The Soldier

  “Still hankering to return to the Kingdom?” said a voice.

  Orlik looked up at the Polity drone nailed to its plate.

  “Shut up, drone.” He wasn’t in the mood for conversation.

  TRIKE

  “What’s happening?” Trike asked, again straining against the bonds around his legs.

  Lyra was silent for a moment, then she lowered her gaze from the ceiling and blinked at both of them. She looked pale and ill now. Perhaps the leeches stuck to the ceiling weren’t supposed to escape.

  “Something’s coming,” she said, “and I don’t know what the fuck it is.”

  “Explain,” Cog demanded.

  She focused on him fully. “I got cam feeds from out there. Zackander fired some container at the legate as he departed. The legate opened it and what looked like a war drone came out. It pushed the legate away with a force-field then rose up and destroyed what was left of Zackander’s home.” She paused, thoughtful. “I don’t know what the hell it was using but the underground explosions were hot enough to melt down a mile deep. Now it’s coming here.”

  “Any Polity war drone is capable of that kind of damage,” said Cog.

  “Yes, but does this look like a Polity war drone?”

  The outline of an object appeared in the middle of the room where Zackander had been, then the projector filled it with substance and colour. The armoured monstrosity seemed to be a blend of mutated lobster and hard technology, a mix of organic and inorganic—similar to Lyra herself, Trike thought.

  “Probably an assassin drone,” said Cog doubtfully.

  “That’s not all,” said Lyra. “This thing is leaving a U-space signature.”

  Now Cog looked a bit tired and ill as well. He was about to say something when the room shook to four hollow booms.

  “Zackander, what have you done?” Lyra asked.

  “What’s happening?” Trike asked, almost cheerfully.

  Cog studied him carefully. Trike looked back and forced seriousness into his expression, waving a hand towards the now shimmering and distorting hologram. “What is that thing?” He knew he wasn’t quite sane, but if he was to get what he wanted, he needed to control himself. Ignore the leeches, he thought. Ignore the hammer whelks and the frog whelks and the auras and that silent tap tap tapping hooder . . .

  The words seemed enough to turn the Old Captain’s mind to other matters, though Trike wasn’t sure which words, the ones he’d spoken out loud or the ones he’d spoken in his mind? Cog looked at the image and said to Lyra, “That U-space signature?”

  “Jain tech,” she confirmed.

  Cog raised the device in his hand and thumbed a control. Trike abruptly found himself free, and was standing in a moment. A fierce and strange joy surged through him and he wanted to run for the door and go after those escaping hammer whelks, but he managed to hold himself in place. He felt an overpowering urge for a drink of sea-cane rum too, and wondered where Lyra had put the bottle. He was about to move, not entirely sure where, when he found his arm immobile. Cog had moved fast and was now standing beside him, one hand clamped round his forearm. Trike tried to struggle free, but it was as if his arm was set in stone.

  “Don’t,” said Cog, “for one moment, think that I don’t know you’re not right, Trike.”

  “I don’t know what you—”

  “Don’t forget this,” Cog interrupted.

  With his other hand, the Old Captain grabbed Trike by the neck and threw him across the room. Trike didn’t even have time to yell before he hit a wall, hard. He hung there, upside down, with broken ceramic tiles falling about him, then peeled out of the impact hole and slid to the floor. He felt broken bones grating inside his body as he righted himself, and peered down at his unnaturally bent forearm. Almost without thinking, he reached down and straightened it out with a crunch, before it healed in that position.

  “It’s obvious I cannot leave you here,” said Cog, now crouching before him. “It’s also obvious you have some self-control. You will come with me and you will do what I tell you. Do not disobey me.”

  Giggling madness swirled in Trike’s head. He wanted to laugh in the Old Captain’s face. He wanted to shout “Frog whelks!” and just run. But at his core he remembered how Cog, for a bet years ago on Spatterjay, snapped a chunk of hull armour with his hands.

  “Don’t make the wrong choice,” Cog said. “I’ve known since we first met what you have inside, just as I always did with Jay. He made the wrong choice. He let it rise within him and he never came back. If you do the same I will do to you what I should have done to him. I will break you into pieces and burn those pieces.”

  The giggling died inside Trike, killed by a spear of cold through his spine. Jay was not a name commonly used on Spatterjay because of its history with their founder. The pirate Jay Hoop, nicknamed Spatterjay, Spatterjay Hoop, had set up his vicious coring trade on that world. He kidnapped people, exposing them to the virus, then coring and thralling them—cutting out their brains and part of their spinal column to replace these with a control mechanism. They were then sold to the pra-dor. Jay had been one of the very first to be infected with the virus. It was rumoured that he was still there on Spatterjay somewhere and that the virus had turned him into a monstrous thing.

  “You knew Jay Hoop?” Trike asked, hallucinations fading around him.

  “Knew him?” said Cog. He reached out with one hand, clasped Trike’s hand and hauled him to his feet. “We were brothers.”

  The room shuddered again, and from outside came the sawing of particle weapons and the sonic cracking of railguns. There was another close boom and the whole room lurched, a crack appearing in the ceiling. Out of this crack squirmed a series of leeches.

  “Go away,” said Trike, and he watched them fade into non-existence.

  “Lyra?” Cog asked.

  “It’s here, obviously,” she replied, “and we’re fighting it.” “You?” asked Cog.

  “The Cyberat are fighting it,” she said, frowning and shaking her head. “I’m with you.”

  Trike felt something thrust into his hands and looked down in puzzlement at his pack, wondering how it had got there. Cog was now over the other side of the room extracting a weapon from his own pack, and screwing on a gigawatt energy canister. Lyra flowed with a harsh metallic rattling towards the door and he found himself trotting to keep up. He took the QC laser out of his pack, as well as mini-grenades which he inserted into his pocket. He found himself in a corridor, the floor thick with blue carpet moss, the ceiling arched overhead and shifting scenes through apparent windows, all different. Deep in one of these—a scene from Earth of some sunny Caribbean island beach—he saw a group of frog whelks leaping joyously, stalked eyes up and eyeballs gyrating cra-zily. He raised a hand to them in acknowledgement and hurried past.

  “It’s in our fucking systems, damn it!” Lyra yelled, leading them through a wooden door into a corridor, at the end of which was the mouth of a grav-shaft. “We go down,” she pointed.

  “Into your systems?” Cog asked.

  “Yes, it’s—” The blood drained from her face, and on the metal legs of her hooder body she skittered backwards. “Oh no,” she added. “Lyra . . .”

  She screamed and rose up high towards the ceiling, supported only by four of the back legs. The hooder part of her body then coiled round, like a woodlouse, lowering her top human body into the rest of the eagerly waving legs. She screamed again to the sounds of multiple butcher’s knives cutting. Trike looked down at something that landed by his feet—a severed human hand with sucker-tipped fingers. When he looked back, Cog was down beside Lyra, trying to pull her free from her own graft, his arms covered in blood up to the shoulders as he snapped off waving metal legs.

  “Lyra! Lyra!” he bellowed.

  “Stop,” said Trike.

  Cog glanced round at him, his expression livid. Trike pointed to where Lyra’s head now lay, a foot away from a neck that looked like it had been through a macerator.
Cog stared at it, while the remaining metal legs moved a few times more before growing still. Cog slowly rose to his feet.

  “I will never, ever accept it,” he said.

  “What?” Trike asked, baffled.

  “Death.” Cog stepped over to him angrily, bloody hands clenching and unclenching. He grabbed Trike’s arm and thrust him towards the dropshaft. Trike hesitated at the edge because obviously the irised gravity field in the shaft had shut down. A hard hand slammed into his back and he found himself falling down into darkness.

  “You’re a fucking hooper,” Cog yelled, falling after him.

  Trike righted his tumble with a couple of slaps against the side of the shaft. He landed on his feet, legs bending, and rolled out of the darkness into chaos. Glancing round he saw the base entrances to other shafts running along the walls to his right and left. He was in a high hall that in one direction terminated with a wall occupied by balconied apartments. At the other end he saw two giant doors standing open and recognized the entrance into the Cube. The hall itself was occupied by Cyberat and other things that looked to be wholly machine.

  “What the fuck?” he said, the exclamation sounding like a joyous observation. He watched a Cyberat man, who consisted of a head and a human torso sprouting numerous metallic spider limbs, running past, pursued by a surgical robot. This giant chromed woodlouse ran on long gleaming legs, terminating in a varied collection of surgical cutlery. Trike thought the man might escape as he tried to scuttle up the wall, but the robot caught hold of one of his legs and dragged him down, then underneath itself. Trike saw the look of appeal on the man’s face before the screaming started, as blood and pieces of flesh sprayed out. He was still watching when a heavy boot thumped into the side of the thing and sent it skittering across the hall and smashing into the wall.

  “Keep moving!” said Cog, cuffing him across the back of the head.

  They ran for the giant doors.

  “Why is it doing this?” Trike asked.

  Cog now held a flat compact gun in one hand, which he fired twice, decapitating a lurching android that definitely wasn’t of the Golem series. Something about that weapon niggled in Trike’s mind.

  Thin-gun, he remembered, but had no idea what that meant.

  “Because it is vicious?” Cog suggested.

  A creature like a huge steel cockroach with an extra joint in its main carapace reared up before Trike, then surged forwards with plug borers whirling at the end of its forelimbs. He considered shooting it but did not want to waste his laser’s charge, so ran to meet it and kicked it hard. With a sound like a glass bottle being tossed into a scrapyard, his boot went right through and the thing sagged.

  “Fuck,” he said.

  Trike struggled on after Cog, still trying to shake the defunct insect robot off his leg. Eventually he paused and brought his other foot down on it to extract the trapped one. He scanned around again. All the strange Cyberat in view now seemed to be attacking themselves. He saw one, who looked much like Zackander, shoot across and slam into a wall, body of flesh first. The sphere then drifted away with the body hanging slack and broken. A woman who had retained human legs but looked like a robotic Kali seemed to be cutting off her own face with her extra robotic limbs.

  Once free of the robot on his leg, and after slapping away one of its smaller kin, Trike dashed after Cog. He followed the Old Captain out through the doors and looked up to where more Cyberat were killing themselves in the sky. He saw a tilted grav-barge spilling people, while firing on others. And higher up, he saw the cyborg lobster, casually drifting along, occasional stabs of a bright green particle beam frying Cyberat and dropping them smoking from the sky.

  “Keep moving,” Cog said. “We still have a chance.” He gestured towards the landing field where a couple of ships were rising into the sky. The creature up there had thus far shown no interest in them.

  They ran, steaming metal and flesh falling about them. The gates into the landing field were open, while the fence on one side was down and smoking, red hot in places. They ran through and soon Cog’s ship lay before them. Its main body bore the shape of an oceangoing ship’s hull, while at the back end stood a cylindrical tower similar to such a ship’s bridge. It was already lowering a ramp as they approached, and Cog ran straight inside.

  Trike felt exhilarated as he followed, and when he stepped inside the ship he had the urge to run back out again. But he clung to an I-beam instead as the ramp closed up, and the feeling began to dissipate. Sudden fear then lurched into his consciousness and in the gloom he heard a tap tapping, and sensed sliding movement behind the strapped-down cargo crates. He was sure the place was packed full of leeches. He quickly followed Cog to a spiral staircase and up into the bridge.

  “Report,” said Cog, settling himself down in his captain’s throne.

  “Nothing in the system,” replied the mind of his ship, the Janus. “Something tried but I put a ghost copy of myself in its way and it took over that.” The mind paused then added, “The others were not so well prepared.”

  The transparent screen that wrapped around the bridge, which until that moment only showed the surrounding landing field, now threw up image frames in its laminate. In one a spreading explosion was visible and Trike heard the rumble from outside. The others showed two of the rising ships he had seen earlier. Even as he watched, one of them lost its drive and began to fall. The cam followed it down to where it hit the ground and fragmented.

  “Full chameleonware and launch,” Cog instructed.

  “Full?” the mind enquired.

  “Have you not been keeping up on events?” Cog asked. “That thing out there is fucking Jain tech.”

  “Ah,” said Janus, a mind that Trike had once thought was from a prador first-child, but about which he now had his doubts.

  He walked over and plumped himself down in one of the other three acceleration chairs, then pulled across and secured the safety straps. Of course, little could hurt him, but if things got rough it would be inconvenient bouncing around in here. After a moment of introspection while he gazed at the console before him, with its overly complicated controls for the ship’s single particle cannon, he returned his attention to the displays.

  The ship launched, just as the final remaining ship above blew apart in a flameless explosion, scrap raining down. New frames now opened in the laminate showing views above and below, all around, and down towards the retreating landscape, with one fixed on the Cube. Trike began humming to himself and rocking against his straps. Maybe if he did this long enough the small whelks sliding in neat lines across the console would disappear. After a moment, he realized Cog was looking at him and he desisted, sitting back to gaze up at the ceiling. A leech appeared there and dropped a questing tubular mouth towards him. He stared at it hard until it had the decency to fade out of existence.

  “Okay,” said Cog after a few minutes of steady acceleration, “either it hasn’t seen us or it’s just—”

  The flash whited-out every frame and flared in the sky outside where they could see it. All the frames then went black for a moment before flicking back on, one by one. The view of the Cube now showed a bright ball of fire sitting at the centre of a dust cloud, and hurtling debris. The Jain lobster had quit playing and its particle weapon flashed perpetually, scoring thousands of lines over the explosion, and thousands of objects fell away, burning. The ball of fire where the Cube had been shrank to a single bright point and winked out. Then all the dust and debris abruptly reversed course, heading into that same point. The whole mess collapsed down and down until it disappeared, leaving a deep crater into which green seawater drained and boiled. A hole opened in the bottom of the crater—a perfectly round tunnel spearing through seawater, and down through rock into darkness. The sea closed the hole then swirled as it rushed into this giant plughole.

  “That was . . . excessive,” said Cog numbly.

  “What?” said Trike. The swirling sea had a strange calming almost hypnotic effect on
him.

  “Are you so far gone you can’t see?” asked Cog, glaring at him.

  Trike detected danger and watched the small whelks scuttle for cover. He forced himself back into the moment and tried to think clearly.

  “Some kind of CTD imploder,” he suggested. He knew about such weapons. They first blew something up then a brief singularity sucked everything back in before vaporizing, causing a second explosion. It was the kind of weapon the Polity used against something seriously dangerous, like Jain technology.

  “Yes, that,” said Cog. He leaned back and took his pipe out of his pocket, and with slightly shaking hands began to pack it. “And where is Ruth?”

  Trike looked around, his remaining hallucinations fled and his chest tightened as he remembered the ships he had seen on the way up being destroyed. He searched with the U-mitter he had in his skull and felt her down there. Shivering, he reached out to the controls before him and input coordinates. A screen frame opened to show him the landing field out on the rim of the crater where the Cube had been. The shuttle still sat there, seemingly undamaged.

  “It’s good that she did not try to leave,” Cog commented.

  “Yes,” was all Trike could manage, his mouth dry.

  An explosion of steam erupted from the crater where the Cube had been, followed by a plume of lava. Then the frame view blacked out, as did others from down on the planet. Trike now gazed through the screen at the curve of the world and starlit space.

  “We got away,” he said flatly.

  “Not yet,” said Cog.

  10

  At the Battle of Agincourt the cream of French chivalry fell to the English longbow. In the First World War, the machinegun inflicted appalling casualties. Hitler’s blitzkrieg of the Second World War smashed through old-time defences and rolled up armies. Following that conflict, air warfare became the predominant force, until defensive lasers and railguns got up to speed. Guerrilla warfare killed the high-tech soldier until killer micro-drones swarmed in. AI-linked soldiers in powered exoskeletons were unstoppable, until induction-warfare beams were invented, and stopped them. The armour of prador warships was nearly the end of the Polity until our industrial might prevailed. Weapons change, logistics change, tactics change and in the interim soldiers get ground into paste. What can be learned from history? That in the end the greatest killer of any soldier is not the longbow or the machinegun, it is not the laser or the micro-drone, but the failure to adapt. My vision of the modern soldier is of one who can change fast enough to accommodate improvements in warfare, and survive. The war drones of the prador/human war came closest to that ideal, but it is my contention that subsequent specialization blunted their edge. But military intelligences still strive to create the ideal—the super-soldier. Perhaps we should be thankful that they continue to fail.