The Mammoth Book of SF Wars (21 page)

“What kind of agreement?”

At last. Carr took a deep breath, and marshalled the arguments he had so often rehearsed. He kept his fingers resting gently on the C-plus activator, and his eyes alert on the instruments that normally monitored the hull for micrometeorite damage.

“I’ve had the feeling,” he began, “that your attacks upon humanity may be only some ghastly mistake. Certainly we were not your original enemy.”

“Life is my enemy. Life is evil.” Pause. “Do you want to become goodlife?”

Carr closed his eyes for a moment; some of the horror stories were coming to life. But then he went firmly on with his argument. “From our point of view, it is you who are bad. We would like you to become a good machine, one that helps men instead of killing them. Is not building a higher purpose than destroying?”

There was a longer pause. “What evidence can you offer that I should change my purpose?”

“For one thing, helping us will be a purpose easier of achievement. No one will damage you and oppose you.”

“What is it to me, if I am damaged and opposed?”

Carr tried again. “Life is basically superior to non-life; and man is the highest form of life.”

“What evidence do you offer?”

“Man has a spirit.”

“I have learned that many men claim that. But do you not define this spirit as something beyond the perception of any machine? And are there not many men who deny that this spirit exists?”

“Spirit is so defined. And there are such men.”

“Then I do not accept the argument of spirit.”

Carr dug out a pain pill and swallowed it. “Still, you have no evidence that spirit does not exist. You must consider it as a possibility.”

“That is correct.”

“But leaving spirit out of the argument for now, consider the physical and chemical organization of life. Do you know anything of the delicacy and intricacy of organization in even a single living cell? And surely you must admit we humans carry wonderful computers inside our few cubic inches of skull.”

“I have never had an intelligent captive to dissect,” the mechanical voice informed him blandly, “though I have received some relevant data from other machines. But you admit that your form is the determined result of the operation of physical and chemical laws?”

“Have you ever thought that those laws may have been designed to do just that – produce brains capable of intelligent action?”

There was a pause that stretched on and on. Carr’s throat felt dry and rough, as if he had been speaking for hours.

“I have never tried to use that hypothesis,” it answered suddenly. “But if the construction of intelligent life is indeed so intricate, so dependent upon the laws of physics being as they are and not otherwise – then to serve life may be the highest purpose of a machine.”

“You may be sure, our physical construction is intricate.” Carr wasn’t sure he could follow the machine’s line of reasoning, but that hardly mattered if he could somehow win the game for life. He kept his fingers on the C-plus activator.

The berserker said: “If I am able to study some living cells—”

Like a hot iron on a nerve, the meteorite-damage indicator moved; something was at the hull. “Stop that!” he screamed, without thought. “The first thing you try, I’ll kill you!”

Its voice was unevenly calm, as always. “There may have been some accidental contact with your hull. I am damaged and many of my commensal machines are unreliable. I mean to land on this approaching planetoid to mine for metals and repair myself as far as possible.” The indicator was quiet again.

The berserker resumed its argument. “If I am able to study some living cells from an intelligent life-unit for a few hours, I expect I will find strong evidence for or against your claims. Will you provide me with cells?”

“You must have had prisoners, sometime.” He said it as a suspicion; he really knew no reason why it must have had human captives. It could have learned the language from another berserker.

“No. I have never taken a prisoner.”

It waited. The question it had asked still hung in the air.

“The only human cells on this ship are my own. Possible I could give you a few of them.”

“Half a cubic centimetre should be enough. Not a dangerous loss for you, I believe. I will not demand part of your brain. Also I understand that you wish to avoid the situation called pain. I am willing to help you avoid it, if possible.”

Did it want to drug him? That seemed too simple. Always unpredictability, the stories said, and sometimes a subtlety out of hell.

He went on with the game. “I have all that is necessary. Be warned that my attention will hardly waver from my control panel. Soon I will place a tissue sample in the airlock for you.”

He opened the ship’s medical kit, took two painkillers, and set very carefully to work with a sterile scalpel. He had some biological training.

When the small wound was bandaged, he cleansed the tissue sample of blood and lymph and with unsteady fingers sealed it into a little tube. Without letting down his guard, he thought, for an instant, he dragged the fallen pilot to the airlock and left it there with the tissue sample. Utterly weary, he got back to the combat chair. When he switched the outer door open, he heard something come into the lock and leave again.

He took a pep pill. It would activate some pain, but he had to stay alert. Two hours passed. Carr forced himself to eat some emergency rations, watched the panel, and waited.

He gave a startled jump when the berserker spoke again; nearly six hours had gone by.

“You are free to leave,” it was saying. “Tell the leading life-units of your planet that when I have refitted, I will be their ally. The study of your cells has convinced me that the human body is the highest creation of the universe, and that I should make it my purpose to help you. Do you understand?”

Carr felt numb. “Yes. Yes. I have convinced you. After you have refitted, you will fight on our side.”

Something shoved hugely and gently at his hull. Through a port he saw stars, and he realized that the great hatch that had swallowed his ship was swinging open.

This far within the system, Carr necessarily kept his ship in normal space to travel. His last sight of the berserker showed it moving as if indeed about to let down upon the airless planetoid. Certainly it was not following him.

A couple of hours after being freed, he roused himself from contemplation of the radar screen, and went to spend a full minute considering the inner airlock door. At last he shook his head, dialled air into the lock, and entered it. The pilot-machine was gone, and the tissue sample. There was nothing out of the ordinary to be seen. Carr took a deep breath, as if relieved, closed up the lock again, and went to a port to spend some time watching the stars.

After a day he began to decelerate, so that when hours had added into another day, he was still a good distance from home. He ate, and slept, and watched his face in a mirror. He weighed himself, and watched the stars some more, with interest, like a man re-examining something long forgotten.

In two more days, gravity bent his course into a hairpin ellipse around his home planet. With it bulking between him and the berserker’s rock, Carr began to use his radio.

“Ho, on the ground, good news.”

The answer came almost instantly. “We’ve been tracking you, Carr. What’s going on? What’s happened?”

He told them. “So that’s the story up to now,” he finished. “I expect the thing really needs to refit. Two warships attacking it now should win.”

“Yes.” There was excited talk in the background. Then the voice was back, sounding uneasy. “Carr – you haven’t started a landing approach yet, so may you understand. The thing was probably lying to you.”

“Oh, I know. Even that pilot-machine’s collapse might have been staged. I guess the berserker was too badly shot up to want to risk a battle, so it tried another way. Must have sneaked the stuff into my cabin air, just before it let me go – or maybe left it in my airlock.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“I’d guess it’s some freshly mutated virus, designed for specific virulence against the tissue I gave it. It expected me to hurry home and land before betting sick, and spread a plague. It must have thought it was inventing biological warfare, using life against life, as we use machines to fight machines. But it needed that tissue sample to blood its pet viruses; it must have been telling the truth about never having a human prisoner.”

“Some kind of virus, you think? What’s it doing to you Carr? Are you in pain? I mean, more than before?”

“No.” Carr swivelled his chair to look at the little chart he had begun. It showed that in the last two days his weight loss had started to reverse itself. He looked down at his body, at the bandaged place near the centre of a discoloured unhuman-looking area. That area was smaller than it had been, and he saw a hint of new and healthy skin.

“What
is
the stuff doing to you?”

Carr allowed himself to smile, and to speak aloud his growing hope. “I think it’s killing off my cancer.”

JUNKED

A COMBAT K ADVENTURE

Andy Remic

Humans have to be tough in the big bad galaxy …

Andy Remic is the wonderfully vivacious wham-bang man of modern conflict SF whose vivid voicy prose delivers more whams per bang than most. Titles such as
Biohell, Warhead, Vampire Warlords
and
Hardcore
have caused comparison with Tarantino, and indeed Remic makes some films too. “Wired and Weird” is the subtitle of his website at
www.andyremic.com
.

T
HE
SLAM
CRUISER
howled through the upper atmosphere of Ryzor, buffeted by an enraged storm. Lightning sparkled from armoured hull shells in crackles. Iron bruise clouds closed around the SLAM like a fist around a pebble, holding it tight for a frozen moment before flinging it down in a violent acceleration …

“We’re gonna die,” moaned Franco, curled foetal in his Crash-Couch, forehead touching his knees, beard rimed with droplets of sweat and vibrating vigorously. He clutched his Kekra quad-barrel machine pistol to his chest, as a mother would a weary child.

“Don’t be such a pussy,” snarled Pippa, glaring at Franco with cold eyes. The female member of this particular Combat K squad, Pippa was low on empathy and understanding, high on the twin goals of violence and destruction. “You knew we were breaching the storm, dickhead. What did you expect, sunshine?”

“I would have preferred a scanty-clad welcome party of thongstrapped, lap-dancing beauties,” said Franco, without any hint of sarcasm. “Either that, or a good pub. Maybe a tastefully decorated brothel.” He glanced up, making eye contact with Pippa, who was battling the SLAM cruiser’s controls. “Hey, actually, now we’re on the subject of sex, what about you and I …”

“No.”

“You don’t know what I was going to suggest?”

“Yeah, I do, Franco. You’re a sexual deviant, and I’ve suffered enough depraved suggestions to last any woman, whore or galslacker a lifetime. Just stay in your couch, focus on the mission and keep your paws off my arse.”

Franco mumbled, and closed his eyes as the SLAM rattled violently, huge shudders juddering corrugated walls, buffeted by Nature. Nature was in a foul mood. She was good and ready for a spot of fisticuffs.

“Coming in fast, Keenan. Bang goes our covert entry.”

Keenan reclined, one army boot on the console, drawing on a home-rolled smoke filled with harsh Widow Maker tobacco. He gave a single nod, rubbed weary eyes. “They’ll not scan shit in this storm,” he drawled on an exhalation of diesel smoke. “Drop us vertical under the Beacon Scanners, an’ we’ll cruise up the river and go in light. I doubt General Zenab is hard to find; the junks will be treating the bastard like a king.”

Combat K were elite, murderous combat squads trained by the Quad-Gal Military specializing in interrogation, infiltration, assassination and detonation. Their original game plan had been simple: to end the Helix War, which had raged for a thousand years. However, after QGM quelled one conflict, so another had taken its place – in the form of
junks
, a twisted hazardous species of deviated aliens, a toxic race intent on polluting the Quad-Gal with their infestation – and wiping out
all
species in the process.

Once believed extinct, the junks had reappeared on Galhari, a quiet fringe planet, with devastating suddenness … in a flood of
millions.
The planet had been taken in hours, and from that foothold the junks began a galaxy-wide conquest which had, in all honesty, gone
bad
for Quad-Gal Military. Recently, a series of freak coincidences led to military intelligence uncovering a source of the junks’ expertise: a psychic general, capable of reading minds across the Four Galaxies and uncovering QGM’s secret plans. Named Zenab, the general was also rumoured to have invented a Nano-Bomb, a microscopic detonation device which could put QGM out of the game for good. Zenab was making it possible for the junks to extend their diseased and toxic empire, and had set up camp in his Nano-Bomb Factory. Now, it was Combat K’s mission to take him out … before millions more died.

“Tipping in now,” said Pippa.

The SLAM’s engines quietened, and it fell vertical, accelerating through high-altitude range towards the smash of jungle canopy below. Like a meteorite they plummeted, the ship’s computers masking their profile and using a radioactive Doppelganger Shift to pre-empt rogue AI SAMs.

Without incident, the SLAM reached a half-klick above the rainlashed jungle, and engines suddenly roared, energy
whumping
against trees and blasting a crater fifty metres wide. Every tree in the radius was shredded, instantly. The SLAM levelled out, stabilizers grunting, and settled into the crater. Engines died. Rain played drumbeats on the hull, and Franco uncurled from his CrashCouch and glared at Pippa with a teenage pout. “Not exactly what I’d call smooth,” he said.