The Soldier

by Neal Asher

  “Now draw off the wormship,” Dragon sent.

  “You can’t handle it?”

  “I cannot.”

  Dragon began moving then—a sudden surge of acceleration directly towards the sun. Meanwhile, the wormship was halfway to its coagulated state and intercepting Blade’s attacks with hardfields. Concentrating on one area with a fusillade of railgun slugs filled space with fire over hard-fields, but also caused long fuse-like explosions in sections of the worm-ish body. The wormship slowed further, then abruptly changed course, heading straight towards Blade.

  “Okay,” Blade sent, “that got your attention.”

  Blade analysed the attack and its results, along with logistics concerning Dragon’s known armament. It seemed likely that the worm-ship had needed to attack Dragon in dispersed form, while the Clade was weakening it internally. In coagulated form, it would be subject to a high-powered white laser shot that would probably fry its systems. But it could not conduct its dispersed attack while Blade was out there burning up its structure. Blade had completely defused its attack, which was supposed to have been a surprise one, and now, accelerating hard, the wormship was obviously pissed off.

  “Come and play,” Blade sent.

  The wormship replied with a particle beam blast that Blade took on its shields. Four hardfield projectors shot from ejection ports and the Obsidian Blade tumbled through vacuum on the blast wave. Induction warfare then hit, scrambling systems so an ensuing blue laser carved into Blade’s forward section.

  “Damn!”

  Blade began weaving and looked around. It needed a foil and the nearest was Dragon itself. While dodging, the attack ship swung round, matching Dragon’s course and having to use nearly everything it had to catch up. The wormship swung in behind and Blade dropped mines in its path, then chaff, while changing course slightly to bring it towards Dragon. Acceleration continued, until all three ships were nearly up to half light speed. A particle beam fired by the wormship oozed out in slow motion and struck a hardfield. It then winked out as the wormship hit the first mines. Three detonations, one on top of another, lost it behind a scaling of hardfields. It came through this flare with actinic fuse-wire burning throughout its structure. But a moment later the particle beam licked out again.

  Dragon, meanwhile, was having its own problems. A great explosion inside the entity peeled up a square mile of its armour, blowing out a mass of its innards, smoking in vacuum and sprinkled with coiled-up Clade units. Whether this was intentional on Dragon’s part Blade did not know. Things were heating up. Vapour issued from the holes in Dragon’s armour while Blade’s cooling systems had kicked in. Perhaps it should try something new . . .

  Blade began opening U-jump splinter missiles on its surface and shedding loads of anti-matter canisters, chemical explosives and ther-mo-nuclear devices, while onlining another weapons system. Strewing this lethal load behind it, Blade waited long minutes, and shed five more hardfield projectors, before activating the weapon. The gravity wave hit the anti-matter canisters just as the wormship reached them. The detonation was immense, its glare wiping out even that of the sun that now loomed huge ahead. Hardfields cycled in this fire and, as it went out, the wormship fuse-wire burned again, while shedding half its mass like flash-burned rope. This all spread out from the central coagulation as it writhed and knotted into something smaller.

  “Shed heat as plasma,” Dragon instructed. “Your U-jump missiles.”

  The entity had changed course, not heading directly into the sun but at a tangent. It looked like it was aiming to swing round, but almost in the thermosphere. Blade began converting heat through thermo-couples and superconducting networks, converting stored hydrogen to plasma. It compressed it into the load compartments of its splinter missiles.

  “One time shot,” Dragon added. “On my mark.”

  Blade splintered up its missiles and targeted the wormship, but with no hope of actually hitting it with the present U-space disruption.

  “Now,” said Dragon.

  A pulse issued from deep inside the entity—a spreading wave through the local gravity map. Blade fired its missiles and saw them taken by that wave’s effect in U-space. In the instant of perception most of the missiles just disappeared in surrounding disruption, but some got through.

  And arrived on target.

  The wormship detonated, flying apart and burning, a spreading cloud of burned rope debris. Blade studied this for a second, hardly believing the thing was gone, then returned its attention to Dragon.

  “You need to pull up,” it said, applying grav-engines at full power to haul itself up out of its fall into the sun. “Correct your course.”

  “Now, I cannot,” said Dragon, as the steady pull of the sun took it.

  As Blade fought to clear the thermosphere it felt a sudden surge of rage as it saw Clade units abandoning Dragon like a huge shoal of fish darting from a brain coral. The units slammed together in one silvery writhing mass, and planed up out of the thermosphere impossibly fast.

  Dragon continued on down.

  ORLANDINE

  Orlandine, ensconced in her interface sphere aboard her ship the Cytoxic, could possess the patience of a drone able to manipulate its perception of time. Only she wasn’t able to do it. Every time she tried to put herself into that waiting state she dropped out of it again and began calculating probabilities, reviewing logistics. But there was nothing more she could do. The runcible was travelling down the axis of the accretion disc’s spin, warded all around by fifty weapons platforms. The other platforms and their attack pods were as ready as they could ever be—a state they had duteously maintained throughout their existence.

  Then everything changed.

  Indicted space all about the accretion disc was scattered with detectors, a pseudo-matter portion of which dipped into underspace to monitor it constantly. One of these, out from the rim and just ten light minutes from the Cytoxic, detected an object approaching through that continuum. It shot a U-com signal at another object holding a position in U-space. That object imploded, emitting a pulse that caused a momentary disruption, like something pinching a stretched rubber sheet. This was enough to fling the object out into the real.

  It appeared adjacent to Weapons Platform Aleph. Just a moment later, a series of twelve detonations across vacuum marked the spots where Aleph’s attack pods blew up. Then the soldier appeared, travelling at three-quarters light speed.

  So this is the enemy, thought Orlandine. Her assessment was cold and logical, the fact of the soldier’s arrival just slotting into her calculations. Via sensors aboard Aleph, she studied the thing.

  The soldier was a mile long and looked vaguely like a giant hoverfly with its wings folded. Scanning in the electromagnetic spectrum merely revealed its outer appearance—the mechanisms tangling its surface like some metallic growth of lichen. However, on the gravity map of the system, it made a substantial dent, while in U-space it was an inversion, like a planetary body, but with odd twists and channels spearing off into that realm.

  “Fire at will,” was Orlandine’s only verbal instruction, while logistics and analyses flashed between weapons platforms.

  First to strike the soldier was a high-powered particle beam, as with any unexpected arrival in the indicted zone. This splashed against the curved meniscus of a hardfield, while the thing spewed a long line of dense spheres, each the size of a human head. It then short-jumped, immediately ricocheting back into the real when Aleph hit it with a USER pulse, but closer to the platform. The fusillade of U-jump missiles the platform fired at it had no effect—disappearing through some internal gate. The spheres disappeared shortly afterwards, one after another, short-jumping to materialize over more of Aleph’s attack pods. They detonated, flinging out gravity waves which smashed into the pods, buckling them and hurling out clouds of debris.

  Aleph replied with a gravity wave of its own. The soldier bucked and shot along this wave, leaving a trail of fire, then jumped again. Aleph opened fire
with all its weapons, filling intervening space with railgun slugs, and complementing this with a USER pulse. The soldier ricocheted out into the real, tumbling, then fired down with an energy beam like a glass rod. This struck Aleph’s hardfields and began boring through them, while the platform spewed projectors. Finally, the beam punched through and hit the platform, carving along it like a knife tip over polystyrene—debris rose into vacuum.

  More weapons platforms began to jump in. Two came first, then a third, which hit a USER pulse emitted by the soldier, causing it to materialize bent out of shape and trail fire—a giant gyrating mass of technology as large as a city. More platforms appeared. One that was out of control clipped another, smashing away spaceship-sized debris. But hundreds of particle beams intersected on the soldier—a concentration of energy that could have fried a small moon. The soldier disappeared inside the burning sphere of an impossible spherical hardfield. In her view of U-space, Orlandine saw the inversion, which marked the soldier’s relative position, turning in some strange way. It then snapped back, and the thing lost its hardfield and jumped just a few miles. It issued three of its own beams which were much the same hue as those Dragon used. These ate up railgun slugs on their course to Aleph. Again, hardfield projectors burned out and the beams punched through. They struck the platform hard, hot fires revealed through the surrounding structure, and they speared right through to the other side.

  “Just keep hitting it,” Orlandine instructed, noting the AI ejecting from the platform that had been mangled by its U-jump—a cylindrical canister hurtled out away from the defence sphere. Next, causing their own local disruption in U-space, another ten platforms jumped in and opened fire on the soldier. Particle beams struck, forcing it to use its spherical hardfield again, then U-jump missiles appeared just outside of this and detonated. In U-space Orlandine saw the soldier’s inversion turning further. Next, seemingly close to the limit of that twist, of U-space storage, it dropped its hardfield once more and this time absorbed the full energy of the particle beams for a microsecond, before jumping again.

  “Bloody hell,” said Aleph.

  “Yes,” was all Orlandine said.

  Nothing should have survived those beams, even for a microsecond.

  Again, a USER pulse forced the soldier into the real. It had shed mass and was glowing like something extracted from a furnace.

  “And again,” Orlandine instructed unnecessarily.

  The mass of weapons platforms jumped, bringing them within thousands of miles of the soldier. Four of them came out of U-space bent out of shape, while a fifth materialized in an explosion of debris. The remainder opened fire, particle beams intersecting on the soldier again with an appalling amount of energy. At the intersection point, particulates spread in a fusion cloud that remained for some time, even after the soldier managed to withstand shutting down its hardfield and jumped yet again. Meanwhile, Orlandine was scanning heavily and knew that this was what the soldier had been doing too. She saw in U-space it was drawing a larger amount of energy for its next jump, and it was taking the tactical course the movement of the platforms had presented: it would head for a gap that had opened up in the defence.

  The soldier reappeared within view of the optical arrays of the Cytoxic. It paused in space then, spewing multiple tails of fusion fire, and began heading in towards the accretion disc on conventional drive. It had no choice: though the particle beams had yet to reach it, USER pulses had done so. A second later it hit a minefield dropped by the platform that had abandoned this position, and disappeared inside a series of actinic explosions. It came out of these inside its spherical hardfield. Just a second after that, forty platforms arrived between it and the disc and opened fire. Then others followed, ramping up the firepower to something that had not been seen since the Polity war with the prador.

  “Now,” she said, “you have eight minutes before the energy levels get too high . . .”

  She could see the underlying twist steadily turning as the hardfield, glaring like a blue sun, routed power away into U-space. But then the unexpected happened. The hardfield suddenly gained motive power, somehow sliding over the surface of space and through vacuum, faster and ever faster. It wasn’t heading into the accretion disc but at a tangent. Orlandine could not understand the purpose of this since it did not decrease the intensity of fire, until she saw something looming ahead, dark against the star field.

  Musket Shot . . .

  The soldier fell towards the leaden planetoid and finally slammed into its surface, blowing out a crater twenty miles across. USER disruption issued from that point—either some effect of the impact or deliberate concealment, because Orlandine lost her view of U-space. The moment this happened Orlandine entertained doubts. Perhaps this had been the soldier’s first intended destination all along? No. The thing had aimed for a stealthy penetration to begin with, so had come in minimal-ized form. She was overthinking this—she had to stick with her plan.

  As a mushroom cloud of fire rose from the impact, Orlandine noted a perceptible alteration in the planetoid’s course. The weapons platforms continued firing at the impact site, pumping appalling amounts of energy at the soldier. Orlandine watched a steady glow spreading out from that point and massive eruptions from the surface. A moment later, railgun slugs began to impact, punching glowing craters and throwing up more clouds of debris. By degrees, Musket Shot disappeared under this cloud.

  “Keep firing,” she instructed, then noted it was a pointless order now she could only use the slow drag of laser communications. The platform AIs knew what to do anyway.

  Musket Shot soon became a glowing ball swathed in cloud. Its radiation kept on increasing and it was soon boiling like a small sun. Surely by now the soldier had taken its energy store to its limit . . .

  A blast down on the surface, brighter than the light of a hypergi-ant, opened an actinic blue eye and threw a chunk out of the planetoid like a large bite from an apple. A great fumarole of debris spewed out a hundred miles long, webbing space with molten lead and fire wraiths. In chaotic U-space, a wave spread out and dispersed.

  “Cease firing,” Orlandine instructed as she watched the planetoid deform and reshape, completely molten now and collapsing back into spherical form. Finally, the particle beams playing over the surface began to go out, but the impacts from railgun slugs went on for much longer. Some hours later, forcing her ship’s systems to their limit to breach the settling disruption of U-space, Orlandine jumped the Cytoxic near to the moon. Scanning its surface, she saw only rivers of molten lead running amidst the slower roil of liquid rock. There was no sign of the soldier.

  19

  As Gordon has asked, “What is death when the most horrendous physical damage can be repaired, minds can be recorded and bodies regrown from a scrap of DNA?” He then notes that, “Death remains that place from which no one returns. Ever.” But we unenhanced humans are fast machines for slow genes. Our thinking is linear, and our reactions reflect that. Unless we have undergone substantial augmentation and reprogramming, we cannot react to the death of an AI in the same way as to that of a fellow human. Even now, the destruction of some remote lump of crystal, or the termination of a disembodied voice, does not elicit commensurate grief no matter that it might be a centuries-old, wise and good being. We react more to the death of AI only if it is embodied, to the death of a war drone friend, but even more so to the deaths of Golem or human-shaped avatars. Death for us is only real if it is physical, animal, and about us. It is also the case that we cannot suppress grief when a close human dies, even if we know they possess a memplants and that their DNA is on file. It’s deep programming and difficult to eradicate because evolution did not prepare us for eternity and, in reality, no religion ever truly prepared us for resurrection.

  —from Quince Guide, compiled by humans

  TRIKE

  Frames open in the screen laminate gave them a perfect view of the action as they fled it. His hand clamped on the back of a bloody chair, Trike e
yed the silvery, writhing mass rising up and away from the sun, and felt tension climbing throughout his body. He glanced around the bridge again at the wreckage of the three Clade units that had attacked them and knew that if that whole mass came after them, they would not survive it. Yet he wanted them to attack—he wanted to lose himself to that violence. It seemed the Clade was all he had left to direct his anger towards now the wormship was gone. He then forced himself to focus on Angel, standing before the shimmershield across the doorway into the rest of the ship and peering through.

  “Janus, what’s the damage?” asked Cog, slumped in his throne.

  There was no reply.

  “Janus?” Cog waited for a moment, then swung his console across and opened another frame to show the emergency data in full. “Fusion engine is offline,” he said flatly. “Main grav-drive and steering thrusters down too, but I can’t tell what the damage is. We’ve lost hull integrity but, luckily, we still have the reactor and enough air.”

  “And?” Trike asked. Shadows were flickering round him, and he felt as if the walls were crawling with leeches. But he could hang on. Ruth was in a cold coffin and could be revived. She was not far from him; she would never be far from him. He could sense the U-mitter in her skull.

  “Janus is dead,” said Cog, and he turned to Angel. “Dragon?”

  Angel looked round. “It has gone from my mind.”

  “Right,” interjected Cog. “No help there. And none from Obsidian Blade either.”

  “Obsidian Blade?” Trike repeated.