Аластер Рейнольдс - The Iron Tactician

‘But not always,’ Merlin said, watching as the boy made up his mind and moved one of the pieces. ‘Part of you knew, or remembered, I think. You’ve been fighting against the lie your whole life. But now you don’t need to. Now you’re free of it.’

Struxer said: ‘We didn’t suspect at first. Even those of us who worked closely with the Tactician were encouraged to think of it as a machine, an artificial intelligence. The medical staff who were involved in the initial work were either dead or sworn to silence, and the Tactician rarely needed any outside intervention. But there were always rumours. Technicians who had seen too much, glimpsed a little too far into the heart of it. Others – like myself – who started to doubt the accepted version of events, this easy story of a dramatic breakthrough in artificial intelligence. I began to…question. Why had the enemy never made a similar advancement? Why had we never repeated our success? But the thing that finally settled it for me was the Tactician itself. We who were the closest to it… we sensed the changes.’

‘Changes?’ Baskin asked.

‘A growing disenchantment with war. A refusal to offer the simple forecasts our military leaders craved. The Tactian’s advice was becoming… quixotic. Unreliable. We adjusted for it, placed less weight on its predictions and simulations. But slowly those of us who were close to it realised that the Tactician was trying to engineer peace, not war.’

‘Peace is what we’ve always striven for,’ Baskin said.

‘But by one means, total victory,’ Struxer said. ‘But the Tactician no longer considered such an outcome desirable. The boy who dreamed of war had grown up, Prince. The boy had started to develop the one thing the surgeons never allowed for.’

‘A conscience,’ Merlin said. ‘A sense of regret.’

The boy froze between one move and the next. He turned to face the door, his eyes searching. He was small-boned, wearing a soldier’s costume tailored for a child.

‘We’re here,’ Struxer said, raising a hand by way of reassurance. ‘Your friends. Merlin spoke to you before, do you remember?’

The boy looked distracted. He moved a piece from one position to another, angrily.

‘You should go,’ he said. ‘I don’t want anyone here today. I’m going to make these armies fight each other so badly they’ll never want to fight again.’

Merlin was the first to step into the room. He approached the boy carefully, picking his way through the gaps in the regiments. They were toy soldiers, but he could well imagine that each piece had some direct and logical correspondence in the fleets engaging near Mundar, as well as Mundar’s own defenses.

‘Prince,’ he said, stooping down with his hands on his knees. ‘You don’t have to do this. Not any more. I know you want something other than war. It’s just that they keep trying to force you into playing the same games, don’t they?’

‘When he didn’t give the military planners the forecasts they wanted,’ Struxer said, ‘they tried to coerce him by other means. Electronic persuasion. Direct stimulation of his nervous system.’

‘You mean, torture,’ Merlin said.

‘No,’ Baskin said. ‘That’s not how it was. The Tactician was a machine… just a machine.’

‘It was never that,’ Merlin replied.

‘I knew what needed to be done,’ Struxer said. ‘It was a long game, of course. But then the Tactician’s strength has always been in long games. I defected first, joined the brigands here in Mundar, and only then did we start putting in place our plans to take the Tactician.’

‘Then it was never about holding him to ransom,’ Merlin said.

‘No,’ Struxer said. ‘All that would have done is prolong the war. We’d been fighting long enough, Merlin. It was time to embrace the unthinkable: a real and lasting ceasefire. It was going to be a long and difficult process, and it could only be orchestrated from a position of neutrality, out here between the warring factions. It would depend on sympathetic allies on both sides: good men and women prepared to risk their own lives in making tiny, cumulative changes, under the Tactician’s secret stewardship. We were ready – eager, even. In small ways we had begun the great work. Admit it, Prince Baskin: the tide of military successes had begun to turn away from you, in recent months. That was our doing. We were winning. And then Merlin arrived.’ Struxer set his features in a mask of impassivity. ‘Nothing in the Tactician’s forecasting predicted you , Merlin, or the terrible damage you’d do to our cause.’

‘I stopped, didn’t I?”

‘Only when Mundar had humbled you.’

The room shook, dust dislodging from the stone walls, one or two of the toy soldiers toppling in their ranks. Merlin knew what that was. Tyrant was communicating the actual attack suffered by Mundar through to the sensorium. The asteroid’s own kinetic weapons were beginning to break through its crust.

‘It won’t be long now,’ he said.

Teal picked her way to Merlin’s side and knelt between the battlements and armies, touching a hand to the boy. ‘We can help you,’ she said. Followed by a glance to Merlin. ‘Can’t we?’

‘Yes,’ he said, doubtfully at first, then with growing conviction. ‘Yes. Prince Baskin. The real Prince. The boy who dreamed of war, and then stopped dreaming. I believe it, too. There isn’t a mind in the universe that isn’t capable of change. You want peace in this system? Something real and lasting, a peace built on forgiveness and reconciliation, rather than centuries of simmering enmity? So do I. And I think you can make it happen, but for that you have to live. I have a ship. You saw me coming in – saw my weapons and what they could do. You blooded me good, as well. But I can help you now – help you do what’s right. Turn the kinetics away from Mundar, Prince. You don’t have to die.’

‘I said you should go away,’ the boy said.

Teal lifted a hand to his cheek. ‘They hurt you,’ she said. ‘Very badly. But my blood’s in you and I won’t rest until you’ve found peace. But not this way. Merlin’s right, Prince. There’s still time to do good.’

‘They don’t want good,’ the boy answered. ‘I gave them good, but they didn’t like it.’

‘You don’t have to concern yourself with them now,’ Merlin said, as another disturbance shook the room. ‘Turn the weapons from Mundar. Do it, Prince.’

The boy’s hand loitered over the wooden battlements. Merlin intuited that these must be the logical representation of Mundar’s defense screens. The boy fingered one of the serrated formations, seemingly on the verge of moving it.

‘It won’t do any good,’ he said.

‘It will,’ Merlin said.

‘You’ve brought them too near,’ the boy said, sweeping his other hand across the massed regiments, in all their colours and divisions. ‘They didn’t know where I was before, but now you’ve shown them.’

‘I made a mistake,’ Merlin admitted. ‘A bad one, because I wanted something too badly. But I’m here to make amends.’

Now it was Baskin’s turn to step closer to the boy. ‘We have half a life in common,’ he said. ‘They stole a life from you, and tried to make me think it was my own. It worked, too. I’m an old man now, and I suppose you’re as old as me, deep down. But we have something in common. We’ve both outgrown war, whether those around us are willing to accept it or not.’ He lowered down, upsetting some of the soldiers as he did – the boy glaring for an instant, then seeming to put the matter behind him. ‘I want to help you. Be your friend, if such a thing’s possible. What Teal said is true: you do have her blood. Not mine, now, but it doesn’t mean I don’t want to help.’ He placed his own hand around the boy’s wrist, the hand that hovered over the wooden battlements. ‘I remember these games,’ he said. ‘These toys. I played them well. We could play together, couldn’t we?’ Slowly, with great trepidation, Baskin risked turning one of the battlements around, until its fortifications were facing outward again.