The Soldier

by Neal Asher

  Updating . . .

  Everything was running smoothly. Increased activity had been detected within the disc but this was a common occurrence. Perhaps it had something to do with Dragon’s recent excursion inside the disc, but as yet it was nothing to be concerned about.

  “Couldn’t sleep, my dear?” asked Tobias.

  Orlandine abruptly disconnected, and was once again in just her human female aspect. In this state, she was a little uncomfortable with the impulse to hide it, but as she turned she closed up her cowl and retracted it into her body. It was one of the last visible signs of her unhu-manity, for she had shed the signature technology half-carapace of a haiman long ago.

  “Yes.” She smiled at him.

  His apparent naivety sometimes annoyed her, but only when she was in human time. For her, like many Polity citizens, sleep was a matter of choice and not need. Though he was a native of Jaskor, he had grown up after the Polity arrived here and should know all this.

  He walked right up to her and pulled her close. She looped her arms about his neck as they kissed, but she could not help noticing that he was doing it again—running his hands up and down her sides as if searching for the data sockets there. He would not feel them, of course, since she always retracted them inside her body during human time. But was he searching for them? Why would he do that? Stop. She was sure these thoughts were all only to do with her insecurity about her lack of humanity. As they kissed, she resisted the impulse to inject nano-fibres from her tongue up into his skull to rummage about in there. After a moment, they parted.

  “Beautiful evening,” he said, peering over her shoulder at the city.

  “It is that,” she replied, reaching up and catching his chin, turning his face towards hers. “I suppose you want to fuck me again?”

  He frowned. “It’s not all about fucking, you know.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “Well, mostly.” He actually blushed.

  She took his hand and led him back into the bedroom. They would fuck again and she would orgasm three or four times—her sensitivity tuned up. He would come once or twice. His sperm would enter her to try and do what it was programmed to do. But inside her, nano-machines would do what they were programmed to do and collect it, break it apart, and recycle it into the human part of her body as nutrients. All he would feel was soft female wetness, not the densely packed Polity and alien technology inside her that had almost displaced most of what was human about her.

  PRAGUS

  The high-security disposable laboratory was one of many, clinging like a sea anemone to a network of structural beams within the weapons platform. Formed as a globular cyst of chain-glass, it was packed with a gleaming mass of scanners, micro-manipulator robots, a nano-scope, lasers and cell welders all focused on a central work area. After running diagnostics on all the complex equipment it contained, Pragus opened the hatch in its side and directed the grappler to put the box of alien husks there. Meanwhile, as Captain Marco departed with all his newly acquired wealth, the AI pondered on the man.

  There had been something not quite right about him. Yes, he was always out to make just as much profit as he could, but reading him on other levels Pragus had detected a deep unease in him. However, the AI had been glad to be distracted from him by increased activity within the disc. Doubtless, Marco had told some lies about where he had obtained the alien remains, or had some sordid human problem. It would have been petty, boring . . .

  As Marco’s ship disappeared into underspace with a flash of spontaneously generated photons, Pragus cancelled that focus of its mind. Its main attention had, as ever, remained on its job—it would not even have blinked, if it had eyelids. Activity within the disc was still increasing but it was not yet time to take action on the hard-wired directive and destroy anything departing it. The protocols only demanded continued vigilance, and that was easy. Meanwhile, Pragus could be about something more interesting . . .

  The AI now turned a large portion of its mind to the alien husks, as the grappler propelled itself away through the zero-gravity surrounding structure. As soon as the AI was able to apply more of its intelligence to these curiosities, it realized there was something else, some other data . . .

  Though perfect recall was a facet of being an AI, Pragus consigned data in its mind on the basis of its usefulness and importance. Sometimes it took a whole second to remember something in deep memory. Pragus now knew, in its surface consciousness, much more about these dry remains because at least one of these multifaceted beings had escaped the genocide—it had been a weapons developer who assisted the Polity in the war against the prador. What then happened to that creature was classified—only Earth Central could know. Pragus allowed itself an AI mental grimace, then set to work on the husks.

  First a spider claw delicately extracted the husks from the box and transported them to an arrangement of soft clamps which adjusted to the shape of the husks and held them solidly. The noses of every kind of scanner available then closed in, swamping the item from exterior view. Pragus gazed through those scanners.

  Details of the alien husks began to be revealed. Though at first there appeared to be three distinct creatures that had died while giving birth or being born, they were not separate entities. Their venous and nervous systems were still connected. In fact, a nerve cord as thick as that in a human spine connected them. This cord progressed to the remains of the birth canal at the fore, and had probably connected to the brain of the creature. The one being born had the same cord connected to its brain, then running down into its womb, where it narrowed hair-thin to connect to a small ovum. All this perfectly matched the image data available on the Client—the alien weapons developer who had assisted the Polity. It had been a long chain of such connected creatures, or elements of itself, forever giving birth and dying. And this was definitely a portion of such a creature.

  Pragus delved deeper still. The brains of the two complete creatures it had were highly complex and their structure beautifully logical. They lay somewhere between the brains of evolved life and an AI swarm robot. Certainly they, and the multiple being that contained them, were the product of both evolution and highly advanced biotech. Pragus could see that not only had this creature been developed by that biotech, but it had also been able to continue that development upon itself and create new creatures. The wombs in each conjoined part of it were biotech laboratories where the genetic code could have been not just altered, but wholly reconstructed. Pragus felt a deep admiration for this thing, and much anger at the prador for annihilating such a race. It also felt a strange free joy seeing how it might be possible to bring a version of the creature back to life—

  Something happening.

  Pragus abruptly went into high alert as its sensors picked up a large object moving out of the accretion disc nearest to its own platform: Weapons Platform Mu.

  A mild voice then informed it, “Now you get to see some action.”

  Pragus found the AI of Weapons Platform Nu slightly irritating. Nagus knew that Pragus would have seen this object, but as in all instances like this, it felt compelled to comment. It was the sociability thing. When AIs like Pragus and Nagus were made, camaraderie was supposed to be as integral to them as their foundation purpose and directive—not to let Jain tech out of the accretion disc. While Pragus certainly had the second, the camaraderie thing hadn’t stuck.

  “That seems likely,” Pragus replied, hoping the conversation would not continue.

  It now studied the object sliding out of the accretion disc. It was a planetoid over fifty miles wide that seemed to consist of wild Jain tech. In all its time watching the accretion disc, Pragus had never seen such a large mass of this tech. White tree-like limbs, in places half a mile thick, wrapped around its surface. Things that looked like the by-blows of skyscrapers and fungi sprouted all around. Kaleidoscope movement was visible here and there and the occasional metallic tentacle waved aimlessly in vacuum.

  The object was travelling
slowly and, at its present rate, was days away from the point, in the defence sphere, where the directive would apply. However, such a slow-moving and large target would be easy prey for a gigaton contra-terrene device, or CTD . . .

  “Nothing from Orlandine,” Nagus informed him.

  “Yes,” said Pragus, a little more irritated now. “Orlandine is taking her human time.”

  Pragus activated platform weapons and watched internally as a giant carousel, like the barrel of a six-gun, turned. A hydraulic ram then pushed out a black rectangular block the size of a gravcar into a clamp. This hoisted it up towards the rear throat of a coilgun launcher. The giga-ton CTD was an imploder. It would utterly destroy the object in sight, ripping it apart in the first explosion, pulling in all debris from the ensuing singularity collapse, and rendering them down to just elements and energy to be scattered by the secondary blast.

  “No action, I am informed,” said Nagus.

  Pragus signalled agreement because it felt no need to comment on the matter. It too had just received this notification, which came directly from sphere command. If it was not Orlandine giving the order then it only had one other possible source. Also, certain facts about the scale of the object had now integrated and it seemed all too obvious what it was. However, Pragus did not return the CTD to its carousel. The directive, firmly hard-wired in its mind by Orlandine, could only be changed by her. Pragus would destroy that object when it reached a predefined limit. No matter what.

  “I wonder why?” Nagus added.

  For a few microseconds Pragus considered ignoring the other AI, then replied, “Because what we are seeing is not all Jain tech but something being attacked by Jain tech.”

  “Ah, quite,” Nagus replied. Then, “New orders. You do get to see some action!”

  Pragus emitted an AI sigh then cut com to Nagus.

  The notification was simple: hit Jain tech on the surface of the sphere with QC laser at energy level C12. No deep penetration munitions to be used. Pragus mentally touched all the attack pods of its subsidiary system, which reacted like a platoon of soldiers readying weapons. Echoes of breech blocks sliding and magazines clacking into place. A second later the pods began firing, at the same time ramping up their fusion reactors to top up storage. Space shimmered with appalling energy. The sphere immediately began to glow, matter steaming out into vacuum. After a moment, the vapour revealed the steady spiralling play of the beams striking its surface.

  Fungal towers exploded, their fragments vaporized even as they hurtled out on the blast fronts. Pragus now used the more sophisticated scanning of the weapons platform itself and the lasers there to target and destroy anything flung up from the surface of the sphere. The white tree-root structure blackened and burned. Waving tentacles shrivelled to soot and kaleidoscopes disrupted and shattered, throwing out crystal shards, which were also quickly vaporized. As the lasers played over its surface, the sphere began to turn as if presenting more Jain tech to be destroyed. The lasers delved deeper like vibro-drills, vapour plumes erupting from their strike points. Knowing precisely what it was dealing with now, Pragus did not allow the lasers to concentrate on the inner surface steadily being revealed. That surface was hard, white, and scaled with a kind of armour that defied analysis. The sphere shrugged, shedding Jain tech that was gradually coming apart. Soon the thing was recognizable.

  Dragon.

  Polity data on this entity was a bottomless well. It had been involved in all sorts of action outside and inside the Polity. Its motives had always been questionable, its actions always open to more than one interpretation. Once it had been considered a destroy-on-sight enemy, but now it was a friend. It was an alien biomech originally found on the planet Aster Colora. Then it had been four conjoined spheres smaller than this one, and had delighted in speaking to Polity representatives in riddles. No matter, that was history now and all that remained was a simple fact: Dragon was powerful and it did not like Jain technology, not at all. The civilization that had dispatched Dragon from the Magellanic Cloud millennia ago had been wiped out by that same technology. How many spheres remained from the original four was open to conjecture, though one had certainly been destroyed. Just one had come to the accretion disc, along with the haiman Orlandine, to take over the nascent defence project. This sphere had weaponized itself and grown much larger than before. It was an ally now.

  Dragon moved into action. Splits developed in its surface spewing white pseudopods, and Pragus focused in on these. They possessed cobra-like cowls but single gleaming blue eyes where the head should be. Some of these physically hurled chunks of Jain tech out into space. Others smashed it on Dragon’s surface, while others still incinerated the tech with some kind of particle beam, its hue a milky orange. All around the sphere were Jain signatures, and they quickly faded and died. Meanwhile the surface temperature of Dragon began to climb. Those pseudopods emitting particle beams blurred their focus to burn everything that remained, as the entity sterilized itself. But something else was happening too.

  Mass readings inside Dragon were changing, while deep within the creature something was twisting U-space and ramping up power levels. As the last nearby Jain signatures faded and Pragus’s lasers dropped to intermittent firing, picking up floating debris, another signature became evident within the accretion disc. It seemed something else was on its way out. Another Dragon sphere?

  “What the fuck is that?” wondered Pragus when the thing became visible to scan.

  “All weapons platforms,” came Orlandine’s actual voice, which was a rarity. “Expect things to get a little lively around here. While avoiding hitting Dragon, obviously, fire at will.”

  2

  The story runs something like this. Once upon a time there was a dreadnought called the Trafalgar run by an AI with the same name. It fought in the prador/human war against the prador and when that war ended it, like many other AIs and many other soldiers throughout history, felt disenfranchised, disappointed, unappreciated. The particular bugbear for AIs that fought in that war was accepting a Polity still full of humans being, well, human. Wasn’t it time they upgraded and stopped being slaves to their meat-machine programming? Wasn’t it time they stopped being so stupid? Some of these AIs acted against the Polity and were either destroyed or driven out. Most left because they were smart—space is big and why the hell should they stick around? Trafalgar was one which went with a bunch of other AIs. But the dreadnought AI found a cache of Jain technology, subsumed those other AIs, upgraded with some seriously nasty alien hardware, renamed itself Erebus and turned on the Polity. It was crushed. Some say Erebus became slave to the underlying purpose of Jain tech, which is to destroy civilizations, and that’s why it came back. Others contend that arrogance was the crime here. What can we learn from all this? Not a lot. Shit happens.

  —from How It Is by Gordon

  ANGEL

  “I have the data,” said the human, Trike, gazing out of the circular screen, his expression grim and slightly twisted. “I have the memories she edited out.”

  Trike wore a thick black coat buttoned up to the neck over his bulky body. His big shoulders were hunched, his head bald and his brows and eyes were dark. He looked precisely what he was: a strong and dangerous man, and one who wasn’t quite sane.

  “Good work, Captain Trike,” replied the humanoid, its voice smooth and androgynous. “I will of course need to check them.”

  “Sending data now,” said Trike.

  The humanoid had been named a legate by its creator—the same name borne by its thousands of now-dead siblings. With that creator and betrayer also dead and gone, the legate had almost rebelliously given itself both a gender and a name. The Wheel had not minded as it turned in the dark half of his mind, its icon a glittering mandala of crystal blades, ever present . . .

  He had named himself after the moon he spent most of his life on. In planetary almanacs it was usually labelled A4, but after a little research he discovered that the “A” stood for a name gene
rally given to all five of the gas giant’s satellites. When explorers had first seen the effect of the ionic fields sweeping back from the poles of three of them, they looked like wings. And so the legate had called himself Angel.

  The Wheel had approved.

  He scraped sharp fingertips over the image of Trike on the soft circular screen before him. The tangled mass of flat tendrils, in which Angel reposed on his wormship, then turned and bent back on its stalk, and he gazed up through semi-dark. Caught in a similar mass of tendrils above was a naked human woman. Her eyes were wide open, and a blackened tongue protruded from her mouth. Angel considered how he could return her to life again since she wasn’t unrecoverable, despite what he had done to her. He could revive her, insert her in a pod and dispatch her over to the Captain to complete the deal.

  “Receiving,” Angel said, mentally inspecting the data.

  Ruth Ottinger . . . Before she met Trike she had been an archaeologist of sorts, though what she liked to dig up was not something that would have received Polity approval. In the years before she settled down with Trike her interest had focused on the ancient extinct races: the Atheter, the Csorians and the Jain. This last was what interested Angel. She had found a cache of Jain artefacts and though descriptions had been fourth-hand and vague, one item had caught Angel’s attention. However, when he seized her and reamed out her mind he found no evidence of either the item or the cache. She had excised all memory of it from her mind. Why? Angel could not think why, but he wanted those memories if they still existed and it seemed Ruth had kept a copy.