by Adam Roberts
The two of them took a trip up-cable and bought an FTL tub, a small black machine with a punchDrive engine. They bought this for 13,477 totales and 60 divizos - the exact price indicating it was being sold by an AI. A human would have rounded the price up, but a machine always charges precisely what an item is worth. Sid and Dub got the money from the Cell. They paid and their payment was cleared and they hurried straight out of orbit in a quarter of an hour. Then they went straight into para-space, flipping through the rapidly alternating pattern that kicked the tub along at two thousand times the speed of light. They were silent the whole trip. Together they had been parents to billions of human beings, and yet spending six hours in a small tub they had no conversation for one another.
They flew to Ber, a single star that threw out orange-white light over its six planets, one of which was inhabited. They were not interested in this world, but in the enormous orbiting arcology located 70,000 km nearer the sun. Their plan was to infiltrate this great green bubble, and somehow confront the commanding officer with themselves: the two fathers of the entire army being assembled. What they would do then was a little vague; perhaps persuade him to stop production; or make some media announcement.
But their tub had been followed, of course; their every move on Bakunin had been monitored. They were hailed half a million kilometres away from the arcology, ordered to stop and be seized. Crazily they shouted defiance at this order, and tried to zigzag the tub away, but neither of them was experienced at space flight, and their para-space manoeuvres proved topographically impossible. The ship splintered three ways. Dub was shredded into shards of flesh and a mist of blood. Sid, luckier, was thrown unprotected into vacuum. Their pursuer, ArmyPolice Cruiser Stand-Down 95, was able to spray him with foam from four thousand kilometres away - a shot of no small skill. He was retrieved, nursed, and he recovered.
~ * ~
Five
Sid awoke in a wide-ceilinged green space supported by columns the shape of hip-joints. There was a loose, low-grav feeling about the place. He was asleep in a chair, and, when he lurched forward with a sudden, startled clonic-jerk sensation of falling, he found himself on his feet. It took several moments to orient himself.
He had never visited an arcology before, but then again he had never even been off-world until this trip. On the other hand there were always similitudes. He’d flown space tubs in similitude many times (although of course he had destroyed the first real one he’d piloted). Likewise he’d visited many exotic locations in similitude, and amongst those imaginary destinations had been food-arcologies.
Sid wandered over the floor with half-floating strides, feeling the vague inner-ear tug that suggested spin rather than gravity. The wall at the far side was transparent and allowed an eye-widening perspective - a 3D grid of enormous green trailers and creepers, vertical and horizontal, reaching away apparently for ever. The creepers were huge, at least a hundred metres across, and their myriad buds and fronds bore all manner of vegetable and adaptanimal growth, all of them drawing their water from the great ice core of the arcology, all of them taking their sunshine directly from the fierce orange-white glow of Ber-star. Towards the centre of the globe, Sid knew, was a form of protein algae that thrived on less light, and provided a rawer sort of food. But it was all good.
The General rose up through the floor and coughed to let Sid know he was there. The green light gave his uniform a nonspecific dark-purple look to it. ‘I’ll introduce myself first,’ he said, ‘and there’s no need for you to reciprocate, because I know all about you. I’m Senior General Luop. Two syllables, lew-op.’
It occurred to Sid that he didn’t know what to do with his hands. He folded them behind his back, but felt stiff and uncomfortable. He let them dangle at his sides, but felt louche and sloppy. So he crossed his arms, and said: ‘Hello.’
‘Your friend is dead, I’m afraid.’
‘I already knew that.’
‘Of course. You should have stopped when the proper authorities accosted you. Still, you’re here now. What was it you wanted?’
The directness of the question startled Sid. He cleared his throat, unfolded his arms, rubbed his newly shaved head. ‘You grow people here,’ he said.
The Senior General beamed, nodded.
‘You grow,’ Sid added, emboldened, ‘my children. My children and Dub’s children - the two of us have joint-fathered children—’
‘By the million,’ agreed the General. ‘And?’
‘And,’ said Sid. ‘I never gave permission for that. I’ve seen the images, and it’s a terrible thing - millions upon millions of my children, their lives thrown away.’
‘You signed a contract, I think?’
‘But it wasn’t explicit!’
‘Oho? I think you’ll find it’s legally binding. But explicit?’
‘About the use you’re putting my children to - about the war.’
‘The war,’ said the General. ‘That’s right. Our foe is tenacious, and cares little for the lives of its own. We must counter them or they would over-run the whole Empire. Surely you don’t want that?’
‘But. . .’ said Sid, struggling with this concept. If he had come to the arcology to argue with the General about sport, or music, or Buzz, or any of these things, he could have been eloquent; but this area of discussion was quite new to him and he faltered. ‘These are live people. These are people just like me - my children. How can you throw them away like this?’
‘The alternative?’
‘I don’t know, man.’
‘Well, you need to know. Or at least to think about it.’ The General sauntered over to the wall to stand beside Sid, looking out. ‘It’s a real problem. We outrun them in space battles, of course, but on the ground we can do little. Area-denial does not affect them. In nascent form, the Advance Warrior form is no bigger than my thumb; it can be projected through space in billions and seeds on all the worlds upon which it lands. We used to think,’ the General continued, ‘that they were just a form of vegetable life, but no pesticide is effective against them. The latest thinking is that they are neither animal nor vegetable, as we understand the term, but some third quantity. The only strategy which has worked is engaging them one at a time, killing them one at a time. Their army is billions strong, as so must ours be.’
‘But—’ stammered Sid, struggling with the archaic concept once called a thix, ‘to send all these people, these people, to death?’
‘What else?’
‘Can’t you make machines? AIs?’
‘AIs take decades to develop. They’re hugely expensive and labour-intensive. We can make non-sentient machines of course, although that is also very expensive, and they make extremely poor warriors. Controlling them remotely involves a time lag, and anyway no waldo is a true substitute for being there. Now, our troops, however; they’re cheap to grow. Effectively they build themselves as they go along, not like an AI. We feed them on the food produced in-house, we pump them up and train them, and in a few years they’re ready to fight. They are tough, inventive, resilient, violent: they are the perfect warriors.’ He chuckled to himself. ‘You’d rather send AIs into battle? No, no, no. AIs are a hundred times more human than our troops. Soldiers? They’re on average three years old, standard markers, when we send them to war. Physically, of course, they’re fifteen, sixteen, and their reflexes are trained into them. But emotionally, and intellectually, they’re simpletons. It would be a crime to destroy AIs in this war; but our troops, they’re not fully people at all.’
‘What about clones?’
‘We could use clones, of course, though that would mean isolating cell nucleotides on a large scale, and that would be expensive and time-consuming. Sperm is cheaper, easier. Besides, clones would be identical; growing the soldiers from two individuals’ sperm cells means that they are all subtly different. Do you know why that is important? Shall I tell you why that is important? Because these battlefields are evolutionary are
nas, on a huge scale. And hugely speeded up! Those who survive do so because they carry useful survival traits. Useful traits.’
Sid blushed with rage. ‘You’re talking about them like they’re things. They’re my children.’
‘Nonsense,’ scoffed General Luop. ‘You have no bond with them at all. Have you sentimentalised them? Dear dear. Here, let me show you. We’re fighting the Xflora on nine hundred worlds at the moment. Let me take you to one.’ He nodded his head, and the walls became a similitude. Sid had to grab Luop’s arm to stop himself tumbling, so dizzying was the shift in perspective. They were a hundred metres above an immense hillside, stretching from horizon to horizon and sloping down for miles. Away, downslope, was a distant river; it looked a mere stream, but infotags said it was a four-kilometre-wide torrent. Upslope was nothing but a bright yellow grassland, shimmering as the breeze moved over it, smoothing it down with invisible hands, stretching away and up until the eye met the pine-coloured sky. Sid looked down again, and saw the Xflora. The vividness of the similitude was viscerally shocking. Before him were uncountable, appalling hordes of Xflora. At first glance it looked like the yellow grassland gave way to a dark-brown monocrop of some kind; then, looking again, you saw it was a mass of Xflora individuals stretching away to the horizon on each side and almost down to the river. Kilometres on kilometres of living material. As Sid’s eye settled on a portion of the similitude, infotags brought it into sharper focus, and he saw the group formations of seven or fifteen, saw them flexing their various terrible limbs and brandishing their horrifying weaponry. They were straining forward, eager to push on. The focus of their attack was a network of human bases, dug into the hillside, out of which a vastly outnumbered force struggled to hold back the tide. Weapon discharges popped and crackled, and flare bombs lit the sky like neon. Sid had, without thinking, brought his hands to his mouth in horror: the human troops were doomed; the sheer force of numbers was crushing the dug-outs one by one.
‘Now,’ said Senior General Luop.
Over the crest of the hill, away (from Sid’s viewpoint) to the right, came the Imperial Army, a surging tide of warriors. Most were running, weapons in both hands, their mouths open. Some flew a metre or so over the grass, carried by some sort of glider, aerodynamic or antigrav - Sid couldn’t tell. Above them hoverjets swooped and veered, and flame networked out and down into the body of Xflora. But Sid could see this aerial bombardment had little effect on the pulsing vitality of the enemy troops. ‘Their vital organs are low on their bodies,’ said the General, almost conversationally. ‘It’s very hard to hit them from above. But we still factor-in aerial attacks; it gives our soldiers heart.’
The enormous wave of humanity collided with the forward line of Xflora with a great shudder, and the forces continued piling down the hill. At the interface, energy weapons discharged in a great line, like foam. ‘Stabbing and cutting work almost as well, and in many cases better,’ said the General, again adopting an informal, lecturing tone, ‘than heat or energy discharge. We don’t quite understand their physiology.’ He picked at empty air with his forefinger and thumb, and manipulated the image. With swooning rapidity the viewpoint zoomed in on the fighting. Sid was surrounded, disconcertingly, by giant-sized people and giant-sized Xflora, straining and fighting. He saw his own face, male, female, a hundred times repeated, with expressions of rage, or fear, or in an ecstasy of berserker aggression; he saw microbladed killing maces swung and thrust, every blow aimed low, and the black-brown, scaly, lined skin of the Virus Warriors seaming open and pouring dry sandy viscera onto the ground. He saw energy weapons levelled and fired at point-blank scorching the front-chest of the aliens. And he saw the many limbs of the Xflora warriors flailing and stabbing, saw their own blue-beamed weapons cracking and blistering human skin - his own skin, his own blood and bone. He saw countless versions of himself reeling and falling, limbs snapped and heads broken or removed. He saw a wall of his own corpses, and saw blue bolts flaming breaches in that wall, and the inexorable force of numbers pushing on through.
With a gesture, Luop returned the perspective to the aerial one.
Sid found himself panting. ‘This,’ the General was saying, ‘is one of hundreds of battles being fought today.’
‘This is happening now?’
‘Yes. I called up an ongoing battle, over-rode the junior General who was supervising it, and gave the order.’
‘You called the Imperial Army over that ridge,’ said Sid, unable to keep awe from his voice. ‘Your word brought out that sea of humanity.’
The General looked pleased at this. ‘I did. I’ll confess, I still feel the excitement of command. It’s a glowing feeling here,’ and he patted his own stomach. ‘I unleash the hordes!’ He chuckled. ‘But it’s a serious thing, too. We are the Empire’s defence. One hundred and forty thousand worlds can carry on their day-to-day lives because we hold back the Virus Race. Is that not worth doing? A noble occupation?’
Sid was only partly paying attention; he was distracted by the unfolding drama of battle similituded all around him. The images he’d seen, those forbidden files the Cell had obtained, had been very low-qual compared to this. This was like being there, better than being there. The two great masses of life swirled and swarmed at each other, eddies in their mass curling or rushing, like abstract art. Like the highest form of abstract art.
‘Now,’ said Luop. ‘We need to decide what to do with you. Don’t we though? Don’t we?’ He waved in the air, and the similitude ended. They were back in the green-lit room, with its view down the dizzy perspectives of the arcology.
Sid looked at the General.
‘You’d probably like to see the labs where we separate out and grade the spermatozoa; where we combine it, and the techniques we use,’ said the General. ‘Or perhaps you’d like to see the Folds, where we grow the foetuses, or the pap-rooms, or the spin-chambers, or the reflex conditioners or the loyalty transmitters. Or perhaps you’d like to see the soldiers later in their development; see them sleeping in pod-bunks, eating in mess, learning together. Or the transport ships - maybe you’d like to see them. They’re a sight to see, hundreds of kilometres long, and they dock every week or so. Would you like to see them?’ The general was acting the benevolent father-figure, the avuncular friend.
Decision came quickly to Sid, as it often did to him, and as it frequently does to adolescents. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I want to join up.’
~ * ~
Six
Sid learned the structures of command. The lowest level of combat troop was the ‘grunt’: straight from the arcology to the transport to the dropship, a vocabulary of about a hundred words, brains soft with non-use, but reflexes trained and conditioned into them. Grunts lived for one thing, to kill an Xflora warrior. Without that their lives would be meaningless and their deaths a waste. If they took down one of their enemy, they died happy. If they killed two, they achieved glory. More than that and an almost transcendent happiness flowed through them.
Grunts were thrown into battle, and most of them died. Those that survived were gathered into new battalions and thrown into battle again. A dozen battles, or twenty, or fifty, depending on the intensity of military action.
Those grunts who survived represented a minuscule fraction of the hundreds of millions of their generation; but if they survived it was usually because they possessed particular ability, or particular luck. They graduated from ‘grunt’ to become ‘spurts’, so called because they had survived long enough for original thoughts to come gushing up from their brains, for some of their actions to be the result of independent thought. A Spurt, a battle veteran, was often given corporal status and notional command of a legion of fifty thousand; although actual command came from above, the Spurt was a sort of centre for the group. But Spurts knew only how to lead from the front, and their fatality rate was high.
Those few, very few, who survived two years of constant warfare were promoted to the level of ‘Stick Around�
�, or ‘Sticks’, a title offered in tribute to their resilience. A conventional military lieutenant would take command of platoons of Sticks, and these more experienced soldiers would be used for more specific missions, tactical insertion, strike-and-retreat, infiltration into enemy territory. When a lieutenant took command of a new platoon he or she would address the soldiers with this joke, hallowed by time and military usage: ‘Hey Sticks, I’m going to use you as a stick to beat the enemy.’ Almost all the Stick Arounds would laugh at this, because their battle-battered intelligence, though still largely nascent, had nonetheless developed to the point where they recognised the humour in collapsing together two meanings of one word, ‘to remain, to stay in place’ and ‘a staff or rod for use in chastisement’. This was how far they had come.
Sid trained for a lieutenancy. In the Cell he had come to regard himself as somebody uniquely special, the father of many millions, the source of the Imperial Army. Now he revised his view. He realised he was only one of many suppliers of biological raw material for the war; there had been a string of adolescent masturbators before him, and others would follow after him. The response to the question ‘Why me?’ was a blank look. Why not him? It had to be somebody. He was young and healthy, and that was all that was required.
