War & Space: Recent Combat

by Ken MacLeod

  Hanei and its escort responded by opening fire.

  We are creatures of fire and water. We wither under a surfeit of light as readily as we wither beneath drowned hopes. When photons march soldier-fashion at an admiral’s bidding, people die.

  When the Yamachin boarded the battlestation serving Heaven’s Gate, Sang awaited them. By then, the station was all but shattered, a fruit for the pressing. Sang’s eyes were shadowed by sleepless nights, his hair rumpled, his hands unsteady.

  The Hanei’s captain, Sezhi Tomo, was the first to board the station. Cho’s border stations knew his name. In the coming years, we would learn every nuance of anger or determination in that soft, suave voice. Sezhi spoke our language, and in times past he had been greeted as one of us. His chancellor-general had demanded his experience in dealing with Cho, however, and so he arrived as an invader, not a guest.

  “Commandant,” he said to Sang, “I ask you and your soldiers to stand down. There’s time yet for war to be averted. Surrender the white gun.” Sezhi must have been aware of the irony of his words. He knew, as most Yamachin apparently did not, that a Chosar officer’s white gun represented not only his rank but his loyalty to the nation. Its single shot is intended for suicide in dire straits.

  “Sezhi-kan,” the commandant replied, addressing the other man by his Yamachin title, “it was too late when your chancellor-general set his eye upon Feng-Huang.” And when our government, faction-torn, failed to heed the diplomats’ warning of Tsehan’s ambitions; but he would not say that to a Yamachin. “It was too late when you opened fire on the station. I will not stand down.”

  “Commandant,” said Sezhi even as his guards trained their rifles on Sang, “please. Heaven’s Gate is lost.” His voice dropped to a murmur. “Sang, it’s over. At least save yourself and the people who are still alive.”

  Small courtesies have power. In the records that made it out of Heaven’s Gate, we see the temptation that sweeps over the commandant’s face as he holds Sezhi’s gaze. We see the moment when he decides that he won’t break eye contact to look around at his haggard soldiers, and the moment when temptation breaks its grasp.

  Oh, yes: the cameras were transmitting to all the relays, with no thought as to who might be eavesdropping.

  “I will surrender the white gun,” Sang said, “when you take it from me. Dying is easier than letting you pass.”

  Sezhi’s face held no more expression than night inside a nexus. “Then take it I shall. Gentlemen.”

  The commandant drew the white gun from its holster, keeping it at all times aimed at the floor. He was right-handed.

  The first shot took off Sang’s right arm.

  His face was white as the blood spurted. He knelt—or collapsed—to pick up the white gun with his left hand, but had no strength left to stand.

  The second shot, from one of the soldiers behind Sezhi, took off his left arm.

  It’s hard to tell whether shock finally caused Sang to slump as the soldiers’ next twelve bullets slammed into him. A few patriots believe that Sang was going to pick up the white gun with his teeth before he died, but never had the opportunity. But the blood is indisputable.

  Sezhi Tomo, pale but dry-eyed, bowed over the commandant’s fallen body, lifting his hand from heart to lips: a Chosar salute, never a Yamachin one. Sezhi paid for that among his own troops.

  And Yen—Admiral, through no fault of your own, you received the news too late to save the commandant. Heaven’s Gate, to our shame, fell in days.

  There is no need to recount our losses to Yamat’s soldiers. Once their warsails had entered Cho’s local space, they showed what a generation of civil war does for one’s martial abilities. Our world-bound populations fell before them like summer leaves before winter winds. One general wrote, in a memorandum to the government, that “death walks the only road left to us.” The only hope was to stop them before they made planetfall, and we failed at that.

  We asked Feng-Huang for aid, but Feng-Huang was suspicious of our failure to inform them earlier of Yamat’s imperial designs. So their warsail fleets and soldiers arrived too late to prevent the worst of the damage.

  It must pain you to look at the starsail battles lost, which you could have won so readily. It is easy to scorn Admiral Wan Kun for not being the tactician you are, less adept at using the nexuses’ spacetime terrain to advantage. But what truly diminishes the man is the fact that he allowed rivalry to cloud his judgment. Instead of using his connections at court to disparage your victories and accuse you of treason, he could have helped unify the fractious factions in coming up with a strategy to defeat Yamat. Alas, he held a grudge against you for invading his jurisdiction at Heaven’s Gate without securing prior permission.

  He never forgave you for eclipsing him. Even as he died in defeat, commanding the Chosar fleet that you had led so effectively, he must have been bitter. But they say this last battle at Yellow Splendor will decide everything. Forget his pettiness, Yen. He is gone, and it is no longer important.

  “I have your file,” the man said to Yen Shenar. His dark blue uniform did not show any rank insignia, but there was a white gun in his holster. “I would appeal to your loyalty, but the programmer assigned to you noted that this was unlikely to succeed.”

  “Then why are you here?” Yen said. They were in a room with high windows and paintings of carp. The guards had given him plain clothing, also in dark blue, a small improvement on the gray that all prisoners wore.

  The man smiled. “Necessity,” he said. “Your military acumen is needed.”

  “Perhaps the government should have considered that before they put me here,” Yen said.

  “You speak as though the government were a unified entity.”

  As if he could forget. The court’s inability to face in the same direction at the same time was legendary.

  “You were not without allies, even then,” the man said.

  Yen tipped his head up: he was not a short man, but the other was taller. “The government has a flawed understanding of ‘military acumen,’ you know.”

  The man raised an eyebrow.

  “It’s not just winning at baduk or other strategy games, or the ability to put starsails in pretty arrangements,” Yen said. “It is leadership; it is inspiring people, and knowing who is worth inspiring; it is honoring your ancestors with your service. And,” he added dryly, “it is knowing enough about court politics to avoid being put in the Garden, where your abilities do you no good.”

  “People are the sum of their loyalties,” the man said. “You told me that once.”

  “I’m expected to recognize you?”

  “No,” the man said frankly. “I told them so. We all know how reprogramming works. There’s no hope of restoring what you were.” There was no particular emotion in his voice. “But they insisted that I try.”

  “Tell me who you are.”

  “You have no way of verifying the information,” the man said.

  Yen laughed shortly. “I’m curious anyway.”

  “I’m your nephew,” the man said. “My name wouldn’t mean anything to you.” At Yen’s scrutiny, he said, “You used to remark on how I take after my mother.”

  “I’m surprised the government didn’t send me back to the Ministry of Virtuous Thought to ensure my cooperation anyway,” Yen said.

  “They were afraid it would damage you beyond repair,” he said.

  “Did the programmer tell them so?”

  “I’ve only spoken to her once,” the man said.

  This was the important part, and this supposed nephew of his didn’t even realize it. “Did she have anything else to say?”

  The man studied him for a long moment, then nodded. “She said you are not the sum of your loyalties, you are the sum of your choices.”

  “I did not choose to be here,” Yen said, because it would be expected of him, although it was not true. Presumably, given that he had known what the king’s decree was to be, he could have committed sui
cide or defected. He was a strategist now and had been a strategist then. This course of action had to have been chosen for a reason.

  He realized now that the Yen Shenar of yesteryear might not have been a man willing to intrigue against his enemies, even where it would have saved him his command. But he had been ready to become one who would, even for the sake of a government that had been willing to discard his service.

  The man was frowning. “Will you accept your reinstatement into the military?”

  “Yes,” Yen said. “Yes.” He was the weapon that he had made of himself, in a life he remembered only through shadows and fissures. It was time to test his forging, to ensure that the government would never be in a position to trap him in the Garden again.

  This is the story the way they are telling it now. I do not know how much of it to believe. Surely it is impossible that you outmatched the Yamachin fleet when it was five times the size of your own; surely it is impossible that over half the Yamachin starsails were destroyed or captured. But the royal historians say it is so.

  There has been rejoicing in the temporary capital: red banners in every street, fragrant blossoms scattered at every doorway. Children play with starsails of folded paper, pretending to vanquish the Yamachin foe, and even the thralls have memorized the famous poem commemorating your victory at Yellow Splendor.

  They say you will come home soon. I hope that is true.

  But all I can think of is how, the one time I met you, you did not wear the white gun. I wonder if you wear it now.

  Scales

  Alastair Reynolds

  The enemy must die.

  Nico stands and waits in the long line, sweating under the electric-yellow dome of the municipal force field.

  They must die.

  Near the recruiting station, one of the captives has been wheeled out in a cage. The reptile is splayed in a harness, stretched like a frog on the dissection table. A steady stream of soldiers-in-waiting leaves the line, jabbing an electro-prod through the bars of the cage to a chorus of jeers. It’s about the size of a man, and surprisingly androform except for its crested lizard head, its stubby tail and the brilliant green shimmer of its scales. Already they’re flaking off, black and charred, where the prod touches. The reptile was squealing to start with, but it’s slumped and unresponsive now.

  Nico turns his head away. He just wants the line to move ahead so he can sign up, obtain his citzenship credits and get out of here.

  The enemy must die.

  They came in from interstellar darkness, unprovoked, unleashing systematic destruction on unsuspecting human assets. They wiped mankind off Mars and blasted Earth’s lunar settlements into radioactive craters. They pushed the human explorers back into a huddle of defenses around Earth. Now they’ve brought the war to cities and towns, to the civilian masses. Now force shields blister Earth’s surface, sustained by fusion plants sunk deep into the crust. Nico’s almost forgotten what it’s like to look up at the stars.

  But the tide is turning. Beneath the domes, factories assemble the ships and weapons to take the war back to the reptiles. Chinks are opening in the enemy’s armour. All that’s needed now are men and women to do Earth’s bidding.

  One of the recruiting sergeants walks the line, handing out iced water and candies. He stops and chats to the soldiers-to-be, shaking them by the hand, patting them on the back. He’s a thirty-mission veteran; been twice as far out as the orbit of the moon. He lost an arm, but the new one’s growing back nicely, budding out from the stump like a baby’s trying to punch its way out of him. They’ll look after you too, he says, holding out a bottle of water.

  “What’s the catch?” Nico asks.

  “There isn’t one,” the sergeant says. “We give you citizenship and enough toys to take apart a planet. Then you go out there and kill as many of those scaly green bastards as you can.”

  “Sounds good to me,” Nico says.

  Up in the fortified holdfast of Sentinel Station, something’s different. The tech isn’t like the equipment Nico saw at the recruiting station, or in basic training back on Earth. It’s heavier, nastier, capable of doing more damage. Which would be reassuring, if it wasn’t for one troubling fact.

  Earth has better ships, guns and armour than anyone down there has heard about—but then so do the reptiles.

  Turns out they’re not exactly reptiles either. Not that Nico cares much. Cold-blooded or not, they still attacked without provocation.

  The six months of in-orbit training at Sentinel Station are tough. Half the kids fall by the wayside. Nico’s come through, maybe not top of his class, but somewhere near it. He can handle the power-armour, the tactical weapons. He’s ready to be shown to his ship.

  It’s not quite what he was expecting.

  It’s a long, sleek, skull-grey shark of a machine that goes faster-than-light.

  “Top secret, of course,” says the instructor. “We’ve been using it for interstellar intelligence gathering and resource-acquistion.”

  “How long have we had this?”

  The instructor grins. “Before you were born.”

  “I thought we never had any ambitions beyond Mars,” says Nico.

  “What about it?”

  “But the reptiles came in unprovoked, they said. If we were already out there . . . ”

  They haul him out after a couple of days in the coolbox. Any more of that kind of questioning and he’ll be sent back home with most of his memories scrubbed.

  So Nico decides it’s not his problem. He’s got his gun, he’s got his armour and now he’s got his ride. Who cares who started the damned thing?

  The FTL transport snaps back into normal space around some other star, heading for a blue gas giant and an outpost that used to be a moon. The place bristles with long-range sensors and the belligerent spines of anti-ship railguns. Chokepoint will be Nico’s home for the next year.

  “Forget your armour certification, your weapons rating,” says the new instructor, a human head sticking out of an upright black life-support cylinder. “Now it’s time to get real.”

  A wall slides back to reveal a hall of headless corpses, rank on rank of them suspended in green preservative.

  “You don’t need bodies where you’re going, you just need brains.” she says. “You can collect your bodies on the way back home, when you’ve completed your tour. We’ll look after them.”

  So they strip Nico down to little more than a head and a nervous system, and plug what’s left into a tiny, hyper-agile fighter. The battle lines are being drawn far beyond conventional FTL now. The war against the reptiles will be won and lost in the N-dimensional tangle of interconnected wormhole pathways.

  Wired into the fighter, Nico feels like a god with armageddon at his fingertips—not that he’s really got fingertips. He doesn’t feel much like Nico any more. He cracks a wry smile at Chokepoint’s new arrivals, gawping at the bodies in the tanks. His old memories are still in there somewhere, but they’re buried under a luminous welter of tactical programming.

  Frankly, he doesn’t miss them.

  They’re not fighting the reptiles any more. Turns out they were just the organic puppets of an implacable, machine-based intelligence. The puppetmasters are faster and smarter and their strategic ambitions aren’t clear. But it doesn’t concern thing-that-was-once-Nico.

  After all, it’s not like machines can’t die.

  Strategic Command sends him deeper. He’s forwarded to an artificial construct actually embedded in the tangle, floating on a semi-stable node like a dark thrombosis. Nico’s past caring where the station lies in relation to real space.

  No one fully human can get this far—the station is staffed by bottled brains and brooding artificial intelligences. With a jolt, thing-that-was-once-Nico realises that he doesn’t mind their company. At least they’ve got their priorities right.

  At the station, thing-that-was-once-Nico learns that a new offensive has opened up against the puppetmasters, even further into
the tangle. It’s harder to reach, so again he must be remade. His living mind is swamped by tiny machines, who build a shining scaffold around the vulnerable architecture of his meat brain. The silvery spikes and struts mesh into a fighter no larger than a drum of oil.

  He doesn’t think much about his old body, back at Chokepoint, not any more.

  The puppetmasters are just a decoy. Tactical analysis reveals them to be an intrusion into the wormhole tangle from what can only be described as an adjunct dimension. The focus of the military effort shifts again.

  Now the organic matter at the core of thing-that-was-once-Nico’s cybernetic mind is totally obsolete. He can’t place the exact moment when he stopped thinking with meat and started thinking with machinery, and he’s not even sure it matters now. As an organism, he was pinned like a squashed moth between two pages in the book of existence. As a machine, he can be endlessly abstracted, simulated unto the seventh simulation, encoded and pulsed across the reality-gap, ready to kill.

  This he—or rather it—does.

  And for a little while there is death and glory.

  Up through the reality stack, level by level. By now it’s not just machines versus machines. It’s machines mapped into byzantine N-dimensional spaces, machines as ghosts of machines. The terms of engagement have become so abstract—so, frankly, higher-mathematical—that the conflict is more like a philosophical dialogue, a debate between protagonists who agree on almost everything except the most trifling, hair-splitting details.

  And yet it must still be to the death—the proliferation of one self-replicating, pan-dimensional class of entities is still at the expense of the other.

  When did it begin? Where did it begin? Why?

  Such questions simply aren’t relevant or even answerable anymore.

  All that matters is that there is an adversary, and the adversary must be destroyed.