The Soldier

by Neal Asher

  “Yes, apparently.”

  “Apparently?”

  “You have been out in the field for some time and it was not necessary for you to be told that Polity AIs have known about us for many years, Orlik. We have tried always to reclaim our dead but many have escaped us. The Polity obtained one of the Guard some time ago during the events concerning Room 101 and its transformation.”

  “Penny Royal?”

  “Yes, those events.” The king paused for a moment then continued, “They obtained a corpse of one of the Guard. I then received a message from Earth Central—a very detailed forensic analysis of the corpse.”

  “I would like to see that forensic analysis,” interjected Orlandine.

  “I am sending it now,” said the king.

  After a pause while he obviously digested that the conversation had not been private, Orlik continued, “Then why is this not generally known now?”

  “Because the AIs want to keep the peace. They know that if the general population of the Kingdom were to learn of this secret it would probably lead to civil war,” the king replied. Then added, “You should have learned the lesson by now that some secrets must be kept.”

  Cutter wondered what that last comment was about. Had Orlik been guilty of some infraction in the past? Did this explain his ersatz renegade status?

  “But the more people that know . . .” said Orlik, unsure now.

  “You are right, the more people who know, the more likely it is for this to become generally known. But Orlandine has known our secret for decades.”

  Light flared in vacuum as detonations went off all around the rail-gun ball. Chunks of armour hurtled out into space.

  “Fuck,” said Cutter, and side-lined what he had been listening to into recording. The five prador had just continued with the plan as he had detailed and were unaware of their father-captain’s exchange with the king of the prador.

  Cutter fired up his own thruster and hurtled down towards the ship’s hull, landing heavily to one side of the railgun ball. Even as he scrambled round to face it, it was rising faster, then faster still. Trailing severed pipes, power lines and hydraulics, it shot out of the ship like a cork, air blasting out all around it. Space fogged with air and water vapour and further debris trailed after it. Amidst this, sucked out by the evacuation, tumbled two second-children in armour. In a flat trajectory, Cutter launched from the hull metal and slammed into the most heavily armed of them. It began firing its Gatling cannon, the recoil sending them both tumbling. Clinging to the thing’s back, Cutter initiated the vibrating shearfields along his already diamond-sharp edges. He reached down with one long limb to the shoulder joint of the prador’s right claw, in which it clutched the cannon, and pressed hard. The shearfield screamed, but since he was in vacuum he could only feel that through his body. It cut into the thinner metal layers of the joint and air jetted out, then green blood that swiftly boiled to vapour.

  Something hit them, and Cutter, nearly dislodged, saw one of his ally prador tumbling past. A hole was burned in its armour that it was struggling to slap a patch over. He glimpsed the remaining four, weaving back and forth as they closed in on the other second-child, which was backed up against the railgun ball. It hit another one of them with its particle cannon lodged in its claw, but then they were close enough and fired up their sprayers. Jets of white fluid hit the second-child and expanded over it like swiftly growing fungus. The breach foam trapped the child’s limbs as it hardened. But now, realizing the danger, it turned its particle cannon on that. They would not be able to hold it for long.

  Cutter reached down again and grabbed, pulling with one limb and cutting with the other. Suddenly the prador’s claw snapped and Cutter sent it tumbling away. A particle beam struck his side, reflected off but ablating. He snared the remaining claw, cutting just above the pincer, then wrenched it angrily. It came off, a broken power supply spewing a cloud of hot ionized gas into vacuum.

  “Take him,” Cutter instructed the four prador.

  He hurled himself from his first victim directly towards the other, immensely annoyed when two beam strikes hit him. He slammed home amidst thrashing limbs and burning breach sealant, then began slashing. Two legs fell away and when he got a grip on the cannon-wielding limb, he did what he did best—what he was named after. Its other claw closed about his neck, and surprisingly it even began to dig into his armour. This prador was strong, unbelievably strong. To his rear he saw the four prador had now all but enclosed the other second-child in sealant. Cutter sliced some more and then pulled, until the claw detached. Swiftly reaching for the other one, he wrenched and broke it off too. Next, with rear limbs against the railgun ball, he sent his second victim towards the first, where the other prador snared it and began rendering it immobile. Cutter felt invigorated, hyped. He looked around just wishing there were others he could attack.

  “Retrieve the severed limbs,” said Orlandine calmly.

  “Why?” he snapped.

  “Because they will be a useful precursor to my investigation,” Orlandine replied. “It will be interesting to see what the virus has done to them.”

  “What?” said Cutter, then he began replaying the rest of the conversation between the king, Orlik and Orlandine while, with another part of his mind, examining the copy of the file the haiman woman had kindly sent him. It seemed that the king had not deemed it necessary for the Guard to be aware of who knew their secret. It also seemed that until now, Orlandine had not deemed it fit to tell Cutter and her other ally drones the full extent of it either.

  14

  It is annoying how contrary facts are ignored by those who, for their own aggrandizement, raise something that is little more than a hypothesis into a theory. So it is, with the current explanation for the action of Jain tech. It is a technology made to destroy civilizations that functions akin to a parasite. The Jain node is the egg that hatches in the hand of an intelligent member of some civilization. In utilizing the power this technology provides, the tertiary host spreads this parasite throughout his civilization. And finally when the main host, the civilization itself, is all but dead and drained, the technology dies, with only its eggs, the Jain nodes, awaiting the next host to come along. But there is an accretion disc that sits outside the border of the Polity that is swarming with active Jain tech, with no civilization, no host to provide it with the—if you like—“nutrients” it requires. Sure, it is producing Jain nodes as this tech does when it is in its spreading phase, but it is stubbornly not dropping into somnolence or death. The hypothesis is merely a description of what we have seen it do, but is not a theory covering everything it does. It is an oversimplification to equate it to some antipersonnel device like a land mine, yet the tech in the accretion disc is like a mine still exploding, as if its intended victim is still standing on it.

  —Anonymous

  CUTTER

  “I’ll be damned,” said Cutter, now inside Orlandine’s ship and cooling down from the fight to capture the two second-children. He was reviewing the file she had sent him, learning the secret history of the King’s Guard.

  It happened towards the end of the war. The Spatterjay virus was a dangerous pandemic that could infect just about any life form, even those alien to the world it was found on. When it infected humans it made them unbelievably strong, rugged—as close to corporeally immortal as a human could get without body swapping into a Golem chassis. But it also had other effects. It could change them using genetic code it had stored from the fauna of that world. This usually happened when the host was injured. The virus turned active then, as it sought to preserve its host. Diet and drugs like Aldetox could suppress it, but still, badly injured hoopers often grew a leech tongue and sometimes underwent other changes before they were well again. Completely unsuppressed change in a human could lead to nightmarish creatures. One of these was the leader of the pirates who had gone to Spatterjay and run their coring and thralling trade. This was (Spatter) Jay Hoop. He had apparently turned into a m
onster on one of the world’s islands, though Polity investigations had yet to confirm that.

  All of this was well known, but it seemed few people had wondered what would happen to a prador infected by the Spatterjay virus. Somehow it had just never come up, as if there was an assumption that, being such monsters, there was nothing much worse they could turn into. This lack of interest was a bit of a discrepancy, and now looking at it from a new perspective, Cutter was starting to suspect AI interference. He was also annoyed not to have known this before. Sure, he’d known the king and the king’s family were mutated, but from this virus? They were prador hoopers?

  “The fuck,” he added, then turned to look at the form clad in white armour squatting beside the wall of Orlandine’s expansive laboratory.

  Orlik swivelled two armoured palp eye stalks to look at him, but kept the focus of his main and decidedly odd eyes on what was happening amidst Orlandine’s machines. Orlandine herself was up, cupped in a hemisphere like a throne, totally linked in to her machinery and her ship, her sensory cowl open as she guided the vibrating shearfields steadily stripping away a captured second-child’s armour.

  “There is something wrong here,” said the prador father-captain.

  “Oh yeah,” said Cutter, “you shit me not.”

  Orlik now turned slightly to gaze at Cutter with his main eyes. “Yes, we have been mutated by the Spatterjay virus. I myself have a form that would give nightmares to my normal prador fellows.”

  “But yet you allow people to see your eyes,” interjected Orlandine. Her voice issued from the com system. Her face was rigid with concentration and her mouth unmoving. Her eyes were metallic, with something akin to kaleidoscopic machine movement in them.

  Orlik tipped his body in acknowledgement. “Yes, I choose to let my eyes be seen. They are enough to unnerve other prador but not enough to arouse suspicions or provide data that can be acted upon.”

  “An absolutely rational decision,” said Orlandine. “I’m sure you have no particular urge to display your . . . difference.”

  “This is beside the point,” said Orlik. Somewhat angrily, Cutter felt. “We keep meticulous record of what the Spatterjay virus has done and is doing to our bodies, and that—” the prador stabbed a claw at the steadily revealed second-child “—is what I meant when I said something is wrong here. This child did not look like that the last time he put on his armour.”

  Cutter swivelled his attention back to the procedure. The second-child sat at the focus of numerous machines, clamped in active gimbals as those machines cut its armour. On the floor lay heaps of the breach foam that had immobilized it, now being scooped up by an infestation of beetlebots. Three-fingered grabs had finished peeling off its leg armour revealing not jointed prador legs, but squirming black, triangular-section tentacles. Now a shearfield had finished slicing away a section of armour above these on one side, peeled it back and discarded it. What this exposed inside, after a spill of glutinous liquid like whipped egg, looked more like the folded-up body of some embryonic insect. In fact, as Cutter watched, he saw one folded limb shift and quiver.

  “It would have been nice if you had sent this data earlier,” said Orlandine.

  Cutter only caught up with this as she sent him two files and he studied them. Here was the physiological data on the two second-children. Upon their last scan, they had still looked vaguely like prador, for they had the requisite number of legs and claws. Mostly. One of them had shrunk, however, its body extended, divided and ribbed so it looked like a trilobite. It had ensconced itself in a smaller mechanism inside its armour, for it had become too small to insert its limbs into the hollow legs and claws its original form had occupied.

  Cutter glanced aside. That was the one Orlandine had yet to open up, which rested against one wall almost completely concealed in a mass of crash foam. The one here, meanwhile, had possessed limbs long enough to occupy its suit. In fact they had been too long, but thin enough to fold up inside the hollow leg and claw armour. The second-child’s body had shrunk and extended, growing a tail. It had been slightly iridescent and Cutter recognized some resemblance to a Spatterjay glister—a lobsterlike crustacean of that world. He now checked through memory for some kind of match with the other creature and surmised that the virus must have incorporated the genome of prador ship lice. Whatever. Orlik was right. The thing before him had changed drastically.

  “This still does not give us answers to immediate questions,” said Cutter.

  “And they would be . . . ?” Orlandine enquired smoothly.

  “How did the worm fragment subvert them so easily? Why this second drastic change?”

  “Quite,” she replied.

  TRIKE

  Trike watched his wife of many years studying him and could see the shock in her expression. This stilled the churning of his mind for a moment and he looked down at himself. He had always appeared stocky and had previously looked as if he was running to fat, but now he was tall and gaunt. He also knew, from an earlier glance in a mirror, that his cheeks had sunk, his lips were thinner, and his ears had now definitely developed points. While she stood before him he reached up and scrubbed a hand over his head, and wondered what strange quirk of biology had started hair growth up there now.

  But she too had changed. She too looked thinner, grey streaks had appeared in her hair, and she had those black eyes he could hardly meet. He flicked his attention aside and pointed with one slightly shaking finger.

  “You should eject that first chance you get,” he said. “Into the sun . . . to burn . . .”

  He could feel his mouth twisting as he tried to suppress a crazy grin. Cog was securing Angel’s remains to the hold floor with heavy straps. He had bagged them first in reinforced sacks, then inserted those in armoured crates. Trike concentrated on them hard, trying to ignore the shadowy shapes shifting at the edges of his vision, and the tittering in his mind.

  “I will not be ejecting this,” said Cog. “Why did you think I stopped Doshane destroying it? Even dead, it contains a wealth of data.”

  Ruth glanced round. “Don’t be so sure he’s dead,” she said, then returned her attention to Trike.

  He began looking round the hold, still unable to meet her gaze. He felt guilty because she had seen him like this before. He had changed in this way when a giant leech took a chunk out of his torso in their first years together, though perhaps not so drastically. It had taken months for either of them to understand that what was happening to him was not quite usual for a hooper—that somehow his mind affected the transformation process, making it spin out of control.

  “Trike,” she said. “Trike, look at me.”

  Finally he focused his eyes on her.

  “Ruth,” he managed.

  She stepped forwards and hugged him, and he wrapped his arms round her. She smelled different, kind of metallic, and felt delicate and breakable. She seemed shorter too, and it didn’t feel like he was hugging the same woman. He abruptly turned his head away from her as his tongue shot from his mouth, the leech mouth clicking at its end. She quickly pulled away, ducking a little as she did so. She remembered this too.

  “You have an up-to-date infirmary, Cog?” she asked.

  The Old Captain moved up beside her. He had his pipe out and was stuffing it with tobacco from his pouch. He looked thoughtful and, Trike thought, just a little bit irritated. Trike stared at the man.

  “A wealth of data,” he repeated tightly, the things he had learned about Cog coming clearer in his mind.

  “Yes,” said Cog, “a forensic AI should be able to obtain much. Now, the infirmary.” He gestured with his pipe stem to the door from the hold and led the way. Ruth glanced at Angel’s remains and then followed him, towing Trike after her. They trudged up the stairs to the bridge then through a door halfway up. Inside was a cylindrical room packed with equipment and a surgical chair at its centre. It bore some resemblance to a standard infirmary, but also to a workshop-cum-laboratory.

  “Sit he
re,” said Ruth, leading Trike over to the chair.

  He followed meekly and sat, then commented, “So you have access to a forensic AI? Not many people have that . . .”

  Ruth walked over to a pedestal-mounted autodoc, then studied the series of extra attachments in a carousel around the column it was mounted upon.

  “So you remember,” said Cog, his voice oddly calm. “I wasn’t sure.”

  Trike remembered Lyra’s death and his own indifference to it, then. “Was Lyra one of you too?” he asked.

  “Yes, she was.”

  Trike turned to Ruth as she towed the autodoc over. “He didn’t want to rescue you while you were with Angel. You were too useful as a method of tracking him.” He felt a stirring of anger and things flickered and oozed just beyond his perception. Closing his eyes and taking a slow breath, he tried to gain calm, to let it go.

  “Cog?” she asked, looking up.

  Cog shrugged, drew on his pipe and puffed out a cloud of fragrant smoke, then said, “I’m sorry, but I work for the Polity. And sometimes I have to make hard choices or follow orders I find . . . uncomfortable.”

  “A Polity agent?” asked Ruth.

  “Yes,” said Cog.

  “The AIs do like to recruit special talents,” she replied, noncommittal as she returned her attention to the autodoc.

  Trike focused on her as she selected an item from the carousel—a cylindrical object with a tight collection of tubes protruding from one end. She plugged it into the underside of the beetle-shaped chromed autodoc. It wiggled its long shiny legs as if this tickled, chain-glass scalpels, probes and micro-manipulators clicking and glinting. He now knew her intention, because again they had both been here before.

  “A very Old Captain is such,” said Trike, his mouth feeling dry, because he remembered Cog telling him that he and Jay Hoop were brothers.

  Cog shot him a look. “Yes, I work for Earth Central and when I told ‘my masters’ what had happened with you they gave me a watching brief. I’ll tell you all you want to know about that. But the other business concerning my antecedents is not for discussion.”