The Soldier Read online

  From this angle the accretion disc, around which the defensive weapons platforms were positioned, looked like a blind, open white eye. It seemed like any other such stellar object in the universe—just a steadily swirling mass of gases and the remnants of older stars which would eventually form a new solar system. His ship’s sensors could detect scattered planetesimals within it, the misty bulks of forming planets and the larger mass of the dead star at the heart of the disc. Occasionally that star would light, traceries of fusion fire fleeing around its surface like the smouldering edges of fuse paper. One day, maybe tomorrow or maybe a thousand years hence, the sun would ignite fully. The resulting blast would blow a large portion of the accretion disc out into interstellar space. Marco knew this was the event to be feared, since it was the job of weapons platform AIs like Pragus to ensure that the virulent pseudo-life within that disc did not escape.

  Marco shivered, wondering how the subplot in which he had been ensnared related to that. Certainly, the creature who had employed him was a conniving bastard . . . No. He shook his head. He could not allow his mind to stray beyond his immediate goal. He banished the image and, as his ship turned, watched Pragus’s permanent home come into view.

  The weapons platform was a slab ten miles long, five wide and a mile thick. The designer, the haiman Orlandine, had based much of its design on the construction blocks of a Dyson sphere—a project of which she was rumoured to have been an original overseer. After his first run here, Marco had tried to find information about this woman from the AI net, but there was little available. It seemed that a lot was restricted about this haiman, a woman who exemplified the closest possible melding of AI and human.

  The platform’s only similarity to a Dyson sphere construction block was its basic shape. The numerous protrusions of weapons and shielded communication devices gave it the appearance of a high-tech city transported into space. But the skyscrapers were railguns, particle cannons, launch tubes for a cornucopia of missiles, as well as the attack pods of the distributed weapons system that the platform controlled. And all were needed because of Jain tech. The accretion disc was swarming with a wild form of technology, created by a race named the Jain. These creatures had shuffled off the universe’s mortal coil five million years ago but left this poisoned chalice for all ensuing civilized races. The technology granted immeasurable power but, in the process, turned on its recipients and destroyed them. Quite simply, it was a technology made to destroy civilizations.

  Marco’s ship drew closer to the platform on a slightly dirty-burning fusion drive—a fault that developed over a month back that he’d never found the time to fix. Its mind signalled on the console that it had applied for final docking permission, and Marco saw it accepted. He looked up to see a pair of space doors opening in the side of the platform. Having used these before, he knew they were more than large enough to allow his ship inside. But, at this distance, they looked like an opening in the side of a million-apartment arcology.

  His ship drew closer and closer, the platform looming gigantic before it. Finally, it slid into the cathedral space of what the AI probably considered to be a small supply hold. Marco used the console to bring up a series of external views. The ship moved along a docking channel and drew to a halt, remora pad fingers folding out from the edges of the channel to steady it, their suction touch creating a gentle shudder he felt through his feet. He operated the door control of his vessel then stomped back through his cabin area, into his ship’s own hold. He paused by the single grav-sled there, then stooped and turned on its gesture control. The sled rose, hovering above the floor and moving closer to him at the flick of a finger, as he turned to face a section of his ship’s hull folding down into a ramp. An equalization of pressure, a whooshing hiss, had his ears popping but would cause him no harm.

  By the time the ramp was down, pressure was back up again. Marco clumped down onto it in his heavy space boots, the sled following him like a faithful dog. He gazed about the hold, at the acres of empty grated flooring, the handler drays stuck in niches like iron and bone plastic beetles. Spider-claw bots hung from the ceiling like vicious chandeliers, and to one side the castellated edges of the space doors closed behind his ship. The sun-pool ripple of a shimmershield was already in place to hold the atmosphere in. As soon as he reached the floor gratings a cylinder door revolved in the wall ahead. Marco grimaced at what stepped out of the transport tube behind.

  The heavy grappler—a robot that looked like a giant, overly muscular human fashioned of grey faceted metal—made its way towards him. It finally halted a few yards away, red-orange fire from its hot insides glaring out of its empty eye sockets and open mouth. But Pragus had used this grappler as an avatar before, so Marco knew he should not allow the sight of it to worry him; he should not let himself think that the AI knew something. He had to try to act naturally. He was just here doing his usual job . . .

  “Still as trusting as ever, I see,” Marco said.

  He could feel one eyelid flickering, and felt a hot flush of panic because he knew the AI would see this and know something was bothering him. He quickly stepped out onto the dock, boots clanking on the gratings. At his gesture, the sled eased past him, then lowered itself to the floor. Sitting on top of it was a large airtight plastic box. The grap-pler swung towards this as if inspecting it, but Marco knew that Pragus was already scanning the contents even as it sent the grappler robot over. In fact, the AI had certainly scanned his ship and its cargo for dangerous items before it docked, like fissionables, super-dense explosives or an anti-matter flask. The more meticulous scan now would reveal something organic. Hopefully this would start no alarm bells ringing because the contents, as far as Marco was aware, were not a bio-weapon. Anyway, it was not as if such a weapon would have much effect here, where the only organic life present was Marco himself, as far as he knew.

  “What is this?” Pragus asked, its voice issuing as a deep throaty rustle from the grappler.

  “Straight out of the Kingdom,” said Marco, sure he was smiling too brightly. “You know how these things go. One prador managed to kill a rival and seize his assets. One of those assets was a war museum and the new owner has been selling off the artefacts.”

  It was the kind of behaviour usual for the race of xenophobic aliens that had once come close to destroying the human Polity.

  “That is still not a sufficient explanation.”

  “I can open it for you to take a look,” said Marco. “But we both know that is not necessary.”

  When the box had been handed over to him, Marco had been given full permission to scan its contents, though he was not allowed to open it or interfere with them. He knew that Pragus would now be seeing a desiccated corpse, like a wasp, six feet long. But it wasn’t quite a single distinct creature. Around its head, like a tubular collar, clung part of another creature like itself. Initial analysis with the limited equipment Marco had available showed this was likely to be the remains of a birth canal. Meanwhile it seemed that the main creature had died while giving birth too. A smaller version of itself was just starting to protrude from its birth canal. It was all very odd.

  “Alien,” said Pragus from the grappler.

  “Oh certainly that,” said Marco. “You want the museum data on it?”

  “Yes.”

  Marco reached down and took a small square of diamond slate from his belt pouch and held it up. The grappler turned towards him, reached out with one thick-fingered hand and took the item between finger and thumb. Marco resisted for a moment, suddenly unsure he should carry this through. He realized that on some level he wanted to be found out, and he fought it down, releasing the piece of slate. The grappler inserted the square into its mouth like a tasty treat. Marco saw it hanging in the glowing opening while black tendrils of manipulator fibres snared and drew it in. Doubtless it would next be pressed to a reader interface inside the grappler’s fiery skull.

  It would not be long now before Marco knew whether or not he had succee
ded. Minutes, only. The AI would put its defences in place, then translate the prador code before reading it. Of course, it had taken Marco a lot longer to translate the thing and read it himself—in fact, most of his journey here.

  He had found out how, before the alien prador encountered the Polity, they had come upon another alien species whose realm had extended to merely four solar systems. The prador had attacked at once, of course, but realized they had snipped off more than they could masticate. What had initially been planned as the quick annihilation of competitors turned into an interminable war against a hive species whose organic form approached AI levels of intelligence. These creatures quickly developed seriously nasty weaponry in response to the attack. The war had dragged on for decades but, in the end, the massive resources of the Prador Kingdom told against the hive creatures. It was during this conflict that the prador developed their kamikazes and, with these, steadily destroyed the hive creatures’ worlds. It seemed the original owner of the museum had been involved in that genocide, and here, in this box, lay the remains of one of the aliens the prador had exterminated.

  “What is your price?” Pragus finally asked.

  “You’ve been doing some useful work with that gravity press of yours?” Marco enquired archly, his acquisitive interest rising up to dispel doubts.

  “I have,” Pragus replied.

  Marco pondered that for a second. “Don’t ask for too much,” the creature had told him, “and don’t ask for too little.” “I want a full ton of diamond slate.” “Expensive and—”

  “And I want a hundred of those data-gems you made last time.”

  This was a fortune. It was enough to buy Marco a life of luxury for many, many years. He had also calculated that it was about all Pragus would have been able to make with the gravity press since the last trader visit, when it wasn’t using the press to make high-density railgun slugs. But was the dead thing inside that box worth so much? Of course it was. Material things like diamond slate and data-gems the AI could manufacture endlessly, filling the weapons-platform storage with such stuff. But the alien corpse would contain a wealth of what AIs valued highest of all: information. It was also so much more to weapons-platform AIs like Pragus: the prospect of months of release from the boredom of watching the accretion disc.

  “You have a deal,” the AI replied.

  Marco had no doubt that Pragus was already having handler drays load the requested items onto themselves. He felt a species of disappointment. Weren’t Polity AIs supposed to be the pinnacle of intelligence? Surely Pragus should be able to see to the core of what was happening here . . . surely the AI would have some idea . . .

  The grappler stooped and carefully picked up the box, then it froze, the fire abruptly dimming in its skull. Marco had seen this before. It meant that Pragus had suddenly focused its full attention elsewhere. Had he been found out?

  After a moment the fire intensified again, and the grappler turned towards the door of the transport tube.

  “Something is happening,” it said.

  “What?” Marco asked, his mind already turning to the prospect of getting away from here as fast as he could.

  “Increased activity in the accretion disc.” The grappler then gave a very human shrug. “It happens.”

  Marco simply acknowledged that with a nod, hoping it would not delay his payment or his departure. This, he decided, would be his last run here. He wanted no more involvement with giant weapons platforms, Jain technology or Orlandine. He also, very definitely, wanted no more involvement with an alien called Dragon—a creature whose form was a giant sphere fifty miles across. A creature who, some months ago, with some not so subtle threats and the promise of great wealth, had compelled Marco to make this strange delivery here.

  ORLANDINE

  Orlandine sat up from the bed, ready at once to re-engage with her project, but quickly stopped herself. This was her human time and she was going to damned well remain human for a little while longer at least. She swung her legs over the side of the bed, stood up, and donned a silk robe. She was aware of its touch on her skin, aware of the feel of her body and was utterly engaged with her human senses. Tying the belt, she then turned and looked down. Tobias was fast asleep as was usual after such an athletic pastime. She gazed at his sweat-sheened back and thick mop of blond hair.

  So human and so normal.

  He was a pretty standard human who relished life. Yes, he had taken advantage of some Polity technology. His DNA had been tweaked—he could regrow severed limbs and, with the suite of medical nano-machines running inside him, was immune to just about any viral or bacterial infection. But he went no further than that. He didn’t even use a mental augmentation to connect him to the local data sphere and had not been boosted, despite the perfect muscular definition of his body. As such he connected her to humanity. For Orlandine, despite her very female appearance, was only marginally more human below her skin than the artificial intelligences that ran the human Polity.

  She smiled down at him then turned away, heading over to the sliding doors leading to the balcony. They whisked open ahead of her and she padded out onto the cool and slightly damp tiles, the scent of jasmine reaching her from a vine spread over the pergola of another balcony nearby. Coming to the rail she rested her hands on it, gazing out into the twilight of Jaskor’s dawn.

  The sky was light umber with a bright red haze along the horizon prior to sunrise. What looked like another small pale sun or a moon sat above the Canine Mountains, but it was neither of these. It was the accretion disc—almost touching distance in interstellar terms. She raised her gaze higher, picking out shapes high in orbit around the world, then blinked and, without thinking, visually enhanced. Now she could gaze upon the massive slab of a weapons platform being built up there.

  Damn. It was just too easy to use her enhancements. But where lay the dividing line between her human and unhuman self? She frowned and continued using them.

  Far to the right of the platform hung the titanic collection of cylinders that was the shipyard. Other objects lay further out—specks in the distance unless she enhanced further and started loading sensor information to her mind from elsewhere. Not yet. She lowered her gaze to the city.

  The planet Jaskor had already been inhabited for some centuries before she came here. The population had only been in the hundreds of millions then. It was a low-tech mostly agricultural world colonized during one of the early diasporas. The colonists had lost a lot of advanced tech and regressed to something akin to the twenty-first century on Earth. But now, with its influx of Polity citizens and the prador in their enclave, mostly technical staff, as well as the establishment of a tightly controlled runcible—an instantaneous transmission gate—it was catching up fast. The City, which had no name, had grown extensively, skyscrapers of every design rearing as high as fifteen thousand feet, sky bridges running between them, and grav-cars buzzing about like bees from a broken hive. However, Orlandine was still puzzled how this world had survived such close proximity to the accretion disc. Perhaps the disc had only recently been as active as she had seen it. Could it be true it had been stirred up by Erebus—a rogue AI that had gone to war against the Polity centuries back?

  She shook her head, her primary concerns steadily occupying more of her thoughts. She could no longer restrain the urge she had felt back in the bed, and again out here, to re-engage. Without conscious thought, a slot opened at the base of the back of her neck. A long tongue of metallic composite emerged high up behind her head and curved forwards. It then divided through its laminations and opened into twelve thinner tongues, cupping her head like the petals of some strange iron flower. Through this sensory cowl she re-established connection to systems beyond her body, to her project, and immediately began updating. Meanwhile her self-image as a human female receded and slid into its position as a small, inferior organic element of her being.

  Through millions of sensors her vision opened out. She routed sensor data close to Jaskor and i
n the Jaskoran system to another portion of herself aboard her ship, high in orbit around the world. Her enhanced senses then ranged to a facility in the Canine Mountains—a small city of towers guarded by lethal security robots under her control. This was where the ghost drives and hard connections to eight hundred weapons-platform AIs lay open to her. From there she reached out. Since the data from the accretion disc was transmitted faster than light-speed via under-space, she was mentally there in an instant. Every one of the platforms and their attack pods, evenly distributed around the accretion disc, lay open to her inspection and her absolute control. When she had come here with Dragon, and the AI ruler of the Polity, Earth Central, had grudgingly allowed her to take charge, there had been just twenty platforms. Since then she had vastly increased their number to build something numinous, and encompassed it. As always, she felt a deep thrill when she considered the colossal firepower that was hers to command.

  But was it hers?

  It had been a surprise how quickly Earth Central had shunted responsibility for all this over to her. In the Polity she was a criminal, but had also greatly assisted in that war against Erebus long ago, and the AIs’ attitude to her was ambivalent. As negotiations between the alien entity Dragon, another who had been integral in the defeat of Erebus, and the ruler of the Polity had progressed, she’d realized it was all about politics. The king of the prador knew about the accretion disc and what it contained and did not like the Polity having full control of it, nor building up such a large amount of firepower in a place which, in interstellar terms, was just a short hop to the Kingdom itself. Giving the king some oversight on this project and putting someone like Orlandine in charge, whom the Polity did not trust, seemed to ameliorate his worries . . . a little. In the ensuing years of contact she felt he had come to trust her more than EC, especially when she allowed a prador enclave on Jaskor. Over those years she had also come to understand the reasons for Dragon’s initial contention: she was the best person for the job. As onetime overseer of the construction of a Dyson sphere—a massive structure and habitat that would many years hence completely enclose a sun—she understood system-scale projects. As a haiman she had the mental watts to deal with it. As a haiman who had actually taken apart a Jain node and incorporated that technology inside herself she understood it better than anyone else.