The Soldier

by Neal Asher

  The soldier’s single-minded focus on destruction, and on loading data, had kept it distracted. It had only concentrated on analysing, then defending itself against computer attacks from the Cyberat, which had enabled Angel to slip something Jain-based into portions of its mind: those worms. As they assembled they began using the soldier’s own transmitters to send back the schematic of its mind to the legate. He prepared to receive something vast and complex but what he got surprised him. It seemed all structure; autonomous systems almost like hard wiring and no plasticity.

  He spent some minutes studying the schematic and found it strangely empty. It was, he realized, a large complex processor. He also saw that he had been very lucky to penetrate it. Though mostly autonomous, it did have some seriously dangerous routines to deal with mental penetration. That they had not reacted seemed likely due to the fact that large portions of the soldier’s mind had yet to be activated, portions Angel failed to understand. But he surmised that this super-soldier was nowhere near its full growth and potential. He then decided he had seen enough of the schematic and, very carefully, began to look into the mind itself.

  Everything that had happened since the moment it became conscious in Zackander’s zero-freezer lay open to his inspection. Angel saw how the super-soldier had allowed the old Cyberat to believe he could command it by giving him control over the command channel of just one small portion of its mind. Meanwhile it had been working steadily to free itself. If Zackander had not panicked when Angel arrived, he calculated that it would have freed itself within two years. The result on this world would have been the same, though Zackander would have been dead too. The legate now began to activate other memories and view them.

  Angel looked upon a strange city of triangular buildings rising from a giant circular grav-plate, hovering above mountains. Something living fled across his view and he glimpsed a lobster body trailing ribbed tentacles. This thing was black and polished silver—the silver being the cyber component of it sunk into its coal-like flesh. Jain? He captured the image and studied it more closely, aware that this must be a memory once stored in the soldier’s very genome. But as he did so other portions of his mind went on high alert. By awakening this memory he had caused a chain-reaction in the soldier’s mind and other parts of it were waking up. Suddenly he understood the purpose of the U-space devices distributed throughout the creature. They were a connection to a backup sitting in that continuum. It seemed likely that this soldier could receive a mind from storage—the mind of a super-soldier that had been out of commission for five million years.

  Angel had to act quickly if he was to seize control of this thing and get it to his wormship. But as a precaution before proceeding, he sent out a call to the sphere transport he had used to land on the Cyberat world. Then he swamped all command channels within the soldier and tried to seize control. But grappling with the mind suddenly became like wrestling eels. More memories and subsystems were loading to it constantly and it began to change shape, forcing Angel to adapt his attack. For a moment he thought he had it, and was gaining control, until he saw the shape of what was now occupying the soldier and it scattered his wits. Almost casually it slapped him away and he found himself back wholly in his own body again.

  Angel tried to understand what he had seen, but could not find a way in. He realized in retrospect that the only common ground between them was the technology. His own mind, when its antecedents were traced back, had arisen from humanity. The shape of this thing was totally alien. It wasn’t even akin to the prador who, though very different from humans, possessed human traits. Here was a mind that had moved far beyond a straight-line evolutionary formation into something much more complex . . . and twisted. This was a dead loss—he could not control it.

  He looked around and opened scanning to take in a wider area. His sphere was hurtling towards him while the soldier still hung in the sky over a hundred miles away. But he knew that once it was ready, it would come for him. He looked up, focusing on his connection with his wormship.

  “New plan,” he sent.

  All he got in return from the Wheel was a sense of puzzlement.

  “Piss it off,” Angel finished.

  The soldier was now on the move, slowly at first, hesitantly, then accelerating. As Angel had supposed, it was heading directly towards him. He issued further instructions to his ship and a bright green particle beam flashed down through the atmosphere, its energy levels perfectly calculated not to penetrate the soldier’s defences. This flashed against a distant hardfield, revealing a curve to the field, which should have been impossible. The soldier dropped from the sky and hit the ground hard, bouncing, but it then shot back up again, shedding fire and smoke. Angel realized his calculations had been wrong, and he really needed to slow the thing down more. His ship fired again. This time the soldier stayed down for longer, but when it came back up again Angel could detect a powerful U-signature at its location—some twist in that continuum he did not recognize. He hit it a third time, but the soldier just disappeared inside an opaque white sphere, which carried on. Angel ordered his ship to continue firing, for while the thing was inside that impossibly spherical hardfield it couldn’t launch any weapons of its own. Hopefully.

  By now Angel’s sphere was just half a mile away. He issued new instructions to it and activated grav inside himself to rise up off the ground. The sphere, opening its door, swept him up and he crashed inside. It snapped shut, and he fell down flat as it accelerated upwards at a hundred gravities. When he finally managed a sensor link he saw, as expected, the soldier speeding after him.

  TRIKE

  Trike regarded the frame images as they reached vacuum. He watched the recording, taken from satellite memory, of Ruth’s shuttle heading into orbit—she had left shortly after the creature moved away from the Cube. The wormship then arrived over the world, but her orbit took her away from it.

  “She got away from it,” he observed.

  “Yes, she did,” said Cog noncommitally.

  “Maybe she isn’t controlled by Angel?”

  “Maybe not.” Cog was now staring at him intently. “Or maybe she escaped that control for a brief while.”

  “Yes . . . yes,” said Trike, confused about what he was feeling.

  “It’s eased a bit now,” said Cog. “Hasn’t it?”

  Trike gazed at him. “How do you know?”

  “I’ve seen this kind of craziness before,” he replied. “You have to be on your guard because it can slide back so easily.” “It always has,” said Trike, feeling hollow.

  Cog turned away from him, shaking his head. After a moment of checking his instruments and pulling up other views in the screen frames, he said, “Something happened down there.” He pointed at one repeating view that showed the wormship firing down towards the planet. “It fired on that thing, I think to delay it so Angel could escape. He’s on his way up now, and fast.” He paused for a second, then added, “And so is that thing.”

  Trike watched the display, which Cog now zoomed in on. He could see the two objects hurtling towards the wormship, and two other screens showed the close views of an ascending sphere and the pursuing creature. Something was puzzling him; something had slipped his mind. He concentrated, trying to understand what the tightness in his chest was telling him.

  “We should get to Ruth,” he said.

  Cog turned and looked at him, his expression hard. “Angel might yet pick her up again.”

  Trike puzzled his way through that, still fighting his wayward mind. He realized then the hard truth. Cog wanted Angel to seize Ruth because then he would have a way to continue tracking the wormship.

  The two objects drew in towards the wormship, the sphere abruptly decelerating. The green particle beam then flashed again and the sphere swerved, the beam just grazing it and sending it tumbling away. It righted itself and, leaving a vapour trail, dropped back towards the planet in a long arc.

  “What the fuck now?” asked Cog.

  Why
? Trike asked himself. Angel’s ship had been firing on the creature, but now it was firing on the legate himself. Even to his befuddled mind, that made no sense.

  Meanwhile the creature was decelerating hard, but it wasn’t going after Angel. It finally came to a halt just a few miles out from the wormship and just hung there in vacuum. After a long pause, it fired up thrusters in its tail and carried on, sliding into a hollow in the ship which writhed and closed around it. The wormship then began moving away from the planet, faster and faster. It shimmered, dropped into U-space and was gone.

  “Fuck,” said Cog. “No coordinates.” He looked over at Trike. “We’ll go get Ruth now.”

  ZACKANDER

  Zackander powered up the lower sphere of his body and ran diagnostics to ensure it was now free of the sequestering programs the soldier had sent to all the Cyberat. As his search ran, he looked at the brace he had put around his broken forearm and then at the bruises all over his body. His neck still hurt from when his own lower body had rammed him into a wall. Luckily he trusted his grafts somewhat less than the younger generation, and had retained an off switch.

  Soon, those of the Cyberat who had not been in the Cube or its vicinity started getting back into contact, and Zackander began analysing what they understood had happened. He was relieved to discover that, apparently, all they knew was that a legate had come to their world and some kind of drone had destroyed the Cube. They did not know that Zackander had been incubating a Jain super-soldier—they did not know where it had come from.

  “This Angel brought that thing with him?” said the Cyberat before him.

  Doshane’s upper torso sat upon the metallic body of a spider, but one armed with prador Gatling cannons on each side. The man had a military turn of mind, and Zackander might have been able to utilize him earlier had he been given the time. It was good that he hadn’t, else the man would have understood Zackander’s responsibility for what had happened here.

  “Yes, he did,” Zackander lied.

  “What did he want?” asked Doshane.

  “Jain artefacts from my collection,” Zackander replied. “I was prepared to deal but then he attacked. I have no idea why.”

  “And why did his own ship turn on him?”

  “Again, I don’t know why,” said Zackander, and in this case he really didn’t. Maybe the Jain soldier had seized control of the ship? “Maybe another party was involved and there was a falling out. All I do know is that this legate must be dealt with.”

  And fast, before he has a chance to speak . . .

  “And then we must clear up the mess,” said Doshane. “We’ve lost many citizens. We have lost the Cube, a defence station and numerous satellites.” He paused, intense. “The U-space research facility survived and perhaps it is time to employ it for . . . its other use.”

  “You mean disrupt U-space and stop anything else arriving,” said Zackander.

  “Yes—it will give us time to recoup.”

  Zackander felt he was getting away from the point. “But first this legate—we must eliminate the dangers here.”

  “Yes, that we must do,” said Doshane. “We are gathering. My own robot soldiers are on their way and the others are providing what they can. We will be at the predicted impact site within four hours—presuming that sphere does not alter course.”

  “I will meet you there,” said Zackander.

  Doshane nodded smartly and his image flickered out.

  Zackander let out a tight breath. He glanced around his ship home and considered what he would have to do. His main home was gone now along with all the work he had been doing there, but he still had other Jain artefacts and he still had his life. Making a mental link, he put his ship into a descent heading towards those predicted coordinates.

  ANGEL

  Wraiths of fire snuffed out inside the transport sphere and Angel lay there burned, damaged, his mind struggling to regain function. The Wheel had been strong as he approached the wormship and he had sensed it groping past him, reaching out for the soldier. It made contact, and he then felt the link driving home into the soldier like a war dock. From that moment the Wheel began ripping from his mind, and only as this happened did he understand how firmly imbedded it had been in him. But also, he learned and understood more about the Wheel itself.

  Certainly it was some kind of alien intelligence, not as strong as a full AI yet also not the product of brute evolution. Maybe a submind? Maybe a cybernetic mind like that of a haiman? It had imbedded itself in the wormship all the time he had been down, stranded on the gas giant moon. From there it had reached out to him and even impelled him to travel to and stand over the intermittent sulphur eruption that had blown him out into space. It had then controlled him, directing him to make repairs to the wormship. However, it had to fill his mind with information for his tasks, and this raised him to higher and higher levels of consciousness, where its control of him began to slip. But what did this alien intelligence want?

  Angel was not sure. He felt numb and the information that had spilled from the Wheel sat in his mind in a confusing morass. Priorities . . . His connection with the sphere was gone and he could not re-establish it mentally, so he pushed his hands into the dense Jain tech around him to make a physical one. Everything was sluggish, in his mind and body and in the sphere itself, but finally something bound and he got a shaky link.

  Half of the sphere’s systems were fried. It had lost its main drives but still had some grav and could access some sensors. He was travelling too fast and the sphere was getting hot. Though it would not burn up in atmosphere the heat would eventually kill what remaining capabilities it had. He used grav to slow it, steadily—not putting too much strain on the grav-engines. Reading sensor data, he plotted a course in his mind. No matter what he did, the landing would still be hard. However, there was a way of softening it, and he altered the course so that it would take him down into the ocean. Finally, he had done all he could to ensure his survival, though he now wasn’t sure if that was something he wanted. He felt like nothing, as though he lay at the bottom of a deep dark pit. But memories of what the Wheel had shown him, of what he could be, as well as what it had promised before abandoning him, impelled him to thought. And he thought about the Wheel.

  There was some kind of conflict and two sides filled with hate. The Wheel was either trapped, or it was a copy of something trapped, or even a submind splintered off from that prison. Certain things needed to happen if the prison was to open, and somehow everything that Angel had done was moving towards that end. He saw gravity and U-space maths, graphical depictions of political machinations between the Polity and the Kingdom, and mental images of alien technology he felt sure was the interior of some kind of ship or space station.

  The sphere was travelling much slower now and was some hours away from splashdown. Angel could not yet work out precisely what the Wheel wanted or was doing. Certainly it had something to do with the accretion disc and the Jain technology there. But did all this matter to him? Looking within he could find only indifference to both the Polity and the Kingdom and knew for certain that the driving hatred he had felt had not been his own. With the Wheel, the soldier and the wormship now gone, he needed to ask himself what he wanted. But motives and aims for the future were vague in him and there was only one certainty: he wanted to survive.

  Looking to his own body, he ran diagnostics. Yes, the energy blast from the glancing particle beam strike had burned through him and the sphere, causing a lot of damage. But that did not account for just how much seemed to have shut down inside him. A lot of the Jain tech was either inactive or sluggish and, as a consequence, self-repair was going exceedingly slowly. Both his senses and his mental capacity were at a low ebb and so many things he could have done with just a thought previously now seemed beyond him.

  I’m depressed . . .

  Yes, he was down in the cybernetic version of that state, lower than he had been under the Wheel, but not as mindless as he had been on the gas g
iant moon. He understood that unless he made an effort he would just lie here in the sphere after it crashed and do nothing, go nowhere. He needed to push himself.

  First he looked more deeply internally, trying to nail down his problems. The technology inside was still active and still plentifully supplied with power from the laminar storage and fusion nodes scattered throughout his body. However, its efficiency was down to just 10 per cent. He found if he focused on particular functions he could speed them up and raise their efficiency, but the moment he turned his attention away it dropped off again. Understanding dawned gradually. At first he thought that the Wheel had deliberately damaged him in some way upon their parting, but now he realized it wasn’t that. As a legate he was in a symbiotic relationship with the wormship. It took most of the processing load of the technology inside him and, when he was within it, perpetually tuned and adjusted it. Separate now, he was a lesser being. And a lesser being might not be able to survive whatever came next.

  And what next?

  He would splash down in the ocean of this world and be trapped. Surviving Cyberat would have no love for him and were probably watching his sphere’s descent even now. That the recent events here were not already known beyond this world seemed unlikely. Any Polity or Kingdom forces coming this way would want to grab him at once and take him apart to see how he ticked, if not destroy him out of hand. To survive he had to move—he had to find a way off this world.

  Angel tilted his head back and focused on some very specific technology inside him. He muttered a name: “Ruth.”

  11

  It is popularly believed that to gaze bare-brained on U-space is to go mad. This is only true for people who have already been knocking on the door of the asylum. For others it can cause headaches, confusion, amnesia, aphasia and psychosis but they are usually temporary. Scanning of the human brain during and after such an event reveals no physical cause. Popular belief has it that the sight of the ineffable, of a continuum that operates by laws outside of the real, is what interferes with brain function. Mechanistic understanding of the human brain says that is simply not true. The human eye, the human visual cortex—in fact the entirety of the human brain—is a product of evolution—a biological computer made to filter out the extraneous and deal with the real. It is incapable of perceiving U-space and will only see its own real-world interpretation of it. If any mind was to be driven insane by the sight, it should be that of an AI or of a human sufficiently enhanced to perceive it, and to (incompletely) understand it. So what is happening here? The best explanation our scientists can come up with is that those affected are the victims of a meme. They believe the sight of U-space will affect them, so therefore it does. That is all. But our scientists are also victims of a meme—that the universe can be explained in mechanistic terms, and that anything falling outside of current theories will, with a little tinkering, be explained in those terms.