‘Lieutenant Kamnor told me where to find you, sergeant, sir,’ Ross blurted, trying to contextualise himself in a way that subtly threw in the chain of command. ‘I was a bit out of sorts, to do with the virus.’
‘What virus?’
‘Sent by the invaders. It’s making people think they’re, er, not themselves.’
‘Never heard of it. Too bad there isn’t one that makes useless sewage pipes like yourself think they’re fucking soldiers. Anyway, Kamnor you say? How is the effete bastard? Still swanning around like his arse wouldn’t rust?’
‘He was, er, looking grand when I left him, sir.’
‘I’ll bet he was. All image and politics with that one. Do anything to avoid losing face.’
Ross tried to retain eye contact with Gortoss in case anything less was considered insubordinate, but his focus kept being drawn to the twitching and possibly not-quite-dead marine still pinned to the ground by his spike. He wasn’t paying maximum attention to the sergeant’s words either, his focus latching immediately on to Gortoss’s dismissal of the virus. He’d never heard of it, he said. What if Kamnor was lying, or mistaken, Ross wondered, glimpsing a host of new possibilities.
Then Ross once again glimpsed what Gortoss was almost absently doing with his lethal appendage and reasoned that, given he was the most dangerously insane individual he’d ever met, perhaps he shouldn’t place too much stock in his testimony.
Gortoss glanced away, over the rim of the next crater, where something had pleasingly taken his eye. He barked a greeting to a Sergeant Zorlak and requested that he stand fast a moment. When he looked back at Ross, he was wearing a grin so steeped in malicious intent, it made Jack Nicholson in The Shining look like Barney the dinosaur.
‘Recruit, we’ve got just the job for you. Get your carcass over here.’
Ross proceeded down the first crater and towards the next with the light step and gaiety of a death row inmate who’d just had his head shaved. He didn’t know what this ‘job’ entailed, but he suspected that if offered the choice, sight unseen, between whatever it was and cleaning John McCririck’s toilet with his tongue, he’d take the latter without even asking for a peek over that next rim.
‘Get a bloody move on. These bastards aren’t going to kill themselves, you know.’
Oh no.
It was as horrible as he’d suspected. Zorlak and several members of his unit, Dagger squad, were standing over two prisoners. The marines were on their knees, hands restrained behind their backs by orange-glowing devices, their heads bowed in resignation and fear. Why were these guys being held, he wondered, when everybody else was just being slaughtered on the spot?
‘Got another thumb-sucking toddler just swapped his rattle for a blaster,’ Gortoss told his counterpart. ‘I want to see if he’s worth a shit, because if he’s not made of the right stuff, I can’t afford any baggage out here.’
‘Be my guest,’ Zorlak replied.
Gortoss beckoned Ross towards them.
‘Execute this pair,’ he commanded, the deranged glint in his eye registering his anticipation of Ross’s difficulty but not betraying whether he would be happier to see him succeed or fail.
One of the prisoners looked up in desperation.
‘Please, no,’ he said.
Gortoss bent over him and spat in his face, some hideous yellow discharge that smelled like diesel and raw sewage.
‘You expect mercy?’ he asked, feigning outrage. ‘You come to our world, bearing weapons of war, intent on putting a yoke around our necks, and you expect mercy? Did you not think there would be consequences to your unprovoked aggression?’
‘To be fair, it wasn’t exactly unprovoked,’ suggested Zorlak reflectively. ‘We did enslave one of their colonies.’
‘We did?’
‘And we did transport about quarter of a million of them here, then butchered them and recycled their body parts as organic replacements. Oh, and there was that business with the sub-space energy mining device that was tapping all the power from their sun. How did you miss all this?’
Gortoss shrugged. ‘I was in jail. You tend not to pay much attention to off-planet affairs when you’re not scheduled to go further than a half-mile radius for the next two decades. Still, doesn’t change my point, does it?’
He turned again to the prisoner who had spoken, lifting his chin to make him look up.
‘You expect mercy? From the people who racked up that little list of achievements? Blood of the fathers: I wish I had your optimism, mate. Recruit, in your own time.’
Ross heard a choked, suppressed whimper, and saw the other prisoner look over at him. It was the kid he’d already had in his sights and then let go. He was minus the helmet now, but that just made his face all the more recognisable. If anything, he looked even younger, and definitely more scared.
Kobayashi Maru, Ross thought. It was a test he could only fail, a test in which he didn’t recognise what could constitute success. Execute unarmed prisoners or refuse and be killed himself, before or after which the same prisoners would be executed anyway. Cold logic therefore suggested he carry out the order, but if cold logic was what defined his actions, then what did that make him?
Whether he had envisaged this or not, Kamnor had been right all along: if he killed these enemies, he would indeed become someone other than the man defined by his memories. Perhaps indeed this was the trigger that would bring back his true self.
He could die as Ross Baker or he could live on as Christ knows what. The choice was just that stark, unless you counted a third option of trying to take down Gortoss, Zorlak and both their units with a glorified hair-drier.
‘Come on, you sadistic bastard,’ Gortoss said with a chuckle. ‘It’s cruel to draw it out like—’
The sergeant didn’t finish his remarks on account of his brains deciding they wanted nothing more to do with him. This was following a bit of gentle persuasion by an armour-piercing ultra-high-velocity projectile that suggested they might prefer to spread themselves around the landscape than remain cooped up inside that cramped skull of his.
Zorlak turned to look for the source, by which time another of his unit had suffered a similarly critical reduction in the number of heads.
Ross dived for cover and heard shouts of panic as the two squads scrambled to return fire. He didn’t quite catch what they were saying, but it sounded like ‘card collector’, which couldn’t be right, as it conjured up images of an acne-ridden pubescent dork staring in the window at Forbidden Planet. Their startled, fearful tones indicated something more likely to be seen in the window at Forbidden Planet, a suggestion backed up by the sudden outbreak of ballistics and body parts in the area.
From his position of relative shelter behind a huge section of mangled landing gear, Ross watched this ‘card collector’ take on the combined might of Rapier and Dagger squads. He was human: another marine, Ross deduced, going on shape and proportion as the man’s head was covered beneath a helmet and visor. He looked more armoured than the others, and somehow more distinct too. The rest of the marines were dressed almost identically, but this card collector subtly stood out, even though Ross couldn’t quite pinpoint why.
He moved faster than the others, or maybe it was just that he moved more deliberately and with greater purpose. He also had a far more powerful weapon to wield, but that wasn’t what was making the difference in the fight. He’d have done fine with one of their standard machine-guns, and would probably have edged it even with Ross’s blaster.
The reason for this was that the home team were having a shocker.
For an advanced civilisation, their martial prowess and tactical awareness were embarrassing. Faced with somebody who wasn’t wandering around in a post-crash daze, they were hopeless. They made no use of the ample cover options, just went straight for their target, blundering obligingly into his line of fire. They exhibited no coordination or even any evidence of attempting to work together, and they were bafflingly unaggressive in the
ir returns of fire. When the card collector was in their sights, they’d loosen off the odd burst, then stop, as though waiting for someone to verify whether he was dead, and clearly they expected that someone to do it by post.
How could they have tapped energy from the Earth’s sun and successfully invaded a colony planet when they were utterly fucking shite at this?
To his astonishment, Ross found himself confidently of the opinion that he could do better himself.
It was a theory he would imminently be given the opportunity to test under consistent conditions, as the card collector had wiped out everybody else and was now heading his way, scanning for his next target. Ross must have broken cover at just the wrong moment, as the marine got a fix on his movement immediately and pointed at him with an outstretched finger. Ross was grateful that it wasn’t a rifle, as a squeeze of the trigger would have been the end, but he couldn’t help interpreting the gesture as a declaration that he was being singled out for something particularly nasty due to being the only one left to toy with.
Ross ducked down and scrambled along the side of the crater, where he lost his footing on the loose gritty surface. He skidded, tumbled and rolled to the bottom, landing on top of a felled member of Dagger squad. This one hadn’t even got as far as unslinging his rifle before being taken down, although going by the level of combat training on display, perhaps he’d been off sick the day they learned about raising it in a straight line, aiming it at somebody you disapproved of and squeezing the little stubby bit at the near end.
Ross picked up the rifle and slung the strap over his shoulder. It was heavy but he found the weight reassuring. Long, dark and jagged, it was glowing in places, and he could feel it hum.
‘That’s what I’m talking about.’
He circled around, checking his six then stepping back in a low crouch, presenting the smallest possible target until he could reach the partial cover of a thigh-high crate that had crashed down intact. He made it there just as the card collector appeared at the rim.
Clagnuts. He was pinned down at the foot of a crater. The big marine knew exactly where he was and had him covered from an elevated angle of fire. Ross could stay down behind the crate, but he’d be fatally exposed if he attempted to scale the sides. And if the collector had any grenades, he was humped.
He raised his head as much as he dared, desperate to confirm the marine’s position. If his opponent moved down beyond the rim, he could pop up again anywhere. The collector hadn’t moved, though. He was standing at the edge of the crater, just watching, and the second he was sure Ross was looking back, he gave him the finger. Not some subtle gesture from the hip, but a full, arm-raised salute.
Oh, he was loving this, the alpha male bell-end. He was relishing the hunt, trying to make it personal.
Ross ducked down again, beginning to feel the way a mouse must when Kitty starts playing with it, savouring the anticipation of the kill. ‘I’m on your side,’ he wanted to say, but he wasn’t even sure it was true.
After a few more excruciating seconds of tension, he stole another glance. The collector hadn’t moved. He was still staring down, and this time when he saw Ross staring back, he began performing exaggerated pelvic thrusts.
Did the cheeky bastard not know he had a proper gun, Ross asked himself; one he’d fire with a bit more conviction than his predecessors?
Evidently not, was the answer, as the card collector now stood with both arms apart: Fuck you, I’m an anteater.
Ross hefted the rifle and fired.
‘Fuck you, I’m an android.’
The energy blast hit the card collector square in the chest, resulting in a storm of electrical flashes around his trunk as he reeled back sharply.
Power armour.
Ross fired another three salvos in quick succession. The first two hit their mark before the collector took evasive action. He ducked down out of sight, only to reappear shortly after, pointing at Ross then once again giving him the finger. He seemed furious, indicated by the fact that the whole time he was jumping up and down on the spot. It didn’t make him much harder to hit, though. Ross kept the trigger down longer on this burst, at the end of which there were no electrical flashes. The power armour was depleted.
This belatedly provoked a response, the collector finally firing his weapon again. Ross heard the projectiles thump into the crate, embedding with singing metallic reverberations, but, to his huge relief, none of them passed right through. Just one of those things would be enough to cut him in half, he knew.
He could hear another sound too, one familiar from watching the collector take down the others: cartridge empty. His opponent needed to reload.
He looked up and saw that the collector had evidently grown accustomed to the obligingly sporadic firing patterns of the locals, as he was changing mag in plain sight. Ross levelled his rifle once more, to which the collector rather idiosyncratically responded by raising his hand in a wave. His response to then being caught in a mercilessly sustained volley of laser fire was more conventional.
He was obliterated.
Then, before Ross could even decide how he felt about this, so was the entire world.
Warped
It was as though someone had suddenly switched off the strong nuclear force. Everything dissolved in a shimmering instant, all matter turning to a swirl of light in a hundred million colours. Ross recalled Zorlak’s confession about sub-space technology, and wondered, in what he believed to be his final thought, whether Earth had deployed some such hideous device as a retaliatory zero option following their failed invasion.
He felt himself come apart, yet even in feeling it and in seeing this dissolution of everything, he was aware he was still conscious.
The colours coalesced, became white. All he could see was white, nothing else.
Uh-oh. World ended, reality dissolved, but still conscious and everything white. This could be awkward.
He spent a very uncomfortable few moments trying to remember his prepared position for explaining to God that he had nonetheless been right not to believe in Him on the basis of all available evidence, and that his empiricism and advocacy of sceptical enquiry was vindicated because faith-based belief had proven hugely detrimental to humankind’s welfare. At the same time, another part of his brain was busy thinking: ‘Please don’t let the Catholics be right, please don’t let the Catholics be right.’ Who wanted an eternity in Pope Benedict’s idea of heaven? In fact, wasn’t the concept of paradise technically incompatible with a belief system that disapproved of just about all known forms of pleasure?
To his relief he gradually distinguished that the white filling his entire field of vision was not formless, but had lines within it, and even texture. He realised he was staring at tiles.
He was back in the scanner cell, lying flat on the bed, staring at the ceiling. He felt an overwhelming mixture of confusion and relief. It had been a dream after all, but how? It had been so vivid, so consistent, and he had tried to wake up from it. Was it some kind of trip Solderburn had cooked up, using the scanner to project into his mind rather than record from it?
Then he once again registered the absence of rails and scanning heads immediately above him.
Ross shot upright in a flash and examined himself.
‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ he sighed. ‘How can I still be a cyborg?’
He stood up and, as before, the door automatically withdrew and slid laterally open to reveal the same corridor. He must have been teleported back here: that’s what the dissolving sensation was. Wow. First a real laser rifle and now he’d experienced teleportation. Here’s to you, Mr Scott, he thought, but it prompted a question: who beamed him back here? And while we’re at it, why? Had he proven himself somehow in taking down the card collector? Or had he inadvertently activated an integral teleportation device himself, like he had inadvertently skewered poor Kamnor through the face?
One thing was for sure: getting his hands dirty in combat hadn’t triggered any shift in
his sense of identity. He still felt one hundred per cent Ross Baker, the same person who had gone to work this morning and learned his girlfriend was pregnant before lying down to test Solderburn’s new scanner. If this was a virus, then he’d caught a mother of a dose.
Carol. Just the thought of her name made something in him ache, in a way that echoed how he’d felt in the days just after he’d met her but before he first asked her out. She had invaded his mind, subjected him to a curious mix of tantalising pleasure at the thought of her, impatient longing to be in her orbit and desolate insecurity in case he was destined never to get clearance beyond the friend zone. He recalled that night at the bowling alley, a group of about a dozen of them commandeering two lanes. It was Tracy’s birthday, and he had been invited along as he was new to the firm and the girls were trying to make him feel welcome. They’d gone for a bite to eat first at some Mexican chain restaurant, and he’d ended up sitting opposite Carol. It wasn’t some love-at-first-sight deal, perhaps because nobody looks particularly alluring trying to eat a chimichanga that’s falling apart in their hands. But then something just altered as he watched her bowl, like a switch being flipped.
Setting ‘Smitten’ = TRUE
He had felt in a trance after that, later having no recollection of how the bowling had gone, and mildly panic-stricken that it might have been noticeable to everybody else that he turned into a besotted catatonic mute.
He couldn’t afford to think about her now. He could feel his connection to her more acutely than ever, but it only served to emphasise the gaping distance that now lay between them, in every sense.
He proceeded once again through the same corridors, his sense of familiarity confused this time by definitely having been here before a couple of hours earlier. The artillery cannon kept up its arrhythmic tattoo, preceded always by that tell-tale inrush and followed by the smaller bangs that he now knew were the sounds of spacecraft disintegrating. His progress was a little less tentative than before, emboldened by his martial exploits, until he caught himself striding confidently towards the elevator platform and realised he no longer had a gun.
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