Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

by Anthology

  I pull easily, ripping the rifle away from him.

  I cannot understand why he has fired on me; why he would attack me at all. Across the colonies, Widows are renowned, legendary even. We are all that stands between the human race and its extinction. We are told of Widows’ successes—of missions that have freed thousands, if not tens of thousands, of human lives. These reports add to our own. Whilst their weapons of war are also machines, they look nothing like Widows. This boy should know what I am. All of humanity knows what I am.

  Yet he is already scrambling back, reaching for the pistol. Why? my mind screams to me. What are you doing? I am not the enemy!

  The pistol is unlikely to penetrate the strongest parts of my armour, but there are weak points in every carapace. I cannot risk failure because of a misunderstanding borne of fear and desperation.

  I strike the boy once across the face. It sickens me to do it, but I have to put him down. My fist opens up a gash across his cheekbone and fractures it. The tiny fissures appear in my vision—X-rays of the bone beneath the bloodied skin. He stumbles and falls, head turning away and dropping quickly; his legs crumple beneath him and I know he is unconscious.

  What now? My mind is racing. The signals are closing in on me, but I cannot leave this boy behind. It will drain more of my power reserves to carry him—perhaps an extra fifteen percent to haul the sixty kilos over my shoulder. I will move more slowly, and react more sluggishly to threats, with that burden. Yet, I cannot leave him here. Somehow he escaped captivity. Found clothes and weapons—how, I do not know and cannot fathom—but to leave him here would be to erase the success of that defiance, and condemn him either to a very real death, or many more years of servitude. He does not deserve that.

  I reach down, gently slip my arm around his waist, and lift him over my shoulder. I know that this action alone might lead to his death, and my failure, but I cannot leave him. I sling the rifle too—if I tear the trigger guard away, I can fire it—and then I run.

  The signals are close now, a noose tightening around my neck, and there is only one way through. A small gap in the snare which is closing around me. No—us. I’m not alone anymore, and for a moment I draw some comfort from the human contact and the renewed sense of purpose it brings me. If I can get him to the other Battle Group, then my mission will not have been a failure. Saving even one precious life is a success and now it is all I care about.

  A reason not to die.

  ***

  The boy stirs and lets out a soft moan. When he wakes, he will struggle. I don’t understand why—what threat he sees in me—but I have to assume he will continue to misunderstand who is now carrying him over a shoulder. I am running as quickly as my power levels will allow, glancing all around me. I want to ensure that no projectile fired at me can hit the boy, so, as I run, I analyse line-of-sight trajectories and shift his weight left and right to minimise the risk he might be hit. It’s a small percentage tactic, but I do it anyway.

  I hear him cry out, and I know he’s awake.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” I say to him, but the Widow’s voice is hollow and metallic—a device for the communication of words, not emotion or tone as human vocal cords would be capable of. It sounds like a machine, because that’s what it is. There is nothing comforting about it, and I know it might even deepen the boy’s fear.

  He shouts again and struggles. I am stronger than he—a bioengineered marriage of servos and gears and armoured alloy—but I have to be careful. I do not have a supercomputer for a brain, and it is possible that I will overcompensate and he will escape. Or I’ll undercompensate and I’ll break a bone or snap a tendon.

  So I repeat, despite the empty emotion in the voice, “I am not going to hurt you. There are threats coming for us—they are all around us—and you need to let me concentrate.”

  The boy takes in a breath, and I can feel him tense. For a moment, I think he might say something, but he falls silent. The pistol is still in his belt. It could be a threat, to a small extent, were he to reach for it without my knowing. But I am able to feel him moving, and it is pressed against my chest. For now, I doubt he could reach it. The knife is little threat to me. If he attacked me with it as I moved, I could easily stop him before he did any real damage. I need him to be armed when They come. When he sees them, I have to bank on him realising I am not a threat to him.

  And that he will need to fight again.

  I reach the base of the spur and charge up it. My footing is sure enough, despite the jumbled signals I know the Widow is receiving from me. I have grown accustomed to the new regime in the suit’s neural cortex, and I am reasonably able to compensate for problems as they occur.

  The spur steepens, the gradient quickly becoming more like vertical with every step; I know that my momentum will slow, and I will soon have to climb instead. I accept a loss of speed, and shift the boy from my shoulder, dropping him slightly so his chest is against mine. This movement brings his face into my field of vision, and I feel a pang of guilt at the bloodied gash on his check and the swelling around it. His eyes carry only rage and hate, but I cannot understand why.

  The first projectile thumps into the joint in my knee, and pain explodes across my neural cortex. I stumble and have to reach out with my free hand, searching for rock to grab onto, otherwise I know I will fall.

  A binary waterfall cascades before my eyes—a stream of information updating me on every system: a visual, diagrammatical representation of the damage to the gears and servos on my right knee joint, accompanied by the technical data I would need if I had the time to repair it. But I don’t, so I ignore it and keep climbing. The pain rushes over me in waves, but I have been trained to ignore it. It doesn’t make me feel nauseous as it might have done were I to be in a body of flesh and bone, a human body; instead it is a series of sensory signals which approximate pain, but which I have been trained to filter, to an extent. Any more than that, that is to say dampening the pain, and it would be useless to us. We need to feel it, be alerted to it and not able to ignore it, but not be overwhelmed by it.

  I continue to climb as the second projectile hits, this time impacting the shoulder. It strikes a glancing blow and whistles off into the sky, and I can see the damage is superficial.

  I scan the flanks of the rock face above me, and the apex of the couloir is not far. With the boy balanced against my shoulder, protected by my body from the projectiles kicking off the rock around us, I cannot return fire. I know that if I try, he might fall. Moreover, I’ll waste time on the climb. Better that I reach the apex, and put him behind me. Then I can turn and fight with the terrain in our favour. When we have some cover, and they will be forced to come and get us.

  And I can attack through a narrow field of fire—conserve my ammunition.

  Another projectile slams into me, in the back around the location of the spine of the Widow. Unlike a human body, the Widow’s spine is a mechanical entity and well armoured. There are no vital neural pathways in the spine—they are spread throughout the suit’s interior, rather than grouped together in one vulnerable column.

  However, the projectile has hit hard, and caused considerable damage to my ability to twist and pivot at the waist. I dampen the pain as much as I can, but climbing becomes harder and slower. I can see the apex now, perhaps fifty metres away. A cornice of snow hangs over it, which will give me minimal but acceptable cover from above. There is a depression in the rock where I can put the boy and still have cover enough to fight from.

  Two more projectiles hit before I reach it, and the pain suffuses almost every fibre of the suit. Red alarms flash all over my field of vision and I shunt them aside so I can see what I need to see, but it’s too much. There’s only one choice left.

  I mentally shift to the Terminal Emergency Mode. The pain dampens further as a cleansing wave washes over me. The scintillating red warnings subside to duller, smaller throbs to the edge of my vision. We are supposed to use this mode only as a last resort, when we k
now we’re about to check out. It is intended to ensure we can fight without hindrance, knowing we have very little time left. It won’t last for long—it’s too dangerous to trust a soldier to be able to ignore the warnings of pain. But it might give me an edge.

  Like everything else, it doesn’t function as it should, but it’s enough.

  I lay the boy down, and read the fear in his eyes. “Stay behind me,” I say. “I’ll protect you as long as I can. When I’m gone, pretend to be dead. I don’t know if it will work, but that’s the only chance you have.”

  And suddenly there is only sadness in his eyes. “Don’t fight,” the boy says.

  I’m so dumbfounded by the words he utters, I can’t respond. I turn away from him and settle into a stance that will give me stability when I fire.

  The first shapes begin to ascend the spurs either side of the couloir. But these are not the familiar hazes I am used to fighting. So much has changed with the Widow, I am hardly surprised. Now, instead, through the dusty, flickering sheen of my vision, I can see actual shapes. I have never been close to one of them before and I wonder if I am about to see what They look like—if the camouflage loses effectiveness up close. Previously, I have killed them only from a distance, and have never encountered one of them close enough to kill them with my hands.

  But as they climb, I can see the shapes are not alien. They are as familiar to me as anything could ever be. They are human.

  Three of them perch on the edges of the rock around me.

  “Shut him down,” I hear one of them say.

  I watch through a flickering veil as another taps away at what appears to be a mobile computer terminal. I see some kind of aerial sticking up from it.

  Then there is nothing.

  ***

  “You can’t move,” a man says to me. His face is gaunt and pockmarked with radiation burns. Where one of his ears should be is a mess of pink scar tissue. He wears wire-rimmed spectacles for his eyes, one arm of which has been duct-taped. They are held in place by a canvas strap. His teeth are yellowed and some are chipped or missing. “We’ve seen to that. But if you try, then I’ll have them shut you down again. Do you understand?”

  I don’t, of course; I don’t understand any of this. Those words have jolted me out of a silent darkness. They are the first things I remember since these people came for me on the mountain.

  I don’t even know where I am.

  But I know I have to cooperate, because I want to understand, and these people must have some answers. So, instead of throwing questions at him, an urge which almost overwhelms me, I simply say, “Yes.”

  He’s right too—almost all systems are on standby or shut down. I cannot move at all. But I can see him.

  “Do you know what planet you are on?”

  “No,” I reply. This is the truth. “We aren’t told much before a drop, in case we’re taken by the enemy. We’re told enough to enable us to fight. I don’t…” I fumble for the right word. “I don’t recognise the landscape of this place. From before the war.” This last part might be a lie. I am not ready to tell him about the flower. I don’t even know if the memory was real, but I cling to it as if it is the only hint I have of who I used to be. Here, like this, it means everything to me.

  “This is Sargasso,” he says. “Do you know how many more there are of you?”

  There are all sorts of military reasons not to tell him, but I need to win his trust; to convince him that I have no desire to hurt him. “My Battle Group was ambushed in a marsh near the jungle—that was the drop zone. They knew we were coming. I was hit there and I should have passed, but I never did. I can’t make contact with the Penrose. I think the interference is atmospheric.”

  I see a twitch at the corners of his mouth that might have been a smile. “The Penrose?” he asks, and then nods, as if the ship is familiar to him. “How many?”

  “There were thirty in the Battle Group. The Widows were still lying in the marsh when I left.”

  “Who attacked you?”

  I am stunned by the question. “Them,” I say. I doubt the mechanical voice coveys my confusion. “They did. Who else?”

  Another voice comes from behind me. I cannot see the speaker. It is a feminine voice, barely above a whisper: “He doesn’t know,” she says, and I detect something like triumph in her tone. “None of them know. They don’t understand what is happening to them.”

  “We don’t know that yet,” the man snaps, not even looking at her; as if in speaking she has revealed some closely guarded secret. “Quiet, woman, or this cannot work.”

  “What is happening to us?” I offer, not wanting to anger him. “What do—”

  But the man cuts me off. “Shut him down,” he says.

  And I am gone.

  ***

  “Are you awake?” The same man. The same position as before. I detect subtle differences in the light, and the hum of the bulb. I don’t know how much time has passed.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “When you fight…Them…” He almost trips on the word as he searches for it, as though he does not understand it. His reaction confuses me. “What do you see?”

  “The same as you,” I reply, growing frustrated. “Their camouflage systems bend light, but you must know that.”

  The man turns away and nods to someone out of my vision.

  ***

  “Are you awake?”

  “You need to stop doing that,” I growl. Although, in reality, I probably don’t growl at all.

  There is a different twitch at the corner of the man’s mouth, accompanied by a slight tightening of his expression. “You need to listen to me very carefully,” he says. “The aliens don’t have any camouflage, at least not as you describe it. That’s because you’ve never seen one. If you have, it’s been removed from your memory.”

  “We are wasting time—”

  “Don’t speak, just listen. This is going to be hard for you to hear.” He pauses and stares at me. He is staring at a machine, I know that, and he cannot see the confusion and fear which is surging through me right now. There is no way to express it across the still, metal features which now contain the essence of me. “You have been fighting alongside them, not against them.”

  “You’ve got it wrong…” I don’t understand what he means.

  “No,” he replies and something wet glistens in the pits of his eyes. “They hide your targets from your sight through a series of scanning systems which blur them artificially on your internal spectral retinas. They explain this to you by reference to a sophisticated camouflage mechanism. You’re not the first to say that. Do you remember anything of your human life, before?”

  “Not much of it.” I choke on the words. “Maybe…snatches. All I remember is fighting inside Widows.”

  The man nods his understanding. “Yes, that’s what you call them, right? Widows.”

  I don’t want to ask the question which seethes in my mind, but I know I have to. All I want is to avoid the truth, but I know I can’t. “Who have been my targets?”

  “Us. The rest of humanity.”

  At first, I cannot comprehend the truth of his words, but slowly, inexorably, I realise he is right. It makes perfect sense to me, as though a veil has been pulled away from my eyes. I should have seen it before. How could I have been so blind? The camouflage that hides our real targets; the paltry amount we are told about our objectives when we fight. The dearth of our own human memories and the negligible contact we have with each other outside of battle—so we cannot question what is happening to us. We are the perfect weapons. Desperate and utterly focused, as we fight for what we believe is our very existence. Killing other human beings is what men have done for thousands of years. All our military training and experience has been honed for that purpose. Who better to do it than us, even subconsciously?

  And we’re expendable.

  Before I can scream, before my mind collapses under the weight of that understanding, the man looks away to someone
out of my field of vision, and this time I am thankful for the darkness.

  ***

  My body no longer exists. I’m sure of that now. Even if it did, my soul was never to be reunited with it. All that remains of me is contained within this alien prison, constructed from a metal alloy I can’t even identify. I’ve spent most of my life slaughtering the beleaguered remains of my own kind. I am hated by them—a nightmare. There is no punishment that befits my crimes. I cannot claim I was unaware; I should have fought to bring myself to the surface. Instead, as They knew I would, I revelled in my immortality. I lusted for the glory of heroism. I am death, but I cannot die.

  ***

  “We don’t know much, of course,” he says once he wakes me again. He studies me as he speaks, as if he searching for an indication of something human—a movement of my armoured body suggestive of an emotional response; a flicker of something in the spectral retinal units which are my eyes, to indicate perhaps a soul. “We don’t know how they transmit the consciousness of those fighting in the armour when they…die. Nor do we know where their bodies are kept. Mostly, it’s been trial and error. Captured technology, reverse-engineering, experimenting with workarounds. Using whatever we can to find out as much as we can.”

  “When did you know it was us? Driving the Widows?”

  “Quite quickly. People reacted differently to that knowledge. Some were convinced you knew what you were doing—that you had chosen your side deliberately to save yourselves. When we found out more and realised what was happening, it split people. I think many were angry that you didn’t fight to find…yourselves. To realise what it was you were doing.”

  I look away from him. I find it strange that They would allow me to feel emotion inside a Widow, and suddenly wish I was even more machine than I am. “Everyone needs someone to blame.”