The Soldier

by Neal Asher

  Trike winced and braced himself as Cog stepped forwards. He remembered the warning. But Cog paused for a second then sat himself on the bed, the frame bending under his weight. He took out his pipe, toyed with it for a moment, then began stoking it with tobacco from his pouch.

  “We’re in orbit now and I’ve yet to set coordinates,” he said. “Earth Central wants Angel’s remains, but I feel I owe it to you and Ruth to take you where you want to go first.”

  Trike stepped back to his chair and sat down astride it. “Have you asked Ruth?”

  Cog shrugged as he slipped his tobacco pouch back into the top pocket of his canvas shirt, took out his laser lighter and with a crack ignited the tobacco in his pipe.

  “I need to speak to her,” said Trike.

  “Yes, you certainly need to do that.”

  Trike grimaced and gazed at the Old Captain as Cog sucked on his pipe and shot smoke from his nostrils. “But I want to know more. I want to know what Angel was doing, and where that wormship went with that . . . thing. I need answers.”

  Cog nodded. “That’s better.”

  After a long quiet pause while the cabin filled with tobacco smoke, Trike finally asked, “Were you Hoop’s actual brother?”

  “Cogulus Hoop,” Cog replied.

  “What happened?”

  Cog smiled, and then leaned back against the wall.

  “The survey ship I was aboard had an early U-space engine, but positioning wasn’t accurate—quite often it entailed a lengthy realspace journey after each jump, sometimes taking years. I was one of a crew of five. It was my turn to come out of hibernation to check on things when we arrived in the new system.”

  Trike leaned forwards, fascinated.

  Cog continued, “I went back into hibernation because it was going to take two more years to bring our vessel into orbit around an interesting world that definitely showed signs of life. We duly did, and ran the orbital survey, recording everything.”

  So how old was Cog? Trike wondered.

  “What was the world?” he asked, already sure he knew.

  Cog smiled a little tiredly and continued, “Three of us went in a landing craft down to the surface to take a closer look.” He shrugged. “Dangerous world, Spatterjay, as you are aware. Only I came back. The second time, after a year of searching from orbit for the missing two, and gathering further data, I went down with the remaining two of my crew. Because the jungles were so dangerous we opted for a sea landing. Yes, we had detected some big stuff in the sea but it seemed rare in the area we chose. Big mistake.”

  “Rarity of life on Spatterjay usually means something big is in the area eating the other life forms,” Trike interjected.

  “Quite,” said Cog. “We landed a little way out from some islands, then brought our landing craft into an atoll and moored it against that. With the craft secured we went onto the atoll to collect samples. It attacked almost immediately.”

  “What?”

  “Whelkus titanicus.”

  The creature was a blend of a whelk and an octopus and when out of the ocean usually bigger than the average landing craft. It was woody and dense with the Spatterjay virus and almost impossible to kill.

  “Not usually in shallow water.”

  “No, not usually. We were just lucky I guess.” His pipe glowed hot as he sucked on it, the heat reflected in his eyes. He continued, “I didn’t know then why I survived. I didn’t know what the leech bite I’d got on my first trip had done to me. I was badly injured but I managed to get away from the thing and climb up the atoll. It followed me, of course, and when I reached the top I thought I was done for. I was up there looking down at the fucker, waiting to die, when claws closed on my shoulders and hauled me into the sky.”

  “A sail,” Trike guessed.

  Cog nodded. “They didn’t have human language back then, in fact I was the first of our kind any of them had seen. It flew me to another atoll and dumped me on a flat rock at the peak, and landed beside me. It sniffed me and burbled something—their own language that they don’t use so much now. I think it was trying to make up its mind whether or not to eat me. It started prodding me, then pulled off my pack and tore it open. There was survey stuff inside and some other instruments. It was very curious about them, even managed to turn on a portable bio-scanner.”

  “They’re pretty smart,” said Trike.

  “I’m not sure what it then decided. It burbled something more then grabbed me again. I was in pain and when I saw it was flying back to the first atoll, I thought it was just going to give me back to the whelk. It didn’t, though—it flew to the landing craft and dumped me on top of it. I managed to get inside and launch, putting the jet of a steering rocket in the whelk’s face . . . doubt I hurt it very much.”

  “So, Jay Hoop and his pirates were not the first humans on Spatterjay?”

  “No, when I got back to Earth things had changed. The Quiet War was nearing its end and the AIs were taking over, but things were still chaotic. I wasn’t sure I wanted to stick around. I met Jay then . . . talked to him through a mesh because he was in prison. I told him about Spatterjay and where it was. Biggest mistake of my life.”

  What was the estimated death toll? The story of how Jay Hoop and his pirates got to the world, and what they did there, wasn’t completely clear. Some said they mutinied aboard a colony ship, others said they were on a prison transport. Whether they arrived during the prador/ human war or before it was also debated. But certainly, they started selling cored humans to the prador and the prador supplied them with captives. By the time their operation was shut down, over ten million people had gone through that process.

  “But you met him again, after that,” said Trike.

  At that moment, there came a knock on the door. Trike cringed inwardly, but stood anyway. Cog shoved a finger into his pipe to put it out and dropped it into his top pocket. “Just a few more preparations to make before we leave.” He stood. “The story of that meeting will have to wait for another time.”

  Trike followed him towards the door. Cog nodded to Ruth and winked at her as he passed, then moved off.

  “We have a lot to talk about,” Trike said as she stepped inside and closed the door behind her.

  “That can wait,” she replied, putting her hand on his chest. “Do you know, you are already shorter, and your ears are less pointy?”

  “It’s perhaps a better look,” he replied.

  “Put your tongue out,” she instructed.

  He poked it out, then after a moment reached up and touched it. It had closed completely, though he could still feel hard bits inside it. “So much of it is in the mind, it seems,” he said. “Shut up and kiss me,” she replied.

  ORLANDINE

  The worm fragment was moving, writhing in the clamps that secured it. Orlandine watched through the single cam she had put online, separating out the image of the thing from the tsunami of other visual data it was directing at the cam from thousands of laser pores all over its body. The fragment was acting as best it could in the circumstances, trying to seize control of the systems around it. How the mind within it had managed to understand it had been discovered she did not know.

  Yet.

  Orlandine ordered her interface sphere to close up and retract. The top hemisphere closed down, enfolding her completely and the sphere withdrew from the study area into the wall, then dropped into the position it usually occupied in her ship. Next, upon another instruction, all but one of the physical connections around the sphere detached. The remaining pipe began filling a tank inside the sphere with a specific list of materials, suspended in atomic form, in a special semi-liquid gel. Meanwhile two of the connections to the interface plugs down her sides detached and folded back, quickly replaced by tubular nutrient feeds. As soon as these connected, they began pumping in the gel-liquid from the tank. This routed through her body to nourish the packed Jain technology inside her, which, under her firm control, began to grow.

  “Do you wish i
t destroyed?” Orlik asked.

  “No,” she replied, “I wish it clear of your ship so I can study it properly.”

  “You’re going all uber-human on us, aren’t you?” Cutter interjected.

  “Yes, I am. There is a mind inside that thing and I want to know what it knows.”

  “Best keep your weapons ready, Orlik,” said Cutter.

  Orlandine felt a distant stab of annoyance, but it was difficult to trace and took her whole microseconds to locate it in the remains of her organic human brain. Irrelevant. Her human self was such a small part of her now and would shortly be overwhelmed, almost invisible.

  “Bludgeon,” she sent. “I want you to keep watch. Ship’s weapons systems are now under your control. You will know when to destroy the fragment.”

  “And when to destroy you,” Cutter added.

  “That is unlikely to be necessary,” Orlandine replied.

  “Uh huh,” Cutter responded simply.

  Meanwhile, Bludgeon connected to her ship’s weapons. “Ooh shiny,” said the drone.

  As the nutrient pipe disconnected, Orlandine’s interface sphere dropped down through her ship to engage with something else. Now semi-organic plugs mated with sockets that had originally taken Polity tech. The Jain tech inside her reached optimum energy and her skin split on either side from armpit to thigh, and Jain tendrils squirmed out. These slid into channels through the usual connections to her body and mated with the incursions from the surrounding mass. And now human time seemed a distant dream.

  Doors opened in the side of her ship and then she, her sphere, and the whole mass surrounding it fell out into vacuum. Orlandine’s sphere now sat like a small egg enfolded on the underside of a huge Jain-tech mechanism. This ribbed object resembled a giant woodlouse. Numerous tentacles of varying thicknesses speared out all around her, while over the thing’s back the segments divided to open on the glare of an ion drive.

  Meanwhile the hold doors of Orlik’s ship were opening, and on a moveable section of the floor, still clamped, the worm fragment began sliding towards them. As soon as the fragment reached the lip of the door this movement halted. The clamps then rose on diagonally divided columns, lifting the thing, until explosions simultaneously split the columns and blew the worm fragment towards the doors. As it hurtled out into vacuum it writhed and shed the clamps, and engaged the drive that had originally brought it to the ship. It tried to propel itself back. Orlik fired up his main fusion drive to pull away from the thing and, for a moment, the distance between them remained the same. But then the fragment began to close the gap.

  The thing then emitted a high-intensity pulse of EMR that even disrupted information in the Jain tech around Orlandine. Orlik’s main drive went down. The fragment had used what was perhaps a weapon of last resort—a flash like an informational warfare beam. This ability explained how it had learned of its own discovery—it had been holding something in reserve.

  “It’s seizing control of his ship again,” Bludgeon told her.

  Her system informed her she had been targeted by Orlik’s ship. Three particle beams stabbed from her ship to the destroyer and struck railguns, even as they swivelled towards her. Ensuing railgun strikes, using projectiles fashioned from exotic matter, punched into the destroyer’s hull, then high-intensity lasers probed through the holes to hit critical system junctures. Explosions lit the prador destroyer from inside.

  “Orlik will be very unhappy,” Cutter noted.

  “Casualties?” Orlandine enquired matter-of-factly.

  “Avoided,” Bludgeon told her.

  The fragment could no longer use the ship as a weapon against her, but it was still trying to retreat into it. Orlandine fully engaged with the mechanism around her. She felt her humanity recede even further as her consciousness expanded into something utterly alien. She saw the ion drive would not be enough and immediately acted. She protruded two nacelles the shape of cored olives from her new carapace. They glared with fusion flame and she shot forwards, tentacles groping. Even as the fragment approached the hold doors back into the prador ship, she slammed down on it like a hunting nautilus, snatching it away.

  The worm fragment fought. It squirmed in her grip, ramped up the output of its laser pores to cutting strength, emitted informational warfare from inside, as well as opened its segments and extruded cutting heads, iron-burners and tentacles of its own. Orlandine swapped out damaged tentacles as she penetrated it, burned out thousands of laser pores with narrow stabs of particle beams, then opened herself to the informational warfare, encompassed it and followed it back. Soon she was finding the thing’s weapons and killing them, while pursuing cho-ate energy patterns and data through its complex and densely packed technology. It still fought back, but it was weaker than she expected, and in very little time she had its connected elements cornered. They had nowhere left to run.

  “What are you?” she asked in a language no human or prador mouth could speak.

  The thing tried to deny her, but the question went to its core as she decoded its being. It could no more refuse to answer than a calculator would refuse to give the result of a mathematical equation. She now saw a wheel spinning in darkness—the manifestation of an alien mind. It wasn’t quite right, she knew, and looked more deeply at the reply. The wheel blurred into two, one of which stripped itself of information, processing, its very essence. It folded in on itself and fell away. So, she was seeing a stripped-down copy of an original mind. She understood that whatever had been in the wormship had made a submind to occupy this fragment.

  She pushed deeper inside now to ask harder questions. She had guessed this thing was some kind of Jain AI and its structure bore that out. Knowing it was a submind of one that occupied the wormship was useful data, but not really what she wanted.

  The thing resisted as she sought out its purpose. It gave her answers but ones that were open to wide interpretation. She kept cutting to the root, however. It had been broken off the wormship to attack Orlik’s vessel, not in any hope of destroying it, but to keep him occupied until the main wormship could do that. Captured inside the prador ship, it had done just what Jain tech did: it subverted and it attempted to destroy. Given the opportunity of access to prador children, it began working on their minds, but then it found something else inside them. It found the virus, and in the genetic structure of that it found the squad.

  Orlandine paused over this latest information. It wasn’t clear whether the soldiers of the squad were actually Jain or some kind of biomech. It was clear that they could resurrect from their own genome. However, in becoming part of the Spatterjay virus this genome had become disrupted, hence the resurrection failures. The fragment corrected the disruption, and those prador children were turning into soldiers. All this confirmed what she herself had found out. But there were other connections in the mind she was taking apart and she traced them.

  Soldiers . . .

  There was a special kind of soldier. In its adolescent stages, it was similar to the ones recorded in the virus, but capable of doing and being a lot more. Such a soldier grew U-space nodes throughout its body that connected it to a backup in that continuum—a vast store of data it could use to transform itself. It could also divert the energy of attacks on itself to U-space, and then feed on that energy. How this was done stretched even Orlandine’s understanding of U-space and hardfield technology. Simply put, here was a soldier that grew stronger the harder something tried to kill it. Here was a Jain super-soldier.

  And one of these had been on the Cyberat world.

  “What do you want it for?” Again, the question was in a language over five million years old. Again, the submind’s inability to circumvent it.

  The image became clear, even as the submind started to destroy itself—corrupting its own data, shorting power supplies, turning its remaining weapons on the last enclaves of its own consciousness. Orlandine saw the accretion disc slowly turning in space. The centre flashed intensely bright as the sun ignited. A shockw
ave hurtled out, irradiating proto-planets and superheating gas and debris but, still, the disc flew apart in cosmic slow motion, spreading a vast amount of the Jain technology existing there. She saw billions of Jain nodes falling through space. Yes, they would take centuries to reach the Polity and the Kingdom and surely many would be destroyed before that happened. But Pandora’s Box would have been opened and, unless both the Polity and the Kingdom advanced to some vastly superior technological state before then, they would face destruction.

  “You cannot stop the soldier,” the fading submind told her.

  “What weapons can stop it?” she asked.

  “You do not have them. It will destroy your defence sphere and detonate the sun.” But even with this answer there was more. Yes, the defence sphere weapons were inadequate in a direct confrontation and she could see why. She was beginning to understand the advanced U-tech and saw that the soldier could generate an all but impenetrable hardfield around itself, as well as divert the energy from that into U-space. However, there was a limit to the amount of energy it could divert. Beyond a certain point, the underlying twist that stored that energy would overload and the feedback from that would destroy the soldier.

  Orlandine paused. The submind, at the last, had managed to lie to her, which now put in question some of the things it had told her before. Certainly, the soldier was very, very dangerous, but she did have a chance of stopping it. Should she just rely on that possibility? No, she should not. The Jain technology in the disc needed to be rendered impotent.

  Orlandine released the worm fragment, ejecting it with a blast of pressurized gas.

  “Destroy this,” she instructed generally.

  Even as particle beams lanced in from both her own ship and the prador destroyer, she opened up U-space com to the accretion disc and began loading data. An instant later she completely reworked the supply logistics there, diverted ships, changed the targets for mining operations, ordered the removal of components from the defence sphere and routed them to another place. While she was doing this, she tried to talk to Dragon, and only then saw that the alien entity was no longer where it should be.