Total Conflict

by Neal Asher

  Shard put his hands, palm down, flat upon the table. “Madame,” he said. “If we are going to talk, you will have to take my word – or nothing.”

  De Souza gave him the kind of look a teacher might give a promising student who had failed a simple test through idleness or a closed mind. Shard cleared his throat. Carelessly, he said, “You know, we often wondered what control individuals had over what they were showing us. How much an image could be manipulated by an unwilling subject. How much we could rely on what was generated as a result.”

  “But you use them within the Commonwealth, don’t you? You must know something about how little a subject can conceal – willing or otherwise.”

  “An artist might use one, yes, or a therapist with a patient, but they’re hardly forced!”

  “How about within the justice system?”

  “If you’ve nothing to hide you’ve nothing to fear –”

  Quickly, Shard cut himself off. Too late. De Souza smiled, benignly and, with a sigh, he began to roll up his sleeve. “Marshal…” Lowe warned.

  Damn idiot sounded surprised. “She has me,” Shard explained, as he attached the sensors. “Condemned from my own mouth.” De Souza leaned over to switch on the box next to him. She was still smiling.

  He gave a bark of laughter. “How much can be concealed? I can find out for myself now, can’t I?” De Souza’s eyes flicked up past his shoulder, and he looked in turn at the right-hand screen behind her, where he could examine his own thoughts. It was hazy for a while, and then sharpened suddenly into focus and showed the face of Gabriel Forshaw.

  De Souza drew in a breath. “I had no idea he was so sick.”

  She was thinking – as Shard could see – of how Forshaw had looked forty years ago, in one of the propaganda ‘casts, encouraging the insurgents to surrender. Smoke and mirrors. Forshaw had never been that glossy. “Even sicker in the flesh,” he said. He tapped the table, clearing his thoughts, and showed her how spectacular his garden had been the previous summer. “Shall we begin?”

  She did not ask about Roby. They talked in some detail about his early career and then she went back in time and asked him about his decision to join the army. He gave his habitual, pre-prepared defence and then was confronted, suddenly, with the sight of his father – a splinter of memory so sharp he feared its capacity to wound if he touched it further. Enough. “Madame. I have to stop.”

  They had been talking for almost three hours. Shard’s head throbbed; so did his upper arm where the band was strapped on. “Of course,” de Souza said.

  Shard yanked the sensors from his temples and the picture on the screen disappeared from view. He saw that de Souza was watching him. “I hope I’ve not worn you out.”

  He wiped his hand across his forehead. “No.”

  “We can break for the day –”

  “No.”

  “Have you discovered how much you can conceal?”

  “Enough,” he answered honestly, “but only with effort. I imagine that your difficulty is in interpretation.”

  “Whereas our fear was always self-disclosure. That was all you needed, really. You needed to make us mistrust ourselves. Self-doubt, a moment of hesitation, checking oneself before speaking – that was your way in. Once that became too much to sustain…” She studied him. She had not yet detached herself. “We would have to continue for some time yet before we reached that point.”

  Shard nodded. His hands, he realized, were trembling slightly. He put them on his knees, hiding them away under the table. “So, have you learned anything of substance, Madame?”

  “Plenty.” She paused, as if to sift through evidence. “You see yourself as scrupulous, meticulous. You hold the politicians responsible for all that happened here, and you mean that in its broadest sense. If you thought you could get away with it, you would tell me that you were only following orders.”

  Shard shoved back his chair. He stood up, abruptly. “Lowe,” he said. He was shaking. “Get the car.”

  “You are besieged,” she told him, softly and, behind her, West-20’s fifth tower shuddered and began to fall. “And I find myself wondering – have you ever stopped thinking of us as the enemy?”

  Brooding that evening alone in his room, Shard concluded that the only option was to go on the offensive. He could not refuse to continue, not having come so far, and not after the small victories she had achieved. The following day, he stuck grimly to the script that he and Lowe had prepared. Doggedly, he told the truth as he saw it – a story of duty and loyalty and honour: simple values, easily communicated, not intrinsically the worse for that. He worked the machine more cannily too: he demanded frequent breaks, pulled the sensors off at random, kept her at bay. He held Forshaw at the front of his mind and with him the grievance that he signified. He found that now that he had started talking, it was easy to keep the accusations flowing. “I know what people say these days. That the military was out of control on Roby.”

  “I have heard it rumoured that there was almost mutiny at the end –”

  “Don’t believe everything you hear. They were there at every stage, the politicians, Foreshaw foremost. Nothing happened without their consent. They were there right to the very end – oh yes!”

  “Tell me about that, Marshal,” she said. She was looking down, sifting through her notes. “The last day. Much about what happened then still puzzles me.”

  He swung away from it. Instead he went back to the beginning, as the script dictated and, methodically, he detailed the battles he had fought. He talked about the people he had commanded, in particular those who had been lost. He wanted her to see – to understand – that the damage had not been all on one side. Deliberately, he avoided studying what appeared on her screen; although, at very end of the day, he glanced over – cautiously, surreptitiously. To his surprise he saw her sunflowers blooming. He pondered the image that night as he tried to sleep. As darkness fell, the meaning came to him. All he had to say, all he had told her – it bored her.

  The injustice almost overwhelmed him. The next day, therefore, he gloried in his occasional victories, the harm that he had done to her at every stage. He drenched his screen in it, forcing her to see it, not looking once at her side. In their fourth session, she withdrew, paying him no more than perfunctory attention. He began to believe he had beaten her back, and his heart sped in anticipation of triumph. Imagining himself all but victorious, and curiously, he began to observe her thoughts again.

  Her mind turned out to be full of what he took to be her Archive – a large unwieldy stack of papers, aging, and with an inkblot in the middle of one page. His eye was drawn to this black spot. Even as he opined, again, on the failure of nerve that had brought about their defeat, he would find himself glancing across. Eventually, he saw that it was not a stain or a blot, but a scorch mark, as if someone had stubbed out a cigarette on the skin of the page, or put a match to it. He became distracted; at one point the image even appeared, for a few short seconds, on his own screen. Soon, he could not keep his eyes off it; it drew him to her like a black hole. In the end, it was the whole of what was between them.

  De Souza was no longer even pretending to listen to him. She sat looking down upon the table, the back of one hand pressed hard against her mouth. Was she ill? “Madame?” he said. “Madame?”

  He reached out to touch her hand and she pulled back. Abruptly, the stain in her mind disappeared; replaced by amorphous unrevealing images, pastoral scenes: the rocky hills above Salvation, the grey-green grass of the plains in sector-13. Then these too were gone. She had removed the sensors from her temples. “Thank you, Marshal. I’m grateful that you were willing to come this far to speak to me.” She took her armband off slowly, and leaned over to switch off her monitor.

  Shard stared at her. “Is that it?”

  She began to gather up her papers. “Yes.”

  “But we haven’t got to the end—”

  “Yes we have. Or, rather – we have got as far as it i
s possible for us to get.”

  Again, he put out his hand, with the idea of stopping her clearing away, but he thought better of it. “There’s still the last day,” he offered. “Don’t you want to know what happened? Don’t you want to know why that tower came down? That and no other?” There was the black hole on the screen. “I know everything, everything that went on.” Seeing her hesitate, he pressed on with his assault. “It will die with me, you know! That gap will remain forever! There’s nobody else. Forshaw will never tell you the truth! He’ll be gone soon anyway. There is only me, Madame,” he taunted her softly. “I’m the only one left.”

  She stood for a while as if in contemplation, her head down, hands gripping the edge of the table. Then she looked him directly in the eye. “You don’t have the heart.” She slung her bag over her shoulder, carrying it like a burden as she walked towards the door. “Goodbye, Marshal. Enjoy what’s left of your feud.”

  In the car back, Lowe did not conceal his relief that the whole sorry business had come to an end. “Foolish to have come here in the first place. The Bureau has unearthed more about de Souza. A teacher and archivist – if only! She ran one of the first underground railways out of Salvation, and then retooled her network to run arms back in. Now they tell me.” Petulantly, he said, “People do not pay enough attention to the details! Wasn’t that exactly how it all started? Smuggling children out of the cities and into the country?”

  “I forget,” Shard said.

  “But we’ve got through without any disasters. And now we can go home.”

  Shard said, “I’m not done here yet.”

  “But Mme de Souza made it quite clear that your sessions together were finished –”

  “I don’t care what she said. I have not finished with her. We’ll go over in the morning as arranged, and we’ll remain there until Mme de Souza has heard all that I have to say.”

  There was a pause. “Regretfully,” Lowe said, “that cannot be ‘we’. If you as a private citizen want to continue your association with Mme de Souza, that is your choice. But as a representative of the Commonwealth, I cannot in conscience knowingly sit down in the same room as someone who committed terrorist acts against us. Not without quite specific permission.”

  Shard smiled. “So I really am on my own?”

  “Only by your own choice, Marshal—”

  Roughly, Shard patted him on the arm. “Leave it. I understand. I understand.”

  In truth, Shard no longer cared. Lowe was irrelevant. His own will had brought him here this time, not the Bureau’s, not the Commonwealth’s, not de Souza’s. He would leave on his own terms. He spent another sleepless night, but this was in anticipation of battle. He was certain that she would come to hear him: that great gap drew her back to him, the only one who could fill it for her. He stood at the window and looked down at the lit-up city – his city, which bore the mark of his time here and always would. A little before dawn he did sleep – fitfully, excitedly – and when the alarm woke him, a message from de Souza was waiting for him. She would meet him at the Archive, as originally planned.

  This was his moment of triumph. His hands shook as he washed and dressed, his heart quaked. He was jubilant. He had them both now: de Souza wanting to know what he knew, Forshaw wanting him to conceal it. He would go this morning and unmake history, remaking it in the way he chose. Not propaganda, not hagiography – he would at last be able to give his own account, which was true.

  He took the car across to the Archive alone. When he arrived, de Souza was there already, sitting at the table talking quietly to her freakish aide. He strode into the room, feeling half his age. When she saw him, de Souza rose from her chair. Before he could start, she said, “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, Marshal. Gabriel Forshaw died yesterday.”

  Shard’s legs all but crumpled beneath him. He made a lunge for the table, gripping it to steady himself. De Souza’s aide discreetly helped into his chair.

  “Quietly, I gather,” de Souza said. “In his sleep.”

  “How else would it be?”

  She took her seat slowly. “We have his lectures of course, his memoirs…” She held up her hands, an old woman’s hands, and empty. “Soon we will all be gone,” she said. “All that will be left will be what we committed to the Archive. I know.” Her voice rose, and he needed no aid to perceive and understand her distress. “…that it will remain of interest for as long as some of us are still alive. But what then? It will become a curiosity, and at last will be lost in time, like a signal that decays. With the children of our great-grandchildren, I would say, when the living link has been severed and there is nobody alive who remembers us, even as we are now.” She looked at him. “What do you think, Marshal? Should we not be glad? If the lives we led and the wars we fought are in the end meaningless?”

  It was to Shard a horror, a kind of hell. In terror, he said, “They won’t. They can’t! Not all of it!”

  She did not answer. Her aide had placed an arm around her shoulder, in comfort, and he saw her then as she was – an old woman who had fought a war; who had lived to see her life’s work transformed beyond recognition, as it would have to be if it was ever to be counted a success. All that remained was the chance to set the record straight. He gathered up the sensors and, when he saw he had her attention, he bent his forefinger to gesture her in. “Let me tell you,” he said, “about Gabriel Forshaw.”

  Liberation Day

  In thirteen minutes the evacuation would be complete. The last ship would have left Roby. Shard stood in C&C watching the lights flash. He had turned off the alarms over an hour ago.

  “Commander,” said his adjutant, who was desperate to leave and even more desperate not to show it, “incoming from the Bureau. The Secretary, sir.”

  Shard, who had been waiting for this, took it in his private office. Forshaw, he observed, did not look like a man who had been up all night. “Still there, Shard? You’re the veritable captain of the sinking ship.”

  “Plenty to do yet, sir.”

  “Quite. Listen, Cabinet finally got its act together and made a decision, so I have this authorization for you. Code-45. You got that?”

  “Code-45. And you’re quite sure about that, sir?”

  “Cabinet’s decision. I’m just the messenger.”

  “I’ll see to it at once, sir.”

  “Good man.”

  Forshaw hesitated. The lights flashed and the clock counted down. “The sooner I can get to it,” Shard pointed out, “the sooner I can leave.”

  “Yes. Of course. Well, I’ll see you on Mount Pleasant in a few days, Commander. Safe journey home.” He cut the comm and was gone.

  “Fucking gangster,” Shard muttered to the space the other man left. He passed on the newly-issued order to the other officers, proceeded to execute it for his own area, and then went back out to C&C to tell his frantic adjutant they could leave. They boarded the shuttle with seven-and-a-half minutes to spare; as it lifted, Shard looked out to watch the light show.

  They had mined all the cities months ago, after the insurgents took North-29, rigging up all the towers individually. Thirty-eight cities, an average of five towers each; almost two hundred bonfires if you totted them all up. Shard imagined the show running the length of the Diamond Coast and up along the Red River deep into the heart of their territory, taking out everything – communications, air links, the lot. If they wanted Roby, they could have it – what was left – and after a few years picking through the rubble, they could come begging for help.

  They were safely above the city when Shard’s tower went down, but they still felt it. His adjutant stared in disbelief out of the porthole and then in horror at Shard. Shard watched the second tower. And watched. And watched. He checked the time. Sixty-four seconds. It should have gone by now – but perhaps something was wrong with the mechanism. At one-hundred-and-sixteen seconds, uneasily, he started watching the third tower. At one-hundred-and-twenty-three seconds, when it was still stand
ing, he knew where the failure had been and knew that it was not in the equipment. The ruin of his own tower was now conspicuously in need of explanation and, as Roby fell away from him, Shard knew who would take the blame. Who else? How did you court-martial an entire army? How did you condemn a whole system?

  The two screens behind de Souza displayed conflicting images. Shard was thinking of the city as he had seen it the night before, lit up but not alight, scarred but not wrecked. De Souza was thinking of the falling cities, seeing the world after collapse, blasted back to the stone age, all but uninhabitable. “Do you not see?” he said, revolted at last by the sight of it. “I thought I was ending it. I thought I was ending the war.”

  “Oh, Mark Shard,” she told him as she clasped his hand, “it was not yours to end.”

  Shard thought fleetingly of reparation – and then, in his mind’s eye, he glimpsed the city as it might have been, not ruined but resurgent. He saw it perfected; the last tower still stood and the sun shone hard upon it. Silhouetted in front was de Souza, sitting like a guardian on the gates of history. Reflected in her face, he saw what could have been. Breathless now, he saw the future that he could have had a hand in making, had all his gifts of loyalty and dedication not been misapplied. As his heart gave out, he saw himself clearly: caught in the pain of an ageless struggle, ruined by his choice of side. He saw the world as it could have been, had the enemy not, this time, persuaded.

  And Ines de Souza – who had survived all those that had declared themselves her enemy – she, when asked, would say: “His heart. In the end – his heart.”