Velocity Weapon

by Megan E O'Keefe

  “We’re all fine and dandy down here,” she said. “Couldn’t be better. We’ll have all the equipment prepped and ready when you get here.”

  “No need to wait,” Pyke said. “Going by my timer it’ll be sundown where you are in less than two hours, so stick to the plan and head out to the objective then. I’ll meet up with all of ye in the tower staging room not long after and before you know it we’ll get some thieving done!”

  “You sure you can find the place?”

  “Van Graes gave me a locationer just like yours before he sent me off after the DNA.” There was a pause. “So, are we set, then?”

  “Sure, no problem, see you at the tower.”

  “I’ll be there. Luck to ye.”

  The channel went dead. Still frowning, Dervla thumbed off the receiver, squatted on a rickety stool and scratched her ear, deep in thought.

  “So the chief hasn’t landed on Ong yet,” said Moleg. “And he’s…”

  “Meeting us at the staging room, yes.” She regarded them. “I want us packed and ready to go soon as possible—oh, assuming that the three of you can get over yer blame-rage spat.”

  There were sheepish looks, nods, mumbled apologies, even handshakes.

  “Good,” Dervla said with a dubious tone. “Right, Kref—weapons and body armour.”

  “Checked and ready, Derv,” the Henkayan said, jerking his thumb at a large backpack sitting in the corner.

  “Ancil?”

  “Got all my probes and sensors tuned and charged,” Ancil said hoarsely. “Van Graes’ briefing file says that the outer vault has a sonic modulation lock so I’ve been over the lockpicking procedure again and again, back on the ship and since we arrived, too. Shouldn’t be a problem, Derv.”

  “But you’ve only been practising it in simulation,” she said. “I need to know that you can cope with the real thing.”

  Ancil cleared his throat and winced a little. “When I come face-to-face with the vault, I’ll be using a resonance cracker to dig out the keynote sequence. In all the practice run-throughs I’ve had the cracker itself hooked into the sim, and my hands have been working directly with the device itself. My fingers know every part of it back to front and upside down by now.”

  “In that case every one of your fingers had better be a safe-cracking genius in its own right,” Dervla said. “Moleg, transport and all the other equipment—can they be ready at short notice?”

  “That was part of the deal that Van Graes arranged in advance,” Moleg said. “All the wall-and-door cutters and counter-detection gear we asked for should be stowed in the airboat when we get to the jetty.”

  Dervla nodded. Their patron, the secretive and stupendously rich Augustine Van Graes, had turned out to be well informed about the planet Ong and suitably well connected with members of Cawl-Vesh’s underworld. It was just unfortunate that even the smartest plan couldn’t allow for operator error.

  “This is all well and good,” she said. “It’s great to see that the three of you have got all your ducks in a row. Shame about the Ongian trader that you’ve taken prisoner.” She went over to the bunk and regarded the slight form lying there. “He’s an Izlak, right? Or is he a Sedlu?”

  “Izlak,” said Moleg. “The others are the ruling Grajul and their Pekyr underlings.”

  The Izlak were the most numerous, being similar to the dog-like Gomedrans, only shorter, scrawnier. The Sedlu were squat, brawny humanoids, while the Pekyr were tall and wiry with oddly small heads. Most of the Pekyr worked as guards and enforcers for the ruling houses of the Grajul, the fourth and most recent of the settler species.

  Kref stared down at the motionless Ongian. “We gotta take care of him,” he said in deep, gravelly tones. Then he caught Dervla giving him a wordless look, and added, “… without hurting him, obviously.”

  “Whatever you do,” Dervla said, “you’ll first have to cope with the fact that the little fellow is starting to come round.”

  Sure enough, the scrawny Izlak was stirring on the bunk. Ancil snapped his fingers. “I’ve got sleepgas capsules in my kit… and I’ve got a plan!”

  “As long as it doesn’t involve betting,” Dervla said, “I’ll give it a listen.”

  It turned out to be not a bad plan. The sleepgas capsule was thankfully effective, putting the Ongian back under almost at the very moment that his eyes started to open. Ancil’s plan to then keep him safe and out of sight just needed a little fine-tuning. Like sneaking him into the next-door building and leaving him bundled up in a blanket inside a storage closet, rather than carrying him into a wharfside bar and abandoning him at a table in the darkest corner. When Ancil and Moleg finally appeared at the slummy, triangular jetty down near the base of the dorm-block they’d called home for four days, it was nearly an hour since Pyke’s call. And although Moleg had alerted their transport contact back then as well, thus far the airboat was a no-show, which had Moleg frowning as he came over to Dervla. She was not best pleased.

  “Derv, I’m really sorry,” he said. “The boatman promised me…”

  “I hope you have a backup plan,” she said. “Otherwise this job is going to turn into a full-scale fail.”

  “I did speak to another boatman,” Moleg said. “He was charging more than Narok but wouldn’t guarantee the kind of readiness that we need. I can see if I can get him to come along, but we’d still have to chase down the other to get our equipment—”

  Dervla felt as if there were some countervailing force trying to stymie their efforts, a feeling she’d had ever since arriving on Ong. But she blanked out these thoughts while pulling the handset from an inner pocket.

  “Make the call,” she said.

  But before Moleg could punch in the local codes, Ancil caught their attention.

  “Hang on—there’s a boat coming!” he said, pointing down.

  Dervla and Moleg went to the rail and peered over. An ungainly looking airboat with a raised stern and brightly coloured awning had emerged from beneath the adjacent building and was ascending to the jetty.

  “That’s Narok,” Moleg said, waving down at a figure standing in the prow, who waved back.

  “I hope he has a good excuse,” said Dervla.

  The airboat looked as if it had been built over a century ago, had a rough working life before being buried in a sand dune, got dug up years later and pressed back into service without much of a cleanup. Not a square inch of its hull and superstructure seemed free from scratches, abrasions, dents or riveted patches. The humming repulsors, two at the prow, two at the stern, were probably the vessel’s newest important components—they were mounted in curved recesses clearly designed for much larger, older units, yet still they managed to look beaten up and scavenged.

  Its captain, Narok, was a squat, block-headed Sedlu garbed in a thick-woven, high-collared coat that Dervla was sure had to be far too warm for this weather. Once the craft was level with the jetty he flung out a gangway and urgently waved them aboard. Moments later, the gangway was hauled back in and the airboat was descending, guided by Narok as he conversed rapidly with Moleg. As the Ongian spoke, Moleg nodded then glanced at Dervla and beckoned her over.

  “Narok tells me that he had to get here by a roundabout route due to the Whipguards making surprise checks at the main undercity boatway junctions. Rumour has it that an offworld gang of crims recently landed near the city, intent on plundering the ancient tombs of Vesh.” Moleg glanced back at the boat’s captain. “Narok knows it can’t be us since we’ve been here several days, but he is understandably jittery.”

  “Do what you can to keep him relaxed,” Dervla said. “Tell him a joke if you have to… mind you, I’ve no idea what makes an Ongian laugh so maybe scratch that one.”

  “He knows that we’re planning to steal something expensive from the Grajul,” Moleg said. “It gives him considerable satisfaction to know this.”

  “Nice,” she said. “A bit o’ sympathy for high-end thievery, that’s what I like to hear!”
<
br />   Soon they were gliding through what the locals called Cellartown, the mazy, shadowy underside of Cawl-Vesh. It was like an inverted city—well, a slummy, rickety, handbuilt city full of noises, smells and music, and the people who were making them. The web of immense cables that supported the city in its entirety was visible here and there, in the gaps between all the pendant and appended frameworks, shacks, shanties and sheds which had been augmented over time, like the encrusted hull of some great ship. Of course, new arrivals built extensions or rebuilt what was there, adding curious arches, balconies, walkways and any number of camouflaged features. Cellartown as a result was riddled with wynds, alleys, secret wharfs and concealed conduits.

  While striving to avoid patrols of Whipguards, the boatman Narok treated them to a brief sidetrip along one of the conduits. Gliding down one alley, the boat ascended to an odd recess beneath an overhang crammed with pipes and power ducts; ahead, the alley cornered to the right but Narok maintained speed and direction towards a brick wall. At the last moment a section of grubby brickwork slid aside and Narok guided them through, without any fuss. Ancil and Kref muttered and chortled at one another as the airboat floated on into a darkened, lamplit passageway. They passed by a small market where baggy-sleeved locals pored over trays of odd produce beneath hanging lanterns; next to that was a cluster of little workshops, each a glowing islet of tools with a lens-wearing artisan at its heart. One looked up as the boat drifted peacefully by, and purely by chance his gaze met Dervla’s—he gave an embarrassed smile and ducked his head. Another artisan looked up, only he offered a challenging glower which made Dervla chuckle quietly and turn away.

  Then, just ahead, a short stretch of the passageway floor parted, admitting a flood of amber evening light into the claustrophobic darkness. Narok slowed his craft and smoothly descended through the opening, re-entering Cellartown in all its scruffy, dusk-tinged splendour. Dervla found herself flashing on some old pix she once saw on some history feed or other, views from an old Earth city called Venice, a coastal city where manually propelled boats travelled around a network of canals. Except that instead of dark and murky waters, vertigo-inducing emptiness gaped beneath the airboat, more than half a kilometre of hot dusty air between the underbelly of Cawl-Vesh and the rocky sands of the canyon floor, supposedly infested with swarms of feralised bots.

  Peering over the side, Dervla studied the canyon, the blue-green outcrops of stone, the patches and stretches of shining pure gold sands, and the curtain of deep shadow cast right across it all by the setting sun. A beautiful vista which also managed to look barren and lifeless.

  Then Moleg was by her side. “We’re almost there—Narok says just a minute or two before we reach the shaft entrance.”

  The airboat was rising again, ascending a high, narrow alley as if heading for one of the balcony jetties jutting out here and there. But they soared steadily past them. Dervla knew from Van Graes’ locationer, and the sketchy maps Moleg had managed to source, that by now they had to be very near to the under-sub-basement of the Tower of the Jul-Tegach. The Jul-Tegach were one of Cawl-Vesh’s ruling Grajul families, one forced by financial troubles to commercialise some of its assets, including entire levels of its dynastic seat. Several floors were currently lying conveniently empty, including one which, by virtue of its extravagant design, projected outward in such a way that its east side sat quite close to the outer wall of the adjacent building, the Grand Halls of Council, the municipal governing heart of the city. Two levels of chambers and galleries in the west wing of the Great Halls had been given over to a museum, the Exquisite Parade of Mysteries, the lower level of which all but jostled against the extravagantly appointed eighth floor next door.

  “Have you checked the gear?” Dervla asked.

  “Everything we requested is there,” Moleg said. “And all the packs are loaded correctly.”

  Dervla smiled. There was a tone in his voice which implied that some repacking had taken place. She glanced up as the airboat passed by one of the huge cables that kept Cawl-Vesh suspended over that canyon. Details resolved out of the shadows above, grimy pipes, weld-lines joining heavy plating, protruding support spars onto which metal hawsers had been bolted, hawsers that were holding up entire sections of Cellartown. There was a metallic scrape, then rusty creaks as a large pair of doors swung open to reveal a dimly lit vertical shaft.

  “Not far to go, eh, Derv?” said Ancil.

  “Are you an optimist or a masochist?” she said. “We still have to carry the gear up two floors.”

  “S’all right, boss,” said Kref. “Ans’ll volunteer me then say a bunch of tricky words to get me to laugh, and then I’ll feel okay about carrying everyone’s stuff!”

  “Now, now,” she said. “We all need to remember the big damn burden that Ancil’s carrying—it can’t be easy getting in and out of doors with that huge bloody ego of his.”

  Ancil nodded at the sniggering that came his way. “Mockery and disrespect, eh?—for this I gave up concert nanosurgery!”

  Their louder laughter was muffled as the shadowy shaft swallowed the airboat.

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  VELOCITY WEAPON

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  THE CORPORATION WARS TRILOGY

  by

  Ken MacLeod

  In deep space, ruthless corporations vie for control of scattered mining colonies, and war is an ever-present threat.

  Led by Seba, a newly sentient mining reboot, an AI revolution grows. Fighting them is Carlos, a grunt who is reincarnated over and over again to keep the “freebots” in check. But he’s not sure whether he’s on the right side.

  Against a backdrop of interstellar drone combat, Carlos and Seba must either find a way to rise above the games their masters are playing or die. And even dying might not be the end of it.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Back in the Day

  Carlos the Terrorist did not expect to die that day. The bombing was heavy now, and close, but he thought his location safe. Leaky pipework dripping with obscure post-industrial feedstock products riddled the ruined nanofacturing plant at Tilbury. Watchdog machines roved its basement corridors, pouncing on anything that moved—a fallen polystyrene tile, a draught-blown paper cone from a dried-out water-cooler—with the mindless malice of kittens chasing flies. Ten metres of rock, steel and concrete lay between the ceiling above his head and the sunlight where the rubble bounced.

  He lolled on a reclining chair and with closed eyes watched the battle. His viewpoint was a thousand metres above where he lay. With empty hands he marshalled his forces and struck his blows.

  Incoming—

  Something he glimpsed as a black stone hurtled towards him. With a fist-clench faster than reflex he hurled a handful of smart munitions at it.

  The tiny missiles missed.

  Carlos twisted, and threw again. On target this time. The black incoming object became a flare of white that faded as his camera drones stepped down their inputs, correcting for the flash like irises contracting. The small missiles that had missed a moment earlier now showered mid-air sparks and puffs of smoke a kilometre away.

  From his virtual vantage Carlos felt and saw like a monster in a Japanese disaster movie, straddling the Thames and punching out. Smoke rose from a score of points on the London skyline. Drone swarms darkened the day. Carlos’s combat drones engaged the enemy’s in buzzing dogfights. Ionised air crackled around his imagined monstrous body in sudden searing beams along which, milliseconds later, lightning bolts fizzed and struck. Tactical updates flickered across his sight.

  Higher above, the heavy hardware—helicopters, fighter jets and hovering aerial drone platforms—loitered on station and now and then called down their ordnance with casual precision. Higher still, in low Earth orbit, fleets of tumbling battle-sats jockeyed and jousted, spearing with laser bursts that left their batteries drained and their signals dead.

  Swarms of camera drones blipped fragmented views to millimetre-scale camouflaged receiver
beads littered in thousands across the contested ground. From these, through proxies, firewalls, relays and feints the images and messages flashed, converging to an onsite router whose radio waves tickled the spike, a metal stud in the back of Carlos’s skull. That occipital implant’s tip feathered to a fractal array of neural interfaces that worked their molecular magic to integrate the view straight to his visual cortex, and to process and transmit the motor impulses that flickered from fingers sheathed in skin-soft plastic gloves veined with feedback sensors to the fighter drones and malware servers. It was the new way of war, back in the day.

  The closest hot skirmish was down on Carlos’s right. In Dagenham, tank units of the London Metropolitan Police battled robotic land-crawlers suborned by one or more of the enemy’s basement warriors. Like a thundercloud on the horizon tensing the air, an awareness of the strategic situation loomed at the back of Carlos’s mind.

  Executive summary: looking good for his side, bad for the enemy.

  But only for the moment.

  The enemy—the Reaction, the Rack, the Rax—had at last provoked a response from the serious players. Government forces on three continents were now smacking down hard. Carlos’s side—the Acceleration, the Axle, the Ax—had taken this turn of circumstance as an oblique invitation to collaborate with these governments against the common foe. Certain state forces had reciprocated. The arrangement was less an alliance than a mutual offer with a known expiry date. There were no illusions. Everyone who mattered had studied the same insurgency and counter-insurgency textbooks.

  In today’s fight Carlos had a designated handler, a deep-state operative who called him-, her- or itself Innovator, and who (to personalise it, as Carlos did, for politeness and the sake of argument) now and then murmured suggestions that made their way to Carlos’s hearing via a warily accepted hack in the spike that someday soon he really would have to do something about.

  Carlos stood above Greenhithe. He sighted along a virtual outstretched arm and upraised thumb at a Rax hellfire drone above Purfleet, and made his throw. An air-to-air missile streaked from behind his POV towards the enemy fighter. It left a corkscrew trail of evasive manoeuvres and delivered a viscerally satisfying flash and a shower of blazing debris when it hit.