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.