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

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.