Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

To Sing of Chaos and Eternal Night

Originally published in No Way Home, edited by Lucas Bale and Alex Roddie, Dark Matter Publishing, 2015

There is no gentle beckoning each time I die. Only a cold, empty darkness—a silent abyss where not even time exists. Nothing about it could be described as poetic; it is feral and strips away every shred of dignity that I might once have considered precious. There is no way to prepare for the first time, and mine was more horrifying than anything I have ever known, like drowning in an infinite ocean of black. After dying a thousand times, you’d think it might get easier, but it doesn’t. It’s just different.

Around me, the wind purls across cold rock and slips between tall reeds. Rain begins to fall. I look up and the night sky is veiled by charcoal cloud. I’m disorientated and, for a moment, I can’t say where I am. I have no memories. I clutch for them, but find nothing there beyond an empty void—my thoughts are like sand in a tornado. All I know is that I’m lying in a sweating bog, thick with mud. Around me, dozens of charred Widows lie motionless in a clearing the size of a battle cruiser. The only smell in the air is the discharge residue from our weapons, and the smoke from a hundred fires.

As I stare in horror at the armoured shadows, battered and broken, the memories creep back; slowly at first, as if the blackened metal is a subconscious trigger for the nightmare of the last two hours. They flicker, then drift in and out of focus. A scattered few, like flotsam on a grey beach. More come, but still I can’t make them out. Eventually, there is a flood, as if somewhere a vast gate has been opened. I choke on them as they run amok in my mind.

We fought and lost here, in this poisoned, barren place. A Battle Group of Widows, dropped into a snare. It had been tranquil at first, a peaceful night where the whirr of servo-gears and the thump of armoured feet on the marshland were the only sounds. Old soldiers know that time well—when the worst is soon to come. Peace is really the eye of the storm.

Memories are not the only things flaring inside my mind. They are accompanied by an exquisite, visceral agony. Inside this armoured machine, my consciousness feels everything, even pain. The Widow is made that way, so the theory goes, because no man-made system can better nature’s own creation: instead of transmitting real-time data to a central processing unit, and arraying that information for us to react to, a Widow feels its environment immediately. Civilian staff we never see, back on the Penrose, tell us war is more efficient that way; it is the quickest way to communicate the Widow’s condition so we can fix a problem, or work around it, and keep fighting. Pain lets you know you’re alive. When you can’t feel anything, that’s when you know you’ve checked out and you’re asleep.

So dying still hurts like a bastard, just like real life.

Death used to be a part of war. The real soldiers, the ones who got through it and came out the other side, accepted they were already dead. They knew they were ghosts sliding through the fog, waiting for the final door to some other, quieter place. Death was a release from the horror.

Not for me. Not for any of us. Now it’s not even a notch on our prison walls.

Death is when we sleep, and they don’t wait long before they wake us up. We fight, we die; and when we wake, we fight again. There’s no hiatus, no time to breathe. In fact, I doubt time now has any meaning for us—I don’t even know what the date is. I guess I don’t need to know. We are all that stands between humanity and its final genocide, possibly its extinction. None of us can afford to lose focus.

So, really, who gives a shit what day it is?

The Widows are who we are now. They are everything we know.

The memories coalesce as my mind processes them, and eventually I remember: they knew we were coming. They were waiting for us; silently, patiently. They knew we could not possibly win—that their ambush was perfect and they could exploit weaknesses in our armour. Before our feet even touched the bog, we had already lost.

But I’m still here. The thought strikes me suddenly. I should’ve passed, but I haven’t. I’m still in the same Widow: I can feel its unique signature on my consciousness. I know it as well as I might once have known the wrinkles on my old skin. I’ve had to acclimatise to the Widow; get to know its mechanical quirks and idiosyncrasies and allow its synapses to fit into mine. This armoured machine driven by my mind is no stranger to me.

The human body is a beautiful, frail thing. It was never meant for war, it was meant to be enjoyed—to savour chargrilled steak and cold beer after a day climbing waterfalls of ice and frozen rock; to make love on fine, sandy beaches, feeling the warm sun on its soft skin. To be moved by poetry, music, art. Yet I hardly remember any of those things—they are the ghosts of distant memories that never linger long enough for me to relive them. Maybe that’s a good thing—memories of my past life could only confuse and distract. Everything is different now. That life is gone forever.

Our first contact with a species other than our own taught us how small and insignificant we are in the endless silence of space. There’s a reason it’s so fucking black, a guy from my unit once said. Take the hint. Of course we couldn’t—it’s not in our nature. We spread our wings and formed new colonies on other planets and suddenly became more vulnerable than we had ever been before. There were some who said, had we stayed on Earth and limited our exploration of the stars, They would never have come. I don’t believe that—I think They would have come anyway. It’s in Their nature, but everyone needs someone to blame. I focus my hate on Them, of course, but I’m an uncomplicated warrior—hating the enemy is part of the process. It’s an unexpected shift from our turbulent, warmongering past; at least we’re no longer fighting each other.

We don’t even have a name for Them. They’ve never communicated with us, nor given us any demands. We don’t know why They attacked or what They want from us—although their actions leave no doubt as to their desire for our extinction. Their attack took us completely by surprise. Their first step was to somehow disable every networked computer system on every colony at once—no one knows how. Eight seconds later, thermonuclear warheads—we still have no idea where they were fired from—detonated over every major urban centre. Virtually the whole of humanity was wiped out in that instant. Billions of lives gone.

Then They began the process of occupying each of our colonies, subjugating what remained of us. They relied on machines to do that. We fought back, but there were too few of us left. I doubt They even broke a sweat fending us off.

It’s almost impossible even to see them. They have suits which bend light—an almost perfect camouflage. They dance around their war machines like ghosts and, when we fight them, we fire through specially rigged sensor systems which harness the vague signals emitted by their camouflage and give us something to aim at. We don’t really see Them; we only see where they are. But it’s enough.

As a species, even before the war, we had already experimented with robotics—drones that flew and killed from the anonymity of the skies. When we developed AI, we created robots that could walk and hunt and kill, but they lacked the finesse required for soldiering. The ability to think creatively and to work with the maxim all good soldiers understand: no plan survives contact with the enemy. War is chaos and the AIs were lost inside the vortex.

Three years into the war, someone had the idea of taking the best of both worlds and the Widows were born. I don’t pretend to understand the process, nor do I need to. We are told enough to fight in one: my consciousness is fed into a web of neural-cortex pathways located somewhere inside this armoured machine and, after a few hours acclimating, I become it. If, as we are told, neurological activity and therefore consciousness is no more than a complex series of electrical and chemical signals, and those neurone signals can be isolated and separated from the physical brain, they can be embedded into something else.

My physical body—the flesh, blood and bone that has always contained me—lies elsewhere. I don’t know where; they won’t tell me. It is protected by the most powerful armour there could possibly be: distance and secrecy. If I am ever taken by the enemy, there is nothing I know which can endanger the others.

We don’t even know how a consciousness is collected from a fallen Widow. All we know is that, each time we die, we wake up inside another unit. Someone once told me there was a time when we would wake up inside our own bodies and have some time to recuperate before the next operation. That doesn’t happen any more. The war got harder and now, unrelentingly, we get deployed to fight. It’s all I remember. The last time I have even the vaguest memory of seeing my own body must be more than a decade ago.

Immortality has its downsides.

I try to think back further to work out why I’m still here; I’m desperate for some explanation. How could I have survived? As we reached the clearing, the Battle Group commander sent a small reconnaissance team ahead—myself and another I know only as Johanssen. We moved lightly through the jungle—our Widows are designed for speed and agility rather than the brute strength and firepower of the others—but we neither saw nor heard anything at all, except the ticking rhythm of the jungle.

Until a barrage of explosions lit up the night sky behind us.

By the time we were back at the marsh, every weapon we had firing at the flashes in the darkness that slid between the trees and vines and muddy hollows, the battle had already been lost. Their numbers were too great, ours too small. They were positioned well for their ambush, hidden on the ridgeline above us by the shadows of the jungle’s huge, ancient trees. The Battle Group was overtaken and succumbed. Too many Widows were already down when we reached them—I cannot say how it happened so quickly—all evaporating into the night sky above us. We didn’t weep for them of course; they weren’t dead, just gone from here. But we cursed our failure and what it meant to those we would have to leave behind. As Johanssen and I burst into the clearing, he was cut down in an instant. I fought on, almost to the limits of my reserves, but eventually I too fell. I remember it distinctly now—fire cutting through my armour and hot, searing pain. Then nothing.

But none of this explains why I am still here—why I am not back on board the Penrose, inside another Widow. Ready to come back down and fight again.

I’m about to push myself off the ground when I realise I might not be alone. I run a scan of the area, but it picks up nothing. No heat signatures, no movement; nothing to indicate an immediate threat. There are still residual half-life radioisotope emissions. Not unusual, even after so many years, and even hundreds of miles from the sites of the worst explosions. It’s another reason the Widow is so effective in these colonies: it has no living tissue to be affected by fallout.

I stay on the ground, remaining perfectly still, and run a systems check. The Widow is functioning well enough, although power plant supply is intermittent. It won’t immediately affect the Widow’s systems, but long-term, it will become a problem. Ammunition reserves are almost fully depleted. I have enough for a handful of two-second bursts. Maybe others will have more.

Why am I still here? The rest of them are gone. Why haven’t they pulled me out with the others? The questions boil in my mind and I have to force myself to focus on surviving. I know very little about the colony on this planet. Our mission parameters were very specific. Attack an enemy compound. Another Widow Battle Group had been tasked to deal with any human prisoners recovered. The Battle Group commander wouldn’t have been told much more, just what he needed to know for the mission. The rest of us are always told just enough to fight. That’s the way our mission parameters work—a closed-cell network so we have nothing to give to the enemy.

Right now, it leaves me nowhere. Comms are down: there is no uplink with the Penrose. Maybe that’s why I haven’t been disconnected and pulled out. I’m in a basin and it’s conceivable the ridgeline is having some effect on the uplink, causing some unexplained electromagnetic corruption of the signal. It seems unlikely, but I get the feeling that moving to higher ground might help. It will sure as hell tell me a little more about the planet, and maybe even the colony.

How did they know we were coming? I suddenly find I can’t stop asking myself that single foolish question. What does it matter now? My priority is to contact the Penrose and get off-planet, preferably with my Widow intact. If possible, the Penrose can evac the other Widows, depending on how hot the area is. Maybe the other Widow Battle Group has had better luck and they still have comms. I somehow doubt it—if They knew we were coming, They probably knew the other Battle Group was coming too. But there might be functioning Widows left. I have to get moving. Sitting in the mud isn’t going to get me anywhere.

This valley is the worst place to be. From above, an attacking force has a clear tactical advantage. Despite this, I have so little power remaining I can’t afford to waste it driving heavy metal up the sodden mountainside. I need to save power for the long climb to the only place I have any hope of a long-range signal getting through the atmospheric interference. I’ve been walking for hours and still the radio signal is being corrupted. I have convinced myself it’s something in the terrain because there is no other explanation.

I cling to the shadows, moving as quickly and quietly as I can. The contours of the landscape have changed. Night has begun to recede as dawn breaks across this hemisphere of the planet. A harsh and wearying sepia light spills from the sky, even though the sun is imprisoned behind a thick pall of ash-coloured cloud. The once-bright hues of the landscape are muted and washed out—the jungle’s green seems more like grey, and the rolling steppes ahead are stained an insipid yellow. The mountains are vast, sprawling waves of lustreless amber, sage and grey that rise up forever on either side of me like the dunes of an endless desert. Craters of snow huddle in the frozen shadows of the crevasses between them. Down here, in the valley, the grass reaches to my knees. Scattered in between are flashes of white flowers that tremble in the wind. The rain continues to fall in sheets, rolling off the armour in rivulets of glistening silver, but I don’t stop.

For the first time since the drop zone ambush, a red mote appears on my sensor array. A single contact, within my combat sphere, picked up by the proximity sensors arranged all over the Widow’s armoured carapace.

Battle systems hum as they kick into life. A series of automated stadiametric targeting reticles vector across my vision, rotating as they hunt for threats. Every servo, gear and mechanical muscle is flooded with energy in anticipation of an engagement.

I back away, seeking cover in a hollow in the rock behind me. The signal is coming from a ridge directly above and across. The sunrise is angled behind the ridges, so I am protected by the shadows cast by the walls of the shallow depression. It’s the only advantage of being down here in the valley.

The signal moves. Not towards me, not down into the valley, but along the ridge.

The purr of my railgun as it cycles comforts me, readying itself, but the knowledge that I have only a few seconds of ammunition fills me with dread. I’m not afraid of dying—I’ve died too many times to feel anything like a fear of death—but I am terrified of failing. If I am caught, the Widows in the marshland drop zone are lost, and we can ill afford to lose so many. I am consumed by a yearning to make it to the second Battle Group. I have convinced myself I can save those machines and help them free those who have been enslaved by the enemy.

It is my only purpose. I must not fail.

The signal disappears.

I wait to see if it is truly gone, if I am still in immediate danger. As I scan the horizon of the ridges which run either side of me, the slender green reticles dart across the rock and ice like insects on carrion. But they flicker and lose focus as they move, and I have to accept that this might be yet more interference. I am more than concerned—if the automated targeting systems are failing, then I may not even be able to see the enemy.

I wait silently, sure there will be more signals; that the first has found me and is telling others.

But there’s nothing.

I know it’s bad judgement, but I decide to make some ground instead of waiting any longer.

I have hardly moved from the hollow when I catch a flash of colour amidst the grass—a subtle glint of orange which stands out against the white and green. Was it there before? How could I not see it? Inexplicably, I am drawn to it and almost without realising, I find myself next to it. I reach down and gently part the grass to see it better. It’s a flower. It captivates me and, for a moment, I can do nothing except stare at it.

Something flickers in the back of my mind. An image I can almost remember, but which remains out of focus. It is familiar—warm, soft, loving. The touch of soft lips on my own. That same flower, a face hidden behind it and framed by long, brown hair which smells of a woman’s perfume and summer coffee beans. Its sudden familiarity chokes me.

I am on my knees before I realise what’s happening. My consciousness is still inside the Widow, but suddenly the pathways through which it surges are twisting and bucking, trying to kick it free. The Widow is suddenly alien to me. It wants me out. I fight to control it—I’ve never seen it react this way before, as though I am a virus and its immune system is gathering to eradicate me.

As suddenly as it began, the Widow stops fighting. Familiar sensations charge through my muscles and I know I am not alone. I was wrong to move prematurely. Whatever the Widow’s problem, it has been overridden. It is now more concerned with the immediate danger it has detected. Dozens of red motes dance on the periphery of my vision, but the targeting reticles are struggling with the interference.

I huddle into the shadows and bring my right arm up. The weapon begins to purr as it cycles again. I tell myself I need to make that few seconds of ammunition count. But for what? What will I achieve except a few more dead in a war where billions have already died? There are dozens of signals all around, lining the ridges which encircle me. I look up and see the familiar flashes of light.

They are here.

The Widow feels cumbersome in my mind. I haven’t passed, because I am not dead. I understand that, but there’s something else happening, something I don’t understand. The Widow is different. It’s been coming, I know—a change I have noticed more and more since I hiked away from the jungle and into this valley. The growing interference messing with the core Visual Combat systems. Coupled with this momentary collapse in our symbiosis—something which is unheard of—the Widow seems more of a stranger to me than it has ever been; even more so than when I first passed into it, weeks ago.

Worse, it is now beginning to feel physically sluggish. I have to work harder to make it respond to my imagined movements—as if it is fighting me.

If this is to be my last stand, the Widow seems as much my enemy as They are.

The signals surround me, darting along each ridge. The interference is increasing. The Widow is reacting intermittently to my neural commands, as if only some are getting through. As though the pathways are too crowded, and commands are jammed into too narrow a conduit. Or everything is confused because my instincts are conveyed in a newly foreign language.

I’m stumbling more than running; mechanical agility is gone. Now all I care about is putting distance between myself and those massing blood-red motes.

I want to head for higher ground to give myself some sort of tactical advantage. If they attack from above—firing into this cauldron of rock and ice—I will have no way to defend myself. Somehow, I need to force them into a funnel; to make them attack me from only one direction, or at least narrow the field of fire. I need to use the terrain to make that happen. If this is to be my last stand, the only way I can do that is to find a natural feature which prevents an attack from every side, and above. The apex of a couloir, or the top of a valley between ridges or spurs. I have to climb.

Servos are listless and unresponsive, allowing the malaise creeping across the Widow to fester.

I check the long-range transmitter on the Widow again, but still the interference is too great. Suddenly, the unthinkable occurs to me—what happens if I run out of power? I know my consciousness remains with the Widow, locked in a reserve power unit, using minimal power to maintain itself. That power could last for years, but if the suit is destroyed completely, including that tiny reserve unit, and there is no signal off-planet…

Will I die forever? Or will they somehow replicate my consciousness and place me into another Widow? Am I saved? Backed up like some artificial intelligence? A true machine. It has never mattered before—I have never before lost contact.

Suddenly, I wonder who I really am.

I am climbing feverishly now, a new fear burning inside me. My unknown future is a fog concealing a vast abyss beneath my feet, each step taking me closer to an endless, desolate void.

I thought I would welcome true death if it ever came—respite from this relentless war. But now, I am afraid.

I stop dead when I see him.

For a moment, what I see standing there in front of me makes no sense. I cannot move. All I can do is stare.

It’s a boy.

He is no more than a young teenager, perhaps fourteen or fifteen. In his hands he clutches a rifle; a pistol and a knife are tucked into his belt. His heart is beating fast—I can see a holographic representation of it and a list of vital signs scrolling to one side of my vision. He is afraid.

I can see he has radiation sickness, but it has been controlled by medication. Cancerous growths have eaten away at some of his internal organs, but they are not currently spreading. He is malnourished, but otherwise fit.

His dress confuses me. He is clothed in thick wool trousers, boots, a thick jumper and a scarf wrapped around his neck. Over all that is a long coat. All of it is dirty and somewhat ragged; well used, but cared for.

He does not have the appearance of a slave, or a prisoner.

The rifle comes up, but it is far too slow and languid. Even in this state, a Widow is quicker—the neural pathways carry the electrical and chemical signals more swiftly than a human body can and the servos and gears augment the speed of my movements. I reach out and, simultaneously, edge to one side. A metal fist closes around the forestock of the rifle; I feel the vibrations of the bullet as it spirals through the barrel and explodes out of the muzzle at more than a thousand metres per second. It surges past my face, spinning in the air and cutting its deadly path, before it is gone.

I pull easily, ripping the rifle away from him.

I cannot understand why he has fired on me; why he would attack me at all. Across the colonies, Widows are renowned, legendary even. We are all that stands between the human race and its extinction. We are told of Widows’ successes—of missions that have freed thousands, if not tens of thousands, of human lives. These reports add to our own. Whilst their weapons of war are also machines, they look nothing like Widows. This boy should know what I am. All of humanity knows what I am.

Yet he is already scrambling back, reaching for the pistol. Why? my mind screams to me. What are you doing? I am not the enemy!

The pistol is unlikely to penetrate the strongest parts of my armour, but there are weak points in every carapace. I cannot risk failure because of a misunderstanding borne of fear and desperation.

I strike the boy once across the face. It sickens me to do it, but I have to put him down. My fist opens up a gash across his cheekbone and fractures it. The tiny fissures appear in my vision—X-rays of the bone beneath the bloodied skin. He stumbles and falls, head turning away and dropping quickly; his legs crumple beneath him and I know he is unconscious.

What now? My mind is racing. The signals are closing in on me, but I cannot leave this boy behind. It will drain more of my power reserves to carry him—perhaps an extra fifteen percent to haul the sixty kilos over my shoulder. I will move more slowly, and react more sluggishly to threats, with that burden. Yet, I cannot leave him here. Somehow he escaped captivity. Found clothes and weapons—how, I do not know and cannot fathom—but to leave him here would be to erase the success of that defiance, and condemn him either to a very real death, or many more years of servitude. He does not deserve that.

I reach down, gently slip my arm around his waist, and lift him over my shoulder. I know that this action alone might lead to his death, and my failure, but I cannot leave him. I sling the rifle too—if I tear the trigger guard away, I can fire it—and then I run.

The signals are close now, a noose tightening around my neck, and there is only one way through. A small gap in the snare which is closing around me. No—us. I’m not alone anymore, and for a moment I draw some comfort from the human contact and the renewed sense of purpose it brings me. If I can get him to the other Battle Group, then my mission will not have been a failure. Saving even one precious life is a success and now it is all I care about.

A reason not to die.

The boy stirs and lets out a soft moan. When he wakes, he will struggle. I don’t understand why—what threat he sees in me—but I have to assume he will continue to misunderstand who is now carrying him over a shoulder. I am running as quickly as my power levels will allow, glancing all around me. I want to ensure that no projectile fired at me can hit the boy, so, as I run, I analyse line-of-sight trajectories and shift his weight left and right to minimise the risk he might be hit. It’s a small percentage tactic, but I do it anyway.

I hear him cry out, and I know he’s awake.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” I say to him, but the Widow’s voice is hollow and metallic—a device for the communication of words, not emotion or tone as human vocal cords would be capable of. It sounds like a machine, because that’s what it is. There is nothing comforting about it, and I know it might even deepen the boy’s fear.

He shouts again and struggles. I am stronger than he—a bioengineered marriage of servos and gears and armoured alloy—but I have to be careful. I do not have a supercomputer for a brain, and it is possible that I will overcompensate and he will escape. Or I’ll undercompensate and I’ll break a bone or snap a tendon.

So I repeat, despite the empty emotion in the voice, “I am not going to hurt you. There are threats coming for us—they are all around us—and you need to let me concentrate.”

The boy takes in a breath, and I can feel him tense. For a moment, I think he might say something, but he falls silent. The pistol is still in his belt. It could be a threat, to a small extent, were he to reach for it without my knowing. But I am able to feel him moving, and it is pressed against my chest. For now, I doubt he could reach it. The knife is little threat to me. If he attacked me with it as I moved, I could easily stop him before he did any real damage. I need him to be armed when They come. When he sees them, I have to bank on him realising I am not a threat to him.

And that he will need to fight again.

I reach the base of the spur and charge up it. My footing is sure enough, despite the jumbled signals I know the Widow is receiving from me. I have grown accustomed to the new regime in the suit’s neural cortex, and I am reasonably able to compensate for problems as they occur.

The spur steepens, the gradient quickly becoming more like vertical with every step; I know that my momentum will slow, and I will soon have to climb instead. I accept a loss of speed, and shift the boy from my shoulder, dropping him slightly so his chest is against mine. This movement brings his face into my field of vision, and I feel a pang of guilt at the bloodied gash on his check and the swelling around it. His eyes carry only rage and hate, but I cannot understand why.

The first projectile thumps into the joint in my knee, and pain explodes across my neural cortex. I stumble and have to reach out with my free hand, searching for rock to grab onto, otherwise I know I will fall.

A binary waterfall cascades before my eyes—a stream of information updating me on every system: a visual, diagrammatical representation of the damage to the gears and servos on my right knee joint, accompanied by the technical data I would need if I had the time to repair it. But I don’t, so I ignore it and keep climbing. The pain rushes over me in waves, but I have been trained to ignore it. It doesn’t make me feel nauseous as it might have done were I to be in a body of flesh and bone, a human body; instead it is a series of sensory signals which approximate pain, but which I have been trained to filter, to an extent. Any more than that, that is to say dampening the pain, and it would be useless to us. We need to feel it, be alerted to it and not able to ignore it, but not be overwhelmed by it.

I continue to climb as the second projectile hits, this time impacting the shoulder. It strikes a glancing blow and whistles off into the sky, and I can see the damage is superficial.

I scan the flanks of the rock face above me, and the apex of the couloir is not far. With the boy balanced against my shoulder, protected by my body from the projectiles kicking off the rock around us, I cannot return fire. I know that if I try, he might fall. Moreover, I’ll waste time on the climb. Better that I reach the apex, and put him behind me. Then I can turn and fight with the terrain in our favour. When we have some cover, and they will be forced to come and get us.

And I can attack through a narrow field of fire—conserve my ammunition.

Another projectile slams into me, in the back around the location of the spine of the Widow. Unlike a human body, the Widow’s spine is a mechanical entity and well armoured. There are no vital neural pathways in the spine—they are spread throughout the suit’s interior, rather than grouped together in one vulnerable column.

However, the projectile has hit hard, and caused considerable damage to my ability to twist and pivot at the waist. I dampen the pain as much as I can, but climbing becomes harder and slower. I can see the apex now, perhaps fifty metres away. A cornice of snow hangs over it, which will give me minimal but acceptable cover from above. There is a depression in the rock where I can put the boy and still have cover enough to fight from.

Two more projectiles hit before I reach it, and the pain suffuses almost every fibre of the suit. Red alarms flash all over my field of vision and I shunt them aside so I can see what I need to see, but it’s too much. There’s only one choice left.

I mentally shift to the Terminal Emergency Mode. The pain dampens further as a cleansing wave washes over me. The scintillating red warnings subside to duller, smaller throbs to the edge of my vision. We are supposed to use this mode only as a last resort, when we know we’re about to check out. It is intended to ensure we can fight without hindrance, knowing we have very little time left. It won’t last for long—it’s too dangerous to trust a soldier to be able to ignore the warnings of pain. But it might give me an edge.

Like everything else, it doesn’t function as it should, but it’s enough.

I lay the boy down, and read the fear in his eyes. “Stay behind me,” I say. “I’ll protect you as long as I can. When I’m gone, pretend to be dead. I don’t know if it will work, but that’s the only chance you have.”

And suddenly there is only sadness in his eyes. “Don’t fight,” the boy says.

I’m so dumbfounded by the words he utters, I can’t respond. I turn away from him and settle into a stance that will give me stability when I fire.

The first shapes begin to ascend the spurs either side of the couloir. But these are not the familiar hazes I am used to fighting. So much has changed with the Widow, I am hardly surprised. Now, instead, through the dusty, flickering sheen of my vision, I can see actual shapes. I have never been close to one of them before and I wonder if I am about to see what They look like—if the camouflage loses effectiveness up close. Previously, I have killed them only from a distance, and have never encountered one of them close enough to kill them with my hands.

But as they climb, I can see the shapes are not alien. They are as familiar to me as anything could ever be. They are human.

Three of them perch on the edges of the rock around me.

“Shut him down,” I hear one of them say.

I watch through a flickering veil as another taps away at what appears to be a mobile computer terminal. I see some kind of aerial sticking up from it.

Then there is nothing.

“You can’t move,” a man says to me. His face is gaunt and pockmarked with radiation burns. Where one of his ears should be is a mess of pink scar tissue. He wears wire-rimmed spectacles for his eyes, one arm of which has been duct-taped. They are held in place by a canvas strap. His teeth are yellowed and some are chipped or missing. “We’ve seen to that. But if you try, then I’ll have them shut you down again. Do you understand?”

I don’t, of course; I don’t understand any of this. Those words have jolted me out of a silent darkness. They are the first things I remember since these people came for me on the mountain.

I don’t even know where I am.

But I know I have to cooperate, because I want to understand, and these people must have some answers. So, instead of throwing questions at him, an urge which almost overwhelms me, I simply say, “Yes.”

He’s right too—almost all systems are on standby or shut down. I cannot move at all. But I can see him.

“Do you know what planet you are on?”

“No,” I reply. This is the truth. “We aren’t told much before a drop, in case we’re taken by the enemy. We’re told enough to enable us to fight. I don’t…” I fumble for the right word. “I don’t recognise the landscape of this place. From before the war.” This last part might be a lie. I am not ready to tell him about the flower. I don’t even know if the memory was real, but I cling to it as if it is the only hint I have of who I used to be. Here, like this, it means everything to me.

“This is Sargasso,” he says. “Do you know how many more there are of you?”

There are all sorts of military reasons not to tell him, but I need to win his trust; to convince him that I have no desire to hurt him. “My Battle Group was ambushed in a marsh near the jungle—that was the drop zone. They knew we were coming. I was hit there and I should have passed, but I never did. I can’t make contact with the Penrose. I think the interference is atmospheric.”

I see a twitch at the corners of his mouth that might have been a smile. “The Penrose?” he asks, and then nods, as if the ship is familiar to him. “How many?”

“There were thirty in the Battle Group. The Widows were still lying in the marsh when I left.”

“Who attacked you?”

I am stunned by the question. “Them,” I say. I doubt the mechanical voice coveys my confusion. “They did. Who else?”

Another voice comes from behind me. I cannot see the speaker. It is a feminine voice, barely above a whisper: “He doesn’t know,” she says, and I detect something like triumph in her tone. “None of them know. They don’t understand what is happening to them.”

“We don’t know that yet,” the man snaps, not even looking at her; as if in speaking she has revealed some closely guarded secret. “Quiet, woman, or this cannot work.”

“What is happening to us?” I offer, not wanting to anger him. “What do—”

But the man cuts me off. “Shut him down,” he says.

And I am gone.

“Are you awake?” The same man. The same position as before. I detect subtle differences in the light, and the hum of the bulb. I don’t know how much time has passed.

“Yes,” I say.

“When you fight…Them…” He almost trips on the word as he searches for it, as though he does not understand it. His reaction confuses me. “What do you see?”

“The same as you,” I reply, growing frustrated. “Their camouflage systems bend light, but you must know that.”

The man turns away and nods to someone out of my vision.

“Are you awake?”

“You need to stop doing that,” I growl. Although, in reality, I probably don’t growl at all.

There is a different twitch at the corner of the man’s mouth, accompanied by a slight tightening of his expression. “You need to listen to me very carefully,” he says. “The aliens don’t have any camouflage, at least not as you describe it. That’s because you’ve never seen one. If you have, it’s been removed from your memory.”

“We are wasting time—”

“Don’t speak, just listen. This is going to be hard for you to hear.” He pauses and stares at me. He is staring at a machine, I know that, and he cannot see the confusion and fear which is surging through me right now. There is no way to express it across the still, metal features which now contain the essence of me. “You have been fighting alongside them, not against them.”

“You’ve got it wrong…” I don’t understand what he means.

“No,” he replies and something wet glistens in the pits of his eyes. “They hide your targets from your sight through a series of scanning systems which blur them artificially on your internal spectral retinas. They explain this to you by reference to a sophisticated camouflage mechanism. You’re not the first to say that. Do you remember anything of your human life, before?”

“Not much of it.” I choke on the words. “Maybe…snatches. All I remember is fighting inside Widows.”

The man nods his understanding. “Yes, that’s what you call them, right? Widows.”

I don’t want to ask the question which seethes in my mind, but I know I have to. All I want is to avoid the truth, but I know I can’t. “Who have been my targets?”

“Us. The rest of humanity.”

At first, I cannot comprehend the truth of his words, but slowly, inexorably, I realise he is right. It makes perfect sense to me, as though a veil has been pulled away from my eyes. I should have seen it before. How could I have been so blind? The camouflage that hides our real targets; the paltry amount we are told about our objectives when we fight. The dearth of our own human memories and the negligible contact we have with each other outside of battle—so we cannot question what is happening to us. We are the perfect weapons. Desperate and utterly focused, as we fight for what we believe is our very existence. Killing other human beings is what men have done for thousands of years. All our military training and experience has been honed for that purpose. Who better to do it than us, even subconsciously?

And we’re expendable.

Before I can scream, before my mind collapses under the weight of that understanding, the man looks away to someone out of my field of vision, and this time I am thankful for the darkness.

My body no longer exists. I’m sure of that now. Even if it did, my soul was never to be reunited with it. All that remains of me is contained within this alien prison, constructed from a metal alloy I can’t even identify. I’ve spent most of my life slaughtering the beleaguered remains of my own kind. I am hated by them—a nightmare. There is no punishment that befits my crimes. I cannot claim I was unaware; I should have fought to bring myself to the surface. Instead, as They knew I would, I revelled in my immortality. I lusted for the glory of heroism. I am death, but I cannot die.

“We don’t know much, of course,” he says once he wakes me again. He studies me as he speaks, as if he searching for an indication of something human—a movement of my armoured body suggestive of an emotional response; a flicker of something in the spectral retinal units which are my eyes, to indicate perhaps a soul. “We don’t know how they transmit the consciousness of those fighting in the armour when they…die. Nor do we know where their bodies are kept. Mostly, it’s been trial and error. Captured technology, reverse-engineering, experimenting with workarounds. Using whatever we can to find out as much as we can.”

“When did you know it was us? Driving the Widows?”

“Quite quickly. People reacted differently to that knowledge. Some were convinced you knew what you were doing—that you had chosen your side deliberately to save yourselves. When we found out more and realised what was happening, it split people. I think many were angry that you didn’t fight to find…yourselves. To realise what it was you were doing.”

I look away from him. I find it strange that They would allow me to feel emotion inside a Widow, and suddenly wish I was even more machine than I am. “Everyone needs someone to blame.”

The man nods. I can see he wants to believe me, but I wonder if he has lost someone to weapons fired by one of my kind. “Until recently,” he says quietly, “we haven’t been able to do much to stop you. But we attacked a compound—months were spent planning it. I can’t tell you much. We don’t know what you might say, if we lose you. We managed to…steal some technology that will assist us. That’s how we can shut down your systems. Not all of them, and not all of the time, but it’s given us an advantage.” He hesitates and looks away from me, and immediately I realise why.

“I understand.” He’s right to be cautious of me. I am still a threat to everyone here. If I am taken, there is no way I can keep any of this from Them. I wonder, in fact, whether any of it is being transmitted somehow right now, but the man must understand my concern, because he speaks quickly.

“There’s no way they can get to you remotely,” he says. “Not now. That part of your system is gone. Now, they would have to come and get you. That’s why we need you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t tell you that,” he says. “But you will need to fight again.”

“I have virtually no ammunition left.”

“That won’t be a problem.” He stands and beckons for me to follow him. We walk along tight corridors and I am forced to duck down to avoid phalanxes of pipes and low-slung steel grating. The place has the look of an industrial plant, but my sensors tell me I am underground.

As I walk, people come out to stare at me. Their faces tell different stories: some speak only of hate, others of fear; none welcomes the enemy walking among them. We walk like that until we reach a set of wide doors, guarded by two men with rifles. They level their weapons at me as I approach and, for a moment, I wonder if in fact this is their retribution. That I will need to fight to satisfy some need for justice; for revenge. Perhaps my broken body on a dirt floor is what these people need in order to summon the resolve to fight again. I find myself willing to give it.

Instead, the armed men separate and open the doors. My interrogator beckons me, and I duck down and step into the room. I am perched on a ledge, wide yet still barely enough to hold me, that runs around the circumference of a huge room. In the vast cavern beneath me stand twenty-nine Widows. My Battle Group. Still and silent monsters in the darkness.

“Now, we can change the way we fight back,” the man says quietly.

“Why didn’t you stop the others from passing?”

“That’s what you call it? When they remove your consciousness? You call it passing?”

I shrug, and find it an alien, cumbersome movement. But I have seen others do it and want to appear human. “That’s what They call it.”

“Right. I see.” He nods absently, staring down at the other Widows. “With them, we couldn’t get close enough.”

“So how did you stop me?”

“You came from the jungle. The one you were with passed before we could get in range. You were alone then, and less of a threat. We had more time.”

A question forms in my mind. I am linked to Them—my consciousness is their weapon. Whatever this man tells me puts these people at risk. “Can you continue to stop me?” I ask.

The man stares at me, again searching my armoured face for something. “We can remove the link permanently,” he says finally.

“Then, if I die…”

“You’ll really be dead.”

“Remove it,” I say. “There’s one more thing.”

The man looks at me, waiting.

“Where’s the boy?”

It must be ridiculous to see this huge, armoured demon hulking over a willowy boy. He doesn’t know what to think; I can see that. His eyes are a conflicted chaos of hate and hope. My kind have been in his nightmares for almost all of his young life—stripping away the layers of humanity for over ten years, leaving behind a bloodied, exhausted mess incapable of fighting yet desperate to survive. Somehow there is resistance—I cannot understand how.

I don’t have any words to express my grief at what I have done, and I doubt he would accept them. I am not sure why I wanted to see him, but I will always remember the defiance written across his face.

He stares at me for a long time, before he hands me a photograph that has become worn at the edges. I look at it: the colours are faded, but I can see a young girl on a swing, the whole of her face released to joy.

“I want you to know,” the boy says quietly, never taking his eyes from mine. “One of your kind killed my sister. She was eight years old.”

I nod. I cannot take my gaze away from the girl’s face. I want to be able to say something, but what can I say? An apology would bring this boy no solace, and I am not even sure I can bring myself to give it. It would feel so hollow and meaningless. I don’t know why he feels he has to show me this—perhaps to force me to share his grief, or to close a circle and give him someone against whom he can focus his anger.

“I want to not blame you,” he continues. “Or even to forgive you. But all I can do is hate you.”

The photograph is steady in my hands because emotion does not translate into a physical reaction as it would in a human body. The agony of this moment does not surface through my stoic metal body. I have never felt more alien. “I understand,” is all I can say.

The boy swallows and nods. “What will you do now?” he asks.

I am still staring at the photograph when I say only this: “Seek retribution.” Fighting is all I’ve ever known. Turning my rage on Them is the only way I can begin to serve my sentence. I know the pain will never recede.

He nods again, and turns away from me, vanishing into the steam behind him. For a while, I watch the yellow light wash my armour, and I wish it were able to take away my sins.

“This is the compound,” my interrogator explains. Although I know his face—and that likely means that if I am captured They will too—I want to know as little else about him, or others, as possible. I never ask him his name, and I only deal with him. He shows me our objective on a wide, curved screen set up in a large room containing only us. I know others are listening to our conversation. When we go in, I will not be alone.

“There are tanks and heavy artillery. All mechanised and fully automated. Driven by sentient artificial intelligence. Without you…” he pauses and looks at me. “We couldn’t hit the place and not take substantial casualties. Too many to make the operation viable.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Create a distraction,” he says. “Ensure their machines are focused on you, rather than the small team which will infiltrate the compound. Take out as many as you can.”

“I guess it’s up to me how I do that?”

The twitch, that ephemeral half-smile, appears and is gone. “Of course. We will signal you when the team is out and you can use whatever means at your disposal to escape.”

I don’t want to know what it is his team seeks, but there is one thing I do want. “The boy stays here,” I say.

My interrogator stares at me, then shakes his head. “We don’t have the resources for that kind of sentimentality,” he says, his eyes scanning my empty face. “We have all lost someone to men like you—there are plenty of collaborators. The boy is not unique in that. Everyone has a part to play now. We all have to fight.”

I turn to him and loom over his small, fragile frame. I don’t want to threaten him, but I will. “He will distract me. It’s a tactical mistake.” I wait there for a moment, allowing my physical presence to sink in, then I turn away. “I’m not going to say it again. It’s your choice.”

He doesn’t want to agree, I can see that. His heart rate is elevated, and sweat gathers on his temples. His face flushes hot. He doesn’t like being told what to do by someone like me—a collaborator. However, I know he understands, which is why he eventually agrees. He needs me.

We discuss the attack for nearly three hours, going over every detail intricately. He is clever and resourceful, and has designed every nuance of the assault to ensure as many of his people get out alive as possible. I am examining the maps one last time when he asks me: “What do they tell you? About the attack and what the colonies are like now?”

I explain what we are told—about the surprise attacks on our networked computer systems, and the warheads launched on our cities, and about what little I know about the Widows—and he nods as he listens, but otherwise his face is strangely expressionless. When I have finished, he tilts his head slightly, and he blinks a few times before he speaks again.

“It isn’t like that everywhere,” he says. “Not every colony was nuked. Destroying us wasn’t their objective. I think the picture They painted was intended to control you, to make you fight—to put your back against the wall.”

He stares again at the maps laid out in front of us and, for a little while, he is silent. When he speaks again, it is quietly and deliberately. I can detect the tremor in his voice, the edge to his words. He is trying to prevent emotion from overwhelming him. “Their objective was always to annex the human race—to dominate us, and to acquire our territory and resources. Some of the colonies were destroyed by thermonuclear attacks, this one for example, but most were not. What’s left of humanity—far more than you have been led to believe—is now governed by Them. We were offered a place in their caste system. We have become part of Their empire and must follow Their laws. Those who are able try to continue with their lives as well as they can. Most have been enslaved and put to work. Others collaborate and receive their favour. All of us are, in truth, prisoners.”

“But yours is a path of resistance. That was your choice.”

He looks at me as if he cannot understand my meaning. My words make no sense to him. “Humanity should be free,” he replies.

“Can They be defeated?”

“Does it matter?”

“Everything you do impacts on the rest of humanity.”

“There are reprisals for our actions, yes.”

I say nothing. I have been fighting an unwinnable war for a long time, and I have died a thousand times doing it. Yet, the war I was fighting was different—I stood between humanity and its extermination. But is it better to live a life of subjugation, even enslavement, rather than face extinction?

He wants to say more, but something prevents him. He does not trust me; it’s more than hate for the murders committed by my kind. He’s right not to. Even I don’t know what link there might be between my own thoughts and the Penrose, or wherever it is I have been all this time. There is more to their resistance than I know. More than I want to know. More to this world which is unfolding behind me, out of sight.

So I focus my rage in the only place I know I can.

We have to travel on foot, which means the hike to our insertion points takes several hours. I could move more quickly and, as we get closer, I will; the plan is for me to attack from the opposite side, to distract. Breaking away from the main team will give me the opportunity to scout the terrain and examine the compound. I have seen holographic diagrams and images, so its physical layout will be nothing new, but seeing the reality is always different.

I examine the men and women around me as we move. Most studiously avoid looking at me, set to one side from them as I am, but some cannot prevent themselves from throwing me looks filled with enmity. They don’t want to be fighting alongside me, but they know they cannot win this particular battle without my help. Some are young, some are old. All carry the scars of war on their weathered faces. I see no fear there, but their beating hearts betray the anxiety they are all feeling. Blood vessels are contracting, redirecting the flow to the heart, lungs and muscles. Airways dilate to allow more oxygen into the lungs. Glucose production is increasing. Their bodies know what is coming.

They are better equipped than I expected. Each carries an adaptive combat railgun with under-slung grenade-launchers—smaller, modular versions of my own weapons—as well as bandoliers of grenades. I wonder for a while how they came to be in possession of military hardware, then push those thoughts from my mind.

I have forced myself not to consider the truth as told to me by my interrogator. I cannot say it does not matter to me, because of course it does, but it is not essential to the task ahead. Memories of my past life have always eluded me, and I was always glad they did because they could only serve to take away my focus. The same can be said now of the truth of the war I am fighting—the future of humanity. What is happening on other colonies is irrelevant, I tell myself. There is only one battle at this moment—the one I face right now.

They have five minutes in the compound. My interrogator set the time. If they haven’t found what they need by then, they leave. I don’t know what it is; I don’t want to know.

I reach my own insertion point, ahead of them reaching theirs by around ten minutes. I hunker down and scan the compound from a high ridge. My low-light optical systems give me vision as good as daylight, and magnify the images I’m seeing. A high fence is charged with electricity. Inside, a dozen low buildings, some bigger than others. At one end sits a phalanx of what look like tanks—sleek, dark armoured monsters, resting silently, each with a single long turret from which a host of gun barrels extend. A small dome sits on top, probably housing communications and scanning equipment. Vents project from either side of that wide, black hull. These beasts are an obvious objective. As soon as I enter the compound and start shooting, they’ll wake up and take me down. I might as well hit them first.

A clutch of red motes eventually appear on the periphery of my vision and I know the time has come. The swell of emotional energy in my consciousness is overwhelming. It is a jarring experience—a human reaction to combat which is, for want of any other way to explain it, alien to me. I am afraid, yet charged. I know if I die here then there will be no awakening. My life, such as it was, is over. If I die here, the men and women behind me, readying themselves across the ridge for the most important battle of their lives, will almost certainly lose their lives with me. I have died a thousand times and fought more battles than I can remember. Each of them, the sum of all those experiences, will subconsciously drive every move I make.

I will not fail.

I launch ten grenades high into the night sky on a looping trajectory which, compensating for the wind, will take them right into the tanks and heavy artillery.

Then I run.

The first grenade hits as I reach the perimeter of the compound and break through the fence. The explosion floods the compound with an incandescent white brilliance for a half-second, then vanishes. The armour on the tank it strikes buckles, but it takes a second grenade in the same place to breach it.

At that moment, the other tanks begin to stir. An energy field ripples across them and, as the rest of the grenades come down and the explosions rock the ground beneath my feet, they lift. There is an electromagnetic disturbance beneath them which appears on my retinal imaging as a shimmering, pulsing haze. The turrets on these smooth, armoured beasts whine as they rotate, searching for their enemy. On the other side of the compound, there are twenty men and women who fit that description.

My purpose is to give the tanks just one.

I sprint towards them, the last of the explosions still unfurling as I channel everything I have into the Widow’s legs and jump. I land on the turret of one of the tanks and slam one great fist into the armour, down by the edge of the curvature of the unit.

It yields with the force of the blow, contorting into a twisted dent. I hammer my fist down again and again until the curve of the turret is so warped it stops turning. I jam a grenade into the gap between the turret and the hull.

A proximity alarm screams in my ears and rushes across my field of vision. I jump away as a super-heated torrent of plasma strikes the turret. I am in mid-air when that first tank explodes. Its armour was weakened by the grenades, maybe even my blow; the plasma just finished the job. The force of the detonation punches me violently upwards, and my Widow spins and convulses in the air as it is tossed away like a rag doll. I ignore the cascade of pain that floods my senses as much as I can, but still it stuns me.

I land heavily, not ready for the hit.

In the second-and-a-half it takes me to recover, the other tanks are already gliding like sharks through the compound, kicking up a violent storm of dirt beneath them. The air around the vents shimmers as excess heat is expelled into the night. I have no doubt they have picked up the signals cast by the human fighters. I open fire on one to drag its attention back towards me. The first quarter-second sees a dozen railgun rounds punch into the armour and ricochet away; the next sees the armour contort slightly beneath the onslaught, but hold firm.

The turret turns first, followed by the tank itself as it slowly pivots in place to bring more of its weapons to bear.

I am up and running, keeping the Widow’s automated targeting reticles locked onto the tank’s hull. All I need to do is weaken the armour enough for a grenade to be effective when it hits that weak point.

I don’t stop firing. Steam hisses from the railguns as their cooling systems fight to dissipate the searing heat.

It takes a full second for the turret to find its prey. Me.

Again, the sensors scream and I know I am about to get hit.

I launch two grenades in that half-second before I have to move.

The jet of plasma burns the air as it surges past me. I’ve left it too late; I’m too slow. It clips my shoulder, fusing armour and alien componentry together. The force of it spins me away and I struggle to remain on my feet, but fail.

I hit the ground hard and force myself to roll. Again I have to block out the pain and I know the time will soon come to engage the Terminal Emergency Mode.

The grenades explode behind me.

I come up and spin, guns firing again, but the tank is shuddering. There is a tear in the armour—not much, but it’s enough. The haze beneath it is flickering as though it isn’t functioning smoothly. A pearl of electricity crackles inside.

I concentrate everything I have on the dark space within the tear. Through the swarming smoke, I can see the other tanks slipping away like ghosts. I have to get to them. There is a short cut.

I turn to the nearest building and kick down the door. It buckles under my weight and I charge through it. Truth is, I’m not interested in what’s inside, except to find an exit and cut off the tanks. I have my mission, and all I care about is occupying the enemy’s machines. It doesn’t matter what they are doing in here. That’s someone else’s priority.

Only, it does matter. It matters a great deal.

Inside the building, there are rows and rows of computerised terminals that I do not recognise or understand. Huge mechanical arms hang from the ceiling, interwoven with pistons and hoses. They end in a variety of claws and pincers. There are walls lined with what I think must be tools, although they are unknown to me. Against one wall are a series of chambers with wires and hoses leading away and disappearing into the ceiling.

Inside each is a Widow.

My sensors scream an alert and I don’t have time to consider the ramifications of what I have seen. On the other side of that wall is a tank. If I’ve located it, I have to assume the sensors in that dome on top of the turret have picked me up too. The wall between us won’t protect me.

The door in the other side will come out in front of the tank. I sprint towards it, drop my shoulder. Momentum carries me up to the door and through it, almost as if it weren’t even there. I drop into a roll and pivot. Both railguns are aimed at the tank and firing before I even realise it. Spears of plasma scorch the air and buildings around me as I slide. But I have a new plan—a weakness I’ve seen in the armour. Not much of one, because to exploit it, I need to get underneath. To get to the vents, I need to be right up close.

I hammer through the door of the building next to the tank. The walls explode with shards of concrete and brick as heavy rounds punch through. I’m kicked back by the chaos and I duck down low as it surges over the top of me. This is the only cover I have, but I don’t need to be in here for long. I know what the tank is trying to do; in fact I am banking on it. Banking on the fact it has been watching the way I fight and is trying to predict what I will do next. The human part of me that is left—what I might once have called guile—is my best weapon now.

There’s a door at the other end, about the right distance. I pop a grenade and aim it just next to the door. It explodes, tearing the steel frame apart and kicking the door, contorted, into the street. Heavy rounds blister the air around it and surge through the broken doorway. But I’m not there to be hit. Instead, I’m sprinting through the first door, behind the tank, dropping low, sliding beneath it in the mud and rain. I launch grenade after grenade at those vents and some of them even go in. But it’s too late to stop the slide. I look away as the tank explodes.

The armoured beast sinks to the ground and I try to roll away, but can’t get my left arm out before it collapses onto it. The pain nearly overwhelms me. I engage the Terminal Emergency Mode and dampen every nuance of it I can. The effect is almost instant: artificial and inhuman. Another reminder of what I really am. I try to get the arm out, but the weight of this armoured titan is too much and I cannot lift it.

As I struggle, through a small gap between the hull and the ground, and amidst the billowing plumes of smoke, I see the boy.

He is on his back, scrambling backwards, trying to bring his railgun up. His face is contorted into a rictus of fear and fury, all focused on something out of my field of vision.

On my sensors, there is a single tank headed towards him.

My interrogator lied to me. Of course, what did I expect? I should be furious, but all I can think about is preventing a conclusion to this mission which involves the boy’s broken, bloodied body lying in the mud alongside others.

I scream inside my head, channelling everything I have into my efforts to move the tank’s vast bulk even a little, but it’s too heavy. I jerk my body away hard, again and again, but cannot free myself. I consider digging but the ground is too hard. There is only one way.

I allow myself to access the image of the small girl on the swing, his sister. I take comfort in her beaming smile. Then I bring my right arm over and level the railgun against my left. I turn away—ricochets might conceivably damage my retinal systems, or maybe I can’t watch as I know even the terminal emergency mode won’t dampen this—and I open fire.

The pain is beyond me, made worse by the knowledge there is no coming back from this amputation—no fresh Widow to take away the loss. Sensory data explodes across my vision, angry warnings I can do nothing about. I pull myself away, sick and reeling; I am unsteady, as if I am skating on slick ice.

There is no time for self-pity. You deserve this. The boy does not.

I turn and run hard, pumping round after round into the tank surging towards him. I want to hit it with grenades, anything that might kick through the hull, but I know it will be a waste; that the armour will turn them away without something more.

The boy sees me coming. He keeps firing.

There is no way I can stop the tank firing on him. No way to disable or destroy it before the plasma tears his fragile body into two. I launch into a dive.

I hit him hard, but there’s nothing I can do about that.

I curl him up in my one good arm and allow the momentum of my run, and the weight of the Widow, to do the rest.

We roll for maybe thirty metres, but I keep my arm rigid around him like a cage. There’s no doubt it will hurt him, but it might be enough to save his life.

A cluster of sensors tell me the plasma has struck about the area where the kidneys might be in the human body. They also tell me that dozens of systems in that area have shut down and that my right leg is receiving intermittent signals from the main neural pathways. I can hardly walk, let alone run.

I stumble, half-carrying, half-dragging the boy and head for the cover of one the compound’s low buildings. I know the tank will reach us in seconds.

I throw him down and lean against the wall, trying to formulate a plan.

The clock reads four minutes, eight seconds. Less than a minute and they’re out.

There is only one play left.

I glance down at the boy and wish, in that moment, he could see my face, instead of the demon from his nightmares. But he can’t. “Go now,” I say. “I’ll get you the window you need to escape.”

He knows they can’t make it out without this; he knows I am not coming. I allow myself to believe I can see something approaching forgiveness in his eyes.

I lift the bandolier of grenades from his shoulder, and turn away from him. I slam a reload into my remaining railgun as I turn the corner and open fire.

It was never my intention to escape. As I listened to my interrogator, I could not help but analyse what he was saying and what that meant for the war. When They had finished their bombardment, they occupied what was left of our colonies because we were easily subjugated. Most colonies have been annexed and are now governed by Them, and what is left of humanity exists at Their whim and within Their prison of night.

But the resistance has been able to attack heavily guarded compounds and surgically remove precisely what it needs to control Widows. They were able to disable and attack my Battle Group in the drop zone. They knew we were coming. Their weaponry, even though it is a scarce resource to them, is military in origin. Now, this last raid might begin to turn the tide in the war.

There is only one way the resistance could have obtained all that information and materiel: they have informants in positions of considerable responsibility. If I know this, and if I am captured, then so will They.

There is only one way to protect that information.

I was once an immortal weapon of war, but now I can finally find peace in death. A permanent sleep from which I will never wake—and no more will die by my hand. I have found my retribution. I have given humanity the tools to free itself.

In my mind, I can see an orange flower, moving gently in the breeze as the darkness comes.

I am death.

Yet finally, I am gone.