The Soldier

by Neal Asher

  “Where are you?” she asked on her private channel, watching the worm fragment writhing, burning and coming apart under fire.

  “Do nothing,” Dragon replied.

  “I have to be ready,” she said, “and I should move to neutralize this threat.” She sent all the data on her recent interrogation of the fragment’s submind.

  “Wait,” Dragon said. “Something is wrong.”

  “Tell me what.”

  “I cannot . . . yet.”

  “Then I must act on the information I have. I cannot wait because you have vague feelings of unease about this.”

  Dragon did not reply so she opened another link.

  “Knobbler?”

  “Here as always,” the assassin drone replied.

  “The exit runcible is nearly ready. Move it now to the accretion disc—further work can continue there.”

  “The reception runcible is not ready,” Knobbler replied.

  “You will shortly have all the resources you require. I am diverting the materials and components that you need to you. I am also sending you all the construction robots from around Jaskor.” In her mind’s eye she could see those same robots swarming towards transports in the Jaskoran system. “As soon as you can, I want you to move it too. Take it to the target and complete the work there.”

  “There is some urgency?”

  She sent him a précis of the submind interrogation.

  “Ah, I see,” said Knobbler. “But we might not have time to get this done before the soldier arrives.”

  “We can only try,” she replied. “Get to work.” She turned her Jain mechanism away from the spreading cloud of hot metallic vapour the worm fragment had become. “I am heading to the accretion disc now.”

  As she approached her ship, she directed her attention back towards the prador destroyer. The weapons Bludgeon had used against it had caused substantial damage and the fragment had once again screwed its systems and its mind, while Orlik, in his sanctum, had detached his interface. It was unimportant in light of what she had learned. Orlik and his crew were dispensable . . . But then some small part of herself objected to such cold pragmatism. She acknowledged it. She could do something that would not hamper her objectives.

  “Cutter, Bludgeon, go across there and help them,” she instructed.

  “You’re leaving us?” they asked simultaneously.

  “You are not required for what is to come,” she replied, calculating how long it would take her to get back aboard the Cytoxic. “You have four minutes to depart.”

  She sensed their disapproval. It was irrelevant.

  TRIKE

  “We want to stay with you, if we can,” said Trike. “We want to see this through.”

  Ruth was hanging on to his arm and now he felt thoroughly, uncompromisingly human. She released it and stretched up to kiss him, before plonking herself down in one of the acceleration chairs. Trike walked over to the other chair and sat, eyeing the Old Captain.

  “That’s good,” said Cog, “because Earth Central wants me to take Angel’s remains to outlink station Catheron. Immediately.”

  “And the reason for that?” Ruth asked.

  Cog looked from one to the other. “Some ally of Angel on board that wormship betrayed him and left with the creature we saw on the Cyberat world. The data I supplied on it got EC all excited. Apparently, that thing we saw is rather dangerous . . .”

  “No shit,” said Trike, remembering the slaughtered Cyberat.

  Cog grimaced and shrugged. “Yes, it caused major damage and loss of life there, but that’s not the kind of danger that gets EC this agitated. A rogue war drone could have caused that.”

  “So not that important,” said Trike bitterly. He was still uncomfortable with the idea of Cog being a Polity agent—working for Earth Central. Like many who traded around the Polity border, he was aware that the ruling AI tended to focus on the big picture. Little people could get lost under the paintwork.

  “So what kind of potential damage gets EC agitated then?” Ruth asked.

  “Suffice to say larger scale,” said Cog. “The loss of a world or two. The occasional sun blowing up. That kind of thing. Also, there might be another party interested in data from Angel’s remains.”

  “Another party?” asked Ruth.

  “EC wasn’t clear on that. All I know is that it’s not a good idea for us to hang on to them.”

  “Then we must go,” said Trike.

  “Yes—Janus, take us out and U-jump when ready.”

  The rumble of the fusion drive started up and the image of the Cyberat world’s horizon fell away. Starlit space filled the screen. A second later a frame opened in the laminate, again showing the Cyberat horizon, and a small moon rising into view.

  “Something big just shed its chameleonware,” Janus warned.

  The moon? Trike wondered.

  This moon was moving fast, growing in the frame which quickly focused in on it. The thing was bone white and apparently smooth, but as Trike watched, a split opened up in its surface revealing a deep red and black cavity, its edges rimmed with writhing movement. Then the frame flickered and the moon became visible through the main screen, bearing down on them.

  “Get us out of here!” Cog bellowed.

  The fusion drive ramped up and, shortly after, Trike felt the weird dislocation that meant the U-space drive was engaging. But then something changed, as if a god had kicked the foundations of the universe.

  “I cannot,” said Janus.

  The moon was now upon them and they fell into its red and black cavity. Trike glimpsed cobra-head tentacles and gleaming sapphire eyes before the ship crashed hard, the impact throwing him out of his chair. He slammed into the bottom of the console, then rolled back and saw that Ruth was still in her chair, having remembered to strap in. Cog had held on, sinking his fingers deep into the arms of his throne.

  “Bugger,” said the Old Captain. “That other party is Dragon.”

  THE CLIENT

  A constellation of lights flashed across a swathe of vacuum and marked the firing from the prador ships. Bounce gates on the Client’s attack pods began registering the passage of U-jump missiles aboard every one of them, as did those aboard the weapons platform. Just one faulty gate and the prador would find it and destroy the vessel concerned. Railgun slugs also hurtled through vacuum—so many that there would surely be hardfield failures, which the prador could then penetrate with ensuing particle beams.

  The Client realized they could not destroy her here and were forcing her to run again. Why? Because she would always be on the defensive, always running, unable to cause further damage in their realm. Perhaps they had something else to deploy? The fleet here was large but a small portion of what the Kingdom could utilize. Or perhaps they just wanted to drive her out of the Kingdom. How should she react to this?

  The library would lead them to her every time, as it had just done again. If she moved outside prador territory, though, would the ships follow? Possibly. But there was one place they would not and that was into the Polity. Was that their aim, to drive her there? If she wanted to continue acting against the prador she needed to be free of the library. She also seriously needed to upgrade her weaponry if she was to go up against the ships trailing her. The answer, as before, lay in the data.

  The Client programmed a U-jump. But this time she reduced the input energy to its minimum and chose a destination outside the Kingdom. It was neither the Kingdom nor the Polity, but that borderland between: the Graveyard. If the ships followed her there it would upset Polity/Kingdom agreements—in fact, her presence there would do the same. Doubtless the Polity had informed the king that she was not one of their AIs, but there would still be doubt. The jump, because of its low energy, would result in her spending a great deal of subjective time in U-space—time to delve deeply into the library data, and time to use the weapons data she had available for the serious upgrade she needed.

  The real shimmered out as Weapons Platfor
m Mu and its remaining attack pods fell into grey. The Client, wound around her crystal tree, still perpetually giving birth to herself and still perpetually dying, partitioned her mind. One part she set to the task of riffling through the data to glean every scrap of information about weapons, and then apply it to the platform and its subsidiary attack pods. Already some of them were building that esoteric beam weapon ready to deploy, and making alterations to their hardfield generators. They were also preparing links to their U-space drives so they could be connected once those drives were no longer in use. The other part of her mind fell into the prehistory of the Species, right back to the beginning.

  16

  In interstellar terms the Harding black hole is a midget. The universe is scattered with black holes that are thousands and millions of times its mass. They sit at the centre of spiral galaxies, are theorized to be the forces that formed such galaxies, hold them together, and will destroy them. In our galaxy, we are steadily circling that drain. But that is beside the point I want to make here. The Harding black hole, like many of similar small masses, is an oddity. AI modelling of stellar formation tracked back through billions of years, either towards the big bang or back through the steady-state eternal universe (choose your preferred theory), does not account for it. It therefore seems likely it is an artefact. In the Polity today we manufacture singularities. They are components in runcibles, USERs and gravity weapons and are used as tools in mega-scale construction projects. We can destroy them but that task is infinitely more difficult than the job of creating them. So isn’t it likely that civilizations before us functioned in a similar manner? Maybe the smaller black holes are singularity dumps filled up over the ages, or the sites of some technological mishap dropping a singularity into a world, or a sun. Or maybe some mega-scale construction tool accidentally gobbling up a small star system? Or, considering we know that high-tech civilizations existed before us and do not exist now, the likes of the Harding black hole could be the detritus of interstellar war.

  —from How It Is by Gordon

  THE CLIENT

  The creatures evolved on a world hot enough to boil water at Earth atmospheric pressure, but the pressure there was high enough to prevent their nursery seas from boiling. In appearance they resembled Earth lobsters, but they had none of the human sense of society, of cooperation. One of them could produce thousands upon thousands of progeny. Genetic mixing—sex—was through a form of genetic rape and theft that left pieces of the losers strewn about the sea floor. Technological advance was conducted by individual research, as well as by theft from other individuals. These hostile, merciless creatures did slowly discover the benefits of cooperation as they rose over millions of years from their boiling seas to space, but it always broke down. And their rise was marked by endless alliances and betrayals, conflicts and exterminations. Seeing all this, the Client made comparisons between technological advance through cooperation and that through warfare. Which was better was open to debate, and certainly, the styles of technology were very different. Everything these creatures made seemed to be weaponized in some way.

  The creatures spread out into their solar system, and, as is usual with technology, more power was put into the compass of lone citizens. For these creatures that meant more individualism. It meant isolated creatures controlling giant stations and spaceships. As they gained greater understanding of their biology and could alter it, incorporating their technology into themselves, it brought radical divergence too. The creatures perpetually experimented on their own progeny and upon themselves. But though they had the need to plot their own courses, the aggressive technological and biological theft continued. This was the glue that prevented them from completely separating after they had developed U-space technology. Their society, their continued conflict, just grew larger and widened beyond their solar system.

  When these creatures encountered other races, they applied the same rules they followed for encounters with their own kind. They stole technology and they exterminated out of hand. They developed artificial intelligence—it was merely another weapon to them and, since they had been thoroughly incorporating their technology, an extension of their own being. Over millions of years they spread out over a large portion of the galaxy: not a society, not a polity, not a kingdom, but a perpetual war. The alliances and betrayals continued, the lone development of technology and then the mixing by theft continued, and they grew ever more powerful as individuals. They wrecked or altered planetary systems to suit their needs, and even moved suns. They used time-travel in their conflicts and wiped out whole swathes of their own past, then created new histories. Yet they succeeded in not wiping themselves out.

  Throughout their patchwork history they tried many things, and altered themselves in numerous ways. Often groups of them tried full cooperation—modelling themselves on particular civilizations they had destroyed. But the driving mass of aggressive individualists always stamped this out—oddly finding their own destructive form of cooperation in response. One of them, however, did manage to build something and take it away, fleeing the occupied part of the galaxy. The creatures were individualists, but never quite wanted to move too far from others they could fight with and steal from. But this individual took its much altered children away to find a place it could work on its new theories and ideas. In terms of its own species, this was practically unheard of.

  The creature established itself in a solar system and began building anew. Its children, reduced to primitivism and left to rise from that state over millions of years, were a hive species that turned into the Species. The creature established itself to watch their development, never able to make the final step to become one of them. When they finally rose to space travel and found the creature, it portioned out knowledge to its children. But it always controlled access to that knowledge, ensuring they took nothing that might cause them to fall back into the habits of its old kind. By their nature, as a hive culture, the Species did not venture far from just a few solar systems. The father of the Species never wanted its progeny to seek out their ancestors, which would certainly result in their destruction. It watched them for millions of years and then faded from memory.

  This creature was the Librarian.

  This creature was one of what the humans called the Jain.

  The Client paused while going through this general overview, both awed and appalled by the history of its own kind. She studied detail, groping for understanding of such hostility. It was there from the very beginning—etched into the biology of the Jain. Mating was violent theft by dint of one creature grabbing hold of another and attaching mating tentacles that ripped out the victim’s genome. The victim itself also became a food source for the production of progeny. But evolution gave these tentacles the ability to thieve more than genetic data. They took survival strategies from the victim in the form of neural patterns, and Jain biotechnology turned that into something more. They ripped knowledge from each other, not only taking the material technology but the essence of it from each other’s minds. They could even reprogram and enslave each other.

  She paused yet again, realizing something. For this process to remain viable, for the Jain to continue pillaging and raping each other of data, there had to be a degree of compliance. Total hostility would only result in mutual destruction. Understanding arose and she briefly focused her attention on that recorded shriek. It was the Librarian’s challenge and, implicit within it, was the question: are you worthy? She could see it was something that had been refined over millions of years. Those who could not answer the challenge were summarily destroyed. Those who could . . . would get up close and personal to its source. This was the Jain way.

  In all of this the Client could see the basis of the Species’ development. Her own body form was a strange expansion of this idea—her serial mind. She was both an individual and a community. But for the larger community of the Species things were very different. They shared knowledge; they did not rip it from each other. From this as
pect the Librarian, in terms of the Jain, was truly insane. Or perhaps it was a genius—as the humans noted, the dividing line between the two states of mind was a thin one. She now turned her attention to what knowledge she could glean about the Librarian itself.

  It was Jain and it was appallingly ancient. It had spent millions of years watching and tweaking the development of its children into the Species. It had also, she saw, interfered less and less as the ages passed. An utter recluse writ large. She could understand its reluctance to allow one of the Species to learn things it had held back from them for millions of years. She thought deeply on what must have happened to its mind. She applied her serial mind to this, utilizing every smallest detail about the Jain and about the Librarian itself. She deduced it had to now be almost completely internalized, its thought patterns fossilized. Yes, it had been utterly different to the usual Jain, perhaps insane, perhaps a genius, but in terms of the Species it was insane. And probably neither the Polity nor the Kingdom would see it as a balanced individual. Did it recognize the prador genocide of its own children, or know what had happened beyond the system of the Species over the last millions of years? Did it even know that the Jain had ceased to exist five million years ago? That last question posed another one: how was it possible that the Jain, so widely spread and so powerful, had ceased to exist?

  These last questions were ones the Client knew, to the heart of her being, she must have answers to. There was only one way to get them. As she fell through U-space, still reviewing Jain history but returning her main attention to her weapons and defences, the Client had a passing thought. Perhaps the Librarian had been right to keep that history forbidden, for she now planned to do exactly as her ancestry dictated: she intended to rip knowledge from the Librarian’s mind.

  KNOBBLER

  In the outer Jaskoran system, Knobbler watched activity go up a gear following Orlandine’s order to complete construction as quickly as possible. The tug resembled a titanic ancient engine block, a convoluted solid lump of technology, tough and resilient and in fact almost all engine itself. It was poised on a long ribbed fusion flame, and strained in a net of braided monofilament cables; this web of cables stretched across the ring frame of the smaller runcible. The cables were stretching but they would not break. Knobbler was as sure of this as he was of the assassin drone aboard the tug getting the job done. But still, banter was required.