The Soldier

by Neal Asher

  Trike swiped with his hand, sure something had flown close to his face. He then tilted his head to a movement on one blank wall—a leech-like writhing. When Ruth started securing him in the chair with heavily reinforced straps he felt grateful. Though, seeing them, he wondered if they had been for Cog himself, or if Cog had he been preparing for him.

  Cog continued, addressing Ruth, “Anyway, what are you going to do?” He gestured to the autodoc.

  “This has happened before and we tried many things,” she explained. “Memory editing to get rid of the hallucinations, neurochem rebalancing . . . but the mind of a hooper is a tough and stubborn thing. In the end only one thing worked.”

  “And that is?”

  “Patterned electrical discharges through the cortex,” she said. “It hits his reset button . . .”

  “ECT by any other name,” said Cog.

  Trike felt that what Ruth was about to do was a lot more complicated, but in essence Cog was right. It was electro-convulsive therapy—frying some portions of his brain so it would settle back into a calmer cycle. At least, being a hooper, the damage would not be permanent.

  “Yes,” Ruth said tightly, moving to the console and screen of the doc and inputting what she wanted it to do. The pedestal rolled closer to the chair and the doc hinged forwards on an arm to come down on Trike. He felt its legs fold in to clamp his head, the cool spray of analgesic, the tug of small incisions, and lasers crackling as they made micro-punctures in his skull. Next, from the attachment, it began to insert hair-thin wires to the correct places within his skull. After a moment, it ran its program.

  Trike grunted and arched in the chair, but the straps held him down. His body turned rigid and his skull felt like it was about to explode. His right eye closed, the lid twitching, then as the power came off and he settled, the room seemed brighter—free of shadows.

  “These antecedents . . .” said Ruth.

  “I wish this kind of treatment had been available back then,” said Cog, eyeing Trike curiously.

  “This treatment has been available since before the first diaspora,” Ruth commented.

  “Okay.” Cog shrugged. “I just didn’t know what to do back then.”

  “You’ve seen something like this before?”

  “Yes, my brother was just as crazy.”

  “Not uncommon amongst hoopers.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  Trike convulsed again, then again. Each time it felt like someone had struck his skull with a hammer. Perhaps Ruth and Cog spoke further while this was happening, he did not know. Finally, the autodoc withdrew the wires and rose from his head, and the pedestal rolled back. Trike looked round at normality, feeling as if a portal into some other reality had been hammered shut.

  “I’ve done what I can,” Ruth said. “That should hold you for a while.”

  “I’m sane?” he asked, able to give a tired smile without something giggling in his skull.

  She keyed the release and all the straps came off to slither into their

  slots.

  She leaned closer to him, closing her hands on his cheeks, peering closely into his eyes. “I wouldn’t go so far—”

  His tongue suddenly snapped closed on the skin just to one side of her mouth. She yelled, more angrily than in pain, and staggered back, a raw hole now present in her face that quickly filled with blood. As her fingers parted from his head it felt as if he had tossed the door keys into the lunatic asylum. But he kept his boot against the door.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know why that happened.”

  “Like I said,” she managed, her voice slightly slurred. “I wouldn’t go so far as to describe you as sane.”

  Trike stared in horror at the wound on her face, then rose and stepped out of the chair. “I’m sorry,” he repeated. He turned and left the medical area.

  ORLANDINE

  In time, Cutter grew bored with the procedures and wandered away. Orlik stayed, watching intently, studying those portions of the data Orlandine showed him with a patience uncharacteristic of the prador. The prador child she was concentrating on—the one that now looked like an insect embryo—had grown noticeably over the last few hours and was a lot more mobile. Orlandine tried to keep it still with the clamps as she scanned it, but it was time for a much closer look. Now it was time for vivisection . . .

  Orlandine paused on that thought as if expecting some visceral reaction from the human part of her mind, but it wasn’t there. She felt a little sympathy for the creature because perhaps some of its earlier personality remained, but this was all just too important for squeamishness. She directed a diamond tube packed with nanofibres inside the thing. Its major ganglion, which in normal prador was a ring-shaped organ, and in this creature had been little different in its earlier form, was in the process of breaking up and separating, as if to be distributed about its body. She injected the millions of nanofibres and directed them individually, making connections throughout the ganglion. A moment later she began switching off higher consciousness and pain reception, leaving only autonomous function. The creature remained alive, but no more conscious than a mollusc.

  Further probes gave her information on physical structure that the scan could not pick up. She extrapolated from this, as well as the earlier scans. The child was turning into something lobster-like, which was not surprising, this being a Spatterjay viral transformation, but there was more. There were nascent structures in its carapace akin to modern Polity battle armour. She found the initial growth of superconductor threads too.

  “We do not normally see that with the Spatterjay virus,” commented Orlik.

  “No,” Orlandine agreed. “Though it is something you might find in a Polity war drone.” She paused for a second, then allowed her curiosity to get the better of her. “Incidentally, why do you keep a Polity assassin drone in your sanctum?”

  “A trophy from the war,” said Orlik.

  “And it is dead?”

  “Yes.”

  She was sure Orlik was lying, but the fate of that single drone was not her concern. She now focused on one of the nodular growths that had been puzzling her earlier and was unsurprised to find a lot of metal in there, and some highly dense ceramics. Again, extrapolating from this proto-growth gave her nothing organic to refer to in her extensive files on alien physiology. However, when she opened the search to other structures, the answer was immediate. The thing was growing a collection of fusion reactors throughout its body.

  “Fuck,” said Orlik.

  “Indeed.”

  Orlandine now highlighted various items within the creature on the display the prador was viewing. Cold assessment. Mentality faced with a complex problem . . .

  “This is the start of some kind of laminar super-capacitor, while this snail-like object seems already to be producing dense objects akin to rail-gun slugs.”

  “A railgun?”

  “Here, in the underside. While here in this claw is the start of something that looks like a multi-phasic particle beam and laser weapon.”

  Orlik said nothing for a long moment, then repeated, “Fuck.”

  “I need to look closely at the virus,” Orlandine stated. “Very closely.”

  The threadlike Spatterjay virus was spread throughout the creature, so removing a sample was no problem. She enclosed it in a micro-bead and withdrew it through another diamond tube, then conveyed it via a series of pipes onto a deep study platen. She then split the bead and brought the head of her most powerful nano-scope down on it. Some careful manipulation with nano-scopic tools opened out one thread and she set the nano-scope scanning along it—meticulous and slow, not missing one detail. Within just a few seconds she saw the thing she had been searching for.

  “Quantum processor crystal,” she said.

  “Was it there before or is it new?” asked Orlik.

  “It was there before—it’s in the data your king sent me.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  Hours of study pas
sed. Even Orlik finally lost patience and left, taking his shuttle back to his destroyer, but Orlandine remained utterly fascinated, as she put together the workings of the virus, and sank deeper into pure intellection. The virus functioned like many parasites that optimized the survivability of a host. However, it was also a collector of a host’s genome, so much so, in fact, that almost the entire viral thread consisted of it. In there, Orlandine found the genomes of the sails—those batlike creatures that hoopers employed as living sails on their ships—as well as that of the Spatterjay leeches, glisters, prill, frog whelks and hammer whelks. This was all well known, for it was these that caused the transformation of further hosts. When a hooper was starving he grew a leech tongue, when his survival was threatened in other ways a mix of changes made him grow tall, thin and tough—a transformation that came from the sails. He would also turn blue, but this was just a colour imparted by the virus as it increased its own survival chances by multiplying inside him. The virus had not stopped its collection with just the fauna of Spatterjay, however.

  Human DNA was evident very quickly. Orlandine thought it might be interesting to find out if its source was just one particular human. Maybe Jay Hoop himself? But no, more likely it was an amalgam of hosts created by viral exchange—all the alleles ready to be expressed when necessary. This was confirmed when she found the DNA of a dog and ran a program to extrapolate from it. The DNA was in a reset state and could be just about any dog. Next she found the prador genome, and that of some of the creatures from their home world: the ship louse and a fish like a giant mudskipper that was one of their food sources. And then she began to find things she did not recognize at all.

  Spatterjay was an old world and, she surmised, was likely to have been visited by more than one alien race. And now this proved to be true. She found a sample of the much modified genome of a creature called a gabbleduck from the planet Masada. Since gabbleducks were the descendants of the Atheter—a race that committed a strange form of race suicide millions of years ago—it seemed that they had visited Spatterjay and perhaps been bitten by a leech. There were other things in there she did not recognize. Perhaps the genomes of Csorians or even the Jain? She did not know. Quite possibly she was seeing stuff from the food animals of the Atheter, or from species that had died out on Spatterjay. There was, in the end, so much here to fascinate her, but she had to keep her eye on the ball. Was the virus connected to how the worm fragment had subverted these two mutated prador?

  Orlandine now concentrated on the large and complex genome that was distributed with quantum processors. From this she extrapolated legs, claws, carapace, but there was always more: complexity within complexity. She found the structures for growing items that were supposedly inorganic—the power supplies, the weapons, the superconductor—but even in them there were deeper levels of complexity. She just focused on an eye and chased it down through layer upon layer. It was like looking at the images of Mandelbrot sets and it seemed endless. It escaped beyond the reach of the nano-scope down into the level of the quanta and she had to use heavy extrapolation and other processes to try and understand what was happening. She found entanglement and at last began to understand. Those quantum crystals were not just for data storage but were processors too—they actually connected to and caused changes in the surrounding genome.

  Sixteen hours later Orlandine began working her way up from the bottom, understanding more clearly what she was seeing now she had some idea of its foundations. She found the connections she had missed, the entanglement she had missed, throughout the entire virus. And now she knew.

  At some time in the far distant past, the Spatterjay virus had been quite a normal parasitic organism. It had not collected the genomes of other creatures. Most likely it had infested the bodies of its hosts to their detriment—perhaps imparting greater ruggedness on the one hand, but taking away the ability to breed, as was often the way with such organisms. Then, millions of years ago, the genome of some kind of soldier had either found its way into the virus, or had been inserted. The virus had become a collector of other genetic material after that, as it tried to express the phenotype of that soldier. The malfunctioning entanglement of those quantum processors with the surrounding genetic material was what drove the drastic transformation of viral hosts. It was trying to turn them into soldiers, and failing. However, this time, with these prador children, it was succeeding, so another element had been introduced.

  Understanding all of this had taken Orlandine’s resources to their limit. For something to set this process working correctly it would have taken similar resources, and a conscious, powerful mind. It was not that of the legate which had been aboard the wormship. It had to be an entity that understood the processes on a deep level, and no legate had been that bright, or rather, had that kind of mind.

  Orlandine knew, with absolute gut-wrenching certainty, that the mind involved had not been around for a while, and was one the universe had not seen in over five million years.

  “That piece of worm is on the move,” interjected Cutter.

  “Of course it is,” Orlandine replied, making a link directly to Orlik’s sanctum, where he had now reconnected his interface to his ship. “Orlik, eject that fucker from your hold, right now!”

  “As the humans would say,” Orlik replied, “that is music to my ears.”

  THE CLIENT

  The platform’s U-space drive was ready now and it was time to go. The Client reached out in concert, firing up the fusion drives of all the attack pods, keeping them in the same funnel formation. A second robot platform acted as a grid in the giant thermionic valve she had created, moving with them. And then she fired up the drive of the platform to follow them out. She could extend this for perhaps a few thousand miles before the effect would be likely to fail. And it wasn’t far enough from the sun for a U-jump.

  The prador ships were spreading out further and a brief assessment gave her their likely tactics: railgun firings from many different locations that would lead to the break-up of the funnel she had created, followed by another conventional attack. No sooner had she surmised this than the prador ships had begun firing, but the swarm of railgun slugs would not reach her in time. She broke the funnel, the attack pods falling into a different formation, and programmed into one of them a deliberate fault that left its U-jump unshielded. This one she sent to a different destination to the others—a far location—when at last, flickering and receding, they all slid into U-space. It would act as a decoy. Some minutes later, as particle beams groped out and the railgun slugs bore down, she jumped the platform too.

  The jump lasted an hour ship-time, until the platform finally materialized in interstellar space, far from any system. The Client began at once to make repairs and carry out the alterations she had considered earlier. This took her full concentration for some hours, but after a certain point she consigned the bulk of it to automatics and maintenance systems. Now, with a breathing space, she finally turned her attention to the data she had taken from the library.

  First, she began looking at the weapons data, because it was her greatest need. She specifically hunted down the stats and schematics on the beam the library had fired at her—the thing that had looked like a glass rod and had turned one of her attack pods frangible, and shattered it. It was not something the Species had used in the war against the pra-dor and she soon found that it was not available in the weapons data she had uploaded. But there was a route to it—in the forbidden data. For reasons she could not quite analyse, she left that for the moment and concentrated on the weapons data that was available. Here she found the full-spectrum white laser Dragon had used on her, bespoke particulates for particle beams that varied in their destructive potential, super-dense railgun slugs, a cornucopia of viruses and worms, combined laser and informational warfare beams, and other things besides. Even as she discovered information on them, she routed alterations to the weapons in the attack pods, and set factories in the platform to making new ones. But now he
r thought strayed to the forbidden data. That lethal beam was in there, so what other weapons might be too?

  With huge reluctance she began looking into that data. She knew this hesitancy was a hangover from her previous state—that venturing into this was something the Species had been given an aversion to almost at an instinctive level. This aversion limited her searches to anything weapons related. She found the glassy beam and the weapon that fired it, but blocked the context of it. It was, she learned, a kind of particle weapon that messed with molecular forces, causing the frangibility she saw. Simple tensions within the normal matter caused it to break apart.

  But the technology of this opened up a whole spectrum of science concerning U-space and what might be possible. She widened her searches and began to see further possibilities and developments. She found that hardfields could be curved and even shaped into enclosing bubbles. From this she made a connection with data that had been in the mind of Pragus. It seemed highly likely that a rogue AI called Penny Royal had deployed such fields, but the data had been heavily redacted and this was a technology the AIs had not allowed to be implemented. Why? Perhaps to keep one trick in the box should the Polity encounter a dangerous and more advanced civilization? Perhaps to keep it out of the claws of the prador? Though less advanced than the Polity, those hostile crustaceans always, eventually, stole anything the Polity developed and widely used.

  She saw that hardfields were actually one facet of U-space tech and, fully integrating what had previously been seen as separate technologies, led to a whole host of further possibilities. The feedback energy created from such fields being struck could be routed back into the underlying continuum and stored there. That energy could then be utilized to power the hardfields and weapons. Other weapons possibilities arose concerning U-space twists, gravity waves, inversions . . . it would, in the end, be like stepping up from bows and arrows to machineguns. She could see how total war with such weapons would lead to the kind of annihilation that had not even been seen during the prador/human war. Perhaps the AIs were right to sit on this. She intended to use it, however, and began making further changes to the platform.