Cyborg (The Deep Wide Black Book 1) Read online

  The Richter avatar nodded in agreement. “Abgemacht. Fair enough. It’s simple, for me. I want to find my people, I want to find me, and I want to let the whole bloody race know what’s coming at us. Big, nasty, carnivorous aliens who we know have wiped out other, competing races.” There. At last the words had been said. The truth that Richter and Chambers had both witnessed out in the depths of space had at last seen the light of day. “There isn’t really anything else, is there?”

  Chambers wondered if that made the Richter avatar trustworthy? “No, that’s true, so far as it goes, and you’re right: it’s the most important news anyone should ever need to hear. But like I’m trying to tell you, I don’t understand why the police reacted the way they did. I don’t know who the hell’s been spending money around here, or why, but things have really changed since I was last home.” Chambers realized he’d been tapping out points on his fingers with a piece of toast, and dropped the offending piece of food onto his plate.

  Brushing the crumbs from his fingers, he went on. “You don’t know Orchard, but people have always teased us we’re a backward kind of a place, a bit rural. Now here I come, running back home for the first time in a few years, and the police have got fancy new cars, there’s a bright, shiny, freight line running right round the hab, everything’s had a paint job, and we’ve finally filled up the seas.

  “That’s a big deal, Richter; that last one is a really important spend. It means we’ve finally got enough money to waste some. Now that’s nice, you might say, but it doesn’t end there. When I announce humanity has run into a major threat with a track record of wiping out annoying animals like us, you’d think someone would be a little bit interested. But no one gives a damn. The lander is towed, and we’re locked up. Everybody else vanishes, but I’m tossed back onto the street and told I’m not worth the effort of killing.

  “You can see why I’m curious, whenever I can spare the time from being terrified. In case you’re wondering, I know I don’t sound like I’m taking this seriously, but I’m trying very hard not to scream.”

  The avatar straightened up and started prowling around the apartment, peering at pictures, furniture, the little statues which Petra collected. Chambers found himself wondering how much of it was unconscious habit and how much a calculated effort to seem as human-normal as possible. Or—errant thought—was the avatar being worked from somewhere?

  After a few moments the Richter avatar stopped its prowling. “Okay. You’re right, that’s strange; and there may be a link between what we know and how the police behaved, between that and all the big investments, but does it change what we have to do?”

  “Damn right it does.” Chambers spluttered. Why couldn’t Richter see? “This twee home of mine—” the avatar turned around and raised its hands, palms out, in conciliation, “—we’re not big enough to have an army, or loads of cops, or much in the way of a security force. There’s never been the need for it. We try to stay friends with people. That’s not hard—out here, we’re the farm, the supermarket for all the moon stations and the orbitals, and everything else. So, people don’t want to attack us, I guess. You don’t blow up the grocery store if you want to eat. There hasn’t been any serious conflict in this system since we first came here. At the moment, there’s enough of everything to go around, I suppose.

  “What I’m trying to say is this place has always been quiet, calm, a bit rustic. So, I don’t understand what’s going on to make it suddenly wealthy, and the cops suddenly scary, and I certainly wasn’t expecting you when you appeared out of nowhere. So, I’ll be straight: I don’t know if I can trust you, whatever you are.

  “And if I can’t trust you, I’m not in a rush to tell you anything about the stuff you say you’ve missed. I don’t see what I’d gain. So, before I do trust you, I want you to tell me about how you download yourself, about what it feels like, about why you’d do such a thing. I want to know a lot more about you. What exactly is the difference between you and an artificial intelligence?” Confrontationally, the avatar leaned forward from the waist, translucent hands on hips, head up, chin forward. If it had been solid, he’d have been ready to dodge a punch.

  Chambers pressed on. “When you’ve done all that, I need you to explain to me why anyone even wants to be enhanced in the first place. Face it, Richter, you’re doubly frightening. You’re not just a scary cyborg from out of ancient history, you’re the ghost of one. Before I start telling the worlds you’re the good guys, I need to believe it myself.

  “So, tell me: why did you want this done to you?” Chambers barely saw the avatar’s face now.

  The sketch-man sighed. “That’s the point—I don’t remember a thing about Enhancement. I certainly didn’t agree to any of it. Who I am now is a very long way from who I intended to be.” The Richter avatar waved a dismissive hand. “But never mind me. You’ve heard us talk about Feroz Mahmoud. If you want to understand us, you need to know about him. A very careful man, Feroz. Right from the start he figured there might come a time when we’d need to, argue our case, I guess. There’d be a moment when we wouldn’t be useful anymore, and someone might just decide to uninvent us. No one ever believed that shit about ‘we’ll reverse the surgery and then you can go home.’ Most of us realized damn quickly that, once we became inconvenient, we were dead. So, we tried very hard to be useful.

  “I say “we,” but I came along when the program had already been going for a bit. Feroz wanted a bargaining chip. He wanted to be able to threaten he could reveal where the bodies were buried, literally. There’s some very scary stuff in the data he collected; it names a lot of names and it’s very convincing. Because it’s true, and there’s not much we can say that about. So that’s what he did. He saved everything and what he didn’t have,” The Richter avatars face split into a wicked grin, “he found ways of acquiring.

  “I’ve been looking after it for a long time. It’s on your slate now, but it’s in a load of other places as well. This data’s not being wiped, whoever goes missing. If you want to understand how this version of me came about, you need to start there. You ready to see some of it?”

  Chambers shook his head. “No, not yet. I want to ask you about what you said just then. What did you mean you didn’t agree to it, or remember it? The getting enhanced.”

  The Richter avatar shrugged its shoulders. “Just that. I never signed up for these modifications, and until the Pietersberg I’d not thought about it at all, for over a century.” Once again, the avatar sounded lost. “I can’t understand why that is. But it matches with everything Feroz warned us about. About checking downloads, about not believing a thing we’re told. About how they’re messing with our heads all the time.”

  Chambers recalled the words of Semyonov, the ARTOK chairman from their fateful meeting that had started this nightmare he found himself in: They have no continuous and uninterrupted personality. How the man referred to the Enhanced troopers as weapons or constructs? Okay, a lot more to know here. And it didn’t make him any clearer about who he was dealing with.

  Chambers decided to press on the way he had been going. “All right, I get that. For now. Let’s go back to talking about your data.”

  “Fair enough.” Said the avatar. “You can start with Stevie Arden. He’s not quite the oldest of us, but he’s been around since the program really took off. Here goes, then.”

  The world around Chambers fades as his reality becomes someone else’s.

  Chapter Five

  Leaving the Dreamtime

  Waking up?

  I’m cold. I must be leaving the dreamtime.

  I’m bouncing around in a vehicle. I can feel the needles withdrawing from my arm, and the shivers start. They always do. I pull down the sleeve of my smock, rubbing at the irritated skin. Feels like my regular combat smock.

  So where is it this time? The doors are hissing open on a battered landscape of rocky hills, scrub, and a yellowish sky. Thunderous noise fills the air—yes,
there’s air, real air. Tastes a little like a chemical plant, tainted but breathable. Gravity feels about Earth-normal. Might even be Earth. Some of the noise must be tactical transport aircraft, the thwock-thwock meant aircraft in an atmosphere, probably flitters or tilt-rotors. Explosions batter at my ears.

  Davis is sitting opposite me—we’re in an armored vehicle, a personnel carrier—and he grins and shrugs. The others are coming out of the dreamtime, and start doing whatever they do: chewing gum, reading quietly. We’re waiting for data now. God, they’re sloppy; this should all be done before the doors open, long before we get to the job.

  At last I snap into the trance as the orders start to download. The carrier doors, and what we can see of the world outside, move at a crawl. A few Slows, our slang term for the unenhanced, are in view. One, a rifleman crouching beside a box of machine gun ammunition, is fixed in a frozen glare at our vehicle. The Slows like us as much as we tolerate them. Not a lot. The noise of battle drops downscale, to a low growling as my enhancements filter out the sounds of combat allowing me to concentrate fully on the incoming orders.

  The orders flow on and the situation comes alive for me, starts to become real. I’m support on phase one, assault on phase two. There won’t be a third phase. Simple, neat, and precise. At least something’s not sloppy.

  Time check gives us long enough for a ground recce and maybe even a Slow’s-eye view of the battle. I pull on my battle order, settle my helmet, and we check all our comms systems. Five minutes to go.

  The doors are open at last. We come out of the vehicle in neural overdrive, moving fast, and go to ground well spread-out. At least the terrain is right: I’ve been on jobs where we debussed into desert, expecting jungle. My flank looks familiar, the orders are good. The data map in my head scrolls as I look around. My eye display updates me on bearings, and crosschecks key features with the data map. I’m happy with the location.

  What about the situation? Around us, Slows are under fire. So are we, in fact, but it’s hard to see it as a problem. The world is full of a low growling, sounds downshifted almost below our hearing. It all adds to the dream feel which can easily end with you dead.

  All the frequencies are full of rumbling and yowling; we’re okay on frequency-agile comms, fed direct to the ear. It helps us make sense of it all.

  One man near me is running, in mid-stride, with both feet airborne. I watch as he sinks and starts his next stride. Low clouds drift by, metal shards puffing out of them. Airbursts. It’s possible for us to see the pressure wave when we operate at these speeds, and often to anticipate the shrapnel’s fall.

  Not so the Slows. I see a wave front bearing down on the runner, see the fragments that are going to kill him. It’s too far for me to push him aside, and the kinetic energy of my body hitting his would do the shell’s work for it, anyway. I look away as their paths converge.

  Mahmoud starts his move forward. He heads for a gully in a weird ballet, leaping to dodge drifting shrapnel and then freezing like any Slow to check for mines. Following his lead, we all take our own routes to the start-line. I move off, King and Irwin to my left. Davis backs me up.

  The start-line’s a small dimple in the ground, maybe fifty meters broad, running across the front of the enemy positions. From it we can see the emplacement halting the advance. Beautifully chosen defense; it covers the gully with enfilade fire and can’t easily be approached. If we linger, the enemy Slows will see us eventually.

  We flicker, moving from point to point without hanging around, pausing only long enough to capture the full picture. I scan in thermal, false-color, and times-four optical. We stay maybe three or four seconds. The whole section uses data-link to confirm to Mahmoud they’ve seen enough, and we head quickly back to the stalled point Company.

  Once there we home in on their major, and drop out of overdrive. The major jumps. The Slows always jump when we pull that one. Eight enhanced troopers materialize around you, when your nerves are already keyed up. Sure, you jump. We tell him what we’re going to do to extricate his company out of its hole and he hates us a little more. Slows are just different, I guess; it’s hard to remember how it felt.

  WE DO IT. IT goes mostly to plan—it usually does. The emplacement never really sees us, but that’s normal too. We are so much better than Slows. Ashford loses his eyes to a laser burn, and Davis takes a bullet in the head and one in the thigh. Little enough, considering. A bit of dreamtime in the casevac tanks, a repair session somewhere, and they’ll be back with us for the next job.

  The armored carrier jolts us to an airfield in the middle of nowhere, a hostile Slow sergeant escorting us. He seems to think we ought to be interested in his battalion’s little battle, but we’re all too wired to give a rip about the details. We’re ready for the piss-up. At the airfield there’ll be a bar, maybe women; maybe Command won’t have gotten its act together to get us back to the dreamtime yet. Maybe.

  We debus…

  “Right, people. Once Keegan’s unloaded you, it’s clean weapons, ammo to the safe-locker.”

  …and Mahmoud down arms us. A good clean, then the weapons are into their boxes, the ammo into his safe-locker. The tanks holding Ashford and Davis, powered down to tick over, are taken away to an aid post. They’ll catch up with us; we’re all too expensive to lose in the military system. Mahmoud flashes authorizations about and accesses the comms nets; I hear him giving Command an after-action report, we all try eavesdropping to find out how much leave we’re due. But he’s too fly for us: he’s gone into a white noise zone, and even turns his back so we can’t lip-read.

  Keegan—she’s the section second in command—leads us away while Mahmoud’s still gassing. Five minutes later we’ve found a bar, and the beers are getting hammered. Mahmoud joins us in time to stop a Slow from being taken apart. The man’s bugging us about who do we think we are, why are we hanging around in uniform, and why do we think we’re so great. Usual stuff.

  They never know what the comedown is like: post-adrenaline depression, tenfold. The whole stinking world seems to go past at a snail’s pace when you are not in Overdrive, that place your enhancements take you too when you are in combat; even talking to a Slow takes forever. I mean, they’re all right as people, but who’s got the time? The temptation to power back up and marry the body to the pace of the mind again is almost overwhelming. But Overdrive costs you; they say it’s near enough a year off your life for every ten minutes. I’ve no idea how they know that. But you don’t waste it.

  Besides, I fall over and hurt myself even when I’m pissed at Slow speed.

  "BEERS INCOMING." CALLS Keegan.

  “Cheers, bud.” I reply.

  “Who’s paying?” Asks Davis.

  “Command!” Laughs Keegan.

  “Did I say how much I like them?” Rejoins Irwin.

  “Fine bunch of men and women.” Echoes King.

  “I wouldn’t go that far. Fine bunch of credit on this card, though.” Says Keegan as she slips the credit card into her uniform blouses pocket.

  Mahmoud doesn’t drink alcohol. As far as I know, it’s not a religious thing. It’s just, well, he’s not the kind of guy who ever fully lets his guard down. He’s careful. Doesn’t get stressed about the rest of us having a laugh, and—thank God—he doesn’t go all sanctimonious if you’re a bit hungover.

  “Where’s this stuff made, then?” I ask holding my amber drink with its frothy head up to the light.

  “Who knows?” Mumbles King. “Drinkable enough, though.”

  “You’re no judge. I’ve seen you drink aviation fuel.” Jokes Keegan

  “Oh, yeah; I remember. Good brew it was, too. Trouble was—”

  Davis finishes King’s line for him. “It didn’t get you high. We’ve all heard it, mate.”

  Fred Irwin, on the other hand, seems to have a limitless capacity for any kind of alcohol, anywhere, anytime.

  “Here, what’s this? Thought you’d got me whisky.”
>
  “I thought it was whisky.” Replied Keegan.

  Irwin held the glass closer to his metal eyes examining its contents minutely. “I think it’s nail varnish remover.”

  “Don’t be soft. Look at the state of your nails—how would you know?”

  “Gimme the bottle; let’s see. It is bloody nail varnish remover!”

  Billy King likes winding people up to see them blow. He’s particularly good at making Carol Keegan mad. She likes everything just so, which is why she’s such a good deputy section commander.

  “Did you see that major’s face when Mahmoud popped up in front of him? He nearly crapped himself.”

  “You’ve got to hand it to Mahmoud: he’s got great people skills.”

  “Hiya, you lot. Anyone seen my nail varnish remover?” Asked Angie Barclay as she sidled up to our table an evil smile on her face.

  “I think we were just set up, guys.” I growled even though I really felt like laughing.

  “I told you: never go drinking with girls.” Admonished Keegan.

  The piss-up’s a good one; Mahmoud uses Command’s magic credit flash and the autobar keeps filling us up, until Angie Barclay tries to see what makes it work. Once she’s got its head off it doesn’t want to play anymore.

  “You’ve busted it, you daft bat.” Moaned Irwin. “Now where we gonna get a drink from?”

  “Never trust a girl with anything technical, that’s what I say.” Said King as if stating an undeniable fact.

  “I dunno. Wouldn’t you call the guys who fly those amazing hypersonic orbital lander things a bit technical?” Asked Barclay dead pan.

  “I suppose. Why?” Responded King.

  In answer Barclay pointed a finger in the direction of the bars entrance. “Keegan’s just pulled one, and she is a girl, too, last time I looked. That’s them off out the door just now.”

  “My point exactly. I don’t trust her with him.”

  “I doubt he’ll break—he looks like a big strong lad. Way to go, Carol!” Shouted Barclay, clapping enthusiastically. The rest of us ignore her and order more drinks.