by Adam Roberts
I rushed through the defile and hurried straight to the top of the hill. The darkness was more complete, and stiller, than usual: the only lights were the ragged green clusters of our own automates, lumbering down the far side of the hill in advance of our assault.
I hurried on through the murk, and reached the stony channel at the base. Here was one solitary remote, picking its way through boulders, and I pinned its clamshell head with two needles before it could even raise its weapon.
Looking behind me I could see a scatter of headless. ‘Come!’ I cried. ‘Would you wish to live for ever?’
‘Where shall we go?’ one of them shouted in return.
I tried to reply up the hill when the boomshell shuddered upon us, shaking the jelly of my body and cramping all my innards. But I was accustomed, now, and the pain did not distract me. I ran on and mounted the far hill.
In the darkness my running became an intimate and alienated thing, as if I were a blind man running on a gymnasium treadmill. I pushed my legs, and strained up the hill. Every now and again a large rock would loom up from the gloom and I would jink round it. After a while it occurred to me that I had gone too far. I stopped, and looked back, but could see nothing. Then on a whim I ran back down the hill for a bit, on a diagonal course. I thought of the hill in the vision, across the lake, with a slant road running straight down it. Was it a dream-translation of my present landscape? One hill, another hill, and the dream-seen path mapping out where I should move? Perhaps so.
A grape-cluster of red lamps faded up into vision as I ran down, and immediately I came upon three small automates standing together. They were, I saw, guarding an inset shaft into the hill. I felt the conviction inside me that this was my target.
I was armed only with a needle gun, when heavier ordnance would have been better. But there was a bleak fearlessness inside me, and I charged on, firing at the machines. One broke into pieces and fell apart. One loomed upon me, gunbarrels aimed, but I riddled it with needles and it froze in place. The third shot at me, and only a painful drop and roll on the stony ground saved me. I slid, and spun, bringing my gun to bear on the target, but when I squeezed the trigger it did not fire.
I could not believe that I had used up my cartridge so soon - but, then again, I had been firing many needles. Perhaps I had lost count.
I jinked again, and dust bullied up from the ground beside me where the automate’s weapons hit. There was nothing to do but retreat, and so I started a zaggy sprint down the hill. As if in response the boomshell slackened and faded away. I felt my heart shudder, bell out and start pumping again.
I ran past two headless. ‘Back!’ I yelled.
‘What’s happening?’ cried one, turning as I passed, and I saw a many fingered blob of black-red, like a coral structure, appear from his chest. Immediately he was falling forward with a hole in his torso, and more blood was gushing. I ran. The second headless turned in the direction of the shooting, and raised his own club-gun; but after holding it there for a short time without firing it he dropped it and turned to run. A dozen automates, of varying sizes, were rolling down the hill out of the black fog.
‘My gun!’ my companion wailed, as the two of us leapt over the boulders at the bottom. ‘It has broken!’
We hurried back to the breakland and through the defile, cursing our weaponry. In ones and twos other headless came back, and the barrage began on the far side of the breakland. I counted three rounds of heavy cannon, and then the bigger guns fell silent.
Engineers - headed men wearing the same elaborate headwear as the superiors - were already in the barrack as I jogged in. Datascreens were connected to the mainframe. ‘It seems it is a general malfunction,’ said Steelhand.
He pulled off his torso armour, and the two great petal-shaped sheets of it were sopping on the inside with blood.
‘What is the manner of the malfunction?’
‘All the guns have seized or broken after a few rounds of fire,’ the engineer said.
I helped Steelhand locate his wound: a small projectile had passed though the corner of his stomach, in at the front and out at the side. The bleeding made the wound look worse than it was, for I could not have fitted my little finger into the actual hole. I pressed medical insert into the wound and strapped a bandage to his side.
‘Why have the weapons seized up?’ I asked.
‘I do not know.’
‘I thought that I had merely emptied my cartridge.’
‘A needle cartridge contains a thousand rounds,’ he said chidingly.
With no headed officers to report to, the main engineer addressed himself to Steelhand. All the remaining headless - forty men, perhaps - gathered about. The face of the engineer, framed in his oversized helmet, appeared anxious at being surrounded by so many headless soldiers. ‘We have uncoupled the mainframe,’ he said. ‘Your weapons will fire, but the eyes in them will not work. You will have to do without the central coordination of the mainframe.’
I was surprised to hear that there had been any central coordination to our fighting, but I said nothing.
‘What has happened to the mainframe?’ Steelhand asked.
‘A battlefield malfunction,’ was the only reply. Though pressed, the engineer would say nothing more. Presumably he did not know.
One of his subordinates, in a state of some anxiety, reported news from one of his datascreens. The enemy had overrun the breaklands. ‘We must fall back,’ the main engineer announced. ‘We are not fighting men.’
And with impressive rapidity they gathered their equipment and left.
The rest of us huddled around Steelhand. ‘What must we do?’ one of the newer headless asked. ‘What should we do?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
But this was not what we needed to hear.
‘Should we retreat?’ suggested one.
‘No,’ replied Steelhand, drawing the syllable out. Then he said: ‘We should stay and fight. Don’t you think?’
There was murmuring. ‘You must tell us what to do,’ I said.
‘Very well.’ He pondered. ‘We shall stay and fight.’
We all of us took two weapons, one in each hand, and gathered outside the barrack. The lights hanging on the side of the building at our backs gave some illumination of the land before us, but the prospect was a foreshortened one, detail soon disappearing into darkness. ‘If they have broken through the defiles, they will be bringing automates over the breaklands,’ Steelhand announced. ‘But first of all I suppose they will send troops through.’
‘Remotes?’
‘Surely they cannot send remotes so far from their base,’ I said. I was talking as if I were expert in such matters, although this statement was nothing more than a guess.
‘It will be troops then,’ said Steelhand. ‘We must ready ourselves.’
We manoeuvred such heavy machinery as we could, hauling it out to provide ourselves with cover, and aimed our guns at the land in front of us. Soon figures emerged, running rapidly towards us out of the black.
‘Fire!’ cried one of the newer recruits, and a volley was discharged, dropping several figures, before Steelhand’s voice crying ‘Stop! Stop!’ halted us. The running men were the headless who manned the breaklands. We had been shooting at our own.
We gathered the dozen or so survivors behind our cover. ‘Our weapons will not work!’ was their complaint. We sent them into the barrack to rearm themselves.
‘They’re right behind us,’ one of these newcomers said. ‘It is headed troops.’
Almost as soon as he had spoken we heard the rumble of automates, and soon we could see the lights of the big machines as they rumbled towards us; and, sheltering behind them as cover, I saw my first human enemy soldiers.
After so many weeks of dutifully jogging along the zigzag paths between the barrack and the front, weeks of resenting that I was not permitted simply to run straight forward - I at last discovered what it was about the dust in between that obliged us to cir
cumvent it. The nearest automate rolled over the path and detonated a dust cloud that spurted up about its wheels. It groaned and whirred, tried flattening its wheels to pinched ovals and walking its way out, but the dust sucked it down.
Troops darted from behind the stalled behemoth and dazzling firework flashes spouted from their weapons. Shrapnel burst upon us in a cloud of glitter. We returned fire, but human troops were much harder targets to hit than the machines with which we were familiar. A second and third automate rumbled to a halt, but the troops, in a series of weaving interlocking runs, continued advancing upon us. They were much more accurate with their weapons than the remotes. Many of the headless fell.
I summoned my resolve. Surely, I told myself, this was as good a place to die as any. And, telling myself this, I yelled and broke cover. Perhaps startled into action by my lead, eight or ten headless shouted and followed me.
My intention had been simply to die, because I was weary of living and fighting. But my impromptu charge had quite another effect. The sight of a dozen headless men running towards them discommoded the enemy soldiers, unused as they were to so outlandish a sight - headless men, ghouls, monsters, firing weapons. The forward mass of enemy broke and ran. I chased, screaming, until I reached the nearest automate and observed its guns levelling on me. Then, without passion, I fired my club-gun twice and disabled the thing.
‘We must retreat,’ Steelhand was yelling.
I ran back, and the group of us retreated through the barrack and along the supply road, half of us covering the run of the others, then swapping positions. This was tiring work, and dangerous too, but at least it occupied the mind and prevented us worrying too greatly at the prospect of likely injury and death. The headed troops had seemed remarkably jittery at the sight of us. Perhaps we were too monstrous for them to bear. But there were too few of us to press this advantage and drive them from the field.
It is the nature of a polarising fog that vertical lines of sight are much more closely muffled than horizontal ones. A balloon might have been hanging ten metres over our heads with powerful arc-neon lights angled down, and we would have seen nothing. But this fog cannot muffle sound, and so we heard the approach of planes coming from behind us. There must have been many of them, but I do not know how many. There was only a multiple wailing noise that steeped sharply to a steam-whistle intensity right over our heads. The screaming hung above us, and then was starting to pass away when piercing bright light ovalled out from a hundred places low against the ground, behind us, to our left, to our right, in front of us. My visual software blanked, and for a moment all I could see was a virtual cursor blinking as the system struggled to reinitialise. Then the grey screen darkened, and became populated with shadowy lumps, headless men, picking themselves up, stumbling on. I felt clogs in my skin where shrapnel had lodged, and there was painful sense of dislocation in several of my ribs. I paid little attention to this, and I ran for cover before planes made a second pass. Both my boots were full of blood and they squelched comically as I lumbered.
We had almost reached a single-storey building whose roof had gone and whose profile presented an undulating rubble line. Crenellations fashioned by the instant erosion of war. But the screaming was coming across the sky again and we had not yet made the cover when the planes again blanked my visual software with their fiat lux. I felt the light as intense pressure and heat and then I felt nothing for a minute or more.
A dozen surviving headless were all who recovered consciousness after this second raid. We gathered on the far side of the broken wall of what had once been a barrack, or warehouse; I knew none of them by name. Steelhand was somewhere behind us, lying unbreathing amongst the black dust.
The others crowded around me and pressed me with questions, because to them I was the veteran, and the leader. The very idea! I told them to take position and hold off the advance, but although we waited for a long stretch with our guns poking over humps of rubbled concrete and through gaps, the assault did not come. The sound of planes, mercifully far distant, was still audible, and from time to time the horizon would gleam with brief splotches of light.
The roofless space in which we took cover was littered with all manner of junk, including quantities of drink and food. This latter had been intended for headed soldiers, but we were able to break it and feed it into our neck valves. No matter how we searched, though, we could not discover any pharmocopies. This was a matter of concern for me.
Soon enough we began coughing up our wadding, and for a while all that could be heard was the hawking and screeching of a dozen headless. Afterwards we found apple juice in a large vat and made cups out of folded cardboard to drink it.
One soldier approached me. ‘What should we do?’ he asked. I did not know his name. I did not ask him it.
‘I have no idea.’
‘Should we stay here? Are our orders to defend this place? Should we push back?’
I examined myself. Blood from eight or ten small wounds had flowed under my armour, down into my meadhres and boots. Two of my ribs were evidently broken, and the fingers of my right hand, where they still clutched the handle of my weapon, were scorched and purple. None of the men now under my command was in a flawless physical condition.
‘No,’ I said. ‘We’d better pull back.’
‘Are you sure? Are you sure?’
‘Somebody must assume command,’ I said. ‘Shall we debate it?’
‘You must assume command,’ said the soldier.
We cleaned up as far as we could, using supplies of army-issue mouthwash to rinse wounds. Then, in reasonably good order, we made our way out of the back of the building and along a kibble-strewn road into the darkness. Coming out we straightaway encountered an automate, one of ours, lying at a forty-five degree angle. Its leg-wheels were broken and much of its infrastructure was melted and torn, but some of its lights were on, and it swivelled a gun barrel at us as we passed. Either it was out of ammunition, or else it recognised us as friendly troops; but either way it did not fire.
Soon we saw our first headed corpse, lying across the road with his face in a puddle. Then we found ourselves stepping over dozens of similar bodies. I do not know how so many troops had been killed so far behind the front line. Perhaps they were casualties from earlier air raids. We passed by this scene. Seeing headed soldiers killed and discarded, amongst them many superiors, was queerly upsetting. This seemed somehow a distortion of what was right and expected. That this many were dead still possessed of their skulls, whilst we limped along alive headless, implied an unhealthy cosmos, a fungal decay at the roots that ought to nourish, a rottenness that twists and buckles the tree above into monstrous shapes.
‘What must we do?’ said my soldiers anxiously. ‘Should we stop and bury them? Should we at least recite the relevant scripture over their bodies?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘We’d better push on back.’
Finally, after long slog, we saw lights and came straight upon an armed encampment: a fence of wire and behind it a bright-lit barrack and warehouse. The guards did not fire upon us, for they recognised our profiles as headless. Instead they waved us through and we came inside the building into a bright-lit space. There were many soldiers here, all headed, lying and sitting, talking, eating, praying. These men stared at us as we came in, their expressions not welcoming, for to them we were criminals and desperate men. This hostility acted upon us as a defining pressure, gathering us into a tight little group.
I tried to find a superior to whom I could report, but nobody answered me when I asked where to find one. Eventually I spotted a captain, and, weary and sore, my skin stiff with my own blood, I summoned my courage and approached him.
‘From where?’ he asked. He was a handsome man, smooth-skinned and pale-haired with sharp blue eyes; but his face was sucked-in with tiredness and the skin beneath his eyes was crimped and hollow. ‘From the front? The breaklands?’
‘Yes, Captain.’
‘I can’t help you. H
ave your men eaten?’
‘We have, Captain.’
‘If I were you,’ he said, turning away, ‘I’d gather them out of the way. The men here are unhappy. They are startled by the turn events have taken. Don’t give them a reason to become angry with you.’
I took his advice, and led my eleven followers to a quiet space behind some large cases. I did not ask why they might be angry with us, of all people; I assumed it was the natural order that we would receive their cuffs and contempt.
Here we sat, and some of my headless took the chance to sleep. I did not. I fingered Mark Pol’s eye stalk, still on its cord about my neck. I explored again the ridges and length of it. I thought about Pluse, about my former life. I thought about my vow to revenge myself upon Mark Pol Treherne. Never before had all these things seemed so utterly distant. It was a complete distance. I say complete in the sense of being unbreachable, although the word has other meanings. Every breath, every click of my neck valve, brought welling soreness in my chest, but that was the least of my concerns.
