Total Conflict

by Neal Asher

  If you don’t move, you’re dead. Didn’t they teach you that?

  The enemy went limp, but some hadn’t died at her hand. There must be another human here, as invisible to her as to the Muranyi.

  She drifted down to the enemy heavy weapon, pushed the dead gun crew off into space and opened fire. She brushed the Muranyi marines off their ship like the wind sweeping snow from the branches of the trees in the foothills around her home base back on Tranquility.

  The thought of a planet with weather and seasons penetrated her combat numbness for long enough to remind her that she did have something worth fighting for: her son’s chance for a few years of peace on a real world. Perhaps that would put a little humanity back into Zenothon. She supposed she should be ashamed that only now did she think of her son in the shielded crèche at the center of Osman Bey.

  Escandala took the bacteria bomb from her hip, secured it to the enemy hull and activated. While she punched the vacuum in triumph, the bomb’s priming mechanism injected atmosphere and nutrients that awoke trillions of bacteria from diapause. Insatiably hungry, they began to feed on the metal in the ship’s hull. The population was predicted to reach critical mass at about six minutes for this class of vessel. After that, nothing could save the ship from rupture.

  She moved up off the hull seeking a better position to defend her attack.

  A bomb placed earlier by another marine cracked the outer hull, launching a geyser of gas and enemy bodies forced through the narrow breach.

  A few minutes later her bomb caused its own decompression explosion. With nothing left for her to do, she withdrew a klick from the doomed craft. Now she must wait, hoping her side would win.

  The stratagems of Gjalp’s slave squadron were already proving successful. The tactical units from the three attacking Sleeves had eliminated half the enemy fleet, and now swarmed around the surviving Muranyi, probing for surprises.

  Finding none, the uncommitted squadron reserves spun away from orbit and wiped out the enemy the easy way, imparting their velocity to kinetic torpedoes that accelerated to relativistic speeds before impact.

  From the initial acceleration along the aerosol corridor through to pickup by the Osman Bey, the entire operation had taken forty minutes.

  Afterwards, Dreamwalker hosted the Sleeve’s victory celebration on her briefing deck. There was plenty of space: of the six TUs in her Sleeve, only Osman Bey and Dreamwalker remained.

  Escandala stood near to Zenothon while Gunnlod, senior Jotun commander of the Sleeve, called out the names of those who had sacrificed all in service to the White Knights. Escandala wept, blaming her emotion on the combat drug toxins, but conscious of how close Zenothon had come to becoming a fleet casualty statistic.

  “You’ll be fine, Momma,” he told her after the ceremony and moved toward her as if for a hug.

  She backed off and walked away, unwilling to have him program her feelings. It wasn’t as if anything she said or did could upset the thing that had once been her son.

  Gjalp ordered the squadron to examine the enemy ships and corpses, looking for explanations for their strange behavior.

  There wasn’t much left to be examined.

  Horden manipulated assignments so that he examined one of the largest chunks of dead metal at the same time as Escandala. It was down to the humans to examine the wreckage for clues, using just their augmented Mark-2 Eyeballs.

  As soon as the metal debris was shielding them from sight, he unexpectedly grappled her. She reached for her knife but when their helmets kissed, Horden initiated a conversation the old-fashioned and private way: using sound waves.

  “None of us will ever go home,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I was an observer at the last Jotun strategy briefing. The Muranyi are using outdated materiel and expendable convict crews to wear us down on the cheap. There’s a major offensive on the way in this sector. No one will be going home to Tranquility. Ever. We’ll be off to our next battle soon. Our Sleeve has just suffered seventy percent casualties. If it’s not our turn to die next, then it will be the time after.”

  “But you can never be sure. There’s always a chance.”

  “Chance?” He laughed. “You’re talking a mathematical possibility, not reality.”

  “So what? We were bred to die. We’ve always known that.”

  “That’s exactly how they rely upon us to think. Why else would they be so open about our prospects at the briefing I saw?”

  “I suppose your Earth-supreme credo gives you a better idea. What do you suggest we do? Mutiny?”

  “Yes. And the offensive means we haven’t much time to carry this out.”

  Escandala struggled to absorb this. Mutiny had never seriously occurred to her. “Even if we secured the ships without being killed, what would we do? Turn them around for the ninety-year trip back to Earth? None of my marines know how to pilot a starship. Do yours?”

  “All I need is a few minutes to myself.”

  “What good will that do us?”

  “For us, nothing. But for Earth, a little. Think of the advantages that our augmentations give us. Our children more so. They can will their metabolism into the hibernation state for interstellar travel. We require complex machinery to achieve the same, but Earth natives can’t even manage that. Think how this one advantage alone will benefit our species, and we have plenty more enhancements than that. I have the augmentation designs on memory crystal. These augmentations might not seem much in comparison with the huge advantages the other species have over us, but I believe in human ingenuity. All I need is to gain access to a powerful enough transmitter or the quantum telegraph. With your help I could do that. The Jotuns trust you. Think how we can turn this to our advantage against—”

  “Our advantage? Keep me and my son out of this. You might impress little boys by stories of embattled Earth, but the planet can rot for all I care. Never forget they sold our ancestors into slavery.”

  Suddenly, alarms pierced the fleet with sound, vibration, and scent alerts. Engines fired up and began to accelerate warboats from standing.

  Escandala didn’t understand the panic until she heard a single phrase over and over: Projectile assault! Projectile assault! Projectile assault!

  She watched an onrushing arc of dancing lights. They offered teasing hints of their form, twinkling briefly in Akinschet’s illumination before winking back behind the veil of darkness.

  Escandala guessed the instrument of their doom: broken fragments of a proto-comet, too small to detect remotely but fast enough to penetrate ship armor. The trap must have been set months or even years ago, waiting for Gjalp’s squadron to be lured into a precise point in space and time.

  Horden jetted away, aiming for the biggest gap between the boats.

  Escandala followed.

  The first exploding TU was quickly followed by the rest of its Sleeve. TUs with enough velocity scattered, abandoning the slower Sleeve frames.

  Too late.

  A cluster of cometary debris shot past. She didn’t even know it was there until the glare of light from a passing TU’s engine lit the scene.

  A TU passed close by. Osman Bey. She prayed to the Creator that Zenothon had been allowed the time to reach the shielded crèche at the heart of the boat. If he was caught in a connecting tube he would be pinned by the acceleration, unable to grab onto the adult-sized handholds that led to the acceleration protection dotted about the vessel.

  She straggled behind the Osman Bey, which accelerated from brisk to flat out. In a few seconds, the zero-point engines would kick in and deliver bone-crushing velocity. Zenothon was now either in protection or he was dead.

  She saw the rock moments before it hit Osman Bey.

  The TU exploded in a fireball that engulfed her mind.

  Fragments of the boat were flung outwards like a cracked helmet visor blown out by explosive decompression. She closed with a section tumbling toward her.

  Horden bumped into her fro
m behind and slowed to match her velocity.

  “Is anyone there?” asked Horden, speaking through the general comms network. “Please notify.”

  She expected no reply from the shattered warboat, and got none.

  They waited.

  She repeated Horden’s plea until finally trailing into stillness. They were alone. Even the comet fragments had finished their assault and vanished into the darkness.

  “Come on,” said Horden. “We only survived because we’re tiny in comparison with the boats. They didn’t stand a chance, but that’s no reason to think there aren’t any survivors.”

  What was the idiot talking about? She surveyed the wreckage of broken TU fragments plunging through clouds of frozen air, blood, and meat.

  “Just because there’s no signal doesn’t mean we should abandon hope,” said Horden.

  “But no signal means no one in a suit. That means all are dead.”

  “Unless they’re in a crèche.”

  She replayed the memories of the Osman Bey shards they had passed, using the AI in her battlesuit to reverse their trajectories to guess where the boat had been when it was hit. They could search that point. The crèches were pressurized, armored and shielded. It was just possible that Zenothon was alive.

  “All secure,” said Horden. “Let’s go.”

  Secure was an optimistic way of describing the lash-up of mag-clamps and webbing the two humans had improvised from insulated-encased power cables. But wrapped in this embrace was the Osman Bey’s crèche with its cargo that might be Zenothon and six other children, or could be corpses. The elation Escandala had felt on locating the crèche melted away when she realized they had no way to communicate with anyone inside.

  The crèche was connected to a salvaged Sleeve vessel, Pheidippides, which still possessed a little rigidity in its shell, and retained functioning communication equipment. Gaping holes in the Sleeve’s control section meant they had no way to pressurize Pheidippides, let alone produce a breathable atmosphere.

  It might not hold and there may be other survivors. No matter. Either way, they had used up their time searching for Zeno. Now they had to seek help amongst the mining settlements on Utgard.

  Escandala engaged the engines, and felt a jerky vibration through her grip on the control panel. The engines were only vector adjusters for fine control during slow maneuvering such as docking. Thrust was pitiful, but the engines were fixed securely and the result moved them toward Utgard.

  Horden had strapped himself to a communication console, looking childlike in the vast expanse designed for the hexapedal Jotun frame.

  TUs carried short range radio and microwave transceivers, but all the Sleeves in their squadron held communicators quantum-entangled with Detroit, their supply depot on their home planet of Tranquility, 43 light years distant. Had they possessed the codes to activate the equipment, they could have asked Detroit to request rescue from Utgard. As it was, they had to hope the miners were intrigued enough to investigate what would probably look to them like drifting wreckage.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” said Horden, fiddling with the controls. “If only we could get this communicator to work, it would give the children a chance. But there’s even more we could achieve. Geirrod, my old Sleeve commander, explained that he could use Detroit as a relay to patch communication to any receiving station in the network. I could get an FTL message to Earth. Just think of that.”

  Escandala ignored him. Horden’s words were nothing better than a fantasy. Humans bred for the fleet were denied access to the interstellar communications network. One-Ear had explained that this was to protect them from distractions, but his mouth had been gaping, indicating heavy irony.

  “I don’t know why I’m bothering,” said Escandala, more to herself than to strike up conversation with the idiot dreaming of Earth. “We have at best three hours air left in our suits. If some of the children are still alive, they have maybe a couple of days before they too run out of air and water.”

  “Done,” he said, giving no sign he had heard her. “I’ve set up a distress signal of sorts which should reach Utgard, although there’s no reason to hope they’ll be listening. It’s a sequence of primes. Not very informative but clearly artificial. Best I could do with no understanding of their language. It’s the children’s best chance.”

  Escandala grudgingly admitted she was impressed. Even a pale flicker of hope was better than utter despair. She said nothing, though, conserving oxygen instead.

  Utgard’s sulfurous globe looked so far away to Escandala, yet it was close enough for a shuttle to launch from the mining port and rendezvous with them within about forty minutes. Not that there was any reason to hope for such a deliverance.

  Her suit diagnostic reported two hours of air remaining.

  “Still no response,” said Horden. He looked up from the communications console and threw out his arms in frustration. “Let’s face it, no one’s coming.”

  “Your timing is impeccable,” said Escandala, jabbing her finger at a point behind Horden’s shoulder. “Someone is coming.”

  The fast-growing speck came not from the moon, but from the jumble of debris that had been two opposing fleets a few hours before. She laughed maniacally. Horden with his big ideas of being an Earth hero! This must be a Muranyi follow-up to eradicate any survivors.

  She zoomed her visor display upon the incoming threat. But this was not an attack. It was a bulky six-legged figure in a fleet EVA suit: a Jotun riding an inspection disk.

  “Identify,” came the command in the whistle and plosive yodeling of the Jotun speech.

  Horden and Escandala obeyed.

  “Would you believe it? It’s my little hatchling, Escandala, and our friend Sergeant Horden.”

  “One-Ear!” Escandala spoke his human nickname in the Jotun tongue, and hugged him as tightly as the suit allowed.

  “You have done well,” said One-Ear, “for such a—”

  “How did you see us?” interrupted Escandala, peering into One-Ear’s visor. “You’re...”

  “Blind. Yes, I thought you might notice that. Caught a heat flash when ‘E’ gun exploded. Melted my eyes and didn’t do the rest of me much good either.”

  “You haven’t answered Escandala’s question.”

  “Well, Horden, you need to understand that we Jotuns have many faculties even you know nothing about. Despite your frequent ransacking of restricted parts of the data store, we still have our secrets.”

  Even under the layers of his suit, Horden exuded unease. “I have never—”

  “Let’s get word to Utgard, shall we?” said One-Ear. “We can talk directly to Detroit through the quantum link, and they can route a message to Utgard. We’ll have you and your hatchlings down there in no time. Here’s how to operate the quantum telegraph.”

  Horden followed the blind Jotun’s instructions to patch One-Ear through to Detroit base.

  “They will order Utgard to send help,” said One-Ear after completing his report. “Looks like the mining life for us,” he said. “Perhaps for the next few decades. I expect they’ll send a fleet to defend or retake the mines — can’t leave them to the enemy — but the nearest reserves are forty-three objective years away. Not so bad in a ship, but we would have to live those years the old-fashioned way. So please don’t forget your old friend and tutor, or I would be ever so lonely.”

  “You silly old flea colony, of course we won’t forget you.”

  “It’s just that... Well, I know you humans too well. With nothing much else to do you’ll start breeding within a few days, and not stop until you die.”

  The humans turned to each other and laughed.

  “You humans! For such a fecund species, you exhibit a bizarre coyness about the actualities of your breeding. It would be different if Jarnsaxa had survived to be with me.”

  “Jarnsaxa?” Escandala allowed herself to relax and enjoy One-Ear’s revelation. “Are you telling us that you were in love with Captain
Jarnsaxa?” She giggled, surprised she could still feel such levity.

  She stopped abruptly. Her guilty amusement was still raw loss to One-Ear.

  The Jotun said nothing for an uncomfortable while. “If you must know, I did dream of an impossible companionship. It hardly seems worth denying now she is a cadaver. She survived the initial attack, but wreckage from our vessel pierced her pressure suit. By the time it self-sealed, enough blood plasma had vaporized to cause an embolism. She died in my embrace.”

  “I am sorry,” said Escandala in the Jotun language, using formal grammar.

  “Don’t be sorry; be grateful. Jarnsaxa thought our victory was too suspicious for our entire squadron to be sitting stationary in one clump. Commodore Gjalp was too busy gloating over her victory to act like a proper squadron commander. Jarnsaxa disobeyed Gjalp’s order to power down the point defense systems. We shot up most of the comet fragments they threw at us. Not enough, but we suffered less damage than the other craft. That’s why your hatchlings might be alive.”

  “Jarnsaxa sounds like a great leader,” said Horden, entering more instructions into the communications console. “Perhaps she should have been squadron commander?” He withdrew a memory crystal from a hip pouch. “Did Detroit tell you anything about the rest of the war? The Muranyi must have been planning this for decades. It cannot be a—”

  “Radio silence. Now!”

  It took a moment for One-Ear’s command to penetrate. She looked to him for instruction. He pointed to Utgard.

  Escandala looked where One-Ear pointed, could see nothing, so magnified the image until she saw a flash on the surface of Utgard. Then there was another; it was an attack on a mining settlement. Scanning for the source of the bombardment, she saw a pair of Muranyi monitor boats: unarmored weapons platforms with poor maneuverability. Perfect for nuking defenseless worlds into glassy slag.

  She noticed Horden insert the memory crystal into the console, ignoring the slaughter around him.

  Millions lived on the moons. Aliens, it was true — she couldn’t even remember the species — but they were her wards.