David Weber - The Apocalypse Troll

"Cyborgs?"

"Cyborgs. Machines with organic brains."

"But if the problem was inbred-"

"I didn't say machines with Kanga brains, Ster Aston," she said harshly. "They had prisoners of their own, and they're fantastic biological engineers. They developed a method to build total obedience into an organic brain. Then they operated on their prisoners."

Aston stared at her, stomach heaving as the implications sank in.

"Yes, Ster Aston," she said coldly. "They decided, in your idiom, to set a thief to catch a thief. If humans could out-think and out-fight them, they needed humans of their own. Their cyborgs were never quite as good as having regular humans, and they've never trusted them entirely. Strategy and sensitive research are still in strictly Kanga hands, but tactics and actual combat are another matter. Their cyborgs are completely expendable, and obedience is engineered into them; they can't even argue about being expended, but they're very good at what they do. By now, the Kangas are actually 'farming' to produce them." She looked ill, but her voice was level. "They clone human brains to produce the things that do their fighting against other humans."

"My God," he whispered, holding his cold pipe.

"God had very little to do with it," she said softly, "and the hell of it is that the cyborgs hate us even more than the Kangas do. We're the ones who keep killing them, but, in a sense, we're also related, and it horrifies and disgusts both of us. They're slaves to the Kangas; even if we wanted to, we could never forget that, and they know it. We didn't create them, and we're not the ones who enslaved them, but they know exactly how horrible we find them, and they feel-and share-our hate.

"When we first realized what they were, we tried to overcome our disgust," she said even more softly. "We really tried, but it didn't work. They're fighting machines-by our standards, their human brains are psychopathic, because the Kangas wanted totally obedient, highly skilled, utterly conscienceless killing machines. They got them, too. The first time we cornered some of them and tried to talk to them, they slaughtered our entire contact team-over a hundred people-even though they knew we had enough troops and firepower to exterminate them.

"In two hundred years, every single confrontation with them has ended in death-ours or theirs. They're poor, bastardized monsters, but they are monsters. We can never let ourselves forget that. I think that's why we never call them 'cyborgs.' "

"What do you call them?" he asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

"We call them Trolls, Ster Aston," she said quietly, "and one of them shot down my interceptor and killed my crew. That's what's loose on your planet-and somehow, we have to find it and kill it."

Ice spicules danced on a howling wind. They'd rattled on the tough alloy, at first; now they only burnished a thick and growing cocoon of ice. The metal skin within exactly matched the temperature of its icy coat, and the interior of the hidden vessel was scarcely warmer. The last surviving Troll sent another surge of current through the heat field that kept his light receptors clear as he watched the gray and white and black-rock bitterness of Antarctica.

This place suited him. It was a fitting place to pause and consider. There was no fear of discovery, for there was no life here, no slightest living thing to disturb his gloating triumph, nor did the chance of distant observation concern him. The technology which had surprised his Shirmaksu masters had surprised him, as well, and he had no more data on this world's current capabilities than they did, for all that his organic ancestors had sprung from it. But what had happened gave him a crude benchmark, and his own sensors had confirmed the presence of several hundred small, obviously artificial objects in orbit about it. It seemed that these humans had primitive spacecraft-of a sort, at any rate-and the sheer numbers of satellites, coupled with the humans' extensive (if crude) weaponry and military readiness, argued that there were probably optical and thermal reconnaissance platforms among them. Not that it mattered now. The astonishing rapidity of their response to what had to have been a totally unexpected threat had surprised him as much as it had his masters, however much it galled him to admit that, but they would not surprise him again, and their satellites would not see him here. They couldn't, for there was no longer anything to see, now that his fighter had merged with the ice and snow, and there was no heat to detect, for he had no need of heat.

The moaning wind pleased him in a way he could not have defined even to another of his own kind. It was like a kindred soul-powerful and pitiless. Its icy breath didn't bother him. Indeed, cold and heat were merely abstract concepts to him, as meaningless as weariness and as alien as pity. Pain he understood, for that was how the Shirmaksu "programmed" his kind. Direct stimulation of the pain and pleasure centers communicated displeasure and grudging approval quite well, he thought coldly, savoring his hate anew.

Yet what he felt now was a special sort of pleasure. It hadn't been inflicted upon him; he had won it for himself. It was ... personal.

He watched the wind of the driving blizzard and quivered with a sort of cerebral ecstasy. He was free. Obedience to the Shirmaksu had been engineered into him, reinforced by agonizing training and long habituation, yet there were no Shirmaksu now for him to obey. The cralkhi's missile had done that for him, had snapped the intangible and thus unbreakable chains which had bound him for so long.

The Troll hadn't recognized that immediately. He'd pursued the cralkhi to its death, obedient to his masters' final orders, before he realized there were no more masters. Not that he would have spared the cralkhi even if he had considered the gift it had given him. The cralkhi had been his enemy, its interceptor the only force which might have challenged him, its brain the only source of information which might endanger him. Logic had decreed that the cralkhi must die, but he hadn't needed logic. Hatred was sufficient.

He closed another circuit in the fighter which was his body, and a recorded playback came to life. He gloated as he watched his missiles tracking in on the cralkhi fighter, savoring in memory the eagerness which had filled him as he pursued his wounded prey, knowing the life of its pilot was his to snuff. There had even been a stab of bittersweet regret as he armed his power guns-regret that this moment of supreme triumph must end, that it couldn't be relished forever.

He watched the playback as the interceptor's stern shattered under his fire and his instruments probed for signs of life. He'd followed the plunging wreckage, scanning it carefully as he held it locked in his sights, prepared to blast it into vapor, but there had been no life aboard it, only rapidly dying electronic systems. He'd followed it for a few moments, torn between an atavistic desire to rend and mutilate his prey and a matching need to proclaim his contempt by letting it tumble to destruction without further effort on his part. Disdain had won-disdain and a cold, gloating joy at the thought that the gravity of the very planet the cralkhi had died to save would complete its demolition.

It wasn't until that moment that the incandescent awareness of freedom had struck. That had puzzled him in retrospect ... until he realized that even the hope of self-rule had been cut away by the bio-engineers who'd designed him. The very possibility of independence, however passionately longed for, had been made unthinkable, but now the unthinkable had happened.

The fiery intoxication had been almost too much. It had flared though him like a voltage surge, burning in his brain like the heart of a nova. Free. He was free ... and omnipotent. Free to do anything he wanted. For the first time, he could satisfy his own desires, know that whatever he did was done of his own volition and will.