed him into the seat.

  Li sat in Huang’s chair and calmly picked up the smartsheet.

  “They’re all connected through here. That should make rounding them up a straightforward matter.”

  The look of shock upon Huang’s face was monumental.

  “‘To the mind that is patient, the whole world s
urrenders.’ That was Sun Tzu, also. As you said, I’m someone who was always prepared to do whatever was required, no matter how extreme, to meet my objective.”

  The nearest droid’s flank opened and a jointed arm fitted with a syringe-like apparatus containing an electrode unfolded in the direction of Huang’s temple.

  “Let’s start with the psychoprobe.”

  Huang gasped as a controlled pulse of compressed air fired the device deep into his brain.

  “As I told you when we first met,” said Li, “the Party goes to enormous lengths to achieve its ends.”

  The Legend of Sharrock

  Philip Palmer

  I was sixteen years when I became a warrior. The ceremony is a simple one. I was stripped naked and daubed in red mud. My father cut a mark beneath each of my eyelids here, and here. So that I wept tears of blood. I stood utterly motionless all night long in the icy cold and in the morning the sun warmed my limbs.

  Then I drank a flask of wine and ate half a prashon for breakfast.

  The scars under my eyes were inked with poison from the sunbark tree, to stop them healing. Some tribes do a similar thing to their – no, you don’t need to know about such barbarous acts. These are primitive customs, you understand. We honour our past by such means.

  After breakfast, I was declared a warrior. And then I embraced my father Lexas. And I embraced my brother Andro. And my sister Wareel kissed me and wept; and I laughed and that made her laugh too. And finally I said goodbye to my mother, Giona.

  “I will miss you, my son,” she said, bitterly. And I laughed, bewildered at her evident sorrow.

  “I’ll be back soon,” I assured her.

  It was one hundred years before I returned.

  And during those years I fought and suffered; and I knew the glory of war. And its horror too, for many friends of mine died; and I saw innocents slaughtered by the weapons of the enemy, and by our weapons too. Such is war; sometime it is full of honour, but sometimes it is not.

  One hundred years I fought, in forests and in swamps and in spacecraft. And on four occasions I travelled through the gashes in space in a suit made of riftstuff; flying swiftly from one galaxy to another like a bird through a raging gale.

  This was our great war against the Raxoan. They had formed a treaty with the Southern Tribes, who had sold them a hundred planets; all of them in fact owned by us, including Madagorian itself. The Raxoan had thus been duped, with contracts most plausible and lies most compellingly told. (Such treachery is typical, as I have explained before, of the effete and soul-denying Southern Tribes.) And though we explained to the Raxoan the error of their ways, they would not be swayed, not by our logic, nor our charm, nor our direst threats.

  And thus, once they had dispatched their invasion fleets against us, we had no choice but to wage war.

  Their efforts to invade us were, in truth, pathetic and easily defeated. The Raxoan had the most powerful of war craft, armed with weapons capable of exploding a star. But our Philosophers had taught us how to sow the space around our planets with gashes in reality that would destroy any untrue vessel. So time and again the vast battle fleets of the Raxoan were rent and ripped by these jagged reefs of nothingness. Their space ships blew up, and their warriors fell out of reality and left not even a particle of flesh to be mourned. The Southern Tribes knew our power of course; they knew the Raxoan would be slaughtered like helpless bleet. But that was the joke of it all for them. Their purpose was to invoke our rage, for the sheer joy of seeing us angry. The humiliation and defraudment of the Raxoan was a mere by-blow.

  And after we had swept aside the great space armadas of the enemy, we invaded them – attacking the planets of the Raxoan with all the power at our disposal. We smashed their ships with waves of dark energy, and despatched unthingness bombs to destroy their missile silos.

  The Raxoan, like the Southern Tribes, were a mechanoid-loving culture, who employed spaceships with databrain minds and warriors made of metal. And we had no problem defeating such creatures, with our remote-power weapons created out of the dreamings of our greatest Philosophers.

  There was no glory to be found in such warfare. It was like hunting birds by burning the air in which they flew; no sport was to be found in that.

  But once their mechanoids had been destroyed, or subverted with our information-snake codes, the real war began. We sent Maxolun killer-craft against their mighty fleets; and engaged their vast warcraft in glorious space combats that lit up the blackness of space with sunfire blasts and left the rubble of destroyed war craft to drift for all eternity. Our Maxolun pilots had a genius for evasion and attack; on many occasions I served as gunner to such craft, and was awed at how the pilots could leap and whirl through space and into other realities before emerging at just the perfect place for a counter-attack. Our tiny warcraft were like insects that could hunt and harry and eventually slay vast herds of karako.

  But mostly I served with the Warrior Guard; the armoured warriors who flew or rifted on to the planet’s surface where we fought a true warrior’s war. Face to obscene bodily excrescence; flesh against flesh; Maxolun against Raxoan.

  The Raxoans were, it must be said, fearsome adversaries, even without their mechanoids. Picture them. Each was larger than you, Cuzco. Multiply- bodied. And spiked; the barbs on their bodies were like an army’s worth of swords raised. They lived in swamps and they swam in seas of their own shit. Their planet had a heavy gravity, which made it hard for us to walk or move. And the Raxoans’ hides were impervious to sword thrusts or axe strikes. So we fought them with sunfire guns and missiles fired from death-tubes. We fought in squads of twenty. And we had spears, each four times my own height, tipped with metal forged in the fire of a sun’s core, which we used to impale the Raxoans. And space armour, of course, was essential; for the air of their planet was corrosive and poisonous, and would rip the flesh off creatures such as us in minutes.

  It was a vile war. We stabbed and blasted, and many of our warriors were slain by whirlpools of mud and by spikes fired from the bodies of Raxoans that penetrated our space armour as it were paper. But we slew magnificently, and remorselessly; and when we heard that the Raxoan fleet had tried to explode our sun, we slew even more of them, with even greater brutality.

  One hundred years I fought, on twenty different planets, all engineered to be replicas of the Raxoan home world with its poison air and seas of shit. All war is glorious; this was somewhat less so, but glorious still. And we prevailed.

  Another tale could be told of the Maxolun Philosopher called Caloud who risked his life by surrendering to their battle fleet. There, with courage and great patience, he explained to the Raxoans how they might surrender in a way that would be acceptable to the Maxolu. It took them a while to comprehend the complexity and poetry of the rituals that were necessary. But eventually they succeeded, somewhat fumblingly, in offering us homage and honour, with gifts and poems and deeds of valour, as a prelude to their surrender.

  The Raxoan then appointed one of their kind as Chieftain of All the Raxoan (for they had no sense of hierarchy, which we found incomprehensible and indeed intolerable.) And this Raxoan travelled to our planet, unarmed and unescorted.

  And in front of the Assembly of All the Chieftains, this monstrously large Raxoan ‘Chieftain’ delivered a message to us, full of ritual invective and arrogant acquiescence; and full too of the most lyrical poetry, about how his people wished to maim and murder our parents then fornicate with their corpses, and other appropriate revilements. One phrase still stays in my memory: ‘your impaled and blood-puking grandmother’s scream of pain shall be foregone by us, for now we would be friends.’ I often wonder if Caloud helped them with the drafting of their surrender speech; for no Raxoan could write such a deliciously vicious line.

  Our Maxolu Chieftains roared their approval at the Raxoan’s rhetoric. And they then agreed to accept the Raxoan as our allies.

  Thus, the war came to an end. And the Raxoans, from that moment on,
never again had dealings with the Southern Tribes.

  And then I returned home and found my father mindwild.

  Does this, I wonder, happen to any of your kind? Yes? No? I see some of you are uneasy. Perhaps it does, then. But I’m not speaking here of simple madness, nor of the losing of wits with the passage of age. Mindwild is something else. It is a kind of possession by a dark fury that happens to those of us who live too long.

  My kind enjoy great longevity, you see. Some argue we could live forever, if we did not fight so many wars and embrace so many risks. In days gone by, warriors often lived five hundred years or more. Now, since the Philosophers invented the paklas which give us such remarkable powers of healing, we can live for far longer; many thousands of years. Of our years, I mean; the time it takes Maxolu to orbit our sun, Karasheen.

  My father was already an old man when he married my mother. Older still when he sired me. I have six older brothers by my father’s first wife; the youngest is a thousand years old. And, as is the way with my kind, every year that passed my father grew stronger and more graceful. His fighting prowess increased. His memory became sharper and more reliable. He knew, for instance, the name of every warrior and Philosopher and home-maker and child in his tribe, and his tribe was two hundred thousand strong. But his soul, ah, his soul. It had darkened.

  Mindwild: possessed by the spirit of a warrior, with no alleviating spirit of poet, or father, or lover, or friend.

  Once, my father had loved my mother with the greatest and most lyrical of passions. Yet now he loathed her. Sometimes, or so I was told, he beat her; on numerous occasions he treated her with contempt, in ways I shall not describe. He hated all his children by her too – Wareel and Andro and I. He hated also all those in his tribe, but he commanded them masterfully. And he had declared war on all the other Tribes of Maxolu – thirty-nine of them in all. His aim was to create a single tribe, powerful enough to launch a war to the death against the Southern Tribes on their far-flung planets.