The Soldier

by Neal Asher

  Then, through a nearby cam, he inspected his present form.

  He was humanoid like the Golem androids made by Cybercorp, but metalskin like some of the company’s older versions. His skin was polished chrome over the smooth areas but shaded to blue-green at his joints and where his ersatz musculature was outlined. He towered tall and incredibly thin, while his fingers were one and a half times the length of human ones and terminated in sharp points. His head slanted backwards, tapering down sharply to the lipless slot of his mouth. He possessed no nose and his eyes were lidless. There were no edges to the metal skin at his joints—the material there actually stretched and flexed like skin. His whole exterior consisted of the same metal, even down to the insect glitter of his eyes.

  This form had been chosen for efficiency in human environments and to generate fear in those he dealt with on behalf of Erebus—the AI that once ran the dreadnought Trafalgar and had become something more vast and dangerous after it took control of Jain technology. Angel had retained this form during his service because that was the wish of Erebus. You did not disobey a creator who made up half of your mental structure and who could consign you to some virtual hell on a whim. But Erebus had both defeated itself and been defeated by the Polity. Turning on itself during a battle with the Polity AIs, it had meticulously destroyed all its parts, or so everyone involved had thought. To Angel, this was the betrayal. He had been left trapped on the surface of a moon, disconnected from Erebus by an electromagnetic storm on the gas giant it orbited, which had been triggered by a Polity gravity-wave weapon.

  He had spent an age on the surface of that moon, wandering aimlessly, his body feeding off environmental radiation, and his mind blank. Only when a sulphur fumarole hurled him out into space, where the partially functioning remains of his wormship picked him up, did some elements of his mind begin to return. With them came the Wheel, nascent, simply turning in the dark half of his mind.

  Slowly he began rebuilding the ship, not even sure why he was doing so. When he finally managed to understand and repair the ship’s drive systems, and leave close orbit of the gas giant, purpose returned. The Polity was the enemy. That’s all he knew then, though later he found his hatred spreading to all present-day sentients, including the prador. But even now, having discovered that two-and-a-half centuries had passed since Erebus’s defeat, the empty half of his mind the rogue AI had occupied was only just beginning to flicker with new thoughts and numerous questions. This was when he felt the turning of the Wheel and sensed it assisting him in his mental endeavours.

  Time, Angel felt, suddenly even angrier, for a change of Erebus’s chosen form.

  He initiated long unused technology inside his body, and his metallic skin began to flow. His head deformed, taking on a more human shape, growing a nose and opening a more mobile mouth, but with everything still shiny and metallic. His bulbous fly eyes sank back into his head and grew lids. He held up a hand and watched the fingers shrink, but was reluctant to forgo their sensitive points. Surely he looked a little less threatening now? He smiled fiercely, aware that, closer to the human form but certainly not quite right, he looked even more menacing. This increased when he turned his eyes midnight black.

  Fallen Angel, he thought, and grinned, exposing gleaming metallic teeth. His smirk disappeared as he remembered that Polity speculation had alleged the legates were in fact corrupted Golem androids. Was he reacting to the influence of his past again? But even though he had changed his outer form, his inner workings remained the same, as did the pattern of his thoughts. Impatient now, he scanned the interior of his ship and focused on one item. The corpse of the woman, Ruth Ottinger, had been snared by ship tendrils. Her body had been burned a little and had ruptured in places from exposure to vacuum, but it might still be serviceable.

  He stared at her, long and hard. Reaching for his hatred of humanity as an explanation for why he had treated her so cruelly, he found only an emptiness. She could serve as a distraction for him right now, he decided. He ran a deeper scan from the tendrils and made an assessment. Not too bad. Doable. But even as he finished assessing her he was not sure why he was doing this. It was irrelevant to his purpose—a diversion. It wasn’t guilt, it could not be guilt . . .

  He injected fibres into her body and began making repairs, summoning thicker tendrils with precision instruments and feed pipes for materials. Fortunately her own nanosuite had kept her body more viable for revival than a base-format human body. Though she had been dead for months her condition was that of someone newly dead. Cerebral degradation was minimal and the burns and other damage could be handled by the nanosuite once her body was up and running again. Angel injected tubules to convey oxygen and nutrients inside her, adding a powerful anticoagulant and other substances to counter the micro-damage throughout. He injected carbon fibres to restart her heart and then, once that was beating, inserted an array of fibres into her brain to spread neural meshes and make connections. Getting her autonomous nervous system running was delicate work, and further tubules were required to add neurochem and remove stubborn blood clots. To speed the process Angel performed some surgery, steadily removing dead matter that was too damaged to revive and spraying in collagen scaffolds. He peeled away burned skin and replaced it with a synthetic used by war-time autodocs. He cell-welded bone breaks. Her burned-out eyes he replaced with synthetic ones which, at the last moment, he tuned to be completely black like his own.

  Ruth began to move, to writhe in the tendrils holding her. Angel debated on whether to restore the higher functions of her brain, because with more autonomy she might be useful to him. Yes, she would be useful to him. Her utility would become clear when he went to reclaim those Jain artefacts . . . was this why he had revived her? Again it was a decision another part of his mind questioned. He paused for a second and delivered instructions to his ship. The semi-vacuum around him began to fill with human-breathable air and he felt its pressure building against his skin. Injecting and adjusting, he gradually started up her mind and, from a ship data cache, restored the memories she herself had edited out. It was while doing this, he found the object imbedded on the inside of her skull.

  Cursory examination revealed the object’s miniature power supply was topped up by photo-electrics grown as part of her hair. It also revealed that part of the device was unavailable to medical scan. Angel used something more powerful and finally recognized what he had found. Here was a quantum-matched transmitter, one of a pair, and made before anyone even thought up the term underspace. The recipients of this pair would always know where the other was, and in which direction their partner lay. However, this device possessed an addition to incorporate stellar travel. It gave U-space coordinates.

  “Captain Trike,” Angel said, pausing then at the odd sound of his voice within the wormship. He had never actually filled the place with air to this pressure before—always retaining a low-pressure atmosphere of inert gas for convenience.

  His first instinct was to shut the transmitter down. But Trike . . . Angel felt a surge of viciousness and briefly searched the dark half of his mind for a nub of brightness—the imminence of the Wheel. He now considered how enjoyable it would be to repay Trike for the destruction the man had wrought. He gazed out through the sensors of his ship into surrounding space, searching for some sign of the hooper. A cursory examination of the planetoid in whose shadow he had lurked revealed nothing. Nor anything on the darker planet it orbited. Anyway, it was quite probable that Trike had used a U-space relay during his assassination attempt. Why would he actually come close and risk himself? Angel disconnected, though he left the scan operating to alert him should anything appear.

  As he returned to the moment, he became aware of a sound. It took him a second to realize this was issuing from Ruth. She was gasping, moaning, and her face was twisted with a look of both horror and pain.

  He felt a cruel satisfaction with this. But then something slid away in his mind and the nub of brightness flickered, darkened and winked
out. Emptiness slammed back and Angel now felt horror at Ruth’s suffering. He quickly shut down the pain messages to her brain but her writhing continued. Panic rose until he realized that her pain was mostly mental, for she was remembering what he had done to her. She was in the same mental state she had been in just before she died, and to her no time had passed. She was terrified. He abruptly switched off her consciousness. Gazing at her for a long time, he tried to understand his complete change in attitude towards her, but this train of thought fled from his grasp.

  Angel decided, on the spur of this moment, that he did not want to control her absolutely. He wanted a semi-autonomous biological probe to which he could give guidance, and trust to get the job done. The job he had resurrected her for, surely? He now injected further fibres and tubules into her and made adjustments. He extracted the organic physical component from her recent memory up to a point before he had seized and bound her here. Now she would remember precisely what had happened to her, but it would not cripple her mentally. The pain would be gone.

  She came to and turned her head to gaze at him with her midnight

  eyes.

  “Fucker! What did you do with Trike?”

  ORLANDINE

  Orlandine remembered her first encounter with the big old assassin drone, when she was incorporating Jain technology into her being and had been more human. He was called Knobbler, and he was a brute, typical of a drone type that usually wanted to manifest as something nasty, and over-endowed with limbs. He looked like the bastard offspring of an octopus and a fiddler crab, with a definite admixture of equipment for earth-moving in his ancestry. His main body was six feet across and as many deep, with a sharp rim just like that of a crab. The body possessed his main sensorium, including disconcerting squid eyes, and was mackerel patterned—indicating now-inactive old-style chameleonware. Extending below and behind the body was a tail resembling the abdomen of a hoverfly, which he could fold up conveniently against his underside. From the juncture between these sections sprouted numerous heavy and partially jointed tentacles. Some suspended him off the floor, others groped through the air, but all terminated in the tools of his one-time lethal trade.

  “Hi, Knobbler,” she said. “How are the guys?”

  As she spoke she analysed, with more senses than just her eyes, the two massive objects out there. The biggest was of a somewhat different design to the one Knobbler and his crew of assassin and war drones had occupied when she had found them two-and-a-half centuries ago. Then they had been aboard a war runcible mothballed since the end of the war. This was a U-space gate used to shift large numbers of ships without U-space drives, or to fling moonlets at the prador. The big runcible the drones were building now, with a lot of robotic help, was an octagonal frame ten miles across, with the frame itself being square in section and a quarter of a mile thick. Each section of the frame was bulked with great hardfield generators, electromagnets and the hardware for creating the gate. Unlike previous war runcibles it wasn’t made to separate and expand. That would create too many weaknesses for its intended use.

  “We are all good,” Knobbler replied. “Most of us are well occupied with the work here. Only Cutter and Bludgeon are getting a bit bored.”

  Orlandine smiled, aware that contact with the drones here sometimes elicited more human emotion from her than contact with humans. Cutter was a war drone like a huge praying mantis fashioned out of razorblades, while Bludgeon looked like a giant bedbug. Most likely, it was Cutter who was being a pain, since he liked action. Bludgeon doubtless agreed with him because of their partnership, which had lasted since the prador/human war. Apparently, while Orlandine had been sleeping for two centuries, the two of them had been in the Graveyard getting into all sorts of scrapes. Adrenaline junkies was the term for the human version of them.

  “And the work is progressing well?”

  Orlandine now focused her full attention on the smaller object out there. This was simply a ring ten miles across. It was another gate and bulked around its rim with similar engines to those on the octagon, but it wasn’t anywhere near as strong. The reason for this was that it only had to generate a gate to let an object exit from underspace. How long it survived after that wasn’t really of much concern. Orlandine calculated it would last less than a second. The octagon had to survive a lot longer, and be strong enough to get close to and gate through the huge and dangerous object concerned.

  “It’s going well,” said Knobbler, “though supplies have been a bit tardy lately. We’re still waiting on two more of the big grav-engines.”

  Orlandine immediately keyed into the data cloud—the manifests, orders, construction plans, lists of stores and all. She worried about the delay because it might mean that her suppliers, either Earth Central or the Kingdom, had started to suspect the orders weren’t intended for the weapons platform as supposed. She noted that the grav-engines had been dispatched from the Polity and would arrive in a few days. Then she saw something else. Other supplies she had diverted here from weapons platform construction had been diverted back again. She studied the data intently but could not see how it had been done. It might even have been some simple computing error. Whatever the cause, it was delaying construction here by months.

  Dragon, she thought, but could not confirm the suspicion.

  She set the details back to how they should be.

  “Good. All is good,” she said, mentally shifting to another connection via U-space. She gave the data a cursory inspection, then paused and went over it again. What was Dragon doing out there in the defence sphere? Was something wrong with it? The entity, according to the feed it allowed from itself, had finally managed to shrug off the Jain technology that had attacked it but was now behaving strangely. Instead of heading off to be about its business—usually cruising around the accretion disc and gathering data, or away on excursions to other systems—it was travelling slowly towards Weapons Platform Mu.

  “You’ll be coming to take a look?” Knobbler asked.

  Orlandine hesitated longer than was usual for her and got pinged by the old assassin drone. Dragon’s recent incursion into the disc had bothered her from the start. Then there was the supply delay that might or might not have been caused by the entity. And now this strange behaviour. It was time to have a long talk with that giant alien. But even as she decided this she could foresee its failure. Yes, she would ask Dragon questions but was too wise in the creature’s ways to expect a straight answer.

  “Yes,” she decided, “I will come take a look.”

  With a thought she sent her ship down towards the larger runcible. She would make her usual physical tour of all the work in progress, reac-quaint herself with the drones working here and ensure everything was up to spec. She trusted the drones but this was very serious business—the slightest error could lead to disaster once the project was activated. She would also make a much closer inspection of all the data related to the work.

  The runcible loomed closer and a docking port signalled its readiness for her. This was set in a large outgrowth like a giant metallic polyp, and was where Knobbler was located. As her ship docked she disconnected from her interface sphere and pushed herself out. Her shipsuit spilled out from the disc on her shoulder and covered her as she stepped into her atrium. A butterfly flower fluttered over, landed on her outstretched hand and she studied the delicate thing for a long moment. Yes, she decided, a close inspection was required here, for Dragon could have introduced errors. She would also isolate the place from the defence sphere. There was simply no room for errors when your aim was to move something as super-massive as a black hole.

  ANGEL

  Angel studied Ruth Ottinger for a long moment, then waved a hand at his face and body. “You recognize me?”

  “I recognize you. I can still see your rotten core.”

  Angel absorbed the insult and almost instinctively considered punishing her, then rejected the idea. What purpose would there be in giving her pain when pain was what he had
just taken away?

  “Trike is alive and well,” he said.

  Her eyes welled with tears. “So you say.”

  Human speech was so slow and inaccurate, Angel felt. He toyed with the idea of downloading a précis of recent events into her mind, rather than using that slow human form of communication. But some hours still remained until he could move his ship and what else did he have to do?

  “My purpose in taking you was to extract your memories concerning the sale of a cache of Jain artefacts,” he explained, and watched her.

  “Memories I have again,” she realized.

  “Yes, you edited them out.” Angel continued, “I promised to return you to Trike if he retrieved those memories for me. He found them . . . in a ruby pendant.”

  “Then why am I still here?” she spat.

  “Things went a little wrong.” Angel tried out a grimace on his new face. “I intended to kill him, of course, as I killed you, but he was smart.” Even as he spoke the words Angel was baffled by them. Why the killing? Why?

  “You killed me?”

  “Yes, but now you are alive again.”

  She opened and closed her mouth as she took it in. She looked haunted and baffled, then said, “He was smart.”

  “He controlled his ship remotely and when I took it he detonated its engines.” Angel shrugged—another attempt at human expression—but he was also grateful to move on from his uncomfortable thoughts. “Destroyed nearly half my ship.”