The Soldier

by Neal Asher

  “Good, but a shame he missed you.” She paused, then continued, “Why did you revive me? What do you want from me now?”

  Angel reached up and a tendril snaked out to his hand. He grasped it and pulled himself up level with where she was caught in the tendrils still repairing her body. He folded his legs below him and hung there like some weird attenuated metal Buddha.

  “You are, at present, a relief from boredom,” he explained, knowing deep inside that he was lying. “So don’t bore me.”

  Panic fled across her features and she looked from side to side as if trying to see some way out. Then abruptly she grew calm and focused on him.

  “Why do you want Jain artefacts?” she asked.

  “One of those artefacts is very interesting,” he replied confidently, then found himself floundering. “I revived you to help me obtain it from the one you sold it to,” he said quickly, and felt a hot flush of something pass through him. He had lied with his previous assertion that boredom had compelled him to wake her. This was confusing—so much did not make sense now. He fell silent, groping for a way to continue . . . being.

  A lot of the work on Ruth’s body was now finished and with a thought Angel instructed those tendrils not still in use to retract. The main mass parted from around her face and upper body, with just a few left in place penetrating her chest and skull. Her arms now free, she crossed them over her breasts, rubbed her upper arms and started shivering.

  “I studied those artefacts,” Ruth said abruptly, still focusing on him.

  “One did contain something odd, or at least stranger than the tech in the others.”

  “Continue,” said Angel, grabbing desperately onto this line of conversation.

  “I’m cold,” she said.

  He felt a flash of irritation, but it dissolved quickly. With another thought, he began to raise the temperature within their pocket of air in the ship. He mentally traced her clothing and found it caught between two of the major worm-forms of the ship. Tendrils extracted it and began making repairs. He then pondered their first meeting. How, after reviewing details and price on the commodity he was supposedly selling, she had come over from Trike’s ship in a shuttle. The man himself had been conducting business aboard the nearby space station which served as a trading post on the Polity Line. She had been so calm, confident and curious as her shuttle docked and she came in through the apparently conventional airlock. The wormship had been tightly knotted then and looked no odder than any other ship around the station. Her calm mood only lasted to the point when the tendrils grabbed her, ripped away her clothing and bound her in a writhing cage while stabbing into her skull.

  Angel grimaced. Why had he been so eager to rip everything away from her? Again the remains of Erebus’s influence? Or something else? His attention strayed to the all but empty half of his mind and his unease grew. But then it was momentarily dispelled as his exterior sensors alerted him to something related to his thoughts. Her shuttle hung out there amidst remaining debris, bent out of shape and badly damaged. Using workable elements of its drive system, he began to move his wormship towards it. Why? Again he was not sure about his motivations. However, he continued because he was sure of one thing: his present actions did not stem from the residue of Erebus in his mind. And they did not come from anything else.

  The temperature rose and soon Ruth stopped shivering, but she kept her arms crossed over her breasts. Angel thought it inappropriate coyness in the circumstances, but he took no pleasure in it. He felt for her, and groped for something to fill the silence.

  “You humans, the AIs, and the prador occupy a significant portion of the galaxy and are so proud of your achievements,” he said all in a rush, “but you are nothing. I don’t know which is stronger, my hatred of you all, or my contempt. One of the older races would crush you like a bug. No, not even that, they would probably not even notice you as they stepped on you.”

  Angel felt no emotion as he spoke, and a great deal of doubt, as if he was testing the words out on her. Was this what he really thought? He inspected himself internally and noted that his mind was changing—that new pathways were etching their way through the organo-metal substrate and that electrical activity was changing. Thought was opening out wider because more of those pathways were now spearing into that portion of his mind that had previously been occupied by Erebus—and by the Wheel.

  “So you hate us all,” she said. “Is there anything you love?”

  “Yes,” he said, and it felt like a lie.

  “You are so sure.” She looked tired now. Understandable really. And he was glad she had not pushed him on the matter.

  “Yes, I am sure.”

  Empty words.

  “Why?” she asked, her attention snapping back towards him, more awake now. “Why do you so—”

  Angel put her to sleep and then studied her for a long time. He had been utterly sure of everything up until Trike nearly destroyed this ship. Doubts now swarmed his mind. Doubts about his own motives, his emotions, his hatred. He shook himself, then moved down to the floor and ensconced himself in his seat of tendrils. He tried to think clearly about all he had done and all he intended to do, and felt himself sinking into a dark mental place. With every thought he had, every feeling, he also found the polar opposite in his mind and steadily his thinking simply locked up. Only many hours later did alerts from his ship pull him back to himself, though he wasn’t sure what “himself” was any more.

  His ship was now ready to depart and he wondered what to do about Ruth. Kill her? wondered one part of his mind, almost tiredly. His attention strayed to the shuttle, now sitting within a cyst of his ship and already being disassembled prior to repair. No, she would be useful, killing her was pointless and . . . he simply did not want to. He had to do what he wanted, and not concede to the ghost impulses of his former master. He shook himself again, then remotely returned the tendrils to Ruth’s skull, drilling them inside, and began weaving a neural lace in her brain. She would be able to talk and her brain would remain intact. But once he was done she would obey him absolutely. There was no reason for her to die.

  Nothing could compel him to kill her. Again.

  PRAGUS

  Dragon was still slowly heading out towards Weapons Platform Mu. Pragus gazed at the entity, recognizing it on levels of its mind that seemed tilted against each other. As Pragus it knew all about Dragon and had seen it many times, but it was also experiencing memories about the entity that were not its own.

  “All quiet on the Western front,” said Nagus.

  “If you say that again,” replied Pragus, selecting from a number of previous replies, “I will be compelled to take drastic action.”

  The banter was realistic enough because Pragus kept the original format of its mind to the forefront of communications. In its deeper self was a vague shifting mass of contradictions and communications with the other AI, a matter of desperately maintaining a front. The ostensibly jocular banter was also, at its heart, a real consideration. Pragus could turn its weapons on Nagus, obliterate that platform and its AI. The elimination of Nagus would make it easier for Pragus to break away from the defence sphere and be about its own business—that of vengeance. Its own business?

  No, attacking its nearest neighbour in the defence sphere or breaking away was impossible. Its job, to destroy anything carrying a Jain signature that left the accretion disc, was still the bedrock of its being. It simply could not disobey the directive Orlandine had hard-wired in its mind.

  “Not even birdsong,” added Nagus.

  Pragus sorted possible replies but one surfaced from an old conversation with a war drone and was out before it could stop it.

  “Fuck off,” it said. After a moment of confusion, and then panic, it cut the comlink to Nagus.

  Pragus realized it had been taken over by the creature. Now out of the artificial womb, and out of the disposable lab that had contained it, the creature was steadily making its way through the weapons platform tow
ards the chain-glass cylinder made into a home for it. The AI knew, with absolute certainty, that its former self would be screaming alarms and fighting for independence. But it was no longer its former self. It didn’t know what it was any more, and its purpose was disordered.

  Pragus the AI studied the creature, the experience strange because its sense of self was confused. It felt itself to be Pragus but also felt it was looking through the mind of another entity. It felt itself in those four conjoined insect forms.

  Reconfigure.

  It detected a huge bloc of information shifting in its mind and sensory inputs fell away. Blind now, Pragus replayed old conversations over and over again. It felt they were all that was keeping it in touch with reality as it sank into the pool of its own and another’s mind.

  Reconfigure.

  Another shift, and it could see again. But it was no longer the AI Pragus.

  As the creature moved along the shortest route to a precise location, the entire weapons platform was clear in her serial mind. She decoded molecules in the air to add further nuance to her visual and radar image of her environment. The technology here was advanced, but she could see that it had not advanced to a point where divisions between biotech and hard technology had been erased. The organic precursors of this, these humans, had yet failed to fully integrate—to become their tools and allow their tools to become them. This she ascertained from her surroundings and the data she continued to extract from Pragus. The AI had now lost its sense of self and had become just an intelligent data store.

  Soon she reached her first destination and, via Pragus, opened a pressure door. She moved inside, inspected the grappler standing back against the wall, then moved over to the sealed cylinder sitting vertical in the middle of the floor. With one forelimb she tipped it over, scribed round the top with a hard blade-like finger and flicked away the end cap. She then reached inside and pulled out the dried-out husk of her former self, which Pragus had moved here from a disposable laboratory. Lifting it, she began to break off pieces—she crunched them up and, forming them into sticky balls with her mandibles and salivary spicules, swallowed them. This was no problem—the quantum storage crystals she was after were just too small and numerous to be damaged by the process.

  Inside her complex gut she began digesting the biomatter and incorporating the nano-crystals. Memories of her former self, which the humans had named the Client, began to load from the crystals to her mind. Yes, there was much missing, but still enough for her to sketch out a coherent picture. Later, of course, when she could make the necessary equipment, she would reclaim her full data backups from her U-space store.

  The Client remembered herself as part of a high civilization, enjoying its power, enjoying its life and the acquisition of knowledge. She, like her fellow beings, was immortal and in no great hurry to move to the next stage of existence on the supposedly inevitable road to the Omega Point. Then the prador had arrived, refusing all attempts at communication and simply destroying everything to do with the Client’s civiliza-tion—the Species—that came within reach. Shocked into inaction, the Species had nearly folded during the first attack. But there were those in their number who had always railed against the complacency of their kind. They took over and turned the knowledge of the Species against the prador. But it was no good. Though they hurt the prador badly, the sheer numerical advantage and industrial might of the alien aggressors was what told in the end. The prador annihilated the Client’s species, and only the Client herself survived.

  Memories of what had come after were vague. And how this husk of herself had ended up here she did not know. Marco’s story of a prador museum was obviously a lie because that had supposedly been about one of her fellows taken as a trophy during their war against the prador. The Client herself had died centuries after that war and sometime following the war between the humans and the prador.

  She finally finished eating the remains of her old self and returned to the corridor. She hurried through it because, though Pragus had raised the temperature as much as possible, it still wasn’t enough for her. As she moved she incorporated more memory and began to remember her association with the humans and Polity AIs. She had made weapons for them but they had betrayed her by negotiating a truce with the prador. She remembered fleeing, then it all became vague but for the intense memory of her own agonizing death. Who had killed her and why, she did not know. She felt an angry resentment against the Polity but that was not as strong as her utter hatred of the prador. Now she could see how it might be possible to cause both some big problems. The Polity and the Kingdom sat in an uneasy truce that could be broken.

  The Client, now through to stolen sensors of Pragus, turned her attention to a protruding hollow cylinder of chain-glass a mile long. Red-orange light glowed from the heaters inside, used to raise the temperature to a comfortable level. It was only minutes away from being ready, and once ensconced inside she could begin to grow properly. Soon she would be able to reclaim her memories from her U-space cache and learn again what she had known. For her present memories hinted that her whole self was a great deal more knowledgeable. She could also begin planning her escape from this place. It would probably entail causing some damage here, to Nagus, and to other nearer weapons platforms. And probably to that Dragon sphere which, annoyingly, she could see was still heading straight towards Weapons Platform Mu.

  4

  The Atheter, Jain, and the Csorians are named after, respectively, a kind of ceramic blade; the daughter of Alexion Smith (she was the first to discover a Jain artefact); and an archaeologist sneezing as he named his new discovery (though that’s probably apocryphal). But no name has been given to the race of hive creatures, whose form was a long chain of conjoined insect-like bodies that the prador exterminated. Maybe this is because the only artefacts to be dug up are in the Prador Kingdom, and because archaeologists—though often fanatical—are perhaps not inclined to risk becoming breakfast in pursuit of the dusty secrets of the past. Also, no human found out about these creatures; one of them found us. The Client called its kind the Species—not an unusual name, historically speaking. The Species had been hanging around for centuries plotting revenge against the prador, and during the war joined up on our side. Some say that the terror weapons we used—like the parasite assassin drones—were an idea that germinated in the creature’s serial brain. Others talk of some super-weapon it created that Polity AIs were too terrified to use. By and by, the Client’s existence has slid into rumour and hearsay. The final act in the story, be it fact or fiction, was of the Client’s grisly death and of a large payment in diamond slate made by the new king of the prador to a freelance assassin.

  —from How It Is by Gordon

  ANGEL

  The wormship fell into the real, with Angel as much in its exterior sensors as in his body and still confused. He felt a strange nostalgia when looking upon the face of the gas giant ahead. Mandelbrot patterns decorated its surface, slowly changing with its hundred-year season. The face of that thing had been a constant in the sky during Angel’s time down on one of its small moons. Via his ship’s sensors, he now gazed upon that particular moon. The thing was dense, almost 50 per cent iron, and possessed a strong magnetic field, just like two other moons in the system. Like them, this moon—Angel 4—interacted strongly with the magnetosphere of the gas giant, ionizing the thin gases perpetually spilling from volcanism on its surface into snow-white trails from its poles—the angel wings it was named after.

  Nearby were two ships. A reaver—a huge golden ship shaped like an extended teardrop and one of the feared vessels of the prador King’s Guard—sat in a pseudo-matter scaffold in a Lagrange point between the moon and the giant planet. Docked to it like some legless parasitic isopod on a shark was Father-Captain Brogus’s battered destroyer. He always remained inside while his children—first- and second-children whose growth to adulthood had been stalled and who were enslaved to his pher-omones—were working hard to restore the reaver. They we
re assisted in their endeavours by the Clade. The collection of strange drones, which were both individuals and components of a swarm AI, worked a great deal more efficiently than the prador. The Clade would also be useful later. Two hundred of its units now resided in the armoury of the reaver, their purpose . . . Angel shook himself. They were part of the plan—yes, that was it.

  Drawing closer, Angel looked, with something approaching bafflement, upon all he had wrought here. All his plans, all his steady work here led to his goal of delivering a hard blow against the hated humans, Polity AIs and the prador—he was certain of his goal. Surely he knew what he was doing?

  Then what? asked a rogue part of his mind.

  The wormship slid through space, closer and closer, and something tightened in his consciousness. He felt his thoughts begin to lose their sluggishness. Darkness receded from his mind, lit by flickering and revolving lights growing in intensity.

  The Clade.

  Angel tried to locate the swarm AI’s main mass and soon found it floating in the upper atmosphere of the gas giant. A big metallic ball that in some ways resembled a wormship, it consisted of thousands of drones. Each possessed the head of a polished steel axolotl and a body like a chrome-plated dinosaur spine. The drones had been made during the Polity war against the prador to penetrate prador war machines and take control of them. But something had happened post-production that caused them to hive together as a single entity, which named itself the Clade. It had been scheduled for destruction shortly after this, but, ruthlessly efficient and amoral, it had murdered its way aboard a departing dreadnought and escaped the war factory where it had been made. It was insane, dangerous and, knowing the right buttons to press, a very useful ally for Angel.

  Brogus . . .

  Angel opened a com connection and was immediately rewarded by the sight of the father-captain resting in his sanctum. Brogus was an old prador who had shed his legs. His shape was that of a vertically flattened pear, the front, upper piece being his visual turret sporting two large red distance eyes and three smaller eyes either side. His upper eye stalks were missing, as were his claws and mandibles, but these last two he had replaced with prosthetics moulded of brassy metal. Shortly after the connection opened he rose, as if startled, off the floor and hovered, supported by two grav-motors—oval slabs of technology attached to his underside.