by Adam Roberts
Three
A number of hours later the captain came behind the crates and addressed himself to one of my soldiers. ‘Are you the leader of these headless?’ The man did not reply.
‘I am the man you are looking for,’ I said, standing up.
He turned to me. ‘You - you are the one to whom I spoke earlier?’
‘I am.’
‘You all look alike to me,’ he said. ‘Come along.’
Across the barrack the headed troops were gathering their material and preparing to move. I stepped through the groups of them feeling, for the first time, intimidated; these men all towered over me, all aggressive and sour. I readied myself, with some weariness, to fight them if I must do, but of course the mere presence of a superior was enough to recall to me the effect of the truncheon, and to make me pliable. I do not believe, as I look back, that he was even carrying a truncheon.
At the back of the open space were several smaller inset rooms, and it was to one of these that I was brought. ‘The magister wants to have a word with you,’ said the captain. ‘Have you ever spoken to a magister before?’
‘No, Captain.’
‘Don’t be intimidated. Or, perhaps it would be better to say, don’t be overly intimidated. Address him as “Magister”.’
‘Yes, Captain.’
‘In.’
Inside the small space were half a dozen headed people hurrying about, busy with unimaginable tasks. The room was filled with datascreens and processing equipment, some of which was being dismantled, some packed away.
The magister himself was a short bald-headed man, dark-skinned. The end of his nose was divided into two little lumps by a central crease, like a coffee bean. He had no eyebrows, not even eyelashes, and his mouth was very wide and mobile. He saw me. ‘Visions?’ he snapped at me. ‘Hallucinations?’
I was very disconcerted. ‘Magister?’
‘Have any - of your men - reported visions?’
‘Yes, magister. I myself have—’
‘Visions of what?’
I could feel my heart galloping. ‘An encounter with a man in a country mansion,’ I said. ‘A conversation. The too-rapid succession of night and day.’
The magister nodded. ‘Where were you stationed?’
‘Magister, I regret to say I do not know. We were attacking a boomshell installation set in a hill - up by the breaklands . . .’
‘You’re a fool,’ he said. ‘All my headless troops have been attacking boomshell installations, of course. To break through the boomshell line is the point of the whole - boh - why talk to you?’ He snorted in anger and turned to say something to a subordinate. I felt my bowels jellify within me. He turned back to me. ‘So you don’t happen to know which boomshell you were attacking? Seven? Nine-A?’
‘Magister I regret to say that I—’
‘Off you go now,’ he said.
I left at once.
The captain was still outside, and walked alongside me as I made my way back. We went in silence for half a minute, and then he asked abruptly, ‘Are you well?’
I was disproportionately touched by this small verbal politeness.
‘Captain, yes,’ I said.
‘You’re trembling.’
‘I have never before,’ I said, ‘encountered a magister.’
The captain laughed, a brief low laugh. ‘He is only a man, he is only an officer. He is, admittedly a high-ranking officer. But to think of one of the fearsome headless trembling at meeting an officer! I had thought you all practically devils. I’d thought you were monsters who roar and devour human flesh!’
‘Is such our reputation, Captain?’ I asked, genuinely astonished to hear this.
‘Indeed. But you seem quietly spoken, even timid.’
We walked on for a while, and returned to the corner of the barrack where the headless were all, save one, asleep on the floor. The captain loitered, talking to me for a while; and I was emboldened to ask him: ‘What has happened here?’
‘I am not sure,’ was his reply. ‘There have been reports of visions from several of the fourteen salients. It is puzzling.’
I was silent. Then the captain said: ‘The mainframes are firewalled, and the guns are firewalled. But you are not firewalled. I believe that is the matter here.’
‘I do not understand, Captain.’
‘Your ordinator, I mean. What would be the point in firewalling your ordinator? Why would anybody try to load a virus into your consciousness? And, in the usual course of things - in peacetime, I mean - if they did, why would anybody be concerned? That matters might be different in war: well . . . I suppose that didn’t occur to anybody.’
I saw then what he meant. It felt like a wave of exhaustion, as if everything was suddenly too much to bear. I wanted to go to sleep. I was unconcerned whether I would even wake up again. ‘The visions . . .’
‘From individual headless, I suppose, into their guns. The guns cannot be hacked externally, for they are designed very carefully to be proof against such attack. But connected to you they become part of your consciousness, of the - how is the phrase? - of the simulation software. I suppose the thinking is that if a virus could be installed into you . . .’ He shook his head. ‘Then corrupted guns download corrupted data into the mainframe and in turn corrupt them. It was all very well co-ordinated. Dozens of headless have reported visions. Conversations that delayed them, spooled out the time, until the viruses could be loaded. Then - snap back to consciousness and back to barracks, and . . .’
I held my peace.
‘We shall counter-attack,’ he said, drawing himself to his full height. ‘We will get things up and running, of course.’ He spoke with genuine confidence. ‘Their software skills cannot be so very far ahead of ours. That cannot be. But the feeling here is ugly, and men who have lost friends and honourable soldiers who feel victory curdling into defeat would need little provocation to turn on your kind. Perhaps,’ he said, as he went, ‘it is only your fearsome reputation that prevents them from falling upon you here and now. That and our orders.’
Soon afterwards the headed troops all pulled back, leaving that place and hurrying away. We were told to stay and defend the installation from enemy attack. We were twelve bodies, no more, and nobody could say how many thousands of enemy soldiers were advancing upon the position. But to think in those terms was, of course, to miss the point of the orders.
We took up positions in the dark outside the building. Behind us the barrack was full of the noises of men and materials being packed up and marched out. Eventually it fell silent. I sent one of my men (my men! - to think I had arrived in such a position of authority!) back into the now-empty space to recover any supplies of food, drink and anything else that might be useful.
We sat and lay at our positions for long hours. The air was sometimes troubled with distant noise, and sometimes there were flickers of peculiar light in the distance, piling upon the horizon like tree-rings and then instantly vanishing into blackness again. There were no signs of encroaching soldiers.
I grew dozy. It occurred to me that it had been a great many days since my last pouch of pharmocopy. Given the nature of war I was not able to recall precisely how many days, but in the solitary dark I tried to remember. But my memory was like a hand from which fingers had been blown off. I could reach clumsily into the past - my life as a poet, the walk to Cainon, my training as a soldier - but I could not manipulate the finer details, or pull anything over towards me for a closer look. I could not remember precisely how many days since the last pouch, or the exact order in which my friends had become casualties. Or the precise delineation of features upon Siuzan Delage’s face. I tried to visualise her, this woman whom I loved and whose life I had ruined, and I could not even remember that. This struck me, in that dark place with sleep starting to rust the metal of my wakefulness, as the most appalling thing of all. I had been prepared to die to save her, and now I could not even picture her face. A melancholy gripped my thoughts, and in an
interior fug I pressed at the memory, pushed and pushed my thoughts as if by sheer will I could conjure up her face. I tried to evoke her eyebrows, the colour of her eyes, the precise tuck and trim of the shape of her lips.
I had a dark revelation. I could not remember her face because she no longer possessed a face. My love for her was such - it was so finely attuned to her - that it had jettisoned her beautiful face as had the headsman. This made me sadder. I could barely hear the noise, like a buzzing, of rhythmic repetition. But it persisted, and I concentrated upon it, and eventually it came into focus as Jon followed by Sieur Jon, repeated over and over. Jon - Sieur Jon - Jon - Sieur Jon—
It was one of the soldiers. ‘What?’
‘Sieur Jon—?’
‘What is it?’ I snapped. ‘What do you want with me?’
He pointed, and I turned my torso to follow the line of his arm. Glinting in the polarised dark were many red lamps, and the scurrying shadows of enemy soldiers. They had advanced silently, and now they were very close to our position. Perhaps I had dozed.
Infuriated I gave the order to fire, and our puny force let loose a number of volleys; but remotes swarmed forward to soak up the barrage and under their cover a large troop of human soldiery rushed us from the left. Hindsight tells me that, of course, I should never have allowed them to slink so far round to the left. But this is what they had achieved, and in minutes they had overrun us. In the last frantic moments I ordered my men to pull back, but this was fruitless. Five of us lay dead; one more refused to give up his weapon and was shot through the chest. Those of us remaining, a ragged half dozen, were wrist-strapped with binding plastic and marched into the empty barrack behind us. I do not believe we inflicted a single human casualty upon them.
They took all our names and wrote them on a data tablet. Why did they take our names? I don’t know why, except that I have heard it said of the Congregation of the Humane Faithful that they take excessive delight in making lists, gathering facts, constructing taxonomies and so on. This is their culture, and there may be little point in quoting at them the Bibliqu’rân to the effect that the spirit keeps alive where the letter kills. This is not their way; they read the sacred book differently. They logged us, and sat us in a line against one wall whilst a great many troops passed into the captured space. We watched as several automates lumbered in, and settled on their creaking wheel-haunches to undergo field services.
A captain came up. He was, or seemed to me, extraordinarily young; but there was no mistaking his rank. He spoke to us with a surprising informality, and his Homish was so heavily accented as to be, on occasion, incomprehensible. ‘You are leader?’
‘I am.’
‘You are Jon Cawa?’
‘Jon Cavala.’
‘You sign docimentation? You sign docimentation accepting your men in surrender of me?’
‘You are a captain?’ I asked. When he looked puzzled I said: ‘Your rank? You hold the rank of captain, yes? You have command here?’
He put his head on one side. ‘Sure, but my name is Haward Fulliof, call me Haw, or sometime Haw-Haw.’
‘Your rank,’ I said, speaking slowly, ‘is such that you may order me to sign whatever you choose.’
He furrowed his brow as he pondered my words, blond eyebrows bowing to one another across the spiky bridge of his nose. His pink cheeks moved as if he were grinding his teeth. ‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘Jon - OK? I an enemy.’
‘Nevertheless,’ I explained, ‘as captives we become bondsmen and you have authority over us.’
‘I to prefer if you sign free, free-ish.’ He shut his eyes, opened them. ‘Free-ly.’
‘I shall do whatever you order me to do,’ I said.
He released my hands from behind my back. From his pocket he brought out a data tablet and stylus. The document I signed was trilingual, and one of the languages was Homish. I signed it - of course - because I had been ordered to do so. Afterwards Captain Haw-Haw asked me, with too many pleases, to turn round and he refastened my wrists in their plastic cuffs. This pulled on the muscles over my chest which increased the pain of my broken ribs. But that was nothing. I tried pushing my hands down so that they might slide over my hips and thighs and come up the front of me, but the shackle was too high up my wrists to permit this. It did not matter.
We sat for a long time, watching the men coming and going. The barrack was a forward point, and at one point a great stream of fresh soldiers poured in, loitered for ten minutes whilst they were re-armed, and then poured out of the other side to prosecute the campaign. The automates, repaired, squeezed their oval wheels thinner to stand up and clanked out. Many of the enemy soldiers rolled out mats and lay down upon them. On occasion a few soldiers would glance in our direction, and talked amongst themselves at the oddity of our appearance. But soon enough we were just one more fixture in a large space filled with things and we were ignored.
The plastic wrist binds were not too tight, and the plastic was soft, but of course it was uncomfortable to sit with my hands strapped together in the small of my back. I rebuked myself, silently, that I had allowed my mind to wander and so be captured. It would not have been too difficult, I reasoned, to have put up a fierce defence and died in the fighting. It was shameful that I had not. It is a feature of shame that it can fill a person brimming as water in a jug, and yet when more shame is poured in it does not spill over the lip but rather sinks into the depths of the jug, thickening the fluid. After everything that I had done in my life, or failed to do, this final failure was nevertheless painful.
The bustle and noise in the barrack died down. I cannot say how many hours we had sat silently against that wall. The lights were dimmed across half the space, perhaps to permit the soldiers the better to sleep.
I concluded that I had the stomach for more shame, after all.
I stood up. I walked, without hurry or delay, to a rack of lances not far from where we were.
I brought my bound hands round from my back to my front. If you, reading this, have a head, you may not understand how easy it is for a headless man to accomplish that mild contortion. My hands were twisted backwards on themselves at the wrist, but a certain range of movement remained in them. After this manoeuvre my hands were still bound, and now bent backwards, but in front of me. The lances were, of course, locked in their rack and all of them were lacking their firing chips, but I was able to fumble a test code into one keypads with the backs of my numb fingers. The tip of a lance heated, and I pressed the plastic of my handcuff to it. Naturally the heat scorched the backs of both of my hands, but this was a pain I could handle easily enough.
In a short time the bonded plastic of my handcuff gave way.
Nobody had noticed me doing this.
I slipped behind a stack of storage boxes and waited there for a while. Watching round the side of this I observed the enemy soldiers: most of them asleep, some of them awake and sitting in groups. Every now and then one might glance over at the line of tied-up headless enemy captives, but they did not register that one of this number had slipped away. My men were canny enough not to draw attention to the fact that I had freed myself.
My options were limited, but after half an hour I was able to insinuate myself close enough to a rack of handguns to lift three weapons. The enemy had omitted to alter the keypad codes, or perhaps they had not yet got around to that task, which was fortunate for me. I primed the weapons.
I slunk back to the wall and my men. A hand weapon was not the best tool for cutting their bonds. Nevertheless I reasoned that it would not be possible to lead them all one by one to the heated tip of the lance. We would surely be observed. And if, in shooting off their cuffs, I shot away one or two of their fingers, then this, though unfortunate, would not prevent them from fighting afterwards.
I slipped back into position amongst my men, with the three guns in my hands behind my back. I did not need to tell them what I had done, or what I planned; nor did I need to spell out the risk to themselves. Th
ey understood, and acceded.
I waited until I judged that things in the barrack were quiet. Then I placed the mouth of one gun, its little ‘o’ mouth of metal surprise, against one of the plastic cuffs, and squeezed out a single round. As I pulled the trigger I hoped that it would not make too loud a noise.
It cracked like a snare drum as it fired, and thumped into the stone floor like a whomper. Naturally this noise attracted attention.
