“This is Sargasso,” he says. “Do you know how many more there are of you?”
There are all sorts of military reasons not to tell him, but I need to win his trust; to convince him that I have no desire to hurt him. “My Battle Group was ambushed in a marsh near the jungle—that was the drop zone. They knew we were coming. I was hit there and I should have passed, but I never did. I can’t make contact with the Penrose. I think the interference is atmospheric.”
I see a twitch at the corners of his mouth that might have been a smile. “The Penrose?” he asks, and then nods, as if the ship is familiar to him. “How many?”
“There were thirty in the Battle Group. The Widows were still lying in the marsh when I left.”
“Who attacked you?”
I am stunned by the question. “Them,” I say. I doubt the mechanical voice coveys my confusion. “They did. Who else?”
Another voice comes from behind me. I cannot see the speaker. It is a feminine voice, barely above a whisper: “He doesn’t know,” she says, and I detect something like triumph in her tone. “None of them know. They don’t understand what is happening to them.”
“We don’t know that yet,” the man snaps, not even looking at her; as if in speaking she has revealed some closely guarded secret. “Quiet, woman, or this cannot work.”
“What is happening to us?” I offer, not wanting to anger him. “What do—”
But the man cuts me off. “Shut him down,” he says.
And I am gone.
“Are you awake?” The same man. The same position as before. I detect subtle differences in the light, and the hum of the bulb. I don’t know how much time has passed.
“Yes,” I say.
“When you fight…Them…” He almost trips on the word as he searches for it, as though he does not understand it. His reaction confuses me. “What do you see?”
“The same as you,” I reply, growing frustrated. “Their camouflage systems bend light, but you must know that.”
The man turns away and nods to someone out of my vision.
“Are you awake?”
“You need to stop doing that,” I growl. Although, in reality, I probably don’t growl at all.
There is a different twitch at the corner of the man’s mouth, accompanied by a slight tightening of his expression. “You need to listen to me very carefully,” he says. “The aliens don’t have any camouflage, at least not as you describe it. That’s because you’ve never seen one. If you have, it’s been removed from your memory.”
“We are wasting time—”
“Don’t speak, just listen. This is going to be hard for you to hear.” He pauses and stares at me. He is staring at a machine, I know that, and he cannot see the confusion and fear which is surging through me right now. There is no way to express it across the still, metal features which now contain the essence of me. “You have been fighting alongside them, not against them.”
“You’ve got it wrong…” I don’t understand what he means.
“No,” he replies and something wet glistens in the pits of his eyes. “They hide your targets from your sight through a series of scanning systems which blur them artificially on your internal spectral retinas. They explain this to you by reference to a sophisticated camouflage mechanism. You’re not the first to say that. Do you remember anything of your human life, before?”
“Not much of it.” I choke on the words. “Maybe…snatches. All I remember is fighting inside Widows.”
The man nods his understanding. “Yes, that’s what you call them, right? Widows.”
I don’t want to ask the question which seethes in my mind, but I know I have to. All I want is to avoid the truth, but I know I can’t. “Who have been my targets?”
“Us. The rest of humanity.”
At first, I cannot comprehend the truth of his words, but slowly, inexorably, I realise he is right. It makes perfect sense to me, as though a veil has been pulled away from my eyes. I should have seen it before. How could I have been so blind? The camouflage that hides our real targets; the paltry amount we are told about our objectives when we fight. The dearth of our own human memories and the negligible contact we have with each other outside of battle—so we cannot question what is happening to us. We are the perfect weapons. Desperate and utterly focused, as we fight for what we believe is our very existence. Killing other human beings is what men have done for thousands of years. All our military training and experience has been honed for that purpose. Who better to do it than us, even subconsciously?
And we’re expendable.
Before I can scream, before my mind collapses under the weight of that understanding, the man looks away to someone out of my field of vision, and this time I am thankful for the darkness.
My body no longer exists. I’m sure of that now. Even if it did, my soul was never to be reunited with it. All that remains of me is contained within this alien prison, constructed from a metal alloy I can’t even identify. I’ve spent most of my life slaughtering the beleaguered remains of my own kind. I am hated by them—a nightmare. There is no punishment that befits my crimes. I cannot claim I was unaware; I should have fought to bring myself to the surface. Instead, as They knew I would, I revelled in my immortality. I lusted for the glory of heroism. I am death, but I cannot die.
“We don’t know much, of course,” he says once he wakes me again. He studies me as he speaks, as if he searching for an indication of something human—a movement of my armoured body suggestive of an emotional response; a flicker of something in the spectral retinal units which are my eyes, to indicate perhaps a soul. “We don’t know how they transmit the consciousness of those fighting in the armour when they…die. Nor do we know where their bodies are kept. Mostly, it’s been trial and error. Captured technology, reverse-engineering, experimenting with workarounds. Using whatever we can to find out as much as we can.”
“When did you know it was us? Driving the Widows?”
“Quite quickly. People reacted differently to that knowledge. Some were convinced you knew what you were doing—that you had chosen your side deliberately to save yourselves. When we found out more and realised what was happening, it split people. I think many were angry that you didn’t fight to find…yourselves. To realise what it was you were doing.”
I look away from him. I find it strange that They would allow me to feel emotion inside a Widow, and suddenly wish I was even more machine than I am. “Everyone needs someone to blame.”
The man nods. I can see he wants to believe me, but I wonder if he has lost someone to weapons fired by one of my kind. “Until recently,” he says quietly, “we haven’t been able to do much to stop you. But we attacked a compound—months were spent planning it. I can’t tell you much. We don’t know what you might say, if we lose you. We managed to…steal some technology that will assist us. That’s how we can shut down your systems. Not all of them, and not all of the time, but it’s given us an advantage.” He hesitates and looks away from me, and immediately I realise why.
“I understand.” He’s right to be cautious of me. I am still a threat to everyone here. If I am taken, there is no way I can keep any of this from Them. I wonder, in fact, whether any of it is being transmitted somehow right now, but the man must understand my concern, because he speaks quickly.