The This, page 20
A shuttle spiralled on its axis, hurtling desperately low overhead. It missed the treetops, and then it couldn’t miss them any more, and it vanished into the woodland with a sound of splintering and crashing.
Adan fired again. Whomp, said the gun.
Nothing.
Whomp.
Whomp.
And suddenly he was facing a phalanx of HMθ bots, and he dropped the gun and turned, terrified, to run in the opposite direction only to see more HMθ bots and, not knowing what he was saying, he screamed Weave a circle round me twice! and the bots
stopped
– stopped dead. They did more than freeze, as they had done on the beach assault. They retracted their weapons, locked down their heads and withdrew their tentacle-legs into their torsos. It was as if a power command had forced the machines wholly to disengage.
There was a period of quiet, and it was eerie. Then the sound of a shuttle coming down fast, and landing somewhere away to Adan’s left. Some small arms fire, as our boys and girls realised that their enemy was no longer fighting back.
:8:
This time Adan’s intervention was noticed. The area was secured, and Adan’s squad pulled back and returned to base. Adan was debriefed separately from the rest of his squad.
‘Is Roj dead?’ he wanted to know.
The lieutenant checked his screen and nodded sombrely.
‘Damn,’ said Adan, wondering why he didn’t feel the loss of his friend more acutely, wondering why it didn’t register in his pulse or his breathing. I mean, it was a shame, no question. Then he remembered Tristis running and falling.
‘What about Tristis? What about my friend Tristis?’
The lieutenant checked her screen again.
‘Tristis Rastapopoulos? She’s alive. She’s in surgery now, but the prognosis is good.’
‘Good,’ said Adan.
But again, there was no spike of relief in his innards. Is that odd? I should be feeling something – shouldn’t I?
‘Trooper,’ said the lieutenant. ‘What happened on the battlefield today?’
‘They all shut down,’ said Adan. ‘I guess. Don’t you guys know how it happened?’
‘We’re trying to work it out,’ she said. ‘Did you fire your weapon at a particular enemy warbot? It could be there’s a weakness in their network that means certain nodes are …’ She didn’t believe it, even as she said it.
‘I couldn’t see real good,’ said Adan, ‘what with the must and all.’
‘The must?’
‘The mist,’ said Adan. ‘I meant to say – mist.’
‘This happened before. You were present at a skirmish on the island of Wallalei and all the enemy bots malfunctioned in unison. That is correct?’
‘Sir – ma’am, I mean. I’m sorry I don’t know what happened, then or today. I mean, I said something and everything stopped.’
The lieutenant caught the charm of this last word, and paid it a small tribute of her own by stopping. She looked up. Then she asked: ‘You said something?’
‘OK,’ said Adan. ‘I mean, I guess. Sure.’
‘Trooper,’ she said, slowly, ‘can you tell me what you said?’
Adan tried to get his thoughts in order, but it wasn’t easy. The whole clotted backstory, it was so stupid, so inconsequential and yet – evidently – so very consequential, actually. But without that backstory the words were just a vapid string of who-knew-what, agitating the air molecules and so passing their informational content from taut voice box to taut eardrum.
‘It was just, ma’am …’ Adan started, and as he began to repeat the phrase he realised what word had been missing, which word he’d been omitting or getting wrong, that oddball olde-worlde poet-word thrice. ‘I just said “weave a circle round me”. That’s more or less what I said, ma’am.’
‘More?’ the lieutenant pressed. ‘Or less? What exactly did you say?’
‘“Weave a circuit round me twice”,’ said Adan, starting to get nervous.
‘Circuit?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Before, you said circle.’
‘That … yeah.’
‘Weave a circle … yes?’
‘Circle.’
‘To be clear – circle?’
‘Yeah. I mean, yes, ma’am, and I mean I said “twice”, but it should have been “thrice”.’
‘Thrice?’
‘Thrice.’
The lieutenant looked at him for a long time. Then she entered something rapidly onto the screen sitting on the table in front of her. Then she sat up, pushed her chair back a little way and said: ‘I’ve called in Colonel Daberlohn. You know the colonel?’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘He’s a specialist in this kind of warfare,’ said the lieutenant, without specifying what kind she meant.
A few minutes later the colonel walked into the room, sans knocking, and sat himself down: a small-stature, brisk-gestured man of middle age.
‘So, Trooper,’ he said, briskly, in a low-pitched and resonant voice. ‘I’ve been looking over your file as I came down here. You didn’t mention that your mother joined the Hive-Mind.’
‘My mother,’ said Adan. ‘Sure. Sir.’
‘You didn’t think that might be something your recruiting officers might have been interested in?’
For the life of him, Adan couldn’t see that it might be. His brows wedged into puzzlement.
‘Sir?’
‘Trooper,’ said the colonel, ‘we appreciate that neither your intellectual capacity nor your level of attainment is of the highest. We appreciate that. You don’t need to be a superbrain to do your duty. To do what a soldier must. Nonetheless, I must inquire of you – are you a five-star moron?’
The spurt of vehemence with which the colonel said this last word jolted Adan straighter in his chair.
‘Yes, sir! No, sir!’
‘You understand the Hive-Mind-θ are the enemy we are fighting? You realise that we, who are doing the fighting, might be interested in knowing that one of our own soldiers has family who have defected to the enemy?’
‘No, sir! Yes, sir!’
‘Now … tell me everything about this –’ a glance at his own screen – ‘weave a circle, or circuit – there seems to be some confusion – round me twice shutdown code of yours. Tell me everything. If it’s worked twice, it could work again.’
‘Sir!’
The two officers waited. Adan looked from one to the other, and then back to the first.
‘Well, go on then,’ snapped the colonel.
‘My girlfriend, sir.’ Adan looked at the lieutenant. ‘Ma’am.’
Another pause.
‘Your girlfriend, yes. She’s the one who taught you this phrase?’
‘She glitched.’
‘Glitched?’
‘She’s a Phene, sir.’ He looked again at the lieutenant. ‘Ma’am.’
‘I see. And she glitched?’
‘Her face was swapped out with some dude’s.’
‘Whose?’
‘I never recognised him, sir. Some dude. Ugly, kind of. Big face, eyes kind-of far apart. Pallid, really. Balding.’
‘And he gave you this line?’
‘He said I’d need it, sir, at the beach. I mean, ma’am, sir, the Wallalei.’
‘He mentioned Wallalei by name?’
‘No, sir. No, he didn’t say the name. But he described it – a beach, me being stuck with porcupine needles. And he told me the words, and I said the words and the Hive-Mind soldiers … stopped.’
‘When was this, Trooper?’ asked the lieutenant.
‘About a three-month before I enlisted, ma’am.’
‘This is the most ridiculous farrago of nonsense I ever heard,’ boomed the colonel. ‘You expect us to believe this? Somebody hacked your whorebot and gave you a verbal code that shut down the most sophisticated military tech warfare has ever seen? I’ve never heard such arrant garbage. Tell us the truth, soldier – are you still in touch with your mother?’
Adan stared into the face of the colonel. That word, whorebot, was so very ugly, that Adan started to cry. He really couldn’t help himself. The colonel goggled at him, but the lieutenant put a hand on his arm, and for a long series of moments the only sound was Adan sobbing.
The door opened and a general entered.
‘Colonel,’ she said, briskly, ‘you are relieved.’
Adan stared up at her. A cleverer person would have had some sense of the effectiveness of taking nasty cop off stage and replacing them with nice cop at the precise moment of the subject’s emotional overload, but Adan was beautifully innocent of all such ruses.
‘I’m General Cho,’ said the officer. ‘I’m here to tell you how grateful we are, Trooper, for your service. I’m going to see to it, personally, that you get a decoration for your bravery, son.’
He could have kissed the general’s hands.
‘Ma’am!’
‘What you’ve stumbled upon here, my lad, could win us the war. You’re a very special person – we’re only now realising just how special. And I want you to come along with me, Adan, to help me tie up this whole war.’
Adan sniffed back the remnants of his weeping.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘We need to get you into space, son,’ she said.
:9:
For two days Adan was kept in a luxuriously appointed room on base. On the third he was invited, rather than ordered, into the general’s ground-car and whisked to the base’s huge launch facility. It was late afternoon, hot, and the ground-car’s windows were all open. The moon was a coin of silver displayed upon a blue velvet cushion, and the wind blowing in from the ocean had been salted to preserve its freshness.
‘I see from your record,’ said General Cho, smiling at him, ‘that you did pass space combat.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Only at E.’
‘That’s correct, ma’am.’
‘Nausea was a problem, according to the report. Well, we’ll try to avoid any such unpleasantness on this trip.’
She added something to the screen in front of her, and then the ground-car slowed and settled and the doors were lifting up like eagle’s wings.
Adan’s training flight had been in a large military shuttle of utility design. Now he was going skywards in a streamlined flitter: individual gel-cushioned seats, a lozenge handed to him by a grave-faced medic which (he was told) he should ‘allow to dissolve under his tongue’ to prevent any vomitous misadventure during flight. A drink.
‘Do you drink, Trooper Vergara? Beer? Whiskey?’
‘Why, thank you, yes. Yes, thank you.’
Launch was a nudge, and then a build of acceleration all along the magchute, towers whiffling past with rapidly increasing frequency as things moved towards the launch point. Then the upkick into low orbit. Adan gazed, amazed, through his porthole – the military training shuttle had been windowless – at the clouds, whitely transparent and edged with sunset colours, swooping down in apparent motion as the flitter ascended. Vast marine invertebrates on their way to the seabed. The earth shrank to the dimensions of its own map, misty with galactic spreads of artificial lights, and the light thickened outside until they had popped, champagne-cork-ishly, out of the atmosphere altogether.
‘We’re going to dock with the Owl of Minerva,’ the general told Adan. ‘She’s a battleship, but I don’t want you to get nervous. Better safe than sorry, is how we view it.’
‘Yes, ma’am,’ Adan replied, quite baffled.
‘You’re not curious where we’re going?’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘You’re the perfect soldier! Well, I’ll tell you, but before I do I want to say something. If it were me, we’d promote you – to corporal in the first instance, but on a conveyor-line upwards from there. If you truly have the capacity to stop the HMθ simply by saying a string of words, then you will be crucial to our war effort. Crucial. We can’t do it yet, because we’re not sure if the HMθ’s interest in you depends upon you being a common soldier – if, that is, promoting you might interfere with this … this ability you seem to have.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Believe me, we’ve tried your little phrase. We’ve sent troops into two separate engagements with orders to yell it at any HMθ bots that approach. No go. It’s no go for that particular bogeyman, I can tell you.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’ Adan wondered if he should have responded with ‘No, ma’am’ instead. But the general didn’t seem to mind.
‘It’s you, Adan,’ she said. ‘It’s something specific to you. I can be honest – we’re not entirely sure what motivates the HMθ. They’re a hive consciousness, but they’re made up of distinct individual human consciousnesses. It’s our job, at the highest levels of military strategising, to try and predict them, and often we can’t.’
‘No, ma’am,’ said Adan.
She gave him a straight look. ‘You’ve a sly wit on you, Trooper,’ she said. ‘I like that. Just so long as it doesn’t shade into actual subordination.’
Adan, lacking any clear idea what she was talking about, smiled.
The flitter banked. The whole world swung out of the porthole and then swung back again, with all its petrol-in-a-puddle wash of coloration. The lights inside the cabin meant it wasn’t possible to see the stars in space, but the moon was there, just as plump and far away as she seemed from the earth; and there was one blinking light, and that was where they were heading. It stayed a speck for a long time and then it was a piece of grit, an irregularly shaped pebble, and suddenly a whole ragged-edge polygon moonlet. That was one of the things the battleship designation meant: a regular spacecraft that had tethered hefty chunks of lunar or asteroid basalt to its hull, and sealed the joins with ablate-resistant foam. Each piece of armour had its own engine, for these were what moved the spacecraft through space when the armour was fully fitted. As the general’s flitter approached, several pieces of hull armour were in satellite orbit, permitting the shuttle to dock; but once the general and her staff – and Adan – were aboard, and the shuttle withdrew, the shell was assembled and the whole bulky craft crawled into a lower, faster orbit, swung round the nightside of the world and fired up its main belt. Reaction blasts adjusted pitch, yaw and orientation and the main belt dug its quantum teeth into the resistant material of the strong nuclear force and spun its metaphorical wheels on this metaphorical rail. It was a slow acceleration, but it was by the same token a steady one, and within six hours Earth had become a mint imperial in the Owl’s rear-view sensors, and they were rushing down a sunward arc, hurrying after the hurrying-away target of Venus … Venus … Venus.
‘Adan,’ said the general, as the two settled down to an intimate dinner à deux in her cabin, ‘I think it’s time you and I had a chat about what’s really going on here.’
‘Ma’am,’ said Adan.
The acceleration was creating a lunar-approximate faux-gravity, so they were both eating from deep open bowls and drinking from regular cups. Red wine, very fruitily tasteful. Pasta in some kind of gloopy, spicy, garlic-infused sauce.
‘Why are we going to Venus, soldier?’
‘I don’t know, ma’am.’
‘Because the HMθ have made diplomatic overtures. For the first time in over a year. It’s a major development – and we think it’s because of you. We hypothesise they’re scared of what you could do.’
‘Me?’
‘Oh, I’m not saying we fully understand what’s going on here. But let’s be clear. You have proved, on two separate combat occasions, that you can, by saying a particular string of words, shut down enemy ordnance. That’s not nothing, you know!’
‘Yes … no, ma’am,’ agreed, or disagreed, Adan.
‘We’ve had our best people look at this … this unusual state of affairs. Their best guess is – it has to do with your Phene. Elegy, I believe, is her name?’
‘Is she all right, ma’am?’ Adan asked, abruptly animated. It was startling to hear Gee’s name in this senior officer’s mouth, and an unfocused terror swept through him. ‘Have you done anything to her?’
‘She’s fine,’ said the general, patting the air down in front of her with one hand to gesture that he should calm himself. ‘You had her in a poky little cupboard in a commercial storage facility – we found her and transferred her to a secure military facility. She’ll be much safer there.’
Adan was finding it hard to breathe. ‘You moved her?’
‘She’s as much a crucial asset in all this as you are. At least that’s what our strategy bigwigs believe. We are highly motivated to keep her safe and secure, and when this mission is over, you and she will be happily reunited.’
The thought of other people putting their hands on Elegy, of men handling her – perhaps dismantling her and putting her back together – brought rage into Adan’s soul. He bit it back.
‘Ma’am,’ he said, in a fierce little voice, ‘I have to say – you moved her without my permission.’
‘There wasn’t time. There was no time to dot all the little legal i’s and get your specific permission and so on. Everything is happening right away. Really, Trooper, you’d do well to calm yourself down. Your Phene is fine.’ And then the general laughed, an odd little curl of sound. ‘Phene is fine! I’m a poet and I didn’t know it.’
Adan’s breathing had not settled.
‘Ma’am,’ he said.
‘I mean, Adan … weren’t you curious as to how this message, this shutdown code, came to you via your Phene – your Phene, of all things?’
The fact that this general – this superstar high-ranking officer – was talking so casually about Elegy – about his Elegy – so casually was baking Adan’s noodle. He grunted, and then made a little hissing noise, and then he said: ‘Ma’am, no, ma’am.’
‘We’re not entirely sure either, of course. It’s hard to be certain. But we have a theory.’
‘Ma’am.’
