Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds

TRAUMA POD

WHEN I come round I’m in a space about the size of a shower cubicle, tipped on its side. I’m flat on my back, resting on a soft padded surface. Curving around me, close enough to touch, are walls of antiseptic white. They wrap around to form a smooth ceiling, broken by hatches and recesses. Cables and tubes emerge through gaps. There’s the soft whirr of pumps, the hiss and chug of air circulation. And looking at me right now, peering down from the ceiling just above my own face, is a pair of stereoscopic camera eyes.

I twitch, trying to raise my head enough to get a good look at myself. I’ve been stripped of my armour. I was wearing combat exo-cladding, but the outer shell’s gone now. All that’s left is the lightweight mesh suit, and that’s ripped and shredded pretty badly. I try and get a better look at my extremities but a pair of hands gently pushes me back down. They poke through a pair of hatches above my sternum, as if there’s someone just outside, reaching in.

They’re perfectly normal human hands, wearing green surgical gloves.

A woman’s voice says: “Stay still, and don’t panic, Sergeant Kane. You’re going to be fine.”

“What…” I start to say.

“That’s good. You can hear us, and understand my words. That’s very positive. You can speak, too. That’s also encouraging. But for the moment, I’d like you to let me do the talking.”

They must have pumped something into me, because for the time being I don’t feel like arguing with anyone or anything.

“Okay.”

A panel has slid open to reveal a screen, and on the screen is a woman’s face. Green uniform, black hair tied back under a surgical cap. She’s looking right at me—close enough that it’s almost uncomfortable. Her lips move.

“You’ve been wounded, Sergeant.”

I manage a smile. “No shit.”

I remember fragments, not the whole story. A deep recon insertion gone wrong. Me and the two others…I’ll remember their names in a moment. Loiter drones above us, enemy Mechs too close for comfort. Armored support too dispersed to help us. Extraction window compromised. Not the way it was meant to go down.

The white flash of the pulse bomb, the skull-jarring concussion of the shockwave.

Someone screaming “Medic!”

Someone who sounded a lot like me.

“You were lucky. One of our field medical robots was able to reach you in time. The bot deployed its trauma pod and hauled you inside. That’s where you are now: in the pod. It’s armoured, independently powered, and fully capable of keeping you alive until we have an extraction window. The field medical unit has secured the area and established an exclusion volume around your site.”

My mouth is very dry, and now that I have some sense of location I begin to pick up on the fact that my head doesn’t feel quite right.

“When,” I say. “How long. Until extraction.”

“Waiting for an update on that right now. Best guess is six to twelve hours, but that may be wide or short of the mark, depending on how things evolve in theatre.”

For a second I think: operating theatre, and wonder why the hell that should be my problem. Get me the fuck out of here, then worry about when you can slot me in for surgery.

Then I realise she’s talking about a different kind of theatre.

“Have I got that long?”

“That’s what we need to talk about. Your injuries have been stabilised, but you’re not out of the woods just yet.” She pauses. “I’m Doctor Annabel Lyze. I’m linking in from the forward surgical unit in Tango Oscar. My colleagues and I will be with you the whole time you’re in the pod, and we’ll be handling your case once you’ve been extracted. I know you feel pretty isolated right now, Sergeant Kane, and that’s only natural. But I want you to know that you’re not alone.”

“Call me Mike,” I say.

“Mike it is.” She nods. “And you can call me Annabel, if that helps. I’m right here, Mike. Never more than a screen away. Look, I can even touch you. These are my hands you’re feeling.”

But they’re not, and she knows it.

Under the surgical gloves lie bones and sinews of plastic and metal. They’re teleoperated robot hands which can emerge from any part of the trauma pod that the situation dictates. Somewhere back in Tango Oscar, Annabel’s wearing haptic feedback gloves—similar to my own mesh-suit—that provide an exact tactile interface with their robot counterparts. She can feel every bruise, every swelling, as if she’s right here in the pod with me. I couldn’t ask for better care.

But she’s not with me, no matter what she wants me to think.

“You said my injuries have been stabilised. Are you ready to tell me the score?”

“Nothing that isn’t fixable. You took a bad hit to your right leg and I’m afraid I had to amputate. But we can grow that back easily enough. That’s not our main concern here. What I’m worried about is a bleed on your brain that we need to treat sooner rather than later.”

So the pod’s surgical systems have already been busy. While I was sleeping my damaged leg was removed, the stump sewn up, my ruined limb ejected through the pod’s disposal vent. I know how it works with trauma pods, and she’s right; they’ll grow me a new leg.

But brain surgery?

“You want to cut into my skull, while I’m still in this thing?”

“Minimally invasive intervention, Mike. There’s a risk, certainly. But there’s an even greater risk in leaving things until later. You may not make it unless we intervene now.”

“I was under, and you brought me back to consciousness. What the hell was the point of that?”

“I wanted to talk things through. Give me the word, and I’ll go in. But if you’d sooner take your chances and wait for extraction, I’ll respect that decision.”

The tone of her voice, the look in her eyes, make it abundantly clear what she thinks of my chances if I decide not to opt for surgery. About as good as if I was still out there in the battlefield, gushing blood into the dirt. But I can’t just give in, without knowing the odds of rescue.

“Show me what’s outside the pod.”

“That won’t help, Mike.”

“Show me anyway. I’m still a soldier. I need to know what’s out there.”

Annabel purses her lips. “If you insist.”

I’m still wearing my military contacts, although I only realise as much when the view of the trauma pod’s scrubs out, replaced by a visual feed from the pod’s own external camera.

It’s not good. I can tell that much from a glance.

I do a slow pan, taking in the blasted, toxic landscape as far as the camera can see. I’m lying flat, or flattish, on a cratered plateau, hemmed in by the craggy ruins of what were once office blocks or retail developments. A vehicle, maybe a school bus, lies on its back fifty meters from me. Some kind of transmission tower or pylon has come down, sagging over the ground contours like the skeleton of some saurian monster. Overhead, the clouds are mustard coloured, sagging with airborne toxicity. The horizon ripples with chemical murk.

Pulse bombs flash in the distance. Plasma bolts gash the clouds. Mechs, humanoid and giant-sized, stalk and stride the hellscape that was once a city. I do another full visual sweep and I don’t see a single human combatant.

Which isn’t too surprising. Since the war went almost entirely robotic, we living soldiers have been increasingly thin on the ground. I wonder if the others got out. Maybe some of them are in pods like me, awaiting extraction. Or maybe they’re all dead.

What the fuck was I doing here anyway?

Ah, yes. Deep recon squad. I remember the others’ names now. Me, Rorvik, Lomax. Robotics specialists, tasked to observe the behaviour of our Mechs, and our enemy’s units, under realtime combat conditions. The reason? No one was saying. But the rumours weren’t hard to pick up. Some of our units were going rogue. It was said to be happening to the enemy machines as well. No one had a clue why.

Actually, we had some theories. We cram our Mechs with sufficient autonomy to make them independent of human control. We give them wits and smarts, then wonder why they start doing stuff we didn’t ask them to.

Not my problem now, though.

I figure I’m safe for the moment. The field medical robot has done its work, not only of dragging my wounded remains into the pod, but of securing the pod itself. I’m surrounded by a low wall of rubble and battlefield junk, shoved hastily into place to act as a screen. Not to bury me, or complicate my extraction, but to shield me from enemy eyes, cameras and weapon systems.

I can see the field medical unit. The four-metre tall robot is circling the pod, keeping the area clear. My contacts drop an ident tag on the robot. Unit KX-457 is a headless humanoid chassis with an oval gap in its torso, a hole I can see right through. Its arms are musclebound with guns, countermeasure-launchers and specialised military-surgical devices. Its titanium-pistoned legs look spindly, but they’re as strong and shock-resistant as aircraft undercarriage. The unit is scary to look at, but it’s on my side, and that makes all the difference.

I don’t remember what happened, what became of Rorvik and Lomax. They’re not my problem now. I was screaming “Medic!” out of pure reflex. I didn’t need to. As soon as my exo-cladding detected that I’d been injured—which was probably sooner than my own nervous system—it would have squawked the nearest field medical unit. My armour would have undertaken some life-preserving measures, but that was only a stopgap until the robot arrived. KX-457 would have detached the pod from its belly recess, laid it on the ground, and—after a preliminary medical assessment—slid me inside.

Under ordinary circumstances, while the trauma pod was fixing me up, the robot would have plugged the pod back into its belly and hightailed it out of the combat area. Not an option today, though: too much risk of the robot being intercepted and taken out. I’m a high-value asset, or so they tell me. Better to keep the pod in-theatre, under robot protection, until a full extraction squad can come in under close aerial cover.

Meanwhile, the field medical unit maintains maximum vigilance. Every now and then KX-457 raises one of its arms and zaps the sky with a plasma cannon. Sometimes, a drone falls out of the clouds. Most of the Mechs on the ground are friendly, but occasionally I’ll spy an enemy scout unit on the limit of visibility, testing our defenses. They’re out there.

I’ve seen enough. It’s clear that I’m not being bullshitted. It really would be suicide to go for extraction now.

Which means that if Doctor Annabel Lyze is right about the brain bleed, I do need to go under the knife.

I pull my point of view back into the pod. The battlefield scrubs out. White surroundings again, the hum and chug of diligent life-support. Disembodied hands reaching through the walls.

I give Annabel my consent. Go in and fix the bleed.

Then get me the fuck out of here.

I COME AROUND. The first thing that hits me is that I’m safe, back in Tango Oscar. I know this because I’m definitely not in the trauma pod any more. Although it has to be said that I’m still in a kind of pod, and it has the same kind of white interior as the first.

But it can’t be the one I woke up in originally, because there just wouldn’t be room. I know this because there’s another body squeezed into this one, another wounded soldier, and that simply wouldn’t be possible in the first pod. Obviously, while I was out cold, being operated on, KX-457 was able to complete the extraction. They’ve got me in this bigger pod while I await my slot in the operating room, or whatever they’ve got in mind. Pretty soon it’ll be smiles and high-fives. Welcome home, soldier. You did a good job out there.

I wonder what happened to the other guy, the one jammed in next to me?

Then something dawns. Through the pod’s insulation, and beyond the background noise of the medical systems, I can still hear the occasional pulse-bomb or plasma cannon discharge.

Either the front moved a lot closer to Tango Oscar while I was out, or I’m not home just yet.

“Can you hear me, Mike?”

“Yes.”

Annabel swallows. “It’s mostly good news. We arrested the bleed, and I’m very happy about that.”

“I don’t like that ‘mostly.’ Why is there another soldier in here with me? Why did you swap me to a bigger pod?”

“It’s the same pod, Mike. We haven’t moved you. You’re still exactly where you were before I put you under.”

I try and budge to one side, suddenly uncomfortable. Although I don’t achieve much, I have the impression that my silent companion has budged by exactly the same amount, as if glued to my side.

“I’m telling you, there’s someone else in here.”

“Okay.” She pulls back for a moment, whispers something to a colleague before returning. “That’s…not unexpected. There’s been some damage to your right frontoparietal regions, Mike. Part of it was caused by the original bleed, and part of it was occasioned by our intervention. I stress that we had no practical option; if we hadn’t gone in, we wouldn’t be having this conversation now. But what you are experiencing now is a hallucination: a kind of out-of-body experience caused by the shutdown of the inhibitory circuits that normally keep your mirror neurons functioning normally. You really are alone, Mike. You just have to take my word for it.”

“Like I took your word that the surgery was going to be straightforward?”

“We have to consider this a success, Mike. You’re with us and you’re stable.”

I try and move again, but my skull feels as if it’s clamped in a vise. It’s not painful, but it’s a long way from anything I’d call pleasant. “Is there a fix for this, or am I stuck with it forever?”

“There’s a fix for most things. As it happens, we can try some workarounds while you’re still in the pod. During surgery I inserted some neural probes at strategic sites around the injured part of your brain. Apart from giving me a much better insight into what’s going on in there, compared to the crude resolution of the pod’s own scanner, I can also intervene in some critical pathways.”

I’m still creeped out by my displaced body image. The body next to mine breathes with me. But it feels dead, like an appendage of me that should have withered and dropped off already.

Still, I need to keep focus. “Meaning what?”

“The neural circuitry involved in your out-of-body sensation is pretty well mapped, Mike. At the moment, signals aren’t getting where they should due to the damage caused by the bleed. But we can route around those obstructions, using the probes I inserted. Think of them as jumper leads, wiring different parts of your head together. If you’re willing, I can attempt to reassert your normal body image.”

“Again: why wait until I’m awake, if there’s something you can do?”

“Again, I need consent. I also need your subjective evaluation of the effects. I said the circuits were well-mapped, and that’s true. But there’s enough idiosyncratic variation from individual to individual to mean we can’t be a hundred percent sure of the outcome of any given intervention.”

“In other words, you’ll poke a stick into my head, stir it around and see what happens.”

“It’s a tiny bit more scientific than that. But it’s entirely reversible, and if we can lessen your distress in any way, I think that the small risk involved is acceptable.”

“I’m not distressed.”

“Your body says otherwise. Stress hormones peaking. Galvanic skin response off the chart. Fear centre lighting up like a football stadium. But that’s understandable, Mike. You’ve been badly injured, in a war zone. You’re being kept alive in a technological coffin, while the war continues around you. Under those circumstances, who wouldn’t be a little rattled?”

For all that she’s right—I am rattled—and for all that I have no desire to spend another second with my phantom self crammed into the pod, my combat instincts momentarily trump all other concerns.

“Give me the external feed again.”

“Mike, there’s no need to concern yourself with matters beyond your control.”

“Just do it, Annabel.”

She mumbles a curse and then I’m outside again, seeing the world through the pop-up camera fixed to the outside of the pod like a periscope.

I spin through three hundred and sixty, assessing my surroundings. I’m still where the field medical unit left me, still hemmed in by a makeshift cordon of rubble and junk. But I must have been out for hours. It’s dark now, the camera viewing the world in grey-green infrared. It’s only when the horizon flashes with an explosion, or something strobes the cloud deck above, that I get any real sense of the tactical environment.

How long was I under the knife? More than a few hours, evidently. And yet it didn’t feel like any time at all.

“I want you to be straight with me, Annabel. The brain surgery. How long did it take?”

“It doesn’t matter, Mike.”

“It does to me.”

“All right, then. Eight hours. There were complications. But you came through. Isn’t that the main thing?”

“Eight hours and you’re still on duty? You said the best guess for my extraction was six to twelve hours.”

“And there’s still every possibility of it happening within that window. Look, I couldn’t abandon you, Mike. But we’ll be getting you out very soon now.”

“Don’t jerk me around. You and I both know they won’t try until day-break, at the earliest.” She can’t argue with that, and she doesn’t try. The combat zone is hazardous at the best of times, but at night, as the ground cools, it’s almost impossible to move without being detected, scoped, targeted. I visualise my trauma pod, lit up like a neon gravestone. And I know I can’t just sit here doing nothing.

“Let me address that body image problem,” Annabel says.

Something snaps inside me. It’s time to start being a soldier again. “Give me full-theatre oversight. I want to know what’s really out there.”

“Mike, I’m not really sure this is in your best—”

“Just do it.”

She really has no option but to give me what I want. I may be injured, but I’m still a high-value asset and my active authority means that I still get to call the shots.

The oversight is a realtime map of the battle zone, out to a radius of fifteen kilometres. It’s compiled from intelligence gathered by Mechs, drones, cameras, even the still-functioning armour of dead or immobilised combatants. Most of that intelligence originates from our own side, but some of it comes from intercepting enemy transmissions, and doubtless they’re doing something similar with ours. The data is woven together and projected onto my contacts. With subvocal commands I can scan and zoom at will.

I take in what the map has to tell me, knowing I should have done this sooner, rather than take Annabel’s word that everything was going to be moonbeams and kittens. Because it’s not.

And I’m in a world of trouble.

A phalanx of enemy machines is coming my way. They’re ten kilometres out, but making steady progress. They may not know I’m here yet, but there’s no guarantee of that. The deployment of a field medical unit is a gold-plated giveaway that someone’s taken a hit, and there’s nothing the enemy would rather do than capture or eliminate a high-value human asset. I study the numbers and the distribution of the advancing formation, measuring the enemy’s strength against my sole ally: the lone medical unit. KX-457’s weapons and countermeasures aren’t to be trifled with. But against a dozen or more enemy Mechs and drones? There’s no contest. Nor is there much hope of my little resting place remaining undetected, when the enemy units arrive en masse.

That’s when the fight or flight response kicks in. It’s a hard nitrous surge, as if fear itself is being pumped into my blood. I’m not going to just stay here and hope that luck’s on my side. We need to be moving, and moving now.

Yes, there’s risk in that as well—especially at night. That’s why my extraction is still on hold. But set against my chances of surviving the arrival of those enemy units, running suddenly looks a lot more attractive.

I pull my point of view back into the trauma pod.

“Tell the field medical unit to scoop me up. We’re shipping out.”

“I can’t issue that order, Mike.”

“Can’t or won’t?”

“We’re running simulations now, and they’re telling us that you have a statistically improved chance of survival if you remain right where you are.”

“By what margin?”

“Enough of a one that I’d really urge you to consider this course of action very thoroughly.”

If the odds were that persuasive, she’d tell me up front. My head’s still clamped tight. But if I could shake it I would. “Bring the medical unit in.”

“Mike, please.”

“Just do it. There’s no point putting a human being in the combat zone if you won’t trust their judgement.”

She relents. I don’t need to see KX-457 approaching; I hear the boulders being dislodged around me and then feel the trauma pod lurch and tilt as the robot hauls it from the ground. I’m rotated through ninety degrees, until my head is higher than my feet—or rather, I remind myself, foot. Then I feel the reassuring clunk as the trauma pod is docked with the oval recess in the medical unit’s torso. Systems interface: power, control, sensory. I’m no longer a wounded man in a humming coffin. I’m a baby in the belly of a killer robot, and that has to be an improvement.

“What are your orders?” the robot asks me.

Recalling the disposition of enemy forces, I start to tell KX-457 to get me as far west as it can. Then I think of something better than being taken along for the ride. I don’t need to be able to move my own body to control the robot. What remains of my own mesh-suit layer should be more than capable of detecting intentions, the merest twitch of a neuromuscular impulse, and giving me appropriate feedback.

“Let me drive you.”

“Mike,” Annabel interrupts. “You don’t need this extra task load. Let the robot extract you, if that’s what you insist on doing. But there’s no need for you to drive it. In your present condition, your reflexes are going to be no match for the robot’s own battle routines.”

But if I’m going to die out here, I’d sooner be doing something than just being carried along for the ride.

“I know what I’m doing, Annabel. KX-457, assign me full command authority. Maintain the link until I say otherwise.”

My point of view shifts again. The field medical unit has no head, but there’s a suite of cameras and sensors built into its shoulder yoke, and that’s where I seem to be looking down from.

I look down at myself. I feel exactly as tall as the KX-457—there’s no sense that I’m contained in a much smaller body, down in the belly pod. And those titanium legs and arms move to my will, just as if they were part of me. I feel whole again, and strong. That phantom image is still there, but it’s much less troubling than when I was jammed into the trauma pod.

I’m still in the pod, of course. Need to remind myself of that, because it would be easy to lose track of things.

WE MOVE, THE KX-457 and I. I should say the KX-457, Annabel, and I, because when those hands reach through to adjust my leg dressing, or the catheter in my arm, or the post-operative clamp on my head, it’s hard not to feel that she’s along for the ride, my wellbeing never less than uppermost in her thoughts. And while it’s clear that she doesn’t entirely approve of my decision to ship out, I’m still glad to have someone to talk to.

“How long have you been in Tango Oscar, Annabel?” I ask, as I work my past way the shallow, smoke-blackened remains of what was once a glorious air-conditioned shopping mall.

She considers my question carefully. “It’s been eighteen months now, Mike. They cycled me in from Echo Victor, and before that it was Charlie Zulu.”

“Charlie Zulu.” I say it with a kind of reverence. “I hear it was pretty intense there.”

She nods. Her face is projected into a small window in my view, fighting for attention with an ever-changing dance of tactical analysis overlays, flagging every potential threat or hiding place. “We had our work cut out.” She gives a small dry laugh, but it’s clear that the memory’s still raw. “That was before the new pods came on-line. The old units didn’t have anything like as much autonomy as the ones we’re used to now. It was hands-on telesurgery, day and night. We were dying on our feet from exhaustion and stress, and we weren’t even out there, in theatre. We saved as many as we could, but when I think about those we couldn’t help…” She falls silent.

“I’m sure you did everything you could.”

“I hope we did. But there are limits. Even now, we can’t always work miracles.”

“Whatever happens to me, you’ve done all that anyone could expect, Annabel. Thanks for sticking with me, all those hours. You must be worn out.”

“Whatever it takes, Mike. I’m not going away.”

“I hope we get to meet up,” I risk telling her, even though it feels like I’m jinxing my chances of ever getting out alive. “Just so I can thank you in person.”

Annabel’s smile is radiant. “I’m sure we will.”

In that moment I don’t doubt that I’ll make it.

That’s when oversight picks up a squadron of enemy scout drones, coming in low just under the cloud deck. My own sensors haven’t seen them at all.

I scan my field of view for concealment options, and decide to duck into the corrugated shoebox that used to contain an indoor amusement park. I pick my way through rubble and the blackened, snaking wreckage of a roller coaster, until I’m sure the drones won’t pick out my infrared or EM signature. There are fallen machines under my titanium feet, and bodies. I crunch through the shattered carcasses of plastic horses and ride-on centipedes.

“We’ll need to lie low for a couple of hours, until those drones are out of the area.” I squat, shutting down essential systems. Just a bleed of power to the trauma pod, and another to the KX-457’s central processor core.

“How will you know it’s safe?”

The building’s shell is blocking ambient comms, interfering with oversight. “I won’t. But if they’re on the usual sweep pattern, we’ll be fine once they’ve passed over.”

“Then there’s no reason for me not to take a look at that body image issue, is there?”

“It’s not bothering me as much as it did.”

“Let me fix it anyway. If you don’t nip these things in the bud, they can become a big problem during recovery.”

I offer a mental shrug. “If you think it’s for the best.”

“I do,” Annabel says. “I do.”

I GIVE IT two hours, then three to be on the safe side. I creep my way out of the amusement park, until I’m almost back under the open air. I’m expecting full oversight to be restored as soon as I regain normal comms, but that’s not what happens. Coverage is still patchy. I pick up intelligence from nearby eyes and ears, but nothing further out than a few kilometers. The fault may be in my own systems, but it’s much more likely that there’s been an attack against a critical node in our distributed grid. Those drones may not have been looking for me at all, but for a vulnerability in our comms network.

It’s still dark, and the drones could still be out there. But I have to trust that they’ve left the area, and that the phalanx of heavy Mechs has continued on its original vector. It might take days to repair oversight, assuming the fault isn’t in me. I can’t wait that long. I’d rather die moving, than waste away hiding from an enemy I can’t see.

“We’ll give it until dawn,” I tell Annabel. “It should be okay to cross open ground then, even with limited oversight.”

“How do you feel now?”

“Different.”

That’s an understatement. But it’s true. My phantom twin has vanished. I don’t feel another body tagging along next to mine. And I guess I should be glad of that, because it means Annabel’s neural cross-wiring has had some effect. But I don’t feel the slightest flicker of elation.

Something else is different.

It’s not a question of being distressed by my phantom twin any more. He’s gone, and with good riddance. But now it’s my own body that’s changed. I can sense it, hanging beneath my point of view like some withered, useless vestigial appendage, but it doesn’t feel like any part of me. I don’t inhabit it, and I have no wish to. All I want to do is flinch away from it. I was indifferent before, but now it repulses me.

I retain enough intellectual detachment to understand that this response is neurological. On some level, something has gone catastrophically wrong with my body image. It’s as if my sense of self, what really matters to me, has extracted itself from my injured human body and taken up residence in the armoured perfection of the field medical unit.

Clearly this is fucked-up.

But even knowing this, I don’t want to go back to the way things used to be. Definitely not: I’m stronger now, and bigger. I stride this ruined world like a colossus. And as much as that revolting thing disgusts me, it’s a small price to pay. I have a certain dependency on it, after all. That’s a no-brainer.

But there’s one other detail I need to address.

Comms is shot to shit. Oversight is a patchwork of blind spots. So how in hell is Doctor Annabel Lyze able to reach over from Tango Oscar and teleoperate her magic green hands?

More than that: how is Doctor Annabel Lyze able to talk me at all? How am I able to see her always smiling, never-tiring face?

“Don’t do that, Mike.”

“Don’t do what?”

“Don’t do what you’re about to do. Don’t check the comms registry. It won’t do you any good at all.”

I hadn’t thought of checking the comms registry. But you know, now that she’s put the idea in my head, that’s an excellent fucking idea.

I call up the history. I scroll through the log, going back minutes, tens of minutes, hours.

And I learn that KX-457 has been out of contact with Tango Oscar—or any command sector, for that matter—for more than nineteen hours. In all that time, it’s been acting entirely autonomously, relying on its own in-built intelligence.

So has the trauma pod. From the moment it was deployed—before I was hauled in and treated—the pod was also operating independently of human control. There was no kindly surgeon on the other side of that screen. There was just…software. Software clever and agile enough to mimic a reassuring presence.

Doctor Annabel Lyze.

Doctor Annabel lies.

The question is: was that software running in the pod, or in my own head?

IT’S DAY WHEN they find me. Not the enemy, but my own side. Although by that point I suppose the distinction is moot.

I find voice amplification mode. My words boom out, distorted and godlike. “Don’t come any closer.”

There are two of them, both wearing full battle armour, backed up by a couple of infantry Mechs. The Mechs have shoulder and arm-mounted plasma cannon batteries locked onto me.

“Mike, listen to me. You’ve been injured. You went in the trauma pod and…something got screwed up.”

Some part of me recognises the voice—Rorvik? Lomax? But it’s a small part and easily ignored.

“Get back.”

The figure who spoke dares to stand a little taller, even as their companion maintains a nervous, bent-at-the-knees crouch. I admire the speaker’s boldness, even as I don’t pretend to fully understand it. Then the figure reaches up and does something even riskier, which is to undo their face mask, allowing it to flop aside on its hinge. Framed by the air-tight seal of a helmet I see a woman’s face, and again there’s a flicker of recognition, which I instantly crush.

“Mike, you need to trust us. There’s only one way you’re going to get help, and that’s to relinquish control of the field medical unit. You have brain damage, very severe brain damage, and we need to get it fixed before it gets worse.”

“I am not Mike,” I tell her. “I am field medical unit KX-457.”

“No, Mike. KX-457 is the machine treating you. You’re experiencing some kind of body image crisis, but that’s all it is. A neurological fault, caused by the damage to your frontal cortex. You’re inside the robot, but you are not the robot itself. This is very, very important. Can you understand what I’m saying, Mike?”

“I understand what you are saying,” I tell her. “But you’re wrong. Mike died. I couldn’t save him.”

She takes a breath. “Mike, listen to me carefully. We need you back. You are a high-value asset, and we can’t afford to lose you, not with the way things have been going. Where you are now, in the machine…you’re not safe. We need you to give up control of the field medical unit and allow us to decouple the trauma pod. Then we can take you back to Tango Oscar and get you fixed up.”

“There’s nothing that needs fixing.”

“Mike…” she starts to say something, then seems to abandon her train of intent. Maybe she thinks I’m too far gone for that kind of persuasion. Instead she turns to her comrade, fixes her mask back on, and nods in response to some exchange I can’t intercept.

The plasma batteries open fire. I’m strong, and well armoured, but I’m no match for two infantry units. They don’t mean to take me out, though. The shots skim past me, wasting most of their energy against the sagging, geologically-layered shell of a collapsed parking structure. Only a fraction of the discharges cause me any harm. I register peripheral armour ablation, loss of forearm weapons functionality, some sensor blackouts. It’s enough to remove my capacity for retaliation, but they haven’t touched my processor core.

Of course they haven’t. It’s not that they care about me. But foolishly or otherwise, they’re still thinking of the soldier I was meant to save. They want to disable me, but not to do anything that might endanger the still-breathing corpse I carry inside. And now that I’ve been de-clawed, now that I’ve been half-blinded, they imagine they can take me apart like some complex puzzle or bomb, without harming my human cargo.

Needless to say, I’m not having any of that.

“Stop,” I say.

They stop. The plasma batteries glow a vile pink. My two human watchers crouch in wary anticipation. The woman says: “Give us Mike, and we’ll leave you be. That’s a promise.”

What they mean is, give us Mike, and we’ll happily blast you to slag.

“You can have Mike back,” I say. “All of him.”

There’s that wordless exchange again. “Good…” the woman says, as if she can’t quite believe her luck. “That’s good.”

“Here’s the first installment.”

I’ve been a busy little beaver, while we’ve been having our little chat. Even holding up my side of the conversation, even being attacked, hasn’t stopped me from working.

And what work! Exquisite surgery, even if do say so myself. There’s really very little that a trauma pod can’t do, with all the gleaming sharp instruments at its disposal. The beauty is that I don’t even have to know anything about medicine. I just tell the pod what must be accomplished, and the autonomous systems take care of the rest. I no more need to know about surgery than a human needs to know about digestion.

So, for instance, if I were to say: remove as much of Mike as is compatible with the continued integrity of his central nervous system, then the trauma pod will enact my order. And when the work has been done, the surplus material will be ejected through the waste disposal vent in the pod’s lower end fairing. Not incinerated, not mashed, but spat out whole, so that there can be no question of its biological origin.

That’s important, because my witnesses have to understand that I mean what I say. They must grasp that this is no hollow threat. Mike means nothing to me, but he means a lot to them, and by a perverse twist that makes him valuable to me as well.

While Mike’s inside me, they’ll let me live.

I back off, and allow them to inspect my offering. There’s a moment when they don’t know quite what to make of it, a hiatus before the horror kicks in. Then they get the picture. That’s a lot of Mike on the ground. But you don’t need to be a brain surgeon to work out that there’s a lot more of Mike still in me.

“This is what’s going to happen,” I tell them. “You’re going to let me leave. I have no weapons, as you know. You can destroy me, that’s true. But do you think you can do that and get inside me before the trauma pod has ceased operation?”

“Don’t do this,” the woman says, amplified voice ripping through her mask. “We can negotiate. We can work something out.”

“That’s what we’re already doing.” Choosing my moment, I turn around to present my back to them. With my sensors damaged, I genuinely don’t know what they’re doing. Maybe they think I’ve already taken Mike apart. Perhaps those plasma cannon batteries are charging up again. If they are, I doubt that I’ll feel a thing when the moment comes.

I start walking. And from somewhere comes the glimmer of a plan. I’m safe while they think Mike’s inside me. Frankly, though, I’d rather kill myself than walk around with that thing still attached.

So when I’m under cover, out of range of spying eyes and snooping drones, I’ll pull what remains of Mike out of the trauma pod and smash his central nervous system to a mushy grey-pink pulp.

Mike won’t miss it, after all. Mike’s long past the point of missing anything at all.

So am I.