SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

‘There’s no time,’ Olzan said. ‘Wreck the fuel lines if you have to.’

‘We’re on it, Olzan!’ Vazoya stepped away from Brenn’s side and pushed into Olzan’s face. She glanced at Keldra, standing behind Olzan. ‘Maybe if you and your friend hadn’t taken so long saving your precious artefact—’

‘Too late.’ Brenn’s voice was without emotion.

They all looked to the screen. A jagged shard of rock was hurtling at them out of the darkness. The manoeuvring thrusters were pushing them aside, but not quickly enough.

There was a gut-wrenching impact sound, an impression of flames and of the room’s wall buckling inwards, and then something struck Olzan’s head and he lost consciousness.

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.