Dark Intelligence (2 page)

“Your memplant had been damaged before it was recognized for what it was, and the forensic AI that first studied it only made basic repairs. Otherwise, it could have lost the data it contained.” He lifted his hand from the table and stabbed that bony finger at me again. “That data being you.”

“So they got some expert advice,” I suggested.

“Absolutely.” He nodded. “It also seems that they
felt,”
he sneered at the word, “that you were owed a life for your service during the war.”

“So what now?” I asked.

“A body awaits you, tank-grown from a sample of your own DNA, stored by wartime Polity medical.”

“Then it’s time for me to start my life again.”

“I envy you, but I don’t envy you trying to incorporate your memories. You don’t have full access at the moment.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can tell they’re not clear—as I said, the memplant was damaged, almost certainly by the intrusion of search fibres from a prador spider thrall. Not even the AIs can work out how you died. But they, and I, uncovered enough to know that it’s all very ugly.” He turned to gaze at me again. “You can, if you wish, decide to edit those memories out.”

My immediate reaction was distaste. They’d started using memory editing during the war and, even though it turned battle-stressed and highly traumatized people back into useful soldiers, I hadn’t liked it. It was a cop-out, reneging on responsibility, going through life with blinkers on.

“I want all my memories,” I said, which was enough to trigger what had been hidden until now.

A chaotic montage of horror returned, delivered through a tsunami of fire.

THE WAR: PANARCHIA

The reality of the war was scribing itself across the sky of Panarchia in brighter text every night. In the beginning it had competition from the accretion disc of Layden’s Sink, a bright oval lighting up half the sky. Perhaps a century hence this black hole would suck down this whole planetary system. Yet now, even that formed a dull backdrop against which Polity and prador forces tore each other apart.

“Close your visor, soldier,” said Captain Gideon.

I touched a control on my combat suit’s helmet, and its visor slid silently closed. I needed the light amplification now, anyway. And, during the night here, given the hostile local wildlife, you maintained suit integrity or you stayed in your tent. General Berners said the octupals, or the “fucking molluscs” as he described them, were an alien import. Yet it struck me that they had burgeoned very nicely thank you, in an environment supposedly not their own. As Gideon settled beside me, I scanned the emplacements around us, uncomfortable with our exposed position, then dropped my gaze to the sheet of solidified lava beneath our feet. This was dotted with small pools where large gas bubbles had burst and looked like a slice of cherry chocolate cake in the twilight. Already some octupals were crawling from those pools, ready to set off on their nightly hunt for prey and for mates—though sometimes they made little distinction between the two. And already I’d heard swearing from some of Gideon’s troops who, like me, had forgotten to close their visors.

“You ever seen a real octopus?” asked Gideon.

“Yes,” I replied, returning my attention to the body of the captured prador first-child—one of the vicious children of our enemy. It was sprawled before me beside the foxhole it had made in the rock here. Its legs, manipulator arms and claws were stacked in a pile a few paces away, behind our big autogun. I now had its carapace open, hinged aside on gristle like the lid of a waste bin. I continued sorting through the offal inside, pulling aside various glutinous items to finally expose its main ganglion, or brain. This sat inside a ring-shaped chalky case. Picking up my surgical hammer, I hit hard, cracking open the case. The first-child hissed and bubbled and I felt the stubs where we had cut off its mandibles knocking pathetically against my leg. Still, even knowing what a creature like this would do to me were it mobile, I hated what I was doing.

“Where?” asked Gideon.

“Where what?”

“Where did you see an octopus?”

“In an aquarium on Earth.”

“Never been there,” he said dismissively. “Never wanted to go there.”

I guessed he was trying to distract himself and, with anyone else, I would have assumed he didn’t want to think too much about what I was doing. However, he and the rest of his men had been fighting the prador for a long time and had ceased to have any squeamishness about bioespionage. When the enemy’s inclination was to both kill and eat you, you tended to toss away any human rules of engagement. I wished I could.

Finally having broken away enough of the ganglion casing, I selected an interrogation implant from my steadily dwindling supply—a chunk of hardware that looked like a steel door wedge—and stabbed it into the required spot. The prador jerked under me, hissed and bubbled some more and squirted green blood from its leg sockets.

I turned away, feeling small impacts on my suit, and noted a nearby octupal shooting poisonous darts at me. It had decided it wanted to either eat or fuck me. Light stabbed through the twilight and the octupal exploded like a microwaved egg. One of our mosquito guns moved on, its camouskin rippling.

“they’don’t look much different,” I said.

“What?”

I gestured to the steaming octupal remains nearby. “These look just like terran octopuses, though the ones on Earth live in water and some varieties grow larger.”

“Do they shoot poisonous darts?” Gideon asked.

I shook my head. “they’don’t have tri-helical DNA and three eyes either.”

Gideon snorted then turned back to look at the prador. “How long before you can get some answers?”

“A few minutes, but I’m not hopeful.”

Gideon looked back the way we had come, towards the mountains, which were now silhouetted against the furthest rim of Layden’s Sink. The eight thousand or so remaining men of Berners’ division were encamped there and fortifying. If the prador already on this world moved against us, there was no doubt that we would be screwed, and fast. But the hundred thousand or more prador surrounding us had just spread out and dug in and were simply waiting. Berners reckoned they were awaiting the result of the space battle raging above. This sometimes turned the night to day, or shook the ground when some leviathan piece of wreckage came down. It was also close enough that passing Polity attack ships could help us out, sending down ceramic shrapnel daisycutters to shred the dispersed prador forces. Berners further pronounced that whichever side ended up controlling near space, owned this world and could quickly dispose of the opposing forces on the ground from orbit. But I didn’t agree.

The prador had already been bombed by Polity ships, yet Berners’ division, whose location the prador certainly knew, had not been touched in retaliation. I suspected a complicated game of strategy. Maybe the prador were keeping us alive in the hope that the Polity would make a rash rescue attempt, putting the AIs at a tactical disadvantage. It was, I felt, a strange strategy to use when you were fighting Polity battle AIs, but seemed to be the only explanation that fitted. I was now hoping for confirmation from this first-child, or at least some explanation.

“It’s not right,” said Gideon.

I turned to him, thinking he was having similar thoughts. Instead, he was staring up at the accretion disc.

“What’s not right?”

“Y’know,” he continued, “in another life I was an astrophysicist.”

“What?” Now I was getting confused.

He pointed up at the accretion disc. “It’s been described as a Kerr black hole because of the massive spin and other readings that indicate a Kerr ring, but there are irregularities.” He lowered his hand and looked at me. “Its electrical charge is just too massive—thought impossible in something naturally formed.”

“But evidently not impossible.”

An icon blinked up in my visor as the interrogation implant made its connections: a small cartoon crab with a speech bubble issuing from its mandibles. We had more pressing matters in hand than out-there theoretical physics. It was my contention that to appreciate the wonder of the universe, one must first remain alive.

“We’re in,” I said. Then, “What’s your name?”

“Floost,” the prador replied.

Of course the creature was not replying to me directly. I’d flooded its brain with a network of nanoscopic tendrils, and these were similar in design to the connection routine of a standard human cerebral augmentation. That device had broken the barriers between the fleshy human brain and computing, but this one had a coercive element that standard augs lacked. And the data-feed routed back through a translation program. The upshot was that Floost couldn’t refuse to answer. However, the prador could give perfectly true but misleading replies.

“Why have you not attacked the human forces on this world?” I asked.

“Because Father ordered us not to.”

“Why did your father order you not to attack us?”

“Because you would be destroyed.”

“Why does your father not want us to be destroyed?”

“Because he was ordered not to destroy you.”

I realized then that this first-child had been coached in how to respond should it be captured and interrogated in this manner. This was going to get a bit laborious.

“Why was he ordered not to destroy us?”

“Because of the tactical advantages.”

“We’ve got movement,” said Gideon, gazing out towards our emplacements.

I glanced over and saw the big autogun swinging its barrel across, then beginning to heave its weight off the ground on lizard-like metal legs.

“Twenty-four targets closing,” someone stated over com. “One first-child and the rest seconds—two of them implant tanks.”

Implant tanks, great. As if the prador children weren’t sufficiently bad in their natural form, their fathers transplanted their brains into heavily armed and armoured war machines.

“Fuckit,” said Gideon. “Get your data, Thorvald.”

“Why would not destroying us be a tactical advantage?” I asked.

“Accruing assets is advantageous.”

“How are we assets?” I managed to ask just before Gatling cannons started thundering. Our force-fields took the strain, their powerful hard-fields appearing in the darkness, gleaming periodically like torch beams falling on glass. Tank shells next ignited the night, followed by a particle cannon beam in royal blue. A shock wave picked me up and deposited me on my back and, as I fell, I glimpsed the burning wreckage of a hardfield generator and projector tumbling past, leaving a trail of glowing molten metal on the stone.

“Covered retreat to the canyon,” said Gideon calmly. “Tic mines all the way.”

I only just heard the prador’s reply over this, and it simply didn’t make any sense, then. “You will serve us,” it had said.

“We’ve gotta go,” said Gideon, tossing a tic mine into the opened-up first-child even as I struggled to my feet.

I grabbed up my equipment and threw it into my backpack. I didn’t bother with the interrogation implant because the things were single use. The rockscape was now constantly lit by pulse-rifle fire, the glaring stabs of beam weapons and the dance of glowing hard force-fields. Our mosquito guns were spitting fire, while our big gun was steadily backing away. Our remaining hardfield generators were now up off the ground and retreating on grav, their cooling fins already cherry red. About a mile beyond their defensive perimeter the prador were advancing behind their own layered hardfields. I could make out a big first-child firing a Gatling cannon. This was attached to one claw and it had a particle cannon attached to the other. Second-children half its size were firing the prador equivalent of our pulse-guns, or staggered along under the load of hard-field generators. The two implant tanks rolled along on treads with side turrets firing shrapnel rounds, while their top turrets coloured the night green with high-intensity lasers.

I watched the troops pulling back behind, firing occasionally and dropping tic mines in selected pools. These last devices behaved just like the insects they were named for. Upon detecting nearby enemy movement, they leapt from concealment and attached themselves. They then detonated their copper-head planar load, to punch through armour. As I retreated after Gideon, I saw one of our troops just fragment into a cloud—seemingly composed of nothing but scraps of camo-cloth.

“Move it!” Gideon bellowed. “We can’t hold this!”

The troops broke into a run and within minutes we reached the edge of the canyon and began scrambling down to the riverbed. As we reached it, all our autoguns and shield generators entrenched themselves above to cover our retreat.

“Full assist,” Gideon ordered.

I hit the control on my wrist panel and felt my movements become easier, smoother. Soon I was running android-fast with the others, back towards the mountains. Behind us the battle continued. I heard a massive detonation and, glancing back, saw that our big autogun was gone.

“Damp down assist,” said Gideon, sounding puzzled. “They’re not following.”

That, I felt, must have something to do with us being “assets” or “resources” but it still made no sense to me. As I cut down on suit assist, splashing through the shallow pools that were all that remained of the river’s flow, I realized that the sky was lighter. Now that Layden’s Sink was out of sight behind the mountains, I could see that the night was nearly over.

“Hey, looks like we’ve got visitors!” someone commented.

We all paused and gazed up above the peaks. High above Berners’ division, a Polity destroyer hung in the pale sky. I felt something relaxing inside me. Every other visit by a Polity vessel had been a quick in-and-out job, sowing destruction amidst the enemy behind us. Maybe now the fleet was making a concerted effort to get us out.

“Why a destroyer and not a transport?” asked Gideon.

“Maybe just cover until they can get something bigger down,” I suggested. “If they’re moving something in to get us out, they know the prador down here will react.”

Then a particle beam stabbed down from the destroyer, blue coherent lightning reaching down here and there in the mountains, giant flashbulbs going off where it touched. The symphony of destruction reached us shortly afterwards, complemented by the shuddering of the ground.