The Soldier

by Neal Asher

Cog gestured to the screen frame showing the Clade. He magnified the image and it revealed a shard of black following the swarm AI—the vessel that had destroyed the wormship. “That’s the black-ops attack ship that was following me. It arrived too late at Angel’s base and was tardy here.” He grimaced. “Obviously it didn’t see fit to let me know it was here and is now trailing the Clade, which looks set on a course out-system.”

  “You would think it would come to see if you’re alive,” said Trike, looking down at the bloody chair. So much blood.

  Cog shrugged. “Priorities. It’s going after the larger danger to the

  Polity.”

  “So, you find yourself on the blunt end of that.” Trike felt anger suddenly surging up inside him. “Those that work for the Polity put threats to it as a whole before mere individual lives.” He snapped his mouth shut. He could feel grooves in his tongue. Closing his eyes, he fought for control. As attractive as it felt to let himself go, that would not help Ruth at all.

  “Not quite,” Cog snapped. “It’s all about numbers. Cold calculations. If Blade comes to us it will lose the Clade, and the Clade is capable of, and probably inclined to, kill thousands . . . if not more.” When Cog paused for thought Trike found himself taking a pace towards the man, but again forced calm, and tried to listen as Cog continued. “Angel, a lot of systems are damaged and I’m not getting the data I need. But I do know that here is the only part of the ship that’s now pressurized. Hoopers can withstand vacuum, but only for a short while . . .”

  Angel nodded. “I will make an assessment, see if there is anything I can do quickly, then return with space suits.” The android moved into and through the shimmershield.

  Trike watched him go, then, still rigidly under control, stepped away from Ruth’s chair to sit down in his own. “What about Dragon?” he asked, wondering whether or not to put the safety strap across—that would at least delay him for a second or two if he started to lose his grip on himself.

  “We will see very shortly,” Cog supplied. “If it doesn’t reappear soon then I would say it’s gone. It was skimming round in the thermosphere of the sun, which it might be able to survive, but if it’s gone right down . . .”

  “Then it’s ash,” Trike said. “But I highly doubt it could survive the thermosphere. You saw what it was like inside its armour—it was organic.”

  Cog nodded in agreement, then returned his attention to the scrolling alert messages.

  “The fusion drive and main grav-engine are offline. I can’t assess the damage as yet,” said Angel, speaking from the intercom. “Your ship AI is floating around in pieces. Steering thrusters were disconnected—I’m re-establishing system links to them and to you now.”

  More frames opened on the screen scrolling further data. Glancing at Cog, Trike noticed the Old Captain’s grim expression get grimmer.

  “Bring us those space suits,” he instructed.

  Studying the data himself helped Trike move away from his internal battle, and he shortly understood how bad things were. When he saw Cog accessing data on the ship’s other cold coffins he knew that Cog had seen it too.

  “How long?” he asked tightly.

  Cog glanced at him, then studied him more closely, his eyes narrowing. “On steering thrusters it will take about thirty-five years to bring us back in orbit around the Cyberat world. Even on fusion, if we can repair the drive, it will take a year.”

  “And the Cyberat?”

  Cog shook his head. “You heard Doshane. I doubt he’ll be sympathetic.”

  “Our reception might be different in thirty-five years, or even a year, maybe,” Trike replied. “And anyway—the USER disruption here will be over in a few months. Perhaps someone else will come . . .”

  “Optimism,” wondered Cog, studying him intently.

  Trike shrugged, trying to keep up the façade that he knew Cog had seen through. The chest injury had been bad enough, and the rest . . . he glanced at the bloody chair while something was tittering on the edge of perception. Was the greatest danger to them the failing ship around them, or was it Trike himself?

  “And it’s back,” said Cog, gesturing to a new screen frame he had opened.

  Trike gazed at the glowing sphere rising up out of the thermosphere of the sun, leaving a trail of hot vapour and burning debris. But then his attention drifted back to that chair. Perhaps he should head into the infirmary to see if the autodoc was functional. It wouldn’t have been enough for Ruth, he now understood—she needed nerve regrowth and a new heart—maybe he could fry more contents of his skull, though? But then frequent treatments like that destroyed his mind further, and he feared that in doing so he would lose his reasons for remaining sane. Was he fooling himself? No, no . . . he could handle this, so long as he could move; have something to do. He swung round as Angel returned to the bridge carrying two space suits.

  “You’re still getting nothing from Dragon?” Cog asked the android.

  Angel blinked, dropped the suits on the floor then gestured at the image. “Perhaps during the fight it disconnected from me. Evidently it survived the fire.”

  Trike transferred his attention to Cog. “We can’t go to the Cyberat world, and maybe someone will come in the next few months, maybe not. Do we want to be stuck out here for that long?” That was the best he could do. Cog knew what was happening to him.

  Cog dipped his head in cautious acknowledgement. He began working his console and a cross-hairs appeared over the rising image of Dragon in the screen frame, vector maths running below it. The ship kicked slightly as steering thrusters fired up in lieu of any better propulsion.

  “We should be able to intercept,” he said, “if it doesn’t change course.” He pushed the console aside and stood up. “Let’s suit up and take a look at the damage.”

  ORLANDINE

  As the disruption settled, instantaneous communication re-established and at last the platforms and their attack pods could travel through underspace. Five platforms arrived first, just thousands of miles out from Musket Shot. Orlandine, still watching from aboard the Cytoxic, ordered in another forty. She was loath to call in more since there was always the possibility that even this soldier’s attack had been a diversion, and that something else might try to get through to the accretion disc.

  Musket Shot was a glowing misty sphere—completely molten. Now able to access U-space, Orlandine scanned it for U-space distortions or twists and found nothing. But still she could not help but think that she had missed something.

  “Too easy,” she commented.

  “Easy?” enquired the nearest AI aboard Weapons Platform Ipsalus. A small data package behind that one word listed their losses. Over a hundred attack pods were scrap. Two platforms had been destroyed while two more were seriously out of commission, though recoverable. Every single platform that had been involved in this action had taken damage.

  “Musket Shot is perhaps a problem,” Ipsalus added.

  As she studied the planetoid via numerous sensors, Orlandine had been coming to a similar conclusion. Prior to the battle with the soldier, she had instructed the platforms to hold off on using some of the larger weapons available to them. A gigaton CTD was effective, but the EMR too disruptive. It would have made losing acquisition of the soldier a possibility. Now she was considering the utility of such a device. Perhaps it was time for this particular planetoid to just go away.

  “Something is not right,” commented one of the other platforms, a microsecond before the others, and a microsecond after Orlandine noticed it.

  The planetoid was showing no technological emissions and nothing was happening in U-space adjacent to its locale, but it was changing shape. Movement on its surface reminded her of parasitic worms crawling under skin, but growing steadily larger as they did so. At the terminus of one of these a mountain was rising rapidly, soon punching above the vapour cloud around the small world.

  “What the hell?” she said—rote words.

  Scanning flickered. One
moment it showed nothing, the next it revealed structure and complexity. The mountain continued to nose out and behind it the planetoid began to unravel. Orlandine gaped at an object, like an immense moray eel fashioned out of molten lead and rock, as its head rose out into vacuum and tilted. Then came a surge of power. A beam like a glassy rod licked out and traversed. The thing was ten feet wide and it sliced through Platform Ipsalus like a milling bit through a child’s toy. Then it went on to the next platform, and the next.

  The platforms opened fire again but the beams struck a hard-field that completely wrapped around what Musket Shot had become. Orlandine had time to see the underlying twist hardly shifting at all, before the beam grazed the Cytoxic as it traversed to another platform and chopped it in half. Systems crashed, fault warnings climbed through her ship as it tumbled through space. Though the beam had only touched her ship, its effect was spreading, debonding molecules, turning materials frangible so they shattered under their own torsion.

  I cannot stop this.

  Orlandine disconnected her interface sphere, then dropped down into the Jain structure she had used to interrogate the worm fragment. She only partially engaged before ejecting from her ship. As she fell away from it, she saw it unravelling from the strike point, falling into pieces like a slow-motion film of safety glass shattering. In space, on the belly of a Jain louse, she fell past island-sized chunks of debris. The beam just kept on carving up weapons platforms, disposing of them in an almost leisurely manner, as the giant moray thing continued to unravel.

  Orlandine now felt the human in her screaming, and suppressed it. Linked into Jain tech, she made her calculations and saw the truth. It didn’t matter if she brought the firepower of every single weapons platform here, it would still not be enough to destroy this thing. Once it was on the move it would be unstoppable and would soon enough reach its destination at the centre of the accretion disc. However, there was one option available.

  “Harlequin,” she sent. “Move.”

  The coordinates she sent would put the exit runcible just a hundred thousand miles out from her own position.

  “Shifting,” the drone aboard that device replied.

  “Knobbler?” she sent.

  After a slight delay the distant drone at the Harding black hole replied, “Here.”

  She sent a data package, and her instructions.

  “This could seriously fuck up,” the drone replied.

  “I calculate a forty per cent chance of failure,” Orlandine replied coldly. “Do it.”

  KNOBBLER

  “O kay,” Knobbler muttered, struggling to keep the runcible stable.

  He was bathed in coloured light in the cage surrounding him, and completely engaged with the runcible through its systems. He sent new instructions. Enclosed in hardfields, the titanic hexagonal frame of the runcible bore the appearance of a ring-shaped faceted gem. It dropped six of these fields evenly spaced around it, and the fusion drives on the underlying structure ignited to throw out white blades of flame. However, the bigger acceleration came when the grav-engines that had been keeping it stable shut down and the Harding black hole snatched hold of it. It was fast under such massive gravity. Within just a few seconds it was falling at thousands of miles an hour towards the misty sphere of matter disruption that marked the position of the black hole. But this created problems.

  With the grav-engines down, and the fusion engines applying thrust, the frame started to distort more than it had done with tidal forces. Automatics compensated for some of this, but Knobbler had to deal with the rest. He feathered this grav-motor, applied electrostatic torsion to some materials, causing some structures to expand and others to contract, while taking field reinforcing up to its maximum. It was like trying to hold together a tissue paper origami sculpture in a gale. Meta-materials that were able to survive re-entry and impact with an Earthlike world were rippling and twisting like rubber.

  “Good I haven’t got sweat glands,” Knobbler commented.

  “Or slippery hands on the controls,” commented one of his fellow drones.

  “Yeah,” said another. “None of that human time now.”

  Knobbler had to agree—this was no time for the kind of foolishness Orlandine enjoyed. But, since he was a machine and had always been a machine, it was not an issue. He allowed himself a glance back through space to where the drones had gathered in and around the remaining supply ship. He liked to think they were all rooting for him, but knew that many of them were watching with less than positive motives and hopes. He then put such thoughts out of his mind and consigned a large portion of his focus to activating the runcible for its prime purpose. A meniscus spread across the frame as the thing began opening its gate. Knobbler routed a large portion of the maths to his fellows and their nattering fell silent as they all took up the load usually taken by a runcible AI somewhat smarter than them. In no-space he fed in coordinates—a realm where they supposedly meant nothing. And he found connection. This runcible was now linked to the one controlled by Harlequin and sub-AI minds of Orlandine at the accretion disc.

  The runcible had covered half the distance to the black hole and would traverse the remainder in just a few minutes. Even formed of such tough material, wrapped in hardfields and supported by grav-engines, the thing was rippling and beginning to radiate heat—glowing red. All his feeds told Knobbler that it was still perfectly functional but he could not help but doubt that. This whole plan had been a human one after all, albeit an advanced human.

  Then it was there. The meniscus hit the matter disruption sphere with an intense flash across the EM spectrum. Just for a second that misty sphere broke to expose an eye on utter midnight. Knobbler had a moment to sense a deep shift into the realm of U-space, then all U-com went down. Another flash followed, burning out sensors and killing all data feeds. A minute later, things began to come back online. Knobbler’s optical array showed the runcible frame, bent and broken, tumbling in a swirl of metal vapour and debris. The Harding black hole, however, was gone.

  ORLANDINE

  The exit runcible slid into the real with a stuttering flash—a series of afterimages fading from existence behind it. Drive flames stabbed out from it and from the tug helping to manoeuver it, with braided monofilament cables sagging on one side as it turned. Appearing one after another, its protective weapons platforms drew into a jostling crowd before it. The soldier, the thing that now seemed to have incorporated the entire mass of Musket Shot, unravelled further and emitted a series of its glassy disruptor beams along one flank. As she dodged debris with spurts of fusion and ion drive, Orlandine saw one of the beams punch through the weapons platform nearest to it, then spiral outwards, turning the entire thing to trash. It was almost as if the soldier was playing. It then must have understood the danger of the new arrival because it turned its firepower towards the runcible.

  Beams speared out, travelling, Orlandine realized, at three-quarters light speed. They struck the intervening weapons platforms and began ripping them apart. Meanwhile, the runcible had gained enough momentum in its turn, and the tug detached and fell away. Orlandine watched all this utterly analytically but knowing that part of her should be appalled. She understood that if this went to plan, most of the intervening weapons platforms were finished—their AIs were all but dead. Instead she continued to coldly analyse logistics and watched as the platforms shifted to block anything from hitting the runcible.

  She now felt the surge in her subminds aboard the runcible as they made their calculations and dipped the device’s spoon into the continuum of U-space. The meniscus appeared, glittering like a soap bubble, first around the edges then closing up a hole to the centre. A cube shot away—Harlequin was making his escape. Orlandine felt as if reality was shifting, and then came an X-ray flash. From the sensors of the platform nearest the runcible, she saw the device fold out of existence and, seemingly, in its place appeared a burning sphere, eight miles across. As this hurtled out, the view from the platform lurched. Eve
rything lurched. It felt as if the universe had just sidestepped.

  Through omniscient vision, Orlandine watched weapons platforms throwing themselves into U-jumps. Twenty of them made it. Five shimmered out of existence, then abruptly snapped back into it, ripped out of shape, and burning. A platform fell into the sphere in an arcing course, stretching out like hot toffee with explosions all down its length, before disappearing in a hot X-ray flash. Sometimes the fire from matter being destroyed on its way to the event horizon cleared on an eye of midnight. But only briefly, just glimpses through the maelstrom.

  The soldier continued to tear apart those platforms that had lain between it and the runcible for just a few seconds more, then it shut down its weapons. It began unknotting itself faster and Orlandine read its intention in U-space.

  “USERs!” she commanded. “Full disruption!”

  The weapons platforms still capable of doing so fired up their USERs and Orlandine lost her view of the continuum. U-com went down and she switched over to laser, even as the Harding black hole reached the wreckage of those platforms the soldier had destroyed. This swirled and fell into the fireball descending towards her. Only then did she accept the danger she was in. She fired up her fusion engines to get away from Musket Shot as fast as she could manage. It seemed a slow drag as the black hole sucked up everything nearby and drew everything remaining into its wake.

  Orlandine ramped up her acceleration to a maximum, complementing fusion with ion drive, a grav-engine, steering thrusters and EM drive—every erg of energy thrown into getting her away. The Harding black hole hurtled past tens of thousands of miles away, but still she felt tidal forces distorting the Jain tech around her and jolting through her body. And despite her efforts, she calculated her chances of escaping its drag at zero. She gazed upon the thing—its appearance now was that of a comet, yet with debris and whole weapons platforms seemingly attached by invisible strings being wound in. Still on course, it hurtled down towards the soldier, and finally it struck the hardfield.