The Soldier

by Neal Asher

  —from Mad by Design by Rev. J. Upholster

  THE CLIENT

  The Client, having collected all the main data she needed from the library, now made her request for the forbidden history of the Species, earlier than the permitted five million years. After a long pause, the library spoke to the Client’s remote, chemically at first, followed by light display, microwave and audio. The four forms of the language affirmed each other to hammer home the point that this was serious stuff.

  “Data allowed only for onsite processing,” it said. “Your remote will be destroyed at termination of research. Only no-extrapolation results allowed.”

  This essentially meant that, yes, data could be released for processing, but any results of that processing would only be allowed to leave the library if the source data could not be extrapolated from them. The Client confirmed her request. After another long pause the library darkened and she was sure she detected movement beyond the storage pillars, which was something that had never happened before. Were some of the Species in hiding here, had some survived?

  “Who is there?” she asked, on every level.

  “Data loading,” replied the library.

  Back aboard Weapons Platform Mu the Client felt steady disconnection from the remote as something began to nudge her out of memory. This went on for some time—a partition keeping the Client from accessing what was being loaded.

  “How much space do you wish to retain for research programs?” the library asked.

  The Client assigned a few terabytes, which was about the minimum she could get away with and remain plausible.

  “Externality initiated,” said the library. Suddenly a triangular column rose out of the floor. Sitting on top of it was pyramidal crystal, while down its length were optic feeds and pheromone pipes which the remote could use to access data from the crystal and process it. Through the remote’s eyes the Client gazed at the thing. A crystal that size, which was all packed quantum storage, contained petabytes of data. Just how much history lay before those five million years?

  “Set your programs to run and withdraw,” the library instructed.

  Now it was time to act. All the forbidden data was here in the mind of the remote and in that crystal. Though still connected to the remote, the Client could not gaze on one speck of it. She set the real program running in the remote’s mind—the task it would carry out even if the library managed to block transmissions to and from the weapons platform. The Client, in the remote, moved forwards, while up in space she moved her most effective attack pods closer to the moon. She then grasped the data crystal in her remote’s mandibles and pushed it back into a mouth that lacked any other purpose.

  “As expected,” said the library.

  Yes, thefts from the library had been tried before and had always ended in failure. All those who had attempted them had come to a bad end and were historically listed as mentally abnormal. Even so, the thieves had made their attempts within the view of the entire Species and its technology, also showing too much respect for the library and all it represented. Those abnormal members of the Species had not come to the library when it was alone and externally unguarded, and they had never arrived with anything like the weapons system the Client controlled. Even they would probably have considered the Client abnormal for what she intended.

  An attack pod fired a series of blast-nose railgun slugs, even as the remote launched from the floor and ignited a chemical rocket in its rear. The slugs hit the moon, penetrating a little way then expending their energy in plasma explosions. Millions of tons of rubble exploded out into space, excavating a massive crater in the regolith. The pod followed that assault with a particle beam, hitting the base of the crater and drilling through. The library chamber rocked, storage pillars clashing against each other like giant wind chimes. Fire exploded down into it, briefly followed by the flash of the particle beam. The remote hurtled towards this, weaving from side to side, but it could not evade tracking for long, and antipersonnel lasers soon picked it up. They hit, burning away black skin to reveal its underlying reflective armour.

  Up in Weapons Platform Mu the Client gave the nearest approximation to a smile that one of the Species was capable of. The library only possessed antipersonnel weaponry to use inside because anything more powerful might damage its valuable contents. Still, they would be enough if it wasn’t for other resources now available to her. The missile another attack pod fired, shortly after the railgun strike, was slow moving. It wasn’t an impact weapon and it was vital it arrived at its target intact. However, it was quite rugged and, firing side thrusters, it swept into a fifty-gravity turn and hurtled straight down into the crater. It bounced down the hole the particle beam had cut there, and entered the chamber, hitting the floor hard. Still linked to the remote’s sensors, the Client winced when the missile smashed into storage pillars and brought a series of them crashing down.

  As it fell out of the wreckage and rolled across the floor, a small fusion reactor fired up to power the hardware packed inside the missile. It began broadcasting strongly, responding to feedback and transmitting anew. This induction warfare device first filled the chamber with microwave tracking beams, identical to those being used by the antipersonnel lasers, and soon few of them were hitting their target. As the library switched over to other forms of tracking it aped them too.

  Now the drones, thought the Client.

  They hurtled out of holes in the walls, flat pennies of technology spewing high-velocity beads from magnetic guns around their rims. The hardware in the missile immediately tracked them and began firing a narrow EMR beam. One after another they died and fell slowly to the floor. The remote shuddered under the impact of a drone’s bead strike, shedding fragments of its body, but still it managed to tilt and allow its rocket to take it up through the hole above. It shot out into space, still accelerating, then a few miles up its motor died and it coasted on towards the weapons platform.

  Now, on the moon, something else was happening. Areas of crust cracked and chunks lifted and fell away as weapons buds rose into view. The Client hit them at once from her subsidiary system, bringing more attack buds into play and targeting them with the bigger weapons on the platform itself. Particle beams struck the rising pods as, like flowers to the sun, they began to tilt up on their stalks. They blew apart, scattering cusps of metallic glass across the moon’s surface. The Client then fired a series of missiles towards the remote to cover its escape—objects like tumbling stick grenades streaming from one attack pod. These exploded in a line to scatter space with material chaff and chaff broadcast units. But this would not be enough because the remote’s course was set and could be predicted by the library. She fired up the engines of the platform to bring it towards the remote and began moving the nearest attack pods between the remote and the moon.

  The Client continued beam strikes against the moon, but now they were hitting hardfields. She then complemented them with the wide and ridiculously powerful beams from the weapons platform, and followed those with a rain of railgun missiles. One of the weapons buds opened, while all over the surface of the moon ports began spewing metal vapour from cooling systems. The open bud, a flower with shiny diamond patterned petals, stabbed out a beam like a glass rod from its heart straight into the attack pod between the moon and the remote. It struck a hard-field, which folded up and disappeared, then punched into the attack pod. Metals and composites turned instantly brittle, shattering glittering fragments across vacuum, and the pod collapsed in on itself. The Client had just a little time to study the data on this new weapon before the railgun missiles reached the moon. Hardfields flicked and flared under their impact and cooling emissions turned to plasma. Something erupted under the surface—an explosion lifting a giant plug of the crust—and the active weapons bud slowly closed and then sagged.

  “Thief,” said a voice, as the remote finally reached Weapons Platform Mu, where the Client caught it with hardfields and brought it into a supply bay.

>   The communication had come directly from the library and had penetrated the Client’s security with ease. It found all available language emitters within the Client’s cylinder and through them made its presence known. The Client read the pheromone output of something . . . like the Species but not actually the Species. Great age was implicit in the interweaving of its language, and imagery created a hologram. The creature hung there, something like a human embryo, or maybe like that odd Earth lizard, the chameleon. It seemed to be of black ancient flesh and glass. Four limbs ending in doubled multi-hands were folded against its torso. Its tail was coiled below it, while its head was a sensory turret not unlike that of the remote. But also, writhing out from its sides, sometimes spread out like the veins of wings, but often coiling up and then finding a new route through the air as if in search of something, were six triangular-section tentacles. The shape of this thing found recognition deep inside the Client, but she really did not know what it was she was recognizing.

  “Thief,” the creature repeated.

  “I am all that remains of the Species,” the Client replied, meanwhile pulling the weapons platform away and turning it once more towards the sun. The attack pods quickly followed. “How can the knowledge now be forbidden to me?”

  “Because I forbid it,” the creature replied.

  “You are not of the Species. What are you?”

  “With what you have stolen you will learn soon enough.”

  “Doubtless.”

  “But I will hunt you down. And you will pay.”

  The Client replied, “But this is foolish. I really am the last of the Species. Why can I not learn the history of my kind?”

  “It is forbidden.”

  “Who are you to forbid?”

  “I am the Librarian. I am . . .”

  Then it came, a shriek across the ether as of some primordial horror. It incorporated most of the EMR spectrum and was in U-com as well. The Client felt it twisting and burrowing deep inside her, trying to tear a response from levels of her mind she had not known existed. But there was more. The shriek was densely packed with information. It contained open-ended formulae and equations, data that interrelated across the spectrum and seemed to be the basis of a language. She saw layered constructs that looked like questions, demands, and the way the whole thing ground against her mind felt like some kind of challenge. Then it cut off.

  There was no logic here, the Client thought, shivering on her crystal tree, only madness. She decided, with an unaccustomed vehemence, that this creature was a threat.

  At the same time, using just a small portion of her mind, she directed the loading of three warheads to one slow-firing coilgun. Her supply of these was limited but perhaps this was a sensible precaution to take. The three gigaton CTDs sped out from the platform then accelerated steadily on their own single-burn fuser drives, back towards the moon.

  “You stir the still pool of history,” said the Librarian. “Terror you cannot comprehend will come up from the depths.”

  Madness, thought the Client, not understanding why she felt such revulsion.

  The missiles continued towards their target and just seconds remained before its destruction. The Client doubted her decision, feeling a deep abhorrence for such destruction of knowledge. But at the last second a large U-signature generated and black space folded around the moon like a curtain, and it was gone.

  ORLANDINE

  Sitting at her table, Orlandine picked up her wine glass and sipped. She then put it down carefully and picked up her knife and fork and set to work on the synthetic steak, salad and new potatoes. All of this was of course completely unnecessary because the nutrient feeds in her interface sphere gave her everything her body needed. It even supplied certain chemicals, nano-machines and carbon-building elements her enhancements required, which she wouldn’t get from the steak.

  She sat in her lounge, facing a panoramic window which, when she was in the real, gave a view out into space. Now it showed the swirling grey—a representation of U-space a human could gaze upon without going insane. When she was haiman—the closest humanity had come to a melding with artificial intelligence—she could handle the real image. But now she was living in human time, reconnecting to her past. Eating like this and drinking wine was not necessary, but it was human. It was her attempt to cling to what she might have been, had her parents not taken the choice away from her when they began enhancing her from birth. Sometimes she felt herself to be sitting in a borderland, on the crux of making a choice. She was both AI and human, but she was neither of them completely.

  “Satisfying your primitive needs?”

  For an assassin drone measuring fifteen feet from the spike of its tail to the top of its antennae, Cutter moved very quietly. But then he was made that way. During the war it had been his job to sneak around in prador ships, hidden from security systems by Bludgeon, and to deal with prador like a professional chef taking apart boiled crabs. He had primarily been a terror weapon but had soon been displaced by even nastier assassin drones that spread biological agents amongst the prador. Or others that gave them a taste of their own thrall technology by burrowing inside them and taking control of their central nervous systems. Cutter had moved to simple war-drone status—joining other drones on raids whose sum purpose had not been to spread terror amongst the prador, but merely to kill as many of them as possible.

  “Yes, I am satisfying my primitive needs,” Orlandine replied. “And doubtless you joined me on this little excursion in the hope of satisfying yours.” She inserted a piece of steak in her mouth and closed her teeth with a click, savouring the taste for a moment before chewing. “However,” she continued after swallowing, “it is unlikely that there will be any prador for you to kill.”

  “Oh I wouldn’t bet on that.” Cutter moved up beside her, reared and tapped one of his forelimbs against the window. “Maybe these prador you are going to meet are ‘good’, but there are always some shitty ones around to work their own angle.”

  “I don’t think it’s going to be like that. This is about a wormship and a legate. The bad guy in this is a product of AI, in fact is an AI himself.” Even though she spoke with certainty it wasn’t really there. It wouldn’t surprise her at all if some bad prador appeared, or if what she was getting involved in turned nasty, or if the good prador turned out not to be so good. She grimaced and said, “Just a few minutes till we arrive.”

  “Shouldn’t you be in your sphere?” Cutter asked.

  “I’m not arriving on coordinates—a few light minutes out.”

  “So you are being understandably cautious?”

  “Of course.”

  Orlandine worked her way through the rest of the meal and finished her wine. She enjoyed the alcohol but, as the view before her seemed to be trying to straighten itself out, she decided it was time to end this break and she expanded once again into her enhancements. Only minutes remained before they arrived, hence Cutter’s presence. She reacquired the submind running her ship and absorbed it, while instructing her internal nano-machines to kill the alcohol buzz. She cleared the human view through the window and gazed bare-brained on U-space, with its twisting perspectives and inversions, and saw both an infinite universe and a zero-point of existence. She understood the long view of AI and the linear thinking of her evolved component, and pondered on eternity. Some minutes later she felt the twist and U-space cleared like fog instantly burned away by the sun. This revealed the swirl of a nebula, the glittering stars of every primary colour in the human visual spectrum, and the glaring green orb of a closer sun.

  “Let’s take a look.” Though she was not plugged into her interface sphere and not completely melded with the systems of her ship, she had opened radio and microwave links with it, which was enough to give her almost complete control. She threw up a frame in the window before her as she focused her telescope array on the fourth world out from the sun. Her sub-AI search program soon found what she was looking for and she focused in on it.
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br />   The prador destroyer sat in orbit of the world. The thing had obviously taken a pounding, but even from this distance she could tell something further was wrong. The ship had fled a recent conflict with a worm-ship and had a piece of this wormship aboard. It had exterior damage and here, in a supposedly safe refuge, she would have expected to see prador working outside on the hull. But all she saw was one drifting hull repair machine with no prador operator inside to control it.

  Orlandine stood and walked towards the back of her lounge, touching the centre of her shipsuit disc that sat at her shoulder. The suit split and slithered into the disc. Naked, she stepped into a dropshaft that whisked her upwards, then moved out into her small atrium where the butterfly flowers were flapping in agitation. She carried on into her interface sphere, quickly going through the connection routine, and her perspective widened.

  The prador destroyer was now just a few miles away, a looming bulk poxed with gun ports. Because of what the king had said about the Jain tech aboard in the form of this piece of wormship, Orlandine set up heavy security before opening communications and sending it the codes the king had given her. Even as she sent these, her sensors picked up power surges around the gun ports, as the destroyer targeted her with its weapons. But then, after a moment, a reply came.