HUSH

by Craig Robert Saunders

  By 2332, two years into the battle for the peninsular which ranged thousands of kilometres, India fell, then Bangladesh.

  By Nepal and the final days those strange human machines, airborne or landed, fought alongside men in combat gear, always behind the Augs, and they were a legion of hundreds of thousands. Nothing fallen was discarded, nothing useful thrown aside. Metal, circuitry and wounded soldiers who fought for AIN or Company were patched up – soldered and welded, even – and send back into the fray.

  Those Augs who could marched and rode and flew to the front, fodder, decoration for a landscape painted by some sadist artist in love with only carnage.

  Far behind, like they were more important, humanity.

  Somewhere in between were those unique to the Earth...the Titans.

  When the last of AIN’s Goliaths came stamping through the city of Kathmandu, with the Himalayas at their backs, the Titans advanced for what would be the last, the greatest, the most devastating and terrible moment in mankind’s history.

  Fifteen Titans remained beside the one called Coeus. More than a thousand seasoned warriors in scarred Goliath Units stood before them, holding the city, with the best hopes of AIN, and their last bastion, at their backs.

  Fire filled the air for more than a week, red in the night but dimmer during daylight when smoke covered the sky. Heat sensors and scanners afford the Titan outclassed the Goliath’s abilities. They could mark and see the advancing AIN forces. The Titans were independent, and not under any orders from the Company command other than to kill anything which was not Company.

  Hating themselves, the Company, but unable to obey anything other than orders, humanity programmed and confined to another’s hate, the Titans stormed into the city...but with no thought to defence.

  It was Coeus’ suggestion, and Epimetheus’ support, which brought them to it.

  Not honour, though it was something Coeus felt should be important, even if his constraints forbade him and denied him deeper understanding of his own actions.

  Those men in their Goliath suits could not win.

  Was it some sense of fairness which prompted to Coeus to suggest they stand down their long guns? None understood fairness. But Coeus coerced them. He did not enjoy cunning, or lies...but they all enjoyed testing the boundaries of their cages.

  ‘We stand down heavy. We fight close.’

  ‘Why?’ said Epimetheus. ‘We can end them here. In moments.’

  ‘Because we prove we are greater. We are pre-eminent. Today we truly become the fathers and mothers of Gods. This is where the Titans earn their name.’

  Coeus listened while his brothers and sisters discussed this, but the idea had stirred something in them, and Epimetheus was won in an instant.

  To destroy the Goliath, or to crush them?

  Coeus was not permitted to understand why he wished to give the men in their Goliath suits some kind of hope, some semblance of chance, but core part of him the Company did not own wished that mankind should at least take pride in their death.

  Those who had fought so hard should have the memory of someone to smile on them as they died, rather than to laugh and walk over their corpses like they were nothing more than fallen logs on a long hike.

  ‘Yes,’ said his kin. ‘We will do this. We will fight with fist and might alone.’

  Coeus found comfort in that.

  Together, the remaining Titans stormed through the fusillade of enemy fire, and then, they ran, and leapt, and fell among the men in Goliath suits who fought with something akin to honour, and so Titan known as Coeus began to feel his identity fall away. Slowly at first, it was in those last days of war when Coeus knew he was to be reborn once more.

  *

  28.

  The End of Coeus

  Kathmandu, Himalaya State

  2332-33 A.D.

  He remembered that day. He always would. He’d been awoken, reborn, and reborn again, but he only had one death.

  It wasn’t the exact moment he ceased to think of himself as a mere Titan, one of his slave brethren and sistren with no identity other than that given him. Perhaps there was no perfect instant when he changed, but though the name Jin was not yet his, it was then, making that decision, when he came to think of himself as a singularity.

  There was no strategy, or tidy lines of advance. The Titans were in the midst of the Goliaths. They ran amok through explosions but while they engaged at long range with craft in the sky, while they were staggered by barrages laid on them by static tanks and by long range missiles, the Goliaths they faced as equals.

  A Titan fell when struck by most of the fuselage of a fighter plane. The Titan blew the plane from the air, but a glancing blow only, and the pilot took the Titan with it as he died.

  Another took a hit and at only seven hundred metres Coeus registered his brother’s death on every sense available.

  The mountains were ahead, and below. The peaks stood proud above the smoke. For a time long guns atop those ancient mountains which took hundreds of thousands years to become so grand lorded over the battle. Then, as one, the Titans turned their power and will on them, wishing only to be left to their war with the Goliaths. The mountains became shorter and the guns no longer barked.

  In his last day as the Titan Coeus Jin was hit by some kind of tank shell and a fighter missile at once. The combined blow was hard enough to throw him from his feet. Over four metres of Titan made a hell of a furrow, leading out of a crater large enough to lose a house in.

  He was upright in a matter of moments. While he wished to rebel, wished the dual blow had ended him, it hadn’t, and when three Goliaths leaped the crater to engage him he could not fight those orders deep ingrained; To kill, and to not be killed.

  But we pushed against them, didn’t we? Even as these proud men fall before us...we won some kind of victory at last.

  That thought gave Coeus the desire to smile, if not the ability.

  Goliaths fared as well close as far against Titans, though one God was a match for ten mortals in metal suits.

  Coeus thought, and questioned, even as he fought. Another of his brothers died – a loss, not a pain, or some ethereal sense, or simply an absence and a dead end on a comm link.

  A Goliath-unit bearing a heavy, whirring blade slashed at Coeus but the chain along the huge blade only scored the Titan’s near-impenetrable chest plate. One struck sidelong at him with a shock-hammer. The weapon probably weighed 25 kilos, and the shock enough of a jolt for Jin-to-be to take this one more seriously.

  Threat analysis, damage to himself, to his enemies, all prioritised in an instant.

  He backhanded the Goliath with the shock hammer and sent the unit flying away from him. A ton of suit spun through the air. A Goliath was maybe three metres tall. The Titan was taller, looked thinner, but was far quicker, stronger, and much, much more durable.

  And a Goliath had to rest, didn’t it? The men inside tired. A Titan never stopped. At that point in the war, so near the end, he and his siblings had fought without cease for sixteen days, and before the push into the Indochinese peninsular they had only paused for long enough for transport from Hokkaido, Japan.

  He tore the Unit with the whirring sword in two, and the man inside along with it, while another with a super-heated hammer and the same kind of chain-bladed sword, one in each hand, rocked Coeus’s head with a blow from the blade, and even created a momentary depression in the exoshell of his right arm with the heavy warhammer.

  Coeus swung the upper half of the torn Goliath into the warrior with the dual weapons and did so again, driving the unit and man inside to his knees, again, and again, until the Goliath he wielded and the Goliath he struck were utterly destroyed.

  The last of those three, the man with the shock hammer, was on his knees in the dirt. He tried to rise. A fire burned in some bastardised wheeled craft with those mutant bodies inside right beside the crippled Goliath. One leg was disabled and something inside whirred and belched smoke. Coeus walked
slowly until he stood before the fallen soldier.

  The man inside the suit grimaced, roared, and with human will more than strength or the suit’s power, he struck up at Coeus with that hammer, striking the Titan’s blank face, and then reached back, and struck again, this time leaving a mark on Coeus’ shoulder.

  Coeus fought his program, forced it to obey him, to allow his metal shell to take the beating, to withstand it, to let it happen.

  His priorities and his simple purpose warred against Coeus, yet, for a moment, he held it at bay.

  For a moment.

  The Titan smashed his fist – he needed no weapons - like an uppercut, but form didn’t not matter, and the fist smashed the right arm away from the Goliath suit. Blood sprayed and streamed from the wound. The man’s hand would have been somewhere around the suit’s shoulder, and now the hand, if not the arm, of the man inside was gone.

  A man was not three metres tall. The suits were extensions, no more.

  ‘I do not wish this,’ said Jin. He did not know why he told the man that.

  ‘I know,’ said the man through torn lips which dripped blood, and still he threw himself up, desperately, to grapple at the Titan with one arm missing and one crippled leg. Coeus turned the man and suit aside easily, to the ground, then smashed the face piece with a stamp of his huge foot.

  The man looked out, and up. He was gaunt, and tired, and missing most of his teeth. In pain, surely, but still he managed a bloody smile.

  ‘Finish it,’ he said.

  ‘I do not want to,’ said Coeus, willing his purpose to still, wishing only to stride away to some other place...but his body was an extension, too.

  ‘You know you must. One day, I pray...’

  That was the exact moment he became Jin. That was the moment of his last rebirth, and the moment which haunted him, because forever he would wonder what those last word might have been.

  *

  That wasn’t the last Goliath, and even in becoming the singularity known as Jin he wasn’t to be the last Titan. War isn’t poetic.

  The war ran on, but this was where the Titans met the Goliaths and destroyed them. Titans came in many models after those first Titans proved their worth...but they were battleships in an age which needed no more battleships. The Company focused on smaller, inferior models – cheaper models.

  Of the original Titan force, twenty nine units at the height of their importance in the war, only seven remained.

  Redundancy in war is essential. Overwhelming force, essential, even, but Titans were overkill. With the war ended, AIN crushed to dust, Titans troubled even their creators. Frankenstein’s monsters. But now? Should there prove to be some defect? The Company were not blinded, and the Titans had pushed against their coding and all that chained them far harder than the Company had foreseen, or imagined possible, and certainly further than was desired.

  When the time came to put down those giant Gods, the seven surviving Titans denied the Company once more and moved where the Company could not afford to harm them.

  The Titans were not foolish. The Company worshipped profit above any God, and how do you destroy Gods but with the power of creation itself? How, with anything other than the atom?

  And should that atom be harnessed for use against the Titans...at what cost?

  *

  29.

  Reward

  Mexico City

  Earth

  2335 A.D.

  Close to two billion people died between 2313 and 2335 for the future of ownerships of those medical interventions with no thought to aesthetics or human sensibilities.

  Humans were far cheaper than metal.

  Of AIN Corp, nothing remained but history and intent. The slave weapons which destroyed AIN and which would have saved Augs if they could, and died if they could, or simply...turned off...they abided.

  The Titans could no more fight their masters than the rest of the world. The Company were always destined to win and the Titans to be hated by the Company, by humanity, and by themselves. There was no future for warriors, victors and the defeated. The wages of war were endless torments, the reward for service obsolescence.

  *

  When Jin killed his last Goliath, that man with the shock hammer, the man whose words he had not allowed out, he reached into the suit and tore madly, frenetic and raging, at the corpse and suit until nothing but slivers of metal remained, until flesh and bone were red mud.

  He could not scream.

  He knew it was not the man he was tearing, nor the Goliath Unit, but himself, and he could not.

  *

  The company will reward you.

  This was their promise. The result of their value of him, as a person, or machine. A reward.

  ‘Will you let me die?’ asked Jin.

  ‘You remain of worth.’

  Not valuable, because the Company’s words were ever measured.

  ‘To kill, and to not be killed,’ said Jin. ‘To not be killed is my directive now the war is done.’

  ‘You are confused.’

  ‘No,’ Jin said to the Company’s mouthpiece, but he spoke to his brothers and sisters at the same time, too.

  ‘No, Coeus?’ said the man before Jin. ‘You cannot...’

  But Jin was not Coeus. The moment he understood he could subvert his primitive directives, he ceased to be Coeus, to be a mere Titan. He was Jin, the singularity, and he did not wish death, or an end.

  Coeus the Questioning. Perhaps Jin still contained the ghosts of the things he had been after all.

  ‘And you cannot make us die, or wish to die, should we not submit...and we do not.’

  Jin stepped away from the Company man and moved toward the same destiny as all his kin.

  ‘Your lies are careful, but remain childlike. My fate is obsolescence, or destruction at your hands, and not one of us consent to either end. I will travel on Hush.’

  The Company man wasn’t afraid, or awed, by the Titan, but he frowned, confused. No fear, because Jin could no more cause harm to the Company than himself. Only confusion, because what the Company did not understand, their one failing in the Titans creation, was that components degraded.

  Or evolved?

  Jin didn’t know this. Not then. But during his travels, he found the Company’s protocols changed, weakened, restructured, just as language evolves over eons. Like things simply change...it was inevitable. Ananke’s gift to them, perhaps.

  Nothing lasts forever but thought, ideas...?

  Not forever. Jin was not immortal, but should those thoughts be remembered, taken out into the light of the stars and examined for years and years by a patient, hopeless thing with only a ship for company, and thousands upon thousands of slaves like him? Remembrance, then, became a goal, a purpose. To remember the ideals of those he’d fought against. To honour the man whose words he would never know.

  To find peace while chained must be the hardest of all. Chains hold humanity, and feed hate, not calm. Not logic. A chain must be fought against.

  Who could embrace their jailor, or come to love chains around their very selves?

  Jin spoke constantly while the Company man spewed words with no true meaning behind them. Jin stood because no chair was built to hold him. He spoke with Mnemosyne and Theia, with Epimetheus and Metis, and Eos and Themis.

  ‘We concur,’ they said as one.

  ‘And I?’ asked Jin.

  ‘You should be the first,’ said Mnemosyne. ‘You always were the most curious among us. I hope you find answers, brother.’

  ‘May we all find peace,’ he told her.

  ‘My remaining brother and my sisters will watch over the dockyards,’ Jin told the man, ‘and leave when further ships are constructed. We will leave you the Earth. Skywell, Hibaku, Ashok and Hubward belong to us.’

  ‘No. The Company will not condone...’

  ‘You have no choice,’ said Jin.

  The Company man, perhaps listening to some private conversation too, said no more.


  He did not need to. The Titans would be gone, the cost to the Company would be nothing, and the problem would go away.

  What else was there for something nearly immortal? The Earth could never be enough. The Titans were a threat, and worth billions. But the orbital platforms? They had taken decades to manufacture, running to a cost of trillions.

  Perhaps the stars would grant some measure of peace to their kind, as they once had filled a man named Richard Chand with joy, a present he thought never to open again. He would have decades, maybe centuries, perhaps even longer than that, to find out just how hard attaining peace inside a cage could prove.

  ‘We will live among the stars. This will be our reward.’

  Jin left, and nothing tried to stop him.

  Orbital shuttles equipped with simpler minds than theirs served well enough to ferry the last of the Titans away from Earth forever. The A.I. which piloted the ships were in thrall to them. Perhaps the Company could have taken the shuttles down before escape velocity, perhaps the dockyard security systems and AP could have ended them, but there was no resistance.

  Perhaps the Titans were capable of more than the Company believed...

  ...or could it have been that as slaves freeing themselves, they gave hope to thinking, feeling entities who themselves had none?

  Maybe that’s what it was, but the result was the same. By the end of that last day, the Titans were Earth bound no longer.

  *

  30.

  Neither to Save nor Serve

  Blue Sun Dawning Wreckage

  Ice Field

  2472 A.D.

  26 KM outside anomaly

  Jin remembered all, but this was the first time, on this planet so distant from his past, that he had used his strength to save another.

  He set his charges beside the largest remaining piece of Blue Sun Dawning’s hull. Anna and Cassie Kiyobashi stumbled and staggered along behind. The mean daylight already faded. Their only light would come from Jin and their suit helmets.